Consider GPS, which relies on the accuracy of atomic clocks in orbit. Each GPS satellite has its own independent clock, which must be accurate to within about 40 billionths of a second, over the life of the satellite. http://gpsinformation.net/main... If the accuracy of one of the satellites' clocks is greater than that threshold, your GPS unit will incorrectly report your location. The accuracy of GPS coordinates is one way to calculate the accuracy of the atomic clocks in orbit. Multiply the error rate (in billionths of a second) times the life of the clock, and you can arrive at a number of years it will take for the clock to be 1 second off.
Similar types of calculations can be done with these new, faster clocks. No, it's not necessary to wait 300 million years to see if the clock is one second off. That number is simply an extrapolation.
The "Internet of Things" is, I think, driven mainly by manufacturers who want people to have an excuse to buy their new thing, which everybody already has, and works fine. Maybe universities should be teaching smartwatch programming too!
No. Universities should teach programming and technology basics. If corporations want to try to convince us all that we need an Internet-connected stapler, they aren't going to go looking for university graduates that have an IoT degree! They'll figure it out all on their own, with people who have ordinary computer science degrees, or even with people who don't have a comp sci degree.
While Chiropractic might have some positive effects, too often Chiropractors sell their services as a cure-all. My parent's childhood chiropractor wanted to be our primary care physician, claiming that Chiropractic could cure colds and other diseases. Chiropractic's founder, D. D. Palmer, claimed his technique cured deafness, even though there are no nerves related to hearing that pass through any part of the spinal column. So even if Chiropractic has some benefits, its practitioners certainly do claim that it can do far more than it actually does, a habit which damages any credibility it might otherwise gain.
If you've ever written software that is ported to multiple platforms, you know that the performance of the ported version can only match the original, if serious performance tuning is done. Performance of ported software is not a measure of the hardware, but of the effort put into making it work better.
Microsoft has always tried to position their phones and tablets as "premium" devices, selling for more than comparable competitors. That's really hard to do when you are the disruptor, trying to break into an established marketplace. Google played the game right, coming into a smartphone marketplace that was dominated by iPhone, as a lower cost option that was "just as good." Over time, Android earned the respect of the marketplace, and eventually they gained dominance.
Microsoft devices were, from the beginning, more expensive than comparable phones and tablets from other vendors. But they had no killer app, and a lot less apps to offer. So why should we all pay more for less?
If Microsoft is serious about making inroads into the mobile market, they are going to have to push bargain-basement devices, until they, like Google, can gain enough market share to get a foothold with pricier models.
Dark matter is like the UFOs of astronomy. It's only called "dark" because they don't know what it is yet! UFOs are only "unidentified" until they identify the flying object. There's no reason to think that "dark matter" is something mysterious or alien, astronomers just can't see it...because it doesn't glow!
Exactly. In suburban Houston, every subdivision has a contract with the sheriff's department in which the subdivision pays a monthly fee, and in exchange the sheriff's department guarantees that officers will spend a specified number of hours per week in that subdivision, patrolling. Without the contract in place, sheriffs would have no legal right to patrol the subdivisions, which are technically private property.
College campuses, very large businesses, stadiums, they all pay for on-duty police protection. The police department gets funded, and people are protected. How is that a bad thing?
The fact that they even claim it's unbreakable makes it obvious that the claim is just commercial hype.
Every new encryption technology is unbreakable at first. But with time, somebody always comes up with a way to defeat the system. Always.
Real researchers are always careful to qualify their claims. For example, they might say that "it is unbreakable by today's processors using known technologies."
How well is Tim Cook doing replacing Steve Jobs? How well did Steve Ballmer do replacing Bill Gates? How did Léo Apotheker do replacing HP's Mark Hurd?
Yes, a great CEO is extremely hard to replace. I've seen this on a smaller scale as well, smaller companies whose founders retired and turned over the reins to investors...the result is usually not pretty.
