I think your explanation is perfect. The whole premise of this article is kinda insulting in an egghead sort of way, subversively using octopus intelligence as the standard for what we should be allowed to eat. Since most people could probably do without eating octopus, they are hoping people will agree with them. Then by this relatively low standard, they can decide what else you should be allowed to eat. Certainly not pigs, probably not cows, maybe chickens, but I'm sure there will be a lively debate about 'chicken intelligence.' The bottom line is to prevent animals from getting eaten by humans. I think in that context it should sound pretty silly since plenty of animals get eaten in the wild.
Yeah, that was obviously a BS legal response on their part about protecting guests. If that was the case, the actions would have spoken a different story. For instance, there should have been signs posted on site saying "We have taken the liberty of blocking rogue WiFi sites that could breach your privacy.. we have provided a safe access point for free at this SSID... Wired Ethernet connections also available."
I do see the concerns that any commercial organization could have. There is potentially a sense of liability that anyone off the street can set up rogue access points and do harm to customers/guests. This is roughly equivalent to skimming credit cards or sneaking into unlocked hotel rooms. So what recourse does an organization have to protect the airwaves on their own premises? Access points are just so common and transient that it would be impossible to report every infraction to the FCC and expect a useful response.
I'm willing to tolerate a little bit of government if it means I don't have to conduct my own testing of every food item, car, or baby toy that I buy. No I don't trust the free market enough... I know damn well that reputation vs. cost savings is a balancing act to maximize profits. I expect no more and no less from a corporation; that is what they are designed to do. It is essentially government regulation that give corporations the framework to exist at all.
If a company can deny, spin, cover-up, and pay off to protect their reputation then they will. It would be a conflict of interest for a corporation to always put utmost safety ahead of profits. Government isn't perfect either, but it isn't inherently a conflict of its own interest to protect my health and safety.
Yes, this is what happened in New York State. Power producers are separated from power delivery. But in today's global (corporate) economy, both entities in my area are owned by the same parent company which is actually not based in the USA. Oh, there are 3rd party suppliers that, in theory, are competitive. But trust me, there is no savings for the consumer...
Plus, they are basically guaranteed a small profit as a public entity. And I don't really care too much, I pay a modest amount to have convenient service.
There is basically no way the utilities are worried unless every home and factory goes off the grid with no backup connection whatsoever.
Individual power plants could be rendered obsolete, but that has been happening since forever. The idea that solar will displace coal/nuclear/etc. is silly unless it can get a lot cheaper. Work out the true cost of solar in terms of storage capacity to actually replace traditional base loads. Solar might add more capacity, but industry and society won't stand for a scarcity of electricity when they need it. I just hope for the day that fusion can operate cheaper than all...
While you can still buy a lot of embedded processors in DIP format, I haven't considered it very much - but yes, those were the days. Now you can just buy reasonable micros on affordable eval boards or other very simple boards with plenty of wire-wrap headers or solder points. You can cut a lot of the mundane work like breadboarding a voltage regulator, memory, osc, serial transceiver, etc.
I think it may be somewhat daunting for a first-year student to go through the learning curve of what would effectively be debugging and optimizing code for an embedded platform... But it needs to be threaded in every CS course how to write code that is appropriate for the given application: speed/code/memory trade-offs and how to avoid code that blocks inappropriately, how to write programs that correctly work with the OS in terms of yielding, using timers, and such. Also, just calling the math library routines isn't the answer in many cases. CS grads should be able to demonstrate how to write their own math functions optimized for special application domains such as fixed-point integer math, decimal formats, interpolation, approximating trig functions, etc.
I personally feel like computer hardware has become incredibly powerful, but the user experience is more or less constant as programmers don't see the value in tuning applications to be as responsive as possible. On the other hand, that can often be due to outside pressure from non-programmers to always add "just one little feature, this won't add much overhead, right?"
Agreed, driving on rails is inherently simpler in automated or manually-controlled conditions compared to cars. Quite frankly, it is amazing that people manage to navigate their cars at all. On the other hand, rails can be so simplified that people potentially don't maintain sufficient attention to the situation. Duality of mankind? We need enough hazards to maintain appropriate vigilance to the current situation?
