Right, so do I. I suspect most/. users can do almost all of these things already. But we are the distinct minority. That's what I mean by 'having all the pieces but not bringing them together'.
to all my other devices via SkyDrive
Unless you have the work fuck in them. then you might be in trouble. http://androidspin.com/2012/08/21/microsoft-skydrive-not-so-private-no-nude-content-or-profanity-in-the-cloud-or-risk-being-banned/
Hence it's not quite ready for prime time.
I'd live you to point me to an ecosystem which can do all this as seamlessly.
No one can, that was sort of my point. This is a benchmark those of us who know what google docs or skydrive or dropbox are, and know how to configure a router can do already with a hodgepodge of devices from various manufacturers. But the average consumer can't navigate doing so yet. Microsoft, Sony and Apple all *could* produce something that everyone manage that. But they aren't.
Have something that would let them sell 70 million rather than 7 million phones.
Unfortunately windows 8 sucks. If people don't buy windows 8, why would they particularly care about a windows 8 phone? Does it do anything to the market that the iPhone (for people who want a good phone but know nothing about how phones work) or Android (people who want good phones and who are happy to install a cyanogen nightly build, or people who want a cheap phone that still has some smarts) don't do? Not really. This is nokia's problem, there's really not a lot of room for them to innovate, they aren't a semiconductor company, they aren't a software company, and they're not big enough to shift the market with the the small set of hardware and software they do make, they're the dell of phones.
The unified windows 8 product family was an opportunity for microsoft to really deliver a combined, integrated entertainment and productivity experience. And they didn't. You desktop/laptop is where you do all of your productivity, but you can take it with you on your phone, you can browse TV on the web or PC, and use the phone to control your TV like a remote, through your Xbox 3. They have all of the pieces, they just didn't bring them together.
What will be more interesting is if Sony can pull off, using android, what microsoft didn't, while still leaving productivity as a microsoft windows PC problem. (Apple of course is trying the same thing, just with Apple TV rather than a playstation or Xbox).
Windows phone is really good to try out. I haven't tried windows phone 8, but WP7 was really quite interesting to see. I'm not sure it's good or bad but it's certainly different than the iPhone/Android setup.
Where I am now that happens a lot. The last place I was they had a lot of rules about what you could (and couldn't) assign over reading week specifically because they were trying to cut down on stress and it was made very clear that you don't assign any major work over reading week.
Depends how hot it got doesn't it? And if they were just all (relatively) rich and could find ways to be cool when the average person was basically a sweating lump.
Well first of all, 100 years ago high school graduation rates were 8% in the US (http://www.historyliteracy.org/download/Sears2.pdf) - because there were jobs to do that didn't require highschool, and the school was setup with labour being needed more than brains. Times change, the competition changes etc.
This has been an open question really for the last 30 or 40 years, if not a bit longer, other countries are producing more productive, more competitive graduates. The US can lure them over with cash, but that's not a great long term strategy.
It's not like this problem of time off didn't have negative repercussions, they were just less serious than the benefits, now the situation has shifted.
In terms of VPN service, no, that's not a problem. In terms of them deciding to sell data on all of your traffic through their service to someone... that's a bit more problematic.
That 24 hour retention policy, not really a 24 hour retention policy, and really a 24 month sold at auction monthly policy could be real unpleasant.
You have to configure it, and your VPN is not necessarily covered by the laws that cover ISP's. This is good and bad of course, but if your VPN does something illegal and then declares bankruptcy there's not really anything you can do about it, if your ISP does something illegal odds are it's big enough they won't be out of business and you may get some form of restitution.
Sure, but you don't have -30 winters with 1m of snow.
I'm near toronto ontario, in canada, and the article is mostly centered around the US education system being a disaster, not that canada is a whole lot better in terms of school years.
If you're somewhere that gets insanely hot, insanely cold etc it's not reasonable to run school in those times, so don't.
2 months off in one block is probably not so good. A month off in the summer, 3 weeks in the winter might work better (as in an extra week in the winter). And then another week to coincide with some major culture group's major holiday, or in the middle of each 'term'. Say a week off in october and a week off in march, with school running august to june.
