More often than you might initially suppose you can get away with not providing a SSN.
First off, just leave the line blank, and don't comment on it. Often people just assume you've filled out their paperwork and don't actually check. You can also enter a number starting with 9.
If anyone notices and complains, ask what they need it for. Demand to know why they are reporting your lease to the Social Security Administration. When they look at you strangely, explain that's the only reason they need your SSN. Continue in this vein. Offer to leave a larger deposit, or otherwise sidestep the issues they bring up as justification for needing your SSN. Ask about the business' data retention, protection, and life-cycle policies. Cheerfully give them your SSN upon receipt of a signed and notarized letter from the president, CEO, CFO, or other high-up in the company personally guaranteeing the safety of your SSN, with appropriate financial penalties for its unauthorized use or dissemination. Note: I've never gotten such a letter, though that approach has worked in other situations.
If you're dealing with a small business, and steps 1 and 2 don't help, you pretty much have to cave or go elsewhere. If dealing with a larger business where the people you antagonized in step 2 won't actually be processing the paperwork, give a "SSN" that starts with 9. It's not a SSN, so you're not committing fraud, you're simply making use of existing law allowing pseudonyms and such for privacy. This assumes, of course, that you're not hiding past bankruptcies, or intending to commit fraud in the future, etc.
Most folks don't even use your SSN; of those that do, few actually need it; of those that do, few consider it important enough to bother with if you put up a fuss.
IANAL, so I don't know if that's really the case, but such promises (contracts with the world, as it were) were brought up in the discussions of Jack Thompson being a petulant asshole. Since there's no law against asshattery (asshaberdashery?), I suspect it relies more on truth in advertising laws (advertise one policy, implement another), but the effect is the same. A law saying you have to actually abide by your privacy policy ought to be redundant, and I'll be more disappointed than usual if that's what the feds come up with. If all they're going to do is reiterate existing law, they'd better at least attach a hefty fine to encourage compliance.
Why not? It has LEDs providing the backlighting, and liquid crystals gating the subpixels. The LEDs aren't firing separately for each pixel, they're just providing a more even, higher-quality, longer-life, and hugely more expensive source of light than the fluorescent tubes more commonly used. The result is more vibrant colors, more even contrast, and no hot pockets in the corners of the screen. All of which are things I'd certainly want if I were spending $6k on a display.
Actually, gray-to-gray times are typically much longer than black-to-white times. The reason is that a sharp black-to-white (or white-to-black) transition involves a relatively large voltage change, which causes a quick change in the LCD. Changing from one gray to another involves a proportionally lesser voltage change, which causes a slower transition.
These faster displays deliberately overshoot the mark, at least in terms of the voltages they supply. The point is to get the fastest possible transition by banging the pixel hard in the direction it's supposed to go, and then back the voltage off to the correct level approximately when the pixel has managed to change to its final opacity. It's analogous to giving a big crate a hard shove to get it moving in the direction you want. The underlying pixel chemistry isn't that much better, but this fancier driver circuitry can compensate.
> Are you suggesting that corporate entities now have the same claims on our government as individual human citizens?
Yes.
Well, perhaps not the same claims, but equally valid ones. Individuals pay taxes to secure safe foods, defended borders, fire and police protection, public education, roads, free and fair markets, etc. Business pay taxes to secure many of those same things. These are things which government can provide for in a more efficient manner than individuals or companies by themselves. Taxation with no commensurate benefit is unfair, and while it sounds whiny, I think it's a reasonable standard to apply. Just as citizens have a right to claim entitlement to state services in exchange for tax monies, so do corporations.
I try to avoid strictly legal arguments because I don't have the training to comport myself well in such spheres, but the treatment of corporations almost like citizens (they can own property, enter into contracts, must pay taxes, etc.) is, IIRC, about 100 years old and signalled a fairly large shift in the business climate. Some privileges are restrained, but most are available to corporations as to individuals.
