Just because you are incapable of multi-tasking doesn't mean that I am as well.
No, it's that you're incapabile of realizing that you can't multi-task.
If I have an accident while driving, give me a ticket for that, not for using my phone
If you hit me because you're talking on the phone and you hurt my wife or children, a ticket is going to be the least of your worries. Having your cell phone surgically removed from your ass is going to be your top priority.
The GPL is meant as a monkey wrench in the copyright system, as a sort of "anti-copyright".
This is exactly correct. Hence the name "copyleft".
If copyright did not exist, there would be no need for the GPL.
Completely wrong. If copyright did not exist, everything would be in the public domain, which is a VERY different beast than GPL. GPL puts restrictions on what you can do with the code which do not exist with public domain code, restrictions which are only enforcable through copyright law.
With Public Domain code, there's nothing to stop you from modifying it and releasing a binary-only commercial product. You can do the same thing with BSD/MIT licensed code, except that you have to give credit to the original author(s).
However, if you take GPL code and modify it, you are forced to distribute your changes to the source code under the GPL. This restriction on what you can do with the code is made possible by copyright law.
I believe they said that it would require ONE hour of focused microwave energy on the sail while still in low earth orbit to achieve Ludicrous Speed.
I should have RTFA first:-) You're right.
How does this thing STOP?
Good question. Off the top of my head, I'd say you'd slingshot around Mars so you're headed back twords the sun and use the sun (or, as you suggest, a laser in Earth orbit) to decellerate enough to get into orbit around Mars. I don't know how long it would take to decellerate with a pure solar sail, so you might have to take the senic route -- slingshot around Jupiter and decellerate as you're headed back twords the sun.
A couple of points of reference, the radar mounted on US Aegis cruisers can put out 4 MWs and the stationary Cobra Dane early warning radar that went online in 1977 puts out 15.4 MW.
I don't think we are that far away from building a 60 MW transmitter now that we have a reason to.
Apple is a company that takes risks. They build products based on what their engineers and designers come up with, not with what the marketroids and focus groups say will sell.
Sometimes, as with the iPod, they come up with the right product at the right time and win big. However, sometimes they get there too early: the Newton was ahead of it's time and much better than the other first generation PDAs, but people just weren't ready to buy them yet.
Get an off the shelf product, like After FX, Maya, Lightwave or Photoshop and run a series of performance tests in both computers.
Nice that you picked some typical programs that everyone uses.
Graphics processing is a compute-bound problem. No one (sane) is going to argue that commodity x86 doesn't give you the most bang for the buck for raw number crunching power, which is why clusters of x86 boxes have basically replaced the traditional Cray-style supercomputer for everything except a small class of esoteric problems.
What you seem to be forgetting is that for most applications, CPU speed isn't the performance bottleneck -- I/O is, in one of it's many forms. Memory I/O is a major bottleneck in modern systems, which is why having a huge on-die cache is so important. It doesn't matter how fast your CPU is when it's sitting idle waiting to get data back from system memory (or even worse, the disk drive). Even low-end modern CPUs are so overpowered compared to the rest of the system that CPU speed doesn't really make much difference when it comes percieved performance in desktop applications.
When a user says "my computer is slow", what they usually mean is that "it takes a long time for a program to come up after I click the icon". Putting a faster CPU in their box isn't going to improve their observed performance, because the CPU isn't what's causing the problem they're seeing -- thier disk drive is. I've found that 95% of the time a faster disk drive is a better investment than a faster CPU for perking up a sluggish system.
I concur completely. One of my christmas presents was a Worst Buy gift certificate. I had been considering buying HL2, but the numerous horror stories about Steam and Valve made me vote with my dollars and buy a better game
OK...You're assuming I'm actually doing something wrong and need to hide my shopping record.
If you'd bothered to pay attention, the guy in TFA wasn't doing anything wrong, yet he was charged with a felony based largely on his shopping record.
