the HP-33 has too much clutter and is too slow. The TI-36X does 99.5% of all the calculations that I need
Odd, I've never found the HP-33S to be slow. I don't often use many of its functions, but the basic stuff is pretty well laid out. I find the programmability it does have to be pretty useful for doing repeated simple calculations... still, 90% of the time I am just doing basic arithmetic on it. The TI-36X would be fine for me, most likely, but I prefer RPN.
For more complicated calculations using matrix transformations or graphs of non-linear systems the HP-48/49 and soon to be HP-50 series can't be beat.
Maybe, but I've never really been happy with a calculator for doing these types of calculations. Generally, as I said, I just turn to a computer and use Matlab or the like for anything beyond simple computations. That's just my preference...
I have to agree that HP is the way to go. I had a TI-85 in HS/college which was all right, but the HP options are hands down more durable and more capable.
Personally, I decided that I did not actually need the graphing features so now just use an HP-33s. It's pretty solid and does everything I need. For me, in the real world, I found that the graphing capabilities of the calcs were not useful -- if I needed to plot, I would do it on a computer. The graphing calc was just not a substitute. I suppose the programming might be more flexible on the bigger calculators as well, but I have not once found myself wishing for one since high school.
(for reference, I've worked as an electrical engineer/programmer and am now a graduate student in physics)
There's nothing illogical about considering context in judging the morality of an action. Is it wrong to punish an innocent man? Yes. Is it wrong to punish a criminal? No. Why? Because if you don't have punishment, more crimes will be committed and more harm will come as a result. It is not that punishment itself is wrong, it is its arbitrary, injudicious application that is the wrong.
Reasonable self defense is not a wrong and you should not have been punished for it. However, it's not at all surprising that you had this experience. School personnel are hardly experts at the equitable application of justice. Even those who might actually care make mistakes, and many are not at all inclined to care whether their own treatment of students is fair. For these, it's just a job and anyone involved in a scuffle is making that job difficult.
Still, their misuse of the phrase does not render it fallacious. Here is a better way to think about it. If I steal your wallet and escape, can you right this wrong by stealing the wallet of a passer-by?
I've not come across dress codes or language "training," but non-discrimination training or anti-discrimination training are very common at large organizations in the US. There are still a few people out there who do have unacceptable ideas of what is humorous or otherwise appropriate in a workplace with regard to these matters. However, it's mostly a cover-your-ass move -- when someone does file a lawsuit for harassment, the company can be liable if they're found to have fostered an environment conducive to that behavior. These training activities demonstrate that the company has made an effort to prevent this.
As for places that may discuss dress code / language / polite behavior, that's perhaps not a bad idea, even if it's unnecessary for most people. There are widely varying ideas of what language / dress are offensive, even among reasonable people. By spelling out what the company considers to be acceptable, perhaps some problems can be avoided. At the least, when the offender is terminated for cause, they can't argue they weren't notified of the company policy from the get-go...
Is it a bad law or is the use of it being abused? There is a big difference between a law that is being applied incorrectly and a law that is just bad.
IMO, a law that leaves itself open to easy abuse is just as bad a law as one that is inherently unjust. Laws need to recognize the limits of the justice system and not only accomplish their intended goal, but also minimize unintended consequences. Even if you believe the overall goals of the DMCA are laudable (I do not), I think there's a strong argument that it is far too easily abused and is still a bad law for that reason.
To give you a bad analogy of my own -- no matter how useful your program might be, if it's got a gaping buffer overflow bug waiting to be exploited, it's still a bad program.
The broken thing with this whole business is that the systems do not interoperate.
Standard broadcast radio and cable TV have competition between channels, not between technologies. Cable has the local providers as well, acting as intermediaries to sell access to the stations to the end users. You don't have to have a separate TV to watch CBS and ABC since they both come in on the same technology.
There's not even a problem selling various levels of access -- you can opt for premium channels or not, and often pick and choose channel-by-channel. Sure, there's "piracy," but the business is still profitable.
