...commercial spaceflight sector can provide a level of safety equal to that offered by the venerable Russian Soyuz system, which has flown safely for the last 38 years, and exceeding that of the Space Shuttle.
So the astronauts are saying that Soyuz is safer than the shuttle. Interesting.
Try doing a query other than one of the ones they suggest. Pick something you're particularly interested in or know a lot about. You'll see this thing does pretty much nothing useful.
Old people with dementia find a change of routine remarkably debilitating. Even minor changes of routine. The solution is not to try keeping their world the way it was, the solution is to make them comfortable with their new world.
That involves deep immersion in routine ("the rut is your friend"), simplification of process, and acknowledging that their world *will* shrink as their sphere of competence decreases... that that this is a *good* thing, not a bad thing. Better for them to have a small world in which they feel they are coping, than to stretch to keep their world slightly wider, and thereby adding to their distress by the constant realization they are not coping.
If they manage to make a cup of tea at some point during the day, that's great. Giving them the opportunity at the end of the day to see themselves put the kettle on 16 times, take the cup out 8 times and put it away again 7 times, well that won't do anything to make them happy. And that's assuming they can remember why they've got this thing around their neck, and where the computer is.
I don't have the reference to hand so feel free to claim it never happened, but this occurred a few years ago with an Australian Collins-class diesel electric. It also happened a few decades ago with an Australian Oberon-class sub, and ISTR some European sub managed a similar trick.
The problem seems to be that US sub crews simply aren't accustomed to going up against diesel-electric subs, which *are* much quieter than the US nukes. There may also be a hubris effect going on, in that the crews *assume* they and their technology will easily detect interlopers, and therefore aren't as much on guard as they should be.
The worrying bit is that (for want of a better term) "rogue states" are much more likely to be using a diesel-electric sub than anything else.
My primary use of this device is that it sits on my coffee table. When I'm watching TV or talking to someone and suddenly have the need to know something I don't already carry inside my skull, I pick up my N800 and within a couple of seconds, I know what I want to know. Whether it's a conversation about oil imports or a spike of curiosity about some actress I see on TV, I've got it to hand.
It's called "internet snacking" -- for this sort of use, I wouldn't be bothered walking into my study and turning on my PC. I will turn on my PC if I'm sitting down to spend an hour researching a new car or something, but for a "60 seconds of curiosity" scenario, if it's not on my coffee table and *always* ready to go, I simply don't bother. (You very rarely turn the N800 off - you just pick it up and touch the screen and away you go).
Add to that that I can check my email over breakfast and in the evening, and now I find I only rarely switch on my main computer.
BTW, the thing that makes it *work* compared to the browser in your phone or iphone is the screen resolution. 800 pixels across is the absolute useful minimum. Anything less is like trying to read a newspaper by looking through a drinking straw. With 800 pixels and a proper browser, I can access pretty much any website without compromise.
Back to the travelling thing - with the N800 I can pick up a Wifi connection or (more usually) come in through GPRS. I've been on holidays and been able to access my email in the most outlandish and remote locations -- anywhere I get GPRS to my GSM phone. But the good thing is that I'm not travelling with a bulky laptop (another bag on the plane, etc). The N800 is so small it's hard to notice you've brought it along.
Then there's extra benefits like being able to make VOIP calls over a Wifi connection, mapping applications, and all the other things you'd expect of a full Linux computer.
It's an interesting niche - it's not a phone, and it's not a laptop computer -- it's neither and both, and I wouldn't be without one:)
C'mon, this is common knowledge among people who hang around the pacific. If you catch a large fish, don't eat the whole thing... eat some, and share around to dilute the risk. People have known this for over 30 years. Large fish have higher risk just because they are older. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciguatera
Sure - happens to me several times a year. I don't want to get into actual code examples, but in outline the first step is to profile your program so you understand where the bottlenecks are. Then profile those bottlenecks in detail. I use VTune. Frequently it comes down to a couple of tight loops somewhere. Then, using your long experience of coding assembler and your in-depth understanding of the performance characteristics of Intel CPUs, recode the loop making maximimal use of registers, careful choice of instructions which use fewest cycles, interveaving instructions to get maximum number of execution units operating in parallel, etc.
A human *always* has a better understanding of the big-picture issues and available trade-offs than a computer does. Compilers are good at generating RISC code, because there are few other ways to generate. Intel CPUs are CISC, and the opportunities for radical re-expression are multitude.
