You're in a mass-market. You can not expect the majority of users to know anything about computers. You can debate that point all you like, but that's how it is. Saying otherwise is like saying only car mechanics should be allowed to drive cars.
But you can tell them to perform preventative maintenence like fluid changes, etc. Then it is their fault if they think they know better and ignore the manufacturer's recommendations.
An example would be brake pads. If you're lazy, you might never replace your brake pads, making you a hazard to everyone else on the road. So, brake pads have metal filings in the last portion of the pad to make an obnoxious grinding noise when it's time to change them. What better way to get people to take care of their car/computer than to annoy them until they fix the issue?
You'd think an all-powerful God might have something to say about all that priest-killing...
What's the church's stance on God's inaction there, anyway? They had it coming?
What inaction? The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, does it?;-)
And yes, this is compatible with Christian teaching. 2 Timothy 3:12 says:
In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted
In Matthew 24:9 Jesus says:
"Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me."
Hmm, sounds like what happened in the Soviet Union. Again in John 15:20 He says:
Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.
I'd call crucifixion from the court of public opinion persecution. So why would they want to be persecuted? Matthew 5:12 says:
Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Obviously you don't agree with that line of thought, but there it is. It wasn't hand-waved away in recent times after Christians started getting killed, it has been part of the deal from the beginning. If Christians weren't supposed to ever suffer, why would God's plan be for Jesus to be crucified? It's the Jewish view that the Messiah will be a conquering king and restore Israel and the temple, but it's not the view of the Christian religion.
Not sure how serious you're being, but a laser could be used without needing to vaporize the entire object. A laser broom works by vaporizing just a small part of the object to create thrust and knock the object out of orbit.
The laser broom is intended to be used at high enough power to punch through the atmosphere with enough remaining power to ablate material from the debris for several minutes. This would provide thrust to alter its orbit, dropping the perigee into the upper atmosphere, increasing drag so that the debris would eventually burn up on reentry.
I'm near DC as well, and it seems to be most people have crazy-long commutes. I know a fair number who commute from PA to south Baltimore suburbs daily.
Of course, I'm one to talk. The current plan after I get married has me living in Northern VA and commuting around DC *shudder* to the Baltimore area...
But unlike FireFox extensions, hardware access is sometimes quite specific. For example, a developer can't depend on a keyboard or little mouse-wheel-thing, so multiple control methods beyond touch need to be tested. They can't depend on a screen resolution, and since all apps run at full screen they need to be tested for them all. Then there are the little glitches that for some reason only happen on certain phones.
While FF extensions are a good analog as far as upgrading the platform goes, they are much more hardware agnostic. With phones, the hardware access is often the point of the application, making the developer's task more difficult.
when there's no documentation either way that's the case, and a strict no refund policy.
You're right on the documentation (you have to depend on bad reviews saying "doesn't work on my Hero/Droid/Eris/etc"), but the marketplace has a 24-hour refund policy.
You get a phone, it runs Android, no problem. And, just like your car, as long as you don't want to change anything or add anything, it won't become a problem.
That's exactly the problem, Android supports applications with no good way of verifying compatibility. Why buy an Android phone if you're not going to add at least one application?
To follow the car analogy, it's like 5 different car manufacturers putting out cars with one level of trim each. Any upgrades that you want beyond driving to work and AM/FM radio aren't standard and only come from 3rd party manufacturers. These 3rd-parties need to design after-market parts that fit all 5 makes. When another company releases a car, you need to verify your parts work on it, too. Then the standard for Air Conditioning changes with the 2.0 release and you need to scramble to make a compatible A/C unit. Most importantly, when you go to the store, you have no way of knowing if the part will fit your car, unless someone else has bought it and left a review stating the incompatibility.
As an owner of a Droid I encountered this first-hand. Layar wasn't 2.0-compatible for several months. And, while cruising the Marketplace, I'm always seeing apps which don't work on certain hardware. I still love my phone, but I'm worried that this kind of thing could make it much harder to find apps that will work.
