There are both kinds of awesome coders. Most often, seriously good coders wind up being the lone-wolf type simply because pairing them with other coders just slows them down. Most coders I know who don't suck prefer to work alone. It's one thing that draws them to this profession. Those who suck have to work with coders who don't in order to have any positive impact at all.
I like to think I'm a pretty darned good coder. A lot of coders feel that way about themselves, which is fine. I'm far more into team based development than most, so I generally impose coding practices that help code be maintainable and easily transferred between team members. Partly because of stupid software patent law in the US, I try to "code dumb", using simple algorithms when they will do the job, even when more clever ones would do better.
However, there's one rock-star coder who I humbly admit has skills far beyond what I ever will have: Ken McElvain, founder and CTO of Synplicity until it was purchased by Synopsis, is an inhuman coder. I was the first coder he hired to work with him at Synplicity, and he'd already written 350,000 lines of C code to do FPGA synthesis. I opened one of the more interesting files that implements one of the many ingenious algorithms Ken invented, and just about had a heart attack. It was over 2,000 lines long, and IIRC, it was exactly one function. There were dozens of variables, and most of them were 1 letter. There seemed to be 2 letter variables only because he'd run out of 1 letter options. There were no comments. Thinking Ken must put his comments elsewhere, I grep-ed the whole code base for comments. There was exactly one, that read "This is a hack." To this day, I doubt any other human understands that hack. I asked Ken why he didn't make smaller functions and why he didn't use longer variable names, and he said it slowed him down, because his typing speed was the primary limit to his productivity. Ken types like a fiend. I watched him develop code for a couple of years, and it was amazing. He writes files from first line to last, literally limited by his typing speed, and when complete, he hits a special icon on the desktop that means "Compile in release mode, and if no errors, push to customer download site". He rarely had any use for a debugger, because the only bugs he'd have would be typos (his fingers were not infallible at the rate he moved them).
So, a rock-star like I consider myself to be can help build an effective development team, one where I can be the lead contributor. On the other hand, I doubt I've ever been part of a team that collectively could out-produce Ken. I decided to write the first version of HDL Analyst rather than try to help Ken improve synthesis quality, which was a good choice. I was able to contribute and not slow him down. However, Synplicity basically went IPO on the strength of Ken's coding. That's one valuable rock-star, even if he's not exactly a team player.
Er... my point to my rambling comment is that Apple clearly lacked an honest inventor in this case. Their lawyers will naturally try to keep their clearly invalid multi-touch patent on the books, never suing anyone with it, simply because they know it's invalid. It's only the inventor who breaks the law by not bringing prior-art to the patent office, and as I found out, there is zero penalty to inventors who break this law.
Sorry, but no. That's what happens when random slashdotter's try to describe a patent that they believe means "pinch to zoom" when in fact it does no such thing. This patent clearly describes a more complicated gesture.
The reason Apple is not defending pinch to zoom is they didn't invent it. It was clearly demonstrated in the original Ted talk that inspired Apple to peruse multi-touch technology. I've been involved in two situations where I found that one of my patent claims was not valid due to prior art. In the first case, the patent examiner had already approved my claims, and he argued with me that my claims were still valid. He restricted my claims in the most minimal possible way to avoid the prior art when I pushed the matter. That's fine... I think he was trying to be good to a rare inventor who was trying to be honest about prior art. In the second case, my customer (I was a contractor for Zvi Orbach) told me after we'd submitted a patent why it was invalid due to prior art at Chip Express. I called the patent office, and was advised that I should not attack claims I'd filed for a previous employer. I had already quit, in part due to this issue, though Zvi had given me many other reasons to stay away from him.
I was massively ADHD, back before they diagnosed it in children. Both of my kids take Vyvance (a derivative of amphetamine), and I tried it and now have my own prescription. School was a nightmare before I started getting stoned. I was bored, and I wasn't dumb, but I couldn't make myself do homework, for example. Now and then a topic would interest me and I'd blow away the rest of the class on a test, and then I'd go back to getting close to zero. It maddened my teachers. They kept applying the whole reward/punishment thing to change my behavior and it never worked, and instead just made me think of myself as a failure. That's tough on a kid who hasn't even reached high school.
The intensive pot smoking for one year did a ton of good. I stopped hating school and stopped feeling like a failure. School became fun and I began to believe in myself. Also, school became more interesting. I'm sure it's the ADHD, but I was able to pay attention better. I remember each week reading the vocabulary list stoned until I had it memorized in one sitting. I'd have to shoot myself if I tried that today, even on Vyvance. I think there are a ton of highly ADHD adults smoking pot as their own therapy.
