I always thought most Bangladeshis not killed by cataclysmic flooding would escape into neighboring countries
They are already doing so in record numbers.
Much of the ethnic strife in the Indian states of Bengal and Assam can be attributed to the locals of those states fearing the large influx of (Muslim) Bangladeshis; the usual canards of alleged voter-roll shenanigans and over-burdening of infrastructure, and a general "nimby" mood have contributed to it.
It's not just a question of pride or vindictiveness. It's a matter of protecting the entire copyright in the first place.
If Rowling had let this slide, then the next person who copies the character or settings wholesale, and tries to publish "Harry Potter" sequels, would have a valid defense that Rowling didn't protect the copyright for this guy, so she effectively has given up the copyright.
The answer to which language you should learn depends, naturally, on why you need/want to learn such a language:
* Communication with (not necessarily geographically distant) colleagues, or customers?
Certainly it's useful to know a little Mandarin, Japanese or Spanish. Even if you aren't fluent, you'll at least be sensitive to internationalization issues.
* Understanding professional literature from other countries?
This used to be very important, years ago, for Physics and Chemistry, where the premier journals used to be in German. Not so important in computer science, where the major publications are all in English.
* Simply expanding your mind? Tourism? Pleasure?
Studies have shown that simply learning a second language trains your mind to look at problems in different ways, opening it up to seeing new solutions (and problems!). So learn some language - any language - and just enjoy the process.
(I learned a little broken French when I lived next door to the Alliance Francaise in Bangalore, and it has been pretty rewarding to me, anyway. I certainly don't read novels in French or anything, but it has been culturally enriching..)
I think you're asking the wrong question. Budget, Ultra-portable, Powerful - you can have any 2 out of 3.
If the question is truly about Budget and "powerful enough", obviously the thing won't be ultraportable. You can get a reasonable machine (~5 lbs, 14" screen, low-end Core Duo or Turion based) for about $500, or even lower if you look for sales or rebates.
You can then add a cheap or free office suite (e.g. OpenOffice), Firefox, etc., and you're ready to go.
I love it when arts majors try to emulate Orwell and struggle hard to dream up "dystopian" scenarios in anything and everything to appear sophisticated in the eyes of their colleagues..
God only knows we are living in dystopian times, with our society under attack from left, right, and corporate interests which don't fit into any pat category..
But Google street view is hardly a "live view" where neighbors snoop upon each other. It's just a one-time snapshot of a spot. If you happen to be bonking someone on the street just at that moment, and don't want your face (or whatever) on camera, tough. Do it indoors..
Even spoofing Caller ID, while a possible phreaking tool, is now common enough today that it's trivial for almost anyone to do. Certainly - most boilerroom telemarketers do this. But it's one thing to direct-dial someone's home and fake the caller ID - it's quite something else to reach a 911 line in Colorado from Boston. Think about that - there's definitely some phreaking involved, unless that 911 center also had a direct line tied in to the same systems.
As to the crime - it's whatever is applicable to other nuisance 911 calls. This is no different than calling from a public phone and saying you saw a gunman at 1234 Somewhere place, or whatever, and sending the SWAT team there..
Just today, I read an article about a new treatment to prevent rejection in transplants, that mirrors this story almost exactly.
Except that the treatment involves explicit transplantation of the original donor's bone marrow into the recipient, in addition to the organ being transplanted. Mostly for live-donor transplants from related donors.
This is really the worst part of modern software-development practices. When users complain about bugs, they are met with hostile demands to explain exactly, how to reproduce the bug[...]
Yeah. Imagine their nerve. I can just see you at the doctor's office:
You: "Hey, Doctor, I feel crappy. Do something!"
Doctor: "Err, can you describe what you're feeling?"
You: "Hey, what's all this hostile questioning? Are you doubting me? Huh? You're the doctor, smarty pants! Figure it out for yourself. Hmph! The nerve!"
Back in 1985, when I joined HP, the state of the art was the HP 7925 (~300MB), a washing-machine sized drive. And boy, did they really make it "bullet-proof" - if you remember the machine-room scene in Terminator 2, those were all 7925's that were stopping the "bad" Terminator's 21st-century bullets..
That bypasses the "Do the crime" bit since they haven't proven you've actually done the crime.
So? That hardly even begins to matter in today's US courts.
Today, the police can seize your car, your house, and your money, including your bank accounts, on the mere "suspicion" that they may be related to drug or terrorist activity. After that, they are not required to return them to you (even if they never even charge you with a crime), and are free to auction them off and keep the money.
It's your burden to prove (to a hard degree of proof) that they are not related to drug activity, in order to get them back. And the police can keep appealing that (on the public dime) until you give up.
