I finally found a better explanation of the new sampling theory. It has to take repeated passes at the same analogue data. First pass is sampled at regular intervals, as usual. This data is analyzed, then on the second pass areas where the data changed fast are sampled at a higher rate. Repeat if needed...
This will usually give results similar to scanning at the maximum sample rate, then "compressing" by throwing out data points where the values are not changing much -- you need less RAM, but the maximum digitizer speed is the same, and you have to replay the analog data somehow. For instance, in an MRI, the multiple scans might mean holding the patient in the machine longer. That's not good, and enough RAM to hold everything isn't going to add much to the cost of the machine. Also, there is one condition where the results could be different -- if a detail such as a hairline fracture is so fine that it might be entirely missed between the points on the first coarse scan. If you scan at maximum resolution first, you won't miss that.
OK, I understand this better. At Oklahoma State, the first year engineering courses weeded out about 2/3 -- but there were plenty of easy majors in other departments, so most of the eng. dropouts didn't drop out of the university. GT may not have the education, literature, and other soft majors at all.
It sounds like GT's decided that anyone lacking the "tech" ability to learn to program in one semester is at the wrong university.
And yes, I have a pretty good idea how easy it is to slide by at Harvard or Yale if you somehow get in, by looking at certain graduates who must have got in by family influence. Gore went to Harvard and obviously has been educated far beyond his intelligence, while GW Bush went to Yale and (although not stupid) shows no signs of being educated at all...
(1) Working conditions and pay really sucks on the bottom. Duh!!! I've worked as a dishwasher, farm labor, and in a non-union factory. The Essex Wire factory job "inspired" me to get the heck out of there by joining the Air Force and getting an education. Pay was $0.50 above minimum wage, no benefits, worse working conditions, layoffs whenever the economy hiccupped, and people who'd been there 11 years (since the plant opened) were making just $0.50 more than new hires. I think the economy is always going to have an oversupply of idiots, so if you want to do better, find some way to distinguish yourself from the idiots...
(2) The rise of "perma-temps." At Essex Wire, we were permanent employees, for all the good it did us. But most permanent employees have some benefits. Permanent employees often learn considerably more about the business than just their jobs, and this experience is valuable -- whether or not the employers recognizes this.
But the HP plant described deliberately separated itself from the hourly personnel and classified them all as "temporary" even if they had been there for years. I guess they were paying Manpower about $12/hr for $8/hr employees, so the economic benefit isn't real obvious. Probably it's that the "temporary" classification kept the hourly workers ineligible for company benefits, and out of the union.
If your english is not so good, then someone 'fluent' in it is going to assume you are not as clever.
No, but if I cannot understand what you are saying, on most jobs it doesn't matter if you are clever. I cannot tell if you understood the instructions, you'll have trouble telling me about problems that arise, and how are you going to communicate with fellow employees or the public? For office jobs (most of the good jobs), communication is critical. For sales and other public-contact jobs, many large American companies do hire people whose English is unintelligible to me, but there is considerable risk of losing customers who get asked "do you want flies with that", or note that United Airline's employees in Korea speak much better English than their employees in San Francisco.
For lousy jobs, speaking English matters less, but there are not so many of those jobs as there used to be. When my Dad ran a cherry farm, the best pickers tended to be migrant families with very little English -- just hand them the buckets and ladder and point to their row of trees. But this job has been done by machine for 30 years now. Or if I was hiring a ditchdigger, I could pick up the shovel and _show_ you what to do. But I can rent a trenching machine that does the work of several men for less than hiring one, so that job is pretty much gone, unless you can demonstrate that you can run the machine or work together with the machine operator. (And if the whole crew speaks Spanish, that's fine as long as one man speaks English too. Since he's the one I can explain the job to, he'll be the foreman and paid more...)
I think American minimum wage tends to run a little bit _below_ the bare subsistence level envisioned by Ricardo. If you are single and can find one hell of a good deal on housing, you might just make it on minimum wage. With a family, you're eligible for welfare...
Note however that Ricardo didn't imagine zoning laws and building codes forbidding the workers from living in really inexpensive housing -- in his day the lowest class of workers would live in one room, no plumbing, minimal heat, and built from sticks, scraps, and mud. You could do a whole lot better than that and still spend less than half of the minimum cost of our regulated union-built "low-income" housing. Nor did Ricardo imagine cities sprawled for 50 miles, so that most workers had to drive to work. We have "progressed" from a condition where the average worker could barely afford to bring home food for his family, to one where a couple hours of work will buy a day's food, but about 25% of the population can't pay for a home out of their own earnings and have enough left to get them to their job.
For a start, it's illegal to pay an H1B holder much less than an American doing the same job
Technically true, but in practice it's a law without force -- because it's impossible to define "same job" for programmers, engineers, and scientists. 1/4 the wages is an exaggeration -- but it's generally possible to find some American, somewhere, doing a job for $30K that _sounds_ like the same one you wouldn't accept less than $60K for. So if they don't want to spend $60K, they advertise that job for $30K, find no qualified applicants (surprise, surprise), and then get an H1B.
