When the families are told by the bank that they will be able to repay the loan and are given very low initial rate, AND the bank knows they will not be able to pay it back, AND the bank knows they will bundle it up the mortgage and sell it off, AND regulators that actually promote this THEN you have banks that are evil, greedy bastards, and you have families that are stupid, and a government that is incompetent, greedy, and stupid.
No, it's not his world view that's fucked up, it's the world.
As well as the installation, maintenance, and hail damage costs associated with a large area installation.
Most people in this thread really need to understand something about lifecycle costs. If solar panels were completely free, it still would not make sense for most people to install them on their roofs, because of all the other costs.
It seems like MIT has been releasing a lot of 'news' that concentrates on making technology available more cheaply. I don't know if it is a change in technology focus, the fact that so many of their students seem to come from foreign countries, or they have a social conscience, but they have recently discussed a cheap solar concentrator, peanut sheller, a low cost water purification, and they host the International Development Design Summit and IDEAS.
No, this is nothing ground-breaking technology wise, but they are cleverly using inexpensive technology to provide capability to a wider range of people. And that's a good thing.
I cannot figure out who is selling these things. Was it a private collector, professional fossil collectors, or did some museum go bust? I suppose that the auction house is not obligated to identify the seller, but it would interesting to know.
Only it appears that you won't be. See Eucalyptus, which is an open source implementation of the Amazon API. Since Amazon is the 300 lb gorilla currently and it's API appears to be on the way of being the defacto standard, having Eucalyptus around means that other cloud service providers can use the same API and steal some of Amazon's business, and users can switch to another provider as necessary or desired.
There are definitely reasons not to use clouds, but lock-in isn't one of them.
Now you're thinking like a scientist. That's a great hypothesis. Get out there and try it! In the mean time, I'll continue doing the experiments with the pretty women.
Which is why you forward them to the CIA and have _them_ figure the whole thing out.
Actually, you would have to be pretty stupid to send them to the CIA. You'd send them to the FBI (as TFA mentions), who would try to figure out if it was foreign or domestic, and then they would get the real experts (NSA) to do the technical work.
Seconded. What is bad about the SVG that Inkscape produces? I've never had any problem with it. I did have a problem once where Inkscape would not open up a file produced by Batik, but it turned out that Batik had a bug and didn't have the correct header, and Inkscape was being correct (though pedantic).
As the referenced article points out, it really does make a difference when you start doing manipulations / editing to the photo. think about it. With only 8 bits, you have very little dynamic range, so expanding and contracting part of the range (as you do when you manipulate color) will cause serious artifacts. 16 bits means that the manipulations do not cause significant artifacts.
I've never understood conceptually the benefit of distributed RCS's over a server based one. People say it is better, and I'm reading this thread to try to understand how it is better, but I'm just not getting it.
On a distributed system you can merge histories together instead of trying to merge changes. They can intermesh like a zipper and end up just fine and often require no further interaction beyond initiation the merge.
Is this it? Why is this a function of the distributed nature of the RCS?
Well, yes, biologically speaking you are a neuter, not a male. Is a male dog still male after you remove its testicles? Not really, it's a neuter.
That's not to say that socially you are not a male. It means that lots and lots of males stop being males when they can no longer produce sperm, have a vascectomy, lose their testicles, etc.
I guess I don't understand this argument. Nobody is proposing a govt monopoly on healthcare, just a base option for people that can't afford private insurance.
Do public universities not care about providing good service? Does the post office not care about providing good service? Don't they compete with private companies or universities providing the same service? Have the existence of public universities and the post office driven out of business private competition?
Your argument fails because government supported options do not automatically eliminate private options. Public unviersities and the post office are existence proofs.
The problem with this sort of article is that it doesn't say how the thing actually works. They are trying to solve the 'SLAM' or Simultaneous Localization and Mapping problem. The best approaches have recently been particle filter based. See the work by Sebastian Thrun at Stanford or Montemerlo's dissertation at CMU. I would have to guess that they are using a similar approach.
But of course this has been done before. The discussed project looks very similar to Minerva.
In addition, there is absolutely no data presented in the article. When you say that there were problems, you should quantify the problems. How long was the response time. The article says
Response times on the service also varied by a factor of twenty depending on the time of day the services were accessed, she said.
Ok, so give me a friggin' number! Did it go from 1 min to 20 minutes? Or from 1 sec to 20 sec. Or 1 hr to 20 hrs? When did you experience these response times? Give me a graph showing the response time as function of time of day and day of week.
I am learning to hate articles that give you a little bit of information and leave out the important data. If Ms. Liu hasn't released the data, then the article should not have been written. Or she should provide it on her web page. Or provide a link to some journal where it's being published. This whole thing stinks of spin and MS FUD.
A manufacturer does not sell a product for less than it costs to make. The cost to make it includes the cost of the energy that it takes to make it.
Assume I buy a 1 watt cell for $3 (No, you wouldn't buy a single watt cell). At $0.05/kwH, if half the cost was energy, it would take 30 kwH to make the cell. How much energy will I get out of it? Assume 6 hr/day, and the cell lasts for 20 years, then it would produce 44 kwH over its lifetime (1w x 6 hr/day x 365 day / year x 20 years).
