Are engineers going to work out a way to get a couple of orders of magnitude more data in the frequencies they've already got? No, so we need more frequency bands to significantly increase capacity. Are Nokia are going to get Switzerland to change the frequencies their emergency services use so they can save $0.05 on the cost of making a phone? No, so we can't use the same frequency bands everywhere in the world because there just aren't that many big chunks of useful spectrum lying unused.
Either they don't care or can't afford an iPhone. People who don't care about having nice things don't spend money buying nice apps. People who can't afford a nice phone are less likely to buy apps. Either way a significant chunk of people who buy Android phones are not people developers want to target.
They turned off selective availability - the deliberate introduction of errors to the unencrypted signal - many years ago, but the encrypted P(Y) military code which provides greater accuracy than the unencrypted C/A code is still encrypted.
You can't spoof the P(Y) code without some pretty serious code breaking, but you could jam the P(Y) code and spoof the C/A code. If the GPS unit falls back to C/A when it can't get a lock on P(Y) you can spoof the position, but as part of the purpose of the P(Y) code is anti-spoofing you'd kinda hope that military receivers would only trust the position when they can get a P(Y) lock.
As for using an INS, the kind of lightweight old-tech INS they'd risk putting in a drone would have significant drift. If you can spoof the position you can drift the apparent GPS position slowly enough that the GPS and INS still agree to within the magin for error of the INS. Tricking a compass would be harder though - you need to be pretty close to do that.
The population density of the EU is only 30% or so higher than the USA. Population density is not the reason broadband in the US sucks. It sucks because you have a shitty regulatory framework.
Ignoring sparsely populated parts of the EU would be absurd as there are sparsely populated parts of the USA too. There are US states with similar populations and population densities to EU countries which have vastly better net access. It's not geography, it's policy.
> The size of games is determined more from the size of the textures and the number of objects in a map. The size of the textures is already near a maximum, until monitor resolutions make large increases; and the number of objects is mostly determined by the amount of time a developer is willing to hand-tune a map.
Rage gives lie to your notion that textures are maxed out. Rage paints pretty much every surface uniquely rather than the enormous amount of texture repetition you get in most games. The net is full of people complaining about blurry textures as a result of the compression required to achieve that. If Carmack thought he could have got away with using 200 GB of textures instead of 20 GB that's what the game would have shipped with. Textures in any game using any technology are hugely limited by current tech.
> But I too haven't gotten why someone who is a self admitted "squatter at MIT" is treated as this "God of programming" when frankly he had ONE idea, which was based on trying to keep the world locked in the 1970s, and since then? Not so much.
RMS didn't just have an idea, he wrote a shitload of code to make his idea a reality.
That article talks about enterprise drives which use SLC flash. SLC has 20 - 30 times the write endurance of the MLC flash you get in consumer-grade SSDs.
SSD controllers are good enough now that I wouldn't worry about the MLC flash in my laptop's SSD for general use, but I'd take a very close look at the numbers if I was using it to do anything that was write heavy (like video work or building a big codebase).
Theft by finding. What a nice person you are. What would you want someone to do if they found your phone?
Re:Errors are universal, humour is cultural
on
The Science of Humor
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· Score: 2
> So there appears to be a conflict here. You'd expect everyone's brain to be wired to catch the same sorts of errors or false inferences, yet if there's a cultural component to humour that contradicts the "error" theory.
That would only be the case if everybody made the same errors and false inferences in the first place, but our view of the world and the inferences we make are very much influenced by our culture.
Do you think my work computer would be running IE6 and Firefox 3.5 if I could install my own software? Shit, I can't even fire up Task Manager to kill an errant app.
I burn my old bank statements etc. and it's actually pretty time consuming and labour intensive to completely burn anything more than a few sheets. Just throwing a stack of papers on a fire doesn't work - the middle pages don't burn and are completely legible. Even when burnt, undisturbed paper ash still has legible text on it. You need to do a lot of stirring and separating of sheets to ensure complete destruction. It's much more time consuming than shredding.
> Your monthly bill is the same whether or not you are on a contract, and whether or not you bought the phone at a subsidized price.
Wow, you have some seriously shitty networks. Over here (UK), SIM-only contracts are significantly less than you'd pay if you wanted a fancy smartphone with your contract. You can ever go further and get a "free" PS3 or laptop with your "free" phone by paying more for your contract.
