Wikia went hand-in-hand with the noteworthiness filter as a strategy to try to make Jimmy Wales into a Big Internet Entrepreneur. Maybe it's not working but it's not for lack of trying.
Suprisingly, no. It's a side effect of the Israel-Palestine issue.
There was at one time a well-known high-ranking editor on Wikipedia who spent his working day making Israel look good on Wikipedia. His main tactic was removing material he described as "original research". Over time, the effect was not that Israel looked better, but that material critical of Israel was cited in more and more detail, with a footnote to a reliable source for every factual statement, sentence by sentence. Then that editor could no longer delete it as "original research". (He kept trying, which got him into trouble. Eventually, he lost his privileged position and was barred from editing any article related to Israel.)
Gradually, this standard for citation spread to the rest of Wikipedia. For people used to writing for refereed journals, it wasn't a problem. For fans, it was hell.
Wikia is Wikipedia's dumpster, or slush pile. As such, it's useful. I had misgivings about Wales being involved with both a profit-making and a nonprofit entity in the same area (the IRS doesn't like that), but it doesn't seem to have meant much. If he wants to monetize fancruft, so be it.
Right. The important articles were in the first million. Let's see what's coming in right now:
Euan Huey: "his brith Euan was born on 2 may 2000.He has a twin and has a IQ of 123.his clan is macRae and he lives in bridge of weir,scotland.Everyone loves him He is the b..." -- Deleted.
List of Senators in Brazil (1826-1889): "This is List of senators in Brazil 1826-1889" -- Kept.
Byron kroon: "Byron is Amazing" (Tag: very short new article) -- Deleted.
List of horror films: 2007: -- Kept.
Silvertone guitars : "Kiss plays this guitar brand so does the artist tj wilt" (Tag: very short new article) -- Deleted.
Percy the Park Keeper: "Percy the Park keeper is an animated childrens series by Nick Butterfield." -- not yet examined.
Any questions?
That's why most new articles are deleted. Most of the whining about "deletionism" is from fans who want to blither endlessly about their favorite movie/comic book/Star Trek episode/vampire. That's what Wikia is for.
Wikia ended up as a hosting service for fancruft. They have the Star [Trek|Craft|Wars|Gate] wikis, and the low-end advertisers who target that demographic. It's not going to get Jimbo Wales a private jet. It's useful to Wikipedia, though, in that the rabid fans can be diverted to Wikia, which has rather lower standards for inclusion.
USC is trying. Here's their GamePipe curriculum. It's education for entry-level programmers at EA.
It's kind of like film school courses that prepare people to be production assistants, then assistant directors, which USC also offers. That's not a path to becoming a director. It's more like a career in field logistics.
Competitive technologies are available. Here's a commercial small, low-cost neutron monitor. That uses zinc sulfide with boron.
Boron detectors seem to be gaining on helium-3 detectors.
What seems to have happened is that Homeland Security locked onto a specific detector technology and supplier, and now the supplier has problems. This is a bureaucracy problem, not a technology problem.
What do we need more bandwidth for? Mostly to deliver HDTV video.? All the high-bandwidth applications used by average consumers are video playback. That doesn't deserve a single tax dollar.
Right. Look at per-capita real median income. The "household" trend is up, but the individual trend is almost flat. $28,100 in the 1970s, $30,513 in 2004. That's not much of an increase, 8% over 30 years, and it's biased upward by three factors. First, the U.S. Government's cost of living index understates housing costs. (This changed in the Reagan years.) The runup in housing prices is not reflected in those numbers. Second, the population is aging, and income tends to increase with age during the working years. Income for people at the same age has decreased. Third, 2004 was a boom year, before the big recession. When figures for 2009 are available, the numbers for 2000-2010 will clearly be lower.
Now look at the change between 1950 and 1970, from $17,077 to $28,100. That's a 65% increase in 20 years. That was real progress, and that was the golden age of optimistic science fiction.
What bothers me is that the "air car" guy got so much attention for so long.
This thing has been in development since 1991, "close to production" since 2003, and the guy has been able to get
enough money to build multiple good-looking prototypes. It's starting to look like a long-running scam like the Keely motor or the Moller flying car. The thermodynamics just don't make sense.
