MP3 is EXACTLY like listening to music through a screen door... one that lines up almost perfectly with the screen door built into the combination of your ear canal and brain. That's why it works so well.
Hey guys guess what. I just read that microsoft is releasing a special version of Vista that can save you 50 USD on the new operating system. All you have to do is bend over and kiss your own asshole while saying 3 hail bills whenever you login. Actually, there's some other COMPLETELY ARBITRARY BULLSHIT you have to do if you want to put more than 30 MP3s on your system or if you want to use your right mouse button in non-microsoft software products. Don't worry though, you can have unlimited WMA files, so long as they're DRM protected. It's ok though because they only protect files to help keep our costs down as consumers!
What happens when kids get to math subjects where trigonometric functions are used for more than just calculating the dimensions of geometric figures? How does this "spread" thing represent angles greater than 180 degrees without redefining what you are measuring, and how does this really make a persons life any easier unless someone tells you the spread as in the textbook chapter? If his explanation is to be taken as any sort of indication of how to measure the spread, then you might as well just walk off the dimensions of what you're measuring because you'll have to do that anyway to calculate it. How will you integrate problems that call for constant rotation using spread? This seems like trading a little bit of pain now for a lot more down the road, and I pray that it won't catch on in the US. If students are really having this much trouble with this subject then it should be introduced earlier and in smaller portions, not ignored. The last thing we need is for someone to take another slice out of the already anaemic math programs in our primary schools.
So there's this plane flying out of Poland, and they're trucking along and the pilot comes on the intercom as they pass near Paris. He says, "If you look to the right, you can see the Eiffel tower." So, of course, everyone looks out the right window. Not only that, but everyone on the left side gets up and moves to look out as well. In a freak coincidence, the plane hits a patch of turbulence at just that instant, begins bucking and pitching and crashes just outside the city. This is big news, obviously, and a major investigation is launched to determine the cause of such a horrific crash. They bring on aeronautical engineers, physicists, meteorologists, anybody to try to explain what happened--but no success. Finally, they bring on an electrical engineer to analyze the radio and recording equipment to try and give the team more clues. Immediately after hearing the situation explained to him, the EE puts his chin in his hand, thinks a second and says, "Aha! Of course the system became unstable, all the Poles were on the right hand side of the plane!"
I work for a company that does release specs, and I can think of a few pretty good reasons some companies shouldn't (from their standpoint anyway):
If you can make money without releasing specs, then why do it?
If you release specs, then you have to make sure that everything you sell fits that spec exactly. Pretty bad idea to voluntarily decrease the sellable ammount of what you produce by setting unecessary rules for yourself. I think this is this is generally more true for commodity hardware, whereas you generally see better documentation for more expensive items - commodity products are (economically) more sensitive to yield issues.
There will be lots of people who still don't get how to use the device, and you'll get all sorts of crap communication from people who think your spec is wrong, when really they just can't figure it out. Limited release of documentation ensures that, for the most part, only people with some sense get access to the stuff.
Now, speaking of intel, they're actually a hell of a lot better than VIA when it comes to documentation IMHO. I was working on a project last summer where I needed to access some of the chipset's boot-time functionality. Intel's documentation for their chipsets are easy to download, but VIA? Nothing unless they approve you first (and they probably wont unless you commit to buying a lot of product).
Well, their not using openfirmware doesn't mean they necessarily will use a PC compliant BIOS either. In so much as the point was that the BIOS would be different, this document offers no particular evidence to the contrary.
Everything I've read so far assumes that there will be some sort of software mechanism that can be broken that will prevent non-Apple x86 hardware from booting OS X, but why would apple NOT just use openfirmware like on the PPC Apple hardware? They could probably even get intel to use a different initialization vector (which is currently something like 16 or 64 bytes before the end of addressable memory -- this is where all x86 chips look for the first instruction in the bios; the bios is always addressed as the last 256K or however large the ROM is). This would make it physically impossible for non-apple intel processors to boot OS X. They may even be able to achieve this without modifying the processors by making the memory controller host/chipset that they use (and which will of course will only be available to them) translate anything that looks like a bios access to a different memory address space. Using openfirmware and either of these methods, Apple would make it damn near impossible to boot a system containing non-apple hardware, or even non-apple compliant video cards -- even if someone rips the x86 openfirmware ROMs. Now, you might say that someone else could BUILD a non-apple motherboard into one that utilizes the same trick, but you first need apple hardware to figure out what the trick is, and even then it would probably be more expensive to modify non-apple hardware than it would be to just buy apple hardware. And that's without even considering the hassle and risk involved, which is substantial.