Clearly I wasn't making a legal argument. Legally, one hopes the Onion is in the wrong and they're legitimately in hot water over it. I don't think that's really relevant though. And don't try to argue that illegal => immoral, or even that illegal => should-be-prosecuted. If "The Onion didn't adhere to the law. Period, end of discussion." is the entirety of your argument, you'd better go turn yourself in. This isn't simply a matter of enforcing laws that are on the books because they're there and they should be enforced. There aren't enough law-enforcement officers in the whole world to accomplish that in just the USA, and it's not in the best interests of society or government to try to operate in that way anyway, so there's little point in trying.
This isn't a trademark case where enforcement or lack of same has any impact on the status of the mark in question. I highly doubt the government burning a bunch of taxpayer money pursuing this case and the Onion burning a bunch of advertisor money defending themselves is going to alter the public perception of government seals. So I'm left wondering what exactly the point is. Obviously what's done is done, and while strict enforcement might make a few people a bit more careful in the future, it's really quite pointless. There are plenty of examples (google image it) of slightly-altered and in fact not-at-all altered presidential seals being used in various contexts. The laws against this sort of behavior do have a purpose, but 1. they're not being uniformly applied; 2. they haven't led to an absolute respect of the seal; 3. lack of enforcement hasn't led to a proliferation of use of the seal in wrong contexts.
So while you claim I just don't get that it's illegal, the fact is that I do realize it's illegal. That's just not the black and white issue you'd like to think it is. Law enforcement like anything else is a tradeoff, and there's way more benefit to be purchased elsewhere at lesser cost. So before you spout off about laws which have no business existing in the first place because the material they cover is amply covered by prior laws against impersonation and fraud, perhaps you'd consider the larger context in which this action takes place.
Let's see. NASA gets it. You and the president seem to be a bit behind though. Let me deliver a quick refresher here.
The Onion paid for that presidential seal. As did I. And in all liklihood you as well. Those of us who pay taxes are entitled to the fruits of those taxes. While many in government clearly don't agree with me, some do. To the point that the various state and federal open-records laws attempt to codify the notion that government is accountable to the people, and its various products should be available for public examination and/or consumption. NASA spends billions of dollars producing pretty pictures of far-away things, and then they spend even more money keeping them up on fairly well-organized web servers for the public. This is as it should be.
The idea that I paid for the creation of a work which I then have no right to use, even as satire, breaks several laws and any reasonable ethical code.
The IE / FF split is actually pretty representative of the world as a whole. Other recent data points show about 85:10 split for IE / FF.
Of/. users who have visited my site from my sig, the split is almost exactly the opposite, 8:75 IE / FF. That's a somewhat higher percentage of FF users than non-slashdot traffic, but IE is in the minority month after month.
Wee bit bigger than that
on
Deep in the Core
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0210426:linkedarticl e says the "enclosed point mass" (read: black hole) has a mass of 3.7 million solar masses, +- 1.5M solar masses. Not 2M solar masses, as the article summary indicates. For most people, myself included, this is a meaningless distinction, but in the interest of scientific accuracy, I thought I'd mention it.
Ultimately it's not pure price (initial cost) that will determine the success or failure of alternative lighting. Cost is obviously a factor, but there are enough situations where the up-front costs are secondary to the lifetime costs in determining whether a purchase will be made. And in many situations the replacement cost includes substantial extra costs (manpower, equipment, etc) over and above the light's purchase price, which make fluorescents and LED lighting relatively attractive.
As yet, LED lighting has certain problems other than its stupendous cost. In high-power situations, such as is required for room lighting, LEDs actually aren't more efficient than long-bulb fluorescents. They still last quite a bit longer and produce nicer light, but not enough to justify the cost. Assuming the latest Nichia and Luxeon LEDs represent an improvement on past technology that can be sustained, the future for LED lighting looks good. Other than price, the lights have little to hold them back. They're as good as or better than existing technology in nearly every respect, but the technology is still young, whereas incandescent and fluorescent lighting are both mature technologies with relatively less room for future improvement.
Unless this new technology exhibits a greater efficiency, has greater longevity, is substantially cheaper to produce, or exhibits some other dramatic improvement over current LED lighting, I don't see how it's really relevant. It may become so in the future but so far it looks like an interesting laboratory result, not an interesting lighting development.