It's not about how much money someone needs. It's about how much money someone is worth to a company.
CEOs are much harder to replace than tellers. And the loss of a CEO is much more detrimental to a bank than the loss of a teller. This is what makes CEOs worth more than tellers (to a bank) and why it makes sense for banks to pay CEOs much more.
Are some CEO's overpaid? Yes, of course. But should CEOs make less money just because tellers make less money? No.
There are security concerns in every company, without exception. Obviously, even the NSA itself had inadequate security!
Yes, many times security concerns are brought up, and brushed off. But this is not necessarily an indication of a problem. Every security risk must be weighed based on the likelihood of occurrence, and the severity of the impact, should it occur. Many of these calculations are inexact, and must be based on incomplete information.
Should Target have protected themselves better? Probably. But hindsight is 20/20. The difficult part is to anticipate the problems that might occur, without crippling your organization through impossibly tight security.
10. When I reply to a post, show my reply in place, under the comment I replied to. Currently in beta, my reply doesn't show up until I re-load the whole page.
I see a lot of complaints here, but not a lot of specifics. Here are a few items that could use improvement:
1. The Comment Threshold doesn't stick. I don't want to read all the 0 and -1 comments. I can switch it to what I want, but I have to re-set it each time I select a new story. 2. The "Load More" button should go away. I want to be able to scan quickly through the comments, without having to click to load more when there are lots of them. That's what broadband is for! 3. The "Parent" link is gone from the bottom of each comment. When my threshold is set to, say, 2, I might still want to read the parent of a comment that catches my eye. 4. Too much white space. 5. Too much WHITE. 6. The Moderate link isn't as easy to use, too spread apart. 7. The comments don't appear below the survey results, even though it says there are comments about the survey. 8. When posting, pressing the Enter key twice to double-line-space between paragraphs...quadruple-spaces instead of just double.
French is a language that is kept pure by the tight control exercised by the French Academy. It has a unique, pleasant sound. It does have weaknesses, such as the lack of phonetic spelling. But is it good? By many measures, yes. Is it successful? Well, it's not dying, but it's not exactly taking over the world, either.
English is nearly the opposite of French. English is promiscuous, allowing in words from any language that is convenient at the time, and even new made-up words. New words and syntaxes become standard just by being used by enough people. Is it good? Well, it does the job. Is it successful? Yes, certainly, it is a language considered essential in many countries. It may be that the very lack of purity of English is what has made it so successful.
JavaScript is more like English than French. It's not pretty, but it works, and it's everywhere. Many people are trying different things with it, different ways to construct useful software. The very lack of enforcement of structure and looseness of the language may be what accounts for its success.
So is JavaScript good? There is already a massive amount of JavaScript software out there. Much of it is shoddy, but there is a steadily growing amount of high-quality software as well. Measured by that standard of how useful it is, I'd say it certainly is good.
The programmers contributing to Webkit from Apple, Google, and Nokia have probably never met, or spoken to, any member of the legal departments of those companies. The lawyers do their thing, and the programmers do their thing. The programmers don't care about the lawsuit, they just want to make a great rendering engine! It's not at all far-fetched for big companies to sue each other, and cooperate with each other, all at the same time.
Every computer science student for decades was taught how to write a bubble sort, as an example of sorting algorithms. Never mind that it is hard to imagine a more inefficient algorithm. And never mind that it isn't even a very intuitive way to sort a list of objects. Every student learned it anyway, and many of them probably took it with them to their future employers.
The author was about to try wiping the OS and reinstalling. But when he installed Chrome, it would have auto-installed the extension on the clean new OS. Just lovely.
Slashdot Mirror
It probably says that you waste a lot of money!
It is, actually, possible to measure such things.
