do you suggest a base-PI number system? because PI will have an infinite, normal expansion in any other base...
No, I'm not suggesting any number system. It was the previous poster who was holding a base-10 number system in some special regard. My question is more along the lines of bible-code nonsense... ie, if there is an uneven distribution of digits or, even better, "messages from god" in pi's expansion, do we have any reason to expect the expansion in base-10 to reveal such things versus base-2 or base-e or base-i^3?
I whipped up a little perl script earlier this summer that a friend and I used to informally prove to ourselves that the digits 0..9 are fairly evenly distributed in the first million digits of pi.
Would a trascendental number like pi (representing an fairly UNarbitrary ratio in nature) be expected to fit well into an arbitrarily chosen, unnatural base-10 number system?
Just for the hell of it, I tried hitting "Submit" with a blank submission of factors. Mostly, I was curious to see if they were using SSL for submissions because what if someone was snooping and intercepted my submission and then submitted it themself. Hey, it could happen!
Anyways, no they don't use SSL, but more surprisingly, they care who your referrer was. And they say "slashdot not found in list of allowed referrers". Not sure if this would actually prevent a legitimate submission, but maybe you don't want to risk clicking thru Slashdot to RSA when you find the real factors. (Especially considering the lack of SSL.)
Error Message:
slashdot not found in list of allowed referrers.
Required Field: email has not been completed.
Required Field: Submitters has not been completed.
Required Field: challnum has not been completed.
Required Field: p has not been completed.
Required Field: q has not been completed.
Required Field: description has not been completed.
Please use your 'back' button to return to the Web form.
An average person can type 30 wpm (a quick web search turns up stats in this range, anyways). An excellent typist can approach 100 wpm. Way to go, little Tandy!
A graph plotting Meccano's disappearance from children's toy boxes would, he claimed, match the alleged fall in the quantity and quality of Britain's young engineers and scientists.
I conjecture that a graph plotting the decline in the use of asbestos insulation in schools would match the alleged fall in the quantity and quality of Rolling Stones albums. I plan to draw a very powerful conclusion from this. Of course, I don't have a Nobel Prize in Chemsitry, so what do I know?
I'm seeing maybe several hundred dollars to reverse that rack job. (Materials and labour, including the white paint that appears to be on the surrounding walls.) So if that actually does damage to a home's resale value... well, it must be a really really freaking cheap home!
Anyways, that rack is really hardcore, man. I love it. Watchen das blinkenlights...
Speed of completion is not important.... now that computers are running life-support systems and the like, there is no room for error.
You're fired.;-) Seriously, speed of completion is always one of the three possible priorities of any software project (or hardware or general engineering project)... 1) time, 2) features, 3) quality. Pick two of the three that are important in any given project or task and then you've got something you can "manage" in the true sense of the word. You're right that life-support systems should not care much about the "time" aspect of development. But time is more critical than "features" in some cases and it's more important than "quality" in some cases.
Every project's requirements (part of the discipline of engineering is recognizing this) will dictate priorities. A couple of examples in these terms might be...
Creating life-support software? Great, make sure it has all the necessary features and it's of "perfect" quality. If it ships late, that's probably fine.
Creating a baseball video game? Great, make sure it's done in time for opening day of the new season to maximize fan demand and competitive advantage (you're up against 6 other similar products that will ship near the same date), and if it's released for a console (ie, a million units will ship on CD-ROM or catridge with no update ability), make sure it's also of near-perfect quality. Leave out features if necessary to get it out by the hard deadline date.
Open-source examples are left as an exercise to the reader... But remember that if your product's main target is initially developers, bug count isn't a show-stopper, so publishing a bug database and acknowledging that quality will have to catch up later can be quite acceptable.
I was bored... driving a semi-regular 4-hour road trip with a rental car from Hertz. It was a 4-door Chevy Malibu. Yee ha, good family fun. It had the NeverLost GPS system. Nice color LCD display on that thing. Wow. Anyways, it seems most cars nowadays have speed limiters and this Chevy's would kick in around 170km/h. I turned on the GPS's trip computer and verified it wouldn't go past 169. You can imagine... foot to the floor, VRRROOOM [silence] VRRROOOM [silence] VRRROOOM [silence], as the limiter would kick in and out. So I tried all manner of things... getting a run at it... pulsing the gas pedal... running her down a hill and as soon as the limiter kicks in, dropping to neutral (automatic). Probably could have used a longer hill. No luck. Stuck at 169. Anyways, after my trip, I tag-teamed the car with a co-worker and assigned him to beat my "high score". I'll find out tomorrow morning how he fared.
I know that if you really NEED Internet access 24/7, you should be using something more expensive than a $30/month cable modem
That philosophy runs contrary to contract law. Price is irrelevant when a contract binds the relationship -- if you really NEED Internet access 24/7, and a company advertises their access as 24/7 then you can reasonably expect them to fulfill that, regardless of price.
