The math was trivial. The Latin wasn't so bad, but in modern times, it's not applicable. The Greek is a thorough waste of time. As you said, in these modern times, any of the four dominant languages (English, Mandarin, Spanish or Arabic) or of the more important of the political languages (English, Mandarin, Russian or Japanese... Korean is questionable as to long term importance) would be much more suitable. Dead languages are better left to the linguists and historians. I love Ancient Greek and Roman history and am impassioned by it, but outside of trivia, other than the main points, it's irrelevant.
Yes... these days, anyone can be educated on the topics in this paper quite easily. I don't think the math touched on anything past what I had been taught in the 9th grade. I admit, I struggled a bit with the polynomials as I don't work much with them anymore, I still don't see any direct application for them even after years of working in scientific computing. Therefore, I see them as a graduation test only, meaning "If we can force you to learn this, then we can force you to learn anything.". This is 2011 and we can let the mathematicians focus on the mechanics of math as such. The rest of the world will either simply forget it (that's about 98% of us) and the remaining handful that may actually find a need for such mundane topics of math will use Mathematica or Matlab to handle it. Or if you're a lazy dolt such as myself, you'll as the Ph.D. in digital signal processing sitting next to you or the Ph.D. in computational mathematics sitting behind you.
I really just hope that by the time my kids reach middle school, Mandarin or Arabic will be languages they can choose to learn. Currently, they would have the choice of French or German of which neither have any benefits outside of just being another language. The usefulness of Mandarin is dissolving at an alarming rate now as well since the Mandarin speaking world has managed to increase their English literacy at rates that should make the rest of the world blush.
Out of all the most insanely ridiculous things I've ever heard of, this has got to be the best. I always thought it was a medieval poet's invention. What does an exorcist actually do? Do they have songs and dances and stuff that go with it? How do you know when it's done? Like, how would you measure how successful an exorcism was? Would the victim no longer be homosexual?
Can we get a list of people who have sent letters to the church asking for the services of exorcists? It would be a great mailing list for people selling beach front swamp land and such.:)
there are more than a few people that manage to crack applications or even reverse engineer video encryption algorithms or DRM algorithms by stepping through much worse code either through a simple debugger or a possibly more advanced debugger such as IDA Pro which makes C style snippets.
Fact is, it's not about the code being written IN javascript. It's about the code being written in Java and then compiled to javascript. The compressed javascript in question is not typically even javascript to begin with and nor is it compressed, but instead is simply the result of compiling java to javascript.
How about the real pros who can take a microscope photograph of a microchip and reverse engineer the the resulting 3d image of lines and boxes into an encryption algorithm?
You're making the comment "is next to impossible even with" applies to you and many others, but there are those among us who can approach the problem differently. For example, instead of starting from the beginning and tracing forward, start with a point of context. I'll speculate at this point having never really cared about gmail other than reading my mail, but I'd imagine there's some algorithm in use which provides the gmail servers with a query for messages. These queries are more than likely meaningful. So, if you're looking up your friend Jim Bob, locate where the post to the server happens and find the reference to Jim Bob. It probably has the field name for which it applies connected to it such as "SearchText='Jim Bob'". At this point, you can be pretty sure the function which transmited that is a transmission function. It should be possible to decipher variable names in that function and work backward from there.
Reverse engineering is typically starting with what you know and working backward, annotating as you go along. Use a damn good editor with a "change symbol name" feature and each time you identify a new symbol change it.
The code in question probably has an extremely high level of complexity as I'm quite sure it's machine generated from another language. If it's hand coded and compressed, it might be equally bad.
But Impossible, certainly not by any means. Just time consuming.
I have to say that Netscape was our best friend. Their code has become such crap that it gave us the chance to not only catch up, but to run free.
Frankly, the lawsuit mentioned was one of the worst things ever to happen to many other companies. Mac, Linux and everyone else was completely left without a browser capable of performing online banking, reading news sites etc... The lawsuit caused Netscape to become a litigation company and their development just fell to pieces. Their server packages were amazingly bad and the day they added Javascript support and "layers" to their browser, everything just fell to pieces.
That left it up to us to come in and make waves. We became "the other browser" sure, our market share at the time sucked. Lars Knoll was still working on the first release of his amazing code.... imagine a browser written in such a way that the code was readable and manageable. But, what it really came down to is, Netscape's focus on litigation damn near ruined the entire computer market for anyone that wasn't willing to simply just become another Microsoft shop.
You want to know what REALLY killed BeOS? It was Netscape. We were too small to make the BeOS version, so we used a small Swedish company run by a group of incredibly bright and talented developers. Even now, years after Opera bought that company, the VP of engineering is the guy who ran that group, the guys making the screaming fast rendering contexts and other technologies which keep Opera in the top two at all times really has a lot to do with those guys. But, we just didn't have the resources to do it back then. As a result, Be would either have to make their own browser (they didn't have the manpower or inclination) or Netscape could have made one. But, without a reasonable browser, users had to reboot their machine into Windows to be able to run IE or Netscape to surf the web.
The world has changed... you can port FireFox or WebKit to a new platform in days (for a crap build, but still functional), if you can interest Opera (which typically isn't hard to do) they can port to a new platform as quickly as they can write a handful of classes and a new Makefile. The reason IE has lost market share isn't because the lawsuit did anything, it's because the other browsers are all equal to or better than IE.
That said, WebKit has become so good as of late that if Microsoft didn't have to support all the IE infrastructure that they do, switching to WebKit would be a great idea for them. Oh... well, there is another catch to that. If they did that, the whole world would be in an uproar complaining about how Microsoft is trying to be WebKit by absorbing it etc...
I don't think however that Microsoft is bothering to compete with other browsers anymore. Their developers have a competitive spirit and should, and they should be proud of what they manage to accomplish, but Microsoft doesn't really benefit at all from competing with other browser now. What's the market case for it? Really, there are now 3 great browsers on Windows (Opera, Chrome, FireFox) and Internet Explorer. They are all getting faster and faster, getting more features, the standard web can now do most of what needs to be done without non-standard extensions, in 5 more years, the web standards might even be as capable as Flash Player. There will always be a need for plug-ins if for no other reason but DRM. But, let's face it, Silverlight was proof that Microsoft isn't trying to alter the basics of the web anymore. They're not trying to make new Microsoft only extensions to the standards, but instead decided that a plug-in which could be run on all browsers would be good enough instead.
Oh, and Chrome and others let you even choose Bing and stuff over Google if you choose to. So, Microsoft still makes their money no matter what browser you use, even if it's Safari (why would anyone use that?) on Mac with Bing.
So, the business case for competing with the other browser vendors is just not there anymore. Internet Explorer is just another p
Where's the eBook. As a matter of principal (and the fact that I don't want to buy a bigger house) I have stored away all my computer books which are available in eBook form whether I've purchased the eBook or not as I can more easily buy it then find the printed copy on my old shelves. I am looking forward to moving all my printed books to the recycling bin in the future. This is 2011, there's just no reason for printed books anymore... well except for going to the book store to find things which look interesting to download.
Please let him know that since we know he keeps the books in Tex format, it's time for a Kindle edition.
Yes, the Apple touchpad offers all the awful features that make OS X unbearable to many users such as myself. And it does them MUCH worse since their Windows driver for the touchpad is the one driver that works like shit under Windows. Mind you, I don't even have OS X on my MacBook, I bought it specifically to use as a Windows machine. I use my Mac Mini as the Mac at our house and use iRapp to use the Mac via remote. That way I can use XCode for making iPhone apps without haven't to use the Mac desktop.
Let's also cover some other problems.
1) Games
Using the Mac Touchpad is utter crap for that. External mouse mandatory. It's just too damn big and there is no tactile feedback to let you know when you're touching the right place. Decent notebooks have a border that lets you know your finger is at the edge of the pad either because of a beveled boundary or because of a change in the texture of the surface of the pad itself. This is just one HUGE surface that feels the same as the laptop case itself.
2) The keyboard OMFG with a major emphasis on the 'F'. It is by far the worst keyboard EVER!!!! It's missing so many keys it's useless and then the Alt key is so damn small that you might as well just go out, get an external mini keyboard and glue it on top of the Mac keyboard. I mean, really. What were they thinking? Let's not forget the totally absent home, end, pg up and pg dn keys. If I have to program ON A MAC, I do it from the terminal using VI since document navigation is at least possible that way. I'm just waiting for them to remove the '!' key as it could be considered offense to someone... or the colon as it is an archaic method of preceding ordered lists and should use fancy icons instead in the future.
3) The CD eject button If and when it works... great.... but every version of bootcamp screws it up more.
My other 4 work notebooks are toshibas... best machines ever!
Since I'm helping to publicize this, I recommend the following
"Opportunist, Beaver Leech Equilibrium Principle"
As for a Greek Symbol, I want the omega... ever since I've taught my children to refer to me as their Alpha and Omega when they want to kiss my ass to buy them a new toy, I've grown quite partial to it. Think we can bump Ohm?
If anything, the transactions should be even faster. Customers who want to have real-time scripts handling trading should be able to run their scripts on the market's computers. The scripts would have to be reviewed to make sure they're not breaking any rules first, but then the scripts would run in a controlled environment. Changes to the scripts would not be able to be made without additional review. The customer might even choose to use pre-fab scripts that perform trading using standard techniques.