I'm not sure if my brain was rewired a bit to be able to do better in school after that or not. Mostly, I think it was believing I could do it that mattered.
I noticed the article talked about people who kept on smoking pot until they were 35. I though I'd be a counter-example to this study, but I only smoked pot heavily in 9th grade. Before that I was universally called the "space cadet", and was infamous for getting lost on the way to the bathroom. I managed to get a D- in 8th grade, which is incredibly hard to do, especially in a school with low standards and easy teachers who hate giving F's. My IQ never tested particularly high as a kid. In 9th grade, I got all A's, and mostly A+'s. Going to school stoned was great. I even joyed spelling tests! By 10th grade, I'd smoked so much pot I burned out on it. I could get high just going for a jog. I gave it up and never started again. School was a lot harder while not stoned, but I still managed a respectable 3.85 average (9th - 12th, back when 4.0 was the max).
My memory remains a leaky can, and I've wondered if smoking pot in 9th grade degraded it any. Thanks for the link to that article about pot improving memory. It does make me feel a bit better. I haven't been officially tested lately for my IQ, but on a dumb on-line quiz that my friends were all taking, I got 100% right, far higher than any of them, and most of them are pretty sharp. If there's a negative impact of heavy smoking for one year in the early teens, I don't know what it is.
By "removing regulatory barriers", they mean Verizon can stop suing the FCC because the GOP plans to give Verizon what they want: the right to censor the internet in any way they choose, which Verizon considers a matter of corporate free speech.
I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad at the prospect of obtaining lot's more uranium. The world has yet to demonstrate that commercial nuclear plants make any financial sense, and then there's the incredibly stupid waste storage system we have in the US (have each plant simply hang onto it). I'm more concerned over the prospect of a fire in those storage polls than a meltdown in a core.
Molten salt reactors seem promising, and there's little debate that they would be cheaper. There are other challenges, but cost seems to be a clear benefit. Also, with continuous fuel reprocessing, the waste is a tiny fraction of what we generate in a traditional light water reactor, and we could even use waste from our existing reactors as fuel for molten salt reactors, eventually burning up most of it. We could even burn Thorium, which should last a very long time. All this needs major investments in R&D. A driving factor behind such investments will be running out of cheap enriched uranium. If we succeed in obtaining uranium from the sea cheaply, we will most likely continue down our incredibly stupid path until someone does have their nuclear waste catch fire and go Chernobyl on us.
Also, please don't take away the consoles as they work now without making sure there's a compatible screen reader available that will read the console boot messages in real time. There are a number of blind sys admins who would be out of a job if they could not hear boot messages during boot. A user space console could be a good thing, but if it harms this small tech community, overall it would be a very bad thing.
Those who do lie about it are going further. Verizon is suing the FCC, specifically for the right to choose what content to block, and what to allow. From this article:
This time around, Verizon is playing the First Amendment card. The challenge, essentially, is that by limiting Verizon’s ability to choose which content to block or promote, the FCC is infringing on Verizon’s right to free speech.
Talk about twisted... requiring that users have uncensored access to the internet is a violation of corporate freedom of speech? I think I have to go shower now to get the slime I feel all over after reading that.
I can't believe you are modded up as informative for this dis-information. Go read about what the FCC has done. They've implemented the most rational parts of net neutrality, and every enforcement action has been over pretty outrageous violations. So, net neutrality is here today. Are you experiencing any of those broken links you talked about, those links that would only be broken if net neutrality were revoked?
Yes. AT&T trashes the QoS of SIP traffic, other than their own (Vonage). While running a number of Asterisk phone servers, I consistently found that using the Asterisk custom protocol resulted in far better QoS than using SIP, even though SIP has better provisions for QoS and is a standard that AT&T's routers recognize and therefore can properly prioritize. So, now I pay AT&T $30/month instead of using Vonage for $20/month.
Also, AT&T recently capped my data plan, which previously had no cap. The overage penalties are insanely high, and there's no reasonable plan offered with a higher data cap. I did a bit of math and realized that I will hit this cap using Netflix for 2 hours/day. So, it's specifically designed to kill Netflix. I consider that anti-competitive and it should be illegal. I don't mind a data cap, because in theory my bandwidth usage costs them money. If they offered a reasonable way to buy extra bandwidth, I would not have a problem with it.
No, go read up. Obama understands and promotes net neutrality, which has happened under his administration through very reasonable FCC rulings. Romney has stated his anti-net-neutrality position, though like most topics, we don't really know what he knows or thinks about this issue. Ryan, on the other hand, has co-sponsored every piece of anti-net-neutrality legislation written for the GOP by AT&T and friends. He clearly understands the issues, and sides with the internet toll trolls.
