Awesome commercial
on
Pods Unite
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Wow!
I can't be the only slashdot poster to see past the technical aspects of hooking up an iPod in a car and see one very very beautifull add. Without looking it up my guess would be that the Volkswagen people put the add together, it's in their style.
With its style & music I put it on the same level as the recent technically cool Honda add.
I hope their not trying to bring the exact same type of excitement as NASCAR. Most of the people there are just waiting for a big crash to watch.
Actually, that wouldn't nescecarily be bad. Don't forget that in NASCAR, the drivers are not trying to crash. Same would be for the X-Prize.
Creating a fanbase with wide diversity of interests, ranging from technological to simple speed-and-crash-exitement, would be a good thing. It would create a bigger sponsor based playing field that might end up in more of us going up there (one of my goals).
Unfortunately, boring stuff on Windows keeps the rest of us (and our numbers are dwindling) in jobs.
How about those of us that actually do 'interesting' stuff on Windows? In my case we have a great hardware product with a combination of open source and closed source libraries/applications. The closed source part of our libraries consist mostly of software models of our hardware (our product) and are thus pieces of intelectual property that we are not willing to freely distribute. Our librararies and applications are Windows2000 and WindowsXP only because those OS's cover 95% of our target audience.
As much as I can see the value of alternative operating systems. Promoting them through my work is not my job.
Branding me with a new name like Sharecropper is not something that motivates me to feel any better about OSS, *n*x*.
Part of the challange is that at each step the programms only get a certain amount of time to do their computations before having to make a move.
Quicky check at the NASA program and I find a switch statement of 2049 (2^11) parts. It is broken up in switch blocks of 64.
if (situation<64){switch(situation){ case 0:tdir=5;break;case 1:tdir=1;break; case 2:tdir=1;break;case 3:tdir=5;break; case 4:tdir=2;break;case 5:tdir=4;break; case 6:tdir=6;break;case 7:tdir=2;break; ... }}else if (situation<128){switch(situation){ case 64:tdir=1;break;case 65:tdir=2; ...
This is sad coding on so many different levels. I am not sure how to express my feelings about it. First let's look at a straight forward way of how to do this....the lookup-table.
//create a big easy to access lookup table static unsigned char nTable[2048] = {
5, 1, 1, 5,..... };
//range check your index if (situation<0 || situation >= 2048) {
situation = 0; //print some debug error message }
tdir = nTable[situation];
It is fast (speed is an issue). Takes up less space (programming space can be an issue). Easier to read (debugging tricky programs is hard enough without the obfuscation). And should have been part of your basic programming education.
And this is state of the art coming out of NASA? I'm impressed our shuttles go UP in the first place (ja, ja...low blow...just kidding ofcourse).
Really, if I see this kind of coding I cringe. Then talk to the person. Then make sure they learn from their mistakes and don't do it again, or they can find themselves a job outside of my team.
The thing with politicaly sensitive topics is that there is typically a lot more involved then can be simply expressed. The problem with people expressing political statements is that they follow the modern journalism mantra of trying to over simplify the problems and coming up with keyphrases that are supposed to be the solution to said political topic.
Let's take your "war is not made by the Military" Sounds like a meaningfull statement, but just think about it for a second longer then you are used to. War is fough by military, so to have a war you need a military (force). To have a military force enables a power to fight a war. America has created a big readily available military force. The complexity of which is not justified by your simple statement. The US Military is complicated on so many levels, of which there are quite a few involved with influences at the highest political circles.
Back to being on topic. I'd say, no whining about people who have figured out that an objective anouncement of a new military toy is fair bait for taking a political stance on what to do with this fancy piece of technology.
Your answer, as much as it might be correct, is only highlighting the technical benefits of a service that I simply don't need in the real world. Really, I only have two ears, and can barely hold a single reasonable conversation. What am I supposed to do with 48 voice conversations?
VoIP was so hyped several years ago but in the end arrived to late to make a difference.
I don't really get the hype around VoIP nowdays. In the last few years my local+long distance phone bill went from $30 per month to $20 per month. And I call a lot, especially from California to my family in The Netherlands. My Internet bill on the other hand went from $9.95 (modem days) to $49.50 for fairly standard DSL (1.5M/768K). So in the time they got us VoIP, the costs have shifted enough that it becomes rather insignificant.
heh, and here I thought that posting a link to a 'news' article about 'stuff' that 'nerds' do was rather exactly what slashdot was all about.
Slashdot doesn't set a moral standard. The posters/moderators/community does.
