If you think a 65mph speed limit law is unjust, are you going to complain to the ticketing officer or try to get the law changed?
Or live in a country where police officers are allowed to use discretion. A British motorway has an upper speed limit of 70mph but nearly no one will be done for doing 80mph or less unless the weather conditions mean it's unsuitable. You can go higher but the higher you go the more likely you are to be done. I tend to drive at 85mph on the motorways (in the right conditions) and have never been stopped. I will do higher than that in good weather.
It's also worth noting that the facial puppetteering is really cool. Everyone involved should be really proud of themselves for pulling off something so visually unique.
Last night, as I sat in bed, I channel hopped and ended up watching BBC 3 on my bedroom TV which receives it's signal through a small set top antenna. In fact that TV can pick up over seventy TV and Radio channels through that antenna.
Why? Because DVB-T, the terrestrial form of the DVB digital television standard uses OFDM to ensure signal reliability. There are roughly eight TV channels per multiplex at PAL resolution which is quite a bandwidth. So how is this new?
It's interesting how the sky+ integrated digital satelite receiver and PVR does it. Subscription TV, including the movie channels, can be recorded and watched when ever. It does all the tricks like series recording automatically, being able to stream series to VCR and the like. The pay per view movies, which are usually last seasons movies from the cinema, can be recorded and stay recorded for a week. You can watch it any number of times in that week. If you don't watch it, because it's part of the receiver, the film is lost but the cost is refunded. So basically it's biggest use there is that it turns PPV broadcasting every ten minutes to video on demand by time shifting. Finally PPV movies always move to the subscription movie channels after six months so if you really want to keep it just wait and then record.
so it's not unheard of for companies to allow this.
I assume you're being funny with that statement. If it's genuinely unusual for phones in the US to have fully featured Bluetooth, you need to move to a first world country! My SonyEricsson T610 and my T68i before that have both been fully featured and unrestricted. It's why I bought them. In fact when I recently went abroad on Vacation I got roaming enabled and published photos taken with the T610 on fotopic by transfering them on to my Zaurus PDA from the phone and then using GPRS via the phone to upload them on to the net. All of it via bluetooth.
I've just been abroad for my hols/vacation. The first time I've flown since the nineties. Interestingly you are now asked to turn up to check in an hour earlier than before. Everyone passes through a metal detector and if it bleeps you continue to take things out of pockets or remove belts and the like before it stops. All handheld luggage was X-rayed, even a magazine I was holding. No one complained and everyone accepted the extra time required. My father, who travels quite frequently has occasionally forgotten about what is prohibited in hand luggage and has had his pocket knife and the like confiscated and mailed back home by the authorities.
Suprisingly they didn't want to manually check my handbag/purse after watching it through the X-ray machine despite it containing a maglite, a digital camera, my cellphone, my PDA, and keys together with other assorted crap. I did have the peace of mind to put my New Rocks in my luggage destined for the hold and not to wear them.
That's how I intend to use the airport that is winging it's way to our house. Except in my case it's a T610. I'm also considering doing some Java MIDP hacking and seeing whether I can do things like iTunes track listings on the phone and the like.
For a while I worked as a research programmer for one of the General Relative Groups working on the GEO600 Gravitational Wave Detector in both the UK and Germany. GEO600 is a UK and Germany co-project.
The interferometer is a typical Michaelson interferemoter using lasers with two orthogonal branches 600 metres in length. These gravitation events are small. Movements are ~10-E24 metres. It is expected that only one or two events a year will be detected. So it must run 24/7, 365 days a year.
Naturally you have to remove as much of the noise from the data as possible to detect an event. Mirrors are hung on glass threads as they are thermally inert. It runs in a vacuum. It is temperature controlled. Everything is monitored from air pressure to sisemology. The amount of data being produced is incredible. I assume LIGO is the same hence the distributed analysis.
GE0600 uses a microwave link to transmit data from the site to Hanover where it is backed up and fat pipes pass it on to partner universities. The 'head end' on site uses triple redundancy and enough bufferage for 24 hours back-up on site.
You are talking many gigabytes a day and many terabytes a year and some where in this lot will be an event. This is truely the domain of super computing or distributed processing.
Of course, even LIGO which is larger, is unlikely to spot many events if any and we will probably have to wait until LISA, the NASA/JPL/ESA spaced based interferometry project is up and running to get decent results.
