I don't find it odd at all that for a short period of time the largest fusion bomb ever tested produced 1% of the sun's energy. I can produce accelerations in the hundreds of G's simply by smashing my fist into a wall and likewise say that "for less than a millisecond I produced forces hundreds of times stronger than the pull of Earth's gravity" and be technically correct.
While your statement about gravity is true, it's not much of a valid comparison. Lets turn it around, shall we?
It took the most powerful human creation ever to produce one hundredth of the energy the sun puts out in 39 nanoseconds. In a given day, it would take 45 quadrillion of these bombs to output the same amount of energy. The statement is more a testament to the unbelievable power of the sun, and the relative smallness of what our own accomplishments represent compared to that.
The holiday? Okay, so I suppose that Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Rohatsu, Yule, Winter Solstice, etc. all don't exist?
Ok, perhaps a poor choice of words- but with it covering greater than 85% of the population nominally, it is *the* holiday. I consider myself to be athiest agnostic (as in- "pretty sure" there's no god) but I still celebrate christmas. With respect to overall economic effects, christmas is most definitely the largest.
Retailers in the U.S. are in the red all year up until "Black Friday" -- the day following Thanksgiving. This is mostly due to the existence of multiple religious holidays where gift giving/exchange is encouraged that fall on or around the winter solstice.
The only reason that buying patterns are concentrated around this time of year is precisely because the holiday exists. If christmas had never been, people would still buy gifts for each other. There might be some other gift-giving holiday, or birthdays might have more importance. In fact, it would cause there to be a more even distribution of buying patterns throughout the year. I don't think your statistic of "being in the red" rings true for all retail sectors, but if it did- it would disappear without christmas.
Of course, then one might argue- but christmas is the only reason people give gifts! If that is the case, it is a rather poor view of humanity. It removes the concept of charity and good will from the human as an individual, and moves it to being purely a creation of religion itself. This is one of the core arguments against atheism- that "godless" people are morally bankrupt.
I was one of the first people to have FIOS, being in the 3rd city in the US that was wired (Huntington Beach). I've had it for almost two years now, and I got the same line from them about how they "had" to cut the copper when they put in the fiber. This guy is lying through his teeth.
Back in 1998, the amount of storage they had was pretty impressive too. It took rooms and rooms to do it, but if I'm remembering this correctly they had about 5 terabytes of disk online and close to 5 petabytes of tape robots. It was a pretty slick automated system- everyone had accounts on a main fileserver, and files that had not been accessed in a certain amount of time were written to tape. If you were to try to grab a file that was on tape, it would fire up the robot, transfer it off the tape, and give it to you- all seamlessly. It was a little slow of course but you never had to do anything- it all appeared as though the files were in your home directory the whole time.
Lest anyone think they are taking up valuable government resources that could be used for something else- Moffett has been essentially idle for the last twenty years. It was decomissioned some time ago, and now the only use that the runways get is the occasional research plane for NASA and AWACS flights.
I worked at NASA Ames (which has basically taken over the whole Moffett campus, since they're all together.) We did tours of the different areas there, and I think the most fun was touring "Hangar 1" and talking to the guys in the tower for the airstrip. They basically sat around all day drinking coffee, waiting for the one or two planes per day they had taking off or landing. The only excitement they ever got was the occasional presidential flight- when chelsea was going to Stanford, clinton would fly in to Moffett.
I think it's a great idea, and they should do more of it- lots of land developers are salivating at the huge chunk of real estate that moffett has there. On top of that, they're trying to demolish Hangar 1, since it's full of toxic substances, the upkeep on it is really expensive, and it's not doing anything (well, except being a stage for a recent Lexus commercial.)
Most of this is based around the questions raised by the first article. The problem with that article is the audience- it's all cable providers. Google is just playing smart by saying they want to partner with the cable companies:
Google instead offered to work together with cable operators to combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks' high-quality delivery of shows.
All they're doing is playing to the audience in saying "we need you." This is not a problem for which there are not solutions. In the case of this article it's a solution (Google partnering with cable companies) in search of a problem (lack of bandwidth).
After all of his dismissive answers to the rest of the questions, that one actually made me laugh out loud. He was starting to sound like a guy who doesn't have any fun!
