I was only there 6 months when the layoffs came up and she got the slip and I didn't. She flew off the handle that I should have went before she did. She didn't appreciate it when I mentioned she probably shouldn't have been so vocal about how she didn't like her job.
Yeah, way to go. Telling someone who has just been laid off that it was basically all their own fault; even if it was, that doesn't reflect well on you at all.
Actually, I expect they *planned* to generate a panorama the old fashioned way- laying it out on a flat table, in carefully chosen positions so it looks about right.
Helicopters don't put out thousands of pounds of ultra-high temperature thrust.
Neither did the Lunar Lander. Don't forget it only had to put out it's own weight on earth, divided by 6. Rocket engines are about 30x lighter than gas turbines, as used in helicopters, and the lander's fuel tank was practically empty by the time it touched down.
Typical government types.
LOL. I'm in the UK, where I was born, and I was 3 when it landed, and I have never worked for *any* government.:-)
* How did the astronauts get thru the Van Allen radiation belt without being toasted? With the amount of radiation present in the belt, it matters not at what speed you're traveling.
The Van Allen belts are actually mostly located over the equator- or atleast that's where they are strongest. By carefully choosing their trajectory, NASA were able to avoid the worst of the belts. However the astronauts still got about 1% of the dose necessary to get radiation poisoning.
* One movie shows the astronauts blasting off from the moon on their way home and the camera, which was on the moon, tilted up to follow the space craft. Who was left behind so they could tilt the camera up to follow the space craft?
It's an automated camera. Amazing what technology they had in those days! Lucky that, otherwise they would have had to leave a cameraman behind to die:-)
* The engine that was used to slow the Lunar Module down, so it didn't crash into the moon surface, puts out thousands of pounds of thrust. Where is the crater under this engine on the moon's surface? The surface dust wasn't even disturbed.
Look, gravity is only 1/6 of that on the earth. A helicopter flies by throwing its own weight in air downwards every second, which is similar to what the lander does; but the helicopter applies about 6x *more* force on the ground than the Lunar Module does with its landing rocket. Why doesn't the ground blow away when a helicopter lands?
* Supposedly, the temperature on the moon's surface is -200 degrees in the shade and over 200 degrees in the light. This means, since there is no atmosphere, there is nothing to hold the heat onto the surface.
Wrong! The surface itself holds the heat. And don't forget- it's in a vacuum, so it loses heat more slowly... just like a thermosflask.
So, when I am facing the light (sun), the front of my suit would be over 200 degrees and the back of my suit (shade) would be -200 degrees. My front would be toast and my back would be ice, instantly, since there is no atmosphere.
No, the heat of the sun is much the same on the moon since the moon is very nearly the same distance from the sun as the earth is. Actually you get reflection of the sun off the ground around you on the moon too, so it isn't so clearcut. The suits actually had airconditioning system in the backpack to keep the astronauts cool (it boiled water to the vacuum to take their heat away, and that of the sun- again because it's hard to cool down in a vacuum.)
* The surface of the moon is covered with dust. This dust was easily "kicked up", as shown by the astronauts. Why isn't there any dust settled on the space craft after the landing?
Actually that's pretty cool. If you look at the dust kicked up it goes in a tiny parabola away from the boot and then lands. It looks very different from what happens on earth due to the lack of air to hold it up. Any dust kicked up from the space craft would fly in a parabola and land directly away from the spacecraft. There's no easy way for it to come back towards the spacecraft, unless it bounced off a rock or something.
No, GC has never been, and never will be faster than free/malloc.
That's not true. It certainly can be faster. In fact in a lot of cases the GC never runs, because the program ends before that point; and then using GC can indeed offer better performance- the shortest C equivalent usually involves hand releasing memory, and that can mean it ends up freeing memory that strictly doesn't need to be. It does depend on the programmer though.
In addition, memory allocation in some languages, like Java, is extraordinarily cheap, just bumping a pointer on by a length, and free can almost literally take no time at all (the VM can pick out the objects it wants to keep which may be very few, and the rest just get written over by the malloc.)
GCing in, say, Java has had the bejeezus optimised out of it, they are stunningly quick operations, and built into the language because they are so often called; more so than malloc and free, which is only a library.
If you think about it, that may well mean that the current Java implementation is faster than a C implementation you may happen to be using.
There can also be issues with C- it is possible for the heap to fragment, Java can defragment, C can't. I have worked on systems where fragmentation actually occured; and it crashes the system. In a fairly real sense Java is very much faster.
The percentage difference between malloc/free and GC is now small enough that the differences between individual programmer skills are bigger than the performance hit of GC- in other words, a lot of programmers out there are worse at doing memory handling than a well written GC.
