Exactly what I was thinking. Had I been there, my reaction, after the initial shock and horror, would have been, "No, if we fail, it will be because you demanded we demo a product before it was ready." There's pushing people to deliver amazing products in an amazing timeframe, and there's pushing people to deliver a product, finished or not, in an unrealistic timeframe. There's a very fine line between the two, and had they failed, it would have been entirely because Steve crossed that line. Fortunately for everyone involved, he didn't. He knew exactly how far and how hard to push, and he pushed that hard, but no harder.
A journal is either "level 2", "level 1" or "level 0". "level 2" is a selection of top journals from each field in science, 2000 in total (for all of science, from computational physics to the sociology of music). "level 1" means the remaining serious peer-reviewed journals. "level 0" either means "bullshit journal" or "journal that was founded just last year".
Here's the problem with doing that so systemically: it is fundamentally anticompetitive, and leads to stagnation. Nobody would bother submitting to a "level 0" journal because it won't earn them any props at all, which means that the journal can never become anything more than a "level 0" journal. This means that you don't get fresh blood with new ideas on the review boards, so progress moves at a snail's pace. There's something to be said for disruptive innovation, even in academic publishing circles.
Also, the entire notion of judging the value of your scientific contribution based on what journal agreed to publish it is as absurd as judging the value of a car based on what dealer sold it. A paper should stand or fall on its own merits. A good article that pushes science forward, even if published in a minor journal, should weigh significantly in your favor for tenure, and a lousy article, even if published in a major journal, should not. A system that does the opposite is abject stupidity, pure and simple.
As I understand it, that single-line 20 Mb/s is only possible if you live basically right next to the CO or a DSL-enabled remote terminal (RT). By the time you get to my distance, ADSL2+ is only slightly faster than plain jane ADSL, circa 1998. With two lines bonded, by my math, I might be able to pull off 1.5 Mbps up and 10 Mbps down, but only with Annex M, and only if the two lines don't interfere with each other at all.
If you're printing only pie charts and other bold colors, they're probably fine, but for photo reproduction, at least in my limited experience, they leave much to be desired. My first experience with Samsung laser printers was going around a trade show asking for sample prints. All the other vendors provided good sample prints with stunning contrast and great color reproduction. The Samsung sample print was a dark, muddy, blotchy mess—easily the worst looking reproduction of a photograph I had ever seen. I've seen a fair number of folks make comments about these printers producing output that looks like that, so I never bothered to give them another chance after that.
The remarkable thing was that their prints were even worse than HP, which had previously held my record for worst print quality. I really don't understand why anyone buys HP printers. Their halftoning is a horribly banded joke on literally every HP printer I've ever used, from the oldest black-and-white printers to the newest color printers, from inkjet to laser. How anyone considers such poor output to be acceptable is beyond me.
I settled on the Konica Minolta 7450 II Grafx, and have never been disappointed.
Sure, I should ideally calibrate my monitor (I haven't had time to calibrate this one yet), but a basic principal of design is that you have to assume that 99% of the people looking at your content are going to be using the hardware with the default calibrations as shipped, and you have to choose your colors accordingly. This design epically fails at that. A 4% difference in brightness does not proper contrast make.
Agreed. Laughter of relief is laughing when something turns out not to be as bad as you thought it was going to be, which is the polar opposite of humor.
A sufficiently lighthearted story can often be described as simply the absence of darkness, but that's not necessarily the case for all humor. Consider the whole genre of dark comedy, in which the story is funny, but involves really dark, depressing situations that are merely portrayed in a lighthearted way.
IMO, there's definitely a category of laughter that I would describe as "laughter of absurdity". It's every bit as visceral as pain, sadness, joy, etc. So humor (or, if you'd prefer, jocularity) is definitely an emotion.
In theory, yes, I could bond two channels together. In practice, our phone lines are excrement. I'd be surprised if there wasn't too much channel leakage for it to do any good.