I'm optimistic in the long run that automated cars will actually do a pretty good job compared to the variety of problems humans cause. The sensors give superior 360 degree information to what human eyes see from a limited vantage point and can make the same decisions repeatedly without fatigue. But from an engineering perspective, I'm not convinced that Google is even 1/10th of the way done in terms of development years. In the internet marketing business, the 80/20 rule is appropriate. In automated driver-less cars, nothing short of solving 100% of potential problems will do. Does their system gracefully handle critters landing on sensors?...corrosion after 10 years of neglected operation?...construction zones?...poorly marked roadways and parking lots?...snow, ice, fog?
Even if the Google car is ready, is the rest of the world? Are there training programs to get qualified techs in every major city to service these vehicles? What does a Google car do in response to bad drivers? What does a Google car do that is unexpected by humans?
We take cars for granted, but there is a huge amount of knowledge gained over the past 100 years of the automobile. There is an amazing amount of fail-safe technology using very clever and low-cost solutions built into cars.
I suspect what Jmstuckman meant was that the controls were not intuitive to humans, or have a range of control that is awkward. In other words, imagine that the gas pedal on your car had 1 mm of travel and you had to manually set 3 different interlocks to change to reverse gear, and you had a significantly obstructed viewpoint, since it was only meant for automated control. Then you too would have a hard time with the simple 1-dimensional control as well. Getting within a foot of the platform target would probably be good enough if it took significant effort on touchy controls to adjust.
Disclaimer: the only train I have controlled is in MS train simulator.
Oh wait. Yeah, I can live with the 1/10,000 chance because THOSE THINGS NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPEN EXCEPT IN YOUR IMAGINATION. Or do you think the "liberal media" is covering up the hundreds of thousands of people who use guns to prevent themselves from being stabbed in our (incredibly safe) country every day?
Actually it turns out that is generally true according to the recent CDC study. (I don't know about an actual cover-up, but clearly these stories are not being reported on.) From the conservative angle: http://www.gunsandammo.com/pol... Same thing from a progressive angle: http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Interesting how both sides were basically surprised when we all just sat down to really look at the problem. They both had a spin to it, but nothing really fit the dialog from either side.
Yeah, and when you personally see the TOS model it actually is very crude....they had no idea that the film prints would be scanned for high-def TV eventually.
When I saw it around 2008 I had two thoughts: 1) Why is something so iconic being given such outcast treatment in the basement of the gift shop? Yes it wasn't actually a spacecraft, but still deserving of attention compared to some random ejection seat or circuit board designed for a space probe. 2) It was really crude.. Basic hardware-store type materials were used. That weird screen-door protector perforated metal with the two different sized holes that was popular in the '60s and '70s... The body of it was mostly just plain surface, maybe wood or something easily workable.
Exactly, some people will adopt the latest style and interface. But most will not, and still have to get their normal jobs done. Computer literacy is something that shouldn't be taken for granted. Why should a company have to keep retraining people to do the same things they have been doing successfully? Not a good business proposition.
The interoperability is no longer an argument in favor of Microsoft. It was always a sham, but just happened to work because everyone was running Microsoft products i.e. Office 97 or similar for about 15 years. When docx et.al. got forced on us, then compatibility got more complicated but was fine as long as you got the plug-ins or whatever within the MS family. But never was this about interoperability, it was simply monopoly that happened to work well for most people. Now it isn't necessarily true anymore, people are expecting web-ready documents, or better ways to collaborate, control changes, etc. Office never really did that very well and there isn't a single dominant player on that front that I'm aware of.
Seems like some very rational long-term thinking to me to make the investment in Linux now. For an institution like a government organization or university, etc. 15 years is nothing, or rather that is exactly the point. Linux will be still be available in a familiar and stable form without a forced 'upgrade', but with reasonable security patches and hardware support. Microsoft, apparently, will not provide that anymore. It is a shame, because all fanaticism aside, that is why people chose Windows in the past; it was generally familiar and ran legacy stuff way past its prime. No longer is this the case, so screw 'em.
