It would be cheaper, but it is absolutely essential in order to provide feature-parity with UPS and FedEx. In any case, they must still be using local mallet-smashers for relatively local (regional) mail, because I still get stuff from within the state in two days or less.
They never seem to care when they break stuff, either. I remember a conversation I once had with a rather chipper mail carrier over a beat-up box clearly marked FRAGILE:
Me: Sounds broken.
Delivery guy: Most likely, sir! I'll bet it was something nice though.
I heard an interesting story from, oddly enough, a MathWorks rep (the people who make MATLAB) about the early days of Microsoft Excel. I don't know if it's true...I think he said he'd either heard it or read it online from an early Excel developer, but my quick Google-fu didn't turn anything up. In any case, he said that after Microsoft first released Excel, they went out to their business customers to figure out how they could improve it. They were flabbergasted to find out that people were using it in completely different ways than they imagined. Even though (I believe) it was originally designed for data analysis, a great number of people weren't even using it for calculations at all. They were using it for to-do list tracking, calendars, structured text documents, presenting tabular data, etc. That's why Microsoft was the first one to have a spreadsheet that allowed the user flexibility to change its appearance: fonts, colors and the like.
He was explaining this as part of his justification for coming out and talking to us, but I think it's also telling that their customers weren't using it like they expected. I guess this is really just a long way of saying that once you get to the point where quick Excel formula isn't cutting it, it stops being the right tool for the job.
(e.g. the overnight loss of 54 miles of range that Broder reported, which the logs support as having happened).
I'd love to see the data plotted versus time, which I assume it must record time as well. If you look at the Cabin Temperature Setpoint at 400 miles, it very curiously spikes to maximum temperature in such a way that it couldn't be a single spurious data point. Letting the car idle with the temperature set to maximum would produce that exact effect. I doubt Musk will release the data publicly, but maybe NYT or some other news outlet that wants to show them up will take the same route with full documentation.
A ball still falls if you drop it while aboard the ISS; in fact, it falls at the same rate as everything else. It's just that we threw the whole thing at the ground and missed.
Can't get to TFA at work, so just guessing: if Google Chrome is like most other cross-platform software, it comes packaged with many of its own libraries on Windows, but on Linux it relies on shared libraries. RHEL tends to contain older versions of libraries with the implication that older means more stable, so maybe some non-essential feature in the latest Chrome had to be disabled and it popped up that warning. I know I had a lot of fun messing around trying to build chromium on RHEL5, which came with gcc 4.1.4 when the build required 4.2+.
Unless it's just detecting the version string or something, in which case this is indeed quite lame.
Just get one of these things and test it under rigorous scientific conditions and scrutiny.
If it works, it works; If it doesn't it's back to the drawing board and we can all move on.
From TFA:
Boeing's Phantom Works, which works on various classified projects and has been involved in space research, went as far as acquiring and testing the EmDrive, but say they are no longer working with Shawyer.
So either it didn't work, or Phantom Works already has/came up with something better. On a related note, the article makes kind of a big deal about the "propellant-less" claim, even though we already have a propellant-less drive with extremely low thrust: solar sails. Although, admittedly you'd need a pretty huge sail to reach 720 mN (the claimed thrust) in Earth orbit. Actually, 720 mN is quite large compared to current ion engines, so I'm curious to know what Phantom Works found.
Python with SciPy is a lot like MATLAB. Python, the language, is far superior to MATLAB's language; I hate 1-based array indexing, for example. MATLAB's language does have a few special features for matrices that Python lacks, but that is just syntactic sugar (there are functions to do everything in Python).
Even as a MATLAB user I agree, as long as we're strictly talking about the language. Many of GNU Octave's woes (though they're getting JIT now!) can be blamed on the poor language design.
But there are many things that SciPy doesn't have. Yes, MATLAB is an unnecessarily expensive choice for data analysis, but my employer only uses it for that (not "big data," mind you) because it's already our design tool, so it's an ideal rapid prototyping environment. That's where it really shines: Simulink and code generation, which is how many of the aerospace companies do it these days. There is no Python/SciPy alternative, and the commercial alternatives can't touch it.
