http://tech-net.sba.gov/tech-net/public/dsp_search.cfm is the search engine. The Small Business Administration doesn't make SBIR or STTR awards, but Congress has charged the SBA with tracking them. Every year, all agencies that awarded SBIR or STTR awards in the previous Federal Fiscal Year are required to report those awards to the SBA, by March I think. The TECH-Net search engine allows you to capture search results in mail merge format for import into spreadsheets, for example. You can drill down to awards and even phases within an award. (As a result of Phase I, the abstract of Phase II could change, for example, and you can see both.) I see that its keyword search capability is finally back after a long hiatus.
This search engine has been on the Web for over 10 years.
But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Not which network protocol to use,... which INTERNET to use. There hasn't always been just one (ARPANet, NSFNet, etc). If you ignore for a moment that the DNS server name string is backwards, above the server name is precisely where "Internet name" would belong hierarchically./internet/server/path/... If there's only one, or if you want the same Internet as the one you're currently on, it can be (and is) omitted.
That reserved spot could yet prove to be very useful someday. Every so often the US military talks about firewalling everything mission-critical to a completely different set of wires/fibers, with certain well-defined access points to bridge to the general Internet. Hoping and praying that they'll be brief, that might be r for restricted and g for general, but only if you have to bridge (//,/r/ or/g/). I was thinking, r for restricted rather than m for mil, because mil, where needed, is already in the server name, and there are obviously civilian servers (DHS, State, White House, etc) also requiring higher security wires/fibers.
But in any case, URL is a location string. And the only location above server would be Internet.
Creator should be part of the application selection criteria, but it doesn't have to be Creator Codes. Creator Codes would be useful for file sharing over CD-ROM or MacBinary, but an ideal solution would be more a Unix-y one that allows plenty of user configurability.
I'd like to control the contextual menu. In that top section where the default is, I'd like to have all the apps I use most for that File Type. For html, cfm, js, xml and xsd documents, I want Dreamweaver, Eclipse and 3 browsers to show up there, with the default set by me. I should even be able to drag an item up to the top of the contextual menu to make it the new default on the fly. Creator Codes can do many-to-one (files-to-app), but they can't do one-to-many (file-to-apps). Let's just lobby for creator and/or current favorite apps to be part of the application selection criteria and leave it up to Apple to come up with a easy-to-use implementation that makes sense from an OS internals point of view.
Amazing. You and I are the only 2 posters on this thread with something truly relevant to say about what really happened 40 years ago, and we're both stuck at (Score:1). But multipart/mixed makes a gestation period joke and gets a (Score:2).
I guess we're all just supposed to tell jokes, not stuff that matters.
Actually, it was the first packet switching router that was delivered to UCLA over Labor Day weekend, 1969. It sat unopened in its box all weekend. It couldn't be said to be the Internet, or even a network, until it was hooked up to Stanford Research Institute's counterpart in October. The following is from Leonard Kleinrock's Personal History/Biography, The Birth of the Internet:
A month later the second node was added (at Stanford Research Institute) and the first Host-to-Host message ever to be sent on the Internet was launched from UCLA. This occurred in early October when Kleinrock and one of his programmers proceeded to "logon" to the SRI Host from the UCLA Host. The procedure was to type in "log" and the system at SRI was set up to be clever enough to fill out the rest of the command, namely to add "in" thus creating the word "login". A telephone headset was mounted on the programmers at both ends so they could communicate by voice as the message was transmitted. At the UCLA end, they typed in the "l" and asked SRI if they received it; "got the l" came the voice reply. UCLA typed in the "o", asked if they got it, and received "got the o". UCLA then typed in the "g" and the darned system CRASHED! Quite a beginning. On the second attempt, it worked fine!
That was the birth of the Internet. When 2 computers first talked to each other using a packet switching connection.
In the world of creating new software, development is the only research there is. You don't know at the time you start coding whether or not you can do what you're setting out to do. It's an experiment. It may fail. Until you succeed, it's research.
