This question was not directed as consumer application. It is direct at Enterprise applications. InstallShield just won't do it.
Developers should not install it. Nor should they help install it. If the Configuration Management team cannot do it themselves, then they need to send it back to the developer for better packaging or instructions.
This is to the developers benefit. When new environments are set up, they shouldn't have to contact the developer to deploy the application to those new environments.
And as always. Titles with questions are typically answered with a "no".
Most places I've worked, the auditors would have kitten if the developers directly touched production servers in any way, shape, or form. The really stringent ones wouldn't even accept binaries - all production code had to be compiled and installed from source handed over to the Operations staff.
I often occupied a position where those rules didn't apply to me, but I obeyed them anyway. That way they couldn't blame me.
I guess you didn't realize this amazingly advanced logic but as a christian, compared to muslims, one of us is correct and one is not. There is no "tolerance" when both religions demand that there be no other fake religions. The only person who can truly promote "tolerance" is one who thinks we're both wrong and that's atheists, which is around 18% of the US and the US is not rules by an 18% majority system. So we disagree, deal with it.
Zeus tells me that BOTH religions are fake. And the Pink Unicorn tells me that making Religion into Law is blasphemous and shall be punished in eternal fire.
Anyway, it's a feeble God who needs armed men to defend himself.
Dream on. Somewhere around 2000-2003 Microsoft software products started getting real cozy with the Mothership via Internet. Meaning that there's a fairly decent chance that Microsoft could simply switch it off on you. Although more likely, based on their past history, you'll simply discover one day that the latest version of Windows won't run Office 2003 properly any more.
This is some sort of alternative timeline thing, right ?
Unfortunately, not. You can see it at its most visible in that both Windows and Office want to be activated via Internet connection, although the truly paranoid can call for an activation code, instead. But if you attach a network traffic monitor, you'll see regular conversations. How else do you think you're getting those update alerts?
It's not just Microsoft, of course. Lots of third-party products also converse regularly. So do some dirty-hippy open-source apps, although they normally allow you to disable that feature (AND honor your wishes when you say to do so).
Consumers expect free - due to open source movement. That means we are headed to ad supported model which is BAD. I'd rather pay for my tech. I'll sign up.
Can't we just call it "CompuServe.Net"? You'd think that people had never heard of this business model before.
Only dirty open source hippies expect things to be free. The rest of us are perfectly willing to pay for things. But it's hard to believe that people, and especially businesses, will actually fall for this scam.
For example, I still have Office 2003. I bought it, I paid for it, and unless someone from Microsoft shows up at my house and points a gun at my head, I can continue to use it forever.
Dream on. Somewhere around 2000-2003 Microsoft software products started getting real cozy with the Mothership via Internet. Meaning that there's a fairly decent chance that Microsoft could simply switch it off on you. Although more likely, based on their past history, you'll simply discover one day that the latest version of Windows won't run Office 2003 properly any more. And whether or not they decide to do an "Amazon" and "1984" old copies of Office or not, it's a virtual certainty that they'll do that for your old versions of Windows itself, if for no other reason than to seal off old exploit vectors. The world has enough ancient infected Microsoft systems afflicting it as it is.
In the mean time, us dirty open-source hippies will be running office software that not only isn't constantly chatting back to home base, but we'll be able to keep it up to date, since new open-source releases will continue to be free.
I'm torn on this. I see the danger of other people knowing how I voted. Accountability requires a papertrail (not the voter's accountability, I mean without a papertrail, how can we prove the votes were tallied correctly?)
How do we prove they weren't tampered with if we don't have such a record?
Sooner or later, it comes down to trust. Trust, but verify. Even in truly corrupt countries there are ways to keep the process honest. Voters get an indelible hand stamp to eliminate vote-early/vote-often. One popular low-tech solution employs plexiglass ballot boxes (fold ballot for privacy before depositing). And LOTS of paranoid people watching each other to make sure that extra ballots don't get slipped in or ballots get swapped out. Take a tally at the local voting office (reduces anonymity, but only slightly). Tally again at the next level up. And so forth. And always make sure people are watching.
You don't need a method of matching a ballot back to a person. Just a way to make sure that there's a one-to-one correspondence between ballots and voters and that there's no chance for substitution of ballots.
The U.S.A. is a free country, we do not require Identity Papers. I did not have a drivers license until age 33 and lived my whole life just fine. For you to say that I would be required to carry identity papers, would be to say that I live as a slave in a totalitarian government. I only carry my drivers license when driving, and only show it to a police officer in regards to a driving offense. That is all it is to be used for.
I can tell you don't fly. Or are papers required to take the bus/train these days, too?