In case you were unaware, there are Mobile Virtual Network Operators that operate on Verizon's network. I haven't tried Page Plus myself, but I've heard good things. I was considering it but went with Cricket's "unlimited" everything for $50, since that also let me bring the Verizon-branded Droid Incredible I snagged off ebay for $150 a couple years ago. I know that kills your wish for unlimited data but it's also a ton cheaper, if you're into sacrificing some usability for a 50+% drop in monthly cell phone bills.
Now that I mention it, though, one of the Page Plus plans might actually work better for us these days...
Meh, RAID 1 with a billion mirrors didn't seem as funny to me...I didn't think using more than two numbers made sense anyway. I should have taken my audience into consideration, though.
Phew! Until you pointed this out, I was worried that we were all walking around with over a hundred petabytes of random data in our bodies (assuming approximately 50 grams of DNA per person). If that were the case there would be a pretty solid chance that, with the right decoder, we're all infringing on somebody's copyright. Thank evolution we're running RAID 1000000000 instead.
That's definitely an interesting question. I did some engineering for an asteroid sample and return mission, and the challenges involved are not trivial. Many of the asteroids we've looked at for missions are already just rubble piles, and have surface escape velocities of less than half a meter per second. So any type of demolition to break something more solid apart will definitely blow away significant mass. Would a drill even work if you didn't have a thruster on it, pushing toward the surface? I don't know; doing these kinds of heavy operations in microgravity is sure to introduce some fun engineering challenges. It'll be interesting to see how they do it.
desktop linux fails because it is still struggling to be mediocre, its not bad, there's nothing wrong with it, its problem is it isnt particularly great.
Success is a relative term, especially when you're talking about something developed by volunteers.
For some Linux distributions, as long as the developers find it worth their time (whether that's in terms of donations, users, etc.) then it's a success. Companies like Red Hat would and should drop their desktop Linux offering if it's not profitable, but last I checked RHEL is doing well -- at least well enough that they haven't killed it yet and apparently have no plans to do so. For me personally, desktop Linux is a huge success, especially these days with more and more indie games supporting it. On top of that it's easy for me, I'm more comfortable with the development environment, the combination of security and the lack of users means I don't have to bog down my machine with anti-malware, and as an Arch user with a custom desktop environment, I know an awful lot about what my computer is doing at all times. Much of that is not so with, for example, my Windows 7 work machine.
I realize that I'm in a tiny minority, and the FOSS programs that I know and love would often be better supported with more users and thus more donations, but pretty much all of them run on other platforms as well, so often they're not just limited to Linux users anyway.
Not sure why you got no love for this. The Sims was the gateway drug for my wife. Since (like the OP) we have kids now, she doesn't play as much as she used to...she mostly sticks to Sim City 4 and The Sims 3 these days. But back before the kids, The Sims got her started, and then she became interested in what I was playing. At the peak of it, we had a ton of fun playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles on the GameCube together. That game hit all the right high notes: we had to work together, it wasn't graphically violent, there are few buttons (we played with Game Boy Advances) and it wasn't twitch-based, her contribution was critical (each GBA showed a different screen, I couldn't go off on my own or do everything). And it was deep, too: she liked planning out the races and professions we would pick, and she liked collecting the plans for various weapons and gathering the materials to build them. We actually restarted several times when she'd change her mind because of that. But YMMV on that; I think the first bits are the more universally enjoyable parts. Note that I didn't really think about all this stuff at the time, but based on what I said, it makes sense why we never really got into any other games as much as that one.
Oh yeah, I have also turned her into a Fire Emblem fanatic, so we'll probably end up getting a 3DS entirely for the new one. But that had nothing to do with playing together.