It's less a matter of design flaws as marketing flaws, I think. The P4 sucks in a lot of ways, but it's also very well-done in a lot of ways. The big problem is not so much netburst as it is Intel's inertia. Intel's working on a way to transition their product matrix from netburst on the desktop and in server space to something based on the pentium-M. The faster pentium-Ms beat the fastest P4s hands down in most benchmarks, but there are no good desktop chipsets for it yet, etc. Eventually Intel will release a dual-core P-M-based design, hopefully with an on-die memory controller, and then the Opteron will finally have some real competition.
Even if Intel eventually hits a process wall, they'll still be able to rest on their huge manufacturing capacity. For the past 5ish years, Intel has been building bigger chips than AMD, mostly in terms of L2 cache. It's not necessarily the best way to improve performance, but it's fairly easy, and leverages Intel's manufacturing strengths. Intel can afford to crank out dies 50-100% larger than an equivalent AMD die, and still make money at it, and still not run out of capacity. The reason Intel has been having shortages of late in the chipset arena is not lack of capacity but bad capacity management. They mis-read the market 3ish months ago and are paying for it now.
Anyway, here's hoping AMD's 65nm transition goes as smoothly as their 90nm one.
The situation (Intel's, not necessarily the difference) should change RSN when Intel's 65nm process comes online. Looking at the huge lead AMD has right now, I don't see how Intel can beat them in both power and performance anytime soon unless they're willing to add a few hundred more pins to their sockets to accomodate on-die memory controller(s). I doubt Intel will do that. I also doubt they'll come back a bit from the 150W/CPU these Paxville chips crank out, so they'll be using the process headroom for higher clocks and/or larger caches.
Ultimately an on-die memory controller is the only way to bridge the increasingly large gap between the CPU and RAM. Intel's managed amazingly low latencies to RAM given that they've got an entire extra bus and chip to run through, but they're still ~50% higher than AMD's. The netburst architecture was supposed to be insensitive to RAM latencies but Intel is not keeping up in the bandwidth department either, and it's clear that these CPUs are suffering from a lack of RAM bandwidth (twice the processing power per chip, but no increase in bandwidth).
The blurb makes it sound like this is essentially a way to quickly switch the hardware from one AP to another, buffering packets until the hardware is connected to the proper AP. I'm curious how efficient this process is, as there's bound to be some switching latency. For low-bandwidth non-latency-bound tasks, I assume it's virtually seamless, but I wonder how non-latency-bound you'd need a task to be before it starts becoming problematic.
Wouldn't a proper software-defined radio be the real solution, allowing connections to 2 APs simultaneously with only one antenna? Obviously Microsoft's working with what they've got, and it's certainly an interesting capability, but I'd rather see real effort on SDRs, particularly the regulatory issues therewith.
Without loss of generality, assume the different-weight ball is heavier.
Put 16 balls on each plate. One plate will sink: it contains the heavy ball.
Of the 16 balls on the heavy plate, put 4 on each plate (12 each) and set aside 4.
If the 3 plates remain even, the heavy ball is one of the discarded 4. If one of the plates sinks, the heavy ball is one of the 4 on that plate.
In either case, take the group of 4 which contains the heavy ball. Balance 3 of the 4. If the plates remain even, the 4th ball is heavy; if one of the plates dips, it contains the heavy ball.
I didn't say the state is not providing anything in exchange for my tax dollars. I said this proposed law seems not to provide anything in return. The income being generated is already taxed, almost certainly twice. I fail to see how auctioneer training is relevant to eBay posting. And I don't believe that "surety bonding" will either make people feel safer buying from or selling through North Dakota state-licensed eBay consignment shops, nor will it make them actually safer.
What's particularly irksome is that this represents triple-taxing of the transaction. eBay consignment shops need a POP because people are more comfortable with that, and shipping an unsold item to sell it and then ship it again is just too expensive. So the business is paying taxes in the state in which it is incorporated. And possibly in all states in which its shops operate (I'm not familiar with the tax situation there). And certainly the individuals who eventually receive the shops' profits are taxed on income. The double-taxation of corporate income is reasonable because the corporate tax rate is low and incorporation provides concrete advantages which it is reasonable to pay for. I really don't see how this third layer of taxation is anything but an attempt by the states to suck a little more money out of the population without providing anything in exchange.
