Seagate's chief technology officer, Mark Kryder, said: "Certainly we are not going to start packaging linear accelerators into hard disk drives, so the kinds of speeds achieved in these experiments would never be observed in an actual recording device," Kryder said. "It's not something that's going to impact anything we're contemplating in hard disk drives."
Who's willing to lay odds that sooner or later, this guy's going to look like an idiot?
This is probably just a flame, but you need to learn to read.
I said "A few people", few meaning "a small number". This is probably a good antonym for "Most". "People" covers the entire population, not just CS/IT grads.
The statements "Most CS/IT grads hardly understand the material" and "For the few people who write good applications, some fraction more than 50% of them are CS/IT grads" are NOT mutually exclusive. I agree with both statements.
The bottom line is that CS/IT degrees are designed to turn out people who know to construct better software than the bulk of the population. This doesn't imply that they implementation is successful, but do not be surprised that the average CS/IT graduate is able to write better software than the average plumber or carpenter. Oddly enough, the average carpenter can build you a better set of kitchen cabinets than most CS/IT grads.
You're right. It's not needed. If you're happy with mediocre.
Too many people write applications/manage systems that get the requirements mostly right, that don't have huge bugs, that get the job done - most of the time.
A few people write applications/manage systems that go above and beyond the requirements, that are a pleasure to use because they are responsive, informative and handle problems well. Those people more often than not are CS/IT graduates. If you understand how the computer/compiler/OS works you tend to be more efficient.
If you're going to go by the entry requirements for H1-B visas, A bachelor's degree is worth about 8 years experience. (degree + 2 years or 10 years required).
From personal experience, there are a lot of people in the industry (Generally with degrees in something that isn't CS/IT) that do not know things after 8 years that get taught in the first year of a CS/IT degree.
Then again, there's an awful lot of college graduates with CS/IT degrees that have got no clue what you really need to do to build a software application in the real world.
So Microsoft will pay the European fine, which will have no impact on their behavior. They will appeal the decision, which will freeze any real enforcement action and effectively authorize continuation for another two to five years of otherwise proscribed behavior while the appeal moves forward.
The first thing that comes to mind is, ta da! A pen. Or a pencil, you could try a pencil. Possibly a crayon, I hear some people even do legal briefs in crayons
Ok, so now it's about 362,000,000 results for 'B'. But why is it some commercial thing hits the top of the list?
Similarly (and more geeky):
It used to be that "A is for Apple" but now (post some odd relevance tweaking by google?) it seems that "A is for your Dictionary"
obOnTopic: In my memory, the passage where the evil mage uses their true names felt very similar to the orginal series, especially where Ged investigates the temple.
Re:Question...
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The evidence: The liquid water under the ice.
They "know" that it's there because the crack/stress patterns visible in the ice could "only" have been produced if the ice was floating. (Yes yes, they don't really know it - they are guessing, but they are well informed guesses). Liquid water means that there is a good chance for life - the temperature is reasonable, there's oxygen, etc etc. The article doesn't describe it because it's a very well accepted/established conjecture that liquid water means a high probability of life (go google for "water is life")
And when it comes down to it, no there is no other way of examining the question before sending a probe. That is the nature of a "conjecture". Scientific evidence suggests that there is a high probability of life there, but we're never going to know for sure if we never go look.
Next, I believe that Cameras go really well with Cellphones, but I don't believe they go well with PDA's. Reason: a cellphone is used for convenience of location, you can make a call from anywhere. Having a picture functionality built into that call is also awesome, because if I'm picking out a car from a lot, I can send pictures back to my mom of the things she wants to look at (color, price, etc), and have her call me back with what she thinks. Rolling this functionality into a PDA seems too clunky; overkill
Yes, of course, while you do want to send photos to your gf^H^Hmom while you're naked^H^H^H^H^Hbuying a car, you would never want to quickly send any sort of document to anyone you're talking to. I mean, why would you send a spreadsheet when a photo of a spreadsheet is so much more useful?
