When you go to the movie theaters in Norway now, you can choose to see Cars 2 in 2D with crappy Norwegian dubbing, crappy 3D with crappy Norwegian dubbing or you can wait until 8pm and see crappy 3D with great original English voices.
Just got my 2D glasses, so even though wearing glasses bothers me A LOT, at least both eyes are now polarized the same so I can watch the film in glorious 2D again.:)
Lego made huge mistakes with this game. The game itself was fine enough... I liked it, but here's what went wrong :
- They released it with too little content in the beginning. This meant that all the early adopters (I was a beta tester) rushed out, bought it, installed it, started playing and in less than 2 days game play had, in the limited sized world capped out and decided... I'll maybe come back when they release some more levels and content. - No thottbot or anything else worth using. This meant people who were too lazy to find it themselves had no place to get help with the quests. Oh well. - Chatting was impossible... if my son an I were in different rooms, we practically couldn't talk with each other. I had to yell across the house. Yes, I know there was chat, but it worked like hell. - Maps were AWFUL!!! - UI was extremely hard to figure out. It's pretty bad when people were comparing it to Everquest and Everquest was easier to figure out. - No family accounts. At the prices they were charging, no parents would spend that kind of money per month on a game... certainly not on two copies of the game so that their two kids could play together. If we could have bought one copy of the game and had two or maybe even three players from the same IP address playing at a time, we would have paid. - Game website including billing site was slower than hell. - No groups (at least at first), guilds would have been nice too. - No Scandinavian language support. This is a biggy... Scandinavians would buy a lump of cow poop if it said Lego on the side of it. But, Scandinavian children don't speak English. They would have sold 10 times as many copies and accounts if they had at least supported their native language (Danish) since even though Danish isn't the same as Norwegian and it's even harder for Swedish kids, it's still easier than English for them. - Account costs were a huge issue. Yes, World of Warcraft costs like $12.99 a month.. but that's a game being paid for primarily by people that make substantially more than $12.99 a month. My son and daughter each get a total of $30 a month in allowance and they work hard for that. $12.99 a month is just too high an amount for them to pay on their own if they ever want anything else. My son has occasionally purchased a game time card with his allowance, but certainly couldn't justify an account. $4.99 a month would have gotten them much less per account, but would have gotten them far more accounts. And the free to play version was just a joke. - They didn't sell the damn thing. I mean, really advertising for this game was dismal at best and the few advertisements they did make didn't have a focus. It was like they didn't know who to sell to so didn't sell to anyone.
I can go on for a long time, but to be honest they screwed up on a scale which was unimaginable. It's a real shame too since this will most likely be Lego's last attempt at this and we'll all suffer because they screwed up.
Make it a requirement for all bankers to have at least an undergraduate degree in math and physics. I have seen the so called math requirements of many of these guys and it's NOT GOOD ENOUGH. These people are studying primarily statistical math and I'm an avid believer that you can't make healthy choices based on trends and statistics without having a more thorough understanding of differential equations.
Also, while physics does not apply to their job very well directly (which is the entire point of having the physics requirement in the first place), it does make certain that no one will be able to become a banker without a pretty good understanding of cause and effect. Many people go through their entire lives without every considering the consequences of their actions. Hopefully more people go through their lives with at least "This happened because of that" or "This will most likely happen because of this". A financial manager/banker/whatever type of gambler should be able to think "This happened because of that and therefore this is likely to happen unless I..." type reasoning at the least. This is physics.
Let's also point out that being forced to grind through truth tables and karnaugh maps for a semester will eliminate students unable to understand logic. I see far too many financial reporters for example that can't understand double negatives let alone demorgan's theorem. I constantly read articles that do no interpret p and q as not p or not q. This is a critical concept when understanding markets and making predictions and these guys can't do it.
I personally know a few of these golden boys that had their faces wall papered on the financial rags... First when they were growing fast. Then when they made mistakes. Then when they were indicted. All of them were able to hop on the trend bandwagon and they made a fortune doing nothing more than buying into the days top performers and selling as they slowed down. Problem is, when growth slowed, they couldn't compensate. So the golden boy failed.
Personally, I think that the idea of gambling on stocks is fairly disgusting. I especially hate people who gamble on commodities and I despise people who consider food a commodity.
If you're going to be a financial geek.. be an investor. Invest in companies. Create jobs. Strengthen the economy. All that stuff... quit this gambling crap... it's killing us all.
ARM isn't like x86. Optimizing for one ARM vs optimizing for another ARM can differ GREATLY. Most Linux distributions are standardizing on older ARM cores (though I imagine there will be a lot of ARM8 64-bit chatter now) this is because they are the lowest common denominator. Once of the greatest shortcomings of Android at this time is the wide support for limited ARM cores. iOS is strong because the build environment is tuned to optimize for the feature set which Apple knows is present on the iPhone and iPod devices.
I have hand optimized several programs for several different ARM processors. You always have to have multiple versions to make it run well. There's the C version for crappy old ARM cores not worth optimizing for (and many phones ship with these), there's the ARM with floating point version, the ARM without floating point, ARM with NEON, ARM without NEON, ARM with big fast multipliers, ARM with small painfully slow multipliers, ARM with hardware division, ARM without hardware division, ARM. ARM with MMU, ARM with emulated MMU, ARM without MMU.
The fact is, any company can grab an ARM core from ARM and slam the thing in a chip unchanged, but many companies (especially Marvell and probably NVidia) add their own IP to the mixture to make their chips faster than others. ARM processors are meant to be small and low power. You can fit a full ARM7 core into the tiniest corner of an FPGA. It'll have a REALLY slow multiplier and divider since that specific version doesn't need a pyramid multiplier (which is enormous). It will be a bare bones CPU which works. On the other hand, you can also put an ARM7 core onto an FPGA, use every single gate in the biggest bad boy Altera has to offer and have a CPU which runs like greased lightning. Things like SIMD pyramid multipliers with adders to optimize multiply and accumulate. Big ass memory busses capable of 256 bit wide external memory accesses on DDR-3 or even GDDR5. The options are unlimited.
This is why you've only scraped the tip of the iceberg. Mono, if implemented properly for ARM would enumerate the capabilities of the processor and memory subsystem and optimize code for the platform it is running on. Personally, I still believe that all ARM Linux distros should be compiled for the phone they're meant to run on and all code sent to those devices should be in an intermediate language whether it's CIL, Java byte code or LLVM based. ARM would be a true contender against x86 then... on the performance front at least. I am still pretty convinced that if you implemented a full Intel grade ALU on an ARM, ARM would lose its edge in power consumption.
There's a huge difference between Greece and Germany other than the system itself. It's the Mediterranean syndrome. I've been to multiple areas of Greece several times. I have been to many cities in Germany and have worked with Germans for years. I have been to many western and central European countries and there are some things which are just plain obvious and any northern Italian will gladly tell you it's true.
The further south you get in Europe, the lower your motivation seems to be. Just last month I was in Crete and I'm not joking, all the frigging stores close in the middle of the day and all the coffee shops and bars fill up. Drivers of trucks on the island stop driving in the middle of the day and stop to have a glass of stong wine or moonshine. The only people working on the entire island at that time of day is the restaurant staff.
It is similar in many places in Spain as well. Malta..... well let's not bother with Malta and Gozo. Southern Italy as well.
On the other hand, if you go to Germany, from the time the day starts, you work and you're efficient. People take pride in their efforts. They set standards for themselves which are high and they achieve the goals they set for themselves. Germany's biggest problem is the cleanliness of their cities. People don't walk the extra 3 steps to make it to a trash can, but there are a lot of workers cleaning up the streets most of the time, so it's not that big of a problem.
Sure taxing the rich would help a bit in Greece, but size of the numbers we're talking about in Greece, if you taxed the entire top 5% of the country a total of 25% of their gross worth each year, it wouldn't touch it. The problems are much bigger than that and they would have to fix it by making people actually change their ways. The goal isn't to tax the people themselves but to produce things in a way which would bring money into the country. Closing down the parasitic tourist industry which barely works in Greece would be a great start.
