Academically, the school system appears to have little to offer this child. He will be bored out of his mind and will find the mundane tasks assigned to him/her in school to be mind boggling awful. But school has far more to offer this child than simply academics, don't forget that this person is in fact A CHILD.
I have been tested since I was a child by multiple shrinks and educational workers to identify my IQ. As many on Slashdot will know, the standard IQ exams pretty much top out at around 150 since it's the point on the IQ scale which pretty much certifies that the personal is above normal and therefore should be tested using more "extreme" tests. I have been given multiple different numbers as to what my IQ actually is, but that is thoroughly irrelevant. What is important is that in my old age (in my mid-30s) I am fully aware that I can pretty much figure out whatever I need to and that I have a sound ability to grasp and cope with the concept of cause and effect which in my personal opinion is a far more accurate method of judging a person's capacity than a silly pattern test such as that offered by the IQ people.
My son is very similar to myself. His thought patterns and problem solving abilities are very similar to mine. He however has the added advantage of virtually unlimited resources for learning. I was confined to the limited public libraries (lived near one of the best in the U.S., but compared to the internet, even the library of congress is limited) and lacked having adults near by capable of providing me scientific and computing information. He is years ahead in math at his school, he reads and writes his two native languages at a level well above average for his age. He grasps complex concepts in math and science at a level which college graduates would envy and yet he takes for granted since he doesn't know otherwise. He objectively evaluates events within history without assigning silly adjectives like "Good" or "Bad" to things. He instead can instead take the events which he learned about and identify cause and effect. He can even suffer through the mandatory religious education in the school system and treat it instead as humanity lessons to better understand people who are religious.
The point being, I send my son to a public school and provide him all the academic resources he needs to move at his own pace while he's not in school. For him, school provides areas of education which are less interesting to him but should be taught to him to provide him a rounded education. He learns to see himself as just another kid without seeing those other children as more or less than him. While he detests sports, he still is forced to play them in gym class and learn a bit about them. If nothing else, it will give him an insight into the nature of people who lack anything in their lives other than sports which sadly accounts for a huge part of the worlds population. He takes music classes where he gets to bang on drums and blow into wooden flutes making sounds which have little resemblance to music but still is entertaining. I want him to socially see himself as just another kid. When he reaches puberty, he should chase girls. When he reaches adulthood, he should find himself waking up on park benches wondering how he got there. He should have all the opportunities to live life and have a great time without the stupidity attached to being labelled "special".
He knows how to learn. All he really needs academically is a more experienced nerd to point him towards more information and help him to learn to research more efficiently. I provide that for my son. If I couldn't or eventually can't, then I'll hire a tutor that can. What he can't learn from books, computers and other informational sources is how to live a fulfilling life. For this, he needs to learn to associate with others and learn about the world around him.
Therefore, the best option for a kid like this is.... send him to school... make him do his mundane assignments just like the other kids and feed his brain as f
I have been more than a little grumpy in the past that too many universities, in order to make some extra money and grow are blurring the lines between IT and CS in the education and now, a CSEE degree is becoming harder and harder to find. I hate that when I need to hire a new developer, I can't feel confident that the universities are actually teaching CSEE to students as opposed to a seriously watered down version. On the brighter side, there are digital signal processing grads all over and generally, while their programming skills are often atrocious, their problem solving skills are precisely what I need.
IT is not computer science... there are a very small handful of IT guys I know which have real problem solving skills. Most on the other hand actually got themselves careers where if they're lucky, they "Get to play with all the new toys". The Cisco CCIE guys are often quite bright. But one thing which I feel is entirely common about all the IT guys is, they are forced to make huge assumptions about how the technology they're working with functions without actually understanding how it must have been developed. As a result, much of what they do is simply guessing.
The DSP Ph.D. sitting next to me made a comment recently where she said that she always felt like computer scientists tend to just hack their way through problems without any real design. She on the other hand, before even heading the the keyboard is more likely to take a pen and paper and attempt to prove the math involved with her theories before hacking implementations. Oddly, the more I think about it, the more I realize that she probably has a point in relation. And oddly, it's funny that this is how I see IT guys. It seems like it's "Hey let's try this new toy" and they find a place for it in the network... or try to come up with a reason they should buy the new toys when they're really unnecessary. I tend to make new toys when I want new toys:)
More importantly, what's the real purpose of a desktop computer anymore. In my house, I have 14 PCs at the moment. 6 media center PCs, 4 laptops and 4 miscellaneous.
Media center PCs are a great place for ARM chips. A media center PC doesn't require a great deal of CPU capacity, but it does require a good video decoder and most ARMs these days are shipping with pretty good hardware media decoders.
Development is another obvious reason. I need something to compile ARM core on for people running on ARMs. Given the current ARM offerings, none of them are fast enough to actually develop on. I'm currently using a Core i7 Sandy Bridge with 16 gigs of RAM and SSD. It's less sluggish than my last i7, but frankly, I am considering a desktop with either two or four 6 core processors in it. 5-10 seconds shaved off each compile adds up to hundreds of saved hours. I save and compile CONSTANTLY. Matlab is also much faster as you through more CPU and GPU at it.
Personal servers are another great reason. A mini-itx motherboard with 8 Serial ATA controller ports on it would be very useful. This should in theory allow building a nice little 22 terabyte RAID with very little power consumption using 8 3-gig drives, a USB thumb drive to boot from etc... with staggered spin up, a 22 TB RAID 5 might be able to function on a 50 watt power brick.
Disposable computing would be another great reason. Using pico or nano-itx motherboard based systems with ARM processors would be nice since you could have tiny desktop machines with everything you need in a small box. Every time I bring furniture to the dump, there's a bin large enough to park 3 cars in rapidly filling with computer equipment... and that's purely residential... most of the systems being thrown away are being thrown away because of one bad part (I suspect, most often a blown capacitor) or because they're too slow or just not fashionable enough anymore. With the much smaller boxes, a great deal less PCs )measured in cubic meters, not number of PCs) will end up in the bin after what I call the LCD effect passes... you know, when the world threw away a gazillion CRT screens that still worked because they're not as fancy as LCD and plasma. People will still toss machines by the bazillions, but they'll be much smaller. If the companies making these machines would also commit to alternatives to epoxy for PCBs which can be broken down easily, then it could be a wonderful step forward towards green computing.
The issue coming up isn't about ARM vs. x86. Personally, in heavy computing work loads when the processor is running at 100%, the power meter on my PC (I have one on each PC) runs at about the same number of joules per function. The ARM works great in low power requirements, but when running heavy loads, it's not that fantastic. If someone ever releases a decent ARM compiler, this might change.
What makes the ARM ideal is the configurability. The ARM market is more about jamming everything on to one chip, not providing I/O for connecting other things. So, you can often find just the right ARM for the job... but if you can't, then you'll have to wait until you can... this might change if the new ARM chips contain PCIe controllers with many lanes, but for now... just imagine the next Mac Mini being in the same box as the Apple TV ships today. There's no reason it shouldn't be. Add some more RAM and some more flash. Back in 2000, I saw Mac OS X running on x86, PPC and Sparc... I'm sure that since Apple already has all the compilers and developer tools in place, they have an ARM version too. A Mac Micro (instead of mini) could be an ARM based Mac with 64 gigs of Flash and 2 gigs of RAM with an A5 or A6 processor. The Mac Mini already could do nearly all of this anyway.
So... there are some reasons and some options.
BTW.. ARM performance in my testing is about the same as x86 if you use the same amount of power... for general purpose tasks... in heavy loads, it still doesn't touch Intel or AMD.
Sorry typo... But I have tested the Netgear as well... it maxed at about 120Mbps as the size of the NAT hash grew. I run 14 PCs (mostly hardwired) and another 20 devices such as printers, IP telephone boxes, remote power switches etc... on my connection.
When you alter the IP address of a network packet, you have to recalculate the checksum as well. With an average packet size of 1024 bytes (during high bandwidth times), that would suggest that on that 680Mhz CPU, 40000 packets per second are being NAT'd. Just for round numbers, that suggests that 1500 instructions are all that is necessary to receive a packet, buffer it, inspect it (verify IP and TCP or UDP checksums, extract the connection number as well as the source and destination IPs), lookup the translation, patch the packet, and possibly recalculate the IPv4 checksum which is highly inefficient in software due to the assumed zero value of the checksum bytes themselves. Then patch the checksum, then pass the packet back to the network interface to be transmitted again. Then you're also suggesting that the operating system which is running doesn't have task switching issues and that all the router is doing is routing and nothing else. Any decent NAT implementation these days also tends to add obfuscation logic to make multiple internal PCs appear as a single PC to the outside so that customer PC limits can't be enforced. So, there's further logic involved with meshing the connection IDs and such.
Let's not forget things like intrusion detection (hope you're running it) port forwarding, etc...
That 400+Mbps sounds like an utterly ridiculous claim. Well, except maybe in single PC environments with minimal numbers of connections.
As for "Who can transfer half the speed of the gigabit ethernet off the net?" At the office, we have full gigabit ethernet to the internet and I regularly use BitTorrent for transferring things sample videos (in full 3Gbps formats) from other places. I regularly see 500Mbps transfers. But for that we're using a behemoth of a catalyst. 500Mbps vs. 400Mbps means either I can download the video today or I'll have to wait until tomorrow.
