Speaking of grey, I'm thinking of making stuff that basically consists of small shapes of metal with grey-shade images/photos on them.
How difficult and expensive is that to do, and what would be the best way to do it? What would be the limitations - e.g. effective DPI for X shades of grey (assuming that if dithering is used, then the effective DPI would be much lower than the laser DPI), and how many shades of grey?
I've been looking for before and after pics with a grey scale from darkest grey to lightest grey. So far can't seem to find any.
My point was in GW1 you can play the _whole_ party. As far as I know in WoW or GW2 you can't - you just control one character (with the exception of pets).
In many popular GW1 PvE team builds you don't have someone in front taking the hits.You could have minions in front taking the hits, or pets, or spirits. In PvP anyone could be taking hits - there's no taunt mechanic. Just because you could have tank+healer+DPS doesn't mean it's closer to WoW otherwise TF2 would be closer to WoW too.
And there are very powerful skills like protective spirit ( damage limited to 10%), spirit bond, shield of absorption. Which makes the way you survive/kill enemies/players very different compared to most other MMOs. With such skills you could unload high DPS on a player for an entire match and the target will not die, even if it's only one or two keeping the target alive. Whereas for the other games if you unload high enough DPS for long enough, the target will die unless you have many coordinated healers.
With the way things work in WoW, you can have RvR. But with GW1 even if it wasn't instanced, I doubt you could have RvR unless you overhaul the skills and classes.
And GW1 is also instanced for everything. The way you play with other people is different - you can't wander around and randomly help someone and then wander off and help someone else.
I quite like the first Guild Wars (GW1) and I'm not sure I'd like GW2 (based on what I see of the game). I really do like the GW1 game mechanics - primary+secondary classes, lots of different very interesting skills. And with the 7 heroes in a team thing, it allows you to try lots of strange team builds - so in PvE you're not playing one player, but playing a "team". So unless I can do that in GW2, to me GW2 will be more similar to WoW and WoWlike games than GW1.
I believe a lot of people who like WoW will also like GW2. Those who temporarily left WoW to try Warhammer Online should probably try GW2. Same for the SWTOR players (unless they are real Star Wars fans).
Portable acceleration is a good substitute. tether+counterweight+spin = good enough gravity.
NASA has been wasting resources on a lot of useless stuff instead of working on practical space stations which humans can actually live in rather than merely survive or decay faster on.
Microsoft did one such major screwup with Vista. The only reason why it didn't cost them a significant share of the desktop market is that they managed to salvage the situation with free WXP "downgrades" and incredibly fast release of W7.
And Desktop Linux didn't gain share that time because they were also busy screwing up.
As for losing competitiveness, I'd say they already lost long ago (yes I know KDE has cool useful stuff like KIO slaves but features like that only interest 1% of the market). The question is whether they are seriously interested in gaining marketshare. And from what I see, they aren't, otherwise they would have taken appropriate action when Microsoft changed UIs with Vista and the Microsoft Office ribbon.
For a very significant period the Desktop Linux bunch weren't even providing basic stuff like reliably working audio.
My biggest problem with HFT is when the algos screw up AND the exchange rolls back/cancels the trades (presumably if the party that screwed up is favoured by the exchange).
It's easy to make money if your biggest trading mistakes were rolled back.
Trades should only be rolled back if the casino aka exchange screws up, not if the players screw up.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
There was also a time when HFTs engaged in what was practically front-running (even if legally not considered front-running)- they got a 30 milliseconds headstart to peek at what everyone else was about to do. I suspect in a casino that would be considered cheating.
Most people don't realize the big differences between software engineering and civil engineering.
With software engineering, design cost is a big part of the project cost. The build phase is just the developers issuing "make all" or "rebuild solution" and going for coffee, and the build phase cost is relatively insignificant.
With civil engineering design cost is typically about 10% of the total project cost. The actual build phase usually involves lots of heavy machinery and people, and is very expensive.
With civil engineering since the build phase is very expensive, you can do a multiple design phases first, you show the customer the artist's impression, the plastic models, the blueprints, 3D simulation, etc, get the go ahead and then only build. Because it costs a lot if you make a big screw up in the actual build.
With software engineering, the "blueprint" or "plastic model" actually kinda runs! So the boss says "ship it as 1.0"... And that's because the design cost is way more than the build phase cost.