Nearly every island in Greece is supported by the tourist industry which exists for about half the year. A waiter at a restaurant I frequented in Crete let me know that his personal income after tips is 12,000 euro per year. He works 14 hours a day 6 days a week during the tourist season to accomplish this and he's highly motivated and a hard worker. Problem is, when the winter comes, he uses his savings during that time for food and necessities and then uses oil he produces in his parents green house to heat his apartment on their property.
These establishments are supported by hotels built, maintained and later abandoned by owners in other countries. These companies exploit cheap labor and build these massive resorts at disgustingly low rate and perform all transactions outside of Greece to avoid paying the Greek taxes and costs of maintaining the money in multiple countries. They fly people from richer countries into Greece using their own airlines (or from other companies similar to their own like Thomas Cook) and their excuse is that they're bringing tourist money to Greece and helping the economy. The problem is, when the economy strengthens in a given area, the resort company practically closes down the last hotel and builds a new one further down the beach where the local workers are willing to work for less money. They don't totally abandon their old hotels, but they'll attempt to sell them to lesser resort companies which have a lower level of patrons with less purchasing power.
These resorts also do everything they can to make a closed environment where they cater to a specific nationality. So the German hotels have German restaurants with German beer and German speaking staff. The Scandinavian hotels have Swedish food with Swedish speaking staff and Swedish convenience stores. They do this so that their guests will be less likely to spend their money outside of the hotel and instead spend a great deal more inside of the hotel. They also attempt to build these hotels as far as possible from cities. Th
As far as I know, they're not issuing new shares. If you buy AMD stocks... not a single penny of that goes to AMD unless it's AMD selling the share itself. You'd just be buying an old share that's already in circulation.
What is accomplished in buying an AMD share from the stock market though is to show confidence in AMD as a company. This has a short term impact of helping to increase the value of the share enough to make it so that the controlling shareholders in the organization will not say things like "Our share prices are down, you need to do something to bring them back up even if that means firing a bunch of people". So, instead of trying to buy shares at this point in time to give them kudos for canning a bunch of people just before Christmas, hold off until AMD starts showing weakness in the market again and help increase the overall feeling as to the future of the company at that point. It could in fact save jobs.
Alternatively, often there is some method of purchasing non-public shares in companies over the counter which would put money directly into the firm and actually help secure some jobs.
Personally, now that Microsoft is porting Windows to ARM, I don't think AMD will have a very strong future. This isn't 1993 when AMD produced Intel socket compatible processors and therefore provided a second source of chips for system builders. In fact, at this point in time, I think the strongest future for AMD is that ARM has made it possible for Intel to acquire AMD for their assets and IP. Intel would definitely benefit from owning what was once ATI and they can save many millions (if not billions) on lawsuits from AMD as has been the case in the past.
Frankly, I think combining the two companies together could be great for all of us. The battle is no longer Intel vs. AMD. In the future, it'll be Intel vs. ARM. And that'll be a much more interesting situation. AMD's leadership has completely destroyed that company by being arrogant and sloppy. They were a little dog that got ahead at one point in technology and just sat back saying "Intel will never beat us again". The end result was that Intel decided not to just let AMD take over their entire business and, while unfortunately employing terrible business tactics during the bad times, they did make a long term investment in the Core technology which just creamed AMD and left them wondering what happened.
So, if I were making an investment in AMD, I'd make it in the hopes of saving jobs, but pray that Intel isn't going to just sit back and wait until AMD is in receivership to swoop in and buy up all the patents.
Linux Expo '99 with Bram Moolenaar
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Bram and I were guest presenters of Tucows at Linux Expo '99. We were sitting in the lobby of the Radisson on 57th and 7th waiting for our shuttle to the Javits center. We were sitting on the bench nearest the door and in comes a guy who walks around us nonchalantly and then decides to leave... but on his way out, attempts to take a coat from the railing behind us that was left there by a patron of the in-hotel cafe during breakfast.
Bram, mid-conversation reaches up and joltingly grabs the guy, takes the coat out of his hand, points his finger at the man's chest and says "No" as if he were a dog trainer talking to a misbehaved rottweiler. Then he handed the coat to the owner with a disappointed look that said "you should know better" and hands the thief to the doorman, then he sat down and continued talked right where he left off as if nothing had happened.
This entire scenario took less than 10 seconds to occur and will be with me for the rest of my life.:)
Bram is a great guy... very nice, very smart. I wish him well.
Please also realize that in areas like Sicily, while not legal tender, prices for most things are still marked in Lira... then when you want to buy it, the shop clerk will break out a calculator and figure out how many euro you owe them if you don't have any lira available.
Just because other standards are set, it doesn't mean they are universally used.
If you wear a size 43 european shoe which is the most common size mens show sold in Europe or you wear a 42 or 44 (those three sizes together accounting for nearly 80% of all mens shoes sold in Europe) which is close enough to a size 43, then your foot is actually a foot or damn close to it in size.
So, while I appreciate that you are trying to help people visualize things in a way they'll understand, the fact is, while most people in the world would prefer to make precise measurements in the metric system, visualizing the size of a cube of gold relative to a component of ones body especially when estimating is most likely more effective.
And last I checked, most carpenters in europe are still purchasing their lumber in thumb measurements, the approximate with of a common mans thumb. Also know as... wait for it... and inch.
As a proof of concept to get the ball rolling, I've been porting an MPEG-1 decoder to JavaScript with support for WebCL for decoding acceleration and WebGL for color space and scaling acceleration. The reason I chose MPEG-1 is because it's easy to work with as a starter project and proof of concept. H.264 employs pretty much all the same principles as MPEG-1, in fact, H.264 doesn't really do much entirely different than MPEG-1, it's been almost all simple evolution (don't argue it... there's nothing really that special in H.264 that wasn't in MPEG-1... the filters were just makeup on the pig).
The fact is.... the video tag is the dumbest thing I've ever seen and the time and effort would have been better invested in making something like a WebAL project which would allow Ecmascript to perform time synchronization between WebGL and WebAL for audio output. By the time the video tag is worth while, both WebM and H.264 will be last generation codecs and then what do we do? Start another bitching match over which one to choose next? How well did that work for getting rid of GIF... which still is everywhere... well unless they replaced them with flash at least.
With technologies like WebCL coming up fast and WebGL already pretty well supported, by the time someone actually manages to implement the codecs in web technologies, it'll be possible to view any video format on any browser without the need of codecs on the device, the codec would simply download along with the video. If you're worried about whether it'll be fast enough... that's rubbish, WebCL is just as fast as OpenCL and you can operate directly on WebGL contexts. The only issue remaining is audio. And let's be brutally honest... audio does not take that much CPU to decode (yes... I know about <insert your shitty engineered lossless codec here, they don't count). So having an audio context which allows passing of buffers from OpenCL to the audio output would be fine.
I am pretty much a hater when it comes to the MVC model of programming as is it is employed forced upon developers in Symbian and am I did not like the Microsoft MFC version of it either. I don't like the Apple Cocoa methods of handling MVC either. BUT!!!! In general, the separation of model from view and controller (also known as the user interface components) is a great idea... particularly when coding in an object oriented language where you don't have to work hard to make this happen.
So, if you happen to be working on a platform that is primarily written in Java as is Blackberry everything, it is simple to imagine that a group of talented UI developers should be able to make at least a simple messenger client quite quickly. Then the nerdy guys in the driver lab can develop the hardware encryption engine in parallel. Let us not forget that there is nothing that can be implemented in hardware that can't also be implemented in software. Encryption code IS NOT that hard to implement. Nearly all encryption functions can be done in relatively little code. So, to let the UI developers make a new UI for the libraries, an internal version of the encryption engine can be hacked together in software while the driver guys sort out the hardware side of it.
All in all.... starting with just the Blackberry phone messaging client and getting a playbook version up SHOULD NOT be a huge issue.