Apple does numerous "resets" of its product development. That's jargon for starting over. All those failed attempts are research into what's the right way to do it. Edison did the same thing with the light bulb. Try 30 new filament materials; they all fail; so try 30 more. It was product development, but because it was hardware, you call it research. Most of software product development is research too. You just don't get to see all the burned-out filaments.
Ideas in journals and conferences are inspiration. What Apple's doing is perspiration. And they're not getting enough credit for turning ideas into realities.
According to Apple's 3rd quarter results (that is, for the quarter that ended June 27th), Apple spent $341M out of $1351M total operating expenses on research and development. The subtitle of the report was "Best Non-Holiday Quarter Revenue and Earnings in Apple History". So Apple's business model certainly isn't broken, despite decent-sized expenditures on R&D.
It's not all funny ads. Apple's earning their success.
Switching utilities, the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission in the DC area charges me 11 bucks a month just to stay hooked up to their pipes. Since Washington DC area tap water is so foul, particularly when the Potomac River gets low, I drink only Deer Park Spring Water. (I buy them in the huge 2.5 gallon jugs, which my county recycles.) So basically, all I ever use tap water for is to hand wash dishes / dinnerware, toilet flushing and the shower. Fortunately, I don't have to estimate that part, because those uses are shown in the non-connection-fee part of the bill. I calculated it out (I assure you, correctly, because I was a Math major), and I'm spending more per gallon for tap water (when you include connection fees) than I am for Deer Park.
I really love the comedian Lewis Black, and if I temporarily suspend remembrance of that calculation, I can still laugh at his tirade about how we're all so stupid for buying bottled water, which we could get "for free".
I'm not saying that people shouldn't have to pay their fair share for services and infrastructure they use. The idea of connection fees is completely fair. I'm just saying, keep an eye on what's actually costing you what, and demand a fair accounting. In justifying price increases, don't let them argue that the rising cost of power production justifies an increase in the connection fee too. And don't let them argue that the rising cost of repairing transmission lines justifies increasing the price per kilowatt-hour.
By aswell, I assume you mean aswollen. As for speedometers, try a tennis tournament with one of those really pretty Russian blondes. They use speedometers to measure the speed of serves, but they probably have to factor out all of the ongoing research.
You must mean Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits. "I'm MSIE the 8th I am. MSIE the 8th I am, I am. I got bested by the browser next door. We've been tryin' 7 times before. And everyone was an MSIE. We wouldn't pass an AcidTest, no ma'am. I'm the User Agent MSIE, MSIE the 8th I am, I am. MSIE the 8th I am."
But I also heard a marklar that Marklar was starting to insist that its marklars speak "Marklar" internally. That way, no one marklar would have all of the marklar necessary to know exactly what Marklar was intending to release to the marklar. So deliberate marklars would no longer be necessary to protect upcoming marklars. Also, when a marklar says "I don't really know the marklar to that. I haven't been kept in the marklar.", he or she would be telling the absolute marklar.
... could just mean that the last leg of the route is noisy. Someone monitoring the line should get suspicious if the rate of retransmission varies according to source, but not if it happens all the time.
The recipient software can mask the stego by requesting retransmission at roughly the same rate all the time. Only if the sending software is in on the stego would the retransmission be significant and (hopefully) encrypted.
Most people don't remember this, but Mac users used to love Microsoft. That ended with Word 6.0, when Microsoft took away all of the features it had been prototyping on the Mac and made Mac users fall back to Windows users' level of functionality. It's been a hatefest ever since.
One of the features of Word for the Mac 5.1 was "formulas", which allowed the same sort of advanced layout we see in TeX. I suspect that this is the return of that feature, for both Windows and Mac.
I think it may be too late to salvage good will between Mac users and Microsoft at this point, but maybe it's possible.