If you really think that it's no big deal to be charged with (or even be investigated as the primary suspect for) a crime you didn't commit is no big deal, I suggest you try and remember what this guy went through.
You don't need to do anything wrong to have your life completely fucked up by the system. It takes nothing more than a random coincidence or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Let's say one weekend you need to fertilize your lawn and change the oil in your car, so you head out and buy a case of motor oil and a 50# bag of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Nothing suspicious about those purchases, until a few weeks later when some nutjob decides to set off a bomb and is seen leaving the scene of the crime.
Unfortunately for you, the perp is the same race and hair color as you and is of a similar height and body type, and was driving a car that's the same body style and color as yours. Now, thanks to your innocent purchases, you're the #1 suspect in a high-profile case.
One of my first "real" programs I wrote in middle school was a doofy little Trek-themed side-scrolling shooter on a TI/99-4a. 16K of RAM + the extended BASIC cartridge, baby! (I say Trek themed... the player's ship was a vaguely Enterprise-shaped blob, if you used your imagination. There's a limit to what you can do with a couple of 8x8 pixel sprites.
Granting access vertically (columns) is easy to do. Limiting access horizontally (rows) is hard to do.
Let's say you have an Inventory table, which has ProductID, DepartmentID, Name, Cost, SalePrice, and NumberInStock. Your security requirements are:
An inventory clerk can see all fields except Cost, and can only update NumberInStock, and cannot add or delete records
A department manger can see everythign, change SalePrice and NumberInStock, can add new products, but cannot delete anything
Clerks and managers are only allowed to see records for their department. They should not be allowed see or alter anything in another department
You can satisfy requirements 1 and 2 through traditional grant statements, however it's more difficult to limit their access to specific rows this way. If they only have rights to rows which match a specific WHERE clause, you either have to use a stored procedure or a view to limit their access. Since you can't give a view an argument, in this example you'd need a different view for each department, an SP which takes an argument (like a session id) which lets you determine what department to use.
Stored procedures are a disaster for OO design. It's hard enough to do good OR-mapping without adding a procedural layer in-between.
Well, I've been devloping OO-database systems for something like 16 years. My experience is exactly the opposite: stored procedures make the Object-Relational mapping EASIER, not more difficult.
Under this approach, each OO method (as well as constructors & destructors, where appropriate) maps one-for-one to a specific corresponding stored procedure call. This isolates your application from the details of the database, which means you can completely change the database schema and the object layer will never know the difference as long as the SP interfaces remain the same.
The application doesn't need to know if the properties for ObjectX are stored in one table or normalized across 5 tables -- it only needs to know how to create, retrieve, and modify the record(s) and fields(s) which correspond to it's properties.
Yes, it's more work to do it this way than using a tool which automates the O-R mapping (like Ruby on Rails). The advantage is that you get a more robust and secure system with better scalability and maintanability.
Perhaps what you mean is that using stored procedures makes it more difficult to jump in and start banging out code without doing good design up front. That is entirely true. I consider this a feature, not a bug. Doing good design and thinking things out first saves you trouble in the long run.
Now find one willing to work for 22k teaching inmates instead of kids.
One way is to bring back teaching scholarships.
My father was able to go to college because of a scholarship like this. In exchange for a paid-for college education, he agreed to teach in whatever school the board of education told him to work in for a certian number of years. 22K isn't a great salary; but if you don't have any college debt, you can live on it for a few years. A deal like that is no worse than taking a ROTC scholarship and getting shipped out to Iraq as a butterbar @ $28K/yr.
But without the bombing runs, I couldn't prevail militarily. Is there a way around this?
Bombers are pretty much a waste -- I only use them for softening up sea units. Build a few fighters and airbases to protect your forces from countereattack, but otherwise concentrate on building regular artillery and fight a pure ground war. Remember that catapults upgrade all the way to mobile artillery, so start building them early and stockpile them. If you're careful, you never need to lose a single artillery piece for the entire game. By the time you get tanks, you can easily have over 100 artillery waiting to go. With a good rail/seaport network you can move them ALL anywhere in a single turn.