It doesn't necessarily save any money -- they have to recruit overseas, do all that paperwork, wait a few months for the gov't to process it, pay for the plane flight, and then they may get employees that don't understand English well enough to fully understand the specs. But the budget looks great up front, unless and until you get into overruns because the H1B's aren't working out as expected. And corporate management nowadays seems to be all about looking good on the next corporate statement, never mind that those projects that are allegedly 75% done (because 75% of the budget has been spent) are really only 25% done.
As you correctly pointed out, simple programs will cause multiple false positives. CheatFinder was not run on those trivial assignments; it was reserved for the longer ones occuring later in the term.
I'm just amazed that an introductory class for _everyone_ manages to get as far as non-trivial assignments -- unless Georgia Tech simply accepts that certain freshman aren't going to make it...
It can be reconstructed perfectly -- if it continues repeating itself exactly forever at a rate less than 1/2 the sample rate. Because if the repetition rate is f/sec and the sample rate is (2f+1)/sec, then eventually the samples will cover every part of the waveform. But real music doesn't work this way (except maybe for Yoko Ono and bad church choirs), it's continually changing, and anything too close to 22KHz may not be adequately rendered in the number of samples taken before the sound ends or changes.
For an extreme example, consider a 21.9KHz tone that only goes for 1 cycle. The sample received may be to points at the top and bottom, in which case reconstruction will be pretty close. Or it may be two points at (almost) the zero crossing, so it appears that there is almost no sound.
The article being extremely light on technical details, I think what was meant is that by non-uniform sampling intervals (deliberately jittering your sample time, but _knowing_ the actual time each sample was taken), you can dodge the aliasing problem. That is, although your average sample rate is (say) 20K/sec, so a 12 KHz sine wave would alias to 2KHz, you have samples taken at other intervals that reveal that a 2KHz wave won't fit.
I'm not sure if this is new at all. Some digital scopes will attempt to hit higher effective bandwidths by shifting the time of starting sampling at each sweep, so as to fill in between the dots of the first sweep. This only works if the signal you are measuring is absolutely regular, and the triggering (detection of the start point in the signal) is perfect...
AOL buys RedHat, then Microsoft offers a whole lot more than RedHat is ever going to make to have AOL deepsix it. It's a gross antitrust violation, so expect it -- and expect the inJustice Dept to let them get away with it by hiding those contracts as "trade secrets", too.
So what? There are lots of other distros. But if I worked for Redhat, the mere suspicion that this could happen would be enough reason to look for another job.
The best that could happen: (1) MS makes that offer, and gets caught. (2) The resulting brouhaha makes it impossible for AOL to continue bundling IE; the new AOL CD's offer Netscape, Mozilla for Windows, or RedHat Linux with Mozilla, you choose. AOL still sucks, but your Aunt Minnie is trying to install Linux, and making angry phone calls about missing drivers. Hardware companies start putting equal priority on Linux and Windows drivers. Installing all the other distros becomes much easier.
What else does Linux actually need? Oh, yes, autosetup and instructions that Aunt Minnie can actually follow...
No, the suitcase is for the antenna and electronics. Power is external. 24VDC is one of the options. Sounds like if you want to run it away from the mains, you'd better have either a generator, a tap into one of the big trucks with 24V batteries, or a van set up for the job.
Since it has 2MHz upload and 300 Hz download, it's not for internet surfing, but rather for a mobile TV camera crew.
The Hindenburg was an aluminum frame, covered with painted fabric, and with gas bags of fabric with rubber or some other sealant. To get it nicely reflective they put aluminum chips in the paint, but the base pigment (to absorb light that got between the chips) was iron oxide (as in barn paint). The chemists should have known better -- Al + FeO2 is thermite, used in incendiary bombs. When heated, the Fe releases it's oxygen to the Al, with considerable heat released, and no way to put it out until the Al fuel is used up.
Being just a thin layer of paint, the energy wasn't concentrated and probably wasn't all that dangerous in itself. But once it lit, it spread all over quickly and burned through the fabrics, so most of the zeppelin suddenly became a big hydrogen leak. H2 went out and mostly up until it mixed with air to get oxygen, then it burned. That wasn't exactly an explosion, but it was one hell of a fire -- and the few percent of heat that radiated down into the cabin was enough to get the wood fittings, fabrics, and diesel fuel burning pretty soon. The people had to leave damned fast; judging by the pictures they were at least 50 feet up, at least until the gondola burned loose from the gasbags and crashed down. Still, the majority somehow managed to get to the ground alive and get clear of the wreck. Train crashes were worse.
I don't know if the He people had anything to do with the rather misleading publicity about this. They _couldn't_ sell He to the Germans, because of laws passed when we were afraid the Germans would bomb us from fire-proof Zeppelins. (They did bomb England from hydrogen filled Zeppelins in WWI, but this must have stopped as soon as any defense was organized.) And, BTW there is no such thing as He2; He atoms do not chemically combine.
For a better picture of H2 safety, look at the "illuminating gas" used in every city in the late 19th century. This was formed by passing steam through hot coal, giving a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. It was explosive _and_ poisonous. In spite of the rather primitive plumbing fittings available at that time, dangerous leaks were pretty rare. Yes, H2 can kill you if you screw up; so can electricity, cars, and kitchen knives.