An Arduino with a really great CPU gets us only part way. While more processing on the Arduino will be a fantastic jump in the right direction, it still is an issue with regards to I/O. This Arduino should have an option to solder on for example an Atmel FPGA which can be programmed by the CPU and in addition has X number of pins from the FPGA which are already level adjusted for 5V using 3.3v to 5v tri-state buffer chip.
Because none of the other Windows 7 phone vendors have been able to display the ability to design a phone which is physically attractive to the consumer. When I walk into Best Buy, only a few telephones manage to stand out. All those phones are "flagship phones". Phones made by companies interested in releasing one or two phones a year and instead of spamming the market with dozens of mediocre designs in a year which will stop being supported by their vendors in 3 months after you buy them are items with long term support.
Companies produce cases, bumpers, accessories, etc... for the iPhone because it's not a short term investment. Sometimes it's as simple as seeing a full rack full of accessories for a phone which makes it attractive.
HTC, Nokia and others just don't get it. If you're going to invest in a phone (meaning buying a phone which is more than just a tosser, but actually invest in it, buy the phone, accessories, apps, music, movies etc...) then there has to be some sort of implied promise from the manufacturer that the phone won't be last months crap by the time they leave the store with it. They need to make you believe they'll provide software updates for it for the next year or three. They need to believe that if they need an accessory for it, they won't have to mail order it from some shady vendor like Expansys.
RIM can enter the market with "THE WINDOWS PHONE" or "THE ANDROID PHONE". They can design something that sparkles. Build 20 different prototypes and plant them in stores and watch which ones attract the customers away from the other vendors phones. Then standardize on that design. Standardize a connector for all features from power to HDMI that can withstand several generations. Build one a year and make it simply rock.
Nokia is still trying to spam the market with piles of crap phones. I can't even figure out on their website what it is they're selling anymore. RIM sells us a dream called QNX, but frankly, that's the lamest marketing scheme I ever heard. No one cares what OS kernel you're running. Otherwise Android phones would be sold as Linux phones instead. It's the platform that matters. If you google QNX, you find tons of information on a real-time operating system (which I have developed for many times over the past 15 years) and then some stuff about Blackberry. They screwed that up HUGE!
If I wanted to switch platforms from iOS to Windows, I would seriously look for a phone that gives me the security I find in an Apple phone. And frankly, RIM CAN do it... but they'll probably be bankrupt before they manage it.
This is an issue which is more likely to effect Slashdotters than the average daily user. Many ISPs are offering 100MBps+ (in civilized countries) knowing there are factors involved such as the fact that the consumers will either never use the allocated bandwidth and there will be even less who can find suitable hardware to handle the connection.
I have personally considered in the past using KickStarter to design a SOHO Layer-3 switch with IPv6 and NAT. Wireless routers will be an issue in high bandwidth environments for a time to come since wireless routers typically use low end ARM processors and perform software based routing. Even using modern high end ARM CPUs, performing routing within software at bitrates over 60MBps is a challenge. Just the memory moves are insane.
An alternative is to use a DSP for software based routing which generally can improve performance substantially in these cases as they tend to contain a separate "Device" which they call an enhanced DMA controller, but instead is simply a device which is programmable to move memory using DMA. More advanced ones even include some scatter/gather functionality which can be useful for restamping network packets for NATing.
I can go into extensive details about how software based routers will always suffer for one reason or another and present dozens of alternative methods of implementing a SOHO (sub $300) solution to this problem, but the point is simply this. It is in fact a problem.
I can't be 100% sure whether the guys at Linksys/Cisco, Netgear, DLink etc... read Slashdot, but raising awareness to the issue may increase the awareness among these vendors to a need we "high end users" are coming across. The aging platforms from these vendors need an overhaul to support higher bandwidth and time has come which network routing is no longer really an option for strictly software based solutions. It is time we start getting consumer priced layer-3 switches with NAT, IPv6 and 6-over-4 solutions as well. The designs should include the features we expect from SOHO routers but should function as switches. This is entirely possible using low end FPGAs and using for example either an Intel Stellerton platform or possibly a Xilinx with embedded ARM would be ideal for these cases.
So, I am pretty pleased this topic has come up here. I am hoping that by the time my ISP upgrades me to 100 MBps (I'm a cheapskate... I only pay for 50up/50down, but can get 400up/400down for twice the price) I'll be able to handle the performance. At the moment, I'm using a Cisco 1900 series router which is soon to max out.
People need to understand already that humor is when you can make jokes and laugh at funny things. Do things that make people smile or smile when you find something funny.
Humour on the other hand is not the same thing. To understand humour, you have to understand that the term funny isn't referring "Oh my god!!! He was so funny. I nearly laughed my ass off and at one point damn near choked on my lung". In the case of humour, funny refers to something like "Hmm.... this fish smells funny... would you eat still eat it?"
Humour is based on statements that are either strictly ironic or sardonic. They can't actually be humorous. Also, humour is often so hard to understand even by the connoisseurs of "fine humour" that under all circumstances after a humourous statement is made, in order to ensure that the audience of said humour is prompted with some sort of explanation as to why it was in fact humourous and therefore the audience will understand they are meant to smile. It is also important to understand that humour is entirely dependent on a laugh track and cannot be understood or appreciated properly without it.
A fine example of humor vs. humour would be that in humor, a clown would entertain children by throwing a pie at another clowns face. The other clown would then begrudgingly wipe the whipped cream from around his mouth, then his eyes. He would the swing a big fish around to smack the first clown back in revenge, but that clown would duck and the swing clown would continue his swing and fall down. That would be humorous.
In the case of humour. Some bald guy would throw a pie at another guy wearing a suit. The laugh track would giggle a little in the background, something not too noisy or intrusive. Another guy would come on stage and say "He hit that guy in the face with a pie... that's funny!" at which point the laugh track would prompt the audience to grin by being played loudly and prolonged.
There have been odd freaks of nature within England (the Scotts and Irish in general are just damn funny, but have been forced over centuries to spell humor as humour as to allow the English to claim a superiority by associating humor with humour as opposed to adopting humor in lieu of humour) such as John Cleese who has managed to combine humor with humour to entertain humans and English alike. We have reason to believe however that he is in fact the bastard child of his mother and the Scottish man servant as the genetics required to understand humor are absolutely absent from the gene pool found in England.
To prove this, there will be multiple readers who either are English or sympathize with the English (such as those social oddities found in Vancouver) who will take offense to this post and rise to the bait and either attempt to prove me wrong or simply express being offended. The proof of this is based on the fact that they simply will lack the ability to understand that this is a posting which uses their humour as a the subject of my humor. Additionally, there will be at least one person who takes serious offense to American's trying to take ownership of a language they spent nearly a millennium hacking into the utter rubbish it has now evolved to and that Webster's attack on the precious Queen's 'ou' to abbreviate the far less efficient 'o' (remember inbreeding) is simply a spelling difference as opposed to a differentiation great enough to justify an alternative definition.
Here in Norway, our configuration isn't too much different with regards to the distribution of the signals. The primary difference is that instead of using coax over fiber as you've explained, instead, the signals are multiplexed by using VLANs. This makes it so that the pretty much any common ethernet switch (by common, I mean common infrastructure grade) can be used for distributing the signals. Therefore there's no additional need for being able to broadcast a non-ethernet signal over the fiber.
The drawback as I see it in comparison is that all the television channels belong to individual multicasts and therefore unless you have something similar to the ONT which will join all the multiplexes and buffer and remultiplexes them and then modulates all the new multiplexes as DVB-C. If the provider were to provide MPTS streams on a separate multicast, then this could theoretically be handled by a relatively inexpensive unit... something in the cost level of a cable modem... well possibly even less as demodulating QAM is more expensive than modulating given the substantially less complex clock circuitry.
There are a few companies which have attempted to make DVB-IP to DVB-C gateways, but their systems were not as advanced. What they did was to produce a centralized set top box which would then contain 3 individual DVB-C modulators that would rebroadcast a single channel each. Then using RF based remote controls, the viewer would change their channel at the set top box itself.
Altibox (the biggest fiber provider in Norway) for the moment will do everything possible to guarantee the set top box rental fees since after 4-6 months, those boxes are generating huge revenues for the company. They also want to guarantee that every time you look at the TV guide, you're being bombarded by advertisements for VoD.
I am pretty impressed in the end by the FIOS design after all... I'm not 100% convinced it's the right design, but until things like ethernet switches and jack are more common in a household... meaning that when a house is built, conduits are installed in the walls and a patch panel is present in a centralized location, it might be the best solution possible.
Holy shit... as a developer of broadcast television infrastructure equipment which is used throughout the world, though predominantly in Europe, I thought I was clued in quite a bit on the back-assward methods used within the industry for transmitting TV and Internet signals.
This was a total shocker for me though. I'm a huge fan of using wavelength multiplexing within fiber. Especially when the fiber in my house is a single fiber as opposed to pairs which are much harder to make look pretty in a house. However this is one of the funniest things I ever heard of.
It's taken a really long time for the industry to finally come up with a less than insanely shitty method of using coax cabling for digital media access. Oddly enough, the cable companies have more or less completely rebuild their coax backbones to make it happen... what makes it odd is that they wanted to keep the coax to avoid having to lay new cable.. haha wow that worked well.