The benefit of this is, it would given everyone an equal opportunity to play on a level field. The priority of who's script runs first would be based on a round robin system. It wouldn't favor anyone over another. Of course, a large organization such as a brokerage house could have one script running for each trade they employ, but it would still give the little guy a chance.
The additional benefit to this system is that if a script crashes, the system can temporarily suspend to sort out the problem and avoid massive loses by customers. This should avoid market crashes.
These types of transactions aren't fraudulent, it's just being smart, it gives a trader the opportunity to gamble millions of times per day based on a set of rules as opposed to gambling in lower quantities.
As to dishonesty. Well, I'm pretty convinced any form of gambling is dishonest at some level. The stock market is insanely unethical in the sense that people think they're actually investing in something when they buy shares on the stock market. The average person investing their personal savings doesn't actually understand that once the shares have been purchased when they were first issued, the company doesn't get anything at all from it... well except the cost and headache of trying to make their stock sound good so they can eventually ask for more money the same way. The stock market is not even gambling based on the performance of a company. It's gambling based on the perceived performance of the company. So, you're gambling on how well the guys running the company can convince the guys gambling on the company that they're doing.
If you have a few bucks laying around to waste vindictively, you can wait for an announcement that a company is doing spectacular and then manipulate the shares by dumping as many as you can, as quickly as you can. Within a short period, people would start dumping as well effectively destroying the value of the share.
The stock market is disgusting is so many ways. It scares the hell out of me that the entire world economy is based on international legalized casinos where the odds aren't even defined.
Why would you go to an Ivy League school to become a salesman who gambles for a living. Frankly, I think the biggest problem with professional gamblers like hedge fund traders and other financial traders in general is that instead of a cheap trading license (which I actually got when I was 19 after 1.5 weeks of studying part time, never used it, I don't approve of gambling), traders should be required to have a degree from a university with a specialization on statistics and probabilities.
So far as I can tell, the only justifiable reason to get an Ivy League education when becoming a 3rd party professional gambler is to find people to swindle while you drink and party at school.
Making it REALLY cheap is a benefit. Ad-hoc is good enough to get things started here.
First, there needs to be a method of getting internet access to the country. There are some crappy options, but good enough to get things started. For example, you can get 2-way satellite access using cheap hardware with 4096 down and 1024 up. That's probably going to cost about $2000 + $2500 a month per uplink and it's money that probably will be thrown away quite quickly as the military will target it. But, let's assume that it's possible to get a few of these up and running and keep them running for a month or two before they're destroyed.
Next, you need a way to distribute the signal. This requires first of all, good performance and second of all good camouflage. For a backbone, the goal is to distribute the signal. This can be done using a configuration of multiple cantennas on top of a wooden post (let's say a few meters high). At the base, there would be a PC with USB adapters for each cantenna running vyatta or a similar router. Using a ARM or ATOM based PC, it should be possible to get the total system power cost to approximately 30 watts or less. With an old car battery or two, there should be enough power to run the devices overnight. The days there are pretty much 12h light, 12 hour dark nearly all year round. So, there would need to be enough solar cells to gather enough power to charge the batteries and operate the system during day time. Finally, the method of signal distribution is in question.
One option is to just use WLAN and leave it up to the users to get close enough to get access. Villiages can use cantennas with wireless repeaters to get the signal closer to their areas. The second is the use of hacked microcells that function as points of presence without the complex billing system. Either way, it has to be using technology which is readily available as opposed to new equipment.
The stations will need to be ordered in a grid of some type, like a large web. OSPF will have to function flawlessly to account for links which failed due to power loss or links that failed due to being destroyed by the government. Problem is, when these stations are found, it will take very little time for the next ones to be found as well. After all, the cantennas would be pointing in the direction of the next station in line.
Using the hackup above, it should be possible to build a base station for $500 or less using commodity equipment. The biggest cost being the solar panels. Someone who knows what they're doing will need to be driving around installing these things quite quickly and monitoring breakages in the network to go out and install new towers regularly to keep things running. So long as the government wants to take the network down, people need to actively be rebuilding, putting up at least 1.5 new links for every link the government removes. Whoever is doing this will very likely be targeted. After all, the easiest way to stop the network from healing itself is to kill off the people building it.
Altogether, I'd say that to get it running up and running, there's probably $100,000 to get started. Figure another $100,000 a month for healing and satellite payments then another $50-$100,000 for growth. This is strictly equipment cost, it does not include the cost of getting the equipment smuggled into Libya, only the cost of building it. The UN, US or any other organization (hell even red cross) could easily spill this kind of money to make this happen without feeling it. What's best is, by establishing this network and teaching the people in Libya how to maintain it, it makes it possible for the people to "westernize" more. This type of a tools is probably more valuable than guns in changing the region. When things eventually stabilize down there (I heard it happened once around 3,750 years ago when Ramses II was Pharaoh, it could happen again for a few weeks), the network would be in place. Then it can be built up and turned into something more professional and even profitable.
What the hell ever happened to fact? Truth is for religious people. For intelligent people, we work in things like Fact and theories. Truth is word that allows people to abuse theory by accepting unsubstantiated theory as fact.
On the other hand, I'll take truth if you toss in a bottle of 30 year single malt scotch and a playboy cover model. Then I should be too busy to bother with silly things like fact.
I'm not too sure about the hardware improvements though.
It appears that the next generation of mobile GPUs that are due to ship this year are no small improvement. PowerVR series 6 claims to be 100 times faster than the PowerVR 5 in the iPhone 4 and that's per milliwatt. While that statement is most likely a great exaggeration, it will still be a huge processing improvement. They claim it is capable of 210 GFlops performance.
NVidia is claiming similar or better numbers for the Tegra.
It should be much easier to do scalable cores in the CPU for mobile than it was for desktop, so it should be pretty straight forward to shut down all unused cores and only run a single slower core most of the time. This would be great for battery life.
Just give up on the "back to basics" idea in coding. It's not going to happen. More and more "engineers" are graduating the university with almost no actual programming experience, not even knowing a programming language. Many more or graduating without understanding how to code without depending on garbage collection. Tons are utterly oblivious to basics like data algorithms and prefer to just randomly pick and choose the first template they find which will do what they need.
Programmers are NOT generally getting better. Instead, they're being taught and learning to code quickly and complete tasks because performance doesn't matter in a world where a telephone has gigaflops of processing power.
The good news is, that on the desktop side of things, the systems have become so powerful now that 5 year old computers are running the latest OS pretty well. There's no great benefit to buying a new PC every year anymore. Hell, my Core i7 notebook needs to be disassembled and blown out, so it's sitting on my kitchen table, in the mean time I'm using a 4 year old Core 2 Duo to code and play games on.
Actually, I code for Windows, Linux, Mac, etc... I just really prefer doing it from within Visual Studio:) I have a bit of an addiction to good debuggers:)
What Windows monopoly? I've been using computers for 30 years and never once have I felt that Windows was a monopoly and hell, I worked for Opera Software for 6 years. For the entire duration of that time, I've had the choice of Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux, QNX, BeOS, etc... I typically just come back to Windows over and over because I find it to be a better solution than the other platforms. Yet, I entirely skipped over Windows 2000 and used Linux instead. Mac OS X is nice for running my projector in the movie room of the house, but on my Mac Book I run Windows because I like to actually get things done. I run a side business developing primarily for Linux, though with the exception of the drivers I write, I do all the development from within Windows.
The time for the mobile phone OS is over. I have a simple iPhone 4 in my pocket. It's running a 32-bit 1Ghz processor with 512 megs of RAM and has 32 gigabytes of Flash. It runs Mac OS X and uses a custom Window manager suitable for phones. If speculation is anything to go by, in another year, I should have a 64-bit dual core 1Ghz processor with 512-1gig of RAM and 64 gigabytes of memory in that same pocket. Let's not forget the GPU which appears to be a full OpenGL 2.0 capable core with shaders, hardware based H.264 encoder and decoding etc...
Why the hell do I need a separate PC?
BTW.. tried Maemo. I completely disagree with the "pretty" part of your description of the phone GUI. It's been 12 years since I felt Nokia knew how to make a user interface.
As a really off topic side note, let me point out that out of all the people I know, lawyers and stock brokers are by far the most likely to purchase lotto tickets or gamble on sports or races.
Lawyers love statistics. In fact, in a market over-saturated with opportunistic lawyers who profit from others misfortune (personal injury, divorce, etc...) the competition is rough. Divorce lawyers are facing a terrible time. More and more people are finding out that there's no point to marriage anymore. There just really isn't any point at all to marriage when you can simply write a good will instead. Marriage has two purposes. It is a religious thing which I'll ignore for this topic. It is also a means to secure the welfare of the member of the relationship who lacks the ability to support themselves financially.
In modern times when women are self sufficient, work full-time jobs, have university educations, run companies, etc... they are no longer the "weaker sex". If a relationship comes to an end, they will no starve or freeze in the cold. Instead, they'll go to work the next day and do what they did the day before and simply reestablish themselves. Life goes on. In short, the need for marriage no longer exists for them.
