...cold fusion *does* work. At least according to the latest edition of NewScientist. The physics behind it was stranger than they thought, though, hence it was very difficult to replicate results.
Compare and contrast with someone whose work is plainly bunk.
Yep. All modern car emissions are *so* far down on what they were. Another amusing fact - because of that, it's no longer possible to kill yourself by gassing yourself with car exhaust. When auto manufacturers put in catalysts and electronic control modules, there was a noticeable drop in suicide rates.
It's actually not too hard, if you've got a properly run system. Get your spec and count requirements. Get your timesheet logs and count hours spent on implementing requirements. Divide B by A.
Of course, I couldn't guarantee you'd get the 25%/100% correspondance, because it depends on the situation. If you've got a lot of stuff to do and no one bit is related to another bit, this is an issue of scaling, not of complexity.
To be smarter, work out how long it takes you to implement something for which there are 40 requirements stating how it should work, and to implement something for which there are 50 requirements. Making sure, of course, that the requirements all influence each other somehow so that it is a true increase in complexity.
Getting the figures is a pretty trivial computational step *IF* you have the information to start with. Everyone hates longwinded timesheets though, so it's difficult getting that info in the first place. And then there's usually some emergency that's more important than analysing data, so you never get to find out how long you *should* estimate for work, because you're too busy firefighting the last bit of work that someone underestimated on!:-/
It is if you're on dial-up, like most people are. And the whole point of broadband over powerlines is that it *is* cheap - there's no enormous investment in cabling to pay back, no maintenance of cables required, no digging up the street. All you need to cover is costs of installing servers and keeping stuff running, plus some profit. They can undercut cable companies by orders of magnitude.
First move is exercising. Do some. If you're working insane hours (12+) at work then you'll likely have no problems sleeping, simply through exhaustion. Otherwise exercise will use up some energy so that you don't feel twitchy.
I know people say "don't exercise after 8pm/10pm/whatever", but it's not a big deal. It may take you an hour or so to stretch, shower, chill out, etc after you've been running, but you'll sleep much better after that. Being a little later to bed is no big deal if you get a better quality of sleep.
Second move is to be relaxed before you go to bed. Do something that doesn't take serious mental effort. Play a game, play a musical instrument, read, whatever. *Don't* spend hours hacking immediately before bed, otherwise your brain will still be racing.
And if you can't sleep, get up and do one of the above for a bit until you *do* feel sleepy. Sometimes all your body needs is a change of scene - go to the bathroom, have a drink of water, and your body will get into "sleep mode".
But this *does* parallel up well. You work out for the current state of each little chunk relative to the others, rinse and repeat. Each processor handles a large number of chunks, and they then only have to communicate about the states of the chunks on the boundaries.
In physical problems like this, you *do* literally have a lot of little chunks with propagation delays between them, so the solver maps pretty accurately onto the problem. The only issue is getting the chunks small enough to be an accurate representation. The way air behaves over a city is different from elsewhere due to light reflection, heat emission from buildings, the thermal mass of the concrete, different levels of pollutants, etc.
No, no, Tony Blair as Wormtongue... Rice would make a keen Nazgul though. And hey, we have an evil, misshapen general in RotK just looking for a casting - step up Mr. Colin Powell!
I just feel sorry for the poor bastards cast as Faramir and his co-suicide-charge victims, out there right now...
Any nay-sayers tout the dangers of DC, they need to consider the stunningly dangerous, should-never-be-allowed hazard of the battery in their car...:-)
If you use a full-wave rectifier (or just use two strings of LEDs), both the positive and negative sides of the cycle will cause the LEDs to light. So you'll actually get them strobing at 120Hz. The eye can't see changes past 100Hz, so no problems there.
Don't know about you, but what I want to avoid losing is my work. Family snapshots on the HDD I can live with losing, but losing the software I've written over 5 years would be a big kick in the teeth.
SourceForge serves a double purpose for that, acting not only as a release mechanism for what I write, but also as an offsite backup system. Nice one SF!
If what you've got isn't code, then put it on your website instead. Free web space is easy to come by. Whatever you're looking to preserve, it'll likely be stuff you've put a lot of work into, and in that case making it available on the web is a Good Thing. And if your PC burns itself to pieces, you can retrieve the files from the website.
OK, I know website providers and SF say that they aren't to be relied on, and that you must always have your own backups. But unless both you and your website provider (or SF) have a major fire at the same time, in practical terms this is pretty safe.
I love the way that everyone presents written records as a good example of a "perpetual" medium which surpasses digital.