Congress requires all federal agencies to report to the SBA annually all SBIR and STTR awards made in the previous federal fiscal year. The SBA publishes this information in their site called TECH-Net. See for yourself:
You can search for over 85,000 awards there, covering the entire range of SBIR and STTR, from 1983 to 2007. The agencies aren't required to report 2008 awards until next month, but I see from a search just now that DoD has already entered over 500 of their 2008 awards. DoD comprises about half of all SBIR/STTR awards at the rate of around 3000 a year, out of around 6000 a year total.
Random observations: The keyword search doesn't seem to be working right now. The State Summary is sortable on the browser. You can get the search results in mail-merge format for copy and paste into Excel or your own database. When you drill down to an individual award, you initially get a composite, where phase 2 overrides phase 1, but you can drill down even further and view either phase individually (see how the title or abstract changed between phases, for example).
Thanks. Computer science majors take heed, fascinating topic indeed.
I wish I had done the topic more justice and written this on its own, not as a reply, with a non-Japanese first line. As it is, with its cryptic title and intro, it will forever be buried 2 levels down with a score of 2, and no one but you and I will have ever read it.
Oh well. I'm glad someone benefited from my research besides me.
Nihon-go de amari yokunai hanashimasu. However, I believe that the Japanese expression was pronounced closer to "Fudgy-dah!" in ads.
I live in the Washington, DC, area. One of the big perks of living here is the Library of Congress. You have to undergo a security clearance to get permission to be there, but once you get that photo id, hoo boy, there sure is a lot of information there.
I'm a computer programmer (currently working in Web development, as my handle here suggests). Long, long ago, I researched fuzzy logic at the Library of Congress from the original studies that proposed it. (I think that the original papers were from an Air Force study.) It did NOT revolve around lookup tables. It was more fundamental than that.
Fuzzy logic assigns a floating point number to data that represents how confident you are that it's true. In the early days, the number varied between 1.0 (absolute certainty) to 0.0 (not a clue, wild guess), or even -1.0 (absolutely sure that it's not true). The exact range used is unimportant except that it's well-known. Of course, almost all of these numbers are between whatever limiting numbers you set, representing shades of gray. That's where the term fuzzy came from.
We like to believe that knowledge is a deterministic process, but to believe that, we have to ignore our fundamental assumptions, which force us to admit that we don't really know for sure. Fuzzy logic seeks to improve decision-making by acknowledging that fuzziness and quantifying it.
We all know that we have to multiply percentages to derive percentages based on multiple criteria. If roughly 1 in 2 people are male and exactly 1 in 2 have characteristics above the median, we derive that roughly 1 in 4 of all people are males with intelligence above the median for males. But how confident are we in knowing that?
Say, for a given population, the 1-in-2 statistic for males is about 97% likely to be true. The 1-in-2 statistic for being above the median is 100% likely to be true, because that's the definition of median. So when you combine the 2 criteria, the 1-in-4 statistic still has a 97% likelihood of being true. In other words, fuzzy logic is a completely independent, parallel computation based on the confidence factors that travel with the data.
The fact that confidence factors travel with the data is an important part of fuzzy logic. You never throw the confidence factors away and say "That's it. We got the inference we wanted. It's over 95%. That's close enough, so we're going to treat it as true." If you do that, you've gained no wisdom whatsoever from tracking confidence factors. You have to remember that there's still a 5% chance that you're wrong. So all inferences also have their own confidence factors, which are also not thrown away.
To take an Air Force example, in deference to my vague recollection that they sponsored the original study, satellite surveillance reveals that a bunch of bombers are heading north in Russia. Is it just an exercise, or first evidence of an attack? You have to factor in a lot of unknowns. What's their air speed? How likely are they to be carrying a payload at that speed? Even if they appear to be carrying a payload, how likely is it to be a full dress rehearsal, with ballast for realistic plane handling? The list goes on and on. As part of standard readiness, the confidence factors of these questions have been calculated and recalculated on an ongoing basis. NORAD sees the scenario and looks it up in a scenarios book. As a result, they decide not to change the DEFCON, but they read ahead to see what to do if the bombers leave Russian air space. Crossing the border has a different confidence factor that goes into the overall calculations of whether or not it's likely to be just an exercise.