All marriage really accomplishes anymore is to lock two people in a relationship by making it a greater inconvenience to separate than if they weren't married. But marriage does actually have a huge draw back. Credit. In modern times, if a single member of a married relationship performs badly with credit, then both members suffer. By avoiding marriage to begin with, mistakes made by one member of the relationship will allow the couple to use the other participants credit while they repair the first persons.
Story finished, the point being, while there are more divorce attorneys popping up all the time, the number of prospective divorces are dropping since divorce requires marriage.
Lawyers advertise fiercely in the U.S., it's hard to watch anything from a children's cartoon to a discovery channel documentary without being bombarded with advertisements regarding personal injury and divorce attorneys. They have to strum up business.
Back in the 80s, there was a guy who made his fortune by reading the NY city statistics reports used for traffic planning and emergency services as to where the most car accidents were occurring within the city. This guy would then rent an open corner or near corner shop at the intersection with the highest accident rate. He'd then put some crappy tables and stools in it and sell some of the cheapest coffee he could buy for $10 a cup with a sign on the wall "No coffee, no loitering". Lawyers would line up around the block each morning at 5am to be the first one in at 6:30am when he opened to get the stool closest to the door while still having a window view. When an accident happened, they'd rush for the door, head straight for the victim and try handing out their card. If the victim said "I have a lawyer", they'd rush to the other guy and say "That guy says he has a lawyer, sign here".
Statistics are part of the legal game. These lawyers would starve if they didn't have them. Because of reports like this one, even poorly executed, they know that placing advertisements on Facebook for their services with tasteless jokes like "If you're a married person here on Facebook, there's a 20% chance you'll need my services". It doesn't matter that the badly researched statistic is badly interpreted. What is important is that the lawyer knows where they should be advertising. In fact, a lawyers ability to twist the meaning of research that was conducted from an inappropriate perspective is often what allows them to feed themselves to begin with.
If I were Facebook, Twitter or otherwise, I would spend a fortune on publishing statistics like this. It would REALLY drum up their advertising revenue. Would be even better if they can offer targeted marketing. For example, if you're willing to pay extra, then instead of spamming 600 million u
Seriously, I've been posting for ages that I want almost this exact device, but it should run Windows Phone 7 on top of Windows 7 (Windows Phone 7 is really mostly a.NET based window manager with apps) and that it should :
- Have wireless charging so I can leave it in my pocket and have a charger in my chair
- Have wireless HDMI (whatever flavor is the flavor of the week)
- Have wireless USB (bluetooth is too damn complex and even still doesn't work worth a shit) for keyboard, mouse, etc
- Should run on a single core in power saving mode when operating as a phone
- Should run on multiple cores when either charging or there is an explicit need for it
Android is interesting, but there are some real problems with it :
- You need a PC to program for it. You can't program directly on it
- There are no IDEs for Android and therefore even with an Android tablet or a PC running Android, complex projects can't be managed
- The window manager on Android (including netbook versions) is not suited for coding, debugging and emulating. You'd need something more conventional
- Android doesn't have any natively hosted compilers that I know of.
- Android lacks desktop style applications. Even with Google working like mad to solve this, it'll be years before their army of coders will make apps that are mature
- Making Android into a desktop operating system will fragment Android so much that developers will be confused as to which Android platform they should code for
- Cloud computing requires an Internet connection so, cloud apps are pretty useless for people who do things like travel through tunnels occasionally or visit cabins, travel to other countries and disable 3G to avoid roaming charges, etc..
Seriously, the choices are "Alliant Techsystems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman" ?
Is there a law which forces the government to use companies with extensive track records of lying like hell on their bids to get the contracts, then creating extensive delays and budget overruns causing later administrations to cancel the projects?
How about a crazy idea of "we'll start by providing a $1 million grant to any company that meets the minimum requirements of having actually put something in space in order to get the ball rolling and get a list of tasks laid out.
We'll pay to launch your designs into space to test them and start debugging the problems.
For each task which is clearly accomplished, we'll pay for the task achieved.
You have three chances to screw up. We'll launch your stuff, but if it doesn't work, we will lose trust in you and you're on your own. You can deliver a finished functional product on your own dime at that point, but we're not paying you to screw up over and over again.
The goal is, put something on mars, then get 10 human scale mannequins to mars and then back again with life support functioning at all times.
Additionally, the cost of the unit CAN NOT exceed X dollars. You have to get there and back again, not including the cost of the initial launch or vehicle recovery from orbit for $200 million or less. If you can't do it for that much, then you're out.
Altogether, if 3 companies manage to reach the finish line on this one, it probably will still cost the U.S. government less than $5 billion including the launches and such.
When you're using mannequins, you don't have to get it right on the first try. What is important is, when you finally do it, you do get it right. I don't think I would even consider stepping foot on a rocket made by any of the three companies contracted for this task.
When I first moved from New York to Florida as a 16 year old. I made the move from a highly competitive school W.T. Clarke which year after year competes (successfully) in the " Intel Science Talent Search" formerly the "Westinghouse Science Talent Search" to a school called Dunedin High School where the focus was clearly on keeping kids from being a nuisance to the voters (elderly people who like to walk in the air conditioned shopping malls during the day).
I was in utter shock that there would be two full time armed police officers on the premises of the school. I had been used to walking to 7-Eleven for lunch in my New York high school but was required to stay on the campus at all times during the school day in this state run penitentiary. I was absolutely amazed at how little responsibility the students showed as they had become dependent on the police and the administration to keep them in line instead of simply being given positive reasons to do so. In short, this was a nightmare for a person who had been raised to think intelligently and responsibly for themselves. I left high school shortly after and chose to start college prematurely instead. I needed an environment where students were educated as opposed to policed.
Your point is true though. Kids these days walk around with gobs of cash and gadgets. As a father raising a 7 and 8 year old in a neighborhood of "entitled people", I can safely say that it doesn't take much for a kid near us to milk mom and dad for $100. All they have to do is say 'we're going on a field trip and I want to buy a toy in the gift shop after' and boom, there you go.
Since I hate school administrators that simply don't use their brains, let me help a little.
1) Kids can't be trusted to be responsible enough to activate this stuff 5 times a day. It's stupid to do it anyway. Instead, the tracking system can choose to log the device's results during each class period where the student should be present and toss the other results to avoid privacy concerns.
2) The GPS units are going to get lost. You can't depend on the students actually remembering where they put them. Teachers are going to be sick of "can I be excused, my house arrest collar is in my locker and I don't want to get in trouble". It's the new "I need to go to the bathroom ploy"
3) As mentioned in the poster, kids are going to help other kids out by carrying their bracelets for them. In fact, a popular kid can skip all day and get counted as present just by taking advantage of one kid in each class who wants to earn his favor and the those guys will organize handing it off between classes when needed... no problem. The gps units should warn when there are 3 of them within a small radius. Two is a problem since boyfriends and girlfriends tend to intertwine themselves in hallways.
The best solution for this is to issue house arrest bracelets on the way in and on the way out of school each day. Or better yet, a house arrest bracelet which stays locked from the time they're put on until after a certain hour of the day has been reached and the bracelet is back in the presence of the charging unit at the student's house. If the bracelet isn't in locked and in contact with human PH levels (meaning skin) by 8:30am, then the school will call the student's mother for a reason why the criminal... I mean student isn't wearing their house arrest brace... I mean GPS sensor. If the mother/father clears it, then the bracelet will be deactivated remotely for the day. If not, then a high pitched nasty nasty hissing noise will be emitted from the bracelet until it's placed on the student. When the student comes home and scans their fingerprint on the base station, then the criminal tracker will release itself and the student will be free to behave like miscreants.
Bonus features:
1) Electric shocker If a student is doing something wrong or not quickly enough, the a high voltage shock can be administered to get them moving. Let's say they're walking to school and aren't moving f
Let's face it, when faced with the choice of what provides better picture quality. It's obvious that the clear winner is the more expensive Monster component cables as opposed to the inexpensive no-name HDMI and SPDIF cables. What you clearly don't understand is the value of the transport. Just put it to the test. I bought a 20 meter Monster Category 6 Ethernet cable and my Internet connection has been faster and more reliable than the crappy old fiber I was using.
You should know that HDMI and fiber kill the quality of your signal because when you lose bits on the line, you get static and drop outs. Top quality multi-layer, gold coated, stranded braided copper with primary and secondary ground planes on both the inner and outer connector are they only practical way of guaranteeing that music and films are seen an heard they way the pros do it.
If you insist on using HDMI cables, don't count on anything less than Monster. It's by far much better than all the competition. It's worth mounting your screen a few extra centimeters from the wall to compensate for the inflexible turning radius of the thicker cable since you'll have far less static and your colors will be much clearer.
When you're a bridge builder, it is critical you have a thorough understanding of physics. Same goes if you're designing the new Boeing airliner. Same goes if you're designing medical equipment. These are topics where your ability to understand the topics at hand are critical. Lives depend on it.
If you're a doctor specializing in virii, I hope to hell you passed both organic chemistry and biochemistry with flying colors.