With this Chinese firm's approach, the build phase cost might go down. But it seems like it still won't be much cheaper than the design cost.
Yeah, I went to a movie theatre to book some tickets (their online booking failed) they said they didn't have any more "HD" versions for the day I wanted to watch, so I went to another place further and a bit more expensive instead.
What's the point of paying for big screen but blurry? I'm already putting up with their crappy 24 fps (which I dislike but there's no choice).
BTW, even my mom and her friends watched Avatar (and liked it!), so I'm not surprised Avatar took in so much money ( I also won't be surprised if Hollywood claims they lost money on Avatar).
I prefer perl instead of Lisp for reasons I gave in my second last paragraph. I find it easier to find and use the libraries (CPAN). Yes there's cliki but it's far from as good - problem/domain coverage, documentation etc.
The desktops I build typically have motherboards with intel graphics bundled, even if they actually going to have an Nvidia/ATI card in them. It doesn't really cost much extra, and often those motherboards are actually the cheaper ones (more volume I guess).
And if/when the nvidia/ATI card fails, you may still have a usable computer for nongraphics intensive stuff (like filling out RMAs, looking for replacements, reading Slashdot).
So I wonder if that sort of thing would be 5% of that 59% or more?
If your ISP was controlled by the Chinese Government, be aware that the Chinese government is in control of a CA that has its certs trusted by your browser, or signed by CAs that are trusted by your browser.
And that's true for ANY of the CAs that are recognized by your browser! Any of them could sign www.microsoft.com whether intentionally, by mistake or by being pwned, and your browser would NOT warn you by default (nowadays Chrome will warn for certain sites/certs - too lazy to look up the details).
I personally use firefox and certificate patrol to warn me in such scenarios.
Even if you delete most of the root certs recognized by IE, as long as Microsoft's cert is still installed, many other CA certs will magically get re-installed as trusted because those certs are signed by Microsoft's cert(s)!
As for the other browsers, it still comes to about the same thing - as long as your browser trusts one of the CAs that have signed the new cert, it trusts that new cert.
Given the way things work and how the browser people do things (no warnings for such scenarios), I conclude that it's not about security at all and all about $$$$$. Companies are paying CAs money every year or so just so their customers/users won't get scary warnings. Not really because of security. Because most users will get phished anyway, or the site will get hacked.
One way I look at programming is as a form of decision compression. Instead of writing a zillion "if then" statements to solve a problem, you write a lot fewer statements.
Just as there is no compression algorithm that's best at compressing all data, it will be unlikely for anyone to come up with a "decision compression language" that will be the best at compressing "everything". To make things more complicated, you often need to change certain stuff in the future, so you shouldn't pack everything too tightly, even if the language allows it.
Last but not least, I prefer a language not because of the code I need to write, but because of all the code I won't need to write ( and debug and document etc). In other words - the libraries and modules are important. Even if a language is very good and simple, and you only have to write one third the lines to do something, it still is not as good if you have to write everything you may need (database connectors, xml parsers, web clients, big number support, strong crypto, etc). In contrast a language that is 3 times more verbose but has libraries for nearly everything you need would actually result in you writing a lot fewer lines, and if the libraries aren't crap, supporting, documenting a lot fewer lines.
So a language that makes my life simple, isn't necessarily a simple language;).
Go read more carefully, Intel's figures are included in the links. But they had a number of severe data loss bugs. Google for those yourself. In contrast I haven't seen as many data loss complaints about Samsung drives, maybe Steve Job's reality distortion field prevents complaints on them showing up (Apple uses Samsung and Toshiba SSDs). I'd personally go for Samsung if I'm buying an SSD (which might be soon).
The stats are there, it's up to the readers to decide what they want to do with them.
Yeah. The problem I see is even in 2012 the reasons for getting a hybrid drive are few! A lot of laptop users no longer need that much directly-attached space, when they're at home/office they have stuff like NAS/fileservers.
By acting solely as a read cache (only read requests to the drive are pulled into the cache), Seagate skirted the complicated issue of effectively building an on-board SSD by only caching reads from the hard drive and not writes to it.
And because of that in too many cases it doesn't even perform much better than a normal hard drive. I wouldn't pay a premium for such a product. Whereas the SSDs are tempting - I am more convinced that they would speed things up for my workloads.