Granted, there's no way in hell I'm connecting it to a network so they can decide on a whim to update it, so I haven't seen the full extent of how annoying they can be.
Count yourself lucky. Both of mine experienced major performance degradation immediately after firmware updates, and they never fixed the bugs.
I'm sorry, but if your Blu-Ray player can't play a DVD without pausing at the layer gap, you really have no business designing hardware. My laptop can spin up the optical drive for a few seconds every few minutes and play DVD content without stuttering. The data rate is trivially low for modern hardware to handle, so a lack of sufficient buffering for basic playback is simply inexcusable.
Speaking of text, in Safari, I have to increase the font size twice before the "Most Discussed" heading on the main page appears in the same row as the rest of the buttons.
Also, when they chose their color scheme, did they actually test it on even one Mac laptop with the standard Mac gamut? Because all those near-white colors are completely indistinguishable until I tilt the screen by about ten or fifteen degrees. They're way, way too subtle. I can't even tell where one story ends and the next one begins. The site borders on unusably hard to read as a result.
Even more damning was that the Note 3 was still faster than the G2 when run using 'stealth' (basically renamed) versions of the benchmarking apps which did not get the boost.
Wait, what? How is that more damning? It sounds like that means the benchmark is faster even without cheating, which means that they've changed the kernel scheduler/idle timers/clock stepping in a way that, at least for the sorts of tests performed in the benchmark, improves performance—presumably because their case design and/or battery capacity is better, allowing them to get away with less processor throttling. That sounds like it is almost inarguably a good thing. And that's coming from somebody who has dealt with several of Samsung's products and hated almost all of them. What's with the hate?
Unless, of course, they're being too aggressive about keeping the clock speed high, in which case you might argue that their battery life isn't what it should be... but that's pretty subjective.
I should be so lucky as to have 2004-era technology. I'm in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and can't get anything faster than basic 1998-era ADSL. If the HOA would let me put up a fifty foot tower, I could probably point a parabolic Wi-Fi antenna towards the Apple or Google campus and get faster service.
If so, it means that the hardware manufacturers are too clueless to recognize that it's a serious problem. I have GPS in my Canon 6D and nearly returned the camera because I thought the GPS had died after a week. Why? Because I had gotten on an airplane, which caused GPS to shut off internally, and it never came back on. After yanking the battery, it started working, at which point I thought for a moment, remembered that ridiculous restriction, and realized what had happened. Had I not been intimately familiar with GPS, Canon would have eaten several hundred bucks because of this limitation.
The reason people don't notice this on phones is that the phone knows to reset GPS if there's a cell signal. Unfortunately, non-phone devices don't have that advantage.
Seriously, though, DSLRs are amazing, so long as you actually learn to use them. I almost laugh out loud on a regular basis when on holiday every time I see someone with an entry-level DSLR in full auto mode with a kit lens, shooting some artefact or monument with the built in flash. Those sorts would do better with an all in one bridge camera and spend the difference in the hotel bar.
The sad thing is that they're just a decent lens and one rotation of the dial away from good pictures (P instead of full auto so that the flash doesn't pop up). I'd estimate that 95% of my shots are done at full auto (including auto ISO) or, at most, full auto with the exposure dialed up or down, because it is fairly rare to have enough time to set up a shot in manual mode, and the best shots are the ones you didn't miss. It's that 5% where I'm shooting under challenging circumstances and take the time to do a full manual setup where the DSLR shines, of course.
The thing is, most of those problems that take a thousand years to verify aren't generally interesting except perhaps in some esoteric field of study.
The interesting uses of QC, IMO involve things like cracking RSA, where the time required to verify a solution is trivial, but the time required to produce a solution is enormous.
Love camera phones. They really did bring about a revolution in photography. At this point dSLRs should only be used by professionals, as image quality is far less important than image usability via social media sharing.