GEO600 is a smaller version of the LIGO interferometer. It works in exactly the same way but where as LIGO has a huge budget, GEO600's building on site is actually a tin shed in a field in Hanover. For a while I was a research programmer for GEO600.
Basically I treat TOS as a completely separate thing because there are *so* many inconsistencies between is and the later Star Treks. Hell in TOS Zephren Cockraine was black.
Apart from it being the RIAA again I assume this is the US type of digital radio not the one used in the rest of the world?
What are the RIAA worried about? People recording music off of the radio and then making it available on the net? Everything I want to listen to is already available via internet streaming anyway and available as audio archives. The only use I can think of for a digital radio (DAB) for me at the moment is in the car. It would allow me access to the wonders of BBC7.
Sure, the US only makes up 4-5% of the world, but the largest portion of the people in the world are thinking about how they are going to get their next meal, and don't even have any devices with any form of video playback, so they could care less about codecs.
I have a reply. GSM, DVB, DAB. All of these technologies are doing well despite the US not being a market. Two of them are the defacto standard outside of the US with some small exceptions. The other is becoming a standard.
You've got China and India and they are not as backward as you thing. The US is less than half the size of Europe, numbers wise. Add South America, Australisia, the Middle East, Asia etc and I'm afraid the US is rather out numbered by thriving markets who can afford the technology.
the USA's 5% makes up most of the scientific research in the world
Quote your source. This is complete bullshit. They do make up a large amount of the research but definitely not the majority.
Stop believing all that propaganda you keep hearing.
The "only" thing they cover is run length encoding...
The article linked mentioned this. It also mentions the patent was granted in 1986. This algorithm is one of those patently obvious ones that must have existed years before the patent was granted.
I know I was using it on 8 bit micros in the very early 80s as a way of compressing games graphics and maps. Games levels were made of maps which were effectively indices to graphics blocks. The maps were RLE to compress them and the graphics blocks themselves were RLE. It meant that you could fit quite a large level in to a few hundred bytes at the cost of a little processing overhead.
I have little to no respect for people who toil away at UML diagrams. They're nothing more than busywork for coders and eye candy for higher-ups.
And I have no respect for coders who just sit and code with no real sense of direction, no design, no idea of what the requirements are etc. I've had to maintain too much shit code from incompetent coders who have then gone and left the company leaving a steaming piles behind. And often it is me who does it as I seem to be one of the few people in the company who can decipher the mess. This is why I insist on properly designed code.
Having said that I do not insist on a full UML model but at least package, object and state diagrams so you know how the various software components tie together.
Honestly, if you're asked to make such a diagram, you're the only one who's going to understand it.
That's a training issue. At work I'm not the only one who understands it.
Not to say that I'm against sketching-out behaviour on a napkin at the pizza parlour, but why would anyone spend time connecting diamonds and rectangles when they could be making demonstrative code?
In my case it's pieces of A3 paper. I just formally document those designs that are needed to be formally documented and only the parts of those designs that need to be formally documented. These documents are usually associated with a programmers guide and example code.
I've gotten a lot more mileage out of primitive code with meaningful outputs* than I have from tracing my way through a UML tree.
I don't believe either on their own are useful so supply both. As I've said above I don't go for the full formal UML model but use the syntax for some diagrams.
* ie. skeleton code that tells you what it's doing at each step ("I just made BankAccount 'steve'", "fetched 'steve's info", "incremented 'BankAccounts'")
That explains a lot. When you are writing software for real time systems like set top boxes you need to be more formal with your working methods.
Who designed that code? Did you just sit down and code it i.e. open new text file and type? Where did the requirements come from? how did you know what was needed? What did it need to look like? What if someone else needs to maintain it: is there back up documentation?
If you just wrote code to other peoples' designs you were a programmer and not a software engineer and your employer did get the description wrong.
Programmers are the production line workers of the 21 Century. It's not programmers that are needed but software engineers and the two terms are not synonyms. Software engineers analyse the problem, create designs and document them, create models (e.g. UML), use patterns, define APIs, integrate existing software components and the like. Once you've done all that properly the rest is just a mechanical process that any reasonably competant individual should be able to undertake. You need some management skills, design skill and a good general knowledge of technologies and software engineering concepts.
The company I work for has outsourced some of it's programming requirement. This has indirectly sorted the software engineers from the programmers in house. For a typical project we now carry out requirements analysis, an iterative design approach resulting in a detailed model and documentation and often framework code. The then whole thing goes to our outsources so they can do the boring bit, filling in the blanks.
