Compare Google Maps to Google Earth, which is more responsive and flexible?
I prefer online maps; they work better for me.
For example, did you know windows live maps includes a bird's eye view feature?
In the world of desktop software, here's how that would have worked: I'd have turned my map view into some sort of file, found web space, uploaded it, and posted a link to it. You would have downloaded the file and been told 'unknown file type', you'd have to go to Microsoft's web page and download 'Microsoft 3D Earth' or whatever their client software is called. You'd need administrator privileges to install it, and it would probably conflict with Google Earth for the 'map view' file type (or perhaps the map view would have opened in google earth and shown you the wrong thing). If you already had the software installed but you got it before the 'bird's eye view' feature came out you'd have to upgrade - probably by manually downloading a multi-megabyte new installer and running it. If you ran Linux or a Mac you might not be able to access the software at all.
On the other hand, with a web interface, you could see the thing I was trying to show you just by clicking a link I copy-and-pasted.
Anyway, I guess my point is: though web-based apps have disadvantages, they also have advantages, and for some applications these advantages can be pretty compelling. I hope web apps are not a fad.
You don't need to understand quantum mechanics to be able to make a reasonable first pass at sorting out who does and does not have a PhD in quantum mechanics and is or is not professionally working in the field at prestigious international physics lab.
I was once at a talk by a sociologist studying masculinity who said (and I'm paraphrasing here) "I got interested in this field because the ideas presented matched my experiences, and so 'resonated with me'". A student in the audience later cited the same motivation in entering the field.
I, on the other hand, didn't think much of his ideas; they didn't match my personal experiences at all. However, I didn't enter the field, study for years getting a PhD and becoming a respected expert, in order to refute his ideas. In fact, I pretty much did nothing.
The mapping from sociology to evolution is obviously a poor one, but it serves to illustrate a point: Academic study may self-select people who agree with ideas in that field, because people who do not agree with these ideas are unlikely to enter the field.
I tried to find a definitive price (the article you link says $6,000) but I couldn't easily find one. I could, however, find a rumour it has been shelved.
I must say, I own a roomba, but had it cost more than ~£150, I couldn't have afforded it; hence I suspect the robot vacuum cleaner market is very price sensitive. That said, ultrasound range finders, optical mouse parts, and MEMS accelerometers are all very cheap, and it would be interesting to see a consumer robot taking advantage of some them, and performing more sophisticated path planning.
But if enjoying life is doing everything that is bad for you, why not do all that stuff anyways?
There are things that are long-term bad ideas but that are enjoyable in the short term.
Buying a sports car by neglecting to save for retirement isn't a good long-term idea. Smoking and getting cancer isn't a good long-term idea. Posting pictures of yourself drunk on the internet that future employers might see isn't a good long-term idea. Majoring in english literature isn't a good long-term idea (few job opportunities). Quitting your job to travel round the world isn't a good long-term idea.
Enjoying life isn't "doing everything that is bad for you" but long-term planning may involve denying oneself short-term pleasures. And if there's no long term, there's no need for long term planning, and no need to deny oneself short-term pleasures.
Sony tried this years ago with their Vaio sub-notebook line of computers. (Here's a picture.) Unlike this... thing... its keyboard was actually fairly decent, the screen was bright, and it was overall fairly useful. It's only problem was that it just wasn't large enough to be practical.
It occurs to me that the most important thing when developing a new form factor is how are people going to carry this.
Cell phones can comfortably be put in your trouser pockets. Everyone has pockets, so the form factor is a success.
PDAs and smartphones wouldn't be so good in your trouser pockets, but are well suited to the inside pocket (or other pockets) on a suit. Target market is business people, who wear suits. The form factor is a success.
Small laptops are designed to be carried in 'normal' bags. Again, they're a success.
Large/desktop replacement laptops are designed to be carried in special carry cases with shoulder straps. This is where the pattern breaks down, as they have their own bags, but this is also the upper limit of portability.
This would explain why, though the vaio sub-notebook was exceptionally cool, it wasn't a success; it couldn't fit in a pocket so it needed a bag, putting it in competition with small notebooks, a competition it lost.
And, implicitly, anyone coming up with a form-factor which is in between pocket sizes is similarly doomed to failure.
and when you quantify a high-gain low-photon data set, you INCREASE the amount of noise in the final data
What particular noise source do you mean?