I can't find the percentage of identified vs. unidentified, but among the identified scrolls:
40% are copies of text from the Hebrew Bible
30% are copies of texts not canonized in the Hebrew Bible (i.e. fanfiction) from the Second Temple Period like the Books of Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, Sirach, and additional psalms
30% are "sectarian manuscripts" - texts that describe rules or a set of beliefs held by certain groups within Judaism.
Imagine how easy and cheap it would be to put together a few pipe bombs jacketed with small ball bearings; that would create every bit as much horror and death in a room for children as this guy was able to do using guns. You can't control the materials for that either without really crippling society. Any intelligent (though not necessarily sane) person who wants to hurt a large number of people in our society can find a way to do so, with or without a gun.
The Columbine shooters tried to build and detonate pipe bombs, and they failed. If they only had knives to fall back on, how many people would have survived? A line has to be drawn somewhere, and you simply don't know enough to say that, had he been unable to obtain that rifle, nothing would have changed. Just because a sufficiently motivated druggie can get high doesn't mean we should just go ahead and legalize cocaine.
The guy's already dead. Personally I think they should just never release his name or any pictures. To twisted wastes of life like this guy, infamy is all they think they can achieve. Take it away from them.
Can you please explain in what regard the security on OSX or Linux (a standard desktop distro) are superior to Windows 7 / 8?
I've seen your other posts, where you go into very interesting detail regarding how Windows actually does have nice security features. But here's the real answer to your question: malware isn't built for Linux. Yeah, a competent Windows admin probably could have avoided this, but even a volunteer Linux admin *definitely* would have, because the virus simply wouldn't have worked. Note that I'm not making any claims about superior features or about how Linux is immune, just that this would not have happened. Yeah, security through obscurity isn't really all that impressive, but generally speaking it works just fine for Linux users.
15 pages of a review, with a poor summary of the results, results in the most number of page views. It would have been nice if they had some sort of summary or benchmark to compare the two against rather than individual tests spread across this. Perhaps a summary chart?
Funny, I never bothered looking at the link, but from this comment alone it was obvious that it's a Phoronix article.
I am disappointed that nobody has pointed out that we can now measure human mass in terms of Libraries of Congress. For example: Americans can now proudly proclaim that we carry, on average, at least ten million more Libraries of Congress than citizens of any other country. Or: I really shouldn't have eaten those atomic wings, I just dropped two million Libraries of Congress from spending so much time in the bathroom.
Anyway, the most under-appreciated sci-fi author, bar none, is Jack Vance.
I think any author recommendation should have a particular book or series to go along with it. Considering the man is nearly a century old, I'd appreciate some help knowing where to start!
you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?
The SNES uses custom chips for most of its functionality. Unless he has access to decapping facilities, taking one apart will provide only limited information.
This might be a stupid question, but is it not very EE-like to do something cool like taking one apart and making his own portable SNES a la benheck?
I've never had trouble with that, but I tried playing split-screen multiplayer Modern Warfare or one of its ilk at a party last year on a 55" Plasma. Now it's not exactly my bailiwick but back in the Halo 2 days I used to be a fairly decent console FPS player even with split-screen limitations. But with MW I seriously could barely see anything, and most often I died without ever seeing any of the people I was fighting. I even tried the old "watch the other guy's screen" cheat and it didn't help at all.
Before this article I couldn't put my finger on it, but I think this was exactly the problem. There may have been plenty of detail, but I couldn't make out the actual enemies. I guess the other players were just used to it.
Despite the legions of posters on this site (and every other site I have been to so far) who seem to feel that because Wikileaks DARED to releas US Government secrets that were submitted to them, Assange should be hung, drawn and quartered in public for having the temerity to do so, I think that Wikileaks serves a very valuable service to the bulk of humanity who might be interested in the things their governments are doing in their name and often keeping them from knowing.
I may be misremembering, but I was under the impression that the people here generally support the actions of Wikileaks, even if they're not the biggest fans of Assange himself. On most other US news sites it's exactly how you say.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be cheaper, but it is absolutely essential in order to provide feature-parity with UPS and FedEx. In any case, they must still be using local mallet-smashers for relatively local (regional) mail, because I still get stuff from within the state in two days or less.