Maybe in your universe. In my universe, camera phones are still relatively poor even when compared with even my original Canon 300D DSLR from a decade ago. Compared with my current 6D, the difference is night and day. Literally. The amount of light is proportional to the square of the lens diameter, which effectively means that I can take high-ISO handheld photos with my 6D in an only partially lit parking lot at night that are similar in quality with pictures shot using my year-old cell phone during the day.
This is not to say that camera phones aren't good. They're great within very well-defined limits. On various photography boards, they have a saying that the best camera is the camera you have with you. If I don't plan to take photos, I always have my phone with me, which lets me shoot acceptable photos so long as the lighting is at least moderately decent, and so long as I can get close enough to not need to use the zoom. However, when I'm traveling or doing anything where I think I might want good pictures, I always drag my DSLR along, because A. there's never enough time to foot-zoom a quarter of a mile, and B. I appreciate shallow depth of field.
Your point and my point are not really in conflict; they're just two sides of the same coin. Ultimately, the first goal of government, sadly, is and has always been maintaining and concentrating power. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. Other governments knowing things about your citizens weakens your own government's power, because those other countries could potentially learn some of your country's secrets. (This is particularly true for business communications.) Your own government knowing things about its citizens increases its power, because it gives them information not only about security threats, but also about potential threats to your power. It also gives them ammunition that they can use for blackmail if they need to silence a dissenter. Therefore, the natural tendency is for a government to want to increase its ability to spy on its citizens while decreasing the ability of other governments to do so. I cite as an example the extensive U.S. government surveillance of people involved in the Occupy movement.
Complete global decentralization, which the Internet typically trends towards in the absence of interference, limits the ability of all governments to spy on anyone. This does not meet the above goals. However, regional centralization (such as EU member governments encouraging people to use servers within the EU) in lieu of global centralization decreases the ability of governments to spy on people from other countries/economic communities, while increasing governments' ability to spy on people in their own countries. This is a win-win for European governments; they get the political win of being able to say that they're protecting people from the watchful eye of the nefarious U.S. government, all the while centralizing that data in a location where it is more easily reachable by their own governments through subpoenas and what not.
Pretty much. Governments have long recognized that the existence of a decentralized packet-switched network makes spying on its citizens harder. Therefore, their goal is to break the Internet, splitting it off into lots of little regional networks that don't fully talk to one another, requiring companies to store data on their citizens in country-specific servers so that it is easier to keep track of everything that's happening, etc. Government would love to go all the way back to the circuit-switched days of mainframe computing if they could.
This is why we, as citizens of the world, must unite to demand more reasonable policies, starting with laws that fine companies an exorbitant amount of money for sharing information about their citizens with foreign governments without a warrant from the citizens' governments. If Google were hit with a million dollar fine every time it obeyed an NSL without getting a court order from whatever country the target was from, Google would then be forced to sue the federal government to reclaim those damages, forcing the U.S. government to act like a proper player on the world stage instead of a world-class thug that bullies its way into whatever information it wants.
Not really, no. Quick: what's the result (including type) of the following expressions?
The strings are coerced into numbers just as they should be. The only one that's even slightly questionable is "1 hello", which you might reasonably argue should have thrown an exception. That said, the behavior is basically the same as C's atoi and atol functions, so if you consider it unreasonable, you're also considering C's string to integer conversion unreasonable. The only thing significantly different about PHP is that it does this implicitly, but IMO that makes perfect sense in a dynamically typed language.
Now I will admit that if you are used to JavaScript, the notion of having separate addition and string concatenation operations takes some getting used to, but having that strict operator separation can prevent lots of security bugs caused by failure to properly sanitize input—particularly important when you're working with programmers who lack experience in code security.
This is a problem as many systems use Base64-encoded cookie values, which get corrupted by this process.
The original cookie spec suggests that the value in a cookie should be URL-encoded. If you URL-encode a Base64 string when setting the cookie, then PHP's behavior gives you exactly what you want—the Base64 blob. The PHP cookie creation functions do this for you. If you're generating cookies with JavaScript, use encodeURIComponent.