Teachers still need some vacation time, as do kids, and taking teachers out of the classroom for holidays is usually a disaster for the kids. Winter is probably a good time to have time off because kids pay relatively little attention when they have christmas coming/new toys anyway. Not to mention the problems with winter in general messing up schedules. Teachers also need prep time, so you can't really compact too much more and still leave them time for vacations + prep time+training etc.
But sure, overall, kids would probably overall benefit from more time at school, having to reteach 2 months of work because kids were gone for 2 months isn't really doing you any favours. Especially if you could make up that difference by teaching for an extra 2 or 3 weeks.
One of the universities I went to had a week long 'reading week' in each semester*, one in october, one in february, and the one in the summer was about mid july (the summer timing is a bit strange). The quality of work from those students was actually a lot better than were I am no, where they only get a break in the midst of february. The 4 months where most students aren't here doesn't do a lot of favours, but the one week break makes a huge difference to stress/sleep/quality of work, and I would suspect the same effect would apply to younger kids.
Semesters are sept-dec, Jan - > April, may - > august.
And enterprise tools. Don't forget all of their moves into the server market and more serious corporate IT stuff.
Besides that, their '20+' year old vision is the foundation for, and the base of most of the successes they have had. There's nothing wrong with that particularly. Cars should drive on the road, so every increment in the last 100 years has been on cars driving on the road. Flying cars have never really materialized as economically feasible. Microsoft have made quite a lot of progress in the desktop paradigm, and there is a legitimate place for small steps towards some cloud connected future rather than leaping in headlong.
As I said, they might not make anything better. But there's a lot of room in the marketplace for a much better cellphone-desktop-homeserver-laptop-productivity+entertainment product suite and they could certainly leverage their existing windows user base to make some really interesting vision materialize. A microsoft built 'Xbox 4' that acts as your cable and other TV enterainment hub, that can, in turn, connect to or act as a home server from which all of your clients (family computers and mobile devices) connect to.
I think the enterprise stuff is really the big factor. If you go into any serious nerds house (especially linux nerds) we've got all sorts of stuff controlled from our PC's, one my buddies controlled his lights from a command line 14 years ago, we've got web servers, file servers, e-mail servers, synchronization and backup tools, user management etc. I don't even use a TV to watch TV, I can do that all with a video capture card and can record TV doing it - and so can everyone else on/. That connected vision is the future, most users aren't capable of it yet, but that's been microsofts deal in the enterprise - you can train someone in a year long course to do a half decent job of managing their corporate stuff for a small business. That's *still* too complicated for a home user, but the easier it gets, the more your 'desktop' is really just your main home server, and everything else is a client to it. Microsofts 'vision' for the future could be stuff we can all do already, (give or take some devices to help) it's just too hard for now - but that's a huge space they can get into.
The question isn't whether or not everything will move to a thin client, it's whether or not a significant chunk of users can do everything they need in a web browser.
Also, as per the article, MS still has 90% of the desktop market, their vision very much matters, especially as they creep into the mobile space, because they really could completely re-envision the desktop-laptop-mobile relationship. Not necessarily for the better of course, but they certainly can change things a lot.
probably the same as everyone else, that windows 7 will get the job done until someone in microsoft picks a single design and sticks with it for windows 9.
Actually, CRC algorithms can be designed to handle all single-bit errors, and even larger errors perfectly.
I specifically used the term perfectly because all CRC have a probability of failing due to multiple bit flips that produce the same CRC. The better the CRC the lower the probability. CRC's sort of by definition will find a single bit flip.
Similarly, it's not at all unusual for mechanical designs to cater for the loss of a single fastener, or even several in a row.
Sure, assuming something could go wrong is part of any design. As you say, with the space station it might be a weight issue, it might also be a matter of how long it takes to do the install, or how hard that would be, or the likelyhood that if you have 4 bolts one of them will be bad and mess up everything else.
They're also just sitting on this problem for like a week because it's not all that serious in the short term, and it's possible it will run with 9 turns rather than 15 and all of that. Why take risks when you don't have to after all.
If you're an electrical or computer engineer specializing in networks you should have enough experience to know that a single bent or corroded pin, or slightly non uniformly applied piece of solder can ruin you day.