Scan-out noise isn't really a problem on modern CCD designs, and quantisation noise wouldn't be a problem because you could just quantise over a scale 1/50th the size.
Also, since it would take some time to decide how far to shift each of the microexposures, you're now taking longer to get a total of 1/30sec of actual photon-catching exposure
We can integrate and readout at the same time with interline transfer CCD designs. I suspect the addition could be done in real time, but if not, RAM is inexpensive nowerdays; we can just cache the data and do the maths later.
Of course, when you think about it, you might be able to get away without the accelerometer; you can tell how far the camera has moved between frames by comparing the two images.
REAL image stabilization uses a servoed prism inside the lens; the image is optically stabilized by sensing movement and adjusting the prism to correct [...] FAKE "image stabilization", which Olympus (among others) are pushing- it only cranks up the sensitivity of the sensor to shorten exposure time.
Here's how it could work: Instead of taking one exposure for 1/10 seconds, take 50 exposures each 1/500 seconds. Use your MEMS accelerometer to detect how much the camera has moved between each exposure, offset each of the 50 images to compensate for the motion, then sum them.
You'd get all the noise reduction of a 1/10 second exposure and all you'd need is a $10 accelerometer.
Michael
Re:Humans can handle more than 1 G
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 1
The nine G figure is unrealistically high, but there are no reasons to assume you can't have a realitivistic rocket that starts out with six G for a short while and then drops its acceleration off to about two G.
Bear in mind, the 12 years the craft travels for would be (presumably) 6 years accelerating and 6 decelerating - rather than the few minutes fighter pilots endure large forces.
Living on a space ship accelerating at 2g for 12 years would be like living on a planet with 2g for 12 years - i.e. it might have funny effects on physiology.
On the other hand, we're quite sure humans can live happily in a 1g environment.
In my experience, lost usually means: another agency or department has it and the agency that originally procured it lost track of it; it was an ancient laptop and its in the bottom of a closet somewhere; or it was scrubbed and disposed of without the proper paperwork being done.
All these things are true. However, if the system for tracking laptops is broken, it should be fixed or thrown away (i.e. if we're gathering bad data and no-one cares, there's no point in gathering data).
For example, if inter-agency loans are possible, there should be an easy system for legitimising them. If obsolete laptops are in closets, there should be a simple laptop return system (perhaps with incentives involving the obsolete laptop's replacement) so the laptops can be reused or securely disposed of. If the laptop has been securely disposed of without the paperwork being done, the paperwork should be simplified. And so on.
If it creates both (a) discerning people and (b) the need for people to be discerning, it seems disingenuous to praise it for making people more discerning.
By the same logic you could say muggers are good because they force people to be more alert.
Does Swiss Cheese have more holes when its package is opened or when it is closed?
Well, some obvious examples of licensed DRM schemes being cracked are DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
It is my understanding that all three were cracked due to poorly implemented software players; for example DeCSS used code reverse-engineered from Xing, and HD-DVD was cracked by trying the entire contents of memory as the volume key, until the volume key was found.
Seems to me 'crap coding in third party players' has caused several DRM schemes to fail. It seems reasonable to want to avoid suffering the same fate.
One obvious argument here is "but what about hardware players? Surely they're secure, just like hardware DVD players are". It's true that you can't read the code off the DVD player under your TV, but Apple likes their iPods to be software-upgradable. This is useful if the DRM scheme changes, as has happened in the past. But I know of at least one embedded system that had its software become public after a firmware upgrade was sniffed as it was performed. Granted, you could encrypt firmware updates, but you would still be vulnerable to the 'crap coding by third parties' problem others have experienced.
In summary, keeping FairPlay closed helps protect apple against bugs in third party implementations.
[conspiracy theory]And Microsoft, Apple's main competitor in the DRMed MP3s arena, would have a clear economic incentive to create crap, easily cracked implementations in order to fuck with Apple, unlike Apple, who have an economic incentive to create hard-to-crack implementations.[/conspiracy theory]
I get that you could measure all those distances and dimensions, using multiple photos -- one each of every flat surface, moving the target each time so it's the same distance from the camera as the surface being measured -- but I don't think it would work from a single photo.