I'd say the main feature was that it made it a lot cheaper and easier to sit 16 people in a basement and play an FPS. Rather than 15 people lugging their desktop, CRT, keyboard, and mouse to your place and setting up a bunch of tables to play CS, you could have 3 friends bring their XBox with 4 controllers, a different 3 friends bring their TV, and another 9 people just need to show up ready to get sniped by someone with a pistol. It took the LAN party from a large undertaking for everyone involved to something where over half the people could just show up with Cheetos and Mountain Dew and still be able to play all night. Like Goldeneye before it, it was the 'hardcore' console party game.
So, you get millions hooked on Halo, and it doesn't matter that the sequels are totally different. They remember playing Halo, most get it for the nostalgia, and they stay for the still incredibly large player-base.
Not necessarily. Many things favor central generation, including end-user distribution infrastructure, bulk buys, centralized maintenance, and -- here's a big one -- much longer lifespans than SOFCs.
And there are also benefits to local generation. According to the articles, the Bloom Box is supposed to be a more efficient electric generator than a full-size power plant. It becomes even more efficient (at the site) without transmission losses. It's more nimble to changes in fuel prices (switch from natural gas to syn-gas, ethanol, etc) than a power plant, as well as being under your own control. You also only get one markup for buying the hardware and recurring costs for maintenance, rather than both of those costs (maintenance subsidized) with an additional markup for the power companies profits.
It's a little to early to decide which side has more weight, though.
I don't know whether VAC checks for memory-resident cheats,
I believe VAC still works like an AV program, checking for 'signatures'. Most (paid for) cheats detect when a new version of VAC is released and unload themselves until a patch has been made to once again avoid VAC.
As an additional data-point, my TF2 team kicked a player who wrote his own memory-injected wall-hack. He was never banned (as far as I know), though he claims he stopped cheating after we kicked him.
More importantly, the process variation of the transistors for each bit could lead each flip-flop to have its own, non-equal probability distribution. Thus, as certain bits would be more likely to be a 1 or 0, it's not truly random either. It would be like a 'fingerprint' for a specific piece of hardware. Run a few million random number requests and look at the distribution of the bits. Match them up, and the machines are likely to be the same (within the confidence interval after you run your statistics).
Just as importantly Pavg=(Vrms)^2/R and similarly Pavg = (Irms)^2R
This is at least in electronics why rms is preferable to the mean of the modulus.
Put another way, the RMS quantifies how much more power a square wave carries than a sine wave, which in turn carries more than a sawtooth wave. It also allows one to see the power of an arbitrary waveform at a glance.
Okay, I wasn't actually arguing against your point. Just pouring gasoline onto the tough engineers vs. wimpy programmers war:)
However, mathematically I don't see much difference between engineering and good software engineering. Sure, it's working with black boxes, but if you just.. abstract the black box into a parameter you get a pure box that works with any black boxes as long as they function within specifications:)
I don't think this is an 'engineers are always better than programmers' war. However, there are questions that someone from a legitimate engineering background are better equipped to handle, while there are others that those from a legitimate CS background are better equipped to handle. The engineer will be able to find holes in the software requirements where the answer doesn't map correctly to reality, but the Computer Scientist will take those requirements and produce better code.
The problem is each group representing themselves as the other. Engineers need to not claim 'I can program' in response to a job that is developing multi-threaded crypto (unless they have specific training in the fields), just as programmers need to not claim 'I am an engineer' in response to development that extends beyond the software realm (again, barring specific training). But more generally, Engineers need to program within their expertise, software designers need to know when they can't determine if their requirements make sense.
Yes, this is true: IEEE has recently been very lax in separating programming from engineering, further exacerbating this problem.
As an engineer with both an Electrical and Computer Engineering degree, I would confidently say Software Engineering is an Engineering discipline. Software Engineers clearly approach programming the same way that any engineer approaches any problem, and have the background knowledge to back it up. The issue would be in Computer Science graduates representing themselves as Software Engineers without the necessary training to back that up.
As I read it, it seems that you also made the mistake of asking for 'engineers who can program', when you wanted 'Mechanical, Electrical, or Computer Engineering graduates who can program'. Again, specifically referencing those with a Software Engineering degree, not knowing materials, electronics, or control systems doesn't preclude one from being an engineer. They could have a Civil, Chemical, Biomedical, or (again) Software engineering degree.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years WITHOUT this.