Make a stack with all the artillery you can muster (say 30+ guns), 3-5 of your best defensive units to defend it, a couple of attack units as skirmishers to clear the way, and enough workers to build a railroad under the stack in one turn. Take out one city at a time. The AI isn't very clever -- it will see you massing your forces on the border and move most of it's units up to face you. After you take out the first 2 or 3 cities, (which can be a bitch) you've probably killed off 90% of their units, mopping up the rest of their civ is a cakewalk. Oh, and when you're fighting a war, turn off all animations and sound -- it goes much faster that way.
Education requires access to information. Computers give you access to drastically more information for much less money.
For one example: Printing a physical textbook on dead trees is fairly expensive (several dollars), and it costs more money to physically transport it to the classroom. Burning the same information to a CD-R is two orders of magnitude cheaper (several cents).
Thanks to initiatives like this one, a poor, remote village school can access the contents of the world's best libraries for about the same cost as a decent set of encyclopedias.
Battlestar Galactica is the best sci-fi TV show since Star Trek: TNG.
Well, personally, I think both Farscape and BSG were better sci-fi shows than TNG, but that's beside the point.
A few reasons I see for BSG's success:
Good actors. The TNG cast were, with one or two exceptions, all really great actors. None of the other Treks had anywhere close to that level of talent. I've watched the first 12 episodes now and the only one of the regulars who's weak is the guy who plays Apollo. Edward James Olmos kicks ass.
Good writing. BSG is first and foremost, a character-based drama. It's based on real, flawed, believable people trying to survive in an insane world. The fact that it's set in space is mere window dressing. And, while not perfect, they have a MUCH better grasp of physics than the particle-of-the-week nitwits who wrote for Trek.
I think that B5 (and Farscape to a lesser extent) really showed that season-long story arcs work much better than the classic Trek planet-of-the-week format.
According to the Federal Government Debt Report, they also own 40% of Treasury bonds & bills. Additionally, they own real estate and factories.
What do they own, really? Paper. A debt is a promise to repay -- one which can be broken. A physical asset can be seized under eminent domain, nationalized, or otherwise confiscated by government fiat.
So you want to buy this factory? Sure, we'll take your money. Here's a piece of paper which says you own it. Then, a few years later we'll say "So sorry, but we're taking the factory under eminent domain. We'll be nice and buy it back at 10 cents on the dollar. You have a problem with that? Take it up with those nice young gentlemen sitting over there in those tanks...
Unfortunately this leads to a lot of wasted and duplicated effort. EG: Gnome vs KDE. IIRC, Gnome got started because some GPL bigots got their panties in a bunch because the Qt license wasn't GPL-compatable. This is a pretty pointless pissing match that doesn't have any benefit to anyone, because the two projects have nearly 100% overlap.
Compare this to the OpenBSD/NetBSD/FreeBSD fork. Each of the forks has a very different design goal: OpenBSD concentrates on security, NetBSD goes for maximum cross-platform portability, and FreeBSD concentrates on device support. Each has a clear point of differentiation with not a whole lot of overlap, and each version borrows from the other pretty freely.
The market does always choose the best option. Always.
The market always choses the most popular option, not the best option. Just because something is more popular does not mean it's superior. History is replete with examples of better technology being eclipsed by inferior rivals with better marketing. Betamax was techically superior to VHS, yet VHS won because of Sony's restrictive licensing policies. Amiga was years ahead of it's time, but failed in the marketplace due to the fact that Commodore was mismanaged and had a marketing department which couldn't sell life preservers to shipwreck victems.
The calculator-style layout dates back to the earliest adding machines. It was a well-accepted standard for years before AT&T introduced touch-tone phones and screwed things up.