I know there is a general backlash to the increasing use of algorithms in determining major decisions such as hiring. However, from a quantitative standpoint interviews have been shown to be extremely inaccurate as a judge of future job performance. There are simply far too many opportunities for bias on the interviewers part and so they tend to be neither reliable nor valid. Irrelevant characteristics such as appearance end up having far too much weight due to the halo effect. If you want the best result, depending on faulty human judgement is often the wrong choice.
For example, the Apgar score for judging the stability of newborn babies was designed to combat biases on the part of delivery room doctors. Prior to the use of this score, doctors rated how healthy newborns were based on a wide-range of criteria, and each doctor did it differently. When the Apgar score was introduced, it standardized the process by rating newborns on five categories: skin complexion, pulse rate, reflexes, muscle tone, and breathing. The result was that the error introduced by human bias was reduced and countless babies have been saved by quick intervention.
Conversely, the problem with "bean counting" is that things that aren't defined as "beans" don't count. See generic testing inherently flawed, below.
Would you demand all your employees learn graphic design and have them all create graphics to be used in production?
Actually, I have been made to produce entire websites from the data tier all the way up to the artwork on may occasions.
Then they laugh at my artwork.
The most powerful graphics programs in the world can't help when the person using them is so artistically challenged that everything looks like it should have been rendered in Crayolas (the fat ones) and stuck to the door of Mom's refrigerator.
Hearing aids have to automatic gain controllers that respond to different frequencies.
Don't tell the patent attorneys at Dolby Labs about that one. Or about frequency-related volume compression technologies. The Fraunhofer people (MP3 compression) would probably also take an interest.
Ergonomics is a good point, although the number of people I saw the other day with stuff jammed into their ears more or less permanently makes me wonder if they really care.
Frequency transposition is a new one on me, though. About the only circuitry I know of that's likely to fit entirely into a in-ear unit (as opposed to a separator receiver pack) would be a ring modulator, and I'm not sure I want that in a hearing aid. Too likely to make life sound like the Invasion of the Daleks.
A high-fidelity top-of-the-line maximum comfort hearing aid may be able to get away with all that stuff, but a lot of people would settle for just being able to hear at telephone voice fidelity if it meant that they could afford it. My smartphone's audio player with graphic equalizer already more than exceeds that. All it needs is to tap into a microphone.
There were a number of Cinammon lock bugs that got fixed about 6 months ago. I haven't seen anyone with a fully patched system complaining about locks for a while now.
Yep. I installed Cinnamon somewhere around June and it locked up frequently enough I moved to Xfce. Shortly thereafter, however, some updates came out that I installed and tried Cinnamon again. It worked well enough I made it my permanent desktop. The only lockups I've had since then were attributable to runaway RAM usage in Firefox, not Cinnamon.
Let's try this. You have four tasks. Each task has some dead time involved as you're waiting for something to happen. Subject 1 does each task sequentially. Subject 2 interleaves the tasks, doing work on the next task during the dead time in the previous task. Who finishes first?
Multitasking reduces the time you are waiting for a task to complete, and in many environments, despite the acknowledged penalty due to context switching, you'll come out ahead.
It seems like all they proved is that distraction is not good. (Well done, Captain Obvious.) That's not testing effectiveness of multitasking.
Unfortunately, that's NOT what they're hitting me with when I'm pressed to multi-task. That's the kind of multi-tasking I used to do before everyone had to be 110% efficient, back when I dumped decks of punched-cards in at the computer room window, sat down and run through printouts from the previous runs, went over to the keypunch and punched corrections to those jobs while waiting for the morning's submissions to come back.
We didn't use the word "multi-tasking" back then. Of course, we didn't use the word "pro-active" back then either, because we were supposed to be simply active. Get off my lawn.
These days, it's not dead time to be exploited, it's running from one fabricated disaster to the next, and a lot of the fabricated disasters are a direct result of being "pro-active" and trying to get too much accomplished during non-dead time. Too much "efficiency" means too little time to handle the unexpected. Or, for that matter, properly plan for it.
If the vehicles accelerate and decelerate instantly, and stop moving after a fixed period of time t according to the observer's frame of reference, the distance between them will have changed by 2 * c * t, regardless of how long it takes for light to get anywhere or how they perceived movement. This is much more important than the time dilation and distorted observations witnessed by the pilots or other craft, and was my original point. (It even has applications.)
I'm quite willing to admit I may just be full of it, but I'm fairly sure I'm not and that if I dug around in Einstein's works a bit, there's probably a treatment of exactly this question, and it should be something similar to this:
1. Einstein space is not Newtonian space. In a relativistic cosmos, time and space are not separate and distinct, they are interrelated. In other words, a point exists not merely at x, y, and z, but also at t. Since instantaneous translation is ruled out (unless you have a warp drive!) that means that any point you observer is not merely "q" distance from you, it's "q" distance PLUS the RELATIVE difference in time between you and the point. You're not observing the point as it is "now", because "now" is a purely local phenomenon.