There is something known as 'depth from defocus'. If you know the focal distance and depth of field, you can detect range by how out of focus things become. It sounds inaccurate, but some people report 1/200 accuracy. However, I gather you need at least two pictures at different distances to produce useful results.
It's just a believable, though, that it relies on parallel features (such as bricks or wall top+bottom) or only works on near-flat surfaces.
You REALLY have to ask alternatives for GoDaddy? That's some hell of a marketing.
The poster could probably have found other registrars easily - google would have happily given him thousands. I think what he really wanted is "alternative registrars to GoDaddy, which don't suck".
Clearly, if you're moving away from one company because of bad service, you don't want to move to a company that's worse. And the domain name business is full of dodgy "free domain parking", companies who register domains if you check their availability, companies who will refuse to let you move your domain to another supplier, and so on. Resultantly, the results google would give wouldn't be that useful - because you don't just want to find a company, you want to find a company that doesn't suck.
And that's an ideal use for 'ask slashdot' - learning from others' experiences.
Ok... someone please elxplain, because I don't get it. [...] Doing internet business in communist and other countries [...] is bad. [...] Pouring billions of dollars into their economy via manufacturing [...] is good (See: China).
To use an emotive example, if I sold a million dollars worth of paper clips to nazi germany, that would be OK, but if I sold a million dollars worth of gas chambers to nazi germany, that would be immoral - even if paper clips and gas chambers are equally legal. The morality and the legality are very different things.
With that established, the obvious question is "why is aiding political oppression considered worse than employing people at below minimum wage, given that both are legal in China and illegal in America?". Well, American history has 'freedom, freedom, freedom' written all over it, and politicians love talking all about freedom and the idea of making it universal (see also: Iraq), but minimum wages are a fairly recent (and slightly socialist-sounding) innovation which some people don't even support, and differences in living costs and suchlike make a global minimum wage an odd-sounding idea.
Shared-memory microprocessors look much more promising as general purpose computers. Having eight or sixteen CPUs in a shared-memory multicore configuration is quite useful.
Isn't shared memory intrinsically slow, because access has to be interleaved between all the processors sharing it?
Obviously it depends on the operation, but for something like matrix multiplication or image blurring (with lots of memory accesses) wouldn't memory bandwidth be a limiting factor?
I ask out of genuine curiosity - I'd be interested to know what you think.
It's funny how on the one hand we hate targeted advertising because it's an invasion of privacy and you can't trust the security of the data that a company keeps about you; and on the other hand, we hate untargeted advertising just as much for spamming us with irrelevant and annoying messages.
I don't think this is hypocrisy; I think it's just a dislike of advertising.
The general idea I have is to [...] allow people to vote on every issue if they wish [...] allow people to delegate their vote to anyone they trust [...] allow people to revoke their vote for a person any time they feel their values are being betrayed by those they elected [...]
This deals with the two major issues facing modern democratic process:
1) Sometimes there's no one to vote for that you trust but they get to speak for you anyways regardless of if you vote or not.
2) Sometimes the person you voted for betrays you and you have no way to remove from them the power of your support for several years without overthrowing the system.
I find your ideas interesting, but there exist other problems the current system tries to deal with, which your system might restore.
The Chartists called for several things (you can read the article yourself) and got all except one; they asked for annual elections. The problem with annual elections would be the government wouldn't have time to achieve anything that took longer than a year. Perhaps they need to cut jobs in a government department, causing unemployment and bad publicity, but in the long term the reforms will increase efficiency. Or perhaps it's a project like the 'new deal'. The point being: A constantly shifting government might make long term projects difficult.
Another problem would be media rule. In the UK, many elections have been won by candidates favoured by the widely read tabloid 'the sun'. It's open to debate whether the newspaper decides the election or if the newspaper just backs the person they think is likely to win. But it serves to illustrate a point: Taking power away from politicians might just put it into the hands of media owners like Rupert Murdoch.
One other problem might be education. Did you know Only 28% of people have bachelors degrees? Consider an example: Should the minimum wage be raised? (Or lowered, or abolished?) Many people have opinions on this, but most people are less informed than, say, Alan Greenspan. There would be wide-ranging economic impacts to any change to the minimum wage. Day-to-day economic issues like this are complicated and hard to understand - and if the majority of voters were uninformed, their decisions might be bad.