Why shouldn't the costs be amortized? Because it may be impossible to fairly decide what portion of the cost of the copying equipment to assign to each copy. If you want to charge a fee for the use of your copying machine, fine - but do not try to argue that the cost of performing the copy should be in anyway related to the cost of producing the orginal.
Copyright laws exist for this reason: to protect the investment of the person/people who spent the money to research and develop the product. They are too often abused to protect a profit making "copying machine".
You're right, but you're really just arguing the original point. The technology to copy and store a 1 gigabyte file these days costs about $400 (I'm talking buying the whole computer w/ drives). Maybe less, depending on rebates blah blah.
In 1948, the same technology would have cost millions. Hell, even the electricity bill would have run into thousands. It may not be possible.
Let's assume this wonderful copying machine costs on the same order as a PC and reduce the copying costs to raw materials and electricity only, further assuming that the electricity cost is not unreasonable. So you're talking some carbon (some lumps of wood. Grows on trees. Arguments about suitable form for use by machine ignored. Arguments that sugar also grows on trees also ignored), some water and five minutes on your standard houshold 240V^H^H^H^H115V (Arguments about stupid american politically inspired choice of electrical transmittion grid ignored too).
One of the points the article makes is that a resource becomes a commodity when demand becomes high enough. There was also some implication that the high demands causes standardization. Essentially he's saying that MP3 players are already commodities, whereas custom built software for specific, individual projects are not. Saying "software is a commodity" doesn't make sense, the word "software" covers too many things - sort of like saying "gas is a commodity". The gas you by from 76 is a commodity, the gas that comes from mexican food sure isn't.
The problem really is that the act of copying a piece of software is terribly easy and costs: The price of the electricity used to run the devices doing the copying plus the cost of wear and tear on the device plus the cost of the media used to store the new copy plus the cost of wear and tear on the media.
This is probably on the order of hundredths or thousandths (hundreds and thousands, yay) of a cent. For any piece of software.
And the old piece of software is still there, unchanged. The act of copying it does not destroy the original.
Some people may argue that the cost of research and development should be born by the user. They may be correct, who am I to say, however the only version of the software that has those costs directly associated it is the original.
Getting back to copying a pound of sugar. Just say we had a machine capable of copying the pound of sugar, given some carbon, hydrogen and whatever other raw materials it needed and electricity. Put the original pound of sugar (the one grown/ harvested/ processed/ researched/ transported/ etc) in the machine and "copy" it. Should the user of the copy have to pay for transporting the orginal to the shop where it was sold? Or just for the raw materials and electricity used in the copying process?
You get an electromagnetic field surrounding magnets. This field is typically at very low frequencies. It does fun things like causing electric currents in wires passed through the field. Also, current passing through wires causes electromagnetic fields. If you reverse that, you can detect currents passing through wires in the field (because it changes the field). If you put some physical object in the magnetic field, the field causes current to flow in anything that is a conductor (most things in a body are electrical conductors). The fun thing is, you can tell what current is flowing in a Magnetic field because it changes the field (Resonance). You can then use these slight field changes to make a picture (Imaging) (MRI). The higher the frequency that you can operate this thing at, the better quality resolution you can get because you can detect smaller and smaller currents - which means you can "see" things that are really bad conductors.
Now,
Electromagnetic radiation == light.
so... <wild guess>
If you can generate a magnetic field at very high frequencies you can do interesting things with the visible light spectrum, like causing it to follow your magnetic field lines. (A magnetic field in the visible spectrum is opaque?)
Just in case you were planning on building laser weapons, you now have "force fields", too. </wild guess>
Good point. I'm still not convinced that it was worth the effort. Sure, there's problems with the format function and he's fixed a lot of them, but I'd much rather have him spending his time writing any number of powerful modules that are as well thought out and flexible. [Sentence using the phrase "Cost Benefit Analysis" elided]
One that comes to mind is an extensible module I can use that lets me send exception reports as an XML attachment via email (or whatever other fun system you like) with as little trouble as you can use this form function.