The focus should change to making each device do one thing, and do it well. Your cell phone should do nothing more than send/recieve phone calls, your PDA should do nothing more than keep appointments and an address book and your MP3 player should do nothing more than play MP3s.
That philosophy is great for command line Unix utilities, but I don't think it scales well to real-life gadgets. Does anyone really want half a dozen devices hanging off their belt or in their pockets? 1. keyboard/input device, 2. MP3 player, 3. phone, 4/5. calendar/contacts, 6. game, 7. etc. In my opinion, one device can do all of the above in a space about the same size as a small phone or PDA. As I see it, RAM/ROM isn't the problem. Display technology isn't the problem. Embedded software techniques aren't the problem. It's really just a good, compact input method that's missing (as the original thread points out).
First, you're 100% right-on to advise people to make a plan and then build their own companies with other competent people. Many who attempt to do this will of course fail, many others will cave into temptation and turn into PHBs themselves, and a few will stay true to their principles and actually make it work. In my opinion (and I'm a practitioner), it's well worth the risk and experience to attempt it.
However, as for your "guaranteed cure for unemployment" (the link you gave was: www.aynrand.org)... YEEEESH! Well, as powerful as her philosophy is, she's also a guaranteed cure for an erection! Yikes. They really need to change the welcome image!
Compressed file != poor quality
on
MP3Pro Released
·
· Score: 2
Real state-of-the-art quality will never come from a compressed file
It is quite simple to compress and decompress, in real time, audio that is identical bit-for-bit with the original.
It's called lossless compression -- I'm tired of people equating compression with data loss. Think of run-length encoding, Lempel-Ziv (PKZIP), etc. and you're on the right track.
Now, you're going to have a devil of a time compressing digital audio 10:1 without loss. Impossible? Not sure, but it hasn't been done yet. And the real-time requirement makes it harder.
Anyway, back to your original claim... hand me your favorite, highest quality CD WAV file and I can hand it back to you, compressed along with a codec that will replay it identically to the original, bit for bit. It's a start, but it ain't gonna be anywhere near 10:1...:-)
The FCC forbids using a cellphone from any platform not attached to the ground.
"Attached to" or "resting on"? I'm not attached to the ground, and I have a pretty lively, bouncy gait when I walk, so would it be illegal for me to walk and talk on the phone?
Bill Gates is Chairman with Steve Ballmer as the CEO. Gates' role is removed from the day to day operation of the company, and he is no longer driving strategy. His primary job is hiring and firing the CEO.
You're right that Gates is no longer CEO, but you're wrong in saying that he's removed from operations. In addition to being Chairman, he's Chief Software Architect, essentially the head of R&D, which is a very operational role. There are people in R&D now who are directly responsible to Gates, which would not be the case if he were simply a Board member, even Chairman.
I work for an adult internet business... With a little work on my hand...
You're sure that was work on your hand?;-)
After a couple months in development, my team was contacted by IPIX lawyers and forced to stop development.
I'm curious how the IPIX lawyers found out details of your project while in development. (Or had it been released to the public?) Did your competitors know what you were up to? Was there previous contact with IPIX? Were you putting the word out for outsourcing technology or doing press releases or anything?
The Cartridges are specced to hold up to 256 Megs of Data.
That's 256 megabits == 32 megabytes. It still has possibilities though... Come up with a very small catridge with, say, 8x or 16x or more 32 meg banks of switchable EEPROM and a GameBoy Advance GUI program to boot from and you've got a cute little MP3 player.
Here's some background, useful for Canadians and non-Candians alike...
In Canada, March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the Copyright Act came into force. Until then, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright. Part VIII legalizes one such activity: copying of sound recordings of musical works onto recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy.
Specifically, the Copyright Board says their ruling "does not legalize (a) copies made for the use of someone other than the person making the copy; and (b) copies of anything else than sound recordings of musical works. It does legalize making a personal copy of a recording owned by someone else."
Cut the power cord and add some motors and wheels. You could plug the little guy into your LAN and telnet into it (sorry, SSH into it) for programming, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to worry, Pentagon officials say -- the plane would fly in a suborbital path and would only attack Earth targets.
Whew! At least they're only attacking Earth targets. Nothing to worry about!
do you suggest a base-PI number system? because PI will have an infinite, normal expansion in any other base...
No, I'm not suggesting any number system. It was the previous poster who was holding a base-10 number system in some special regard. My question is more along the lines of bible-code nonsense... ie, if there is an uneven distribution of digits or, even better, "messages from god" in pi's expansion, do we have any reason to expect the expansion in base-10 to reveal such things versus base-2 or base-e or base-i^3?
