straight_stewie

So how do you actually become a verified gamer to get this. I can't find any information besides two threads and the original tweet. Is that intended?

You're supposed to have trouble understanding it. Researchers working for businesses often have to write their whitepapers and especially their patents in such a way that they are purposefully difficult to read so that other businesses will have trouble parsing it. Technobabble is real, and it is everywhere. As best I can tell from the statements, they are using the "glass" on the surface of the disk as a lens to change the wavelength of the light that the laser is emitting. This would let you use a cheaper laser in the equipment but get the benefits of a much more high quality laser.

That's 10% more than it could have been... I'm wondering why on Earth a mail truck needs so much glass. That thing looks like somebody put the back of a box truck on a golf cart and topped it off with the glass from the front of a combine.

So, to be clear, I could write something like: foo = manual_seed(blah) and foo will be an object? So manual_seed() isn't setting a global seed value?

The experiment forgot a test group: Cards that were powered on in machines for the 1.5 years, but not utilized. Besides the lack of a statistically significant number of cards, or a proper testing methodology, I strongly suspect you could see something close to a 10% performance drop just from having the thing powered on (even if doing nothing) for 1.5 years, but I have neither the money nor the time to prove this.

@Mira Yurizaki @FakeCIA They may be gone, but they shall not be forgotten.

There are many different reasons why this processor was used instead of something newer, or something faster. The first, and likely biggest reason, is existing software and developer familiarity. We are talking about people who are writing extremely complex software in an excruciatingly complex environment, with very many very detailed and exacting no failure allowed requirements. The second biggest reason is manufacturer comfort. This thing was built at a time when the director of NASA was used to getting things through back channel from longtime allies and suppliers. Basically, for a long while, our space agency was involved in a racketeering scheme (it usually isn't characterized like that, but one could argue that that's what it was). BAE has long been a supplier to virtually every part of the government that buys high tech items. The third reason is going to be that the RAD750 package is radiation hardened. This is a huge requirement, and having radiation hardened electronics can save the rover manufacturers serious weight. Weight is critical in every single mission, much less sending an SUV and a helicopter to Mars. The fourth reason that a package like this would be used is that it's a single board computer, and a radiation hardened one at that. That saves alot of time, and money, in integration work. Putting a modern(ish) processor in a system is one of the most complex things you can do. The RAD750 is very well flight tested (it's flown on virtually every mission from every space fairing NATO ally since it's introduction in 2001), and having the processor already on a board, and all of it radiation hardened, is a huge time, effort, and money saver. The fifth reason is that quite a big part of the performance of modern application processors (what's in your computer or phone) is branch prediction. In a realtime environment like this, branch prediction mixed with deep pipelining is no good because it makes it nearly impossible to prove that your critical paths execute in the required amount of time (which is part of writing "real time" code). If the branch predictor misses, there is no way to know how long it will take for the processor to recover. The sixth reason is that that's still a beastly processor when you think about it from the perspective of hand writing code (with an abnormally high amount of hand tweaked assembly at that) with the sole purpose of performance in mind. Your desktop needs a much faster processor because the OS has to manage all of these different applications from all of these different manufacturers all trying to exploit weak security, use up all of your resources, and trying to use the same limited resources all at the same time. That slows things down ALOT. As an aside, the rover as a whole has more storage than what's listing in your OP. The storage listed in your OP only references what's on the RAD750 board. There is a 4GB SSD available on board for program storage. The cameras also aren't as nice as they appear. The highest resolution camera on board only takes 1600x1200 2-megapixel images (that's almost 6 megabytes per image). The rover also regularly sends it's images back to us, and then will get deleted once we are sure we got them correctly. NASA says that they figure the storage on board is good for about one Sol (a Martian year) worth of data.

Something very close to it. This will also probably help in huge data storage solutions. I'm sure that some in-memory databasing could be improved with fast in memory array searching.

Since it's characterized in TFLOPs and not TOPs, and it's advertised as being an "AI-accelerator" of sorts, I'd venture to guess that it will wind up being 32 bit floating point multiply-accumulate operations. Likely, to achieve that much performance, you will have to be doing fused multiply-adds. Vector processors are pretty neat, and can increase performance in some applications. Still, one wonders how an OS might expose an in-memory processor for general use. That will have to be solved pretty neatly before it becomes useful.