So no, fuzzy logic is not simply using lookup tables. Lookup tables are just a convenient way to organize inferences based on changing conditions in reality.
I once had to write a PPP script (remember those?) to log into my dialup ISP at that time. Apparently, there were different servers programmed by different programmers, because sometimes it would prompt me for 'Password' (capitalized) and sometimes for 'password' (all lower case). So to write a script that would catch both prompts, I looked for the string 'assword'.
That's what a password is, or at least aptly describes the place from which you pull it.
What I wanna know is, can I plug it into my TV before a sporting event and make that narcissistic singer hit only one note per syllable except for the 7 syllables that are supposed to have 2 notes?
For an American, the Star Spangled Banner can be a profoundly moving experience to sing along with, if the singer could only hit the notes and rhythm correctly. (*) It never fails to bring tears to my eyes if the singer just sings it straight and lets us all sing along. Not one of the selfish, narcissistic singers (who all want to say 'Look how wonderful my voice is!') has ever brought a tear to my eye. Not one. Ever.
(*) I say 'could' rather than 'would' because I really don't think they can. I think they're covering for their inability to hit the difficult notes by improvising around them. Pretty thinly veiled, in fact. I would love to be proven wrong, but none of them ever accepts the challenge of singing it straight. Hmmm, I wonder why?
So I'll buy the Auto-Tune box that has been preprogrammed to know the notes and rhythm of that particular song and has a red 'SSB Correction Mode' button. Then all the stadium goers who don't really feel like singing along anyway can hear it their way (butchered), and I can hear it at home the right way... the profoundly moving way... once again... finally.
Assembly language = the language, assembler = the utility that turns it into machine language. If you can't be at least that precise in English, you can't handle assembly language.
The biggest impediment to programming in general is that computers are notoriously unforgiving. To be a programmer requires patience, a love of figuring out puzzles and determination. But to be an assembly language coder requires a level of determination that borders on sadism.
I once worked on a computer belonging to folks so paranoid, they didn't allow any compilers. You could pay them to use their computers, but only to do processing. And yet they had a bug in a magnetic tape reader and no one working for them smart enough to debug it. But they had a file editor that allowed binary edits...:-)
I dumped the tape reader's object code, translated it into binary, disassembled it in my head into assembly language, saw that they had a coding error, composed the fix, mentally reassembled it into binary and figured out how to patch the object code to get past the error. When we stopped using that computer, I sent them a note giving them the file system address of a fixed version of the utility. (I'm sure that set off a frenzy of omigod, how did he do that?)
How I did that is that I absolutely refuse to let a machine tell me what to do. I tell the machine what to do, and the machine had better be my bitch and do it.
If you can't think like that, do not take the advice above. Do not try to learn assembly language. Machine language will leave you broken and doubting your intelligence for the first time as much as a freshman at the India Institute of Technology.
That said, EmbeddedJanitor is right. If you truly need to make the computer obey your will, nothing else comes close to assembly language.
Re:jQuery is very well thought-out
on
jQuery in Action
·
· Score: 1
By the way, don't get me wrong, this is a damn fine book to learn jQuery.
Re:jQuery is very well thought-out
on
jQuery in Action
·
· Score: 1
Glad I'm not the only one who thinks animation could be better documented.
BTW, I finally found a pretty good book on explaining the ideas behind jQuery: John Resig's own book, Pro JavaScript Techniques. It's pretty old by Web standards, so it doesn't exactly correspond to jQuery 1.2.6. But it's damn good.
I guess I'm revealing that I'm behind the times by saying that. Oh well.
