No they wouldn't because there is a theoretical maximum of 34% efficiency for a single-junction cell with unconcentrated light.
FTA: "This world record increasing our efficiency level by more than 1 point in less than 4 months demonstrates the extreme potential of our four-junction solar cell design" (bolding mine for emphasis).
But then you might have to make your roof bigger.. still bankrupting you.
Who said anything about putting them on the roof? When I said pave a quarter acre with them, I meant it more-or-less literally... You wouldn't really need a quarter acre, of course - more like 1/40th of an acre - but if you have 50-100 1m^2 panels fencing in your yard, or off in that back corner overgrown with weeds anyway, or even acting as your driveway/sidewalk (obviously those last two would require panels a bit more durable than normal, but not anything more efficient) - Hey, cool, free electricity.
Why is it none of these ever make it to manufacture. Typical solar panels have an average efficiency of 15%, with the best commercially available panels at 21%.
Because as much as I look forward to someday powering my entire house with a handful of 90% efficient solar panels, I care a lot more about the cost per panel at present. If I can afford to pave a quarter acre with 10% efficient panels while these 40%+ ones would bankrupt me - Hey, guess which ones I'll just buy 4x as many of?
Reflectors aren't weightless, and neither are the extensive heat removal systems that will be required to cool a concentrated solar cell in space. I've never seen a representation of a satellite with anything but unconcentrated cells.
Pssst - Although not guaranteed, if they get 44.7% efficiency at 300x normal sunlight... They probably do similarly under 1x sunlight. Claims like the one made don't describe a requirement for that efficiency, they describe an extreme under which the cells can still perform. As in "oooh, we only need one $1000 panel and 297 $10 mirrors, rather than 297 $150 panels"
If you're pissed that someone whose income is ONE HUNDRED FUCKING PERCENT DEPENDENT on the commissions from sales
Perhaps you should consider seeing a professional about your anger issues.;)
Did you know that ESPN's income is ONE HUNDRED FUCKING PERCENT DEPENDENT on people actually paying to watch TV?
Funny, I don't really care about ESPN, either. Go figure.
the service department doesn't pay for the dealership, and wouldn't exist if not for it
I'd love to hear your theories as to how independent "service departments" exist, and how they not only do well, but cost a hell of a lot less than the ones attached to actual dealerships?
HOWEVER, cars COULD be built to last 25-50 years, easily, with only a few parts needing to be replaced if the cars were engineered right.
Did you exist yet, 25 years ago? Did you know the biggest public objection to unleaded gas didn't come from "enthusiasts" worried about their poor soft valve covers, but rather, from the fact that it smelled like ass when used in almost every car on the road at the time? Aside from driving behind a fume-spewing dumptruck, do you even remember that car exhaust used to have a smell at all, before modern emissions control devices? Did you know cars 25 years ago couldn't corner at 35MPH (without pulling a tire-damaging e-brake assisted maneuver)? Did you know cars 25 years ago generally got 10-20MPG?
I very much dislike planned obsolescence. But some mass produced products, we should replace more than twice per century.
If you buy a new car on average every five years over about 50 years of life, and "waste," (as you seem to consider it,) $2000/car that's just to pay the salespeople... that's 20,000 over a lifetime.
$20k of waste over a lifetime. I don't quite know how you thought that would read, but... $20k of waste over a lifetime?!?!? Holy shit, dude! If we want to discuss the relative merits of wasting "only" $20k, do you have any idea how many hookers and how much blow that would buy? How many Lego Death-star sets? How much Pez???
"Only" 20k? Jesus, I make pretty decent money, but your income must put me to shame if you don't go white with fury at the thought of wasting $20k on useless middle-men only employed in the first place because they managed to legislate themselves into a last few years in the sun before direct sales obliterate them.
Do the world a favor and hold your breath until that happens.
You realize, of course, that by the next time I need a new car, that will have happened?
Consider me calm. Despite the tone of my previous post, shit, the very thought of car dealerships vanishing from the face of the planet practically leaves me cackling in glee!