Slashdot provides room for debates about these sort of articles. Feel free to debate the moral soundness of the topic of the article if you feel that inclination. Hint's like 'defacing websites is illegal' are probably a good thing for those readers that hadn't picked up on that fact yet though.
They keep bring us new stuff like MS-Bob.... and Clippy... and...
funny you mention clippy, since I just saw his brother 'blinky' the lightbulb in OpenOffice and I was wandered if this was included because of irony or innovation?
The business downside (to online music stores) can probably be found in the difference in margin between the sales of CD's and sales of tracks through online services. Recently someone broke down where the $0.99 went that is paid for a track through Apple's online music store. The breakdown showed that something like $0.12 went to the artist. Doesn't look like that is very much, but it happened to be a lot more then the amount that they get for each dollar made through regular CD sales.
In other words, the old fashioned CD sales make the record companies a lot more profit. They are used to having a very strong grip on this industry and are now kicking around hard to try to keep it that way.
Is this is a result of our free market economy in which this unregulated corporate behaviour is just a unfortunate side effect? EFF has put up it's opinion. Go take sides!
For those of you who do not feel the need to RTFA, and might easily take the slashdot story the wrong way, here is the important part of what the EFF is after (Paragraph 2 on the the EFF site):
The problem is that there is no adequate system in place that allows music lovers access to their favorite music while compensating artists and copyright holders.
This is quite different from the 'illegal-file-sharing-rules!! the RIAA-sucks!!' idea I got from the slashdot story. I very much agree and support the EFF in this effort. Give the artists what they deserve, give me what I want and stop artificially inflating the music prices.
Getting punished for monetary damages that have not occurred yet is insane. Just think of the other directions these type of suits could be taking. Yes, think of the RIAA. The engineers behind KaZaa, Morpheas, Grokster, etc better get their lawyers ready. According to my wife (WIAL (Who Is A Laywer)) the outcome of the suit, at least the monetary damages part, is not in accordence with the law and should be overthrown by the appeal.
Re:No surprise
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I know I'm going to get flamed big time for this, but it has to be said...
The reason Americans have to work more than the rest of the world is because they are less productive. If you were in Japan, I doubt you could sit at a desk for 8 hours and really only be coding for 5. In North America most companies let you get away with that, and then try and make up for the lack of productivity by forcing people to work longer hours... So 8 hours in the US = about 5 hours in the rest of the world.
I much rather work for 12 hours a day, than work hard for 8. You guys just don't know when to quit complaining!
I know you just should be flamed, but I'll bite...
As far as I know the americans work just as efficient as people in the rest of the world. Where you base your numbers on Japanese, I'll base my ideas on the Dutch. Most of my friends in Holland do not work nearly as long OR efficient as the people I am around here in America. Then again, they get rewarded pretty much for that effort (no where near as much as I am). Overtime isn't big in Holland either, but is rewarded. Here overtime isn't rewarded directly, but check the difference in pay between the top-hard working engineers vs the bottom of the pile at the same company. I know that at my company there is as much as a 2x difference in salaries between the hard-workers and the slackers. I'll admit that this isn't always very well balanced.
As far as slacking for 12 hours vs working efficient for 8, well...I'll take the hard work any time. Getting bored and wasting your time is one of the worst things that you can do to yourself. This is where the real issue lies, how come the americans all work so hard, yet don't have the imagination to take time of and do fun things with their hard earned money? Really, here is where we can learn from the Dutch and the rest of the world.
same here. No problems with SP4. I had to reboot my developer machine after 3 weeks of uninterupted uptime (installed a new Adaptec USB2 driver 3 weeks back). That is quite a step up from a few years back when many a debug session would end in a reboot. For me windows 2000 has been rock solid and a pleasant experience. I might still pick Linux over 2000, but my work leaves me little choice (and I really don't care that much).
I am very interested in these (or other) small form factor computers. Especially the fanless models (that's just sweet). But I do have a need for High-speed USB 2.0 (demonstrating image sensors). The specs sheet on the pages don't answer what type of USB the MicroServers come with. I have allready sent them a question, but if any of you readers know the answer, please feel free to email it to dam@yellowcatdesign.com.
Any suggestions about other small formfactor PC's with High-speed USB 2 are also welcome.
Let's keep our focus on the actual article gentleman, your fantasies are amusing but rather offtopic. I don't think the technology that is talked about has anything to do with object recognition. Though the article is impressivly vague on technical details I think the technology is based on GPS + direction vectors to determine a location or object.
or as others would have so delicatly put it 'RTFA':-)
It delays all incoming emails for a certain amount of time. Unfortunate side effect of the algorithm. Can anyone tell me what the average extra time is?
