than traditional models. Frankly Amazon.com is nothing more than a large catalog mail order store. Its just that the catalog and much of the ordering process has been automated by computers.
Actually, I contend that the internet is a fundamentally new way of business; one that can be generalized by the term "Just In Time"
For instance, many e-tailers keep track of inventory; when I browse their website, I'm seeing a selection of what is currently available in the warehouse. If something is backordered, I will generally know about it before I place the order, and be able to select an alternate product or vendor if this is unacceptable to me.
Another excellent example of how this Just In Time concept can provide value to both the consumer and the business, is that unlike a catalog, changes are instaneous. Let's say you have a new product you add to your line today; you don't have to wait for the next catalog mailer before you start seeing a sizeable order volume.
Look at the surplus market; internet surplus thrives on a Just In Time model.
Yeah I'm gonna do that. Cause, you know, running scripts someone gave me on slashdot is a good idea.
And yes I am a coder, and yes I could spend the time reading through that to verify that it isn't doing anything disingenious... but if I really wanted to put that amount of effort into removing MSN Messenger, I'd just Search the MS Knowledge Base for an appropriate article...
With the advent of "disposable" digital cameras and protocols to read them, one can use a disposable for this.
Of course, the company selling it would be upset at the modifications required... but if you never return it, they don't really need to know, do they?
And remember, most of the cost of a digital camera is in the screen (followed closely by the battery)... What do you need a screen for if it's on a kite? That's how they get the cost of the disposables down, ditch the screen. And then battery consumption is way down too...
Actually, they have up to 36 hours in which to do it (assuming the flight happens on an equinox)
Take off right at dawn, heading west. If you land at the same longitude as your departure point 36 hours later, you will land just as the sun is setting, and you will not have been in darkness at all.
Of course, if you could increase power by 50%, then you could do it indefinitely, because the sun would not appear to move in the sky to you.
Of course, since they have batteries, they won't have to worry about such a timetable and the logistics involved, not to mention the power it takes to go at the speeds required...
would love to see a game based on SF... but the more I've thought about it, there's not one single SF themed multiplayer game that I think would be fun without borrowing heavily from fantasy.
Wouldn't it be logical for the telemarketers to simply not hand out their info. unless they make a sale of some sort? How does one get sufficient info. to file a complaint against them?
junkbusters.com has a phone script you can follow. In the days before the DNC, answering incorrectly or FAILING to answer was a violation. I imagine its the same here; if you ask their name, business address, etc. they are required to give it.
If they don't give it, there's a code you can type in after they hang up (again, junkbusters.com) that will alert the phone company to save the call record for the last call. Then you just ask them for the information, they hand it over, you submit to the FTC...
Not only does your company have to profit, it has to profit more than last year, every year. This is one of the reasons people get laid off even when a company is making record profits.
Wouldn't the definition of record profits be that you're making more profit than in any previous year?
Sounds like you would've satisfied the criteria, in that case...
In fact, I believe it commendable that you do preview movies for your children. So few parents take an active role in their children's entertainment these days...
Also ditch the crazy attempts at copy protection. I rented Legaly Blonde 2. The FBI warning got stuck in an endless loop on both a standalone DVD player (Classic brand) and a computer.
Wow. That's amazing. I liken this statement to admitting, on slashdot, in front of millions of readers, that I'm a huge fan of Brittney Spears, I can't wait for the new N*Sync album, and goatse.cx just makes me fantasize about Justin Timberlake...
While you're at it why don't you just tell us about your carebear sheets and get it over with?
I don't think we can have superconducting transistors. See a transistor works on the principle of semiconductors, materials that are insulating except under certain conditions... superconductors are always perfect conductors, and therefore can't be used in switching circuitry.