If you're a political science, law, psychology, marketing, business, english lit, etc... student, cheat all you want. It really doesn't matter if you actually learn anything in school. It's not like you'll actually need to use it. You're not really at school to learn anything anyway. Psychology is more about how you perform, political science is about how you talk (unless you're a political analyst at which time it's more important that you can listen), marketing... well that's just funny to think it's actually a course in school, business it's about how you talk and how well you delegate to smart people. English lit, well, you took that major because you didn't actually want to study in school to begin with.
Possibly the only course located outside of the sciences in the university which requires any actual studying and research is economics. If you're going to educated as a gambler, you should at the very least understand statistics and hopefully cause and effect.
So, the real issue is, what percentage of the science and engineering students cheated. When they cheated, did they cheat on something important or did they cheat on their IBM 370 Mainframe assembler class? I read a statistic sometime somewhere (based on polling) that the two most cheated on papers by science and engineering students was ethics and technical writing. Technical writing is obvious. Ethics is ironic;)
Out of all the stats we saw, there's just nothing that's really impressive. A building that large with that much cabling sounds pretty average. The number of ports really isn't all that amazing either. These days, cash registers with credit card terminals all use ports. I'd imagine there are 10 ports used just for the registers at each hot dog or beer stand. Cameras probably are transmitting losslessly either over a box that I make using JPEG2000 over 1Gb or a box from Cisco that does no compression over 10Gbe (based on the latency, that's more likely, we struggle to get below 500ms on that stretch). So they're using ports as well. Frankly, none of what I saw was even moderately complicated.
The wireless tech, well, let's just say that with 15 channels and 50,000-100,000 people sharing the 15 channels in a small space, let's assume only 1/4 of them actually use the wireless access for the application. That's still more than 1500 people sharing a single frequency channel. Of course, some people might be able to use the 5Ghz range, but it's 1%.. maybe. So, since unmanaged 802.11 technologies use a simple time sharing mechanism to share bandwidth and most phones don't support managed tech, so it must be assumed, then there's 1500 people stomping each other pretty hard. Imagine 1500 people sharing 54Mbps, that's an average of 36Kbps per user. Of course since G will degrade and collisions will be constant, expect closer to 9Kbps if there's connection at all. It doesn't matter how many access points you install, there are only so much bandwidth which can be communicated on. The only way to make more access points better than fewer would be to isolate sections of the stadium in large scale faraday cages... and I'm assuming those will get in the way of the game. Though it might be possible to make something like a stripes through the stadium so that channels reuse is far enough away from each other that there can be some level of channel reuse without having to synchronize with other networks on the same channel. 4G and LTE would be much better technologies for this purpose, but it would be hard to accomplish on this scale. It would require users to "switch carriers" or data networks to move over. It's not likely to happen though. Maybe an agreement can be made with the major carriers to install additional POPs within the stadium which would serve the traffic and provide access to sites hosted in the stadium free to the users.
The video technology isn't really impressive. It's just more is more. If you build a new stadium, whether you install 50 screens or 500 screens makes little difference. The video switching technology is a little interesting, but frankly, most of that is manageable using switching equipment which has been readily available for 5 or more years. It's just not rocket science.
Shrinking the X number of shitty old servers down to X/5 modern servers is pretty pathetic. It sounds like CDW really wanted to sell more VMWare licenses than necessary. The machines they replaced probably were on average 1/10th as fast and the new ones and 1/4 utilized on average. That means they installed twice the processing capability to handle a task that probably only needed 1/4 the CPU power to begin with. Ok, they have room to grow, but let's be realistic about this, installing 1/4 the machines in a chasis which can accept additional blades when they need more power would have been much smarter. But compared to the cost of the fiber cabling, the servers and the power to run them for 10 years didn't mean shit anyway, so who cares.
Wow, 70 wiring cabinets. Really? You mean that there are 70 places in a frigging stadium large enough to play a football game as well as a second stadium within it and another game going to converge the 40,000 points to connect cash registers, wireless access points, smoke detectors etc together. Snore... oh... sorry, yeh impressive.. really impressive.
As for integration of systems like inventory management and the PDA carried by the poor kid working ther
There are tons of factors defining how we'll behave on a primordial level if left unchecked. Women will flock to men who provide well even if it means being one of ten of his mates. Men will beat tigers over the heads with clubs in a jungle etc...
Genetics which provide a leaning towards needing to be a member of a group of people no matter how ridiculous their belief system is is a primordial survival trait as well. Let's face it, weaker people survive when they gather into groups. They're willing to say or do just about anything so long as it will allow them to survive. There will also always be "leaders" in this group. People who are believers and wanted to lead to support other believers, or opportunists which see the clear benefit of leading large groups of easily mailable followers.
The point being that even if the gene had 100% proliferation into society, it should make very little difference. If anything, it can work against religion (as in believing in imaginary "higher beings") just as easily as for it. I would imagine (though I have no substantiating evidence or research to support) that the same gene which makes someone more susceptible to spending 3-5 full years of their lives sitting on uncomfortable benches praying to some imaginary thing that the world will be better etc... while the other people are out actually trying to make it better is the exact same gene which creates music groupies. People who want to be part of something "bigger than themselves" but instead of idolizing and praying to some mysterious magical thing, they instead idolize and practically pray to "super stars" which seem bigger than life. And they gain their "status" as being a "true fan" since they give up large portions of their lives to follow the band on the road and be their "true fans".
This same behavior, if acted upon properly could instead be used to make society as a whole the "great being" or make education the "greater group" etc... but, so long as we don't actively exploit the weakness in this way of thinking to attempt to help these people, they are more likely to choose religion or a rock band as their "larger than life, higher existence". This is the benefit of trying to make rock stars out of scientists and engineers. "Immortalize" the smart people and others can choose to learn more and become part of the "greater meaning". Sure, they'll still be idiot religious groupies, but they might spend their time trying to actually fix problems as opposed to being stubborn pains in the asses who pray for a better world and then get in the way of anyone who try make it for them.
So, here's my argument with your point.
1) It's an economics professor formulating a theory regarding the spread of a gene. Ok, he's got a model, but it's highly doubtful he understands the constants and the variables well enough to allow the model to have any merit.
2) He is clearly biased in the direction that from what I can read, his model is designed to attempt to prove "We'll all be religious one day, shouldn't we just skip all the waiting and get to it now".
3) His "facts" regarding reproduction rates based on the popular science sources he sites are poorly interpreted to begin with.
4) The model makes the assumption the "religiosity" gene plays a strictly dominant role and has a damn near 100% success rate of being carried from one generation to the next.
5) He doesn't take environment into consideration nearly enough. He models based on the idea that all people will live strictly by their primordial instincts. It's entirely possible the gene in question is present in tons of non-religious people as well. From what I can tell, the gene is kind of like a thing which says "A kid born with this gene and left in the wild to raise him/herself is more likely to pray to volley balls named Wilson that wash up on the shore than kids who aren't." It doesn't seem to actually have that great of an impact on people in their later lives. Just that it seems they are more likely to come from other p
Media frameworks such as DirectShow, GStreamer and the such are quite good at this. I work on this specific type of code all day long and maintain my own alternative for extremely high bit-rate environments.
You're talking about designing an object that consumes and produces real-time data. The source of this data is provided by an "upstream" component (or object to be consistent) within your processing pipeline. The destination for the data produced is provided to a "downstream" object.
An API for this type of component should always been seen from the perspective of the user of the component or object. Therefore the interfaces should be named NOT from their internal perspective, but from their external perspective. After all, your APIs are theoretically there so that someone else can use your component without being familiar with the internal architecture of the component itself.
An upstream component which provides data to downstream components are "Data Sources".
A downstream component which consumes data provided by "Data Sources" are "Data Sinks"
A component which acts on data received from an upstream "data source", alters it or produces new data from to send down stream to a "data sink" is called a "transformation" object.
So, a processing pipeline should consist of 3 elements.
1) Data source
2) Transformation Object
3) Data sink
This is similar in nature to :
1) Input
2) Process
3) Output
Though in an object oriented model making use of a pipeline style pattern, it's best to name the objects appropriately.
The output of an object, or the API of an object which provides data to downstream elements, components, objects (etc) should be referred to as Source. So a "Source Object" outputs its data through a "Source". In GStreamer for example, you would say "The source element provides data to downstream elements through one of its source pins" as GStreamer (like other pipeline architectures) provides a uniform interface for providing and consuming data.
The input point of an object (which receives data from upstream objects) should be called a "Sink".
A transformation element contains a minimum of one source and one sink. Data is received by the object via its sink and the processed data is pushed from the object via its source.
This methodology is very simple to use and understand.
An alternative can be "Receiver" which suggests the object received media via this interface and "Transmitter" which suggests that the object transmits data from the interface.
Some people like to use "Listener", "Observer" etc... but since there's no nice corresponding opposite to either of these, I find them grotesque when I encounter them in code.
I think that if you read up on the GStreamer documentation web site, you'll get some great ideas for how best to handle this. Just remember that when you're providing an API to a customer, you're delivering something that should be easy to use and understand from their perspective from the outside. Your API naming should reflect this.
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After all... I doubt they'd get a single question regarding modern history even close to correct!