What's cool about it, reading it for the first time nowadays, is seeing the concepts presented before they came to fruition as jQuery. I chuckle to myself reading it: Gee, it would be really cool if there were a library that would do all of this for you.:-)
I'm not done reading it yet. Just got it. Only up to chapter 5. But I'd already recommend it if you're looking to understand how jQuery was written and why things were done the way they were.
Slashdot Mirror
http://tech-net.sba.gov/tech-net/public/dsp_search.cfm is the search engine. The Small Business Administration doesn't make SBIR or STTR awards, but Congress has charged the SBA with tracking them. Every year, all agencies that awarded SBIR or STTR awards in the previous Federal Fiscal Year are required to report those awards to the SBA, by March I think. The TECH-Net search engine allows you to capture search results in mail merge format for import into spreadsheets, for example. You can drill down to awards and even phases within an award. (As a result of Phase I, the abstract of Phase II could change, for example, and you can see both.) I see that its keyword search capability is finally back after a long hiatus.
This search engine has been on the Web for over 10 years.
But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Not which network protocol to use, ... which INTERNET to use. There hasn't always been just one (ARPANet, NSFNet, etc). If you ignore for a moment that the DNS server name string is backwards, above the server name is precisely where "Internet name" would belong hierarchically. /internet/server/path/... If there's only one, or if you want the same Internet as the one you're currently on, it can be (and is) omitted.
/r/ or /g/). I was thinking, r for restricted rather than m for mil, because mil, where needed, is already in the server name, and there are obviously civilian servers (DHS, State, White House, etc) also requiring higher security wires/fibers.
That reserved spot could yet prove to be very useful someday. Every so often the US military talks about firewalling everything mission-critical to a completely different set of wires/fibers, with certain well-defined access points to bridge to the general Internet. Hoping and praying that they'll be brief, that might be r for restricted and g for general, but only if you have to bridge (//,
But in any case, URL is a location string. And the only location above server would be Internet.
Creator should be part of the application selection criteria, but it doesn't have to be Creator Codes. Creator Codes would be useful for file sharing over CD-ROM or MacBinary, but an ideal solution would be more a Unix-y one that allows plenty of user configurability.
I'd like to control the contextual menu. In that top section where the default is, I'd like to have all the apps I use most for that File Type. For html, cfm, js, xml and xsd documents, I want Dreamweaver, Eclipse and 3 browsers to show up there, with the default set by me. I should even be able to drag an item up to the top of the contextual menu to make it the new default on the fly. Creator Codes can do many-to-one (files-to-app), but they can't do one-to-many (file-to-apps). Let's just lobby for creator and/or current favorite apps to be part of the application selection criteria and leave it up to Apple to come up with a easy-to-use implementation that makes sense from an OS internals point of view.
Amazing. You and I are the only 2 posters on this thread with something truly relevant to say about what really happened 40 years ago, and we're both stuck at (Score:1). But multipart/mixed makes a gestation period joke and gets a (Score:2).
I guess we're all just supposed to tell jokes, not stuff that matters.
That was the birth of the Internet. When 2 computers first talked to each other using a packet switching connection.
In the world of creating new software, development is the only research there is. You don't know at the time you start coding whether or not you can do what you're setting out to do. It's an experiment. It may fail. Until you succeed, it's research.
Apple does numerous "resets" of its product development. That's jargon for starting over. All those failed attempts are research into what's the right way to do it. Edison did the same thing with the light bulb. Try 30 new filament materials; they all fail; so try 30 more. It was product development, but because it was hardware, you call it research. Most of software product development is research too. You just don't get to see all the burned-out filaments.
Ideas in journals and conferences are inspiration. What Apple's doing is perspiration. And they're not getting enough credit for turning ideas into realities.
According to Apple's 3rd quarter results (that is, for the quarter that ended June 27th), Apple spent $341M out of $1351M total operating expenses on research and development. The subtitle of the report was "Best Non-Holiday Quarter Revenue and Earnings in Apple History". So Apple's business model certainly isn't broken, despite decent-sized expenditures on R&D.