If you're on site somewhere, especially somewhere remote, it's hard to know just how things will get messed up. What works in a lab is very different than after you've shipped it off some place and tried to get it to behave there.
Before you deploy a network you obviously test it in your own lab under exactly the same humidity, temperature, radiation exposure, altitude and personnel as for on site right? To what tolerance? You also test all of your backup equipment by having samples you store in exactly the way they're going to be stored at a live test sight, so you know what the probability is of something happening to them during storage?
Now we know single bit flip in an ethernet packet is just the sort of low hanging fruit of problems that we have network engineers for right? So I'm guessing you developed your own mathematically perfect CRC that you have published and that we should all use, to solve the 'low hanging fruit' of single bit flip errors? Just like a thread on nut and bolt right - you can take your perfect errorless network hardware, put in an aircraft, fly it to a remote island 12 time zones away you know you, with absolute certainty, that it will work 100% of the time? You should get a PhD and write articles about your techniques, the rest of us could really benefit from that.
Maybe you're not on the software side of things, but more hardware, say telephone twisted pair. Now as you know, the reason we twist pairs of wires is to prevent a signal on one wire from inducing a field on another. So I'm guessing you have some piece of equipment that can verify that all the twisted pair sets of wires you use are optimally twisted? What's it called?
Ok I'll stop being a snide asshole, unless I find out you're one of my former students.
You're right, that yes, good engineering is supposed to predict problems in advance and plan for them. You do as many tests as you can, and hope that you've figured out what problems will arise. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work perfectly, there's always some random error involved, that you have to cope with on the fly. On the ground I would say 'try another bolt', up in space, when you've got a dude in a space suit simple solutions become very expensive, time consuming and very risky. I used to do something very similar to network engineering as an on site guy, and problems that take 5 minutes to solve in the lab can take hours in the field. And think about the problem they're having they removed an old unit, and in doing so a bolt shaved. They don't, apparently, have spare bolts easily accessible for this. Now they have a tool that can apply more force to the bolt, but that could break the bolt, so rather than trying it (and it might work, and everyone is happy, and no news story gets posted on/.) they decide to take some time, think about it, probably test out a few scenarios on the ground, and go from there.
Notice also how they seemed to have some idea what to do when there were shavings from the bolt - they tried to blow away the pieces with nitrogen - someone planned enough to figure carrying a can of nitrogen might be useful, but I suspect that's a tricky problem with gloves on where you can risk puncturing the glove.
Trying to work in space, and to a lesser degree underwater, is very much an exercise in trying to not make things worse - even if you think you have a solution to this problem you're better to not screw it up and wreck hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment or a bolt that probably several hundred if not several thousand dollars to even get there (a single 100g bolt would cost anywhere between 400 dollars and 4000 depending on what launched it there).
but this is a mechanism that has not been previously observed and largely discounted as insignificant by experimenters in the past.
Well, except that if it is what I think it is, it has been observed experimentally even in nuclear physics, it's how you can use lasers for Uranium enrichment, and the effect is definitely there in electron structures. Granted, me being wrong would pose some really interesting science, and sticking numbers to it properly is a lot harder than typing a few sentences on/..
And the effect is insignificant, so that makes sense. Relativity still applies to an object moving 1m/h but it's not all that important. It's important if that's the only way you can measure relativity, but it's not all that important at that scale. Think Cavendish experiment sort of stuff. The big implication with this sort of research would be that you can induce radioactive decay by bombarding something with the right particle/photon, we sort of know that already - that's how fission reactors work.
Neutrino flux from the sun also has a day - night cycle to it, so that could at least theoretically be testable with high enough precision measurements. I know the SNO guys had done a fair bit on day/night stuff.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good paper, but there's nothing obviously intellectually earth shattering about it for the moment.
You mean what if the current nuclear decay dating methods are found to be invalid? They aren't, you can actually see from the first graph they plot, the cycle is minuscule in magnitude. Carbon 14 has a half life of something like 5730 +/- 40 years by the old measurements (see wikipedia). This make it more like (and I haven't done the math so I'm being illustrative rather than exact her) 5750 +/- 10 on a 10 year cycle +/- 5 randomness.