The math was trivial. The Latin wasn't so bad, but in modern times, it's not applicable. The Greek is a thorough waste of time. As you said, in these modern times, any of the four dominant languages (English, Mandarin, Spanish or Arabic) or of the more important of the political languages (English, Mandarin, Russian or Japanese... Korean is questionable as to long term importance) would be much more suitable. Dead languages are better left to the linguists and historians. I love Ancient Greek and Roman history and am impassioned by it, but outside of trivia, other than the main points, it's irrelevant.
Yes... these days, anyone can be educated on the topics in this paper quite easily. I don't think the math touched on anything past what I had been taught in the 9th grade. I admit, I struggled a bit with the polynomials as I don't work much with them anymore, I still don't see any direct application for them even after years of working in scientific computing. Therefore, I see them as a graduation test only, meaning "If we can force you to learn this, then we can force you to learn anything.". This is 2011 and we can let the mathematicians focus on the mechanics of math as such. The rest of the world will either simply forget it (that's about 98% of us) and the remaining handful that may actually find a need for such mundane topics of math will use Mathematica or Matlab to handle it. Or if you're a lazy dolt such as myself, you'll as the Ph.D. in digital signal processing sitting next to you or the Ph.D. in computational mathematics sitting behind you.
I really just hope that by the time my kids reach middle school, Mandarin or Arabic will be languages they can choose to learn. Currently, they would have the choice of French or German of which neither have any benefits outside of just being another language. The usefulness of Mandarin is dissolving at an alarming rate now as well since the Mandarin speaking world has managed to increase their English literacy at rates that should make the rest of the world blush.
Out of all the most insanely ridiculous things I've ever heard of, this has got to be the best. I always thought it was a medieval poet's invention. What does an exorcist actually do? Do they have songs and dances and stuff that go with it? How do you know when it's done? Like, how would you measure how successful an exorcism was? Would the victim no longer be homosexual?
:)
Can we get a list of people who have sent letters to the church asking for the services of exorcists? It would be a great mailing list for people selling beach front swamp land and such.
there are more than a few people that manage to crack applications or even reverse engineer video encryption algorithms or DRM algorithms by stepping through much worse code either through a simple debugger or a possibly more advanced debugger such as IDA Pro which makes C style snippets.
Fact is, it's not about the code being written IN javascript. It's about the code being written in Java and then compiled to javascript. The compressed javascript in question is not typically even javascript to begin with and nor is it compressed, but instead is simply the result of compiling java to javascript.
How about the real pros who can take a microscope photograph of a microchip and reverse engineer the the resulting 3d image of lines and boxes into an encryption algorithm?
You're making the comment "is next to impossible even with" applies to you and many others, but there are those among us who can approach the problem differently. For example, instead of starting from the beginning and tracing forward, start with a point of context. I'll speculate at this point having never really cared about gmail other than reading my mail, but I'd imagine there's some algorithm in use which provides the gmail servers with a query for messages. These queries are more than likely meaningful. So, if you're looking up your friend Jim Bob, locate where the post to the server happens and find the reference to Jim Bob. It probably has the field name for which it applies connected to it such as "SearchText='Jim Bob'". At this point, you can be pretty sure the function which transmited that is a transmission function. It should be possible to decipher variable names in that function and work backward from there.
Reverse engineering is typically starting with what you know and working backward, annotating as you go along. Use a damn good editor with a "change symbol name" feature and each time you identify a new symbol change it.
The code in question probably has an extremely high level of complexity as I'm quite sure it's machine generated from another language. If it's hand coded and compressed, it might be equally bad.
But Impossible, certainly not by any means. Just time consuming.
I have to say that Netscape was our best friend. Their code has become such crap that it gave us the chance to not only catch up, but to run free.
Frankly, the lawsuit mentioned was one of the worst things ever to happen to many other companies. Mac, Linux and everyone else was completely left without a browser capable of performing online banking, reading news sites etc... The lawsuit caused Netscape to become a litigation company and their development just fell to pieces. Their server packages were amazingly bad and the day they added Javascript support and "layers" to their browser, everything just fell to pieces.
That left it up to us to come in and make waves. We became "the other browser" sure, our market share at the time sucked. Lars Knoll was still working on the first release of his amazing code.... imagine a browser written in such a way that the code was readable and manageable. But, what it really came down to is, Netscape's focus on litigation damn near ruined the entire computer market for anyone that wasn't willing to simply just become another Microsoft shop.
You want to know what REALLY killed BeOS? It was Netscape. We were too small to make the BeOS version, so we used a small Swedish company run by a group of incredibly bright and talented developers. Even now, years after Opera bought that company, the VP of engineering is the guy who ran that group, the guys making the screaming fast rendering contexts and other technologies which keep Opera in the top two at all times really has a lot to do with those guys. But, we just didn't have the resources to do it back then. As a result, Be would either have to make their own browser (they didn't have the manpower or inclination) or Netscape could have made one. But, without a reasonable browser, users had to reboot their machine into Windows to be able to run IE or Netscape to surf the web.
The world has changed... you can port FireFox or WebKit to a new platform in days (for a crap build, but still functional), if you can interest Opera (which typically isn't hard to do) they can port to a new platform as quickly as they can write a handful of classes and a new Makefile. The reason IE has lost market share isn't because the lawsuit did anything, it's because the other browsers are all equal to or better than IE.
That said, WebKit has become so good as of late that if Microsoft didn't have to support all the IE infrastructure that they do, switching to WebKit would be a great idea for them. Oh... well, there is another catch to that. If they did that, the whole world would be in an uproar complaining about how Microsoft is trying to be WebKit by absorbing it etc...
I don't think however that Microsoft is bothering to compete with other browsers anymore. Their developers have a competitive spirit and should, and they should be proud of what they manage to accomplish, but Microsoft doesn't really benefit at all from competing with other browser now. What's the market case for it? Really, there are now 3 great browsers on Windows (Opera, Chrome, FireFox) and Internet Explorer. They are all getting faster and faster, getting more features, the standard web can now do most of what needs to be done without non-standard extensions, in 5 more years, the web standards might even be as capable as Flash Player. There will always be a need for plug-ins if for no other reason but DRM. But, let's face it, Silverlight was proof that Microsoft isn't trying to alter the basics of the web anymore. They're not trying to make new Microsoft only extensions to the standards, but instead decided that a plug-in which could be run on all browsers would be good enough instead.
Oh, and Chrome and others let you even choose Bing and stuff over Google if you choose to. So, Microsoft still makes their money no matter what browser you use, even if it's Safari (why would anyone use that?) on Mac with Bing.
So, the business case for competing with the other browser vendors is just not there anymore. Internet Explorer is just another p
Where's the eBook. As a matter of principal (and the fact that I don't want to buy a bigger house) I have stored away all my computer books which are available in eBook form whether I've purchased the eBook or not as I can more easily buy it then find the printed copy on my old shelves. I am looking forward to moving all my printed books to the recycling bin in the future. This is 2011, there's just no reason for printed books anymore... well except for going to the book store to find things which look interesting to download.
Please let him know that since we know he keeps the books in Tex format, it's time for a Kindle edition.
Yes, the Apple touchpad offers all the awful features that make OS X unbearable to many users such as myself. And it does them MUCH worse since their Windows driver for the touchpad is the one driver that works like shit under Windows. Mind you, I don't even have OS X on my MacBook, I bought it specifically to use as a Windows machine. I use my Mac Mini as the Mac at our house and use iRapp to use the Mac via remote. That way I can use XCode for making iPhone apps without haven't to use the Mac desktop.
Let's also cover some other problems.
1) Games
Using the Mac Touchpad is utter crap for that. External mouse mandatory. It's just too damn big and there is no tactile feedback to let you know when you're touching the right place. Decent notebooks have a border that lets you know your finger is at the edge of the pad either because of a beveled boundary or because of a change in the texture of the surface of the pad itself. This is just one HUGE surface that feels the same as the laptop case itself.
2) The keyboard
OMFG with a major emphasis on the 'F'. It is by far the worst keyboard EVER!!!! It's missing so many keys it's useless and then the Alt key is so damn small that you might as well just go out, get an external mini keyboard and glue it on top of the Mac keyboard. I mean, really. What were they thinking? Let's not forget the totally absent home, end, pg up and pg dn keys. If I have to program ON A MAC, I do it from the terminal using VI since document navigation is at least possible that way. I'm just waiting for them to remove the '!' key as it could be considered offense to someone... or the colon as it is an archaic method of preceding ordered lists and should use fancy icons instead in the future.
3) The CD eject button
If and when it works... great.... but every version of bootcamp screws it up more.
My other 4 work notebooks are toshibas... best machines ever!
Since I'm helping to publicize this, I recommend the following
"Opportunist, Beaver Leech Equilibrium Principle"
As for a Greek Symbol, I want the omega... ever since I've taught my children to refer to me as their Alpha and Omega when they want to kiss my ass to buy them a new toy, I've grown quite partial to it. Think we can bump Ohm?
The fact that this might not be a joke will cause me nightmares.
If you are planning on making a joke, please make it obvious, say Barry Manilow instead
If anything, the transactions should be even faster. Customers who want to have real-time scripts handling trading should be able to run their scripts on the market's computers. The scripts would have to be reviewed to make sure they're not breaking any rules first, but then the scripts would run in a controlled environment. Changes to the scripts would not be able to be made without additional review. The customer might even choose to use pre-fab scripts that perform trading using standard techniques.
