I agree with you regarding the "movies" that were really just 4 episodes with a loosely coordinated plot-line. That seemed to be more about making the economics of reviving the show work (i.e., direct to video sales plus delayed airings on CC). However, I thought they really fell flat on their face and were not engaging. It was obvious that the writers just couldn't make a 2 hour plot line broken up into 4 parts work.
However, I thought the follow-up season on CC was actually pretty decent. I would not argue that they were the best the series had to offer, but they seemed like worthwhile inclusions, imho.
My understanding is that he was a creative director at Microsoft. Is that honestly that high of a position there? At other large companies, such titles are very common and often imply only moderate leadership (e.g., second tier management) or a relatively senior individual contributor. How many of us would have known his name if not for this debacle?
My point is that it very well may have been an expectation that any twitter followers of his were friends or acquaintances who would be reasonably familiar with his sense of humor and/or debate styles. It seems clear by the tone that he was at best playing a devil's advocate and at worst trolling a friend. Now it is hugely stupid for him to simply assume that no strangers would follow him on twitter and he should have made his twitter account private from the start if he was going to say such things. However, it isn't a reasonable response to "resign" ( * cough * fire * cough *) someone over this.
I'm not saying that Microsoft doesn't have the legal right to terminate his employment for this, just that it is disproportionate to the actual action taken. Remember, he came off as an arrogant person with an opinion on a technical aspect of a game console design. I'm sure no one on Slashdot could be accused of the same heinous crime. It isn't like he said something racist, misogynistic, threatening, or even particularly offensive. Heck he didn't even officially confirm that there was a new Xbox or that it actually had this particular feature. He just argued (poorly) that it wasn't a big deal.
You were on the right track with the voice module aspect, but went off the track with the white papers and corporate BS. "Enterprise class" means a 3D printer that is used in a ship like the USS Enterprise. This means that Gartner is predicting that we will have sub $2000 replicators. You are correct that a voice module is required for this technology, specifically one that uses Majel Barret's voice.
I know, I know... you are saying to yourself, but the Enterprise is a Galaxy class starship. Shouldn't this be a "Galaxy class" 3D printer? I would agree with you, but again this is Gartner, you can't expect them to get it completely right.
Similar to the claim the parent made, my understanding is also that the Xbox was pulled so quickly and replaced by the 360 because of the infeasibility of doing a die shrink to make a higher margin (or more accurately some margin rather than significant loss) design with the original Xbox.
My understanding is that Microsoft did not procure the rights to the implementations of the CPU nor the graphics chip used in the original Xbox. This was presumably because the Xbox was rushed and/or MS was not familiar with the standard terms used in the console game. This is not all that surprising on the CPU side since it was an Intel Pentium 3 based processor and I'd be surprised if Intel would have given MS any significant IP rights. The problem is that when it came time to try to make a cheaper version of the Xbox, MS had no leverage or ability to port the IP to a smaller process geometry or create a single chip implementation without costly relicensing of the designs. Supposedly MS was so pissed about that (especially with respect to Nvidia) that they switched to AMD for the GPU of the 360 and supposedly are continuing that trend with the 720 (aka Durango, aka Infinity).
AMD is appearing to circle the drain (e.g., the recent short term stop gap measure of selling their offices to another party so that they can lease them back and pocket a quick buck at the cost of increased long term expense). I am very curious what all of the consoles are going to do if AMD ceases to be. Maybe AMD will continue to be viable as a much smaller company that primarily makes chips for consoles.
Speaking of Carnegie, even in his more altruistic endeavors he often had shrewd, secondary considerations. As a case in point, years ago I toured Carnegie Mellon University and the tour guide informed the audience that one of the main buildings that we were passing was built with an intentional grade rather than being level. The reason for this grade was that if the university did not take off he could then repurpose the building as a factory with an assembly line that would move down the slope. I found that to be an interesting insight into his mind.
The "market rate" concept is one of the key things wrong with the pay scales in the US. Specifically, HR depts. generally work to restrict the paygrades to ensure that the rates are "competitive" with other comparable companies using (sometimes questionable) market data. "Competitive" in HR parlance means pay your employees the median (or preferable under the median and claim other non-salary benefits make up or exceed the difference). However, taken to the logical extreme and with virtual collusion through the fact that the majority of HR depts do the same thing, this means that pay rates effectively stagnate and barely keep up with inflation (often not even that). These rigid pay grades severely limits the flexibility to truly pay your workers what they are worth and often moving to higher pay grades requires forcing them to take on managerial responsibilities which may not be of interest to the high value employees in question and may burn them out even faster.