I didn't indend to get into a GUI/command line debate. It's more to do with generating displays and the use of fixed width fonts. Even if you're not generating HTML, most of the things supplied by the form function are irrelevant when you're using fonts that aren't monospaced/fixed width. I'm under the impression that most applicances/devices/applications these days tend to display in true type/outline fonts.
(Not to mention that most HHDs/appliances don't even give you anything even vaguely resembling a command line by default)
After reading through a lot of this article and being blown away by the genuinely powerful and, dare I say it, awesome abilities that have been given to the form function, I'm left asking myself:
"Who gives a crap?"
Most the projects I've worked on for the last few years have predominately displayed text in web pages. Almost all the reports produced have been generated as HTML and then printed as necessary. The only text output done has been generally into log files, where you really don't need a lot of formatting. While this is obviously a really great, well thought out piece of coding,... that's all it is, some geek's personal project that doesn't really seem to have much relevance to the real world.
Maybe I'm just missing a huge community of people who spend most of their time looking at command lines and printing out reports in fixed width fonts.
You're assuming the industry wasn't (and still isn't) full of people who are a) lazy b) inexperienced c) incompetant d) cheap e) smart enough to know how to cut and paste and do global search/replace.
You could rephrase something like this:
Faced with an old can of worms you don't really understand do you a) copy the can and try to fix the copy, changing as little real code as possible in the hopes you don't break it? or b) spend far too much time untangling the worms and breaking the can in a vain attempt to understand enough of it to port it while being pressured by deadlines and budgets? or c) admit to your boss you don't really understand this and that he should have spent the money to hire someone who does? or d) quietly outsource the thing to someone who knows how to fix it and costs less than you do?
They have some research kit that sells for $450 that includes 3 gyros. If the assumption that they have 3 seperate gyros in each mouse is correct you could get your 6 degrees of freedom from the device? But then, that would mean your mouse is a poorly documented research kit with inconvenient packaging.
The web site has it for $79.95? Is this a new variety of slashdot effect? (In which case prepare to get sued by the "red dot" people for violation of look and feel)
Or am I looking at the wrong wireless optical gyro mouse?
Slashdot Mirror
Who's willing to lay odds that sooner or later, this guy's going to look like an idiot?
This is probably just a flame, but you need to learn to read.
I said "A few people", few meaning "a small number". This is probably a good antonym for "Most". "People" covers the entire population, not just CS/IT grads.
The statements "Most CS/IT grads hardly understand the material" and "For the few people who write good applications, some fraction more than 50% of them are CS/IT grads" are NOT mutually exclusive. I agree with both statements.
The bottom line is that CS/IT degrees are designed to turn out people who know to construct better software than the bulk of the population. This doesn't imply that they implementation is successful, but do not be surprised that the average CS/IT graduate is able to write better software than the average plumber or carpenter. Oddly enough, the average carpenter can build you a better set of kitchen cabinets than most CS/IT grads.
You're right. It's not needed. If you're happy with mediocre.
Too many people write applications/manage systems that get the requirements mostly right, that don't have huge bugs, that get the job done - most of the time.
A few people write applications/manage systems that go above and beyond the requirements, that are a pleasure to use because they are responsive, informative and handle problems well. Those people more often than not are CS/IT graduates. If you understand how the computer/compiler/OS works you tend to be more efficient.
If you're going to go by the entry requirements for H1-B visas, A bachelor's degree is worth about 8 years experience. (degree + 2 years or 10 years required).
From personal experience, there are a lot of people in the industry (Generally with degrees in something that isn't CS/IT) that do not know things after 8 years that get taught in the first year of a CS/IT degree.
Then again, there's an awful lot of college graduates with CS/IT degrees that have got no clue what you really need to do to build a software application in the real world.
Telnet is great for quickly debugging the output of an awful lot of things that read/generate [semi] human readable output.... like HTTP servers.