You might be interested in reading about Athenian democracy. FTA: "It remains a unique and intriguing experiment in direct democracy where the people do not elect representatives to vote on their behalf but vote on legislation and executive bills in their own right." - I'll let you read more about it yourself, but in short it had it's problems - some generals produced unsatisfactory results, and found themselves executed - and when the people later changed their minds, the people who advocated executing the generals were also executed.
Is was my understanding that Sony won't license blu-ray to anyone making a dual-format player. I'm not sure if HD-DVD is the same, not that it makes any difference. I assume there's currently no legal way to manufacture blu-ray without a license. Of course, I suspect companies aren't supposed to make region-free players, but they still do...
I agree with the post to an extent; I only brought a DVD-RW drive when I could get one that did plus, minus and ram formats in one unit, and cost less than $80, and could be made region-free.
My criteria in this situation are similar: Either a decisive winner or a dual format drive, costing less than $80. I'm guessing I'm not one of those 'early adopters' I've heard so much about.
I understand this is Singapore issuing the challenge, but I would like to see robots (in any format) capable of navigating buildings and hogtying humans without injuring them.
Also if a disabling robot malfunctions and kills someone, that would be a much bigger problem than if a killing robot malfunctioned and didn't kill people - hence, it's a more difficult technical problem.
As for Microsoft Outlook... who uses it these days anyway? I sure as hell don't.
Probably people in corporate environments. And traditionally PDAs were aimed at people in corporate environments, so having outlook synchronisation was a pretty important feature for a PDA to have.
Granted, the iphone isn't just a PDA; it has lots of other functionality. But part of its functionality is as a PDA, and you can't have a PDA without outlook synchronisation.
Slashdot Mirror
Compare Google Maps to Google Earth, which is more responsive and flexible?
I prefer online maps; they work better for me.
For example, did you know windows live maps includes a bird's eye view feature?
In the world of desktop software, here's how that would have worked: I'd have turned my map view into some sort of file, found web space, uploaded it, and posted a link to it. You would have downloaded the file and been told 'unknown file type', you'd have to go to Microsoft's web page and download 'Microsoft 3D Earth' or whatever their client software is called. You'd need administrator privileges to install it, and it would probably conflict with Google Earth for the 'map view' file type (or perhaps the map view would have opened in google earth and shown you the wrong thing). If you already had the software installed but you got it before the 'bird's eye view' feature came out you'd have to upgrade - probably by manually downloading a multi-megabyte new installer and running it. If you ran Linux or a Mac you might not be able to access the software at all.
On the other hand, with a web interface, you could see the thing I was trying to show you just by clicking a link I copy-and-pasted.
Anyway, I guess my point is: though web-based apps have disadvantages, they also have advantages, and for some applications these advantages can be pretty compelling. I hope web apps are not a fad.
You don't need to understand quantum mechanics to be able to make a reasonable first pass at sorting out who does and does not have a PhD in quantum mechanics and is or is not professionally working in the field at prestigious international physics lab.
I was once at a talk by a sociologist studying masculinity who said (and I'm paraphrasing here) "I got interested in this field because the ideas presented matched my experiences, and so 'resonated with me'". A student in the audience later cited the same motivation in entering the field.
I, on the other hand, didn't think much of his ideas; they didn't match my personal experiences at all. However, I didn't enter the field, study for years getting a PhD and becoming a respected expert, in order to refute his ideas. In fact, I pretty much did nothing.
The mapping from sociology to evolution is obviously a poor one, but it serves to illustrate a point: Academic study may self-select people who agree with ideas in that field, because people who do not agree with these ideas are unlikely to enter the field.
Just my $0.02.
I tried to find a definitive price (the article you link says $6,000) but I couldn't easily find one. I could, however, find a rumour it has been shelved.
I must say, I own a roomba, but had it cost more than ~£150, I couldn't have afforded it; hence I suspect the robot vacuum cleaner market is very price sensitive. That said, ultrasound range finders, optical mouse parts, and MEMS accelerometers are all very cheap, and it would be interesting to see a consumer robot taking advantage of some them, and performing more sophisticated path planning.
This article is clearly spam for that proserv link in the writeup.
Don't editors check out the links before stories get posted? Oh, wait, this is slashdot, of course they don't.
But if enjoying life is doing everything that is bad for you, why not do all that stuff anyways?
There are things that are long-term bad ideas but that are enjoyable in the short term.