This is where interesting physics happens. You had a number (5730 +/-40) someone figured out how to get that error down to something like +/- 0.4 and we discovered that within the range of +/-40 there was actually a cycle that we couldn't see before.
Except they did this with Cs137. 137Cs has a half life of (From NIST, http://www.nist.gov/pml/data/halflife-html.cfm): 11018.3 ± 9.5 d. Which is 30 years and change, give or take 10 days. It looks like this was being able to take measurements within something like +/- 0.15 days (I think), and there's a cycle in the range of 1 day, maybe 2, somewhere in there, and they've eliminated 70 or 80% of the 9.5 day uncertainty. I'm too lazy to try and do maths on my labour day weekend.
Any sort of EM radiation or neutrino's would be the obvious choice. We know neutrino cross sections pretty well *I think*, I was an 'atomic' (as in electrons) rather than 'nuclear' (as in protons and neutrons) physicist so I I'm not 100% sure on that, and could probably account for neutrino's already - but maybe not.
Gravity from the sun is unlikely to be noticeably cyclical this far away. (Any gravity changes from moving mass on the sun would be apparent locally of course, but I don't think the total mass of the sun isn't increasing and decreasing cyclically). You'd also have an effect from the moon, since it's gravity has a noticeable impact on earth.
makes sense, there's probably something from the sun that interacts with a nucleus inducing a slightly higher rate of decay.
If you think about what a particle accelerator is, we basically fling particles at other particles and induce a (in many cases artificial or otherwise bizarre) form of radioactive decay. If you figure every particle has some interaction cross section with gamma rays from the sun you will then have an observable effect as the sun cycles. You can probably produce the same effect with a laser (or equivalent for the appropriate range), or a particle accelerator if it's a particle- mass interaction, but the effect is really small, so no one noticed or cared before.
Of course the reason is that it's not 'explained' or with a good theory is that you'd have to figure out what specifically is the interaction, and whether or not it's nucleus specific (probably).
The biggest challenge with 2560x1600 is that you start pushing your luck on graphics cards that can connect to, and effectively drive that resolution, you usually need two DVI connectors. I'm not sure on 2560x1440 - it's close enough you might not need two.
I would expect to see a 'retina' display from Apple some time soon. But for the next couple of years that sort of tech is going to be more trouble than it's worth.
It hung around this long, that says a lot. 2004 -2012 is a very very successful game.
You can't expect a product to survive indefinitely if it can't attract enough customers to replace the ones who gradually attrition away. Even WoW is losing subscribers. The MMO landscape is changing a lot, the economy is bad, peoples tastes change, etc. It's possible the market has shifted and there won't even be another world of warcraft to follow, it will just be a series of smaller more casual niche games that are all free to play and only last a couple of years.
No slicing still gives free money, it's supposed to. It's just supposed to be rate limited, and the rate was too high initially. This would be like finding an instant respawn that infinitely re spawned slicing container that always produced a significant amount of credits. Looting it once is legitimate. Looting it twice is understandable. Looting it for hours over and over is clearly an exploit.
When they *didn't* ban people after having had the one day huge honour exploit on ilum they screwed up PVP for months, there were suddenly a pile of people who did exploit, that were now rank 60 and getting all the best gear, and everyone else who needed a couple of hundred hours of work to get to the same point. It was a mess.
All the companies will have in their TOS that you can't exploit a game bug to personal benefit, and that you can't take unfair advantage of game mechanics the same way, this is probably technically the latter, but that's the point - it's exploiting a game mechanic to make money. Buying and selling once could believably be legitimate, a couple of more times and it's not really serious (imagine you could do this every day, but only twice, well.. so what? ) but for hours on end, that's bad....
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I have
Right, so do I. I suspect most /. users can do almost all of these things already. But we are the distinct minority. That's what I mean by 'having all the pieces but not bringing them together'.
to all my other devices via SkyDrive
Unless you have the work fuck in them. then you might be in trouble. http://androidspin.com/2012/08/21/microsoft-skydrive-not-so-private-no-nude-content-or-profanity-in-the-cloud-or-risk-being-banned/
Hence it's not quite ready for prime time.