Sure, assuming we get a revolution in power storage/generation/transmission of a suitable size.
One of the problems with making smaller silicon transistors is the leakage currents start to creep back up higher. This means more power consumption for the same speed. That's in addition to the normal increase in power consumption that goes along with faster clock rates. This type of transistor would sidestep this issue, as well as avoid the limitations of photolithography.
It should be, hence why just using page faults and percent of occupied RAM doesn't give an accurate picture of how efficient their caching algorithm is.
Ok, I'm truly curious here. How the heck would the OS know what memory space corresponds to the active tab in FF versus the inactive tabs or other application data?
Most recently accessed would be a good way to determine recent tabs, and most frequently accessed (or the one where the program counter is pointing) gives you the main executable. Just start by caching the least recently and frequently accessed pages first, your necessary application data to reload should be the last thing out of RAM. QED.
The newspapers don't, of course, tell you whether the alarm is armed, but of course there's always those stickers and signs that alarm companies put up all around your house when they install the alarm. The presence of signs/stickers suggests the alarm is probably armed (why wouldn't it be?), while a lack of signs/stickers suggests the alarm isn't armed (or even installed).
Which was my original point: twitter geotagging is just as effective as a newpaper pile at telling you that there is an alarm. How useful is that? Not at all.
Of course the newspaper pile means you're within walking distance to check (or to ring the doorbell and listen for rotweilers...) which is an advantage, but twitter lets you scope out more buildings faster.
Of course, the detail that has been left out is that a Twitter search won't tell you if the alarm has been armed or if the three nasty rottweilers have been fed recently.
Neither will a pile of newspapers on the front porch.
But more page-faults doesn't always correlate to more slowdowns. An OS with better page-allocation prediction will run faster (from the user's perspective) with the same number of page-faults. It's only a problem if the page-faults are on cached data that the user is requesting at that moment.
Continuing the Firefox example: it might be one page of memory to each page you want to view. A smart OS will leave the pages with the main Firefox program and current tab in RAM and cache the others first. Then when tasks switch, the cached Firefox pages are reloaded while the user is still looking at the first page. There are page faults, but the user experiences fewer delays.
Basically, there is no meaningful conclusion we can draw just from peak RAM utilization and page fault numbers (either average or peak). To do that, we would need to measure the number of page faults for pages that were already in memory but cached to disk and that required the user to wait before continuing.
More importantly, to claim that Windows 7 is 'bloat' just because it uses more RAM and has more page faults is erroneous without additional evidence.
Agreed. Again, if this is like every other engineering discipline, the firm will be held responsible when their Quality Management processes failed (aka, not following ISO or other processes), the engineer will be held responsible when they knew there was a problem (or remained willfully ignorant) but signed anyway (check their e-mails), and QC or programmers will be held responsible for falsifying data (fraud).
Even if your claims are correct, then Toyota met all of its contractual requirements, provided income to American companies and seeks to reduce costs. That does not sound evil to me.
You can still be evil while following the letter of the contract (in geeky terms, lawful evil).
Minimum orders were based on covering the design cost with the overhead, anticipating additional orders to make profit. Toyota in-turn steals their intellectual property (the real kind of intellectual property, we're not talking digital bits). They could turn Toyota down, but without their business there would be even more layoffs. So income was provided to American employees, not their companies. Of course, this company has gone through several rounds of layoffs already, overtime is mandatory and unpaid, and benefits are unheard of in an attempt to keep their heads above water.
I'm not certain that Toyota's other suppliers get the same raw deal. However, I have several buddies who work for this supplier and have confirmed this fact to me. And yes, they supply highly engineered components that are crucial to auto performance, not just cupholders or molding.
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You're in a mass-market. You can not expect the majority of users to know anything about computers. You can debate that point all you like, but that's how it is. Saying otherwise is like saying only car mechanics should be allowed to drive cars.
But you can tell them to perform preventative maintenence like fluid changes, etc. Then it is their fault if they think they know better and ignore the manufacturer's recommendations.