Would have been interesting, paying the fine would require disclosure to shareholders? Is that a violation of 'super secret stuff'? Who wins SEC vs. NSA?
..Because 5 year-olds haven't been influenced by conservative rhetoric. And believe me, I'm fairly conservative. But I hear this 'fairness isn't a real thing', and see this as a dark side of conservatism to deny fairness as a basic trait of civil behavior. To a 5 year-old, fairness is getting an equal slice of pie. To an adult, fairness is equal consideration under the law. Not really a hard concept to define. That, of course, isn't trying to argue that the world has to be made equal by redistribution; it just means that giving company A a tax break that isn't available to company B is worthy of criticism. Maybe it can ultimately be justified, but I'm not on-board with the automatic statement that tax breaks are a part of the free-market. There is clearly potential for monopolistic, corrupt, and nepotistic behavior, or just ineffective results. Where I live, the county's tax break program (conservative politicians that created and run it) is largely a joke for spending millions of dollars for only creating a few jobs.
Yes, this is exactly it. It is the polarization in politics. We argue with each other to support our prejudiced conclusions without looking at our own motivations first. Problems can potentially be solved with moderate, incremental, and mutually agreeable solutions. But that doesn't satisfy the dogmatic, extreme ideas from each side. Add moneyed interests, stubborn defensiveness, and how can we possibly get out of our own way?
Why should I agree to support any liberal / conservative politicians when I know they will take it a mile in one extreme or the other? How can we have prosperity and stability knowing the laws can change abruptly every 4 years depending on who got elected?
Mean == average (sum of samples / number of samples) Median == 50th percentile within the set of samples. Mean != median (unless by chance the distribution is symmetrical.)
When an even number of samples exists, the common practice is to find the median between the two central samples by averaging the two. But that does not imply an average of the whole data set.
The real question is whether the rules of engagement in various scenarios keep the F35 beyond visual range or not. Military planners like to have that capability, but often in modern warfare, the rules of engagement require visual confirmation. Also, once the stuff hits the fan in a larger conflict, sheer numbers of opponents and battlefield confusion might close that distance quickly. Once the enemy can see you visually, they can target you with a variety or means besides radar and traditional maneuverability and speed become crucial. Also, an opponent having even a low-quality/low-frequency radar hit from a ground station on an F35 will give enough warning for opponent force to take evasive actions.
That is very true, but for several reasons: 1) location: embedded work is not necessarily something you find in every city. Much of it is concentrated in cities like the SF Bay area, Detroit (cars are at least still designed there), place where aerospace is. So much of consumer devices are designed off-shore now. 2) how talent is scouted: in my job-seeking experience, most engineering jobs are never posted. And the jobs that are posted are vaporware or duplicates of jobs already filled - usually just to help recruiters fill their databases in case a job opens up. Sometimes you have to cold-call HR departments or work with head-hunters. Hiring of friends or classmates is very common, so it pays to know people. 3) HR: jobs that need embedded programmers are often listed more generically by HR if they don't understand the significance of embedded vs. systems or applications programming. Often people find themselves doing embedded programming when the job description was simply an EE-type job posting for hardware design.
Things that require assembly: - special instructions that the compiler didn't support, but that need to be manipulated - extensions to the instruction set like DSP, SIMD, etc. Compilers generally won't automatically make use of these. If you are lucky, your compiler has macros that basically translate to asm instructions. - math operations not supported effectively in the abstract concepts of your programming language (overflow, carry, etc.) - access to data types or structures that your language cannot support effectively - work-around compiler bugs or limitations - access to special memory areas that the compiler doesn't understand - code that just won't run fast enough or use resources efficiently from the compiler
Granted, C++ on x86 or ARM probably has enough maturity to avoid these issues. But these are daily occurrences on embedded platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your explanation is perfect. The whole premise of this article is kinda insulting in an egghead sort of way, subversively using octopus intelligence as the standard for what we should be allowed to eat. Since most people could probably do without eating octopus, they are hoping people will agree with them. Then by this relatively low standard, they can decide what else you should be allowed to eat. Certainly not pigs, probably not cows, maybe chickens, but I'm sure there will be a lively debate about 'chicken intelligence.' The bottom line is to prevent animals from getting eaten by humans. I think in that context it should sound pretty silly since plenty of animals get eaten in the wild.