You may note that the author says "you can read 100-year-old newspapers *on* *microfiche*". This point practically jumps up and down to be noticed - even in the world of printing, paper copies are not seen as suitable for long-term storage, due to difficulties of preservation and physical bulk. So these paper copies are transferred to some other medium for long-term storage. This medium relies on readers existing - if all companies making microfiche readers went out of business (which probably won't be too many years ahead) then the microfiches will be unreadable. And the microfiches themselves are fragile - a scratch in the wrong place will make it difficult to read, and it's on plastic which will degrade over time.
Why should digital be any different? If you want ultra-long-term storage of digital data, use punch holes in gold sheets. Otherwise you use a storage medium which gives you a reasonable storage size and reasonable data security.
On reading the data back, suppose microfiche readers went obsolete and you couldn't buy them. The method of reading the data is still known and recorded, and can be reconstructed by someone needing to get the data back. Similarly, the most common bulk storage methods today are the CD-R and the DVD+/-R (tape backups are practically obsolete). Now the standard for data storage on CD and DVD is, well, *standard*. So if in 200 years time someone wants to read one back, they could build a CD player from first principles.
If you're talking resolution, I suggest you look into more recent digital FX instead of something X years old. Modern FX use 24-bit sampling, usually with higher-precision internal variables for doing calculations. I simply don't believe anyone who says they can tell 24-bit sampled from the real thing.
Now whether the FX pedal has an algorithm which exactly matches a tube amp, that's debatable. But you get 24-bit resolution, the ADCs and DACs are *not* the limiting factor...
Our local arts cinema ran FotR extended edition on the big screen, and did a back-to-back showing of FotR and TTT extended (obviously with some time between for calls of nature!:-) So they'd damn well better do the thing properly for RotK...
I warned my wife that when they did that, she'd be losing me for a day. She looked at me funny and said "But I'll be going to see it too." God, I love that woman...:-)
A patent for a Dead Author Generator? I can see the application now...
"This claim covers approaching an author of fictional or non-fictional works published in book, short-story collection, magazine or other form, pointing a pistol, machine-gun, revolver or similar firearm at them and pulling the trigger. Prior art exists for use of a knife or similar weapon (cf Julius Caesar) and burning alive (cf Catholic Church), so these methods are not claimed."
Except that the MS license says it's not to be used in safety-critical applications. If you do use it in a safety-critical app, that's your problem and not MS's.
No, lemon laws exist to protect consumers from bad products where the "badness" is very easy to quantify. If a 2-litre Ford engine doesn't pull as well as a 2-litre Honda engine, you have no rights under the lemon laws. But if it bursts into flames, *that's* where the lemon laws can come into play. And it's very easy to determine whether an engine has burst into flames or not, I think...
And what do auto manufacturers do? They recall the cars and modify them. Put simply, they upgrade them. What does MS do when there's a new Windows vulnerability? Exactly the same thing.
The only sale is a bit of physical media. You can do with the CD itself what you like. If you want to play frisbee with it or use it as a coaster, MS isn't stopping you.
But the software, they just sold you a license to use it. Nothing more, nothing less. You go to Hertz and pay the rental price, you aren't being sold the car, are you? You're being sold a license to use it under certain conditions (one condition being that you give it back after the hire period).
I don't say it's good, I don't say it's right, I don't even say that all the license agreements are legal (no doubt some aren't, but they've not been tested in court any more than the GPL ever has been). I do say that if you paid your money under that agreement, you can't shout "fraud" when you get what you paid for. If you don't like the license, take the whole lot back to the store and get your money back. If you don't understand the license and click "I agree" anyway, that's your problem.
This whole article is based on a false premise. "If we can't earn our living solely from the game, it isn't a sport." Frankly, that is pure garbage.
Most athletes earn their money not from salaries or tournament prizes but from sponsorship. This applies as much to athletes in highly-popular sports as to any others. There's a reason why Anna Kournikova made a fortune in spite of being a frankly indifferent tennis player, and that's bcos she used her looks to get massive sponsorship deals. I wouldn't need to take my socks off to count the number of tennis players who've made a million bucks from tournament prizes in their entire lives, but the top 20 players will be getting way more than that a *year*, courtesy of Nike, Reebok, Slazenger and the rest.
The only exception to this is in sports where the athletes earn their money through wages - football, baseball and soccer, for example. In these, wages are covered by tens of thousands of people paying to see them play each week. Until you can get tens of thousands of people to watch CS tournaments, you can forget this.
