Google doesn't need that many more smart technical people. What they could use some people who could figure out something other than ads that people would actually pay for. Their track record in actual products is awful. The overpriced "Google Search Appliance" isn't doing well. They do corporate hosted mailboxes, but that's Postini, which they bought.
Google is really an ad agency. That's where the money comes from.
Google still needs smart people. They have competition, and often serious, heavy-weight competition, on every front. If they were to stagnate, as you suggest, they would die.
But why are you judging a service company by actual, by which you seem to mean physical, products, when they have class-defining services like Google Search, GMail, Google Scholar, Google Maps, etc., and not-quite-as-good-but-still-respectable services like Google Voice, Google Docs, Google Checkout, etc.? Saying that they're an also-ran in products is being nearsighted. And if by products you mean something that you must pay for to acquire, you've been missing the new business model. Google Chrome and Picassa being but two very-good-to-excellent products that are provided for free, and without advertising support.
So, while Google makes its money mostly from advertising, yes, saying that they have a bad track record on products doesn't seem quite clear headed.
"We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research," said Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell. "However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T."
So the school superintendent would apparently have been OK with the computers running 24 hours per day, 365 days per year (Denise Birdwell's interpretation of these programs work) running Folding@Home, "slow[ing] down educational programs in every classroom and cost[ing] the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts," but not SETI@Home?
Someone needs to educate Ms. Birdwell, who is presented as overly dramatic in the linked article, about how these programs work. And how entirely appropriate it would be for local schools to donate unused computer time to running programs like these, and what a great opportunity it would have presented to the scientific education of the children in the district.
Technology is technology; the more modern, the more ephemeral. People get attached to things that have durability.
My grandmother was a minor author, with five books or pamphlets under her belt. She wrote them all, in addition to her personal correspondence, on an Underwood manual typewriter from the 1890s. I've had it cleaned and serviced, and expect that it will continue to work just fine for another 120 years, assuming we can still get the ribbons (and if not, making them doesn't seem that daunting). Every letter that I type on it, every journal entry, connects me to her because she used it for so long.
In contrast, since my first laptop purchase in 1992 or 1993, I've had eight or nine of them. They don't last. There's only one that I remember fondly (and still have a working model) but the likelihood that it will work in 20 years is quite low. The battery certainly will no longer hold any appreciable charge. My current laptop could disappear and be replaced with a newer model and I'd not really blink.
My grandmother's typewriter has a cast iron frame and steel parts. My best laptops have had cast magnesium frames and mostly plastic parts. In the 50 years that my grandmother used her typewriter, some of the letters started to show wear. My laptops have universally shown keyboard wear in under 2 years, most in under 1 year.
If computers had an appreciable lifetime beyond two or three years, then quite possibly, we might find the same attachment, but we don't. The only real attachment that people have are to some keyboards, most notably the IBM Model M, which is built like an old-style typewriter.
It's all spelled out in their AUP, first paragraph:
General Policy: Verizon reserves the sole discretion to deny or restrict your Service, or immediately to suspend or terminate your Service, if the use of your Service by you or anyone using it, in our sole discretion, violates the Agreement or other Verizon policies, is objectionable or unlawful, interferes with the functioning or use of the Internet or the Verizon network by Verizon or other users, or violates the terms of this Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP").
This may be overbroad wording in response to spam comments or the like (remember the Christmas store junk that kept getting posted here over the last few weeks?). The wording is broad, but that may very well be to make sure that they can reasonably catch it all and respond.
Sorry if that's too ontopic. I guess I could help that out by copy and pasting some hot fanfic but a quick google search doesn't show any Steven Chu/Terry Tao slash.
And it gives them ammunition to terminate essentially anyone's service, at will, since deciding whether a posting is on-topic or off-topic is entirely subjective.
I find it amusing how most of you seem to have the image that South America is one big jungle, with no cities, no technology whatsoever and where people use treetops as shelters. I doubt he'll spend more than 10% of his total journey in the actual jungles.
Who said anything about jungles? Just being a little off the beaten track means poor-to-no internet connectivity. As the OP said himself: "Keep in mind that many places have very poor bandwidth and latency."
But the very fact that his primary purpose for the trip is to specifically NOT stay in the comfort of his resplendently connected home means that it will, no matter where he travels, be somewhat difficult to get good connectivity with the same sort of ease. Even in large cities, when you want internet access, how long between the decision to seek it out and to be actually online (without a global wireless plan that includes 3G service)? 30 minutes of wandering around? An hour? Maybe the connection is a shared ISDN line that the gamer teens are maxing out. So maybe it takes another two hours to find some place where the connectivity is decent. Remember, the OP is going to places he's never been before, so doesn't automatically know where everything is.