Now, it appears that Verizon has decided to transmit the entire cable multiplex over a single wavelength, therefore allowing them to a) guarantee their bandwidth usage even if it's insanely high, b) decrease hackability of TV fiber as it is on a not so common wavelength and therefore difficult for consumers/hackers to get receivers for it. c) run less expensive multiplexers they wouldn't require conditional IP multicasting at the switches. d) decrease the cost of maintaining a huge TCP/IP network of devices as it would be possible to remove the IP layer altogether and use a more reliable ATM style layer.
This design so fantastically screws consumers into buying/leasing equipment exclusively from Verizon that it damn near guarantees Verizon a minimum of $30 a month extra per average household just in equipment rentals. And what's best is, they can claim "Sure, we support using third party hardware with our system Mr. FCC, but there's no law that says we have to help anyone make equipment that works with out network is there? But if anyone ever does... sure, we'll support them".
The only true benefit of this design to the consumer is that it would be possible to make a fiber to DVB-C converter that would theoretically make it possible for a TV to receive the signal using the digital coax connection within the TV.
I am SOOOOO glad I don't live in the states anymore... this stuff would infuriate me... it's bad enough I had to make an FPGA for brute forcing DVB-CAS in order to cut my power usage in the house by 100watts (24/7 since the shutting off the set top box from the fiber company requires a 3-5 minute startup time). Now I use an FPGA which consumes 5watts to crack the keys and shared them out with the rest of the house. Saves me a fortune. The FIOS thing would drive me nuts... oh there's the additional bitch about FIOS which is that it's DOG SLOW!!!!
In a country built on the concept of being punishing several races of people who had the audacity to occupy our land before we discovered it, it only seems right that now we punish people for thinking of things before we did too.
First of all, there are multiple types of RAID. There is mirroring and there is striping with parity with regards to ensuring that the R in raid is not meaningless.
Everyone knows for reasons of pure logic that having two identical mirrors are the best minimal solution. This means that you have at least one functioning copy at all times. Then you can remirror to a new set of devices when a failure in one copy occurs.
There is however a problem. Even in the best RAID enclosures, the close proximity of the drives tends to make the drives fail relative to one another. The likelihood that the two drives neighboring a failed drive (physically) being produced in consecutively in the same batch or being of the precise same design is great. Therefore, for truly important data, it is common sense to have multiple levels of redundancy.
To achieve multiple levels of redundancy, there are several options. The "best" is three or more way mirroring (with at least one pair of mirrors offsite). The next best is to implement parity and mirroring. Therefore you have two identical RAID 5s. My personal favorite which optimizes cost vs. reliability is RAID 6 (double parity) plus spare. In addition, by monitoring the number of spare sectors on the drive (all drives have spare sectors for remapping bad sectors), when the number of spare sectors drops below a certain level for a given drive, the drive would immediately mirror to a spare and an alarm would be generated for the spare the be replaced. In addition to this, using rsync or similar to mirror to an offsite location is a must.
The goal is.. NEVER EVER EVER lose redundancy. When you have one copy left, you have one point of failure.
The important thing to remember here isn't the quality of the drives involved. The important thing to remember is that all drives fail. Screw the MTBF ratings, they're utter rubbish since that's the duration of the expected life of a drive that doesn't fail. The reality on the other hand is that drives fail and you SHOULD NEVER EVER EVER trust the reliability of a drive, file-system or subsystem.
To bitch at you for your rubbish... your comment " then millions would not be using RAID as the defacto method of redundancy" is just nonsense. RAID is the defacto standard because it's relatively easy, cheap and most importantly... for the most part, there are no other alternatives. The best I've seen so far was Microsoft's attempt with their Windows Home Server files system which was removed from the latest version. It was great... it was wasteful as it required two copies of everything, but it had less points of failure than any other RAID system I've encountered. It was genius, too bad they didn't follow through with it.
Here in Norway, all medical records are centralized and on a separate secure network. Of course, we don't worry about things like payment and insurance systems because all of our medical costs are paid for by the government. We only pay tiny symbolic doctors fees which are designed to keep us from going to the doctor 100 times a week.
When you live in a 3rd world country like the U.S. (been to Alabama and the shit holes in Mexico, the difference being people in Alabama have color TV and glass or screen in the windows of their trailer holes and in Mexico, the houses are made of clay and the people who live in them work for a living or starve... no welfare), you complain about anything like centralized medical databases and socialized medicine because you would rather live in fear of all your neighbors then to improve their quality of living enough to reduce the risks.
But in alternative circumstances, non-medical, fax machines should have died a long time ago.
The #1 security problem with any device is the user. And therefore, my point stands... Windows, iPhone, Blackberry, etc... are all insanely shitty regarding security.
As for the lack of trying issue here... let's say that I would never consider a hacker a threat that tries to do anything other than using the weakest link in security.
I did take offense to the GP... for years I've been complaining about people making ridiculous false statements about security based on stupid little things like "Well, no one has hacked it yet... we think" or "It's java so it must be secure". If I were a hacker and a thief... I WOULD LOVE JAVA!!! Banks would be so much harder to hack without it. Combined with stupid people in general, hiding a trojan that can hijack a bank account would be much more difficult.
Years ago before Jon published the crack to DVD, I was investigating the terms required in order to obtain a license to CSS so I could write a DVD player for Linux. Part of the agreement (designed by Intel actually) clearly stated that any implementation, software or otherwise must not be able to be reverse engineered without a multi-million dollar laboratory. And Intel sold the movie industry this crap security design based on ideas that such a thing could possibly be achieved. They lied to the industry about security and it cost a lot of people a lot of money and a lot of jobs.
People lie to the general public about things like 'The Secure System' actually existing. People say buy product A instead of product B because it's more secure... which should instead be said, if you remove the human factor, it might be more secure.
So... let's take all these great track records and whatnot of a platform a toss them out... a platform is only as secure as the user. And the mentality of the common user is "This computer expert friend of mine told me this phone is secure... so I don't have to worry about it... I can click anything and it won't be a problem".
In theory, there is very little past the 3rd grade which people will use throughout their lives. Most people never use more than basic arithmetic, percentages and maybe interest calculation from math (everyone uses statistics and fractions, but more for making up numbers than from the mathematical sense). The majority of people don't use much science at all, if anything, I would say that teaching everyone anatomy, biology and physiology maybe even botany has proven to make jobs harder for doctors since people can now misdiagnose themselves and their children with bigger words they don't understand. English... don't make me laugh. Social studies... let's be frank... the fact that Christine O'Donnell managed to get 30% of the vote is absolute proof that people don't understand shit about social studies. And statistics have shown time and again that there are an insanely high number of people who couldn't find their own home on a globe.
Some people would say that teaching skills to the kids when they're that small would be a really bad idea. Through 6th grade, the education should most likely be entirely academic. Some might argue that it would be beneficial to give kids with low aptitude for academic education an opportunity to end a trade school where they're taught a skill in the 7th grade would make sense. This would solve many problems... unfortunately... there could be quite a few great minds of the future who get lost in that system.
Skills aren't for children. Dad or mom can teach them skills at that age... in a school... ABCs and 123s are much better.
As for children knowing how to use computers... well, I hate the idea of my kid making power point presentations in school... is degrading... it makes them into business school/saleman idiot drones. Basic programming, problem solving, etc... would be much better:)
Yes... a proper silicon fab plant costs billions to build. Ask Intel, Foundery, TSMC or the others involved. Therefore any solar company will be limited by the silicon they can acquire without the ability to experiment, tool and retool thee plants. Given the outrageous cost of this type of business, it either needs to be government run or whoever is running it will have one chance at most to get it right.
That being said... your point is utter rubbish in this context since anyone with a clue should have realized this long before ever getting this business running. When the crooks running this company started taking the money, they should have made it perfectly clear to the idiot politicians they begged for money that this company would likely leak like a wooden ship hit by a cruise missile. Additionally, it would be likely that this company would be so heavily in debt by the time it folded that the company's value was not the eventual possibility to turn a profit, but instead was to provide a tremendous amount of research in solar energy to the world after it has gone defunct, allowing future companies to startup using a niche of their research and turn a profit based on it.
Based on that, I'm convinced that some people got VERY VERY fat on this. I'd even guess that there are some politicians involved in the funding process who did quite well on this. This stinks of either criminal stupidity or outright corruption. Giving more money to these people would have been a curse.
I haven't read the whole posting, but I highly disagree with the use of the term moderately with regards to significant in this context. First I would need to understand your usage of the term significant. Are you the type of person that considers a Hummer to be a monster truck or an economy vehicle for city driving? That would give be a better idea of how to interpret your use of the word significant. Then in relation, the use of the optional term moderately can be applied, but again... I'd have to know if you're the type of person that uses only half the 2kg tub of butter on a slice of bread because all things are good in moderation or if you believe moderation is a bit more practical of a term (relatively speaking).
Please clarify or your entire statement must be dubbed invalid and utterly unreliable. Work and personal references as well as research references would be greatly appreciated.
P.S. - please don't forget to include bank account numbers and personal identification so we can properly audit your accounts for inconsistencies that could theoretically be used to prove you can't manage your own business and therefore should NOT be allowed to interfere with others.:)
Ummm... it's what?!?!?!? Do you seriously have enough experience with both platforms to make such a judgement?
What part of this article was about security? What kind of security are you talking about?
