Um, fuck you buddy! I'm quite proud about not being a confirmist monkey. Us sloppy fat geeks are the ones who embrace new tech and make it do neat tricks, and ultimately that's what kickstarts interest in all things technical. It's the wackos that dig up all the fun stuff.
"Embracing new tech" is the sorriest excuse in the world for being sloppy and fat. You can be clean and fit and still do neat tricks with new tech, you know.
No, it doesn't mean that. It comes from legal terminology and means that when there's a rule with no mention of exceptions, you can argue that there should be exceptions. But when exceptions are explicitly mentioned, the rule is strengthened: these are the exceptions and nothing more.
Do these morons really think I want to pay them to watch 160x120 videos of the black eyed peas on my phone? This is not the killer app you are looking for!
They just have not accepted that people just want reasonably priced IP connectivity. They want to lock people to their own services and charge money for something else than just transmitted bytes.
The operators in my country (.fi) have been complaining that there is too much competition to allow them to develop new services. I say: your new services suck. Let's split the operators into base providers that provice just the bandwidth (and maybe plain call routing), and separate content producers. The content producers can waste their money in their crap services that no-one wants and I can get my mobile bandwidth for a reasonable price. Last time I checked, the price of 3G data transfer was 6e/MB, which is utterly ridiculous.
Seems to work fine. Motion is as easy to install and use, though, and comes with much more surveillance features.
Unfortunately both seem to only support mjpeg/multipart-jpeg streaming. Anyone know a package that allows streaming of mpeg4 or some other advanced video codec?
I agree. This same technology (small handheld TVs) has been around since the 80s at least and never really caught on. I think the cellphone companies are pushing this now because they need the next gimmick to sell the next generation of phones. We've now seen, in addition to plain old phone functionality, PDA functionality, Web browsing, digital cameras, and now they need more.
I think they're wasting their time and money in this. Video-on-demand is what the people really want, and that in a package more like a PSP than a cellphone. But that is out of the question until we get some sort of reasonable cellular data transfer. (I hear some areas already have it, most do not, due to completely ridiculous per-megabyte pricing by the service providers.)
Now, if there was enough matter in the universe, the gravity between it would eventually slow it down, stop it, and finally start it contracting back together. That was a rather attractive idea -- that the big bang wasn't a one-time thing, but that we just happened to be seeing evidence of the most recent occurrence.
The problem was that our estimates of how much matter there was in the universe came out well below what was needed for there to be enough gravity to make the expansion stop and eventually reverse.
But the expansion of the universe doesn't mean that the galaxies are moving away from each other, even though this is a very, very common misconception. It means that the space itself is expanding. See 'superluminal expansion'. Yeah, I don't get it either. Why the hell would space itself be expanding and why would dark energy or matter have anything to do with it?
Nature finds a way to keep the population from getting too out-of-control - it has to.
Nonsense, nature doesn't have to do anything. And population control in nature happens mainly through multiplication of predators and starvation anyway.
Besides, humans that already live will not benefit that much from these advances. If my genes contain a susceptibility to some disorder, the cure would have to first rewrite the genes in my cells and then the affected tissues would have to be regrown using the updated DNA to get rid of the existing weakness (some disorders can be fixed by just updating the DNA). It would be like binary patching a buggy database server without first stopping it.
Ever hear of Natural Selection?
Yeah, it has stopped working for the human race some time ago. Smartest, healthiest people are not reproducing at a greater rate than the rest of the population. What about it?
I predict that we will see in the future a great conflict between the people who want to have engineered "upgrades" in their kids' DNA - first fixes for diseases and disorders, but later other modifications - and the people who will only accept the "natural" reproduction.
"Instead of using stolen cards, criminals are now taking over people's identities and applying for cards in their name. If you think about a credit card application, it doesn't actually require much information about an individual that can't be found out with a little bit of research."
Oh please! Because the authentication of people's credit card applications is completely broken, the problem of cloned and stolen cards shouldn't be fixed? I'm the first to admit that technology alone isn't enough, but this absolute stupidity of authenticating people by "personal" "secret" information has got to stop. (And no, trying to fix that by safeguarding the info better will never work.)
I can't stress enough how much fun can be had with microcontrollers!
Microcontrollers are an excellent bridge between code and hardware - you can code in C but your I/O is actually CMOS digital I/O which can then be plugged up to whatever digital devices or auxiliary chips you want.
