YOU are the one who is repeating dumb shit. Here is an example of what happens when your wonderful advice is followed. Nope, nothing dangerous about a 168ft, 700 ton ship floating around uncontrolled. Not dangerous at all. Nobody could have possibly been hurt by that.
So you don't think that a ship which has broken from it's moorings in a storm is a hazard to anyone? Really? I am sure that this posed no threat to anyone.
I love these "I am so much smarter than everyone else" posts. Seems that someone as smart as you figured that out, and put a 168ft, 700 ton water tanker in dock and had the crew get off. When the ship broke free it travelled a mile before ending up on a street in Staten Island. Nope, nothing dangerous about that at all, not a bit.
Well, for comparison, there was a 700 tanker ship which was in port, broke free, and wound up a mile away on a street in Staten Island. The fact that no-one got hurt from that is pretty amazing.
Well, if you and your idiot tailgating buddies were in Atlantic City, you would have been under 8 feet of water. If you were in Queens, it would only have been 3 feet of water, but you would at least be nice and toasty because your and 79 of your neighbors houses were on fire. If it was lower Manhatten, I am sure that the little 13 foot storm surge (highest ever recorded) would not have fazed you at all. And the 700 ton tanker that wound up on a street in Staten Island - I am sure that happens all the time in Wisconsin. And who needs little things like power (especially if you happen to live 50 stories up)? And I hope you were planning on walking (or more likely swimming) to your tailgate, because the entire transportation system is shut down.
And since you live on a tropical island with an average of 28 storms a year, you probably have very few large trees that will fall over (on power lines, houses, and roads) or have limbs that will fall off. How would your tropical island fare if suddenly two feet of snow fell on it? Happens all the time here.
And here's a little geography lesson: the people expected to be impacted from this storm are not 'on the coast' - they are hundeds of miles inland.
And again, your comparisons are meaningless. First, if you are in an area that gets certain kind of weather 'regularly', the same weather is going to affect those areas differently than in areas that don't get that kind of weather. For instance, if you are in an area that regularly gets gale-force winds for days at a time, you are not going to have a lot of trees that lose their limbs or fall over in gale force winds.
I seem to recall seeing a lot of news reports about drought in those states you mentioned, but not much about the drought in Death Valley. Why the difference?
And again, the thing that makes weather newsworthy is it's impact on people. There are thousands of times more people going to be affected by this storm than by your storms where very few people live.
I am not about to search for IBMs patents and then tell you where there are used, that is just pointless. But you would have to be a complete idiot to think that there is nothing patented in their new z12 mainframes, or Power 7 systems, or the new Pure Systems stuff. Then there are the chips themselves which no doubt have many patented things (including manufacturing processes). And their systems manufacturing processes probably have patented elements. Then of course there is their software.
Yes, it is 'only' a category one hurricane. That is going to cover ALL of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusettes, and parts of Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine with at least tropical storm force winds.
Do you realize how many people live in that area? And, OK, it is 'only' a Category 1 storm, so the most likely effects (away from the coast) is power outages. Except that when the entire mid-Atantic and Northeast regions are covered, there is no help available from neighboring states.
And, oh yeah, the storm surge at NYC is supposed to be 'only' 8 to 11 feet - which has happened never before. Since much of NYCs infrastructure is underground (including, of course, the subways), this is a big deal, regardless of the category of the storm or what similar storms have done elsewhere.
Weird how a storm which "didn't materialize" (Irene) managed to be the fifth most destructive Atlantic hurricane.
It materialized, and caused significant damage to New York, Connecticut, Massachusettes, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Just because it didn't cause major problems in NYC doesn't mean it "didn't happen".
I disagree. The fourth leg on a chair is not superfluous. Removing it involves a tradeoff. In exchange for better stability on uneven surfaces, you get a seat that is either a triangle (uncomfortable) or unstable at some points (there will be places that are off to the sides of two legs. I see no reason why making a decision to trade seating area for stability does not count as invention.
On the other hand, you claim that putting a back on a chair IS invention. Why? People have been resting against trees and rocks forever, so that is not a 'new idea'. People have been sitting on things forever, so that is not a 'new idea'.
Your example of transmitting sheet music is really bad, and has absolutely nothing to do with what they have done. What you are suggesting is that somehow an entire movie (for example) has already been transmitted to the remote computer (we will conveniently ignore how), but by send a very short message (play file x) we have somehow 'encoded' the download of that movie very efficiently.
Well, sure. But that is an application decision. With UDP, the application designer can decide how much of each packet to use for correction, how many packets can be lost, how to recover from lost packets, etc. It would be bad to have lower layers modifying your packets to try to create some lost packet recovery when the application is already doing it. That is different from TCP, where the application is sending a stream, not packets, and does not care what the individual packets contain or how they are managed.
