Strangely, people seem to be focused on the "OMG it's something that people know how to do already" and missed out on the price point. Yeah, given $15,000, I could develop something that does this by putting together panotools and a commercially available robot arm; that's not the point. The point is, it costs under $300, and that's pretty cool.
Ironically, the people claiming these researchers haven't done their homework seem to have not bothered to look into what claims to novelty are being made, something which is pretty trivial to do. Yes, this builds on a large body of work in photo stitching and superresolution. This is a problem because...?
AFAICT, no single part of this system is radically new or different, but as a whole, it's a pretty neat new thing. It's an interesting, integrated technology that's being made available to the average Joe.
It seems to be the same people that developed the Qwerk, which is a low cost LInux PC with integrated stuff for controlling robots. Same MO: cheap, integrated stuff to push robotic technology to the larger community.
So, please, get off your high horses people, and stop accusing people of laziness or dishonesty without first giving some modicum of effort to understanding what it is you're talking about.
While the numbers for the Linux kernel look pretty good, there's a bit more to this story, I think.
IIRC, Coverity is the commercialization of the "Stanford Checker" static analysis tool. By most accounts, it's a pretty nifty tool. Back when it was still a research project, some of the folks working on it would run it against different parts of the kernel and post the bugs it found to LKML. It was a mutually beneficial relationship--the kernel people fixed a lot of bugs, and the Stanford folks got analysis on the false positives which they then used to improve their tool.
I don't know if the Stanford Checker was used on other FOSS projects.
In the case of the kernel, at least, I would expect that some of the low defect rate can be attributed to that previous experience. I imagine the tool has improved over time, and I know there's been a lot of code added to/changed in the kernel, but still, the past history must help those numbers out significantly.
From personal observations, it seems unlikely that the random selection is uniform. I would guess they do what they call stratified random sampling, and what other people would call profiling.
I work for a university in the middle east. Once, when flying with 6 other people on one way tickets from the US to Qatar, every single one of us was "randomly" selected for extra security. When my parents, who live in the US, came out to visit, they were "randomly" selected for security. Upon returning to the states, they found that they were "randomly" selected for extra security checks on every flight they took for the next year or so. Me? I can recall one flight in the few years since I moved to the middle east in which I was not "randomly" selected for special security.
So I'm guessing that there is a random element to it, but if you meet certain criteria, your probability of selection is pretty close to 1...
I'm hoping to finish up a Ph.D. in Robotics in the next couple of years, so I have some perspective.
My background is C.S., and that serves me pretty well. There are not many interesting robots these days which are built and programmed from scratch by a single person. Robotics is by its nature cross disciplinary. You don't need to have the skills of a Mech E, or be a pro at VLSI work to be in the field. It's good to have some knowledge in those areas, but that's primarily to enable you to work effectively with other more hardware-oriented people, not to be a hardware designer.
The other point of which you are probably aware is that Robotics/AI is an extraordinarily diverse field, even more so than CS, which itself contains a large variety of options. You'll be better off if you have some narrower focus for long term work, be that data mining, machine learning, biomimetics, or whatever else you want to do.
So I wonder if this is primarily just a clever application of photostitching, or if they actually use superresolution techniques to generate a high-quality image.
Either way, neat hack. But the latter would definitely be the neat*er* hack.
I've actually worked for a number of years on autonomous vehicle technologies, and am more than passingly familiar with most of this stuff.
Wireless ad-hoc traffic information networks run into some major security issues. How do you establish trust? If the trust model is basically wide open, then antisocial people are going to put together systems which look at your route and start telling other cars "Avoid these roads at all costs! It's backed up for miles!", so that their own personal drive is relatively free of cars.
How do you prevent this? Do you require warnings from multiple sources before you believe them? Then you've just increased the required critical mass before usability by an order of magnitude. Do you trust that automobile makers can put together some sort of embedded crypto system that's "secure enough" and "tamper proof"? Well, that's worked so well for the DRM people, hasn't it?