Seriously, this is bad. In the UK, politicians have to declare their commercial links, and if they don't- they are in fairly big trouble.
Personally, I like that. I like that a lot.
If we pay our politicians a fairly decent wage, and we do, then there's no reason for them sticking their hand in corporate pockets or corporations sticking their hand in the politicians pockets.
Patents would be ok, if they were inventive as required by the law. Unfortunately, there is no way on Earth to measure or judge inventiveness, so all a patent examiner can do is to judge whether the application is novel.
There is, but it involves going to court.
But that is the big problem.
The whole patent system needs reforming. Patents are too easy to get, can be obtained for ideas that are trivial extensions of existing ideas (particularly in the software area)- and there's little or no downside to getting such a patent. So companies just play the percentages, get lots and lots of patents.
Meanwhile, individuals are rarely well advised to get patents- a patent is just a license to sue, but individuals often can't afford to sue anyway, so then the patent isn't worth the paper it is printed on.
There's also big problems with patents in that nobody really knows what a patent covers. Remember that patent that BT 'had' on the world wide web? It wasn't a slam dunk that they wouldn't win that one, it was close. Patents don't only cover the exact invention, they also cover similar inventions. And the web was sorta similar to their patent; but the court decided it was too far, in that case, a different court might have decided otherwise. That's what makes it all impossibly complex.
To make things worse, many software patents usually don't come with a useful description of how to actually do stuff, which is sad, since software can be documented by the sourcecode and printed.
That would be stupid- a patent application has to be written so that one 'skilled in the art' is able to reproduce the invention. Not doing that might well invalidate the patent.
They say that spam accounts for so much lost productivity, but they fail to mention that spam has spawned a whole new race of products and services that keep people employed.
It probably hasn't pushed up overall employment, at best it has employed software engineers instead of other forms of employment, and the end users have lost out with what else they could have bought with that money.
Yeah, but consider that those that have tracked the spam back to the people who actually paid for it to be done, have shown that Americans pay for the vast majority of spam mail shots. Those are the real culprits.
The point about accountability is that if something messes up in a project, a manager can point at Microsoft and say: "look it's their fault!"
And Microsoft will say "Look, it's our fault".
Bingo, instant scapegoat.
Merely being responsible isn't enough; since finger pointing can't be employed if they aren't accountable. You can be responsible for fixing something without it being remotely your fault and without anyone blaming you. A mechanic to fix your car is responsible for fixing it, but they probably weren't accountable for it going wrong, unless they messed up a previous repair or something.
I think McGrath's point is that there's no difference between responsibility and liability so long as both hit your pocketbook.
No, that isn't his point and isn't true either, since the liability means it hits *their* pocketbook- they pay for your lost business. That's what liable means.
I would think that the dust particles would have some small amount of centripetal force acting on them, pulling them to the outside of the mirror.
However, the combined acceleration (of the gravity and rotation) on the mercury is the same as that of the dust, but the mercury forms a perpendicular surface to that force. So the mercury's curved surface supports the dust in place and the dust doesn't get thrown out to the rim as you might expect.
Another way of looking at the same thing is that the surface of the mercury forms what physicists call an isopotential - it has the same potential energy at each point on the surface. Incidentally, so is the surface of the earth, which is why the crust of the earth doesn't slide around due to it's rotation, even though the crust is sitting on a slippery liquid core.
Because the mercury is an isopotential the dust can't gain kinetic energy by moving around on the surface.
The dust would tend to float on the mercury. They could just occasionally filter the mercury to clean it up. They'd probably have to stop observing while they did this though- it's bound to create ripples on the surface.
Presumably he sends mail anyway, but the ISP will only turn off connections they aren't being paid money to turn a blind eye on; so in practice, just the DDOS zombies get hit by this.
According to his presentation at the HOPE conference, John Draper (aka Captain Crunch) recently implemented a honey pot system connected up to an automatic mailing program.
When his honey pot receives mail it tracks down the mail to the sending machine, works back to the ISP and mails a report to the ISP admins in realtime. If the PC is own3d then the admins usually disconnect it from the net fairly soon until the owners have fixed it, so the machines can only be used for a short time.
Because the admins work in parallel on the problem worldwide, apparently it's making a noticeable dent in the DDOS population; he connected to IRC and listened to the spammers bemoaning the fact that their favourite toys are getting fixed too quickly.:-)
The studies there have been on say, language aquisition show that adults learn languages *faster* than children (if you teach them properly)- except for accent.
