The unchecked bloat that is being output by these latest college grads who know nothing but c#, vb, and java are serving no one's interest besides the hardware vendors.
That's funny cause I've never seen a single C# or Java apps that uses as much memory as C++ programs like Firefox (currently using 350 megs of RAM) or OpenOffice.org (current using 250 megs of RAM). On the other hand I have 5 different.NET apps and a Java app running and their combined RAM usage isn't even 200 megs.
Are any of those.NET apps a web browser or office application? Both require the files they are working on (or at least a sufficiently large portion of them) to reside in local memory. I'm guessing your.NET apps aren't doing anything as data intensive.
Let's at least compare apples to oranges, here, rather than ham to tomatos.
Seven lives were sacrificed for nothing of value: they never needed to be there.
Nothing of scientific value, or maybe nothing worth the cost, but engineering/social/political knowledge is being gained with every launch, especially on international projects.
Smart missiles and remote controlled drones cost much less, are more reliable and don't kill their pilot when they fail.
Because a pilot in the cockpit can look around much more quickly, has instantaneous input to the plane, and (unlike a drone control signal) can't be jammed.
There's plenty of room for both manned and unmanned aircraft on the battlefield.
I thought the last close-combat airfights were done in WWII, and from there on, it became a race of how to fire the longest-range missile with the best available radar tracking coverage. The current generation of missiles can hit a target at 100+ km away, I think... So what's the point?
While air to air combat is no longer short range dogfighting, it's still an important job. The F-22 is supposed to be able to destroy any opposing fighter (including the F-35) before the enemy can return fire. That's the very definition of an air superiority fighter.
Add that the F-22 is faster, more maneuverable, and stealth and even in the event that it is targeted, the pilot and plane should be able to evade any threat. As well, it's the only fighter we have that can travel faster than Mach 1 without the use of afterburners.
But it seems to me that if you're interested enough in playing music to spend hours on a simplified simulator, you might as well buy a cheap guitar / bass / drum kit and do it for real. It's not quite as easy, but it's far more rewarding and you aren't limited to playing other people's songs.
I'm assuming you mean to say that the hardcore players who would keep the genre going may be moving to proper instruments, rather than the same tired troll "LRN to play N00B"?
Not to mention that the retail sales should be smaller than last year due to fewer bundles being sold (since everyone that wants the controllers already has them). Add that we're in a recession and game sales as a whole are down, and that this study doesn't include digital song download revenue (at $2 a pop!); this is a non-story.
I swear to God, there has to be some extension of Godwin's Law for every time someone brings up the Stasi. What is the ratio of NSA informers to the American population?
Exactly. Especially since the NSA is not (legally) allowed to analyze "signals" from US citizens, and the vast majority of their employees care about following that rule.
"The system will house streaming data, unstructured text, large files, and other forms of intelligence data, and analysts will be able to add metadata and tags that, among other things, designate how securely information is to be handled and how widely it gets disseminated. For end users, the system will come with search, discovery, collaboration, correlation, and analysis tools."
More data is only bad if the signal to noise ratio doesn't also improve an equivalent amount. It doesn't matter if you've got 4x more hay to search through if you also can search the hay 4x (or more) faster. You might even find 4x more needles for the same effort.
Right, and I feel like the producers are the ones most at fault. They should know better, and the name "802.11n" should never have been allowed to be attached to the draft, since it's not an IEEE standard.
And for 256GB, the $1000 price tag is roughly in line with current thumb drive pricing. It is slightly higher due to the additional cost of fitting that much memory in a small form factor.
If you need (very) large capacity portable storage, this could be worth it to you.
Which is, of course, the mistake of releasing, producing to, and buying products based on a draft of a standard: there's nothing standard about it.
Trying to get compatibility to the draft could prove difficult, depending on the changes. If it isn't there, that's what you get for buying non-compliant hardware. Typical early-adopter penalty.
At least in the U.S., cover versions of any publicly-distributed songs are covered by compulsory licensing, which means the copyright holder is legally compelled to license the song to anyone who asks properly.
Part of the asking properly is 30-days advance notice before being made available. So yes, he would need to contact the publisher beforehand.