500cd/m2 max brightness implies.5ucd/m2 min brightness. I'd say that's pretty dim. Even if you figure the specs are inflated 10x from normal every-day contrast ratios you would see on real images that's 5ucd/m2, nice and dark. Which is pretty amazing, and way better than the claimed 1000:1 contrast ratio you can get today, and the real 300:1 or so that these panels deliver at sane brightnesses. Of course, the real news would be if this panel could also offer 10-12bits per channel of real actual comes-out-of-the-panel color resolution, as that would simultaneously solve half the current problems with display tech.
The article sort of mumbled through why I should care. Does anyone know? Do these logic gates offer the promise of smaller, faster, cheaper, or lower-power CPUs? Some combination of the above? Do they allow the creation of computers of a type not practical before? Where's the beef?
I majored in computer engineering. There were some excellent professors, who could explain topics, make them interesting, and genuinely add material that I couldn't get from a book. There were also TA-taught classes, some of which were good; some not. And there were classes taught by profs who were teaching because they had to in order to spend the rest of the day in the lab and it showed.
I also have a spanish major. While I doubt any of the profs that sucked were running off to a lab, they certainly existed. And there were also excellent professors as well.
At any reasonably large school there will be alternatives. And no, I don't mean performance art. For every TA who admits he's just arrived in this country 2 weeks ago (and has the "can extract topic but doesn't actually understand questions" grasp of English to prove it), there's a TA with a genuine flair for teaching and a sufficient command of English to communicate. Everyone's different; if your brain doesn't deal well with accents and needs an unpopular teaching style to succeed, you'll have (not-insurmountable) problems. But most people can arrange to find classes and professors / TAs that work for them. Intro classes are great for this - there are often 4 or more TAs working with a given professor, giving you plenty of opportunity to pick one that you can live with.
The system's hardly perfect, but it's neither as bad as the article suggests nor as isolated to engineering.
The example's contrived. I don't like contrived examples unless they illustrate an important principle, which this one doesn't really do. Such data loss has already started happening even in my own life, but I don't think that's a bad thing. The fairly minimal effort required to keep data up-to-date is a natural impediment to a policy of keeping everything. Data which isn't worth a new hard drive and an rsync dies. Data which isn't worth the effort of importing and re-saving in a newer format dies. This isn't bad. It's not new either.
Data goes the way of the dodo not because of technological obstacles, but because of a decision made or not made to preserve it. We don't know how the great pyramids were built, the obelisks shaped and erected, etc. not because there was no way to preserve that information, but because it wasn't important enough to justify the effort. The same is true of 10-yr-old WP documents I made to bill people when I mowed lawns for spending money, or a million other things that get saved or trashed every day.
If you're serious about the problem, then it's not a technical hurdle. Data storage is cheap. Emulators are good. Batch document conversion is possible. The problem, if you're willing to call it that is that the benefit has to outweigh the cost. Lowering the cost of data preservation only increases the cost of data searching and real information retrieval. And very quickly it becomes a philosophical argument about the value of preserving irrelevant knowledge in a world that has moved on. Yet the argument is couched in terms of data storage and manipulation which is really the tiniest corner of the issue.
A few tests on the archive.org'd copies of/. for the past few years indicates that the number hovered between 88 and "sorry, your document contains bytes that are not valid UTF-8 characters". Actually a lot closer to the latter than the former, as I only found one cached date that would work, out of the dozen or so I tried.
40kV isn't hard to build up. In fact, you can safely play with hundreds of kV, and make some really nice sparks. The 'starting things on fire' number you're looking for is power. And energy. You need to be able to transfer enough energy into an object that it will reach its combustion temperature, and you need to be quick enough at it that the object doesn't shed the energy to nearby objects in the meantime. It takes a lot of energy (as compared to the energy content in your average static 'zap') to set carpet fibers aflame, or even melt them.
Not to say that it didn't happen, of course. It's just not well-reported, and is clearly not terribly common.
Slashdot Mirror
More often than you might initially suppose you can get away with not providing a SSN.
First off, just leave the line blank, and don't comment on it. Often people just assume you've filled out their paperwork and don't actually check. You can also enter a number starting with 9.