If you are cracking hydrocarbons to get the hydrogen for fuel cells, the process _may_ still be cleaner than burning hydrocarbons in several ways:
1) Cogeneration. Waste heat from fuel cell could be used to heat buildings, thereby using less fuel overall. This is also possible with conventional power systems (gas turbines and steam plants), but who wants to have their house or office close enough to a power plant to make this work? Fuel cells are quiet and don't emit smoke, so there's no problem sticking them in the basement in place of the furnace.
2) Lower carbon emissions: The cracker will emit CO2; the reaction is approximately (CH2)n + n(H2O) --> n(CO2) + 2n(H2), and you get the same CO2 emission from one gallon of oil as you would by burning it. But power plants are under 40% efficient at turning heat into electricity, and internal combustion motors are considerably worse. If the cracker/fuel cell combo is more efficient, then you burn less fuel, emit less CO2, and arab shieks have to cut back on the cadillac purchases.
3) Zero combustion pollution: The fuel cell doesn't emit smoke particles, unburned hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, or sulfur oxides. The cracker might, but it's probably cleaner than burning the fuel.
However, the economics of fuel cells running on H2 cracked from fossil fuel are dubious. That Coleman fuel cell, without a cracker, has a capital cost over 4 times that of a motor-generator. I'm not sure about running costs; a motor-generator is a fuel hog and takes considerable maintenance, but relying on essentially sole-source bottled hydrogen is bound to be expensive too. I don't know about the maintenance requirements or lifetime of the cracker or fuel cell; I would expect the cell to be virtually maintenance free until something corrodes away and the cell is scrap, but would the cracker tend to plug up with tar or something?
So far, fuel cells have only been viable when someone is willing to pay a lot more for a power source that you don't notice running in the basement, or for extremely specialized high-budget things like Apollo space capsules. Of course, if the H2 is electrolized from water by power from renewable sources, then the fuel cost is virtually zero. But the cost of a big enough wind turbine, electrolyzer, compressor, storage tank, and fuel cells make for an extremely high capital cost.
Also note that while environmentalists may love your wind turbine right now, if they ever become a practical power source, they're going to be out there with picket signs complaining about your giant bird blender...
Do fuel cells need platinum or palladium catalysts? This would explain the high price -- and the only things that could bring down the price of platinum metals much would be the discovery of a non-precious-metal catalyst for auto catalytic converters, or discovering platinum metal ores in a whole new area...
Very interesting comparison. Back in elementary school there was a boy whose hobbies seemed to be beating up people twice his size and chess. (He was very good at chess -- as for fighting, all I can judge by is the damage I saw happening to guys that thought they were big and tough. Maybe that's less of a contradiction than it seemed...
A few days ago, a neighbor showed me a crank-handle pencil sharpener that was made in the 19th century. Still works great! The only problem with that product was, once you bought one, you'd never need another one.
Is that necessarily a problem? I doubt that lack of repeat sales was what killed the Dandy Pencil Sharpener company -- because if it had saturated the market, then expired because it couldn't think of anything else to sell, you'd still be seeing them everywhere. Almost certainly it was high-priced; you don't get that sort of reliability using low-grade steel and cheap bearings. Probably it got pushed off the market by other sharpeners that cost half as much but wouldn't last five years. To the long-term detriment of the consumers -- but it was the consumers who were choosing the cheap competitors.
The moral of that story is that quality tends to be undervalued in the marketplace, because it is hard to tell which products are really high-quality, and what the quality differences are going to cost you down the road. To tell that this sharpener wasn't going to last, and this other one would be fine for over a century, you might have had to saw sections through both of them and studied the grain patterns in the metal under a microscope. Kind of excessive when you just want to buy one, so that one's cheaper and looks as good...
OTOH, there is one way consumers do come to know about quality -- that is a company's reputation. The trouble there is, the executives think they can get a good reputation cheaper by advertising than by actually putting good products out. I can't see how any number of advertisements about Windows servers running unattended could override the memory of one machine that had to be rebooted every hour, but judging by the sales figures, PT Barnum was a pessimist...
The concern with who actually controls PDF comes about because most of us _are_uneasy about who controls our source formats. That is, if we have to dig out a 10 year old project and make changes, we may have to try to replicate the computer environment of 10 years ago -- Office documents are probably OK, but the engineering programs I used in DOS and Win 3.11 won't run in 98 or NT. So, can I find those disks, and can I find a computer they'll run on, because DOS 6.22/Win 3.11 certainly doesn't believe in 30G hard drives, or plug and pray, or the printer drivers I use now?
And getting into today's projects in 10 years is goiing to be worse. Hell, if you "upgraded" to XP with the product activation, you'll have to crack that just to run the same software!
If you want a document to re-format to fit different page sizes and displays, use HTML. PDF is for transmitting a fully laid-out page. You can't do a layout without assuming a page size. Change the page size and the only way a computer can make the layout fit right is "shrink to fit". (That _is_ a checkbox option when printing from Acrobat 4.x.) Otherwise some _human_ is going to have to make decisions about how to rearrange the layout.
My understanding is that A4 is a few mm narrower and a few mm taller. So printing an A4 pdf to letter page with "shrink to fit" on will give overly wide side margins, but it isn't too bad. Letter to A4 would give a lot of top or bottom margin. I wouldn't mind a few other options in Acrobat -- keep the header and footer at the same position from the top & bottom, and call me if things truly won't fit in between -- but I do get and send PDF's internationally and it's acceptable.