It's not all funny ads. Apple's earning their success.
Switching utilities, the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission in the DC area charges me 11 bucks a month just to stay hooked up to their pipes. Since Washington DC area tap water is so foul, particularly when the Potomac River gets low, I drink only Deer Park Spring Water. (I buy them in the huge 2.5 gallon jugs, which my county recycles.) So basically, all I ever use tap water for is to hand wash dishes / dinnerware, toilet flushing and the shower. Fortunately, I don't have to estimate that part, because those uses are shown in the non-connection-fee part of the bill. I calculated it out (I assure you, correctly, because I was a Math major), and I'm spending more per gallon for tap water (when you include connection fees) than I am for Deer Park.
I really love the comedian Lewis Black, and if I temporarily suspend remembrance of that calculation, I can still laugh at his tirade about how we're all so stupid for buying bottled water, which we could get "for free".
I'm not saying that people shouldn't have to pay their fair share for services and infrastructure they use. The idea of connection fees is completely fair. I'm just saying, keep an eye on what's actually costing you what, and demand a fair accounting. In justifying price increases, don't let them argue that the rising cost of power production justifies an increase in the connection fee too. And don't let them argue that the rising cost of repairing transmission lines justifies increasing the price per kilowatt-hour.
By aswell, I assume you mean aswollen. As for speedometers, try a tennis tournament with one of those really pretty Russian blondes. They use speedometers to measure the speed of serves, but they probably have to factor out all of the ongoing research.
You must mean Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits. "I'm MSIE the 8th I am. MSIE the 8th I am, I am. I got bested by the browser next door. We've been tryin' 7 times before. And everyone was an MSIE. We wouldn't pass an AcidTest, no ma'am. I'm the User Agent MSIE, MSIE the 8th I am, I am. MSIE the 8th I am."
Doubleplusgood, that.
But I also heard a marklar that Marklar was starting to insist that its marklars speak "Marklar" internally. That way, no one marklar would have all of the marklar necessary to know exactly what Marklar was intending to release to the marklar. So deliberate marklars would no longer be necessary to protect upcoming marklars. Also, when a marklar says "I don't really know the marklar to that. I haven't been kept in the marklar.", he or she would be telling the absolute marklar.
No marklar.
Read and wrote without a chart: 01110011 01101111 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101
... could just mean that the last leg of the route is noisy. Someone monitoring the line should get suspicious if the rate of retransmission varies according to source, but not if it happens all the time.
The recipient software can mask the stego by requesting retransmission at roughly the same rate all the time. Only if the sending software is in on the stego would the retransmission be significant and (hopefully) encrypted.
Just got 2.0 and went straight to http://acid3.acidtests.org/: Passed 100/100.
Most people don't remember this, but Mac users used to love Microsoft. That ended with Word 6.0, when Microsoft took away all of the features it had been prototyping on the Mac and made Mac users fall back to Windows users' level of functionality. It's been a hatefest ever since.
One of the features of Word for the Mac 5.1 was "formulas", which allowed the same sort of advanced layout we see in TeX. I suspect that this is the return of that feature, for both Windows and Mac.
I think it may be too late to salvage good will between Mac users and Microsoft at this point, but maybe it's possible.
Congress requires all federal agencies to report to the SBA annually all SBIR and STTR awards made in the previous federal fiscal year. The SBA publishes this information in their site called TECH-Net. See for yourself:
http://web.sba.gov/tech-net/docrootpages/index2.cfm
You can search for over 85,000 awards there, covering the entire range of SBIR and STTR, from 1983 to 2007. The agencies aren't required to report 2008 awards until next month, but I see from a search just now that DoD has already entered over 500 of their 2008 awards. DoD comprises about half of all SBIR/STTR awards at the rate of around 3000 a year, out of around 6000 a year total.
