I wasn't seriously suggesting that the article be called "English System mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter" -- this was just an example to clarify my point. A more appropriate title would have been something like "Unit mixup caused loss of Nasa orbiter". The present title isn't even accurate and is highly misleading -- at first glance it seems as though the problem was caused by some silly engineers using the metric system when everyone else in NASA was using english units (in fact it was the other way around); but maybe you think that the shortness of a headline is more important than accuracy.
Cnn has an article on this. The title is extremely revealing of US biases. Notice it's titled "Metric mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter" and not "English System mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter", as if the problem were caused by the use of the metric system -- in reality, the latter title would have been more appropriate.
I think they do have a point. Kids can't be expected to make rational calculations about expected loss or profit. Lotteries that target kids are wrong, if not outright illegal. As for why the parents didn't know or couldn't stop their kids from spending thousands of dollars on these cards, I think that's possible;I remember as a child, kids in class would scrimp and save their pocket money for the craze of the time, or gamble with other kids etc.. There were even cases of outright theft.
"At the very least, it gives average folks at home who may thing that *nix is too complicated a chance to see it"
Having the average person who knows nothing about unix telnet into one of those unix boxes and presenting him or her with an obscure command prompt will only reconfirm the perception that unix is too difficult to use. As a means of selling unix to a new user, it's difficult to think of a worse way of presenting unix.
JBuilder 3 is already dreadfully slow, especially the parts that are written in Java (e.g. the help system). I dread to think how slow a pure java version will be.
One more thing, as a end user I REALLY do NOT care about how fast you wrote the application
You will care if it means that you can get the application delivered to you faster. This is especially important for in-house applications where people really care about getting the application they want quickly. Cross platform compatibility is a big plus as well.
I've been working with the JAI. I really wish that your statement about the core part being written in C were true, but it really isn't. Too many functions are still in pure Java. The speed is actually pretty decent, but what makes it slow is the memory inefficient way you're forced to code when using the JAI -- it really slows things down when your system runs out of ram, and it starts to page the hard disk or stops to garbage collect. The Java garbage collection mechanism seems really unsuitable for working which large amounts of data -- when you're dealing with large data sets, you really want tight control over how the program uses memory.
I tried counting how many clicks it takes to get from one web site to another some time back. It's on my web site here. My effort never quite got off the ground though:(
"Randomizing post order doesn't really solve the problem -- in a sufficiently long forum, you'll hit moderator overload no matter what."
The problem I had in mind was where moderators don't moderate posts made later in a long discussion simply because it takes too long to get to them. I'm sure you realise that it's practically a waste of time making the 300th (main thread) post in a discussion since it's unlikely to get read by any one at all, including moderators.
The number of moderation points given out is proportional to the number of posts made on slashdot so I don't think moderators actually run out of points just because the discussion is long.
Randomization seems like the only way to go: in any non-random scheme, some posts will be displayed first, and some later according to the scheme used, and those displayed later will not be read.
I think a way to improve the moderation system would be to have an option to randomize the order of the posts. The way the system works now, when there're too many posts, later posts don't get moderated up because it's too difficult for moderators to plough through everything to get to them. An option to randomize the order which posts are displayed ensures that everything gets a fair shot at being seen.
Channel capacity (the actual number of bits per second that can be transmitted reliably) is likely to be very bad. The high amount of noise and attenuation is going to make the signal to noise ratio very low, which means that very aggressive error control schemes will be needed -- which introduce redundancies and thus reduce the effective bit transfer rate.
Bandwidth doesn't tell you how fast data can be transferred. Channel capacity does -- which, according to the Shannon coding theorem, is proportional to both the bandwidth and signal to noise ratio.
Not really I think. The requirements on the channel needed to transmit the key are less stringent: you just have to make sure the key cannot be read by an attacker without your knowledge (e.g. use a trusted courier who keeps the key with him at all times); if the key is read by an attacker, simply do not use the key and you don't lose much.
Re:I dont think it is all that great
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you. I read Ender's Game after it had been out for sometime, and I found that it wasn't all it was cut out to be. The characters were generally unlikeable i.e. smart but obnoxious kids, and the concept seemed a bit stale by the time I read it. I thought Speaker for the Dead was a much stronger work; much more morally challenging. I found the sequel to SFTD, Xenocide, with its pseudo-Chinese mysticism completely unreadable. I couldn't bear reading more than a few pages of that.