An example would be brake pads. If you're lazy, you might never replace your brake pads, making you a hazard to everyone else on the road. So, brake pads have metal filings in the last portion of the pad to make an obnoxious grinding noise when it's time to change them. What better way to get people to take care of their car/computer than to annoy them until they fix the issue?
You'd think an all-powerful God might have something to say about all that priest-killing...
What's the church's stance on God's inaction there, anyway? They had it coming?
What inaction? The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, does it? ;-)
And yes, this is compatible with Christian teaching. 2 Timothy 3:12 says:
In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted
In Matthew 24:9 Jesus says:
"Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me."
Hmm, sounds like what happened in the Soviet Union. Again in John 15:20 He says:
Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.
I'd call crucifixion from the court of public opinion persecution. So why would they want to be persecuted? Matthew 5:12 says:
Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Obviously you don't agree with that line of thought, but there it is. It wasn't hand-waved away in recent times after Christians started getting killed, it has been part of the deal from the beginning. If Christians weren't supposed to ever suffer, why would God's plan be for Jesus to be crucified? It's the Jewish view that the Messiah will be a conquering king and restore Israel and the temple, but it's not the view of the Christian religion.
Not sure how serious you're being, but a laser could be used without needing to vaporize the entire object. A laser broom works by vaporizing just a small part of the object to create thrust and knock the object out of orbit.
The laser broom is intended to be used at high enough power to punch through the atmosphere with enough remaining power to ablate material from the debris for several minutes. This would provide thrust to alter its orbit, dropping the perigee into the upper atmosphere, increasing drag so that the debris would eventually burn up on reentry.
I'm near DC as well, and it seems to be most people have crazy-long commutes. I know a fair number who commute from PA to south Baltimore suburbs daily.
Of course, I'm one to talk. The current plan after I get married has me living in Northern VA and commuting around DC *shudder* to the Baltimore area...
But unlike FireFox extensions, hardware access is sometimes quite specific. For example, a developer can't depend on a keyboard or little mouse-wheel-thing, so multiple control methods beyond touch need to be tested. They can't depend on a screen resolution, and since all apps run at full screen they need to be tested for them all. Then there are the little glitches that for some reason only happen on certain phones.
While FF extensions are a good analog as far as upgrading the platform goes, they are much more hardware agnostic. With phones, the hardware access is often the point of the application, making the developer's task more difficult.
when there's no documentation either way that's the case, and a strict no refund policy.
You're right on the documentation (you have to depend on bad reviews saying "doesn't work on my Hero/Droid/Eris/etc"), but the marketplace has a 24-hour refund policy.
You get a phone, it runs Android, no problem. And, just like your car, as long as you don't want to change anything or add anything, it won't become a problem.
That's exactly the problem, Android supports applications with no good way of verifying compatibility. Why buy an Android phone if you're not going to add at least one application?
To follow the car analogy, it's like 5 different car manufacturers putting out cars with one level of trim each. Any upgrades that you want beyond driving to work and AM/FM radio aren't standard and only come from 3rd party manufacturers. These 3rd-parties need to design after-market parts that fit all 5 makes. When another company releases a car, you need to verify your parts work on it, too. Then the standard for Air Conditioning changes with the 2.0 release and you need to scramble to make a compatible A/C unit. Most importantly, when you go to the store, you have no way of knowing if the part will fit your car, unless someone else has bought it and left a review stating the incompatibility.
As an owner of a Droid I encountered this first-hand. Layar wasn't 2.0-compatible for several months. And, while cruising the Marketplace, I'm always seeing apps which don't work on certain hardware. I still love my phone, but I'm worried that this kind of thing could make it much harder to find apps that will work.
I'd say the main feature was that it made it a lot cheaper and easier to sit 16 people in a basement and play an FPS. Rather than 15 people lugging their desktop, CRT, keyboard, and mouse to your place and setting up a bunch of tables to play CS, you could have 3 friends bring their XBox with 4 controllers, a different 3 friends bring their TV, and another 9 people just need to show up ready to get sniped by someone with a pistol. It took the LAN party from a large undertaking for everyone involved to something where over half the people could just show up with Cheetos and Mountain Dew and still be able to play all night. Like Goldeneye before it, it was the 'hardcore' console party game.