Random observations: The keyword search doesn't seem to be working right now. The State Summary is sortable on the browser. You can get the search results in mail-merge format for copy and paste into Excel or your own database. When you drill down to an individual award, you initially get a composite, where phase 2 overrides phase 1, but you can drill down even further and view either phase individually (see how the title or abstract changed between phases, for example).
Thanks. Computer science majors take heed, fascinating topic indeed.
I wish I had done the topic more justice and written this on its own, not as a reply, with a non-Japanese first line. As it is, with its cryptic title and intro, it will forever be buried 2 levels down with a score of 2, and no one but you and I will have ever read it.
Oh well. I'm glad someone benefited from my research besides me.
Nihon-go de amari yokunai hanashimasu. However, I believe that the Japanese expression was pronounced closer to "Fudgy-dah!" in ads.
I live in the Washington, DC, area. One of the big perks of living here is the Library of Congress. You have to undergo a security clearance to get permission to be there, but once you get that photo id, hoo boy, there sure is a lot of information there.
I'm a computer programmer (currently working in Web development, as my handle here suggests). Long, long ago, I researched fuzzy logic at the Library of Congress from the original studies that proposed it. (I think that the original papers were from an Air Force study.) It did NOT revolve around lookup tables. It was more fundamental than that.
Fuzzy logic assigns a floating point number to data that represents how confident you are that it's true. In the early days, the number varied between 1.0 (absolute certainty) to 0.0 (not a clue, wild guess), or even -1.0 (absolutely sure that it's not true). The exact range used is unimportant except that it's well-known. Of course, almost all of these numbers are between whatever limiting numbers you set, representing shades of gray. That's where the term fuzzy came from.
We like to believe that knowledge is a deterministic process, but to believe that, we have to ignore our fundamental assumptions, which force us to admit that we don't really know for sure. Fuzzy logic seeks to improve decision-making by acknowledging that fuzziness and quantifying it.
We all know that we have to multiply percentages to derive percentages based on multiple criteria. If roughly 1 in 2 people are male and exactly 1 in 2 have characteristics above the median, we derive that roughly 1 in 4 of all people are males with intelligence above the median for males. But how confident are we in knowing that?
Say, for a given population, the 1-in-2 statistic for males is about 97% likely to be true. The 1-in-2 statistic for being above the median is 100% likely to be true, because that's the definition of median. So when you combine the 2 criteria, the 1-in-4 statistic still has a 97% likelihood of being true. In other words, fuzzy logic is a completely independent, parallel computation based on the confidence factors that travel with the data.
The fact that confidence factors travel with the data is an important part of fuzzy logic. You never throw the confidence factors away and say "That's it. We got the inference we wanted. It's over 95%. That's close enough, so we're going to treat it as true." If you do that, you've gained no wisdom whatsoever from tracking confidence factors. You have to remember that there's still a 5% chance that you're wrong. So all inferences also have their own confidence factors, which are also not thrown away.
To take an Air Force example, in deference to my vague recollection that they sponsored the original study, satellite surveillance reveals that a bunch of bombers are heading north in Russia. Is it just an exercise, or first evidence of an attack? You have to factor in a lot of unknowns. What's their air speed? How likely are they to be carrying a payload at that speed? Even if they appear to be carrying a payload, how likely is it to be a full dress rehearsal, with ballast for realistic plane handling? The list goes on and on. As part of standard readiness, the confidence factors of these questions have been calculated and recalculated on an ongoing basis. NORAD sees the scenario and looks it up in a scenarios book. As a result, they decide not to change the DEFCON, but they read ahead to see what to do if the bombers leave Russian air space. Crossing the border has a different confidence factor that goes into the overall calculations of whether or not it's likely to be just an exercise.
So no, fuzzy logic is not simply using lookup tables. Lookup tables are just a convenient way to organize inferences based on changing conditions in reality.