Now, if the parent poster to yours is correct at any level, it could be an issue that the servers are unable to support multiple messaging clients on the same account in parallel. If this is the case... WOW!!! What a piece of shit!.
Internet Explorer itself is nothing more than a user interface around the Internet Explorer rendering engine in Window. Anyone who wants to can release another browser app based on it.
The entire Metro UI is in fact an Internet Explorer based browser. Meaning, it's a new UI to Internet Explorer's engine but with touch support and gestures. The Metro UI applications are in absolutely no way different than those found in Chrome or Opera these days. In fact, it should be relatively easy for a developer to use WebKit or something else to make a Metro UI app player for another OS... just need to make it full screen and add AppX package support.
So, what people are actually complaining about is that Internet Explorer's icon is still present on the computer. I have a very fancy solution to this.... delete it. Then Internet Explorer is ALL GONE. Then use whatever browser you prefer.
I was paying $21 per 1meg SIPP one day and three days later, I was buying up 1meg SIPPs at $95 and the following week selling them for $125. To do it, I asked my dad if I could use his credit card. He handed it to me and said "You better pay me back". Then he got a bill for $20,000 and I handed him the cash. I still had a nice chunk for myself.
That was a fire that caused that situation...
So I don't know about the quoted prices on that site...maybe they were the wholesale prices... but the retailers were certainly much higher than that.
Hardening can be done in theory by running tests and closing the holes you know about up. But hardened is not secure. It's just more secure than if you haven't done the tests.
Security comes from hardening after being attacked. QNX has never been a proper target of hackers. Yes there have been a few ATM machines that used QNX, but those ATM machines come from a generation when they were dedicated connections as opposed to connecting them over the Internet or using wireless phone technology. And even then, finding them to hack them was an issue.
Putting an operating system on 100,000 or more phones commonly purchased by people wearing neck ties on purpose on the other hand, that makes the phone a target. So until they have done that for a while... I wouldn't trust them to be secure.
1) The departments he's attacking have been a critical central component to the U.S. throughout their existences. Yes, they're huge and financially screwed up and possibly irreparable, but let's face it... they are important. The alternative would be to be entirely dependent on organizations like Lockheed (bet he owns a few stocks there) which would be disastrous. Just because he doesn't understand what's being researched there doesn't mean that some of the most important scientific research in the U.S. isn't occurring there.
2) The movement throughout many states to force Christianity into the government, the schools etc... at the expense of the freedoms which the U.S. was established upon is hurting the country terribly. Scientists are being viewed as the enemy because they keep coming up with these silly facts that conflict with what was written for a group of uneducated brick layers travelling through the dessert 3700 years ago. Because of that, they are seen as unnecessary by uneducated people. Maybe someone should explain to them that their god sent these scientists to fix all the problems they keep praying for answers to. But, as a result, the Christian movement keeps getting stronger and stronger in government and it almost certainly will push the world (or at least the U.S.) into a new dark age where science is denounced.... well as long as it doesn't cut off their cell phone and TV signals.
3) Even educational TV isn't that educational anymore. Those networks are trying to get ratings in order to justify the cost of producing programs and broadcasting the signals. TV infrastructure companies keep wanting to pay less and less since they have to support having more channels for the same amount of money to the consumer. This is dumbing down the world as even Discovery is hardly educational anymore and is broadcasting mainly programs like Top Gear (while cool... is more of a sports program or game show than educational).
4) The secondary educational system is completely and totally broken. For the most part, general education that is required in junior and senior years is an utter waste of time.... at least at that age of the student. While there are students who will certainly benefit from it and appreciate it, for the vast majority, the raging hormones in the age group makes it a ridiculous waste of time at that point. I personally believe that from the end of tenth grade and for two years after, students should be able to choose:
a) a vocational school
b) community service (local, military or peace corp)
c) to stay in school (for the ones who will attend the university
Then, after those two years, the students will hopefully have matured a bit... maybe even gotten laid a few times to level out their raging hormone problem, send them back to school for junior and senior year courses. It would be the same as making junior college compulsory. In addition, it will help the kids have a little more time to figure out who they'll be for the rest of their lives... a decision they're thoroughly unsuited for making at the age of 16.
In addition, for students who are interested in an undergraduate level of education, that should be part of the secondary education program in the government. This way, kids can just continue high school for the additional 4 years or switch to a university undergraduate program. Point being that while it would cost a great deal more money to support this system, it'll also generate a much higher amount of tax revenue for the government by making it possible for a much larger population to get a college level education and to choose their path for the rest of their careers at the age of 24 instead of 17 or 18. Additionally, by making vocational school freely available for 2 years during junior and senior years, a great deal more of skilled workers will be available. Kids would have better options available than to work at Walmart or the gas station if they are even slightly motivated.
What's more concerning is that they claim that this is to make life easier for law enforcement.
Let's face it... if there are things we can do to make life easier for law enforcement, I'm all for it. In fact, I'll chip in to build another dunkin' donuts or two to shorten their commutes to and from crime scenes. However I don't recall that there are any reasonable provisions in the constitution that suggests that making life easier for law enforcement at the person expense of those they are meant to protect is justification for passing new laws.
Cop.. What citizenship are you? Me.. My mother's maiden name is Schwartz... Cop.. That wasn't what I asked. Me.. do you happen to have access to a NY Yellow Pages... I need to call my uncle. Please, just open the phone book to lawyers and pick any guy named Schwartz... there's a few hundred of them, but there's still a good chance one of them is my uncle or cousin. By the way, can I please write down your name and badge number? Cop.. Do you need a lawyer? Me.. Well, I don't believe you had reasonable cause to impede my travel and conduct this "interview". I want to have him on the phone to make sure that I'm not having my rights abused by overzealous law enforcement. Cop.. Have a nice day
None of what I said was true... but it really doesn't matter. There's only one thing scarier to a cop than a lawyer and that's a Jewish New York attorney. While I despise modern lawyers, they are currently our only protection against the TSA and law enforcement.
QNX... what it has always done best was to be a tiny little itty bitty real-time operating system kernel which... as a user of it for 20 years I can safely say was AWESOME. They fit their entire real-time kernel into kilobytes and then supported building whatever you needed on top of it using a fairly unique (for the time, but really similar to UNIX messages) message passing system to communicate between tasks.
QNX was NOT fast. It was however quite efficient and bragged for years about task switching times in the milliseconds when that kind of resolution was almost certainly unreachable.
QNX later added on the Photon GUI which was almost a rip off of Xt and Motif... but without XLib. This worked out well since it supported the fairly dynamic message passing approach to development common in QNX. It also REALLY REALLY sucked. In fact... every since GUI produced by QNX was a dog with fleas.
The point of all this is not that QNX sucks... the point being that QNX is just not something that should interest the user. In fact... it's pretty lame to announce this. Apple sold the hell out of OS X to DEVELOPERS by using the term UNIX all the time during marketing. But Blackberry tells us that the UNIX roots (and QNX is basically just a real-time UNIX microkernel) are unavailable to programmers that have to use Java anyway. Apple and Google on the other hand.. they don't go on and on talking about the operating system kernel of their systems... that's just nonsense. They focus on what the actual platform is. "iOS.. Apple's platform with all these bells and whistles...oh an just one more thing"... "Android... Googles awesome platform with all Google perks like maps and translation etc... built into an awesome interface... oh and it has angry birds too". Then we get Blackberry... "The platform based on this really cool operating system kernel called QNX that... well.. it doesn't give us anything really... it just... well... we have NO IDEA what this can possibly give the user... but... it has an X in the name and that makes it special".
QNX is not a hardened secure OS... Blackberry's security just got screwed since now... instead of the half baked network environment they had before which made hacking pretty close to impossible, they now have a full POSIX networking stack which has never been hardened or challenged in an environment where people knew they could get your money. So... now... hackers know that with the new OS... they should start hacking QNX's networking stacks and file systems to get their hands on your banking data. Linux at least has the Linux stack which has been hardened over years. OS X has BSD which has been hardened over decades. QNX has... well QNX which has been hardened... well no it hasn't... but at least it has an X in the name and that makes it special.