If anyone notices and complains, ask what they need it for. Demand to know why they are reporting your lease to the Social Security Administration. When they look at you strangely, explain that's the only reason they need your SSN. Continue in this vein. Offer to leave a larger deposit, or otherwise sidestep the issues they bring up as justification for needing your SSN. Ask about the business' data retention, protection, and life-cycle policies. Cheerfully give them your SSN upon receipt of a signed and notarized letter from the president, CEO, CFO, or other high-up in the company personally guaranteeing the safety of your SSN, with appropriate financial penalties for its unauthorized use or dissemination. Note: I've never gotten such a letter, though that approach has worked in other situations.
If you're dealing with a small business, and steps 1 and 2 don't help, you pretty much have to cave or go elsewhere. If dealing with a larger business where the people you antagonized in step 2 won't actually be processing the paperwork, give a "SSN" that starts with 9. It's not a SSN, so you're not committing fraud, you're simply making use of existing law allowing pseudonyms and such for privacy. This assumes, of course, that you're not hiding past bankruptcies, or intending to commit fraud in the future, etc.
Most folks don't even use your SSN; of those that do, few actually need it; of those that do, few consider it important enough to bother with if you put up a fuss.
IANAL, so I don't know if that's really the case, but such promises (contracts with the world, as it were) were brought up in the discussions of Jack Thompson being a petulant asshole. Since there's no law against asshattery (asshaberdashery?), I suspect it relies more on truth in advertising laws (advertise one policy, implement another), but the effect is the same. A law saying you have to actually abide by your privacy policy ought to be redundant, and I'll be more disappointed than usual if that's what the feds come up with. If all they're going to do is reiterate existing law, they'd better at least attach a hefty fine to encourage compliance.
It can't be a LED-based LCD.
Why not? It has LEDs providing the backlighting, and liquid crystals gating the subpixels. The LEDs aren't firing separately for each pixel, they're just providing a more even, higher-quality, longer-life, and hugely more expensive source of light than the fluorescent tubes more commonly used. The result is more vibrant colors, more even contrast, and no hot pockets in the corners of the screen. All of which are things I'd certainly want if I were spending $6k on a display.
Actually, gray-to-gray times are typically much longer than black-to-white times. The reason is that a sharp black-to-white (or white-to-black) transition involves a relatively large voltage change, which causes a quick change in the LCD. Changing from one gray to another involves a proportionally lesser voltage change, which causes a slower transition.
These faster displays deliberately overshoot the mark, at least in terms of the voltages they supply. The point is to get the fastest possible transition by banging the pixel hard in the direction it's supposed to go, and then back the voltage off to the correct level approximately when the pixel has managed to change to its final opacity. It's analogous to giving a big crate a hard shove to get it moving in the direction you want. The underlying pixel chemistry isn't that much better, but this fancier driver circuitry can compensate.
> Are you suggesting that corporate entities now have the same claims on our government as individual human citizens?
Yes.
Well, perhaps not the same claims, but equally valid ones. Individuals pay taxes to secure safe foods, defended borders, fire and police protection, public education, roads, free and fair markets, etc. Business pay taxes to secure many of those same things. These are things which government can provide for in a more efficient manner than individuals or companies by themselves. Taxation with no commensurate benefit is unfair, and while it sounds whiny, I think it's a reasonable standard to apply. Just as citizens have a right to claim entitlement to state services in exchange for tax monies, so do corporations.
I try to avoid strictly legal arguments because I don't have the training to comport myself well in such spheres, but the treatment of corporations almost like citizens (they can own property, enter into contracts, must pay taxes, etc.) is, IIRC, about 100 years old and signalled a fairly large shift in the business climate. Some privileges are restrained, but most are available to corporations as to individuals.
Clearly I wasn't making a legal argument. Legally, one hopes the Onion is in the wrong and they're legitimately in hot water over it. I don't think that's really relevant though. And don't try to argue that illegal => immoral, or even that illegal => should-be-prosecuted. If "The Onion didn't adhere to the law. Period, end of discussion." is the entirety of your argument, you'd better go turn yourself in. This isn't simply a matter of enforcing laws that are on the books because they're there and they should be enforced. There aren't enough law-enforcement officers in the whole world to accomplish that in just the USA, and it's not in the best interests of society or government to try to operate in that way anyway, so there's little point in trying.