Blackberry is a Java based phone. If you find ANY opening in it that would allow you to alter the class loader code, it's all tits to the wind after that. You could insert viruses all over that. Oh and given the crap quality of the app store, it seems like it's probably REALLY easy to get an app on the device with malicious intent.
Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry are EQUALLY shitty with regards to security and quite spouting off worthless trash like this. Show me a secure smart phone operating system and I'll sell you this bridge I own in Brooklyn.
Seriously... lots of people rushed out and bought the shit tablets on the market that look sorta like iPads but just aren't. Honeycomb is kinda interesting, but not really. It's a version 0.0001 of an operating system and the two times I played with it... it struck me that Google needs to spend more time communicated with app developers to try and make a better, more uniform experience.
iPad is a more or less useless device which is fairly ok for browsing the web, not too bad as a GPS if you have a iPhone near by and is quite nice for watching films.... you can't do anything useful on it without a computer to do the hard work, but you can rent or download a kiddy movie to keep the brats quiet on the car trip. At my company where we were all given iPads for christmas last year, no one actually uses it for anything productive.. half the people just gave them to their kids or wives as they had no utility. At my wife's company (newspaper) where every journalist has one, the ones who couldn't type to begin with are using iPads to write their articles now, the rest are using it for wikipedia access while they're typing on their laptops.
Android tablets don't run an software of interest. They are pretty boring to look at. They don't have a proper music or movie store as there's no iTunes type application to sync with. They just devices without an ecosystem behind them.
Oh... let's also note the massive number of users who got burnt last Christmas when they rushed out and bought Android tablets for their wives, kids, etc... only to find that the lifespan of that device was measured in hours since in January, Google said "we're not supporting all those old tablet in the next OS release coming out next month... and BTW... nearly no software written for the new OS will run on the old OS... and BTW... you shouldn't waste your time developing for the old OS".
Microsoft will release Windows for ARM and tablets... with an external keyboard, those tablets will be useful as actual laptops. So a keyboard case with a touch pad would effectively make the device a laptop. When you want to use it as a tablet, watch films, play angry birds, etc... it'll work great. When you want to log into the office and do some work with keyboard and mouse, it'll work great. If you want to program an new app for the device, you can run Visual Studio and it'll work great. This is the point when tablets will start taking over traditional laptop sales.
Until then... there's just no alternative to laptops and iPads.
It wasn't even about the portable music player. It was about the overall infrastructure. When iTunes was released, the commercial music players sucked (think adware/spyware from Real) and the free music players were all about bling bling (think WinAmp) which chased away users like myself. (And I paid the $10 for WinAmp).
He turned Apple into a music center... then, instead of treating iTunes as an accessory to a music player, he treated the music player as an accessory to this free program which he released not only for Mac, but also for PC... for free. Then, instead of focusing on marketing this music player accessory to his normal audience of Apple cultists (and if you consider Jobs to be anything less than an insanely successful cult leader, you'd be insulting him), he decided to target the general consumer. He went after the most lucrative music market in the world... the teenaged-mid 20s girl. By extension, he went after the mothers who do things like buy shoes and purses to feel prettier. The iPod was NOT about the music. It wasn't about being an electronic device. It was completely about the fashion involved.
This proved so successful that Mac, iPad, iPod, iPhone are ALL ABOUT FASHION. They cost more... so does Prada. They lack the features of the competitors... so does Louis Vuitton. They are far more restrictive and often less functional than the competitors... so is Jimmy Choo. But they shine. They provide status. They are pretty.
Apple tried making servers... the XServe was BEAUTIFUL... FASHIONALBLE. Any data center using these things would stand out as being sexy... but that wasn't enough. The product just didn't take off.
Apple continued trying to make big video editing computers like the Mac Pro. Well... look at what Apple's done to Final Cut X and Mac OS X Server. I assure you. The lifespan of the Mac Pro is limited. In fact, the latest Mac Book Pro has just as much CPU power as most post production video editors have in their studio systems. Using accessories from Blackmagic, Promise and others that connect via Thunderbolt, a Mac Book Pro or iMac is a far more ideal post production video editing system than a Mac Pro. After all, you can bring your projects on the road with you when you don't need the editing decks and mixing boards. The Mac Pro is soon a goner. Costs too much to produce and it doesn't really give you much more than you get from a notebook these days. Apple seems to be yielding the high end pro market to Avid and being happy with the average mom and pop shop. Final Cut will help them sell more notebooks for $299. In the past, the price of Final Cut was so high that people would buy PCs with Vegas if they couldn't afford the Apple stuff.
Apple is about fashion... Being part of something bigger by making a purchase... you too can be special.
Let's also point out that in a world where :
"Nerds do their best to be perceived as normal and geeks do their best to be perceived as nerds"
Apple allows geeks to present themselves as nerds a little easier to the common individual because by learning the specs of Apple machines and the boot commands to boot from different devices and how to install boot camp etc... they can pretend to be nerds. And being an Apple nerd by extension is more fashionable than being just a geek. Therefore, when the average consumer goes to the geekiest person they know, incorrectly thinking they are nerds by extension, the geek will spew out specs and geek crap about Windows and Mac and convince the people who came to them that in their informed expert opinion, the Mac is by far a much better solution.
It's about being more. And Apple gives people that. Windows is what those other losers who refuse to spend $400 on a pair of shoes get. Apple is fashion baby. As an example... the first thing most people think of when they hear the name Steve Jobs isn't Apple... but it's "Black Turtleneck"
So... unless Apple can continue to produce an mystic of approachable high fashion.... it'll be an issue. I think Steve has laid a great foundation for the future of Apple. He's not leaving and he's not bad mouthing them on the way out. Instead, he'll stick around and help continue the fashion.
It is clear to me that this guy Kevin Slavin, who appears to be a marketing guy from whatever searching I can do has impressed someone or another with his knowledge of places where algorithms are used. I am convinced however from the searches which I've done regarding what he's talked about that he doesn't clearly understand what an algorithm is. Therefore, for his limited understanding of what an algorithm is, he is an expert on that topic.
Generally the term expert is applied best to a person who hasn't learned enough about a topic to recognize its scope. I personally feed my family by understanding other peoples algorithms and developing new algorithms for topics such as motion search, frequency domain conversions, etc... yet I would never call myself an expert on algorithms, I know way too much about algorithms to ever dare calling myself an expert on them.
I hope in the future that the term expert will be more clearly understood by the average person. Any "expert" would clearly understand that the term expert is provided to allow the uneducated masses to perceive an individual as an who knows more about it than the reporter presenting them does.
I personally prefer specialists when I need information. That's a person who focuses a considerable portion of their lives in the direction of studying and researching a topic until such time as their knowledge of the topic would allow them to be considered a legitimate resource of information on the topic.
The average person loves experts though. They run to their priests when they need an expert on matters of life. They run to their unshaven neighbor when they need a computer expert. etc...
What I find most humorous about the articles which are linked is the fact that wall street is hiring mathematicians and physicists to program high speed trading systems. I love mathematicians and physicists, a little bummed I didn't go that route in life myself... instead I became a specialist in algorithm development. Frankly, mathematicians and physicists make shitted programmers. The one sitting in front of me can do magic with numbers, but his code is utter crap that falls apart all the time. The one to the right of me doesn't even bother writing code, she just hands me the math and I write it for her. Frankly, high speed trading algorithms require a much more computer oriented mind... mathematicians and physicists are an utter waste of money in these circumstances. They should instead of be looking for trial and error hackers which would develop algorithms based on simulated markets and once they're proven to win more than they lose... put them into production. It would almost certainly be much more accurate and yield much better results at much better prices.
There was a point in time where system administrators needed to be more capable than simply being able to install Windows. What you're describing is an excellent example of extremely poor IT within the organization... I know this because my company provided computer (which I use for e-mail) is riddled with this crap from half-assed IT "professionals" as well.
Booting Windows should never take more than a minute. Or at least should never take more than a minute following POST. Login scripts are piss poor alternatives to having a single actual programmer on staff. A programmer who actually focuses on IT related tasks can make a single configurable application capable of sorting out all the citrix, antivirus and other crap involved.
Also, there's the issue of application virtualization. This is 2011, app virtualization makes a tremendous amount of things much easier and faster. In a virtualized app environment, most things don't need to start up until they are actually needed. Additionally, when coping with software getting messed up, it's much easier to sort out than if machines need to be reinstalled. Just delete the old app folder, copy over a new one.
In fact, thanks to app virtualization (App-Z isn't even that bad), boot times are almost nothing. This is because the system itself stays relatively virgin the entire time. No installed apps, no startup scripts, etc... therefore, the machine boots as fast after a year as it did the day you got the machine.
I'm sorry... this whole start up script thing really unnerves me... I actually can't believe there are still a bunch of IT losers out there that use them. It's truly pathetic.
Oh... and as for Windows domain policies... that's easily solved... make an app for that. If the stock stuff doesn't work... fix it. Adding delays is hacking the shit out of it. Adding delays doesn't fix problems, it just hides them away for a little while until the machine gets so slow again that you need to extend the delays further.
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Academically, the school system appears to have little to offer this child. He will be bored out of his mind and will find the mundane tasks assigned to him/her in school to be mind boggling awful. But school has far more to offer this child than simply academics, don't forget that this person is in fact A CHILD.
