NASA is an awesome organization, but the political requirements they have which seem to be congressional mandates to pump good money after bad into hogs like Lockheed, Grumman, Harris, etc... is their greatest failure.
I have tried many times to find any records of successful projects from the companies building the SLS. Not once have they ever come close to deadline or within 100% of their original budget. They appear to habitually underbid on contracts to win them. They then appear to invest heavily in posturing for more money. Then when lawsuits fly, they provide massive golden parachutes and eventually start work understaffed and without the right people. What few projects they actually complete are often rubbish.
I don't always agree with Elon Musk. His choice to poison the planet with lithium waste and intentionally not focusing on a better method of lowering the cost of recycling lithium pisses me off. I grew up with a fear of the beach because of toxic and medical waste washed ashore because assholes like him chose the easier path. But, NASA needs to help build more companies like his. Companies the say "If you give us $100 million, we'll do the same as those big guys need $5 billion for".
Even better, try to build dreams. There are probably 1 million+ highly skilled and experienced hackers and engineers here that would happily work a 2-4 year stint making new space tech if we had any idea where to apply.
How about a massive maker fair where mad scientists and creative geniuses gather to present ideas. Once a day for two weeks, a group walks the floor, evaluates projects and cancels some and move those engineers to other teams which made the cut. At the end, give 5-10 teams a development budget of $10 million and 6 months wages. Call them back and the teams who show something that actually works will be granted funds and contracts.
There are so many better ways to work than how NASA does.
Wouldn't it be better just to spin a roulette wheel?
I don't see how, given the information provided us we can actually make an intelligent and informed decision as to who is better qualified to hold a job position we ourselves don't understand we can choose correctly.
From my experience, campaigns are little more that bitch slap matches similar in nature to a WWF interview with someone talking a lot of smack. We're really only assembling a team of gray haired wrinkle warriors who can battle with words against the other team.
A long time ago,I read a book about object oriented programming in x86 assembler. In fact, if I needed to code assembler today, I would use those methods.
I code in C# these days because I'm too old to spend 2 years writing pretty C or C++ code to do what I can don in a month with a modern language and library.
I code very similar in C, C++ Assembler and C#. I use the same algorithms and patterns. I just write much cleaner code much faster.
I have little respect for people who talk about optimization and don't employ garbage collection to run structured cleanup during idle cycles.
Haha! Yeh, let me just leave my $10,000 watch at the counter of a mall store with a relatively anonymous, low paid young adult wearing a uniform for that service by some kid in the backroom sometime next week.
Maybe it's better to use insured shipping with tracking to Apple instead.
Why are these people hitting each other? What kind of people would see this as a good thing? What kind of people would want to be considered part of this demographic? Why am I watching TV in the first place... I should be out doing something!
You haven't identified the problem you're trying to solve. At least you made a huge mistake of asking here since you're asking for opinions from an extremely opinionated community without taking the time to actually identify what it is that you're actually having problems with. It seems you just haven't even bothered thinking about it.
1) Are you trying to teach CS to children? Is this the goal? Have you considered asking whether people with legitimate pedagogical sciences experience and studies have identified methods of teaching children topics of this type?
2) Are you asking if there are other tested methods of teaching children computer science which have proven effective that can be adapted to the tool you want to use?
3) Are you in love with a certain tool and while it has almost no practical value to anyone else, you considered it might be a great way to teach kids and now you want to see how you can justify the existence of such a tool (which should simple be, it was fun to make) by trying to use it in CS education of children because "Hey back in the 80's I used AppleSoft Basic and learned from that!"
4) Have you stopped for a minute to decide whether you're narrowing your scope so much by choosing a specific tool and language that your first goal should have been "How do I teach kids CS?" and then "Are there any learning platforms already available for this?" and then "What are the benefits of making a new learning platform using a language like BASIC when the rest of the world, using well funded pedagogical studies have chosen alternative approaches?"
5) Why are you trying to choose a language as a tool. You want to teach principles and things like linked lists and design patterns just are damn near impossible to implement in your language. Any form of real math is also shit in BASIC. Yes, we managed to do these things back when a PASCAL compiler cost $400 and a cheese burger cost $2 and BASIC was free. We have moved on.
6) What are you actually hoping to teach with BASIC? Are you trying to teach them how to draw a line on a screen? Are you trying to teach them to do math? Teach them to do something more applied? What kind of tasks do you actually plan on teaching them? Did you honestly put any thought into this at all.
I know I'm tearing you up here, but I hope you'll consider it tough love. You're trying to mess with children's minds. This is more than just a fun toy... you need to consider the implications of things like "If I teach them BASIC today, will it actually assist in building interest in kids that otherwise would have never programmed or will it chase off the kids who thought it might be fun but were scared to try and now will never try again because it was too nerdy."