Seconded! Forget the combination of diodes, resistors and old PCs and get some Atmel AVR prototyping boards and set up a C programming environment for them on a Linux PC. Then get a bunch of cheap RC servos - these are very versatile and very easy to control from a MCU. Then some leds, switches of different kinds, and sensors (light, sound). You can whip up all sorts of stuff from these in no time and learn a ton in the process.
The response time is measured only for white->black (IIRC) transition. For other than the extreme colors, it can be 2-3 times that. Tom's hardware has some response time measurements for the whole brightness range.
Then the viewing angle measurements are so useless it's not even funny. They apparently measure the angle where the contrast ratio stays above 1:5 and then come up with something like 170 degree viewing angle. They should measure the angle where the contrast ratio falls to half the original straight-on ratio, that would be more useful. Even better would be curves with contrast ratio vs. viewing angle in both horizontal and vertical. In my 2002 vintage laptop LCD, the black starts turning noticeably grey if you look at the screen from outside of about 10 degree vertical angle (in horizontal it's much better).
Anyway, I'll say it again, the design methodology is no different. The challenges are no different. The creativity is no different. The customers are no different. The only difference is in the minds of the programmers
This is nonsense! Both the possibilites to evaluate the performance of designs and turning the designs into working hardware are so much more developed in the field of physical engineering than in the field of software engineering that the whole fields have very little in common. I can calculate how much load a given structure will bear, I can simulate it with a computer or test with a scale model, I can put qualified welders to work on quality steel and be pretty damn sure that the final product has no significant defects. Where are the equations to calculate how I should build my server so that it will not crash when given every possible sequence of input? They don't exist. Where is the possibility to test a scale model? There's no such thing, anything else than the server itself doesn't guarantee anything. Where are the sufficiently defect-free manufacturing and testing methods? No such things exist, the best practices in existence still result in undetected defects in the end product.
Oh how I hate when people claim that the silver bullet of defect-free software not only does exist, but is available for everyone instantly once they just snap out of the "programmer" mindset and start behaving like an "engineer". The comparable engineering tools are missing, dammit! And there's no guarantee that they are even possible to create (any more than e.g. algorithmic AI).
This sometimes amazes me. The market forces that push companies to try and release products ahead of the competition exist in every industry, but it seems to only be software that has responded in such an insane manner, and I'm pretty sure software is the only industry where a company who does this can get away with it.
It's simple. It's the same as pricing. If the customer complains that the product is too expensive but still buys the product, it does not mean that the product is too expensive. On the contrary, the price is quite right at that point. As long as the customers complain about the bugs but still buy the product, there are not too many bugs in it, from the viewpoint of the seller.
You save settings/games by essentially dumping data straight from memory to disk? How large projects have you implmented this way? How do you figure out the right parts to write/read? How you ensure that the program memory (data segment, stack and heap) will all be in a consistent state after a load?
Space travel has not progressed like it should have in the decades following the amazing progress of the 1960s.... I feel that it is because we have become completely and hopelessly terrified of danger.
No, it's because there isn't anything out there that we can't get much, much cheaper here on Earth. Metals, minerals, lebensraum, you name it. The rewards just aren't there.
We also happened to reach the plateau in technology in the 1960s. Much like the airliners: how different is the Airbus A380 really from Boeing 747 developed in the 60s? Sure it's much more sophisticated but have the speed, range, altitude ceiling or even cost of operation improved anywhere near order of magnitude? No, and chemical rockets have the same problem.
The counterattack on bin Laden and al Qaeda's bases should not have even waited until September 12th, much less October 7th, giving them almost a month to hide, regroup, and prepare for the US attack. By that point most of the bases we bombed were empty.
This assumes they were known and weren't empty on September 12th, and that US had all the necessary hardware and information in place to move on 12th. I don't think that any of these basic assumptions is true.
Instead, Bush waited to launch a huge nation-building adventure in Afghanistan
What? "Huge nation-building adventure" is exactly what did NOT happen in Afghanistan. US has given very little money and attention to Afghanistan - instead the UN/NATO troops have tried to rebuild the country while US has been trying to find the Al Qaeda in the countryside. Given the amount of hate and rage the US policies have been generating in the middle east for decades, I don't think that US staying out of occupation and rebuilding is a bad thing at all...
The U.S., for example, is not a democracy, and that's a good thing. It'd be even more of a mess if it were.
US is a democracy. It's a representational democracy (a republic), which is a subclass of democracy. The other subclass is the direct democracy (which is mostly a historical curiosity nowadays).
To the best I can understand, you seem to think that a government is a "democracy" if it "operates according to the general precepts of a democracy", even if it's not elected by the people?