Palmtops are a problem. They are a lousy way of viewing files, but when you have to, HTML might work, because (if the writer didn't overspecify) it does allow the displaying computer to reformat the text layout to whatever width is desirable. However, HTML often has to be re-written for palmtops. Besides the issue of authoring tools that somehow locked in a minimum width, often people are trying to receive the documents on low bandwidth wireless links. So if you want people to have a good experience viewing your web page on a palm-top, keep the byte count down -- use text only as much as possible, and only as many html tags as strictly needed. Since PDF's tend to be enormous, they won't mix well with palmtops even if you reformatted for the screen size...
I agree. Too good to be true. Let me try to rate the believability of the claimed events:
1) Al Qaeda flees from it's office, leaving behind a computer. Without wiping the hard drive. OK, they're in a hurry, they don't know much about computers, but 10 rounds from a AK47 would do the job in half a second... (25%)
2) Someone steals the computer. Afghanistan is now desperately poor, if it's valuable and unguarded, it's gone.(100%)
3) American journalists who need a new laptop also buy this desktop. Huh? They didn't have enough to lug around already? How often are they going to have a chance to plug it into electricity? (10%)
4) All that shooting and abject poverty gets really, really boring, so they look at the files left behind on the desktop. (50%)
5) Some unspecified files are readable, and give them the hint that it would be worth-while looking at the encrypted files. If you believe the terrorists were careless enough to leave the HD behind, it's easy to believe they would leave something unencrypted, but harder to believe the journalists easily found an unencrypted file that made it clear whose computer this was. Was the first document a letter beginning "Dear Osama"?Did they have an Al Quaeda letterhead? Username = "Madbomber"? I'll rate this (50%)
6) They knew how to brute-force decrypt, or knew someone who knew. How tech savvy are these guys?
Leaving #6 aside, I've got.25 *.10 *.50 *.50 =.00625. Yes, I'd consider two alternate hypotheses to be more probable:
--lying journalists,
--setup
Somebody mod bluegecko's post up, please. Very informative. I was wondering if there was a _technical_ advantage to PDF, not just that Adobe flooded the internet with free viewers. (I'd assume there are free viewers for DVI somewhere also.) The answer was, yes. DVI doesn't (easily) embed fonts and images; that's a big point for PDF, and in a good many cases it would decide the issue all by itself.
"Secure content" I consider a point against PDF -- it won't work, but it provides jobs for lawyers.
Other than that, how proprietary are these formats? Can you write an open-source/free PDF editor or converter program without running afoul of Adobe patents, copyrights, or trademarks? Has anyone written such programs? And for DVI, same questions.
Less focus on features sounds good to me. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 had all the features I could use -- except true 32 bit operation, long file names, and stability. Win 95 gave 1-1/2 of those 3 points (all the 32-bit operation that was possible while keeping compatibility with DOS applications), NT 4.0 gave two of them, but we're _still_ waiting for stability.
As far as desktop OS and office apps are is concerned, I don't think anyone wants more features. Fewer features and all of them working would be an improvement.
Maybe server OS's need more features -- but even if all the security holes and instabilities resulting from patches piled on patches were magically cured, Windows is never going to be a good server OS as long as software installations require re-booting. Unix boxes often stay on-line continually for years, even while installing updates to the OS. That's the up-time mark you should shoot for if you want to be in the server business, and MS wasn't even trying for 20 years.
You think they will straighten out because of a letter from Gates, or even a month of re-training. It's like taking a 20 year old fat kid whose hobbies are eating chips and watching TV, and training him for the 4-minute mile!
The computer industry already had a standard format for controlling the layout, fonts, and appearance of printed text. Tex. I'm not real familiar with it, but I know it existed in the 70's, is still around as LaTex, and I think it's not proprietary. So can anyone clarify whether PDF has advantages over LaTex for anyone besides Adobe?
Would you, or anyone else, know how HP's PC division is doing financially?
HP used to be a company that made good test equipment, sold it at the highest prices, and supported it very well (also at the highest price). Now that's been spun off to the bizarrely named Agilent, leaving HP with the low-margin PC's and printers. The trouble with making PC's is that the market is very price competitive -- you've got to cut prices to just above cost to sell anything. Maybe you can make it up in volume. Or maybe you let your expenses get a teeny bit too high, and you're losing money every time you make a sale.
Just wondering how HP weathered that change, from a "don't just do things right, do them better at any cost" culture to low-margin commodity manufacturing?
The "VWs" were kids -- who tend to think they have infinite reaction speed, and their luck will never give out. Yes, they're dangerous, but if they survive they'll learn better. They might be more dangerous now, since they're more likely to be driving small agile 4x4s instead of 2,000 pound foreign cars.
I think I saw a solution to that on a South African web site. Just add a second set of flamethrowers pointing in to the ones car-jacking conscious SA's install pointing out. And of course the closed circuit camera, the automated vandal scanning system, the minimum wage flunkies looking at the pictures when the vandal scan goes off and pressing the "inside" or "outside" buttons, and the maintenance station the car goes to to be hosed out and have the gas cylinders recharged.
Now all you need is a plan to kill off the rest of the yoofs.
