I wonder whether this technology is inherently limited to a very steep saturation-brightness tradeoff.
In the picture (provided earlier, by thedohman), the color E-ink panel looks very dark.
Clue: Phillips explains that they made the colors with a plastic overlay.
Speculation: the overlay could be a transparent RGB grid, where each cell transmits (and therefore reflects) only Red, Green, or Blue. Just like an LCD, right? Unfortunately, because it is purely reflective, that would cut its brightness way down, because you'd be blocking most incipient light even in your most-white state. In the simple case, with equal numbers of Red, Green, and Blue cells, the max brightness would be 1/3 of incipient light, since each cell could only reflect its own color. If you, say, threw in a white cell too, you could get at most 1/2 of incipient light, but at the cost of saturation (because your colors would have to be either washed out by the white quarter, or dark because they can only use a small fraction of the total surface for reflection).
There's a good answer to that: the compiler can be invoked in two modes. Production mode generates compressed, obfuscated (as a side effect of compression) JavaScript, with function names like a3(). Development mode, though, generates incredibly verbose JavaScript, with Java packages and class names and method names visible everywhere, that is encredibly easy to trace back to your original code.
You mean Champaign, Illinois? I'm typing this from Urbana, right next door to Champaign (and just down the highway from storied Peoria), although as a child I lived in the the one and only Oblong, IL.
Ha! A chance to be pedantic! How often does that happen?
Auugh! No, not the off-topic button! The Midwest really does exist! It's made of peeeeeooople!
It may sound Philistine, but I think one of the very best ways to get better at something is to do it under pressure. With programming, having a smart mentor nearby can be a tremendous help in such a situation, but even working alone under pressure will both (1) improve your understanding, and (2) stretch your capacity (endurance, memory, etc).
That pressure can come from either an external deadline or, if you are able to do it, an internal one (more difficult to achieve, IMO). Programming contests may be a really good place to find them: you get all three: (1) interesting, difficult problems, (2) time pressure, and (3) smart mentors (well, only partially, since you can only get advice by viewing others' code after the fact).
Yes, I switched mousing hands too, to deal with shoulder pain in my mousing arm -- I even blogged about it (that counts as modern because I'm over 30).
Man was it hard though -- it took about two weeks to feel reasonably comfortable. But it really worked.
Otherwise, how about one o' them ThinkPad keyboards with a little red nubby thing plus a trackpad?
Yes, VMWare, a thousand times yes. All you need is enough memory to run both OSes. First, the bad news:
Linux (which I am assuming will be the guest OS) will run more slowly than normal. The slowdown will depend on the software; more system calls will mean more slowdown. I've seen a 10% to 75% slowdown, but normally I would guess (without any real measurements) around 30%. But very usable.
No native accelerated graphics in Linux. Still pretty fast, but I don't think you have a chance of getting a decent framerate in Half-Life.
You'll want to suspend Linux before you suspend the laptop. VMWare doesn't play nicely (or it didn't when I last tried it a year ago) with sleep etc. But don't worry -- suspending a VMWare image is trivially easy and very quick.
Now, the good news:
Both OSes at once! No dual-booting!
No special Linux lappy configuration -- no wireless networking, no ACPI -- just plain vanilla drivers. SCSI, even:)
Not just one but lots of Linuxes! You can run several machines. Your own network! For me that's nice, since I do a lot of integration projects, but it may not matter for you. You can start with a base config and clone it. Etc.
Portability and backup -- your main machine will be virtual (your Linux VM image). Just back up the image (you can pause it, back it up, and unpause it without rebooting it) periodically and, if your shell machine (Windows) dies, which laptops are wont to do for a thousand reasons, you can migrate your Linux VM to a new host. Isn't there a Star Trek race like that in DS9?
VMWare (at least one version) is free now. I use VMWare Workstation, which is $115 (academic), but that may not be necessary with the recent changes.
Chicks! Ha ha, just kidding. I wouldn't know. I'm married, I use Linux (and Linux hosted on VMWare itself running under Linux), and my wife insists on staying with me anyway. So maybe it's true.