Now you could use it for bus fabric and the like; The biggest advantage there is that superconductors don't radiate radio waves except in the presence of an external magnetic field (the electromagnetic force symmetry is broken in a superconductor, because the electrons all have spins of 0)... that would make system design much easier. The only other advantage of using superconductors in this kind of application would be in your heat-sink material itself; superconductors are perfect conductors of not only electricity, but of heat as well. A super conductor is measurably the same temperature throughout. Actually, heat spreads through it at the speed of light; unless you're talking about a very big super conductor and a very big heatsource, it makes no difference.
So you can plate the top of all your chips with this super conductive material, and have one tiny thin little wire of superconductor linking them all, and that wire goes to your compressor, where there is a superconductor heatsink that is cooled. The temperature of a superconductor is an average of all the heat deltas over area; the more area inside the compressor, the cooler it'll be...
The only problem is that you can't turn it off; if you do, the superconductor will stop being superconducting. And you've got to get it back down to temperature before it'll be superconducting again. Actually, there's a lot of research into what happens when a large sample of superconductor is cooled down, and what exactly happens when it becomes superconductor; my best guess in a situation like this is that you'd have superconducting domains, starting in the heatsink of the compressor; they'd cool down, become superconducting, and then warm back up through improved thermal transfer with surrounding regions, so they would not be superconducting any more. This cycle would repeat until the entire sample is superconducting...
I think he just discovered how we as a species will extend Moore's Law to continue to be accurate once we start running up against insurmountable barriers in the "smaller, faster, better" arena...
All I know is, my montly bills are up: electricity, gas and phone. My market bill is bigger now than last year... and I don't think I am eating anything different. Everything is up except for the inflation numbers... go figure eh:-/
To paraphrase the article:
The US Consumer Price Index leaves out such volatile US Markets as food and energy
seriously though, $470 just to get a girl to dance? I know some top notch places that'll get you a beer AND a dance for $15;)
I would assume it's an all day dance; that's the only realistic way to price the services based on the text of the song. (and good thing for the total cost of christmas index that they're at the end!!!)
Large databases just can't be put to tape anymore. Even if you did, it would take days or weeks to recover them if they failed. Disk to disk is about the only way to provide backups for really large databases.
We have a large database (3 or so TB)... and we have a three-tier recovery model:
First off, we have a RAID array (I forget the number; its one of the high redundancy modes) so any single disk failure doesn't result in data loss
Secondly, we have a hot backup system with log shipping... whenever a transaction is committed, the log gets shipped to the backup system, which then applies the same changes. This way catastrophic database failure can be recovered immediately.
In case the problem is worse or one of those measures itself fails, we still do a tape backup. The notion that tape is inadequate to cover this sort of system is preposterous. We have a midrange tape robot utilizing fair sized tapes (I think the uncompressed storage space is 320GB)... We can do a full backup weekly and a differential backup nightly with no problems. The full backup completes within a few hours.
And yes, we're on the list... I don't know why we're not on the Windows Storage Space list for DSS... but we are on the Peak Workload (All Platforms) for DSS Top Ten...
Number one in Decision Support System Peak Workload for Windows!
Number eight in the same category for all platforms!
See, small guys can do big things! We're a small to midsize consulting firm (50 or so employees), and yet we're on the top ten list of largest databases in the world!
Only way around this would be if your GPU core was software driven and they could update it. Otherwise to get new DX10 support, you need a DX10 card that was built with the new functionality in mind.
Or if it was reconfigurable hardware... like an FPGA
Only problem is that performance FPGAs in the types of speeds graphics cards require are not cheap... 1 GHz units typically cost $300+, and those top out at about a million logic units, making for a final end-user cost on the wrong side of $1000, I'm sure...
This becomes economical when one considers the expected useful lifespan of such a device compared to a regular videocard, and the possibility for future upgrades of the VPU seperate from the card (like motherboards, this design is flexible enough for drop-in processing unit replacements... just gotta load the right firmware to make the card and VPU talk to each other)... but it's hard for me, the consumer, to look at a $250 card and a $1000 card, know that their performance is currently equivalent, and choose the $1000 card...