That's because it's called the United Nations, you great oaf! Not United People, not United Citizens, not United Humans, but United Nations. So of course the nations vote there, not individual citizens.
In a nutshell, my 20 year collection of laserdisks still number less than 15. Then people der why the format never really caught on.
The fact that they are friggin' huge and only hold 40 minutes of movie per side might also have had something to do with it...
And they weren't that cheap to make. Reportedly there were a lot of difficulties to get the pressed disc to detach from the mold properly (it's big and it's got a lot of pits), the finished disc needs the two sides to be properly sandwiched, and one movie often takes more than one disc.
There's absolutely NO PROBLEM using the metric system in the kitchen. 250 g of butter, 8 dl of flour and 1 l of milk... Easy to conceptualize, easy to communicate, and making multiples or fractions is really not a problem. A third of 250 g is 80 g to the degree of accuracy needed in cooking. And 1/3 of any recipe is so small amount that it's not usually reasonable to make - usually I'm multiplying the recipe.
You need to fold something that's 1 foot long into thirds, how long will it be? Conceptualize that size in your mind and put your fingers about that far appart.
Now do the same for something that's half a meter? How long will it be when folded in thirds (without going to imperial units). Put your fingers that far appart.
What the hell is this supposed to demonstrate? I can easily guesstimate a third of anything with my fingers.
being evenly divisible by 3 and 4 are important features that the metric system lacks.
So? Why would I need to evenly divide anything into 3 or 4 equal parts? And how convenient is it really to divide that 2' 5 7/16" wide part into 3 or 4 equal parts? Oh, I didn't remember, everything always is some convenient integer multiple of a measurement in the imperial system, because otherwise that division argument would be pure bullshit! Silly me. Whenever I'm building something, the plans call for parts with certain dimensions, and I cut according to the given dimensions. If I only used the imperial system, even as I cut parts from them, my raw materials would magically continue to have integer multiple measurements to help me divide it into 3 or 4 equal parts! Never would I end up with some stupid fraction of an inch in the measurent.
As with so many other times when people throw out time tested wisdom, converting every-day measuring to the metric system was a bad idea.
It's stupidity that didn't stand the test of time, which is why pretty much everyone else threw it out a long time ago. But the NIH syndrome and hating the French runs so deep in a certain part of the world.
This is exactly what the electoral college is designed for, as a check against a popularly-elected president that horrifies Congress.
Many other countries have fixed this by giving the congress/parliament the ability to fire the head of the administrative branch (usually called the prime minister) anytime they want to. Seems to work ok, one way or another the parliament gets someone they can work with to head the administration.
I think that once managers (and employees for that matter) are able to grasp the idea of working from home, it will revolutionize the work place.
I work as a software developer in a team of 10-15 people and a part of the team tried working from home, but it really didn't work out that well. Sure, some of the work can be done anywhere alone, maybe even better than at the office, but we found out that email and phones suck compared to getting physically together with relevant people, looking over some piece of code or spec or problem and figuring things out.
And if I worked from home, sitting alone all day, every day in my tiny apartment, I'd go nucking futs in a couple of weeks. My commute to the office is 15 minutes each way and we have private rooms, or at most one roomie, but we also have a large common area (including a pool table) for the "informal discussions".
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Um, fuck you buddy! I'm quite proud about not being a confirmist monkey. Us sloppy fat geeks are the ones who embrace new tech and make it do neat tricks, and ultimately that's what kickstarts interest in all things technical. It's the wackos that dig up all the fun stuff.
"Embracing new tech" is the sorriest excuse in the world for being sloppy and fat. You can be clean and fit and still do neat tricks with new tech, you know.
No, it doesn't mean that. It comes from legal terminology and means that when there's a rule with no mention of exceptions, you can argue that there should be exceptions. But when exceptions are explicitly mentioned, the rule is strengthened: these are the exceptions and nothing more.
They just have not accepted that people just want reasonably priced IP connectivity. They want to lock people to their own services and charge money for something else than just transmitted bytes.
The operators in my country (.fi) have been complaining that there is too much competition to allow them to develop new services. I say: your new services suck. Let's split the operators into base providers that provice just the bandwidth (and maybe plain call routing), and separate content producers. The content producers can waste their money in their crap services that no-one wants and I can get my mobile bandwidth for a reasonable price. Last time I checked, the price of 3G data transfer was 6e/MB, which is utterly ridiculous.
Seems to work fine. Motion is as easy to install and use, though, and comes with much more surveillance features.
Unfortunately both seem to only support mjpeg/multipart-jpeg streaming. Anyone know a package that allows streaming of mpeg4 or some other advanced video codec?