"why on earth you feel a need to access your investment account from the depths of south america, i'm not sure."
Wait until you figure out you lost half of your portfolio in 24 hours then you know why.
The parent post is 100% spot on, but the grandparent post has an inadvertent truth as well -- if you're away from your normal life, then you're not day trading. If you're not day trading, every now-and-then phone access to your broker service combined with some well-considered limit/stop orders should suffice if you have sporadic newspaper or web-based stock quotes. Network-based access to your investment portfolio is a convenience (and even e*trade has phone service) that might well be considered an unnecessary luxury while on a long trip to remote parts of the world.
Wouldn't power consumption grow more than linearly with neuron count? I would think the number of connections is the dominant factor - so the comparison of two data points of power consumption vs neuron count is meaningless.
Neurons are not typically fully connected in K-star like networks, they are more usually connected to a fixed number of other neurons that varies by type from a small handful to 10,000. The latter number (10,000) is used as when researchers and scientists want to estimate the total number of connections in the cortex, especially when talking about simulations or writing grant proposals where bigger numbers are more impressive.
So, power consumption should grow linearly with neuron count, if the simulation is following this particular lead from biology, and the simulation writers didn't do something stupid to create an O(n^2) dependency.
Thank you for the details that support my assertion. The people listed are a very, very small fraction of the total populace. As a general member of the public, you have no direct say in making a nomination.
Nobel prizes are not decided by popular vote. They are not decided by wider discussion and consideration. There is no forum for public nomination. There are no public announcements of the candidates under consideration, even after the fact. Despite what kdawson might hope, he, and the rest of the people around Portland get no say in deciding Nobel prizes.
... whose first operand is the task to perform. Followed by the necessary operands for that task.
Exactly. It isn't a single instruction computer.
And the idea isn't new.
If a single instruction architecture is designed, then there is only one instruction (duh), and there's no reason to encode that instruction in the instructions themselves. All that will be left is encoding for operands. There's a tempting but brief foray into semantics where you can argue that the first handful of bits in TFA's instruction set are operands to the execution control unit, but that is, in fact, what most would consider defining a set of instructions where each distinct value in that first handful of bits describes more-or-less a distinct instruction. One quickly realizes, however, that there is a fundamental difference between data operands and instruction operands, and, by stating that it is a single instruction architecture, the implication is that there are no instruction operands. Therefore, TFA's architecture is not single instruction.
It's well known that there are universal logic elements (like the two-input NOR gate), and, by extension, you can create single instruction architectures that compute the universal logic element operation on two arguments, writing the results to a third. Instructions in such architectures are just memory locations -- source A, source B and destination. While incredibly simple, such a machine is going to have a very, very low instruction set density. It's an interesting project for intellectual curiosity (like in an introductory graduate level machine architecture course) but hardly worthy of a Slashdot front page mention.
if you're used to Photoshop. Gimp is a lot more intuitive than Photoshop if you're used to Gimp. I've cursed at Photoshop; my wife curses at Gimp. That's cause we got used to working with one, and the other just works differently.
The problem is that GIMP has historically had a very poor user interface, while Adobe has worked very hard with Photoshop to make it usable. My agility with GIMP has improved over the years with exposure, but it still lags far behind my agility with Photoshop, and I use the two about the same amount. With Photoshop, I have the intangible sensation that there is some logic waiting to be discovered about how things are organized; with GIMP, the intangible sensation is that someone was deeply confused and that the interface is different only to be different, rather than to be better. Working with GIMP on a Windows box (or anything without virtual desktops) compounds the nightmare.
GIMP is not a professional tool; it lacks some of the basic requirements for professional use (eg, 16 bit mode, CMYK mode). For free, it's not bad. But there's no way you can argue that GIMP's multi-window UI is anything but atrocious.
You're supposed to turn your phone off on the plane anyways. Wouldn't that count as power cycling?
Yeah, I didn't want to get into all of the details of the various different circumstances when I saw the bug.
Here's the full explanation: Mostly, my phone was never power cycled, so the server mis-configuration never affected me, once I had set the timezone on my phone correctly (and to do that I had to disable automatic updating of the time). When I *did* have to power cycle the phone, *and* had the automatic updating feature enabled, then the bug became apparent. Mostly the only times I power cycled the phone when the automatic updating feature was enabled was the result of traveling to another time zone, where the time servers were configured correctly. So I saw the bug when returning home from abroad (or when doing some investigation). One time that I returned from abroad and went directly to my GF's house (yes, as a geek I had a GF... we're married with a kid now, thankyouverymuch), and when I powered the phone back on, there was no bug! Bingo. That showed me it was localized to the part of the cell network near my home, and not, say, T-Mobile's service throughout our state.