Why does air have to be turned into "superhot plasma" to make a sonic boom? A supersonic jet doesn't superheat air, per se, it displaces it. A nighthawk doesn't superheat the air, but produces a sonic boom with its tailfeathers.
And photons cannot displace air molecules other than through heating. A concussive sound requires concussive heating. Concussive heating without a huge instaneous power rating requires a threshold condition. The only threshold condition available in a gas as it heats is the transition to plasma, which acts as a blackbody with respect to light...
The article says it's "about 40,000 times more powerful than a laser pointer", and 40k*5mW=200 watts.
You have to be careful with power measurements with lasers; there are several different ways to measure power and they all come up with similar units...
The key thing here is that this laser is q-switched, while a laser pointer is continuous-wave. Meaning the laser pointer is on all the time, while this laser is on for brief instances several times a second.
The power delivered, during that brief instance, may be 40,000 times as powerful as a laser pointer, which is not really that impressive... that's possible with significant cooling with off the shelf surplus hardware... because this laser might be on for 2 ns and off for 50 ms (Nitrogen lasers have exactly that sort of switching)... if it had a periodicity like that, it would actually be less powerful than a laser pointer in terms of energy delivered over time...
However, if the AVERAGE power delivered is 40,000 times as powerful as a laser pointer, that means the pulses may be a million times as powerful, and the energy delivered measured over any significantly long period of time will be the equivalent of 40,000 laser pointers.
But whenever reading laser manufacturer specs, it is important to know the difference between pulse power and average power...
A magnesium flare is certainly for the brief time it goes off much more powerful than my coffee maker. But that single magnesium flare would never be able to completely boil away 1 gallon of water... which is something that my coffee maker routinely does when I forget to turn it off...
quoth merli_jim: "a free P2P network technology may be easily subverted by the spammers themselves (they hack the client and present their new blacklist as the official one; with themselves conveniently absent)"
not necessarily - the data could be signed by GPG and then distributed... which would prevent modification by the spammers (up to the strength of the signing protocol).
But it would cost to implement such a situation... maybe bittorrent supports it natively? I don't know... but if it doesn't, then you would have to roll your own... not an inexpensive proposition...
Isn't there some way to distribute the anti-spam sites/lists so that a DDOS attack can't take it out? All that's needed is a simple neural net-style system - redundancy and distributed content (which the internet makes simple) could solve this sort of problem, at least for now.
The problem isn't that its not doable - P2P network technology like kazaa or bittorrent would do the job, as would the same type of network hardening that was done to the root servers in the wake of last years attacks on them...
The problem is that these are provided as free services as a community service, for the most part... They don't make enough money to do a distributed network on their own, and a free P2P network technology may be easily subverted by the spammers themselves (they hack the client and present their new blacklist as the official one; with themselves conveniently absent)
Which makes me wonder how many pixels would be necessary to reach a point where no additional sharpness could be obtained by additional pixels.
The definition in this case is completely filling my field of view (wrap around screen or retinal scanner), allowing me to move my eyes without redrawing, so every point would have to be as sharp as my full center of view (foveal) vision, but without allowing me to move my head (either changing its angle or moving closer to the image).
RTFA...
He answers this question there.
The short answer is:
The eye's resolution comes out to about 1 arcminute. A regular 3 MP camera has approximately this resolution. This image captures 100 times more detail than a human standing at the same spot can see.
This image is not, however, panoramic. There are tripods and software to do panoramic views with a 3 MP camera, which would certainly do the trick you are discussing.
As for the display, what's wrong with a monitor and a scrollbar?
If they plan to do it, they better do it quick. The only (I believe) common character of the trilogy and the Hobbit is Gandalf. Ian McKellen isn't getting any younger.
Well, Gandalf, and maybe, you know... the Hobbit... Bilbo Baggins. You know, he meets a wizard that's really an angel (though he never finds out), bands together with thirteen dwarves, fights an evil dragon, participates in the war of the five armies, and just so happens to find a magical ring on the way?
I think somehow he may have had something to do with the Lord of The Rings trilogy...