I whipped up a little perl script earlier this summer that a friend and I used to informally prove to ourselves that the digits 0..9 are fairly evenly distributed in the first million digits of pi.
Would a trascendental number like pi (representing an fairly UNarbitrary ratio in nature) be expected to fit well into an arbitrarily chosen, unnatural base-10 number system?
Just for the hell of it, I tried hitting "Submit" with a blank submission of factors. Mostly, I was curious to see if they were using SSL for submissions because what if someone was snooping and intercepted my submission and then submitted it themself. Hey, it could happen!
Anyways, no they don't use SSL, but more surprisingly, they care who your referrer was. And they say "slashdot not found in list of allowed referrers". Not sure if this would actually prevent a legitimate submission, but maybe you don't want to risk clicking thru Slashdot to RSA when you find the real factors. (Especially considering the lack of SSL.)
Error Message:
slashdot not found in list of allowed referrers.
Required Field: email has not been completed.
Required Field: Submitters has not been completed.
Required Field: challnum has not been completed.
Required Field: p has not been completed.
Required Field: q has not been completed.
Required Field: description has not been completed.
Please use your 'back' button to return to the Web form.
Can you type at a sustained 300bps? I don't think I could keep it up, and I type faster than "most people".
Approximately...
300 bps
= 30 cps
= 6 wps
= 360 wpm
An average person can type 30 wpm (a quick web search turns up stats in this range, anyways). An excellent typist can approach 100 wpm. Way to go, little Tandy!
I think Slashcode should have a rating:
-1 Not funny
Your post was not funny. You would have earned your -1.
Me too.
A graph plotting Meccano's disappearance from children's toy boxes would, he claimed, match the alleged fall in the quantity and quality of Britain's young engineers and scientists.
I conjecture that a graph plotting the decline in the use of asbestos insulation in schools would match the alleged fall in the quantity and quality of Rolling Stones albums. I plan to draw a very powerful conclusion from this. Of course, I don't have a Nobel Prize in Chemsitry, so what do I know?
I'm seeing maybe several hundred dollars to reverse that rack job. (Materials and labour, including the white paint that appears to be on the surrounding walls.) So if that actually does damage to a home's resale value... well, it must be a really really freaking cheap home!
Anyways, that rack is really hardcore, man. I love it. Watchen das blinkenlights...
Combining the space and porn genres, my money is on Jean Michel Jarre.
Speed of completion is not important. ... now that computers are running life-support systems and the like, there is no room for error.
;-) Seriously, speed of completion is always one of the three possible priorities of any software project (or hardware or general engineering project)... 1) time, 2) features, 3) quality. Pick two of the three that are important in any given project or task and then you've got something you can "manage" in the true sense of the word. You're right that life-support systems should not care much about the "time" aspect of development. But time is more critical than "features" in some cases and it's more important than "quality" in some cases.
You're fired.
Every project's requirements (part of the discipline of engineering is recognizing this) will dictate priorities. A couple of examples in these terms might be...
Creating life-support software? Great, make sure it has all the necessary features and it's of "perfect" quality. If it ships late, that's probably fine.
Creating a baseball video game? Great, make sure it's done in time for opening day of the new season to maximize fan demand and competitive advantage (you're up against 6 other similar products that will ship near the same date), and if it's released for a console (ie, a million units will ship on CD-ROM or catridge with no update ability), make sure it's also of near-perfect quality. Leave out features if necessary to get it out by the hard deadline date.
Open-source examples are left as an exercise to the reader... But remember that if your product's main target is initially developers, bug count isn't a show-stopper, so publishing a bug database and acknowledging that quality will have to catch up later can be quite acceptable.
Seriously, brewing just seems like a slow, agonizing, skunky way to make ground coffee fester.
Make mine an Americano.
I was bored... driving a semi-regular 4-hour road trip with a rental car from Hertz. It was a 4-door Chevy Malibu. Yee ha, good family fun. It had the NeverLost GPS system. Nice color LCD display on that thing. Wow. Anyways, it seems most cars nowadays have speed limiters and this Chevy's would kick in around 170km/h. I turned on the GPS's trip computer and verified it wouldn't go past 169. You can imagine... foot to the floor, VRRROOOM [silence] VRRROOOM [silence] VRRROOOM [silence], as the limiter would kick in and out. So I tried all manner of things... getting a run at it... pulsing the gas pedal... running her down a hill and as soon as the limiter kicks in, dropping to neutral (automatic). Probably could have used a longer hill. No luck. Stuck at 169. Anyways, after my trip, I tag-teamed the car with a co-worker and assigned him to beat my "high score". I'll find out tomorrow morning how he fared.
Share your cheats and strategies!
I know that if you really NEED Internet access 24/7, you should be using something more expensive than a $30/month cable modem
That philosophy runs contrary to contract law. Price is irrelevant when a contract binds the relationship -- if you really NEED Internet access 24/7, and a company advertises their access as 24/7 then you can reasonably expect them to fulfill that, regardless of price.