You need to be a bit clearer with your units. You say that you get "2 megs per second" on your dsl, but do you mean two megaBITS or two megaBYTES? I've had FIOS for a little over a year, and I can say it definitely delivers. I have the 15 megabit / 2 megabit connection, and it's a lot faster than any DSL i've ever had. Your 768k DSL is thirty times slower than that to put things in perspective.
As for torrents- it works great. I have a linux box running the commandline torrent client, and I can routinely max out the connection in both directions- downloading torrents at 1.6 megaBYTES per second, and uploading at 200 kiloBYTES per second. It's nearly impossible to find cable service or DSL that can match that.
You know, sometimes the patent debate isn't so cut and dried. In this case, tivo actually has a product that was something new and innovative, as opposed to something like "1-click ordering". IFF MythTV really did infringe on the tivo patents, I might support them- but there's no money in it for them. How much are they going to get off the guys, $19 in loose change and a couple of Arby's two-for-one coupons? Certainly not $78 million!
I don't have one, but from what I've read about the MDA is that it already supports EDGE, GPRS, and wifi. I currently use a Sidekick 2 (hiptop) and it uses only GPRS. I don't know if it's because some people have moved over to the EDGE network with compatible devices but I have noticed a significant speed increase on their GPRS network.
I switched from a Sidekick2 to the MDA on the first day they came out. I had the Sidekick 1 from the first day it came out a few years back... what can I say, I like my gadgets.:) It does do all of those things, and the edge actually works quite well... but in the end, the SK2 was a much more usable device. Danger's UI is much easier to navigate than the crap that is WM5, and the web proxying they do speeds the device up a TON. Even with twice the data speed, loading some web pages is dog slow. That combined with the fact that windows mobile is still pretty glitchy, and it's a big toss-up. Oh, and the keyboard SUCKS! No dedicated number keys, and I can't touch type on the keyboard like I can with the SK. The keys aren't tall enough.
At this point, I'd probably wait until the MDA gets cheaper. Sure, it's neat to be able to use it as an EDGE modem or put your own apps/games/ringtones on it, but Danger REALLY did their homework on the SK. I'm waiting to see if the SK3 is a better device... in a few months I may have an MDA to sell:)
Which just goes to prove to be a really big drug dealer you need a computer and connections, not just to hang out in your Accura in McDonald's parking lot late at night.
Wellllll... there are quite a few McDonalds now with free wifi. So it wouldn't surprise me if he WAS sitting out in the parking lot.:)
I mean, how hard would it be to have your friends play at the same table as you while on a conference call with them?
This is actually a huge problem for online casinos, whether it be over the phone or IM. Online casinos watch for play patterns that would indicate collusion between the players, and they'll flag people for it. They have a good deal of automated software that does the tracking. The huge advantage they have is that they log every single bet, so they have a lot more data to look through. Real casinos can do the same by watching with cameras, but it's much easier for the online ones.
Power consumption goes up when it is removed from the PCI slot, says the article. If that's so, there is a design fault somewhere - it suggests that there are floating inputs.
There's power on the PCI bus even when the system is off, to power things like LAN cards for Wake-On-Lan. Are you saying that the card shouldn't take advantage of the available power that's there all the time?
...and it works great. I've had it for just over two months now, and I haven't had a single problem with it. $49/mo is pretty nice, too.
The actual installation took about four hours, so I had quite a bit of time to talk to the installer. He said that they do two installs a day, and that they're booked pretty solid for the next few months doing installs. This is in Huntington Beach, CA, one of the first areas that they're rolling out their FTTP services.
By that metric, I'm more than twice as cool! Yeah, I'll probably get modded down because this post was stupid but I'll take any opportunity I can to show off...;)
Assuming you're talking about a 700kbit stream and most users have between 128-384kbps of upload capacity, you're really only talking about 4:1 or 2:1 ratio. While that doesn't mean everybody can just serve each other, it does reduce the load on the server by 25 or 50 percent. Being able to serve twice as many users with a fixed initial cost would definitely pay out in the long run.
Gah, this was about as surprising to me as when that/. article on Sony phasing out Betamax...