Of course, I'm just making these numbers up, YMMV, etc. But, I can't see any way that it takes more energy to make than it will produce based on the math.
Almost makes me want to apply so I can down my alt.com and bmezine.com usernames and passwords. If nothing else, it will be enlightening for city employees who get to review it.:-)
And then I'd be rich when they refuse my application because of it and I sue their asses off.
I'm not sure I agree with you on this. Supposedly, based on the banks that have repaid TARP funds so far, the gov't is making a nice profit. This may, or may not, be a similar situation.
If you meant that I won't see a dividend check in my mail, that's true, but I didn't see a bill when the money was spent either.
Why does it need a library? why isn't this the compiler's job?
Does an operation have a side effect? If not, then it can happen in parallel with other operations that are working on different data. In this case, there isn't a side effect (unless you're in C++ land and you've changed the meaning of +) and each operation occurs on a different pieces of data. So, if you have 1000 cores, they should all happen at the same time. the problem is that 1) you are going to be I/O bound and 2) this is a trivial example and in general it's much harder to determine if there are side effects. Which is why C sucks for parallelism and Erlang rocks.
No, Graphviz has a different feature-set. If I need to make a 'graph' in the mathematical or computer science, then it's the way to go. If I need to make plots, it doesn't do it. Frankly, I'd use JFreeChart since right now I'm doing a Java project; I've also used it for web apps. See the project at Google Chart API.
For a cool example, open a new browser tab and put in: "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World"
There are thousands already out there, so this horse has left the barn. See, for example, the Raven or Packbot. Note the numbers already shipped (>8000 and >2000). No, they are not autonomous, but they definitely don't have a human physically attached. And they are getting more autonomous all the time.
While it might be a good idea, I don't think that the main proponent / user of the technology (U.S.) would agree to get rid of them. Too damn useful. And you are right that there will come the day that the US might regret its decision. On the other hand, there is a huge difference between nuclear weapons and military robots, in terms of the necessary parts. The parts for a robot just are not that complicated, and in 20 years I'm guessing that it will be trivial to piece together a sophisticated military robot from stuff you can get at local stores. It will still be hard to get nuclear grade material.
Take a look at the statistics in terms of the number of unmanned airplanes and ground vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan right now. There are, literally, thousands of them. Right now, they are remotely piloted, but you can't tell that when one is driving around or flying over your house. And pretty soon, they won't be remotely piloted.
Slashdot Mirror
When the families are told by the bank that they will be able to repay the loan and are given very low initial rate, AND the bank knows they will not be able to pay it back, AND the bank knows they will bundle it up the mortgage and sell it off, AND regulators that actually promote this THEN you have banks that are evil, greedy bastards, and you have families that are stupid, and a government that is incompetent, greedy, and stupid.
No, it's not his world view that's fucked up, it's the world.
As well as the installation, maintenance, and hail damage costs associated with a large area installation.
Most people in this thread really need to understand something about lifecycle costs. If solar panels were completely free, it still would not make sense for most people to install them on their roofs, because of all the other costs.
Indeed. Check out what happened to this one.
Seriously though, it does suck to be a lab rat; however, omelet, eggs.
It seems like MIT has been releasing a lot of 'news' that concentrates on making technology available more cheaply. I don't know if it is a change in technology focus, the fact that so many of their students seem to come from foreign countries, or they have a social conscience, but they have recently discussed a cheap solar concentrator, peanut sheller, a low cost water purification, and they host the International Development Design Summit and IDEAS.
No, this is nothing ground-breaking technology wise, but they are cleverly using inexpensive technology to provide capability to a wider range of people. And that's a good thing.
I cannot figure out who is selling these things. Was it a private collector, professional fossil collectors, or did some museum go bust? I suppose that the auction house is not obligated to identify the seller, but it would interesting to know.
Only it appears that you won't be. See Eucalyptus, which is an open source implementation of the Amazon API. Since Amazon is the 300 lb gorilla currently and it's API appears to be on the way of being the defacto standard, having Eucalyptus around means that other cloud service providers can use the same API and steal some of Amazon's business, and users can switch to another provider as necessary or desired.
There are definitely reasons not to use clouds, but lock-in isn't one of them.
Now you're thinking like a scientist. That's a great hypothesis. Get out there and try it! In the mean time, I'll continue doing the experiments with the pretty women.
So, what you are saying is that the comparable test for women would be to do the test in a Coach bag store?
Which is why you forward them to the CIA and have _them_ figure the whole thing out.
Actually, you would have to be pretty stupid to send them to the CIA. You'd send them to the FBI (as TFA mentions), who would try to figure out if it was foreign or domestic, and then they would get the real experts (NSA) to do the technical work.
Seconded. What is bad about the SVG that Inkscape produces? I've never had any problem with it. I did have a problem once where Inkscape would not open up a file produced by Batik, but it turned out that Batik had a bug and didn't have the correct header, and Inkscape was being correct (though pedantic).
Well, it's flamebait, but not a troll.