The g'ment did a great job bootstrapping space exploration. It's time for private enterprise to carry this burden farther, and although NASA may have some appropriate role in advancing to our goals, our tax money may be better spent elsewhere.
I fail to see how the private sector can do a better job of achieving the long term goals of space research. The private sector, being motivated by profit as it is, has little interest in carrying burdens; if the government is less than far sighted, the private sector is even more short sighted.
If the private sector were running space research, what would its nature be? The moon mined for minerals? A colony on Mars run by corporation XYZ?... the stuff of science fiction nightmares.
The private sector has an eventual role to play, but the initial development and exploration of space needs a much more altruistic and far sighted agency. The lack of interest in space research by governments is disastrous.
One of the reasons why console games are less buggy and more stable than PC games is because there's no chance to patch the game once it's released -- a buggy, unstable game is an unsaleable game.
But with consoles like the Dreamcast that connect to the internet, console developers will find out how tempting it is to 'release the game now, post a patch on the net later'. Console games will become much buggier.
The article reports that the 'strangelets' produced may set off a chain reaction, converting everything it comes into contact with into strange matter. But it seems that a lot of energy will be required to break up nuclei into its constituent quarks (?). But where would the energy for a such chain reaction come from? After all energy has to be conserved e.g. colliders require very large amounts of energy to accelerate atoms to very high speeds to break them up in the first place.
But the article just says that matter may be transformed into 'more strange matter'. What does this actually mean?
Re:The problem is more severe in Windows
on
BO2K cracked
·
· Score: 1
Not if the winnt directory is set to read only for ordinary users, as it should be.
But only intelligent beings can interpret stimuli in a meaningful fashion and can be logically said to "suffer". Pain isn't just stimulus to humans; we fear pain because we *know* pain is associated with death.
Animals are perfectly capable of feeling pain and suffering, as well as fearing and anticipating their deaths: a pig in an abbatoir, a dog about to be put to sleep. Most animals are conscious and therefore pain isn't just stimuli to them. Try torturing a dog or a cat and telling me it doesn't suffer -- this is why we've laws against this kind of thing.
The difference in intelligence between higher animals like primates is more of a matter of degree than kind. So even based on intelligence, there's no reason to deny that animals suffer. After all, it's conceivable that the intelligence gap between some alien race and us, would be the same as the intelligence gap between us and say chimpanzees. Would it be ok to make humans suffer then?
Certainly some intelligence is needed to appreciate pain and suffering, but to argue that human-like intelligence is needed to suffer is just human-centrism designed to justify the torture of animals.
This is the same Bentham, who, in his "Defense of Usuary" basically said it is morally okay for rich people to screw over everyone else.
Bentham's other views are not very relevant to the validity of a particular statment.
Um, because humans are intelligent beings and cows and mice aren't. Why should intelligence be the criteria for giving animals humane consideration? What does this have to do with the ability to feel pain and suffer?
From altweb (alt. to animal testing): In 1789, philosopher Jeremy Bentham sounded the rallying cry for animals everywhere: "The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?"
Xoom.com is another company that provides free web pages (I have a web page there so I checked out their service agreement).
This is from their service agreement (italics added):
"You grant to XOOM.com and its affiliates a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide, unrestricted license to use, copy, modify, transmit, distribute, and publicly perform or display the submitted pages or other content for the purposes of displaying such information on XOOM.com's sites and for the promotion and marketing of XOOM.com's services. XOOM.com disclaims ownership of member sites and will not resell or otherwise convey these rights to any third party."
Compare this with Yahoo/Geocities' service agreement:
"By submitting Content to any Yahoo property, you automatically grant, or warrant that the owner of such Content has expressly granted, Yahoo the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed."
Yahoo's claim that their agreement is necessary to protect themselves against lawsuits doesn't hold water. If that were true, their agreement would be more like Xoom's, which sounds exactly like what is needed to protect themselves against lawsuits. Yahoo's agreement sounds like they intend to profit from the sale or resale of content posted on the webpages.. this is completely unacceptable.
There's a problem with that. The PC's no Playstation or Dreamcast: what about all the different possible hardware configurations? Configuring the OS for the system isn't trivial; it's time consuming and often not completely automatic..this seems to kill the scheme you described.
Rather than convert the ANSI art to gifs etc., they should write a plugin that displays ANSI art embedded in web pages directly. Great way to do low bandwidth graphics.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't seriously suggesting that the article be called "English System mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter" -- this was just an example to clarify my point. A more appropriate title would have been something like "Unit mixup caused loss of Nasa orbiter". The present title isn't even accurate and is highly misleading -- at first glance it seems as though the problem was caused by some silly engineers using the metric system when everyone else in NASA was using english units (in fact it was the other way around); but maybe you think that the shortness of a headline is more important than accuracy.