I understand it's possible all of mathematics could be a joke, but from what I have studied and know it would be highly unlikely for that to be true
Actually, mathematics has been proven to be true. One of the classical masters (I believe either Plato or Aristotle) laid the work for it; Basically he took basic set theory, which is not mathematics but a logical framework that is provably true, and used it to prove that all mathematical operations of the time is also provably true.
Certain modern mathematical concepts, most notably i (the square root of negative 1) were not included in this treatise, however.
A little googling couldn't turn up this seminal work. IIRC from my physics class, it's a little over 300 pages and not a very interesting read, but my teacher recommended it as being worth a glance or two...
Why would I ever want to take the time to learn the 1,000-odd pages of this framework if I can roll my own in less time, and it will do what I want?
Well take automatic cross-compiling for the entire PocketPC line to start with...
Throw in that you can use the same skills and APIs as your other.NET experience has taught you and you're pretty good.
Bottom line: if you're a linux coder and have never looked at.NET, Why in hell would you think that a book about writing.NET for mobile devices is for you?
If you're a mobile device coder that is using a cross-compiling C language and happy with it, the above statement already applies.
If on the other hand, you're a Windows developer, already familiar with a.NET language (Most good VB6 and C++ coders can make the transition in a few hours)... and wanting to get into mobile development without a huge learning curve, then this technology is for you.
Sure there are gotchas. The first version of the Compact Framework didn't support all the Math functions, for instance (I can imagine the guy responsible for the CF.NET footprint saying something like "complex roots??? why would someone need THAT mobily" and then getting bitch-slapped by Bill when the beta was released)... even today there are a bunch of.NET framework objects that are unavailable due to size constraints, and there's half a dozen new objects to deal with issues unique to mobile computing...
And I believe it's those two sets that this book spends most of its time dwelling on...
Slashdot Mirror
than traditional models. Frankly Amazon.com is nothing more than a large catalog mail order store. Its just that the catalog and much of the ordering process has been automated by computers.
Actually, I contend that the internet is a fundamentally new way of business; one that can be generalized by the term "Just In Time"
For instance, many e-tailers keep track of inventory; when I browse their website, I'm seeing a selection of what is currently available in the warehouse. If something is backordered, I will generally know about it before I place the order, and be able to select an alternate product or vendor if this is unacceptable to me.
Another excellent example of how this Just In Time concept can provide value to both the consumer and the business, is that unlike a catalog, changes are instaneous. Let's say you have a new product you add to your line today; you don't have to wait for the next catalog mailer before you start seeing a sizeable order volume.
Look at the surplus market; internet surplus thrives on a Just In Time model.
Yeah I'm gonna do that. Cause, you know, running scripts someone gave me on slashdot is a good idea.
And yes I am a coder, and yes I could spend the time reading through that to verify that it isn't doing anything disingenious... but if I really wanted to put that amount of effort into removing MSN Messenger, I'd just Search the MS Knowledge Base for an appropriate article...
Of course that woukld include obligatory, non-overridable DRM chip driver?
Big Brother Has You!
In Soviet Russia, you watch the DRM chip!!!
With the advent of "disposable" digital cameras and protocols to read them, one can use a disposable for this.
Of course, the company selling it would be upset at the modifications required... but if you never return it, they don't really need to know, do they?
And remember, most of the cost of a digital camera is in the screen (followed closely by the battery)... What do you need a screen for if it's on a kite? That's how they get the cost of the disposables down, ditch the screen. And then battery consumption is way down too...
I hope they plan to do this in under 24 hours
Actually, they have up to 36 hours in which to do it (assuming the flight happens on an equinox)
Take off right at dawn, heading west. If you land at the same longitude as your departure point 36 hours later, you will land just as the sun is setting, and you will not have been in darkness at all.
Of course, if you could increase power by 50%, then you could do it indefinitely, because the sun would not appear to move in the sky to you.