In the only publicized test, the vehicle had a range of 7.22 km.
Much is made of the connection between these guys and Tata, the Indian car company. But from IEEE Spectrum, it turns out that Tata's "deal" is that that they just have an option to buy into the technology if it ever works.
The Nantes Tramway had compressed-air street cars working in 1911. They ran 6km on flat ground between compressor stations, so their range was comparable to the "air car". They used about 15 pounds of coal (at the compressor stations) per mile, which is
roughly equivalent to 1.5 MPG. A typical Diesel bus today gets 6 MPG.
The real problem is that most of the big themes in classical SF require vast amounts of energy. And that's not happening. There hasn't been a new source of energy in fifty years, just
marginal improvements in the old ones. This matters.
That's why space travel is a bust. With chemical fuels, it will never be more than an overly expensive, marginal enterprise. The better '50s SF writers all knew this; read Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon". They just assumed that, somehow, the energy problem would be cracked. Didn't happen. So space travel remains an expensive ego trip for countries and billionaires.
Industrial civilization is only 200 years old. 1808, the first time someone bought a train ticket on a commercial railroad and went someplace, is a good starting point. Industrial abundance, being able to make more stuff than people could consume, only goes back to WWII.
During most of the 20th century, "progress" was a big theme. We don't hear that phrase used much any more.
The number by which one measures "progress" for the average Joe, "per capita median real income for urban wage earners", peaked in 1973. (Median income, not average income; the average is biased by wealth concentration to rich people.) Back then, a guy without a high school diploma could get a job at GM and make enough to buy a house, two cars, a boat, and an education for his kids. That's over. (You don't see that number mentioned much any more. It was heavily publicized back when the US boasted "the highest standard of living in the world".)
Now we're starting to run out of energy and raw materials. Nobody serious thinks there's enough left to sustain current output for another century, let alone bring China and India up to US levels of consumption.
It's hard to write good SF about "the great winding down". It's been done, but it's not read much. The glory days of SF coincide with the period during which "progress" was a win for the little guy.
That's why SF is dead. The plausible future sucks.
Fill ultrasonic cleaner in glove box with deionized water / detergent solution. Fill rinse tank with deionized water.
Start ventilation system for glove box. Using tongs, place unit in glove box and close door. Disassemble unit in glove box. Place each board and case component in ultrasonic cleaner for one minute, then in rinse tank, then on drying rack. Allow 10 minutes for preliminary drying. Open glove box, remove drying rack with components, and take to repair technician. Dispose of contaminated water as medium-toxicity liquid waste.
What's the problem?
Pre-cleaning is routine in maintenance of equipment used in bio and chemical labs and in medical facilities. It works for computers with flood damage, too. Almost all electronic components other than hard drives are tolerant of cleaning in this fashion. The last step in PC board manufacture is a pass through a dishwasher-like cleaning station.
The problem with nuclear weapons development is boredom. It took a huge establishment to make the things, with way too many smart people. The plants are run down or closed, and the smart people are retired or dead.
It's like NASA. Who goes to work for NASA today? At least NASA launches something once in a while. Imagine going to work for Pantex and spending your whole life on refurb jobs. That's not going to attract the best and the brightest.
Some of the bomb designs are "too clever". The AEC had too many smart people around in the glory days, and some of the designs are more complex than they need to be. The effort to shrink fusion bombs down to MIRV and cruise missile size resulted in some designs that took actual nuclear tests to validate and are hard to check without real tests. That's why everyone is so nervous about keeping the old designs going.
Yes, there are simulations, but without tests, they're hard to validate.
Best Buy did comment. What bothers Best Buy is that consumers might be able to purchase non-compliant TVs from out of state over the Internet, making Best Buy look non-competitive. They're also complaining about the label placement requirement.
Sony has a long list of complaints. An amusing one is that the power requirements at standby prohibit TVs from doing background processing ("download acquisition") when turned off. They also complain about the requirement for power factor correction in power supplies on large units.
Sharp is concerned about hotel TVs. "Hotel TVs maintain a 24/7 link to the server". (Sending what data, one wonders.) So they have trouble with the standby power limit.
