Very true. To some extent, it's reasonable to truncate a few bits of precision if the noise floor of the BAC sensor is substantially higher than the dynamic range of a 12-bit ADC. No reason to display a bunch of meaningless flickering digits extending far to the right of the decimal point.
But when you're displaying a decimal value, every place value with full 0-9 range takes about 3.3 bits of precision. If you're going to return numbers like "0.18" from a device with a range of 0.00 to 0.99, you need to keep at least 7 bits intact, or you're making stuff up. If their BAC sensor's uncertainty is insufficient to provide consistent, monotonic 7-bit values, or if they're deliberately throwing away all but four bits, then they're making stuff up.
Who the hell didn't pay attention in the A/D quantization error in controls class?
Oh, I'm sure they paid attention to quantization. Digital readings look more consistent, and hence more trustworthy, when you lop off a few LSBs. Stable and repeatable readings are much more important than accurate ones in the law-enforcement business.
The code in question, among other things, calculates an arithmetic mean of a sequence of values by successively averaging each value with the mean of all the previous ones, and reduces 12 bits of precision coming from the hardware sensor to 4 for some unspecified but undoubtedly stupid reason.
Well, it's not hard to imagine why they throw away all those bits. Prospective LEO customer: "Wow, this thing never gives the same reading twice. How am I supposed to secure convictions with numbers this flaky?"
The averaging thing, on the other hand... that's just a dumbass bug. One that's probably wrecked a few peoples' lives.
Demonstrating that another link in the evolutionary chain can happen without conscious intervention (spontaneously and mechanically) does not demonstrate the non-existence of an intelligent designer.
As a logician, what are your thoughts on the minimum description-length principle? The MDL principle suggests that it's a mistake to add a God to the equation if there's no specific need for one.
Same here. Only problem is that one of the major libraries "QtUiTools" is still only available as a static library which means if you use it then your app becomes GPL infected. It's hard not to use it if you use anything that creates GUI resources (eg. Qt Creator).
Is QtUiTools part of the Qt source distribution? If so, can you recompile it as a.DLL and get around the GPL encumbrance?
- Any public-school science teacher, atheist or not, who wants to tell his students that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old and that Jesus didn't ride dinosaurs can expect to be "inhibited or dissuaded" from doing so, if he's teaching in the wrong part of the country.
- 53% of the American public would refuse to vote for an atheist in a presidential election. That's not just "demonization," that's disenfranchisement. Unless you profess a belief in an invisible sky fairy, you have no representation in American government.
6 man EOD team response, more like $10k. What are they going to do, NOT respond when you call about a potential bomb on your car?
No, they'll surround your car with sandbags and water barriers and blow it up.
It pays to think these things through.
Re:What do you get combining Apple + gaming compan
on
Apple Eyeing EA?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Steve Jobs said he wanted Apple to be the new Sony, that is, to be the leader in consumer electronics. At the time, I thought Jobs was either out of it, or being typically grandiose. But over the past ten years, this is exactly what Apple has done.
Very good point. The reason Apple is kicking Sony's ass from hell to breakfast is precisely because Sony can't decide whether they're a hardware company or a content company. They're a house divided against itself; every time the hardware guys want to do something cool, the packaged-entertainment side of the company overrules them.
So, yeah, if Apple wants to be the next Sony, then buying EA is exactly what they'd do. And that would be great news for whatever startup is waiting in the wings to take Apple's place.
It's been difficult to really calculate such, especially compared to alternatives such as *direct* funding of technology research.
Direct funding of directionless research has a pretty terrible record by any metric you can think of. NASA spent about $25B total on the Apollo project, which yielded numerous useful spinoff technologies and companies, inspired countless numbers of engineering and science students, and put men on the moon. Microsoft spends roughly $6-$7B per year on their in-house research budget, which has yielded, well, let's see, Microsoft Bob(tm) and Songsmith.
Admittedly I'm comparing 1960s dollars with current dollars, but still... Bill, just give the money to NASA, for Chrissake.
Even when you're talking about pie-in-the-sky "pure research," people don't tend to appreciate the amount of tangible technology that comes out of those efforts. If you need to do some leading-edge photonic RF work, the papers you read are from NRAO. If you're working on next-gen MRI machines, you're probably interested in superconducting magnet tech developed for accelerators. There are any number of other cases where things you use every day came from applications you wouldn't have cared about at the time.
Filename extensions have been hidden by default for many years now, in all shipping versions of Windows. And they've been making it easy for malware authors to fool users for just as long.
It was an insanely stupid policy on MS's part, and it borders on negligence that they're still doing it.