Sorry the first time wasn't as clear; I was trying to be brief.
I had a similarly frustrating experience with T-Mobile's customer service in the Boston area. My cell phone was set to auto-upate time. It would always select the correct time and hour, but the wrong timezone, specifically, Pacific Time, instead of Eastern Time. I didn't bother trying to figure it out, since it only affected me when I returned from a flight to another time zone and powered up the phone for the first time, and that was somewhat rare.
Then, through a series of coincidences, I noticed that when I power cycled my phone at my then girlfriend's house about 10 miles away, the time zone was set correctly. After verifying this by testing at my apartment (incorrect time zone) and then at her place (correct time zone) again, I called T-Mobile customer service.
Yep, I was told to power cycle my phone. To set the auto time update option. Ad nauseum. I called many times. It was universally assumed that the fault was with my operation of the phone. The CS reps I spoke to were unable to grasp that there must be separate time servers for different parts of the Boston area, and that the one my home was served by WAS WRONG. I begged to have tickets put in, but eventually, I gave up. CS reps are idiots because the general population is a bunh of idiots, and it is often impossible to get around this fact.
But, someone, somewhere, noticed because some weeks later, the time zone in my home cell was fixed.
It's important to note that this stimulus funding (they're also called 'Recovery Act' grants) were under a very short submission cycle.
Essentially, we only had a few months to prepare and submit a proposal to get funded, which isn't a lot of time -- unless you already had a proposal ready (or nearly ready) in the wings.
Was it even months? I recall it being less than that. It was an incredibly short cycle. Also, reading through the list of proposed areas of research was obviously reading through a list of project summaries that were culled out of program officers' piles of unfunded grant applications, making it seem like the decisions had already been made.
The ironic thing about the ARRA funding was that new investigators are the best way to create jobs and economic stimulus. New investigators need to buy equipment and hire people. Established labs in contrast already have equipment and personnel, so additional money is likely to be spent on maintaining the status quo, rather than economic stimulation. But the way the ARRA grants were structured, there were strong disincentives for new investigators to apply for them. As a new investigator I was separately advised against applying for ARRA funding three times by people in the NIH.
Somehow I doubt a 16x16 pixel grayscale sensor is going to detect counterfeit coins any better than the human eye, but maybe I should read TFA before I jump to judgement...
And maybe before posting, too? Just a suggestion.
Generally, if you're about to post something that is along the lines of, "this couldn't possibly work because..." without (a) having read the article, and (b) being an expert in the field, best to think twice.
I sometimes write code for number theory algorithms. Often short-cuts and little speed ups have long proofs to justify why they work. If I expect the code to be used/read by other people I'll often include these explanations (and so I don't need to bother convincing myself later if I look at the code a year later). There's nothing wrong with long comments. Moreover, given a negative attitude towards long comments, many bad programmers will likely simply respond by not commenting their code at all. That's not good.
I am similarly long-winded when I optimize code and end up using a particular, sometimes non-intuitive, phrasing because it ends up being faster. I leave as much of the evidence and analysis in the comments as possible -- as the parent wrote, mostly so I don't need to convince myself again at a later time. If there's a magic number, I provide the derivation of that number (e.g., explaining why 2 seconds is an appropriate timeout for a file transfer, and giving the empirical evidence). Sometimes I'll even leave in commented out versions of the code that were particularly tempting, but that ultimately proved to be incorrect or slower. But the MOST important version of these long-winded comments is when I'm going balls-to-the-wall for execution speed and the optimized code ends up being non-intuitive. Then, I include the original source (that was previously shown to be correct) and any important intermediate stages in developing the final form, so that the optimized version can be validated.
Of course all of these different long-winded comments are important when the code itself is not clear, when there is substantial reasoning that was required to create the code, and when the code does not itself contain that reasoning at first inspection. When writing high-quality code the first priority is correctness, and a very, very close second is clarity.
TFA quotes temperature resistance of 176 degrees. Fahrenheit. For a "synthetic stone" product that is supposed to be super durable, that is chickenshit. It's barely warmer than parked-car-in-summer-sun.
I have to wonder, did some journalist fail at accuracy, or are these things actually pretty painfully unexciting in terms of temperature resistance?