Yeah, that was obviously a BS legal response on their part about protecting guests. If that was the case, the actions would have spoken a different story. For instance, there should have been signs posted on site saying "We have taken the liberty of blocking rogue WiFi sites that could breach your privacy.. we have provided a safe access point for free at this SSID... Wired Ethernet connections also available."
I do see the concerns that any commercial organization could have. There is potentially a sense of liability that anyone off the street can set up rogue access points and do harm to customers/guests. This is roughly equivalent to skimming credit cards or sneaking into unlocked hotel rooms. So what recourse does an organization have to protect the airwaves on their own premises? Access points are just so common and transient that it would be impossible to report every infraction to the FCC and expect a useful response.
I'm willing to tolerate a little bit of government if it means I don't have to conduct my own testing of every food item, car, or baby toy that I buy. No I don't trust the free market enough... I know damn well that reputation vs. cost savings is a balancing act to maximize profits. I expect no more and no less from a corporation; that is what they are designed to do. It is essentially government regulation that give corporations the framework to exist at all.
If a company can deny, spin, cover-up, and pay off to protect their reputation then they will. It would be a conflict of interest for a corporation to always put utmost safety ahead of profits. Government isn't perfect either, but it isn't inherently a conflict of its own interest to protect my health and safety.
How did that work out when California decided to allow "the free market"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Yes, this is what happened in New York State. Power producers are separated from power delivery. But in today's global (corporate) economy, both entities in my area are owned by the same parent company which is actually not based in the USA. Oh, there are 3rd party suppliers that, in theory, are competitive. But trust me, there is no savings for the consumer...
Plus, they are basically guaranteed a small profit as a public entity. And I don't really care too much, I pay a modest amount to have convenient service.
There is basically no way the utilities are worried unless every home and factory goes off the grid with no backup connection whatsoever.
Individual power plants could be rendered obsolete, but that has been happening since forever. The idea that solar will displace coal/nuclear/etc. is silly unless it can get a lot cheaper. Work out the true cost of solar in terms of storage capacity to actually replace traditional base loads. Solar might add more capacity, but industry and society won't stand for a scarcity of electricity when they need it. I just hope for the day that fusion can operate cheaper than all...
While you can still buy a lot of embedded processors in DIP format, I haven't considered it very much - but yes, those were the days. Now you can just buy reasonable micros on affordable eval boards or other very simple boards with plenty of wire-wrap headers or solder points. You can cut a lot of the mundane work like breadboarding a voltage regulator, memory, osc, serial transceiver, etc.
I wish I could have 64KiB on the platform I work with...
I think it may be somewhat daunting for a first-year student to go through the learning curve of what would effectively be debugging and optimizing code for an embedded platform... But it needs to be threaded in every CS course how to write code that is appropriate for the given application: speed/code/memory trade-offs and how to avoid code that blocks inappropriately, how to write programs that correctly work with the OS in terms of yielding, using timers, and such. Also, just calling the math library routines isn't the answer in many cases. CS grads should be able to demonstrate how to write their own math functions optimized for special application domains such as fixed-point integer math, decimal formats, interpolation, approximating trig functions, etc.
I personally feel like computer hardware has become incredibly powerful, but the user experience is more or less constant as programmers don't see the value in tuning applications to be as responsive as possible. On the other hand, that can often be due to outside pressure from non-programmers to always add "just one little feature, this won't add much overhead, right?"
Yeah, true. Basically, let's see what happens when Google operates their car year-round in New York, not California.
Agreed, driving on rails is inherently simpler in automated or manually-controlled conditions compared to cars. Quite frankly, it is amazing that people manage to navigate their cars at all. On the other hand, rails can be so simplified that people potentially don't maintain sufficient attention to the situation. Duality of mankind? We need enough hazards to maintain appropriate vigilance to the current situation?