Only RAM or ROM is measured in base 2, due to the innate binary nature of computers (they measure in multiples of 256, 512, 1024, 2048, et cetera). Clock speed is independent of that and measured in base 10 such that 1 megahertz == 1000 hertz.
Absolutely correct. Hertz is an SI unit. Just as 1km = 1000m, so does 1kHz = 1000Hz.
So obviously there's no direct parallel for the American Revolution today, but my point is that standards of war change -- and if we continue to believe that only "proper" war combatants should be protected, we're betraying principles which most of us believe to be more important than any government.
On the other hand, the founding fathers were very clear that they were now a new state. Of course, the goal is to know who to hold accountable for following the rules of the Geneva Convention.
This doesn't mean we should violate our common sense of human decency, but we are not held accountable to the letter of the Geneva Convention because it only works if both parties follow the rules.
If we had built newer and better spacecraft every year since our first manned space flight in the early 1960's, we'd have over 40 generations of spacecraft. Just since the inception of the Space Shuttle program, we should have 28 newer generations of spacecraft, each with improvements from the previous designs.
I think you underestimate how prohibitively expensive that ammount of design would cost. The shuttle cost billions to design, and each design would require a similar investment.
More importantly, these designs take time. One year is not enough time to develop a space flight system that will be reliable, cost effective, and better than the previous design. Rushing the next design will make things worse, not better.
Perhaps a new flight vehicle every decade is a better goal. That should be enough time to learn from the previous vehicle while still advancing the technology. Still takes money, so tell your Congress-critter to put more money into NASA (and what to take it away from).
The F22 is an insurance policy. It doesn't run flights in Afghanistan because it's not our best tool for that job. For firing on targets with a moments notice and cheaply, a Predator drone is cheaper and does the job faster.
The F22 is an air superiority fighter. If the Taliban had fighters of their own, we'd fly F22 sorties until they didn't anymore. If we do get into another air war, the F22 would save pilot, airmen, soldier, and civilian lives doing a job that no other plane does as well. I hope we never have to use the F22, but I'm sure glad we have it. I hope the maintenance issues get worked out as well, but that's unfortunately not always something that's foreseeable.
I hope that we continue to build defenses for all types of threats. When anthrax in the mail was the terror tool of choice, we placed hazard detectors in the USPS. When global superpowers were our likely next threat, we prepared with the F22. Now, with insurgent conflicts, we are designing tools for unconventional warfare.
It's only by preventing all possible threats that we have that insurance policy. How much worse would it be to develop our entire capability towards fighting against insurgents only to be threatened by a nuclear armed nation with cruise missiles, fighters, and a standing army and be unprepared again. I'll keep my F22s, just in case.
Seriously, twenty seconds doing nothing before the POST? Something has to be messed up.
Doing nothing? No. You're starting up the hardware, which shouldn't take 20s on most systems. Perhaps your hardware configuration is bad? Weak power supply, clogged fans, etc?
Everything then was mundane as it is now, and the old technology worked very well. Supposedly objects about a half metre were tracked, but that was "classified" information at the time.
Did you actually read the article? The current system tracks objects 4 inches and larger in diameter. The new system will track objects as small as 1/2 inch in diameter.
FTA:
"the United States Space Surveillance Network, managed by U.S. Strategic Command, is tracking more than 19,000 objects in orbit about the Earth, of which approximately 95 percent represent some form of debris. However, these are only the larger pieces of space debris, typically four inches or more in diameter. The number of debris as small as half an inch exceeds 300,000. Due to the tremendous energies possessed by space debris, the collision between a piece of debris only a half-inch in diameter and an operational spacecraft, piloted by humans or robotic, has the potential for catastrophic consequences, he stated."
It would appear to me that an American corporation is just trying to get yet another contract to do the same thing that they have been doing for years. VHF/UHF has some disadvantages, but the system in place is (or at least was) similar to the UK's. It looks like yet another money grab by the contractors to replace something that is fully functional and could operate for a generation or two at a nominal cost. What, after all, is a mere $30 million USD, though?
FTA:
"The current system requires constant sustainment intervention to maintain operations and does not address the growing population of small and micro satellites in orbit, Northrop stated."
At some point, maintenence costs on big systems like these get too high. A replacement system will not only operate better, but cheaper. Either replace it now and shut off the old system when we're done, or wait until the old system fails and scramble to build a new system (rushed development produces errors and costs more).