The Consumer Electronics Retailer Coalition wants a six-month delay because the product cycle for TVs changes models at mid-year, and the regulations change at January 1.
Other than Sony, most of the big players don't seem to have major problems with the requirements.
That's an old idea. The classic "one instruction" is "subtract, store, and branch if negative". This works,
but the instructions are rather big, since each has both an operand address and a branch address.
Once you have your one instruction, you need a macroassembler, because you're going to be generating long code sequences for simple operations like "call". Then you write the subroutine library, for shifting, multiplication, division, etc.
It's a lose on performance. It's a lose on code density. And the guy needed a 1,000,000 gate FPGA to implement it, which is huge for what he's doing. Chuck Moore's original Forth chip, from 1985 had less than 4,000 gates, and delivered good performance, with one Forth word executed per clock.
The whole "smart grid" thing is way too complicated. All you really need are a few bits per minute broadcast from the power company, telling you how their current load status. A few more bits from your local electric meter about your own current load would be helpful.
Loads that draw more than about 300 watts and can run unattended needs to be receiving those bits, which in a home mostly means major appliances and HVAC.
During periods of power scarcity, the power company can send out, in increasing order of need, requests to drop excess load, warnings that excess load will push your electric bill into extra high rate territory, and finally an order to drop below a given load or the electric meter will cut your power. Or, at the other end of the scale, "power is really cheap right now, good time to charge electric cars, self-clean ovens, etc."
Businesses would probably sign up for demand pricing, where power during peak periods above some threshold is very
expensive, and would have their own local controller devoted to keeping the cost down by making freezer cabinet compressors take turns, cutting off some lighting, and such. You can get that now; data transmission from the power company just means it has more info about the power supply situation.
Very little info needs to flow back from the meter to the utility. A reading once an hour is sufficient, if not overkill.
We do not need something that gives every appliance an IPv6 address.
The initial release of 4.3BSD had a bug like that. It wouldn't interoperate with implementations that chose TCP sequence numbers in the upper half of the 32-bit address space. BSD itself didn't do this until it had been up for 2^31 seconds, so it got through testing. Other implementations cycled faster. We were losing network connections for two hours out of every four.
It took a 1-line fix, after three days of looking at the generated machine code to figure out exactly how the sequence number arithmetic worked. Too many casts in the source.
Actually, the simulation isn't the big deal. This is: "We have developed a new algorithm, BlueMatter, that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging." So they're also developing techniques to extract the wiring diagram of living brains. That's significant.
Don't read too much into the amount of supercomputer hardware required. They're running what's basically a circuit simulator, and those are inefficient but flexible. When NVidia develops a new graphics chip, they test and debug by compiling the VHDL into C, and running it, slowly, on about thirty racks of 1U servers. When that's working, the VHDL is compiled down to IC masks and the consumer part that's a few centimeters across is fabricated. That kind of shrink ratio should be expected once the R&D effort figures out what to fab.
Wow, that's nice to have the dials to manipulate 3D objects. Is there anything like that which someone can buy today?
Until about 2002 or so (about when SGI tanked), most of the high-end 3D systems supported MIDI devices as controllers. You could plug in a MIDI knob or slider box and connect it up to the joints of your character. For some reason, few people do that any more. Support for that never really caught on when 3D moved to the PC, even though MIDI devices were cheap.
The Jurassic Park guys had a small dinosaur skeleton model with sensors at the joints wired up to a MIDI interface, so they could pose the thing and the animation would follow. That sort of thing was popular around 1995-2000 because it required little retraining for stop-motion animators.
So they change something and if they can't see the bug anymore they go cvs commit right then and there.
Yes. Bug trackers should have statuses like "Developer in denial" for situations like that.
(Mozilla's bug tracker has a "WORKSFORME" status which is used far too much.)
The exascale systems will be needed for high-resolution climate models, bio energy products and smart grid development as well as fusion energy design.
Sounds like a pork program. What are "bio energy products", anyway. Ethanol? Supercomputer proposals seem to come with whatever buzzword is hot this year.
It's striking how few supercomputers are sold to commercial companies. Even the military doesn't use them much any more.