I'd live you to point me to an ecosystem which can do all this as seamlessly.
No one can, that was sort of my point. This is a benchmark those of us who know what google docs or skydrive or dropbox are, and know how to configure a router can do already with a hodgepodge of devices from various manufacturers. But the average consumer can't navigate doing so yet. Microsoft, Sony and Apple all *could* produce something that everyone manage that. But they aren't.
Have something that would let them sell 70 million rather than 7 million phones.
Unfortunately windows 8 sucks. If people don't buy windows 8, why would they particularly care about a windows 8 phone? Does it do anything to the market that the iPhone (for people who want a good phone but know nothing about how phones work) or Android (people who want good phones and who are happy to install a cyanogen nightly build, or people who want a cheap phone that still has some smarts) don't do? Not really. This is nokia's problem, there's really not a lot of room for them to innovate, they aren't a semiconductor company, they aren't a software company, and they're not big enough to shift the market with the the small set of hardware and software they do make, they're the dell of phones.
The unified windows 8 product family was an opportunity for microsoft to really deliver a combined, integrated entertainment and productivity experience. And they didn't. You desktop/laptop is where you do all of your productivity, but you can take it with you on your phone, you can browse TV on the web or PC, and use the phone to control your TV like a remote, through your Xbox 3. They have all of the pieces, they just didn't bring them together.
What will be more interesting is if Sony can pull off, using android, what microsoft didn't, while still leaving productivity as a microsoft windows PC problem. (Apple of course is trying the same thing, just with Apple TV rather than a playstation or Xbox).
Windows phone is really good to try out. I haven't tried windows phone 8, but WP7 was really quite interesting to see. I'm not sure it's good or bad but it's certainly different than the iPhone/Android setup.
It turns into a week of homework.
Can be.
Where I am now that happens a lot. The last place I was they had a lot of rules about what you could (and couldn't) assign over reading week specifically because they were trying to cut down on stress and it was made very clear that you don't assign any major work over reading week.
Depends how hot it got doesn't it? And if they were just all (relatively) rich and could find ways to be cool when the average person was basically a sweating lump.
Well first of all, 100 years ago high school graduation rates were 8% in the US (http://www.historyliteracy.org/download/Sears2.pdf) - because there were jobs to do that didn't require highschool, and the school was setup with labour being needed more than brains. Times change, the competition changes etc.
This has been an open question really for the last 30 or 40 years, if not a bit longer, other countries are producing more productive, more competitive graduates. The US can lure them over with cash, but that's not a great long term strategy.
It's not like this problem of time off didn't have negative repercussions, they were just less serious than the benefits, now the situation has shifted.
In terms of VPN service, no, that's not a problem. In terms of them deciding to sell data on all of your traffic through their service to someone... that's a bit more problematic.
That 24 hour retention policy, not really a 24 hour retention policy, and really a 24 month sold at auction monthly policy could be real unpleasant.
Well, what is the disadvantage
You have to configure it, and your VPN is not necessarily covered by the laws that cover ISP's. This is good and bad of course, but if your VPN does something illegal and then declares bankruptcy there's not really anything you can do about it, if your ISP does something illegal odds are it's big enough they won't be out of business and you may get some form of restitution.
Near is relative. Talking to someone in north africa 300Km is close to Toronto.
Also, e.g. http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/storm_watch_stories3&stormfile=one_year_ago_looking_back_a_051211 from the year 2010.
An area near where I am got 180 cm in 102 hours.
the 402 over to sarnia had people trapped on it.
Last year on the other hand, was one of the warmest on record and we had rain.
Sure, but you don't have -30 winters with 1m of snow.
I'm near toronto ontario, in canada, and the article is mostly centered around the US education system being a disaster, not that canada is a whole lot better in terms of school years.
If you're somewhere that gets insanely hot, insanely cold etc it's not reasonable to run school in those times, so don't.
2 months off in one block is probably not so good. A month off in the summer, 3 weeks in the winter might work better (as in an extra week in the winter). And then another week to coincide with some major culture group's major holiday, or in the middle of each 'term'. Say a week off in october and a week off in march, with school running august to june.