2. The information that tells you that an object approaching you at a certain speed is travelling at the speed of light. As the rate of approach approaches c, the object being observed doesn't project the information ahead any faster, since c is as fast as it can get. Therefore instead, you get a frequency shift (the blue shift).
3. If you are in the shuttle travelling at c, then, the space station approaching you is approaching at c, just as it would be if the shuttle was stationary. Time and distance appear normal to you, but if you could look in the window of the space station, (and things hadn't blue-shifted out of the visible spectrum) people within the station would appear immobile because their time frame relative to yours had stopped. They would say exactly the same thing about you.
4. Now we get to the sticky point. From the third-party point of view, the inhabitants of BOTH moving objects are frozen in time, their motion dimensions have collapsed down to zero and their mass has increased to infinity, thereby warping space itself. Which is probably what ultimately keeps their relative motions limited to c even for third-party observers.
That's about as close as I can get without RTFM'ing. Like I said, I might be seriously delusional here, but I don't think so. And the reason why is that the common-sense rules are based on an absolute conception of frames of reference, and relativity by its fundamental definition is not.
realize politics isn't a fucking sporting event between two teams
Except, it kinda does work that way.
Most people just have the teams wrong - Not red vs blue, not plebes vs silver-spoons, but rather "all of us" vs "anyone who runs for public office".
Oddly, despite having the bigger team, we usually lose.
Unfortunately, the competition these days makes soccer hooliganism look tame. Nothing less than the complete extermination of the other team and all its fans is acceptable. No "Well, we lost this one, so better luck next time" like in REAL sports.
Alright, I can accept that. So what would happen if you had a shuttlecraft moving at c in one direction, a space station moving at c in the opposite direction, and an independent observer witnessing both these events? Would the shuttlecraft appear to move past the surface of the station at 2c, or not? What would happen to time inside the station and the shuttle, and what would it matter?
You're trying to force the experiment into an absolute framework according to Newtonian rules. In Relativity, all 3 points are relativistic, not just the "moving" ones.
Time proceeds normally at all 3 points. However time as seen from either of the 2 external observation points has slowed to a halt. That's as true for the shuttlecraft observing the observer as it is for the observer looking at the shuttlecraft.
If your observer was in the middle of the line on which the shuttle approaches the space station, both shuttle and station would appear to be approaching the observer at the speed of light. However, from the shuttle's point of view, BOTH the observer AND the station would be approaching IT at the speed of light. Thanks to the relativistic compression of time and length.
Presumably, however, you don't want to be at Ground Zero, you want to be off to the side somewhere. Makes little difference, since the trajectories are now vector equations and the only real difference is that the angles swept out as the respective objects zoom past are also affected by relativity. And on top of that, the light that shows you what's happening is also not merely relativistic, but (by definition) moving at the speed of light, and therefore the observation itself is relativistic.
None of this is "playing dice with the Universe". Unlike quantum theory, everything is precisely mathematically predictable. It's just not immediately intuitive for people used looking at the Universe through a Newtonian lens. Then again, how intuitive is is that an apple falling from a tree should fall twice as fast at the end of 2 seconds as it does at the end of 1 second?
If by weird you mean "red shift" and "blue shift", you're quite correct.
However, once again, it's all relative. If the observer is also moving identically at the speed of light along the same vector, the relative velocities of light source and observer would be zero and the observer would see no net shift. A stationary observer (in terms of the oncoming light, however, would see a shift.
FTL is easy. It's ETL (equal to light) that's hard. That's because that's where the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations end up doing a divide-by-zero.
In fact, once you pass the speed of light, going even faster gets easier the faster you go (assuming the equations still hold). The difficult part is actually reaching c, since it would require infinite (contracted) time and infinite energy to accelerate the resulting infinite mass.
On the other hand, if you could tunnel around the actual speed of light and go directly from 0.99c to 1.01c, it would be relatively easy. No pun intended.
Not to put too fine a point upon it, but that doesn't affect my argument. If you have two ships going c in opposite directions for 1 hour, and then they stop moving, the distance between them will be twice that if only one was moving. You can replace 'absolute frame of reference' with 'starting frame' or 'parent frame' if you really need that itch scratched.
That would be true in Newtonian physics. But the whole point here is that we're dealing with relativistic physics, where space and time are intimately intertwined and there is no such thing as an "absolute" frame of reference and the "starting frame" is not merely a locus defined in space, but in time as well.
Ergo, not only wibbly-wobbly, but timey-wimey too.
Or to quote Einstein himself: "There was a young lady named Bright..."
Why? You ask. Because SSD capacity is still useless - they are in the low hundreds of Gb, if you are lucky.