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I finally found a better explanation of the new sampling theory. It has to take repeated passes at the same analogue data. First pass is sampled at regular intervals, as usual. This data is analyzed, then on the second pass areas where the data changed fast are sampled at a higher rate. Repeat if needed...
This will usually give results similar to scanning at the maximum sample rate, then "compressing" by throwing out data points where the values are not changing much -- you need less RAM, but the maximum digitizer speed is the same, and you have to replay the analog data somehow. For instance, in an MRI, the multiple scans might mean holding the patient in the machine longer. That's not good, and enough RAM to hold everything isn't going to add much to the cost of the machine. Also, there is one condition where the results could be different -- if a detail such as a hairline fracture is so fine that it might be entirely missed between the points on the first coarse scan. If you scan at maximum resolution first, you won't miss that.
OK, I understand this better. At Oklahoma State, the first year engineering courses weeded out about 2/3 -- but there were plenty of easy majors in other departments, so most of the eng. dropouts didn't drop out of the university. GT may not have the education, literature, and other soft majors at all.
It sounds like GT's decided that anyone lacking the "tech" ability to learn to program in one semester is at the wrong university.
And yes, I have a pretty good idea how easy it is to slide by at Harvard or Yale if you somehow get in, by looking at certain graduates who must have got in by family influence. Gore went to Harvard and obviously has been educated far beyond his intelligence, while GW Bush went to Yale and (although not stupid) shows no signs of being educated at all...
This article has two main points.
(1) Working conditions and pay really sucks on the bottom. Duh!!! I've worked as a dishwasher, farm labor, and in a non-union factory. The Essex Wire factory job "inspired" me to get the heck out of there by joining the Air Force and getting an education. Pay was $0.50 above minimum wage, no benefits, worse working conditions, layoffs whenever the economy hiccupped, and people who'd been there 11 years (since the plant opened) were making just $0.50 more than new hires. I think the economy is always going to have an oversupply of idiots, so if you want to do better, find some way to distinguish yourself from the idiots...
(2) The rise of "perma-temps." At Essex Wire, we were permanent employees, for all the good it did us. But most permanent employees have some benefits. Permanent employees often learn considerably more about the business than just their jobs, and this experience is valuable -- whether or not the employers recognizes this.
But the HP plant described deliberately separated itself from the hourly personnel and classified them all as "temporary" even if they had been there for years. I guess they were paying Manpower about $12/hr for $8/hr employees, so the economic benefit isn't real obvious. Probably it's that the "temporary" classification kept the hourly workers ineligible for company benefits, and out of the union.
If your english is not so good, then someone 'fluent' in it is going to assume you are not as clever.
No, but if I cannot understand what you are saying, on most jobs it doesn't matter if you are clever. I cannot tell if you understood the instructions, you'll have trouble telling me about problems that arise, and how are you going to communicate with fellow employees or the public? For office jobs (most of the good jobs), communication is critical. For sales and other public-contact jobs, many large American companies do hire people whose English is unintelligible to me, but there is considerable risk of losing customers who get asked "do you want flies with that", or note that United Airline's employees in Korea speak much better English than their employees in San Francisco.
For lousy jobs, speaking English matters less, but there are not so many of those jobs as there used to be. When my Dad ran a cherry farm, the best pickers tended to be migrant families with very little English -- just hand them the buckets and ladder and point to their row of trees. But this job has been done by machine for 30 years now. Or if I was hiring a ditchdigger, I could pick up the shovel and _show_ you what to do. But I can rent a trenching machine that does the work of several men for less than hiring one, so that job is pretty much gone, unless you can demonstrate that you can run the machine or work together with the machine operator. (And if the whole crew speaks Spanish, that's fine as long as one man speaks English too. Since he's the one I can explain the job to, he'll be the foreman and paid more...)
I think American minimum wage tends to run a little bit _below_ the bare subsistence level envisioned by Ricardo. If you are single and can find one hell of a good deal on housing, you might just make it on minimum wage. With a family, you're eligible for welfare...
Note however that Ricardo didn't imagine zoning laws and building codes forbidding the workers from living in really inexpensive housing -- in his day the lowest class of workers would live in one room, no plumbing, minimal heat, and built from sticks, scraps, and mud. You could do a whole lot better than that and still spend less than half of the minimum cost of our regulated union-built "low-income" housing. Nor did Ricardo imagine cities sprawled for 50 miles, so that most workers had to drive to work. We have "progressed" from a condition where the average worker could barely afford to bring home food for his family, to one where a couple hours of work will buy a day's food, but about 25% of the population can't pay for a home out of their own earnings and have enough left to get them to their job.
For a start, it's illegal to pay an H1B holder much less than an American doing the same job
Technically true, but in practice it's a law without force -- because it's impossible to define "same job" for programmers, engineers, and scientists. 1/4 the wages is an exaggeration -- but it's generally possible to find some American, somewhere, doing a job for $30K that _sounds_ like the same one you wouldn't accept less than $60K for. So if they don't want to spend $60K, they advertise that job for $30K, find no qualified applicants (surprise, surprise), and then get an H1B.