So, you get millions hooked on Halo, and it doesn't matter that the sequels are totally different. They remember playing Halo, most get it for the nostalgia, and they stay for the still incredibly large player-base.
Before you get mad that he doesn't say something, RTFA:
Inside the box are a unique kind of fuel cell consisting of ceramic disks coated with green and black "inks".
In other words, that's exactly what he's saying. Not sure if it's only Methane or other forms of fuel (seems to claim syn-gas and ethanol) as well.
Not necessarily. Many things favor central generation, including end-user distribution infrastructure, bulk buys, centralized maintenance, and -- here's a big one -- much longer lifespans than SOFCs.
And there are also benefits to local generation. According to the articles, the Bloom Box is supposed to be a more efficient electric generator than a full-size power plant. It becomes even more efficient (at the site) without transmission losses. It's more nimble to changes in fuel prices (switch from natural gas to syn-gas, ethanol, etc) than a power plant, as well as being under your own control. You also only get one markup for buying the hardware and recurring costs for maintenance, rather than both of those costs (maintenance subsidized) with an additional markup for the power companies profits.
It's a little to early to decide which side has more weight, though.
I don't know whether VAC checks for memory-resident cheats,
I believe VAC still works like an AV program, checking for 'signatures'. Most (paid for) cheats detect when a new version of VAC is released and unload themselves until a patch has been made to once again avoid VAC.
As an additional data-point, my TF2 team kicked a player who wrote his own memory-injected wall-hack. He was never banned (as far as I know), though he claims he stopped cheating after we kicked him.
More importantly, the process variation of the transistors for each bit could lead each flip-flop to have its own, non-equal probability distribution. Thus, as certain bits would be more likely to be a 1 or 0, it's not truly random either. It would be like a 'fingerprint' for a specific piece of hardware. Run a few million random number requests and look at the distribution of the bits. Match them up, and the machines are likely to be the same (within the confidence interval after you run your statistics).
Just as importantly Pavg=(Vrms)^2/R and similarly Pavg = (Irms)^2R
This is at least in electronics why rms is preferable to the mean of the modulus.
Put another way, the RMS quantifies how much more power a square wave carries than a sine wave, which in turn carries more than a sawtooth wave. It also allows one to see the power of an arbitrary waveform at a glance.
Okay, I wasn't actually arguing against your point. Just pouring gasoline onto the tough engineers vs. wimpy programmers war:)
However, mathematically I don't see much difference between engineering and good software engineering. Sure, it's working with black boxes, but if you just.. abstract the black box into a parameter you get a pure box that works with any black boxes as long as they function within specifications :)
I don't think this is an 'engineers are always better than programmers' war. However, there are questions that someone from a legitimate engineering background are better equipped to handle, while there are others that those from a legitimate CS background are better equipped to handle. The engineer will be able to find holes in the software requirements where the answer doesn't map correctly to reality, but the Computer Scientist will take those requirements and produce better code.
The problem is each group representing themselves as the other. Engineers need to not claim 'I can program' in response to a job that is developing multi-threaded crypto (unless they have specific training in the fields), just as programmers need to not claim 'I am an engineer' in response to development that extends beyond the software realm (again, barring specific training). But more generally, Engineers need to program within their expertise, software designers need to know when they can't determine if their requirements make sense.
Yes, this is true: IEEE has recently been very lax in separating programming from engineering, further exacerbating this problem.
As an engineer with both an Electrical and Computer Engineering degree, I would confidently say Software Engineering is an Engineering discipline. Software Engineers clearly approach programming the same way that any engineer approaches any problem, and have the background knowledge to back it up. The issue would be in Computer Science graduates representing themselves as Software Engineers without the necessary training to back that up.
As I read it, it seems that you also made the mistake of asking for 'engineers who can program', when you wanted 'Mechanical, Electrical, or Computer Engineering graduates who can program'. Again, specifically referencing those with a Software Engineering degree, not knowing materials, electronics, or control systems doesn't preclude one from being an engineer. They could have a Civil, Chemical, Biomedical, or (again) Software engineering degree.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years WITHOUT this.