They never seem to care when they break stuff, either. I remember a conversation I once had with a rather chipper mail carrier over a beat-up box clearly marked FRAGILE:
Me: Sounds broken.
Delivery guy: Most likely, sir! I'll bet it was something nice though.
And then he stole my dog.
I heard an interesting story from, oddly enough, a MathWorks rep (the people who make MATLAB) about the early days of Microsoft Excel. I don't know if it's true...I think he said he'd either heard it or read it online from an early Excel developer, but my quick Google-fu didn't turn anything up. In any case, he said that after Microsoft first released Excel, they went out to their business customers to figure out how they could improve it. They were flabbergasted to find out that people were using it in completely different ways than they imagined. Even though (I believe) it was originally designed for data analysis, a great number of people weren't even using it for calculations at all. They were using it for to-do list tracking, calendars, structured text documents, presenting tabular data, etc. That's why Microsoft was the first one to have a spreadsheet that allowed the user flexibility to change its appearance: fonts, colors and the like.
He was explaining this as part of his justification for coming out and talking to us, but I think it's also telling that their customers weren't using it like they expected. I guess this is really just a long way of saying that once you get to the point where quick Excel formula isn't cutting it, it stops being the right tool for the job.
(e.g. the overnight loss of 54 miles of range that Broder reported, which the logs support as having happened).
I'd love to see the data plotted versus time, which I assume it must record time as well. If you look at the Cabin Temperature Setpoint at 400 miles, it very curiously spikes to maximum temperature in such a way that it couldn't be a single spurious data point. Letting the car idle with the temperature set to maximum would produce that exact effect. I doubt Musk will release the data publicly, but maybe NYT or some other news outlet that wants to show them up will take the same route with full documentation.
A ball still falls if you drop it while aboard the ISS; in fact, it falls at the same rate as everything else. It's just that we threw the whole thing at the ground and missed.
Can't get to TFA at work, so just guessing: if Google Chrome is like most other cross-platform software, it comes packaged with many of its own libraries on Windows, but on Linux it relies on shared libraries. RHEL tends to contain older versions of libraries with the implication that older means more stable, so maybe some non-essential feature in the latest Chrome had to be disabled and it popped up that warning. I know I had a lot of fun messing around trying to build chromium on RHEL5, which came with gcc 4.1.4 when the build required 4.2+.
Unless it's just detecting the version string or something, in which case this is indeed quite lame.
Just get one of these things and test it under rigorous scientific conditions and scrutiny.
If it works, it works; If it doesn't it's back to the drawing board and we can all move on.
From TFA:
Boeing's Phantom Works, which works on various classified projects and has been involved in space research, went as far as acquiring and testing the EmDrive, but say they are no longer working with Shawyer.
So either it didn't work, or Phantom Works already has/came up with something better. On a related note, the article makes kind of a big deal about the "propellant-less" claim, even though we already have a propellant-less drive with extremely low thrust: solar sails. Although, admittedly you'd need a pretty huge sail to reach 720 mN (the claimed thrust) in Earth orbit. Actually, 720 mN is quite large compared to current ion engines, so I'm curious to know what Phantom Works found.
Python with SciPy is a lot like MATLAB. Python, the language, is far superior to MATLAB's language; I hate 1-based array indexing, for example. MATLAB's language does have a few special features for matrices that Python lacks, but that is just syntactic sugar (there are functions to do everything in Python).
Even as a MATLAB user I agree, as long as we're strictly talking about the language. Many of GNU Octave's woes (though they're getting JIT now!) can be blamed on the poor language design.
But there are many things that SciPy doesn't have. Yes, MATLAB is an unnecessarily expensive choice for data analysis, but my employer only uses it for that (not "big data," mind you) because it's already our design tool, so it's an ideal rapid prototyping environment. That's where it really shines: Simulink and code generation, which is how many of the aerospace companies do it these days. There is no Python/SciPy alternative, and the commercial alternatives can't touch it.