Re:PyPy - crashing and burning with "agile".
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 1
"Agile" designs for the business logic part of web sites makes sense. The problems aren't technological. Writing an efficient compiler for a language that's never had one is a design and theory problem. A big team hacking away somewhat randomly won't cut it.
There are ways in which Google is vulnerable, but that isn't one of them.
Google's real vulnerability is that if organic search is good enough, nobody ever need click on the ads. When organic search takes you to the right place on the first try, Google makes no money. So the organic search results have to suck, just a little, to make the ads look more attractive. Google needs for some of the traffic to go to ad-heavy pages. That's how Google gets much of their revenue. That's where they're vulnerable.
Google advertisers are about 36% "bottom-feeders", sites that don't have an identifiable, real-world business behind them. Most of those are ad sites.
PyPy - crashing and burning with "agile".
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The attempt to write a Python implementation in Python, PyPy, turned into a death march. The project has been underway since at least 2003 (when they had their first "sprint"), never produced a usable system, and the European Union pulled the plug on funding. But the project limps on. There's a released version. It's slower than CPython. There's supposed to be a "just in time" compiler Real Soon Now. (This is try #2 at a JIT, not counting the schemes for outputting Java bytecode and Javascript.) Six years in on a compiler project, and no product.
The PyPy project is very "agile". They have "sprints". They have "flexibility". They have nightly builds. They have mailing lists and trackers. They support multiple output back-ends. They have about 50 contributors. What they don't have is a usable product.
Meanwhile, one programmer produced Shed Skin, which compiles Python to C++, with a speed gain of 5x to 50x over CPython.
When the problem is dominated by design and architecture, "agile" doesn't help.
This is good. High-precision GPS, which requires seeing 5 or more satellites, is intermittent in urban canyon situations.
With the ability to use GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo signals, the odds of having five sats high in your local sky improve substantially. The high-precision (15cm) receivers will be less flakey.
FreeCreditReport is a ripoff of
AnnualCreditReport.com, the real free site which the U.S. Federal Trade Commission requires the three major credit bureaus to maintain at their expense.
"ConsumerInfo.com, Inc. and Freecreditreport.com are not affiliated with the annual free credit report program. Under a new Federal law, you have the right to receive a free copy of your credit report once every 12 months from each of the three nationwide consumer reporting companies. To request your free annual report under that law, you must go to www.annualcreditreport.com."
Slashdot Mirror
Wikia went hand-in-hand with the noteworthiness filter as a strategy to try to make Jimmy Wales into a Big Internet Entrepreneur. Maybe it's not working but it's not for lack of trying.
Suprisingly, no. It's a side effect of the Israel-Palestine issue.
There was at one time a well-known high-ranking editor on Wikipedia who spent his working day making Israel look good on Wikipedia. His main tactic was removing material he described as "original research". Over time, the effect was not that Israel looked better, but that material critical of Israel was cited in more and more detail, with a footnote to a reliable source for every factual statement, sentence by sentence. Then that editor could no longer delete it as "original research". (He kept trying, which got him into trouble. Eventually, he lost his privileged position and was barred from editing any article related to Israel.)
Gradually, this standard for citation spread to the rest of Wikipedia. For people used to writing for refereed journals, it wasn't a problem. For fans, it was hell.
Wikia is Wikipedia's dumpster, or slush pile. As such, it's useful. I had misgivings about Wales being involved with both a profit-making and a nonprofit entity in the same area (the IRS doesn't like that), but it doesn't seem to have meant much. If he wants to monetize fancruft, so be it.
Right. The important articles were in the first million. Let's see what's coming in right now:
Any questions?
That's why most new articles are deleted. Most of the whining about "deletionism" is from fans who want to blither endlessly about their favorite movie/comic book/Star Trek episode/vampire. That's what Wikia is for.
Wikia ended up as a hosting service for fancruft. They have the Star [Trek|Craft|Wars|Gate] wikis, and the low-end advertisers who target that demographic. It's not going to get Jimbo Wales a private jet. It's useful to Wikipedia, though, in that the rabid fans can be diverted to Wikia, which has rather lower standards for inclusion.