I'm optimistic in the long run that automated cars will actually do a pretty good job compared to the variety of problems humans cause. The sensors give superior 360 degree information to what human eyes see from a limited vantage point and can make the same decisions repeatedly without fatigue. But from an engineering perspective, I'm not convinced that Google is even 1/10th of the way done in terms of development years. In the internet marketing business, the 80/20 rule is appropriate. In automated driver-less cars, nothing short of solving 100% of potential problems will do. Does their system gracefully handle critters landing on sensors? ...corrosion after 10 years of neglected operation? ...construction zones? ...poorly marked roadways and parking lots? ...snow, ice, fog?
Even if the Google car is ready, is the rest of the world? Are there training programs to get qualified techs in every major city to service these vehicles? What does a Google car do in response to bad drivers? What does a Google car do that is unexpected by humans?
We take cars for granted, but there is a huge amount of knowledge gained over the past 100 years of the automobile. There is an amazing amount of fail-safe technology using very clever and low-cost solutions built into cars.
I suspect what Jmstuckman meant was that the controls were not intuitive to humans, or have a range of control that is awkward. In other words, imagine that the gas pedal on your car had 1 mm of travel and you had to manually set 3 different interlocks to change to reverse gear, and you had a significantly obstructed viewpoint, since it was only meant for automated control. Then you too would have a hard time with the simple 1-dimensional control as well. Getting within a foot of the platform target would probably be good enough if it took significant effort on touchy controls to adjust.
Disclaimer: the only train I have controlled is in MS train simulator.
Oh wait. Yeah, I can live with the 1/10,000 chance because THOSE THINGS NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPEN EXCEPT IN YOUR IMAGINATION. Or do you think the "liberal media" is covering up the hundreds of thousands of people who use guns to prevent themselves from being stabbed in our (incredibly safe) country every day?
Actually it turns out that is generally true according to the recent CDC study. (I don't know about an actual cover-up, but clearly these stories are not being reported on.)
From the conservative angle:
http://www.gunsandammo.com/pol...
Same thing from a progressive angle:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Interesting how both sides were basically surprised when we all just sat down to really look at the problem. They both had a spin to it, but nothing really fit the dialog from either side.
Yeah, and when you personally see the TOS model it actually is very crude. ...they had no idea that the film prints would be scanned for high-def TV eventually.
When I saw it around 2008 I had two thoughts:
1) Why is something so iconic being given such outcast treatment in the basement of the gift shop? Yes it wasn't actually a spacecraft, but still deserving of attention compared to some random ejection seat or circuit board designed for a space probe.
2) It was really crude.. Basic hardware-store type materials were used. That weird screen-door protector perforated metal with the two different sized holes that was popular in the '60s and '70s... The body of it was mostly just plain surface, maybe wood or something easily workable.
Exactly, some people will adopt the latest style and interface. But most will not, and still have to get their normal jobs done. Computer literacy is something that shouldn't be taken for granted. Why should a company have to keep retraining people to do the same things they have been doing successfully? Not a good business proposition.
The interoperability is no longer an argument in favor of Microsoft. It was always a sham, but just happened to work because everyone was running Microsoft products i.e. Office 97 or similar for about 15 years. When docx et.al. got forced on us, then compatibility got more complicated but was fine as long as you got the plug-ins or whatever within the MS family. But never was this about interoperability, it was simply monopoly that happened to work well for most people. Now it isn't necessarily true anymore, people are expecting web-ready documents, or better ways to collaborate, control changes, etc. Office never really did that very well and there isn't a single dominant player on that front that I'm aware of.
Seems like some very rational long-term thinking to me to make the investment in Linux now. For an institution like a government organization or university, etc. 15 years is nothing, or rather that is exactly the point. Linux will be still be available in a familiar and stable form without a forced 'upgrade', but with reasonable security patches and hardware support. Microsoft, apparently, will not provide that anymore. It is a shame, because all fanaticism aside, that is why people chose Windows in the past; it was generally familiar and ran legacy stuff way past its prime. No longer is this the case, so screw 'em.