This is merely a small extension of that principle.
Um, no. If you want to be technical, if there's no license attached to the code, then you can't use it. But then, there's also two other questions that arise:
* fair use of small snippets of code - trivial expressions of basic algorithms like "quicksort". Remember that simply copying code and changing variable names has been held to be copying in the context of copyright violations, so technically even if you write a quicksort from scratch, it'll be very much like some "copyrighted quicksort". But fair use will cover this situation.
* If the snippet is small enough, it's too trivial to be covered. Otherwise I could just publish a blog entry with the line "i = i+1;" and you'd never be able to use that in your own work:-).
It even failed to mention some potential liabilities. When he "emails his family five photographs of the Utes football game he attended the previous Saturday," the point is the infringement of the copyright of his friend who took the pictures. He doesn't pile on the possibility that the images themselves contain copyrighted team logos...
And worse, commercial broadcast contract language is now so loose that it covers pretty much any public description of the game. E.g. the NFL, etc., have tried to restrict people from announcing the scores of games while they're live, without getting their permission first. Similarly for bloggers writing game accounts while the game is live.
So merely broadcasting pictures of the game (even if he had taken them himself) would constitute a copyright violation.
So when advertisers are ready to financially guarantee (with appropriate compensation at, say, $100/hour spent cleaning up each system after an infection) that they won't serve malware and virus-laden ads, we'll be ready to consider actually allowing those ads to be downloaded.
Yet another waste of silicon to 'accellerate' badly written software.
Instead of devoting transistors to speed up the latest toy programming languages ('managed' code), why can't we just train programmers better?
Ahh..of course, because of java..don't bother learning HOW to optimized, let java do it FOR you...
I'm tempted to slam this as an uneducated rant, but since there's a little teeny kernel of truth in it, I'll let it slide.
The issue is not "badly written code". It's being able to run the same compiled code on a wide variety of hardware without recompiling it for every chip variant.
The huge drawback with all the RISC architectures (at least initially) was that each version of each chip had different numbers of functional units, different latencies for the functional units, different latencies to cache and memory, etc.
If you ever dealt with the MIPS or Sun compilers, they have a huge number of flags for hyper-optimizations on a variety of implementations of those architectures. The problem is that when you optimize it for one variant, it often makes it worse on other variants (because instructions that didn't collide in the instruction pipeline now do, as just one example..)
Now all of the modern architectures play the same games. Power/PowerPC, SPARC, Itanium, all of them. They all have multiple pipelines and execution units, massively parallel instruction issue, etc. Just like the X86.
And it's not because the programmers are idiots, but because that's the only way you could ever ship one binary that would run "optimally" on every implementation of that architecture.
PS. Java and C++ only make this worse because they are so dependent on such out-of-order massively-parallel execution (since they are so darn difficult to statically optimize).
The supreme irony of this is that for a while there, Java on X86 (Sun's implementation, no less!) ran rings around Java on SPARC (great strategy for pulling in customers for SPARC !). It's only with recent SPARC implentations (Niagara/Niagara 2) that play the same way as the X86's, that SPARC has finally caught up with and passed X86 again..
That page seems to be from *1994*!!
Besides, it's OK to ask for "reasonable charges" for GNU software distribution. Especially if you're distributing a "Reel to reel Unix tar 9-track 1600 bpi". Whoa, I haven't seen one of those since 1989.
So, who are we to go about chucking stones at the new Evil^H^H^H^HGood Empire when we rush out to buy Plasma TVs just in time for the Super Bowl / March Madness /...? I'll betcha that around the Super Bowl, we added a few 100 MW of draw to our already overloaded power distribution system.
It's not like they don't have ambitions in this regard, though.
They designated a special version of 6.06 as "LTS" (for Long-term support), with a 5-year support promise. I suspect they'll be slower with the LTS releases than the general public release cycle (which is every 6 months), and base the next LTS on some stable version of a top-level series (say 7.0X for X >> 4).
C'mon! Now if you didn't know what you were looking at before, now you know there's a target of interest there. For one thing, that's hardly a way to track down "points of interest for terror attacks". And it's trivially defeated by blurring 10000+ targets (sensitive and not-so-sensitive ones).
The main concern about truly high-resolution images is not "knowing that it's there", but using the 1m-resolution images to look for fences (and weaknesses in them), trees and other obstructions that can be used to hide from watchers, etc. With a good high-resolution image, it's a lot easier to plan a path for attack. (This is what was happening in Basra with the British encampment, which is apparently now blurred in Google..)