The benefit of this is, it would given everyone an equal opportunity to play on a level field. The priority of who's script runs first would be based on a round robin system. It wouldn't favor anyone over another. Of course, a large organization such as a brokerage house could have one script running for each trade they employ, but it would still give the little guy a chance.
The additional benefit to this system is that if a script crashes, the system can temporarily suspend to sort out the problem and avoid massive loses by customers. This should avoid market crashes.
These types of transactions aren't fraudulent, it's just being smart, it gives a trader the opportunity to gamble millions of times per day based on a set of rules as opposed to gambling in lower quantities.
As to dishonesty. Well, I'm pretty convinced any form of gambling is dishonest at some level. The stock market is insanely unethical in the sense that people think they're actually investing in something when they buy shares on the stock market. The average person investing their personal savings doesn't actually understand that once the shares have been purchased when they were first issued, the company doesn't get anything at all from it... well except the cost and headache of trying to make their stock sound good so they can eventually ask for more money the same way. The stock market is not even gambling based on the performance of a company. It's gambling based on the perceived performance of the company. So, you're gambling on how well the guys running the company can convince the guys gambling on the company that they're doing.
If you have a few bucks laying around to waste vindictively, you can wait for an announcement that a company is doing spectacular and then manipulate the shares by dumping as many as you can, as quickly as you can. Within a short period, people would start dumping as well effectively destroying the value of the share.
The stock market is disgusting is so many ways. It scares the hell out of me that the entire world economy is based on international legalized casinos where the odds aren't even defined.
Why would you go to an Ivy League school to become a salesman who gambles for a living. Frankly, I think the biggest problem with professional gamblers like hedge fund traders and other financial traders in general is that instead of a cheap trading license (which I actually got when I was 19 after 1.5 weeks of studying part time, never used it, I don't approve of gambling), traders should be required to have a degree from a university with a specialization on statistics and probabilities.
So far as I can tell, the only justifiable reason to get an Ivy League education when becoming a 3rd party professional gambler is to find people to swindle while you drink and party at school.
Hedge fund traders have never been accused of being ethical or trustworthy except by their defense attorneys.
:)
Sentence is entirely valid and works just fine. Your comment is just invalid
Making it REALLY cheap is a benefit. Ad-hoc is good enough to get things started here.
First, there needs to be a method of getting internet access to the country. There are some crappy options, but good enough to get things started. For example, you can get 2-way satellite access using cheap hardware with 4096 down and 1024 up. That's probably going to cost about $2000 + $2500 a month per uplink and it's money that probably will be thrown away quite quickly as the military will target it. But, let's assume that it's possible to get a few of these up and running and keep them running for a month or two before they're destroyed.
Next, you need a way to distribute the signal. This requires first of all, good performance and second of all good camouflage. For a backbone, the goal is to distribute the signal. This can be done using a configuration of multiple cantennas on top of a wooden post (let's say a few meters high). At the base, there would be a PC with USB adapters for each cantenna running vyatta or a similar router. Using a ARM or ATOM based PC, it should be possible to get the total system power cost to approximately 30 watts or less. With an old car battery or two, there should be enough power to run the devices overnight. The days there are pretty much 12h light, 12 hour dark nearly all year round. So, there would need to be enough solar cells to gather enough power to charge the batteries and operate the system during day time. Finally, the method of signal distribution is in question.
One option is to just use WLAN and leave it up to the users to get close enough to get access. Villiages can use cantennas with wireless repeaters to get the signal closer to their areas. The second is the use of hacked microcells that function as points of presence without the complex billing system. Either way, it has to be using technology which is readily available as opposed to new equipment.
The stations will need to be ordered in a grid of some type, like a large web. OSPF will have to function flawlessly to account for links which failed due to power loss or links that failed due to being destroyed by the government. Problem is, when these stations are found, it will take very little time for the next ones to be found as well. After all, the cantennas would be pointing in the direction of the next station in line.
Using the hackup above, it should be possible to build a base station for $500 or less using commodity equipment. The biggest cost being the solar panels. Someone who knows what they're doing will need to be driving around installing these things quite quickly and monitoring breakages in the network to go out and install new towers regularly to keep things running. So long as the government wants to take the network down, people need to actively be rebuilding, putting up at least 1.5 new links for every link the government removes. Whoever is doing this will very likely be targeted. After all, the easiest way to stop the network from healing itself is to kill off the people building it.
Altogether, I'd say that to get it running up and running, there's probably $100,000 to get started. Figure another $100,000 a month for healing and satellite payments then another $50-$100,000 for growth. This is strictly equipment cost, it does not include the cost of getting the equipment smuggled into Libya, only the cost of building it. The UN, US or any other organization (hell even red cross) could easily spill this kind of money to make this happen without feeling it. What's best is, by establishing this network and teaching the people in Libya how to maintain it, it makes it possible for the people to "westernize" more. This type of a tools is probably more valuable than guns in changing the region. When things eventually stabilize down there (I heard it happened once around 3,750 years ago when Ramses II was Pharaoh, it could happen again for a few weeks), the network would be in place. Then it can be built up and turned into something more professional and even profitable.
What the hell ever happened to fact? Truth is for religious people. For intelligent people, we work in things like Fact and theories. Truth is word that allows people to abuse theory by accepting unsubstantiated theory as fact.
On the other hand, I'll take truth if you toss in a bottle of 30 year single malt scotch and a playboy cover model. Then I should be too busy to bother with silly things like fact.
I'm not too sure about the hardware improvements though.
It appears that the next generation of mobile GPUs that are due to ship this year are no small improvement. PowerVR series 6 claims to be 100 times faster than the PowerVR 5 in the iPhone 4 and that's per milliwatt. While that statement is most likely a great exaggeration, it will still be a huge processing improvement. They claim it is capable of 210 GFlops performance.
NVidia is claiming similar or better numbers for the Tegra.
It should be much easier to do scalable cores in the CPU for mobile than it was for desktop, so it should be pretty straight forward to shut down all unused cores and only run a single slower core most of the time. This would be great for battery life.
Just give up on the "back to basics" idea in coding. It's not going to happen. More and more "engineers" are graduating the university with almost no actual programming experience, not even knowing a programming language. Many more or graduating without understanding how to code without depending on garbage collection. Tons are utterly oblivious to basics like data algorithms and prefer to just randomly pick and choose the first template they find which will do what they need.
Programmers are NOT generally getting better. Instead, they're being taught and learning to code quickly and complete tasks because performance doesn't matter in a world where a telephone has gigaflops of processing power.
The good news is, that on the desktop side of things, the systems have become so powerful now that 5 year old computers are running the latest OS pretty well. There's no great benefit to buying a new PC every year anymore. Hell, my Core i7 notebook needs to be disassembled and blown out, so it's sitting on my kitchen table, in the mean time I'm using a 4 year old Core 2 Duo to code and play games on.
Phones will catch up fast to that I think.
Actually, I code for Windows, Linux, Mac, etc... I just really prefer doing it from within Visual Studio :) I have a bit of an addiction to good debuggers :)
What Windows monopoly? I've been using computers for 30 years and never once have I felt that Windows was a monopoly and hell, I worked for Opera Software for 6 years. For the entire duration of that time, I've had the choice of Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux, QNX, BeOS, etc... I typically just come back to Windows over and over because I find it to be a better solution than the other platforms. Yet, I entirely skipped over Windows 2000 and used Linux instead. Mac OS X is nice for running my projector in the movie room of the house, but on my Mac Book I run Windows because I like to actually get things done. I run a side business developing primarily for Linux, though with the exception of the drivers I write, I do all the development from within Windows.
The time for the mobile phone OS is over. I have a simple iPhone 4 in my pocket. It's running a 32-bit 1Ghz processor with 512 megs of RAM and has 32 gigabytes of Flash. It runs Mac OS X and uses a custom Window manager suitable for phones. If speculation is anything to go by, in another year, I should have a 64-bit dual core 1Ghz processor with 512-1gig of RAM and 64 gigabytes of memory in that same pocket. Let's not forget the GPU which appears to be a full OpenGL 2.0 capable core with shaders, hardware based H.264 encoder and decoding etc...
Why the hell do I need a separate PC?
BTW.. tried Maemo. I completely disagree with the "pretty" part of your description of the phone GUI. It's been 12 years since I felt Nokia knew how to make a user interface.
As a really off topic side note, let me point out that out of all the people I know, lawyers and stock brokers are by far the most likely to purchase lotto tickets or gamble on sports or races.
Lawyers love statistics. In fact, in a market over-saturated with opportunistic lawyers who profit from others misfortune (personal injury, divorce, etc...) the competition is rough. Divorce lawyers are facing a terrible time. More and more people are finding out that there's no point to marriage anymore. There just really isn't any point at all to marriage when you can simply write a good will instead. Marriage has two purposes. It is a religious thing which I'll ignore for this topic. It is also a means to secure the welfare of the member of the relationship who lacks the ability to support themselves financially.