So yeah, dealing. I have to buy one more car from a useless middle-man in my life. Hell, I might go so far as to celebrate it as my last major offline purchase.
Pint, quarts and gallons are US measurements. In my region, we use milk jugs. We added the conversion to water bottles for heathens outside the US who haven't been educated in how to properly measure liquid.
Heathens??? Pot, meet kettle. All the "civilized" countries use metric nowadays - decijugs, centijugs, millijugs, and so on.
Or stop being a prima donna and blaming the world for your social dysfunction or because you don't have the backbone to deal with salesmen.
Not a matter of backbone, but rather, of the pointlessness of it all. I don't make it a habit of intentionally dealing with wolves, either, even though a modern firearm will make short work of them. I simply have no interest in the whole negotiating game. For my last car, I found what I wanted, went to the nearest dealer, took it for a ride, came back and told the salesperson what I would pay for it (a fair price, not the most profitable customer of the day but not a loss, either). As soon as she started to play the "I'll need to talk with my manager" bullshit, I headed for the door (and would have left) when she backpedaled faster than Lance Armstrong on Oprah. I drove it home half an hour later after filling out the annoying ream of paper (getting rid of that wouldn't suck, either, but I realize most of it doesn't have anything to do with the actual dealer).
Specialists and middlemen exist for a reason, I pay them to make my life easier.
No, they don't. You haven't bought a car in a while, have you?
You don't get to customize them anymore. You pick one of a small number (half a dozen or so) of equally ugly colors with stupid names you don't even recognize, you pick one of a small number (less than three, usually) of standard trims, and you might have one or two options you can select (like alloy vs steel wheels); in most cases, upgrading to option-X requires upgrading the entire trim (or buying it after-market). Oh, make no mistake, I have no doubt you could get it with whatever you want. But whether they say it or not, you will pay for trim-package-B when they "throw in for free" the 17" rims.
But the best part about all that? You could just as easily choose all those options via the dropdown size/color/etc boxes Amazon already has. So no, I don't have any use whatsoever for salesmen; and those particular middlemen haven't counted as "specialists" in a good 20 years (if they ever did, which I somewhat doubt).
Now, as for this listing on Amazon - Amazingly enough, I currently need a new car. And I have considered that exact car as an option. I went to that page fully intending to add it to my cart and order (you won't do much better than $1000 off a $14k car anywhere else, so paying MSRP really doesn't much matter here)... And sure, I understand that a "real" dealer would technically have sold it to me, but at least I wouldn't have needed to actually deal with them.
And as one further perk, most dealers won't actually let you put a whole car on plastic (usually limiting it to something like $5k or 10% as a down-payment), but that woudln't present a problem on Amazon... Except... It did, and in fact, just cost them a sale. That page doesn't sell you a car, it amounts to nothing but an ad. You can't just buy it there and check out, "Purchase or lease must be completed at Nissan dealer within 30 days of submitting your contact request". You don't buy a car at that page, Nissan buys you as a sales lead.
So fuck you, car dealers, and fuck you too, Amazon - Oh, and fuck you too, Slashvertisement on the FP. I can't wait for Tesla to come out with something under $30k; Once they do, I'll never go to a physical dealership again in my life.
I beg to differ - I just tried it, works just fine (well, in Chromium, anyway - I don't see much reason to use the version that comes pre-loaded with Google spyware). As does the "menu" key.
Perhaps you have some misbehaving plugin capturing your keystrokes and not properly passing them on to the parent window?
(b) is dumb. No one (statistically speaking) gives a fuck.
You have mistaken giving a fuck out of principle for giving a fuck out of annoyance.
I have quite a few gamer friends. Most of them couldn't give the least damn about the ethics or long term implications of DRM in games. Every single one of them understands what it means when they can't play (for example) a single-player game offline on their laptop in a waiting room or on a plane. And the majority (sometimes with a bit of help, admittedly) of them have "fixed" those problems by grabbing a crack off the internet.