Of course, if you're relying on the wireless system for safety, you're essentially giving the ability to swerve/brake hard to systems you don't own, so the matter of trust becomes even more significant, and liability becomes killer. Any way you tie the systems together to try to keep people safer, there's someone who's going to argue (with a non-negligable probability of success) that you should have done it a different way, and now you owe someone $millions.
In addition, liability is going to keep this stuff down for a while yet. No autonomous system is ever going to be perfect, and when dealing with loss of human life, liability more or less demands perfection. If I could put together a fully autonomous system tomorrow which provably had 99% fewer accidents than human drivers, I'd still get sued by the 1%.
This is the primary reason all remote sensing tech on the market today is in the form of "driver assist". If your system screws up, it's still primarily the driver's responsibility to avoid accidents.
I'm not a complete pessimist. I don't think the issues I'm raising are insoluable, and I believe we'll have good autonomous systems eventually. I just think the problems are fundamentally hard, and the legal environment doesn't help; it may be a few decades before the more exotic stuff gets into production cars.
As a Comp Sci major, I must warn you that your post sucks.
It has massive massive editing errors (bizzare? Corectly? it's?).
It could have been an excellent post, but it falls quite short.
Its spelling and prose falls far short.
Anyone know of a good barebones online storage service? There are companies like xdrive that provide fancy interfaces to 5GB of storage for ~$10/month, but I'm wondering if there's a company catering to geeks that sells a bit more storage for a bit less with some minimal interface (ssh?). I've had no luck digging up any such company on my own; anyone else find something interesting?
This comes out of AMD's aquisition of Rich Witek's startup (named Alchemy). Rich Witek was one of the original guys working on the Alpha chip (among other projects). Alchemy originally targetted PDA's with their low power MIPS32 processors and on-chip peripheral support.
Interestingly, Dan Dobberpuhl, another Digital alumnus who was influential in the Alpha project, also founded his own company to make MIPS based processers, though for a slightly different target market. That company was SiByte, and was acquired by Broadcom in 2000 or 2001. He has since moved on to start PASemi, which seems to be in the same general business.
Digital may be gone, but it's engineers are still making waves!
Re:Actually, it's an ARM7
on
A .Net CPU
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I assume FBGA is a typo for FPGA.
When referring to packaging, FBGA is usually Fine Ball Grid Array. I really doubt it's a typo. From the programmers point of view, the package virtually never significant.
Overall, this sounds remarkably similar to picoJava, which, last I checked, was going nowhere, and for good reason.
Designing bytecode formats for VMs is not really the same as designing opcodes for microprocessors -- shoehorning hardware that way is painful and generally results in less elegant, more expensive designs.
OTOH, the bytecodes in question aren't really significantly worse than, say, x86, and look where that is today...
Nope, sorry. Those control how the editor defaults to indenting a block, but never let you bind a key (like, say, tab) to re-indent the current line of code, or the current block of code.
Serves you right for not being a vi fan - there's already a vim kpart:).
Hey, I said I was not trying to start a flamewar, you vim-using scum-sucking infidel!:)
I love emacs. (No this is not an attempt to start a flamewar).
Since I wanted to see what the fuss was about, I recently grabbed the most recent KDevelop and took it for a spin. It's got a ton of really, really cool stuff in there. Integration with valgrind is sweet. The debugger integration is a Good Thing. The reasonably intuitive API documentation access is great. The integration with QT designer is beautiful.
If I were just starting to code, I'd probably use Kdevelop.
However, I found over the course of a couple of painful days that I'm too dependent on some features of emacs to make the switch worthwhile. Quick searching. Tab indentation. Keyboard split buffers. Mouseless cut and paste.
Some of these have equivalents in Kdevelop that would just require relearning a different way to work, which is fine, if somewhat aggravating in my personal case. But some, like tab indentation, don't. So I'm back in good old emacs.