There are people who spend decades researching how to introduce topics like this into schools. They don't just say "Hey wouldn't it be great if we made them play with this for a bit!". These people instead are educated not only as engineers but as school teachers. Most of them have at least one masters and one bachelors and they think in terms of "How can we most productively introduce a topic like programming and CS to children" and then they research it with teachers, parents and children.
I think you are very cool for being interested in getting involved.... I hope I gave you some food for thought and I really hope you take your ambitions further and accomplish your goals... once you figure out what they are.
In addition, I was thinking that if you're going to use a robot to do the laundry, then it would make more sense to make a laundry system condusive the abilities of the robot. Also, I was thinking that a robot doesn't have to have human limitations such as two arms. Instead, it can have more limbs which can assist in the process.
1) Opening and closing the door.. I would imagine that this would be done by the machine, not by the robot. 2) Sorting the laundry. While it's certainly optimal if we could use specialized tags to identify the clothing, it can be tricky. Mens' clothing would be easy since sticking an RFid on a tag could be done easily enough, but women's garments which tend to be much closer to the skin can be problematic. So the robot would in fact have to be able to sort using vision. This is acceptable. If the robot were to lay the garments on a table and properly lay them out, then patterns can be recognized. In addition, choosing which mode to use should be pretty simple as the weight of the garment relative to its size should be an effective means of doing this. 3) Operating the machine... like the door, it's a matter of having a machine that the robot can speak with. 4) folding the laundry. This is difficult for one particular reason. It's because clothing is often left in an unknown state. My daughter for example has never once in her life actually put her pants in the hamper without them being inside-out. The robot would need to lay out the article and then appropriately invert the garment. I as a human have trouble at times identifying with certain garments which way is which. I'm pretty sure a routine of "Place the garments unable to be properly identified in a pile. Wait for the user to assist in teaching the robot what should be done with it next time. To be fair, this is not a robot problem, my wife and I do this with each other as well. Women's clothing can be a major problem as well. H&M for example recently sold a kind of "over dress" which is kind of like a fishnet garment. I tried folding this once.. my fingers kept getting stuck in the holes. This would kill a robot haha 5) Choosing how to fold each garment.... When in doubt, ask Sheldon Cooper. He has a nifty device which can apparently fold anything. A robot should manage quite ok with that. For hanging garments, I assume it would take effort, but it can be done.
I think the article wasn't bad. It points out the obvious problem that when operating with fabric, there is so much entropy involved that a laundry robot can be amazingly difficult to make. That said, difficult is not impossible and therefore, I would say that while it might take a massive investment to produce a robot of such intelligence, it would also be a huge step towards revolutionizing the garment production industry. So I'm sure it would be worth while to a company like Foxconn to invest heavily in such a machine.
You've written single functions with 4500 lines of code? I think I would passionately hate working with you. I throw a fit when I am over 45 lines of code in a function.
hahah well said... I wrote 4500 lines of code this weekend. It was a virtual machine runtime engine proof of concept. I am rewriting it now that I have proven the API
The paper itself is a crap read to begin with. It's just screaming for a Fox News headline model like this. I think Slashdot really summarized itwbennet summarized it pretty well.
I read a bit of it looking for actual meaningful numbers, but it was clear to me that none of the people involved or focused worked on multi-million line projects. I am almost choking on my tongue thinking "Imagine the code quality of a web browser if the code wasn't regularly refactored to reduce the number of possible bugs?
Every single thing test they ran and used as proof, I can personally contradict from experience being part of implementing CSS 3 in a browser. There are thousands of contexts in CSS alone where it is business critical to refactor.
They say "To access the files, many of which are password protected, the cops developed password-cracking software in-house that is slowly sifting through the mountain of information."
Uh... I'll translate this to, the files are all protected with easy to remember, dictionary based passwords and they wrote a script which uses a rainbow list to try each one which is why it's so damn slow.
When you read shit statements made by whoever provided the interview to whoever actually performed it and realize they're both clueless, it becomes really hard to take the rest of the article seriously. It's like when you read a CV from a fry boy at McDonalds who writes "Food preparation technician", you just can't expect everything else to be embellished in order to sound more important.
Another example of "STUPID!!!" is : "The volume of information is so expansive that in order to store and analyze the data safely and securely, police had to purchase storage hardware similar to what was used by Canadian military forces in Afghanistan."
Computer crimes forensics has to be handled very carefully. If you alter the data, it's inadmissible in most courts as it's tampering with evidence. The FBI paid millions to write data handling procedures following the public beating they took on the gloves in the OJ case. So, it's important to have a backup and some way to read the data without altering it... or they need to keep a copy.