Satellite radio needs to adopt this type of competition. The monolithic system it's using now is braindead, for exactly the reason that Sirius and XM would consider merging if they'd been permitted.
You have a good point. The only real innovations in consoles since the NES have been pretty minor. Controllers got more complicated, gained extra buttons, and analog sticks. Consoles got either hard drives or larger flash drives. Graphics/sound/processing got better and faster. All of these things happened for every manufacturer at about the same time. There has been no reason to single out a platform for your game if you have the resources to port it to the others, unless one of the console manufacturers will pay you for exclusive rights.
I'd say that the additional processing power on all the platforms levels the playing field to a great degree. In the days of the NES/SMS, you had to do a lot of low-level programming to take full advantage of the hardware's very limited capabilities. Now that every console has what was a supercomputer in the NES/SMS days, you can do fairly abstract programming and it's a smaller task to port to multiple platforms (proportional to overall game development cost, not in absolute cost).
But, the Wii/DS and other unique innovations might provide non-technical reasons to single out platforms. Of course, it remains to be seen if these are technical curiosities or revolutionary developments.
Your choice of ten million mediocre skins, or one superb interface that thinks just the way I think?
Frankly, I would prefer not to have an interface that thinks the way you think, since it's abundantly clear that you think pretty exclusively like a pretentious, juvenile troll...
I disagree. Google should tell you that your number is considered compromised/blacklisted so that, in case you are the legitimate holder, you waste no time in getting the situation resolved.
If a scammer is using the number and it gets rejected without explanation, he's probably already going to move on to the next number in his pile. You're not giving him much advantage by providing an explanation. He's got a good reason to suspect that he may be detected and will likely view any out-of-the-ordinary problems as a sign he's been noticed.
The legitimate owner, on the other hand, will presume that he's going to be allowed to do what he's trying to do. If there's a generic problem like repeated order cancellations, it's not at all obvious to conclude it's a problem with his credit card. My first guess would be that the store is having inventory problems or just has a lousy ordering system. Being told to contact your bank to change your credit card number would be extremely useful to a legitimate user.
Giving the reason for the rejection gives little benefit to a scammer and great benefit to a legitimate user. It'd be better to provide the reason.
What, you think because someone doesn't like something because it's different we should coddle them?
No, but people get very comfortable using their tools. Is it really a ridiculous request to keep the old keyboard? Is it really something worth mocking him over? As an IT worker, your job is to support the users, not to make arbitrary changes to their working environment. If there's a good reason that the request NOT to have his keyboard changed would create a serious problem, then he's got to adapt. Otherwise, it's just a jerk in IT going on a power trip.
Frankly, the keyboards with those 6 keys vertical bug the heck out of me, too. It's a lot harder to feel where the middle row is when it's 3-high instead of 3-wide, since my fingers are arranged horizontally on the keyboard.
I don't think it's as much a contradiction as you make out. They'd really be arguing that they didn't ASK him to work on it, but he did anyway. Most employees are free to work as many extra, unpaid hours as they would like to do. That doesn't mean they're owners of what they produce, nor does it mean they are entitled to extra compensation if their employer wants access to their output for that time.
The wrinkle here is whether his work constituted part of his job. If it did, I think there's a pretty strong argument that he was simply foolish to put in extra time without an agreement for compensation ahead of time.
On one side, there isn't anything inherently wrong with a person hacking into a computer to look around, as long as they don't cause any harm within the computer or use the knowledge to cause harm in the real world (e.g. using secret information to buy stock may change the stock price and hurt a buyer or seller who doesn't have that info). On the other side, hacking/cracking is always wrong because, in practice, a hacker has no way to ensure that their actions will not cause any harm (e.g. they may cause a system slow-down, crash, release of proprietary info, etc.).