Cnn has an article on this. The title is extremely revealing of US biases. Notice it's titled "Metric mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter" and not "English System mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter", as if the problem were caused by the use of the metric system -- in reality, the latter title would have been more appropriate.
I think they do have a point. Kids can't be expected to make rational calculations about expected loss or profit. Lotteries that target kids are wrong, if not outright illegal. As for why the parents didn't know or couldn't stop their kids from spending thousands of dollars on these cards, I think that's possible;I remember as a child, kids in class would scrimp and save their pocket money for the craze of the time, or gamble with other kids etc.. There were even cases of outright theft.
"At the very least, it gives average folks at home who may thing that *nix is too complicated a chance to see it"
Having the average person who knows nothing about unix telnet into one of those unix boxes and presenting him or her with an obscure command prompt will only reconfirm the perception that unix is too difficult to use. As a means of selling unix to a new user, it's difficult to think of a worse way of presenting unix.
JBuilder 3 is already dreadfully slow, especially the parts that are written in Java (e.g. the help system). I dread to think how slow a pure java version will be.
One more thing, as a end user I REALLY do NOT care about how fast you wrote the application
You will care if it means that you can get the application delivered to you faster. This is especially important for in-house applications where people really care about getting the application they want quickly. Cross platform compatibility is a big plus as well.
I've been working with the JAI. I really wish that your statement about the core part being written in C were true, but it really isn't. Too many functions are still in pure Java. The speed is actually pretty decent, but what makes it slow is the memory inefficient way you're forced to code when using the JAI -- it really slows things down when your system runs out of ram, and it starts to page the hard disk or stops to garbage collect. The Java garbage collection mechanism seems really unsuitable for working which large amounts of data -- when you're dealing with large data sets, you really want tight control over how the program uses memory.
I tried counting how many clicks it takes to get from one web site to another some time back. It's on my web site here. :(
My effort never quite got off the ground though
"Randomizing post order doesn't really solve the problem -- in a sufficiently long forum, you'll hit moderator overload no matter what."
The problem I had in mind was where moderators don't moderate posts made later in a long discussion simply because it takes too long to get to them. I'm sure you realise that it's practically a waste of time making the 300th (main thread) post in a discussion since it's unlikely to get read by any one at all, including moderators.
The number of moderation points given out is proportional to the number of posts made on slashdot so I don't think moderators actually run out of points just because the discussion is long.
Randomization seems like the only way to go: in any non-random scheme, some posts will be displayed first, and some later according to the scheme used, and those displayed later will not be read.
I think a way to improve the moderation system would be to have an option to randomize the order of the posts. The way the system works now, when there're too many posts, later posts don't get moderated up because it's too difficult for moderators to plough through everything to get to them. An option to randomize the order which posts are displayed ensures that everything gets a fair shot at being seen.
Channel capacity (the actual number of bits per second that can be transmitted reliably) is likely to be very bad. The high amount of noise and attenuation is going to make the signal to noise ratio very low, which means that very aggressive error control schemes will be needed -- which introduce redundancies and thus reduce the effective bit transfer rate.
Bandwidth doesn't tell you how fast data can be transferred. Channel capacity does -- which, according to the Shannon coding theorem, is proportional to both the bandwidth and signal to noise ratio.
Not really I think. The requirements on the channel needed to transmit the key are less stringent: you just have to make sure the key cannot be read by an attacker without your knowledge (e.g. use a trusted courier who keeps the key with him at all times); if the key is read by an attacker, simply do not use the key and you don't lose much.
I agree with you. I read Ender's Game after it had been out for sometime, and I found that it wasn't all it was cut out to be. The characters were generally unlikeable i.e. smart but obnoxious kids, and the concept seemed a bit stale by the time I read it.
I thought Speaker for the Dead was a much stronger work; much more morally challenging.
I found the sequel to SFTD, Xenocide, with its pseudo-Chinese mysticism completely unreadable. I couldn't bear reading more than a few pages of that.
The g'ment did a great job bootstrapping space exploration. It's time for private enterprise to carry this burden farther, and although NASA may have some appropriate role in advancing to our goals, our tax money may be better spent elsewhere.
... the stuff of science fiction nightmares.