Fallout New Vegas ultra edition: 25 Gb. Old Republic: 25 Gb Battlefield 3: 14 Gb Any total war game: 15+ gb Most MMOs: over 16 gb
You can't fit everything, you'd waste at least half your hard drive capability with solid states for your important games and OS. Assuming you're a gamer or you do 3D work. One day...one day my friends.
Actually, I was seriously considering SSD for my database server. I have a large, ill-organized database that needs high performance. The rest of my server system can get by just fine on traditional hard drives, but the database tables just happen to be about the right size for recent-vintage SSDs, and if they'd save me enough on latency, I'd gladly pay the premium.
If I'd been a little braver I would have gone that route, but I didn't have time to discover tuning tricks for SSDs and I managed to get the system tweaked enough to meet deadline. One or 2 more price cuts, though, and It's Xmas, I think.
I seriously considered buying one but negative comments in battery life and cleaning quality (especially with respect to dog hair) have made me stick to my manual vacuum cleaner. I hope to someday change my mind once robot vacuum cleaners reach a higher quality.
I have 2 of them - one of the older models and one about 2 years old now. They won't replace even the cheapest regular vacuum for heavy-duty use, but they're great for when you are too lazy to vacuum it yourself, and they're outstanding for cleaning the dust bunnies out from under beds and sofas.
The original Roomba took forever to charge and the algorithms in it were prone to get it into "lobster traps" and other stalled situations. The newer system has a faster charger (still too slow), and smarter code, including dirt sensors so that it will spend extra time on dirty areas.
The older roomba split a tread, so I got a repair kit. It wasn't very impressive. The newer Roomba is actually less sturdy in some ways, although it has a bigger dustbin. Both Roombas are at their best on carpet and their worst on tile (where they mostly just kick dirt around). And, of course, you have to make the room "Roomba friendly" by removing tasselled rugs and other things that can get grabbed by the brushes and jam the works.
The lifespans of all Roomba battery packs are annoyingly short, although these days it's easy at least to find replacement packs. I got one at Radio Shack and another from a local battery store.
I pay you enough money you will be motivated to get good at it. The question is how naturally will it come to you. The followup is how good you will get.
Those that it comes to naturally will need less money and will be better at it for that money. So your priced out of the market unless you have a natural interest and aptitude for it.
The vast majority of programmers start out as science types that have to learn programming out of necessity since can't afford to hire anyone else and they need their work done right. They are already procedure and process minded.
I recognize you. You're the person who said "It's easy! All You Have To Do Is..."
Oh for heaven's sake. If you aren't a computer scientist (and the above statement demonstrates that you are not), don't make assertions about computer science. And if you aren't a mathematician, don't make assertions about math. "Math is continuous?" That's about as meaningful as saying "pink is ten." What you are talking about is a difference in notation. Look up lambda calculus on wikipedia, and get back to us when you've cleaned up the brain cells that dribbled out your ears when your brain exploded. Don't even get me started on type theory...
Amen. I know people who assert that everything is ultimately math, but I think they're stretching the point.
I'm not a mathematician, but math isn't just the traditional number system operating according to traditional rules. Math is symbolic manipulation, including meta-symbolic manipulation, and an algorithm isn't disqualified from being mathematical for being either stateful or discontinuous. Alan Turing was a mathematician, and unless I mis-remember my schooling, he's as famous for mathematically proving the Turing Machine as for inventing it. The Calculus of Propositions obeys the laws of mathematics and without it, if/then statements would not be what they are.
You do not need to "know calculus backwards and forwards" to do programming, despite what some idiots have asserted to me, and I'm living proof and have the transcript to prove it. However, programming is definitely based on mathematical principles.
I think that almost anyone can become a programmer. What they lack is the ability to put-up with the mind-numbing boredom that programming represents, just as many people lack the ability to listen to a teacher drone in a classroom about math or science or english verb tenses. Many people would rather be doing something else. (Just like right now I'd rather be watching a movie instead of coding..... oh wait, that is what I'm doing. Well technically I'm doing both.)
I would like to propose 3 categories, based on personal observations, including the dropout rates I've seen in programming classes:
1. People who'd rather have their internal organs gouged out with dull spoons rather than program. I cannot say definitively that some members of this group simply cannot program at all, but I'm willing to entertain that idea, based on the proverbial VCRs with flashing "12s".
2. People who can program but consider it "mind-numbing boredom". In other words, it's just a job. If it's mind-numbing enough, you get to move to group #1.
3. People who are freaking insane and would rather program than have sex (not that they're proverbially given a choice). Who consider "mind numbing" and "programming" to be mutually exclusive.
For practical purposes you can really only hire programmers from groups 2 and 3. Ideally, they'd all be 3's, but there aren't enough 3's to go around, even if they weren't stereotypically social nightmares.
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This question was not directed as consumer application. It is direct at Enterprise applications. InstallShield just won't do it.