Bluetooth is well established in Europe so I don't see it disappearing all that soon.
I'm writing this on my laptop using WiFi to connect to my broadband net connection. Last weekend I stayed with my parents and used the same laptop via a bluetooth dongle and GPRS on my mobile phone.
I use bluetooth to sync that phone with the laptop and to transfer photos from the phone to the laptop.
On the drive home I noted many other drivers with bluetooth headsets on their ears. If I meet someone we exchange contact details via bluetooth. My housemate controls the MP3 player on her iBook from her phone using Bluetooth. I sync my phone to my PDA via Bluetooth.
I can see the usefulness of a high speed Bluetooth like system but there are applications that just don't need a faster connection and for them Bluetooth works just fine. Also, I'm not sure about the US, but in Europe it seems that Joe/Josephine Public have picked it up just fine and it's not restricted to geeks.
I suppose if you live down south you need a sense of humour what with the cost of housing, cost of living, number of people and time spent sat in traffic jams or squeezed in to public transport.
Far from being the backward place you believe it to be Manchester was one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution; one end of one of the earliest Railway systems in the world (the Liverpool to Manchester for which speed trials were held where Stephenson's Rocket won); and the birthplace of digital stored program computers.
It's a *railway* with *trucks*, *wagons*, *vans* and *coaches* and the swivelly things with the wheels on are *bogies*. We ought to know we invented the things. [1]
"Britain and America, two nations divided by a common language" - Oscar Wilde
[1] Actually I believe it was the greeks who first invented a tracked wagon way. We came to them late, the 18th century. [2]
[2] My local village railway station is 161 this year. It was opened in 1844.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think a 65mph speed limit law is unjust, are you going to complain to the ticketing officer or try to get the law changed?
Or live in a country where police officers are allowed to use discretion. A British motorway has an upper speed limit of 70mph but nearly no one will be done for doing 80mph or less unless the weather conditions mean it's unsuitable. You can go higher but the higher you go the more likely you are to be done. I tend to drive at 85mph on the motorways (in the right conditions) and have never been stopped. I will do higher than that in good weather.
It's also worth noting that the facial puppetteering is really cool. Everyone involved should be really proud of themselves for pulling off something so visually unique.
It strikes me it pays much homage to the work of Gerry Anderson from Stingray , through Thunderbirds, to Terrahawks.
In fact Team America is more of a homage to Gerry Anderson than the US live action remake of Thunderbirds.
Last night, as I sat in bed, I channel hopped and ended up watching BBC 3 on my bedroom TV which receives it's signal through a small set top antenna. In fact that TV can pick up over seventy TV and Radio channels through that antenna.
Why? Because DVB-T, the terrestrial form of the DVB digital television standard uses OFDM to ensure signal reliability. There are roughly eight TV channels per multiplex at PAL resolution which is quite a bandwidth. So how is this new?
much like small insects, bugs, and of course, Jesus.
Except this is real and one of the above is a myth.
It's interesting how the sky+ integrated digital satelite receiver and PVR does it. Subscription TV, including the movie channels, can be recorded and watched when ever. It does all the tricks like series recording automatically, being able to stream series to VCR and the like. The pay per view movies, which are usually last seasons movies from the cinema, can be recorded and stay recorded for a week. You can watch it any number of times in that week. If you don't watch it, because it's part of the receiver, the film is lost but the cost is refunded. So basically it's biggest use there is that it turns PPV broadcasting every ten minutes to video on demand by time shifting. Finally PPV movies always move to the subscription movie channels after six months so if you really want to keep it just wait and then record.
It's not Legos. It's like sheep. I have one sheep. You have one sheep. We have many sheep. This field is full of sheep. The printer is made of Lego!
so it's not unheard of for companies to allow this.
I assume you're being funny with that statement. If it's genuinely unusual for phones in the US to have fully featured Bluetooth, you need to move to a first world country! My SonyEricsson T610 and my T68i before that have both been fully featured and unrestricted. It's why I bought them. In fact when I recently went abroad on Vacation I got roaming enabled and published photos taken with the T610 on fotopic by transfering them on to my Zaurus PDA from the phone and then using GPRS via the phone to upload them on to the net. All of it via bluetooth.
