Are you kidding? When I was at Stanford (a ways back now) most of the intro class lectures were big enough that non-students could easily sit in on any lectures if they wanted (and I would recognize several who did repeatedly - some of whom were clearly not "all there"). I bet you could even turn in the homework and take tests in many cases... and occasionally they'd probably be oblivious enough to grade it and give it back.
I looked at the courses, and (scarily?) I recognize a few of the profs/lectures from over 15 years ago - they definitely picked some of the best for this program (the CS106A lecturer was my CS106A TA back then, but he was a fantastic TA;)
Anyway, as a former undergrad, I hope people do use this resource! The more quality education/teachers available to anyone who wants it the better.
I'm sorry to be blunt, this post is almost entirely inaccurate! Informative, jeesh.
1) There is no GT950 - Mac Minis use the Intel GMA 950.
2) the GMA 950 has NOTHING to do with merging the CPU and GPU - it merges the motherboard chipset with the GPU.
3) the GMA 950 is the same old special-purpose GPU concept as anything from NVidia or ATI (er, AMD) - just slower and using system memory instead of dedicated RAM.
The article is talking about rendering graphics on a high-performance, parallelized general purpose processor, not a crappy GPU embedded on the motherboard. Think a future generation of the Sony Cell architecture, not the Intel GMA!
Not that it's not at least as post-worthy as half the other content on/. - but I find it "interesting" that a Computerworld employee/blogger submitted a Computerworld story with the impression that he was a neutral observer...
Oh well. As I said, still better than the average story, I probably shouldn't complain.
Technically I'd say cropping is a subset of pan and scan (which is cropping plus panning the cropped image to center on the action, etc) but whatever, I guess now I'm being as pedantic as you...
On the other hand, letterboxing is NOT the same as anamorphic encoding at all. Letterboxed DVDs encode black bars in the picture (so they look letterboxed without doing anything for 4:3 output, and let you zoom in for 16:9, at the cost of resolution), while anamorphic DVDs as you said change the pixel aspect ratio to preseve as much resolution as possible (and let the DVD player add the bars for 4:3, or DVD/TV stretch for 16:9 output).
Aspect ratio is not at all relative if you want to preserve a 1:1 *pixel aspect* ratio. 1.85:1 to 16:9 or 4:3 conversions are done by cropping or pan & scan, not by changing the aspect ratio of the pixels.
Buying/renting a DVD that has been pan & scanned from 1.85:1 to 4:3 is the silly thing, not trying to watch video in the pixel aspect ratio that was intended.
Thanks, you prove my point of shortsighted ideas about energy.
Today, power is mostly generated with coal. And 100 years ago, power (though more for transportation and heat since electricity was relatively new) was mostly generated with coal. We came up with a bunch of new technologies since then but none that are as cost abundant or effective in the SHORT term.
If it takes 10 years to approve, design, and build a fission reactor with technology mostly developed 50 years ago, then waiting around assuming "someone will think of something better" is foolhardy. Not to mention the environmental impact of burning coal, which will be absolutely DISASTROUS if "use it until it's gone" is the plan. Just look at the pollution controversy at the Bejing Olympics to show how you don't have to bring "global warming" into the argument to see how coal burning power plants can seriously screw with human quality of life in the short term.
Calling geothermal energy a "temporary fix" is about as useful as calling solar energy a temporary fix. Really, I don't think it's too shortsighted to consider an energy source that could provide power for millions (geothermal) vs billions (solar) of years as more than "temporary". Especially considering how we will have used up the relatively scarce (geologically speaking) oil resource we are looking to replace in the scale of hundreds of years. Hell, I'd be happy to see people think 50 years in advance, imagine what we could do with nuclear power if we'd invest for results with a payoff that far away...
How is what I said in any way different from what you just said?
"Because stupid or not, we gave our government the power to require them." Try to pay attention... 'stupid' = the law in question, 'we' = voters, 'government' = the people we elected who enacted this law.
My point is that all of these laws are human constructs (as are "human rights" to be honest), so it's pointless to argue about "trademarking the Earth". If a law is passed to prohibit US citizens from taking photos of Earth from space, then it's illegal until someone (hopefully) finds a way to get it overturned.