It doesn't necessarily save any money -- they have to recruit overseas, do all that paperwork, wait a few months for the gov't to process it, pay for the plane flight, and then they may get employees that don't understand English well enough to fully understand the specs. But the budget looks great up front, unless and until you get into overruns because the H1B's aren't working out as expected. And corporate management nowadays seems to be all about looking good on the next corporate statement, never mind that those projects that are allegedly 75% done (because 75% of the budget has been spent) are really only 25% done.
As you correctly pointed out, simple programs will cause multiple false positives. CheatFinder was not run on those trivial assignments; it was reserved for the longer ones occuring later in the term.
I'm just amazed that an introductory class for _everyone_ manages to get as far as non-trivial assignments -- unless Georgia Tech simply accepts that certain freshman aren't going to make it...
It can be reconstructed perfectly -- if it continues repeating itself exactly forever at a rate less than 1/2 the sample rate. Because if the repetition rate is f/sec and the sample rate is (2f+1)/sec, then eventually the samples will cover every part of the waveform. But real music doesn't work this way (except maybe for Yoko Ono and bad church choirs), it's continually changing, and anything too close to 22KHz may not be adequately rendered in the number of samples taken before the sound ends or changes.
For an extreme example, consider a 21.9KHz tone that only goes for 1 cycle. The sample received may be to points at the top and bottom, in which case reconstruction will be pretty close. Or it may be two points at (almost) the zero crossing, so it appears that there is almost no sound.
The article being extremely light on technical details, I think what was meant is that by non-uniform sampling intervals (deliberately jittering your sample time, but _knowing_ the actual time each sample was taken), you can dodge the aliasing problem. That is, although your average sample rate is (say) 20K/sec, so a 12 KHz sine wave would alias to 2KHz, you have samples taken at other intervals that reveal that a 2KHz wave won't fit.
I'm not sure if this is new at all. Some digital scopes will attempt to hit higher effective bandwidths by shifting the time of starting sampling at each sweep, so as to fill in between the dots of the first sweep. This only works if the signal you are measuring is absolutely regular, and the triggering (detection of the start point in the signal) is perfect...
AOL buys RedHat, then Microsoft offers a whole lot more than RedHat is ever going to make to have AOL deepsix it. It's a gross antitrust violation, so expect it -- and expect the inJustice Dept to let them get away with it by hiding those contracts as "trade secrets", too.
So what? There are lots of other distros. But if I worked for Redhat, the mere suspicion that this could happen would be enough reason to look for another job.
The best that could happen: (1) MS makes that offer, and gets caught. (2) The resulting brouhaha makes it impossible for AOL to continue bundling IE; the new AOL CD's offer Netscape, Mozilla for Windows, or RedHat Linux with Mozilla, you choose. AOL still sucks, but your Aunt Minnie is trying to install Linux, and making angry phone calls about missing drivers. Hardware companies start putting equal priority on Linux and Windows drivers. Installing all the other distros becomes much easier.
What else does Linux actually need? Oh, yes, autosetup and instructions that Aunt Minnie can actually follow...
No, the suitcase is for the antenna and electronics. Power is external. 24VDC is one of the options. Sounds like if you want to run it away from the mains, you'd better have either a generator, a tap into one of the big trucks with 24V batteries, or a van set up for the job.
Since it has 2MHz upload and 300 Hz download, it's not for internet surfing, but rather for a mobile TV camera crew.
The Hindenburg was an aluminum frame, covered with painted fabric, and with gas bags of fabric with rubber or some other sealant. To get it nicely reflective they put aluminum chips in the paint, but the base pigment (to absorb light that got between the chips) was iron oxide (as in barn paint). The chemists should have known better -- Al + FeO2 is thermite, used in incendiary bombs. When heated, the Fe releases it's oxygen to the Al, with considerable heat released, and no way to put it out until the Al fuel is used up.
Being just a thin layer of paint, the energy wasn't concentrated and probably wasn't all that dangerous in itself. But once it lit, it spread all over quickly and burned through the fabrics, so most of the zeppelin suddenly became a big hydrogen leak. H2 went out and mostly up until it mixed with air to get oxygen, then it burned. That wasn't exactly an explosion, but it was one hell of a fire -- and the few percent of heat that radiated down into the cabin was enough to get the wood fittings, fabrics, and diesel fuel burning pretty soon. The people had to leave damned fast; judging by the pictures they were at least 50 feet up, at least until the gondola burned loose from the gasbags and crashed down. Still, the majority somehow managed to get to the ground alive and get clear of the wreck. Train crashes were worse.
I don't know if the He people had anything to do with the rather misleading publicity about this. They _couldn't_ sell He to the Germans, because of laws passed when we were afraid the Germans would bomb us from fire-proof Zeppelins. (They did bomb England from hydrogen filled Zeppelins in WWI, but this must have stopped as soon as any defense was organized.) And, BTW there is no such thing as He2; He atoms do not chemically combine.
For a better picture of H2 safety, look at the "illuminating gas" used in every city in the late 19th century. This was formed by passing steam through hot coal, giving a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. It was explosive _and_ poisonous. In spite of the rather primitive plumbing fittings available at that time, dangerous leaks were pretty rare. Yes, H2 can kill you if you screw up; so can electricity, cars, and kitchen knives.
