Cows are remarkably resilient too. Sort of funny story - my dad grew up on a farm with cows roaming around freely, and they also used to mix red ochre with old engine oil for painting buildings.. Yeah, you can see where this is going. One day one of the cows drank a bucket of the paint. The cow survived, but for the next 3 days it was excreting red dung all over the yard.
It seems to me that part of the dynamic here is that highly skilled programmers in the US have less of a need to prove themselves in a competition like this - they probably already have good salaries and good jobs. Programmers in poorer countries are probably not as fortunate, though, and taking part in an international programming competition could provide a ticket to a more lucrative future working for a Western company.
If a hacker gets caught causing damage to a company's infrastructure it's hard to imagine him not going to jail and/or having to pay for the damages he/she caused. Given that Stuxnet spread around the world, do the victims get to send their cleanup bills to Uncle Sam?
I've watched debates on this topic for almost two decades and they never seem to go anywhere. People who believe in supernatural entities tend to justify their beliefs through less logical arguments, and people who do not believe in them have logical reasons to support their view; ergo there's no satisfactory middle ground - there's no common language between believers and non-believers.
This is a case of a belief that'll die with their adherents, as new generations seem to hold less superstitious world-views than their parents. Hallelujah to that.
“So although you might not really notice the problem after one year or two years, after five or ten years it can become a huge problem,” he explains.
This area definitively warrants further research - if nothing else, it could mean that Iris scans will have to be re-done every 5-10 years (a bit like passport renewals). Depending on the specifics of the cumulative degradation (i.e. how exponential the effect is), you could be looking at a 2,000,000% failure rate increase in 11 years.
To be fair, in the days and weeks ahead of the IPO I can't remember anyone thinking USD 38.0 was a reasonable price for this stock - it was obviously overvalued in relation to the company's revenues and arguably overvalued in relation to its growth potential. Everyone I know knew this, so I can't imagine people purchasing the stock at the opening price except for greedy speculators who hoped they could make a quick buck on the FB bubble before it popped. Regardless of what Jim Cramer et al will say in the coming days it's very difficult to feel bad for anyone who lost money betting on this overvalued IPO.
Based in San Diego, California, MP3tunes was launched in 2005 by Robertson three years after stepping down as CEO of MP3.com, which was also founded by him.
Vulnerable people who live in less safe areas are the most obvious candidates for self-defence courses, no? I don't see the Queen of England signing up for one of these.
The medical industry has been using 3D voxel based imaging for a long time now, and this looks like a neat extension of existing techniques. The output looks quite grainy but this is probably partly down to kinect resolution, and partly down to compression. Based on the video my guess is that the voxel resolution is somewhere between 128x128x128 and 256x256x256 so worst case you could be looking at 10x more data than HD video at full frame rate.
This looks like a great little R&D project, but one has to wonder what the best market for this kind of live 3D videoconferecing would be - perhaps getting feedback on your golf swing or dance steps by a remote coach? It likely won't come cheap, and a decent (say 10 Mbps) network link is almost certainly going to be a requirement at both ends for decent performance.
The big marketing hurdle of Nokia isn't going to be in pushing Windows Phone - once Windows 8 launches and the Metro UI becomes ubiquitous then more people will be comfortable with it on their phones as well.
The big marketing problem for Nokia will be in convincing people to shell extra for a Nokia branded Windows Phone - I've been satisfied with my (cheaper) HTC Windows Phone with largely the same functionality and apps for the past 11 months.
This is coincidentally the same problem they'd face in the Android handset market as well.
No they're not. It is just the classic Google Maps "get directions" feature, but with realtime traffic estimates. Suppose your comment was just a way to bash Google.
Actually, what I think the parent is worried about is how Android navigation might provide information to Google, and from a programming point of view it seems entirely possible (and even sensible) to correlate map tile request frequency with traffic flow (I assume Android navigation fetches new map tiles as needed). So, conceivably Google could collect and archive information like 'john.doe@gmail.com's mobile phone is travelling at 90 mph along the Interstate' if you use Google Maps for turn-by-turn navigation.
On the other hand, it's my understanding that traffic data is purchased from companies like transport companies who fit their trucks with GPS for realtime logistics purposes (I've sometimes seen alerts for traffic queues on empty roads where there are transport lorries parked by the roadside). These days traffic data is also reported by modern Sat Nav units (e.g. http://consumerist.com/2011/04/tomtom-sold-speeding-data-to-police-cops-used-it-to-bust-drivers.html ) and as said maybe Google can harvest a bit of traffic data from their Android sets as well.
Whether we like it or not, companies like Google buy and harvest traffic data from misc existing sources, and use this data to propagate their results. Those drivers who knowingly or unknowingly share their traffic data will help those of us who just want to avoid being stuck in traffic.
You might have seen early Go talks in which Rob Pike jokes that the idea for Go arose while waiting for a large Google server to compile. That really was the motivation for Go: to build a language that worked well for building the large software that Google writes and runs.