That's a strikingly similar comparison, as both products are still being used by businesses long after they had been abandoned by consumers. It's getting harder to find betamax stuff these days, but up until a few years ago it was THE thing to be using for a lot of professional video editing. It's almost been completely usurped by digital technologies.
Ok, I see... I thought you had gotten as far as seeing what the numbers were- items in the list of 10-digit numbers taken from the first 10,000 digits of e. But, if you didn't solve the first problem yourself, then I can see how that would not be obvious.
It's not a classical polynomial function because it's not a function at all. The next number in the list is only related to the previous numbers in the list by a certain property that all the numbers share. There is no way to generate the entire series by just knowing previous elements in the series. The series is a certain set of numbers within the set of ten-digit numbers contained in the digits of e. Check out the hint posted in my previous reply.
Actually, you can't solve this problem with polynomial interpolation because it's not a polynomial interpolation problem. This is not a classical polynomial function. As I said, the answer is much simpler. The position of the next term in the list CANNOT be derived from the previous terms.
The point of the "idiotic" question is that people can spend a lot of time (in my case two hours) working on completely the wrong solution (which may seem obvious) when the TRUE solution is much simpler. This is a classic "think outside the box" problem.
That being said, I did find this really cool page while trying to figure out the next number in the series.. The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. You give it a piece of a sequence and it finds integer sequences that match the pattern. Very cool.
P.S.- if you want to know, here's a hint, rot13'd:
I hate "what is the next number in the sequence" type puzzles. The correct answer is always the same. Anything I damn well like. I understand polynomial interpolation
<hint> That's good, because you don't need polynomial interpolation. I spent a couple hours trying to make it work, no dice. The answer is MUCH MUCH simpler than that. </hint>
People don't have a problem with their credit card companies tracking every cent they are spending, so why should they have problems with this?
Because the credit card companies don't use the information they collect against you, that's the key issue here. "We noticed that you used your credit card to buy lots of alcohol, which we don't like- so we're going to raise your interest rate." Sounds ludicrous, right? Now try this statement on. "We noticed that you traveled 8mph over the speed limit on the freeway, so we're going to rase your premiums."
The problem is not that the insurance companies will immediately use it for the most nefarious means possible, its that the possibility exists. When faced with the opportunity to jack up their clients rates for breaking the law (which they do now, but they can only rely on you getting caught) they'll go for it. It doesn't matter whether you were driving safely and keeping up with the flow of traffic, the law is black and white!
Slashdot Mirror
Either that or wait to do all the good stuff until right before you die. That's my plan.
No, because Perl is not an acronym! At least you didn't put it in all capitals.
While your statement about gravity is true, it's not much of a valid comparison. Lets turn it around, shall we?
It took the most powerful human creation ever to produce one hundredth of the energy the sun puts out in 39 nanoseconds. In a given day, it would take 45 quadrillion of these bombs to output the same amount of energy. The statement is more a testament to the unbelievable power of the sun, and the relative smallness of what our own accomplishments represent compared to that.
Ok, perhaps a poor choice of words- but with it covering greater than 85% of the population nominally, it is *the* holiday. I consider myself to be athiest agnostic (as in- "pretty sure" there's no god) but I still celebrate christmas. With respect to overall economic effects, christmas is most definitely the largest.
Retailers in the U.S. are in the red all year up until "Black Friday" -- the day following Thanksgiving. This is mostly due to the existence of multiple religious holidays where gift giving/exchange is encouraged that fall on or around the winter solstice.
The only reason that buying patterns are concentrated around this time of year is precisely because the holiday exists. If christmas had never been, people would still buy gifts for each other. There might be some other gift-giving holiday, or birthdays might have more importance. In fact, it would cause there to be a more even distribution of buying patterns throughout the year. I don't think your statistic of "being in the red" rings true for all retail sectors, but if it did- it would disappear without christmas.
Of course, then one might argue- but christmas is the only reason people give gifts! If that is the case, it is a rather poor view of humanity. It removes the concept of charity and good will from the human as an individual, and moves it to being purely a creation of religion itself. This is one of the core arguments against atheism- that "godless" people are morally bankrupt.
