I had math and computer science classes where homework was not graded. All course credit came from exams. If you "cheated" on your homework, you came up short on the exam where showing all work was required to receive any credit for a problem. Those are the best types of classes, because it truly tests your ability to solve problems.
For something like a Math class, I agree. I think making large amounts of homework contribute significantly to your grade is just silly. OTOH, for something like a film class, it would be hard to grade a student director on films that he can make completely in a 50 minute class period.
First, meteors aren't hot. Second, if a "pea-sized piece of rock" is going fast enough to make "a foot wide crater in the ground," it's not going to be "bouncing off" shit, least of all this kid's hand. It would tear through him like a shotgun slug. Was the kid's hand blown off? No? Then it didn't leave a fucking crater in the ground either. How about some photographs? Oh, there are none? Hmmm.
The only way I can read this is that "foot wide crater" must mean something more like "hit a pile of dust and pebbles, and scattered things as far as a foot." Then it starts to make more sense. Still, AFAICT, this claim is unproven. Which means that jumping through hoops in the reading may not be worth the effort.
Simple, black holes are very messy eaters - they radiate a significant fraction of their food as photons. Keep in mind you are accelerating much of the star to a significant fraction of c, letting it collide with itself. This goes double for stellar mass black holes - you have a million+ kilometer star getting 'swallowed' by a twenty kilometer black hole. Even a perfect landing is going to result in most of the star's mass getting flung back out into space if only because the hole is smaller than the core of the star.
Simple analogy I sometimes use to explain black hole emissions in a way most people are familiar with...
Ever flush a toilet and notice a splash that jumps above the rim? Same thing.
While the majority of the mass gets pulled into the hole, the chaotic nature of the flow means that some mass gets ejected every which way. Depending on where you are situated, the ejected material can be quite noticeable.
As a non-programmer, can someone give a brief explanation of what a garbage collector is as it pertains to programming.
C++ has two important keywords: "new" and "delete." You use new when creating an object, and when you are done with it, you use delete to free up the memory it was using. (And, depending on the object, it may do some special stuff while being deleted, like close network sockets, or write a log entry about how sad being deleted is.)
Java has a concept of "new," but it doesn't have a "delete." (Well, the concept exists behind the cutain, but programmers never delete things themselves when using Java.) Java assumes that you are more interested in creating stuff, and don't want to be bothered with the minutia of getting rid of it when you no longer care about it. So, the Java run time goes around deleting stuff that seems like it is no longer being used. (Reference count indicates it can no longer be used.) This is called garbage collection. It's a surprisingly tricky, and nuanced process to figure out when stuff should be deleted. You want to be pretty prompt in deleting stuff that is no longer used so it doesn't sit around using memory for no reason. But, you don't want your garbage collector to be so manic about cleaning things up that the actual program doesn't get enough CPU time to get anything done. You also want a garbage collector to be fairly predictable. It's great if it usually has a low overhead, but terribly if it occasionally goes insane and locks everything up for three minutes under some use cases.
This new garbage collector is a little more sane, a little quicker and a little less manic. For many well written programs, the difference won't be that huge because they shouldn't creating and abandoning enough stuff for garbage collector to really matter. At least, that's my assumption. If I ever actually meet a well written program, I'll be able to verify that.:)
I have to ask. . . the MAP (Main Article Poster) was asking for a *lightweight* SVG implementation. If he uses Qt, won't he have to load the *entire* Qt library, including all the code for all the different windows and widgets and data structures he's not interested in? How modular is Qt? I suppose if they've broken it down into enough libraries, maybe the set of libs he would need to load might not be bad. ..
Qt is broken into many modules. However, I'd still be surprised if you managed to make Qt use much less than 2MB of RAM with less work than it took for the MAP to write his custom engine. I'm still deeply confused about why 2 MB is such a concern on a desktop app. Is the MAP targeting Win95 systems with 8 MB of RAM? On any system capable of running a currently shipping version of Windows, 2MB of RAM is much smaller than anything worth investing a lot of time over. The only real issue I can see would be in Internet distribution for an app targeting people using dialup connections. On dialup, 2MB would add a significant amount of time to the transfer.
I'm surprised it took this long to mention Qt Creator. I've been using it quite a bit recently, as I've been doing some Qt GUI stuff for work. Free and cross platform. Easy to setup. Biggest drawback for the OP is that last time I checked, DirectX was only supported with MS compilers. The included mingw(?) gcc doesn't include out of the box support for direct X. OpenGL isn't a particular problem though. Unfortunately, some of the Qt Phonon stuff on Windows depends on Direct X.