I agree. This same technology (small handheld TVs) has been around since the 80s at least and never really caught on. I think the cellphone companies are pushing this now because they need the next gimmick to sell the next generation of phones. We've now seen, in addition to plain old phone functionality, PDA functionality, Web browsing, digital cameras, and now they need more.
I think they're wasting their time and money in this. Video-on-demand is what the people really want, and that in a package more like a PSP than a cellphone. But that is out of the question until we get some sort of reasonable cellular data transfer. (I hear some areas already have it, most do not, due to completely ridiculous per-megabyte pricing by the service providers.)
The problem was that our estimates of how much matter there was in the universe came out well below what was needed for there to be enough gravity to make the expansion stop and eventually reverse.
But the expansion of the universe doesn't mean that the galaxies are moving away from each other, even though this is a very, very common misconception. It means that the space itself is expanding. See 'superluminal expansion'. Yeah, I don't get it either. Why the hell would space itself be expanding and why would dark energy or matter have anything to do with it?
Nonsense, nature doesn't have to do anything. And population control in nature happens mainly through multiplication of predators and starvation anyway.
Besides, humans that already live will not benefit that much from these advances. If my genes contain a susceptibility to some disorder, the cure would have to first rewrite the genes in my cells and then the affected tissues would have to be regrown using the updated DNA to get rid of the existing weakness (some disorders can be fixed by just updating the DNA). It would be like binary patching a buggy database server without first stopping it.
Ever hear of Natural Selection?
Yeah, it has stopped working for the human race some time ago. Smartest, healthiest people are not reproducing at a greater rate than the rest of the population. What about it?
I predict that we will see in the future a great conflict between the people who want to have engineered "upgrades" in their kids' DNA - first fixes for diseases and disorders, but later other modifications - and the people who will only accept the "natural" reproduction.
Oh please! Because the authentication of people's credit card applications is completely broken, the problem of cloned and stolen cards shouldn't be fixed? I'm the first to admit that technology alone isn't enough, but this absolute stupidity of authenticating people by "personal" "secret" information has got to stop. (And no, trying to fix that by safeguarding the info better will never work.)
Microcontrollers are an excellent bridge between code and hardware - you can code in C but your I/O is actually CMOS digital I/O which can then be plugged up to whatever digital devices or auxiliary chips you want.
Seconded! Forget the combination of diodes, resistors and old PCs and get some Atmel AVR prototyping boards and set up a C programming environment for them on a Linux PC. Then get a bunch of cheap RC servos - these are very versatile and very easy to control from a MCU. Then some leds, switches of different kinds, and sensors (light, sound). You can whip up all sorts of stuff from these in no time and learn a ton in the process.
Then the viewing angle measurements are so useless it's not even funny. They apparently measure the angle where the contrast ratio stays above 1:5 and then come up with something like 170 degree viewing angle. They should measure the angle where the contrast ratio falls to half the original straight-on ratio, that would be more useful. Even better would be curves with contrast ratio vs. viewing angle in both horizontal and vertical. In my 2002 vintage laptop LCD, the black starts turning noticeably grey if you look at the screen from outside of about 10 degree vertical angle (in horizontal it's much better).
This is nonsense! Both the possibilites to evaluate the performance of designs and turning the designs into working hardware are so much more developed in the field of physical engineering than in the field of software engineering that the whole fields have very little in common. I can calculate how much load a given structure will bear, I can simulate it with a computer or test with a scale model, I can put qualified welders to work on quality steel and be pretty damn sure that the final product has no significant defects. Where are the equations to calculate how I should build my server so that it will not crash when given every possible sequence of input? They don't exist. Where is the possibility to test a scale model? There's no such thing, anything else than the server itself doesn't guarantee anything. Where are the sufficiently defect-free manufacturing and testing methods? No such things exist, the best practices in existence still result in undetected defects in the end product.
Oh how I hate when people claim that the silver bullet of defect-free software not only does exist, but is available for everyone instantly once they just snap out of the "programmer" mindset and start behaving like an "engineer". The comparable engineering tools are missing, dammit! And there's no guarantee that they are even possible to create (any more than e.g. algorithmic AI).
It's simple. It's the same as pricing. If the customer complains that the product is too expensive but still buys the product, it does not mean that the product is too expensive. On the contrary, the price is quite right at that point. As long as the customers complain about the bugs but still buy the product, there are not too many bugs in it, from the viewpoint of the seller.
You save settings/games by essentially dumping data straight from memory to disk? How large projects have you implmented this way? How do you figure out the right parts to write/read? How you ensure that the program memory (data segment, stack and heap) will all be in a consistent state after a load?