For slashdot geeks I'd think a 120-250GB SSD + always-on Linux fileserver covers most use cases - I have more confidence in the Linux caching algorithms than Seagate's. 4-8GB of Linux read/write cache RAM should beat Seagate's 4-8GB of SLC NAND read-only cache. Many of us will have reasons to have a home Linux machine running 24/7 anyway (if you're don't go crazy it won't use that much power). And even if you don't leave it on, booting up a server-based Linux distro doesn't take long (assuming it's not doing an fsck).
And when the SSD return rates are often even higher than "spinning disk" drives you should be very careful which SSDs you use (so far I think Samsung is OK).
Slow internet connections, ISP quotas and throttling might help make this true for longer.
But if there's a sudden jump to widely available high speed internet connections, a lot of people might stop downloading and storing, and switch to streaming (assuming the **AA don't shutdown too many streaming sites).
The potential saviour for Seagate etc is if more and more content starts being made for 2880x1800 and higher. Then home user storage and bandwidth requirements might go up.
I on the other hand get tempted to request chopsticks when eating spaghetti... I find it harder to eat spaghetti using a fork and spoon instead of chopsticks. Of course the safer solution is to order stuff like penne or fusilli instead.
Slashdot Mirror
In SQL null for numbers is NULL.
In other areas, null for numbers might be NaN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN
Speaking of grey, I'm thinking of making stuff that basically consists of small shapes of metal with grey-shade images/photos on them.
How difficult and expensive is that to do, and what would be the best way to do it? What would be the limitations - e.g. effective DPI for X shades of grey (assuming that if dithering is used, then the effective DPI would be much lower than the laser DPI), and how many shades of grey?
I've been looking for before and after pics with a grey scale from darkest grey to lightest grey. So far can't seem to find any.
My point was in GW1 you can play the _whole_ party. As far as I know in WoW or GW2 you can't - you just control one character (with the exception of pets).
In many popular GW1 PvE team builds you don't have someone in front taking the hits.You could have minions in front taking the hits, or pets, or spirits. In PvP anyone could be taking hits - there's no taunt mechanic. Just because you could have tank+healer+DPS doesn't mean it's closer to WoW otherwise TF2 would be closer to WoW too.
And there are very powerful skills like protective spirit ( damage limited to 10%), spirit bond, shield of absorption. Which makes the way you survive/kill enemies/players very different compared to most other MMOs. With such skills you could unload high DPS on a player for an entire match and the target will not die, even if it's only one or two keeping the target alive. Whereas for the other games if you unload high enough DPS for long enough, the target will die unless you have many coordinated healers.
With the way things work in WoW, you can have RvR. But with GW1 even if it wasn't instanced, I doubt you could have RvR unless you overhaul the skills and classes.
And GW1 is also instanced for everything. The way you play with other people is different - you can't wander around and randomly help someone and then wander off and help someone else.
So to me GW1 is more different from WoW than GW2.
I quite like the first Guild Wars (GW1) and I'm not sure I'd like GW2 (based on what I see of the game). I really do like the GW1 game mechanics - primary+secondary classes, lots of different very interesting skills. And with the 7 heroes in a team thing, it allows you to try lots of strange team builds - so in PvE you're not playing one player, but playing a "team". So unless I can do that in GW2, to me GW2 will be more similar to WoW and WoWlike games than GW1.
I believe a lot of people who like WoW will also like GW2. Those who temporarily left WoW to try Warhammer Online should probably try GW2. Same for the SWTOR players (unless they are real Star Wars fans).
Portable acceleration is a good substitute. tether+counterweight+spin = good enough gravity.
NASA has been wasting resources on a lot of useless stuff instead of working on practical space stations which humans can actually live in rather than merely survive or decay faster on.
Microsoft did one such major screwup with Vista. The only reason why it didn't cost them a significant share of the desktop market is that they managed to salvage the situation with free WXP "downgrades" and incredibly fast release of W7.
And Desktop Linux didn't gain share that time because they were also busy screwing up.
As for losing competitiveness, I'd say they already lost long ago (yes I know KDE has cool useful stuff like KIO slaves but features like that only interest 1% of the market). The question is whether they are seriously interested in gaining marketshare. And from what I see, they aren't, otherwise they would have taken appropriate action when Microsoft changed UIs with Vista and the Microsoft Office ribbon.
For a very significant period the Desktop Linux bunch weren't even providing basic stuff like reliably working audio.