The 555 timer is deader than dead. Might as well teach them how to use a vacuum tube, at least those are still used in some high-end audio amplifiers. The 555 died with the microcontroller, and will never come back.
A simple transistor circuit seems much better, as it would use modern technology, and is useful. An amplifier would be nice, and could be as simple as 1-2 transistors, a potentiometer, and some resistors. If the kids chip in $2-3 each they could get 1/8" audio plugs and play their iPod through it to speakers. As a bonus project, the kids could make their own paper-cone speakers.
The BIOS isn't always the problem... if it takes three seconds for the video card to become usable (fans running, memory initialized, etc), you're not going to get less than a three-second perceived boot time, no matter how fast you make everything else happen. The same goes for other hardware. If they happen in series (or worse, if they have to happen in series), then that can add up - that can be mitigated by the BIOS, of course, but I can see why boot times might get longer.
This is absolutely part of the problem. The power supply needs to turn on its fans and generate stable voltage, then the case fans and mobo power conditioning needs to stabilize. Then you get to touch the BIOS, which probably does a staggered startup of most devices to prevent power supply droop. As stated, all of this hardware then needs to reach a usable state, both mechanically and electrically.
In a car, the power supply is DC to start with, the hardware is smaller and simpler (requiring fewer moving parts to wait for), the BIOS has mostly sensors to startup (If not done within the OS), and the OS needs only to load the basics and a few drivers from ROM. One second startups are common for small embedded systems, including to embedded versions of Linux. Just don't expect it on a desktop.
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The unchecked bloat that is being output by these latest college grads who know nothing but c#, vb, and java are serving no one's interest besides the hardware vendors.
That's funny cause I've never seen a single C# or Java apps that uses as much memory as C++ programs like Firefox (currently using 350 megs of RAM) or OpenOffice.org (current using 250 megs of RAM). On the other hand I have 5 different .NET apps and a Java app running and their combined RAM usage isn't even 200 megs.
Are any of those .NET apps a web browser or office application? Both require the files they are working on (or at least a sufficiently large portion of them) to reside in local memory. I'm guessing your .NET apps aren't doing anything as data intensive.
Let's at least compare apples to oranges, here, rather than ham to tomatos.
Seven lives were sacrificed for nothing of value : they never needed to be there.
Nothing of scientific value, or maybe nothing worth the cost, but engineering/social/political knowledge is being gained with every launch, especially on international projects.
Smart missiles and remote controlled drones cost much less, are more reliable and don't kill their pilot when they fail.
Because a pilot in the cockpit can look around much more quickly, has instantaneous input to the plane, and (unlike a drone control signal) can't be jammed.
There's plenty of room for both manned and unmanned aircraft on the battlefield.
I thought the last close-combat airfights were done in WWII, and from there on, it became a race of how to fire the longest-range missile with the best available radar tracking coverage. The current generation of missiles can hit a target at 100+ km away, I think... So what's the point?
While air to air combat is no longer short range dogfighting, it's still an important job. The F-22 is supposed to be able to destroy any opposing fighter (including the F-35) before the enemy can return fire. That's the very definition of an air superiority fighter.
Add that the F-22 is faster, more maneuverable, and stealth and even in the event that it is targeted, the pilot and plane should be able to evade any threat. As well, it's the only fighter we have that can travel faster than Mach 1 without the use of afterburners.
But it seems to me that if you're interested enough in playing music to spend hours on a simplified simulator, you might as well buy a cheap guitar / bass / drum kit and do it for real. It's not quite as easy, but it's far more rewarding and you aren't limited to playing other people's songs.
I'm assuming you mean to say that the hardcore players who would keep the genre going may be moving to proper instruments, rather than the same tired troll "LRN to play N00B"?
Not to mention that the retail sales should be smaller than last year due to fewer bundles being sold (since everyone that wants the controllers already has them). Add that we're in a recession and game sales as a whole are down, and that this study doesn't include digital song download revenue (at $2 a pop!); this is a non-story.
I swear to God, there has to be some extension of Godwin's Law for every time someone brings up the Stasi. What is the ratio of NSA informers to the American population?