A 1.2 petabyte SAN can be done in 16U for analysis using 6TB drives and Cisco 3160 servers. For unaltered storage, there are tape drives. They're slow and they're inefficient, but they're an accepted medium for evidence.
So, making dumb ass statements like "we needed 1.2TB of hard drives and a workstation" as making some idiotic remark like how they've gone war zone grade was just LAME!
Nailing the data center is a great idea EXCEPT!!! they probably run almost all that crap through Tor and use BitCoin now. So, if there is actually any real traceable information to be had, they just passed up their best opportunity to planting a proper honeypot and actually busting the people using the site. They could have put "dating sites" like "find an anonymous live show in your area" and the pervs who are using telephones can provide their locations via GPS. Then they can track and bust them.
Instead, they've just done what the police have found so successful with the Pirate Bay and the site will be moved somewhere else next week or month and they won't have a clue what to do about it.
Let's be honest, these fool cops probably just secured the safety of the pedophiles for a while longer.
I am a near full-time instructor who regularly teaches in multiple countries at once thanks to this rig.
For multiple people sharing the same whiteboard, I recommend using WebEx which has a mediocre whiteboard, but it works better than the other's I've tried.
I was thinking that the $5 discount coupon would only be given to people willing to spend 15 minutes filling out the forms to get it. The lawyers will collect the difference after the expiration.
I think it's more likely that there's lawyers sitting around somewhere who are reading news rags and looking for reviews which out this type of stuff. They then initiate the class action and make noise on sites like Slashdot to get people to sign up in order to establish the requirements for it to be considered a class action.
There are far too many people who would do something stupid like say "I clicked the link out of principle!"
More accurately, nVidia could probably make it clear that 3.5 gigs is better than 3 gigs and 512megs is more expensive to add than the extra gig. So, a 4 gig card with 3.5 gigs active is the best you can expect right now. So the user with the 4 gig card can still expect better performance than a user with a 3 gig card.
I was thinking the same thing. I see this as a massive misappropriation of tax payers' funds. I don't know what the accountants would say on the issue, but I'd imagine that isolation has a higher cost to the tax payer than general population since the convict needs everything brought to them in special quarters built to what I can only assume is a higher standard.
A simple firewall with some sort of websense technology should be more than satisfactory to limit the use of these networks by the inmates. I'm sure it's an issue of "If you build a bigger mouse trap, I'll build a bigger mouse", but there is definitely a finite number of social networking sites out there and I'm pretty sure that there's a room full of near-slaves working in a sweatshop somewhere in the East which are constantly updating those web sense filters.
Here's an even better idea, why not actually track HTTP POST requests to unknown sites as well. This way, when the inmate clicks a button to post something and the websense filter doesn't know how to handle that request, an administrator somewhere on duty will immediately see their screen and then click whether it should be allowed or not. This will allow the inmates to apply to online universities to assist in their rehab while mindless blocking known "Red Zones" like Facebook. I can't imagine that we'd need more than one person on duty for an entire prison corporation during one shift per day.
If the inmate can't post data, push a popup to the user saying "You're attempting to post information to an unknown or unapproved site." followed by "Please wait for approval by an administrator" or "The administrator is not on duty today. Please try your request another day".
This type of a system IS NOT hard to implement. It would be MUCH less expensive than keeping inmates in solitary as well.
I'm pretty sure the biggest problem with American prisons has to be that they are penal facilities instead of rehabilitation facilities. I'm pretty convinced there are such things as people so broken they can't be fixed, but I'm also pretty sure that goal of a prison shouldn't be to punish someone for 25 to life but instead should be to actually fix the problems. The people who seem the most hellbent on hate and punishment of these people often seem a lot scarier than the criminals themselves.
I always sympathize with victims of heinous crimes, but we the people become victims of those who choose to force us to pay for the punishments. When you get someone truly nasty and broken, I don't see we have a choice but to jail them for life. I'd prefer to see them locked in proper facilities to deal with their illnesses instead of exposing criminals of a less extent to them. I don't have an overwhelming need to pamper people who did crimes during their correctional stints. I do however HATE the idea of hardening everyone who enters the system so that some kid who got busted smoking a joint ends up in and out of prison for the next 50 years. If for no other reason than that I don't want to make even more damn hardened criminals, we need to make it possible for prisoners to be online, learn trades, self-discipline, responsibility, etc... but make no mistake, they showed enough poor judgement to end up there, they don't need access to entertainment websites. It should be a tool, not a toy for them.