My biggest problem with HFT is when the algos screw up AND the exchange rolls back/cancels the trades (presumably if the party that screwed up is favoured by the exchange).
It's easy to make money if your biggest trading mistakes were rolled back.
Trades should only be rolled back if the casino aka exchange screws up, not if the players screw up.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
There was also a time when HFTs engaged in what was practically front-running (even if legally not considered front-running)- they got a 30 milliseconds headstart to peek at what everyone else was about to do. I suspect in a casino that would be considered cheating.
Most people don't realize the big differences between software engineering and civil engineering.
With software engineering, design cost is a big part of the project cost. The build phase is just the developers issuing "make all" or "rebuild solution" and going for coffee, and the build phase cost is relatively insignificant.
With civil engineering design cost is typically about 10% of the total project cost. The actual build phase usually involves lots of heavy machinery and people, and is very expensive.
With civil engineering since the build phase is very expensive, you can do a multiple design phases first, you show the customer the artist's impression, the plastic models, the blueprints, 3D simulation, etc, get the go ahead and then only build. Because it costs a lot if you make a big screw up in the actual build.
With software engineering, the "blueprint" or "plastic model" actually kinda runs! So the boss says "ship it as 1.0"... And that's because the design cost is way more than the build phase cost.
With this Chinese firm's approach, the build phase cost might go down. But it seems like it still won't be much cheaper than the design cost.
Seems to me they could break 1 minute easily with a better cyclist and maybe better gearing ratios?
Q) A Russian airliner is flying to China, it crashes right on the border of Mongolia and China.
Where do they bury the survivors?
A) China of course.
Has anyone ever tested if we actually need air conditioning for a server room?
You do need "air conditioning", since you do want to make sure the air is not too dirty or humid or dry or hot.
But yes you can do without conventional data center air conditioning:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150148003778920&_fb_noscript=1
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/the-facebook-data-center-faq-newest-page/
They're also trying in a warmer more humid area:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/04/facebook-data-center-2/
Wonder how well that will work.
Yeah, I went to a movie theatre to book some tickets (their online booking failed) they said they didn't have any more "HD" versions for the day I wanted to watch, so I went to another place further and a bit more expensive instead.
What's the point of paying for big screen but blurry? I'm already putting up with their crappy 24 fps (which I dislike but there's no choice).
BTW, even my mom and her friends watched Avatar (and liked it!), so I'm not surprised Avatar took in so much money ( I also won't be surprised if Hollywood claims they lost money on Avatar).
I prefer perl instead of Lisp for reasons I gave in my second last paragraph. I find it easier to find and use the libraries (CPAN). Yes there's cliki but it's far from as good - problem/domain coverage, documentation etc.
The desktops I build typically have motherboards with intel graphics bundled, even if they actually going to have an Nvidia/ATI card in them. It doesn't really cost much extra, and often those motherboards are actually the cheaper ones (more volume I guess).
And if/when the nvidia/ATI card fails, you may still have a usable computer for nongraphics intensive stuff (like filling out RMAs, looking for replacements, reading Slashdot).
So I wonder if that sort of thing would be 5% of that 59% or more?
http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ-VjUKAsao#t=2m30s
Note that you may have problems boarding the plane with such gear :).
Your browser won't raise alarms in many cases.
If your ISP was controlled by the Chinese Government, be aware that the Chinese government is in control of a CA that has its certs trusted by your browser, or signed by CAs that are trusted by your browser.
And that's true for ANY of the CAs that are recognized by your browser! Any of them could sign www.microsoft.com whether intentionally, by mistake or by being pwned, and your browser would NOT warn you by default (nowadays Chrome will warn for certain sites/certs - too lazy to look up the details).
I personally use firefox and certificate patrol to warn me in such scenarios.
Even if you delete most of the root certs recognized by IE, as long as Microsoft's cert is still installed, many other CA certs will magically get re-installed as trusted because those certs are signed by Microsoft's cert(s)!
As for the other browsers, it still comes to about the same thing - as long as your browser trusts one of the CAs that have signed the new cert, it trusts that new cert.
Given the way things work and how the browser people do things (no warnings for such scenarios), I conclude that it's not about security at all and all about $$$$$. Companies are paying CAs money every year or so just so their customers/users won't get scary warnings. Not really because of security. Because most users will get phished anyway, or the site will get hacked.