Hah, that's a good point. Look for a not-so-well-disguised anagram of "Chris Chung" in whatever LB's next game is, complete with a dastardly reputation followed by a horrible death at the player's hands.
haha, clearly you haven't heard of something called the "Social Contract". You should check that out.
Haha, I don't remember signing any "social contract."
Valid contracts are entered into voluntarily, and contain terms of offer, acceptance, and consideration. If sticking a gun in my face and demanding money because I own a computer is what you call the "social contract," then you and Tommy Hobbes can leave me out of it.
One of the interesting things about the Ultima V: Lazarus project, which was a remake of U5 based on the Dungeon Siege engine, was that several spells and features from the original 8-bit release couldn't be implemented safely. (You can't teleport around in dungeons, among other things.)
The old-school 2D worlds had some real advantages when it came to game-design freedom. If you wanted to implement an airplane, you changed the player icon into a 14x16-pixel airplane, made the speaker play a repetitive clicking sound, and turned off collision detection. Need a teleport spell? Just generate pairs of random numbers from 0-63 and accept the first pair that lands on an empty tile. It took about 10 minutes to add a new monster via the 2D tile editor; no need to submit a request to the art director, coordinate with the animators, and hope you're not setting the schedule back another week or blowing the texture-memory budget.
Bottom line, the first three Ultimas were chock full of stuff that would be a nightmare to implement in a modern game engine. Lighting, animation, physics, sound, and so forth don't just complicate the code base, they complicate all aspects of production. It'd be comparable to the difference between writing a chapter in a novel about dragons attacking a city, and shooting the scene in a $200M movie. Not to say it can't be done, or that it shouldn't be done, but what you end up with will not be a very faithful heir to the originals.
I guess what I'm saying is, the only places where the iPhone comes up short are battery life and the fact that it's hardwired to AT&T. (The Kindle only wishes it had the iPhone's pinch-to-zoom UI.)
If Apple were to scale the platform up to a larger form factor -- something comparable to the size of the next-gen Kindle -- and drop the phone functionality, they'd have a fairly revolutionary tablet PC on their hands. They could incorporate larger batteries and lose their contractual ties to AT&T, since the platform would no longer technically be a phone.
I will probably buy one of the new Kindles as a newspaper-substitute, but I don't expect to grow very attached to it, and I doubt it'll see much use if the rumors about an iPhone-style tablet come to pass. Yes, e-ink is still preferable for serious reading, but I'm mostly looking for a better news-surfing platform, and the iPhone is just plain right for that application.
I'll probably have the same debate with myself again at this time next year, though. There really is getting to be less and less in the paper generally - it's getting thinner - and even less content than ever is something that I haven't already read online prior to the delivery of the paper.
Exactly. I've had that debate with myself for about the past five years. This was the year the newspaper lost.
Manufactured swine-flu hysteria was what pushed me over the edge, FWIW, but the paper's one-sided editorial slant was another factor. If someone wants a masturbatory echo chamber for their views, they can visit Free Republic or DailyKos for free. And as you point out, it's rare to read anything in the morning papers that you didn't see online the night before.
Racism exists pretty much everywhere, in one form or another. Where there are no visible racial differences, there will be imagined ones. Someone farther up the thread remarked favorably upon Japanese culture compared to African-American culture. He probably hadn't read this article or he'd have understood that so-called "racism" and "cultural bias" are ubiquitous whenever two or more humans who aren't identical siblings congregate.
Each individual is responsible for keeping and honoring the best parts of his/her culture, and rejecting the worst parts. It doesn't matter whether you're of Asian or African descent, you're still going to have to deal with some asshats who think they're better than you are.
Then what do you suggest be cut? English? Reading? Math? Science?
There's not much low-hanging fruit left in most curricula, but one suggestion would be penmanship. I still resent the hundreds of hours I spent being forced to practice a completely worthless skill in second through fourth grade. My school could have put that time to much better use.
Slashdot Mirror
Very true. To some extent, it's reasonable to truncate a few bits of precision if the noise floor of the BAC sensor is substantially higher than the dynamic range of a 12-bit ADC. No reason to display a bunch of meaningless flickering digits extending far to the right of the decimal point.
But when you're displaying a decimal value, every place value with full 0-9 range takes about 3.3 bits of precision. If you're going to return numbers like "0.18" from a device with a range of 0.00 to 0.99, you need to keep at least 7 bits intact, or you're making stuff up. If their BAC sensor's uncertainty is insufficient to provide consistent, monotonic 7-bit values, or if they're deliberately throwing away all but four bits, then they're making stuff up.