I have been tested since I was a child by multiple shrinks and educational workers to identify my IQ. As many on Slashdot will know, the standard IQ exams pretty much top out at around 150 since it's the point on the IQ scale which pretty much certifies that the personal is above normal and therefore should be tested using more "extreme" tests. I have been given multiple different numbers as to what my IQ actually is, but that is thoroughly irrelevant. What is important is that in my old age (in my mid-30s) I am fully aware that I can pretty much figure out whatever I need to and that I have a sound ability to grasp and cope with the concept of cause and effect which in my personal opinion is a far more accurate method of judging a person's capacity than a silly pattern test such as that offered by the IQ people.
My son is very similar to myself. His thought patterns and problem solving abilities are very similar to mine. He however has the added advantage of virtually unlimited resources for learning. I was confined to the limited public libraries (lived near one of the best in the U.S., but compared to the internet, even the library of congress is limited) and lacked having adults near by capable of providing me scientific and computing information. He is years ahead in math at his school, he reads and writes his two native languages at a level well above average for his age. He grasps complex concepts in math and science at a level which college graduates would envy and yet he takes for granted since he doesn't know otherwise. He objectively evaluates events within history without assigning silly adjectives like "Good" or "Bad" to things. He instead can instead take the events which he learned about and identify cause and effect. He can even suffer through the mandatory religious education in the school system and treat it instead as humanity lessons to better understand people who are religious.
The point being, I send my son to a public school and provide him all the academic resources he needs to move at his own pace while he's not in school. For him, school provides areas of education which are less interesting to him but should be taught to him to provide him a rounded education. He learns to see himself as just another kid without seeing those other children as more or less than him. While he detests sports, he still is forced to play them in gym class and learn a bit about them. If nothing else, it will give him an insight into the nature of people who lack anything in their lives other than sports which sadly accounts for a huge part of the worlds population. He takes music classes where he gets to bang on drums and blow into wooden flutes making sounds which have little resemblance to music but still is entertaining. I want him to socially see himself as just another kid. When he reaches puberty, he should chase girls. When he reaches adulthood, he should find himself waking up on park benches wondering how he got there. He should have all the opportunities to live life and have a great time without the stupidity attached to being labelled "special".
He knows how to learn. All he really needs academically is a more experienced nerd to point him towards more information and help him to learn to research more efficiently. I provide that for my son. If I couldn't or eventually can't, then I'll hire a tutor that can. What he can't learn from books, computers and other informational sources is how to live a fulfilling life. For this, he needs to learn to associate with others and learn about the world around him.
Therefore, the best option for a kid like this is.... send him to school... make him do his mundane assignments just like the other kids and feed his brain as f
And you know God has to be real because there's like a whole billion people who believe in him/her/it.
What kind of an argument is that really?
Mass scale proliferation through business agreements and perceived lack of alternatives does not a great platform make.
I have been more than a little grumpy in the past that too many universities, in order to make some extra money and grow are blurring the lines between IT and CS in the education and now, a CSEE degree is becoming harder and harder to find. I hate that when I need to hire a new developer, I can't feel confident that the universities are actually teaching CSEE to students as opposed to a seriously watered down version. On the brighter side, there are digital signal processing grads all over and generally, while their programming skills are often atrocious, their problem solving skills are precisely what I need.
:)
IT is not computer science... there are a very small handful of IT guys I know which have real problem solving skills. Most on the other hand actually got themselves careers where if they're lucky, they "Get to play with all the new toys". The Cisco CCIE guys are often quite bright. But one thing which I feel is entirely common about all the IT guys is, they are forced to make huge assumptions about how the technology they're working with functions without actually understanding how it must have been developed. As a result, much of what they do is simply guessing.
The DSP Ph.D. sitting next to me made a comment recently where she said that she always felt like computer scientists tend to just hack their way through problems without any real design. She on the other hand, before even heading the the keyboard is more likely to take a pen and paper and attempt to prove the math involved with her theories before hacking implementations. Oddly, the more I think about it, the more I realize that she probably has a point in relation. And oddly, it's funny that this is how I see IT guys. It seems like it's "Hey let's try this new toy" and they find a place for it in the network... or try to come up with a reason they should buy the new toys when they're really unnecessary. I tend to make new toys when I want new toys
More importantly, what's the real purpose of a desktop computer anymore. In my house, I have 14 PCs at the moment. 6 media center PCs, 4 laptops and 4 miscellaneous.
Media center PCs are a great place for ARM chips. A media center PC doesn't require a great deal of CPU capacity, but it does require a good video decoder and most ARMs these days are shipping with pretty good hardware media decoders.
Development is another obvious reason. I need something to compile ARM core on for people running on ARMs. Given the current ARM offerings, none of them are fast enough to actually develop on. I'm currently using a Core i7 Sandy Bridge with 16 gigs of RAM and SSD. It's less sluggish than my last i7, but frankly, I am considering a desktop with either two or four 6 core processors in it. 5-10 seconds shaved off each compile adds up to hundreds of saved hours. I save and compile CONSTANTLY. Matlab is also much faster as you through more CPU and GPU at it.
Personal servers are another great reason. A mini-itx motherboard with 8 Serial ATA controller ports on it would be very useful. This should in theory allow building a nice little 22 terabyte RAID with very little power consumption using 8 3-gig drives, a USB thumb drive to boot from etc... with staggered spin up, a 22 TB RAID 5 might be able to function on a 50 watt power brick.
Disposable computing would be another great reason. Using pico or nano-itx motherboard based systems with ARM processors would be nice since you could have tiny desktop machines with everything you need in a small box. Every time I bring furniture to the dump, there's a bin large enough to park 3 cars in rapidly filling with computer equipment... and that's purely residential... most of the systems being thrown away are being thrown away because of one bad part (I suspect, most often a blown capacitor) or because they're too slow or just not fashionable enough anymore. With the much smaller boxes, a great deal less PCs )measured in cubic meters, not number of PCs) will end up in the bin after what I call the LCD effect passes... you know, when the world threw away a gazillion CRT screens that still worked because they're not as fancy as LCD and plasma. People will still toss machines by the bazillions, but they'll be much smaller. If the companies making these machines would also commit to alternatives to epoxy for PCBs which can be broken down easily, then it could be a wonderful step forward towards green computing.
The issue coming up isn't about ARM vs. x86. Personally, in heavy computing work loads when the processor is running at 100%, the power meter on my PC (I have one on each PC) runs at about the same number of joules per function. The ARM works great in low power requirements, but when running heavy loads, it's not that fantastic. If someone ever releases a decent ARM compiler, this might change.
What makes the ARM ideal is the configurability. The ARM market is more about jamming everything on to one chip, not providing I/O for connecting other things. So, you can often find just the right ARM for the job... but if you can't, then you'll have to wait until you can... this might change if the new ARM chips contain PCIe controllers with many lanes, but for now... just imagine the next Mac Mini being in the same box as the Apple TV ships today. There's no reason it shouldn't be. Add some more RAM and some more flash. Back in 2000, I saw Mac OS X running on x86, PPC and Sparc... I'm sure that since Apple already has all the compilers and developer tools in place, they have an ARM version too. A Mac Micro (instead of mini) could be an ARM based Mac with 64 gigs of Flash and 2 gigs of RAM with an A5 or A6 processor. The Mac Mini already could do nearly all of this anyway.
So... there are some reasons and some options.
BTW.. ARM performance in my testing is about the same as x86 if you use the same amount of power... for general purpose tasks... in heavy loads, it still doesn't touch Intel or AMD.
Sorry typo... But I have tested the Netgear as well... it maxed at about 120Mbps as the size of the NAT hash grew. I run 14 PCs (mostly hardwired) and another 20 devices such as printers, IP telephone boxes, remote power switches etc... on my connection.
When you alter the IP address of a network packet, you have to recalculate the checksum as well. With an average packet size of 1024 bytes (during high bandwidth times), that would suggest that on that 680Mhz CPU, 40000 packets per second are being NAT'd. Just for round numbers, that suggests that 1500 instructions are all that is necessary to receive a packet, buffer it, inspect it (verify IP and TCP or UDP checksums, extract the connection number as well as the source and destination IPs), lookup the translation, patch the packet, and possibly recalculate the IPv4 checksum which is highly inefficient in software due to the assumed zero value of the checksum bytes themselves. Then patch the checksum, then pass the packet back to the network interface to be transmitted again. Then you're also suggesting that the operating system which is running doesn't have task switching issues and that all the router is doing is routing and nothing else. Any decent NAT implementation these days also tends to add obfuscation logic to make multiple internal PCs appear as a single PC to the outside so that customer PC limits can't be enforced. So, there's further logic involved with meshing the connection IDs and such.
Let's not forget things like intrusion detection (hope you're running it) port forwarding, etc...
That 400+Mbps sounds like an utterly ridiculous claim. Well, except maybe in single PC environments with minimal numbers of connections.
As for "Who can transfer half the speed of the gigabit ethernet off the net?" At the office, we have full gigabit ethernet to the internet and I regularly use BitTorrent for transferring things sample videos (in full 3Gbps formats) from other places. I regularly see 500Mbps transfers. But for that we're using a behemoth of a catalyst. 500Mbps vs. 400Mbps means either I can download the video today or I'll have to wait until tomorrow.