In case you were unaware, there are Mobile Virtual Network Operators that operate on Verizon's network. I haven't tried Page Plus myself, but I've heard good things. I was considering it but went with Cricket's "unlimited" everything for $50, since that also let me bring the Verizon-branded Droid Incredible I snagged off ebay for $150 a couple years ago. I know that kills your wish for unlimited data but it's also a ton cheaper, if you're into sacrificing some usability for a 50+% drop in monthly cell phone bills.
Now that I mention it, though, one of the Page Plus plans might actually work better for us these days...
Meh, RAID 1 with a billion mirrors didn't seem as funny to me...I didn't think using more than two numbers made sense anyway. I should have taken my audience into consideration, though.
I'm sure AC was deliberately being misogynistic, but I assumed the first guy was trying to be funny. I shake my head at the insightful mod, though.
I'm a little disappointed that they didn't conduct a parallel study where they asked a random sampling of people the same question, though.
Phew! Until you pointed this out, I was worried that we were all walking around with over a hundred petabytes of random data in our bodies (assuming approximately 50 grams of DNA per person). If that were the case there would be a pretty solid chance that, with the right decoder, we're all infringing on somebody's copyright. Thank evolution we're running RAID 1000000000 instead.
That's definitely an interesting question. I did some engineering for an asteroid sample and return mission, and the challenges involved are not trivial. Many of the asteroids we've looked at for missions are already just rubble piles, and have surface escape velocities of less than half a meter per second. So any type of demolition to break something more solid apart will definitely blow away significant mass. Would a drill even work if you didn't have a thruster on it, pushing toward the surface? I don't know; doing these kinds of heavy operations in microgravity is sure to introduce some fun engineering challenges. It'll be interesting to see how they do it.
desktop linux fails because it is still struggling to be mediocre, its not bad, there's nothing wrong with it, its problem is it isnt particularly great.
Success is a relative term, especially when you're talking about something developed by volunteers.
For some Linux distributions, as long as the developers find it worth their time (whether that's in terms of donations, users, etc.) then it's a success. Companies like Red Hat would and should drop their desktop Linux offering if it's not profitable, but last I checked RHEL is doing well -- at least well enough that they haven't killed it yet and apparently have no plans to do so. For me personally, desktop Linux is a huge success, especially these days with more and more indie games supporting it. On top of that it's easy for me, I'm more comfortable with the development environment, the combination of security and the lack of users means I don't have to bog down my machine with anti-malware, and as an Arch user with a custom desktop environment, I know an awful lot about what my computer is doing at all times. Much of that is not so with, for example, my Windows 7 work machine.
I realize that I'm in a tiny minority, and the FOSS programs that I know and love would often be better supported with more users and thus more donations, but pretty much all of them run on other platforms as well, so often they're not just limited to Linux users anyway.
Not sure why you got no love for this. The Sims was the gateway drug for my wife. Since (like the OP) we have kids now, she doesn't play as much as she used to...she mostly sticks to Sim City 4 and The Sims 3 these days. But back before the kids, The Sims got her started, and then she became interested in what I was playing. At the peak of it, we had a ton of fun playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles on the GameCube together. That game hit all the right high notes: we had to work together, it wasn't graphically violent, there are few buttons (we played with Game Boy Advances) and it wasn't twitch-based, her contribution was critical (each GBA showed a different screen, I couldn't go off on my own or do everything). And it was deep, too: she liked planning out the races and professions we would pick, and she liked collecting the plans for various weapons and gathering the materials to build them. We actually restarted several times when she'd change her mind because of that. But YMMV on that; I think the first bits are the more universally enjoyable parts. Note that I didn't really think about all this stuff at the time, but based on what I said, it makes sense why we never really got into any other games as much as that one.
Oh yeah, I have also turned her into a Fire Emblem fanatic, so we'll probably end up getting a 3DS entirely for the new one. But that had nothing to do with playing together.