This isn't a trademark case where enforcement or lack of same has any impact on the status of the mark in question. I highly doubt the government burning a bunch of taxpayer money pursuing this case and the Onion burning a bunch of advertisor money defending themselves is going to alter the public perception of government seals. So I'm left wondering what exactly the point is. Obviously what's done is done, and while strict enforcement might make a few people a bit more careful in the future, it's really quite pointless. There are plenty of examples (google image it) of slightly-altered and in fact not-at-all altered presidential seals being used in various contexts. The laws against this sort of behavior do have a purpose, but 1. they're not being uniformly applied; 2. they haven't led to an absolute respect of the seal; 3. lack of enforcement hasn't led to a proliferation of use of the seal in wrong contexts.
So while you claim I just don't get that it's illegal, the fact is that I do realize it's illegal. That's just not the black and white issue you'd like to think it is. Law enforcement like anything else is a tradeoff, and there's way more benefit to be purchased elsewhere at lesser cost. So before you spout off about laws which have no business existing in the first place because the material they cover is amply covered by prior laws against impersonation and fraud, perhaps you'd consider the larger context in which this action takes place.
Let's see. NASA gets it. You and the president seem to be a bit behind though. Let me deliver a quick refresher here.
The Onion paid for that presidential seal. As did I. And in all liklihood you as well. Those of us who pay taxes are entitled to the fruits of those taxes. While many in government clearly don't agree with me, some do. To the point that the various state and federal open-records laws attempt to codify the notion that government is accountable to the people, and its various products should be available for public examination and/or consumption. NASA spends billions of dollars producing pretty pictures of far-away things, and then they spend even more money keeping them up on fairly well-organized web servers for the public. This is as it should be.
The idea that I paid for the creation of a work which I then have no right to use, even as satire, breaks several laws and any reasonable ethical code.
The IE / FF split is actually pretty representative of the world as a whole. Other recent data points show about 85:10 split for IE / FF.
/. users who have visited my site from my sig, the split is almost exactly the opposite, 8:75 IE / FF. That's a somewhat higher percentage of FF users than non-slashdot traffic, but IE is in the minority month after month.
Of
The http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0210426:linkedarticl e says the "enclosed point mass" (read: black hole) has a mass of 3.7 million solar masses, +- 1.5M solar masses. Not 2M solar masses, as the article summary indicates. For most people, myself included, this is a meaningless distinction, but in the interest of scientific accuracy, I thought I'd mention it.
Ultimately it's not pure price (initial cost) that will determine the success or failure of alternative lighting. Cost is obviously a factor, but there are enough situations where the up-front costs are secondary to the lifetime costs in determining whether a purchase will be made. And in many situations the replacement cost includes substantial extra costs (manpower, equipment, etc) over and above the light's purchase price, which make fluorescents and LED lighting relatively attractive.
As yet, LED lighting has certain problems other than its stupendous cost. In high-power situations, such as is required for room lighting, LEDs actually aren't more efficient than long-bulb fluorescents. They still last quite a bit longer and produce nicer light, but not enough to justify the cost. Assuming the latest Nichia and Luxeon LEDs represent an improvement on past technology that can be sustained, the future for LED lighting looks good. Other than price, the lights have little to hold them back. They're as good as or better than existing technology in nearly every respect, but the technology is still young, whereas incandescent and fluorescent lighting are both mature technologies with relatively less room for future improvement.
Unless this new technology exhibits a greater efficiency, has greater longevity, is substantially cheaper to produce, or exhibits some other dramatic improvement over current LED lighting, I don't see how it's really relevant. It may become so in the future but so far it looks like an interesting laboratory result, not an interesting lighting development.
It's less a matter of design flaws as marketing flaws, I think. The P4 sucks in a lot of ways, but it's also very well-done in a lot of ways. The big problem is not so much netburst as it is Intel's inertia. Intel's working on a way to transition their product matrix from netburst on the desktop and in server space to something based on the pentium-M. The faster pentium-Ms beat the fastest P4s hands down in most benchmarks, but there are no good desktop chipsets for it yet, etc. Eventually Intel will release a dual-core P-M-based design, hopefully with an on-die memory controller, and then the Opteron will finally have some real competition.