That's my suggestion. It may sound weird if you're used to a one-OS-at-a-time machine, but I swear, once you try it you'll never go back.
A lot of people have asked why the Chinese gov't picked this guy to make an example ofspeculating, for example, that he was a token victim because somebody's head had to roll.
Instead, it seems pretty clear from the article that stuff like this is bad for China, and the party leaders know it. Fraud does not lead to scientific progress and independence, and those are what the government of China is after, understandably.
More interesting, to me anyway, is that this points out how critical ethical behavior is for the progress of a nation. I don't want to belabor the point, but dishonesty and corruption breed chaos, infighting, and waste, which is the biggest reason China needs honest work and research.
You know, it might be possible to have an optional "PC user compatibility" switch that would map, in software, ctrl-c and ctrl-v to cmd-c and cmd-v. Ooh, maybe that's even patentable!
Or an enterprising software maker could make something that does that. You could install it on your new Mac so that your wife and mother-in-law, who lives with you, but you get along pretty well with her, can use it easily.
There's some hatin' in the ads, but there's also some emphasis on the cool things a Mac can doiLife, mainly.
I agree with the poster, though, in that the negative parts made me cringe. Ugh. They were a little over-done. Especially the rebooting. (Just a sec, while I, umm, install some updates on this PC.)
Some random thoughts about complexity. I don't have a coherent argument though:
The author seems to assume that the more programmers there are, the more a software project will advance. In my experience, though, a small, dedicated team of 1 to 4 programmers can outperform the entire rest of the world in 99% of interesting cases. On page 3, for example,
A new feature for a software project posted on the internet increases the overall complexity of the project.
The author seems to equate an increase in complexity with an increase in functionality. It's true to some extent, but it also makes maintenance harder. To maintain or even improve any software, you need people who understand that software and, more importantly, who understand each other's changes. Which is why it's so nice to have a small group who can meet and talk and make decisions together. And to be productive, those people have to have a really good reason to:
Stick together
Respect each other's efforts
Refine the software until it is usable, which can take much longer than achieving basic functionality.
Be aware of what users really need, and not just what the programmers think they need.
So far, I have seen these qualities mainly in commercial teams, with a few prominent exceptions in the open-source world.
IANAA (Accountant), but I've done a few thousand dollars' worth of consulting -- never more than about $10k in a year -- and self-employment tax is simple. You just get a 1040-SE form and fill it out. The tax rates are a little higher (about 7.5% for me) than if you are employed because you will have to pay your own social security employer's tax (I guess part of social security tax is paid for by the employer). If you make very much, the IRS wants you to file estimated tax payments quarterly, but that's not too hard either. If you've been doing your own taxes, then you can definitely handle the additional paperwork. You can even include expenses on a 1040-SE.
Are you saying you have doubts about the Governor's leadership? It's people like you that are the vulnerabilities -- not the engineering in the Death Star. Have you even seen it? It's massive! It's undefeatable! Worried about a "small, one-man fighter?" Sheesh, just put a few blaster turrets on it, and that thing will be history. I can't believe people are worried about things like that. Isn't the whole point of having a new republic to get rid of the dissent that's been wasting all of our time? Sheesh.
Is paint art? Of course not. It's a medium. Games can be created artistically or not, just like paint can be used to express truth and beauty or simply to cover a wall.
Sun has been talking about shared VMs for a while now -- I can't remember if it's scheduled for version 6 or 7 -- the object space would be partitioned among the running Java "processes", but only one JVM would be necessary. It would improve startup times, memory consumption, etc. They could all share one instance of rt.jar, for example, assuming it was process-safe (it may not be now, but fixing it would be something Sun would have to do for the actual release).
I don't see it listed in the Java 6 (Mustang) notes (for example here), so I would guess that it's slated for versin 7 (Dolphin).
It sounds like you're talking about monitoring your network for application performance and watching for telltales that precede degredation. You might check out a product from this company:
Unlike a general packet sniffer or network monitor, they aim exactly at your kind of problem.