Might it be nice to have some standard FEC library that UDP apps could use? Sure. Should the OS, etc be doing it 'under the covers'? No.
Except that they are not 'preventing' packet loss, they are coping with it. And if you care about coping with packet loss, why are you using a protocol who's main feature is that you don't care if the packet is received or not?
Um, no. First of all, data compression means you are sending less data, and they are not. They are sending more data in total, but can tolerate missing packets.
Second, no, 5% missing packets does not slow you down by only 5%. Worst case, the sender has to wait for a timeout to occur with no ack received before resending the packet - that is going to be a long time.
Yes, clearly this is the first time math has ever been used in computing!
I'll just sit here and watch. Watch what? All those people who didn't learn math happily using their computers with improved speed? Or do you think it is going to be up to the user to solve the equations to re-create this missing data?
Seems to me it is a much data compression as RAID-5 is. Spread 2 packets of information across 3 packets. Lose any one of them and you are still OK. You didn't send any less data (in fact, you sent more) but you can tolerate lost packets now.
Note that I am NOT saying that is what they are doing, just giving an example where being able to lose data does not imply compression.
Filament? I thought stadiums used some sort of arc (metal halide, sodium vapor, etc) lamps.
And I am still not seeing why flicker is a problem at high speed, but not a normal TV speeds. A high speed camera may record flicker as whole frames with different levels of lighting, but a regular TV camera is going to have some artifact from the flicker (brighter and darker bands, etc).
I would think that either the lamps are not flickering at all, or are flickering at such a high rate (much higher than 60Hz) that the cameras can't distinguish it.
No. We have cameras that given a repeatable event (say a pulsing laser) can take pictures of successive events with a very small offset in timing, giving the appearance of taking a video of a single event at a trillion FPS. Fire laser, take picture. Fire laser again, wait 1nS, take picture, etc. Very different than capturing a one-time event.
Why would the lights flicker at 60Hz? There are two zero crossings in every cycle, so why wouldn't they flicker at 120Hz? And if they are flickering, why doesn't that present a problem for regular TV? It seems to me there should be relatively stable, or slowly scrolling, black bars on the picture when the lights are 'out'. Or do they somehow manage to make the 'dark' period of the light fit entirely in the vertical retrace?
In the US, residential wiring is single-phase. There is only one hot primary wire on the pole transformer. On the secondary side, neutral is the center tap, with hots at either end (I guess maybe that is two-phase). So either side to neutral is 120V (single phase), and end to end is 240V (single phase).
It would have taken you 10 whole seconds to google that and find out you are wrong. Yes, "rumble" feedback is patented, and Sony and Microsoft were both sued by Immersion for infringement of US patents 6,424,333 and 6,275,213. Nintendo was not sued because they used their own technology, patented in US patents 6,200,253 and 6,676,520.
Of course these things are patentable, why wouldn't they be?
You can't just 'go down the list and patent everything', you have to claim how you do it. And just because you come up with a way to do something doesn't mean someone else can't come up with another way of accomplishing it, avoiding your patent (see the case I referenced above).
No, a movie is not prior art, since it says nothing at all about HOW that effect is accomplished (which is, of course, what is patentable).
Yes, "temperature feedback motion controller" is different from "battery level indicator". Why would you think otherwise?
15 year old kids probably do not know what they want to do for the rest of their life. By the time they are 17 or 18, they are expected to make that choice. What colleges are you applying to? What programs? What is you major going to be? So they pick something based on their extremely limited experience, spend a few years and a lot of money at a college, and decide they really don't want to do whatever it is they picked. So they switch majors or transfer schools, spend more money, try again. Rinse and repeat. By the time they graduate from college they are deep in debt, disillusioned, and jobless.
A lot of this could be alleviated if at some point in high school students are at least exposed to different career paths. Where I live they have 8 school periods a day, with 4 marking periods in a year. If they took just half a year, they could expose students to 16 different careers for a full marking period each. In that time they could learn what someone in that career actually does, what the job outlook is for the career, what schooling is needed for the career, etc.
But that is not the reality today. Today, all they get is a steady, unappetizing, diet of math, science, language. Nothing to give them a clue about what is out there that they actually may want to do for the rest of their lives.
I do hear the argument 'what if they make the wrong decision in high school? They could be hopelessly behind.' So what? Every community college offers courses to catch you up. A semester or two at a community college is going to be much cheaper, and time better spent, than enrolling in a four year school without having a clue that what you are doing is right for you.
Slashdot Mirror
YOU are the one who is repeating dumb shit. Here is an example of what happens when your wonderful advice is followed. Nope, nothing dangerous about a 168ft, 700 ton ship floating around uncontrolled. Not dangerous at all. Nobody could have possibly been hurt by that.