You seem to be assuming that copyrights, patents, licenses etc. are some sort of universal force of nature (also, the NOAA doesn't pass the laws, Congress does. The NOAA enforces them.)
Of course they can require a license to take photos of the Earth from space, just like they can require a license for you to get married, drive a car, or own a dog. Why? Because stupid or not, we gave our government the power to require them. Feel free to ignore these laws, but don't expect your rational arguments to make any different in court...
Re:Price Drop? He just said 'free'
on
IPhone 2.0 Jailbroke
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you could show you had the rights to the source material for your dictionary (ie it was public domain, licensed, or you wrote it youself) then they would have no problem with it. I downloaded a free audio Mandarin phrasebook from Lonely Plenet that was free yesterday.
What country do you live in? In the US, the FCC requires all TVs and receivers (cable or satellite) to support closed captioning, and depending on content (but clearly for all new content, which includes news and sports) requires programmers (ie networks/stations) to provide closed captioning in their broadcasts.
If you aren't in the US, I'd be really surprised your country's broadcasting/disability laws are so far behind the US (where these have existed for almost 15 years), as from what I have seen the FCC almost always picks the worst broadcast standards of those available (or makes up a new one when there aren't any existing ones that are bad enough). If you are in the US (and your TV is less than 15 years old), check again, I'm sure you can get CC. NBC/ABC/CBS have no reason to violate FCC rules.
If they could get someone who could transcribe them in real time. Possible, I guess, stenographers need to be able to do something like that.
Turn on any live sporting event or news broadcast and enable closed captioning on your TV (or receiver, DVR, whatever) - they have been doing this for a LONG time.
Tell me you are not so desperate for a job that you would spend 25% of your time fixing a coworker's mistakes? Bring it up with your manager, have his faults explained to him, document it over a month or so, and fire him if he doesn't get better. If the company doesn't agree to hold your coworkers accountable for their work, leave. There are plenty of other companies that do.
In fact, if you haven't already tried the above suggestions, the problem is almost as much your fault as anyone else's.
there are legal consequences as it is, a scientist's lab notebook is considered a legal document, fudging/lying in this case is already something that has legal consequences
Wha? Since WHEN? There may be other reasons a scientist's notes/research takes on more sigificance than random scribbling (owned by the company/lab, funded by the govt, etc) but that is in no way just because "it's a scientist's notebook"...
If so, then I heretofor declare myself "a scientist" and everything I write down is now a legal document! Should I be worried?
Arrogant or not, you need to learn to RTFA. The article uses degrees C as any respectable scientific paper would, American or not. It's only the (not surprisingly) poor slashdot summary that used degrees F.
Actually, looking at what I typed, I realized it was actually 1920x1200. And yes, the Inspiron 8600 was released around Oct '03, which seems to me to qualify as "an almost 5 year old laptop".
Check your facts before making inane and incorrect sarcastic posts, dipshit.
I'd say the screen quality would be the limiting factor. Dead pixels eventually add up.
Since when??
I finally replaced an almost 5 year old Inspiron 8600. The keyboard was sticking, the mouse buttons barely worked, the drive was way too small, the battery lasted 1/2 as long as it used to, the graphics were painful for modern games, and the CPU was showing its age - but the 15.4" 1920x1080 display was as amazing as the day I got it (and still better than most new laptop displays... why is it so hard to find displays that good any more?)
If you want to see how much of an asshole Jobs can really be to employees, just see what he would do to his best friend.... (nicked from wikipedia):
He returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered US$100 for each chip that was reduced in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them US$600 (instead of the actual US$5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus US$300
It's not irrelevant, it's reinforcing the only point I was trying to make: RJ45 != Ethernet.
Otherwise, I actually wholeheartedly agree with the general idea that "audiophile" (ie ridiculously overpriced) cables are a pointless waste of money, analog or digital (but yes, especially digital).
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding? When I was at Stanford (a ways back now) most of the intro class lectures were big enough that non-students could easily sit in on any lectures if they wanted (and I would recognize several who did repeatedly - some of whom were clearly not "all there"). I bet you could even turn in the homework and take tests in many cases... and occasionally they'd probably be oblivious enough to grade it and give it back.