As the referenced article points out, it really does make a difference when you start doing manipulations / editing to the photo. think about it. With only 8 bits, you have very little dynamic range, so expanding and contracting part of the range (as you do when you manipulate color) will cause serious artifacts. 16 bits means that the manipulations do not cause significant artifacts.
Thank goodness your test code will catch it!
On a distributed system you can merge histories together instead of trying to merge changes. They can intermesh like a zipper and end up just fine and often require no further interaction beyond initiation the merge.
Is this it? Why is this a function of the distributed nature of the RCS?
Well, yes, biologically speaking you are a neuter, not a male. Is a male dog still male after you remove its testicles? Not really, it's a neuter.
That's not to say that socially you are not a male. It means that lots and lots of males stop being males when they can no longer produce sperm, have a vascectomy, lose their testicles, etc.
I guess I don't understand this argument. Nobody is proposing a govt monopoly on healthcare, just a base option for people that can't afford private insurance.
Do public universities not care about providing good service? Does the post office not care about providing good service? Don't they compete with private companies or universities providing the same service? Have the existence of public universities and the post office driven out of business private competition?
Your argument fails because government supported options do not automatically eliminate private options. Public unviersities and the post office are existence proofs.
The problem with this sort of article is that it doesn't say how the thing actually works. They are trying to solve the 'SLAM' or Simultaneous Localization and Mapping problem. The best approaches have recently been particle filter based. See the work by Sebastian Thrun at Stanford or Montemerlo's dissertation at CMU. I would have to guess that they are using a similar approach.
But of course this has been done before. The discussed project looks very similar to Minerva.
Response times on the service also varied by a factor of twenty depending on the time of day the services were accessed, she said.
Ok, so give me a friggin' number! Did it go from 1 min to 20 minutes? Or from 1 sec to 20 sec. Or 1 hr to 20 hrs? When did you experience these response times? Give me a graph showing the response time as function of time of day and day of week.
I am learning to hate articles that give you a little bit of information and leave out the important data. If Ms. Liu hasn't released the data, then the article should not have been written. Or she should provide it on her web page. Or provide a link to some journal where it's being published. This whole thing stinks of spin and MS FUD.
A manufacturer does not sell a product for less than it costs to make. The cost to make it includes the cost of the energy that it takes to make it.
Assume I buy a 1 watt cell for $3 (No, you wouldn't buy a single watt cell). At $0.05/kwH, if half the cost was energy, it would take 30 kwH to make the cell. How much energy will I get out of it? Assume 6 hr/day, and the cell lasts for 20 years, then it would produce 44 kwH over its lifetime (1w x 6 hr/day x 365 day / year x 20 years).
Of course, I'm just making these numbers up, YMMV, etc. But, I can't see any way that it takes more energy to make than it will produce based on the math.
Do you really think that they're going to hire someone with a slashdot name of 'sexconker'??
Almost makes me want to apply so I can down my alt.com and bmezine.com usernames and passwords. If nothing else, it will be enlightening for city employees who get to review it. :-)
And then I'd be rich when they refuse my application because of it and I sue their asses off.
I'm not sure I agree with you on this. Supposedly, based on the banks that have repaid TARP funds so far, the gov't is making a nice profit. This may, or may not, be a similar situation.
If you meant that I won't see a dividend check in my mail, that's true, but I didn't see a bill when the money was spent either.
Why does it need a library? why isn't this the compiler's job?
Does an operation have a side effect? If not, then it can happen in parallel with other operations that are working on different data. In this case, there isn't a side effect (unless you're in C++ land and you've changed the meaning of +) and each operation occurs on a different pieces of data. So, if you have 1000 cores, they should all happen at the same time. the problem is that 1) you are going to be I/O bound and 2) this is a trivial example and in general it's much harder to determine if there are side effects. Which is why C sucks for parallelism and Erlang rocks.
No, Graphviz has a different feature-set. If I need to make a 'graph' in the mathematical or computer science, then it's the way to go. If I need to make plots, it doesn't do it. Frankly, I'd use JFreeChart since right now I'm doing a Java project; I've also used it for web apps. See the project at Google Chart API.
For a cool example, open a new browser tab and put in: "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World"
There are thousands already out there, so this horse has left the barn. See, for example, the Raven or Packbot. Note the numbers already shipped (>8000 and >2000). No, they are not autonomous, but they definitely don't have a human physically attached. And they are getting more autonomous all the time.
While it might be a good idea, I don't think that the main proponent / user of the technology (U.S.) would agree to get rid of them. Too damn useful. And you are right that there will come the day that the US might regret its decision. On the other hand, there is a huge difference between nuclear weapons and military robots, in terms of the necessary parts. The parts for a robot just are not that complicated, and in 20 years I'm guessing that it will be trivial to piece together a sophisticated military robot from stuff you can get at local stores. It will still be hard to get nuclear grade material.
Take a look at the statistics in terms of the number of unmanned airplanes and ground vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan right now. There are, literally, thousands of them. Right now, they are remotely piloted, but you can't tell that when one is driving around or flying over your house. And pretty soon, they won't be remotely piloted.