So you don't think that a ship which has broken from it's moorings in a storm is a hazard to anyone? Really? I am sure that this posed no threat to anyone.
I love these "I am so much smarter than everyone else" posts. Seems that someone as smart as you figured that out, and put a 168ft, 700 ton water tanker in dock and had the crew get off. When the ship broke free it travelled a mile before ending up on a street in Staten Island. Nope, nothing dangerous about that at all, not a bit.
Well, for comparison, there was a 700 tanker ship which was in port, broke free, and wound up a mile away on a street in Staten Island. The fact that no-one got hurt from that is pretty amazing.
Well, if you and your idiot tailgating buddies were in Atlantic City, you would have been under 8 feet of water. If you were in Queens, it would only have been 3 feet of water, but you would at least be nice and toasty because your and 79 of your neighbors houses were on fire. If it was lower Manhatten, I am sure that the little 13 foot storm surge (highest ever recorded) would not have fazed you at all. And the 700 ton tanker that wound up on a street in Staten Island - I am sure that happens all the time in Wisconsin. And who needs little things like power (especially if you happen to live 50 stories up)? And I hope you were planning on walking (or more likely swimming) to your tailgate, because the entire transportation system is shut down.
What exactly do you consider 'real news'?
And since you live on a tropical island with an average of 28 storms a year, you probably have very few large trees that will fall over (on power lines, houses, and roads) or have limbs that will fall off. How would your tropical island fare if suddenly two feet of snow fell on it? Happens all the time here.
And here's a little geography lesson: the people expected to be impacted from this storm are not 'on the coast' - they are hundeds of miles inland.
And again, your comparisons are meaningless. First, if you are in an area that gets certain kind of weather 'regularly', the same weather is going to affect those areas differently than in areas that don't get that kind of weather. For instance, if you are in an area that regularly gets gale-force winds for days at a time, you are not going to have a lot of trees that lose their limbs or fall over in gale force winds.
I seem to recall seeing a lot of news reports about drought in those states you mentioned, but not much about the drought in Death Valley. Why the difference?
And again, the thing that makes weather newsworthy is it's impact on people. There are thousands of times more people going to be affected by this storm than by your storms where very few people live.
I am not about to search for IBMs patents and then tell you where there are used, that is just pointless. But you would have to be a complete idiot to think that there is nothing patented in their new z12 mainframes, or Power 7 systems, or the new Pure Systems stuff. Then there are the chips themselves which no doubt have many patented things (including manufacturing processes). And their systems manufacturing processes probably have patented elements. Then of course there is their software.
Yes, it is 'only' a category one hurricane. That is going to cover ALL of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusettes, and parts of Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine with at least tropical storm force winds.
Do you realize how many people live in that area? And, OK, it is 'only' a Category 1 storm, so the most likely effects (away from the coast) is power outages. Except that when the entire mid-Atantic and Northeast regions are covered, there is no help available from neighboring states.
And, oh yeah, the storm surge at NYC is supposed to be 'only' 8 to 11 feet - which has happened never before. Since much of NYCs infrastructure is underground (including, of course, the subways), this is a big deal, regardless of the category of the storm or what similar storms have done elsewhere.
Do you have any evidence of IBM doing this? Ever?
Weird how a storm which "didn't materialize" (Irene) managed to be the fifth most destructive Atlantic hurricane.
It materialized, and caused significant damage to New York, Connecticut, Massachusettes, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Just because it didn't cause major problems in NYC doesn't mean it "didn't happen".
That's what I thought. So why is this guy claiming that the lights are flickering at 60Hz, and that produces problems for high-speed cameras?
I disagree. The fourth leg on a chair is not superfluous. Removing it involves a tradeoff. In exchange for better stability on uneven surfaces, you get a seat that is either a triangle (uncomfortable) or unstable at some points (there will be places that are off to the sides of two legs. I see no reason why making a decision to trade seating area for stability does not count as invention.
On the other hand, you claim that putting a back on a chair IS invention. Why? People have been resting against trees and rocks forever, so that is not a 'new idea'. People have been sitting on things forever, so that is not a 'new idea'.
Your example of transmitting sheet music is really bad, and has absolutely nothing to do with what they have done. What you are suggesting is that somehow an entire movie (for example) has already been transmitted to the remote computer (we will conveniently ignore how), but by send a very short message (play file x) we have somehow 'encoded' the download of that movie very efficiently.
Well, sure. But that is an application decision. With UDP, the application designer can decide how much of each packet to use for correction, how many packets can be lost, how to recover from lost packets, etc. It would be bad to have lower layers modifying your packets to try to create some lost packet recovery when the application is already doing it. That is different from TCP, where the application is sending a stream, not packets, and does not care what the individual packets contain or how they are managed.