Basically adults have more places to fit new knowledge into. Children have to learn everything from scratch, which is a bit harder. However children haven't already learnt a particular way to move their mouth, throat and tongue; so they learn accent very well. Adults have already learnt a different way to move them, and relearning this is harder.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, way to go. Telling someone who has just been laid off that it was basically all their own fault; even if it was, that doesn't reflect well on you at all.
Actually, I expect they *planned* to generate a panorama the old fashioned way- laying it out on a flat table, in carefully chosen positions so it looks about right.
Neither did the Lunar Lander. Don't forget it only had to put out it's own weight on earth, divided by 6. Rocket engines are about 30x lighter than gas turbines, as used in helicopters, and the lander's fuel tank was practically empty by the time it touched down.
Typical government types.
LOL. I'm in the UK, where I was born, and I was 3 when it landed, and I have never worked for *any* government. :-)
The Van Allen belts are actually mostly located over the equator- or atleast that's where they are strongest. By carefully choosing their trajectory, NASA were able to avoid the worst of the belts. However the astronauts still got about 1% of the dose necessary to get radiation poisoning.
* One movie shows the astronauts blasting off from the moon on their way home and the camera, which was on the moon, tilted up to follow the space craft. Who was left behind so they could tilt the camera up to follow the space craft?
It's an automated camera. Amazing what technology they had in those days! Lucky that, otherwise they would have had to leave a cameraman behind to die :-)
* The engine that was used to slow the Lunar Module down, so it didn't crash into the moon surface, puts out thousands of pounds of thrust. Where is the crater under this engine on the moon's surface? The surface dust wasn't even disturbed.
Look, gravity is only 1/6 of that on the earth. A helicopter flies by throwing its own weight in air downwards every second, which is similar to what the lander does; but the helicopter applies about 6x *more* force on the ground than the Lunar Module does with its landing rocket. Why doesn't the ground blow away when a helicopter lands?
* Supposedly, the temperature on the moon's surface is -200 degrees in the shade and over 200 degrees in the light. This means, since there is no atmosphere, there is nothing to hold the heat onto the surface.
Wrong! The surface itself holds the heat. And don't forget- it's in a vacuum, so it loses heat more slowly... just like a thermosflask.
So, when I am facing the light (sun), the front of my suit would be over 200 degrees and the back of my suit (shade) would be -200 degrees. My front would be toast and my back would be ice, instantly, since there is no atmosphere.
No, the heat of the sun is much the same on the moon since the moon is very nearly the same distance from the sun as the earth is. Actually you get reflection of the sun off the ground around you on the moon too, so it isn't so clearcut. The suits actually had airconditioning system in the backpack to keep the astronauts cool (it boiled water to the vacuum to take their heat away, and that of the sun- again because it's hard to cool down in a vacuum.)
* The surface of the moon is covered with dust. This dust was easily "kicked up", as shown by the astronauts. Why isn't there any dust settled on the space craft after the landing?
Actually that's pretty cool. If you look at the dust kicked up it goes in a tiny parabola away from the boot and then lands. It looks very different from what happens on earth due to the lack of air to hold it up. Any dust kicked up from the space craft would fly in a parabola and land directly away from the spacecraft. There's no easy way for it to come back towards the spacecraft, unless it bounced off a rock or something.
Life's a risk. Yucca is wayyyyy down the risk list though; and it's a lot lower down the list than where they are putting the waste at the moment.
That's not true. It certainly can be faster. In fact in a lot of cases the GC never runs, because the program ends before that point; and then using GC can indeed offer better performance- the shortest C equivalent usually involves hand releasing memory, and that can mean it ends up freeing memory that strictly doesn't need to be. It does depend on the programmer though.
In addition, memory allocation in some languages, like Java, is extraordinarily cheap, just bumping a pointer on by a length, and free can almost literally take no time at all (the VM can pick out the objects it wants to keep which may be very few, and the rest just get written over by the malloc.)
GCing in, say, Java has had the bejeezus optimised out of it, they are stunningly quick operations, and built into the language because they are so often called; more so than malloc and free, which is only a library.
If you think about it, that may well mean that the current Java implementation is faster than a C implementation you may happen to be using.
There can also be issues with C- it is possible for the heap to fragment, Java can defragment, C can't. I have worked on systems where fragmentation actually occured; and it crashes the system. In a fairly real sense Java is very much faster.
The percentage difference between malloc/free and GC is now small enough that the differences between individual programmer skills are bigger than the performance hit of GC- in other words, a lot of programmers out there are worse at doing memory handling than a well written GC.
Personally, I like that. I like that a lot.