So no, most people have no idea they should oppose DRM. Despite that, most people do hate everything about it without even knowing the target of their ire.
Snark aside, you have it absolutely correct. No one has as a "right" to your work. In the real world, however, that only works as long as you don't ever let your creations out of your head. As soon as you casually whistle that catchy little tune you wrote, in earshot of someone else - Game over (potentially). The universe now owns it, and you can go suck eggs.
For better or worse, compensating the author of a creative work very much depends on the charitable, even grateful, feelings those works inspire in their audience. I want my favorite bands to produce more, and do my best to get money to them; on the flip side of that, I loathe my favorite bands' labels, and wouldn't stop to piss on their execs in I found them dying of thirst in the Sahara. This leads to a bit of cognitive dissonance, obviously, which I personally resolve by doing my best to compensate the artists directly (concerts, merchandise, direct sales, etc) while shamelessly pirating anything actually released by the parasites that "own" them.
It's time for scientists to come down from there ivory towers and let the masses participate, rather than treat them as audience.
Don't confuse academia for science, even though most of the latter happens in the world of the former.
That said, the masses count as complete idiots. They will prefer the argument by the guy with the best hair over the one with actual supporting evidence. They prefer to hear about how great everything looks over the possibility that we as a species have caused an ongoing global extinction event which may yet climax with our own extinction. The give more weight to what their friend Steve's mother's best friend heard about Fukushima Daiichi at the hairdressers than they do to the IAEA with boots-on-the-ground in Futaba.
If the masses count as mere audience, they do so out of choice - "Math is hard, let's go shopping!"
Myst was a tedious exercise in figuring out exactly in what order to do what the designers wanted you to do.
This. I like puzzle games, and remember playing Myst shortly after it came out - And I really just didn't find it all that entertaining, aside from the novelty of the level of eye candy. And eye candy wears off way too quickly to base a whole game, much less a whole genre, on it.
And today? Hell, we have casual "nuisance" puzzles in games consisting of columns of rippling water that more-or-less accurately refract light as the player moves around them.
Put bluntly, Myst didn't fall off the map after wild success - It simply failed in general, despite enjoying a level of commercial success.
You guys used to serve a valuable purpose. Yes, you've always screwed us as hard as you could get away with, but hey, can't fault you for following the American Way to the American Dream.
But now? Congratulations, the internet has made you nothing more than the place I go to test drive your products before I let the nearest 50 of you bid against each other for my next buy (and don't think I won't buy from the other side of the country if someone there has a good enough sale going on to cover the cost of shipping the damned thing to me).
You had a good run. Congratulations. Now cash out before you run out of cash. Simple as that.
Please, go down gracefully. Don't let this turn into yet another "when you can't compete, legislate" disaster. That just never goes well for the "legacy" side of the battle.
Trying to do the right thing would be not sending text messages while operating a car, period.
We have laws for a reason. When the enforcement of those laws doesn't serve that reason, we need to change the law. Simple as that.
We suffer the abridgement of our freedom of speech that comes with bans on texting-while-driving because not paying attention while at the helm of half a million Newtons of rolling death poses a very real and immediate threat to those around you. A stopped car just doesn't pose that same level of threat.
Hes doing his job, whether you like it or not. Dont blame the police for laws you dont like.
Police have a huge amount of discretion in who they write up and for what. He could actually, y'know, work, and catch people posing some threat to those around him; but instead, he'd rather sit at a stop light and give tickets to fish in a barrel - To people at least trying to do the right thing and not text while driving (even if still technically "operating" their car).
So yeah, that still makes him a complete asshole. To all the good cops out there - This guy explains why we loathe you all so much. When you hear about shit like this, a good blanket party would do a world of wonders for your overall PR.
Okay, you'll have to 'splain it too me as well then, because I don't see the joke (and only refrained from posting substantially the same response because an AC beat me to it).