Why would you think net neutrality would restrict any of those things? The FCC has implemented net neutrality rules, and none of that was effected. Are you one of those poorly informed people who thinks the FCC wants to keep you from optimizing TCP traffic differently than UDP traffic? Or do you believe AT&T should be allowed to block Vonage?
Slashdotters include a major portion of people with mental issues, who will find reasons to disagree with anything. They couldn't agree that the sky is blue on a clear sunny day. If you're parsing that sentence and trying to figure out why you disagree with it, consider yourself at least somewhat mental.
However, the non-mental slashdot crowd has a strong consensus on the basics of Net Neutrality. This strongly correlates to the subset of net neutrality that has been implemented as policy by the FCC. Net neutrality should not prevent ISPs from treating TCP packets like TCP packets, and UDP packets like UDP packets. It should prevent ISPs from charging content providers a fee for being fast or even accessible on their network. It should prevent them from filtering or censoring legal content. It also should prevent ISPs from purposely harming the QoS of competing services such as Vonage and Netflix. These are the sorts of policies that we generally agree on, and it's what the FCC is enforcing (poorly it seems).
Where reasonable slashdotters often don't agree is Bittorrent. Should ISPs be allowed to purposely slow down any P2P traffic? We don't have a solid consensus. Just because we don't agree on 100% of the details doesn't mean the FCC should not move forward on issues where there is consensus. It's currently doing the right thing, and that will probably be reversed if Romney/Ryan get elected.
That was an insightful post. My ISP, AT&T, capped my data exactly where they felt it would do the most harm to Netflix. In the meantime, there's no data cap for AT&T U-verse, or their pay-per-view. I had crappy reliability with Vonage, so now I pay AT&T for their more expensive VoIP service instead. The only difference has to be AT&T bias against Vonage packets.
However, there's some hope. I agree with the other poster that content providers like Google will put their dollars behind net neutrality. One place I've seen this recently is the FCC just spanked Verizon for illegally charging for portable wifi hotspots and tethering. I pay Verizon a stupidly high cost of $30/month for tethering that was free on T-Mobile. This violates a deal the FCC made with Verizon and other carriers when they did the 4G spectrum auction. Of course, the $1.25M fine is nothing, and I called Verizon this week to get that $30 taken off my bill, and they wouldn't do it, and said they'd never heard of the FCC ruling. Man, these mobile phone a-holes are the worst! Remember not being able to use the camera in your own phone, because you couldn't on principle pay $0.25/photo that you took on your own hardware and just wanted to transfer to your own computer using your own cable? Well, I'm sure you guys all hacked your phones and got those freaking photos for free anyway.
ISPs (AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, Verison, and friends) are 100% behind Romney. There are no significant ISPs putting money behind Obama. On the other side we have Microsoft, Google, eBay, Vonage, Netflix, and Amazon, who are all companies that provide content and services over the Internet, and they are 100% behind Obama. In short, the ISPs want to charge the big content providers extra money to be quickly accessible, or even accessible at all, over their network. It's a shakedown by stupid tube maintainers of the corporations whilch provide real value, and a major thread to innovation and smaller content providers. Dorks like TCP inventor Bob Kahn refuse to comprehend that net neutrality is not about regulating how packets are routed, and instead continue to espouse the AT&T view that Google wants to destroy the internet by shackling "network engineers". It's about routing Vonage packets and Netflix packets without purposely destroying their QoS. It's about not being evil.
Yep. You've got to love the Mumbo Jumbo add. I assume this will degrade into pointless partisan bickering, but what's at stake is your ability to reach places slashdot.org. The anti-net-neutrality crowed would literally give ISPs like AT&T and Comcast the right to censor the web for you, to support their own agenda. It's incredible that so many of our representatives are anti-net-neutrality. On the other side, there's beneficial traffic shaping and various tricks ISPs play to improve the typical user experience. All reasonable definitions as well as recent net-neutrality bills and FCC actions allow for this, which is one reason wireless providers currently have more freedom to muck with traffic in ways we generally despise, such as charging for tethering or hot-spot functionality, and charging us for Skype calls. The anti-net-neutrality zombies will be all over this thread, but I challenge them to answer this: name one benefit ever received by consumers which went away with the introduction of FCC net neutrality rules?
I just followed the blog's steps, and I got it working in 5 minutes! I've built several Asterisk boxes, and in general done a lot of playing around with VoIP. Usually, it takes me a couple hours to set up a new VoIP connection. I've often had to run WireShark to debug problems. The news here is with this blog and a Nexus 7 tablet, it's only 5 minutes. Thanks for writing that blog! Who would have guessed that the tablet would show up as a Google Chat device? That would have had me pulling my hair out.