Would have been interesting, paying the fine would require disclosure to shareholders? Is that a violation of 'super secret stuff'? Who wins SEC vs. NSA?
..Because 5 year-olds haven't been influenced by conservative rhetoric. And believe me, I'm fairly conservative. But I hear this 'fairness isn't a real thing', and see this as a dark side of conservatism to deny fairness as a basic trait of civil behavior. To a 5 year-old, fairness is getting an equal slice of pie. To an adult, fairness is equal consideration under the law. Not really a hard concept to define. That, of course, isn't trying to argue that the world has to be made equal by redistribution; it just means that giving company A a tax break that isn't available to company B is worthy of criticism. Maybe it can ultimately be justified, but I'm not on-board with the automatic statement that tax breaks are a part of the free-market. There is clearly potential for monopolistic, corrupt, and nepotistic behavior, or just ineffective results. Where I live, the county's tax break program (conservative politicians that created and run it) is largely a joke for spending millions of dollars for only creating a few jobs.
Yes, this is exactly it. It is the polarization in politics. We argue with each other to support our prejudiced conclusions without looking at our own motivations first. Problems can potentially be solved with moderate, incremental, and mutually agreeable solutions. But that doesn't satisfy the dogmatic, extreme ideas from each side. Add moneyed interests, stubborn defensiveness, and how can we possibly get out of our own way?
Why should I agree to support any liberal / conservative politicians when I know they will take it a mile in one extreme or the other? How can we have prosperity and stability knowing the laws can change abruptly every 4 years depending on who got elected?
Heck, those pesky Bar exams and medical boards too... :)
Mean == average (sum of samples / number of samples)
Median == 50th percentile within the set of samples.
Mean != median (unless by chance the distribution is symmetrical.)
When an even number of samples exists, the common practice is to find the median between the two central samples by averaging the two. But that does not imply an average of the whole data set.
Or visual basic
The real question is whether the rules of engagement in various scenarios keep the F35 beyond visual range or not. Military planners like to have that capability, but often in modern warfare, the rules of engagement require visual confirmation. Also, once the stuff hits the fan in a larger conflict, sheer numbers of opponents and battlefield confusion might close that distance quickly. Once the enemy can see you visually, they can target you with a variety or means besides radar and traditional maneuverability and speed become crucial. Also, an opponent having even a low-quality/low-frequency radar hit from a ground station on an F35 will give enough warning for opponent force to take evasive actions.
That is very true, but for several reasons:
1) location: embedded work is not necessarily something you find in every city. Much of it is concentrated in cities like the SF Bay area, Detroit (cars are at least still designed there), place where aerospace is. So much of consumer devices are designed off-shore now.
2) how talent is scouted: in my job-seeking experience, most engineering jobs are never posted. And the jobs that are posted are vaporware or duplicates of jobs already filled - usually just to help recruiters fill their databases in case a job opens up. Sometimes you have to cold-call HR departments or work with head-hunters. Hiring of friends or classmates is very common, so it pays to know people.
3) HR: jobs that need embedded programmers are often listed more generically by HR if they don't understand the significance of embedded vs. systems or applications programming. Often people find themselves doing embedded programming when the job description was simply an EE-type job posting for hardware design.
You could train it with 80% of the historical data and see if it predicts the next 20% of historical data.
Things that require assembly:
- special instructions that the compiler didn't support, but that need to be manipulated
- extensions to the instruction set like DSP, SIMD, etc. Compilers generally won't automatically make use of these. If you are lucky, your compiler has macros that basically translate to asm instructions.
- math operations not supported effectively in the abstract concepts of your programming language (overflow, carry, etc.)
- access to data types or structures that your language cannot support effectively
- work-around compiler bugs or limitations
- access to special memory areas that the compiler doesn't understand
- code that just won't run fast enough or use resources efficiently from the compiler
Granted, C++ on x86 or ARM probably has enough maturity to avoid these issues. But these are daily occurrences on embedded platforms.