There's another reason that even "harmlessly" hacking a machine is wrong. Namely, the system administrator has no way to know what a hacker's intentions or actions were. If they detect the intrusion, they must expend effort to determine whether anything was compromised, whether any damage was done, whether the system was infected, etc. It is wrong to impose this burden on someone without permission, even if you are so good that you can guarantee you do no other harm.
Perhaps clever, but again I'm skeptical that they were the first to use the PWM into a digital input scheme, largely because their claim is so narrow. If they were the first to realize you can use the PWM signal with a digital-only input line, then there's no doubt you can patent that alone. Since they restrict it as an application for a joystick (and since this was 1998), my gut tells me they took a known technique and patented the specific application.
If they really are the first to come up with this particular scheme, then maybe they have a claim.
Except I'm pretty certain they didn't develop the concept of using a circuit like that to convert an analog signal into a digital PWM signal. If they invented that, then I wouldn't dispute the patent-worthiness. However, merely applying someone else's analog-to-PWM circuit to joysticks doesn't seem to me to meet the non-obviousness criterion.
And, furthermore, this is an example of the inability of information to be transmitted faster than light. We will not know whether this prediction is correct until the evidence (photons) travels from the pillars to us. Once it does, we can work out the spacetime coordinates of the event and figure out how long ago it occurred in our local coordinates.
Regardless of how you number them, the ordinals don't have a "zeroth" element. If you start numbering from zero, then the first element is number zero, the fourth is number three. I didn't read/listen to TFA, but if he really said there is no fourth freedom, he's wrong and I agree with you. If he's just numbering from zero, then I have no problem with that aspect.
"Criticize yourself first" means that when you encounter a problem, you first ask whether you are to blame. If so, then fix it. If not, determine where the blame falls and take appropriate steps. This is a sensible approach and, if people actually followed it, would be a great step forward.
While what you say regarding our guilt may or may not be true, it's not really at all what the parent was talking about.
It's interesting that he mentions Consumer Reports as the easy to cancel. When I was buying a car a few years ago, I signed up with them to read reviews and advice. Their term was a year. After I bought my car (a month or two after I signed up), I canceled the account and was credited the pro-rated cost of the time I did not use. It was so easy and honest that I couldn't believe it was really going to work. After it was done, I felt a little bad for canceling service with a company that got something so right from a customer point of view, even when it costs them money.
Sure, but Akamai doesn't own the links that users together. They've hung a bunch of machines on those (neutral) pipes and use those machines to improve performance for end users. Anyone else is free to hang their own distributed network of servers and provide a similar service and enjoy the same performance. That is orders of magnitude easier than physically running the lines to provide the basic network service to the end users.
It's this difference, plus the fact that we all subsidized the initial deployment of end user connections that give us this right to demand fair, neutral treatment from the current custodians of the telecommunications infrastructure. Akamai owns all their own machines and footed the bill to put them out, so they don't have the same responsibility to provide their service neutrally.
Re:I've been using vi for so long...
on
The Birth of vi
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· Score: 1
I find the easiest way to hit the emacs stuff is just to use the side of my left palm to hold down ctrl and then hit the keys with my fingers. Of course, this probably gives me RSI like hell... I'm a fast touch typist, but never got the hang of hitting modifiers (other than shift) with my left hand. Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but I've never really been happy with a calculator for doing these types of calculations. Generally, as I said, I just turn to a computer and use Matlab or the like for anything beyond simple computations. That's just my preference...
I have to agree that HP is the way to go. I had a TI-85 in HS/college which was all right, but the HP options are hands down more durable and more capable.
Personally, I decided that I did not actually need the graphing features so now just use an HP-33s. It's pretty solid and does everything I need. For me, in the real world, I found that the graphing capabilities of the calcs were not useful -- if I needed to plot, I would do it on a computer. The graphing calc was just not a substitute. I suppose the programming might be more flexible on the bigger calculators as well, but I have not once found myself wishing for one since high school.