One Saturday morning, I had to rush to the convenience store near the house because we learned we were out of milk for the baby. There was some reason or another it was a rush, I don't quite remember why it couldn't wait. All I know is that I was buying milk for a baby. This is one of those things which goes in the list of "It doesn't get any more pure than that" or "Only a jackass would keep a person from buying milk for their baby", etc...
Well I got there and apparently it was the last 15 minutes before cut-off for lottery tickets for the week. It took precisely 15 minutes to reach the front of the line. Do you know why? Because the three people in front of me had stacks of lottery tickets forms they had spent considerable time (dozens of hours) filling in that all had to be manually fed to the machine before the cut-off because these people actually believed that the actual numbers they chose mattered. It wasn't good enough to just say "Give me 400 quick pick tickets", they had to all be custom.
So, in the end, my son had to wait an extra 15 minutes to get his milk because these idiots are still breathing air... which I can only imagine reaches brain cells in suboptimal quantities.
I can honestly say, I've never seen anyone other than fixed-income granny buy a single lottery ticket. It seems far more common that tickets are purchased in wallets, stacks or boxes. It's a tax designed specifically to try and convince people to burn their money on government sponsored gambling instead of online or casino gambling. Either way, the government is 100% sure you'll lose and they'll win and the lottery at least lets them win a greater percentage than if they had to share with the casino.
This is why it's called "The volunteer stupid tax". It's a tax people pay for being stupid and are simply so stupid they choose to pay it voluntarily.
$2 is a used paperback book $2 is a used college text that has a new version $2 is a bus ticket $2 is a Egg McMuffin for breakfast. $2 is a gallon of gas to visit a friend $2 is half way to something that's 4 bucks
I can go on for ages. I can spend $2 tens of thousands of times a year. If you want to spend $2 on a gambling receipt, you're welcome to do so. You have all my blessings. But the instant you think that the crumby little piece of paper gives you hope for something greater, I recommend you spend $2 on a used bible instead, I have never found anything other than a few interesting old stories in it, but I hear there are billions of suckers out there who have found hope in those things. The odds are far better in your favor there.
On Windows Azure, OpenStack, Citrix and even the ever-lame VMware,there are extensive orchestration tools. Write your script once and next time you need a server, click deploy.
In a world where most programmers don't have a clue why they chose a list vs. an array vs. a tree for anything, this is actually an excellent question to test students with.
This is obviously not an optimal solution to the problem it solves, but it is in fact a fairly compact example that can be used to test whether a student understands recursion and can follow code.
The question isn't whether there is bad code on the exam. This was a great question.
The question is, is there also a question relating to excessive or unbound recursion and what will happen if the number is too big.
What about Big-O notation and algorithmic complexity.
I had to implement a compiler and virtual machine last week because I couldn't find anyone else to do it that was available. This is because not enough people understand topics like recursion.
The teacher who posted the article made it very clear that his competence is limited and he himself is quite slow witted by stating the he found recursion hard to understand at first. Why is this even on Slashdot?
I have been workong directly and indirectly with massive scale computing for decades:
1) break single threaded tasks into smaller jobs that can be distributed. 2) test that they still work 3) establish a chain of dependencies so that tasks which must be performed in order will. 4) establish pipeline cost and cache coherency cost for each job. 5) distribute tasks who share common data sets to cores which have the lowest latency between them 6) take jobs which depend on output of other jobs and offset their start time so the input data from the other job is available befor it is need in the current job decreasing the cost or synchronization. 8) optimize job distribution so that tasks running in parallel with dependencies will be distributed to cores nearest to one another in the coherency ring.
This is old school thinking. Randomizing should not offer better performance than properly scheduled tasks.
There are hundreds of different BIOSes. System init code isn't like program code, it's non-relocatable. You can't just add a hook and bypass the original. In theory, boot block flash which is a mini-BIOS might be hooked, but every single MB model would be different. Unless you're running a REALLY high volume computer (Surface, Macbook), the investment in such hooks would be meaningless.
HD firmware could be more interesting, but the payoff would be hard to justify. HD vendors tend to use the same firmware for an entire series. Still, I can't see it.
Just because "Security researchers" can show a possible exploit for a specific hd or mb model and raise FUD, I would just reflash those components if I were actually concerned.
EFI is a different beast, but that's why we have signed code and OS bootloaders.
until someone writes a something which specifically circumvents it. Nice concept, seems of little value. A home NAS with automatic historical backups is much more sensible... or you could use cloud storage and just put it all out there for anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
NASA is an awesome organization, but the political requirements they have which seem to be congressional mandates to pump good money after bad into hogs like Lockheed, Grumman, Harris, etc... is their greatest failure.