176F = 80C
That sounds like maximum operating, not storage, temperature for something stone-like.
It sounds like you have all the control here, so simply lock down those computers. Install a decent anti-virus, firewall, and script blockers. Install a decent web browser and delete the IE icon on the desktop. Ensure all these and the OS are able to update themselves automatically. Install the programs your family uses. Then create a non-admin account for them and do not give them the admin password. That's what I've been doing and the only problems I've had to deal with in the last few years were a hard drive crash and some minor issues. If they need to install a new program or need the admin password for any reason, they have to go through me to get it done.
Inevitably, something else bad will happen (an unrecognized virus will get through), and you'll have to re-install the system. So, once everything has been set up, including installing all of the tools mentioned above, then, checkpoint the system to an external drive that's physically compatible with the primary disk in the system. Next time things crap out, copy the disk image back.
Also, keep the system in one disk / partition, and user data on another. When you have to restore the system, it's easier to retain user data unharmed.
Executives want to know how well their business is working. One of the basic metrics for that is ROI -- return on investment -- and the way that translates into capital holdings is efficiency. Or, in other words, is it worth having all of those servers sucking power, consuming AC, and justifying your salary and benefits.
If you've already got uptime nailed (congrats!), then mean, median, and max response times are useful. This speaks to efficiency, and helps you, as IT guy, determine how many servers you actually need.
The other main criterion for efficiency is cost; standard costs are bandwidth charges, power, and A/C. But be warned, if you give them a number, executives will want to optimize it, so be prepared to do so.
I can't wait til they're required by law to give us all the nutritional information of every piece of fruit, down to the calorie count and the chemical breakdown. Perhaps government will put missing persons reports on them, or government mandated reminders of what it means to be a good citizen! So many useful applications!
I know this is meant to be funny, but the parent poster is missing the point. This technology is useful to the manufacturers for three reasons:
1. it is lower total cost than sticky labels 2. it makes it easier to custom label each shipment (Walmart gets its own SKU, Costco a different one, etc.) and to uniquely identify each processing batch 3. it opens up a HUGE new opportunity for advertising
The technology is only marginally useful to the consumer. After all, we got by without labels of any sort on each piece of fruit for decades, no?
X11 has never been a bottleneck in performance on the desktop. Many people have been confusing X11 with the desktop system/kernel/applications and wrongly blamed X11 for any slowness.
Yes, exactly. X11 ran reasonably complicated applications 20 years ago on hardware that we throw out as woefully inadequate (or quaintly archaic) today, and did so with entirely acceptable speed. X11 isn't the problem -- hardware is what, two orders of magnitude faster now? -- it's all of the poor programming practices that have layer upon layer of abstraction and interpretation stacked tall and high.
I had a 266 MHz laptop in the mid 1990s (about 15 years ago) that ran Linux (RedHat 6.2, mostly) and X11 perfectly well with a mere 64 MB of main memory. A while ago, I tried to load a Fedora release (9, if I recall correctly) on it. "Laughable" is a good term to describe the result. My current laptop has a 10x faster processor and 50x more memory. There's more cache on the processor in my new laptop than total system memory on the old one --- And yet, Fedora 11 feels sluggish on the new hardware. X11 is not the problem.
Really, there's nothing hard about this problem. Don't keep try to directly keep track of the seconds, keep track of the ticks, then convert them into the time units you need when needed. This way it doesn't matter what impossible fraction of a second each tick represents, no errors will creep in except your usual non-cumulative rounding error when converting (but at this point it's really trivial to make sure you get enough precision out of it).
Yes, but now you're assuming that the timekeeping of clock ticks is 100% accurate. I am not familiar with the hardware in question, so while it is entirely possible that it could be using an ultra-accurate timebase that would drift less than seconds over the projected lifetime of the equipment, given the reported quality of the software, I have my doubts.
In other words, even if the timebase counting is made completely accurate (which it previously was not), that doesn't mean it is veridical. Errors can come in from other sources. From the sound of it, this was a software timebase (huge mistake without closed-loop correction), which means that it's susceptible to hardware clock drift, missed or delayed interrupts in the software, numerical conversion errors when going from hardware to software clocks, etc.
Just because the proposed correction makes the clock count increment by precisely 0.1 does not mean it's therefore truthful without additional system analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
Google doesn't need that many more smart technical people. What they could use some people who could figure out something other than ads that people would actually pay for. Their track record in actual products is awful. The overpriced "Google Search Appliance" isn't doing well.
They do corporate hosted mailboxes, but that's Postini, which they bought.