I worked at Verizon as an intern a couple of years ago when this was first offered at a flat rate, and EVERYONE in my office (except for the underpaid interns, of course;-) ) jumped on the bandwagon and got the service. I never used it personally, but I heard a lot of great things about it, and never really heard any complaints. Re: VPN - they all used VPN to connect to the company intranet and work from home and on the road, so I know this works at least. As for other services over this connection, I'm not really sure, but I'm assuming they work fine as well.
Disclaimer: I no longer work for Verizon, so I have no vested interest or official viewpoint on this product, and I never worked in or near the business unit that offers this product; any formal inquiries about the service should be directed to them. Cheers.
My general philosophy when it comes to dealing with bosses/jobs is something like this: act like a particle. That means, find the lowest energy possible and sit there unless something, a new job for instance, fires you up (this doesn't apply to when you're actually working, of course).
Pretty much every boss I've had has been gracious about it, but if your old boss is making it difficult to leave on good terms, act like a particle. It's easier to just let it slide; not only that, but it's better too, and here's why: If your boss is really that nutso, you probably don't want to work for him again anyway. As for your co-workers and the company's clients, well, like you said, they know he's nuts too and I don't think they'll hold his idosyncrasies against you.
Also, religion is not subject to the same level of criticism and argument as scientific theory.
This fact, and the fact that the loudest people supposedly on the side of science rarely take advantage of it, was more or less the point of my post. This is not so much a response to evolution, either, as much as the people saying "yay for evolution, down with religion" (I paraphrased there) because they're talking about perhaps five completely unrelated things. I guess Bertrand Russell said what I meant to say best with the words, "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Bearing in mind that religious fanatics aren't the only kind of fanatics out there.
A lot of non religious people like to belittle others who blindly believe what people with degrees in divinity tell them. These persons get this authority because they blindly believe what people with degrees in chemistry, biology, or physics tell them.
Sadly, neither of these sets of people are any more enlightened or less gullible than the other. One can be convinced of anything within a reasonable limit because they have faith that what a certain authority tells them is true. The other group can be convinced of anything within a reasonable limit because they have the knowledge that what a certain authority tells them is true. Frankly, unless you independantly confirm what scientists tell you through your own experimentation, you're no better off than someone who believes someone elses interpretation of a religious text. You're possibly even worse off since scientists are more likely to be alive than your average religious figure and consequently more likely to spin the truth a little for personal gain. See also: dog and pony show.
Let me put it another way: would you consider either of the following people more or less foolish, and if so, who. Person one is someone who believes that something they read in a certain book is probably true without doing any investigation of their own. Person two is someone who believes what they read in a certain book is not only true, but can be proven, and is backed up by several independant, trustworthy, and living persons without doing any investigation of their own. Think about this next time you read a chapter in a math or physics text and instead of getting on slashdot or some other forum and proclaiming the superiority of your beliefs, prove it by backing up what you've read with independent evidence, or better yet, your own experimentation or logical proofs from more fundamental concepts.
One final thought: just because you don't believe in typical interpretations of religious texts doesn't mean that they don't contain a lot of really good advice. At least take the time to read what these books say before dogging them based on some nut's wacko interpretation of them.
GPS positioning is better. You just need to have a special decode key to utilize the higher precision signals that the satellites transmit in addition to the public signals. Only military/etc. get access to such decode keys. There is a (good?) reason for this: they don't want just anyone having precise tracking abilities. Since they're their satellites, they can do what they want... and I'm guessing what they want doesn't include providing a better GPS system or they would have released a public decoding mechanism by now.
The US kids are the smart ones here. While Czech/Korean/Other kids are busting their asses to score high on achievement tests and getting little to no funding compared to American schools, progeny of the United States are sitting on their asses not caring about achievement tests and getting people to throw more and more money at them so their grades improve!
Yikes, I wish I came up with a plan so clever while I was in High School!
Apple is one of the original three to develop the PowerPC architecture in the AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) alliance in the first place. I would imagine that their membership/input would be defacto in IBM's eyes. The fact that they aren't on the list to sign up doesn't mean they aren't already involved in this group, and it isn't really compelling evidence that Apple and IBM are set to merge.