I have tried many times to find any records of successful projects from the companies building the SLS. Not once have they ever come close to deadline or within 100% of their original budget. They appear to habitually underbid on contracts to win them. They then appear to invest heavily in posturing for more money. Then when lawsuits fly, they provide massive golden parachutes and eventually start work understaffed and without the right people. What few projects they actually complete are often rubbish.
I don't always agree with Elon Musk. His choice to poison the planet with lithium waste and intentionally not focusing on a better method of lowering the cost of recycling lithium pisses me off. I grew up with a fear of the beach because of toxic and medical waste washed ashore because assholes like him chose the easier path. But, NASA needs to help build more companies like his. Companies the say "If you give us $100 million, we'll do the same as those big guys need $5 billion for".
Even better, try to build dreams. There are probably 1 million+ highly skilled and experienced hackers and engineers here that would happily work a 2-4 year stint making new space tech if we had any idea where to apply.
How about a massive maker fair where mad scientists and creative geniuses gather to present ideas. Once a day for two weeks, a group walks the floor, evaluates projects and cancels some and move those engineers to other teams which made the cut. At the end, give 5-10 teams a development budget of $10 million and 6 months wages. Call them back and the teams who show something that actually works will be granted funds and contracts.
There are so many better ways to work than how NASA does.
Wouldn't it be better just to spin a roulette wheel?
I don't see how, given the information provided us we can actually make an intelligent and informed decision as to who is better qualified to hold a job position we ourselves don't understand we can choose correctly.
From my experience, campaigns are little more that bitch slap matches similar in nature to a WWF interview with someone talking a lot of smack. We're really only assembling a team of gray haired wrinkle warriors who can battle with words against the other team.
It's hopeless.
A long time ago,I read a book about object oriented programming in x86 assembler. In fact, if I needed to code assembler today, I would use those methods.
I code in C# these days because I'm too old to spend 2 years writing pretty C or C++ code to do what I can don in a month with a modern language and library.
I code very similar in C, C++ Assembler and C#. I use the same algorithms and patterns. I just write much cleaner code much faster.
I have little respect for people who talk about optimization and don't employ garbage collection to run structured cleanup during idle cycles.
Haha! Yeh, let me just leave my $10,000 watch at the counter of a mall store with a relatively anonymous, low paid young adult wearing a uniform for that service by some kid in the backroom sometime next week.
Maybe it's better to use insured shipping with tracking to Apple instead.
Why are these people hitting each other? What kind of people would see this as a good thing? What kind of people would want to be considered part of this demographic? Why am I watching TV in the first place... I should be out doing something!
You haven't identified the problem you're trying to solve. At least you made a huge mistake of asking here since you're asking for opinions from an extremely opinionated community without taking the time to actually identify what it is that you're actually having problems with. It seems you just haven't even bothered thinking about it.
1) Are you trying to teach CS to children? Is this the goal? Have you considered asking whether people with legitimate pedagogical sciences experience and studies have identified methods of teaching children topics of this type?
2) Are you asking if there are other tested methods of teaching children computer science which have proven effective that can be adapted to the tool you want to use?
3) Are you in love with a certain tool and while it has almost no practical value to anyone else, you considered it might be a great way to teach kids and now you want to see how you can justify the existence of such a tool (which should simple be, it was fun to make) by trying to use it in CS education of children because "Hey back in the 80's I used AppleSoft Basic and learned from that!"
4) Have you stopped for a minute to decide whether you're narrowing your scope so much by choosing a specific tool and language that your first goal should have been "How do I teach kids CS?" and then "Are there any learning platforms already available for this?" and then "What are the benefits of making a new learning platform using a language like BASIC when the rest of the world, using well funded pedagogical studies have chosen alternative approaches?"
5) Why are you trying to choose a language as a tool. You want to teach principles and things like linked lists and design patterns just are damn near impossible to implement in your language. Any form of real math is also shit in BASIC. Yes, we managed to do these things back when a PASCAL compiler cost $400 and a cheese burger cost $2 and BASIC was free. We have moved on.
6) What are you actually hoping to teach with BASIC? Are you trying to teach them how to draw a line on a screen? Are you trying to teach them to do math? Teach them to do something more applied? What kind of tasks do you actually plan on teaching them? Did you honestly put any thought into this at all.
I know I'm tearing you up here, but I hope you'll consider it tough love. You're trying to mess with children's minds. This is more than just a fun toy... you need to consider the implications of things like "If I teach them BASIC today, will it actually assist in building interest in kids that otherwise would have never programmed or will it chase off the kids who thought it might be fun but were scared to try and now will never try again because it was too nerdy."