Teachers still need some vacation time, as do kids, and taking teachers out of the classroom for holidays is usually a disaster for the kids. Winter is probably a good time to have time off because kids pay relatively little attention when they have christmas coming/new toys anyway. Not to mention the problems with winter in general messing up schedules. Teachers also need prep time, so you can't really compact too much more and still leave them time for vacations + prep time+training etc.
But sure, overall, kids would probably overall benefit from more time at school, having to reteach 2 months of work because kids were gone for 2 months isn't really doing you any favours. Especially if you could make up that difference by teaching for an extra 2 or 3 weeks.
One of the universities I went to had a week long 'reading week' in each semester*, one in october, one in february, and the one in the summer was about mid july (the summer timing is a bit strange). The quality of work from those students was actually a lot better than were I am no, where they only get a break in the midst of february. The 4 months where most students aren't here doesn't do a lot of favours, but the one week break makes a huge difference to stress/sleep/quality of work, and I would suspect the same effect would apply to younger kids.
Semesters are sept-dec, Jan - > April, may - > august.
And enterprise tools. Don't forget all of their moves into the server market and more serious corporate IT stuff.
Besides that, their '20+' year old vision is the foundation for, and the base of most of the successes they have had. There's nothing wrong with that particularly. Cars should drive on the road, so every increment in the last 100 years has been on cars driving on the road. Flying cars have never really materialized as economically feasible. Microsoft have made quite a lot of progress in the desktop paradigm, and there is a legitimate place for small steps towards some cloud connected future rather than leaping in headlong.
As I said, they might not make anything better. But there's a lot of room in the marketplace for a much better cellphone-desktop-homeserver-laptop-productivity+entertainment product suite and they could certainly leverage their existing windows user base to make some really interesting vision materialize. A microsoft built 'Xbox 4' that acts as your cable and other TV enterainment hub, that can, in turn, connect to or act as a home server from which all of your clients (family computers and mobile devices) connect to.
I think the enterprise stuff is really the big factor. If you go into any serious nerds house (especially linux nerds) we've got all sorts of stuff controlled from our PC's, one my buddies controlled his lights from a command line 14 years ago, we've got web servers, file servers, e-mail servers, synchronization and backup tools, user management etc. I don't even use a TV to watch TV, I can do that all with a video capture card and can record TV doing it - and so can everyone else on /. That connected vision is the future, most users aren't capable of it yet, but that's been microsofts deal in the enterprise - you can train someone in a year long course to do a half decent job of managing their corporate stuff for a small business. That's *still* too complicated for a home user, but the easier it gets, the more your 'desktop' is really just your main home server, and everything else is a client to it. Microsofts 'vision' for the future could be stuff we can all do already, (give or take some devices to help) it's just too hard for now - but that's a huge space they can get into.
The question isn't whether or not everything will move to a thin client, it's whether or not a significant chunk of users can do everything they need in a web browser.
Also, as per the article, MS still has 90% of the desktop market, their vision very much matters, especially as they creep into the mobile space, because they really could completely re-envision the desktop-laptop-mobile relationship. Not necessarily for the better of course, but they certainly can change things a lot.
probably the same as everyone else, that windows 7 will get the job done until someone in microsoft picks a single design and sticks with it for windows 9.
Actually, CRC algorithms can be designed to handle all single-bit errors, and even larger errors perfectly.
I specifically used the term perfectly because all CRC have a probability of failing due to multiple bit flips that produce the same CRC. The better the CRC the lower the probability. CRC's sort of by definition will find a single bit flip.
Similarly, it's not at all unusual for mechanical designs to cater for the loss of a single fastener, or even several in a row.
Sure, assuming something could go wrong is part of any design. As you say, with the space station it might be a weight issue, it might also be a matter of how long it takes to do the install, or how hard that would be, or the likelyhood that if you have 4 bolts one of them will be bad and mess up everything else.
They're also just sitting on this problem for like a week because it's not all that serious in the short term, and it's possible it will run with 9 turns rather than 15 and all of that. Why take risks when you don't have to after all.