4G doesn't do it, at least not for lots of people at once. Just as with 3G technology when you want lots of people to use it at once you have to build lots of cells. The density of cells in urban areas is well beyond what is needed to provide coverage - the extra cells are there for capacity, not coverage. You can have lots of range or you can serve a lot of people at once, but with limited spectrum you can't do both at once. It works for cell networks because they carefully manage the power output and frequency ranges of their cells so they don't overlap too much and they can pack them in tightly. With unlicensed spectrum with high powers and low frequencies you wouldn't have that kind of management so the potential would be wasted. You could provide coverage for an entire city with one tower with AM radio frequencies - local radio stations do it all the time - but you wouldn't have nearly enough bandwidth for everybody's internet needs.
With more spectrum people could do more, of course, but the really good stuff is limited enough that without centralised management it'll be much less useful. Centralised management goes against the whole decentralised mesh networking concept. Somebody is going to have to build and operate the long-distance high-bandwidth links and they're not going to do it for free.
You talk as though the Pi is feeble. It's a staggeringly powerful computer. Better than a workstation of a few years ago or a supercomputer of a few decades ago. You know, the kinds of things they used to design jet aircraft, run accounts for multi-national corporations, invent nuclear weapons, plan space missions, develop models of the universe and stuff. We're just accustomed to almost unbelievably powerful computers.
If you want someone to learn how to code efficiently give them an 8-bit microcontroller, not a 32-bit one-point-something GHz CPU with hundreds of MB of RAM.
If you want long-distance propagation you need lower frequencies - the higher you go the closer to direct line-of-sight you need.
The 2.4GHz band we use for WiFi is 100 MHz wide. Even WiFi with its puny range is crowded in that band. If you extended a 100 MHz wide band over a 50 mile radius it would be saturated in an instant. Well then, let's use a band of frequencies 100 times as wide - oh dear, now we need everything from 0-10 GHz, which means our frequencies are way too high for 50 mile links without line-of-sight and we've still not got nearly enough bandwidth for everyone in a 50 mile radius who'd want to use a medium range link.
It just won't work. Low frequencies are lovely, but they are very, very scarce. The future is higher frequencies operating at shorter ranges.
> If your provider fails to provide what people pay for — then he is to blame.
If your provider isn't providing what they are contracted to provide you do have a legitimate cause for complaint. But almost always in the cases where people complain they are in fact getting what they paid for - the ISP never promised you dedicated bandwidth and no traffic shaping on your residential connection and you haven't paid the going rate for that kind of connection.
If you shop around for dedicated bandwidth with an SLA and guarantees of zero traffic shaping and zero contention you can most certainly get it. Expect to pay at least an order of magnitude more than you pay for your basic residential connection.
>> I tried the stuff they do in Apple's Siri adds with Vlingo.
> No you didn't.
Yes, I did. I tried it on a Nokia N8 and an iPad. Maybe it does more on Android phones or iPhones.
Most of the time it just gave me a Google search of what I just said (like a Google search of "what is my next appointment"). It would not set a timer. It would not tell me what my next appointment was. It never asked for clarification. It was not aware of context. The only thing that worked anything like properly was dictating a text message or email, provided I followed the specified format.
I tried the stuff they do in Apple's Siri adds with Vlingo. It categorically does not do what Siri does. It doesn't even come close. Voice Actions aren't much better either.
If you think Siri is about voice recognition you're completely missing the point.
Android's voice actions are a generation behind Siri. It's not about voice recognition, which we've had on innumerable platforms for years, it's about natural language processing and integration.
>> Roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit of global warming has taken place; we're responsible for one quarter of it.
Isn't that estimate of the total anthropological warming an order of magnitude lower than the mainstream view? That's pretty sceptical position. The mainstream view is that warming was 3 x as much as he stated there and that it was mostly caused by us. He agrees on the magnitude of the change now, but not the cause.
He may never have been a sceptic that warming was happening, just about whether we could or should do anything about it. For sceptics with an agenda (I'm not saying he has one), saying there's nothing we can do is as effective as saying it isn't happening.
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Are engineers going to work out a way to get a couple of orders of magnitude more data in the frequencies they've already got? No, so we need more frequency bands to significantly increase capacity. Are Nokia are going to get Switzerland to change the frequencies their emergency services use so they can save $0.05 on the cost of making a phone? No, so we can't use the same frequency bands everywhere in the world because there just aren't that many big chunks of useful spectrum lying unused.