The even uglier side of things is that executive compensation works almost exactly the opposite to that of general employee compensation. Executives are compared to other executives from competing companies to ensure that their pay is significantly higher than the median market price. The thinking being, surely you don't want to hire an average executive, so you must compensate him/her higher than average in order to hire a good one. This creates positive feedback for executive compensation which then increases the disparity between a company's average employee pay and its average executive pay. Using this line of thought, I have never understood why a company would want above average executives, but only average (or below average) employees since the employees are the ones that are directly generating revenue and have the greatest day to day impact to the success or failure of a company.
In Northern VA myself. Voted thrice in Minnesota and many times in Virginia. Have to say that Virginia requirements are ridiculous for voting and are almost designed to stop people who don't have their shit together from voting. In 2000 on the U of MN campus I was walking around campus on election day and outside they had a big thing setup for me to vote. I had my student ID and driver's license and that was all they needed to register me, take my vote and give me a voter registration ID! They asked if I had a utility bill and I told them I was living in a dorm room on campus. No further questions needed, just had to fill out a form.
I also lived in MN and am now in Virginia (SW). As you said, voting in MN couldn't be easier. However in VA, getting my initial voter registration was easy through the DMV, but when I moved to another VA city 30 minutes away, I found the process of changing my voter registration to be a huge hassle. While you can get your driver's license changed via an on-line method, you actually have to fill out a paper form and mail it in and wait weeks to change the voter registration. I had to do this twice before it actually took and I was left wondering if I'd actually get my card until about a month ago when it finally arrived in the mail.
The effort to keep people from voting doesn't just stop there. My ballot consisted of 5 questions. President, congressional races, and 2 state amendments, that's it. In other states I would have at least 10 - 20 items to vote on. It appears that in VA (or at least my part of it), they push the vast majority of the ballot items to the off-cycle elections. I have to suspect that they do this because they know that the voter turn-out is decreased during those elections and presumably making it easier for the groups who do show up for the off-cycle elections to push their agendas.
One last thing that I found annoying about the VA election process (or that which I experienced), is that the entire thing used a touchscreen interface until the very end. At the end, the screen tells you to push the vote button to lock in your selections. However, the vote button is not on the screen, instead it is a smallish physical button at the very top of the device. Admittedly the button is lit up and vote is written on it, but after going through the entire process via on-screen cues, it was not immediately obvious that I had to push a physical button. Luckily I found it, I wonder how many people thought they had voted, but did not find and press that button.
Yep, you forgot about how kick-starter was used to fund the creation of the robotic miniatures. Also, the Raspberry Pi was actually running MineCraft which had a working implementation of an 8-bit processor that was doing the actual BitCoin mining. Researchers were observing the operation of the MineCraft processor using the Oculus Rift headset. In the future, the designers plan to port this all to the upcoming Ouya.
I have to agree with this. I was at a zoo recently and saw a person holding up a smartphone in a protective case. I noticed a small cutout in the case around the camera lens, but then saw another much larger cutout in the case. I was at an angle so couldn't immediately tell what else needed access through the case. I became curious and walked around to see that it was a cutout over the Apple logo. So basically the structure of the case was compromised not to enable some internal function that the case's structure would block, but purely to ensure that someone looking at this person's phone would know that it was an iPhone. I immediately cracked up at the ridiculousness of the situation, both that a case manufacturer would make a case like this and also that someone would buy it.
I agree that color laser printers should be the way to go. However, I think there is still a gap due to their relatively poor color image handling capabilities. I'm not asking for a reasonably priced color laser that can do something comparable to the images you get from the 12 ink photo printers combined with the ultra expensive ink jet photo paper, but I'd like a reasonably priced color laser that is comparable to a midrange CMYK-based inkjet for color image reproduction.
Unfortunately, my experiences (with a previous 7 year old Minolta and currently a 3 year old HP; both in the $400-700 price range) have been that the color aspect of color lasers are really only good for very rough draft color prints or color prints of Power Points or Word Docs where the color is used to augment figures and tables, but does not require significant image quality. Invariably, pictures printed on these printers look washed out, have limited color gradients, and sometimes even obvious banding issues. These are issues that most mid-range inkjets had solved over 10 years ago. Perhaps affordable color lasers have gotten drastically better in the last 3 years, but I am skeptical.
Since it is now Monday, I doubt anyone will actually see this, but here goes. Disclaimer: I did not RTFA, I've been a Slashdot reader long enough to know there be dragons.
