Because you couldn't come up with my sequence of 0s and 1s without me. If you want to break it down that way why should someone get copyright on a book just because it is a sequence of black dots that make up things we recognize as letters. Or paintings because they are just splashes of different pigments on a wall.
Copyright wasn't created to sustain the creation of art. It wasn't (and still isn't) about making sure the artist gets rewarded for the effort. It was, and still is, about rewarding those entrepreneurs who are willing to take the risk of copying those works and distributing the copies. Creating art was never the expensive part. Making copies so that society could enjoy the art was. Today that is no longer true. No one needs an incentive to distribute the works, people will do it for free. Copyright is an anachronism. The behavior, it was created to promote, now happens automatically and without intervention of any kind. Copyright has outlived the purpose for which it was created, and now serves only to prevent the very activity it was supposed to promote. Ask yourself, if there was no copyright, would society as a whole be better off going forward? The answer is absolutely yes. Artists don't create works for money, they create works because they can't help themselves. They will continue to do it even if they are not paid to do so because it is a part of who they are. If you want to do something good for society, figure out how to make sure that artists get the food, shelter, and tools they need to create, and let the internet worry about how to get those finished products into the hands of the people. That will make the world a better place.
Just as a point of fact, I pirated lots when I was a kid. Now I have money, and now I buy games.
Except for one thing... Now that I'm willing to pay money for things, I'm ALSO willing to look more closely at the quality of what I'm purchasing. If I don't like what I see, I don't buy it, period. If it's good but too expensive (and yes, I am the sole judge for what I feel is too expensive), I don't buy it.
I cant agree more. I used to spend a fair amount of money on CDs, but I only bought through "Columbia house" and other cd discounters, and it didn't take long before I had exhausted their inventory. I stopped buying for two reasons. First, I already owned everthing that was priced where I was willing to pay, and getting the music from CDs onto my personal do-hickey player was a royal pain in the rump. I found it was simply easier to go and download a copy than to rip it myself, and forget about carrying hundreds of CDs around.
That is how they lost me. I wont come back because the only place to get everything in one shot is iTunes, and I still cant use their songs on most of my do-hickeys without a pain-in-the-ass conversion. So I download, and once in a while (when I find something truly exceptional), I buy, but not until I have already downloaded a copy. I buy just to make sure the artists gets something.
Movies are going the same way. For the moment, its more convenient to simply buy and have DVD's. I regularly check out the $5 and $8 bins when I'm out shopping, and I still find lots to buy, but I'll be damned if I'm paying more than that for anything other than the most exceptional of movies (like Fight Club ironically enough). Soon, thanks to Boxee and their ilk, my attitude towards movies will come more in line with my attitude on music, and if the movie industry hasn't gotten their heads out of their ass before that time, they will loose my money just like the music industry did.
As for games, I don't play as much as I used to, but the old business model still works just fine for them. I'm not in a position to be trying to play the same types of games on all my devices, so I am content to have my purchase locked to just one machine. Someday that may change, but until it does, the game devs have me by the pocketbook, and I reward them amply for their continued efforts.
If person, like the GP, has the ability to pay and still chooses not to, then that's their choice. But don't paint everyone else with the same dishonest brush. Some of us are simply pissed off.
It would take another sentence at most to tie an explanation of SoC. This is not about anger, or being ill prepared. That is just ridiculous anyways. How do you prepare yourself for exposure to jargon from dozens of different fields?
One word: Google
There are two kinds of people on the planet right now. Those that know how to find the answer to any question humanity knows the answer to... and those that don't. I don't understand 3/4 of any technical jargon that I see in slashdot articles. When I find the topic interesting enough, I Google the things I am unfamiliar with. This approach serves as a good launching pad for learning about any unfamiliar topic. Anyone who whines that other people aren't doing their basic research for them deserve to remain ignorant of the world around them.
That's what I always liked about Stephen Hawking's books.
My mother reads hawking. She is ill equipped to understand Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, but believes that because whe has read hawking, she understands something about these fields. It is patently absurd, because if you don't understand the jargon, you don't understand the field. The jargon didn't just spring up to make people sound elitist, it is there to denote very specific things that normal language cant relay. Hawking explains some of the jargon, but without the math it is irrelevant. More importantly, Hawking is in the business of selling books to lay people. These articles (And slashdot's subsequent conversations are not intended for that same audience).
It's not that hard. Another sentence at most. I don't have a problem searching for terms and concepts I don't fully grasp, but it would be nice to have some quality journalism again. Seriously.... grammar and spelling mistakes everywhere now, even at mainstream outlets like CNN. Just once I would like the impression that somebody with an English major was doing actual editing.
The only problem with that is that English majors are no longer qualified to understand the world around them. Once upon a time, a Liberal Arts degree came with enough STEM to be useful in many contexts, these days its just a very expensive credential that has no substance behind it, and the holders of these degrees are not qualified to speak to any subject outside their own very narrow view. These are not the people you want editing technical documents, because they would spell check the value right out of them. If you don't understand the acronyms, use Google until you do, or just give it up. Don't get mad at others because you have ill prepared yourself to understand the world around you, and for gods sake stop expecting anyone to feed you sanitized news because you might just be unlucky enough to get your wish.