This is also why certain celebrities want their estates blurred out (so that paparazzi and (other) persons with ill intent can't figure out how to break into the estate easily). Slippery slope and all that.
As a layman this sounds like a pretty massive improvement. Is this a major breakthrough or is this progress as usual? Depends on your definition of "breakthrough". Breakthroughs aren't what they were 30 years ago. This one gives us maybe 10 additional years on the Moore's law curve. Sounds like a middling leap at best.
Can I see the clock speed boosted? Not everything can be parallelized and besides I don't think anyone at Microsoft knows how to. Another blurb in TFA talks about this:
HK + MG Combined:
Drive current increased >20%, (>20% higher performance) OR
source-drain leakage reduced >5x
What this means is that you can get higher performance (~20%) at the cost of higher power consumption (on the order of today's processors), OR you can get the same performance at substantially (not 1/5x, though) reduced power.
The first few Penryn processors are apparently targeted at the Mobile market, so we can see where they are going with this in the short term.
Slashdot Mirror
That was the first thought that crossed my mind, too..
I always thought most Bangladeshis not killed by cataclysmic flooding would escape into neighboring countries
They are already doing so in record numbers.
Much of the ethnic strife in the Indian states of Bengal and Assam can be attributed to the locals of those states fearing the large influx of (Muslim) Bangladeshis; the usual canards of alleged voter-roll shenanigans and over-burdening of infrastructure, and a general "nimby" mood have contributed to it.
It's not just a question of pride or vindictiveness. It's a matter of protecting the entire copyright in the first place.
If Rowling had let this slide, then the next person who copies the character or settings wholesale, and tries to publish "Harry Potter" sequels, would have a valid defense that Rowling didn't protect the copyright for this guy, so she effectively has given up the copyright.
Blame the courts and the law.
The answer to which language you should learn depends, naturally, on why you need/want to learn such a language:
* Communication with (not necessarily geographically distant) colleagues, or customers?
Certainly it's useful to know a little Mandarin, Japanese or Spanish. Even if you aren't fluent, you'll at least be sensitive to internationalization issues.
* Understanding professional literature from other countries?
This used to be very important, years ago, for Physics and Chemistry, where the premier journals used to be in German. Not so important in computer science, where the major publications are all in English.
* Simply expanding your mind? Tourism? Pleasure?
Studies have shown that simply learning a second language trains your mind to look at problems in different ways, opening it up to seeing new solutions (and problems!). So learn some language - any language - and just enjoy the process.
(I learned a little broken French when I lived next door to the Alliance Francaise in Bangalore, and it has been pretty rewarding to me, anyway. I certainly don't read novels in French or anything, but it has been culturally enriching..)
For those of you who remember this incident a couple of years ago:
http://www.news.com/2100-1028_3-6140118.html
James Kim's family was rescued because of a *single* ping received from a dying cell phone at a remote tower in Oregon.
I think you're asking the wrong question. Budget, Ultra-portable, Powerful - you can have any 2 out of 3.
If the question is truly about Budget and "powerful enough", obviously the thing won't be ultraportable. You can get a reasonable machine (~5 lbs, 14" screen, low-end Core Duo or Turion based) for about $500, or even lower if you look for sales or rebates.
You can then add a cheap or free office suite (e.g. OpenOffice), Firefox, etc., and you're ready to go.
I love it when arts majors try to emulate Orwell and struggle hard to dream up "dystopian" scenarios in anything and everything to appear sophisticated in the eyes of their colleagues..
God only knows we are living in dystopian times, with our society under attack from left, right, and corporate interests which don't fit into any pat category..
But Google street view is hardly a "live view" where neighbors snoop upon each other. It's just a one-time snapshot of a spot. If you happen to be bonking someone on the street just at that moment, and don't want your face (or whatever) on camera, tough. Do it indoors..
As to the crime - it's whatever is applicable to other nuisance 911 calls. This is no different than calling from a public phone and saying you saw a gunman at 1234 Somewhere place, or whatever, and sending the SWAT team there..
Just today, I read an article about a new treatment to prevent rejection in transplants, that mirrors this story almost exactly.
Except that the treatment involves explicit transplantation of the original donor's bone marrow into the recipient, in addition to the organ being transplanted. Mostly for live-donor transplants from related donors.
Yeah. Imagine their nerve. I can just see you at the doctor's office:
You: "Hey, Doctor, I feel crappy. Do something!"
Doctor: "Err, can you describe what you're feeling?"
You: "Hey, what's all this hostile questioning? Are you doubting me? Huh? You're the doctor, smarty pants! Figure it out for yourself. Hmph! The nerve!"