If you're an electrical or computer engineer specializing in networks you should have enough experience to know that a single bent or corroded pin, or slightly non uniformly applied piece of solder can ruin you day.
If you're on site somewhere, especially somewhere remote, it's hard to know just how things will get messed up. What works in a lab is very different than after you've shipped it off some place and tried to get it to behave there.
Before you deploy a network you obviously test it in your own lab under exactly the same humidity, temperature, radiation exposure, altitude and personnel as for on site right? To what tolerance? You also test all of your backup equipment by having samples you store in exactly the way they're going to be stored at a live test sight, so you know what the probability is of something happening to them during storage?
Now we know single bit flip in an ethernet packet is just the sort of low hanging fruit of problems that we have network engineers for right? So I'm guessing you developed your own mathematically perfect CRC that you have published and that we should all use, to solve the 'low hanging fruit' of single bit flip errors? Just like a thread on nut and bolt right - you can take your perfect errorless network hardware, put in an aircraft, fly it to a remote island 12 time zones away you know you, with absolute certainty, that it will work 100% of the time? You should get a PhD and write articles about your techniques, the rest of us could really benefit from that.
Maybe you're not on the software side of things, but more hardware, say telephone twisted pair. Now as you know, the reason we twist pairs of wires is to prevent a signal on one wire from inducing a field on another. So I'm guessing you have some piece of equipment that can verify that all the twisted pair sets of wires you use are optimally twisted? What's it called?
Ok I'll stop being a snide asshole, unless I find out you're one of my former students.
You're right, that yes, good engineering is supposed to predict problems in advance and plan for them. You do as many tests as you can, and hope that you've figured out what problems will arise. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work perfectly, there's always some random error involved, that you have to cope with on the fly. On the ground I would say 'try another bolt', up in space, when you've got a dude in a space suit simple solutions become very expensive, time consuming and very risky. I used to do something very similar to network engineering as an on site guy, and problems that take 5 minutes to solve in the lab can take hours in the field. And think about the problem they're having they removed an old unit, and in doing so a bolt shaved. They don't, apparently, have spare bolts easily accessible for this. Now they have a tool that can apply more force to the bolt, but that could break the bolt, so rather than trying it (and it might work, and everyone is happy, and no news story gets posted on /.) they decide to take some time, think about it, probably test out a few scenarios on the ground, and go from there.
Notice also how they seemed to have some idea what to do when there were shavings from the bolt - they tried to blow away the pieces with nitrogen - someone planned enough to figure carrying a can of nitrogen might be useful, but I suspect that's a tricky problem with gloves on where you can risk puncturing the glove.
Trying to work in space, and to a lesser degree underwater, is very much an exercise in trying to not make things worse - even if you think you have a solution to this problem you're better to not screw it up and wreck hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment or a bolt that probably several hundred if not several thousand dollars to even get there (a single 100g bolt would cost anywhere between 400 dollars and 4000 depending on what launched it there).
Try running a decent game at that resolution.
Being able to run a desktop, and being able to run a game, or decode a video stream at that resolution are not the same problem.
but this is a mechanism that has not been previously observed and largely discounted as insignificant by experimenters in the past.
Well, except that if it is what I think it is, it has been observed experimentally even in nuclear physics, it's how you can use lasers for Uranium enrichment, and the effect is definitely there in electron structures. Granted, me being wrong would pose some really interesting science, and sticking numbers to it properly is a lot harder than typing a few sentences on /..
And the effect is insignificant, so that makes sense. Relativity still applies to an object moving 1m/h but it's not all that important. It's important if that's the only way you can measure relativity, but it's not all that important at that scale. Think Cavendish experiment sort of stuff. The big implication with this sort of research would be that you can induce radioactive decay by bombarding something with the right particle/photon, we sort of know that already - that's how fission reactors work.
Neutrino flux from the sun also has a day - night cycle to it, so that could at least theoretically be testable with high enough precision measurements. I know the SNO guys had done a fair bit on day/night stuff.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good paper, but there's nothing obviously intellectually earth shattering about it for the moment.
Not even necessarily a high cross section, there *is* a cross section after all, this is just a really really really tiny magnitude effect.