USC is trying. Here's their GamePipe curriculum. It's education for entry-level programmers at EA.
It's kind of like film school courses that prepare people to be production assistants, then assistant directors, which USC also offers. That's not a path to becoming a director. It's more like a career in field logistics.
More like Ratliff wanted his life back and decided what he was getting paid wasn't worth it
Yeah. What if everybody lost interest and stopped looking, and he was stuck in Outer Nowhere, working in a warehouse.
"You mean nobody remembers my Round the World Walk?" - old cartoon from Punch, showing a guy in hiking gear in the lobby of a big London newspaper.
Competitive technologies are available. Here's a commercial small, low-cost neutron monitor. That uses zinc sulfide with boron. Boron detectors seem to be gaining on helium-3 detectors. What seems to have happened is that Homeland Security locked onto a specific detector technology and supplier, and now the supplier has problems. This is a bureaucracy problem, not a technology problem.
What do we need more bandwidth for? Mostly to deliver HDTV video.? All the high-bandwidth applications used by average consumers are video playback. That doesn't deserve a single tax dollar.
Right. Look at per-capita real median income. The "household" trend is up, but the individual trend is almost flat. $28,100 in the 1970s, $30,513 in 2004. That's not much of an increase, 8% over 30 years, and it's biased upward by three factors. First, the U.S. Government's cost of living index understates housing costs. (This changed in the Reagan years.) The runup in housing prices is not reflected in those numbers. Second, the population is aging, and income tends to increase with age during the working years. Income for people at the same age has decreased. Third, 2004 was a boom year, before the big recession. When figures for 2009 are available, the numbers for 2000-2010 will clearly be lower.
Now look at the change between 1950 and 1970, from $17,077 to $28,100. That's a 65% increase in 20 years. That was real progress, and that was the golden age of optimistic science fiction.
What bothers me is that the "air car" guy got so much attention for so long. This thing has been in development since 1991, "close to production" since 2003, and the guy has been able to get enough money to build multiple good-looking prototypes. It's starting to look like a long-running scam like the Keely motor or the Moller flying car. The thermodynamics just don't make sense.
In the only publicized test, the vehicle had a range of 7.22 km.
Much is made of the connection between these guys and Tata, the Indian car company. But from IEEE Spectrum, it turns out that Tata's "deal" is that that they just have an option to buy into the technology if it ever works.
The Nantes Tramway had compressed-air street cars working in 1911. They ran 6km on flat ground between compressor stations, so their range was comparable to the "air car". They used about 15 pounds of coal (at the compressor stations) per mile, which is roughly equivalent to 1.5 MPG. A typical Diesel bus today gets 6 MPG.
The real problem is that most of the big themes in classical SF require vast amounts of energy. And that's not happening. There hasn't been a new source of energy in fifty years, just marginal improvements in the old ones. This matters.
That's why space travel is a bust. With chemical fuels, it will never be more than an overly expensive, marginal enterprise. The better '50s SF writers all knew this; read Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon". They just assumed that, somehow, the energy problem would be cracked. Didn't happen. So space travel remains an expensive ego trip for countries and billionaires.
Industrial civilization is only 200 years old. 1808, the first time someone bought a train ticket on a commercial railroad and went someplace, is a good starting point. Industrial abundance, being able to make more stuff than people could consume, only goes back to WWII.
During most of the 20th century, "progress" was a big theme. We don't hear that phrase used much any more. The number by which one measures "progress" for the average Joe, "per capita median real income for urban wage earners", peaked in 1973. (Median income, not average income; the average is biased by wealth concentration to rich people.) Back then, a guy without a high school diploma could get a job at GM and make enough to buy a house, two cars, a boat, and an education for his kids. That's over. (You don't see that number mentioned much any more. It was heavily publicized back when the US boasted "the highest standard of living in the world".)
Now we're starting to run out of energy and raw materials. Nobody serious thinks there's enough left to sustain current output for another century, let alone bring China and India up to US levels of consumption.
It's hard to write good SF about "the great winding down". It's been done, but it's not read much. The glory days of SF coincide with the period during which "progress" was a win for the little guy.
That's why SF is dead. The plausible future sucks.