If you are cracking hydrocarbons to get the hydrogen for fuel cells, the process _may_ still be cleaner than burning hydrocarbons in several ways:
1) Cogeneration. Waste heat from fuel cell could be used to heat buildings, thereby using less fuel overall. This is also possible with conventional power systems (gas turbines and steam plants), but who wants to have their house or office close enough to a power plant to make this work? Fuel cells are quiet and don't emit smoke, so there's no problem sticking them in the basement in place of the furnace.
2) Lower carbon emissions: The cracker will emit CO2; the reaction is approximately (CH2)n + n(H2O) --> n(CO2) + 2n(H2), and you get the same CO2 emission from one gallon of oil as you would by burning it. But power plants are under 40% efficient at turning heat into electricity, and internal combustion motors are considerably worse. If the cracker/fuel cell combo is more efficient, then you burn less fuel, emit less CO2, and arab shieks have to cut back on the cadillac purchases.
3) Zero combustion pollution: The fuel cell doesn't emit smoke particles, unburned hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, or sulfur oxides. The cracker might, but it's probably cleaner than burning the fuel.
However, the economics of fuel cells running on H2 cracked from fossil fuel are dubious. That Coleman fuel cell, without a cracker, has a capital cost over 4 times that of a motor-generator. I'm not sure about running costs; a motor-generator is a fuel hog and takes considerable maintenance, but relying on essentially sole-source bottled hydrogen is bound to be expensive too. I don't know about the maintenance requirements or lifetime of the cracker or fuel cell; I would expect the cell to be virtually maintenance free until something corrodes away and the cell is scrap, but would the cracker tend to plug up with tar or something?
So far, fuel cells have only been viable when someone is willing to pay a lot more for a power source that you don't notice running in the basement, or for extremely specialized high-budget things like Apollo space capsules. Of course, if the H2 is electrolized from water by power from renewable sources, then the fuel cost is virtually zero. But the cost of a big enough wind turbine, electrolyzer, compressor, storage tank, and fuel cells make for an extremely high capital cost.
Also note that while environmentalists may love your wind turbine right now, if they ever become a practical power source, they're going to be out there with picket signs complaining about your giant bird blender...
Do fuel cells need platinum or palladium catalysts? This would explain the high price -- and the only things that could bring down the price of platinum metals much would be the discovery of a non-precious-metal catalyst for auto catalytic converters, or discovering platinum metal ores in a whole new area...
Very interesting comparison. Back in elementary school there was a boy whose hobbies seemed to be beating up people twice his size and chess. (He was very good at chess -- as for fighting, all I can judge by is the damage I saw happening to guys that thought they were big and tough. Maybe that's less of a contradiction than it seemed...
A few days ago, a neighbor showed me a crank-handle pencil sharpener that was made in the 19th century. Still works great! The only problem with that product was, once you bought one, you'd never need another one.
Is that necessarily a problem? I doubt that lack of repeat sales was what killed the Dandy Pencil Sharpener company -- because if it had saturated the market, then expired because it couldn't think of anything else to sell, you'd still be seeing them everywhere. Almost certainly it was high-priced; you don't get that sort of reliability using low-grade steel and cheap bearings. Probably it got pushed off the market by other sharpeners that cost half as much but wouldn't last five years. To the long-term detriment of the consumers -- but it was the consumers who were choosing the cheap competitors.
The moral of that story is that quality tends to be undervalued in the marketplace, because it is hard to tell which products are really high-quality, and what the quality differences are going to cost you down the road. To tell that this sharpener wasn't going to last, and this other one would be fine for over a century, you might have had to saw sections through both of them and studied the grain patterns in the metal under a microscope. Kind of excessive when you just want to buy one, so that one's cheaper and looks as good...
OTOH, there is one way consumers do come to know about quality -- that is a company's reputation. The trouble there is, the executives think they can get a good reputation cheaper by advertising than by actually putting good products out. I can't see how any number of advertisements about Windows servers running unattended could override the memory of one machine that had to be rebooted every hour, but judging by the sales figures, PT Barnum was a pessimist...
The concern with who actually controls PDF comes about because most of us _are_uneasy about who controls our source formats. That is, if we have to dig out a 10 year old project and make changes, we may have to try to replicate the computer environment of 10 years ago -- Office documents are probably OK, but the engineering programs I used in DOS and Win 3.11 won't run in 98 or NT. So, can I find those disks, and can I find a computer they'll run on, because DOS 6.22/Win 3.11 certainly doesn't believe in 30G hard drives, or plug and pray, or the printer drivers I use now?
And getting into today's projects in 10 years is goiing to be worse. Hell, if you "upgraded" to XP with the product activation, you'll have to crack that just to run the same software!
If you want a document to re-format to fit different page sizes and displays, use HTML. PDF is for transmitting a fully laid-out page. You can't do a layout without assuming a page size. Change the page size and the only way a computer can make the layout fit right is "shrink to fit". (That _is_ a checkbox option when printing from Acrobat 4.x.) Otherwise some _human_ is going to have to make decisions about how to rearrange the layout.
My understanding is that A4 is a few mm narrower and a few mm taller. So printing an A4 pdf to letter page with "shrink to fit" on will give overly wide side margins, but it isn't too bad. Letter to A4 would give a lot of top or bottom margin. I wouldn't mind a few other options in Acrobat -- keep the header and footer at the same position from the top & bottom, and call me if things truly won't fit in between -- but I do get and send PDF's internationally and it's acceptable.