So, how is this offering from India any different? I could do it in less than 8 to 16 weeks if the customer supplies me the C code to be converted. As in, download/purchase any one of these utilities, run the customer's file through it, and mail it back to them.
Pretty simple.
Dear Sir, please implement the following program in hardware:
main(int argc, char* argv)
{
int niter=0;
double x,y;
int i,count=0;/* # of points in the 1st quadrant of unit circle */
double z;
double pi;
printf("Enter the number of iterations used to estimate pi: ");
scanf("%d",&niter);
/* initialize random numbers */
srand(SEED);
count=0;
for ( i=0; i
x = (double)rand()/RAND_MAX;
y = (double)rand()/RAND_MAX;
z = x*x+y*y;
if (z;
}
pi=(double)count/niter*4;
printf("# of trials= %d , estimate of pi is %g \n",niter,pi);
}
Presumably, though, you could use a source-to-source compiler to convert C (with certain restrictions) into SystemC.* From there, you could do source-to-source compilation to convert SystemC into Verilog or whatever. You'd end up with crappy hardware, but the claim says nothing about design quality only design capability.
The problem with compiling any high level language to hardware is that there are simple high level constructs that are prohibitively difficult to render in hardware. A good example is any procedural function like a loop with dependencies that prevent parallelization. Such loops can only be processed sequentially while the rest of the "program" can be rendered simultaneously. This leads to all kinds of synchronization problems. Hardware description Languages combat this problem by making non-synchronous constructs explicitly non-synthesizeable, or outright prohibited. As a good exercise for the reader, ask yourself how you would implement a divider coupled to an adder in hardware. The adder is a simple construct that can be fully paralleled into a SOP (Sum of Products). The divider would require an almost impossible number of gates to create as an SOP for any realistic number of bits, so the divider needs to be implemented as a sequence of repeating steps, Now how would you make the adder interact with the divider? The answer is not trivial, and all we tried to do is implement X = A + B/C. At its root, compiling any language to hardware is a massive exercise in dependency mapping. Some languages are designed for this (Verilog, VHDL), others are not (any non HDL language).
A large part of her behavior was from extreme abuse. What would be the effects of simple isolation? Isolation with teaching and socialization videos / tv / internet?
For that matter, what are the effects of prolonged isolation on adults? This is the more interesting question as it will relate strongly to space travel in any significant quantity.
Teachers are there to keep our sanity. Humans need social interaction. Physical interaction.
They do? What happens if they don't get it? I don't necessarily disagree with you, but a statement that bold requires some degree of evidential support.
Running a stop sign is not a tiny little thing. If the officer actually observed the complete failure to properly obey the STOP sign, a ticket should have been issued.
Actually, there is a lot of gray area around a stop sign. Lets say you come to a stop sign at the intersection of two streets in the middle of nowhere with 1/2 mile visibility in all directions and no traffic. Why should you stop? The law? That's just stupid. What if you slow down approaching a stop sign, prepared to stop, and then speed up when the way is clear? Stop signs are an abomination and should all be replaced with yield signs. If we replaced all intersections with roundabouts (assuming there was space), the annual fuel and time savings would be somewhere north of $100B for the economy. A very large percentage of the time we stop at stop signs are unnecessary for any reason other than compliance with the law. Roundabouts are safer, and more efficient as they eliminate the need to stop in many circumstances. Stop signs are bad. they give drivers going in the other directions a false sense of security and cost billions in lost productivity. At the very least replace all the stop signs with yield signs. Better yet, start wholesale replacement of intersections with rotaries and their ilk.
I don't know how it works in the 1000s of other cities and towns, but in mine THE POLICE DON'T KEEP THE MONEY.
Most jurisdictions have this same arrangement, but the cheat is common and almost universal. Victim gets ticketed, and shows up in court knowing that the prosecutor will plead down. Prosecutor pleads down to a parking fine (or other 0 point non-moving violation). The magic is that for the 0 point non-moving violations, the local jurisdiction gets to keep some portion of the money (usually half). My town does this, as do all of the towns around me. My local town police have the sense not to pull this with town residents, but all of the cops in other towns will get me. I found the only practical defense was to join the police benevolent association. It is something that I would encourage people to do anyway, but officers that are otherwise ticketing everyone in sight will usually let a PBA go as long as the infraction isn't severe (don't run any red lights and stay with 10 MPH of the limit). The town uses the additional income to offset our property taxes, so in a way we are taxing the motorists who pass through our town to reduce our local taxes. Given that, I don't begrudge the additional cost of driving, and am actually kind of encouraged that these fines actually help fund our local senior transportation service and the local bus service.
They serve more arrest warrants than anybody else and are the ones most likely to be visible to the population at large.