I assume you live in the US. You should be aware that our 6th-9th grade health classes are educating children on the dangers of drugs, and most habitual drug users (including alcohol and nicotine) start using drugs in high school, or in some cases even earlier. There's a reason all of those anti-smoking and D.A.R.E campaigns target schools... Seeing people talk about consuming marijuana on a technology forum is unlikely to cause any serious change in their life. IMO a school child is much more likely to try marijuana because of the class stoner than because of LTT.com

That's a terrible solution, and it's why x86 is quickly losing favor. Promising full backwards compatibility relegates you to using old techniques forever. It's also a promise you can't actually keep. I suspect that, eventually, small quantum annealing processors will make their way into consumer computers. Not as the main processor, but as a unit in the CPU or as an add-in card, or even part of a graphics card. Quantum annealing processors are very good at optimization problems, and that's a very large part of what consumer devices are asked to do, especially if the user is playing games. As an aside, the greatest asset and biggest liability of ARM and RISC-V is that there aren't any centralized manufacturers of them. Think about it, there are basically two families of x86/64 processors, and so there are only two lines of associated devices (motherboards and such) that people need to know about. With ARM (and eventually RISC-V), there are potentially 100's of different manufacturers, all of them using different pin layouts, power requirements, and features. That will have to be solved and standardized to provide a real path forward to widespread consumer desktop computers.

People will slowly reveal their true selves to you anyway if you spend enough time with them. Being very good at lying, subversion, and hiding is very difficult and most people don't have the time or the capacity to actually do it well (think about all the training and continuing education that, i.e. CIA case agents go through to learn "field operations"). As for your actual question, so much of it depends on the person, and on the amount of money. By and large, most people who receive a huge windfall, such as winning a big powerball jackpot, will end up doing what they did when they didn't have enough to get by: That is, they will go out and by things on loans, spending almost the entire windfall on the down payments and then being unable to actually pay off the loans. This is the most common result of receiving a huge windfall. As for me, well, I have multiple ideas that I keep iterating over regarding what I would do with various sizes of windfalls. Most of it involves setting myself up to never have to work for someone else again. That doesn't mean I won't have to work, and it doesn't mean that the plan would make me rich. It just means that I wouldn't have to work for someone else ever again. The plans range in size from $100,000 windfall to super large 100 million dollar plus lottery jackpots (which I don't play anyway except for the case where I will buy one ticket per drawing when the jackpot exceeds 1 billion dollars). TL;DR: I don't know what anyone else would do, but I know about myself: I'd just hang out with my current friends. I have a very small group of very good friends, and no amount of anything will make me give them up. It's generally very hard for me to make friends, and that's something that money simply can't replace.

You can do a complete simulation of a modern cell phone, in near real time (but not quite), of the physical circuits, including those in the integrated circuits, on even a relatively modest computer. You can even get the tools to do so, for free, from device makers (like Microchip Inc. for example). You can even simulate/emulate a portion of the hardware, completely accurately including electrical response timing, on a desktop computer while the rest of the circuit is physically built and operating, from a cheap laptop. This is called In Circuit Emulation. I'm not trying to be to anti-Phil Wheaton here, but your estimations of the amount of data involved in doing things leave a lot to be desired. And just to add some real science to this, if quantum mechanics is correct, then every possible universe that might exist is nothing but a closed form probability function. In fact, every universe is just different points along the same probability function. And that, is surely something that can be calculated within the universe for which you are doing the calculation.

Even though we call them "flight simulators", that's somewhat of a misnomer. In most of them, the flight characteristics simulations are driven largely by lookup tables of precomputed values. Which is why most absolutely suck at simulating turbulence. X-Plane is a little better at this than FS, Prepar3D, and DCS world, but not that much better. They are getting pretty good at systems simulations these days, but failure simulations are still lacking. To really rest this topic some discussion needs to be had on the difference between simulation and emulation, and where the line is drawn between the two. Most people use the term simulation as if it means an emulation that is close enough to real life. But that's a very ambiguous definition, as no one is ever going to agree on how close is close enough.