Memory runs roughly 1000x faster than disk (it can get down to around 50x on an array of SSDs, but up to 100,000x for random seeks across physical platters). Holding all else equal, 1000*O(log N) will take longer than 1*O(N log N) until N=1000, despite the lower time complexity. Additionally, the AC made a good point about the relative constant factor of the algorithms themselves, in that a binary search of a sorted list has virtually no overhead, while a good general purpose sorting algorithm does.
And all that said, yes, I see now that I made an error because this change applies to columnar rather than row-oriented data; O(log N) will still eventually beat O(N), however.
First, let me say that I would love to have a table option to keep a particularly heavily-hit table always in memory.
This ain't it.
From TFA, "Maintaining those indexes is expensive and slows down transaction processing. Let's get rid of them," Ellison remarked. "Let's throw all of those analytic indexes away and replace the indexes with in-memory column sort."
This merely minimizes the penalties of poor indexing and RBAR by making complete table scans on arbitrary columns faster. Apparently Mr. Ellison has forgotten his algoithmics and combinatorics - Oh, wait, no he didn't, he dropped out as a sophmore. Pity, because had he stayed, he would have learned that even with a 1000x slower storage medium, an O(log N) algorithm (index seek) will eventually beat an O(N log N) algorithm (column sort).
Thanks, Larry, but you want to make Oracle faster? Remove cursors from the core language, and although that alone won't "fix" it, you'll see all the hacks who can't think in set-based logic drop out overnight.
the only benefits of Apple's Lightning connector over Micro USB are being able to insert it upside down
That actually doesn't count as a "benefit" - Quite the opposite, it means that incorrectly attaching a device most people consider passive has to potential to destroy your much more expensive phone/tablet if its orientation sensing ability fails (unless it has the exact same pinout on both sides, in which case, can we say "wasteful"?)
OTOH, I have yet to successfully plug a USB cable in upside-down, no matter how hard I try to force it.
Engineers have had a fabulous infallible technique for making people plug things together the right way for literally centuries (yes, this predates electricity) - Keyed connectors. Trapezoids, notches, asymmetric sides of a bend, hell, even the standard 3-prong AC adapter - All work simply wonderfully, no need for expensive active electronics just to get 5V to a battery charge controller.
No, you had the right idea in general, just chose a suboptimal target for it. Overall, I agree with your sentiment. People (even Slashdotters) would, sadly, rather discuss 101 ways to hack their XBox than hear about any "real" scientific breakthroughs short of a Higgs Boson level discovery.:)
I can't believe that Americans, the worlds greatest talkers of democracy, will tolerate such an uttlerly despicible act of totalitarianism, within their own country.
Well, sure, in theory the people won't stand for this egregious violation of our rights, and come November, you can bet that... Omigawd, did you see what Miley did at the VMAs? And that new video of hers - That girl seems headed for trouble, mark my words! Hey, can you stop and McD's on the way over and get me two Big Macs, a large fry, and a large strawberry shake? No, wait... I need to lose a few pounds, make it a small fry. So, who do you think will win the big game tonight?
Have you ever seen a normal fluorescence microscope? They're not portable, lightweight, and they're not cheap.
Yes, actually - I've even used one.
Why is it with every story on slashdot that is ACTUALLY ABOUT SCIENCE, there's some guy here talking uninformed trash on it?
I think you might have mistaken my criticism as pointed in the wrong direction. The "story", as presented, does contain complete trash. The real story here involves these folks making a lightweight, portable fluorescence microscope - Not that they used a cellphone's camera in place of a dedicated CCD.
"Researchers make a lightweight, portable fluorescence microscope", however, wouldn't have made it to the front page of Slashdot. Made it a cool cellphone mod, however, and BAM, open the firehose.
Slashdot Mirror
No they wouldn't because there is a theoretical maximum of 34% efficiency for a single-junction cell with unconcentrated light.
FTA: "This world record increasing our efficiency level by more than 1 point in less than 4 months demonstrates the extreme potential of our four-junction solar cell design" (bolding mine for emphasis).
But then you might have to make your roof bigger.. still bankrupting you.