Back in 1985, when I joined HP, the state of the art was the HP 7925 (~300MB), a washing-machine sized drive. And boy, did they really make it "bullet-proof" - if you remember the machine-room scene in Terminator 2, those were all 7925's that were stopping the "bad" Terminator's 21st-century bullets..
So? That hardly even begins to matter in today's US courts.
Today, the police can seize your car, your house, and your money, including your bank accounts, on the mere "suspicion" that they may be related to drug or terrorist activity. After that, they are not required to return them to you (even if they never even charge you with a crime), and are free to auction them off and keep the money.
It's your burden to prove (to a hard degree of proof) that they are not related to drug activity, in order to get them back. And the police can keep appealing that (on the public dime) until you give up.
This is merely a small extension of that principle.
* fair use of small snippets of code - trivial expressions of basic algorithms like "quicksort". Remember that simply copying code and changing variable names has been held to be copying in the context of copyright violations, so technically even if you write a quicksort from scratch, it'll be very much like some "copyrighted quicksort". But fair use will cover this situation.
* If the snippet is small enough, it's too trivial to be covered. Otherwise I could just publish a blog entry with the line "i = i+1;" and you'd never be able to use that in your own work
And worse, commercial broadcast contract language is now so loose that it covers pretty much any public description of the game. E.g. the NFL, etc., have tried to restrict people from announcing the scores of games while they're live, without getting their permission first. Similarly for bloggers writing game accounts while the game is live.
So merely broadcasting pictures of the game (even if he had taken them himself) would constitute a copyright violation.
So when advertisers are ready to financially guarantee (with appropriate compensation at, say, $100/hour spent cleaning up each system after an infection) that they won't serve malware and virus-laden ads, we'll be ready to consider actually allowing those ads to be downloaded.
Until then, sayonara..
Instead of devoting transistors to speed up the latest toy programming languages ('managed' code), why can't we just train programmers better?
Ahh..of course, because of java..don't bother learning HOW to optimized, let java do it FOR you...
I'm tempted to slam this as an uneducated rant, but since there's a little teeny kernel of truth in it, I'll let it slide.
The issue is not "badly written code". It's being able to run the same compiled code on a wide variety of hardware without recompiling it for every chip variant.
The huge drawback with all the RISC architectures (at least initially) was that each version of each chip had different numbers of functional units, different latencies for the functional units, different latencies to cache and memory, etc.
If you ever dealt with the MIPS or Sun compilers, they have a huge number of flags for hyper-optimizations on a variety of implementations of those architectures. The problem is that when you optimize it for one variant, it often makes it worse on other variants (because instructions that didn't collide in the instruction pipeline now do, as just one example..)
Now all of the modern architectures play the same games. Power/PowerPC, SPARC, Itanium, all of them. They all have multiple pipelines and execution units, massively parallel instruction issue, etc. Just like the X86.
And it's not because the programmers are idiots, but because that's the only way you could ever ship one binary that would run "optimally" on every implementation of that architecture.
PS. Java and C++ only make this worse because they are so dependent on such out-of-order massively-parallel execution (since they are so darn difficult to statically optimize).
The supreme irony of this is that for a while there, Java on X86 (Sun's implementation, no less!) ran rings around Java on SPARC (great strategy for pulling in customers for SPARC !). It's only with recent SPARC implentations (Niagara/Niagara 2) that play the same way as the X86's, that SPARC has finally caught up with and passed X86 again..
That page seems to be from *1994*!! Besides, it's OK to ask for "reasonable charges" for GNU software distribution. Especially if you're distributing a "Reel to reel Unix tar 9-track 1600 bpi". Whoa, I haven't seen one of those since 1989.
So, who are we to go about chucking stones at the new Evil^H^H^H^HGood Empire when we rush out to buy Plasma TVs just in time for the Super Bowl / March Madness / ...? I'll betcha that around the Super Bowl, we added a few 100 MW of draw to our already overloaded power distribution system.
It's not like they don't have ambitions in this regard, though. They designated a special version of 6.06 as "LTS" (for Long-term support), with a 5-year support promise. I suspect they'll be slower with the LTS releases than the general public release cycle (which is every 6 months), and base the next LTS on some stable version of a top-level series (say 7.0X for X >> 4).
HK + MG Combined:
- Drive current increased >20%, (>20% higher performance) OR
- source-drain leakage reduced >5x
What this means is that you can get higher performance (~20%) at the cost of higher power consumption (on the order of today's processors), OR you can get the same performance at substantially (not 1/5x, though) reduced power. The first few Penryn processors are apparently targeted at the Mobile market, so we can see where they are going with this in the short term.Who's "plaintiff Wallace"? The Spam King?