Developers should not install it. Nor should they help install it. If the Configuration Management team cannot do it themselves, then they need to send it back to the developer for better packaging or instructions.
This is to the developers benefit. When new environments are set up, they shouldn't have to contact the developer to deploy the application to those new environments.
And as always. Titles with questions are typically answered with a "no".
Most places I've worked, the auditors would have kitten if the developers directly touched production servers in any way, shape, or form. The really stringent ones wouldn't even accept binaries - all production code had to be compiled and installed from source handed over to the Operations staff.
I often occupied a position where those rules didn't apply to me, but I obeyed them anyway. That way they couldn't blame me.
I guess you didn't realize this amazingly advanced logic but as a christian, compared to muslims, one of us is correct and one is not. There is no "tolerance" when both religions demand that there be no other fake religions. The only person who can truly promote "tolerance" is one who thinks we're both wrong and that's atheists, which is around 18% of the US and the US is not rules by an 18% majority system. So we disagree, deal with it.
Zeus tells me that BOTH religions are fake. And the Pink Unicorn tells me that making Religion into Law is blasphemous and shall be punished in eternal fire.
Anyway, it's a feeble God who needs armed men to defend himself.
This is some sort of alternative timeline thing, right ?
Unfortunately, not. You can see it at its most visible in that both Windows and Office want to be activated via Internet connection, although the truly paranoid can call for an activation code, instead. But if you attach a network traffic monitor, you'll see regular conversations. How else do you think you're getting those update alerts?
It's not just Microsoft, of course. Lots of third-party products also converse regularly. So do some dirty-hippy open-source apps, although they normally allow you to disable that feature (AND honor your wishes when you say to do so).
Consumers expect free - due to open source movement. That means we are headed to ad supported model which is BAD. I'd rather pay for my tech. I'll sign up.
Can't we just call it "CompuServe .Net"? You'd think that people had never heard of this business model before.
Only dirty open source hippies expect things to be free. The rest of us are perfectly willing to pay for things. But it's hard to believe that people, and especially businesses, will actually fall for this scam.
For example, I still have Office 2003. I bought it, I paid for it, and unless someone from Microsoft shows up at my house and points a gun at my head, I can continue to use it forever.
Dream on. Somewhere around 2000-2003 Microsoft software products started getting real cozy with the Mothership via Internet. Meaning that there's a fairly decent chance that Microsoft could simply switch it off on you. Although more likely, based on their past history, you'll simply discover one day that the latest version of Windows won't run Office 2003 properly any more. And whether or not they decide to do an "Amazon" and "1984" old copies of Office or not, it's a virtual certainty that they'll do that for your old versions of Windows itself, if for no other reason than to seal off old exploit vectors. The world has enough ancient infected Microsoft systems afflicting it as it is.
In the mean time, us dirty open-source hippies will be running office software that not only isn't constantly chatting back to home base, but we'll be able to keep it up to date, since new open-source releases will continue to be free.
I'm torn on this. I see the danger of other people knowing how I voted. Accountability requires a papertrail (not the voter's accountability, I mean without a papertrail, how can we prove the votes were tallied correctly?)
How do we prove they weren't tampered with if we don't have such a record?
Sooner or later, it comes down to trust. Trust, but verify. Even in truly corrupt countries there are ways to keep the process honest. Voters get an indelible hand stamp to eliminate vote-early/vote-often. One popular low-tech solution employs plexiglass ballot boxes (fold ballot for privacy before depositing). And LOTS of paranoid people watching each other to make sure that extra ballots don't get slipped in or ballots get swapped out. Take a tally at the local voting office (reduces anonymity, but only slightly). Tally again at the next level up. And so forth. And always make sure people are watching.
You don't need a method of matching a ballot back to a person. Just a way to make sure that there's a one-to-one correspondence between ballots and voters and that there's no chance for substitution of ballots.
The U.S.A. is a free country, we do not require Identity Papers. I did not have a drivers license until age 33 and lived my whole life just fine. For you to say that I would be required to carry identity papers, would be to say that I live as a slave in a totalitarian government. I only carry my drivers license when driving, and only show it to a police officer in regards to a driving offense. That is all it is to be used for.
I can tell you don't fly. Or are papers required to take the bus/train these days, too?
I know there is a general backlash to the increasing use of algorithms in determining major decisions such as hiring. However, from a quantitative standpoint interviews have been shown to be extremely inaccurate as a judge of future job performance. There are simply far too many opportunities for bias on the interviewers part and so they tend to be neither reliable nor valid. Irrelevant characteristics such as appearance end up having far too much weight due to the halo effect. If you want the best result, depending on faulty human judgement is often the wrong choice.