Let's be honest... if this is the best that Blackberry can do... well... screw it.
I've read tons of comments and things which people have been sorely missing is that the problem is solved best progressively.
Using a publicly funded model will fail miserably since NASA is at the mercy of politicians who increase or scrap their budgets in short cycles. Everything NASA does has to be rushed and contracts have to be farmed out to pigs like Lockheed Martin that spend $0.10 on development and production for every $1 wasted on bureaucratic crap. 99% of the projects performed by NASA during the period of my life would have been hundreds and sometimes thousands of times less expensively if they were handled by companies who hungry enough to get them done as opposed to dragging them out long enough that they could blame the delays and failures on the politicians that left office.
I'm excited about China and India being part of the space community now since both of those countries can produce the technology necessary at minuscule fractions of the cost of pigs like Lockheed.
Now that NASA is out of the picture regarding space travel and will become something similar to FAA in time, there is a great deal of hope. Private companies will solve the problems in smaller steps and at smaller costs.
An entire floating space station should be able to be build at a relatively low cost and assembled in space using absolutely no humans in the environment. Using SpaceX's technology and similar, it'll be possible to launch into space at record low costs. I'm quite sure the Chinese are already working on something similar which will be far less expensive to launch that even that vehicle. And as they could setup a launch facility at Qingzang, they could theoretically cut their rocket fuel consumption a bit.
Therefore, using the SpaceX technology which could theoretically launch multiple payloads per week at relatively low costs, it should be possible to launch many self assembling modules into space.
Now, I'm no expert, but I have pictured that if you were to design each module similar to how Capsula (the toy) is designed... minus the gears... with each connector of each capsule designed as an airlock mechanism, it should be possible to send up capsules with limited self guidance (small boosters) that can steer themselves towards one another and then connect each other together. If each module is built using a rhombic triacontahedron design instead of cubic, then a spherical shape would be rather easy to produce. It might be possible to simulate gravity through centrifugal force in this design.
Best part would be that the design can continuously grow, and due to the air lock concept at each junction, modules maybe able to be moved from place to place to better suite the the environment. For rapid growth, it may be able to produce a collapsable module that can be stacked for launch. Those modules would serve no other purpose but to increase the volume of the habitat. Then it might be possible to stack 5 or ten of those modules for each launch and the size of the habitat can grow very quickly. Those modules along with additional material, and produced transparent can be used to produce greenhouse elements. Of course, it's great to have scrubbers in space, but vegetation cleans air and provides food.
Well... point being... with a design such as this... individuals and organizations wouldn't have to do the whole jobs themselves and in one go. Instead, they can launch their own modules which would become a component of the larger habitat and an economy can be established where the module owners pay for their share of air purification, water (which at least initially must be shipped up), power (for modules which consume more than they generate) and cooling/heating (when the module doesn't provide its own.
Once a habitat such as this grows large enough... new habitats can be established elsewhere (such as deeper into space.. maybe closer to the moon) from modules that detach from the initial habitats. Shipping services can be established by owners of modules that have the p
Geek derives from the term it originally defined which was a circus freak which had no particular talent but defined themselves as a freak by biting the heads of live chickens in front of an audience.
In a more modern sense, a geek is a person who does something unusual in order to associate themselves with a particular group. Sociologically, it's a means of either separating themselves intentionally or more commonly to find strength in numbers.
Nerds on the other hand are generally a group of people with a very high aptitude in one thing or another generally academically related. Nerds tend to look funny during their youth as they focus far less on physical appearance and focus far more on their intellectual ambitions. A nerd doesn't try to look like a nerd, it's generally associated with a lack of interest in their person appearance and therefore the nerd simply lets his mother dress him. My son is a nerd, but he doesn't dress like one even though he takes no interest in his appearance. This is because his mother (unlike his father) is not a nerd and would never let her child look like his mother dressed him.
Upon reaching puberty nerds will start attempting to mate as any person will, but it may take time before they are able to start dressing and behaving as a typical member of society. This is often due to their limited personal financial resources which is generally ruined further by their prioritization of "toys" as opposed to clothing. So they'll do the best they can to use the clothing mommy buys them in the least unfashionable way, though sadly there is only so much you can do with those clothes. The mothers of these children also tend to be a great deal more protective of their children than other mothers and therefore will fight harder to avoid losing their right to dress them. That is why nerds often aren't able to do anything about their appearance until gaining a certain level of financial self-dependence. They will instead during their adolescence attempt to pick up a fashionable hobby... either trying out sports at school, learning to play guitar, or smoking cigarettes or large quantities of marijuana etc. A nerd generally is person with a high aptitude and often highly capable in cerebral topics. In fact, nerds are entirely unable to be identified reliably based on physical appearance.
A geek on the other hand is a person has no specific talent to define themselves with. They are general among the average in most everything they do. They lack muscular physiques and are self conscious about their visual appearance. In general they aren't even outcasts as they lack anything in particular to be cast out of. Unlike the nerds who are generally confident in their personal abilities in a given subject, they also are often self-conscious about how their intellect is perceived. As a result, they attempt to identify themselves as nerds by appearing similar to a adolescent nerd to allow them to establish relationships with one another to form friendships and also for the sake of self preservation.
Let's be frank, nerds and geeks generally have a rough time in school and this isn't likely to change any time soon. While nerds often are physically capable of defending themselves, they would prefer not to as it's illogical that it should be necessary. Geeks (not necessarily the fat ones) are generally unable to physically defend themselves in a one-on-one fight as the antagonizers don't tend to... well antagonize without a audience, the geeks or nerds are almost always outnumbered and most likely outgunned during times of conflict. When geeks and nerds gather in groups, they are less likely targets for physical violence from others and therefore are in a much better and positive situation.
So, as opposed to biting heads off of live chickens in order to be a member of a group (in that case circus performers), a modern geek chooses the group they will most likely be able to fit in with. The added fact that nerds are generally far more accepting of friends no m
This is far less disturbing and harmful than the fact that the majority of the security in airports is handled by armies of uneducated gorillas as opposed to a smaller more intelligent and more motivated group of individuals. Of course, I have yet to meet an intelligent, educated and motivated person that would be willing to work in such a position.
At least in this case, we're talking about students and not day labor. At least students are people who should in theory be bright. As for training... well let's be frank... they'll surf and find these sights and when there's a question regarding site which are so gray you're not sure which side of the line they sit on, they'll discuss it or seek guidance from a trained nanny.
With the exception of the role he playing in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape", he has been film after film trying to play roles he is thoroughly unsuited for. He tries to play roles made for guys much more macho or intelligent than he is. Other's have mentioned Keanu as being the type to fail the Turing test... but in reality, from the interviews I've seen with him, DiCaprio is often nearly as bad. I think it's terrible when you have little guy like DiCaprio who is in rush to grow up to be Matt Damon playing roles like these.
I think that DiCaprio needs someone to explain to him that he is not and never will be Bruce Willis (for pure testosterone), Matt Damon (for his ability to fake someone intelligent) or Al Pacino (for his sheer versatility and ability to play role such as the jew in "the merchant of venice"). Even worse is that someone needs to tell him that there is no way in hell he is a suitable replacement for Michael Clarke Duncan... he's too short, too small, too white and also not nearly smart enough.
He is at best who Heath Ledger was trying so hard not to be... a pretty little boy who will end up on posters in teenaged girls bedrooms.... though more like middle aged women now probably.
I truly hope they can find an actor far better suited for this role.
Well... maybe if they do a film about Babbage... Leo can play Ada.
Umm... Woz is a nerd... but yes... geeks would attempt to gain status in their geekdom by allowing someone of such nerdom to cut in line.
Remember that nerds are people that actually know things... modern day computer geeks are generally people who try to pass themselves off as nerds... of course, many nerds prefer to pass themselves off as normal people, a feat that is generally unreachable for geeks.