So, yeah. Conclusion: they're making stuff up.
Who the hell didn't pay attention in the A/D quantization error in controls class?
Oh, I'm sure they paid attention to quantization. Digital readings look more consistent, and hence more trustworthy, when you lop off a few LSBs. Stable and repeatable readings are much more important than accurate ones in the law-enforcement business.
The code in question, among other things, calculates an arithmetic mean of a sequence of values by successively averaging each value with the mean of all the previous ones, and reduces 12 bits of precision coming from the hardware sensor to 4 for some unspecified but undoubtedly stupid reason.
Well, it's not hard to imagine why they throw away all those bits. Prospective LEO customer: "Wow, this thing never gives the same reading twice. How am I supposed to secure convictions with numbers this flaky?"
The averaging thing, on the other hand... that's just a dumbass bug. One that's probably wrecked a few peoples' lives.
Demonstrating that another link in the evolutionary chain can happen without conscious intervention (spontaneously and mechanically) does not demonstrate the non-existence of an intelligent designer.
As a logician, what are your thoughts on the minimum description-length principle? The MDL principle suggests that it's a mistake to add a God to the equation if there's no specific need for one.
Same here. Only problem is that one of the major libraries "QtUiTools" is still only available as a static library which means if you use it then your app becomes GPL infected. It's hard not to use it if you use anything that creates GUI resources (eg. Qt Creator).
Is QtUiTools part of the Qt source distribution? If so, can you recompile it as a .DLL and get around the GPL encumbrance?
Yep. It's all one big conspiracy to silence your faith. You figured it out. Here, take a cookie, and have some Kool-Aid to wash it down.
Ahhhh - bigotry
Yes. We're all bigots. You're bigoted against adults who believe in the Tooth Fairy; the rest of us see your faith in the same light.
- Any public-school science teacher, atheist or not, who wants to tell his students that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old and that Jesus didn't ride dinosaurs can expect to be "inhibited or dissuaded" from doing so, if he's teaching in the wrong part of the country.
- Yes, Richard Dawkins
- All atheists were "demonized" by no less a figure than President G. H. W. Bush.
- 53% of the American public would refuse to vote for an atheist in a presidential election. That's not just "demonization," that's disenfranchisement. Unless you profess a belief in an invisible sky fairy, you have no representation in American government.
More examples here.
Any more questions?
6 man EOD team response, more like $10k. What are they going to do, NOT respond when you call about a potential bomb on your car?
No, they'll surround your car with sandbags and water barriers and blow it up.
It pays to think these things through.
Steve Jobs said he wanted Apple to be the new Sony, that is, to be the leader in consumer electronics. At the time, I thought Jobs was either out of it, or being typically grandiose. But over the past ten years, this is exactly what Apple has done.
Very good point. The reason Apple is kicking Sony's ass from hell to breakfast is precisely because Sony can't decide whether they're a hardware company or a content company. They're a house divided against itself; every time the hardware guys want to do something cool, the packaged-entertainment side of the company overrules them.
So, yeah, if Apple wants to be the next Sony, then buying EA is exactly what they'd do. And that would be great news for whatever startup is waiting in the wings to take Apple's place.
It's funny how few people remember that Col. Grossman was Emperor Palpatine to Jack Thompson's Darth Vader.
Sigh. Yes, which is why I said as much.
Same order of magnitude, though; the point stands.
It's been difficult to really calculate such, especially compared to alternatives such as *direct* funding of technology research.
Direct funding of directionless research has a pretty terrible record by any metric you can think of. NASA spent about $25B total on the Apollo project, which yielded numerous useful spinoff technologies and companies, inspired countless numbers of engineering and science students, and put men on the moon. Microsoft spends roughly $6-$7B per year on their in-house research budget, which has yielded, well, let's see, Microsoft Bob(tm) and Songsmith.
Admittedly I'm comparing 1960s dollars with current dollars, but still... Bill, just give the money to NASA, for Chrissake.
Even when you're talking about pie-in-the-sky "pure research," people don't tend to appreciate the amount of tangible technology that comes out of those efforts. If you need to do some leading-edge photonic RF work, the papers you read are from NRAO. If you're working on next-gen MRI machines, you're probably interested in superconducting magnet tech developed for accelerators. There are any number of other cases where things you use every day came from applications you wouldn't have cared about at the time.
Welcome to Windows 95?!
Filename extensions have been hidden by default for many years now, in all shipping versions of Windows. And they've been making it easy for malware authors to fool users for just as long.
It was an insanely stupid policy on MS's part, and it borders on negligence that they're still doing it.