Also, if you need the raw cookie values in some other form, you can always split $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE_VARS'] yourself. AFAIK, that contains the raw data.
A leaky abstraction is a serious indicator that a designer hasn't properly thought things through.
Or that the designer wants the language to be C-like. Providing a near-exact clone of the C API in another language isn't necessarily a bad thing if you think that a significant percentage of your programmers are going to be writing code in both languages.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you? That's exactly what I said.
Exactly what I was thinking. Had I been there, my reaction, after the initial shock and horror, would have been, "No, if we fail, it will be because you demanded we demo a product before it was ready." There's pushing people to deliver amazing products in an amazing timeframe, and there's pushing people to deliver a product, finished or not, in an unrealistic timeframe. There's a very fine line between the two, and had they failed, it would have been entirely because Steve crossed that line. Fortunately for everyone involved, he didn't. He knew exactly how far and how hard to push, and he pushed that hard, but no harder.
Here's the problem with doing that so systemically: it is fundamentally anticompetitive, and leads to stagnation. Nobody would bother submitting to a "level 0" journal because it won't earn them any props at all, which means that the journal can never become anything more than a "level 0" journal. This means that you don't get fresh blood with new ideas on the review boards, so progress moves at a snail's pace. There's something to be said for disruptive innovation, even in academic publishing circles.
Also, the entire notion of judging the value of your scientific contribution based on what journal agreed to publish it is as absurd as judging the value of a car based on what dealer sold it. A paper should stand or fall on its own merits. A good article that pushes science forward, even if published in a minor journal, should weigh significantly in your favor for tenure, and a lousy article, even if published in a major journal, should not. A system that does the opposite is abject stupidity, pure and simple.
As I understand it, that single-line 20 Mb/s is only possible if you live basically right next to the CO or a DSL-enabled remote terminal (RT). By the time you get to my distance, ADSL2+ is only slightly faster than plain jane ADSL, circa 1998. With two lines bonded, by my math, I might be able to pull off 1.5 Mbps up and 10 Mbps down, but only with Annex M, and only if the two lines don't interfere with each other at all.
Obligatory:
This thread is useless without pi...
No, wait.
If you're printing only pie charts and other bold colors, they're probably fine, but for photo reproduction, at least in my limited experience, they leave much to be desired. My first experience with Samsung laser printers was going around a trade show asking for sample prints. All the other vendors provided good sample prints with stunning contrast and great color reproduction. The Samsung sample print was a dark, muddy, blotchy mess—easily the worst looking reproduction of a photograph I had ever seen. I've seen a fair number of folks make comments about these printers producing output that looks like that, so I never bothered to give them another chance after that.
The remarkable thing was that their prints were even worse than HP, which had previously held my record for worst print quality. I really don't understand why anyone buys HP printers. Their halftoning is a horribly banded joke on literally every HP printer I've ever used, from the oldest black-and-white printers to the newest color printers, from inkjet to laser. How anyone considers such poor output to be acceptable is beyond me.
I settled on the Konica Minolta 7450 II Grafx, and have never been disappointed.
Sure, I should ideally calibrate my monitor (I haven't had time to calibrate this one yet), but a basic principal of design is that you have to assume that 99% of the people looking at your content are going to be using the hardware with the default calibrations as shipped, and you have to choose your colors accordingly. This design epically fails at that. A 4% difference in brightness does not proper contrast make.
Agreed. Laughter of relief is laughing when something turns out not to be as bad as you thought it was going to be, which is the polar opposite of humor.
A sufficiently lighthearted story can often be described as simply the absence of darkness, but that's not necessarily the case for all humor. Consider the whole genre of dark comedy, in which the story is funny, but involves really dark, depressing situations that are merely portrayed in a lighthearted way.
IMO, there's definitely a category of laughter that I would describe as "laughter of absurdity". It's every bit as visceral as pain, sadness, joy, etc. So humor (or, if you'd prefer, jocularity) is definitely an emotion.