An Arduino with a really great CPU gets us only part way. While more processing on the Arduino will be a fantastic jump in the right direction, it still is an issue with regards to I/O. This Arduino should have an option to solder on for example an Atmel FPGA which can be programmed by the CPU and in addition has X number of pins from the FPGA which are already level adjusted for 5V using 3.3v to 5v tri-state buffer chip.
:)
This is just my two cents
Because none of the other Windows 7 phone vendors have been able to display the ability to design a phone which is physically attractive to the consumer. When I walk into Best Buy, only a few telephones manage to stand out. All those phones are "flagship phones". Phones made by companies interested in releasing one or two phones a year and instead of spamming the market with dozens of mediocre designs in a year which will stop being supported by their vendors in 3 months after you buy them are items with long term support.
Companies produce cases, bumpers, accessories, etc... for the iPhone because it's not a short term investment. Sometimes it's as simple as seeing a full rack full of accessories for a phone which makes it attractive.
HTC, Nokia and others just don't get it. If you're going to invest in a phone (meaning buying a phone which is more than just a tosser, but actually invest in it, buy the phone, accessories, apps, music, movies etc...) then there has to be some sort of implied promise from the manufacturer that the phone won't be last months crap by the time they leave the store with it. They need to make you believe they'll provide software updates for it for the next year or three. They need to believe that if they need an accessory for it, they won't have to mail order it from some shady vendor like Expansys.
RIM can enter the market with "THE WINDOWS PHONE" or "THE ANDROID PHONE". They can design something that sparkles. Build 20 different prototypes and plant them in stores and watch which ones attract the customers away from the other vendors phones. Then standardize on that design. Standardize a connector for all features from power to HDMI that can withstand several generations. Build one a year and make it simply rock.
Nokia is still trying to spam the market with piles of crap phones. I can't even figure out on their website what it is they're selling anymore. RIM sells us a dream called QNX, but frankly, that's the lamest marketing scheme I ever heard. No one cares what OS kernel you're running. Otherwise Android phones would be sold as Linux phones instead. It's the platform that matters. If you google QNX, you find tons of information on a real-time operating system (which I have developed for many times over the past 15 years) and then some stuff about Blackberry. They screwed that up HUGE!
If I wanted to switch platforms from iOS to Windows, I would seriously look for a phone that gives me the security I find in an Apple phone. And frankly, RIM CAN do it... but they'll probably be bankrupt before they manage it.
This is an issue which is more likely to effect Slashdotters than the average daily user. Many ISPs are offering 100MBps+ (in civilized countries) knowing there are factors involved such as the fact that the consumers will either never use the allocated bandwidth and there will be even less who can find suitable hardware to handle the connection.
I have personally considered in the past using KickStarter to design a SOHO Layer-3 switch with IPv6 and NAT. Wireless routers will be an issue in high bandwidth environments for a time to come since wireless routers typically use low end ARM processors and perform software based routing. Even using modern high end ARM CPUs, performing routing within software at bitrates over 60MBps is a challenge. Just the memory moves are insane.
An alternative is to use a DSP for software based routing which generally can improve performance substantially in these cases as they tend to contain a separate "Device" which they call an enhanced DMA controller, but instead is simply a device which is programmable to move memory using DMA. More advanced ones even include some scatter/gather functionality which can be useful for restamping network packets for NATing.
I can go into extensive details about how software based routers will always suffer for one reason or another and present dozens of alternative methods of implementing a SOHO (sub $300) solution to this problem, but the point is simply this. It is in fact a problem.
I can't be 100% sure whether the guys at Linksys/Cisco, Netgear, DLink etc... read Slashdot, but raising awareness to the issue may increase the awareness among these vendors to a need we "high end users" are coming across. The aging platforms from these vendors need an overhaul to support higher bandwidth and time has come which network routing is no longer really an option for strictly software based solutions. It is time we start getting consumer priced layer-3 switches with NAT, IPv6 and 6-over-4 solutions as well. The designs should include the features we expect from SOHO routers but should function as switches. This is entirely possible using low end FPGAs and using for example either an Intel Stellerton platform or possibly a Xilinx with embedded ARM would be ideal for these cases.
So, I am pretty pleased this topic has come up here. I am hoping that by the time my ISP upgrades me to 100 MBps (I'm a cheapskate... I only pay for 50up/50down, but can get 400up/400down for twice the price) I'll be able to handle the performance. At the moment, I'm using a Cisco 1900 series router which is soon to max out.
People need to understand already that humor is when you can make jokes and laugh at funny things. Do things that make people smile or smile when you find something funny.
Humour on the other hand is not the same thing. To understand humour, you have to understand that the term funny isn't referring "Oh my god!!! He was so funny. I nearly laughed my ass off and at one point damn near choked on my lung". In the case of humour, funny refers to something like "Hmm.... this fish smells funny... would you eat still eat it?"
Humour is based on statements that are either strictly ironic or sardonic. They can't actually be humorous. Also, humour is often so hard to understand even by the connoisseurs of "fine humour" that under all circumstances after a humourous statement is made, in order to ensure that the audience of said humour is prompted with some sort of explanation as to why it was in fact humourous and therefore the audience will understand they are meant to smile. It is also important to understand that humour is entirely dependent on a laugh track and cannot be understood or appreciated properly without it.
A fine example of humor vs. humour would be that in humor, a clown would entertain children by throwing a pie at another clowns face. The other clown would then begrudgingly wipe the whipped cream from around his mouth, then his eyes. He would the swing a big fish around to smack the first clown back in revenge, but that clown would duck and the swing clown would continue his swing and fall down. That would be humorous.
In the case of humour. Some bald guy would throw a pie at another guy wearing a suit. The laugh track would giggle a little in the background, something not too noisy or intrusive. Another guy would come on stage and say "He hit that guy in the face with a pie... that's funny!" at which point the laugh track would prompt the audience to grin by being played loudly and prolonged.
There have been odd freaks of nature within England (the Scotts and Irish in general are just damn funny, but have been forced over centuries to spell humor as humour as to allow the English to claim a superiority by associating humor with humour as opposed to adopting humor in lieu of humour) such as John Cleese who has managed to combine humor with humour to entertain humans and English alike. We have reason to believe however that he is in fact the bastard child of his mother and the Scottish man servant as the genetics required to understand humor are absolutely absent from the gene pool found in England.
To prove this, there will be multiple readers who either are English or sympathize with the English (such as those social oddities found in Vancouver) who will take offense to this post and rise to the bait and either attempt to prove me wrong or simply express being offended. The proof of this is based on the fact that they simply will lack the ability to understand that this is a posting which uses their humour as a the subject of my humor. Additionally, there will be at least one person who takes serious offense to American's trying to take ownership of a language they spent nearly a millennium hacking into the utter rubbish it has now evolved to and that Webster's attack on the precious Queen's 'ou' to abbreviate the far less efficient 'o' (remember inbreeding) is simply a spelling difference as opposed to a differentiation great enough to justify an alternative definition.
I'm going to tell the female Ph.D. in digital signal processing sitting next to me that you said girls can't do tech.
If you're still reading AC, how exactly did you deduce that he's ruining it for others?
Here in Norway, our configuration isn't too much different with regards to the distribution of the signals. The primary difference is that instead of using coax over fiber as you've explained, instead, the signals are multiplexed by using VLANs. This makes it so that the pretty much any common ethernet switch (by common, I mean common infrastructure grade) can be used for distributing the signals. Therefore there's no additional need for being able to broadcast a non-ethernet signal over the fiber.
:)
The drawback as I see it in comparison is that all the television channels belong to individual multicasts and therefore unless you have something similar to the ONT which will join all the multiplexes and buffer and remultiplexes them and then modulates all the new multiplexes as DVB-C. If the provider were to provide MPTS streams on a separate multicast, then this could theoretically be handled by a relatively inexpensive unit... something in the cost level of a cable modem... well possibly even less as demodulating QAM is more expensive than modulating given the substantially less complex clock circuitry.
There are a few companies which have attempted to make DVB-IP to DVB-C gateways, but their systems were not as advanced. What they did was to produce a centralized set top box which would then contain 3 individual DVB-C modulators that would rebroadcast a single channel each. Then using RF based remote controls, the viewer would change their channel at the set top box itself.
Altibox (the biggest fiber provider in Norway) for the moment will do everything possible to guarantee the set top box rental fees since after 4-6 months, those boxes are generating huge revenues for the company. They also want to guarantee that every time you look at the TV guide, you're being bombarded by advertisements for VoD.
I am pretty impressed in the end by the FIOS design after all... I'm not 100% convinced it's the right design, but until things like ethernet switches and jack are more common in a household... meaning that when a house is built, conduits are installed in the walls and a patch panel is present in a centralized location, it might be the best solution possible.
Thanks for the information
Holy shit... as a developer of broadcast television infrastructure equipment which is used throughout the world, though predominantly in Europe, I thought I was clued in quite a bit on the back-assward methods used within the industry for transmitting TV and Internet signals.
This was a total shocker for me though. I'm a huge fan of using wavelength multiplexing within fiber. Especially when the fiber in my house is a single fiber as opposed to pairs which are much harder to make look pretty in a house. However this is one of the funniest things I ever heard of.