/servlet/url.xml?blah=blah HTTP/1.1
telnet localhost 80
GET
The first thing that comes to mind is, ta da! A pen. Or a pencil, you could try a pencil. Possibly a crayon, I hear some people even do legal briefs in crayons
That could have come from an artist talking about companies like ARIA.
Ok, so now it's about 362,000,000 results for 'B'. But why is it some commercial thing hits the top of the list?
Similarly (and more geeky):
It used to be that "A is for Apple" but now (post some odd relevance tweaking by google?) it seems that "A is for your Dictionary"
obOnTopic: In my memory, the passage where the evil mage uses their true names felt very similar to the orginal series, especially where Ged investigates the temple.
The evidence: The liquid water under the ice.
They "know" that it's there because the crack/stress patterns visible in the ice could "only" have been produced if the ice was floating.
(Yes yes, they don't really know it - they are guessing, but they are well informed guesses).
Liquid water means that there is a good chance for life - the temperature is reasonable, there's oxygen, etc etc.
The article doesn't describe it because it's a very well accepted/established conjecture that liquid water means a high probability of life (go google for "water is life")
And when it comes down to it, no there is no other way of examining the question before sending a probe. That is the nature of a "conjecture". Scientific evidence suggests that there is a high probability of life there, but we're never going to know for sure if we never go look.
Yes, of course, while you do want to send photos to your gf^H^Hmom while you're naked^H^H^H^H^Hbuying a car, you would never want to quickly send any sort of document to anyone you're talking to. I mean, why would you send a spreadsheet when a photo of a spreadsheet is so much more useful?
Why shouldn't the costs be amortized? Because it may be impossible to fairly decide what portion of the cost of the copying equipment to assign to each copy. If you want to charge a fee for the use of your copying machine, fine - but do not try to argue that the cost of performing the copy should be in anyway related to the cost of producing the orginal.
Copyright laws exist for this reason: to protect the investment of the person/people who spent the money to research and develop the product. They are too often abused to protect a profit making "copying machine".
You're right, but you're really just arguing the original point. The technology to copy and store a 1 gigabyte file these days costs about $400 (I'm talking buying the whole computer w/ drives). Maybe less, depending on rebates blah blah.
In 1948, the same technology would have cost millions. Hell, even the electricity bill would have run into thousands. It may not be possible.
Let's assume this wonderful copying machine costs on the same order as a PC and reduce the copying costs to raw materials and electricity only, further assuming that the electricity cost is not unreasonable. So you're talking some carbon (some lumps of wood. Grows on trees. Arguments about suitable form for use by machine ignored. Arguments that sugar also grows on trees also ignored), some water and five minutes on your standard houshold 240V^H^H^H^H115V (Arguments about stupid american politically inspired choice of electrical transmittion grid ignored too).
One of the points the article makes is that a resource becomes a commodity when demand becomes high enough. There was also some implication that the high demands causes standardization. Essentially he's saying that MP3 players are already commodities, whereas custom built software for specific, individual projects are not.
Saying "software is a commodity" doesn't make sense, the word "software" covers too many things - sort of like saying "gas is a commodity". The gas you by from 76 is a commodity, the gas that comes from mexican food sure isn't.
The problem really is that the act of copying a piece of software is terribly easy and costs: The price of the electricity used to run the devices doing the copying plus the cost of wear and tear on the device plus the cost of the media used to store the new copy plus the cost of wear and tear on the media.
This is probably on the order of hundredths or thousandths (hundreds and thousands, yay) of a cent. For any piece of software.
And the old piece of software is still there, unchanged. The act of copying it does not destroy the original.
Some people may argue that the cost of research and development should be born by the user. They may be correct, who am I to say, however the only version of the software that has those costs directly associated it is the original.
Getting back to copying a pound of sugar. Just say we had a machine capable of copying the pound of sugar, given some carbon, hydrogen and whatever other raw materials it needed and electricity. Put the original pound of sugar (the one grown/ harvested/ processed/ researched/ transported/ etc) in the machine and "copy" it. Should the user of the copy have to pay for transporting the orginal to the shop where it was sold? Or just for the raw materials and electricity used in the copying process?