Anyway, if the single correct answer is given 48% of the time and the set of all other incorrect answers is given at a rate of 52% of the time, it is possible that any individual incorrect answer does not appear nearly as many times as the correct answer. For example, lets say the correct answer is presented 48% of the time, but Wa is presented 24% of the time and Wb is presented 28% of the time. Where Wa is wrong answer a and Wb is wrong answer b where Wa is not equal to Wb. As long as the statistical presentation of an incorrect answer is significantly smaller than the presentation of a correct answer then the result could still be valuable since it should be easy to detect the likely correct answer "quickly". This is only the case if you can run the calculation enough times to determine a statistically significant variation between the correct answer and the various wrong answers in less time than it would take a non quantum computer to calculate it correctly the first time. As the problem space scales up, there should be a divergence point where this would occur.
Alternatively, for one way functions you could do as numerous others have suggested in this thread: get a factored answer and run it forward to see if the answer is correct. If it is, stop, if not, refactor. This could also be faster than a single run with a non quantum computer and may be faster than what I've proposed above.
I was a subscriber when I was a kid back in the early days (late 80's to early-90's) before gaming info was widely available online. My favorite part was the really well done maps they had of the various scrollers. They had what appeared to be linearly stitched screenshots with pointers to important areas, items, and enemy bosses that referenced legends of useful information (e.g. the location of a heart container). It was really fun to play the game and then go back and open the magazine and see all the stuff that you missed and then go back into the game to find it. No other magazine provided the same quality of maps, relying upon (often confusing) text directions and maybe a screenshot or two. It extended the replayability of lots of games for me. Of course as a kid I had no money so I had to make games last.
So basically the same strategy that Google used with Honeycomb (Android 3.0). Come up with a tablet interface as quickly as possible and fix it for other formats (i.e. phones) in the next release Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). At least Google publicly acknowledged this is what they were doing and had the good sense to not recommend Honeycomb be used on phones. Of course, one could argue that not releasing the source for Honeycomb was not a good move from an open source perspective.
Maybe Microsoft should just skip Windows 8 for the desktop and call Windows 8 the tablet edition. However, I'm not convinced you can ever truly unify a tablet interface with a desktop interface.
The first thing that I thought about is that I have seen Lynyrd Skynyrd shirts that use the Jack Daniels label format but replace the contents with the band name and info about the band. I am curious why that is not infringement, while the book is? The only things I can think of is that there is: a) a cross promotional license between JD and LS allowing them to do this, b) JD does not want to piss off the LS fan base since there is probably a significant overlap so they just let it slide, or c) these shirts are made by those no-name, fly-by-night, low quality t-shirt companies that sell unlicensed shirts and stuff outside of concert venues and therefore it is hard to identify them and prosecute them. Does anyone know the answer?
So I just received my Nexus 7 last night and am surprised by the reactions that I've seen. I watched the unboxing compilation while I was eagerly awaiting delivery and was expecting the worst. The only thing that I experienced as potentially problematic was the two tape tabs. They would not be easy to peel without damaging the box, so cutting really is your best option. However, everything else, including sliding the sleeve off the box, was very easy and simple. I honestly didn't even notice that there were arrows directing me what to do and still found it quite intuitive.
I wonder if there are just some manufacturing tolerance issues or some automated packaging assembly issues that are causing the packaging to be more tedious for some than for others.
The bottom line is that this is just about the silliest thing to complain about. Asus/Google's packaging was perfectly fine and far and above what you would see on the vast majority of consumer products. It may be inferior to Apple's (can't say since I don't have an iPad), but who really cares. I want to use the tablet, not marvel at the box.
A report on msnbc stated: NBC's Pete Williams reported that Roberts reasoned that “there’s no real compulsion here” since those who do not pay the penalty for not having insurance can’t be sent to jail.
I do not understand this statement because currently if I do not pay my taxes then I will go to jail for tax evasion (maybe not immediately, but eventually). Is there some special provision that specifically states that failure to pay the penalty (tax, whatever) cannot be enforced through incarceration? If so, what enforcement measures are allowed: liens, wage garnishment, something else? Are those not means of compulsion? If there are no enforcement measures, then what are the motivations for paying the penalty at all? I do not like the concept that the government can pass almost anything as long as the penalty for non-compliance is not jail time. I'm hoping that the Williams' statement was just a poorly worded extrapolation of Roberts' argument.
In many states auto insurance is already compulsory if you own a car and want to drive it on public roads. If you don't have car insurance, then you cannot get your annual automobile registration (and the accompanying license plate stickers). In some cases people get the insurance just long enough to have proof of insurance to get the registration and then drop it only to repeat the process the next year, but often the states are catching on to that as well and will fine you or void your registration if your car is uninsured.