That is only because the police refuse to put any real resources into investigating *real* crimes like theft and vandalism. If the police took all of their traffic cops and put them on investigating property crimes instead, there would be a huge decrease in property crimes and we could start putting people in jail for real crimes for a change. How many times have you heard about a friend whos home or car got broken into? These criminals are not brain surgeons. They leave tremendous amounts of evidence behind, but the police dont even bother to collect any of it, much less investigate. My car was broken into a few years back, and the perpetrator left about 50 full prints behind. The cops wouldn't even show up (took a statement over the phone!). My wife was a criminal justice student at the time and had access to a fingerprinting lab. After lifting about 3 dozen prints, a friend of ours in the DCJS ran the prints through the database (only a minor violation...), and sure enough out pops a guy we've never met. Had three prior convictions for drug related charges, and one grand theft! This was strike four, and the guy would have been off the streets for good, but the cops failed completely.
Long Story short, the police need to stop worrying about traffic tickets so much, and start doing actual criminal investigations. At any given point, how many cops are tied up in speeding traps? How many real crimes could be solved if those cops were to spend their time investigating instead of sitting in a parked car...
More importantly, we only have the officers word that he didn't stop, and the officer can't say with any certainty that he didn't, as the officer did not make any direct observations that contradict the defendants claims. What the officer did see (as demonstrated by the defendants math) could very easily have been an optical illusion (and a common one at that).
In Canada, the first thing the courts would do would call for a media black out until the judgement is rendered, and then likely another black out until sentencing. The idea is to prevent bias in the potential jury pool.
That would not work in the US. Canadian Free Speech is somewhat more limited than American Free Speech. In the US, freedom of expression is taken to an almost paranoid degree. The press can't be enjoined from presenting anything they like short of inciting a riot (which they've never been prosecuted for anyway), or publishing national security information. In Canada, the courts have more support in the law, and significantly more precedent to allow them to squash free speech rights for the sake of a fair trial.
This event is exposing the BEST of this country. Most people are outraged by this event because up until a few hours ago THERE WOULD BE NO TRIAL. Now, the wheels of justice are spinning, in large part due to public attention on this case.
That is an extremely libelous statement, and one which I hope you are prepared to provide more than hear-say evidence. Are you an investigative journalist? have you personally been tracking down evidence for this case? You sir are the problem with this country, far more than racism (and that is saying a lot). When well meaning idiots go off half cocked at the slightest hint of conspiracy or injustice, you give power to the media who will use you and your ignorance to fuel their own agenda. Let the powers that be, do their work, and when you have hard evidence of real negligence, then speak up. Until then, take your righteous indignation and keep it to yourself lest you be accused of using someone elses tragedy to further your own public image.
It's exposing far worse than that. It is exposing the extreme willingness of the mass media in this country to use racism and impunity to further their own monetary and political goals. The police have been very careful to dot their i's and cross their t's because they cant afford a mis-step in large part due to the over-amped media attention to this.
Racism will never die as long as a story like this is a media sensation.
Replaced it with a more expensive HDMI cable, and haven't had any problems since.
You can make your more expensive cable behave just like the cheaper one too. Just kink it real hard and straighten it back out. This will probably damage enough of the wires to cause an intermittent fault for a while before it fails outright. The only real advantage *some* more expensive cables have is a bigger physical wire which is more resilient to kinking, but most cables use the same gauge wire, and just use stupid gimmicks like "Gold plated connectors", or braided shielding, or magic plastic, or any of a hundred other irrelevant things. In short, the cheap cable you initially bought was DOA, and should be returned for one that wasn't mishandled.
Why can't people in rural or semi-rural parts of the US just use Amazon like everyone else in the US?
If you have a week and a half to wait (or a day and $15 for express shipping) then online ordering is great.
Thats funny, Amazon has warehouses withing two days shipping from pretty much the entire US (much of it within 1 day). They ship from the closest of these sites to the recipient, so unless you are ordering very rare items, or are purchasing through Amazon, but not from Amazon, your product will be on your doorstep two days later...
Restated, is the sole reason people no longer desire to go to Best Buy due to the poor shopping experience or is that just the most glaring issue among many?
It is just one of many issues facing BB. Their business model is pretty much toast. They might do better to try something a little more off beat, like setting up a game room where people can come in a rent high end gaming rigs by the hour to play whatever fad game of the week. This way they have a strong draw to bring in the kind of people who are going to cough up top dollar at some point, plus a gaming room with a couple dozen machines can actually be a pretty good money maker. I know a guy about 3 hours from me that has two 12 seat gaming rooms, and since he put it in, he has tripled his net profits, and not all of it is from renting the seats. He is getting a tremendous amount of secondary sales from impulse shoppers. Maybe BB takes this a step further, and makes sure that they have nice big fat pipes between stores, and makes big hay out of tournaments and the like and I bet they could build a whole new market.
Put some tablets, digital cameras, appliances, and televisions on a display floor and then make the money off of cell phones, cables, and media like flash drives and memory cards.
They would be best served by having a limited selection of the big floor space hogs and rotating inventory fairly regularly.