I am not convinced that most of the spam comes from specialized email applications that can be fooled with a temporarily failure. Can anyone provide numbers on this?
How does the algorithm adapt when aforementioned email applications adapt to 'greylisting'?
I see a lot of spam that was probably produced by applications that use an automated signup to yahoo/hotmail/etc. to obtain a temporary email address and leave the actual emailing to those services which will circumvent 'greylisting'.
How much of the total internet traffic is made up of email? What happends of we all install 'greylisting' filters and each email has to be resent several times? Is doubling/tripling the amount of email traffic going to be noticable?
I like the idea though. Since SMTP is broken anyway, why not use another of it's features in a new way to help filter unwanted email. Keep up the good work!
So Fossil offers us a Palm based wristwatch. We already all knew about the Linux based wristwatch from IBM right. What the Slashdot crowd really needs to know is that the Microsoft/MSN based wristwatch will be here this fall.:-)
ok, so maybe not as breakthrough as to deserve any attantion, it does look to offer IM through Microsoftâ(TM)s dynamic new Smart Personal Objects Technology platform.
Well, it is not as good as it sounds. Housing starts at $400K for a small 2 bedroom condo or $600+K for free standing tiny house in a neighbourhood you dare to invite friends too. Pretty much need a (decent) double income here to live a regular life.
We are all betting on an economic recovery in the next 4-ish years, enough so that some of our stock options will kick in.:-)
thanks, good points. I still maintain that some experienced programmers should loosen up on their 'style' occasionaly. Teach the young generation about how a consistent style helps other programmers read your code easier, but lets not get carried away about not letting go of your TABS HAVE TO BE x SPACES. (/danger...religion here;-)
$64k experienced developer? Whoops, I am in Silicon Valley. We can't get juniors to take anything less then $75k and the seniors can't be bothered to show up for half a day for anything less then $120k. Sad but true.
Why should I be flamed for generalizing? The topic is about generalizations. We are talking about 'the group', not you. Should I explain how a group has 'average' properies while the individuals can accel? Or do you want to claim that just because you are modern and have progressed with the times that so did everyone else? hmmmm, me thinks not.
I should be rewarded for HINTING that I was generalizing.
Apart from that I commend you on your skills, I'd hire you in a heartbeat too. And we ARE hiring (mailto: dbacker AT micron.com)
Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
·
· Score: 1
Well, I moved from Cupertino (1500Kbps cable) to North Valley San Jose (190Kbps DSL, no cable option). Seems that I am simply 'out of luck' for an unknown reason. They tested the hell out of my DSL line and don't know why our neighbourhood is this slow. I'm not that far from my local CO either. I'm not convinced they gave it all the effor it deserves given the amount of people in my area that seem to be effected.
Lesson: Check broadband availability before you buy the house. Because if you rely on it (my wife runs her business from home) you could be in for a surprise.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow!
I can't be the only slashdot poster to see past the technical aspects of hooking up an iPod in a car and see one very very beautifull add. Without looking it up my guess would be that the Volkswagen people put the add together, it's in their style.
With its style & music I put it on the same level as the recent technically cool Honda add.
I hope their not trying to bring the exact same type of excitement as NASCAR. Most of the people there are just waiting for a big crash to watch.
Actually, that wouldn't nescecarily be bad. Don't forget that in NASCAR, the drivers are not trying to crash. Same would be for the X-Prize.
Creating a fanbase with wide diversity of interests, ranging from technological to simple speed-and-crash-exitement, would be a good thing. It would create a bigger sponsor based playing field that might end up in more of us going up there (one of my goals).
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until somebody's uncle pops a ventricle.
Then it's just fun.
Unfortunately, boring stuff on Windows keeps the rest of us (and our numbers are dwindling) in jobs.
How about those of us that actually do 'interesting' stuff on Windows? In my case we have a great hardware product with a combination of open source and closed source libraries/applications. The closed source part of our libraries consist mostly of software models of our hardware (our product) and are thus pieces of intelectual property that we are not willing to freely distribute. Our librararies and applications are Windows2000 and WindowsXP only because those OS's cover 95% of our target audience.
As much as I can see the value of alternative operating systems. Promoting them through my work is not my job.
Branding me with a new name like Sharecropper is not something that motivates me to feel any better about OSS, *n*x*.
Quicky check at the NASA program and I find a switch statement of 2049 (2^11) parts. It is broken up in switch blocks of 64.This is sad coding on so many different levels. I am not sure how to express my feelings about it.
First let's look at a straight forward way of how to do this....the lookup-table.It is fast (speed is an issue).