I was one of the first people to have FIOS, being in the 3rd city in the US that was wired (Huntington Beach). I've had it for almost two years now, and I got the same line from them about how they "had" to cut the copper when they put in the fiber. This guy is lying through his teeth.
Back in 1998, the amount of storage they had was pretty impressive too. It took rooms and rooms to do it, but if I'm remembering this correctly they had about 5 terabytes of disk online and close to 5 petabytes of tape robots. It was a pretty slick automated system- everyone had accounts on a main fileserver, and files that had not been accessed in a certain amount of time were written to tape. If you were to try to grab a file that was on tape, it would fire up the robot, transfer it off the tape, and give it to you- all seamlessly. It was a little slow of course but you never had to do anything- it all appeared as though the files were in your home directory the whole time.
Lest anyone think they are taking up valuable government resources that could be used for something else- Moffett has been essentially idle for the last twenty years. It was decomissioned some time ago, and now the only use that the runways get is the occasional research plane for NASA and AWACS flights.
I worked at NASA Ames (which has basically taken over the whole Moffett campus, since they're all together.) We did tours of the different areas there, and I think the most fun was touring "Hangar 1" and talking to the guys in the tower for the airstrip. They basically sat around all day drinking coffee, waiting for the one or two planes per day they had taking off or landing. The only excitement they ever got was the occasional presidential flight- when chelsea was going to Stanford, clinton would fly in to Moffett.
I think it's a great idea, and they should do more of it- lots of land developers are salivating at the huge chunk of real estate that moffett has there. On top of that, they're trying to demolish Hangar 1, since it's full of toxic substances, the upkeep on it is really expensive, and it's not doing anything (well, except being a stage for a recent Lexus commercial.)
All they're doing is playing to the audience in saying "we need you." This is not a problem for which there are not solutions. In the case of this article it's a solution (Google partnering with cable companies) in search of a problem (lack of bandwidth).
Gotta say that I didn't see that one coming.
After all of his dismissive answers to the rest of the questions, that one actually made me laugh out loud. He was starting to sound like a guy who doesn't have any fun!
You need to be a bit clearer with your units. You say that you get "2 megs per second" on your dsl, but do you mean two megaBITS or two megaBYTES? I've had FIOS for a little over a year, and I can say it definitely delivers. I have the 15 megabit / 2 megabit connection, and it's a lot faster than any DSL i've ever had. Your 768k DSL is thirty times slower than that to put things in perspective.
As for torrents- it works great. I have a linux box running the commandline torrent client, and I can routinely max out the connection in both directions- downloading torrents at 1.6 megaBYTES per second, and uploading at 200 kiloBYTES per second. It's nearly impossible to find cable service or DSL that can match that.
You know, sometimes the patent debate isn't so cut and dried. In this case, tivo actually has a product that was something new and innovative, as opposed to something like "1-click ordering". IFF MythTV really did infringe on the tivo patents, I might support them- but there's no money in it for them. How much are they going to get off the guys, $19 in loose change and a couple of Arby's two-for-one coupons? Certainly not $78 million!
I don't have one, but from what I've read about the MDA is that it already supports EDGE, GPRS, and wifi. I currently use a Sidekick 2 (hiptop) and it uses only GPRS. I don't know if it's because some people have moved over to the EDGE network with compatible devices but I have noticed a significant speed increase on their GPRS network.
:) It does do all of those things, and the edge actually works quite well... but in the end, the SK2 was a much more usable device. Danger's UI is much easier to navigate than the crap that is WM5, and the web proxying they do speeds the device up a TON. Even with twice the data speed, loading some web pages is dog slow. That combined with the fact that windows mobile is still pretty glitchy, and it's a big toss-up. Oh, and the keyboard SUCKS! No dedicated number keys, and I can't touch type on the keyboard like I can with the SK. The keys aren't tall enough.
:)
I switched from a Sidekick2 to the MDA on the first day they came out. I had the Sidekick 1 from the first day it came out a few years back... what can I say, I like my gadgets.