No, it's because there isn't anything out there that we can't get much, much cheaper here on Earth. Metals, minerals, lebensraum, you name it. The rewards just aren't there.
We also happened to reach the plateau in technology in the 1960s. Much like the airliners: how different is the Airbus A380 really from Boeing 747 developed in the 60s? Sure it's much more sophisticated but have the speed, range, altitude ceiling or even cost of operation improved anywhere near order of magnitude? No, and chemical rockets have the same problem.
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This assumes they were known and weren't empty on September 12th, and that US had all the necessary hardware and information in place to move on 12th. I don't think that any of these basic assumptions is true.
Instead, Bush waited to launch a huge nation-building adventure in Afghanistan
What? "Huge nation-building adventure" is exactly what did NOT happen in Afghanistan. US has given very little money and attention to Afghanistan - instead the UN/NATO troops have tried to rebuild the country while US has been trying to find the Al Qaeda in the countryside. Given the amount of hate and rage the US policies have been generating in the middle east for decades, I don't think that US staying out of occupation and rebuilding is a bad thing at all...
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US is a democracy. It's a representational democracy (a republic), which is a subclass of democracy. The other subclass is the direct democracy (which is mostly a historical curiosity nowadays).
To the best I can understand, you seem to think that a government is a "democracy" if it "operates according to the general precepts of a democracy", even if it's not elected by the people?
That's because it's called the United Nations, you great oaf! Not United People, not United Citizens, not United Humans, but United Nations. So of course the nations vote there, not individual citizens.
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The fact that they are friggin' huge and only hold 40 minutes of movie per side might also have had something to do with it...
And they weren't that cheap to make. Reportedly there were a lot of difficulties to get the pressed disc to detach from the mold properly (it's big and it's got a lot of pits), the finished disc needs the two sides to be properly sandwiched, and one movie often takes more than one disc.
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Who the hell is asking that much? Amazon.de is selling it for 48 euros.
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Screw the cables! I want this to work over bluetooth.
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There's absolutely NO PROBLEM using the metric system in the kitchen. 250 g of butter, 8 dl of flour and 1 l of milk... Easy to conceptualize, easy to communicate, and making multiples or fractions is really not a problem. A third of 250 g is 80 g to the degree of accuracy needed in cooking. And 1/3 of any recipe is so small amount that it's not usually reasonable to make - usually I'm multiplying the recipe.
You need to fold something that's 1 foot long into thirds, how long will it be? Conceptualize that size in your mind and put your fingers about that far appart.
Now do the same for something that's half a meter? How long will it be when folded in thirds (without going to imperial units). Put your fingers that far appart.
What the hell is this supposed to demonstrate? I can easily guesstimate a third of anything with my fingers.
being evenly divisible by 3 and 4 are important features that the metric system lacks.
So? Why would I need to evenly divide anything into 3 or 4 equal parts? And how convenient is it really to divide that 2' 5 7/16" wide part into 3 or 4 equal parts? Oh, I didn't remember, everything always is some convenient integer multiple of a measurement in the imperial system, because otherwise that division argument would be pure bullshit! Silly me. Whenever I'm building something, the plans call for parts with certain dimensions, and I cut according to the given dimensions. If I only used the imperial system, even as I cut parts from them, my raw materials would magically continue to have integer multiple measurements to help me divide it into 3 or 4 equal parts! Never would I end up with some stupid fraction of an inch in the measurent.
As with so many other times when people throw out time tested wisdom, converting every-day measuring to the metric system was a bad idea.
It's stupidity that didn't stand the test of time, which is why pretty much everyone else threw it out a long time ago. But the NIH syndrome and hating the French runs so deep in a certain part of the world.
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Many other countries have fixed this by giving the congress/parliament the ability to fire the head of the administrative branch (usually called the prime minister) anytime they want to. Seems to work ok, one way or another the parliament gets someone they can work with to head the administration.
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I work as a software developer in a team of 10-15 people and a part of the team tried working from home, but it really didn't work out that well. Sure, some of the work can be done anywhere alone, maybe even better than at the office, but we found out that email and phones suck compared to getting physically together with relevant people, looking over some piece of code or spec or problem and figuring things out.
And if I worked from home, sitting alone all day, every day in my tiny apartment, I'd go nucking futs in a couple of weeks. My commute to the office is 15 minutes each way and we have private rooms, or at most one roomie, but we also have a large common area (including a pool table) for the "informal discussions".
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There's an old saying: The people have the leaders they deserve.
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