Palmtops are a problem. They are a lousy way of viewing files, but when you have to, HTML might work, because (if the writer didn't overspecify) it does allow the displaying computer to reformat the text layout to whatever width is desirable. However, HTML often has to be re-written for palmtops. Besides the issue of authoring tools that somehow locked in a minimum width, often people are trying to receive the documents on low bandwidth wireless links. So if you want people to have a good experience viewing your web page on a palm-top, keep the byte count down -- use text only as much as possible, and only as many html tags as strictly needed. Since PDF's tend to be enormous, they won't mix well with palmtops even if you reformatted for the screen size...
I agree. Too good to be true. Let me try to rate the believability of the claimed events:
.25 * .10 * .50 *.50 = .00625. Yes, I'd consider two alternate hypotheses to be more probable:
1) Al Qaeda flees from it's office, leaving behind a computer. Without wiping the hard drive. OK, they're in a hurry, they don't know much about computers, but 10 rounds from a AK47 would do the job in half a second... (25%)
2) Someone steals the computer. Afghanistan is now desperately poor, if it's valuable and unguarded, it's gone.(100%)
3) American journalists who need a new laptop also buy this desktop. Huh? They didn't have enough to lug around already? How often are they going to have a chance to plug it into electricity? (10%)
4) All that shooting and abject poverty gets really, really boring, so they look at the files left behind on the desktop. (50%)
5) Some unspecified files are readable, and give them the hint that it would be worth-while looking at the encrypted files. If you believe the terrorists were careless enough to leave the HD behind, it's easy to believe they would leave something unencrypted, but harder to believe the journalists easily found an unencrypted file that made it clear whose computer this was. Was the first document a letter beginning "Dear Osama"?Did they have an Al Quaeda letterhead? Username = "Madbomber"? I'll rate this (50%)
6) They knew how to brute-force decrypt, or knew someone who knew. How tech savvy are these guys?
Leaving #6 aside, I've got
--lying journalists,
--setup
Somebody mod bluegecko's post up, please. Very informative. I was wondering if there was a _technical_ advantage to PDF, not just that Adobe flooded the internet with free viewers. (I'd assume there are free viewers for DVI somewhere also.) The answer was, yes. DVI doesn't (easily) embed fonts and images; that's a big point for PDF, and in a good many cases it would decide the issue all by itself.
"Secure content" I consider a point against PDF -- it won't work, but it provides jobs for lawyers.
Other than that, how proprietary are these formats? Can you write an open-source/free PDF editor or converter program without running afoul of Adobe patents, copyrights, or trademarks? Has anyone written such programs? And for DVI, same questions.
Less focus on features sounds good to me. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 had all the features I could use -- except true 32 bit operation, long file names, and stability. Win 95 gave 1-1/2 of those 3 points (all the 32-bit operation that was possible while keeping compatibility with DOS applications), NT 4.0 gave two of them, but we're _still_ waiting for stability.
As far as desktop OS and office apps are is concerned, I don't think anyone wants more features. Fewer features and all of them working would be an improvement.
Maybe server OS's need more features -- but even if all the security holes and instabilities resulting from patches piled on patches were magically cured, Windows is never going to be a good server OS as long as software installations require re-booting. Unix boxes often stay on-line continually for years, even while installing updates to the OS. That's the up-time mark you should shoot for if you want to be in the server business, and MS wasn't even trying for 20 years.
You think they will straighten out because of a letter from Gates, or even a month of re-training. It's like taking a 20 year old fat kid whose hobbies are eating chips and watching TV, and training him for the 4-minute mile!
The computer industry already had a standard format for controlling the layout, fonts, and appearance of printed text. Tex. I'm not real familiar with it, but I know it existed in the 70's, is still around as LaTex, and I think it's not proprietary. So can anyone clarify whether PDF has advantages over LaTex for anyone besides Adobe?
Would you, or anyone else, know how HP's PC division is doing financially?
HP used to be a company that made good test equipment, sold it at the highest prices, and supported it very well (also at the highest price). Now that's been spun off to the bizarrely named Agilent, leaving HP with the low-margin PC's and printers. The trouble with making PC's is that the market is very price competitive -- you've got to cut prices to just above cost to sell anything. Maybe you can make it up in volume. Or maybe you let your expenses get a teeny bit too high, and you're losing money every time you make a sale.
Just wondering how HP weathered that change, from a "don't just do things right, do them better at any cost" culture to low-margin commodity manufacturing?
The "VWs" were kids -- who tend to think they have infinite reaction speed, and their luck will never give out. Yes, they're dangerous, but if they survive they'll learn better. They might be more dangerous now, since they're more likely to be driving small agile 4x4s instead of 2,000 pound foreign cars.
OTOH, the "cadillacs" will never learn...
I think I saw a solution to that on a South African web site. Just add a second set of flamethrowers pointing in to the ones car-jacking conscious SA's install pointing out. And of course the closed circuit camera, the automated vandal scanning system, the minimum wage flunkies looking at the pictures when the vandal scan goes off and pressing the "inside" or "outside" buttons, and the maintenance station the car goes to to be hosed out and have the gas cylinders recharged.
Now all you need is a plan to kill off the rest of the yoofs.