That being said you can reasonably make the argument that the difference is that this (compulsory car insurance) is something the states are doing and it is in their power to do so, but that the federal government does not and should not have the power to enact these types of requirements.
I'm shocked that I haven't seen a Library of Congress as unit of measurement joke yet. It is unfortunate that the cost of donating the materials to the Library of Congress was undisclosed because then we could have a conversion factor for money to LoCs.
Thank you! I'm really shocked that I had to go down the comment tree this far until someone pointed out the true value of Media Center as PVR/DVR for an HTPC.
While there is other Windows-based DVR software, Media Center is the only one that works with a CableCard (at least not without some sort of gray-market hack, not that I know of one just that there probably is one). Also it is the only one that allows mostly seamless integration with the Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender (basically allowing you to easily use the same DVR interface on any networked Xbox). Admittedly there are some flaws with this integration (it is MS after all), but it is quite workable. I've used it to eliminate the per TV cable company forced box "rental" fees to enable HD in the digital tier. Now I just pay for one cheap cablecard rental ($2/month) for my PC and use Xboxen as media center extenders everywhere else.
Frankly, I'm really surprised by this move. It seems to me that Microsoft has talked over and over about wanting to own not just the office, but also the living room. The lack of an additional cost for Media Center combined with the tight integration with the Xbox seems like really good steps in the direction of achieving this goal. Making Media Center something that you have to pay for results in the user having to really think about whether the additional cost is worth it versus other software and could drive users towards non-Windows solutions. I wonder if the recent statement that Xbox users use their systems to stream media from 3rd party services (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) more often than they spend gaming online on the Xbox is the reason for this direction change? Perhaps they think that they have already won the living room with a solution that eliminates the Windows PC from the mix.
If (and I say IF) they can figure out the whole "install" part of the picture - and Apple isn't really into the soldering-irons-and-screwdrivers crowd - they could very easily wrap up a large portion of the auto market if they play their cards right.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read this part. The statement is completely true, but is not how it used to be. I remember as a kid when my dad brought home our new Apple ][e, it most certainly was a soldering-irons and screwdrivers crowd type device. I remember my dad's hands shaking as he carefully put in the 80 column card and hooked up the dual disk controller out of fear that he'd break the insanely expensive computer (he didn't). Today simply opening your latest iDevice to swap out the battery is an action that will void your warranty and will probably soon get you a visit from the iPolice.
I agree, it seems like UF was playing a game of chicken with the state legislature by using a key STEM program as a ploy in response to their frustrating cuts to the school's budgets by ~25% over the last 5 years. Hopefully some backroom deal was made with the legislature to stop further cuts, but on the face of it it just looks like UF flinched first. If there is no backroom deal then not only did UF fail at playing chicken but they also have severely damaged the institution's academic credibility in a fruitless effort.
On a related note, I agree with President Machen that there were misunderstandings about what was actually being done and I think the original Forbes blog post was embarrassingly inaccurate and insufficiently informative. The bottom line is there would still have been a CS program at UF, it just would have been severely scaled back by eliminating research, the doctoral program, and several faculty and staff positions. While I do not like those changes, they are a far cry from cutting CS entirely as the Forbes post was claiming.
While the website of the company does claim that they can also use this technology for FPGA-based designs, their big claim is that they are going from unmodified ANSI C to GDS-II in 8-16 weeks. GDS-II is a file format that specifies the physical implementation of the design and is used in microelectronic foundry flows. GDS-II files are not used in FPGA design flows, although they do have a much more highly abstracted analogue. However it is possible that they are using a reconfigurable fabric that they have developed or bought rights to use and are simply hard wiring it in their foundry flow (effectively making it a mask programmable gate array instead of an FPGA), but that would seem to be unlikely if their power claims are to be believed.
The biggest gap that I think they have is the lack of a decently defined verification flow. Their claim is that they use customer provided test vectors to validate the design. This seems too simplistic to me since exhaustive test vectors are infeasible for anything of modest complexity. Their flow could greatly benefit from some sort of formal verification basis proving that the SoC truly represents the same function as the C algorithm in order to be something that I'd be willing to gamble money on fabbing. At the very least, utilization of an extensive constrained random verification suite that is referenced back to the C model would be desirable for all but the simplest designs. That being said, either option would likely kick them out of the 8-16 week timeframe.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you regarding the "movies" that were really just 4 episodes with a loosely coordinated plot-line. That seemed to be more about making the economics of reviving the show work (i.e., direct to video sales plus delayed airings on CC). However, I thought they really fell flat on their face and were not engaging. It was obvious that the writers just couldn't make a 2 hour plot line broken up into 4 parts work.