Sure, it's not true that rewriting *anything* in assembler will make it go faster. And IMO there is no value in capturing the assembler output from your compiler and starting with that, because quite frankly if you have to do that and can't start from scratch(ish), then you're unlikely to be able to concieve or execute the sort of re-expression that will yield dividends.
Compilers frequently generate code that sh/w/ould make you weep. Usually it doesn't matter. But let's say you're processing 10TB of text, then for those bits where you are doing something for every character processed, there will inevitably be fragments of code which are expensive to run, and for which other options exist, and where replacing 3 lines of code with 30 lines of assembler might drop your total runtime by 10 or 20%.
You're writing some software which will run on modern, fast computers. The software does a bunch of stuff, frequently on very large volumes, and you want your software to go faster than your competitors. So you analyse the performance, and discover there's four places where three lines of code consume 75% of total execution time. By rewriting those 12 lines in assember, the rest of your half million lines goes twice as fast as it used to, and you sell more software than your competitor who wasn't prepared to go the extra mile.
The nice thing about this reason is that as hardware gets faster, the reason remains.
This is a very patient man, but he needs more experience talking to idiots. He kept talking above them. They kept reciting the seeds of their own defeat, but instead of nailing them on it, he tried to educate them and bring them up to his level. He could have defeated them on their own level. Regardless, Verizon hire idiots supervised by idiots.
As a very smart man I used to work with used to say, "there is no such thing as virtual memory".
For a while, I thought he was just having a play on words, but after a while I realised it was actually a very important observation about performance in computing systems, and if you make the mistake of thinking virtual memory was in any way as good as real memory, you were headed for tears. In these days of cheap RAM, if you need 4GB, install 4GB, and be done with this foolishness of thinking hard disk is just as good.
Of course, in reality it's always good to have a few unused holes on your belt, and VM is a useful thing. Just don't think it's in any way as good as real. For best performance, the optimum ratio is 1:1. That's the message.
This is pretty easy stuff when applied to news stories, and has been around for decades.
News stories have a regular structure - they're written in a formulaic way by professionals according to a standard. The first sentence is almost invariably a statement of what the story is about. Rarely do news stories start with a paragraph of whimsical nonsequetur. They are the ideal corpus for this sort of thing, which is why people have been doing so for years. It's a couple of order of magnitudes harder doing the same thing on arbitrary text.
Oh for heavens sake - the russians have been doing this for decades with their KURS automated docking system on the Progress and Soyuz vehicles. Has worked very reliably. The only time they've had a collision was when they tried to fly a manual remote-control docking, rather than use the automated system. Buy one, pull it apart, learn something.
In one scenario, the money goes into the company and you end up as pennyless as you were, except for your equity in the business, which may (usually does) end up being worth precisely nothing. Yes, yes, "larger pie" and all that, but in most cases the pie ends up being dropped on the floor.
In the other scenario, the money goes to you, you go buy a very large boat, and if the business goes bad and fails, you still have your very large boat. To keep.p>
In one scenario, you are rich on paper. In the other scenario, you are rich. It's a pretty important distinction.
Also, for the scenario you outline, the two outcomes are *not* equivalent because if the money comes to you and then you put it back into the business, there will be a capital gains tax.
There's a key difference between these two scenarios. Where the original shareholder(s) transfer a portion of their own shares, the new money goes to them. Where the company issues additional shares, the money goes to it.
Frequently, new investors much prefer to see their money going into the business in which they are investing, rather than into the pockets of the original investors. The new investor usually does not want to give the original investors the path to tiptoe quietly away while reducing their exposure. They want everyone to keep their skin in the game.
Yes, Michael Foal has spent about half as long as the guy in #1 spot, but what isn't clear from that is that Michael Foal ranks in 19th place. The next American after Foal appears in 33rd place.
Not really. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo all had escape methods available at all times during launch. The Shuttle does not. If anything goes wrong while the solids are lit, you have to just sit tight until they finish their burn. No plan B. The Gemini escape system was pretty hairy in comparison to Mercury and Apollo, but at least it had one. With Shuttle, you just cross your fingers.
It's a discussion about desktop search, and not everyone is managing to distinguish that there's two markets. So yeah, I'm joining the discussion because it's an area we happen to know a little something about. Why is that a bad thing?
BusinessWeek is right - it's a mugs game giving away free software to people who never would have paid for it anyway.
But there is money to be made in desktop search, and we and some of our competitors have been doing so for years. The trick is to sell a premium quality product to people who have sufficient need that they're happy to pay a reasonable price for it. Not dumbed-down, feature crippled search software, but a fully-featured, professional, top-shelf product. It's worth paying for, and you know what, it's more fun to produce, too, because your users see the value.