Takes up less space (programming space can be an issue).
Easier to read (debugging tricky programs is hard enough without the obfuscation).
And should have been part of your basic programming education.
And this is state of the art coming out of NASA?
I'm impressed our shuttles go UP in the first place (ja, ja...low blow...just kidding ofcourse).
Really, if I see this kind of coding I cringe. Then talk to the person. Then make sure they learn from their mistakes and don't do it again, or they can find themselves a job outside of my team.
The thing with politicaly sensitive topics is that there is typically a lot more involved then can be simply expressed. The problem with people expressing political statements is that they follow the modern journalism mantra of trying to over simplify the problems and coming up with keyphrases that are supposed to be the solution to said political topic.
Let's take your "war is not made by the Military"
Sounds like a meaningfull statement, but just think about it for a second longer then you are used to. War is fough by military, so to have a war you need a military (force). To have a military force enables a power to fight a war. America has created a big readily available military force. The complexity of which is not justified by your simple statement. The US Military is complicated on so many levels, of which there are quite a few involved with influences at the highest political circles.
Back to being on topic. I'd say, no whining about people who have figured out that an objective anouncement of a new military toy is fair bait for taking a political stance on what to do with this fancy piece of technology.
Your answer, as much as it might be correct, is only highlighting the technical benefits of a service that I simply don't need in the real world. Really, I only have two ears, and can barely hold a single reasonable conversation. What am I supposed to do with 48 voice conversations?
VoIP was so hyped several years ago but in the end arrived to late to make a difference.
my 2 cents.
I don't really get the hype around VoIP nowdays. In the last few years my local+long distance phone bill went from $30 per month to $20 per month. And I call a lot, especially from California to my family in The Netherlands. My Internet bill on the other hand went from $9.95 (modem days) to $49.50 for fairly standard DSL (1.5M/768K). So in the time they got us VoIP, the costs have shifted enough that it becomes rather insignificant.
heh, and here I thought that posting a link to a 'news' article about 'stuff' that 'nerds' do was rather exactly what slashdot was all about.
Slashdot doesn't set a moral standard. The posters/moderators/community does.
Slashdot provides room for debates about these sort of articles. Feel free to debate the moral soundness of the topic of the article if you feel that inclination. Hint's like 'defacing websites is illegal' are probably a good thing for those readers that hadn't picked up on that fact yet though.
funny you mention clippy, since I just saw his brother 'blinky' the lightbulb in OpenOffice and I was wandered if this was included because of irony or innovation?
The business downside (to online music stores) can probably be found in the difference in margin between the sales of CD's and sales of tracks through online services. Recently someone broke down where the $0.99 went that is paid for a track through Apple's online music store. The breakdown showed that something like $0.12 went to the artist. Doesn't look like that is very much, but it happened to be a lot more then the amount that they get for each dollar made through regular CD sales.
In other words, the old fashioned CD sales make the record companies a lot more profit. They are used to having a very strong grip on this industry and are now kicking around hard to try to keep it that way.
Is this is a result of our free market economy in which this unregulated corporate behaviour is just a unfortunate side effect? EFF has put up it's opinion. Go take sides!
For those of you who do not feel the need to RTFA, and might easily take the slashdot story the wrong way, here is the important part of what the EFF is after (Paragraph 2 on the the EFF site):
The problem is that there is no adequate system in place that allows music lovers access to their favorite music while compensating artists and copyright holders.
This is quite different from the 'illegal-file-sharing-rules!! the RIAA-sucks!!' idea I got from the slashdot story. I very much agree and support the EFF in this effort. Give the artists what they deserve, give me what I want and stop artificially inflating the music prices.
Irony == ;-)
;-)
duh
Getting punished for monetary damages that have not occurred yet is insane. Just think of the other directions these type of suits could be taking. Yes, think of the RIAA. The engineers behind KaZaa, Morpheas, Grokster, etc better get their lawyers ready.
According to my wife (WIAL (Who Is A Laywer)) the outcome of the suit, at least the monetary damages part, is not in accordence with the law and should be overthrown by the appeal.
I know I'm going to get flamed big time for this, but it has to be said...
The reason Americans have to work more than the rest of the world is because they are less productive. If you were in Japan, I doubt you could sit at a desk for 8 hours and really only be coding for 5. In North America most companies let you get away with that, and then try and make up for the lack of productivity by forcing people to work longer hours... So 8 hours in the US = about 5 hours in the rest of the world.
I much rather work for 12 hours a day, than work hard for 8. You guys just don't know when to quit complaining!
I know you just should be flamed, but I'll bite...