Of course, since they have batteries, they won't have to worry about such a timetable and the logistics involved, not to mention the power it takes to go at the speeds required...
would love to see a game based on SF... but the more I've thought about it, there's not one single SF themed multiplayer game that I think would be fun without borrowing heavily from fantasy.
Enter the Matrix.
Wouldn't it be logical for the telemarketers to simply not hand out their info. unless they make a sale of some sort? How does one get sufficient info. to file a complaint against them?
junkbusters.com has a phone script you can follow. In the days before the DNC, answering incorrectly or FAILING to answer was a violation. I imagine its the same here; if you ask their name, business address, etc. they are required to give it.
If they don't give it, there's a code you can type in after they hang up (again, junkbusters.com) that will alert the phone company to save the call record for the last call. Then you just ask them for the information, they hand it over, you submit to the FTC...
Not only does your company have to profit, it has to profit more than last year, every year. This is one of the reasons people get laid off even when a company is making record profits.
Wouldn't the definition of record profits be that you're making more profit than in any previous year?
Sounds like you would've satisfied the criteria, in that case...
Sorry; I was having a bad day.
In fact, I believe it commendable that you do preview movies for your children. So few parents take an active role in their children's entertainment these days...
Also ditch the crazy attempts at copy protection. I rented Legaly Blonde 2. The FBI warning got stuck in an endless loop on both a standalone DVD player (Classic brand) and a computer.
Wow. That's amazing. I liken this statement to admitting, on slashdot, in front of millions of readers, that I'm a huge fan of Brittney Spears, I can't wait for the new N*Sync album, and goatse.cx just makes me fantasize about Justin Timberlake...
While you're at it why don't you just tell us about your carebear sheets and get it over with?
I don't think we can have superconducting transistors. See a transistor works on the principle of semiconductors, materials that are insulating except under certain conditions... superconductors are always perfect conductors, and therefore can't be used in switching circuitry.
Now you could use it for bus fabric and the like; The biggest advantage there is that superconductors don't radiate radio waves except in the presence of an external magnetic field (the electromagnetic force symmetry is broken in a superconductor, because the electrons all have spins of 0)... that would make system design much easier. The only other advantage of using superconductors in this kind of application would be in your heat-sink material itself; superconductors are perfect conductors of not only electricity, but of heat as well. A super conductor is measurably the same temperature throughout. Actually, heat spreads through it at the speed of light; unless you're talking about a very big super conductor and a very big heatsource, it makes no difference.
So you can plate the top of all your chips with this super conductive material, and have one tiny thin little wire of superconductor linking them all, and that wire goes to your compressor, where there is a superconductor heatsink that is cooled. The temperature of a superconductor is an average of all the heat deltas over area; the more area inside the compressor, the cooler it'll be...
The only problem is that you can't turn it off; if you do, the superconductor will stop being superconducting. And you've got to get it back down to temperature before it'll be superconducting again. Actually, there's a lot of research into what happens when a large sample of superconductor is cooled down, and what exactly happens when it becomes superconductor; my best guess in a situation like this is that you'd have superconducting domains, starting in the heatsink of the compressor; they'd cool down, become superconducting, and then warm back up through improved thermal transfer with surrounding regions, so they would not be superconducting any more. This cycle would repeat until the entire sample is superconducting...
Ladies and gentlemen, give this man a prize.
I think he just discovered how we as a species will extend Moore's Law to continue to be accurate once we start running up against insurmountable barriers in the "smaller, faster, better" arena...
All I know is, my montly bills are up: electricity, gas and phone. My market bill is bigger now than last year... and I don't think I am eating anything different. Everything is up except for the inflation numbers... go figure eh :-/
To paraphrase the article:
The US Consumer Price Index leaves out such volatile US Markets as food and energy
There's your answer...
seriously though, $470 just to get a girl to dance? I know some top notch places that'll get you a beer AND a dance for $15 ;)
I would assume it's an all day dance; that's the only realistic way to price the services based on the text of the song. (and good thing for the total cost of christmas index that they're at the end!!!)