So you're saying follow the radio shack business model? Its worked wonders for them... Get rid of the crap, that people only come in for once a decade, and sell the stuff with real profit! Here's the problem. The non-profitable stuff is the only reason people went into the store. The profitable stuff is more an impulse buy than a reason to come in. So Radio Shack gave up their draw to maximize shelf space for high margin stuff, but in the process drove away 90% of their customer base. Permanently. They will never get those customers back. No matter what they do, they are basically toast. When people realize they cant get what they need at BB, they wont go there. The other day I went looking for an HDMI cable (3 foot). I know a little about consumer electronics, so I know that digital cables dont need to be fancy to work perfect. That being said, an HDMI cable should run about $10. So, being in a hurry I went to BB. Sure enough, they had HDMI cables, tons of them. The cheapest was $75. WTF I said, so I figured Walmart. If ever there was a place to shop when quality doesn't matter... Walmart: $53! WTF I said, so I figured Radio Shack. What the hell I said, I haven't been in one in a decade, maybe they wised up a bit. RadioShack: $95! Finally I decided I didn't need one that bad and ordered online from Cables to Go: $11 including shipping. Had it in my hands less than 30 hours later. These people have given up the draw, and they wonder why their profits are plummeting.
I guess I'm in the minority, but I've actually got a pretty positive outlook on them. Most of the time, I can find what I'm looking for there, and it's often at a price competitive with the best I can find online.
Then you're not looking in the right places online, or you're buying overpriced commodities like Apple brand PCs, or Microsoft brand anything.
If you're looking for generic (I need a mouse, keyboard, sound card, etc...), then you'll always find a much better deal online. I suggest pricewatch.com as a good place to start.
I have a job, a home, a bright looking future. I think there's lots of problems with the world that should be fixed, but I sure as hell am not going to risk losing what I have.
Then, frankly, you don't belong in a democratic society. The whole point of our society and especially how the U.S. was set up to begin with was so that anyone in the populous could fight for what they believe is right without the fear of losing everything they have for speaking up. I am beginning to think that complacency isn't the real problem here, cowardice is. When did America get castrated by the corporations and the bullies? It's a sad day in a democracy when the people are afraid to say something is right or wrong because they are afraid to lose everything.
No, Actually the failing there is Democracy. It may be the best we've got, but its a far cry from good. Democracy fails the same way everything else political fails; No one gets involved unless it is in their best interest to do so, and the only time it is in someones *individual* best interest to get involved is when the system is screwing them personally, or they are using the system to screw someone else.
Whatever you do, whatever happens: Don't call the police.
That's incredibly bad advice. My bank called me at work last April asking if I was missing some checks, that someone had tried to cash an obviously forged one. When I got home I found my back door broken open and a lot of stuff gone -- including an almost ful box of checks. I called the cops, who took the report, went to the bank and viewed the video, and arrested the guy half an hour later.
However, he had accomplices. Over the next year (it's still going on) I would get notices from merchants that I'd cashed checks on a closed account. Of course I cloised if after the theft! I sent all of them copies of the police report, and the fraudulent bastards, every single one, turned them into the county's State's Attorney anyway.
Had I not reported the burglary I could have wound up in prison for those damned stolen checks.
If you get in an automobile accident you had damned well better call the cops, because if you don't you're jailhouse-bound. If there is an injury you've committed a felony, and the cops are pretty damned serious about folks leaving the scene of an accident.
Now, someone attcks you in a bar? Don't call the cops, they're as likely to arrest you as your attacker.
So what you're saying is the only good reason to call the police is to defend yourself... Thats even better advice than the GP was handing out. The truth is that the police are too busy handing out traffic tickets, and arresting drug addicts, to do their job. Its high time that the police were forced to a return to their responsibility to society. Take the monetary incentive out of the cycle, and the cops would do what they are supposed to, but as long as some part of the department budget is tied to handing out traffic tickets, that's what they're going to do.
Really, what advantages do you have with using an old, outdated version? Smaller memory footprint, well, are you actually low on memory? RAM is cheap. You already said that version 3.X is slower than modern builds.
When you have to choose between food fro a week and ram, I think you'll change your mind about how cheap ram is, especially if your PC wont accept any more ram than it already has...
It needs to be pointed out to the Slashdot crowd, not everyone who hates having to upgrade is a Luddite. There are real world costs that the majority of Americans face, and the overwhelming majority the worlds population faces, that make constant upgrade paths prohibitive. $40 for new ram is more than 1/2 of the worlds population pays for food each month, and would make many Americans cringe with having to figure out what to give up to pay for it as well. So the next time you are in a position of wanting to force an upgrade ask yourself, what am I buying with this, and who needs it?
So, basically, everyone else was lying about how advanced they were, so Firefox should, too?
Welcome to marketing 101. As you can see form the syllabus, the course is pretty easy, and all you have to do to succeed is leave your soul in our safe deposit box...
Slashdot Mirror
Because you couldn't come up with my sequence of 0s and 1s without me. If you want to break it down that way why should someone get copyright on a book just because it is a sequence of black dots that make up things we recognize as letters. Or paintings because they are just splashes of different pigments on a wall.