There are people who spend decades researching how to introduce topics like this into schools. They don't just say "Hey wouldn't it be great if we made them play with this for a bit!". These people instead are educated not only as engineers but as school teachers. Most of them have at least one masters and one bachelors and they think in terms of "How can we most productively introduce a topic like programming and CS to children" and then they research it with teachers, parents and children.
I think you are very cool for being interested in getting involved.... I hope I gave you some food for thought and I really hope you take your ambitions further and accomplish your goals... once you figure out what they are.
I was thinking the same thing.
In addition, I was thinking that if you're going to use a robot to do the laundry, then it would make more sense to make a laundry system condusive the abilities of the robot. Also, I was thinking that a robot doesn't have to have human limitations such as two arms. Instead, it can have more limbs which can assist in the process.
1) Opening and closing the door.. I would imagine that this would be done by the machine, not by the robot.
2) Sorting the laundry. While it's certainly optimal if we could use specialized tags to identify the clothing, it can be tricky. Mens' clothing would be easy since sticking an RFid on a tag could be done easily enough, but women's garments which tend to be much closer to the skin can be problematic. So the robot would in fact have to be able to sort using vision. This is acceptable. If the robot were to lay the garments on a table and properly lay them out, then patterns can be recognized. In addition, choosing which mode to use should be pretty simple as the weight of the garment relative to its size should be an effective means of doing this.
3) Operating the machine... like the door, it's a matter of having a machine that the robot can speak with.
4) folding the laundry. This is difficult for one particular reason. It's because clothing is often left in an unknown state. My daughter for example has never once in her life actually put her pants in the hamper without them being inside-out. The robot would need to lay out the article and then appropriately invert the garment. I as a human have trouble at times identifying with certain garments which way is which. I'm pretty sure a routine of "Place the garments unable to be properly identified in a pile. Wait for the user to assist in teaching the robot what should be done with it next time. To be fair, this is not a robot problem, my wife and I do this with each other as well. Women's clothing can be a major problem as well. H&M for example recently sold a kind of "over dress" which is kind of like a fishnet garment. I tried folding this once.. my fingers kept getting stuck in the holes. This would kill a robot haha
5) Choosing how to fold each garment.... When in doubt, ask Sheldon Cooper. He has a nifty device which can apparently fold anything. A robot should manage quite ok with that. For hanging garments, I assume it would take effort, but it can be done.
I think the article wasn't bad. It points out the obvious problem that when operating with fabric, there is so much entropy involved that a laundry robot can be amazingly difficult to make. That said, difficult is not impossible and therefore, I would say that while it might take a massive investment to produce a robot of such intelligence, it would also be a huge step towards revolutionizing the garment production industry. So I'm sure it would be worth while to a company like Foxconn to invest heavily in such a machine.
You've written single functions with 4500 lines of code? I think I would passionately hate working with you. I throw a fit when I am over 45 lines of code in a function.
hahah well said... I wrote 4500 lines of code this weekend. It was a virtual machine runtime engine proof of concept. I am rewriting it now that I have proven the API
The paper itself is a crap read to begin with. It's just screaming for a Fox News headline model like this. I think Slashdot really summarized itwbennet summarized it pretty well.
I read a bit of it looking for actual meaningful numbers, but it was clear to me that none of the people involved or focused worked on multi-million line projects. I am almost choking on my tongue thinking "Imagine the code quality of a web browser if the code wasn't regularly refactored to reduce the number of possible bugs?
Every single thing test they ran and used as proof, I can personally contradict from experience being part of implementing CSS 3 in a browser. There are thousands of contexts in CSS alone where it is business critical to refactor.
I hate articles like this.
They say "To access the files, many of which are password protected, the cops developed password-cracking software in-house that is slowly sifting through the mountain of information."
Uh... I'll translate this to, the files are all protected with easy to remember, dictionary based passwords and they wrote a script which uses a rainbow list to try each one which is why it's so damn slow.
When you read shit statements made by whoever provided the interview to whoever actually performed it and realize they're both clueless, it becomes really hard to take the rest of the article seriously. It's like when you read a CV from a fry boy at McDonalds who writes "Food preparation technician", you just can't expect everything else to be embellished in order to sound more important.
Another example of "STUPID!!!" is :
"The volume of information is so expansive that in order to store and analyze the data safely and securely, police had to purchase storage hardware similar to what was used by Canadian military forces in Afghanistan."
Computer crimes forensics has to be handled very carefully. If you alter the data, it's inadmissible in most courts as it's tampering with evidence. The FBI paid millions to write data handling procedures following the public beating they took on the gloves in the OJ case. So, it's important to have a backup and some way to read the data without altering it... or they need to keep a copy.