Large databases just can't be put to tape anymore. Even if you did, it would take days or weeks to recover them if they failed. Disk to disk is about the only way to provide backups for really large databases.
We have a large database (3 or so TB)... and we have a three-tier recovery model:
First off, we have a RAID array (I forget the number; its one of the high redundancy modes) so any single disk failure doesn't result in data loss
Secondly, we have a hot backup system with log shipping... whenever a transaction is committed, the log gets shipped to the backup system, which then applies the same changes. This way catastrophic database failure can be recovered immediately.
In case the problem is worse or one of those measures itself fails, we still do a tape backup. The notion that tape is inadequate to cover this sort of system is preposterous. We have a midrange tape robot utilizing fair sized tapes (I think the uncompressed storage space is 320GB)... We can do a full backup weekly and a differential backup nightly with no problems. The full backup completes within a few hours.
And yes, we're on the list... I don't know why we're not on the Windows Storage Space list for DSS... but we are on the Peak Workload (All Platforms) for DSS Top Ten...
Number one in Decision Support System Peak Workload for Windows!
Number eight in the same category for all platforms!
See, small guys can do big things! We're a small to midsize consulting firm (50 or so employees), and yet we're on the top ten list of largest databases in the world!
*pops the champagne*
Only way around this would be if your GPU core was software driven and they could update it. Otherwise to get new DX10 support, you need a DX10 card that was built with the new functionality in mind.
Or if it was reconfigurable hardware... like an FPGA
Only problem is that performance FPGAs in the types of speeds graphics cards require are not cheap... 1 GHz units typically cost $300+, and those top out at about a million logic units, making for a final end-user cost on the wrong side of $1000, I'm sure...
This becomes economical when one considers the expected useful lifespan of such a device compared to a regular videocard, and the possibility for future upgrades of the VPU seperate from the card (like motherboards, this design is flexible enough for drop-in processing unit replacements... just gotta load the right firmware to make the card and VPU talk to each other)... but it's hard for me, the consumer, to look at a $250 card and a $1000 card, know that their performance is currently equivalent, and choose the $1000 card...
Why does air have to be turned into "superhot plasma" to make a sonic boom? A supersonic jet doesn't superheat air, per se, it displaces it. A nighthawk doesn't superheat the air, but produces a sonic boom with its tailfeathers.
And photons cannot displace air molecules other than through heating. A concussive sound requires concussive heating. Concussive heating without a huge instaneous power rating requires a threshold condition. The only threshold condition available in a gas as it heats is the transition to plasma, which acts as a blackbody with respect to light...
The article says it's "about 40,000 times more powerful than a laser pointer", and 40k*5mW=200 watts.
You have to be careful with power measurements with lasers; there are several different ways to measure power and they all come up with similar units...
The key thing here is that this laser is q-switched, while a laser pointer is continuous-wave. Meaning the laser pointer is on all the time, while this laser is on for brief instances several times a second.
The power delivered, during that brief instance, may be 40,000 times as powerful as a laser pointer, which is not really that impressive... that's possible with significant cooling with off the shelf surplus hardware... because this laser might be on for 2 ns and off for 50 ms (Nitrogen lasers have exactly that sort of switching)... if it had a periodicity like that, it would actually be less powerful than a laser pointer in terms of energy delivered over time...
However, if the AVERAGE power delivered is 40,000 times as powerful as a laser pointer, that means the pulses may be a million times as powerful, and the energy delivered measured over any significantly long period of time will be the equivalent of 40,000 laser pointers.
But whenever reading laser manufacturer specs, it is important to know the difference between pulse power and average power...
A magnesium flare is certainly for the brief time it goes off much more powerful than my coffee maker. But that single magnesium flare would never be able to completely boil away 1 gallon of water... which is something that my coffee maker routinely does when I forget to turn it off...
quoth merli_jim:
"a free P2P network technology may be easily subverted by the spammers themselves (they hack the client and present their new blacklist as the official one; with themselves conveniently absent)"
not necessarily - the data could be signed by GPG and then distributed... which would prevent modification by the spammers (up to the strength of the signing protocol).