Even if Intel eventually hits a process wall, they'll still be able to rest on their huge manufacturing capacity. For the past 5ish years, Intel has been building bigger chips than AMD, mostly in terms of L2 cache. It's not necessarily the best way to improve performance, but it's fairly easy, and leverages Intel's manufacturing strengths. Intel can afford to crank out dies 50-100% larger than an equivalent AMD die, and still make money at it, and still not run out of capacity. The reason Intel has been having shortages of late in the chipset arena is not lack of capacity but bad capacity management. They mis-read the market 3ish months ago and are paying for it now.
Anyway, here's hoping AMD's 65nm transition goes as smoothly as their 90nm one.
The situation (Intel's, not necessarily the difference) should change RSN when Intel's 65nm process comes online. Looking at the huge lead AMD has right now, I don't see how Intel can beat them in both power and performance anytime soon unless they're willing to add a few hundred more pins to their sockets to accomodate on-die memory controller(s). I doubt Intel will do that. I also doubt they'll come back a bit from the 150W/CPU these Paxville chips crank out, so they'll be using the process headroom for higher clocks and/or larger caches.
Ultimately an on-die memory controller is the only way to bridge the increasingly large gap between the CPU and RAM. Intel's managed amazingly low latencies to RAM given that they've got an entire extra bus and chip to run through, but they're still ~50% higher than AMD's. The netburst architecture was supposed to be insensitive to RAM latencies but Intel is not keeping up in the bandwidth department either, and it's clear that these CPUs are suffering from a lack of RAM bandwidth (twice the processing power per chip, but no increase in bandwidth).
The blurb makes it sound like this is essentially a way to quickly switch the hardware from one AP to another, buffering packets until the hardware is connected to the proper AP. I'm curious how efficient this process is, as there's bound to be some switching latency. For low-bandwidth non-latency-bound tasks, I assume it's virtually seamless, but I wonder how non-latency-bound you'd need a task to be before it starts becoming problematic.
Wouldn't a proper software-defined radio be the real solution, allowing connections to 2 APs simultaneously with only one antenna? Obviously Microsoft's working with what they've got, and it's certainly an interesting capability, but I'd rather see real effort on SDRs, particularly the regulatory issues therewith.
Yep. Perhaps the parent will explain why the problem's formulated for 48 balls rather than 64.
Two.
The function takes two points, a and b. Return the plane which contains a and which has the line between a and b normal to it.
Moving both a and b allows the plane to be located anywhere. Moving b while maintaining a allows the plane to be rotated in any way.
Without loss of generality, assume the different-weight ball is heavier.
Put 16 balls on each plate. One plate will sink: it contains the heavy ball.
Of the 16 balls on the heavy plate, put 4 on each plate (12 each) and set aside 4.
If the 3 plates remain even, the heavy ball is one of the discarded 4. If one of the plates sinks, the heavy ball is one of the 4 on that plate.
In either case, take the group of 4 which contains the heavy ball. Balance 3 of the 4. If the plates remain even, the 4th ball is heavy; if one of the plates dips, it contains the heavy ball.
4 sheep. And 8 sheep carcasses.
I didn't say the state is not providing anything in exchange for my tax dollars. I said this proposed law seems not to provide anything in return. The income being generated is already taxed, almost certainly twice. I fail to see how auctioneer training is relevant to eBay posting. And I don't believe that "surety bonding" will either make people feel safer buying from or selling through North Dakota state-licensed eBay consignment shops, nor will it make them actually safer.
What's particularly irksome is that this represents triple-taxing of the transaction. eBay consignment shops need a POP because people are more comfortable with that, and shipping an unsold item to sell it and then ship it again is just too expensive. So the business is paying taxes in the state in which it is incorporated. And possibly in all states in which its shops operate (I'm not familiar with the tax situation there). And certainly the individuals who eventually receive the shops' profits are taxed on income. The double-taxation of corporate income is reasonable because the corporate tax rate is low and incorporation provides concrete advantages which it is reasonable to pay for. I really don't see how this third layer of taxation is anything but an attempt by the states to suck a little more money out of the population without providing anything in exchange.