So, sure, all the serious slashdot VoIP geeks may roll their eyes and wonder why this made it on slashdot, but for most of us who are slashdotters, but not up to speed on Android and VoIP, this was an excellent post, one that will be easy to google for probably a couple of years. I'd guess that thousands of people will benefit just like me.
It is very cool. You have "nets" on chips which are copper or aluminum traces connecting components together. Each segment of these traces has resistance, capacitance, and inductance (though inductance is hard to characterize and model). We model simple nets with one driver and multiple destinations as a tree of resistors and capacitors. To determine delay from the output of one logic gate to the input of the next, you could use SPICE to simulate the net, but since chips have millions of nets, it's too slow. Instead, because of the tree structure, we're able to do what SPICE can't: directly compute the next set of voltages. SPICE has to make a good guess, and then refine it over several steps until the error is acceptable. Overall, it's at least a 1000X speed up. It's so fast, we don't even report that it's running to the user, and it's literally more accurate than SPICE (no error in each step other than round-off errors). However, some nets have multiple drivers in parallel, and clock nets can have drivers which are far apart. These nets are almost trees, but not quite, so the simple original algorithm fails. The IIT grad figured out how to add cut points to the near-tree to turn it into a tree, and then solve the whole system at the future point in time with a single matrix inversion who's width and height is the number of cut points, which is usually small. It involved some very cool math. Backward Trapezoid is just means we compute the future point in time such that if we took a step backwards in time, we'd get to the current state. That helps keep the system mathematically stable while taking large steps. Trapezoid just means we use the average of the slopes on voltages at the current state and the future state, rather than just one. This is exactly how most SPICE simulators work. So, now we can simulate all the interconnect on the die with better than SPICE accuracy, and even take non-linear effects into account. The solution from the IIT grad is the coolest math hack I've seen from any coworker, and it exceeds the best math hacks I've coded, and I've done some very cool shit.
I also have lost central vision in one eye, though my good eye is headed that way as well. In any case, the procedure for this technology is just gene therapy. It does involve sticking a needle into your eye, so I'm not thrilled about having it done, but there's no knife involved. You have at least three kinds of very important cells in your retina. Rods and cones are the ones most people know about, but ganglion cells in your retina are required to pass signals from rods and cones to your optic nerve. There's a very cool gene therapy under development that turns those ganglion cells into photo receptors, similar to rods. So, after one shot in your eye, you're ready for the visor.
The size of these 7-inch tablets are meant to be similar to the size of a paper-back novel, which in turn was designed to fit in the pocket of a GI in WWII. I put my Nexus 7 in my pants pocket all the time. I wouldn't want to have it their for hours while sitting in a plane, but it's a convenient place to put it when I need my hands free to carry stuff.
A tablet is not an e-reader any more than a computer is a pocket calculator.
Huh? This article is about price cuts to Amazon and B&N's 7-inch tablets, which are sold as e-book readers. The Nexus 7 is better in every way than either of these devices. The price cuts are a direct response to the perceived lower value than the Nexus 7. The Nexus 7 is a better e-book reader than either the Fire or Nook Color, as it's much lighter and easier to hold in one hand for long periods of time. Discussion of all three of these tablets is clearly on-topic.
I love mine, and I've got three tablets in my house: my Nexus 7, my old Motorola Xoom, and my wife's original iPad. The smaller size and weight makes it better for reading, which is why my wife has borrowed my Nexus 7 twice already for two trips. The software and hardware upgrade from the Xoom is such that I have no interest in my $500 Xoom anymore. I've given it to the kids for games, but they keep stealing my Nexus 7. It's great for games, videos, Internet browsing, and e-books.
The Nexus 7 is far lighter than the Kindle Fire and B&N Nook Color, making it a better e-book reader. It also isn't crippled to only (meaning the non-slashdot crowd have trouble hacking it) allow buying e-books from one vendor. It's great for watching videos, which I'm doing somewhat regularly with the Nexus 7, though I never did with the Xoom.
I think this is a revolutionary device. With one product launch, Google effectively turns the tide from single-vendor content running on proprietary devices to multi-vendor content running on multi-vendor devices, as Google is giving away the Nexus 7 technology to their Android partners for free, most of whom have said they will offer similar device. At the launch of the Xoom, I told everyone that only an idiot like me would buy such a device. With the Nexus 7, I have to say only an ignorant person would buy a Kindle Fire or a Nook Color. They will still sell well for a while, just because people don't know better. Anyone considering buying an IPod Touch should take a good look at the Nexus 7 as well.
Now, when are we geeks going to connect keyboards and mice to these things and start using them for native software development, rather than using the crappy emulators?