However, I thought the follow-up season on CC was actually pretty decent. I would not argue that they were the best the series had to offer, but they seemed like worthwhile inclusions, imho.
It's parents who will say, "No. We're getting a PS4 instead because it has 99% of the same games and doesn't have absurd DRM requirements."
- Said no parent anywhere, ever.
My understanding is that he was a creative director at Microsoft. Is that honestly that high of a position there? At other large companies, such titles are very common and often imply only moderate leadership (e.g., second tier management) or a relatively senior individual contributor. How many of us would have known his name if not for this debacle?
My point is that it very well may have been an expectation that any twitter followers of his were friends or acquaintances who would be reasonably familiar with his sense of humor and/or debate styles. It seems clear by the tone that he was at best playing a devil's advocate and at worst trolling a friend. Now it is hugely stupid for him to simply assume that no strangers would follow him on twitter and he should have made his twitter account private from the start if he was going to say such things. However, it isn't a reasonable response to "resign" ( * cough * fire * cough *) someone over this.
I'm not saying that Microsoft doesn't have the legal right to terminate his employment for this, just that it is disproportionate to the actual action taken. Remember, he came off as an arrogant person with an opinion on a technical aspect of a game console design. I'm sure no one on Slashdot could be accused of the same heinous crime. It isn't like he said something racist, misogynistic, threatening, or even particularly offensive. Heck he didn't even officially confirm that there was a new Xbox or that it actually had this particular feature. He just argued (poorly) that it wasn't a big deal.
You were on the right track with the voice module aspect, but went off the track with the white papers and corporate BS. "Enterprise class" means a 3D printer that is used in a ship like the USS Enterprise. This means that Gartner is predicting that we will have sub $2000 replicators. You are correct that a voice module is required for this technology, specifically one that uses Majel Barret's voice.
I know, I know ... you are saying to yourself, but the Enterprise is a Galaxy class starship. Shouldn't this be a "Galaxy class" 3D printer? I would agree with you, but again this is Gartner, you can't expect them to get it completely right.
Similar to the claim the parent made, my understanding is also that the Xbox was pulled so quickly and replaced by the 360 because of the infeasibility of doing a die shrink to make a higher margin (or more accurately some margin rather than significant loss) design with the original Xbox.
My understanding is that Microsoft did not procure the rights to the implementations of the CPU nor the graphics chip used in the original Xbox. This was presumably because the Xbox was rushed and/or MS was not familiar with the standard terms used in the console game. This is not all that surprising on the CPU side since it was an Intel Pentium 3 based processor and I'd be surprised if Intel would have given MS any significant IP rights. The problem is that when it came time to try to make a cheaper version of the Xbox, MS had no leverage or ability to port the IP to a smaller process geometry or create a single chip implementation without costly relicensing of the designs. Supposedly MS was so pissed about that (especially with respect to Nvidia) that they switched to AMD for the GPU of the 360 and supposedly are continuing that trend with the 720 (aka Durango, aka Infinity).
AMD is appearing to circle the drain (e.g., the recent short term stop gap measure of selling their offices to another party so that they can lease them back and pocket a quick buck at the cost of increased long term expense). I am very curious what all of the consoles are going to do if AMD ceases to be. Maybe AMD will continue to be viable as a much smaller company that primarily makes chips for consoles.
Speaking of Carnegie, even in his more altruistic endeavors he often had shrewd, secondary considerations. As a case in point, years ago I toured Carnegie Mellon University and the tour guide informed the audience that one of the main buildings that we were passing was built with an intentional grade rather than being level. The reason for this grade was that if the university did not take off he could then repurpose the building as a factory with an assembly line that would move down the slope. I found that to be an interesting insight into his mind.
The "market rate" concept is one of the key things wrong with the pay scales in the US. Specifically, HR depts. generally work to restrict the paygrades to ensure that the rates are "competitive" with other comparable companies using (sometimes questionable) market data. "Competitive" in HR parlance means pay your employees the median (or preferable under the median and claim other non-salary benefits make up or exceed the difference). However, taken to the logical extreme and with virtual collusion through the fact that the majority of HR depts do the same thing, this means that pay rates effectively stagnate and barely keep up with inflation (often not even that). These rigid pay grades severely limits the flexibility to truly pay your workers what they are worth and often moving to higher pay grades requires forcing them to take on managerial responsibilities which may not be of interest to the high value employees in question and may burn them out even faster.