Exactly. Especially since the NSA is not (legally) allowed to analyze "signals" from US citizens, and the vast majority of their employees care about following that rule.
"The system will house streaming data, unstructured text, large files, and other forms of intelligence data, and analysts will be able to add metadata and tags that, among other things, designate how securely information is to be handled and how widely it gets disseminated. For end users, the system will come with search, discovery, collaboration, correlation, and analysis tools."
More data is only bad if the signal to noise ratio doesn't also improve an equivalent amount. It doesn't matter if you've got 4x more hay to search through if you also can search the hay 4x (or more) faster. You might even find 4x more needles for the same effort.
Right, and I feel like the producers are the ones most at fault. They should know better, and the name "802.11n" should never have been allowed to be attached to the draft, since it's not an IEEE standard.
And for 256GB, the $1000 price tag is roughly in line with current thumb drive pricing. It is slightly higher due to the additional cost of fitting that much memory in a small form factor.
If you need (very) large capacity portable storage, this could be worth it to you.
It's sad that you're subject to the "early-adopter penalty" after purchasing a product that's been out for nearly 5 years...
It's sad to expect that purchasing a product built on the first draft of a protocol, rather than an IEEE standard, will be forward compatible.
Which is, of course, the mistake of releasing, producing to, and buying products based on a draft of a standard: there's nothing standard about it.
Trying to get compatibility to the draft could prove difficult, depending on the changes. If it isn't there, that's what you get for buying non-compliant hardware. Typical early-adopter penalty.
Have you already contacted the Stones' publisher?
He doesn't need to.
At least in the U.S., cover versions of any publicly-distributed songs are covered by compulsory licensing, which means the copyright holder is legally compelled to license the song to anyone who asks properly.
Part of the asking properly is 30-days advance notice before being made available. So yes, he would need to contact the publisher beforehand.
Only RAM or ROM is measured in base 2, due to the innate binary nature of computers (they measure in multiples of 256, 512, 1024, 2048, et cetera). Clock speed is independent of that and measured in base 10 such that 1 megahertz == 1000 hertz.
Absolutely correct. Hertz is an SI unit. Just as 1km = 1000m, so does 1kHz = 1000Hz.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz
Now we have the wealth envy its not fair someone who works harder has more stuff crowd
Unemployment in Michigan is over 10%. You need a job to work.
Pssh, 10% is old news. It's over 15% now.
There's a reason I left MI for the east coast in order to get an engineering job.
So obviously there's no direct parallel for the American Revolution today, but my point is that standards of war change -- and if we continue to believe that only "proper" war combatants should be protected, we're betraying principles which most of us believe to be more important than any government.
On the other hand, the founding fathers were very clear that they were now a new state. Of course, the goal is to know who to hold accountable for following the rules of the Geneva Convention.
This doesn't mean we should violate our common sense of human decency, but we are not held accountable to the letter of the Geneva Convention because it only works if both parties follow the rules.
Yes, this was an unfortunate wording on my part. The artist gets %30, MS and MTV split the rest.
If we had built newer and better spacecraft every year since our first manned space flight in the early 1960's, we'd have over 40 generations of spacecraft. Just since the inception of the Space Shuttle program, we should have 28 newer generations of spacecraft, each with improvements from the previous designs.
I think you underestimate how prohibitively expensive that ammount of design would cost. The shuttle cost billions to design, and each design would require a similar investment.
More importantly, these designs take time. One year is not enough time to develop a space flight system that will be reliable, cost effective, and better than the previous design. Rushing the next design will make things worse, not better.
Perhaps a new flight vehicle every decade is a better goal. That should be enough time to learn from the previous vehicle while still advancing the technology. Still takes money, so tell your Congress-critter to put more money into NASA (and what to take it away from).
The F22 is an insurance policy. It doesn't run flights in Afghanistan because it's not our best tool for that job. For firing on targets with a moments notice and cheaply, a Predator drone is cheaper and does the job faster.
The F22 is an air superiority fighter. If the Taliban had fighters of their own, we'd fly F22 sorties until they didn't anymore. If we do get into another air war, the F22 would save pilot, airmen, soldier, and civilian lives doing a job that no other plane does as well. I hope we never have to use the F22, but I'm sure glad we have it. I hope the maintenance issues get worked out as well, but that's unfortunately not always something that's foreseeable.