Who said anything about putting them on the roof? When I said pave a quarter acre with them, I meant it more-or-less literally... You wouldn't really need a quarter acre, of course - more like 1/40th of an acre - but if you have 50-100 1m^2 panels fencing in your yard, or off in that back corner overgrown with weeds anyway, or even acting as your driveway/sidewalk (obviously those last two would require panels a bit more durable than normal, but not anything more efficient) - Hey, cool, free electricity.
Why is it none of these ever make it to manufacture. Typical solar panels have an average efficiency of 15%, with the best commercially available panels at 21%.
Because as much as I look forward to someday powering my entire house with a handful of 90% efficient solar panels, I care a lot more about the cost per panel at present. If I can afford to pave a quarter acre with 10% efficient panels while these 40%+ ones would bankrupt me - Hey, guess which ones I'll just buy 4x as many of?
Reflectors aren't weightless, and neither are the extensive heat removal systems that will be required to cool a concentrated solar cell in space. I've never seen a representation of a satellite with anything but unconcentrated cells.
Pssst - Although not guaranteed, if they get 44.7% efficiency at 300x normal sunlight... They probably do similarly under 1x sunlight. Claims like the one made don't describe a requirement for that efficiency, they describe an extreme under which the cells can still perform. As in "oooh, we only need one $1000 panel and 297 $10 mirrors, rather than 297 $150 panels"
If you're pissed that someone whose income is ONE HUNDRED FUCKING PERCENT DEPENDENT on the commissions from sales
;)
Perhaps you should consider seeing a professional about your anger issues.
Did you know that ESPN's income is ONE HUNDRED FUCKING PERCENT DEPENDENT on people actually paying to watch TV?
Funny, I don't really care about ESPN, either. Go figure.
the service department doesn't pay for the dealership, and wouldn't exist if not for it
I'd love to hear your theories as to how independent "service departments" exist, and how they not only do well, but cost a hell of a lot less than the ones attached to actual dealerships?
HOWEVER, cars COULD be built to last 25-50 years, easily, with only a few parts needing to be replaced if the cars were engineered right.
Did you exist yet, 25 years ago? Did you know the biggest public objection to unleaded gas didn't come from "enthusiasts" worried about their poor soft valve covers, but rather, from the fact that it smelled like ass when used in almost every car on the road at the time? Aside from driving behind a fume-spewing dumptruck, do you even remember that car exhaust used to have a smell at all, before modern emissions control devices? Did you know cars 25 years ago couldn't corner at 35MPH (without pulling a tire-damaging e-brake assisted maneuver)? Did you know cars 25 years ago generally got 10-20MPG?
I very much dislike planned obsolescence. But some mass produced products, we should replace more than twice per century.
If you buy a new car on average every five years over about 50 years of life, and "waste," (as you seem to consider it,) $2000/car that's just to pay the salespeople... that's 20,000 over a lifetime.
$20k of waste over a lifetime. I don't quite know how you thought that would read, but... $20k of waste over a lifetime?!?!? Holy shit, dude! If we want to discuss the relative merits of wasting "only" $20k, do you have any idea how many hookers and how much blow that would buy? How many Lego Death-star sets? How much Pez???
"Only" 20k? Jesus, I make pretty decent money, but your income must put me to shame if you don't go white with fury at the thought of wasting $20k on useless middle-men only employed in the first place because they managed to legislate themselves into a last few years in the sun before direct sales obliterate them.
Do the world a favor and hold your breath until that happens.
You realize, of course, that by the next time I need a new car, that will have happened?
Consider me calm. Despite the tone of my previous post, shit, the very thought of car dealerships vanishing from the face of the planet practically leaves me cackling in glee!
So yeah, dealing. I have to buy one more car from a useless middle-man in my life. Hell, I might go so far as to celebrate it as my last major offline purchase.
Best "woosh fail" of the week!
So, you clearly didn't make it to the 12th word... I'd guess you probably made it 10, but possibly only 4.