The even uglier side of things is that executive compensation works almost exactly the opposite to that of general employee compensation. Executives are compared to other executives from competing companies to ensure that their pay is significantly higher than the median market price. The thinking being, surely you don't want to hire an average executive, so you must compensate him/her higher than average in order to hire a good one. This creates positive feedback for executive compensation which then increases the disparity between a company's average employee pay and its average executive pay. Using this line of thought, I have never understood why a company would want above average executives, but only average (or below average) employees since the employees are the ones that are directly generating revenue and have the greatest day to day impact to the success or failure of a company.
In Northern VA myself. Voted thrice in Minnesota and many times in Virginia. Have to say that Virginia requirements are ridiculous for voting and are almost designed to stop people who don't have their shit together from voting. In 2000 on the U of MN campus I was walking around campus on election day and outside they had a big thing setup for me to vote. I had my student ID and driver's license and that was all they needed to register me, take my vote and give me a voter registration ID! They asked if I had a utility bill and I told them I was living in a dorm room on campus. No further questions needed, just had to fill out a form.
I also lived in MN and am now in Virginia (SW). As you said, voting in MN couldn't be easier. However in VA, getting my initial voter registration was easy through the DMV, but when I moved to another VA city 30 minutes away, I found the process of changing my voter registration to be a huge hassle. While you can get your driver's license changed via an on-line method, you actually have to fill out a paper form and mail it in and wait weeks to change the voter registration. I had to do this twice before it actually took and I was left wondering if I'd actually get my card until about a month ago when it finally arrived in the mail.
The effort to keep people from voting doesn't just stop there. My ballot consisted of 5 questions. President, congressional races, and 2 state amendments, that's it. In other states I would have at least 10 - 20 items to vote on. It appears that in VA (or at least my part of it), they push the vast majority of the ballot items to the off-cycle elections. I have to suspect that they do this because they know that the voter turn-out is decreased during those elections and presumably making it easier for the groups who do show up for the off-cycle elections to push their agendas.
One last thing that I found annoying about the VA election process (or that which I experienced), is that the entire thing used a touchscreen interface until the very end. At the end, the screen tells you to push the vote button to lock in your selections. However, the vote button is not on the screen, instead it is a smallish physical button at the very top of the device. Admittedly the button is lit up and vote is written on it, but after going through the entire process via on-screen cues, it was not immediately obvious that I had to push a physical button. Luckily I found it, I wonder how many people thought they had voted, but did not find and press that button.
Replying to correct accidental mismoderation.
Yep, you forgot about how kick-starter was used to fund the creation of the robotic miniatures. Also, the Raspberry Pi was actually running MineCraft which had a working implementation of an 8-bit processor that was doing the actual BitCoin mining. Researchers were observing the operation of the MineCraft processor using the Oculus Rift headset. In the future, the designers plan to port this all to the upcoming Ouya.
There, I think that has it covered. :)
I just want to say that I thought this was one of the funniest things I've read all week. Thank you!
I wonder if this could start a whole new meme in the same vein as Chuck Norris jokes?
I have to agree with this. I was at a zoo recently and saw a person holding up a smartphone in a protective case. I noticed a small cutout in the case around the camera lens, but then saw another much larger cutout in the case. I was at an angle so couldn't immediately tell what else needed access through the case. I became curious and walked around to see that it was a cutout over the Apple logo. So basically the structure of the case was compromised not to enable some internal function that the case's structure would block, but purely to ensure that someone looking at this person's phone would know that it was an iPhone. I immediately cracked up at the ridiculousness of the situation, both that a case manufacturer would make a case like this and also that someone would buy it.
I agree that color laser printers should be the way to go. However, I think there is still a gap due to their relatively poor color image handling capabilities. I'm not asking for a reasonably priced color laser that can do something comparable to the images you get from the 12 ink photo printers combined with the ultra expensive ink jet photo paper, but I'd like a reasonably priced color laser that is comparable to a midrange CMYK-based inkjet for color image reproduction.
Unfortunately, my experiences (with a previous 7 year old Minolta and currently a 3 year old HP; both in the $400-700 price range) have been that the color aspect of color lasers are really only good for very rough draft color prints or color prints of Power Points or Word Docs where the color is used to augment figures and tables, but does not require significant image quality. Invariably, pictures printed on these printers look washed out, have limited color gradients, and sometimes even obvious banding issues. These are issues that most mid-range inkjets had solved over 10 years ago. Perhaps affordable color lasers have gotten drastically better in the last 3 years, but I am skeptical.
Since it is now Monday, I doubt anyone will actually see this, but here goes. Disclaimer: I did not RTFA, I've been a Slashdot reader long enough to know there be dragons.