Don't get me wrong, I think that'd be pretty cool and may happen. I just don't see this as very good evidence given the circumstances surrounding PPC and Apple's seminal involvement in the architecture.
For those of you who have asked questions about someone hacking into a computer and turning off the safety and shooting someone, or the safety malfuncitoning or something, did you ever consider that you can UNLOAD the rifle? If you UNLOAD the rifle then it's pretty hard to get killed by the rifle unless the guy includes a bludgeon function as well.
I'm by no means saying that this is a good idea, but if you go out into the field to work on equipment and don't have the presense of mind to unload the gun, then you're probably going the way of the dodo bird before too long anyway.
I understand that it's difficult to switch from one technology (gasoline) to another (electricity) without some intermediate steps (alternative fuel) to get the idiot masses used to the idea of doing things differently.
Actually, intermediate steps are there less for the idiot masses and more for the greedy asses. Oil companies get pissed off when people try and undermine their business overnight and, frankly, oil companies pull a lot of weight with a lot of people.
This is a big step forward in spintronics, not in quantum computing. Quantum computing is predicated on the idea that solutions to the Schrödinger equation can be a linear combination of several single-state equations; this is the case with any higher order differential equation. By detecting or explicitly setting the spin, you force the solution to be only one of these equations, and the quantum magic goes away. Great news for spintronics (using spin, not charge transporation to carry information), not news at all for quantum computing.
You mean when the job market for a particular type of job goes down, student enrollment does too? Amazing.
I think a better study would be, "The effects of cattle-prodding incomming male Computer Science students on their willingness to study a subject more conducive to their actually finding a job."
Everyone knows that all sports have to lend to easy marketing (like big hoods to paint logos on, or people who use shoes and can do commercials for them).
The white board companies just don't need spokespersons . . .
Slashdot Mirror
That's not irony, it's karma.
MP3 is EXACTLY like listening to music through a screen door ... one that lines up almost perfectly with the screen door built into the combination of your ear canal and brain. That's why it works so well.
Hey guys guess what. I just read that microsoft is releasing a special version of Vista that can save you 50 USD on the new operating system. All you have to do is bend over and kiss your own asshole while saying 3 hail bills whenever you login. Actually, there's some other COMPLETELY ARBITRARY BULLSHIT you have to do if you want to put more than 30 MP3s on your system or if you want to use your right mouse button in non-microsoft software products. Don't worry though, you can have unlimited WMA files, so long as they're DRM protected. It's ok though because they only protect files to help keep our costs down as consumers!
What happens when kids get to math subjects where trigonometric functions are used for more than just calculating the dimensions of geometric figures? How does this "spread" thing represent angles greater than 180 degrees without redefining what you are measuring, and how does this really make a persons life any easier unless someone tells you the spread as in the textbook chapter? If his explanation is to be taken as any sort of indication of how to measure the spread, then you might as well just walk off the dimensions of what you're measuring because you'll have to do that anyway to calculate it. How will you integrate problems that call for constant rotation using spread? This seems like trading a little bit of pain now for a lot more down the road, and I pray that it won't catch on in the US. If students are really having this much trouble with this subject then it should be introduced earlier and in smaller portions, not ignored. The last thing we need is for someone to take another slice out of the already anaemic math programs in our primary schools.
That's only MechE's. EEs build a self-optimizing system in MatLab and allow the model to converge to the ball's volume.
So there's this plane flying out of Poland, and they're trucking along and the pilot comes on the intercom as they pass near Paris. He says, "If you look to the right, you can see the Eiffel tower." So, of course, everyone looks out the right window. Not only that, but everyone on the left side gets up and moves to look out as well. In a freak coincidence, the plane hits a patch of turbulence at just that instant, begins bucking and pitching and crashes just outside the city. This is big news, obviously, and a major investigation is launched to determine the cause of such a horrific crash. They bring on aeronautical engineers, physicists, meteorologists, anybody to try to explain what happened--but no success. Finally, they bring on an electrical engineer to analyze the radio and recording equipment to try and give the team more clues. Immediately after hearing the situation explained to him, the EE puts his chin in his hand, thinks a second and says, "Aha! Of course the system became unstable, all the Poles were on the right hand side of the plane!"