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There are both kinds of awesome coders. Most often, seriously good coders wind up being the lone-wolf type simply because pairing them with other coders just slows them down. Most coders I know who don't suck prefer to work alone. It's one thing that draws them to this profession. Those who suck have to work with coders who don't in order to have any positive impact at all.
I like to think I'm a pretty darned good coder. A lot of coders feel that way about themselves, which is fine. I'm far more into team based development than most, so I generally impose coding practices that help code be maintainable and easily transferred between team members. Partly because of stupid software patent law in the US, I try to "code dumb", using simple algorithms when they will do the job, even when more clever ones would do better.
However, there's one rock-star coder who I humbly admit has skills far beyond what I ever will have: Ken McElvain, founder and CTO of Synplicity until it was purchased by Synopsis, is an inhuman coder. I was the first coder he hired to work with him at Synplicity, and he'd already written 350,000 lines of C code to do FPGA synthesis. I opened one of the more interesting files that implements one of the many ingenious algorithms Ken invented, and just about had a heart attack. It was over 2,000 lines long, and IIRC, it was exactly one function. There were dozens of variables, and most of them were 1 letter. There seemed to be 2 letter variables only because he'd run out of 1 letter options. There were no comments. Thinking Ken must put his comments elsewhere, I grep-ed the whole code base for comments. There was exactly one, that read "This is a hack." To this day, I doubt any other human understands that hack. I asked Ken why he didn't make smaller functions and why he didn't use longer variable names, and he said it slowed him down, because his typing speed was the primary limit to his productivity. Ken types like a fiend. I watched him develop code for a couple of years, and it was amazing. He writes files from first line to last, literally limited by his typing speed, and when complete, he hits a special icon on the desktop that means "Compile in release mode, and if no errors, push to customer download site". He rarely had any use for a debugger, because the only bugs he'd have would be typos (his fingers were not infallible at the rate he moved them).
So, a rock-star like I consider myself to be can help build an effective development team, one where I can be the lead contributor. On the other hand, I doubt I've ever been part of a team that collectively could out-produce Ken. I decided to write the first version of HDL Analyst rather than try to help Ken improve synthesis quality, which was a good choice. I was able to contribute and not slow him down. However, Synplicity basically went IPO on the strength of Ken's coding. That's one valuable rock-star, even if he's not exactly a team player.
Er... my point to my rambling comment is that Apple clearly lacked an honest inventor in this case. Their lawyers will naturally try to keep their clearly invalid multi-touch patent on the books, never suing anyone with it, simply because they know it's invalid. It's only the inventor who breaks the law by not bringing prior-art to the patent office, and as I found out, there is zero penalty to inventors who break this law.
Sorry, but no. That's what happens when random slashdotter's try to describe a patent that they believe means "pinch to zoom" when in fact it does no such thing. This patent clearly describes a more complicated gesture.
The reason Apple is not defending pinch to zoom is they didn't invent it. It was clearly demonstrated in the original Ted talk that inspired Apple to peruse multi-touch technology. I've been involved in two situations where I found that one of my patent claims was not valid due to prior art. In the first case, the patent examiner had already approved my claims, and he argued with me that my claims were still valid. He restricted my claims in the most minimal possible way to avoid the prior art when I pushed the matter. That's fine... I think he was trying to be good to a rare inventor who was trying to be honest about prior art. In the second case, my customer (I was a contractor for Zvi Orbach) told me after we'd submitted a patent why it was invalid due to prior art at Chip Express. I called the patent office, and was advised that I should not attack claims I'd filed for a previous employer. I had already quit, in part due to this issue, though Zvi had given me many other reasons to stay away from him.
I was massively ADHD, back before they diagnosed it in children. Both of my kids take Vyvance (a derivative of amphetamine), and I tried it and now have my own prescription. School was a nightmare before I started getting stoned. I was bored, and I wasn't dumb, but I couldn't make myself do homework, for example. Now and then a topic would interest me and I'd blow away the rest of the class on a test, and then I'd go back to getting close to zero. It maddened my teachers. They kept applying the whole reward/punishment thing to change my behavior and it never worked, and instead just made me think of myself as a failure. That's tough on a kid who hasn't even reached high school.
The intensive pot smoking for one year did a ton of good. I stopped hating school and stopped feeling like a failure. School became fun and I began to believe in myself. Also, school became more interesting. I'm sure it's the ADHD, but I was able to pay attention better. I remember each week reading the vocabulary list stoned until I had it memorized in one sitting. I'd have to shoot myself if I tried that today, even on Vyvance. I think there are a ton of highly ADHD adults smoking pot as their own therapy.