It's taken a really long time for the industry to finally come up with a less than insanely shitty method of using coax cabling for digital media access. Oddly enough, the cable companies have more or less completely rebuild their coax backbones to make it happen... what makes it odd is that they wanted to keep the coax to avoid having to lay new cable.. haha wow that worked well.
Now, it appears that Verizon has decided to transmit the entire cable multiplex over a single wavelength, therefore allowing them to a) guarantee their bandwidth usage even if it's insanely high, b) decrease hackability of TV fiber as it is on a not so common wavelength and therefore difficult for consumers/hackers to get receivers for it. c) run less expensive multiplexers they wouldn't require conditional IP multicasting at the switches. d) decrease the cost of maintaining a huge TCP/IP network of devices as it would be possible to remove the IP layer altogether and use a more reliable ATM style layer.
This design so fantastically screws consumers into buying/leasing equipment exclusively from Verizon that it damn near guarantees Verizon a minimum of $30 a month extra per average household just in equipment rentals. And what's best is, they can claim "Sure, we support using third party hardware with our system Mr. FCC, but there's no law that says we have to help anyone make equipment that works with out network is there? But if anyone ever does... sure, we'll support them".
The only true benefit of this design to the consumer is that it would be possible to make a fiber to DVB-C converter that would theoretically make it possible for a TV to receive the signal using the digital coax connection within the TV.
I am SOOOOO glad I don't live in the states anymore... this stuff would infuriate me... it's bad enough I had to make an FPGA for brute forcing DVB-CAS in order to cut my power usage in the house by 100watts (24/7 since the shutting off the set top box from the fiber company requires a 3-5 minute startup time). Now I use an FPGA which consumes 5watts to crack the keys and shared them out with the rest of the house. Saves me a fortune. The FIOS thing would drive me nuts... oh there's the additional bitch about FIOS which is that it's DOG SLOW!!!!
In a country built on the concept of being punishing several races of people who had the audacity to occupy our land before we discovered it, it only seems right that now we punish people for thinking of things before we did too.
First of all, there are multiple types of RAID. There is mirroring and there is striping with parity with regards to ensuring that the R in raid is not meaningless.
Everyone knows for reasons of pure logic that having two identical mirrors are the best minimal solution. This means that you have at least one functioning copy at all times. Then you can remirror to a new set of devices when a failure in one copy occurs.
There is however a problem. Even in the best RAID enclosures, the close proximity of the drives tends to make the drives fail relative to one another. The likelihood that the two drives neighboring a failed drive (physically) being produced in consecutively in the same batch or being of the precise same design is great. Therefore, for truly important data, it is common sense to have multiple levels of redundancy.
To achieve multiple levels of redundancy, there are several options. The "best" is three or more way mirroring (with at least one pair of mirrors offsite). The next best is to implement parity and mirroring. Therefore you have two identical RAID 5s. My personal favorite which optimizes cost vs. reliability is RAID 6 (double parity) plus spare. In addition, by monitoring the number of spare sectors on the drive (all drives have spare sectors for remapping bad sectors), when the number of spare sectors drops below a certain level for a given drive, the drive would immediately mirror to a spare and an alarm would be generated for the spare the be replaced. In addition to this, using rsync or similar to mirror to an offsite location is a must.
The goal is.. NEVER EVER EVER lose redundancy. When you have one copy left, you have one point of failure.
The important thing to remember here isn't the quality of the drives involved. The important thing to remember is that all drives fail. Screw the MTBF ratings, they're utter rubbish since that's the duration of the expected life of a drive that doesn't fail. The reality on the other hand is that drives fail and you SHOULD NEVER EVER EVER trust the reliability of a drive, file-system or subsystem.
To bitch at you for your rubbish... your comment " then millions would not be using RAID as the defacto method of redundancy" is just nonsense. RAID is the defacto standard because it's relatively easy, cheap and most importantly... for the most part, there are no other alternatives. The best I've seen so far was Microsoft's attempt with their Windows Home Server files system which was removed from the latest version. It was great... it was wasteful as it required two copies of everything, but it had less points of failure than any other RAID system I've encountered. It was genius, too bad they didn't follow through with it.
Here in Norway, all medical records are centralized and on a separate secure network. Of course, we don't worry about things like payment and insurance systems because all of our medical costs are paid for by the government. We only pay tiny symbolic doctors fees which are designed to keep us from going to the doctor 100 times a week.
When you live in a 3rd world country like the U.S. (been to Alabama and the shit holes in Mexico, the difference being people in Alabama have color TV and glass or screen in the windows of their trailer holes and in Mexico, the houses are made of clay and the people who live in them work for a living or starve... no welfare), you complain about anything like centralized medical databases and socialized medicine because you would rather live in fear of all your neighbors then to improve their quality of living enough to reduce the risks.
But in alternative circumstances, non-medical, fax machines should have died a long time ago.
The #1 security problem with any device is the user. And therefore, my point stands... Windows, iPhone, Blackberry, etc... are all insanely shitty regarding security.
... I WOULD LOVE JAVA!!! Banks would be so much harder to hack without it. Combined with stupid people in general, hiding a trojan that can hijack a bank account would be much more difficult.
As for the lack of trying issue here... let's say that I would never consider a hacker a threat that tries to do anything other than using the weakest link in security.
I did take offense to the GP... for years I've been complaining about people making ridiculous false statements about security based on stupid little things like "Well, no one has hacked it yet... we think" or "It's java so it must be secure". If I were a hacker and a thief
Years ago before Jon published the crack to DVD, I was investigating the terms required in order to obtain a license to CSS so I could write a DVD player for Linux. Part of the agreement (designed by Intel actually) clearly stated that any implementation, software or otherwise must not be able to be reverse engineered without a multi-million dollar laboratory. And Intel sold the movie industry this crap security design based on ideas that such a thing could possibly be achieved. They lied to the industry about security and it cost a lot of people a lot of money and a lot of jobs.
People lie to the general public about things like 'The Secure System' actually existing. People say buy product A instead of product B because it's more secure... which should instead be said, if you remove the human factor, it might be more secure.
So... let's take all these great track records and whatnot of a platform a toss them out... a platform is only as secure as the user. And the mentality of the common user is "This computer expert friend of mine told me this phone is secure... so I don't have to worry about it... I can click anything and it won't be a problem".
In theory, there is very little past the 3rd grade which people will use throughout their lives. Most people never use more than basic arithmetic, percentages and maybe interest calculation from math (everyone uses statistics and fractions, but more for making up numbers than from the mathematical sense). The majority of people don't use much science at all, if anything, I would say that teaching everyone anatomy, biology and physiology maybe even botany has proven to make jobs harder for doctors since people can now misdiagnose themselves and their children with bigger words they don't understand. English... don't make me laugh. Social studies... let's be frank... the fact that Christine O'Donnell managed to get 30% of the vote is absolute proof that people don't understand shit about social studies. And statistics have shown time and again that there are an insanely high number of people who couldn't find their own home on a globe.
:)
Some people would say that teaching skills to the kids when they're that small would be a really bad idea. Through 6th grade, the education should most likely be entirely academic. Some might argue that it would be beneficial to give kids with low aptitude for academic education an opportunity to end a trade school where they're taught a skill in the 7th grade would make sense. This would solve many problems... unfortunately... there could be quite a few great minds of the future who get lost in that system.
Skills aren't for children. Dad or mom can teach them skills at that age... in a school... ABCs and 123s are much better.
As for children knowing how to use computers... well, I hate the idea of my kid making power point presentations in school... is degrading... it makes them into business school/saleman idiot drones. Basic programming, problem solving, etc... would be much better
Yes... a proper silicon fab plant costs billions to build. Ask Intel, Foundery, TSMC or the others involved. Therefore any solar company will be limited by the silicon they can acquire without the ability to experiment, tool and retool thee plants. Given the outrageous cost of this type of business, it either needs to be government run or whoever is running it will have one chance at most to get it right.
That being said... your point is utter rubbish in this context since anyone with a clue should have realized this long before ever getting this business running. When the crooks running this company started taking the money, they should have made it perfectly clear to the idiot politicians they begged for money that this company would likely leak like a wooden ship hit by a cruise missile. Additionally, it would be likely that this company would be so heavily in debt by the time it folded that the company's value was not the eventual possibility to turn a profit, but instead was to provide a tremendous amount of research in solar energy to the world after it has gone defunct, allowing future companies to startup using a niche of their research and turn a profit based on it.
Based on that, I'm convinced that some people got VERY VERY fat on this. I'd even guess that there are some politicians involved in the funding process who did quite well on this. This stinks of either criminal stupidity or outright corruption. Giving more money to these people would have been a curse.
I haven't read the whole posting, but I highly disagree with the use of the term moderately with regards to significant in this context. First I would need to understand your usage of the term significant. Are you the type of person that considers a Hummer to be a monster truck or an economy vehicle for city driving? That would give be a better idea of how to interpret your use of the word significant. Then in relation, the use of the optional term moderately can be applied, but again... I'd have to know if you're the type of person that uses only half the 2kg tub of butter on a slice of bread because all things are good in moderation or if you believe moderation is a bit more practical of a term (relatively speaking).
:)
Please clarify or your entire statement must be dubbed invalid and utterly unreliable. Work and personal references as well as research references would be greatly appreciated.
P.S. - please don't forget to include bank account numbers and personal identification so we can properly audit your accounts for inconsistencies that could theoretically be used to prove you can't manage your own business and therefore should NOT be allowed to interfere with others.