Buying a sports car by neglecting to save for retirement isn't a good long-term idea. Smoking and getting cancer isn't a good long-term idea. Posting pictures of yourself drunk on the internet that future employers might see isn't a good long-term idea. Majoring in english literature isn't a good long-term idea (few job opportunities). Quitting your job to travel round the world isn't a good long-term idea.
Enjoying life isn't "doing everything that is bad for you" but long-term planning may involve denying oneself short-term pleasures. And if there's no long term, there's no need for long term planning, and no need to deny oneself short-term pleasures.
FPSes have a 'first person view', i.e. doom.
An example of a shooter-like-game with a third person view is Tomb Raider. Also resident evil, GTA3, and so on.
Sony tried this years ago with their Vaio sub-notebook line of computers. (Here's a picture.) Unlike this... thing... its keyboard was actually fairly decent, the screen was bright, and it was overall fairly useful. It's only problem was that it just wasn't large enough to be practical.
It occurs to me that the most important thing when developing a new form factor is how are people going to carry this.
Cell phones can comfortably be put in your trouser pockets. Everyone has pockets, so the form factor is a success.
PDAs and smartphones wouldn't be so good in your trouser pockets, but are well suited to the inside pocket (or other pockets) on a suit. Target market is business people, who wear suits. The form factor is a success.
Small laptops are designed to be carried in 'normal' bags. Again, they're a success.
Large/desktop replacement laptops are designed to be carried in special carry cases with shoulder straps. This is where the pattern breaks down, as they have their own bags, but this is also the upper limit of portability.
This would explain why, though the vaio sub-notebook was exceptionally cool, it wasn't a success; it couldn't fit in a pocket so it needed a bag, putting it in competition with small notebooks, a competition it lost.
And, implicitly, anyone coming up with a form-factor which is in between pocket sizes is similarly doomed to failure.
Just my $0.02.
and when you quantify a high-gain low-photon data set, you INCREASE the amount of noise in the final data
What particular noise source do you mean?
Scan-out noise isn't really a problem on modern CCD designs, and quantisation noise wouldn't be a problem because you could just quantise over a scale 1/50th the size.
Also, since it would take some time to decide how far to shift each of the microexposures, you're now taking longer to get a total of 1/30sec of actual photon-catching exposure
We can integrate and readout at the same time with interline transfer CCD designs. I suspect the addition could be done in real time, but if not, RAM is inexpensive nowerdays; we can just cache the data and do the maths later.
Of course, when you think about it, you might be able to get away without the accelerometer; you can tell how far the camera has moved between frames by comparing the two images.
REAL image stabilization uses a servoed prism inside the lens; the image is optically stabilized by sensing movement and adjusting the prism to correct [...] FAKE "image stabilization", which Olympus (among others) are pushing- it only cranks up the sensitivity of the sensor to shorten exposure time.
Here's how it could work: Instead of taking one exposure for 1/10 seconds, take 50 exposures each 1/500 seconds. Use your MEMS accelerometer to detect how much the camera has moved between each exposure, offset each of the 50 images to compensate for the motion, then sum them.
You'd get all the noise reduction of a 1/10 second exposure and all you'd need is a $10 accelerometer.
Michael
The nine G figure is unrealistically high, but there are no reasons to assume you can't have a realitivistic rocket that starts out with six G for a short while and then drops its acceleration off to about two G.
Bear in mind, the 12 years the craft travels for would be (presumably) 6 years accelerating and 6 decelerating - rather than the few minutes fighter pilots endure large forces.
Living on a space ship accelerating at 2g for 12 years would be like living on a planet with 2g for 12 years - i.e. it might have funny effects on physiology.
On the other hand, we're quite sure humans can live happily in a 1g environment.
In my experience, lost usually means: another agency or department has it and the agency that originally procured it lost track of it; it was an ancient laptop and its in the bottom of a closet somewhere; or it was scrubbed and disposed of without the proper paperwork being done.
All these things are true. However, if the system for tracking laptops is broken, it should be fixed or thrown away (i.e. if we're gathering bad data and no-one cares, there's no point in gathering data).