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When you go to the movie theaters in Norway now, you can choose to see Cars 2 in 2D with crappy Norwegian dubbing, crappy 3D with crappy Norwegian dubbing or you can wait until 8pm and see crappy 3D with great original English voices.
:)
Just got my 2D glasses, so even though wearing glasses bothers me A LOT, at least both eyes are now polarized the same so I can watch the film in glorious 2D again.
Lego made huge mistakes with this game. The game itself was fine enough... I liked it, but here's what went wrong :
... I'll maybe come back when they release some more levels and content.
- They released it with too little content in the beginning. This meant that all the early adopters (I was a beta tester) rushed out, bought it, installed it, started playing and in less than 2 days game play had, in the limited sized world capped out and decided
- No thottbot or anything else worth using. This meant people who were too lazy to find it themselves had no place to get help with the quests. Oh well.
- Chatting was impossible... if my son an I were in different rooms, we practically couldn't talk with each other. I had to yell across the house. Yes, I know there was chat, but it worked like hell.
- Maps were AWFUL!!!
- UI was extremely hard to figure out. It's pretty bad when people were comparing it to Everquest and Everquest was easier to figure out.
- No family accounts. At the prices they were charging, no parents would spend that kind of money per month on a game... certainly not on two copies of the game so that their two kids could play together. If we could have bought one copy of the game and had two or maybe even three players from the same IP address playing at a time, we would have paid.
- Game website including billing site was slower than hell.
- No groups (at least at first), guilds would have been nice too.
- No Scandinavian language support. This is a biggy... Scandinavians would buy a lump of cow poop if it said Lego on the side of it. But, Scandinavian children don't speak English. They would have sold 10 times as many copies and accounts if they had at least supported their native language (Danish) since even though Danish isn't the same as Norwegian and it's even harder for Swedish kids, it's still easier than English for them.
- Account costs were a huge issue. Yes, World of Warcraft costs like $12.99 a month.. but that's a game being paid for primarily by people that make substantially more than $12.99 a month. My son and daughter each get a total of $30 a month in allowance and they work hard for that. $12.99 a month is just too high an amount for them to pay on their own if they ever want anything else. My son has occasionally purchased a game time card with his allowance, but certainly couldn't justify an account. $4.99 a month would have gotten them much less per account, but would have gotten them far more accounts. And the free to play version was just a joke.
- They didn't sell the damn thing. I mean, really advertising for this game was dismal at best and the few advertisements they did make didn't have a focus. It was like they didn't know who to sell to so didn't sell to anyone.
I can go on for a long time, but to be honest they screwed up on a scale which was unimaginable. It's a real shame too since this will most likely be Lego's last attempt at this and we'll all suffer because they screwed up.
Make it a requirement for all bankers to have at least an undergraduate degree in math and physics. I have seen the so called math requirements of many of these guys and it's NOT GOOD ENOUGH. These people are studying primarily statistical math and I'm an avid believer that you can't make healthy choices based on trends and statistics without having a more thorough understanding of differential equations.
Also, while physics does not apply to their job very well directly (which is the entire point of having the physics requirement in the first place), it does make certain that no one will be able to become a banker without a pretty good understanding of cause and effect. Many people go through their entire lives without every considering the consequences of their actions. Hopefully more people go through their lives with at least "This happened because of that" or "This will most likely happen because of this". A financial manager/banker/whatever type of gambler should be able to think "This happened because of that and therefore this is likely to happen unless I..." type reasoning at the least. This is physics.
Let's also point out that being forced to grind through truth tables and karnaugh maps for a semester will eliminate students unable to understand logic. I see far too many financial reporters for example that can't understand double negatives let alone demorgan's theorem. I constantly read articles that do no interpret p and q as not p or not q. This is a critical concept when understanding markets and making predictions and these guys can't do it.
I personally know a few of these golden boys that had their faces wall papered on the financial rags... First when they were growing fast. Then when they made mistakes. Then when they were indicted. All of them were able to hop on the trend bandwagon and they made a fortune doing nothing more than buying into the days top performers and selling as they slowed down. Problem is, when growth slowed, they couldn't compensate. So the golden boy failed.
Personally, I think that the idea of gambling on stocks is fairly disgusting. I especially hate people who gamble on commodities and I despise people who consider food a commodity.
If you're going to be a financial geek.. be an investor. Invest in companies. Create jobs. Strengthen the economy. All that stuff... quit this gambling crap... it's killing us all.
ARM isn't like x86. Optimizing for one ARM vs optimizing for another ARM can differ GREATLY. Most Linux distributions are standardizing on older ARM cores (though I imagine there will be a lot of ARM8 64-bit chatter now) this is because they are the lowest common denominator. Once of the greatest shortcomings of Android at this time is the wide support for limited ARM cores. iOS is strong because the build environment is tuned to optimize for the feature set which Apple knows is present on the iPhone and iPod devices.
I have hand optimized several programs for several different ARM processors. You always have to have multiple versions to make it run well. There's the C version for crappy old ARM cores not worth optimizing for (and many phones ship with these), there's the ARM with floating point version, the ARM without floating point, ARM with NEON, ARM without NEON, ARM with big fast multipliers, ARM with small painfully slow multipliers, ARM with hardware division, ARM without hardware division, ARM. ARM with MMU, ARM with emulated MMU, ARM without MMU.
The fact is, any company can grab an ARM core from ARM and slam the thing in a chip unchanged, but many companies (especially Marvell and probably NVidia) add their own IP to the mixture to make their chips faster than others. ARM processors are meant to be small and low power. You can fit a full ARM7 core into the tiniest corner of an FPGA. It'll have a REALLY slow multiplier and divider since that specific version doesn't need a pyramid multiplier (which is enormous). It will be a bare bones CPU which works. On the other hand, you can also put an ARM7 core onto an FPGA, use every single gate in the biggest bad boy Altera has to offer and have a CPU which runs like greased lightning. Things like SIMD pyramid multipliers with adders to optimize multiply and accumulate. Big ass memory busses capable of 256 bit wide external memory accesses on DDR-3 or even GDDR5. The options are unlimited.
This is why you've only scraped the tip of the iceberg. Mono, if implemented properly for ARM would enumerate the capabilities of the processor and memory subsystem and optimize code for the platform it is running on. Personally, I still believe that all ARM Linux distros should be compiled for the phone they're meant to run on and all code sent to those devices should be in an intermediate language whether it's CIL, Java byte code or LLVM based. ARM would be a true contender against x86 then... on the performance front at least. I am still pretty convinced that if you implemented a full Intel grade ALU on an ARM, ARM would lose its edge in power consumption.
There's a huge difference between Greece and Germany other than the system itself. It's the Mediterranean syndrome. I've been to multiple areas of Greece several times. I have been to many cities in Germany and have worked with Germans for years. I have been to many western and central European countries and there are some things which are just plain obvious and any northern Italian will gladly tell you it's true.
The further south you get in Europe, the lower your motivation seems to be. Just last month I was in Crete and I'm not joking, all the frigging stores close in the middle of the day and all the coffee shops and bars fill up. Drivers of trucks on the island stop driving in the middle of the day and stop to have a glass of stong wine or moonshine. The only people working on the entire island at that time of day is the restaurant staff.
It is similar in many places in Spain as well. Malta..... well let's not bother with Malta and Gozo. Southern Italy as well.
On the other hand, if you go to Germany, from the time the day starts, you work and you're efficient. People take pride in their efforts. They set standards for themselves which are high and they achieve the goals they set for themselves. Germany's biggest problem is the cleanliness of their cities. People don't walk the extra 3 steps to make it to a trash can, but there are a lot of workers cleaning up the streets most of the time, so it's not that big of a problem.
Sure taxing the rich would help a bit in Greece, but size of the numbers we're talking about in Greece, if you taxed the entire top 5% of the country a total of 25% of their gross worth each year, it wouldn't touch it. The problems are much bigger than that and they would have to fix it by making people actually change their ways. The goal isn't to tax the people themselves but to produce things in a way which would bring money into the country. Closing down the parasitic tourist industry which barely works in Greece would be a great start.