At this point, I'd probably wait until the MDA gets cheaper. Sure, it's neat to be able to use it as an EDGE modem or put your own apps/games/ringtones on it, but Danger REALLY did their homework on the SK. I'm waiting to see if the SK3 is a better device... in a few months I may have an MDA to sell
Which just goes to prove to be a really big drug dealer you need a computer and connections, not just to hang out in your Accura in McDonald's parking lot late at night.
:)
Wellllll... there are quite a few McDonalds now with free wifi. So it wouldn't surprise me if he WAS sitting out in the parking lot.
I mean, how hard would it be to have your friends play at the same table as you while on a conference call with them?
This is actually a huge problem for online casinos, whether it be over the phone or IM. Online casinos watch for play patterns that would indicate collusion between the players, and they'll flag people for it. They have a good deal of automated software that does the tracking. The huge advantage they have is that they log every single bet, so they have a lot more data to look through. Real casinos can do the same by watching with cameras, but it's much easier for the online ones.
Power consumption goes up when it is removed from the PCI slot, says the article. If that's so, there is a design fault somewhere - it suggests that there are floating inputs .
There's power on the PCI bus even when the system is off, to power things like LAN cards for Wake-On-Lan. Are you saying that the card shouldn't take advantage of the available power that's there all the time?
...and it works great. I've had it for just over two months now, and I haven't had a single problem with it. $49/mo is pretty nice, too.
The actual installation took about four hours, so I had quite a bit of time to talk to the installer. He said that they do two installs a day, and that they're booked pretty solid for the next few months doing installs. This is in Huntington Beach, CA, one of the first areas that they're rolling out their FTTP services.
A really low user ID, and that makes me cool.
;)
By that metric, I'm more than twice as cool! Yeah, I'll probably get modded down because this post was stupid but I'll take any opportunity I can to show off...
Assuming you're talking about a 700kbit stream and most users have between 128-384kbps of upload capacity, you're really only talking about 4:1 or 2:1 ratio. While that doesn't mean everybody can just serve each other, it does reduce the load on the server by 25 or 50 percent. Being able to serve twice as many users with a fixed initial cost would definitely pay out in the long run.
Gah, this was about as surprising to me as when that /. article on Sony phasing out Betamax...
That's a strikingly similar comparison, as both products are still being used by businesses long after they had been abandoned by consumers. It's getting harder to find betamax stuff these days, but up until a few years ago it was THE thing to be using for a lot of professional video editing. It's almost been completely usurped by digital technologies.
Turns out somebody already thought of it- check this thing out!
here:[...etc...]
It's not a classical polynomial function because it's not a function at all. The next number in the list is only related to the previous numbers in the list by a certain property that all the numbers share. There is no way to generate the entire series by just knowing previous elements in the series. The series is a certain set of numbers within the set of ten-digit numbers contained in the digits of e. Check out the
hint posted in my previous reply.
The point of the "idiotic" question is that people can spend a lot of time (in my case two hours) working on completely the wrong solution (which may seem obvious) when the TRUE solution is much simpler. This is a classic "think outside the box" problem.
That being said, I did find this really cool page while trying to figure out the next number in the series.. The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. You give it a piece of a sequence and it finds integer sequences that match the pattern. Very cool.
P.S.- if you want to know, here's a hint, rot13'd:
I hate "what is the next number in the sequence" type puzzles. The correct answer is always the same.
Anything I damn well like. I understand polynomial interpolation
<hint>
That's good, because you don't need polynomial interpolation. I spent a couple hours trying to make it work, no dice. The answer is MUCH MUCH simpler than that.
</hint>
People don't have a problem with their credit card companies tracking every cent they are spending, so why should they have problems with this?
Because the credit card companies don't use the information they collect against you, that's the key issue here. "We noticed that you used your credit card to buy lots of alcohol, which we don't like- so we're going to raise your interest rate." Sounds ludicrous, right? Now try this statement on. "We noticed that you traveled 8mph over the speed limit on the freeway, so we're going to rase your premiums."
The problem is not that the insurance companies will immediately use it for the most nefarious means possible, its that the possibility exists. When faced with the opportunity to jack up their clients rates for breaking the law (which they do now, but they can only rely on you getting caught) they'll go for it. It doesn't matter whether you were driving safely and keeping up with the flow of traffic, the law is black and white!