Huh?
You mean what if the current nuclear decay dating methods are found to be invalid? They aren't, you can actually see from the first graph they plot, the cycle is minuscule in magnitude. Carbon 14 has a half life of something like 5730 +/- 40 years by the old measurements (see wikipedia). This make it more like (and I haven't done the math so I'm being illustrative rather than exact her) 5750 +/- 10 on a 10 year cycle +/- 5 randomness.
This is where interesting physics happens. You had a number (5730 +/-40) someone figured out how to get that error down to something like +/- 0.4 and we discovered that within the range of +/-40 there was actually a cycle that we couldn't see before.
Except they did this with Cs137. 137Cs has a half life of (From NIST, http://www.nist.gov/pml/data/halflife-html.cfm): 11018.3 ± 9.5 d. Which is 30 years and change, give or take 10 days. It looks like this was being able to take measurements within something like +/- 0.15 days (I think), and there's a cycle in the range of 1 day, maybe 2, somewhere in there, and they've eliminated 70 or 80% of the 9.5 day uncertainty. I'm too lazy to try and do maths on my labour day weekend.
Any sort of EM radiation or neutrino's would be the obvious choice. We know neutrino cross sections pretty well *I think*, I was an 'atomic' (as in electrons) rather than 'nuclear' (as in protons and neutrons) physicist so I I'm not 100% sure on that, and could probably account for neutrino's already - but maybe not.
Gravity from the sun is unlikely to be noticeably cyclical this far away. (Any gravity changes from moving mass on the sun would be apparent locally of course, but I don't think the total mass of the sun isn't increasing and decreasing cyclically). You'd also have an effect from the moon, since it's gravity has a noticeable impact on earth.
makes sense, there's probably something from the sun that interacts with a nucleus inducing a slightly higher rate of decay.
If you think about what a particle accelerator is, we basically fling particles at other particles and induce a (in many cases artificial or otherwise bizarre) form of radioactive decay. If you figure every particle has some interaction cross section with gamma rays from the sun you will then have an observable effect as the sun cycles. You can probably produce the same effect with a laser (or equivalent for the appropriate range), or a particle accelerator if it's a particle- mass interaction, but the effect is really small, so no one noticed or cared before.
Of course the reason is that it's not 'explained' or with a good theory is that you'd have to figure out what specifically is the interaction, and whether or not it's nucleus specific (probably).
The biggest challenge with 2560x1600 is that you start pushing your luck on graphics cards that can connect to, and effectively drive that resolution, you usually need two DVI connectors. I'm not sure on 2560x1440 - it's close enough you might not need two.
I would expect to see a 'retina' display from Apple some time soon. But for the next couple of years that sort of tech is going to be more trouble than it's worth.
It hung around this long, that says a lot. 2004 -2012 is a very very successful game.
You can't expect a product to survive indefinitely if it can't attract enough customers to replace the ones who gradually attrition away. Even WoW is losing subscribers. The MMO landscape is changing a lot, the economy is bad, peoples tastes change, etc. It's possible the market has shifted and there won't even be another world of warcraft to follow, it will just be a series of smaller more casual niche games that are all free to play and only last a couple of years.
No slicing still gives free money, it's supposed to. It's just supposed to be rate limited, and the rate was too high initially. This would be like finding an instant respawn that infinitely re spawned slicing container that always produced a significant amount of credits. Looting it once is legitimate. Looting it twice is understandable. Looting it for hours over and over is clearly an exploit.
When they *didn't* ban people after having had the one day huge honour exploit on ilum they screwed up PVP for months, there were suddenly a pile of people who did exploit, that were now rank 60 and getting all the best gear, and everyone else who needed a couple of hundred hours of work to get to the same point. It was a mess.
All the companies will have in their TOS that you can't exploit a game bug to personal benefit, and that you can't take unfair advantage of game mechanics the same way, this is probably technically the latter, but that's the point - it's exploiting a game mechanic to make money. Buying and selling once could believably be legitimate, a couple of more times and it's not really serious (imagine you could do this every day, but only twice, well.. so what? ) but for hours on end, that's bad....