Nearly every island in Greece is supported by the tourist industry which exists for about half the year. A waiter at a restaurant I frequented in Crete let me know that his personal income after tips is 12,000 euro per year. He works 14 hours a day 6 days a week during the tourist season to accomplish this and he's highly motivated and a hard worker. Problem is, when the winter comes, he uses his savings during that time for food and necessities and then uses oil he produces in his parents green house to heat his apartment on their property.
These establishments are supported by hotels built, maintained and later abandoned by owners in other countries. These companies exploit cheap labor and build these massive resorts at disgustingly low rate and perform all transactions outside of Greece to avoid paying the Greek taxes and costs of maintaining the money in multiple countries. They fly people from richer countries into Greece using their own airlines (or from other companies similar to their own like Thomas Cook) and their excuse is that they're bringing tourist money to Greece and helping the economy. The problem is, when the economy strengthens in a given area, the resort company practically closes down the last hotel and builds a new one further down the beach where the local workers are willing to work for less money. They don't totally abandon their old hotels, but they'll attempt to sell them to lesser resort companies which have a lower level of patrons with less purchasing power.
These resorts also do everything they can to make a closed environment where they cater to a specific nationality. So the German hotels have German restaurants with German beer and German speaking staff. The Scandinavian hotels have Swedish food with Swedish speaking staff and Swedish convenience stores. They do this so that their guests will be less likely to spend their money outside of the hotel and instead spend a great deal more inside of the hotel. They also attempt to build these hotels as far as possible from cities. Th
As far as I know, they're not issuing new shares. If you buy AMD stocks... not a single penny of that goes to AMD unless it's AMD selling the share itself. You'd just be buying an old share that's already in circulation.
What is accomplished in buying an AMD share from the stock market though is to show confidence in AMD as a company. This has a short term impact of helping to increase the value of the share enough to make it so that the controlling shareholders in the organization will not say things like "Our share prices are down, you need to do something to bring them back up even if that means firing a bunch of people". So, instead of trying to buy shares at this point in time to give them kudos for canning a bunch of people just before Christmas, hold off until AMD starts showing weakness in the market again and help increase the overall feeling as to the future of the company at that point. It could in fact save jobs.
Alternatively, often there is some method of purchasing non-public shares in companies over the counter which would put money directly into the firm and actually help secure some jobs.
Personally, now that Microsoft is porting Windows to ARM, I don't think AMD will have a very strong future. This isn't 1993 when AMD produced Intel socket compatible processors and therefore provided a second source of chips for system builders. In fact, at this point in time, I think the strongest future for AMD is that ARM has made it possible for Intel to acquire AMD for their assets and IP. Intel would definitely benefit from owning what was once ATI and they can save many millions (if not billions) on lawsuits from AMD as has been the case in the past.
Frankly, I think combining the two companies together could be great for all of us. The battle is no longer Intel vs. AMD. In the future, it'll be Intel vs. ARM. And that'll be a much more interesting situation. AMD's leadership has completely destroyed that company by being arrogant and sloppy. They were a little dog that got ahead at one point in technology and just sat back saying "Intel will never beat us again". The end result was that Intel decided not to just let AMD take over their entire business and, while unfortunately employing terrible business tactics during the bad times, they did make a long term investment in the Core technology which just creamed AMD and left them wondering what happened.
So, if I were making an investment in AMD, I'd make it in the hopes of saving jobs, but pray that Intel isn't going to just sit back and wait until AMD is in receivership to swoop in and buy up all the patents.
Bram and I were guest presenters of Tucows at Linux Expo '99. We were sitting in the lobby of the Radisson on 57th and 7th waiting for our shuttle to the Javits center. We were sitting on the bench nearest the door and in comes a guy who walks around us nonchalantly and then decides to leave... but on his way out, attempts to take a coat from the railing behind us that was left there by a patron of the in-hotel cafe during breakfast.
:)
Bram, mid-conversation reaches up and joltingly grabs the guy, takes the coat out of his hand, points his finger at the man's chest and says "No" as if he were a dog trainer talking to a misbehaved rottweiler. Then he handed the coat to the owner with a disappointed look that said "you should know better" and hands the thief to the doorman, then he sat down and continued talked right where he left off as if nothing had happened.
This entire scenario took less than 10 seconds to occur and will be with me for the rest of my life.
Bram is a great guy... very nice, very smart. I wish him well.
Please also realize that in areas like Sicily, while not legal tender, prices for most things are still marked in Lira... then when you want to buy it, the shop clerk will break out a calculator and figure out how many euro you owe them if you don't have any lira available.
Just because other standards are set, it doesn't mean they are universally used.
If you wear a size 43 european shoe which is the most common size mens show sold in Europe or you wear a 42 or 44 (those three sizes together accounting for nearly 80% of all mens shoes sold in Europe) which is close enough to a size 43, then your foot is actually a foot or damn close to it in size.
So, while I appreciate that you are trying to help people visualize things in a way they'll understand, the fact is, while most people in the world would prefer to make precise measurements in the metric system, visualizing the size of a cube of gold relative to a component of ones body especially when estimating is most likely more effective.
And last I checked, most carpenters in europe are still purchasing their lumber in thumb measurements, the approximate with of a common mans thumb. Also know as... wait for it... and inch.
As a proof of concept to get the ball rolling, I've been porting an MPEG-1 decoder to JavaScript with support for WebCL for decoding acceleration and WebGL for color space and scaling acceleration. The reason I chose MPEG-1 is because it's easy to work with as a starter project and proof of concept. H.264 employs pretty much all the same principles as MPEG-1, in fact, H.264 doesn't really do much entirely different than MPEG-1, it's been almost all simple evolution (don't argue it... there's nothing really that special in H.264 that wasn't in MPEG-1... the filters were just makeup on the pig).
:)
The fact is.... the video tag is the dumbest thing I've ever seen and the time and effort would have been better invested in making something like a WebAL project which would allow Ecmascript to perform time synchronization between WebGL and WebAL for audio output. By the time the video tag is worth while, both WebM and H.264 will be last generation codecs and then what do we do? Start another bitching match over which one to choose next? How well did that work for getting rid of GIF... which still is everywhere... well unless they replaced them with flash at least.
With technologies like WebCL coming up fast and WebGL already pretty well supported, by the time someone actually manages to implement the codecs in web technologies, it'll be possible to view any video format on any browser without the need of codecs on the device, the codec would simply download along with the video. If you're worried about whether it'll be fast enough... that's rubbish, WebCL is just as fast as OpenCL and you can operate directly on WebGL contexts. The only issue remaining is audio. And let's be brutally honest... audio does not take that much CPU to decode (yes... I know about <insert your shitty engineered lossless codec here, they don't count). So having an audio context which allows passing of buffers from OpenCL to the audio output would be fine.
I look forward to showing off soon
I am pretty much a hater when it comes to the MVC model of programming as is it is employed forced upon developers in Symbian and am I did not like the Microsoft MFC version of it either. I don't like the Apple Cocoa methods of handling MVC either. BUT!!!! In general, the separation of model from view and controller (also known as the user interface components) is a great idea... particularly when coding in an object oriented language where you don't have to work hard to make this happen.
So, if you happen to be working on a platform that is primarily written in Java as is Blackberry everything, it is simple to imagine that a group of talented UI developers should be able to make at least a simple messenger client quite quickly. Then the nerdy guys in the driver lab can develop the hardware encryption engine in parallel. Let us not forget that there is nothing that can be implemented in hardware that can't also be implemented in software. Encryption code IS NOT that hard to implement. Nearly all encryption functions can be done in relatively little code. So, to let the UI developers make a new UI for the libraries, an internal version of the encryption engine can be hacked together in software while the driver guys sort out the hardware side of it.
All in all.... starting with just the Blackberry phone messaging client and getting a playbook version up SHOULD NOT be a huge issue.
Now, if the parent poster to yours is correct at any level, it could be an issue that the servers are unable to support multiple messaging clients on the same account in parallel. If this is the case... WOW!!! What a piece of shit!.