I can't find the percentage of identified vs. unidentified, but among the identified scrolls:
40% are copies of text from the Hebrew Bible
30% are copies of texts not canonized in the Hebrew Bible (i.e. fanfiction) from the Second Temple Period like the Books of Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, Sirach, and additional psalms
30% are "sectarian manuscripts" - texts that describe rules or a set of beliefs held by certain groups within Judaism.
Imagine how easy and cheap it would be to put together a few pipe bombs jacketed with small ball bearings; that would create every bit as much horror and death in a room for children as this guy was able to do using guns. You can't control the materials for that either without really crippling society. Any intelligent (though not necessarily sane) person who wants to hurt a large number of people in our society can find a way to do so, with or without a gun.
The Columbine shooters tried to build and detonate pipe bombs, and they failed. If they only had knives to fall back on, how many people would have survived? A line has to be drawn somewhere, and you simply don't know enough to say that, had he been unable to obtain that rifle, nothing would have changed. Just because a sufficiently motivated druggie can get high doesn't mean we should just go ahead and legalize cocaine.
The guy's already dead. Personally I think they should just never release his name or any pictures. To twisted wastes of life like this guy, infamy is all they think they can achieve. Take it away from them.
Can you please explain in what regard the security on OSX or Linux (a standard desktop distro) are superior to Windows 7 / 8?
I've seen your other posts, where you go into very interesting detail regarding how Windows actually does have nice security features. But here's the real answer to your question: malware isn't built for Linux. Yeah, a competent Windows admin probably could have avoided this, but even a volunteer Linux admin *definitely* would have, because the virus simply wouldn't have worked. Note that I'm not making any claims about superior features or about how Linux is immune, just that this would not have happened. Yeah, security through obscurity isn't really all that impressive, but generally speaking it works just fine for Linux users.
15 pages of a review, with a poor summary of the results, results in the most number of page views. It would have been nice if they had some sort of summary or benchmark to compare the two against rather than individual tests spread across this. Perhaps a summary chart?
Funny, I never bothered looking at the link, but from this comment alone it was obvious that it's a Phoronix article.
I am disappointed that nobody has pointed out that we can now measure human mass in terms of Libraries of Congress. For example: Americans can now proudly proclaim that we carry, on average, at least ten million more Libraries of Congress than citizens of any other country. Or: I really shouldn't have eaten those atomic wings, I just dropped two million Libraries of Congress from spending so much time in the bathroom.
Anyway, the most under-appreciated sci-fi author, bar none, is Jack Vance.
I think any author recommendation should have a particular book or series to go along with it. Considering the man is nearly a century old, I'd appreciate some help knowing where to start!
you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?
The SNES uses custom chips for most of its functionality. Unless he has access to decapping facilities, taking one apart will provide only limited information.
This might be a stupid question, but is it not very EE-like to do something cool like taking one apart and making his own portable SNES a la benheck?
I've never had trouble with that, but I tried playing split-screen multiplayer Modern Warfare or one of its ilk at a party last year on a 55" Plasma. Now it's not exactly my bailiwick but back in the Halo 2 days I used to be a fairly decent console FPS player even with split-screen limitations. But with MW I seriously could barely see anything, and most often I died without ever seeing any of the people I was fighting. I even tried the old "watch the other guy's screen" cheat and it didn't help at all.
Before this article I couldn't put my finger on it, but I think this was exactly the problem. There may have been plenty of detail, but I couldn't make out the actual enemies. I guess the other players were just used to it.
Are you sure it's message is entirely correct?
Despite the legions of posters on this site (and every other site I have been to so far) who seem to feel that because Wikileaks DARED to releas US Government secrets that were submitted to them, Assange should be hung, drawn and quartered in public for having the temerity to do so, I think that Wikileaks serves a very valuable service to the bulk of humanity who might be interested in the things their governments are doing in their name and often keeping them from knowing.
I may be misremembering, but I was under the impression that the people here generally support the actions of Wikileaks, even if they're not the biggest fans of Assange himself. On most other US news sites it's exactly how you say.