Consider GPS, which relies on the accuracy of atomic clocks in orbit. Each GPS satellite has its own independent clock, which must be accurate to within about 40 billionths of a second, over the life of the satellite. http://gpsinformation.net/main... If the accuracy of one of the satellites' clocks is greater than that threshold, your GPS unit will incorrectly report your location. The accuracy of GPS coordinates is one way to calculate the accuracy of the atomic clocks in orbit. Multiply the error rate (in billionths of a second) times the life of the clock, and you can arrive at a number of years it will take for the clock to be 1 second off.
Similar types of calculations can be done with these new, faster clocks. No, it's not necessary to wait 300 million years to see if the clock is one second off. That number is simply an extrapolation.
The "Internet of Things" is, I think, driven mainly by manufacturers who want people to have an excuse to buy their new thing, which everybody already has, and works fine. Maybe universities should be teaching smartwatch programming too!
No. Universities should teach programming and technology basics. If corporations want to try to convince us all that we need an Internet-connected stapler, they aren't going to go looking for university graduates that have an IoT degree! They'll figure it out all on their own, with people who have ordinary computer science degrees, or even with people who don't have a comp sci degree.
While Chiropractic might have some positive effects, too often Chiropractors sell their services as a cure-all. My parent's childhood chiropractor wanted to be our primary care physician, claiming that Chiropractic could cure colds and other diseases. Chiropractic's founder, D. D. Palmer, claimed his technique cured deafness, even though there are no nerves related to hearing that pass through any part of the spinal column. So even if Chiropractic has some benefits, its practitioners certainly do claim that it can do far more than it actually does, a habit which damages any credibility it might otherwise gain.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicin...
Not so fast. The IRS does tax barter transactions.
http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/t...
If you've ever written software that is ported to multiple platforms, you know that the performance of the ported version can only match the original, if serious performance tuning is done. Performance of ported software is not a measure of the hardware, but of the effort put into making it work better.
Microsoft has always tried to position their phones and tablets as "premium" devices, selling for more than comparable competitors. That's really hard to do when you are the disruptor, trying to break into an established marketplace. Google played the game right, coming into a smartphone marketplace that was dominated by iPhone, as a lower cost option that was "just as good." Over time, Android earned the respect of the marketplace, and eventually they gained dominance.
Microsoft devices were, from the beginning, more expensive than comparable phones and tablets from other vendors. But they had no killer app, and a lot less apps to offer. So why should we all pay more for less?
If Microsoft is serious about making inroads into the mobile market, they are going to have to push bargain-basement devices, until they, like Google, can gain enough market share to get a foothold with pricier models.
Dark matter is like the UFOs of astronomy. It's only called "dark" because they don't know what it is yet! UFOs are only "unidentified" until they identify the flying object. There's no reason to think that "dark matter" is something mysterious or alien, astronomers just can't see it...because it doesn't glow!
Exactly. In suburban Houston, every subdivision has a contract with the sheriff's department in which the subdivision pays a monthly fee, and in exchange the sheriff's department guarantees that officers will spend a specified number of hours per week in that subdivision, patrolling. Without the contract in place, sheriffs would have no legal right to patrol the subdivisions, which are technically private property.
College campuses, very large businesses, stadiums, they all pay for on-duty police protection. The police department gets funded, and people are protected. How is that a bad thing?
The fact that they even claim it's unbreakable makes it obvious that the claim is just commercial hype.
Every new encryption technology is unbreakable at first. But with time, somebody always comes up with a way to defeat the system. Always.
Real researchers are always careful to qualify their claims. For example, they might say that "it is unbreakable by today's processors using known technologies."
We found people weren’t aware of where they should look in the UI.
Amazing, they must have finally done some actual usability testing!
How hard are CEOs to replace? Consider this:
How well is Tim Cook doing replacing Steve Jobs?
How well did Steve Ballmer do replacing Bill Gates?
How did Léo Apotheker do replacing HP's Mark Hurd?
Yes, a great CEO is extremely hard to replace. I've seen this on a smaller scale as well, smaller companies whose founders retired and turned over the reins to investors...the result is usually not pretty.
It's not about how much money someone needs. It's about how much money someone is worth to a company.