This is quite an interesting proposition. Is the computer simulating the airflow, or just doing a really good job of emulating it? One could say that the computer is just emulating the fluid flow, which we know it is: The techniques used in CFD are just approximations of real life. One could also say that the emulation is good enough for the task at hand. Which of course, ties into the question: How much of an understanding is enough? Sure our understanding of some things is flawed or incomplete, but does that mean that our understanding of those things is useless?

Ostensibly, their profit is hidden from you. When you go to buy, they quote you the ask price. When you go to sell, they quote you the bid price. If you are profitable at those prices, then you are profitable at those prices. When learning about bid/ask spreads is also a good time to learn about bid-ask arbitrage: The cool thing about crypto currency is that cross exchange bid-ask spread arbitrage is easily available to retail investors because of the way wallets work. This is not the case for retail forex traders, as you need direct access to trading desks to pull off true cross exchange arbitrage with "paper" currencies. For easy reference, cross exchange bid-ask spread arbitrage, when done correctly, brings immediate profits with little to no risk as you carry no open positions. Exchanges don't just compete on features, they also compete on prices. So basically you can buy currency on an exchange that's trading lower and sell on an exchange that's trading higher. The difference between the ask price on the buying exchange and the bid price on the selling exchange is your profit. You conduct the trade simultaneously (or nearly simultaneously if you don't have a margin account on the selling exchange), and immediately pocket the difference between the two as profit, without having to carry any currency (or without having to carry any currency for more than a few seconds if you don't have margin/aren't automated).

Usually it's the same way that foreign currency exchanges make profit: Inside the Bid/Ask spread Bid/Ask is kind of a weird term. It's more recognizable what it means when it's written as "SellPrice/BuyPrice". So, as an abstract example, let's say that currency is currently trading at value x. The exchange will publish a bid/ask spread of the form x-y/x+y where y is half the exchanges profit per unit of currency. Or, in other words, a buyer buys currency at higher than market rate, and a seller sells currency at a lower than market rate. The difference between the two is the exchanges/brokers profit. Bid/Ask spreads will differ by exchange, which is where currency arbitrage comes from.

How large do you expect the site to get once you go live? Are you planning any advertising? What is the popularity of the game?

I agree that they made the wrong choice, but for different reasons: Reintegrating long retired spaceflight equipment has never worked. You lose too much of the engineering data, both that stored on "paper" and that which is in the heads of the engineers. But, to play devils advocate here, we don't know yet if this is a design flaw or a manufacturing flaw. If It's a manufacturing flaw, we might not be that much further behind. TL;DR: The previous NASA administrator, Charlie Bolden, was doing things with the partners through back alleys. These back alley deals allowed the partners to subvert some of the oversight that NASA usually has in place. Because of that, the last decade is not a valid indicator of whether or not NASA policies can produce results. I'd give them a second chance: When the policies were being followed we went to the moon, developed the space shuttle, and put a permanent human presence in space. We have to discount basically the entire last ten years. Jim Bridenstines predecessor, Charlie Bolden, got (politically) forced out because he was found to be being corrupt because he "thought it was the right thing to do to move things along quicker. That's how things have always been done." (<-- his own words). In reality, what he was doing was allowing the project partners to get sloppy by subverting some of the NASA oversight that's normally in place. Because that oversight was subverted, the partners (mostly Lockheed Martin and Boeing) were able to do a poor job of record keeping, which severely reduced their ability to perform the job over the long run. (as people come and go, the information stored in their head goes with them. This is a common problem in long-term product development, showing up very commonly in software development as well.) IMO, I'd go so far as to accuse the leadership of those companies of having planned that out, because the end result is that they end up having a lot of unnecessary hold ups which, all added together, have ended up in delays significant enough to get more and more funding out of the same project (think: "this is turning out to be more difficult than we thought", but in reality the difficulty is only because they were doing a half ass job in the first place). But that is a leap without evidence.