Copyright wasn't created to sustain the creation of art. It wasn't (and still isn't) about making sure the artist gets rewarded for the effort. It was, and still is, about rewarding those entrepreneurs who are willing to take the risk of copying those works and distributing the copies. Creating art was never the expensive part. Making copies so that society could enjoy the art was. Today that is no longer true. No one needs an incentive to distribute the works, people will do it for free. Copyright is an anachronism. The behavior, it was created to promote, now happens automatically and without intervention of any kind. Copyright has outlived the purpose for which it was created, and now serves only to prevent the very activity it was supposed to promote. Ask yourself, if there was no copyright, would society as a whole be better off going forward? The answer is absolutely yes. Artists don't create works for money, they create works because they can't help themselves. They will continue to do it even if they are not paid to do so because it is a part of who they are. If you want to do something good for society, figure out how to make sure that artists get the food, shelter, and tools they need to create, and let the internet worry about how to get those finished products into the hands of the people. That will make the world a better place.
-=Geoskd
Just as a point of fact, I pirated lots when I was a kid. Now I have money, and now I buy games.
Except for one thing... Now that I'm willing to pay money for things, I'm ALSO willing to look more closely at the quality of what I'm purchasing. If I don't like what I see, I don't buy it, period. If it's good but too expensive (and yes, I am the sole judge for what I feel is too expensive), I don't buy it.
I cant agree more. I used to spend a fair amount of money on CDs, but I only bought through "Columbia house" and other cd discounters, and it didn't take long before I had exhausted their inventory. I stopped buying for two reasons. First, I already owned everthing that was priced where I was willing to pay, and getting the music from CDs onto my personal do-hickey player was a royal pain in the rump. I found it was simply easier to go and download a copy than to rip it myself, and forget about carrying hundreds of CDs around.
That is how they lost me. I wont come back because the only place to get everything in one shot is iTunes, and I still cant use their songs on most of my do-hickeys without a pain-in-the-ass conversion. So I download, and once in a while (when I find something truly exceptional), I buy, but not until I have already downloaded a copy. I buy just to make sure the artists gets something.
Movies are going the same way. For the moment, its more convenient to simply buy and have DVD's. I regularly check out the $5 and $8 bins when I'm out shopping, and I still find lots to buy, but I'll be damned if I'm paying more than that for anything other than the most exceptional of movies (like Fight Club ironically enough). Soon, thanks to Boxee and their ilk, my attitude towards movies will come more in line with my attitude on music, and if the movie industry hasn't gotten their heads out of their ass before that time, they will loose my money just like the music industry did.
As for games, I don't play as much as I used to, but the old business model still works just fine for them. I'm not in a position to be trying to play the same types of games on all my devices, so I am content to have my purchase locked to just one machine. Someday that may change, but until it does, the game devs have me by the pocketbook, and I reward them amply for their continued efforts.
If person, like the GP, has the ability to pay and still chooses not to, then that's their choice. But don't paint everyone else with the same dishonest brush. Some of us are simply pissed off.
Amen
-=Geoskd
Now implement a compiler that does all that, but for any arbitrary equation...
Let me know how that turns out.
-=Geoskd
It would take another sentence at most to tie an explanation of SoC. This is not about anger, or being ill prepared. That is just ridiculous anyways. How do you prepare yourself for exposure to jargon from dozens of different fields?
One word: Google
There are two kinds of people on the planet right now. Those that know how to find the answer to any question humanity knows the answer to... and those that don't. I don't understand 3/4 of any technical jargon that I see in slashdot articles. When I find the topic interesting enough, I Google the things I am unfamiliar with. This approach serves as a good launching pad for learning about any unfamiliar topic. Anyone who whines that other people aren't doing their basic research for them deserve to remain ignorant of the world around them.
That's what I always liked about Stephen Hawking's books.
My mother reads hawking. She is ill equipped to understand Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, but believes that because whe has read hawking, she understands something about these fields. It is patently absurd, because if you don't understand the jargon, you don't understand the field. The jargon didn't just spring up to make people sound elitist, it is there to denote very specific things that normal language cant relay. Hawking explains some of the jargon, but without the math it is irrelevant. More importantly, Hawking is in the business of selling books to lay people. These articles (And slashdot's subsequent conversations are not intended for that same audience).
-=Geoskd
It's not that hard. Another sentence at most. I don't have a problem searching for terms and concepts I don't fully grasp, but it would be nice to have some quality journalism again. Seriously.... grammar and spelling mistakes everywhere now, even at mainstream outlets like CNN. Just once I would like the impression that somebody with an English major was doing actual editing.
The only problem with that is that English majors are no longer qualified to understand the world around them. Once upon a time, a Liberal Arts degree came with enough STEM to be useful in many contexts, these days its just a very expensive credential that has no substance behind it, and the holders of these degrees are not qualified to speak to any subject outside their own very narrow view. These are not the people you want editing technical documents, because they would spell check the value right out of them. If you don't understand the acronyms, use Google until you do, or just give it up. Don't get mad at others because you have ill prepared yourself to understand the world around you, and for gods sake stop expecting anyone to feed you sanitized news because you might just be unlucky enough to get your wish.