This is a perfect opportunity for law enforcement to USE CRAIGSLIST TO BUST THESE PEOPLE. Don't shut it down -- use it to your advantage! These 'criminals' will just go elsewhere and shutting down Craigslist is as effective as shutting down Pacific Blvd. after 9PM... In other words: ineffectual
I continue to be convinced that Law Enforcement realises how useful Craigs List could be for busting prostitution. That's why they want it shut down. If craigslist exists, they'll be called out if they ignore it. If they don't ignore it, they have to take down something they either don't care about, or enjoy. The guy in SC was probably getting all huffy about the craigslist postings because his 'girlfriend' complained about the competition.
My Symbian phone is based on a successor architecture to the MIPS chip that was in the original PS1 and is an order of magnitude faster, which might simplify system emulation. If there were an official PS1 emulator for my phone (and that's what we're really talking about after all, isn't it?) I'd buy it. And since Sony already owns Connectix...
No, they aren't really talking about "PlayStation" the device. They are talking about "PlayStation" the brand. Keeping to MIPS would potentially simplify porting things from PS1/PS2/PSP to the "PlayStation Phone," but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a PlayStation Phone use an ARM CPU instead. It's pretty standard on phones these days.
Those who actually bothered to read TFA, what exactly is the point of this? I understand Robin Chase loves feel-good social causes, and she is a good organizer, but no one ever accused her of being an engineer. Having read TFA, it sounds to me a bit like confused meandering of someone trying to figure out how to use some of the stimulus billions for yet another social pet cause, but without the clear definition of what that cause is.
Allow high load devices to communicate with energy producers to reduce peak load on the grid by rescheduling periods of high load.
Well, I managed 25 words or fewer. Basically, electric cars will all get plugged in when everybody gets home from work. If they all try to charge as quickly as possible, you get an extreme load on the electric grid from ~6-9 PM. Most of those cars won't be driven again until after sunup when the driver has to get to work the next day. It would be more efficient if the cars charged from 6pm - 6 am. If the power plant can tell the cars "hey, I'm going as hard as I can. Try later tonight when everybody is asleep!" then the electricity distribution system can be built around a typical average load, instead of needing to be built to handle wasteful peaks.
Then, add lots of hippie buzzwords about interconnectedness and unity. And some businessy buzzwords about paradigms and efficiencies of marketitude.
8 bits per channel, or 8 bits per pixel? 8 bits per pixel is always guaranteed to be slow on modern hardware like a quadro. It isn't designed to work with a pallette. If you actually have it set to 8 bits per pixel in hopes that fewer bits will be faster, then use 32 bits per pixel and enjoy the improvements. (And if you mean 8 bits per channel vs 10 bpc, never mind...)
The domination of polygon and SDS workflow in 3D modeling was mostly about the convenience for the artist. NURBS were available long before SDS became common. Subdivided polygons replaced real curved surfaces simply because they are so much easier to work with. CSG models still exist in some markets like CAD because the generally superior polygon workflows are inadequate.
The BBC is quoting doctors as saying that this has been around for a week. If people in Mexico City are expressing symptoms, you can bet it's around the world now, by people carrying it during its incubation period. I live in London, and I bet you a tenner that someone, somewhere in this city has this right now.
So far, no reports of London. But, there are two potential cases that have become public up in Scotland. So, whether or not it's in your city, it's almost certainly on your island.
As more people want things at home, mission to moon and the entire manned space programme shall be delayed indefinitely.
Once the shuttles are retired, I have my doubts whether the entire manned program doesn't get canned.
Makes for a sort of depressing answer to the Fermi Paradox. Why haven't the thousands of advanced species conquered the universe yet? Oh, they will. It's just not practical right now. Maybe during the next budget period they can establish a group to consider returning to space. It'll happen eventually. They've been meaning to do another manned orbital mission for the last few thousand years. They'll get to it as soon as some immediate priorities are sorted out.
So basically private information of yours that nobody has any right to should never be published openly unless you can show a public interest angle. That's totally reasonable in my book.
So, these people felt nobody had any right to their private information. That's why they sent it to a complete stranger on the Internet.
Don't use 'GET/', 'HTTP/1.0', or 'user-agent' as your password, and you will be much less likely to have your password submitted automatically by an HTTP client program.