Internet Explorer itself is nothing more than a user interface around the Internet Explorer rendering engine in Window. Anyone who wants to can release another browser app based on it.
The entire Metro UI is in fact an Internet Explorer based browser. Meaning, it's a new UI to Internet Explorer's engine but with touch support and gestures. The Metro UI applications are in absolutely no way different than those found in Chrome or Opera these days. In fact, it should be relatively easy for a developer to use WebKit or something else to make a Metro UI app player for another OS... just need to make it full screen and add AppX package support.
So, what people are actually complaining about is that Internet Explorer's icon is still present on the computer. I have a very fancy solution to this.... delete it. Then Internet Explorer is ALL GONE. Then use whatever browser you prefer.
I was paying $21 per 1meg SIPP one day and three days later, I was buying up 1meg SIPPs at $95 and the following week selling them for $125. To do it, I asked my dad if I could use his credit card. He handed it to me and said "You better pay me back". Then he got a bill for $20,000 and I handed him the cash. I still had a nice chunk for myself.
That was a fire that caused that situation...
So I don't know about the quoted prices on that site...maybe they were the wholesale prices... but the retailers were certainly much higher than that.
well until it's not.
Hardening can be done in theory by running tests and closing the holes you know about up. But hardened is not secure. It's just more secure than if you haven't done the tests.
Security comes from hardening after being attacked. QNX has never been a proper target of hackers. Yes there have been a few ATM machines that used QNX, but those ATM machines come from a generation when they were dedicated connections as opposed to connecting them over the Internet or using wireless phone technology. And even then, finding them to hack them was an issue.
Putting an operating system on 100,000 or more phones commonly purchased by people wearing neck ties on purpose on the other hand, that makes the phone a target. So until they have done that for a while... I wouldn't trust them to be secure.
My 18 year old niece had no idea who MC hammer was before I told her recently.
1) The departments he's attacking have been a critical central component to the U.S. throughout their existences. Yes, they're huge and financially screwed up and possibly irreparable, but let's face it... they are important. The alternative would be to be entirely dependent on organizations like Lockheed (bet he owns a few stocks there) which would be disastrous. Just because he doesn't understand what's being researched there doesn't mean that some of the most important scientific research in the U.S. isn't occurring there.
:
2) The movement throughout many states to force Christianity into the government, the schools etc... at the expense of the freedoms which the U.S. was established upon is hurting the country terribly. Scientists are being viewed as the enemy because they keep coming up with these silly facts that conflict with what was written for a group of uneducated brick layers travelling through the dessert 3700 years ago. Because of that, they are seen as unnecessary by uneducated people. Maybe someone should explain to them that their god sent these scientists to fix all the problems they keep praying for answers to. But, as a result, the Christian movement keeps getting stronger and stronger in government and it almost certainly will push the world (or at least the U.S.) into a new dark age where science is denounced.... well as long as it doesn't cut off their cell phone and TV signals.
3) Even educational TV isn't that educational anymore. Those networks are trying to get ratings in order to justify the cost of producing programs and broadcasting the signals. TV infrastructure companies keep wanting to pay less and less since they have to support having more channels for the same amount of money to the consumer. This is dumbing down the world as even Discovery is hardly educational anymore and is broadcasting mainly programs like Top Gear (while cool... is more of a sports program or game show than educational).
4) The secondary educational system is completely and totally broken. For the most part, general education that is required in junior and senior years is an utter waste of time.... at least at that age of the student. While there are students who will certainly benefit from it and appreciate it, for the vast majority, the raging hormones in the age group makes it a ridiculous waste of time at that point. I personally believe that from the end of tenth grade and for two years after, students should be able to choose
a) a vocational school
b) community service (local, military or peace corp)
c) to stay in school (for the ones who will attend the university
Then, after those two years, the students will hopefully have matured a bit... maybe even gotten laid a few times to level out their raging hormone problem, send them back to school for junior and senior year courses. It would be the same as making junior college compulsory. In addition, it will help the kids have a little more time to figure out who they'll be for the rest of their lives... a decision they're thoroughly unsuited for making at the age of 16.
In addition, for students who are interested in an undergraduate level of education, that should be part of the secondary education program in the government. This way, kids can just continue high school for the additional 4 years or switch to a university undergraduate program. Point being that while it would cost a great deal more money to support this system, it'll also generate a much higher amount of tax revenue for the government by making it possible for a much larger population to get a college level education and to choose their path for the rest of their careers at the age of 24 instead of 17 or 18. Additionally, by making vocational school freely available for 2 years during junior and senior years, a great deal more of skilled workers will be available. Kids would have better options available than to work at Walmart or the gas station if they are even slightly motivated.
The biggest pr
What's more concerning is that they claim that this is to make life easier for law enforcement.
Let's face it... if there are things we can do to make life easier for law enforcement, I'm all for it. In fact, I'll chip in to build another dunkin' donuts or two to shorten their commutes to and from crime scenes. However I don't recall that there are any reasonable provisions in the constitution that suggests that making life easier for law enforcement at the person expense of those they are meant to protect is justification for passing new laws.
Cop.. What citizenship are you?
Me.. My mother's maiden name is Schwartz...
Cop.. That wasn't what I asked.
Me.. do you happen to have access to a NY Yellow Pages... I need to call my uncle. Please, just open the phone book to lawyers and pick any guy named Schwartz... there's a few hundred of them, but there's still a good chance one of them is my uncle or cousin. By the way, can I please write down your name and badge number?
Cop.. Do you need a lawyer?
Me.. Well, I don't believe you had reasonable cause to impede my travel and conduct this "interview". I want to have him on the phone to make sure that I'm not having my rights abused by overzealous law enforcement.
Cop.. Have a nice day
None of what I said was true... but it really doesn't matter. There's only one thing scarier to a cop than a lawyer and that's a Jewish New York attorney. While I despise modern lawyers, they are currently our only protection against the TSA and law enforcement.
QNX... what it has always done best was to be a tiny little itty bitty real-time operating system kernel which... as a user of it for 20 years I can safely say was AWESOME. They fit their entire real-time kernel into kilobytes and then supported building whatever you needed on top of it using a fairly unique (for the time, but really similar to UNIX messages) message passing system to communicate between tasks.
... well.. it doesn't give us anything really... it just... well... we have NO IDEA what this can possibly give the user... but... it has an X in the name and that makes it special".
QNX was NOT fast. It was however quite efficient and bragged for years about task switching times in the milliseconds when that kind of resolution was almost certainly unreachable.
QNX later added on the Photon GUI which was almost a rip off of Xt and Motif... but without XLib. This worked out well since it supported the fairly dynamic message passing approach to development common in QNX. It also REALLY REALLY sucked. In fact... every since GUI produced by QNX was a dog with fleas.
The point of all this is not that QNX sucks... the point being that QNX is just not something that should interest the user. In fact... it's pretty lame to announce this. Apple sold the hell out of OS X to DEVELOPERS by using the term UNIX all the time during marketing. But Blackberry tells us that the UNIX roots (and QNX is basically just a real-time UNIX microkernel) are unavailable to programmers that have to use Java anyway. Apple and Google on the other hand.. they don't go on and on talking about the operating system kernel of their systems... that's just nonsense. They focus on what the actual platform is. "iOS.. Apple's platform with all these bells and whistles...oh an just one more thing"... "Android... Googles awesome platform with all Google perks like maps and translation etc... built into an awesome interface... oh and it has angry birds too". Then we get Blackberry... "The platform based on this really cool operating system kernel called QNX that
QNX is not a hardened secure OS... Blackberry's security just got screwed since now... instead of the half baked network environment they had before which made hacking pretty close to impossible, they now have a full POSIX networking stack which has never been hardened or challenged in an environment where people knew they could get your money. So... now... hackers know that with the new OS... they should start hacking QNX's networking stacks and file systems to get their hands on your banking data. Linux at least has the Linux stack which has been hardened over years. OS X has BSD which has been hardened over decades. QNX has... well QNX which has been hardened... well no it hasn't... but at least it has an X in the name and that makes it special.