So only those guys who get sponsorship are likely to make a living out of it. That means either you get sponsored, or you cut your standard of living until unemployment benefit or some part-time job can finance your life while you devote your time to your sport, or you live off savings in the hope that you'll get sponsorship before they run out (ie. "burn rate" like a startup business), or you go work for a company that produces stuff for that sport and get your practise time as "product testing". In *every* minor sport, these are the available options for aspiring athletes.
To the author of this article: I suggest you go and talk to some rock climbers, hang-glider pilots, cross-country runners, parachutists, motocross riders, skaters (street or ice), discus/shot-put/hammer throwers, rowers, swimmers, or simply female athletes in traditionally-male sports (like soccer). Go whine to them that CS can't succeed as a sport bcos it's *so* hard to make a good living out of it. And when they've laughed in your face (or kicked the living shit out of you), maybe you'll have some perspective on your situation.
Problem is that many web designers are graphic artists, not programmers. They're fine at drawing pretty pictures, but if you want something useable, go whistle. This wasn't so big a deal in the "old days" of the web when HTML was simple - artists could just about figure it out - but these days they need some proper programming know-how. I'm sure there are *many* counter-examples, but generally you find that there aren't so many ppl who are good programmers *and* good artists.
Actually, Poul Anderson did write a few Man-Kzin Wars stories. Niven let a lot of ppl in to play in his universe. Which is just as well, since it means there's Man-Kzin-based stories which aren't erotic furries. "Ringworld Throne" - eep! I don't want to speculate too much about Niven's private life, but I think he should be kept well clear of any cats/dogs/sheep...
Excellent. Then you can write to them and say "It wasn't me, it was my friend." And get your friend to acknowledge that yes, it was him/her. The police will take into account that the vehicle may be driven by the spouse of the owner, or that it may be a hire car, or whatever. Whilst the original ticket may have been issued automatically, you can bring in humans after that to deal with the special cases.
What you *can't* dispute is that your car was going past the camera in excess of the speed limit, so the driver (whoever it happened to be) was breaking the law.
Slashdot Mirror
...cold fusion *does* work. At least according to the latest edition of NewScientist. The physics behind it was stranger than they thought, though, hence it was very difficult to replicate results.
Compare and contrast with someone whose work is plainly bunk.
Grab.
Yep. All modern car emissions are *so* far down on what they were. Another amusing fact - because of that, it's no longer possible to kill yourself by gassing yourself with car exhaust. When auto manufacturers put in catalysts and electronic control modules, there was a noticeable drop in suicide rates.
Grab.
It's actually not too hard, if you've got a properly run system. Get your spec and count requirements. Get your timesheet logs and count hours spent on implementing requirements. Divide B by A.
:-/
Of course, I couldn't guarantee you'd get the 25%/100% correspondance, because it depends on the situation. If you've got a lot of stuff to do and no one bit is related to another bit, this is an issue of scaling, not of complexity.
To be smarter, work out how long it takes you to implement something for which there are 40 requirements stating how it should work, and to implement something for which there are 50 requirements. Making sure, of course, that the requirements all influence each other somehow so that it is a true increase in complexity.
Getting the figures is a pretty trivial computational step *IF* you have the information to start with. Everyone hates longwinded timesheets though, so it's difficult getting that info in the first place. And then there's usually some emergency that's more important than analysing data, so you never get to find out how long you *should* estimate for work, because you're too busy firefighting the last bit of work that someone underestimated on!
Grab.
And if power goes out, you're going to be running your desktop how, exactly? Or have you sprung for a UPS?
Grab.
It is if you're on dial-up, like most people are. And the whole point of broadband over powerlines is that it *is* cheap - there's no enormous investment in cabling to pay back, no maintenance of cables required, no digging up the street. All you need to cover is costs of installing servers and keeping stuff running, plus some profit. They can undercut cable companies by orders of magnitude.
Grab.
First move is exercising. Do some. If you're working insane hours (12+) at work then you'll likely have no problems sleeping, simply through exhaustion. Otherwise exercise will use up some energy so that you don't feel twitchy.
I know people say "don't exercise after 8pm/10pm/whatever", but it's not a big deal. It may take you an hour or so to stretch, shower, chill out, etc after you've been running, but you'll sleep much better after that. Being a little later to bed is no big deal if you get a better quality of sleep.
Second move is to be relaxed before you go to bed. Do something that doesn't take serious mental effort. Play a game, play a musical instrument, read, whatever. *Don't* spend hours hacking immediately before bed, otherwise your brain will still be racing.
And if you can't sleep, get up and do one of the above for a bit until you *do* feel sleepy. Sometimes all your body needs is a change of scene - go to the bathroom, have a drink of water, and your body will get into "sleep mode".