A 1.2 petabyte SAN can be done in 16U for analysis using 6TB drives and Cisco 3160 servers. For unaltered storage, there are tape drives. They're slow and they're inefficient, but they're an accepted medium for evidence.
So, making dumb ass statements like "we needed 1.2TB of hard drives and a workstation" as making some idiotic remark like how they've gone war zone grade was just LAME!
Nailing the data center is a great idea EXCEPT!!! they probably run almost all that crap through Tor and use BitCoin now. So, if there is actually any real traceable information to be had, they just passed up their best opportunity to planting a proper honeypot and actually busting the people using the site. They could have put "dating sites" like "find an anonymous live show in your area" and the pervs who are using telephones can provide their locations via GPS. Then they can track and bust them.
Instead, they've just done what the police have found so successful with the Pirate Bay and the site will be moved somewhere else next week or month and they won't have a clue what to do about it.
Let's be honest, these fool cops probably just secured the safety of the pedophiles for a while longer.
I am a near full-time instructor who regularly teaches in multiple countries at once thanks to this rig.
For multiple people sharing the same whiteboard, I recommend using WebEx which has a mediocre whiteboard, but it works better than the other's I've tried.
I was thinking that the $5 discount coupon would only be given to people willing to spend 15 minutes filling out the forms to get it. The lawyers will collect the difference after the expiration.
I think it's more likely that there's lawyers sitting around somewhere who are reading news rags and looking for reviews which out this type of stuff. They then initiate the class action and make noise on sites like Slashdot to get people to sign up in order to establish the requirements for it to be considered a class action.
There are far too many people who would do something stupid like say "I clicked the link out of principle!"
More accurately, nVidia could probably make it clear that 3.5 gigs is better than 3 gigs and 512megs is more expensive to add than the extra gig. So, a 4 gig card with 3.5 gigs active is the best you can expect right now. So the user with the 4 gig card can still expect better performance than a user with a 3 gig card.
Pretty sad
I was thinking the same thing. I see this as a massive misappropriation of tax payers' funds. I don't know what the accountants would say on the issue, but I'd imagine that isolation has a higher cost to the tax payer than general population since the convict needs everything brought to them in special quarters built to what I can only assume is a higher standard.
A simple firewall with some sort of websense technology should be more than satisfactory to limit the use of these networks by the inmates. I'm sure it's an issue of "If you build a bigger mouse trap, I'll build a bigger mouse", but there is definitely a finite number of social networking sites out there and I'm pretty sure that there's a room full of near-slaves working in a sweatshop somewhere in the East which are constantly updating those web sense filters.
Here's an even better idea, why not actually track HTTP POST requests to unknown sites as well. This way, when the inmate clicks a button to post something and the websense filter doesn't know how to handle that request, an administrator somewhere on duty will immediately see their screen and then click whether it should be allowed or not. This will allow the inmates to apply to online universities to assist in their rehab while mindless blocking known "Red Zones" like Facebook. I can't imagine that we'd need more than one person on duty for an entire prison corporation during one shift per day.
If the inmate can't post data, push a popup to the user saying "You're attempting to post information to an unknown or unapproved site." followed by "Please wait for approval by an administrator" or "The administrator is not on duty today. Please try your request another day".
This type of a system IS NOT hard to implement. It would be MUCH less expensive than keeping inmates in solitary as well.
I'm pretty sure the biggest problem with American prisons has to be that they are penal facilities instead of rehabilitation facilities. I'm pretty convinced there are such things as people so broken they can't be fixed, but I'm also pretty sure that goal of a prison shouldn't be to punish someone for 25 to life but instead should be to actually fix the problems. The people who seem the most hellbent on hate and punishment of these people often seem a lot scarier than the criminals themselves.
I always sympathize with victims of heinous crimes, but we the people become victims of those who choose to force us to pay for the punishments. When you get someone truly nasty and broken, I don't see we have a choice but to jail them for life. I'd prefer to see them locked in proper facilities to deal with their illnesses instead of exposing criminals of a less extent to them. I don't have an overwhelming need to pamper people who did crimes during their correctional stints. I do however HATE the idea of hardening everyone who enters the system so that some kid who got busted smoking a joint ends up in and out of prison for the next 50 years. If for no other reason than that I don't want to make even more damn hardened criminals, we need to make it possible for prisoners to be online, learn trades, self-discipline, responsibility, etc... but make no mistake, they showed enough poor judgement to end up there, they don't need access to entertainment websites. It should be a tool, not a toy for them.
COOL!! I love that idea! Too bad you posted as AC, I'd be PMing you to ask where I can send a pizza to for that one!