For example, the Apgar score for judging the stability of newborn babies was designed to combat biases on the part of delivery room doctors. Prior to the use of this score, doctors rated how healthy newborns were based on a wide-range of criteria, and each doctor did it differently. When the Apgar score was introduced, it standardized the process by rating newborns on five categories: skin complexion, pulse rate, reflexes, muscle tone, and breathing. The result was that the error introduced by human bias was reduced and countless babies have been saved by quick intervention.
Conversely, the problem with "bean counting" is that things that aren't defined as "beans" don't count. See generic testing inherently flawed, below.
Er... that should be "horde." Probably a sign from the universe that I should re-evaluate whether or not I'm part of the ignorant voters...
Oh, I don't know, isn't hoarding ignorant voters more commonly referred to as "playing to the base"?
Would you demand all your employees learn graphic design and have them all create graphics to be used in production?
Actually, I have been made to produce entire websites from the data tier all the way up to the artwork on may occasions.
Then they laugh at my artwork.
The most powerful graphics programs in the world can't help when the person using them is so artistically challenged that everything looks like it should have been rendered in Crayolas (the fat ones) and stuck to the door of Mom's refrigerator.
Hearing aids have to automatic gain controllers that respond to different frequencies.
Don't tell the patent attorneys at Dolby Labs about that one. Or about frequency-related volume compression technologies. The Fraunhofer people (MP3 compression) would probably also take an interest.
Ergonomics is a good point, although the number of people I saw the other day with stuff jammed into their ears more or less permanently makes me wonder if they really care.
Frequency transposition is a new one on me, though. About the only circuitry I know of that's likely to fit entirely into a in-ear unit (as opposed to a separator receiver pack) would be a ring modulator, and I'm not sure I want that in a hearing aid. Too likely to make life sound like the Invasion of the Daleks.
A high-fidelity top-of-the-line maximum comfort hearing aid may be able to get away with all that stuff, but a lot of people would settle for just being able to hear at telephone voice fidelity if it meant that they could afford it. My smartphone's audio player with graphic equalizer already more than exceeds that. All it needs is to tap into a microphone.
Sure you do, call the vendor they have support lines. Often the OEM handles it instead of MS though.
"Press 1"
"Press 7"
"Press 6"
"Press 2"
"Press 5"
"All of our representatives are currently busy helping other customers. Please stay on the line. Your call is VERY important to us."
There were a number of Cinammon lock bugs that got fixed about 6 months ago. I haven't seen anyone with a fully patched system complaining about locks for a while now.
Yep. I installed Cinnamon somewhere around June and it locked up frequently enough I moved to Xfce. Shortly thereafter, however, some updates came out that I installed and tried Cinnamon again. It worked well enough I made it my permanent desktop. The only lockups I've had since then were attributable to runaway RAM usage in Firefox, not Cinnamon.
Let's try this. You have four tasks. Each task has some dead time involved as you're waiting for something to happen. Subject 1 does each task sequentially. Subject 2 interleaves the tasks, doing work on the next task during the dead time in the previous task. Who finishes first?
Multitasking reduces the time you are waiting for a task to complete, and in many environments, despite the acknowledged penalty due to context switching, you'll come out ahead.
It seems like all they proved is that distraction is not good. (Well done, Captain Obvious.) That's not testing effectiveness of multitasking.
Unfortunately, that's NOT what they're hitting me with when I'm pressed to multi-task. That's the kind of multi-tasking I used to do before everyone had to be 110% efficient, back when I dumped decks of punched-cards in at the computer room window, sat down and run through printouts from the previous runs, went over to the keypunch and punched corrections to those jobs while waiting for the morning's submissions to come back.
We didn't use the word "multi-tasking" back then. Of course, we didn't use the word "pro-active" back then either, because we were supposed to be simply active. Get off my lawn.
These days, it's not dead time to be exploited, it's running from one fabricated disaster to the next, and a lot of the fabricated disasters are a direct result of being "pro-active" and trying to get too much accomplished during non-dead time. Too much "efficiency" means too little time to handle the unexpected. Or, for that matter, properly plan for it.
If the vehicles accelerate and decelerate instantly, and stop moving after a fixed period of time t according to the observer's frame of reference, the distance between them will have changed by 2 * c * t, regardless of how long it takes for light to get anywhere or how they perceived movement. This is much more important than the time dilation and distorted observations witnessed by the pilots or other craft, and was my original point. (It even has applications.)
I'm quite willing to admit I may just be full of it, but I'm fairly sure I'm not and that if I dug around in Einstein's works a bit, there's probably a treatment of exactly this question, and it should be something similar to this:
1. Einstein space is not Newtonian space. In a relativistic cosmos, time and space are not separate and distinct, they are interrelated. In other words, a point exists not merely at x, y, and z, but also at t. Since instantaneous translation is ruled out (unless you have a warp drive!) that means that any point you observer is not merely "q" distance from you, it's "q" distance PLUS the RELATIVE difference in time between you and the point. You're not observing the point as it is "now", because "now" is a purely local phenomenon.