CEOs are much harder to replace than tellers. And the loss of a CEO is much more detrimental to a bank than the loss of a teller. This is what makes CEOs worth more than tellers (to a bank) and why it makes sense for banks to pay CEOs much more.
Are some CEO's overpaid? Yes, of course. But should CEOs make less money just because tellers make less money? No.
There are security concerns in every company, without exception. Obviously, even the NSA itself had inadequate security!
Yes, many times security concerns are brought up, and brushed off. But this is not necessarily an indication of a problem. Every security risk must be weighed based on the likelihood of occurrence, and the severity of the impact, should it occur. Many of these calculations are inexact, and must be based on incomplete information.
Should Target have protected themselves better? Probably. But hindsight is 20/20. The difficult part is to anticipate the problems that might occur, without crippling your organization through impossibly tight security.
After watching the healthcare.gov debacle, it would seem that surpassing nation-state-created software is a very low hurdle!
Which is it, dollars or bitcoin???
Seems the concept is so new that the language hasn't caught up yet.
10. When I reply to a post, show my reply in place, under the comment I replied to. Currently in beta, my reply doesn't show up until I re-load the whole page.
9. Let me edit my post after I've submitted it...please!
I see a lot of complaints here, but not a lot of specifics. Here are a few items that could use improvement:
1. The Comment Threshold doesn't stick. I don't want to read all the 0 and -1 comments. I can switch it to what I want, but I have to re-set it each time I select a new story.
2. The "Load More" button should go away. I want to be able to scan quickly through the comments, without having to click to load more when there are lots of them. That's what broadband is for!
3. The "Parent" link is gone from the bottom of each comment. When my threshold is set to, say, 2, I might still want to read the parent of a comment that catches my eye.
4. Too much white space.
5. Too much WHITE.
6. The Moderate link isn't as easy to use, too spread apart.
7. The comments don't appear below the survey results, even though it says there are comments about the survey.
8. When posting, pressing the Enter key twice to double-line-space between paragraphs...quadruple-spaces instead of just double.
What makes a language good?
French is a language that is kept pure by the tight control exercised by the French Academy. It has a unique, pleasant sound. It does have weaknesses, such as the lack of phonetic spelling. But is it good? By many measures, yes. Is it successful? Well, it's not dying, but it's not exactly taking over the world, either.
English is nearly the opposite of French. English is promiscuous, allowing in words from any language that is convenient at the time, and even new made-up words. New words and syntaxes become standard just by being used by enough people. Is it good? Well, it does the job. Is it successful? Yes, certainly, it is a language considered essential in many countries. It may be that the very lack of purity of English is what has made it so successful.
JavaScript is more like English than French. It's not pretty, but it works, and it's everywhere. Many people are trying different things with it, different ways to construct useful software. The very lack of enforcement of structure and looseness of the language may be what accounts for its success.
So is JavaScript good? There is already a massive amount of JavaScript software out there. Much of it is shoddy, but there is a steadily growing amount of high-quality software as well. Measured by that standard of how useful it is, I'd say it certainly is good.
Bing!
The programmers contributing to Webkit from Apple, Google, and Nokia have probably never met, or spoken to, any member of the legal departments of those companies. The lawyers do their thing, and the programmers do their thing. The programmers don't care about the lawsuit, they just want to make a great rendering engine! It's not at all far-fetched for big companies to sue each other, and cooperate with each other, all at the same time.
You're assuming he knew it was a Chrome extension. If he wiped the OS, he would have done that because he didn't know.
Every computer science student for decades was taught how to write a bubble sort, as an example of sorting algorithms. Never mind that it is hard to imagine a more inefficient algorithm. And never mind that it isn't even a very intuitive way to sort a list of objects. Every student learned it anyway, and many of them probably took it with them to their future employers.
The author was about to try wiping the OS and reinstalling. But when he installed Chrome, it would have auto-installed the extension on the clean new OS. Just lovely.