When touch-tone phones were introduced, AT&T used the 1-on-top layout, rather than the traditional 10-key layout, because some suit thought it was closer to a rotary phone.
Linux isn't the answer to help starving and sick kids in the 3rd world
No, but it can help, indirectly and in the long term. Having cheap computing resources helps give children a better education, which means more scientists, doctors, and engineers eventually. It gives the existing doctors, scientists, and engineers who don't have a lot of resources to work with the tools they need to help people.
Computers are tools for organizing and communicating information. They help people work more efficiently and to accomplish more with fewer resources. Free tools don't do anything on their own, but you need them to help yourself. If you give someone a plow, it won't feed them today; but it will allow them to feed themself next year.
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Funny... I do that when my wife is driving. Wonderful woman, but she just can't comprehend the 2-second following distance rule.
This is exactly correct. Hence the name "copyleft".
Completely wrong. If copyright did not exist, everything would be in the public domain, which is a VERY different beast than GPL. GPL puts restrictions on what you can do with the code which do not exist with public domain code, restrictions which are only enforcable through copyright law.With Public Domain code, there's nothing to stop you from modifying it and releasing a binary-only commercial product. You can do the same thing with BSD/MIT licensed code, except that you have to give credit to the original author(s).
However, if you take GPL code and modify it, you are forced to distribute your changes to the source code under the GPL. This restriction on what you can do with the code is made possible by copyright law.
Sometimes, as with the iPod, they come up with the right product at the right time and win big. However, sometimes they get there too early: the Newton was ahead of it's time and much better than the other first generation PDAs, but people just weren't ready to buy them yet.
Graphics processing is a compute-bound problem. No one (sane) is going to argue that commodity x86 doesn't give you the most bang for the buck for raw number crunching power, which is why clusters of x86 boxes have basically replaced the traditional Cray-style supercomputer for everything except a small class of esoteric problems.
What you seem to be forgetting is that for most applications, CPU speed isn't the performance bottleneck -- I/O is, in one of it's many forms. Memory I/O is a major bottleneck in modern systems, which is why having a huge on-die cache is so important. It doesn't matter how fast your CPU is when it's sitting idle waiting to get data back from system memory (or even worse, the disk drive). Even low-end modern CPUs are so overpowered compared to the rest of the system that CPU speed doesn't really make much difference when it comes percieved performance in desktop applications.
When a user says "my computer is slow", what they usually mean is that "it takes a long time for a program to come up after I click the icon". Putting a faster CPU in their box isn't going to improve their observed performance, because the CPU isn't what's causing the problem they're seeing -- thier disk drive is. I've found that 95% of the time a faster disk drive is a better investment than a faster CPU for perking up a sluggish system.
I concur completely. One of my christmas presents was a Worst Buy gift certificate. I had been considering buying HL2, but the numerous horror stories about Steam and Valve made me vote with my dollars and buy a better game
If you really think that it's no big deal to be charged with (or even be investigated as the primary suspect for) a crime you didn't commit is no big deal, I suggest you try and remember what this guy went through.
You don't need to do anything wrong to have your life completely fucked up by the system. It takes nothing more than a random coincidence or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Let's say one weekend you need to fertilize your lawn and change the oil in your car, so you head out and buy a case of motor oil and a 50# bag of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Nothing suspicious about those purchases, until a few weeks later when some nutjob decides to set off a bomb and is seen leaving the scene of the crime.
Unfortunately for you, the perp is the same race and hair color as you and is of a similar height and body type, and was driving a car that's the same body style and color as yours. Now, thanks to your innocent purchases, you're the #1 suspect in a high-profile case.