In modern times when women are self sufficient, work full-time jobs, have university educations, run companies, etc... they are no longer the "weaker sex". If a relationship comes to an end, they will no starve or freeze in the cold. Instead, they'll go to work the next day and do what they did the day before and simply reestablish themselves. Life goes on. In short, the need for marriage no longer exists for them.
All marriage really accomplishes anymore is to lock two people in a relationship by making it a greater inconvenience to separate than if they weren't married. But marriage does actually have a huge draw back. Credit. In modern times, if a single member of a married relationship performs badly with credit, then both members suffer. By avoiding marriage to begin with, mistakes made by one member of the relationship will allow the couple to use the other participants credit while they repair the first persons.
Story finished, the point being, while there are more divorce attorneys popping up all the time, the number of prospective divorces are dropping since divorce requires marriage.
Lawyers advertise fiercely in the U.S., it's hard to watch anything from a children's cartoon to a discovery channel documentary without being bombarded with advertisements regarding personal injury and divorce attorneys. They have to strum up business.
Back in the 80s, there was a guy who made his fortune by reading the NY city statistics reports used for traffic planning and emergency services as to where the most car accidents were occurring within the city. This guy would then rent an open corner or near corner shop at the intersection with the highest accident rate. He'd then put some crappy tables and stools in it and sell some of the cheapest coffee he could buy for $10 a cup with a sign on the wall "No coffee, no loitering". Lawyers would line up around the block each morning at 5am to be the first one in at 6:30am when he opened to get the stool closest to the door while still having a window view. When an accident happened, they'd rush for the door, head straight for the victim and try handing out their card. If the victim said "I have a lawyer", they'd rush to the other guy and say "That guy says he has a lawyer, sign here".
Statistics are part of the legal game. These lawyers would starve if they didn't have them. Because of reports like this one, even poorly executed, they know that placing advertisements on Facebook for their services with tasteless jokes like "If you're a married person here on Facebook, there's a 20% chance you'll need my services". It doesn't matter that the badly researched statistic is badly interpreted. What is important is that the lawyer knows where they should be advertising. In fact, a lawyers ability to twist the meaning of research that was conducted from an inappropriate perspective is often what allows them to feed themselves to begin with.
If I were Facebook, Twitter or otherwise, I would spend a fortune on publishing statistics like this. It would REALLY drum up their advertising revenue. Would be even better if they can offer targeted marketing. For example, if you're willing to pay extra, then instead of spamming 600 million u
Seriously, I've been posting for ages that I want almost this exact device, but it should run Windows Phone 7 on top of Windows 7 (Windows Phone 7 is really mostly a .NET based window manager with apps) and that it should :
- Have wireless charging so I can leave it in my pocket and have a charger in my chair
- Have wireless HDMI (whatever flavor is the flavor of the week)
- Have wireless USB (bluetooth is too damn complex and even still doesn't work worth a shit) for keyboard, mouse, etc
- Should run on a single core in power saving mode when operating as a phone
- Should run on multiple cores when either charging or there is an explicit need for it
Android is interesting, but there are some real problems with it :
- You need a PC to program for it. You can't program directly on it
- There are no IDEs for Android and therefore even with an Android tablet or a PC running Android, complex projects can't be managed
- The window manager on Android (including netbook versions) is not suited for coding, debugging and emulating. You'd need something more conventional
- Android doesn't have any natively hosted compilers that I know of.
- Android lacks desktop style applications. Even with Google working like mad to solve this, it'll be years before their army of coders will make apps that are mature
- Making Android into a desktop operating system will fragment Android so much that developers will be confused as to which Android platform they should code for
- Cloud computing requires an Internet connection so, cloud apps are pretty useless for people who do things like travel through tunnels occasionally or visit cabins, travel to other countries and disable 3G to avoid roaming charges, etc..
Seriously, the choices are "Alliant Techsystems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman" ?
Is there a law which forces the government to use companies with extensive track records of lying like hell on their bids to get the contracts, then creating extensive delays and budget overruns causing later administrations to cancel the projects?
How about a crazy idea of "we'll start by providing a $1 million grant to any company that meets the minimum requirements of having actually put something in space in order to get the ball rolling and get a list of tasks laid out.
We'll pay to launch your designs into space to test them and start debugging the problems.
For each task which is clearly accomplished, we'll pay for the task achieved.
You have three chances to screw up. We'll launch your stuff, but if it doesn't work, we will lose trust in you and you're on your own. You can deliver a finished functional product on your own dime at that point, but we're not paying you to screw up over and over again.
The goal is, put something on mars, then get 10 human scale mannequins to mars and then back again with life support functioning at all times.
Additionally, the cost of the unit CAN NOT exceed X dollars. You have to get there and back again, not including the cost of the initial launch or vehicle recovery from orbit for $200 million or less. If you can't do it for that much, then you're out.
Altogether, if 3 companies manage to reach the finish line on this one, it probably will still cost the U.S. government less than $5 billion including the launches and such.
When you're using mannequins, you don't have to get it right on the first try. What is important is, when you finally do it, you do get it right. I don't think I would even consider stepping foot on a rocket made by any of the three companies contracted for this task.
When I first moved from New York to Florida as a 16 year old. I made the move from a highly competitive school W.T. Clarke which year after year competes (successfully) in the " Intel Science Talent Search" formerly the "Westinghouse Science Talent Search" to a school called Dunedin High School where the focus was clearly on keeping kids from being a nuisance to the voters (elderly people who like to walk in the air conditioned shopping malls during the day).
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I was in utter shock that there would be two full time armed police officers on the premises of the school. I had been used to walking to 7-Eleven for lunch in my New York high school but was required to stay on the campus at all times during the school day in this state run penitentiary. I was absolutely amazed at how little responsibility the students showed as they had become dependent on the police and the administration to keep them in line instead of simply being given positive reasons to do so. In short, this was a nightmare for a person who had been raised to think intelligently and responsibly for themselves. I left high school shortly after and chose to start college prematurely instead. I needed an environment where students were educated as opposed to policed.
Your point is true though. Kids these days walk around with gobs of cash and gadgets. As a father raising a 7 and 8 year old in a neighborhood of "entitled people", I can safely say that it doesn't take much for a kid near us to milk mom and dad for $100. All they have to do is say 'we're going on a field trip and I want to buy a toy in the gift shop after' and boom, there you go.
Since I hate school administrators that simply don't use their brains, let me help a little.
1) Kids can't be trusted to be responsible enough to activate this stuff 5 times a day. It's stupid to do it anyway. Instead, the tracking system can choose to log the device's results during each class period where the student should be present and toss the other results to avoid privacy concerns.
2) The GPS units are going to get lost. You can't depend on the students actually remembering where they put them. Teachers are going to be sick of "can I be excused, my house arrest collar is in my locker and I don't want to get in trouble". It's the new "I need to go to the bathroom ploy"
3) As mentioned in the poster, kids are going to help other kids out by carrying their bracelets for them. In fact, a popular kid can skip all day and get counted as present just by taking advantage of one kid in each class who wants to earn his favor and the those guys will organize handing it off between classes when needed... no problem. The gps units should warn when there are 3 of them within a small radius. Two is a problem since boyfriends and girlfriends tend to intertwine themselves in hallways.
The best solution for this is to issue house arrest bracelets on the way in and on the way out of school each day. Or better yet, a house arrest bracelet which stays locked from the time they're put on until after a certain hour of the day has been reached and the bracelet is back in the presence of the charging unit at the student's house. If the bracelet isn't in locked and in contact with human PH levels (meaning skin) by 8:30am, then the school will call the student's mother for a reason why the criminal... I mean student isn't wearing their house arrest brace... I mean GPS sensor. If the mother/father clears it, then the bracelet will be deactivated remotely for the day. If not, then a high pitched nasty nasty hissing noise will be emitted from the bracelet until it's placed on the student. When the student comes home and scans their fingerprint on the base station, then the criminal tracker will release itself and the student will be free to behave like miscreants.
Bonus features
1) Electric shocker
If a student is doing something wrong or not quickly enough, the a high voltage shock can be administered to get them moving. Let's say they're walking to school and aren't moving f
Let's face it, when faced with the choice of what provides better picture quality. It's obvious that the clear winner is the more expensive Monster component cables as opposed to the inexpensive no-name HDMI and SPDIF cables. What you clearly don't understand is the value of the transport. Just put it to the test. I bought a 20 meter Monster Category 6 Ethernet cable and my Internet connection has been faster and more reliable than the crappy old fiber I was using.
You should know that HDMI and fiber kill the quality of your signal because when you lose bits on the line, you get static and drop outs. Top quality multi-layer, gold coated, stranded braided copper with primary and secondary ground planes on both the inner and outer connector are they only practical way of guaranteeing that music and films are seen an heard they way the pros do it.
If you insist on using HDMI cables, don't count on anything less than Monster. It's by far much better than all the competition. It's worth mounting your screen a few extra centimeters from the wall to compensate for the inflexible turning radius of the thicker cable since you'll have far less static and your colors will be much clearer.
When you're a bridge builder, it is critical you have a thorough understanding of physics. Same goes if you're designing the new Boeing airliner. Same goes if you're designing medical equipment. These are topics where your ability to understand the topics at hand are critical. Lives depend on it.