Google is really an ad agency. That's where the money comes from.
Google still needs smart people. They have competition, and often serious, heavy-weight competition, on every front. If they were to stagnate, as you suggest, they would die.
But why are you judging a service company by actual, by which you seem to mean physical, products, when they have class-defining services like Google Search, GMail, Google Scholar, Google Maps, etc., and not-quite-as-good-but-still-respectable services like Google Voice, Google Docs, Google Checkout, etc.? Saying that they're an also-ran in products is being nearsighted. And if by products you mean something that you must pay for to acquire, you've been missing the new business model. Google Chrome and Picassa being but two very-good-to-excellent products that are provided for free, and without advertising support.
So, while Google makes its money mostly from advertising, yes, saying that they have a bad track record on products doesn't seem quite clear headed.
From the linked article:
"We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research," said Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell. "However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T."
So the school superintendent would apparently have been OK with the computers running 24 hours per day, 365 days per year (Denise Birdwell's interpretation of these programs work) running Folding@Home, "slow[ing] down educational programs in every classroom and cost[ing] the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts," but not SETI@Home?
Someone needs to educate Ms. Birdwell, who is presented as overly dramatic in the linked article, about how these programs work. And how entirely appropriate it would be for local schools to donate unused computer time to running programs like these, and what a great opportunity it would have presented to the scientific education of the children in the district.
Will the eight be tipped on its side to make an infinity symbol?
Fedora 8 did that, so why not?
Technology is technology; the more modern, the more ephemeral. People get attached to things that have durability.
My grandmother was a minor author, with five books or pamphlets under her belt. She wrote them all, in addition to her personal correspondence, on an Underwood manual typewriter from the 1890s. I've had it cleaned and serviced, and expect that it will continue to work just fine for another 120 years, assuming we can still get the ribbons (and if not, making them doesn't seem that daunting). Every letter that I type on it, every journal entry, connects me to her because she used it for so long.
In contrast, since my first laptop purchase in 1992 or 1993, I've had eight or nine of them. They don't last. There's only one that I remember fondly (and still have a working model) but the likelihood that it will work in 20 years is quite low. The battery certainly will no longer hold any appreciable charge. My current laptop could disappear and be replaced with a newer model and I'd not really blink.
My grandmother's typewriter has a cast iron frame and steel parts. My best laptops have had cast magnesium frames and mostly plastic parts. In the 50 years that my grandmother used her typewriter, some of the letters started to show wear. My laptops have universally shown keyboard wear in under 2 years, most in under 1 year.
If computers had an appreciable lifetime beyond two or three years, then quite possibly, we might find the same attachment, but we don't. The only real attachment that people have are to some keyboards, most notably the IBM Model M, which is built like an old-style typewriter.
It's all spelled out in their AUP, first paragraph:
General Policy: Verizon reserves the sole discretion to deny or restrict your Service, or immediately to suspend or terminate your Service, if the use of your Service by you or anyone using it, in our sole discretion, violates the Agreement or other Verizon policies, is objectionable or unlawful, interferes with the functioning or use of the Internet or the Verizon network by Verizon or other users, or violates the terms of this Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP").
This may be overbroad wording in response to spam comments or the like (remember the Christmas store junk that kept getting posted here over the last few weeks?). The wording is broad, but that may very well be to make sure that they can reasonably catch it all and respond.
Sorry if that's too ontopic. I guess I could help that out by copy and pasting some hot fanfic but a quick google search doesn't show any Steven Chu/Terry Tao slash.
And it gives them ammunition to terminate essentially anyone's service, at will, since deciding whether a posting is on-topic or off-topic is entirely subjective.
I find it amusing how most of you seem to have the image that South America is one big jungle, with no cities, no technology whatsoever and where people use treetops as shelters. I doubt he'll spend more than 10% of his total journey in the actual jungles.
Who said anything about jungles? Just being a little off the beaten track means poor-to-no internet connectivity. As the OP said himself: "Keep in mind that many places have very poor bandwidth and latency."
But the very fact that his primary purpose for the trip is to specifically NOT stay in the comfort of his resplendently connected home means that it will, no matter where he travels, be somewhat difficult to get good connectivity with the same sort of ease. Even in large cities, when you want internet access, how long between the decision to seek it out and to be actually online (without a global wireless plan that includes 3G service)? 30 minutes of wandering around? An hour? Maybe the connection is a shared ISDN line that the gamer teens are maxing out. So maybe it takes another two hours to find some place where the connectivity is decent. Remember, the OP is going to places he's never been before, so doesn't automatically know where everything is.
