The book, on the other hand, was great, in my opinion.
Although I was given "The Da Vinci Code" this was only after someone else had given me "The Va Dinci Cod" which makes it very difficult to take the former seriously!
"The technology required to actually make something invisible is so complex and unreliable that it isn't worth the bother. The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain."
You don't even need a battery. Just build it to look like a sink full of dirty dishes in a student household and no one will see it.
I found the biggest problem with the wireless system in a place I was in was that the batteries would go flat so quickly that you'd just get fed up replacing them!
I still believe iPhone is all marketing, the product itself is just average. But that's only my opinion...
In that case, at least in the graphics department, the G1 is less than average. Assuming it is equivalent performance-wise to the HTC Touch diamond (since they seem to have the same chipset) then the in GLBenchmark, it would likely score around "99"
but it now means that a windows hibernate and restore take of the order of several minutes(!) rather than 10s of seconds.
Let me translate what you're trying to say: "WAAAH! WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH!", also, "WAAAH!". Did I get that right? Full disk encryption of laptops is mandatory if you want to even pretend to have any semblance of data security. Deal with it, and deal with the CPU overhead. Maybe you could use the extra minutes(!!!!OHNOES!!!!) to get a head start on pulling your head out of your ass?
How mature. I'm surprised they have computers at your kindergarden.
FWIW, I 100% agree with the company's policy of encrypting the whole hard disk. I just don't agree with the claims of the software vendors that the overhead is unnoticeable.
Truecrypt Whole Disk Encryption has less than 1% over head. I can't see the problem. Surely the patent and IP information security outweighs this minimal overhead.
That's what we got told when our laptops were "whole disk encrypted" with a competing product.... but it now means that a windows hibernate and restore take of the order of several minutes(!) rather than 10s of seconds.**
I have not experienced PGP so maybe it has a much more efficient system, but I have my doubts.
**Yes I know that MS make it impossible for these systems (apart from their own 8-|) to guarantee security of the hibernate file but I can't see how that would affect the performance.
There is no copyright on non-creative works. A schedule isn't creative.
The ones for the commercial stations in Australia must be. Anything that turns what is, say, a 1hr show on a commercial station in the UK to 1.5hrs on a commercial station in Aus must involve enormous amounts of creativity!
And what do you think Qantas is going to retort? That the malfunction was caused by radio signals from passengers' electronic devices. Duh! Look at it. A computer starts spewing "random data". That can only be caused by random radio waves from random clicking with a wireless mouse. No, in a few months time, everyone bringing a wireless mouse on board will be considered a terrorist.
Magpies also have been known to kick the shit out of people. Some of them even going so far as to attack just a single person over and over again.
I had a lady friend who was in Cann River, OZ and before visiting she'd had a magpie attack and beat the hell out of her head.
This is not meant to be a excerpt from "The Holy Grail", but you aren't confusing Australian and European magpies are you? They are completely different birds. European magpies aren't the aggressive b***ers that Aussie ones are during the breeding season.
checksums really only help in detecting errors. Once you've found errors, if you have an exact redundancy somewhere else you can repair the errors. What reed-solomon codes do is provide the error detecting ability but also the error correcting ability whilst at the same time reducing the amount of redundancy required to a near theoretical minimum.
Having both, however, can be useful. For example, you can arrange your data in a rectangle and use standard error detecting checksums along the rows and RS on the columns. Knowing that particular rows may have an error can effectively double the error correction rate of Reed Solomon. See Erasure
It would be nice if YouTube supported in-browser Theora once Firefox 3.1 is released. It would also be nice if Theora were a good enough codec for that to be practical for them.
My worry is, "is it any good"? I've had a quick glance through the specification and it appears to lack some rather useful features of, say, H.264 such as *4x4 blocks *bidirectional prediction and *arithmetic encoding. If this means the quality/bit goes down by a big margin, would you really want to be waiting or paying (3G or PAYG broadband) for longer download times and/or worse quality?
Know what's harder than LaTex when you need math typeset correctly? Anything that's not LaTex.
I needed a few equations for a [rejected:-(] paper I wrote recently and, rather than try to do it all in TeX/latex, I used the free "TeXaide" tool. (Hmm. A quick search seems to show it's no longer available from Design Science... that's a pity.)
Essentially, it is the equation editor from MS-word except that it produces TeX code that you simply paste into you document. A complete doddle to use.
SRAM is constructed from latching circuits. Anyone knows what's their volatility when compared to DRAM? Do they lose contents immediately when powered off or do they retain the state for some time like DRAM?