Do tell - How short of an attention span do you have?
Pint, quarts and gallons are US measurements. In my region, we use milk jugs. We added the conversion to water bottles for heathens outside the US who haven't been educated in how to properly measure liquid.
Heathens??? Pot, meet kettle. All the "civilized" countries use metric nowadays - decijugs, centijugs, millijugs, and so on.
/ And the same units work for bra sizes, too!
Or stop being a prima donna and blaming the world for your social dysfunction or because you don't have the backbone to deal with salesmen.
Not a matter of backbone, but rather, of the pointlessness of it all. I don't make it a habit of intentionally dealing with wolves, either, even though a modern firearm will make short work of them. I simply have no interest in the whole negotiating game. For my last car, I found what I wanted, went to the nearest dealer, took it for a ride, came back and told the salesperson what I would pay for it (a fair price, not the most profitable customer of the day but not a loss, either). As soon as she started to play the "I'll need to talk with my manager" bullshit, I headed for the door (and would have left) when she backpedaled faster than Lance Armstrong on Oprah. I drove it home half an hour later after filling out the annoying ream of paper (getting rid of that wouldn't suck, either, but I realize most of it doesn't have anything to do with the actual dealer).
Specialists and middlemen exist for a reason, I pay them to make my life easier.
No, they don't. You haven't bought a car in a while, have you?
You don't get to customize them anymore. You pick one of a small number (half a dozen or so) of equally ugly colors with stupid names you don't even recognize, you pick one of a small number (less than three, usually) of standard trims, and you might have one or two options you can select (like alloy vs steel wheels); in most cases, upgrading to option-X requires upgrading the entire trim (or buying it after-market). Oh, make no mistake, I have no doubt you could get it with whatever you want. But whether they say it or not, you will pay for trim-package-B when they "throw in for free" the 17" rims.
But the best part about all that? You could just as easily choose all those options via the dropdown size/color/etc boxes Amazon already has. So no, I don't have any use whatsoever for salesmen; and those particular middlemen haven't counted as "specialists" in a good 20 years (if they ever did, which I somewhat doubt).
Now, as for this listing on Amazon - Amazingly enough, I currently need a new car. And I have considered that exact car as an option. I went to that page fully intending to add it to my cart and order (you won't do much better than $1000 off a $14k car anywhere else, so paying MSRP really doesn't much matter here)... And sure, I understand that a "real" dealer would technically have sold it to me, but at least I wouldn't have needed to actually deal with them.
And as one further perk, most dealers won't actually let you put a whole car on plastic (usually limiting it to something like $5k or 10% as a down-payment), but that woudln't present a problem on Amazon... Except... It did, and in fact, just cost them a sale. That page doesn't sell you a car, it amounts to nothing but an ad. You can't just buy it there and check out, "Purchase or lease must be completed at Nissan dealer within 30 days of submitting your contact request". You don't buy a car at that page, Nissan buys you as a sales lead.
So fuck you, car dealers, and fuck you too, Amazon - Oh, and fuck you too, Slashvertisement on the FP. I can't wait for Tesla to come out with something under $30k; Once they do, I'll never go to a physical dealership again in my life.
What is with the vitriol here? Why should buyers and sellers not be able to come together to make a transaction at any time that they like?
They should!
But computers can't "like" ice cream, either.
Doesn't work in Google Chrome.
I beg to differ - I just tried it, works just fine (well, in Chromium, anyway - I don't see much reason to use the version that comes pre-loaded with Google spyware). As does the "menu" key.
Perhaps you have some misbehaving plugin capturing your keystrokes and not properly passing them on to the parent window?
AC or not, this post count as 100% the correct response to the GP. Why did it get modded to -1?
Woe betide you should you ever find yourself on a Windows machine without a mouse, then.
Shift-F10.
(b) is dumb. No one (statistically speaking) gives a fuck.
You have mistaken giving a fuck out of principle for giving a fuck out of annoyance.