I don't see an ethical dilemma with technologies that allow me to share information voluntarily. I want them to respect my preferences and disclose what they do with the data, but it's no different with doctors, banks, or retailers. Why is this an ethical problem for a web site?
Because at least one of the academics involved fancies himself an ethicist which means he knows if he thinks about it long enough, he can come up with an ethical dilemma in anything.
This is misinformed B.S. Itanium didn't kill anything.
That was (and is) triumphant march of Linux/x64 all the time.
Itanium killed high end MIPS years before anybody was talking about x64. You mentioned PA RISC, and Alpha was dead in-practice long before HP ever had it to officially declare it dead. Itanium killed a lot of good architectures.
OK I googled Sun laptop and got a few hits. Most of which were EOL products. I have never seen someone with a sun laptop. I have seen a few sun towers on carts with a UPS that were called 'portable'. I laptop might have helped sun a bit. Who knows. Then again, the 4 Sun servers are louder then the other 15 servers combined in out server room. Everyone complains about the noise from those 4 servers. When we turned them off it was much nicer noise-wise. I have not opened them up, but I swear that Sun uses those vantec super loud fans. Those fans move air, but you do not want to be in the same room.
Sun never made their own laptops, but there have been 3rd party SPARC/Solaris laptops. Not recently, though. As for fan noise, when the data center is three floors down, you sort of stop caring about the fan noise, and start worrying about the possibility that the fans won't move enough air and the server overheats, and somebody actually has to be in the same room as the servers.
I...if this...orking or...an you he...ause I ca...ou...Wha...er...is...ucks.
Yeah, everybody knows it's impossible to transmit audio in real time on a telephone. The connection just isn't designed for that type of 21st century use.
I lack a printer, and thus I rely on the University's printing capabilities. I'm sure I'm not the only one; many students appear to have their own computers, but seem to rely on the University for printing off papers or projects.
Could be interesting to see a networked laser printer on every floor of every dorm in response to this. It need not be too horribly difficult to tie into a centralised auth system so you can track who prints how much, so you can have people pay for toner if they go over quota.
When I ran one, it was a lab of Linux machines running Matlab and a bunch of other software that most student machines wouldn't have. The computer lab was extremely useful for the students. I expect that you'll continue to see labs being used for anything that isn't common on a student's computer. (Video editing, 3D animation, Matlab, anything with specialty software), or for computer skills courses. Teaching excel is a lot easier when everybody is looking at the same version.
Sure, if it's just being used for web browsing and checking email, a computer lab may be much less useful now than it was ten years ago. Still, I think the social aspect of a computer lab shouldn't be overlooked. I expect that you'll soon see a movement of "micro computer labs" the size of a conference room with something like 3-6 computers, a conference table, and a white board, maybe a projector. Extremely useful for group projects, and things like that, but also useful by a group of completely random individuals as a small computer lab.
Interesting, but in a previous/. discussion, I got convinced that there was no perfect captcha, since one can simply pay a group of underpaid workers (e.g. in poor country) to manually solve the captchas...
If it requires actual workers, then it is a perfectly working CAPTCHA. "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." Don't think of it as a way to keep bad posts from your forum, because it isn't. It just tries to increase the likelihood that a human was involved in the process. If you want to limit abuse, getting a guarantee that a human was involved is only one small step in the process.
Screw uninsured motorists, IMO. If you can't afford compulsory insurance, you can't afford to drive, period. Take the bus. I don't care if this particular move disproportionately affects minorities, if they are the ones disproportionately breaking the law.
Public transit in America is a joke. All the fees and costs that go along with having a car might make sense in a world where it was practical not to have one. But, my tax dollars go to create infrastructure and city planning that assumes everybody has a car. In many places it is simply impossible to live near where you work because there isn't anything zoned residential within several miles. And, not even all government offices are particularly accessible by public transit. If you eventually give up on the bus and decide to get a car, there is a very real chance that you'll need somebody to drive you to the appropriate offices.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how can the x86 architecture itself be subject to copyright? Isn't the protected property not the publicly documented instruction set, but the implementation thereof?
My understanding is that if you wanted to make a 286 clone designed from scratch, you would probably be in the clear. OTOH, if you want modern extensions like MMX, or even SSE/AMD64, then you need a license for the more modern variations. That said, the whole field is deeply complicated and unclear. Some parts of the situation have never really been tested in court so anybody claiming to have a 100% understanding of the legal issues is almost certainly mistaken.