I looked at the Go pages for 15 minutes to try to figure out why this was commissioned as a project to begin with. Ultimately I ran into the above paragraph. Projects like this make me think that Google no longer has a clear idea of how they could improve their existing business, so they're spending an increasing amount of time rearranging deck chairs to keep their programmers busy on the off chance that they'll need them for something useful.
The expected market demand for Jedi Knights is probably marginally less than the expected market demand for philosophers in general - yet this doesn't stop people from studying philosophy for misc reasons.
However, in this case it seems like the primary goal is simply to provide exercise/dance classes with a bit of a Sci-Fi/philo twist (Sci-Phi?), and there's definitively a market demand for fitness courses/instructors. If this niche inspires a few couch potatoes to exercise more than they otherwise would, why not?
I can only imagine the time and effort spent on tracking down this problem - a rare CPU condition is exponentially more difficult to narrow down than most programming mistakes. A lot of progress in IT depends on engineers like this, who obsessively solve problems even when it's much easier to just ignore them, try to hack around them or pass the buck around. Kudos.
For me it's partly about saving space (yes, 50K documents take a fair bit of it), partly about 'fireproofing' them, partly about portability (I travel) and partly about searchability (OCR + indexing) - the ability to find most documents which mention a particular topic over the past few decades in a matter of seconds is exceptionally valuable for me personally.
Outsourcing is definitively the way to go if your archive is big. I am facing the same problem - basically looking to digitize an old archive of miscellaneous "important" documents - and a local business offered to scan my estimated 50,000 pieces of paper for GBP 1350 (approx USD 2150). That's 4 cents per document - a no brainer in labour-saving and time-saving terms.
Most people probably wouldn't deny that the climate keeps changing (e.g. Ice Age) but so far I've personally not seen credible evidence for the idea that mankind has much if anything to do with it - temperatures appear to have changed substantially even long before the industrial revolution. On balance it's probably natural for geeks (many of whom are naturally inquisitive) to question ideas which insist on substantial changes to our lifestyles with tenuous evidence behind them.
Obviously 100K is much better than nothing, but it's difficult to see the odd 100K donation making much difference to a software project of the scale of perl. At the same time it's easy to demonstrate how much OS projects like perl are contributing to the economy. Perhaps after a few more SOPA-like victories the IT industry will feel empowered enough to lobby the government for some taxpayer money to support critical web infrastructure maintenance/development.
Slashdot Mirror
Cows are remarkably resilient too. Sort of funny story - my dad grew up on a farm with cows roaming around freely, and they also used to mix red ochre with old engine oil for painting buildings.. Yeah, you can see where this is going. One day one of the cows drank a bucket of the paint. The cow survived, but for the next 3 days it was excreting red dung all over the yard.
So much for worrying about liver failure in old age.
Frankly, a man in his 50s is less likely to produce new offspring so the accident is unlikely to be of tangible benefit to the gene pool.
It seems to me that part of the dynamic here is that highly skilled programmers in the US have less of a need to prove themselves in a competition like this - they probably already have good salaries and good jobs. Programmers in poorer countries are probably not as fortunate, though, and taking part in an international programming competition could provide a ticket to a more lucrative future working for a Western company.
If a hacker gets caught causing damage to a company's infrastructure it's hard to imagine him not going to jail and/or having to pay for the damages he/she caused. Given that Stuxnet spread around the world, do the victims get to send their cleanup bills to Uncle Sam?
I've watched debates on this topic for almost two decades and they never seem to go anywhere. People who believe in supernatural entities tend to justify their beliefs through less logical arguments, and people who do not believe in them have logical reasons to support their view; ergo there's no satisfactory middle ground - there's no common language between believers and non-believers.
This is a case of a belief that'll die with their adherents, as new generations seem to hold less superstitious world-views than their parents. Hallelujah to that.
FTFA:
“So although you might not really notice the problem after one year or two years, after five or ten years it can become a huge problem,” he explains.
This area definitively warrants further research - if nothing else, it could mean that Iris scans will have to be re-done every 5-10 years (a bit like passport renewals). Depending on the specifics of the cumulative degradation (i.e. how exponential the effect is), you could be looking at a 2,000,000% failure rate increase in 11 years.
To be fair, in the days and weeks ahead of the IPO I can't remember anyone thinking USD 38.0 was a reasonable price for this stock - it was obviously overvalued in relation to the company's revenues and arguably overvalued in relation to its growth potential. Everyone I know knew this, so I can't imagine people purchasing the stock at the opening price except for greedy speculators who hoped they could make a quick buck on the FB bubble before it popped. Regardless of what Jim Cramer et al will say in the coming days it's very difficult to feel bad for anyone who lost money betting on this overvalued IPO.
All that's left of them now is what mattered the most to the rest of the world.
The only bit which rang a bell FTFA:
Based in San Diego, California, MP3tunes was launched in 2005 by Robertson three years after stepping down as CEO of MP3.com, which was also founded by him.
Q: What's the last thing to go through a person's mind when thinking about buying a Russian superjet? A: A mountain
Vulnerable people who live in less safe areas are the most obvious candidates for self-defence courses, no? I don't see the Queen of England signing up for one of these.