I've just been abroad for my hols/vacation. The first time I've flown since the nineties. Interestingly you are now asked to turn up to check in an hour earlier than before. Everyone passes through a metal detector and if it bleeps you continue to take things out of pockets or remove belts and the like before it stops. All handheld luggage was X-rayed, even a magazine I was holding. No one complained and everyone accepted the extra time required. My father, who travels quite frequently has occasionally forgotten about what is prohibited in hand luggage and has had his pocket knife and the like confiscated and mailed back home by the authorities.
Suprisingly they didn't want to manually check my handbag/purse after watching it through the X-ray machine despite it containing a maglite, a digital camera, my cellphone, my PDA, and keys together with other assorted crap. I did have the peace of mind to put my New Rocks in my luggage destined for the hold and not to wear them.
That's how I intend to use the airport that is winging it's way to our house. Except in my case it's a T610. I'm also considering doing some Java MIDP hacking and seeing whether I can do things like iTunes track listings on the phone and the like.
For a while I worked as a research programmer for one of the General Relative Groups working on the GEO600 Gravitational Wave Detector in both the UK and Germany. GEO600 is a UK and Germany co-project.
The interferometer is a typical Michaelson interferemoter using lasers with two orthogonal branches 600 metres in length. These gravitation events are small. Movements are ~10-E24 metres. It is expected that only one or two events a year will be detected. So it must run 24/7, 365 days a year.
Naturally you have to remove as much of the noise from the data as possible to detect an event. Mirrors are hung on glass threads as they are thermally inert. It runs in a vacuum. It is temperature controlled. Everything is monitored from air pressure to sisemology. The amount of data being produced is incredible. I assume LIGO is the same hence the distributed analysis.
GE0600 uses a microwave link to transmit data from the site to Hanover where it is backed up and fat pipes pass it on to partner universities. The 'head end' on site uses triple redundancy and enough bufferage for 24 hours back-up on site.
You are talking many gigabytes a day and many terabytes a year and some where in this lot will be an event. This is truely the domain of super computing or distributed processing.
Of course, even LIGO which is larger, is unlikely to spot many events if any and we will probably have to wait until LISA, the NASA/JPL/ESA spaced based interferometry project is up and running to get decent results.
GEO600 is a smaller version of the LIGO interferometer. It works in exactly the same way but where as LIGO has a huge budget, GEO600's building on site is actually a tin shed in a field in Hanover. For a while I was a research programmer for GEO600.
There are other kinds of gravitational wave detectors, such as resonant bar detectors.
Which, due to the size of a gravitational effect are about as useful as a chocolate fireguard.
Basically I treat TOS as a completely separate thing because there are *so* many inconsistencies between is and the later Star Treks. Hell in TOS Zephren Cockraine was black.
Apart from it being the RIAA again I assume this is the US type of digital radio not the one used in the rest of the world?
What are the RIAA worried about? People recording music off of the radio and then making it available on the net? Everything I want to listen to is already available via internet streaming anyway and available as audio archives. The only use I can think of for a digital radio (DAB) for me at the moment is in the car. It would allow me access to the wonders of BBC7.
Sure, the US only makes up 4-5% of the world, but the largest portion of the people in the world are thinking about how they are going to get their next meal, and don't even have any devices with any form of video playback, so they could care less about codecs.
I have a reply. GSM, DVB, DAB. All of these technologies are doing well despite the US not being a market. Two of them are the defacto standard outside of the US with some small exceptions. The other is becoming a standard.
You've got China and India and they are not as backward as you thing. The US is less than half the size of Europe, numbers wise. Add South America, Australisia, the Middle East, Asia etc and I'm afraid the US is rather out numbered by thriving markets who can afford the technology.
the USA's 5% makes up most of the scientific research in the world
Quote your source. This is complete bullshit. They do make up a large amount of the research but definitely not the majority.
Stop believing all that propaganda you keep hearing.
The "only" thing they cover is run length encoding...
The article linked mentioned this. It also mentions the patent was granted in 1986. This algorithm is one of those patently obvious ones that must have existed years before the patent was granted.
I know I was using it on 8 bit micros in the very early 80s as a way of compressing games graphics and maps. Games levels were made of maps which were effectively indices to graphics blocks. The maps were RLE to compress them and the graphics blocks themselves were RLE. It meant that you could fit quite a large level in to a few hundred bytes at the cost of a little processing overhead.