I have quite a few gamer friends. Most of them couldn't give the least damn about the ethics or long term implications of DRM in games. Every single one of them understands what it means when they can't play (for example) a single-player game offline on their laptop in a waiting room or on a plane. And the majority (sometimes with a bit of help, admittedly) of them have "fixed" those problems by grabbing a crack off the internet.
So no, most people have no idea they should oppose DRM. Despite that, most people do hate everything about it without even knowing the target of their ire.
And no one is entitled to someone else's work.
;)
So I take it you don't pay taxes?
Snark aside, you have it absolutely correct. No one has as a "right" to your work. In the real world, however, that only works as long as you don't ever let your creations out of your head. As soon as you casually whistle that catchy little tune you wrote, in earshot of someone else - Game over (potentially). The universe now owns it, and you can go suck eggs.
For better or worse, compensating the author of a creative work very much depends on the charitable, even grateful, feelings those works inspire in their audience. I want my favorite bands to produce more, and do my best to get money to them; on the flip side of that, I loathe my favorite bands' labels, and wouldn't stop to piss on their execs in I found them dying of thirst in the Sahara. This leads to a bit of cognitive dissonance, obviously, which I personally resolve by doing my best to compensate the artists directly (concerts, merchandise, direct sales, etc) while shamelessly pirating anything actually released by the parasites that "own" them.
It's time for scientists to come down from there ivory towers and let the masses participate, rather than treat them as audience.
Don't confuse academia for science, even though most of the latter happens in the world of the former.
That said, the masses count as complete idiots. They will prefer the argument by the guy with the best hair over the one with actual supporting evidence. They prefer to hear about how great everything looks over the possibility that we as a species have caused an ongoing global extinction event which may yet climax with our own extinction. The give more weight to what their friend Steve's mother's best friend heard about Fukushima Daiichi at the hairdressers than they do to the IAEA with boots-on-the-ground in Futaba.
If the masses count as mere audience, they do so out of choice - "Math is hard, let's go shopping!"
Myst was a tedious exercise in figuring out exactly in what order to do what the designers wanted you to do.
This. I like puzzle games, and remember playing Myst shortly after it came out - And I really just didn't find it all that entertaining, aside from the novelty of the level of eye candy. And eye candy wears off way too quickly to base a whole game, much less a whole genre, on it.
And today? Hell, we have casual "nuisance" puzzles in games consisting of columns of rippling water that more-or-less accurately refract light as the player moves around them.
Put bluntly, Myst didn't fall off the map after wild success - It simply failed in general, despite enjoying a level of commercial success.
You guys used to serve a valuable purpose. Yes, you've always screwed us as hard as you could get away with, but hey, can't fault you for following the American Way to the American Dream.
But now? Congratulations, the internet has made you nothing more than the place I go to test drive your products before I let the nearest 50 of you bid against each other for my next buy (and don't think I won't buy from the other side of the country if someone there has a good enough sale going on to cover the cost of shipping the damned thing to me).
You had a good run. Congratulations. Now cash out before you run out of cash. Simple as that.
Please, go down gracefully. Don't let this turn into yet another "when you can't compete, legislate" disaster. That just never goes well for the "legacy" side of the battle.
Trying to do the right thing would be not sending text messages while operating a car, period.
We have laws for a reason. When the enforcement of those laws doesn't serve that reason, we need to change the law. Simple as that.
We suffer the abridgement of our freedom of speech that comes with bans on texting-while-driving because not paying attention while at the helm of half a million Newtons of rolling death poses a very real and immediate threat to those around you. A stopped car just doesn't pose that same level of threat.
Hes doing his job, whether you like it or not. Dont blame the police for laws you dont like.
Police have a huge amount of discretion in who they write up and for what. He could actually, y'know, work, and catch people posing some threat to those around him; but instead, he'd rather sit at a stop light and give tickets to fish in a barrel - To people at least trying to do the right thing and not text while driving (even if still technically "operating" their car).
So yeah, that still makes him a complete asshole. To all the good cops out there - This guy explains why we loathe you all so much. When you hear about shit like this, a good blanket party would do a world of wonders for your overall PR.