Ummm... it's what?!?!?!? Do you seriously have enough experience with both platforms to make such a judgement?
What part of this article was about security? What kind of security are you talking about?
Blackberry is a Java based phone. If you find ANY opening in it that would allow you to alter the class loader code, it's all tits to the wind after that. You could insert viruses all over that. Oh and given the crap quality of the app store, it seems like it's probably REALLY easy to get an app on the device with malicious intent.
Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry are EQUALLY shitty with regards to security and quite spouting off worthless trash like this. Show me a secure smart phone operating system and I'll sell you this bridge I own in Brooklyn.
Seriously... lots of people rushed out and bought the shit tablets on the market that look sorta like iPads but just aren't. Honeycomb is kinda interesting, but not really. It's a version 0.0001 of an operating system and the two times I played with it... it struck me that Google needs to spend more time communicated with app developers to try and make a better, more uniform experience.
iPad is a more or less useless device which is fairly ok for browsing the web, not too bad as a GPS if you have a iPhone near by and is quite nice for watching films.... you can't do anything useful on it without a computer to do the hard work, but you can rent or download a kiddy movie to keep the brats quiet on the car trip. At my company where we were all given iPads for christmas last year, no one actually uses it for anything productive.. half the people just gave them to their kids or wives as they had no utility. At my wife's company (newspaper) where every journalist has one, the ones who couldn't type to begin with are using iPads to write their articles now, the rest are using it for wikipedia access while they're typing on their laptops.
Android tablets don't run an software of interest. They are pretty boring to look at. They don't have a proper music or movie store as there's no iTunes type application to sync with. They just devices without an ecosystem behind them.
Oh... let's also note the massive number of users who got burnt last Christmas when they rushed out and bought Android tablets for their wives, kids, etc... only to find that the lifespan of that device was measured in hours since in January, Google said "we're not supporting all those old tablet in the next OS release coming out next month... and BTW... nearly no software written for the new OS will run on the old OS... and BTW... you shouldn't waste your time developing for the old OS".
Microsoft will release Windows for ARM and tablets... with an external keyboard, those tablets will be useful as actual laptops. So a keyboard case with a touch pad would effectively make the device a laptop. When you want to use it as a tablet, watch films, play angry birds, etc... it'll work great. When you want to log into the office and do some work with keyboard and mouse, it'll work great. If you want to program an new app for the device, you can run Visual Studio and it'll work great. This is the point when tablets will start taking over traditional laptop sales.
Until then... there's just no alternative to laptops and iPads.
It wasn't even about the portable music player. It was about the overall infrastructure. When iTunes was released, the commercial music players sucked (think adware/spyware from Real) and the free music players were all about bling bling (think WinAmp) which chased away users like myself. (And I paid the $10 for WinAmp).
He turned Apple into a music center... then, instead of treating iTunes as an accessory to a music player, he treated the music player as an accessory to this free program which he released not only for Mac, but also for PC... for free. Then, instead of focusing on marketing this music player accessory to his normal audience of Apple cultists (and if you consider Jobs to be anything less than an insanely successful cult leader, you'd be insulting him), he decided to target the general consumer. He went after the most lucrative music market in the world... the teenaged-mid 20s girl. By extension, he went after the mothers who do things like buy shoes and purses to feel prettier. The iPod was NOT about the music. It wasn't about being an electronic device. It was completely about the fashion involved.
This proved so successful that Mac, iPad, iPod, iPhone are ALL ABOUT FASHION. They cost more... so does Prada. They lack the features of the competitors... so does Louis Vuitton. They are far more restrictive and often less functional than the competitors... so is Jimmy Choo. But they shine. They provide status. They are pretty.
Apple tried making servers... the XServe was BEAUTIFUL... FASHIONALBLE. Any data center using these things would stand out as being sexy... but that wasn't enough. The product just didn't take off.
Apple continued trying to make big video editing computers like the Mac Pro. Well... look at what Apple's done to Final Cut X and Mac OS X Server. I assure you. The lifespan of the Mac Pro is limited. In fact, the latest Mac Book Pro has just as much CPU power as most post production video editors have in their studio systems. Using accessories from Blackmagic, Promise and others that connect via Thunderbolt, a Mac Book Pro or iMac is a far more ideal post production video editing system than a Mac Pro. After all, you can bring your projects on the road with you when you don't need the editing decks and mixing boards. The Mac Pro is soon a goner. Costs too much to produce and it doesn't really give you much more than you get from a notebook these days. Apple seems to be yielding the high end pro market to Avid and being happy with the average mom and pop shop. Final Cut will help them sell more notebooks for $299. In the past, the price of Final Cut was so high that people would buy PCs with Vegas if they couldn't afford the Apple stuff.
Apple is about fashion... Being part of something bigger by making a purchase... you too can be special.
Let's also point out that in a world where :
"Nerds do their best to be perceived as normal and geeks do their best to be perceived as nerds"
Apple allows geeks to present themselves as nerds a little easier to the common individual because by learning the specs of Apple machines and the boot commands to boot from different devices and how to install boot camp etc... they can pretend to be nerds. And being an Apple nerd by extension is more fashionable than being just a geek. Therefore, when the average consumer goes to the geekiest person they know, incorrectly thinking they are nerds by extension, the geek will spew out specs and geek crap about Windows and Mac and convince the people who came to them that in their informed expert opinion, the Mac is by far a much better solution.
It's about being more. And Apple gives people that. Windows is what those other losers who refuse to spend $400 on a pair of shoes get. Apple is fashion baby. As an example... the first thing most people think of when they hear the name Steve Jobs isn't Apple... but it's "Black Turtleneck"
So... unless Apple can continue to produce an mystic of approachable high fashion.... it'll be an issue. I think Steve has laid a great foundation for the future of Apple. He's not leaving and he's not bad mouthing them on the way out. Instead, he'll stick around and help continue the fashion.
It is clear to me that this guy Kevin Slavin, who appears to be a marketing guy from whatever searching I can do has impressed someone or another with his knowledge of places where algorithms are used. I am convinced however from the searches which I've done regarding what he's talked about that he doesn't clearly understand what an algorithm is. Therefore, for his limited understanding of what an algorithm is, he is an expert on that topic.
Generally the term expert is applied best to a person who hasn't learned enough about a topic to recognize its scope. I personally feed my family by understanding other peoples algorithms and developing new algorithms for topics such as motion search, frequency domain conversions, etc... yet I would never call myself an expert on algorithms, I know way too much about algorithms to ever dare calling myself an expert on them.
I hope in the future that the term expert will be more clearly understood by the average person. Any "expert" would clearly understand that the term expert is provided to allow the uneducated masses to perceive an individual as an who knows more about it than the reporter presenting them does.
I personally prefer specialists when I need information. That's a person who focuses a considerable portion of their lives in the direction of studying and researching a topic until such time as their knowledge of the topic would allow them to be considered a legitimate resource of information on the topic.
The average person loves experts though. They run to their priests when they need an expert on matters of life. They run to their unshaven neighbor when they need a computer expert. etc...
What I find most humorous about the articles which are linked is the fact that wall street is hiring mathematicians and physicists to program high speed trading systems. I love mathematicians and physicists, a little bummed I didn't go that route in life myself... instead I became a specialist in algorithm development. Frankly, mathematicians and physicists make shitted programmers. The one sitting in front of me can do magic with numbers, but his code is utter crap that falls apart all the time. The one to the right of me doesn't even bother writing code, she just hands me the math and I write it for her. Frankly, high speed trading algorithms require a much more computer oriented mind... mathematicians and physicists are an utter waste of money in these circumstances. They should instead of be looking for trial and error hackers which would develop algorithms based on simulated markets and once they're proven to win more than they lose... put them into production. It would almost certainly be much more accurate and yield much better results at much better prices.
There was a point in time where system administrators needed to be more capable than simply being able to install Windows. What you're describing is an excellent example of extremely poor IT within the organization... I know this because my company provided computer (which I use for e-mail) is riddled with this crap from half-assed IT "professionals" as well.
Booting Windows should never take more than a minute. Or at least should never take more than a minute following POST. Login scripts are piss poor alternatives to having a single actual programmer on staff. A programmer who actually focuses on IT related tasks can make a single configurable application capable of sorting out all the citrix, antivirus and other crap involved.
Also, there's the issue of application virtualization. This is 2011, app virtualization makes a tremendous amount of things much easier and faster. In a virtualized app environment, most things don't need to start up until they are actually needed. Additionally, when coping with software getting messed up, it's much easier to sort out than if machines need to be reinstalled. Just delete the old app folder, copy over a new one.
In fact, thanks to app virtualization (App-Z isn't even that bad), boot times are almost nothing. This is because the system itself stays relatively virgin the entire time. No installed apps, no startup scripts, etc... therefore, the machine boots as fast after a year as it did the day you got the machine.
I'm sorry... this whole start up script thing really unnerves me... I actually can't believe there are still a bunch of IT losers out there that use them. It's truly pathetic.
Oh... and as for Windows domain policies... that's easily solved... make an app for that. If the stock stuff doesn't work... fix it. Adding delays is hacking the shit out of it. Adding delays doesn't fix problems, it just hides them away for a little while until the machine gets so slow again that you need to extend the delays further.