2. The information that tells you that an object approaching you at a certain speed is travelling at the speed of light. As the rate of approach approaches c, the object being observed doesn't project the information ahead any faster, since c is as fast as it can get. Therefore instead, you get a frequency shift (the blue shift).
3. If you are in the shuttle travelling at c, then, the space station approaching you is approaching at c, just as it would be if the shuttle was stationary. Time and distance appear normal to you, but if you could look in the window of the space station, (and things hadn't blue-shifted out of the visible spectrum) people within the station would appear immobile because their time frame relative to yours had stopped. They would say exactly the same thing about you.
4. Now we get to the sticky point. From the third-party point of view, the inhabitants of BOTH moving objects are frozen in time, their motion dimensions have collapsed down to zero and their mass has increased to infinity, thereby warping space itself. Which is probably what ultimately keeps their relative motions limited to c even for third-party observers.
That's about as close as I can get without RTFM'ing. Like I said, I might be seriously delusional here, but I don't think so. And the reason why is that the common-sense rules are based on an absolute conception of frames of reference, and relativity by its fundamental definition is not.
realize politics isn't a fucking sporting event between two teams
Except, it kinda does work that way.
Most people just have the teams wrong - Not red vs blue, not plebes vs silver-spoons, but rather "all of us" vs "anyone who runs for public office".
Oddly, despite having the bigger team, we usually lose.
Unfortunately, the competition these days makes soccer hooliganism look tame. Nothing less than the complete extermination of the other team and all its fans is acceptable. No "Well, we lost this one, so better luck next time" like in REAL sports.
Alright, I can accept that. So what would happen if you had a shuttlecraft moving at c in one direction, a space station moving at c in the opposite direction, and an independent observer witnessing both these events? Would the shuttlecraft appear to move past the surface of the station at 2c, or not? What would happen to time inside the station and the shuttle, and what would it matter?
You're trying to force the experiment into an absolute framework according to Newtonian rules. In Relativity, all 3 points are relativistic, not just the "moving" ones.
Time proceeds normally at all 3 points. However time as seen from either of the 2 external observation points has slowed to a halt. That's as true for the shuttlecraft observing the observer as it is for the observer looking at the shuttlecraft.
If your observer was in the middle of the line on which the shuttle approaches the space station, both shuttle and station would appear to be approaching the observer at the speed of light. However, from the shuttle's point of view, BOTH the observer AND the station would be approaching IT at the speed of light. Thanks to the relativistic compression of time and length.
Presumably, however, you don't want to be at Ground Zero, you want to be off to the side somewhere. Makes little difference, since the trajectories are now vector equations and the only real difference is that the angles swept out as the respective objects zoom past are also affected by relativity. And on top of that, the light that shows you what's happening is also not merely relativistic, but (by definition) moving at the speed of light, and therefore the observation itself is relativistic.
None of this is "playing dice with the Universe". Unlike quantum theory, everything is precisely mathematically predictable. It's just not immediately intuitive for people used looking at the Universe through a Newtonian lens. Then again, how intuitive is is that an apple falling from a tree should fall twice as fast at the end of 2 seconds as it does at the end of 1 second?
If by weird you mean "red shift" and "blue shift", you're quite correct.
However, once again, it's all relative. If the observer is also moving identically at the speed of light along the same vector, the relative velocities of light source and observer would be zero and the observer would see no net shift. A stationary observer (in terms of the oncoming light, however, would see a shift.
FTL is easy. It's ETL (equal to light) that's hard. That's because that's where the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations end up doing a divide-by-zero.
In fact, once you pass the speed of light, going even faster gets easier the faster you go (assuming the equations still hold). The difficult part is actually reaching c, since it would require infinite (contracted) time and infinite energy to accelerate the resulting infinite mass.
On the other hand, if you could tunnel around the actual speed of light and go directly from 0.99c to 1.01c, it would be relatively easy. No pun intended.
Not to put too fine a point upon it, but that doesn't affect my argument. If you have two ships going c in opposite directions for 1 hour, and then they stop moving, the distance between them will be twice that if only one was moving. You can replace 'absolute frame of reference' with 'starting frame' or 'parent frame' if you really need that itch scratched.
That would be true in Newtonian physics. But the whole point here is that we're dealing with relativistic physics, where space and time are intimately intertwined and there is no such thing as an "absolute" frame of reference and the "starting frame" is not merely a locus defined in space, but in time as well.
Ergo, not only wibbly-wobbly, but timey-wimey too.
Or to quote Einstein himself: "There was a young lady named Bright..."
Answer: No.
Why? You ask. Because SSD capacity is still useless - they are in the low hundreds of Gb, if you are lucky.