One way I look at programming is as a form of decision compression. Instead of writing a zillion "if then" statements to solve a problem, you write a lot fewer statements.
;).
Just as there is no compression algorithm that's best at compressing all data, it will be unlikely for anyone to come up with a "decision compression language" that will be the best at compressing "everything". To make things more complicated, you often need to change certain stuff in the future, so you shouldn't pack everything too tightly, even if the language allows it.
Last but not least, I prefer a language not because of the code I need to write, but because of all the code I won't need to write ( and debug and document etc). In other words - the libraries and modules are important. Even if a language is very good and simple, and you only have to write one third the lines to do something, it still is not as good if you have to write everything you may need (database connectors, xml parsers, web clients, big number support, strong crypto, etc). In contrast a language that is 3 times more verbose but has libraries for nearly everything you need would actually result in you writing a lot fewer lines, and if the libraries aren't crap, supporting, documenting a lot fewer lines.
So a language that makes my life simple, isn't necessarily a simple language
Yeah and my car is based on old tech so it has crappier performance than more modern cars.
Whatever the excuse, a loss is still a loss.
ARM is way better for low power consumption stuff, but if you want performance/watt, Intel still leads.
Go read more carefully, Intel's figures are included in the links. But they had a number of severe data loss bugs. Google for those yourself. In contrast I haven't seen as many data loss complaints about Samsung drives, maybe Steve Job's reality distortion field prevents complaints on them showing up (Apple uses Samsung and Toshiba SSDs). I'd personally go for Samsung if I'm buying an SSD (which might be soon).
The stats are there, it's up to the readers to decide what they want to do with them.
Yeah. The problem I see is even in 2012 the reasons for getting a hybrid drive are few! A lot of laptop users no longer need that much directly-attached space, when they're at home/office they have stuff like NAS/fileservers.
IF seagate's hybrid drive performed better then it would make more sense. There's no technical reason why seagate's hybrid drive should perform worse than SSDs. But instead they take the easy crappy way out:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5160/seagate-2nd-generation-momentus-xt-750gb-hybrid-hdd-review/1
By acting solely as a read cache (only read requests to the drive are pulled into the cache), Seagate skirted the complicated issue of effectively building an on-board SSD by only caching reads from the hard drive and not writes to it.
And because of that in too many cases it doesn't even perform much better than a normal hard drive. I wouldn't pay a premium for such a product. Whereas the SSDs are tempting - I am more convinced that they would speed things up for my workloads.
For slashdot geeks I'd think a 120-250GB SSD + always-on Linux fileserver covers most use cases - I have more confidence in the Linux caching algorithms than Seagate's. 4-8GB of Linux read/write cache RAM should beat Seagate's 4-8GB of SLC NAND read-only cache. Many of us will have reasons to have a home Linux machine running 24/7 anyway (if you're don't go crazy it won't use that much power). And even if you don't leave it on, booting up a server-based Linux distro doesn't take long (assuming it's not doing an fsck).
That's a myth. Maybe it was true for some old SSDs. But it hasn't even been that true for normal usb drives.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot-I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?78706-OCZ-Vertex2-180GB-lost-all-Data-after-3-Days
http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
You may say those failures are due to bugs, but when there are so many bugs, they are effectively the main failure cause of SSDs, not "wear and tear": http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/09/01/ssd-users-report-widespread-data-loss/1
And when the SSD return rates are often even higher than "spinning disk" drives you should be very careful which SSDs you use (so far I think Samsung is OK).
http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-7/components-returns-rates-5.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
Slow internet connections, ISP quotas and throttling might help make this true for longer.
But if there's a sudden jump to widely available high speed internet connections, a lot of people might stop downloading and storing, and switch to streaming (assuming the **AA don't shutdown too many streaming sites).
The potential saviour for Seagate etc is if more and more content starts being made for 2880x1800 and higher. Then home user storage and bandwidth requirements might go up.
Children should not cycle through areas that are too dangerous to walk through.
I on the other hand get tempted to request chopsticks when eating spaghetti... I find it harder to eat spaghetti using a fork and spoon instead of chopsticks. Of course the safer solution is to order stuff like penne or fusilli instead.
They could have air-dropped aid packages just like they do in somewhat similar places elsewhere.
One of the richest and the most powerful country in the world after all.