But it would cost to implement such a situation... maybe bittorrent supports it natively? I don't know... but if it doesn't, then you would have to roll your own... not an inexpensive proposition...
Isn't there some way to distribute the anti-spam sites/lists so that a DDOS attack can't take it out? All that's needed is a simple neural net-style system - redundancy and distributed content (which the internet makes simple) could solve this sort of problem, at least for now.
The problem isn't that its not doable - P2P network technology like kazaa or bittorrent would do the job, as would the same type of network hardening that was done to the root servers in the wake of last years attacks on them...
The problem is that these are provided as free services as a community service, for the most part... They don't make enough money to do a distributed network on their own, and a free P2P network technology may be easily subverted by the spammers themselves (they hack the client and present their new blacklist as the official one; with themselves conveniently absent)
Which makes me wonder how many pixels would be necessary to reach a point where no additional sharpness could be obtained by additional pixels.
The definition in this case is completely filling my field of view (wrap around screen or retinal scanner), allowing me to move my eyes without redrawing, so every point would have to be as sharp as my full center of view (foveal) vision, but without allowing me to move my head (either changing its angle or moving closer to the image).
RTFA...
He answers this question there.
The short answer is:
The eye's resolution comes out to about 1 arcminute. A regular 3 MP camera has approximately this resolution. This image captures 100 times more detail than a human standing at the same spot can see.
This image is not, however, panoramic. There are tripods and software to do panoramic views with a 3 MP camera, which would certainly do the trick you are discussing.
As for the display, what's wrong with a monitor and a scrollbar?
If they plan to do it, they better do it quick. The only (I believe) common character of the trilogy and the Hobbit is Gandalf. Ian McKellen isn't getting any younger.
Well, Gandalf, and maybe, you know... the Hobbit... Bilbo Baggins. You know, he meets a wizard that's really an angel (though he never finds out), bands together with thirteen dwarves, fights an evil dragon, participates in the war of the five armies, and just so happens to find a magical ring on the way?
I think somehow he may have had something to do with the Lord of The Rings trilogy...
I understand it's possible all of mathematics could be a joke, but from what I have studied and know it would be highly unlikely for that to be true
Actually, mathematics has been proven to be true. One of the classical masters (I believe either Plato or Aristotle) laid the work for it; Basically he took basic set theory, which is not mathematics but a logical framework that is provably true, and used it to prove that all mathematical operations of the time is also provably true.
Certain modern mathematical concepts, most notably i (the square root of negative 1) were not included in this treatise, however.
A little googling couldn't turn up this seminal work. IIRC from my physics class, it's a little over 300 pages and not a very interesting read, but my teacher recommended it as being worth a glance or two...
Why would I ever want to take the time to learn the 1,000-odd pages of this framework if I can roll my own in less time, and it will do what I want?
.NET experience has taught you and you're pretty good.
.NET, Why in hell would you think that a book about writing .NET for mobile devices is for you?
.NET language (Most good VB6 and C++ coders can make the transition in a few hours)... and wanting to get into mobile development without a huge learning curve, then this technology is for you.
.NET framework objects that are unavailable due to size constraints, and there's half a dozen new objects to deal with issues unique to mobile computing...
Well take automatic cross-compiling for the entire PocketPC line to start with...
Throw in that you can use the same skills and APIs as your other
Bottom line: if you're a linux coder and have never looked at
If you're a mobile device coder that is using a cross-compiling C language and happy with it, the above statement already applies.
If on the other hand, you're a Windows developer, already familiar with a
Sure there are gotchas. The first version of the Compact Framework didn't support all the Math functions, for instance (I can imagine the guy responsible for the CF.NET footprint saying something like "complex roots??? why would someone need THAT mobily" and then getting bitch-slapped by Bill when the beta was released)... even today there are a bunch of
And I believe it's those two sets that this book spends most of its time dwelling on...