;)
If you're a doctor specializing in virii, I hope to hell you passed both organic chemistry and biochemistry with flying colors.
If you're a political science, law, psychology, marketing, business, english lit, etc... student, cheat all you want. It really doesn't matter if you actually learn anything in school. It's not like you'll actually need to use it. You're not really at school to learn anything anyway. Psychology is more about how you perform, political science is about how you talk (unless you're a political analyst at which time it's more important that you can listen), marketing... well that's just funny to think it's actually a course in school, business it's about how you talk and how well you delegate to smart people. English lit, well, you took that major because you didn't actually want to study in school to begin with.
Possibly the only course located outside of the sciences in the university which requires any actual studying and research is economics. If you're going to educated as a gambler, you should at the very least understand statistics and hopefully cause and effect.
So, the real issue is, what percentage of the science and engineering students cheated. When they cheated, did they cheat on something important or did they cheat on their IBM 370 Mainframe assembler class? I read a statistic sometime somewhere (based on polling) that the two most cheated on papers by science and engineering students was ethics and technical writing. Technical writing is obvious. Ethics is ironic
Out of all the stats we saw, there's just nothing that's really impressive. A building that large with that much cabling sounds pretty average. The number of ports really isn't all that amazing either. These days, cash registers with credit card terminals all use ports. I'd imagine there are 10 ports used just for the registers at each hot dog or beer stand. Cameras probably are transmitting losslessly either over a box that I make using JPEG2000 over 1Gb or a box from Cisco that does no compression over 10Gbe (based on the latency, that's more likely, we struggle to get below 500ms on that stretch). So they're using ports as well. Frankly, none of what I saw was even moderately complicated.
The wireless tech, well, let's just say that with 15 channels and 50,000-100,000 people sharing the 15 channels in a small space, let's assume only 1/4 of them actually use the wireless access for the application. That's still more than 1500 people sharing a single frequency channel. Of course, some people might be able to use the 5Ghz range, but it's 1%.. maybe. So, since unmanaged 802.11 technologies use a simple time sharing mechanism to share bandwidth and most phones don't support managed tech, so it must be assumed, then there's 1500 people stomping each other pretty hard. Imagine 1500 people sharing 54Mbps, that's an average of 36Kbps per user. Of course since G will degrade and collisions will be constant, expect closer to 9Kbps if there's connection at all. It doesn't matter how many access points you install, there are only so much bandwidth which can be communicated on. The only way to make more access points better than fewer would be to isolate sections of the stadium in large scale faraday cages... and I'm assuming those will get in the way of the game. Though it might be possible to make something like a stripes through the stadium so that channels reuse is far enough away from each other that there can be some level of channel reuse without having to synchronize with other networks on the same channel. 4G and LTE would be much better technologies for this purpose, but it would be hard to accomplish on this scale. It would require users to "switch carriers" or data networks to move over. It's not likely to happen though. Maybe an agreement can be made with the major carriers to install additional POPs within the stadium which would serve the traffic and provide access to sites hosted in the stadium free to the users.
The video technology isn't really impressive. It's just more is more. If you build a new stadium, whether you install 50 screens or 500 screens makes little difference. The video switching technology is a little interesting, but frankly, most of that is manageable using switching equipment which has been readily available for 5 or more years. It's just not rocket science.
Shrinking the X number of shitty old servers down to X/5 modern servers is pretty pathetic. It sounds like CDW really wanted to sell more VMWare licenses than necessary. The machines they replaced probably were on average 1/10th as fast and the new ones and 1/4 utilized on average. That means they installed twice the processing capability to handle a task that probably only needed 1/4 the CPU power to begin with. Ok, they have room to grow, but let's be realistic about this, installing 1/4 the machines in a chasis which can accept additional blades when they need more power would have been much smarter. But compared to the cost of the fiber cabling, the servers and the power to run them for 10 years didn't mean shit anyway, so who cares.
Wow, 70 wiring cabinets. Really? You mean that there are 70 places in a frigging stadium large enough to play a football game as well as a second stadium within it and another game going to converge the 40,000 points to connect cash registers, wireless access points, smoke detectors etc together. Snore... oh... sorry, yeh impressive.. really impressive.
As for integration of systems like inventory management and the PDA carried by the poor kid working ther
There are tons of factors defining how we'll behave on a primordial level if left unchecked. Women will flock to men who provide well even if it means being one of ten of his mates. Men will beat tigers over the heads with clubs in a jungle etc...
Genetics which provide a leaning towards needing to be a member of a group of people no matter how ridiculous their belief system is is a primordial survival trait as well. Let's face it, weaker people survive when they gather into groups. They're willing to say or do just about anything so long as it will allow them to survive. There will also always be "leaders" in this group. People who are believers and wanted to lead to support other believers, or opportunists which see the clear benefit of leading large groups of easily mailable followers.
The point being that even if the gene had 100% proliferation into society, it should make very little difference. If anything, it can work against religion (as in believing in imaginary "higher beings") just as easily as for it. I would imagine (though I have no substantiating evidence or research to support) that the same gene which makes someone more susceptible to spending 3-5 full years of their lives sitting on uncomfortable benches praying to some imaginary thing that the world will be better etc... while the other people are out actually trying to make it better is the exact same gene which creates music groupies. People who want to be part of something "bigger than themselves" but instead of idolizing and praying to some mysterious magical thing, they instead idolize and practically pray to "super stars" which seem bigger than life. And they gain their "status" as being a "true fan" since they give up large portions of their lives to follow the band on the road and be their "true fans".
This same behavior, if acted upon properly could instead be used to make society as a whole the "great being" or make education the "greater group" etc... but, so long as we don't actively exploit the weakness in this way of thinking to attempt to help these people, they are more likely to choose religion or a rock band as their "larger than life, higher existence". This is the benefit of trying to make rock stars out of scientists and engineers. "Immortalize" the smart people and others can choose to learn more and become part of the "greater meaning". Sure, they'll still be idiot religious groupies, but they might spend their time trying to actually fix problems as opposed to being stubborn pains in the asses who pray for a better world and then get in the way of anyone who try make it for them.
So, here's my argument with your point.
1) It's an economics professor formulating a theory regarding the spread of a gene. Ok, he's got a model, but it's highly doubtful he understands the constants and the variables well enough to allow the model to have any merit.
2) He is clearly biased in the direction that from what I can read, his model is designed to attempt to prove "We'll all be religious one day, shouldn't we just skip all the waiting and get to it now".
3) His "facts" regarding reproduction rates based on the popular science sources he sites are poorly interpreted to begin with.
4) The model makes the assumption the "religiosity" gene plays a strictly dominant role and has a damn near 100% success rate of being carried from one generation to the next.
5) He doesn't take environment into consideration nearly enough. He models based on the idea that all people will live strictly by their primordial instincts. It's entirely possible the gene in question is present in tons of non-religious people as well. From what I can tell, the gene is kind of like a thing which says "A kid born with this gene and left in the wild to raise him/herself is more likely to pray to volley balls named Wilson that wash up on the shore than kids who aren't." It doesn't seem to actually have that great of an impact on people in their later lives. Just that it seems they are more likely to come from other p
Media frameworks such as DirectShow, GStreamer and the such are quite good at this. I work on this specific type of code all day long and maintain my own alternative for extremely high bit-rate environments.
You're talking about designing an object that consumes and produces real-time data. The source of this data is provided by an "upstream" component (or object to be consistent) within your processing pipeline. The destination for the data produced is provided to a "downstream" object.
An API for this type of component should always been seen from the perspective of the user of the component or object. Therefore the interfaces should be named NOT from their internal perspective, but from their external perspective. After all, your APIs are theoretically there so that someone else can use your component without being familiar with the internal architecture of the component itself.
An upstream component which provides data to downstream components are "Data Sources".
A downstream component which consumes data provided by "Data Sources" are "Data Sinks"
A component which acts on data received from an upstream "data source", alters it or produces new data from to send down stream to a "data sink" is called a "transformation" object.
So, a processing pipeline should consist of 3 elements.
1) Data source
2) Transformation Object
3) Data sink
This is similar in nature to :
1) Input
2) Process
3) Output
Though in an object oriented model making use of a pipeline style pattern, it's best to name the objects appropriately.
The output of an object, or the API of an object which provides data to downstream elements, components, objects (etc) should be referred to as Source. So a "Source Object" outputs its data through a "Source". In GStreamer for example, you would say "The source element provides data to downstream elements through one of its source pins" as GStreamer (like other pipeline architectures) provides a uniform interface for providing and consuming data.
The input point of an object (which receives data from upstream objects) should be called a "Sink".
A transformation element contains a minimum of one source and one sink. Data is received by the object via its sink and the processed data is pushed from the object via its source.
This methodology is very simple to use and understand.
An alternative can be "Receiver" which suggests the object received media via this interface and "Transmitter" which suggests that the object transmits data from the interface.
Some people like to use "Listener", "Observer" etc... but since there's no nice corresponding opposite to either of these, I find them grotesque when I encounter them in code.
I think that if you read up on the GStreamer documentation web site, you'll get some great ideas for how best to handle this. Just remember that when you're providing an API to a customer, you're delivering something that should be easy to use and understand from their perspective from the outside. Your API naming should reflect this.