If we pay our politicians a fairly decent wage, and we do, then there's no reason for them sticking their hand in corporate pockets or corporations sticking their hand in the politicians pockets.
Hint: there's tens or even hundreds of thousands of languages out there...
The girlfriends give him some 'help' too I expect.
There is, but it involves going to court.
But that is the big problem.
The whole patent system needs reforming. Patents are too easy to get, can be obtained for ideas that are trivial extensions of existing ideas (particularly in the software area)- and there's little or no downside to getting such a patent. So companies just play the percentages, get lots and lots of patents.
Meanwhile, individuals are rarely well advised to get patents- a patent is just a license to sue, but individuals often can't afford to sue anyway, so then the patent isn't worth the paper it is printed on.
There's also big problems with patents in that nobody really knows what a patent covers. Remember that patent that BT 'had' on the world wide web? It wasn't a slam dunk that they wouldn't win that one, it was close. Patents don't only cover the exact invention, they also cover similar inventions. And the web was sorta similar to their patent; but the court decided it was too far, in that case, a different court might have decided otherwise. That's what makes it all impossibly complex.
To make things worse, many software patents usually don't come with a useful description of how to actually do stuff, which is sad, since software can be documented by the sourcecode and printed.
That would be stupid- a patent application has to be written so that one 'skilled in the art' is able to reproduce the invention. Not doing that might well invalidate the patent.
VOIP P2P App.
That's the broken window fallacy.
It probably hasn't pushed up overall employment, at best it has employed software engineers instead of other forms of employment, and the end users have lost out with what else they could have bought with that money.
Yeah, but consider that those that have tracked the spam back to the people who actually paid for it to be done, have shown that Americans pay for the vast majority of spam mail shots. Those are the real culprits.
The fact that it is used in court, doesn't really mean that it does work, only that some lawyers managed to allow it to be used.
I'm not aware of any firm reproducible, scientific evidence that it actually works.
More like, pay them out of your spare change, whilst USG haemorrhage cash to NASA.
The entire Russian space program is a teeny, tiny fraction of the size of NASA.
Significant, invisible characters like tab? Just say no. And that's just the start of your problems...
I still have nightmares.
And Microsoft will say "Look, it's our fault".
Bingo, instant scapegoat.
Merely being responsible isn't enough; since finger pointing can't be employed if they aren't accountable. You can be responsible for fixing something without it being remotely your fault and without anyone blaming you. A mechanic to fix your car is responsible for fixing it, but they probably weren't accountable for it going wrong, unless they messed up a previous repair or something.
I think McGrath's point is that there's no difference between responsibility and liability so long as both hit your pocketbook.
No, that isn't his point and isn't true either, since the liability means it hits *their* pocketbook- they pay for your lost business. That's what liable means.
In an approximate sense the dust is always at the bottom of the well wherever it is on the surface.
However, the combined acceleration (of the gravity and rotation) on the mercury is the same as that of the dust, but the mercury forms a perpendicular surface to that force. So the mercury's curved surface supports the dust in place and the dust doesn't get thrown out to the rim as you might expect.
Another way of looking at the same thing is that the surface of the mercury forms what physicists call an isopotential - it has the same potential energy at each point on the surface. Incidentally, so is the surface of the earth, which is why the crust of the earth doesn't slide around due to it's rotation, even though the crust is sitting on a slippery liquid core.
Because the mercury is an isopotential the dust can't gain kinetic energy by moving around on the surface.
The dust would tend to float on the mercury. They could just occasionally filter the mercury to clean it up. They'd probably have to stop observing while they did this though- it's bound to create ripples on the surface.
And a statistical analysis of the digits of Pi would be useful because? :-)
Presumably he sends mail anyway, but the ISP will only turn off connections they aren't being paid money to turn a blind eye on; so in practice, just the DDOS zombies get hit by this.
When his honey pot receives mail it tracks down the mail to the sending machine, works back to the ISP and mails a report to the ISP admins in realtime. If the PC is own3d then the admins usually disconnect it from the net fairly soon until the owners have fixed it, so the machines can only be used for a short time.
Because the admins work in parallel on the problem worldwide, apparently it's making a noticeable dent in the DDOS population; he connected to IRC and listened to the spammers bemoaning the fact that their favourite toys are getting fixed too quickly. :-)
p.s. if it's that great, how come you don't show your email address publicly on Slashdot? :-)
Basically adults have more places to fit new knowledge into. Children have to learn everything from scratch, which is a bit harder. However children haven't already learnt a particular way to move their mouth, throat and tongue; so they learn accent very well. Adults have already learnt a different way to move them, and relearning this is harder.