I'm not sure if my brain was rewired a bit to be able to do better in school after that or not. Mostly, I think it was believing I could do it that mattered.
I noticed the article talked about people who kept on smoking pot until they were 35. I though I'd be a counter-example to this study, but I only smoked pot heavily in 9th grade. Before that I was universally called the "space cadet", and was infamous for getting lost on the way to the bathroom. I managed to get a D- in 8th grade, which is incredibly hard to do, especially in a school with low standards and easy teachers who hate giving F's. My IQ never tested particularly high as a kid. In 9th grade, I got all A's, and mostly A+'s. Going to school stoned was great. I even joyed spelling tests! By 10th grade, I'd smoked so much pot I burned out on it. I could get high just going for a jog. I gave it up and never started again. School was a lot harder while not stoned, but I still managed a respectable 3.85 average (9th - 12th, back when 4.0 was the max).
My memory remains a leaky can, and I've wondered if smoking pot in 9th grade degraded it any. Thanks for the link to that article about pot improving memory. It does make me feel a bit better. I haven't been officially tested lately for my IQ, but on a dumb on-line quiz that my friends were all taking, I got 100% right, far higher than any of them, and most of them are pretty sharp. If there's a negative impact of heavy smoking for one year in the early teens, I don't know what it is.
By "removing regulatory barriers", they mean Verizon can stop suing the FCC because the GOP plans to give Verizon what they want: the right to censor the internet in any way they choose, which Verizon considers a matter of corporate free speech.
I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad at the prospect of obtaining lot's more uranium. The world has yet to demonstrate that commercial nuclear plants make any financial sense, and then there's the incredibly stupid waste storage system we have in the US (have each plant simply hang onto it). I'm more concerned over the prospect of a fire in those storage polls than a meltdown in a core.
Molten salt reactors seem promising, and there's little debate that they would be cheaper. There are other challenges, but cost seems to be a clear benefit. Also, with continuous fuel reprocessing, the waste is a tiny fraction of what we generate in a traditional light water reactor, and we could even use waste from our existing reactors as fuel for molten salt reactors, eventually burning up most of it. We could even burn Thorium, which should last a very long time. All this needs major investments in R&D. A driving factor behind such investments will be running out of cheap enriched uranium. If we succeed in obtaining uranium from the sea cheaply, we will most likely continue down our incredibly stupid path until someone does have their nuclear waste catch fire and go Chernobyl on us.
Also, please don't take away the consoles as they work now without making sure there's a compatible screen reader available that will read the console boot messages in real time. There are a number of blind sys admins who would be out of a job if they could not hear boot messages during boot. A user space console could be a good thing, but if it harms this small tech community, overall it would be a very bad thing.
Those who do lie about it are going further. Verizon is suing the FCC, specifically for the right to choose what content to block, and what to allow. From this article:
Talk about twisted... requiring that users have uncensored access to the internet is a violation of corporate freedom of speech? I think I have to go shower now to get the slime I feel all over after reading that.
I can't believe you are modded up as informative for this dis-information. Go read about what the FCC has done. They've implemented the most rational parts of net neutrality, and every enforcement action has been over pretty outrageous violations. So, net neutrality is here today. Are you experiencing any of those broken links you talked about, those links that would only be broken if net neutrality were revoked?
Yes. AT&T trashes the QoS of SIP traffic, other than their own (Vonage). While running a number of Asterisk phone servers, I consistently found that using the Asterisk custom protocol resulted in far better QoS than using SIP, even though SIP has better provisions for QoS and is a standard that AT&T's routers recognize and therefore can properly prioritize. So, now I pay AT&T $30/month instead of using Vonage for $20/month.
Also, AT&T recently capped my data plan, which previously had no cap. The overage penalties are insanely high, and there's no reasonable plan offered with a higher data cap. I did a bit of math and realized that I will hit this cap using Netflix for 2 hours/day. So, it's specifically designed to kill Netflix. I consider that anti-competitive and it should be illegal. I don't mind a data cap, because in theory my bandwidth usage costs them money. If they offered a reasonable way to buy extra bandwidth, I would not have a problem with it.
No, go read up. Obama understands and promotes net neutrality, which has happened under his administration through very reasonable FCC rulings. Romney has stated his anti-net-neutrality position, though like most topics, we don't really know what he knows or thinks about this issue. Ryan, on the other hand, has co-sponsored every piece of anti-net-neutrality legislation written for the GOP by AT&T and friends. He clearly understands the issues, and sides with the internet toll trolls.