(for reference, I've worked as an electrical engineer/programmer and am now a graduate student in physics)
There's nothing illogical about considering context in judging the morality of an action. Is it wrong to punish an innocent man? Yes. Is it wrong to punish a criminal? No. Why? Because if you don't have punishment, more crimes will be committed and more harm will come as a result. It is not that punishment itself is wrong, it is its arbitrary, injudicious application that is the wrong.
Reasonable self defense is not a wrong and you should not have been punished for it. However, it's not at all surprising that you had this experience. School personnel are hardly experts at the equitable application of justice. Even those who might actually care make mistakes, and many are not at all inclined to care whether their own treatment of students is fair. For these, it's just a job and anyone involved in a scuffle is making that job difficult.
Still, their misuse of the phrase does not render it fallacious. Here is a better way to think about it. If I steal your wallet and escape, can you right this wrong by stealing the wallet of a passer-by?
No scientific journals I'm aware of pay you to publish in them. Quite the contrary, authors generally pay to have their articles published.
I've not come across dress codes or language "training," but non-discrimination training or anti-discrimination training are very common at large organizations in the US. There are still a few people out there who do have unacceptable ideas of what is humorous or otherwise appropriate in a workplace with regard to these matters. However, it's mostly a cover-your-ass move -- when someone does file a lawsuit for harassment, the company can be liable if they're found to have fostered an environment conducive to that behavior. These training activities demonstrate that the company has made an effort to prevent this.
As for places that may discuss dress code / language / polite behavior, that's perhaps not a bad idea, even if it's unnecessary for most people. There are widely varying ideas of what language / dress are offensive, even among reasonable people. By spelling out what the company considers to be acceptable, perhaps some problems can be avoided. At the least, when the offender is terminated for cause, they can't argue they weren't notified of the company policy from the get-go...
To give you a bad analogy of my own -- no matter how useful your program might be, if it's got a gaping buffer overflow bug waiting to be exploited, it's still a bad program.
Interesting. Still, compared to the situation for standard radio and TV, considering two players to be "competition" is pretty laughable.
The broken thing with this whole business is that the systems do not interoperate.
Standard broadcast radio and cable TV have competition between channels, not between technologies. Cable has the local providers as well, acting as intermediaries to sell access to the stations to the end users. You don't have to have a separate TV to watch CBS and ABC since they both come in on the same technology.
There's not even a problem selling various levels of access -- you can opt for premium channels or not, and often pick and choose channel-by-channel. Sure, there's "piracy," but the business is still profitable.
Satellite radio needs to adopt this type of competition. The monolithic system it's using now is braindead, for exactly the reason that Sirius and XM would consider merging if they'd been permitted.
You have a good point. The only real innovations in consoles since the NES have been pretty minor. Controllers got more complicated, gained extra buttons, and analog sticks. Consoles got either hard drives or larger flash drives. Graphics/sound/processing got better and faster. All of these things happened for every manufacturer at about the same time. There has been no reason to single out a platform for your game if you have the resources to port it to the others, unless one of the console manufacturers will pay you for exclusive rights.
I'd say that the additional processing power on all the platforms levels the playing field to a great degree. In the days of the NES/SMS, you had to do a lot of low-level programming to take full advantage of the hardware's very limited capabilities. Now that every console has what was a supercomputer in the NES/SMS days, you can do fairly abstract programming and it's a smaller task to port to multiple platforms (proportional to overall game development cost, not in absolute cost).
But, the Wii/DS and other unique innovations might provide non-technical reasons to single out platforms. Of course, it remains to be seen if these are technical curiosities or revolutionary developments.
I disagree. Google should tell you that your number is considered compromised/blacklisted so that, in case you are the legitimate holder, you waste no time in getting the situation resolved.
If a scammer is using the number and it gets rejected without explanation, he's probably already going to move on to the next number in his pile. You're not giving him much advantage by providing an explanation. He's got a good reason to suspect that he may be detected and will likely view any out-of-the-ordinary problems as a sign he's been noticed.