Translation: "They haven't gored any of my oxen, at least not yet."
Hah, that's a good point. Look for a not-so-well-disguised anagram of "Chris Chung" in whatever LB's next game is, complete with a dastardly reputation followed by a horrible death at the player's hands.
Back in the day, it was "Pirt Snikwah."
haha, clearly you haven't heard of something called the "Social Contract". You should check that out.
Haha, I don't remember signing any "social contract."
Valid contracts are entered into voluntarily, and contain terms of offer, acceptance, and consideration. If sticking a gun in my face and demanding money because I own a computer is what you call the "social contract," then you and Tommy Hobbes can leave me out of it.
One of the interesting things about the Ultima V: Lazarus project, which was a remake of U5 based on the Dungeon Siege engine, was that several spells and features from the original 8-bit release couldn't be implemented safely. (You can't teleport around in dungeons, among other things.)
The old-school 2D worlds had some real advantages when it came to game-design freedom. If you wanted to implement an airplane, you changed the player icon into a 14x16-pixel airplane, made the speaker play a repetitive clicking sound, and turned off collision detection. Need a teleport spell? Just generate pairs of random numbers from 0-63 and accept the first pair that lands on an empty tile. It took about 10 minutes to add a new monster via the 2D tile editor; no need to submit a request to the art director, coordinate with the animators, and hope you're not setting the schedule back another week or blowing the texture-memory budget.
Bottom line, the first three Ultimas were chock full of stuff that would be a nightmare to implement in a modern game engine. Lighting, animation, physics, sound, and so forth don't just complicate the code base, they complicate all aspects of production. It'd be comparable to the difference between writing a chapter in a novel about dragons attacking a city, and shooting the scene in a $200M movie. Not to say it can't be done, or that it shouldn't be done, but what you end up with will not be a very faithful heir to the originals.
There was no similar bubble in commercial real estate.
Are you sure?
I guess what I'm saying is, the only places where the iPhone comes up short are battery life and the fact that it's hardwired to AT&T. (The Kindle only wishes it had the iPhone's pinch-to-zoom UI.)
If Apple were to scale the platform up to a larger form factor -- something comparable to the size of the next-gen Kindle -- and drop the phone functionality, they'd have a fairly revolutionary tablet PC on their hands. They could incorporate larger batteries and lose their contractual ties to AT&T, since the platform would no longer technically be a phone.
I will probably buy one of the new Kindles as a newspaper-substitute, but I don't expect to grow very attached to it, and I doubt it'll see much use if the rumors about an iPhone-style tablet come to pass. Yes, e-ink is still preferable for serious reading, but I'm mostly looking for a better news-surfing platform, and the iPhone is just plain right for that application.
Reducing the font size to capture more than a few paragraphs is unwieldy.
ROFL. Compared to what other phone?!
As soon as Apple comes to their senses and scales the iPhone up in size by a factor of 2x in both dimensions, it's all over for everybody else.
I'll probably have the same debate with myself again at this time next year, though. There really is getting to be less and less in the paper generally - it's getting thinner - and even less content than ever is something that I haven't already read online prior to the delivery of the paper.
Exactly. I've had that debate with myself for about the past five years. This was the year the newspaper lost.
Manufactured swine-flu hysteria was what pushed me over the edge, FWIW, but the paper's one-sided editorial slant was another factor. If someone wants a masturbatory echo chamber for their views, they can visit Free Republic or DailyKos for free. And as you point out, it's rare to read anything in the morning papers that you didn't see online the night before.
If you had an Apple II before 1974, then you had something a lot more interesting than an Apple II on your hands.
AFAIK the only 16-bit computers outside the defense sector were at Hewlett-Packard. This is the first homebrew 16-bit machine I've seen.
Racism exists pretty much everywhere, in one form or another. Where there are no visible racial differences, there will be imagined ones. Someone farther up the thread remarked favorably upon Japanese culture compared to African-American culture. He probably hadn't read this article or he'd have understood that so-called "racism" and "cultural bias" are ubiquitous whenever two or more humans who aren't identical siblings congregate.
Each individual is responsible for keeping and honoring the best parts of his/her culture, and rejecting the worst parts. It doesn't matter whether you're of Asian or African descent, you're still going to have to deal with some asshats who think they're better than you are.
Then what do you suggest be cut? English? Reading? Math? Science?
There's not much low-hanging fruit left in most curricula, but one suggestion would be penmanship. I still resent the hundreds of hours I spent being forced to practice a completely worthless skill in second through fourth grade. My school could have put that time to much better use.