Fill ultrasonic cleaner in glove box with deionized water / detergent solution. Fill rinse tank with deionized water. Start ventilation system for glove box. Using tongs, place unit in glove box and close door. Disassemble unit in glove box. Place each board and case component in ultrasonic cleaner for one minute, then in rinse tank, then on drying rack. Allow 10 minutes for preliminary drying. Open glove box, remove drying rack with components, and take to repair technician. Dispose of contaminated water as medium-toxicity liquid waste.
What's the problem?
Pre-cleaning is routine in maintenance of equipment used in bio and chemical labs and in medical facilities. It works for computers with flood damage, too. Almost all electronic components other than hard drives are tolerant of cleaning in this fashion. The last step in PC board manufacture is a pass through a dishwasher-like cleaning station.
The problem with nuclear weapons development is boredom. It took a huge establishment to make the things, with way too many smart people. The plants are run down or closed, and the smart people are retired or dead.
It's like NASA. Who goes to work for NASA today? At least NASA launches something once in a while. Imagine going to work for Pantex and spending your whole life on refurb jobs. That's not going to attract the best and the brightest.
Some of the bomb designs are "too clever". The AEC had too many smart people around in the glory days, and some of the designs are more complex than they need to be. The effort to shrink fusion bombs down to MIRV and cruise missile size resulted in some designs that took actual nuclear tests to validate and are hard to check without real tests. That's why everyone is so nervous about keeping the old designs going. Yes, there are simulations, but without tests, they're hard to validate.
Too many of the comments seem to come from Fox News viewers. All rant, no facts.
First, here are the actual regulations. All comments submitted (including e-mail rants) are on-line. Some of the better ones:
Other than Sony, most of the big players don't seem to have major problems with the requirements.
That's an old idea. The classic "one instruction" is "subtract, store, and branch if negative". This works, but the instructions are rather big, since each has both an operand address and a branch address.
Once you have your one instruction, you need a macroassembler, because you're going to be generating long code sequences for simple operations like "call". Then you write the subroutine library, for shifting, multiplication, division, etc.
It's a lose on performance. It's a lose on code density. And the guy needed a 1,000,000 gate FPGA to implement it, which is huge for what he's doing. Chuck Moore's original Forth chip, from 1985 had less than 4,000 gates, and delivered good performance, with one Forth word executed per clock.
The whole "smart grid" thing is way too complicated. All you really need are a few bits per minute broadcast from the power company, telling you how their current load status. A few more bits from your local electric meter about your own current load would be helpful. Loads that draw more than about 300 watts and can run unattended needs to be receiving those bits, which in a home mostly means major appliances and HVAC.
During periods of power scarcity, the power company can send out, in increasing order of need, requests to drop excess load, warnings that excess load will push your electric bill into extra high rate territory, and finally an order to drop below a given load or the electric meter will cut your power. Or, at the other end of the scale, "power is really cheap right now, good time to charge electric cars, self-clean ovens, etc."
Businesses would probably sign up for demand pricing, where power during peak periods above some threshold is very expensive, and would have their own local controller devoted to keeping the cost down by making freezer cabinet compressors take turns, cutting off some lighting, and such. You can get that now; data transmission from the power company just means it has more info about the power supply situation.
Very little info needs to flow back from the meter to the utility. A reading once an hour is sufficient, if not overkill.
We do not need something that gives every appliance an IPv6 address.
Unfortunately, there's a pork-laden subsidy program for "smart metering" that encourages meters to talk too much. This is becoming a boondoggle like ethanol.
The initial release of 4.3BSD had a bug like that. It wouldn't interoperate with implementations that chose TCP sequence numbers in the upper half of the 32-bit address space. BSD itself didn't do this until it had been up for 2^31 seconds, so it got through testing. Other implementations cycled faster. We were losing network connections for two hours out of every four.
It took a 1-line fix, after three days of looking at the generated machine code to figure out exactly how the sequence number arithmetic worked. Too many casts in the source.
Actually, the simulation isn't the big deal. This is: "We have developed a new algorithm, BlueMatter, that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging." So they're also developing techniques to extract the wiring diagram of living brains. That's significant.