-=Geoskd
So, how is this offering from India any different? I could do it in less than 8 to 16 weeks if the customer supplies me the C code to be converted. As in, download/purchase any one of these utilities, run the customer's file through it, and mail it back to them.
Pretty simple.
Dear Sir, please implement the following program in hardware:
/* # of points in the 1st quadrant of unit circle */
/* initialize random numbers */
main(int argc, char* argv)
{
int niter=0;
double x,y;
int i,count=0;
double z;
double pi;
printf("Enter the number of iterations used to estimate pi: ");
scanf("%d",&niter);
srand(SEED);
count=0;
for ( i=0; i x = (double)rand()/RAND_MAX;
y = (double)rand()/RAND_MAX;
z = x*x+y*y;
if (z; }
pi=(double)count/niter*4;
printf("# of trials= %d , estimate of pi is %g \n",niter,pi);
}
Let me know how that turns out.
-=Geoskd
Presumably, though, you could use a source-to-source compiler to convert C (with certain restrictions) into SystemC.* From there, you could do source-to-source compilation to convert SystemC into Verilog or whatever. You'd end up with crappy hardware, but the claim says nothing about design quality only design capability.
The problem with compiling any high level language to hardware is that there are simple high level constructs that are prohibitively difficult to render in hardware. A good example is any procedural function like a loop with dependencies that prevent parallelization. Such loops can only be processed sequentially while the rest of the "program" can be rendered simultaneously. This leads to all kinds of synchronization problems. Hardware description Languages combat this problem by making non-synchronous constructs explicitly non-synthesizeable, or outright prohibited. As a good exercise for the reader, ask yourself how you would implement a divider coupled to an adder in hardware. The adder is a simple construct that can be fully paralleled into a SOP (Sum of Products). The divider would require an almost impossible number of gates to create as an SOP for any realistic number of bits, so the divider needs to be implemented as a sequence of repeating steps, Now how would you make the adder interact with the divider? The answer is not trivial, and all we tried to do is implement X = A + B/C. At its root, compiling any language to hardware is a massive exercise in dependency mapping. Some languages are designed for this (Verilog, VHDL), others are not (any non HDL language).
-=Geoskd
Humans need social interaction.
What happens if they don't get it?
Some will end up like Genie.
A large part of her behavior was from extreme abuse. What would be the effects of simple isolation? Isolation with teaching and socialization videos / tv / internet?
For that matter, what are the effects of prolonged isolation on adults? This is the more interesting question as it will relate strongly to space travel in any significant quantity.
-=Geoskd
Teachers are there to keep our sanity. Humans need social interaction. Physical interaction.
They do? What happens if they don't get it? I don't necessarily disagree with you, but a statement that bold requires some degree of evidential support.
-=Geoskd
Running a stop sign is not a tiny little thing. If the officer actually observed the complete failure to properly obey the STOP sign, a ticket should have been issued.
Actually, there is a lot of gray area around a stop sign. Lets say you come to a stop sign at the intersection of two streets in the middle of nowhere with 1/2 mile visibility in all directions and no traffic. Why should you stop? The law? That's just stupid. What if you slow down approaching a stop sign, prepared to stop, and then speed up when the way is clear? Stop signs are an abomination and should all be replaced with yield signs. If we replaced all intersections with roundabouts (assuming there was space), the annual fuel and time savings would be somewhere north of $100B for the economy. A very large percentage of the time we stop at stop signs are unnecessary for any reason other than compliance with the law. Roundabouts are safer, and more efficient as they eliminate the need to stop in many circumstances. Stop signs are bad. they give drivers going in the other directions a false sense of security and cost billions in lost productivity. At the very least replace all the stop signs with yield signs. Better yet, start wholesale replacement of intersections with rotaries and their ilk.
-=Geoskd
I don't know how it works in the 1000s of other cities and towns, but in mine THE POLICE DON'T KEEP THE MONEY.
Most jurisdictions have this same arrangement, but the cheat is common and almost universal. Victim gets ticketed, and shows up in court knowing that the prosecutor will plead down. Prosecutor pleads down to a parking fine (or other 0 point non-moving violation). The magic is that for the 0 point non-moving violations, the local jurisdiction gets to keep some portion of the money (usually half). My town does this, as do all of the towns around me. My local town police have the sense not to pull this with town residents, but all of the cops in other towns will get me. I found the only practical defense was to join the police benevolent association. It is something that I would encourage people to do anyway, but officers that are otherwise ticketing everyone in sight will usually let a PBA go as long as the infraction isn't severe (don't run any red lights and stay with 10 MPH of the limit). The town uses the additional income to offset our property taxes, so in a way we are taxing the motorists who pass through our town to reduce our local taxes. Given that, I don't begrudge the additional cost of driving, and am actually kind of encouraged that these fines actually help fund our local senior transportation service and the local bus service.
-=Geoskd
They serve more arrest warrants than anybody else and are the ones most likely to be visible to the population at large.