The Yahoo product is just the old X1.. nothing new here, move along folks.
All these products have one thing in common - they're aimed at very basic searching suitable for the home user. They're not professional grade search products, like for example, ISYS. There's a world of difference between a freebee home product and a professional tool, both in terms of feature set and price point. We compete against free search tools every day of the week, and beat them routinely. The only time we don't is when the 'customer' is looking for a free tool to search through his recipe collection and Outlook Express in-tray.
There's two different product-spaces going on here.
... is for everyone to choose one spam per month, go to their website, and start acting like an interested purchaser. Ask how much discount if you buy two. How much for ten. How much if you become a reseller and want to buy 100 at a time. What currencies do they accept. What delivery mechanisms. Can they do special customizations?
Keep "the sales process" going over a week, and for the sake of 5 minutes per month of your time, masquerading as a juicy deal will waste 15 minutes of thier time. If everyone does this, it's like an DOS attack on their brain. They end up having all their time wasted by people who look like customers but aren't.
Obviously use a disposable email address for this. If we all do this, it completely changes the economics of the spam equation. The trick is not to start talking too big too soon, otherwise they realise you're not bona fide.
Well of course it would:) I wasn't bothering to pretend otherwise, just pointing out there is a need for such products and giving examples of ones that exist. Others exist as well, but I think ours are pretty good. So shoot me !
Our hard drives, on the other hand... I don't understand why you'd need Google for that. [snip] a filename or full-text search can already be done by the operating system.
Yes, but spectacularly badly. So badly in fact, that in practice most people don't do it. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are pursuing desktop search because they realize just what a chasm there is between a "proper" search engine, and what's available right now for personal search.
If you've only got a few dozen docs and a few hundred emails, then you don't have a problem. But for anyone doing more than storing recipes, you need a proper desktop search engine, or even just an email search engine. Don't make the misteak of thinking both Google and Microsoft are way off base here -- it's something they know about.
no other nation in the world can compete with the technology in the US subs
A quick reality check here. In 2003, a "noisy" Australian deisel boat sunk two US nuclear attack subs and an aircraft carrier during joint war games. The Dutch have done the same sort of thing. On a previous occasion, an Australian sub sat underneath a US carrier, inside the CBG cordon, and followed it around for some days. At the end of the exercise it surfaced next to the carrier to the horror and amazement of all involved.
The biggest danger the US navy faces is hubris my boy. That's the real thing you have to watch out for.
Slashdot Mirror
...commercial spaceflight sector can provide a level of safety equal to that offered by the venerable Russian Soyuz system, which has flown safely for the last 38 years, and exceeding that of the Space Shuttle.
So the astronauts are saying that Soyuz is safer than the shuttle. Interesting.
... I have one word : wParam.
I rest my case.
In Win32, wParam went from 16-bit to 32-bit, but still stayed as wParam. Now in Win64, wParam is a 64-bit quantity.
wParam my foot.
Try doing a query other than one of the ones they suggest. Pick something you're particularly interested in or know a lot about. You'll see this thing does pretty much nothing useful.
Old people with dementia find a change of routine remarkably debilitating. Even minor changes of routine. The solution is not to try keeping their world the way it was, the solution is to make them comfortable with their new world.
That involves deep immersion in routine ("the rut is your friend"), simplification of process, and acknowledging that their world *will* shrink as their sphere of competence decreases... that that this is a *good* thing, not a bad thing. Better for them to have a small world in which they feel they are coping, than to stretch to keep their world slightly wider, and thereby adding to their distress by the constant realization they are not coping.
If they manage to make a cup of tea at some point during the day, that's great. Giving them the opportunity at the end of the day to see themselves put the kettle on 16 times, take the cup out 8 times and put it away again 7 times, well that won't do anything to make them happy. And that's assuming they can remember why they've got this thing around their neck, and where the computer is.
I don't have the reference to hand so feel free to claim it never happened, but this occurred a few years ago with an Australian Collins-class diesel electric. It also happened a few decades ago with an Australian Oberon-class sub, and ISTR some European sub managed a similar trick.
The problem seems to be that US sub crews simply aren't accustomed to going up against diesel-electric subs, which *are* much quieter than the US nukes. There may also be a hubris effect going on, in that the crews *assume* they and their technology will easily detect interlopers, and therefore aren't as much on guard as they should be.