A virtual gerbil running inside this tube projector coming to a Hollywood celebrity near you.
The medical industry has been using 3D voxel based imaging for a long time now, and this looks like a neat extension of existing techniques. The output looks quite grainy but this is probably partly down to kinect resolution, and partly down to compression. Based on the video my guess is that the voxel resolution is somewhere between 128x128x128 and 256x256x256 so worst case you could be looking at 10x more data than HD video at full frame rate.
This looks like a great little R&D project, but one has to wonder what the best market for this kind of live 3D videoconferecing would be - perhaps getting feedback on your golf swing or dance steps by a remote coach? It likely won't come cheap, and a decent (say 10 Mbps) network link is almost certainly going to be a requirement at both ends for decent performance.
Once you go silverback, there's no going back.
The big marketing hurdle of Nokia isn't going to be in pushing Windows Phone - once Windows 8 launches and the Metro UI becomes ubiquitous then more people will be comfortable with it on their phones as well.
The big marketing problem for Nokia will be in convincing people to shell extra for a Nokia branded Windows Phone - I've been satisfied with my (cheaper) HTC Windows Phone with largely the same functionality and apps for the past 11 months.
This is coincidentally the same problem they'd face in the Android handset market as well.
No they're not. It is just the classic Google Maps "get directions" feature, but with realtime traffic estimates. Suppose your comment was just a way to bash Google.
Actually, what I think the parent is worried about is how Android navigation might provide information to Google, and from a programming point of view it seems entirely possible (and even sensible) to correlate map tile request frequency with traffic flow (I assume Android navigation fetches new map tiles as needed). So, conceivably Google could collect and archive information like 'john.doe@gmail.com's mobile phone is travelling at 90 mph along the Interstate' if you use Google Maps for turn-by-turn navigation.
On the other hand, it's my understanding that traffic data is purchased from companies like transport companies who fit their trucks with GPS for realtime logistics purposes (I've sometimes seen alerts for traffic queues on empty roads where there are transport lorries parked by the roadside). These days traffic data is also reported by modern Sat Nav units (e.g. http://consumerist.com/2011/04/tomtom-sold-speeding-data-to-police-cops-used-it-to-bust-drivers.html ) and as said maybe Google can harvest a bit of traffic data from their Android sets as well.
Whether we like it or not, companies like Google buy and harvest traffic data from misc existing sources, and use this data to propagate their results. Those drivers who knowingly or unknowingly share their traffic data will help those of us who just want to avoid being stuck in traffic.
FTFA:
I looked at the Go pages for 15 minutes to try to figure out why this was commissioned as a project to begin with. Ultimately I ran into the above paragraph. Projects like this make me think that Google no longer has a clear idea of how they could improve their existing business, so they're spending an increasing amount of time rearranging deck chairs to keep their programmers busy on the off chance that they'll need them for something useful.
The expected market demand for Jedi Knights is probably marginally less than the expected market demand for philosophers in general - yet this doesn't stop people from studying philosophy for misc reasons.
However, in this case it seems like the primary goal is simply to provide exercise/dance classes with a bit of a Sci-Fi/philo twist (Sci-Phi?), and there's definitively a market demand for fitness courses/instructors. If this niche inspires a few couch potatoes to exercise more than they otherwise would, why not?
I can only imagine the time and effort spent on tracking down this problem - a rare CPU condition is exponentially more difficult to narrow down than most programming mistakes. A lot of progress in IT depends on engineers like this, who obsessively solve problems even when it's much easier to just ignore them, try to hack around them or pass the buck around. Kudos.
For me it's partly about saving space (yes, 50K documents take a fair bit of it), partly about 'fireproofing' them, partly about portability (I travel) and partly about searchability (OCR + indexing) - the ability to find most documents which mention a particular topic over the past few decades in a matter of seconds is exceptionally valuable for me personally.
Outsourcing is definitively the way to go if your archive is big. I am facing the same problem - basically looking to digitize an old archive of miscellaneous "important" documents - and a local business offered to scan my estimated 50,000 pieces of paper for GBP 1350 (approx USD 2150). That's 4 cents per document - a no brainer in labour-saving and time-saving terms.
Most people probably wouldn't deny that the climate keeps changing (e.g. Ice Age) but so far I've personally not seen credible evidence for the idea that mankind has much if anything to do with it - temperatures appear to have changed substantially even long before the industrial revolution. On balance it's probably natural for geeks (many of whom are naturally inquisitive) to question ideas which insist on substantial changes to our lifestyles with tenuous evidence behind them.
Obviously 100K is much better than nothing, but it's difficult to see the odd 100K donation making much difference to a software project of the scale of perl. At the same time it's easy to demonstrate how much OS projects like perl are contributing to the economy. Perhaps after a few more SOPA-like victories the IT industry will feel empowered enough to lobby the government for some taxpayer money to support critical web infrastructure maintenance/development.
If we had this technology in the shape of a buttocks then it would bring telecommuting to a whole new level.