...a scientist with SETI (Search for Intelligent Life Institute), told CNN...
That would be SILI, not SETI. Silly, CNN.
The focus should change to making each device do one thing, and do it well. Your cell phone should do nothing more than send/recieve phone calls, your PDA should do nothing more than keep appointments and an address book and your MP3 player should do nothing more than play MP3s.
That philosophy is great for command line Unix utilities, but I don't think it scales well to real-life gadgets. Does anyone really want half a dozen devices hanging off their belt or in their pockets? 1. keyboard/input device, 2. MP3 player, 3. phone, 4/5. calendar/contacts, 6. game, 7. etc. In my opinion, one device can do all of the above in a space about the same size as a small phone or PDA. As I see it, RAM/ROM isn't the problem. Display technology isn't the problem. Embedded software techniques aren't the problem. It's really just a good, compact input method that's missing (as the original thread points out).
First, you're 100% right-on to advise people to make a plan and then build their own companies with other competent people. Many who attempt to do this will of course fail, many others will cave into temptation and turn into PHBs themselves, and a few will stay true to their principles and actually make it work. In my opinion (and I'm a practitioner), it's well worth the risk and experience to attempt it.
However, as for your "guaranteed cure for unemployment" (the link you gave was: www.aynrand.org)... YEEEESH! Well, as powerful as her philosophy is, she's also a guaranteed cure for an erection! Yikes. They really need to change the welcome image!
Real state-of-the-art quality will never come from a compressed file
:-)
It is quite simple to compress and decompress, in real time, audio that is identical bit-for-bit with the original.
It's called lossless compression -- I'm tired of people equating compression with data loss. Think of run-length encoding, Lempel-Ziv (PKZIP), etc. and you're on the right track.
Now, you're going to have a devil of a time compressing digital audio 10:1 without loss. Impossible? Not sure, but it hasn't been done yet. And the real-time requirement makes it harder.
Anyway, back to your original claim... hand me your favorite, highest quality CD WAV file and I can hand it back to you, compressed along with a codec that will replay it identically to the original, bit for bit. It's a start, but it ain't gonna be anywhere near 10:1...
Jon Katz in his underwear
ahhhhhhMother of God!ahhhhhhI'm blind!I'm blind!
The FCC forbids using a cellphone from any platform not attached to the ground.
"Attached to" or "resting on"? I'm not attached to the ground, and I have a pretty lively, bouncy gait when I walk, so would it be illegal for me to walk and talk on the phone?
Jump! Jump! Jump!
Bill Gates is Chairman with Steve Ballmer as the CEO. Gates' role is removed from the day to day operation of the company, and he is no longer driving strategy. His primary job is hiring and firing the CEO.
You're right that Gates is no longer CEO, but you're wrong in saying that he's removed from operations. In addition to being Chairman, he's Chief Software Architect, essentially the head of R&D, which is a very operational role. There are people in R&D now who are directly responsible to Gates, which would not be the case if he were simply a Board member, even Chairman.
Gates' "web site" is here.
I work for an adult internet business ... With a little work on my hand ...
;-)
You're sure that was work on your hand?
After a couple months in development, my team was contacted by IPIX lawyers and forced to stop development.
I'm curious how the IPIX lawyers found out details of your project while in development. (Or had it been released to the public?) Did your competitors know what you were up to? Was there previous contact with IPIX? Were you putting the word out for outsourcing technology or doing press releases or anything?
> Stupid Slashdot won't allow me to post a percent sign
It is possible: %
But yeah, it doesn't seem to recognize the W3 HTML entity:
The Cartridges are specced to hold up to 256 Megs of Data.
That's 256 megabits == 32 megabytes. It still has possibilities though... Come up with a very small catridge with, say, 8x or 16x or more 32 meg banks of switchable EEPROM and a GameBoy Advance GUI program to boot from and you've got a cute little MP3 player.
Here's some background, useful for Canadians and non-Candians alike...
In Canada, March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the Copyright Act came into force. Until then, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright. Part VIII legalizes one such activity: copying of sound recordings of musical works onto recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy.
Specifically, the Copyright Board says their ruling "does not legalize (a) copies made for the use of someone other than the person making the copy; and (b) copies of anything else than sound recordings of musical works. It does legalize making a personal copy of a recording owned by someone else."
You may want to look at the Goverment of Canada Copyright Board backgrounder (see point 2, specifically) and allowance for private-use copying.
This is one reason why (for first-generation, private-use copies) Canada is a better place to use P2P than the United States.
Cut the power cord and add some motors and wheels. You could plug the little guy into your LAN and telnet into it (sorry, SSH into it) for programming, etc.