Disclaimer: until I entered the glorious realm of academic programming, I was employed by NEXVU, and I still have stock and stock options. Even though they no longer benefit from my obvious genius, I think they have a great product. If enough VoIP administrators agree, then those options may be worth something in the future!
There is no end to the invention you can pour into growing plants and taking care of animals.
Being not very far descended from farmers, I have to say that agriculture of any kind is a great target for creativity. And a couple of centuries ago, a heck of a lot of the world's population was subsistence farming.
You have to plan for the seasons, account for risks (weather, sickness), do more with less effort, take care of your tools and your land, preserve foods, try to maintain nutrition through a long winter. Some of it you can figure out on your own, and some of it you really need to learn from those who have gone before you...
... But I digress. Farming rewards intelligence and hard work. And it punishes stupidity and sloth with just about the stiffest penalties I can think of -- starvation of not just yourself, but your family as well. Darwin's hand at work, shaping the geeks of today over millenia past.
According to the article, Linux accounted for 10% of sales:
Linux server sales continued to show the strongest growth at 35.2 per cent and accounted for $1.2bn in sales. Linux servers made up 10 per cent of total sales in the quarter.
So Linux is being must be counted separately from Unix.
The substrate is that big (2.2 x 1.87 meters), but that's for two 82" screens. A single screen is a little less than half that size -- it fits 1920 pixels into something less than 1.87 meters, and 1080 in less than 1.1 meters. If they're square, then they're slightly less than 1 millimeter on a side.
The Miniket is based on a Samsung S5C7376 SoC (system-on-chip) clocked at 216MHz. The SoC includes an ARM9 core with MMU; however, the Miniket's uClinux 2.6 kernel does not use the chip's MMU.
That's an interesting suggestion. I think it would be tough to pull off because, in order to detect hot spots, you need performance metrics. Compiled code that generates metrics on itself (for example, running with embedded profiling tools) is usually very slow. To take advantage of pre-compiling, you'd basically need a profiler with as little speed penalty as possible.
Also, it may turn out to be easier to recompile based on the original bytecode rather than the compiler machine code. Which would mean you'd have to ship both versions with every binary, unless the machine code was JIT'd at runtime.
On the other hand, if you had a way to optimize the already-compiled code, then heck, you'd have a general-purpose application accelerator. I think I remember reading, a few years ago, about research group at HP that started out working on aggressive processor emulation techniques and ended up with an optimizing recompiler. They were surprised to found that, when they targeted the same processor that the original binary came from, their application sped up 10-20% thanks to optimizations they could apply that the compiler couldn't have known about (cross-library inlining, for example).
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder whether this technology is inherently limited to a very steep saturation-brightness tradeoff.
In the picture (provided earlier, by thedohman), the color E-ink panel looks very dark.
Clue: Phillips explains that they made the colors with a plastic overlay.
Speculation: the overlay could be a transparent RGB grid, where each cell transmits (and therefore reflects) only Red, Green, or Blue. Just like an LCD, right? Unfortunately, because it is purely reflective, that would cut its brightness way down, because you'd be blocking most incipient light even in your most-white state. In the simple case, with equal numbers of Red, Green, and Blue cells, the max brightness would be 1/3 of incipient light, since each cell could only reflect its own color. If you, say, threw in a white cell too, you could get at most 1/2 of incipient light, but at the cost of saturation (because your colors would have to be either washed out by the white quarter, or dark because they can only use a small fraction of the total surface for reflection).
There's a good answer to that: the compiler can be invoked in two modes. Production mode generates compressed, obfuscated (as a side effect of compression) JavaScript, with function names like a3(). Development mode, though, generates incredibly verbose JavaScript, with Java packages and class names and method names visible everywhere, that is encredibly easy to trace back to your original code.
You mean Champaign , Illinois? I'm typing this from Urbana, right next door to Champaign (and just down the highway from storied Peoria), although as a child I lived in the the one and only Oblong, IL.