Might it be nice to have some standard FEC library that UDP apps could use? Sure. Should the OS, etc be doing it 'under the covers'? No.
So putting two previous ideas together 'cleverly' is not a new invention, eh? What exactly would qualify as a new invention?
Except that they are not 'preventing' packet loss, they are coping with it. And if you care about coping with packet loss, why are you using a protocol who's main feature is that you don't care if the packet is received or not?
Um, no. First of all, data compression means you are sending less data, and they are not. They are sending more data in total, but can tolerate missing packets.
Second, no, 5% missing packets does not slow you down by only 5%. Worst case, the sender has to wait for a timeout to occur with no ack received before resending the packet - that is going to be a long time.
Yes, clearly this is the first time math has ever been used in computing!
I'll just sit here and watch. Watch what? All those people who didn't learn math happily using their computers with improved speed? Or do you think it is going to be up to the user to solve the equations to re-create this missing data?
Seems to me it is a much data compression as RAID-5 is. Spread 2 packets of information across 3 packets. Lose any one of them and you are still OK. You didn't send any less data (in fact, you sent more) but you can tolerate lost packets now.
Note that I am NOT saying that is what they are doing, just giving an example where being able to lose data does not imply compression.
Filament? I thought stadiums used some sort of arc (metal halide, sodium vapor, etc) lamps.
And I am still not seeing why flicker is a problem at high speed, but not a normal TV speeds. A high speed camera may record flicker as whole frames with different levels of lighting, but a regular TV camera is going to have some artifact from the flicker (brighter and darker bands, etc).
I would think that either the lamps are not flickering at all, or are flickering at such a high rate (much higher than 60Hz) that the cameras can't distinguish it.
No. We have cameras that given a repeatable event (say a pulsing laser) can take pictures of successive events with a very small offset in timing, giving the appearance of taking a video of a single event at a trillion FPS. Fire laser, take picture. Fire laser again, wait 1nS, take picture, etc. Very different than capturing a one-time event.
Why would the lights flicker at 60Hz? There are two zero crossings in every cycle, so why wouldn't they flicker at 120Hz? And if they are flickering, why doesn't that present a problem for regular TV? It seems to me there should be relatively stable, or slowly scrolling, black bars on the picture when the lights are 'out'. Or do they somehow manage to make the 'dark' period of the light fit entirely in the vertical retrace?
In the US, residential wiring is single-phase. There is only one hot primary wire on the pole transformer. On the secondary side, neutral is the center tap, with hots at either end (I guess maybe that is two-phase). So either side to neutral is 120V (single phase), and end to end is 240V (single phase).
It would have taken you 10 whole seconds to google that and find out you are wrong. Yes, "rumble" feedback is patented, and Sony and Microsoft were both sued by Immersion for infringement of US patents 6,424,333 and 6,275,213. Nintendo was not sued because they used their own technology, patented in US patents 6,200,253 and 6,676,520.
Of course these things are patentable, why wouldn't they be?
You can't just 'go down the list and patent everything', you have to claim how you do it. And just because you come up with a way to do something doesn't mean someone else can't come up with another way of accomplishing it, avoiding your patent (see the case I referenced above).
No, a movie is not prior art, since it says nothing at all about HOW that effect is accomplished (which is, of course, what is patentable).
Yes, "temperature feedback motion controller" is different from "battery level indicator". Why would you think otherwise?
15 year old kids probably do not know what they want to do for the rest of their life. By the time they are 17 or 18, they are expected to make that choice. What colleges are you applying to? What programs? What is you major going to be? So they pick something based on their extremely limited experience, spend a few years and a lot of money at a college, and decide they really don't want to do whatever it is they picked. So they switch majors or transfer schools, spend more money, try again. Rinse and repeat. By the time they graduate from college they are deep in debt, disillusioned, and jobless.
A lot of this could be alleviated if at some point in high school students are at least exposed to different career paths. Where I live they have 8 school periods a day, with 4 marking periods in a year. If they took just half a year, they could expose students to 16 different careers for a full marking period each. In that time they could learn what someone in that career actually does, what the job outlook is for the career, what schooling is needed for the career, etc.
But that is not the reality today. Today, all they get is a steady, unappetizing, diet of math, science, language. Nothing to give them a clue about what is out there that they actually may want to do for the rest of their lives.
I do hear the argument 'what if they make the wrong decision in high school? They could be hopelessly behind.' So what? Every community college offers courses to catch you up. A semester or two at a community college is going to be much cheaper, and time better spent, than enrolling in a four year school without having a clue that what you are doing is right for you.