Anyway, if the single correct answer is given 48% of the time and the set of all other incorrect answers is given at a rate of 52% of the time, it is possible that any individual incorrect answer does not appear nearly as many times as the correct answer. For example, lets say the correct answer is presented 48% of the time, but Wa is presented 24% of the time and Wb is presented 28% of the time. Where Wa is wrong answer a and Wb is wrong answer b where Wa is not equal to Wb. As long as the statistical presentation of an incorrect answer is significantly smaller than the presentation of a correct answer then the result could still be valuable since it should be easy to detect the likely correct answer "quickly". This is only the case if you can run the calculation enough times to determine a statistically significant variation between the correct answer and the various wrong answers in less time than it would take a non quantum computer to calculate it correctly the first time. As the problem space scales up, there should be a divergence point where this would occur.
Alternatively, for one way functions you could do as numerous others have suggested in this thread: get a factored answer and run it forward to see if the answer is correct. If it is, stop, if not, refactor. This could also be faster than a single run with a non quantum computer and may be faster than what I've proposed above.
I was a subscriber when I was a kid back in the early days (late 80's to early-90's) before gaming info was widely available online. My favorite part was the really well done maps they had of the various scrollers. They had what appeared to be linearly stitched screenshots with pointers to important areas, items, and enemy bosses that referenced legends of useful information (e.g. the location of a heart container). It was really fun to play the game and then go back and open the magazine and see all the stuff that you missed and then go back into the game to find it. No other magazine provided the same quality of maps, relying upon (often confusing) text directions and maybe a screenshot or two. It extended the replayability of lots of games for me. Of course as a kid I had no money so I had to make games last.
So basically the same strategy that Google used with Honeycomb (Android 3.0). Come up with a tablet interface as quickly as possible and fix it for other formats (i.e. phones) in the next release Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). At least Google publicly acknowledged this is what they were doing and had the good sense to not recommend Honeycomb be used on phones. Of course, one could argue that not releasing the source for Honeycomb was not a good move from an open source perspective.
Maybe Microsoft should just skip Windows 8 for the desktop and call Windows 8 the tablet edition. However, I'm not convinced you can ever truly unify a tablet interface with a desktop interface.
Kudos to JD on their handling of this!
The first thing that I thought about is that I have seen Lynyrd Skynyrd shirts that use the Jack Daniels label format but replace the contents with the band name and info about the band. I am curious why that is not infringement, while the book is? The only things I can think of is that there is: a) a cross promotional license between JD and LS allowing them to do this, b) JD does not want to piss off the LS fan base since there is probably a significant overlap so they just let it slide, or c) these shirts are made by those no-name, fly-by-night, low quality t-shirt companies that sell unlicensed shirts and stuff outside of concert venues and therefore it is hard to identify them and prosecute them. Does anyone know the answer?
So I just received my Nexus 7 last night and am surprised by the reactions that I've seen. I watched the unboxing compilation while I was eagerly awaiting delivery and was expecting the worst. The only thing that I experienced as potentially problematic was the two tape tabs. They would not be easy to peel without damaging the box, so cutting really is your best option. However, everything else, including sliding the sleeve off the box, was very easy and simple. I honestly didn't even notice that there were arrows directing me what to do and still found it quite intuitive.
I wonder if there are just some manufacturing tolerance issues or some automated packaging assembly issues that are causing the packaging to be more tedious for some than for others.
The bottom line is that this is just about the silliest thing to complain about. Asus/Google's packaging was perfectly fine and far and above what you would see on the vast majority of consumer products. It may be inferior to Apple's (can't say since I don't have an iPad), but who really cares. I want to use the tablet, not marvel at the box.
A report on msnbc stated: NBC's Pete Williams reported that Roberts reasoned that “there’s no real compulsion here” since those who do not pay the penalty for not having insurance can’t be sent to jail.
I do not understand this statement because currently if I do not pay my taxes then I will go to jail for tax evasion (maybe not immediately, but eventually). Is there some special provision that specifically states that failure to pay the penalty (tax, whatever) cannot be enforced through incarceration? If so, what enforcement measures are allowed: liens, wage garnishment, something else? Are those not means of compulsion? If there are no enforcement measures, then what are the motivations for paying the penalty at all? I do not like the concept that the government can pass almost anything as long as the penalty for non-compliance is not jail time. I'm hoping that the Williams' statement was just a poorly worded extrapolation of Roberts' argument.