I looked at the courses, and (scarily?) I recognize a few of the profs/lectures from over 15 years ago - they definitely picked some of the best for this program (the CS106A lecturer was my CS106A TA back then, but he was a fantastic TA ;)
Anyway, as a former undergrad, I hope people do use this resource! The more quality education/teachers available to anyone who wants it the better.
http://www.google.com/search?q=perl
http://www.google.com/search?q=python
http://www.google.com/search?q=java
http://www.google.com/search?q=asp
Try to guess the pattern to find more!
I'm sorry to be blunt, this post is almost entirely inaccurate! Informative, jeesh.
1) There is no GT950 - Mac Minis use the Intel GMA 950.
2) the GMA 950 has NOTHING to do with merging the CPU and GPU - it merges the motherboard chipset with the GPU.
3) the GMA 950 is the same old special-purpose GPU concept as anything from NVidia or ATI (er, AMD) - just slower and using system memory instead of dedicated RAM.
The article is talking about rendering graphics on a high-performance, parallelized general purpose processor, not a crappy GPU embedded on the motherboard. Think a future generation of the Sony Cell architecture, not the Intel GMA!
Not that it's not at least as post-worthy as half the other content on /. - but I find it "interesting" that a Computerworld employee/blogger submitted a Computerworld story with the impression that he was a neutral observer...
Oh well. As I said, still better than the average story, I probably shouldn't complain.
Don't forget he was a co-founder of Eazel... one of the worst business ideas of the 90's dotcom bubble (and that's saying a lot!)
So, far - I sure can't...
Technically I'd say cropping is a subset of pan and scan (which is cropping plus panning the cropped image to center on the action, etc) but whatever, I guess now I'm being as pedantic as you...
On the other hand, letterboxing is NOT the same as anamorphic encoding at all. Letterboxed DVDs encode black bars in the picture (so they look letterboxed without doing anything for 4:3 output, and let you zoom in for 16:9, at the cost of resolution), while anamorphic DVDs as you said change the pixel aspect ratio to preseve as much resolution as possible (and let the DVD player add the bars for 4:3, or DVD/TV stretch for 16:9 output).
Aspect ratio is not at all relative if you want to preserve a 1:1 *pixel aspect* ratio. 1.85:1 to 16:9 or 4:3 conversions are done by cropping or pan & scan, not by changing the aspect ratio of the pixels.
Buying/renting a DVD that has been pan & scanned from 1.85:1 to 4:3 is the silly thing, not trying to watch video in the pixel aspect ratio that was intended.
Thanks, you prove my point of shortsighted ideas about energy.
Today, power is mostly generated with coal. And 100 years ago, power (though more for transportation and heat since electricity was relatively new) was mostly generated with coal. We came up with a bunch of new technologies since then but none that are as cost abundant or effective in the SHORT term.
If it takes 10 years to approve, design, and build a fission reactor with technology mostly developed 50 years ago, then waiting around assuming "someone will think of something better" is foolhardy. Not to mention the environmental impact of burning coal, which will be absolutely DISASTROUS if "use it until it's gone" is the plan. Just look at the pollution controversy at the Bejing Olympics to show how you don't have to bring "global warming" into the argument to see how coal burning power plants can seriously screw with human quality of life in the short term.
Oh come on, someone modded this *informative*?
Calling geothermal energy a "temporary fix" is about as useful as calling solar energy a temporary fix. Really, I don't think it's too shortsighted to consider an energy source that could provide power for millions (geothermal) vs billions (solar) of years as more than "temporary". Especially considering how we will have used up the relatively scarce (geologically speaking) oil resource we are looking to replace in the scale of hundreds of years. Hell, I'd be happy to see people think 50 years in advance, imagine what we could do with nuclear power if we'd invest for results with a payoff that far away...
Actually, these days you almost can...
How is what I said in any way different from what you just said?
"Because stupid or not, we gave our government the power to require them." Try to pay attention... 'stupid' = the law in question, 'we' = voters, 'government' = the people we elected who enacted this law.