From David Stutz's website (http://www.synthesist.net/writing/commodity_softw are.html)
From a very vague understanding:
You get an electromagnetic field surrounding magnets. This field is typically at very low frequencies. It does fun things like causing electric currents in wires passed through the field. Also, current passing through wires causes electromagnetic fields. If you reverse that, you can detect currents passing through wires in the field (because it changes the field). If you put some physical object in the magnetic field, the field causes current to flow in anything that is a conductor (most things in a body are electrical conductors). The fun thing is, you can tell what current is flowing in a Magnetic field because it changes the field (Resonance). You can then use these slight field changes to make a picture (Imaging) (MRI). The higher the frequency that you can operate this thing at, the better quality resolution you can get because you can detect smaller and smaller currents - which means you can "see" things that are really bad conductors.
Now,
Electromagnetic radiation == light.
so...
<wild guess>
If you can generate a magnetic field at very high frequencies you can do interesting things with the visible light spectrum, like causing it to follow your magnetic field lines. (A magnetic field in the visible spectrum is opaque?)
Just in case you were planning on building laser weapons, you now have "force fields", too.
</wild guess>
Does this mean that ... in normal countries ... your bike eats corrosive chemicals?
Good point. I'm still not convinced that it was worth the effort. Sure, there's problems with the format function and he's fixed a lot of them, but I'd much rather have him spending his time writing any number of powerful modules that are as well thought out and flexible.
[Sentence using the phrase "Cost Benefit Analysis" elided]
One that comes to mind is an extensible module I can use that lets me send exception reports as an XML attachment via email (or whatever other fun system you like) with as little trouble as you can use this form function.
I didn't indend to get into a GUI/command line debate. It's more to do with generating displays and the use of fixed width fonts. Even if you're not generating HTML, most of the things supplied by the form function are irrelevant when you're using fonts that aren't monospaced/fixed width. I'm under the impression that most applicances/devices/applications these days tend to display in true type/outline fonts.
(Not to mention that most HHDs/appliances don't even give you anything even vaguely resembling a command line by default)
After reading through a lot of this article and being blown away by the genuinely powerful and, dare I say it, awesome abilities that have been given to the form function, I'm left asking myself:
... that's all it is, some geek's personal project that doesn't really seem to have much relevance to the real world.
"Who gives a crap?"
Most the projects I've worked on for the last few years have predominately displayed text in web pages. Almost all the reports produced have been generated as HTML and then printed as necessary. The only text output done has been generally into log files, where you really don't need a lot of formatting.
While this is obviously a really great, well thought out piece of coding,
Maybe I'm just missing a huge community of people who spend most of their time looking at command lines and printing out reports in fixed width fonts.
You're assuming the industry wasn't (and still isn't) full of people who are
a) lazy
b) inexperienced
c) incompetant
d) cheap
e) smart enough to know how to cut and paste and do global search/replace.
You could rephrase something like this:
Faced with an old can of worms you don't really understand do you
a) copy the can and try to fix the copy, changing as little real code as possible in the hopes you don't break it? or
b) spend far too much time untangling the worms and breaking the can in a vain attempt to understand enough of it to port it while being pressured by deadlines and budgets? or
c) admit to your boss you don't really understand this and that he should have spent the money to hire someone who does? or
d) quietly outsource the thing to someone who knows how to fix it and costs less than you do?
For some reason, the article reminds me of the South Park episode where the kids tried to build a ladder to heaven so they could find Kenny.
Nanotubes have nothing to do with ladders to heaven do they?
They have some research kit that sells for $450 that includes 3 gyros.
If the assumption that they have 3 seperate gyros in each mouse is correct you could get your 6 degrees of freedom from the device?
But then, that would mean your mouse is a poorly documented research kit with inconvenient packaging.
The web site has it for $79.95? Is this a new variety of slashdot effect? (In which case prepare to get sued by the "red dot" people for violation of look and feel)
Or am I looking at the wrong wireless optical gyro mouse?