Ha! A chance to be pedantic! How often does that happen?
Auugh! No, not the off-topic button! The Midwest really does exist! It's made of peeeeeooople!
It may sound Philistine, but I think one of the very best ways to get better at something is to do it under pressure. With programming, having a smart mentor nearby can be a tremendous help in such a situation, but even working alone under pressure will both (1) improve your understanding, and (2) stretch your capacity (endurance, memory, etc).
That pressure can come from either an external deadline or, if you are able to do it, an internal one (more difficult to achieve, IMO). Programming contests may be a really good place to find them: you get all three: (1) interesting, difficult problems, (2) time pressure, and (3) smart mentors (well, only partially, since you can only get advice by viewing others' code after the fact).
As long as you get enough sleep, that is :)
Except that the CO2 that they do emit is balanced by the CO2 absorbed by plants during their production. Net result = zero CO2 emissions.
Yes, I switched mousing hands too, to deal with shoulder pain in my mousing arm -- I even blogged about it (that counts as modern because I'm over 30).
Man was it hard though -- it took about two weeks to feel reasonably comfortable. But it really worked.
Otherwise, how about one o' them ThinkPad keyboards with a little red nubby thing plus a trackpad?
Yes, that sounds good. I need to take a course like this to catch up on some crypto for work!
Yes, VMWare, a thousand times yes. All you need is enough memory to run both OSes. First, the bad news:
Now, the good news:
That's my suggestion. It may sound weird if you're used to a one-OS-at-a-time machine, but I swear, once you try it you'll never go back.
A lot of people have asked why the Chinese gov't picked this guy to make an example ofspeculating, for example, that he was a token victim because somebody's head had to roll.
Instead, it seems pretty clear from the article that stuff like this is bad for China, and the party leaders know it. Fraud does not lead to scientific progress and independence, and those are what the government of China is after, understandably.
More interesting, to me anyway, is that this points out how critical ethical behavior is for the progress of a nation. I don't want to belabor the point, but dishonesty and corruption breed chaos, infighting, and waste, which is the biggest reason China needs honest work and research.
You know, it might be possible to have an optional "PC user compatibility" switch that would map, in software, ctrl-c and ctrl-v to cmd-c and cmd-v. Ooh, maybe that's even patentable!
Or an enterprising software maker could make something that does that. You could install it on your new Mac so that your wife and mother-in-law, who lives with you, but you get along pretty well with her, can use it easily.
There's some hatin' in the ads, but there's also some emphasis on the cool things a Mac can doiLife, mainly.
I agree with the poster, though, in that the negative parts made me cringe. Ugh. They were a little over-done. Especially the rebooting. (Just a sec, while I, umm, install some updates on this PC.)
Some random thoughts about complexity. I don't have a coherent argument though:
The author seems to assume that the more programmers there are, the more a software project will advance. In my experience, though, a small, dedicated team of 1 to 4 programmers can outperform the entire rest of the world in 99% of interesting cases. On page 3, for example,
The author seems to equate an increase in complexity with an increase in functionality. It's true to some extent, but it also makes maintenance harder. To maintain or even improve any software, you need people who understand that software and, more importantly, who understand each other's changes. Which is why it's so nice to have a small group who can meet and talk and make decisions together. And to be productive, those people have to have a really good reason to:
So far, I have seen these qualities mainly in commercial teams, with a few prominent exceptions in the open-source world.
IANAA (Accountant), but I've done a few thousand dollars' worth of consulting -- never more than about $10k in a year -- and self-employment tax is simple. You just get a 1040-SE form and fill it out. The tax rates are a little higher (about 7.5% for me) than if you are employed because you will have to pay your own social security employer's tax (I guess part of social security tax is paid for by the employer). If you make very much, the IRS wants you to file estimated tax payments quarterly, but that's not too hard either. If you've been doing your own taxes, then you can definitely handle the additional paperwork. You can even include expenses on a 1040-SE.