[Disclaimer: The following was from many years ago...] From my experience of a home computer (in the early 80s) with (CMOS) SRAM memory, the contents stay almost intact with a switch off of a second or less and gradually decay to "random" if the power is off for several minutes. IIRC given that CMOS uses MOSFETS which also have tiny capacitors, this is perhaps not too surprising.
Most Slashdotters probably don't need to be told this, but anyone interested in historical fiction about Bletchley Park shouldn't miss Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It's entertaining and rich in technical detail.
I also recently (re)read "Station X" by Michael Smith, which gives first hand accounts of some of the many thousands of people who worked there. There's not a lot on the actual code breaking techniques, but it is, none the less, an interesting read (IMHO).
BTW: I visited Bletchley Park some years ago and found it quite interesting and this was before they had finished building a Bombe and Collosus.
BTW2: After the Station X TV series aired, I was amazed to find out that neighbour had actually worked there as a WREN.
To do a side-by-side rundown with the iPhone (correct me if I get anything wrong): -------
Does anyone know what current phones have an SMedia 3362? According to GLBenchmark the top performers seem to be totally dominated by PowerVR-based systems. Any idea how the 3362 compares?
(Aside: The formatting/preview in the inline editor doesn't seem to be working correctly in Firefox 3. Anyone else experienced this?)
http://calorielab.com/news/2005/08/25/obesity-visualized-state-by-state/ (There's a map of obesity by state) It seems north/south is irrelevant, it's how near an ocean you are. Pardon my ignorance of US geography, but the proximity to the ocean seems irrelevant. To me, it looks like Mississippi river is a bigger influence. Perhaps the consumption of Mud Pies has something to do with it;-)
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing Apple about this, everything in marketing and advertisements is fake, exaggerated or just outright untrue and misleading.
Agreed.
Having just watched the demo that PC-Pro did - apart from getting the emailed PDF - I was very impressed with the speed of the system.
Frankly, depending on the time of day, it seemed faster than my broadband link on the home PC. Grrrrr :-(
To me it sounds like sour grapes from some competitor.
Although I was given "The Da Vinci Code" this was only after someone else had given me "The Va Dinci Cod" which makes it very difficult to take the former seriously!
The -- ahem -- "idealist" says "these are my principles, I don't violate them".
The "pragmatist" says "I just want this done by Friday and will violate my principles for the sake of that."
Could not one say a pragmatist is one who has a set of "ideals" but realizes that list may contain mutually exclusive goals?
Actually, the iPod wasn't the gagdet which popularized the iSomething. The iMac predates it for about three years.
Surely Asimov's "iRobot" predates those. 8-P
They should be working on the SEP field.
Hitchikers guide reference:
"The technology required to actually make something invisible is so complex and unreliable that it isn't worth the bother. The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain."
You don't even need a battery. Just build it to look like a sink full of dirty dishes in a student household and no one will see it.
I found the biggest problem with the wireless system in a place I was in was that the batteries would go flat so quickly that you'd just get fed up replacing them!
I still believe iPhone is all marketing, the product itself is just average. But that's only my opinion...
In that case, at least in the graphics department, the G1 is less than average. Assuming it is equivalent performance-wise to the HTC Touch diamond (since they seem to have the same chipset) then the in GLBenchmark, it would likely score around "99"
The iphone, OTOH, scores 527.
Let me translate what you're trying to say: "WAAAH! WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH!", also, "WAAAH!".
Did I get that right? Full disk encryption of laptops is mandatory if you want to even pretend to have any semblance of data security. Deal with it, and deal with the CPU overhead. Maybe you could use the extra minutes(!!!!OHNOES!!!!) to get a head start on pulling your head out of your ass?
How mature. I'm surprised they have computers at your kindergarden.
FWIW, I 100% agree with the company's policy of encrypting the whole hard disk. I just don't agree with the claims of the software vendors that the overhead is unnoticeable.
Truecrypt Whole Disk Encryption has less than 1% over head. I can't see the problem. Surely the patent and IP information security outweighs this minimal overhead.
That's what we got told when our laptops were "whole disk encrypted" with a competing product.... but it now means that a windows hibernate and restore take of the order of several minutes(!) rather than 10s of seconds.**
I have not experienced PGP so maybe it has a much more efficient system, but I have my doubts.
**Yes I know that MS make it impossible for these systems (apart from their own 8-|) to guarantee security of the hibernate file but I can't see how that would affect the performance.
There is no copyright on non-creative works. A schedule isn't creative.
The ones for the commercial stations in Australia must be. Anything that turns what is, say, a 1hr show on a commercial station in the UK to 1.5hrs on a commercial station in Aus must involve enormous amounts of creativity!
And what do you think Qantas is going to retort? That the malfunction was caused by radio signals from passengers' electronic devices. Duh! Look at it. A computer starts spewing "random data". That can only be caused by random radio waves from random clicking with a wireless mouse. No, in a few months time, everyone bringing a wireless mouse on board will be considered a terrorist.