500cd/m2 max brightness implies .5ucd/m2 min brightness. I'd say that's pretty dim. Even if you figure the specs are inflated 10x from normal every-day contrast ratios you would see on real images that's 5ucd/m2, nice and dark. Which is pretty amazing, and way better than the claimed 1000:1 contrast ratio you can get today, and the real 300:1 or so that these panels deliver at sane brightnesses. Of course, the real news would be if this panel could also offer 10-12bits per channel of real actual comes-out-of-the-panel color resolution, as that would simultaneously solve half the current problems with display tech.
The article sort of mumbled through why I should care. Does anyone know? Do these logic gates offer the promise of smaller, faster, cheaper, or lower-power CPUs? Some combination of the above? Do they allow the creation of computers of a type not practical before? Where's the beef?
I majored in computer engineering. There were some excellent professors, who could explain topics, make them interesting, and genuinely add material that I couldn't get from a book. There were also TA-taught classes, some of which were good; some not. And there were classes taught by profs who were teaching because they had to in order to spend the rest of the day in the lab and it showed.
I also have a spanish major. While I doubt any of the profs that sucked were running off to a lab, they certainly existed. And there were also excellent professors as well.
At any reasonably large school there will be alternatives. And no, I don't mean performance art. For every TA who admits he's just arrived in this country 2 weeks ago (and has the "can extract topic but doesn't actually understand questions" grasp of English to prove it), there's a TA with a genuine flair for teaching and a sufficient command of English to communicate. Everyone's different; if your brain doesn't deal well with accents and needs an unpopular teaching style to succeed, you'll have (not-insurmountable) problems. But most people can arrange to find classes and professors / TAs that work for them. Intro classes are great for this - there are often 4 or more TAs working with a given professor, giving you plenty of opportunity to pick one that you can live with.
The system's hardly perfect, but it's neither as bad as the article suggests nor as isolated to engineering.
The example's contrived. I don't like contrived examples unless they illustrate an important principle, which this one doesn't really do. Such data loss has already started happening even in my own life, but I don't think that's a bad thing. The fairly minimal effort required to keep data up-to-date is a natural impediment to a policy of keeping everything. Data which isn't worth a new hard drive and an rsync dies. Data which isn't worth the effort of importing and re-saving in a newer format dies. This isn't bad. It's not new either.
Data goes the way of the dodo not because of technological obstacles, but because of a decision made or not made to preserve it. We don't know how the great pyramids were built, the obelisks shaped and erected, etc. not because there was no way to preserve that information, but because it wasn't important enough to justify the effort. The same is true of 10-yr-old WP documents I made to bill people when I mowed lawns for spending money, or a million other things that get saved or trashed every day.
If you're serious about the problem, then it's not a technical hurdle. Data storage is cheap. Emulators are good. Batch document conversion is possible. The problem, if you're willing to call it that is that the benefit has to outweigh the cost. Lowering the cost of data preservation only increases the cost of data searching and real information retrieval. And very quickly it becomes a philosophical argument about the value of preserving irrelevant knowledge in a world that has moved on. Yet the argument is couched in terms of data storage and manipulation which is really the tiniest corner of the issue.
A few tests on the archive.org'd copies of /. for the past few years indicates that the number hovered between 88 and "sorry, your document contains bytes that are not valid UTF-8 characters". Actually a lot closer to the latter than the former, as I only found one cached date that would work, out of the dozen or so I tried.
40kV isn't hard to build up. In fact, you can safely play with hundreds of kV, and make some really nice sparks. The 'starting things on fire' number you're looking for is power. And energy. You need to be able to transfer enough energy into an object that it will reach its combustion temperature, and you need to be quick enough at it that the object doesn't shed the energy to nearby objects in the meantime. It takes a lot of energy (as compared to the energy content in your average static 'zap') to set carpet fibers aflame, or even melt them.
Not to say that it didn't happen, of course. It's just not well-reported, and is clearly not terribly common.