Reference for an explanation (sort of).
- If you can make money without releasing specs, then why do it?
- If you release specs, then you have to make sure that everything you sell fits that spec exactly. Pretty bad idea to voluntarily decrease the sellable ammount of what you produce by setting unecessary rules for yourself. I think this is this is generally more true for commodity hardware, whereas you generally see better documentation for more expensive items - commodity products are (economically) more sensitive to yield issues.
- There will be lots of people who still don't get how to use the device, and you'll get all sorts of crap communication from people who think your spec is wrong, when really they just can't figure it out. Limited release of documentation ensures that, for the most part, only people with some sense get access to the stuff.
Now, speaking of intel, they're actually a hell of a lot better than VIA when it comes to documentation IMHO. I was working on a project last summer where I needed to access some of the chipset's boot-time functionality. Intel's documentation for their chipsets are easy to download, but VIA? Nothing unless they approve you first (and they probably wont unless you commit to buying a lot of product).Well, their not using openfirmware doesn't mean they necessarily will use a PC compliant BIOS either. In so much as the point was that the BIOS would be different, this document offers no particular evidence to the contrary.
Everything I've read so far assumes that there will be some sort of software mechanism that can be broken that will prevent non-Apple x86 hardware from booting OS X, but why would apple NOT just use openfirmware like on the PPC Apple hardware? They could probably even get intel to use a different initialization vector (which is currently something like 16 or 64 bytes before the end of addressable memory -- this is where all x86 chips look for the first instruction in the bios; the bios is always addressed as the last 256K or however large the ROM is). This would make it physically impossible for non-apple intel processors to boot OS X. They may even be able to achieve this without modifying the processors by making the memory controller host/chipset that they use (and which will of course will only be available to them) translate anything that looks like a bios access to a different memory address space. Using openfirmware and either of these methods, Apple would make it damn near impossible to boot a system containing non-apple hardware, or even non-apple compliant video cards -- even if someone rips the x86 openfirmware ROMs. Now, you might say that someone else could BUILD a non-apple motherboard into one that utilizes the same trick, but you first need apple hardware to figure out what the trick is, and even then it would probably be more expensive to modify non-apple hardware than it would be to just buy apple hardware. And that's without even considering the hassle and risk involved, which is substantial.
I worked at Verizon as an intern a couple of years ago when this was first offered at a flat rate, and EVERYONE in my office (except for the underpaid interns, of course ;-) ) jumped on the bandwagon and got the service. I never used it personally, but I heard a lot of great things about it, and never really heard any complaints. Re: VPN - they all used VPN to connect to the company intranet and work from home and on the road, so I know this works at least. As for other services over this connection, I'm not really sure, but I'm assuming they work fine as well.
Disclaimer: I no longer work for Verizon, so I have no vested interest or official viewpoint on this product, and I never worked in or near the business unit that offers this product; any formal inquiries about the service should be directed to them. Cheers.
My general philosophy when it comes to dealing with bosses/jobs is something like this: act like a particle. That means, find the lowest energy possible and sit there unless something, a new job for instance, fires you up (this doesn't apply to when you're actually working, of course).
Pretty much every boss I've had has been gracious about it, but if your old boss is making it difficult to leave on good terms, act like a particle. It's easier to just let it slide; not only that, but it's better too, and here's why: If your boss is really that nutso, you probably don't want to work for him again anyway. As for your co-workers and the company's clients, well, like you said, they know he's nuts too and I don't think they'll hold his idosyncrasies against you.
Another page that outlines the hoax, figured I'd post it for the hell of it.
Also, religion is not subject to the same level of criticism and argument as scientific theory.
This fact, and the fact that the loudest people supposedly on the side of science rarely take advantage of it, was more or less the point of my post. This is not so much a response to evolution, either, as much as the people saying "yay for evolution, down with religion" (I paraphrased there) because they're talking about perhaps five completely unrelated things. I guess Bertrand Russell said what I meant to say best with the words, "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Bearing in mind that religious fanatics aren't the only kind of fanatics out there.
A lot of non religious people like to belittle others who blindly believe what people with degrees in divinity tell them. These persons get this authority because they blindly believe what people with degrees in chemistry, biology, or physics tell them.