Sure, assuming we get a revolution in power storage/generation/transmission of a suitable size.
One of the problems with making smaller silicon transistors is the leakage currents start to creep back up higher. This means more power consumption for the same speed. That's in addition to the normal increase in power consumption that goes along with faster clock rates. This type of transistor would sidestep this issue, as well as avoid the limitations of photolithography.
If it's geotagged, there will be a GPS coordinate. Add a little bit of online sleuthing and it shouldn't be to hard to narrow the search down.
Isn't that essentially what it's already doing?
It should be, hence why just using page faults and percent of occupied RAM doesn't give an accurate picture of how efficient their caching algorithm is.
Ok, I'm truly curious here. How the heck would the OS know what memory space corresponds to the active tab in FF versus the inactive tabs or other application data?
Most recently accessed would be a good way to determine recent tabs, and most frequently accessed (or the one where the program counter is pointing) gives you the main executable. Just start by caching the least recently and frequently accessed pages first, your necessary application data to reload should be the last thing out of RAM. QED.
The newspapers don't, of course, tell you whether the alarm is armed, but of course there's always those stickers and signs that alarm companies put up all around your house when they install the alarm. The presence of signs/stickers suggests the alarm is probably armed (why wouldn't it be?), while a lack of signs/stickers suggests the alarm isn't armed (or even installed).
Which was my original point: twitter geotagging is just as effective as a newpaper pile at telling you that there is an alarm. How useful is that? Not at all.
Of course the newspaper pile means you're within walking distance to check (or to ring the doorbell and listen for rotweilers...) which is an advantage, but twitter lets you scope out more buildings faster.
I'm not worried by them eating the newspapers, I'm worried that they've broken through the front door in order to get onto the porch!
Of course, the detail that has been left out is that a Twitter search won't tell you if the alarm has been armed or if the three nasty rottweilers have been fed recently.
Neither will a pile of newspapers on the front porch.
But more page-faults doesn't always correlate to more slowdowns. An OS with better page-allocation prediction will run faster (from the user's perspective) with the same number of page-faults. It's only a problem if the page-faults are on cached data that the user is requesting at that moment.
Continuing the Firefox example: it might be one page of memory to each page you want to view. A smart OS will leave the pages with the main Firefox program and current tab in RAM and cache the others first. Then when tasks switch, the cached Firefox pages are reloaded while the user is still looking at the first page. There are page faults, but the user experiences fewer delays.
Basically, there is no meaningful conclusion we can draw just from peak RAM utilization and page fault numbers (either average or peak). To do that, we would need to measure the number of page faults for pages that were already in memory but cached to disk and that required the user to wait before continuing.
More importantly, to claim that Windows 7 is 'bloat' just because it uses more RAM and has more page faults is erroneous without additional evidence.
Agreed. Again, if this is like every other engineering discipline, the firm will be held responsible when their Quality Management processes failed (aka, not following ISO or other processes), the engineer will be held responsible when they knew there was a problem (or remained willfully ignorant) but signed anyway (check their e-mails), and QC or programmers will be held responsible for falsifying data (fraud).
You know, the way it should be.
Even if your claims are correct, then Toyota met all of its contractual requirements, provided income to American companies and seeks to reduce costs. That does not sound evil to me.
You can still be evil while following the letter of the contract (in geeky terms, lawful evil).
Minimum orders were based on covering the design cost with the overhead, anticipating additional orders to make profit. Toyota in-turn steals their intellectual property (the real kind of intellectual property, we're not talking digital bits). They could turn Toyota down, but without their business there would be even more layoffs. So income was provided to American employees, not their companies. Of course, this company has gone through several rounds of layoffs already, overtime is mandatory and unpaid, and benefits are unheard of in an attempt to keep their heads above water.
I'm not certain that Toyota's other suppliers get the same raw deal. However, I have several buddies who work for this supplier and have confirmed this fact to me. And yes, they supply highly engineered components that are crucial to auto performance, not just cupholders or molding.