Well, it is and it isn't reflective of the real world. The assumption that @deserttan made when he said: Was that the efficient market hypothesis is true outside of the securities markets. Price tends to go up when most people value an item at a lower rate than alternatives, until such a problem spirals out of control and the seller folds and has to sell the items at any cost, just to get rid of them. I guess what we can say about the assumption is that it is usually eventually true, but "eventually" isn't well defined enough to say that the efficient market hypothesis applies to goods traded in the real world, at least as far as it pertains to the argument being made. Consumers are rarely well informed until after-the-fact, and pricing tends to follow the rules of supply and demand before it follows the rules of an efficient market.

Power usage seldom goes down with the advancement of technology. In fact, it usually goes up. We actually use power consumption as one way to classify a civilizations technological advancement through the Kardashev Scale (and other similar scales). Generally speaking, as a society becomes more technologically advanced, the power requirements to run that society also increase. The manufacturing of LED bulbs significantly outweighs the benefit of actually using them. Most simply don't last long enough to overcome the extra cost of getting the super rare and hard to get materials involved in making integrated circuits and PCBs. They also usually have quite a bit of plastic, where a regular lightbulb is, quite literally, aluminum, tungsten, and silica. (electronics also recycle very poorly. Fiberglass is not recyclable, nor is it biodegradable). Most things work out that way. As it currently stands, electric cars are by far worse for the environment than gas cars are when you include the full production chain in the analysis, because they just don't overcome the environmental cost of getting the absolutely insane amount of lithium required to build them (getting lithium out of the ground and into a usable state is incredibly destructive to the environment. The mining process alone is almost as bad as fracking, and consumes more water than most fracking operations.) Beyond that, properly disposing of all that lithium is nearly impossible and rarely happens. Running the electric car doesn't overcome that cost because, for the vast majority of owners, the electricity comes from coal or gas fired power plants, which while more efficient than an internal combustion engine, are fairly environmentally costly themselves. As an aside to that, in most cases, if you include the full production chain and lifecycle of a device, from mineral production to device disposal, quite a few of the more "green" options are by far less green than the traditional option. Many even come with additional human rights or economic concerns (Conflict minerals/goods are still widely used as they are frequently the only option available) that the traditional options don't come with. One of the more recent discoveries is that wind turbines wear out and blades have to get thrown away. These are not recyclable nor are they biodegradable. They literally just get buried in the ground at landfills, to remain there essentially for all eternity. A lot of things in this world really are poo in one hand and hope in the other. One that hasn't been mentioned here is the terrible socio-economic disaster that nicotine vaping is.

I'd venture to guess that a high quality, audio-visual geared workstation laptop would get the job super nicely here. So, we're talking about like a $750 class gaming build type desktop here. Bump that up to maybe $1200 if he wants a super aesthetic build. I suspect that portability is a much higher concern here though.

Moving diagonally is not hard. The problem is that there are four diagonals: Down and to the right Assuming that you want to move diagonally down and to the right, the algorithm is to continually increment both indices (row, column) until either one is out of range. Down and to the left Assuming that you want to move diagonally down and to the left, the algorithm is to increment row while decrementing column, until either one is out of range. Up and to the right Assuming that you want to move diagonally up and to the right, the algorithm is to decrement row while increment column, until either one is out of range. Up and to the left. Assuming that you want to move diagonally up and to the left, the algorithm is to decrement both row and column, until either one is out of range.

I didn't notice a date in the article. Does anyone know what date(s) the data was grabbed on?

It's in a detached garage and generates me enough revenue at a high enough margin and low enough workload to be worthwhile. I could quit my day job if I wanted to, but whatever: A day job gives me an opportunity to get out of the house. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/04/01/1790970/0/en/7-95-Billion-Edible-Insects-Market-Global-Forecast-to-2030.html#:~:text=Also%2C in terms of volume,reach 732%2C684.1 tonnes by 2030.&text=Based on insect type%2C crickets,market during the forecast period. Most people just go to their local baitshop or grocery store to buy fishing/pet feeding crickets. Human consumption is also increasing across the world, and has been popular in Asian countries since time began basically.