Why would you think net neutrality would restrict any of those things? The FCC has implemented net neutrality rules, and none of that was effected. Are you one of those poorly informed people who thinks the FCC wants to keep you from optimizing TCP traffic differently than UDP traffic? Or do you believe AT&T should be allowed to block Vonage?
It's the right approach. Go ahead... you can say it.
Slashdotters include a major portion of people with mental issues, who will find reasons to disagree with anything. They couldn't agree that the sky is blue on a clear sunny day. If you're parsing that sentence and trying to figure out why you disagree with it, consider yourself at least somewhat mental.
However, the non-mental slashdot crowd has a strong consensus on the basics of Net Neutrality. This strongly correlates to the subset of net neutrality that has been implemented as policy by the FCC. Net neutrality should not prevent ISPs from treating TCP packets like TCP packets, and UDP packets like UDP packets. It should prevent ISPs from charging content providers a fee for being fast or even accessible on their network. It should prevent them from filtering or censoring legal content. It also should prevent ISPs from purposely harming the QoS of competing services such as Vonage and Netflix. These are the sorts of policies that we generally agree on, and it's what the FCC is enforcing (poorly it seems).
Where reasonable slashdotters often don't agree is Bittorrent. Should ISPs be allowed to purposely slow down any P2P traffic? We don't have a solid consensus. Just because we don't agree on 100% of the details doesn't mean the FCC should not move forward on issues where there is consensus. It's currently doing the right thing, and that will probably be reversed if Romney/Ryan get elected.
That was an insightful post. My ISP, AT&T, capped my data exactly where they felt it would do the most harm to Netflix. In the meantime, there's no data cap for AT&T U-verse, or their pay-per-view. I had crappy reliability with Vonage, so now I pay AT&T for their more expensive VoIP service instead. The only difference has to be AT&T bias against Vonage packets.
However, there's some hope. I agree with the other poster that content providers like Google will put their dollars behind net neutrality. One place I've seen this recently is the FCC just spanked Verizon for illegally charging for portable wifi hotspots and tethering. I pay Verizon a stupidly high cost of $30/month for tethering that was free on T-Mobile. This violates a deal the FCC made with Verizon and other carriers when they did the 4G spectrum auction. Of course, the $1.25M fine is nothing, and I called Verizon this week to get that $30 taken off my bill, and they wouldn't do it, and said they'd never heard of the FCC ruling. Man, these mobile phone a-holes are the worst! Remember not being able to use the camera in your own phone, because you couldn't on principle pay $0.25/photo that you took on your own hardware and just wanted to transfer to your own computer using your own cable? Well, I'm sure you guys all hacked your phones and got those freaking photos for free anyway.
ISPs (AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, Verison, and friends) are 100% behind Romney. There are no significant ISPs putting money behind Obama. On the other side we have Microsoft, Google, eBay, Vonage, Netflix, and Amazon, who are all companies that provide content and services over the Internet, and they are 100% behind Obama. In short, the ISPs want to charge the big content providers extra money to be quickly accessible, or even accessible at all, over their network. It's a shakedown by stupid tube maintainers of the corporations whilch provide real value, and a major thread to innovation and smaller content providers. Dorks like TCP inventor Bob Kahn refuse to comprehend that net neutrality is not about regulating how packets are routed, and instead continue to espouse the AT&T view that Google wants to destroy the internet by shackling "network engineers". It's about routing Vonage packets and Netflix packets without purposely destroying their QoS. It's about not being evil.
Yep. You've got to love the Mumbo Jumbo add. I assume this will degrade into pointless partisan bickering, but what's at stake is your ability to reach places slashdot.org. The anti-net-neutrality crowed would literally give ISPs like AT&T and Comcast the right to censor the web for you, to support their own agenda. It's incredible that so many of our representatives are anti-net-neutrality. On the other side, there's beneficial traffic shaping and various tricks ISPs play to improve the typical user experience. All reasonable definitions as well as recent net-neutrality bills and FCC actions allow for this, which is one reason wireless providers currently have more freedom to muck with traffic in ways we generally despise, such as charging for tethering or hot-spot functionality, and charging us for Skype calls. The anti-net-neutrality zombies will be all over this thread, but I challenge them to answer this: name one benefit ever received by consumers which went away with the introduction of FCC net neutrality rules?
I just followed the blog's steps, and I got it working in 5 minutes! I've built several Asterisk boxes, and in general done a lot of playing around with VoIP. Usually, it takes me a couple hours to set up a new VoIP connection. I've often had to run WireShark to debug problems. The news here is with this blog and a Nexus 7 tablet, it's only 5 minutes. Thanks for writing that blog! Who would have guessed that the tablet would show up as a Google Chat device? That would have had me pulling my hair out.