As far as I know the americans work just as efficient as people in the rest of the world. Where you base your numbers on Japanese, I'll base my ideas on the Dutch. Most of my friends in Holland do not work nearly as long OR efficient as the people I am around here in America. Then again, they get rewarded pretty much for that effort (no where near as much as I am). Overtime isn't big in Holland either, but is rewarded. Here overtime isn't rewarded directly, but check the difference in pay between the top-hard working engineers vs the bottom of the pile at the same company. I know that at my company there is as much as a 2x difference in salaries between the hard-workers and the slackers. I'll admit that this isn't always very well balanced.
As far as slacking for 12 hours vs working efficient for 8, well...I'll take the hard work any time. Getting bored and wasting your time is one of the worst things that you can do to yourself. This is where the real issue lies, how come the americans all work so hard, yet don't have the imagination to take time of and do fun things with their hard earned money? Really, here is where we can learn from the Dutch and the rest of the world.
same here. No problems with SP4. I had to reboot my developer machine after 3 weeks of uninterupted uptime (installed a new Adaptec USB2 driver 3 weeks back). That is quite a step up from a few years back when many a debug session would end in a reboot. For me windows 2000 has been rock solid and a pleasant experience. I might still pick Linux over 2000, but my work leaves me little choice (and I really don't care that much).
I am very interested in these (or other) small form factor computers. Especially the fanless models (that's just sweet). But I do have a need for High-speed USB 2.0 (demonstrating image sensors). The specs sheet on the pages don't answer what type of USB the MicroServers come with. I have allready sent them a question, but if any of you readers know the answer, please feel free to email it to dam@yellowcatdesign.com.
Any suggestions about other small formfactor PC's with High-speed USB 2 are also welcome.
Thanks.
Let's keep our focus on the actual article gentleman, your fantasies are amusing but rather offtopic. I don't think the technology that is talked about has anything to do with object recognition. Though the article is impressivly vague on technical details I think the technology is based on GPS + direction vectors to determine a location or object.
:-)
or as others would have so delicatly put it 'RTFA'
I like the idea though. Since SMTP is broken anyway, why not use another of it's features in a new way to help filter unwanted email. Keep up the good work!
Upto 11Mbit/s (theoretical)
Also known as USB 1.1
Also known as Original USB
Also known as Slow mode
or old mode
or whatever
Upto 480Mbit/s (theoratical max)
Also known as USB 2.0
The fast mode
So Fossil offers us a Palm based wristwatch. We already all knew about the Linux based wristwatch from IBM right. What the Slashdot crowd really needs to know is that the Microsoft/MSN based wristwatch will be here this fall. :-)
ok, so maybe not as breakthrough as to deserve any attantion, it does look to offer IM through Microsoftâ(TM)s dynamic new Smart Personal Objects Technology platform.
Well, it is not as good as it sounds. Housing starts at $400K for a small 2 bedroom condo or $600+K for free standing tiny house in a neighbourhood you dare to invite friends too. Pretty much need a (decent) double income here to live a regular life.
:-)
:-(
We are all betting on an economic recovery in the next 4-ish years, enough so that some of our stock options will kick in.
I missed the dot-com wave by 1 year.
thanks, good points. ;-)
I still maintain that some experienced programmers should loosen up on their 'style' occasionaly. Teach the young generation about how a consistent style helps other programmers read your code easier, but lets not get carried away about not letting go of your TABS HAVE TO BE x SPACES. (/danger...religion here
$64k experienced developer? Whoops, I am in Silicon Valley. We can't get juniors to take anything less then $75k and the seniors can't be bothered to show up for half a day for anything less then $120k. Sad but true.
Why should I be flamed for generalizing? The topic is about generalizations. We are talking about 'the group', not you. Should I explain how a group has 'average' properies while the individuals can accel? Or do you want to claim that just because you are modern and have progressed with the times that so did everyone else? hmmmm, me thinks not.
I should be rewarded for HINTING that I was generalizing.
Apart from that I commend you on your skills, I'd hire you in a heartbeat too. And we ARE hiring (mailto: dbacker AT micron.com)
Well, I moved from Cupertino (1500Kbps cable) to North Valley San Jose (190Kbps DSL, no cable option). Seems that I am simply 'out of luck' for an unknown reason. They tested the hell out of my DSL line and don't know why our neighbourhood is this slow. I'm not that far from my local CO either. I'm not convinced they gave it all the effor it deserves given the amount of people in my area that seem to be effected.
Lesson: Check broadband availability before you buy the house. Because if you rely on it (my wife runs her business from home) you could be in for a surprise.