Sadly, neither of these sets of people are any more enlightened or less gullible than the other. One can be convinced of anything within a reasonable limit because they have faith that what a certain authority tells them is true. The other group can be convinced of anything within a reasonable limit because they have the knowledge that what a certain authority tells them is true. Frankly, unless you independantly confirm what scientists tell you through your own experimentation, you're no better off than someone who believes someone elses interpretation of a religious text. You're possibly even worse off since scientists are more likely to be alive than your average religious figure and consequently more likely to spin the truth a little for personal gain. See also: dog and pony show.
Let me put it another way: would you consider either of the following people more or less foolish, and if so, who. Person one is someone who believes that something they read in a certain book is probably true without doing any investigation of their own. Person two is someone who believes what they read in a certain book is not only true, but can be proven, and is backed up by several independant, trustworthy, and living persons without doing any investigation of their own. Think about this next time you read a chapter in a math or physics text and instead of getting on slashdot or some other forum and proclaiming the superiority of your beliefs, prove it by backing up what you've read with independent evidence, or better yet, your own experimentation or logical proofs from more fundamental concepts.
One final thought: just because you don't believe in typical interpretations of religious texts doesn't mean that they don't contain a lot of really good advice. At least take the time to read what these books say before dogging them based on some nut's wacko interpretation of them.
GPS positioning is better. You just need to have a special decode key to utilize the higher precision signals that the satellites transmit in addition to the public signals. Only military/etc. get access to such decode keys. There is a (good?) reason for this: they don't want just anyone having precise tracking abilities. Since they're their satellites, they can do what they want ... and I'm guessing what they want doesn't include providing a better GPS system or they would have released a public decoding mechanism by now.
Don't you guys get it?
The US kids are the smart ones here. While Czech/Korean/Other kids are busting their asses to score high on achievement tests and getting little to no funding compared to American schools, progeny of the United States are sitting on their asses not caring about achievement tests and getting people to throw more and more money at them so their grades improve!
Yikes, I wish I came up with a plan so clever while I was in High School!
Apple is one of the original three to develop the PowerPC architecture in the AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) alliance in the first place. I would imagine that their membership/input would be defacto in IBM's eyes. The fact that they aren't on the list to sign up doesn't mean they aren't already involved in this group, and it isn't really compelling evidence that Apple and IBM are set to merge.
Don't get me wrong, I think that'd be pretty cool and may happen. I just don't see this as very good evidence given the circumstances surrounding PPC and Apple's seminal involvement in the architecture.
For those of you who have asked questions about someone hacking into a computer and turning off the safety and shooting someone, or the safety malfuncitoning or something, did you ever consider that you can UNLOAD the rifle? If you UNLOAD the rifle then it's pretty hard to get killed by the rifle unless the guy includes a bludgeon function as well.
I'm by no means saying that this is a good idea, but if you go out into the field to work on equipment and don't have the presense of mind to unload the gun, then you're probably going the way of the dodo bird before too long anyway.
I understand that it's difficult to switch from one technology (gasoline) to another (electricity) without some intermediate steps (alternative fuel) to get the idiot masses used to the idea of doing things differently.
Actually, intermediate steps are there less for the idiot masses and more for the greedy asses. Oil companies get pissed off when people try and undermine their business overnight and, frankly, oil companies pull a lot of weight with a lot of people.
This is a big step forward in spintronics, not in quantum computing. Quantum computing is predicated on the idea that solutions to the Schrödinger equation can be a linear combination of several single-state equations; this is the case with any higher order differential equation. By detecting or explicitly setting the spin, you force the solution to be only one of these equations, and the quantum magic goes away. Great news for spintronics (using spin, not charge transporation to carry information), not news at all for quantum computing.
One wonders why someone that can't afford food would have spent money on a computer on which to play these games.
Yes, one often wonders, "why," but very rarely, "if".
You mean when the job market for a particular type of job goes down, student enrollment does too? Amazing.
I think a better study would be, "The effects of cattle-prodding incomming male Computer Science students on their willingness to study a subject more conducive to their actually finding a job."
So does VCU, but from scratch and without off-the-shelf components. Plus they win the competition.
Disclaimer: I'm a VCU EE student, but not associated with this project.
"s/credit/money/;s/invetions/sitting on their ass/"
Everyone knows that all sports have to lend to easy marketing (like big hoods to paint logos on, or people who use shoes and can do commercials for them).
The white board companies just don't need spokespersons . . .