"why on earth you feel a need to access your investment account from the depths of south america, i'm not sure."
Wait until you figure out you lost half of your portfolio in 24 hours then you know why.
The parent post is 100% spot on, but the grandparent post has an inadvertent truth as well -- if you're away from your normal life, then you're not day trading. If you're not day trading, every now-and-then phone access to your broker service combined with some well-considered limit/stop orders should suffice if you have sporadic newspaper or web-based stock quotes. Network-based access to your investment portfolio is a convenience (and even e*trade has phone service) that might well be considered an unnecessary luxury while on a long trip to remote parts of the world.
Wouldn't power consumption grow more than linearly with neuron count? I would think the number of connections is the dominant factor - so the comparison of two data points of power consumption vs neuron count is meaningless.
Neurons are not typically fully connected in K-star like networks, they are more usually connected to a fixed number of other neurons that varies by type from a small handful to 10,000. The latter number (10,000) is used as when researchers and scientists want to estimate the total number of connections in the cortex, especially when talking about simulations or writing grant proposals where bigger numbers are more impressive.
So, power consumption should grow linearly with neuron count, if the simulation is following this particular lead from biology, and the simulation writers didn't do something stupid to create an O(n^2) dependency.
Thank you for the details that support my assertion. The people listed are a very, very small fraction of the total populace. As a general member of the public, you have no direct say in making a nomination.
Nobel prizes are not decided by popular vote. They are not decided by wider discussion and consideration. There is no forum for public nomination. There are no public announcements of the candidates under consideration, even after the fact. Despite what kdawson might hope, he, and the rest of the people around Portland get no say in deciding Nobel prizes.
... whose first operand is the task to perform. Followed by the necessary operands for that task.
Exactly. It isn't a single instruction computer.
And the idea isn't new.
If a single instruction architecture is designed, then there is only one instruction (duh), and there's no reason to encode that instruction in the instructions themselves. All that will be left is encoding for operands. There's a tempting but brief foray into semantics where you can argue that the first handful of bits in TFA's instruction set are operands to the execution control unit, but that is, in fact, what most would consider defining a set of instructions where each distinct value in that first handful of bits describes more-or-less a distinct instruction. One quickly realizes, however, that there is a fundamental difference between data operands and instruction operands, and, by stating that it is a single instruction architecture, the implication is that there are no instruction operands. Therefore, TFA's architecture is not single instruction.
It's well known that there are universal logic elements (like the two-input NOR gate), and, by extension, you can create single instruction architectures that compute the universal logic element operation on two arguments, writing the results to a third. Instructions in such architectures are just memory locations -- source A, source B and destination. While incredibly simple, such a machine is going to have a very, very low instruction set density. It's an interesting project for intellectual curiosity (like in an introductory graduate level machine architecture course) but hardly worthy of a Slashdot front page mention.
When are people going to learn?
if you're used to Photoshop.
Gimp is a lot more intuitive than Photoshop if you're used to Gimp. I've cursed at Photoshop; my wife curses at Gimp. That's cause we got used to working with one, and the other just works differently.
The problem is that GIMP has historically had a very poor user interface, while Adobe has worked very hard with Photoshop to make it usable. My agility with GIMP has improved over the years with exposure, but it still lags far behind my agility with Photoshop, and I use the two about the same amount. With Photoshop, I have the intangible sensation that there is some logic waiting to be discovered about how things are organized; with GIMP, the intangible sensation is that someone was deeply confused and that the interface is different only to be different, rather than to be better. Working with GIMP on a Windows box (or anything without virtual desktops) compounds the nightmare.
GIMP is not a professional tool; it lacks some of the basic requirements for professional use (eg, 16 bit mode, CMYK mode). For free, it's not bad. But there's no way you can argue that GIMP's multi-window UI is anything but atrocious.
You're supposed to turn your phone off on the plane anyways. Wouldn't that count as power cycling?
Yeah, I didn't want to get into all of the details of the various different circumstances when I saw the bug.
Here's the full explanation: Mostly, my phone was never power cycled, so the server mis-configuration never affected me, once I had set the timezone on my phone correctly (and to do that I had to disable automatic updating of the time). When I *did* have to power cycle the phone, *and* had the automatic updating feature enabled, then the bug became apparent. Mostly the only times I power cycled the phone when the automatic updating feature was enabled was the result of traveling to another time zone, where the time servers were configured correctly. So I saw the bug when returning home from abroad (or when doing some investigation). One time that I returned from abroad and went directly to my GF's house (yes, as a geek I had a GF ... we're married with a kid now, thankyouverymuch), and when I powered the phone back on, there was no bug! Bingo. That showed me it was localized to the part of the cell network near my home, and not, say, T-Mobile's service throughout our state.