I hear that there may be an effort to embed emacs as one of the source code editor options, in which case I'd definitely switch. I'd probably even switch if there were some reasonable emacs-like bindings in Kate. It looks like a really cool tool generally, and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to make a switch sometime in the not too distant future.
I got my B.S. in CS in 1997, from a small school with 5 CS faculty at the time (only 3 of which were full profs). It was not a bad program, but not stellar; I managed to pick up a good internship which turned into a good job after graduation.
It was definitely harder for me to get in the door for that first job, though. I got lucky in many respects, whereas other folks from higher profile programs had an easier in. For the most part, though, I agree with the folks here saying your first job matters more than your degree. After my first job, experience and social networking were definitely more important than the degree itself.
On the other hand, I didn't want to finish with a B.S., I wanted to go back to grad school and eventually get into teaching at the college level. So after having been a part of the workforce for a few years, I applied to Ph.D. programs at several well known schools.
Despite my having very good grades and excellent references, most of them turned me down flat. I'm reasonable sure the primary reason was my undergraduate degree -- when you're competing with 9 other people for one slot in the program, it's easy to get tossed out for not having a degree from a well known university. My work supervisor at the time got his Ph.D. in CS from CMU, one of the programs to which I was applying. He wrote one of my recommendations. I got in. I think if he hadn't, they probably would have turned me away because of my undergraduate degree as well.
So I do think what program you're in does matter. It's also been my recent experience that the undergrads at the high profile program really do learn a lot more than I did in my undergraduate program. That doesn't mean it's true in all cases, but it certainly is true in my limited experience.
When I first applied to undergrad programs, I was accepted at severalwell-knownprograms, but I decided I wanted to go to smaller, more personal school instead. I liked the program I was in, but if I had a chance to do it over again, I would choose a different school.
Shorter summary: Granter of degree is not destiny, but is an important component of same.
I think the target here is ultra-dense high capacity storage users. It has to be, though I can't imagine there are that many customers in this space.
Certainly for lower capacities (e.g. 10 TB), there are much, much cheaper turnkey solutions in the form of the XServe RAID from Apple, not to mention the stuff Promise sells.
So long as the holder of the domain makes it clear he is not affiliated with the compaign that the URL would imply, I don't see a problem with it. Looking over this site, I think it's sufficiently clear that it's not actually being run by the candidate being mocked.
On the other hand, looking over this site and seeing how it's done make me dislike Floyd more than Van Hollen. But I'm not in that district, so...
I don't see how this is significantly different than www.gwbush.com (currently defunct), although gwbush.com was a bit cleverer.
Those are interesting choices for "critical reads". Let's take a quick look, shall we?
Scott Johnson, of Power Line writes about how working to undo the damage of the Patriot Act is such a left wing position:
The concept of secrecy during wartime does not seem like much of a theme with which to scandalize average citizens. Average citizens might be more interested in seeking the thread that connects left-wing legal outfits such as the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights. The thread that is apparent to me from my visit to the Guild convention is the assault on the critical legal components of the defense of the United States from its Islamofascist enemies in the name of a Constitution that in reality they hate.
I don't have much firsthand experience with The Weekly Standard. It has the reputation of tilting conservative, but not in the rabid, right-is-good-left-is-bad style of, say, Newsmax. So I'll give this one a pass.
Little Green Footballs, on the other hand, is a lair of unrepudiated scoundrals. I don't think I can do better a better job illustrating that than this quiz.
Calling LGF and Power Line critical, at least as in critical thinking is as much a misnomer as calling the seat of power during the largest expansion of government in the past 50 years a conservative administration
If there really was a significant demand for such technology at the higher price points, why don't you see any of the high-end digital slr's coming out with multiple CF-slots? It would be reasonably cheap to add to the body of, say, the Nikon D1H, and would double not only your capacity, but your bandwidth to flash, making it possible to burst higher resolution pictures to CF indefinitely.