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For something like a Math class, I agree. I think making large amounts of homework contribute significantly to your grade is just silly. OTOH, for something like a film class, it would be hard to grade a student director on films that he can make completely in a 50 minute class period.
The only way I can read this is that "foot wide crater" must mean something more like "hit a pile of dust and pebbles, and scattered things as far as a foot." Then it starts to make more sense. Still, AFAICT, this claim is unproven. Which means that jumping through hoops in the reading may not be worth the effort.
Simple analogy I sometimes use to explain black hole emissions in a way most people are familiar with...
Ever flush a toilet and notice a splash that jumps above the rim? Same thing.
While the majority of the mass gets pulled into the hole, the chaotic nature of the flow means that some mass gets ejected every which way. Depending on where you are situated, the ejected material can be quite noticeable.
C++ has two important keywords: "new" and "delete." You use new when creating an object, and when you are done with it, you use delete to free up the memory it was using. (And, depending on the object, it may do some special stuff while being deleted, like close network sockets, or write a log entry about how sad being deleted is.)
Java has a concept of "new," but it doesn't have a "delete." (Well, the concept exists behind the cutain, but programmers never delete things themselves when using Java.) Java assumes that you are more interested in creating stuff, and don't want to be bothered with the minutia of getting rid of it when you no longer care about it. So, the Java run time goes around deleting stuff that seems like it is no longer being used. (Reference count indicates it can no longer be used.) This is called garbage collection. It's a surprisingly tricky, and nuanced process to figure out when stuff should be deleted. You want to be pretty prompt in deleting stuff that is no longer used so it doesn't sit around using memory for no reason. But, you don't want your garbage collector to be so manic about cleaning things up that the actual program doesn't get enough CPU time to get anything done. You also want a garbage collector to be fairly predictable. It's great if it usually has a low overhead, but terribly if it occasionally goes insane and locks everything up for three minutes under some use cases.
This new garbage collector is a little more sane, a little quicker and a little less manic. For many well written programs, the difference won't be that huge because they shouldn't creating and abandoning enough stuff for garbage collector to really matter. At least, that's my assumption. If I ever actually meet a well written program, I'll be able to verify that. :)
Qt is broken into many modules. However, I'd still be surprised if you managed to make Qt use much less than 2MB of RAM with less work than it took for the MAP to write his custom engine. I'm still deeply confused about why 2 MB is such a concern on a desktop app. Is the MAP targeting Win95 systems with 8 MB of RAM? On any system capable of running a currently shipping version of Windows, 2MB of RAM is much smaller than anything worth investing a lot of time over. The only real issue I can see would be in Internet distribution for an app targeting people using dialup connections. On dialup, 2MB would add a significant amount of time to the transfer.
I'm surprised it took this long to mention Qt Creator. I've been using it quite a bit recently, as I've been doing some Qt GUI stuff for work. Free and cross platform. Easy to setup. Biggest drawback for the OP is that last time I checked, DirectX was only supported with MS compilers. The included mingw(?) gcc doesn't include out of the box support for direct X. OpenGL isn't a particular problem though. Unfortunately, some of the Qt Phonon stuff on Windows depends on Direct X.
I continue to be convinced that Law Enforcement realises how useful Craigs List could be for busting prostitution. That's why they want it shut down. If craigslist exists, they'll be called out if they ignore it. If they don't ignore it, they have to take down something they either don't care about, or enjoy. The guy in SC was probably getting all huffy about the craigslist postings because his 'girlfriend' complained about the competition.
No, they aren't really talking about "PlayStation" the device. They are talking about "PlayStation" the brand. Keeping to MIPS would potentially simplify porting things from PS1/PS2/PSP to the "PlayStation Phone," but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a PlayStation Phone use an ARM CPU instead. It's pretty standard on phones these days.
Allow high load devices to communicate with energy producers to reduce peak load on the grid by rescheduling periods of high load.
Well, I managed 25 words or fewer. Basically, electric cars will all get plugged in when everybody gets home from work. If they all try to charge as quickly as possible, you get an extreme load on the electric grid from ~6-9 PM. Most of those cars won't be driven again until after sunup when the driver has to get to work the next day. It would be more efficient if the cars charged from 6pm - 6 am. If the power plant can tell the cars "hey, I'm going as hard as I can. Try later tonight when everybody is asleep!" then the electricity distribution system can be built around a typical average load, instead of needing to be built to handle wasteful peaks.