Grab.
But this *does* parallel up well. You work out for the current state of each little chunk relative to the others, rinse and repeat. Each processor handles a large number of chunks, and they then only have to communicate about the states of the chunks on the boundaries.
In physical problems like this, you *do* literally have a lot of little chunks with propagation delays between them, so the solver maps pretty accurately onto the problem. The only issue is getting the chunks small enough to be an accurate representation. The way air behaves over a city is different from elsewhere due to light reflection, heat emission from buildings, the thermal mass of the concrete, different levels of pollutants, etc.
Grab.
No, no, Tony Blair as Wormtongue... Rice would make a keen Nazgul though. And hey, we have an evil, misshapen general in RotK just looking for a casting - step up Mr. Colin Powell!
I just feel sorry for the poor bastards cast as Faramir and his co-suicide-charge victims, out there right now...
Grab.
Any nay-sayers tout the dangers of DC, they need to consider the stunningly dangerous, should-never-be-allowed hazard of the battery in their car... :-)
Grab.
If you use a full-wave rectifier (or just use two strings of LEDs), both the positive and negative sides of the cycle will cause the LEDs to light. So you'll actually get them strobing at 120Hz. The eye can't see changes past 100Hz, so no problems there.
Grab.
Not a peep out of her until you used it, anyway... ;-)
Grab.
Don't know about you, but what I want to avoid losing is my work. Family snapshots on the HDD I can live with losing, but losing the software I've written over 5 years would be a big kick in the teeth.
SourceForge serves a double purpose for that, acting not only as a release mechanism for what I write, but also as an offsite backup system. Nice one SF!
If what you've got isn't code, then put it on your website instead. Free web space is easy to come by. Whatever you're looking to preserve, it'll likely be stuff you've put a lot of work into, and in that case making it available on the web is a Good Thing. And if your PC burns itself to pieces, you can retrieve the files from the website.
OK, I know website providers and SF say that they aren't to be relied on, and that you must always have your own backups. But unless both you and your website provider (or SF) have a major fire at the same time, in practical terms this is pretty safe.
Grab.
I love the way that everyone presents written records as a good example of a "perpetual" medium which surpasses digital.
You may note that the author says "you can read 100-year-old newspapers *on* *microfiche*". This point practically jumps up and down to be noticed - even in the world of printing, paper copies are not seen as suitable for long-term storage, due to difficulties of preservation and physical bulk. So these paper copies are transferred to some other medium for long-term storage. This medium relies on readers existing - if all companies making microfiche readers went out of business (which probably won't be too many years ahead) then the microfiches will be unreadable. And the microfiches themselves are fragile - a scratch in the wrong place will make it difficult to read, and it's on plastic which will degrade over time.
Why should digital be any different? If you want ultra-long-term storage of digital data, use punch holes in gold sheets. Otherwise you use a storage medium which gives you a reasonable storage size and reasonable data security.
On reading the data back, suppose microfiche readers went obsolete and you couldn't buy them. The method of reading the data is still known and recorded, and can be reconstructed by someone needing to get the data back. Similarly, the most common bulk storage methods today are the CD-R and the DVD+/-R (tape backups are practically obsolete). Now the standard for data storage on CD and DVD is, well, *standard*. So if in 200 years time someone wants to read one back, they could build a CD player from first principles.
Grab.
If you're talking resolution, I suggest you look into more recent digital FX instead of something X years old. Modern FX use 24-bit sampling, usually with higher-precision internal variables for doing calculations. I simply don't believe anyone who says they can tell 24-bit sampled from the real thing.
Now whether the FX pedal has an algorithm which exactly matches a tube amp, that's debatable. But you get 24-bit resolution, the ADCs and DACs are *not* the limiting factor...
Grab.
Our local arts cinema ran FotR extended edition on the big screen, and did a back-to-back showing of FotR and TTT extended (obviously with some time between for calls of nature! :-) So they'd damn well better do the thing properly for RotK...
:-)
I warned my wife that when they did that, she'd be losing me for a day. She looked at me funny and said "But I'll be going to see it too." God, I love that woman...
Grab.
A patent for a Dead Author Generator? I can see the application now...
"This claim covers approaching an author of fictional or non-fictional works published in book, short-story collection, magazine or other form, pointing a pistol, machine-gun, revolver or similar firearm at them and pulling the trigger. Prior art exists for use of a knife or similar weapon (cf Julius Caesar) and burning alive (cf Catholic Church), so these methods are not claimed."
Grab.
Except that the MS license says it's not to be used in safety-critical applications. If you do use it in a safety-critical app, that's your problem and not MS's.