I hope that we continue to build defenses for all types of threats. When anthrax in the mail was the terror tool of choice, we placed hazard detectors in the USPS. When global superpowers were our likely next threat, we prepared with the F22. Now, with insurgent conflicts, we are designing tools for unconventional warfare.
It's only by preventing all possible threats that we have that insurance policy. How much worse would it be to develop our entire capability towards fighting against insurgents only to be threatened by a nuclear armed nation with cruise missiles, fighters, and a standing army and be unprepared again. I'll keep my F22s, just in case.
They are smart enough to not put all their eggs in one basket, I see that as a plus for now.
Exactly, the worst case scenario is they still produce biofuels, and have more corn available to turn into polymers.
As an aside, some interesting reading on Dow's history of messing with cartels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Henry_Dow#Breaking_a_Monopoly
We'll cut their fiber. You don't need fiber to brew beer!
Seriously, twenty seconds doing nothing before the POST? Something has to be messed up.
Doing nothing? No. You're starting up the hardware, which shouldn't take 20s on most systems. Perhaps your hardware configuration is bad? Weak power supply, clogged fans, etc?
Everything then was mundane as it is now, and the old technology worked very well. Supposedly objects about a half metre were tracked, but that was "classified" information at the time.
Did you actually read the article? The current system tracks objects 4 inches and larger in diameter. The new system will track objects as small as 1/2 inch in diameter.
FTA:
"the United States Space Surveillance Network, managed by U.S. Strategic Command, is tracking more than 19,000 objects in orbit about the Earth, of which approximately 95 percent represent some form of debris. However, these are only the larger pieces of space debris, typically four inches or more in diameter. The number of debris as small as half an inch exceeds 300,000. Due to the tremendous energies possessed by space debris, the collision between a piece of debris only a half-inch in diameter and an operational spacecraft, piloted by humans or robotic, has the potential for catastrophic consequences, he stated."
It would appear to me that an American corporation is just trying to get yet another contract to do the same thing that they have been doing for years. VHF/UHF has some disadvantages, but the system in place is (or at least was) similar to the UK's. It looks like yet another money grab by the contractors to replace something that is fully functional and could operate for a generation or two at a nominal cost. What, after all, is a mere $30 million USD, though?
FTA:
"The current system requires constant sustainment intervention to maintain operations and does not address the growing population of small and micro satellites in orbit, Northrop stated."
At some point, maintenence costs on big systems like these get too high. A replacement system will not only operate better, but cheaper. Either replace it now and shut off the old system when we're done, or wait until the old system fails and scramble to build a new system (rushed development produces errors and costs more).
The 555 timer is deader than dead. Might as well teach them how to use a vacuum tube, at least those are still used in some high-end audio amplifiers. The 555 died with the microcontroller, and will never come back.
A simple transistor circuit seems much better, as it would use modern technology, and is useful. An amplifier would be nice, and could be as simple as 1-2 transistors, a potentiometer, and some resistors. If the kids chip in $2-3 each they could get 1/8" audio plugs and play their iPod through it to speakers. As a bonus project, the kids could make their own paper-cone speakers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_amplifier
http://www.ecircuitcenter.com/Circuits/pushpull/pushpull.htm
The BIOS isn't always the problem... if it takes three seconds for the video card to become usable (fans running, memory initialized, etc), you're not going to get less than a three-second perceived boot time, no matter how fast you make everything else happen. The same goes for other hardware. If they happen in series (or worse, if they have to happen in series), then that can add up - that can be mitigated by the BIOS, of course, but I can see why boot times might get longer.
This is absolutely part of the problem. The power supply needs to turn on its fans and generate stable voltage, then the case fans and mobo power conditioning needs to stabilize. Then you get to touch the BIOS, which probably does a staggered startup of most devices to prevent power supply droop. As stated, all of this hardware then needs to reach a usable state, both mechanically and electrically.
In a car, the power supply is DC to start with, the hardware is smaller and simpler (requiring fewer moving parts to wait for), the BIOS has mostly sensors to startup (If not done within the OS), and the OS needs only to load the basics and a few drivers from ROM. One second startups are common for small embedded systems, including to embedded versions of Linux. Just don't expect it on a desktop.