Either they don't care or can't afford an iPhone. People who don't care about having nice things don't spend money buying nice apps. People who can't afford a nice phone are less likely to buy apps. Either way a significant chunk of people who buy Android phones are not people developers want to target.
They turned off selective availability - the deliberate introduction of errors to the unencrypted signal - many years ago, but the encrypted P(Y) military code which provides greater accuracy than the unencrypted C/A code is still encrypted.
You can't spoof the P(Y) code without some pretty serious code breaking, but you could jam the P(Y) code and spoof the C/A code. If the GPS unit falls back to C/A when it can't get a lock on P(Y) you can spoof the position, but as part of the purpose of the P(Y) code is anti-spoofing you'd kinda hope that military receivers would only trust the position when they can get a P(Y) lock.
As for using an INS, the kind of lightweight old-tech INS they'd risk putting in a drone would have significant drift. If you can spoof the position you can drift the apparent GPS position slowly enough that the GPS and INS still agree to within the magin for error of the INS. Tricking a compass would be harder though - you need to be pretty close to do that.
The population density of the EU is only 30% or so higher than the USA. Population density is not the reason broadband in the US sucks. It sucks because you have a shitty regulatory framework.
Ignoring sparsely populated parts of the EU would be absurd as there are sparsely populated parts of the USA too. There are US states with similar populations and population densities to EU countries which have vastly better net access. It's not geography, it's policy.
> The size of games is determined more from the size of the textures and the number of objects in a map. The size of the textures is already near a maximum, until monitor resolutions make large increases; and the number of objects is mostly determined by the amount of time a developer is willing to hand-tune a map.
Rage gives lie to your notion that textures are maxed out. Rage paints pretty much every surface uniquely rather than the enormous amount of texture repetition you get in most games. The net is full of people complaining about blurry textures as a result of the compression required to achieve that. If Carmack thought he could have got away with using 200 GB of textures instead of 20 GB that's what the game would have shipped with. Textures in any game using any technology are hugely limited by current tech.
> But I too haven't gotten why someone who is a self admitted "squatter at MIT" is treated as this "God of programming" when frankly he had ONE idea, which was based on trying to keep the world locked in the 1970s, and since then? Not so much.
RMS didn't just have an idea, he wrote a shitload of code to make his idea a reality.
That article talks about enterprise drives which use SLC flash. SLC has 20 - 30 times the write endurance of the MLC flash you get in consumer-grade SSDs.
SSD controllers are good enough now that I wouldn't worry about the MLC flash in my laptop's SSD for general use, but I'd take a very close look at the numbers if I was using it to do anything that was write heavy (like video work or building a big codebase).
Theft by finding. What a nice person you are. What would you want someone to do if they found your phone?
> So there appears to be a conflict here. You'd expect everyone's brain to be wired to catch the same sorts of errors or false inferences, yet if there's a cultural component to humour that contradicts the "error" theory.
That would only be the case if everybody made the same errors and false inferences in the first place, but our view of the world and the inferences we make are very much influenced by our culture.
Do you think my work computer would be running IE6 and Firefox 3.5 if I could install my own software? Shit, I can't even fire up Task Manager to kill an errant app.
My work computers run Windows XP, IE6 and Firefox 3.5 - no Flash in either browser. How can I run Angry Birds on that shitheap?
I burn my old bank statements etc. and it's actually pretty time consuming and labour intensive to completely burn anything more than a few sheets. Just throwing a stack of papers on a fire doesn't work - the middle pages don't burn and are completely legible. Even when burnt, undisturbed paper ash still has legible text on it. You need to do a lot of stirring and separating of sheets to ensure complete destruction. It's much more time consuming than shredding.
> Your monthly bill is the same whether or not you are on a contract, and whether or not you bought the phone at a subsidized price.
Wow, you have some seriously shitty networks. Over here (UK), SIM-only contracts are significantly less than you'd pay if you wanted a fancy smartphone with your contract. You can ever go further and get a "free" PS3 or laptop with your "free" phone by paying more for your contract.
That's a very precise number. I wonder how they gather those statistics?