That is only because the police refuse to put any real resources into investigating *real* crimes like theft and vandalism. If the police took all of their traffic cops and put them on investigating property crimes instead, there would be a huge decrease in property crimes and we could start putting people in jail for real crimes for a change. How many times have you heard about a friend whos home or car got broken into? These criminals are not brain surgeons. They leave tremendous amounts of evidence behind, but the police dont even bother to collect any of it, much less investigate. My car was broken into a few years back, and the perpetrator left about 50 full prints behind. The cops wouldn't even show up (took a statement over the phone!). My wife was a criminal justice student at the time and had access to a fingerprinting lab. After lifting about 3 dozen prints, a friend of ours in the DCJS ran the prints through the database (only a minor violation...), and sure enough out pops a guy we've never met. Had three prior convictions for drug related charges, and one grand theft! This was strike four, and the guy would have been off the streets for good, but the cops failed completely.
Long Story short, the police need to stop worrying about traffic tickets so much, and start doing actual criminal investigations. At any given point, how many cops are tied up in speeding traps? How many real crimes could be solved if those cops were to spend their time investigating instead of sitting in a parked car...
-=Geoskd
We only have his word that he actually stopped.
More importantly, we only have the officers word that he didn't stop, and the officer can't say with any certainty that he didn't, as the officer did not make any direct observations that contradict the defendants claims. What the officer did see (as demonstrated by the defendants math) could very easily have been an optical illusion (and a common one at that).
-=Geoskd
In Canada, the first thing the courts would do would call for a media black out until the judgement is rendered, and then likely another black out until sentencing. The idea is to prevent bias in the potential jury pool.
That would not work in the US. Canadian Free Speech is somewhat more limited than American Free Speech. In the US, freedom of expression is taken to an almost paranoid degree. The press can't be enjoined from presenting anything they like short of inciting a riot (which they've never been prosecuted for anyway), or publishing national security information. In Canada, the courts have more support in the law, and significantly more precedent to allow them to squash free speech rights for the sake of a fair trial.
-=Geoskd
This event is exposing the BEST of this country. Most people are outraged by this event because up until a few hours ago THERE WOULD BE NO TRIAL. Now, the wheels of justice are spinning, in large part due to public attention on this case.
That is an extremely libelous statement, and one which I hope you are prepared to provide more than hear-say evidence. Are you an investigative journalist? have you personally been tracking down evidence for this case? You sir are the problem with this country, far more than racism (and that is saying a lot). When well meaning idiots go off half cocked at the slightest hint of conspiracy or injustice, you give power to the media who will use you and your ignorance to fuel their own agenda. Let the powers that be, do their work, and when you have hard evidence of real negligence, then speak up. Until then, take your righteous indignation and keep it to yourself lest you be accused of using someone elses tragedy to further your own public image.
-=Geoskd
Agreed. It's exposing racism and impunity.
It's exposing far worse than that. It is exposing the extreme willingness of the mass media in this country to use racism and impunity to further their own monetary and political goals. The police have been very careful to dot their i's and cross their t's because they cant afford a mis-step in large part due to the over-amped media attention to this.
Racism will never die as long as a story like this is a media sensation.
-=Geoskd
Replaced it with a more expensive HDMI cable, and haven't had any problems since.
You can make your more expensive cable behave just like the cheaper one too. Just kink it real hard and straighten it back out. This will probably damage enough of the wires to cause an intermittent fault for a while before it fails outright. The only real advantage *some* more expensive cables have is a bigger physical wire which is more resilient to kinking, but most cables use the same gauge wire, and just use stupid gimmicks like "Gold plated connectors", or braided shielding, or magic plastic, or any of a hundred other irrelevant things. In short, the cheap cable you initially bought was DOA, and should be returned for one that wasn't mishandled.
-=Geoskd
Why can't people in rural or semi-rural parts of the US just use Amazon like everyone else in the US?
If you have a week and a half to wait (or a day and $15 for express shipping) then online ordering is great.
Thats funny, Amazon has warehouses withing two days shipping from pretty much the entire US (much of it within 1 day). They ship from the closest of these sites to the recipient, so unless you are ordering very rare items, or are purchasing through Amazon, but not from Amazon, your product will be on your doorstep two days later...
-=Geoskd
Restated, is the sole reason people no longer desire to go to Best Buy due to the poor shopping experience or is that just the most glaring issue among many?
It is just one of many issues facing BB. Their business model is pretty much toast. They might do better to try something a little more off beat, like setting up a game room where people can come in a rent high end gaming rigs by the hour to play whatever fad game of the week. This way they have a strong draw to bring in the kind of people who are going to cough up top dollar at some point, plus a gaming room with a couple dozen machines can actually be a pretty good money maker. I know a guy about 3 hours from me that has two 12 seat gaming rooms, and since he put it in, he has tripled his net profits, and not all of it is from renting the seats. He is getting a tremendous amount of secondary sales from impulse shoppers. Maybe BB takes this a step further, and makes sure that they have nice big fat pipes between stores, and makes big hay out of tournaments and the like and I bet they could build a whole new market.
-=Geoskd
Put some tablets, digital cameras, appliances, and televisions on a display floor and then make the money off of cell phones, cables, and media like flash drives and memory cards.