So, sure, all the serious slashdot VoIP geeks may roll their eyes and wonder why this made it on slashdot, but for most of us who are slashdotters, but not up to speed on Android and VoIP, this was an excellent post, one that will be easy to google for probably a couple of years. I'd guess that thousands of people will benefit just like me.
It is very cool. You have "nets" on chips which are copper or aluminum traces connecting components together. Each segment of these traces has resistance, capacitance, and inductance (though inductance is hard to characterize and model). We model simple nets with one driver and multiple destinations as a tree of resistors and capacitors. To determine delay from the output of one logic gate to the input of the next, you could use SPICE to simulate the net, but since chips have millions of nets, it's too slow. Instead, because of the tree structure, we're able to do what SPICE can't: directly compute the next set of voltages. SPICE has to make a good guess, and then refine it over several steps until the error is acceptable. Overall, it's at least a 1000X speed up. It's so fast, we don't even report that it's running to the user, and it's literally more accurate than SPICE (no error in each step other than round-off errors). However, some nets have multiple drivers in parallel, and clock nets can have drivers which are far apart. These nets are almost trees, but not quite, so the simple original algorithm fails. The IIT grad figured out how to add cut points to the near-tree to turn it into a tree, and then solve the whole system at the future point in time with a single matrix inversion who's width and height is the number of cut points, which is usually small. It involved some very cool math. Backward Trapezoid is just means we compute the future point in time such that if we took a step backwards in time, we'd get to the current state. That helps keep the system mathematically stable while taking large steps. Trapezoid just means we use the average of the slopes on voltages at the current state and the future state, rather than just one. This is exactly how most SPICE simulators work. So, now we can simulate all the interconnect on the die with better than SPICE accuracy, and even take non-linear effects into account. The solution from the IIT grad is the coolest math hack I've seen from any coworker, and it exceeds the best math hacks I've coded, and I've done some very cool shit.
Good guess. Actually, I worked at QuickLogic from 1990 to 1995, but I've been doing more ASIC related work for most of the last decade.
I also have lost central vision in one eye, though my good eye is headed that way as well. In any case, the procedure for this technology is just gene therapy. It does involve sticking a needle into your eye, so I'm not thrilled about having it done, but there's no knife involved. You have at least three kinds of very important cells in your retina. Rods and cones are the ones most people know about, but ganglion cells in your retina are required to pass signals from rods and cones to your optic nerve. There's a very cool gene therapy under development that turns those ganglion cells into photo receptors, similar to rods. So, after one shot in your eye, you're ready for the visor.
The size of these 7-inch tablets are meant to be similar to the size of a paper-back novel, which in turn was designed to fit in the pocket of a GI in WWII. I put my Nexus 7 in my pants pocket all the time. I wouldn't want to have it their for hours while sitting in a plane, but it's a convenient place to put it when I need my hands free to carry stuff.
Huh? This article is about price cuts to Amazon and B&N's 7-inch tablets, which are sold as e-book readers. The Nexus 7 is better in every way than either of these devices. The price cuts are a direct response to the perceived lower value than the Nexus 7. The Nexus 7 is a better e-book reader than either the Fire or Nook Color, as it's much lighter and easier to hold in one hand for long periods of time. Discussion of all three of these tablets is clearly on-topic.
I love mine, and I've got three tablets in my house: my Nexus 7, my old Motorola Xoom, and my wife's original iPad. The smaller size and weight makes it better for reading, which is why my wife has borrowed my Nexus 7 twice already for two trips. The software and hardware upgrade from the Xoom is such that I have no interest in my $500 Xoom anymore. I've given it to the kids for games, but they keep stealing my Nexus 7. It's great for games, videos, Internet browsing, and e-books.
The Nexus 7 is far lighter than the Kindle Fire and B&N Nook Color, making it a better e-book reader. It also isn't crippled to only (meaning the non-slashdot crowd have trouble hacking it) allow buying e-books from one vendor. It's great for watching videos, which I'm doing somewhat regularly with the Nexus 7, though I never did with the Xoom.
I think this is a revolutionary device. With one product launch, Google effectively turns the tide from single-vendor content running on proprietary devices to multi-vendor content running on multi-vendor devices, as Google is giving away the Nexus 7 technology to their Android partners for free, most of whom have said they will offer similar device. At the launch of the Xoom, I told everyone that only an idiot like me would buy such a device. With the Nexus 7, I have to say only an ignorant person would buy a Kindle Fire or a Nook Color. They will still sell well for a while, just because people don't know better. Anyone considering buying an IPod Touch should take a good look at the Nexus 7 as well.
Now, when are we geeks going to connect keyboards and mice to these things and start using them for native software development, rather than using the crappy emulators?