I have little to no respect for people who toil away at UML diagrams. They're nothing more than busywork for coders and eye candy for higher-ups.
And I have no respect for coders who just sit and code with no real sense of direction, no design, no idea of what the requirements are etc. I've had to maintain too much shit code from incompetent coders who have then gone and left the company leaving a steaming piles behind. And often it is me who does it as I seem to be one of the few people in the company who can decipher the mess. This is why I insist on properly designed code.
Having said that I do not insist on a full UML model but at least package, object and state diagrams so you know how the various software components tie together.
Honestly, if you're asked to make such a diagram, you're the only one who's going to understand it.
That's a training issue. At work I'm not the only one who understands it.
Not to say that I'm against sketching-out behaviour on a napkin at the pizza parlour, but why would anyone spend time connecting diamonds and rectangles when they could be making demonstrative code?
In my case it's pieces of A3 paper. I just formally document those designs that are needed to be formally documented and only the parts of those designs that need to be formally documented. These documents are usually associated with a programmers guide and example code.
I've gotten a lot more mileage out of primitive code with meaningful outputs* than I have from tracing my way through a UML tree.
I don't believe either on their own are useful so supply both. As I've said above I don't go for the full formal UML model but use the syntax for some diagrams.
* ie. skeleton code that tells you what it's doing at each step ("I just made BankAccount 'steve'", "fetched 'steve's info", "incremented 'BankAccounts'")
That explains a lot. When you are writing software for real time systems like set top boxes you need to be more formal with your working methods.
Who designed that code? Did you just sit down and code it i.e. open new text file and type? Where did the requirements come from? how did you know what was needed? What did it need to look like? What if someone else needs to maintain it: is there back up documentation?
If you just wrote code to other peoples' designs you were a programmer and not a software engineer and your employer did get the description wrong.
Programmers are the production line workers of the 21 Century. It's not programmers that are needed but software engineers and the two terms are not synonyms. Software engineers analyse the problem, create designs and document them, create models (e.g. UML), use patterns, define APIs, integrate existing software components and the like. Once you've done all that properly the rest is just a mechanical process that any reasonably competant individual should be able to undertake. You need some management skills, design skill and a good general knowledge of technologies and software engineering concepts.
The company I work for has outsourced some of it's programming requirement. This has indirectly sorted the software engineers from the programmers in house. For a typical project we now carry out requirements analysis, an iterative design approach resulting in a detailed model and documentation and often framework code. The then whole thing goes to our outsources so they can do the boring bit, filling in the blanks.
Bluetooth is well established in Europe so I don't see it disappearing all that soon.
I'm writing this on my laptop using WiFi to connect to my broadband net connection. Last weekend I stayed with my parents and used the same laptop via a bluetooth dongle and GPRS on my mobile phone.
I use bluetooth to sync that phone with the laptop and to transfer photos from the phone to the laptop.
On the drive home I noted many other drivers with bluetooth headsets on their ears. If I meet someone we exchange contact details via bluetooth. My housemate controls the MP3 player on her iBook from her phone using Bluetooth. I sync my phone to my PDA via Bluetooth.
I can see the usefulness of a high speed Bluetooth like system but there are applications that just don't need a faster connection and for them Bluetooth works just fine. Also, I'm not sure about the US, but in Europe it seems that Joe/Josephine Public have picked it up just fine and it's not restricted to geeks.
I can see
Actually I was wrong it's 6000 GBP which explains how we can produce more dope than Morocco and yet not export much.
Soon, copied films will be as rare as students lighting up a joint after their exams.
An average Brit will spend 2000 GBP on dope over their lifetime!
I suppose if you live down south you need a sense of humour what with the cost of housing, cost of living, number of people and time spent sat in traffic jams or squeezed in to public transport.
Far from being the backward place you believe it to be Manchester was one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution; one end of one of the earliest Railway systems in the world (the Liverpool to Manchester for which speed trials were held where Stephenson's Rocket won); and the birthplace of digital stored program computers.
It's a *railway* with *trucks*, *wagons*, *vans* and *coaches* and the swivelly things with the wheels on are *bogies*. We ought to know we invented the things. [1]
"Britain and America, two nations divided by a common language" - Oscar Wilde
[1] Actually I believe it was the greeks who first invented a tracked wagon way. We came to them late, the 18th century. [2]
[2] My local village railway station is 161 this year. It was opened in 1844.