Let's say you have an Inventory table, which has ProductID, DepartmentID, Name, Cost, SalePrice, and NumberInStock. Your security requirements are:
- An inventory clerk can see all fields except Cost, and can only update NumberInStock, and cannot add or delete records
- A department manger can see everythign, change SalePrice and NumberInStock, can add new products, but cannot delete anything
- Clerks and managers are only allowed to see records for their department. They should not be allowed see or alter anything in another department
You can satisfy requirements 1 and 2 through traditional grant statements, however it's more difficult to limit their access to specific rows this way. If they only have rights to rows which match a specific WHERE clause, you either have to use a stored procedure or a view to limit their access. Since you can't give a view an argument, in this example you'd need a different view for each department, an SP which takes an argument (like a session id) which lets you determine what department to use.Under this approach, each OO method (as well as constructors & destructors, where appropriate) maps one-for-one to a specific corresponding stored procedure call. This isolates your application from the details of the database, which means you can completely change the database schema and the object layer will never know the difference as long as the SP interfaces remain the same.
The application doesn't need to know if the properties for ObjectX are stored in one table or normalized across 5 tables -- it only needs to know how to create, retrieve, and modify the record(s) and fields(s) which correspond to it's properties.
Yes, it's more work to do it this way than using a tool which automates the O-R mapping (like Ruby on Rails). The advantage is that you get a more robust and secure system with better scalability and maintanability.
Perhaps what you mean is that using stored procedures makes it more difficult to jump in and start banging out code without doing good design up front. That is entirely true. I consider this a feature, not a bug. Doing good design and thinking things out first saves you trouble in the long run.
My father was able to go to college because of a scholarship like this. In exchange for a paid-for college education, he agreed to teach in whatever school the board of education told him to work in for a certian number of years. 22K isn't a great salary; but if you don't have any college debt, you can live on it for a few years. A deal like that is no worse than taking a ROTC scholarship and getting shipped out to Iraq as a butterbar @ $28K/yr.
Make a stack with all the artillery you can muster (say 30+ guns), 3-5 of your best defensive units to defend it, a couple of attack units as skirmishers to clear the way, and enough workers to build a railroad under the stack in one turn. Take out one city at a time. The AI isn't very clever -- it will see you massing your forces on the border and move most of it's units up to face you. After you take out the first 2 or 3 cities, (which can be a bitch) you've probably killed off 90% of their units, mopping up the rest of their civ is a cakewalk. Oh, and when you're fighting a war, turn off all animations and sound -- it goes much faster that way.
RTFM next time.
For one example: Printing a physical textbook on dead trees is fairly expensive (several dollars), and it costs more money to physically transport it to the classroom. Burning the same information to a CD-R is two orders of magnitude cheaper (several cents).
Thanks to initiatives like this one, a poor, remote village school can access the contents of the world's best libraries for about the same cost as a decent set of encyclopedias.
I think that B5 (and Farscape to a lesser extent) really showed that season-long story arcs work much better than the classic Trek planet-of-the-week format.
So you want to buy this factory? Sure, we'll take your money. Here's a piece of paper which says you own it. Then, a few years later we'll say "So sorry, but we're taking the factory under eminent domain. We'll be nice and buy it back at 10 cents on the dollar. You have a problem with that? Take it up with those nice young gentlemen sitting over there in those tanks...
Compare this to the OpenBSD/NetBSD/FreeBSD fork. Each of the forks has a very different design goal: OpenBSD concentrates on security, NetBSD goes for maximum cross-platform portability, and FreeBSD concentrates on device support. Each has a clear point of differentiation with not a whole lot of overlap, and each version borrows from the other pretty freely.
The calculator-style layout dates back to the earliest adding machines. It was a well-accepted standard for years before AT&T introduced touch-tone phones and screwed things up.
When touch-tone phones were introduced, AT&T used the 1-on-top layout, rather than the traditional 10-key layout, because some suit thought it was closer to a rotary phone.
Computers are tools for organizing and communicating information. They help people work more efficiently and to accomplish more with fewer resources. Free tools don't do anything on their own, but you need them to help yourself. If you give someone a plow, it won't feed them today; but it will allow them to feed themself next year.