In many states auto insurance is already compulsory if you own a car and want to drive it on public roads. If you don't have car insurance, then you cannot get your annual automobile registration (and the accompanying license plate stickers). In some cases people get the insurance just long enough to have proof of insurance to get the registration and then drop it only to repeat the process the next year, but often the states are catching on to that as well and will fine you or void your registration if your car is uninsured.
That being said you can reasonably make the argument that the difference is that this (compulsory car insurance) is something the states are doing and it is in their power to do so, but that the federal government does not and should not have the power to enact these types of requirements.
I'm shocked that I haven't seen a Library of Congress as unit of measurement joke yet. It is unfortunate that the cost of donating the materials to the Library of Congress was undisclosed because then we could have a conversion factor for money to LoCs.
Thank you! I'm really shocked that I had to go down the comment tree this far until someone pointed out the true value of Media Center as PVR/DVR for an HTPC.
While there is other Windows-based DVR software, Media Center is the only one that works with a CableCard (at least not without some sort of gray-market hack, not that I know of one just that there probably is one). Also it is the only one that allows mostly seamless integration with the Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender (basically allowing you to easily use the same DVR interface on any networked Xbox). Admittedly there are some flaws with this integration (it is MS after all), but it is quite workable. I've used it to eliminate the per TV cable company forced box "rental" fees to enable HD in the digital tier. Now I just pay for one cheap cablecard rental ($2/month) for my PC and use Xboxen as media center extenders everywhere else.
Frankly, I'm really surprised by this move. It seems to me that Microsoft has talked over and over about wanting to own not just the office, but also the living room. The lack of an additional cost for Media Center combined with the tight integration with the Xbox seems like really good steps in the direction of achieving this goal. Making Media Center something that you have to pay for results in the user having to really think about whether the additional cost is worth it versus other software and could drive users towards non-Windows solutions. I wonder if the recent statement that Xbox users use their systems to stream media from 3rd party services (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) more often than they spend gaming online on the Xbox is the reason for this direction change? Perhaps they think that they have already won the living room with a solution that eliminates the Windows PC from the mix.
If (and I say IF) they can figure out the whole "install" part of the picture - and Apple isn't really into the soldering-irons-and-screwdrivers crowd - they could very easily wrap up a large portion of the auto market if they play their cards right.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read this part. The statement is completely true, but is not how it used to be. I remember as a kid when my dad brought home our new Apple ][e, it most certainly was a soldering-irons and screwdrivers crowd type device. I remember my dad's hands shaking as he carefully put in the 80 column card and hooked up the dual disk controller out of fear that he'd break the insanely expensive computer (he didn't). Today simply opening your latest iDevice to swap out the battery is an action that will void your warranty and will probably soon get you a visit from the iPolice.
I agree, it seems like UF was playing a game of chicken with the state legislature by using a key STEM program as a ploy in response to their frustrating cuts to the school's budgets by ~25% over the last 5 years. Hopefully some backroom deal was made with the legislature to stop further cuts, but on the face of it it just looks like UF flinched first. If there is no backroom deal then not only did UF fail at playing chicken but they also have severely damaged the institution's academic credibility in a fruitless effort.
On a related note, I agree with President Machen that there were misunderstandings about what was actually being done and I think the original Forbes blog post was embarrassingly inaccurate and insufficiently informative. The bottom line is there would still have been a CS program at UF, it just would have been severely scaled back by eliminating research, the doctoral program, and several faculty and staff positions. While I do not like those changes, they are a far cry from cutting CS entirely as the Forbes post was claiming.
While the website of the company does claim that they can also use this technology for FPGA-based designs, their big claim is that they are going from unmodified ANSI C to GDS-II in 8-16 weeks. GDS-II is a file format that specifies the physical implementation of the design and is used in microelectronic foundry flows. GDS-II files are not used in FPGA design flows, although they do have a much more highly abstracted analogue. However it is possible that they are using a reconfigurable fabric that they have developed or bought rights to use and are simply hard wiring it in their foundry flow (effectively making it a mask programmable gate array instead of an FPGA), but that would seem to be unlikely if their power claims are to be believed.
The biggest gap that I think they have is the lack of a decently defined verification flow. Their claim is that they use customer provided test vectors to validate the design. This seems too simplistic to me since exhaustive test vectors are infeasible for anything of modest complexity. Their flow could greatly benefit from some sort of formal verification basis proving that the SoC truly represents the same function as the C algorithm in order to be something that I'd be willing to gamble money on fabbing. At the very least, utilization of an extensive constrained random verification suite that is referenced back to the C model would be desirable for all but the simplest designs. That being said, either option would likely kick them out of the 8-16 week timeframe.