For example, if inter-agency loans are possible, there should be an easy system for legitimising them. If obsolete laptops are in closets, there should be a simple laptop return system (perhaps with incentives involving the obsolete laptop's replacement) so the laptops can be reused or securely disposed of. If the laptop has been securely disposed of without the paperwork being done, the paperwork should be simplified. And so on.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
caffeine makes people more alert, does that mean caffeine is bad?
Caffeine (a) makes people more alert, but does not (b) create the need for people to be more alert.
Therefore my argument doesn't apply.
How is this a bad thing?
If it creates both (a) discerning people and (b) the need for people to be discerning, it seems disingenuous to praise it for making people more discerning.
By the same logic you could say muggers are good because they force people to be more alert.
Does Swiss Cheese have more holes when its package is opened or when it is closed?
Well, some obvious examples of licensed DRM schemes being cracked are DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
It is my understanding that all three were cracked due to poorly implemented software players; for example DeCSS used code reverse-engineered from Xing, and HD-DVD was cracked by trying the entire contents of memory as the volume key, until the volume key was found.
Seems to me 'crap coding in third party players' has caused several DRM schemes to fail. It seems reasonable to want to avoid suffering the same fate.
One obvious argument here is "but what about hardware players? Surely they're secure, just like hardware DVD players are". It's true that you can't read the code off the DVD player under your TV, but Apple likes their iPods to be software-upgradable. This is useful if the DRM scheme changes, as has happened in the past. But I know of at least one embedded system that had its software become public after a firmware upgrade was sniffed as it was performed. Granted, you could encrypt firmware updates, but you would still be vulnerable to the 'crap coding by third parties' problem others have experienced.
In summary, keeping FairPlay closed helps protect apple against bugs in third party implementations.
[conspiracy theory]And Microsoft, Apple's main competitor in the DRMed MP3s arena, would have a clear economic incentive to create crap, easily cracked implementations in order to fuck with Apple, unlike Apple, who have an economic incentive to create hard-to-crack implementations.[/conspiracy theory]
Just my $0.02,
Michael
I get that you could measure all those distances and dimensions, using multiple photos -- one each of every flat surface, moving the target each time so it's the same distance from the camera as the surface being measured -- but I don't think it would work from a single photo.
There is something known as 'depth from defocus'. If you know the focal distance and depth of field, you can detect range by how out of focus things become. It sounds inaccurate, but some people report 1/200 accuracy. However, I gather you need at least two pictures at different distances to produce useful results.
It's just a believable, though, that it relies on parallel features (such as bricks or wall top+bottom) or only works on near-flat surfaces.
Sounds like pretty good value for money. It isn't often you can get a level of coverage comparable to the superbowl, for only $2 million.
Having just completed a Forensics bootcamp, I was frankly amazed at what the current state of the art practices are in password cracking.
Bruce Schneier had an interesting bit about this a few weeks ago...
Michael
You REALLY have to ask alternatives for GoDaddy? That's some hell of a marketing.
The poster could probably have found other registrars easily - google would have happily given him thousands. I think what he really wanted is "alternative registrars to GoDaddy, which don't suck".
Clearly, if you're moving away from one company because of bad service, you don't want to move to a company that's worse. And the domain name business is full of dodgy "free domain parking", companies who register domains if you check their availability, companies who will refuse to let you move your domain to another supplier, and so on. Resultantly, the results google would give wouldn't be that useful - because you don't just want to find a company, you want to find a company that doesn't suck.
And that's an ideal use for 'ask slashdot' - learning from others' experiences.
Just my $0.02
Ok ... someone please elxplain, because I don't get it. [...] Doing internet business in communist and other countries [...] is bad. [...] Pouring billions of dollars into their economy via manufacturing [...] is good (See: China).
I think the idea is doing business in oppressive countries isn't intrinsically bad, but actually acting to help with the oppression is bad.
To use an emotive example, if I sold a million dollars worth of paper clips to nazi germany, that would be OK, but if I sold a million dollars worth of gas chambers to nazi germany, that would be immoral - even if paper clips and gas chambers are equally legal. The morality and the legality are very different things.
With that established, the obvious question is "why is aiding political oppression considered worse than employing people at below minimum wage, given that both are legal in China and illegal in America?". Well, American history has 'freedom, freedom, freedom' written all over it, and politicians love talking all about freedom and the idea of making it universal (see also: Iraq), but minimum wages are a fairly recent (and slightly socialist-sounding) innovation which some people don't even support, and differences in living costs and suchlike make a global minimum wage an odd-sounding idea.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
Shared-memory microprocessors look much more promising as general purpose computers. Having eight or sixteen CPUs in a shared-memory multicore configuration is quite useful.