Don't read too much into the amount of supercomputer hardware required. They're running what's basically a circuit simulator, and those are inefficient but flexible. When NVidia develops a new graphics chip, they test and debug by compiling the VHDL into C, and running it, slowly, on about thirty racks of 1U servers. When that's working, the VHDL is compiled down to IC masks and the consumer part that's a few centimeters across is fabricated. That kind of shrink ratio should be expected once the R&D effort figures out what to fab.
Wow, that's nice to have the dials to manipulate 3D objects. Is there anything like that which someone can buy today?
Until about 2002 or so (about when SGI tanked), most of the high-end 3D systems supported MIDI devices as controllers. You could plug in a MIDI knob or slider box and connect it up to the joints of your character. For some reason, few people do that any more. Support for that never really caught on when 3D moved to the PC, even though MIDI devices were cheap.
The Jurassic Park guys had a small dinosaur skeleton model with sensors at the joints wired up to a MIDI interface, so they could pose the thing and the animation would follow. That sort of thing was popular around 1995-2000 because it required little retraining for stop-motion animators.
So they change something and if they can't see the bug anymore they go cvs commit right then and there.
Yes. Bug trackers should have statuses like "Developer in denial" for situations like that. (Mozilla's bug tracker has a "WORKSFORME" status which is used far too much.)
The exascale systems will be needed for high-resolution climate models, bio energy products and smart grid development as well as fusion energy design.
Sounds like a pork program. What are "bio energy products", anyway. Ethanol? Supercomputer proposals seem to come with whatever buzzword is hot this year.
It's striking how few supercomputers are sold to commercial companies. Even the military doesn't use them much any more.
"Agile" designs for the business logic part of web sites makes sense. The problems aren't technological. Writing an efficient compiler for a language that's never had one is a design and theory problem. A big team hacking away somewhat randomly won't cut it.
What a dumb idea.
There are ways in which Google is vulnerable, but that isn't one of them.
Google's real vulnerability is that if organic search is good enough, nobody ever need click on the ads. When organic search takes you to the right place on the first try, Google makes no money. So the organic search results have to suck, just a little, to make the ads look more attractive. Google needs for some of the traffic to go to ad-heavy pages. That's how Google gets much of their revenue. That's where they're vulnerable.
Google advertisers are about 36% "bottom-feeders", sites that don't have an identifiable, real-world business behind them. Most of those are ad sites.
The attempt to write a Python implementation in Python, PyPy, turned into a death march. The project has been underway since at least 2003 (when they had their first "sprint"), never produced a usable system, and the European Union pulled the plug on funding. But the project limps on. There's a released version. It's slower than CPython. There's supposed to be a "just in time" compiler Real Soon Now. (This is try #2 at a JIT, not counting the schemes for outputting Java bytecode and Javascript.) Six years in on a compiler project, and no product.
The PyPy project is very "agile". They have "sprints". They have "flexibility". They have nightly builds. They have mailing lists and trackers. They support multiple output back-ends. They have about 50 contributors. What they don't have is a usable product.
Meanwhile, one programmer produced Shed Skin, which compiles Python to C++, with a speed gain of 5x to 50x over CPython.
When the problem is dominated by design and architecture, "agile" doesn't help.
This is good. High-precision GPS, which requires seeing 5 or more satellites, is intermittent in urban canyon situations. With the ability to use GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo signals, the odds of having five sats high in your local sky improve substantially. The high-precision (15cm) receivers will be less flakey.
I'm surprised the TSA considered $4500 to be a "large sum of money". That's about two weeks of business travel. If that.
With current credit card fees, it may be more cost-effective to carry cash. Even if you get robbed 1% of the time, you're still ahead.
FreeCreditReport is a ripoff of AnnualCreditReport.com, the real free site which the U.S. Federal Trade Commission requires the three major credit bureaus to maintain at their expense.
"ConsumerInfo.com, Inc. and Freecreditreport.com are not affiliated with the annual free credit report program. Under a new Federal law, you have the right to receive a free copy of your credit report once every 12 months from each of the three nationwide consumer reporting companies. To request your free annual report under that law, you must go to www.annualcreditreport.com."