They would be best served by having a limited selection of the big floor space hogs and rotating inventory fairly regularly.
So you're saying follow the radio shack business model? Its worked wonders for them... Get rid of the crap, that people only come in for once a decade, and sell the stuff with real profit! Here's the problem. The non-profitable stuff is the only reason people went into the store. The profitable stuff is more an impulse buy than a reason to come in. So Radio Shack gave up their draw to maximize shelf space for high margin stuff, but in the process drove away 90% of their customer base. Permanently. They will never get those customers back. No matter what they do, they are basically toast. When people realize they cant get what they need at BB, they wont go there. The other day I went looking for an HDMI cable (3 foot). I know a little about consumer electronics, so I know that digital cables dont need to be fancy to work perfect. That being said, an HDMI cable should run about $10. So, being in a hurry I went to BB. Sure enough, they had HDMI cables, tons of them. The cheapest was $75. WTF I said, so I figured Walmart. If ever there was a place to shop when quality doesn't matter... Walmart: $53! WTF I said, so I figured Radio Shack. What the hell I said, I haven't been in one in a decade, maybe they wised up a bit. RadioShack: $95! Finally I decided I didn't need one that bad and ordered online from Cables to Go: $11 including shipping. Had it in my hands less than 30 hours later. These people have given up the draw, and they wonder why their profits are plummeting.
-=Geoskd
I guess I'm in the minority, but I've actually got a pretty positive outlook on them. Most of the time, I can find what I'm looking for there, and it's often at a price competitive with the best I can find online.
Then you're not looking in the right places online, or you're buying overpriced commodities like Apple brand PCs, or Microsoft brand anything.
If you're looking for generic (I need a mouse, keyboard, sound card, etc...), then you'll always find a much better deal online. I suggest pricewatch.com as a good place to start.
-=Geoskd
I have a job, a home, a bright looking future. I think there's lots of problems with the world that should be fixed, but I sure as hell am not going to risk losing what I have.
Then, frankly, you don't belong in a democratic society. The whole point of our society and especially how the U.S. was set up to begin with was so that anyone in the populous could fight for what they believe is right without the fear of losing everything they have for speaking up. I am beginning to think that complacency isn't the real problem here, cowardice is. When did America get castrated by the corporations and the bullies? It's a sad day in a democracy when the people are afraid to say something is right or wrong because they are afraid to lose everything.
No, Actually the failing there is Democracy. It may be the best we've got, but its a far cry from good. Democracy fails the same way everything else political fails; No one gets involved unless it is in their best interest to do so, and the only time it is in someones *individual* best interest to get involved is when the system is screwing them personally, or they are using the system to screw someone else.
-=Geoskd
Whatever you do, whatever happens: Don't call the police.
That's incredibly bad advice. My bank called me at work last April asking if I was missing some checks, that someone had tried to cash an obviously forged one. When I got home I found my back door broken open and a lot of stuff gone -- including an almost ful box of checks. I called the cops, who took the report, went to the bank and viewed the video, and arrested the guy half an hour later.
However, he had accomplices. Over the next year (it's still going on) I would get notices from merchants that I'd cashed checks on a closed account. Of course I cloised if after the theft! I sent all of them copies of the police report, and the fraudulent bastards, every single one, turned them into the county's State's Attorney anyway.
Had I not reported the burglary I could have wound up in prison for those damned stolen checks.
If you get in an automobile accident you had damned well better call the cops, because if you don't you're jailhouse-bound. If there is an injury you've committed a felony, and the cops are pretty damned serious about folks leaving the scene of an accident.
Now, someone attcks you in a bar? Don't call the cops, they're as likely to arrest you as your attacker.
So what you're saying is the only good reason to call the police is to defend yourself... Thats even better advice than the GP was handing out. The truth is that the police are too busy handing out traffic tickets, and arresting drug addicts, to do their job. Its high time that the police were forced to a return to their responsibility to society. Take the monetary incentive out of the cycle, and the cops would do what they are supposed to, but as long as some part of the department budget is tied to handing out traffic tickets, that's what they're going to do.
-=Geoskd
Really, what advantages do you have with using an old, outdated version? Smaller memory footprint, well, are you actually low on memory? RAM is cheap. You already said that version 3.X is slower than modern builds.
When you have to choose between food fro a week and ram, I think you'll change your mind about how cheap ram is, especially if your PC wont accept any more ram than it already has...
It needs to be pointed out to the Slashdot crowd, not everyone who hates having to upgrade is a Luddite. There are real world costs that the majority of Americans face, and the overwhelming majority the worlds population faces, that make constant upgrade paths prohibitive. $40 for new ram is more than 1/2 of the worlds population pays for food each month, and would make many Americans cringe with having to figure out what to give up to pay for it as well. So the next time you are in a position of wanting to force an upgrade ask yourself, what am I buying with this, and who needs it?
-=Geoskd -=Geoskd
So, basically, everyone else was lying about how advanced they were, so Firefox should, too?
Welcome to marketing 101. As you can see form the syllabus, the course is pretty easy, and all you have to do to succeed is leave your soul in our safe deposit box...
-=Geoskd