Returning to Washington, DC, area fo
I once had to write a PPP script (remember those?) to log into my dialup ISP at that time. Apparently, there were different servers programmed by different programmers, because sometimes it would prompt me for 'Password' (capitalized) and sometimes for 'password' (all lower case). So to write a script that would catch both prompts, I looked for the string 'assword'.
That's what a password is, or at least aptly describes the place from which you pull it.
What I wanna know is, can I plug it into my TV before a sporting event and make that narcissistic singer hit only one note per syllable except for the 7 syllables that are supposed to have 2 notes?
For an American, the Star Spangled Banner can be a profoundly moving experience to sing along with, if the singer could only hit the notes and rhythm correctly. (*) It never fails to bring tears to my eyes if the singer just sings it straight and lets us all sing along. Not one of the selfish, narcissistic singers (who all want to say 'Look how wonderful my voice is!') has ever brought a tear to my eye. Not one. Ever.
(*) I say 'could' rather than 'would' because I really don't think they can. I think they're covering for their inability to hit the difficult notes by improvising around them. Pretty thinly veiled, in fact. I would love to be proven wrong, but none of them ever accepts the challenge of singing it straight. Hmmm, I wonder why?
So I'll buy the Auto-Tune box that has been preprogrammed to know the notes and rhythm of that particular song and has a red 'SSB Correction Mode' button. Then all the stadium goers who don't really feel like singing along anyway can hear it their way (butchered), and I can hear it at home the right way... the profoundly moving way... once again... finally.
Assembly language = the language, assembler = the utility that turns it into machine language. If you can't be at least that precise in English, you can't handle assembly language.
:-)
The biggest impediment to programming in general is that computers are notoriously unforgiving. To be a programmer requires patience, a love of figuring out puzzles and determination. But to be an assembly language coder requires a level of determination that borders on sadism.
I once worked on a computer belonging to folks so paranoid, they didn't allow any compilers. You could pay them to use their computers, but only to do processing. And yet they had a bug in a magnetic tape reader and no one working for them smart enough to debug it. But they had a file editor that allowed binary edits...
I dumped the tape reader's object code, translated it into binary, disassembled it in my head into assembly language, saw that they had a coding error, composed the fix, mentally reassembled it into binary and figured out how to patch the object code to get past the error. When we stopped using that computer, I sent them a note giving them the file system address of a fixed version of the utility. (I'm sure that set off a frenzy of omigod, how did he do that?)
How I did that is that I absolutely refuse to let a machine tell me what to do. I tell the machine what to do, and the machine had better be my bitch and do it.
If you can't think like that, do not take the advice above. Do not try to learn assembly language. Machine language will leave you broken and doubting your intelligence for the first time as much as a freshman at the India Institute of Technology.
That said, EmbeddedJanitor is right. If you truly need to make the computer obey your will, nothing else comes close to assembly language.
You may not like that this article isn't flattering to Windows AT ALL, but it does reveal physical memory addressability limits, which may help your understanding of the problems: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/03/road_to_mac_os_x_snow_leopard_64_bits_santa_rosa_and_the_great_pc_swindle.html
By the way, don't get me wrong, this is a damn fine book to learn jQuery.
Glad I'm not the only one who thinks animation could be better documented.
:-)
BTW, I finally found a pretty good book on explaining the ideas behind jQuery: John Resig's own book, Pro JavaScript Techniques. It's pretty old by Web standards, so it doesn't exactly correspond to jQuery 1.2.6. But it's damn good.
I guess I'm revealing that I'm behind the times by saying that. Oh well.
What's cool about it, reading it for the first time nowadays, is seeing the concepts presented before they came to fruition as jQuery. I chuckle to myself reading it: Gee, it would be really cool if there were a library that would do all of this for you.
I'm not done reading it yet. Just got it. Only up to chapter 5. But I'd already recommend it if you're looking to understand how jQuery was written and why things were done the way they were.