In theory, yes, I could bond two channels together. In practice, our phone lines are excrement. I'd be surprised if there wasn't too much channel leakage for it to do any good.
Count yourself lucky. Both of mine experienced major performance degradation immediately after firmware updates, and they never fixed the bugs.
I'm sorry, but if your Blu-Ray player can't play a DVD without pausing at the layer gap, you really have no business designing hardware. My laptop can spin up the optical drive for a few seconds every few minutes and play DVD content without stuttering. The data rate is trivially low for modern hardware to handle, so a lack of sufficient buffering for basic playback is simply inexcusable.
Interesting. I'm wondering if Canon's hardware uses a much lower limit, as I've seen this behavior on multiple plane rides, and nowhere else.
Speaking of text, in Safari, I have to increase the font size twice before the "Most Discussed" heading on the main page appears in the same row as the rest of the buttons.
Also, when they chose their color scheme, did they actually test it on even one Mac laptop with the standard Mac gamut? Because all those near-white colors are completely indistinguishable until I tilt the screen by about ten or fifteen degrees. They're way, way too subtle. I can't even tell where one story ends and the next one begins. The site borders on unusably hard to read as a result.
You've obviously never used their Blu-Ray players.
Wait, what? How is that more damning? It sounds like that means the benchmark is faster even without cheating, which means that they've changed the kernel scheduler/idle timers/clock stepping in a way that, at least for the sorts of tests performed in the benchmark, improves performance—presumably because their case design and/or battery capacity is better, allowing them to get away with less processor throttling. That sounds like it is almost inarguably a good thing. And that's coming from somebody who has dealt with several of Samsung's products and hated almost all of them. What's with the hate?
Unless, of course, they're being too aggressive about keeping the clock speed high, in which case you might argue that their battery life isn't what it should be... but that's pretty subjective.
I should be so lucky as to have 2004-era technology. I'm in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and can't get anything faster than basic 1998-era ADSL. If the HOA would let me put up a fifty foot tower, I could probably point a parabolic Wi-Fi antenna towards the Apple or Google campus and get faster service.
If so, it means that the hardware manufacturers are too clueless to recognize that it's a serious problem. I have GPS in my Canon 6D and nearly returned the camera because I thought the GPS had died after a week. Why? Because I had gotten on an airplane, which caused GPS to shut off internally, and it never came back on. After yanking the battery, it started working, at which point I thought for a moment, remembered that ridiculous restriction, and realized what had happened. Had I not been intimately familiar with GPS, Canon would have eaten several hundred bucks because of this limitation.
The reason people don't notice this on phones is that the phone knows to reset GPS if there's a cell signal. Unfortunately, non-phone devices don't have that advantage.
Interesting. I've never had much trouble shooting fish. Try more light. Or bigger fish. ;-)
The sad thing is that they're just a decent lens and one rotation of the dial away from good pictures (P instead of full auto so that the flash doesn't pop up). I'd estimate that 95% of my shots are done at full auto (including auto ISO) or, at most, full auto with the exposure dialed up or down, because it is fairly rare to have enough time to set up a shot in manual mode, and the best shots are the ones you didn't miss. It's that 5% where I'm shooting under challenging circumstances and take the time to do a full manual setup where the DSLR shines, of course.
The thing is, most of those problems that take a thousand years to verify aren't generally interesting except perhaps in some esoteric field of study.
The interesting uses of QC, IMO involve things like cracking RSA, where the time required to verify a solution is trivial, but the time required to produce a solution is enormous.
Maybe in your universe. In my universe, camera phones are still relatively poor even when compared with even my original Canon 300D DSLR from a decade ago. Compared with my current 6D, the difference is night and day. Literally. The amount of light is proportional to the square of the lens diameter, which effectively means that I can take high-ISO handheld photos with my 6D in an only partially lit parking lot at night that are similar in quality with pictures shot using my year-old cell phone during the day.