I fail to see how the private sector can do a better job of achieving the long term goals of space research. The private sector, being motivated by profit as it is, has little interest in carrying burdens; if the government is less than far sighted, the private sector is even more short sighted.
If the private sector were running space research, what would its nature be? The moon mined for minerals? A colony on Mars run by corporation XYZ?
The private sector has an eventual role to play, but the initial development and exploration of space needs a much more altruistic and far sighted agency. The lack of interest in space research by governments is disastrous.
One of the reasons why console games are less buggy and more stable than PC games is because there's no chance to patch the game once it's released -- a buggy, unstable game is an unsaleable game.
But with consoles like the Dreamcast that connect to the internet, console developers will find out how tempting it is to 'release the game now, post a patch on the net later'.
Console games will become much buggier.
In the case of a nuclear explosion, energy is released because the resulting nuclei have less binding energy than the original nuclei.
If nuclei are ripped into their constituent quarks, it seems that energy would be required (rather than released) to do so.
The article reports that the 'strangelets' produced may set off a chain reaction, converting everything it comes into contact with into strange matter. But it seems that a lot of energy will be required to break up nuclei into its constituent quarks (?). But where would the energy for a such chain reaction come from? After all energy has to be conserved e.g. colliders require very large amounts of energy to accelerate atoms to very high speeds to break them up in the first place.
But the article just says that matter may be transformed into 'more strange matter'. What does this actually mean?
Not if the winnt directory is set to read only for ordinary users, as it should be.
But only intelligent beings can interpret stimuli in a meaningful fashion and can be logically said to "suffer". Pain isn't just stimulus to humans; we fear pain because we *know* pain is associated with death.
Animals are perfectly capable of feeling pain and suffering, as well as fearing and anticipating their deaths: a pig in an abbatoir, a dog about to be put to sleep. Most animals are conscious and therefore pain isn't just stimuli to them. Try torturing a dog or a cat and telling me it doesn't suffer -- this is why we've laws against this kind of thing.
The difference in intelligence between higher animals like primates is more of a matter of degree than kind. So even based on intelligence, there's no reason to deny that animals suffer. After all, it's conceivable that the intelligence gap between some alien race and us, would be the same as the intelligence gap between us and say chimpanzees. Would it be ok to make humans suffer then?
Certainly some intelligence is needed to appreciate pain and suffering, but to argue that human-like intelligence is needed to suffer is just human-centrism designed to justify the torture of animals.
This is the same Bentham, who, in his "Defense of Usuary" basically said it is morally okay for rich people to screw over everyone else.
Bentham's other views are not very relevant to the validity of a particular statment.
Um, because humans are intelligent beings and cows and mice aren't.
Why should intelligence be the criteria for giving animals humane consideration? What does this have to do with the ability to feel pain and suffer?
From altweb (alt. to animal testing):
In 1789, philosopher Jeremy Bentham sounded the rallying cry for animals everywhere: "The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?"
Xoom.com is another company that provides free web pages (I have a web page there so I checked out their service agreement).
.. this is completely unacceptable.
This is from their service agreement (italics added):
"You grant to XOOM.com and its affiliates a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide, unrestricted license to use, copy, modify, transmit, distribute, and publicly perform or display the submitted pages or other content for the purposes of displaying such information on XOOM.com's sites and for the promotion and marketing of XOOM.com's services. XOOM.com disclaims ownership of member sites and will not resell or otherwise convey these rights to any third party."
Compare this with Yahoo/Geocities' service agreement:
"By submitting Content to any Yahoo property, you automatically grant, or warrant that the owner of such Content has expressly granted, Yahoo the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed."
Yahoo's claim that their agreement is necessary to protect themselves against lawsuits doesn't hold water. If that were true, their agreement would be more like Xoom's, which sounds exactly like what is needed to protect themselves against lawsuits. Yahoo's agreement sounds like they intend to profit from the sale or resale of content posted on the webpages
Let's have a poll for the clone worthiest person.
There's a problem with that. The PC's no Playstation or Dreamcast: what about all the different possible hardware configurations?
Configuring the OS for the system isn't trivial; it's time consuming and often not completely automatic..this seems to kill the scheme you described.
Rather than convert the ANSI art to gifs etc., they should write a plugin that displays ANSI art embedded in web pages directly. Great way to do low bandwidth graphics.
My post has been taken to -1.
I can't believe that I've been proven right so quickly...
Come on Rob, we really need an anti-Linux option.