4G doesn't do it, at least not for lots of people at once. Just as with 3G technology when you want lots of people to use it at once you have to build lots of cells. The density of cells in urban areas is well beyond what is needed to provide coverage - the extra cells are there for capacity, not coverage. You can have lots of range or you can serve a lot of people at once, but with limited spectrum you can't do both at once. It works for cell networks because they carefully manage the power output and frequency ranges of their cells so they don't overlap too much and they can pack them in tightly. With unlicensed spectrum with high powers and low frequencies you wouldn't have that kind of management so the potential would be wasted. You could provide coverage for an entire city with one tower with AM radio frequencies - local radio stations do it all the time - but you wouldn't have nearly enough bandwidth for everybody's internet needs.
With more spectrum people could do more, of course, but the really good stuff is limited enough that without centralised management it'll be much less useful. Centralised management goes against the whole decentralised mesh networking concept. Somebody is going to have to build and operate the long-distance high-bandwidth links and they're not going to do it for free.
I'm guessing they went with Broadcom because at least one of the Pi team works for Broadcom.
You talk as though the Pi is feeble. It's a staggeringly powerful computer. Better than a workstation of a few years ago or a supercomputer of a few decades ago. You know, the kinds of things they used to design jet aircraft, run accounts for multi-national corporations, invent nuclear weapons, plan space missions, develop models of the universe and stuff. We're just accustomed to almost unbelievably powerful computers.
If you want someone to learn how to code efficiently give them an 8-bit microcontroller, not a 32-bit one-point-something GHz CPU with hundreds of MB of RAM.
If you want long-distance propagation you need lower frequencies - the higher you go the closer to direct line-of-sight you need.
The 2.4GHz band we use for WiFi is 100 MHz wide. Even WiFi with its puny range is crowded in that band. If you extended a 100 MHz wide band over a 50 mile radius it would be saturated in an instant. Well then, let's use a band of frequencies 100 times as wide - oh dear, now we need everything from 0-10 GHz, which means our frequencies are way too high for 50 mile links without line-of-sight and we've still not got nearly enough bandwidth for everyone in a 50 mile radius who'd want to use a medium range link.
It just won't work. Low frequencies are lovely, but they are very, very scarce. The future is higher frequencies operating at shorter ranges.
> In what way does one benefit from owning a stock if that stock doesn't increase in value?
If you'd been paying attention you'd know that you make money through dividends even with a flat stock price.
> If your provider fails to provide what people pay for — then he is to blame.
If your provider isn't providing what they are contracted to provide you do have a legitimate cause for complaint. But almost always in the cases where people complain they are in fact getting what they paid for - the ISP never promised you dedicated bandwidth and no traffic shaping on your residential connection and you haven't paid the going rate for that kind of connection.
If you shop around for dedicated bandwidth with an SLA and guarantees of zero traffic shaping and zero contention you can most certainly get it. Expect to pay at least an order of magnitude more than you pay for your basic residential connection.
Randomness is easy, but turning that into unbiased random numbers in the right range is a damn sight harder.
>> I tried the stuff they do in Apple's Siri adds with Vlingo.
> No you didn't.
Yes, I did. I tried it on a Nokia N8 and an iPad. Maybe it does more on Android phones or iPhones.
Most of the time it just gave me a Google search of what I just said (like a Google search of "what is my next appointment"). It would not set a timer. It would not tell me what my next appointment was. It never asked for clarification. It was not aware of context. The only thing that worked anything like properly was dictating a text message or email, provided I followed the specified format.
I tried the stuff they do in Apple's Siri adds with Vlingo. It categorically does not do what Siri does. It doesn't even come close. Voice Actions aren't much better either.
If you think Siri is about voice recognition you're completely missing the point.
Android's voice actions are a generation behind Siri. It's not about voice recognition, which we've had on innumerable platforms for years, it's about natural language processing and integration.
>> Roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit of global warming has taken place; we're responsible for one quarter of it.
Isn't that estimate of the total anthropological warming an order of magnitude lower than the mainstream view? That's pretty sceptical position. The mainstream view is that warming was 3 x as much as he stated there and that it was mostly caused by us. He agrees on the magnitude of the change now, but not the cause.
He may never have been a sceptic that warming was happening, just about whether we could or should do anything about it. For sceptics with an agenda (I'm not saying he has one), saying there's nothing we can do is as effective as saying it isn't happening.