RTFA. Qantas were investigating a possible link.
Magpies also have been known to kick the shit out of people. Some of them even going so far as to attack just a single person over and over again.
I had a lady friend who was in Cann River, OZ and before visiting she'd had a magpie attack and beat the hell out of her head.
This is not meant to be a excerpt from "The Holy Grail", but you aren't confusing Australian and European magpies are you? They are completely different birds. European magpies aren't the aggressive b***ers that Aussie ones are during the breeding season.
checksums really only help in detecting errors. Once you've found errors, if you have an exact redundancy somewhere else you can repair the errors. What reed-solomon codes do is provide the error detecting ability but also the error correcting ability whilst at the same time reducing the amount of redundancy required to a near theoretical minimum.
Having both, however, can be useful. For example, you can arrange your data in a rectangle and use standard error detecting checksums along the rows and RS on the columns. Knowing that particular rows may have an error can effectively double the error correction rate of Reed Solomon. See Erasure
It would be nice if YouTube supported in-browser Theora once Firefox 3.1 is released. It would also be nice if Theora were a good enough codec for that to be practical for them.
My worry is, "is it any good"? I've had a quick glance through the specification and it appears to lack some rather useful features of, say, H.264 such as *4x4 blocks *bidirectional prediction and *arithmetic encoding. If this means the quality/bit goes down by a big margin, would you really want to be waiting or paying (3G or PAYG broadband) for longer download times and/or worse quality?
Know what's harder than LaTex when you need math typeset correctly? Anything that's not LaTex.
I needed a few equations for a [rejected :-(] paper I wrote recently and, rather than try to do it all in TeX/latex, I used the free "TeXaide" tool. (Hmm. A quick search seems to show it's no longer available from Design Science... that's a pity.)
Essentially, it is the equation editor from MS-word except that it produces TeX code that you simply paste into you document. A complete doddle to use.
Seems it has a TI OMAP 2420, 400Mhz, which has roughly the same graphics system as the iPhone.
href="http://www.consumerdepot.com/products.asp?id=N810RB&referer=google">http://www.consumerdepot.com/products.asp?id=N810RB&referer=google
It is not only "like" the iPod touch, it is far and away more capable.
Do you have any link to what graphics processor it has? I couldn't see it listed on the mobile GL benchmark site
I've never been to LA... but I do like to make references to Charles Dickens.
So do I, but "that's Dikkens with two Ks, the well-known Dutch author." :)
. but then, London does have the distinction of being the only city in the world wherein you can see the air you breathe ;-)
Sorry. You must either be colour blind to shades of brown or have never been to LA :-|
SRAM is constructed from latching circuits. Anyone knows what's their volatility when compared to DRAM? Do they lose contents immediately when powered off or do they retain the state for some time like DRAM?
[Disclaimer: The following was from many years ago...]
From my experience of a home computer (in the early 80s) with (CMOS) SRAM memory, the contents stay almost intact with a switch off of a second or less and gradually decay to "random" if the power is off for several minutes. IIRC given that CMOS uses MOSFETS which also have tiny capacitors, this is perhaps not too surprising.
But, IMHO, it did make a very good example. :)
Slashdot should make their own virtual social network. Think of the possibilities!
A bit like linkedin? The social network for people who don't socialise** ;)
(** Yes, yes, it's gross stereotyping but it applies to those who would have had quadraphonic)
Most Slashdotters probably don't need to be told this, but anyone interested in historical fiction about Bletchley Park shouldn't miss Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It's entertaining and rich in technical detail.
I also recently (re)read "Station X" by Michael Smith, which gives first hand accounts of some of the many thousands of people who worked there. There's not a lot on the actual code breaking techniques, but it is, none the less, an interesting read (IMHO).
BTW: I visited Bletchley Park some years ago and found it quite interesting and this was before they had finished building a Bombe and Collosus.
BTW2: After the Station X TV series aired, I was amazed to find out that neighbour had actually worked there as a WREN.
To do a side-by-side rundown with the iPhone (correct me if I get anything wrong):
-------
Does anyone know what current phones have an SMedia 3362? According to GLBenchmark the top performers seem to be totally dominated by PowerVR-based systems. Any idea how the 3362 compares?
(Aside: The formatting/preview in the inline editor doesn't seem to be working correctly in Firefox 3. Anyone else experienced this?)
It seems north/south is irrelevant, it's how near an ocean you are. Pardon my ignorance of US geography, but the proximity to the ocean seems irrelevant. To me, it looks like Mississippi river is a bigger influence. Perhaps the consumption of Mud Pies has something to do with it