Isn't shared memory intrinsically slow, because access has to be interleaved between all the processors sharing it?
Obviously it depends on the operation, but for something like matrix multiplication or image blurring (with lots of memory accesses) wouldn't memory bandwidth be a limiting factor?
I ask out of genuine curiosity - I'd be interested to know what you think.
Cheers,
Michael
It's funny how on the one hand we hate targeted advertising because it's an invasion of privacy and you can't trust the security of the data that a company keeps about you; and on the other hand, we hate untargeted advertising just as much for spamming us with irrelevant and annoying messages.
I don't think this is hypocrisy; I think it's just a dislike of advertising.
The general idea I have is to [...] allow people to vote on every issue if they wish [...] allow people to delegate their vote to anyone they trust [...] allow people to revoke their vote for a person any time they feel their values are being betrayed by those they elected [...]
This deals with the two major issues facing modern democratic process:
1) Sometimes there's no one to vote for that you trust but they get to speak for you anyways regardless of if you vote or not.
2) Sometimes the person you voted for betrays you and you have no way to remove from them the power of your support for several years without overthrowing the system.
I find your ideas interesting, but there exist other problems the current system tries to deal with, which your system might restore.
The Chartists called for several things (you can read the article yourself) and got all except one; they asked for annual elections. The problem with annual elections would be the government wouldn't have time to achieve anything that took longer than a year. Perhaps they need to cut jobs in a government department, causing unemployment and bad publicity, but in the long term the reforms will increase efficiency. Or perhaps it's a project like the 'new deal'. The point being: A constantly shifting government might make long term projects difficult.
Another problem would be media rule. In the UK, many elections have been won by candidates favoured by the widely read tabloid 'the sun'. It's open to debate whether the newspaper decides the election or if the newspaper just backs the person they think is likely to win. But it serves to illustrate a point: Taking power away from politicians might just put it into the hands of media owners like Rupert Murdoch.
One other problem might be education. Did you know Only 28% of people have bachelors degrees? Consider an example: Should the minimum wage be raised? (Or lowered, or abolished?) Many people have opinions on this, but most people are less informed than, say, Alan Greenspan. There would be wide-ranging economic impacts to any change to the minimum wage. Day-to-day economic issues like this are complicated and hard to understand - and if the majority of voters were uninformed, their decisions might be bad.
You might be interested in reading about Athenian democracy. FTA: "It remains a unique and intriguing experiment in direct democracy where the people do not elect representatives to vote on their behalf but vote on legislation and executive bills in their own right." - I'll let you read more about it yourself, but in short it had it's problems - some generals produced unsatisfactory results, and found themselves executed - and when the people later changed their minds, the people who advocated executing the generals were also executed.
Just my $0.02
Michael
Is was my understanding that Sony won't license blu-ray to anyone making a dual-format player. I'm not sure if HD-DVD is the same, not that it makes any difference. I assume there's currently no legal way to manufacture blu-ray without a license. Of course, I suspect companies aren't supposed to make region-free players, but they still do...
I agree with the post to an extent; I only brought a DVD-RW drive when I could get one that did plus, minus and ram formats in one unit, and cost less than $80, and could be made region-free.
My criteria in this situation are similar: Either a decisive winner or a dual format drive, costing less than $80. I'm guessing I'm not one of those 'early adopters' I've heard so much about.
I understand this is Singapore issuing the challenge, but I would like to see robots (in any format) capable of navigating buildings and hogtying humans without injuring them.
A problem with many nonlethal weapons is abuse.
Also if a disabling robot malfunctions and kills someone, that would be a much bigger problem than if a killing robot malfunctioned and didn't kill people - hence, it's a more difficult technical problem.
As for Microsoft Outlook... who uses it these days anyway? I sure as hell don't.
Probably people in corporate environments. And traditionally PDAs were aimed at people in corporate environments, so having outlook synchronisation was a pretty important feature for a PDA to have.
Granted, the iphone isn't just a PDA; it has lots of other functionality. But part of its functionality is as a PDA, and you can't have a PDA without outlook synchronisation.
Just my $0.02.