The worrying bit is that (for want of a better term) "rogue states" are much more likely to be using a diesel-electric sub than anything else.
Travelling is one aspect, but only a small one.
:)
My primary use of this device is that it sits on my coffee table. When I'm watching TV or talking to someone and suddenly have the need to know something I don't already carry inside my skull, I pick up my N800 and within a couple of seconds, I know what I want to know. Whether it's a conversation about oil imports or a spike of curiosity about some actress I see on TV, I've got it to hand.
It's called "internet snacking" -- for this sort of use, I wouldn't be bothered walking into my study and turning on my PC. I will turn on my PC if I'm sitting down to spend an hour researching a new car or something, but for a "60 seconds of curiosity" scenario, if it's not on my coffee table and *always* ready to go, I simply don't bother. (You very rarely turn the N800 off - you just pick it up and touch the screen and away you go).
Add to that that I can check my email over breakfast and in the evening, and now I find I only rarely switch on my main computer.
BTW, the thing that makes it *work* compared to the browser in your phone or iphone is the screen resolution. 800 pixels across is the absolute useful minimum. Anything less is like trying to read a newspaper by looking through a drinking straw. With 800 pixels and a proper browser, I can access pretty much any website without compromise.
Back to the travelling thing - with the N800 I can pick up a Wifi connection or (more usually) come in through GPRS. I've been on holidays and been able to access my email in the most outlandish and remote locations -- anywhere I get GPRS to my GSM phone. But the good thing is that I'm not travelling with a bulky laptop (another bag on the plane, etc). The N800 is so small it's hard to notice you've brought it along.
Then there's extra benefits like being able to make VOIP calls over a Wifi connection, mapping applications, and all the other things you'd expect of a full Linux computer.
It's an interesting niche - it's not a phone, and it's not a laptop computer -- it's neither and both, and I wouldn't be without one
C'mon, this is common knowledge among people who hang around the pacific. If you catch a large fish, don't eat the whole thing... eat some, and share around to dilute the risk. People have known this for over 30 years. Large fish have higher risk just because they are older.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciguatera
Sure - happens to me several times a year. I don't want to get into actual code examples, but in outline the first step is to profile your program so you understand where the bottlenecks are. Then profile those bottlenecks in detail. I use VTune. Frequently it comes down to a couple of tight loops somewhere. Then, using your long experience of coding assembler and your in-depth understanding of the performance characteristics of Intel CPUs, recode the loop making maximimal use of registers, careful choice of instructions which use fewest cycles, interveaving instructions to get maximum number of execution units operating in parallel, etc.
A human *always* has a better understanding of the big-picture issues and available trade-offs than a computer does. Compilers are good at generating RISC code, because there are few other ways to generate. Intel CPUs are CISC, and the opportunities for radical re-expression are multitude.
Sure, it's not true that rewriting *anything* in assembler will make it go faster. And IMO there is no value in capturing the assembler output from your compiler and starting with that, because quite frankly if you have to do that and can't start from scratch(ish), then you're unlikely to be able to concieve or execute the sort of re-expression that will yield dividends.
Compilers frequently generate code that sh/w/ould make you weep. Usually it doesn't matter. But let's say you're processing 10TB of text, then for those bits where you are doing something for every character processed, there will inevitably be fragments of code which are expensive to run, and for which other options exist, and where replacing 3 lines of code with 30 lines of assembler might drop your total runtime by 10 or 20%.
- You're writing some software which will run on modern, fast computers. The software does a bunch of stuff, frequently on very large volumes, and you want your software to go faster than your competitors. So you analyse the performance, and discover there's four places where three lines of code consume 75% of total execution time. By rewriting those 12 lines in assember, the rest of your half million lines goes twice as fast as it used to, and you sell more software than your competitor who wasn't prepared to go the extra mile.
The nice thing about this reason is that as hardware gets faster, the reason remains.This is a very patient man, but he needs more experience talking to idiots. He kept talking above them. They kept reciting the seeds of their own defeat, but instead of nailing them on it, he tried to educate them and bring them up to his level. He could have defeated them on their own level. Regardless, Verizon hire idiots supervised by idiots.
For a while, I thought he was just having a play on words, but after a while I realised it was actually a very important observation about performance in computing systems, and if you make the mistake of thinking virtual memory was in any way as good as real memory, you were headed for tears. In these days of cheap RAM, if you need 4GB, install 4GB, and be done with this foolishness of thinking hard disk is just as good.