The legitimate owner, on the other hand, will presume that he's going to be allowed to do what he's trying to do. If there's a generic problem like repeated order cancellations, it's not at all obvious to conclude it's a problem with his credit card. My first guess would be that the store is having inventory problems or just has a lousy ordering system. Being told to contact your bank to change your credit card number would be extremely useful to a legitimate user.
Giving the reason for the rejection gives little benefit to a scammer and great benefit to a legitimate user. It'd be better to provide the reason.
Frankly, the keyboards with those 6 keys vertical bug the heck out of me, too. It's a lot harder to feel where the middle row is when it's 3-high instead of 3-wide, since my fingers are arranged horizontally on the keyboard.
I don't think it's as much a contradiction as you make out. They'd really be arguing that they didn't ASK him to work on it, but he did anyway. Most employees are free to work as many extra, unpaid hours as they would like to do. That doesn't mean they're owners of what they produce, nor does it mean they are entitled to extra compensation if their employer wants access to their output for that time.
The wrinkle here is whether his work constituted part of his job. If it did, I think there's a pretty strong argument that he was simply foolish to put in extra time without an agreement for compensation ahead of time.
Exactly.
It's pretty darn close to a perfect vacuum... according to Wikipedia (and my recollection), the average density of the universe is less than 1 atom per cubic meter. That includes all the pretty things out there to look at...
Perhaps clever, but again I'm skeptical that they were the first to use the PWM into a digital input scheme, largely because their claim is so narrow. If they were the first to realize you can use the PWM signal with a digital-only input line, then there's no doubt you can patent that alone. Since they restrict it as an application for a joystick (and since this was 1998), my gut tells me they took a known technique and patented the specific application.
And, furthermore, this is an example of the inability of information to be transmitted faster than light. We will not know whether this prediction is correct until the evidence (photons) travels from the pillars to us. Once it does, we can work out the spacetime coordinates of the event and figure out how long ago it occurred in our local coordinates.
Or perhaps "Free, but you have to pay for it."
Not sure that's really what they want to convey. Seems quite counter to their message...
Regardless of how you number them, the ordinals don't have a "zeroth" element. If you start numbering from zero, then the first element is number zero, the fourth is number three. I didn't read/listen to TFA, but if he really said there is no fourth freedom, he's wrong and I agree with you. If he's just numbering from zero, then I have no problem with that aspect.
Criticize != Blame.
"Criticize yourself first" means that when you encounter a problem, you first ask whether you are to blame. If so, then fix it. If not, determine where the blame falls and take appropriate steps. This is a sensible approach and, if people actually followed it, would be a great step forward.
While what you say regarding our guilt may or may not be true, it's not really at all what the parent was talking about.
It's interesting that he mentions Consumer Reports as the easy to cancel. When I was buying a car a few years ago, I signed up with them to read reviews and advice. Their term was a year. After I bought my car (a month or two after I signed up), I canceled the account and was credited the pro-rated cost of the time I did not use. It was so easy and honest that I couldn't believe it was really going to work. After it was done, I felt a little bad for canceling service with a company that got something so right from a customer point of view, even when it costs them money.
Sure, but Akamai doesn't own the links that users together. They've hung a bunch of machines on those (neutral) pipes and use those machines to improve performance for end users. Anyone else is free to hang their own distributed network of servers and provide a similar service and enjoy the same performance. That is orders of magnitude easier than physically running the lines to provide the basic network service to the end users.
It's this difference, plus the fact that we all subsidized the initial deployment of end user connections that give us this right to demand fair, neutral treatment from the current custodians of the telecommunications infrastructure. Akamai owns all their own machines and footed the bill to put them out, so they don't have the same responsibility to provide their service neutrally.
I find the easiest way to hit the emacs stuff is just to use the side of my left palm to hold down ctrl and then hit the keys with my fingers. Of course, this probably gives me RSI like hell... I'm a fast touch typist, but never got the hang of hitting modifiers (other than shift) with my left hand. Oh well.