Are you saying you have doubts about the Governor's leadership? It's people like you that are the vulnerabilities -- not the engineering in the Death Star. Have you even seen it? It's massive! It's undefeatable! Worried about a "small, one-man fighter?" Sheesh, just put a few blaster turrets on it, and that thing will be history. I can't believe people are worried about things like that. Isn't the whole point of having a new republic to get rid of the dissent that's been wasting all of our time? Sheesh.
- Toned down their intrusiveness on victims' machines
- Become a known quantity rather than a shocking intruder
- Survived and made some money, thus earning de facto legitimacy as a business
They're still a scourge -- just a legal and known one.Is paint art? Of course not. It's a medium. Games can be created artistically or not, just like paint can be used to express truth and beauty or simply to cover a wall.
Sun has been talking about shared VMs for a while now -- I can't remember if it's scheduled for version 6 or 7 -- the object space would be partitioned among the running Java "processes", but only one JVM would be necessary. It would improve startup times, memory consumption, etc. They could all share one instance of rt.jar, for example, assuming it was process-safe (it may not be now, but fixing it would be something Sun would have to do for the actual release). I don't see it listed in the Java 6 (Mustang) notes (for example here), so I would guess that it's slated for versin 7 (Dolphin).
- Resize the window -- the movie will expand too.
- Ctrl-3 fills the screen
You can't get seamless full-screen, which I assume you can if you pay for Pro, but you can do almost as well.If this were an AI contest, I would agree. But the goal is practical driving, instead, by any (software) means necessary.
It sounds like you're talking about monitoring your network for application performance and watching for telltales that precede degredation. You might check out a product from this company:
Because that's exactly what they do :)
Unlike a general packet sniffer or network monitor, they aim exactly at your kind of problem.
Disclaimer: until I entered the glorious realm of academic programming, I was employed by NEXVU, and I still have stock and stock options. Even though they no longer benefit from my obvious genius, I think they have a great product. If enough VoIP administrators agree, then those options may be worth something in the future!
There is no end to the invention you can pour into growing plants and taking care of animals.
Being not very far descended from farmers, I have to say that agriculture of any kind is a great target for creativity. And a couple of centuries ago, a heck of a lot of the world's population was subsistence farming.
You have to plan for the seasons, account for risks (weather, sickness), do more with less effort, take care of your tools and your land, preserve foods, try to maintain nutrition through a long winter. Some of it you can figure out on your own, and some of it you really need to learn from those who have gone before you ...
... But I digress. Farming rewards intelligence and hard work. And it punishes stupidity and sloth with just about the stiffest penalties I can think of -- starvation of not just yourself, but your family as well. Darwin's hand at work, shaping the geeks of today over millenia past.
According to the article, Linux accounted for 10% of sales:
So Linux is being must be counted separately from Unix.
The substrate is that big (2.2 x 1.87 meters), but that's for two 82" screens. A single screen is a little less than half that size -- it fits 1920 pixels into something less than 1.87 meters, and 1080 in less than 1.1 meters. If they're square, then they're slightly less than 1 millimeter on a side.
The SoC (System on a Chip) that Samsung uses has an MMU, but they just don't use it for this device.
From the LinuxDevices article:
That's an interesting suggestion. I think it would be tough to pull off because, in order to detect hot spots, you need performance metrics. Compiled code that generates metrics on itself (for example, running with embedded profiling tools) is usually very slow. To take advantage of pre-compiling, you'd basically need a profiler with as little speed penalty as possible.
Also, it may turn out to be easier to recompile based on the original bytecode rather than the compiler machine code. Which would mean you'd have to ship both versions with every binary, unless the machine code was JIT'd at runtime.
On the other hand, if you had a way to optimize the already-compiled code, then heck, you'd have a general-purpose application accelerator. I think I remember reading, a few years ago, about research group at HP that started out working on aggressive processor emulation techniques and ended up with an optimizing recompiler. They were surprised to found that, when they targeted the same processor that the original binary came from, their application sped up 10-20% thanks to optimizations they could apply that the compiler couldn't have known about (cross-library inlining, for example).