Of course, in reality it's always good to have a few unused holes on your belt, and VM is a useful thing. Just don't think it's in any way as good as real. For best performance, the optimum ratio is 1:1. That's the message.
News stories have a regular structure - they're written in a formulaic way by professionals according to a standard. The first sentence is almost invariably a statement of what the story is about. Rarely do news stories start with a paragraph of whimsical nonsequetur. They are the ideal corpus for this sort of thing, which is why people have been doing so for years. It's a couple of order of magnitudes harder doing the same thing on arbitrary text.
This is easy greasy kids stuff.
Oh for heavens sake - the russians have been doing this for decades with their KURS automated docking system on the Progress and Soyuz vehicles. Has worked very reliably. The only time they've had a collision was when they tried to fly a manual remote-control docking, rather than use the automated system. Buy one, pull it apart, learn something.
In one scenario, the money goes into the company and you end up as pennyless as you were, except for your equity in the business, which may (usually does) end up being worth precisely nothing. Yes, yes, "larger pie" and all that, but in most cases the pie ends up being dropped on the floor.
In the other scenario, the money goes to you, you go buy a very large boat, and if the business goes bad and fails, you still have your very large boat. To keep.p> In one scenario, you are rich on paper. In the other scenario, you are rich. It's a pretty important distinction.
Also, for the scenario you outline, the two outcomes are *not* equivalent because if the money comes to you and then you put it back into the business, there will be a capital gains tax.
Frequently, new investors much prefer to see their money going into the business in which they are investing, rather than into the pockets of the original investors. The new investor usually does not want to give the original investors the path to tiptoe quietly away while reducing their exposure. They want everyone to keep their skin in the game.
Of the 33 top place getters, 31 are Russian.
Not really. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo all had escape methods available at all times during launch. The Shuttle does not. If anything goes wrong while the solids are lit, you have to just sit tight until they finish their burn. No plan B. The Gemini escape system was pretty hairy in comparison to Mercury and Apollo, but at least it had one. With Shuttle, you just cross your fingers.
It's a discussion about desktop search, and not everyone is managing to distinguish that there's two markets. So yeah, I'm joining the discussion because it's an area we happen to know a little something about. Why is that a bad thing?
But there is money to be made in desktop search, and we and some of our competitors have been doing so for years. The trick is to sell a premium quality product to people who have sufficient need that they're happy to pay a reasonable price for it. Not dumbed-down, feature crippled search software, but a fully-featured, professional, top-shelf product. It's worth paying for, and you know what, it's more fun to produce, too, because your users see the value.
All these products have one thing in common - they're aimed at very basic searching suitable for the home user. They're not professional grade search products, like for example, ISYS. There's a world of difference between a freebee home product and a professional tool, both in terms of feature set and price point. We compete against free search tools every day of the week, and beat them routinely. The only time we don't is when the 'customer' is looking for a free tool to search through his recipe collection and Outlook Express in-tray.
There's two different product-spaces going on here.
Keep "the sales process" going over a week, and for the sake of 5 minutes per month of your time, masquerading as a juicy deal will waste 15 minutes of thier time. If everyone does this, it's like an DOS attack on their brain. They end up having all their time wasted by people who look like customers but aren't.
Obviously use a disposable email address for this. If we all do this, it completely changes the economics of the spam equation. The trick is not to start talking too big too soon, otherwise they realise you're not bona fide.
Best of all, it's fun.
Well of course it would :) I wasn't bothering to pretend otherwise, just pointing out there is a need for such products and giving examples of ones that exist. Others exist as well, but I think ours are pretty good. So shoot me !
Yes, but spectacularly badly. So badly in fact, that in practice most people don't do it. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are pursuing desktop search because they realize just what a chasm there is between a "proper" search engine, and what's available right now for personal search.
If you've only got a few dozen docs and a few hundred emails, then you don't have a problem. But for anyone doing more than storing recipes, you need a proper desktop search engine, or even just an email search engine. Don't make the misteak of thinking both Google and Microsoft are way off base here -- it's something they know about.
They bagged two subs as well as a surface ship.
A quick reality check here. In 2003, a "noisy" Australian deisel boat sunk two US nuclear attack subs and an aircraft carrier during joint war games. The Dutch have done the same sort of thing. On a previous occasion, an Australian sub sat underneath a US carrier, inside the CBG cordon, and followed it around for some days. At the end of the exercise it surfaced next to the carrier to the horror and amazement of all involved.
The biggest danger the US navy faces is hubris my boy. That's the real thing you have to watch out for.