My point is that all of these laws are human constructs (as are "human rights" to be honest), so it's pointless to argue about "trademarking the Earth". If a law is passed to prohibit US citizens from taking photos of Earth from space, then it's illegal until someone (hopefully) finds a way to get it overturned.
You seem to be assuming that copyrights, patents, licenses etc. are some sort of universal force of nature (also, the NOAA doesn't pass the laws, Congress does. The NOAA enforces them.)
Of course they can require a license to take photos of the Earth from space, just like they can require a license for you to get married, drive a car, or own a dog. Why? Because stupid or not, we gave our government the power to require them. Feel free to ignore these laws, but don't expect your rational arguments to make any different in court...
If you could show you had the rights to the source material for your dictionary (ie it was public domain, licensed, or you wrote it youself) then they would have no problem with it. I downloaded a free audio Mandarin phrasebook from Lonely Plenet that was free yesterday.
What country do you live in? In the US, the FCC requires all TVs and receivers (cable or satellite) to support closed captioning, and depending on content (but clearly for all new content, which includes news and sports) requires programmers (ie networks/stations) to provide closed captioning in their broadcasts.
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/closedcaption.html
If you aren't in the US, I'd be really surprised your country's broadcasting/disability laws are so far behind the US (where these have existed for almost 15 years), as from what I have seen the FCC almost always picks the worst broadcast standards of those available (or makes up a new one when there aren't any existing ones that are bad enough). If you are in the US (and your TV is less than 15 years old), check again, I'm sure you can get CC. NBC/ABC/CBS have no reason to violate FCC rules.
If they could get someone who could transcribe them in real time. Possible, I guess, stenographers need to be able to do something like that.
Turn on any live sporting event or news broadcast and enable closed captioning on your TV (or receiver, DVR, whatever) - they have been doing this for a LONG time.
Tell me you are not so desperate for a job that you would spend 25% of your time fixing a coworker's mistakes? Bring it up with your manager, have his faults explained to him, document it over a month or so, and fire him if he doesn't get better. If the company doesn't agree to hold your coworkers accountable for their work, leave. There are plenty of other companies that do.
In fact, if you haven't already tried the above suggestions, the problem is almost as much your fault as anyone else's.
The Red Queen is a great book - though mentioning Matt Ridley, I thought Genome was even better...
As do you...
there are legal consequences as it is, a scientist's lab notebook is considered a legal document, fudging/lying in this case is already something that has legal consequences
Wha? Since WHEN? There may be other reasons a scientist's notes/research takes on more sigificance than random scribbling (owned by the company/lab, funded by the govt, etc) but that is in no way just because "it's a scientist's notebook"...
If so, then I heretofor declare myself "a scientist" and everything I write down is now a legal document! Should I be worried?
And the rest of the world calls us arrogant.
Arrogant or not, you need to learn to RTFA. The article uses degrees C as any respectable scientific paper would, American or not. It's only the (not surprisingly) poor slashdot summary that used degrees F.
Actually, looking at what I typed, I realized it was actually 1920x1200. And yes, the Inspiron 8600 was released around Oct '03, which seems to me to qualify as "an almost 5 year old laptop".
Check your facts before making inane and incorrect sarcastic posts, dipshit.
I'd say the screen quality would be the limiting factor. Dead pixels eventually add up.
Since when??
I finally replaced an almost 5 year old Inspiron 8600. The keyboard was sticking, the mouse buttons barely worked, the drive was way too small, the battery lasted 1/2 as long as it used to, the graphics were painful for modern games, and the CPU was showing its age - but the 15.4" 1920x1080 display was as amazing as the day I got it (and still better than most new laptop displays... why is it so hard to find displays that good any more?)
If you want to see how much of an asshole Jobs can really be to employees, just see what he would do to his best friend.... (nicked from wikipedia):
He returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered US$100 for each chip that was reduced in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them US$600 (instead of the actual US$5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus US$300
It's not irrelevant, it's reinforcing the only point I was trying to make: RJ45 != Ethernet.
Otherwise, I actually wholeheartedly agree with the general idea that "audiophile" (ie ridiculously overpriced) cables are a pointless waste of money, analog or digital (but yes, especially digital).