This is not to say that camera phones aren't good. They're great within very well-defined limits. On various photography boards, they have a saying that the best camera is the camera you have with you. If I don't plan to take photos, I always have my phone with me, which lets me shoot acceptable photos so long as the lighting is at least moderately decent, and so long as I can get close enough to not need to use the zoom. However, when I'm traveling or doing anything where I think I might want good pictures, I always drag my DSLR along, because A. there's never enough time to foot-zoom a quarter of a mile, and B. I appreciate shallow depth of field.
Your point and my point are not really in conflict; they're just two sides of the same coin. Ultimately, the first goal of government, sadly, is and has always been maintaining and concentrating power. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. Other governments knowing things about your citizens weakens your own government's power, because those other countries could potentially learn some of your country's secrets. (This is particularly true for business communications.) Your own government knowing things about its citizens increases its power, because it gives them information not only about security threats, but also about potential threats to your power. It also gives them ammunition that they can use for blackmail if they need to silence a dissenter. Therefore, the natural tendency is for a government to want to increase its ability to spy on its citizens while decreasing the ability of other governments to do so. I cite as an example the extensive U.S. government surveillance of people involved in the Occupy movement.
Complete global decentralization, which the Internet typically trends towards in the absence of interference, limits the ability of all governments to spy on anyone. This does not meet the above goals. However, regional centralization (such as EU member governments encouraging people to use servers within the EU) in lieu of global centralization decreases the ability of governments to spy on people from other countries/economic communities, while increasing governments' ability to spy on people in their own countries. This is a win-win for European governments; they get the political win of being able to say that they're protecting people from the watchful eye of the nefarious U.S. government, all the while centralizing that data in a location where it is more easily reachable by their own governments through subpoenas and what not.
This article is a good read on the subject.
Pretty much. Governments have long recognized that the existence of a decentralized packet-switched network makes spying on its citizens harder. Therefore, their goal is to break the Internet, splitting it off into lots of little regional networks that don't fully talk to one another, requiring companies to store data on their citizens in country-specific servers so that it is easier to keep track of everything that's happening, etc. Government would love to go all the way back to the circuit-switched days of mainframe computing if they could.
This is why we, as citizens of the world, must unite to demand more reasonable policies, starting with laws that fine companies an exorbitant amount of money for sharing information about their citizens with foreign governments without a warrant from the citizens' governments. If Google were hit with a million dollar fine every time it obeyed an NSL without getting a court order from whatever country the target was from, Google would then be forced to sue the federal government to reclaim those damages, forcing the U.S. government to act like a proper player on the world stage instead of a world-class thug that bullies its way into whatever information it wants.
FTFY.
The strings are coerced into numbers just as they should be. The only one that's even slightly questionable is "1 hello", which you might reasonably argue should have thrown an exception. That said, the behavior is basically the same as C's atoi and atol functions, so if you consider it unreasonable, you're also considering C's string to integer conversion unreasonable. The only thing significantly different about PHP is that it does this implicitly, but IMO that makes perfect sense in a dynamically typed language.
Now I will admit that if you are used to JavaScript, the notion of having separate addition and string concatenation operations takes some getting used to, but having that strict operator separation can prevent lots of security bugs caused by failure to properly sanitize input—particularly important when you're working with programmers who lack experience in code security.
The original cookie spec suggests that the value in a cookie should be URL-encoded. If you URL-encode a Base64 string when setting the cookie, then PHP's behavior gives you exactly what you want—the Base64 blob. The PHP cookie creation functions do this for you. If you're generating cookies with JavaScript, use encodeURIComponent.
Also, if you need the raw cookie values in some other form, you can always split $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE_VARS'] yourself. AFAIK, that contains the raw data.
Or that the designer wants the language to be C-like. Providing a near-exact clone of the C API in another language isn't necessarily a bad thing if you think that a significant percentage of your programmers are going to be writing code in both languages.