One Saturday morning, I had to rush to the convenience store near the house because we learned we were out of milk for the baby. There was some reason or another it was a rush, I don't quite remember why it couldn't wait. All I know is that I was buying milk for a baby. This is one of those things which goes in the list of "It doesn't get any more pure than that" or "Only a jackass would keep a person from buying milk for their baby", etc...
... which I can only imagine reaches brain cells in suboptimal quantities.
Well I got there and apparently it was the last 15 minutes before cut-off for lottery tickets for the week. It took precisely 15 minutes to reach the front of the line. Do you know why? Because the three people in front of me had stacks of lottery tickets forms they had spent considerable time (dozens of hours) filling in that all had to be manually fed to the machine before the cut-off because these people actually believed that the actual numbers they chose mattered. It wasn't good enough to just say "Give me 400 quick pick tickets", they had to all be custom.
So, in the end, my son had to wait an extra 15 minutes to get his milk because these idiots are still breathing air
I can honestly say, I've never seen anyone other than fixed-income granny buy a single lottery ticket. It seems far more common that tickets are purchased in wallets, stacks or boxes. It's a tax designed specifically to try and convince people to burn their money on government sponsored gambling instead of online or casino gambling. Either way, the government is 100% sure you'll lose and they'll win and the lottery at least lets them win a greater percentage than if they had to share with the casino.
This is why it's called "The volunteer stupid tax". It's a tax people pay for being stupid and are simply so stupid they choose to pay it voluntarily.
I simply have no patience for those people
$2 is a used paperback book
$2 is a used college text that has a new version
$2 is a bus ticket
$2 is a Egg McMuffin for breakfast.
$2 is a gallon of gas to visit a friend
$2 is half way to something that's 4 bucks
I can go on for ages. I can spend $2 tens of thousands of times a year. If you want to spend $2 on a gambling receipt, you're welcome to do so. You have all my blessings. But the instant you think that the crumby little piece of paper gives you hope for something greater, I recommend you spend $2 on a used bible instead, I have never found anything other than a few interesting old stories in it, but I hear there are billions of suckers out there who have found hope in those things. The odds are far better in your favor there.
On Windows Azure, OpenStack, Citrix and even the ever-lame VMware,there are extensive orchestration tools. Write your script once and next time you need a server, click deploy.
In a world where most programmers don't have a clue why they chose a list vs. an array vs. a tree for anything, this is actually an excellent question to test students with.
This is obviously not an optimal solution to the problem it solves, but it is in fact a fairly compact example that can be used to test whether a student understands recursion and can follow code.
The question isn't whether there is bad code on the exam. This was a great question.
The question is, is there also a question relating to excessive or unbound recursion and what will happen if the number is too big.
What about Big-O notation and algorithmic complexity.
I had to implement a compiler and virtual machine last week because I couldn't find anyone else to do it that was available. This is because not enough people understand topics like recursion.
The teacher who posted the article made it very clear that his competence is limited and he himself is quite slow witted by stating the he found recursion hard to understand at first. Why is this even on Slashdot?
Oh... And 7 is not lucky :)
I have been workong directly and indirectly with massive scale computing for decades:
1) break single threaded tasks into smaller jobs that can be distributed.
2) test that they still work
3) establish a chain of dependencies so that tasks which must be performed in order will.
4) establish pipeline cost and cache coherency cost for each job.
5) distribute tasks who share common data sets to cores which have the lowest latency between them
6) take jobs which depend on output of other jobs and offset their start time so the input data from the other job is available befor it is need in the current job decreasing the cost or synchronization.
8) optimize job distribution so that tasks running in parallel with dependencies will be distributed to cores nearest to one another in the coherency ring.
This is old school thinking. Randomizing should not offer better performance than properly scheduled tasks.
There are hundreds of different BIOSes. System init code isn't like program code, it's non-relocatable. You can't just add a hook and bypass the original. In theory, boot block flash which is a mini-BIOS might be hooked, but every single MB model would be different. Unless you're running a REALLY high volume computer (Surface, Macbook), the investment in such hooks would be meaningless.
HD firmware could be more interesting, but the payoff would be hard to justify. HD vendors tend to use the same firmware for an entire series. Still, I can't see it.
Just because "Security researchers" can show a possible exploit for a specific hd or mb model and raise FUD, I would just reflash those components if I were actually concerned.
EFI is a different beast, but that's why we have signed code and OS bootloaders.
My NAS has history and revisions... I can't really see how it could harm that :/
until someone writes a something which specifically circumvents it. Nice concept, seems of little value. A home NAS with automatic historical backups is much more sensible... or you could use cloud storage and just put it all out there for anyone.