Sorry the first time wasn't as clear; I was trying to be brief.
I had a similarly frustrating experience with T-Mobile's customer service in the Boston area. My cell phone was set to auto-upate time. It would always select the correct time and hour, but the wrong timezone, specifically, Pacific Time, instead of Eastern Time. I didn't bother trying to figure it out, since it only affected me when I returned from a flight to another time zone and powered up the phone for the first time, and that was somewhat rare.
Then, through a series of coincidences, I noticed that when I power cycled my phone at my then girlfriend's house about 10 miles away, the time zone was set correctly. After verifying this by testing at my apartment (incorrect time zone) and then at her place (correct time zone) again, I called T-Mobile customer service.
Yep, I was told to power cycle my phone. To set the auto time update option. Ad nauseum. I called many times. It was universally assumed that the fault was with my operation of the phone. The CS reps I spoke to were unable to grasp that there must be separate time servers for different parts of the Boston area, and that the one my home was served by WAS WRONG. I begged to have tickets put in, but eventually, I gave up. CS reps are idiots because the general population is a bunh of idiots, and it is often impossible to get around this fact.
But, someone, somewhere, noticed because some weeks later, the time zone in my home cell was fixed.
It's important to note that this stimulus funding (they're also called 'Recovery Act' grants) were under a very short submission cycle.
Essentially, we only had a few months to prepare and submit a proposal to get funded, which isn't a lot of time -- unless you already had a proposal ready (or nearly ready) in the wings.
Was it even months? I recall it being less than that. It was an incredibly short cycle. Also, reading through the list of proposed areas of research was obviously reading through a list of project summaries that were culled out of program officers' piles of unfunded grant applications, making it seem like the decisions had already been made.
The ironic thing about the ARRA funding was that new investigators are the best way to create jobs and economic stimulus. New investigators need to buy equipment and hire people. Established labs in contrast already have equipment and personnel, so additional money is likely to be spent on maintaining the status quo, rather than economic stimulation. But the way the ARRA grants were structured, there were strong disincentives for new investigators to apply for them. As a new investigator I was separately advised against applying for ARRA funding three times by people in the NIH.
Vending machines rely on mechanical factors, mostly: Weight, size, metallic composition (measured by conductivity characteristics).
This one seems to focus on the graphics on the faces. It's complementary.
And magnetic, don't forget magnetic characteristics. Also for size, don't forget to separately include thickness, diameter, and shape.
Somehow I doubt a 16x16 pixel grayscale sensor is going to detect counterfeit coins any better than the human eye, but maybe I should read TFA before I jump to judgement...
And maybe before posting, too? Just a suggestion.
Generally, if you're about to post something that is along the lines of, "this couldn't possibly work because ..." without (a) having read the article, and (b) being an expert in the field, best to think twice.
I sometimes write code for number theory algorithms. Often short-cuts and little speed ups have long proofs to justify why they work. If I expect the code to be used/read by other people I'll often include these explanations (and so I don't need to bother convincing myself later if I look at the code a year later). There's nothing wrong with long comments. Moreover, given a negative attitude towards long comments, many bad programmers will likely simply respond by not commenting their code at all. That's not good.
I am similarly long-winded when I optimize code and end up using a particular, sometimes non-intuitive, phrasing because it ends up being faster. I leave as much of the evidence and analysis in the comments as possible -- as the parent wrote, mostly so I don't need to convince myself again at a later time. If there's a magic number, I provide the derivation of that number (e.g., explaining why 2 seconds is an appropriate timeout for a file transfer, and giving the empirical evidence). Sometimes I'll even leave in commented out versions of the code that were particularly tempting, but that ultimately proved to be incorrect or slower. But the MOST important version of these long-winded comments is when I'm going balls-to-the-wall for execution speed and the optimized code ends up being non-intuitive. Then, I include the original source (that was previously shown to be correct) and any important intermediate stages in developing the final form, so that the optimized version can be validated.
Of course all of these different long-winded comments are important when the code itself is not clear, when there is substantial reasoning that was required to create the code, and when the code does not itself contain that reasoning at first inspection. When writing high-quality code the first priority is correctness, and a very, very close second is clarity.
TFA quotes temperature resistance of 176 degrees. Fahrenheit. For a "synthetic stone" product that is supposed to be super durable, that is chickenshit. It's barely warmer than parked-car-in-summer-sun.