Grab.
No, lemon laws exist to protect consumers from bad products where the "badness" is very easy to quantify. If a 2-litre Ford engine doesn't pull as well as a 2-litre Honda engine, you have no rights under the lemon laws. But if it bursts into flames, *that's* where the lemon laws can come into play. And it's very easy to determine whether an engine has burst into flames or not, I think...
And what do auto manufacturers do? They recall the cars and modify them. Put simply, they upgrade them. What does MS do when there's a new Windows vulnerability? Exactly the same thing.
Grab.
Bullshit on you.
The only sale is a bit of physical media. You can do with the CD itself what you like. If you want to play frisbee with it or use it as a coaster, MS isn't stopping you.
But the software, they just sold you a license to use it. Nothing more, nothing less. You go to Hertz and pay the rental price, you aren't being sold the car, are you? You're being sold a license to use it under certain conditions (one condition being that you give it back after the hire period).
I don't say it's good, I don't say it's right, I don't even say that all the license agreements are legal (no doubt some aren't, but they've not been tested in court any more than the GPL ever has been). I do say that if you paid your money under that agreement, you can't shout "fraud" when you get what you paid for. If you don't like the license, take the whole lot back to the store and get your money back. If you don't understand the license and click "I agree" anyway, that's your problem.
Grab.
This whole article is based on a false premise. "If we can't earn our living solely from the game, it isn't a sport." Frankly, that is pure garbage.
Most athletes earn their money not from salaries or tournament prizes but from sponsorship. This applies as much to athletes in highly-popular sports as to any others. There's a reason why Anna Kournikova made a fortune in spite of being a frankly indifferent tennis player, and that's bcos she used her looks to get massive sponsorship deals. I wouldn't need to take my socks off to count the number of tennis players who've made a million bucks from tournament prizes in their entire lives, but the top 20 players will be getting way more than that a *year*, courtesy of Nike, Reebok, Slazenger and the rest.
The only exception to this is in sports where the athletes earn their money through wages - football, baseball and soccer, for example. In these, wages are covered by tens of thousands of people paying to see them play each week. Until you can get tens of thousands of people to watch CS tournaments, you can forget this.
So only those guys who get sponsorship are likely to make a living out of it. That means either you get sponsored, or you cut your standard of living until unemployment benefit or some part-time job can finance your life while you devote your time to your sport, or you live off savings in the hope that you'll get sponsorship before they run out (ie. "burn rate" like a startup business), or you go work for a company that produces stuff for that sport and get your practise time as "product testing". In *every* minor sport, these are the available options for aspiring athletes.
To the author of this article: I suggest you go and talk to some rock climbers, hang-glider pilots, cross-country runners, parachutists, motocross riders, skaters (street or ice), discus/shot-put/hammer throwers, rowers, swimmers, or simply female athletes in traditionally-male sports (like soccer). Go whine to them that CS can't succeed as a sport bcos it's *so* hard to make a good living out of it. And when they've laughed in your face (or kicked the living shit out of you), maybe you'll have some perspective on your situation.
Grab.
Wow, you heard that someone alive was going to die...? Hold the presses, authors are not immortal! ;-)
Grab.
Problem is that many web designers are graphic artists, not programmers. They're fine at drawing pretty pictures, but if you want something useable, go whistle. This wasn't so big a deal in the "old days" of the web when HTML was simple - artists could just about figure it out - but these days they need some proper programming know-how. I'm sure there are *many* counter-examples, but generally you find that there aren't so many ppl who are good programmers *and* good artists.
Grab.
No Doctor Who merchandise/memorabilia/props? Shurely shome mishtake...
More likely, perhaps, is that all the Doctor Who stuff has already been bought by fans, and Allen couldn't be bothered asking anyone for it.
Grab.
Actually, Poul Anderson did write a few Man-Kzin Wars stories. Niven let a lot of ppl in to play in his universe. Which is just as well, since it means there's Man-Kzin-based stories which aren't erotic furries. "Ringworld Throne" - eep! I don't want to speculate too much about Niven's private life, but I think he should be kept well clear of any cats/dogs/sheep...
Grab.
Excellent. Then you can write to them and say "It wasn't me, it was my friend." And get your friend to acknowledge that yes, it was him/her. The police will take into account that the vehicle may be driven by the spouse of the owner, or that it may be a hire car, or whatever. Whilst the original ticket may have been issued automatically, you can bring in humans after that to deal with the special cases.
What you *can't* dispute is that your car was going past the camera in excess of the speed limit, so the driver (whoever it happened to be) was breaking the law.
Grab.