Let's be honest... if this is the best that Blackberry can do... well... screw it.
I've read tons of comments and things which people have been sorely missing is that the problem is solved best progressively.
Using a publicly funded model will fail miserably since NASA is at the mercy of politicians who increase or scrap their budgets in short cycles. Everything NASA does has to be rushed and contracts have to be farmed out to pigs like Lockheed Martin that spend $0.10 on development and production for every $1 wasted on bureaucratic crap. 99% of the projects performed by NASA during the period of my life would have been hundreds and sometimes thousands of times less expensively if they were handled by companies who hungry enough to get them done as opposed to dragging them out long enough that they could blame the delays and failures on the politicians that left office.
I'm excited about China and India being part of the space community now since both of those countries can produce the technology necessary at minuscule fractions of the cost of pigs like Lockheed.
Now that NASA is out of the picture regarding space travel and will become something similar to FAA in time, there is a great deal of hope. Private companies will solve the problems in smaller steps and at smaller costs.
An entire floating space station should be able to be build at a relatively low cost and assembled in space using absolutely no humans in the environment. Using SpaceX's technology and similar, it'll be possible to launch into space at record low costs. I'm quite sure the Chinese are already working on something similar which will be far less expensive to launch that even that vehicle. And as they could setup a launch facility at Qingzang, they could theoretically cut their rocket fuel consumption a bit.
Therefore, using the SpaceX technology which could theoretically launch multiple payloads per week at relatively low costs, it should be possible to launch many self assembling modules into space.
Now, I'm no expert, but I have pictured that if you were to design each module similar to how Capsula (the toy) is designed... minus the gears... with each connector of each capsule designed as an airlock mechanism, it should be possible to send up capsules with limited self guidance (small boosters) that can steer themselves towards one another and then connect each other together. If each module is built using a rhombic triacontahedron design instead of cubic, then a spherical shape would be rather easy to produce. It might be possible to simulate gravity through centrifugal force in this design.
Best part would be that the design can continuously grow, and due to the air lock concept at each junction, modules maybe able to be moved from place to place to better suite the the environment. For rapid growth, it may be able to produce a collapsable module that can be stacked for launch. Those modules would serve no other purpose but to increase the volume of the habitat. Then it might be possible to stack 5 or ten of those modules for each launch and the size of the habitat can grow very quickly. Those modules along with additional material, and produced transparent can be used to produce greenhouse elements. Of course, it's great to have scrubbers in space, but vegetation cleans air and provides food.
Well... point being... with a design such as this... individuals and organizations wouldn't have to do the whole jobs themselves and in one go. Instead, they can launch their own modules which would become a component of the larger habitat and an economy can be established where the module owners pay for their share of air purification, water (which at least initially must be shipped up), power (for modules which consume more than they generate) and cooling/heating (when the module doesn't provide its own.
Once a habitat such as this grows large enough... new habitats can be established elsewhere (such as deeper into space.. maybe closer to the moon) from modules that detach from the initial habitats. Shipping services can be established by owners of modules that have the p
Geek derives from the term it originally defined which was a circus freak which had no particular talent but defined themselves as a freak by biting the heads of live chickens in front of an audience.
... well antagonize without a audience, the geeks or nerds are almost always outnumbered and most likely outgunned during times of conflict. When geeks and nerds gather in groups, they are less likely targets for physical violence from others and therefore are in a much better and positive situation.
In a more modern sense, a geek is a person who does something unusual in order to associate themselves with a particular group. Sociologically, it's a means of either separating themselves intentionally or more commonly to find strength in numbers.
Nerds on the other hand are generally a group of people with a very high aptitude in one thing or another generally academically related. Nerds tend to look funny during their youth as they focus far less on physical appearance and focus far more on their intellectual ambitions. A nerd doesn't try to look like a nerd, it's generally associated with a lack of interest in their person appearance and therefore the nerd simply lets his mother dress him. My son is a nerd, but he doesn't dress like one even though he takes no interest in his appearance. This is because his mother (unlike his father) is not a nerd and would never let her child look like his mother dressed him.
Upon reaching puberty nerds will start attempting to mate as any person will, but it may take time before they are able to start dressing and behaving as a typical member of society. This is often due to their limited personal financial resources which is generally ruined further by their prioritization of "toys" as opposed to clothing. So they'll do the best they can to use the clothing mommy buys them in the least unfashionable way, though sadly there is only so much you can do with those clothes. The mothers of these children also tend to be a great deal more protective of their children than other mothers and therefore will fight harder to avoid losing their right to dress them. That is why nerds often aren't able to do anything about their appearance until gaining a certain level of financial self-dependence. They will instead during their adolescence attempt to pick up a fashionable hobby... either trying out sports at school, learning to play guitar, or smoking cigarettes or large quantities of marijuana etc. A nerd generally is person with a high aptitude and often highly capable in cerebral topics. In fact, nerds are entirely unable to be identified reliably based on physical appearance.
A geek on the other hand is a person has no specific talent to define themselves with. They are general among the average in most everything they do. They lack muscular physiques and are self conscious about their visual appearance. In general they aren't even outcasts as they lack anything in particular to be cast out of. Unlike the nerds who are generally confident in their personal abilities in a given subject, they also are often self-conscious about how their intellect is perceived. As a result, they attempt to identify themselves as nerds by appearing similar to a adolescent nerd to allow them to establish relationships with one another to form friendships and also for the sake of self preservation.
Let's be frank, nerds and geeks generally have a rough time in school and this isn't likely to change any time soon. While nerds often are physically capable of defending themselves, they would prefer not to as it's illogical that it should be necessary. Geeks (not necessarily the fat ones) are generally unable to physically defend themselves in a one-on-one fight as the antagonizers don't tend to
So, as opposed to biting heads off of live chickens in order to be a member of a group (in that case circus performers), a modern geek chooses the group they will most likely be able to fit in with. The added fact that nerds are generally far more accepting of friends no m
This is far less disturbing and harmful than the fact that the majority of the security in airports is handled by armies of uneducated gorillas as opposed to a smaller more intelligent and more motivated group of individuals. Of course, I have yet to meet an intelligent, educated and motivated person that would be willing to work in such a position.
At least in this case, we're talking about students and not day labor. At least students are people who should in theory be bright. As for training... well let's be frank... they'll surf and find these sights and when there's a question regarding site which are so gray you're not sure which side of the line they sit on, they'll discuss it or seek guidance from a trained nanny.
With the exception of the role he playing in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape", he has been film after film trying to play roles he is thoroughly unsuited for. He tries to play roles made for guys much more macho or intelligent than he is. Other's have mentioned Keanu as being the type to fail the Turing test... but in reality, from the interviews I've seen with him, DiCaprio is often nearly as bad. I think it's terrible when you have little guy like DiCaprio who is in rush to grow up to be Matt Damon playing roles like these.
I think that DiCaprio needs someone to explain to him that he is not and never will be Bruce Willis (for pure testosterone), Matt Damon (for his ability to fake someone intelligent) or Al Pacino (for his sheer versatility and ability to play role such as the jew in "the merchant of venice"). Even worse is that someone needs to tell him that there is no way in hell he is a suitable replacement for Michael Clarke Duncan... he's too short, too small, too white and also not nearly smart enough.
He is at best who Heath Ledger was trying so hard not to be... a pretty little boy who will end up on posters in teenaged girls bedrooms.... though more like middle aged women now probably.
I truly hope they can find an actor far better suited for this role.
Well... maybe if they do a film about Babbage... Leo can play Ada.
Umm... Woz is a nerd... but yes... geeks would attempt to gain status in their geekdom by allowing someone of such nerdom to cut in line.
Remember that nerds are people that actually know things... modern day computer geeks are generally people who try to pass themselves off as nerds... of course, many nerds prefer to pass themselves off as normal people, a feat that is generally unreachable for geeks.
the program which runs Windows Update and is used to download another browser when you install a new computer right?