I have to wonder, did some journalist fail at accuracy, or are these things actually pretty painfully unexciting in terms of temperature resistance?
176F = 80C
That sounds like maximum operating, not storage, temperature for something stone-like.
It sounds like you have all the control here, so simply lock down those computers. Install a decent anti-virus, firewall, and script blockers. Install a decent web browser and delete the IE icon on the desktop. Ensure all these and the OS are able to update themselves automatically. Install the programs your family uses. Then create a non-admin account for them and do not give them the admin password. That's what I've been doing and the only problems I've had to deal with in the last few years were a hard drive crash and some minor issues. If they need to install a new program or need the admin password for any reason, they have to go through me to get it done.
Inevitably, something else bad will happen (an unrecognized virus will get through), and you'll have to re-install the system. So, once everything has been set up, including installing all of the tools mentioned above, then, checkpoint the system to an external drive that's physically compatible with the primary disk in the system. Next time things crap out, copy the disk image back.
Also, keep the system in one disk / partition, and user data on another. When you have to restore the system, it's easier to retain user data unharmed.
Executives want to know how well their business is working. One of the basic metrics for that is ROI -- return on investment -- and the way that translates into capital holdings is efficiency. Or, in other words, is it worth having all of those servers sucking power, consuming AC, and justifying your salary and benefits.
If you've already got uptime nailed (congrats!), then mean, median, and max response times are useful. This speaks to efficiency, and helps you, as IT guy, determine how many servers you actually need.
The other main criterion for efficiency is cost; standard costs are bandwidth charges, power, and A/C. But be warned, if you give them a number, executives will want to optimize it, so be prepared to do so.
I can't wait til they're required by law to give us all the nutritional information of every piece of fruit, down to the calorie count and the chemical breakdown. Perhaps government will put missing persons reports on them, or government mandated reminders of what it means to be a good citizen! So many useful applications!
I know this is meant to be funny, but the parent poster is missing the point. This technology is useful to the manufacturers for three reasons:
1. it is lower total cost than sticky labels
2. it makes it easier to custom label each shipment (Walmart gets its own SKU, Costco a different one, etc.) and to uniquely identify each processing batch
3. it opens up a HUGE new opportunity for advertising
The technology is only marginally useful to the consumer. After all, we got by without labels of any sort on each piece of fruit for decades, no?
X11 has never been a bottleneck in performance on the desktop. Many people have been confusing X11 with the desktop system/kernel/applications and wrongly blamed X11 for any slowness.
Yes, exactly. X11 ran reasonably complicated applications 20 years ago on hardware that we throw out as woefully inadequate (or quaintly archaic) today, and did so with entirely acceptable speed. X11 isn't the problem -- hardware is what, two orders of magnitude faster now? -- it's all of the poor programming practices that have layer upon layer of abstraction and interpretation stacked tall and high.
I had a 266 MHz laptop in the mid 1990s (about 15 years ago) that ran Linux (RedHat 6.2, mostly) and X11 perfectly well with a mere 64 MB of main memory. A while ago, I tried to load a Fedora release (9, if I recall correctly) on it. "Laughable" is a good term to describe the result. My current laptop has a 10x faster processor and 50x more memory. There's more cache on the processor in my new laptop than total system memory on the old one --- And yet, Fedora 11 feels sluggish on the new hardware. X11 is not the problem.
Really, there's nothing hard about this problem. Don't keep try to directly keep track of the seconds, keep track of the ticks, then convert them into the time units you need when needed. This way it doesn't matter what impossible fraction of a second each tick represents, no errors will creep in except your usual non-cumulative rounding error when converting (but at this point it's really trivial to make sure you get enough precision out of it).
Yes, but now you're assuming that the timekeeping of clock ticks is 100% accurate. I am not familiar with the hardware in question, so while it is entirely possible that it could be using an ultra-accurate timebase that would drift less than seconds over the projected lifetime of the equipment, given the reported quality of the software, I have my doubts.
In other words, even if the timebase counting is made completely accurate (which it previously was not), that doesn't mean it is veridical. Errors can come in from other sources. From the sound of it, this was a software timebase (huge mistake without closed-loop correction), which means that it's susceptible to hardware clock drift, missed or delayed interrupts in the software, numerical conversion errors when going from hardware to software clocks, etc.
Just because the proposed correction makes the clock count increment by precisely 0.1 does not mean it's therefore truthful without additional system analysis.
Like I said, error analysis is HARD.