Okay, you'll have to 'splain it too me as well then, because I don't see the joke (and only refrained from posting substantially the same response because an AC beat me to it).
Memory runs roughly 1000x faster than disk (it can get down to around 50x on an array of SSDs, but up to 100,000x for random seeks across physical platters). Holding all else equal, 1000*O(log N) will take longer than 1*O(N log N) until N=1000, despite the lower time complexity. Additionally, the AC made a good point about the relative constant factor of the algorithms themselves, in that a binary search of a sorted list has virtually no overhead, while a good general purpose sorting algorithm does.
And all that said, yes, I see now that I made an error because this change applies to columnar rather than row-oriented data; O(log N) will still eventually beat O(N), however.
First, let me say that I would love to have a table option to keep a particularly heavily-hit table always in memory.
This ain't it.
From TFA, "Maintaining those indexes is expensive and slows down transaction processing. Let's get rid of them," Ellison remarked. "Let's throw all of those analytic indexes away and replace the indexes with in-memory column sort."
This merely minimizes the penalties of poor indexing and RBAR by making complete table scans on arbitrary columns faster. Apparently Mr. Ellison has forgotten his algoithmics and combinatorics - Oh, wait, no he didn't, he dropped out as a sophmore. Pity, because had he stayed, he would have learned that even with a 1000x slower storage medium, an O(log N) algorithm (index seek) will eventually beat an O(N log N) algorithm (column sort).
Thanks, Larry, but you want to make Oracle faster? Remove cursors from the core language, and although that alone won't "fix" it, you'll see all the hacks who can't think in set-based logic drop out overnight.
the only benefits of Apple's Lightning connector over Micro USB are being able to insert it upside down
That actually doesn't count as a "benefit" - Quite the opposite, it means that incorrectly attaching a device most people consider passive has to potential to destroy your much more expensive phone/tablet if its orientation sensing ability fails (unless it has the exact same pinout on both sides, in which case, can we say "wasteful"?)
OTOH, I have yet to successfully plug a USB cable in upside-down, no matter how hard I try to force it.
Engineers have had a fabulous infallible technique for making people plug things together the right way for literally centuries (yes, this predates electricity) - Keyed connectors. Trapezoids, notches, asymmetric sides of a bend, hell, even the standard 3-prong AC adapter - All work simply wonderfully, no need for expensive active electronics just to get 5V to a battery charge controller.
No, you had the right idea in general, just chose a suboptimal target for it. Overall, I agree with your sentiment. People (even Slashdotters) would, sadly, rather discuss 101 ways to hack their XBox than hear about any "real" scientific breakthroughs short of a Higgs Boson level discovery. :)
Cheers!
I can't believe that Americans, the worlds greatest talkers of democracy, will tolerate such an uttlerly despicible act of totalitarianism, within their own country.
Well, sure, in theory the people won't stand for this egregious violation of our rights, and come November, you can bet that... Omigawd, did you see what Miley did at the VMAs? And that new video of hers - That girl seems headed for trouble, mark my words! Hey, can you stop and McD's on the way over and get me two Big Macs, a large fry, and a large strawberry shake? No, wait... I need to lose a few pounds, make it a small fry. So, who do you think will win the big game tonight?
Have you ever seen a normal fluorescence microscope? They're not portable, lightweight, and they're not cheap.
Yes, actually - I've even used one.
Why is it with every story on slashdot that is ACTUALLY ABOUT SCIENCE, there's some guy here talking uninformed trash on it?
I think you might have mistaken my criticism as pointed in the wrong direction. The "story", as presented, does contain complete trash. The real story here involves these folks making a lightweight, portable fluorescence microscope - Not that they used a cellphone's camera in place of a dedicated CCD.
"Researchers make a lightweight, portable fluorescence microscope", however, wouldn't have made it to the front page of Slashdot. Made it a cool cellphone mod, however, and BAM, open the firehose.