Then, add lots of hippie buzzwords about interconnectedness and unity. And some businessy buzzwords about paradigms and efficiencies of marketitude.
8 bits per channel, or 8 bits per pixel? 8 bits per pixel is always guaranteed to be slow on modern hardware like a quadro. It isn't designed to work with a pallette. If you actually have it set to 8 bits per pixel in hopes that fewer bits will be faster, then use 32 bits per pixel and enjoy the improvements. (And if you mean 8 bits per channel vs 10 bpc, never mind...)
The domination of polygon and SDS workflow in 3D modeling was mostly about the convenience for the artist. NURBS were available long before SDS became common. Subdivided polygons replaced real curved surfaces simply because they are so much easier to work with. CSG models still exist in some markets like CAD because the generally superior polygon workflows are inadequate.
So far, no reports of London. But, there are two potential cases that have become public up in Scotland. So, whether or not it's in your city, it's almost certainly on your island.
Makes for a sort of depressing answer to the Fermi Paradox. Why haven't the thousands of advanced species conquered the universe yet? Oh, they will. It's just not practical right now. Maybe during the next budget period they can establish a group to consider returning to space. It'll happen eventually. They've been meaning to do another manned orbital mission for the last few thousand years. They'll get to it as soon as some immediate priorities are sorted out.
Nah, I'm sure they worked in '.net' and 'Live' somewhere in the title.
So, these people felt nobody had any right to their private information. That's why they sent it to a complete stranger on the Internet.
Don't use 'GET /', 'HTTP/1.0', or 'user-agent' as your password, and you will be much less likely to have your password submitted automatically by an HTTP client program.
Because at least one of the academics involved fancies himself an ethicist which means he knows if he thinks about it long enough, he can come up with an ethical dilemma in anything.
Itanium killed high end MIPS years before anybody was talking about x64. You mentioned PA RISC, and Alpha was dead in-practice long before HP ever had it to officially declare it dead. Itanium killed a lot of good architectures.
Sun never made their own laptops, but there have been 3rd party SPARC/Solaris laptops. Not recently, though. As for fan noise, when the data center is three floors down, you sort of stop caring about the fan noise, and start worrying about the possibility that the fans won't move enough air and the server overheats, and somebody actually has to be in the same room as the servers.
Yeah, everybody knows it's impossible to transmit audio in real time on a telephone. The connection just isn't designed for that type of 21st century use.
Could be interesting to see a networked laser printer on every floor of every dorm in response to this. It need not be too horribly difficult to tie into a centralised auth system so you can track who prints how much, so you can have people pay for toner if they go over quota.
When I ran one, it was a lab of Linux machines running Matlab and a bunch of other software that most student machines wouldn't have. The computer lab was extremely useful for the students. I expect that you'll continue to see labs being used for anything that isn't common on a student's computer. (Video editing, 3D animation, Matlab, anything with specialty software), or for computer skills courses. Teaching excel is a lot easier when everybody is looking at the same version.
Sure, if it's just being used for web browsing and checking email, a computer lab may be much less useful now than it was ten years ago. Still, I think the social aspect of a computer lab shouldn't be overlooked. I expect that you'll soon see a movement of "micro computer labs" the size of a conference room with something like 3-6 computers, a conference table, and a white board, maybe a projector. Extremely useful for group projects, and things like that, but also useful by a group of completely random individuals as a small computer lab.
If it requires actual workers, then it is a perfectly working CAPTCHA. "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." Don't think of it as a way to keep bad posts from your forum, because it isn't. It just tries to increase the likelihood that a human was involved in the process. If you want to limit abuse, getting a guarantee that a human was involved is only one small step in the process.
Public transit in America is a joke. All the fees and costs that go along with having a car might make sense in a world where it was practical not to have one. But, my tax dollars go to create infrastructure and city planning that assumes everybody has a car. In many places it is simply impossible to live near where you work because there isn't anything zoned residential within several miles. And, not even all government offices are particularly accessible by public transit. If you eventually give up on the bus and decide to get a car, there is a very real chance that you'll need somebody to drive you to the appropriate offices.
My understanding is that if you wanted to make a 286 clone designed from scratch, you would probably be in the clear. OTOH, if you want modern extensions like MMX, or even SSE/AMD64, then you need a license for the more modern variations. That said, the whole field is deeply complicated and unclear. Some parts of the situation have never really been tested in court so anybody claiming to have a 100% understanding of the legal issues is almost certainly mistaken.