Fallout New Vegas ultra edition: 25 Gb.
Old Republic: 25 Gb
Battlefield 3: 14 Gb
Any total war game: 15+ gb
Most MMOs: over 16 gb
You can't fit everything, you'd waste at least half your hard drive capability with solid states for your important games and OS. Assuming you're a gamer or you do 3D work. One day...one day my friends.
Actually, I was seriously considering SSD for my database server. I have a large, ill-organized database that needs high performance. The rest of my server system can get by just fine on traditional hard drives, but the database tables just happen to be about the right size for recent-vintage SSDs, and if they'd save me enough on latency, I'd gladly pay the premium.
If I'd been a little braver I would have gone that route, but I didn't have time to discover tuning tricks for SSDs and I managed to get the system tweaked enough to meet deadline. One or 2 more price cuts, though, and It's Xmas, I think.
I seriously considered buying one but negative comments in battery life and cleaning quality (especially with respect to dog hair) have made me stick to my manual vacuum cleaner. I hope to someday change my mind once robot vacuum cleaners reach a higher quality.
I have 2 of them - one of the older models and one about 2 years old now. They won't replace even the cheapest regular vacuum for heavy-duty use, but they're great for when you are too lazy to vacuum it yourself, and they're outstanding for cleaning the dust bunnies out from under beds and sofas.
The original Roomba took forever to charge and the algorithms in it were prone to get it into "lobster traps" and other stalled situations. The newer system has a faster charger (still too slow), and smarter code, including dirt sensors so that it will spend extra time on dirty areas.
The older roomba split a tread, so I got a repair kit. It wasn't very impressive. The newer Roomba is actually less sturdy in some ways, although it has a bigger dustbin. Both Roombas are at their best on carpet and their worst on tile (where they mostly just kick dirt around). And, of course, you have to make the room "Roomba friendly" by removing tasselled rugs and other things that can get grabbed by the brushes and jam the works.
The lifespans of all Roomba battery packs are annoyingly short, although these days it's easy at least to find replacement packs. I got one at Radio Shack and another from a local battery store.
I pay you enough money you will be motivated to get good at it. The question is how naturally will it come to you. The followup is how good you will get.
Those that it comes to naturally will need less money and will be better at it for that money. So your priced out of the market unless you have a natural interest and aptitude for it.
The vast majority of programmers start out as science types that have to learn programming out of necessity since can't afford to hire anyone else and they need their work done right. They are already procedure and process minded.
I recognize you. You're the person who said "It's easy! All You Have To Do Is..."
Oh for heaven's sake. If you aren't a computer scientist (and the above statement demonstrates that you are not), don't make assertions about computer science. And if you aren't a mathematician, don't make assertions about math. "Math is continuous?" That's about as meaningful as saying "pink is ten." What you are talking about is a difference in notation. Look up lambda calculus on wikipedia, and get back to us when you've cleaned up the brain cells that dribbled out your ears when your brain exploded. Don't even get me started on type theory...
Amen. I know people who assert that everything is ultimately math, but I think they're stretching the point.
I'm not a mathematician, but math isn't just the traditional number system operating according to traditional rules. Math is symbolic manipulation, including meta-symbolic manipulation, and an algorithm isn't disqualified from being mathematical for being either stateful or discontinuous. Alan Turing was a mathematician, and unless I mis-remember my schooling, he's as famous for mathematically proving the Turing Machine as for inventing it. The Calculus of Propositions obeys the laws of mathematics and without it, if/then statements would not be what they are.
You do not need to "know calculus backwards and forwards" to do programming, despite what some idiots have asserted to me, and I'm living proof and have the transcript to prove it. However, programming is definitely based on mathematical principles.
I think that almost anyone can become a programmer. What they lack is the ability to put-up with the mind-numbing boredom that programming represents, just as many people lack the ability to listen to a teacher drone in a classroom about math or science or english verb tenses. Many people would rather be doing something else. (Just like right now I'd rather be watching a movie instead of coding..... oh wait, that is what I'm doing. Well technically I'm doing both.)
I would like to propose 3 categories, based on personal observations, including the dropout rates I've seen in programming classes:
1. People who'd rather have their internal organs gouged out with dull spoons rather than program. I cannot say definitively that some members of this group simply cannot program at all, but I'm willing to entertain that idea, based on the proverbial VCRs with flashing "12s".
2. People who can program but consider it "mind-numbing boredom". In other words, it's just a job. If it's mind-numbing enough, you get to move to group #1.
3. People who are freaking insane and would rather program than have sex (not that they're proverbially given a choice). Who consider "mind numbing" and "programming" to be mutually exclusive.
For practical purposes you can really only hire programmers from groups 2 and 3. Ideally, they'd all be 3's, but there aren't enough 3's to go around, even if they weren't stereotypically social nightmares.