The demand just isn't there. I think an 8GB CF card is cool, but I think anyone that believes they NEED one at that price point is either a loony, or has an extremely specialized application.
Granted, this is slashdot, so there's likely to be a high proportion of both types on here anyways.:)
It is a useful programming exercise to write a simulation of a strapdown inertial system and play with bias, noise, and nonlinearity errors (add cross axis coupling and acceleration effects for micromachined gyros for bonus points). Pick reasonable ranges and quantize to 12 bits, then integrate at 100 hz or so. You can start the simulation motionless, but in a minute it will be cruising along at 60 mph in some random direction, hundreds of feet from the start position. An hour later, it will be heading for Mars.
Methinks your simulations may have been a bit pessimistic. I use 3-axis IMU's frequently, and find the local errors to be very reasonable. Even without basic filtering, you can see locally smooth motion for good stretches of time.
Of course, the long term error is unbounded, making it more or less useless for a transatlantic flight. You need to incorporate other global positioning sensing techniques with bounded absolute error to do reasonable global positioning. Combining the data of these two kinds of sensors is nontrivial, but the basic methods are well documented.
The only reason you wouldn't want to use GPS in an ocean crossing is if you are afraid a Bad Guy might be jamming the signals.
Agreed. There's no reason I can see that they can't live with errors on the order of 10's of meters.
All you need is to hook up a camerea up do an artificial neural net and spend a couple hours teaching/progamming it to steer and throw in a cpu and run a rule based system with a well defined set of rules(for navigation,traffic laws, etc) and we're set. Piece of cake.
Let me put this in layman's terms.
I've heard about these things called neural nets, and you, like, train them and stuff, and then they can do anything! I've never actually implemented a neural net, and don't understand how they work, but I'm sure I could put one together to solve this particular problem in 3, 4 hours tops.
Neural nets != panacea. If things were as straightforward as you describe, we would have had autonomous urban driving many years ago.
For most computer vision code, Matlab is a must for prototyping. It's useful in other areas, and, if you know how to use it, reasonably fast. If you're doing particularly involved matrix manipulations, it takes a lot of work to come up with C/C++ code that will work faster then well-written matlab code.
Personally, I also use Mathematica for doing real math work. If I need to derive something that's particularly complex, then Mathematica's notebook style is really nice to work with, and it makes possible extremely clear and concise mathematical arguments while limiting stupid human errors when doing drudgery like taking derivatives and the like.
I hear Maple and MathCad are both good, too, but I've never used them.
x86 -- it's cheap, fast, available, and compatible. That's why it consistently wins in the marketplace.
That doesn't mean it's the best solution. Merely the one that's going to win. Architecturally speaking, x86 is one of the biggest loads of crap to come along since...well...hmmm...I can't think of anything crappier off the top of my head.
Extreme register pressure. Segmentation models that make you want to retch. Hacks (PAE, anyone?) that leave any sane designer gibbering incoherently.
If you read the thead, Linus' main argument seems to be "to get good performance, all the other architectures have had to do complex things in hardware, so there's no real hardware simplification in going with a 'better' architectural design. Plus variable length opcodes are a natural cache optimization!"
I respect Linus a great deal, but he's talking out of his ass here. I agree that IA-64 may be best relegated to some academic's wet dream, but just about any of the major RISC architectures are big wins over x86. Intel and AMD have worked miracles with x86 to get it to run fast, but at a staggering engineering cost. The teams working on RISC chips tend to be a fraction of the size to come out with a high-performance chip. If the RISC houses had an engineering team of comperable size (and access to the same bleeding edge lithography processes) it would easily be worth an extra 25% in performance, minimum.
If you look in the embedded world, just about anything that requires serious embedded performance is RISC based (MIPS/ARM, mostly), simply because it decreases the engineering work involved by an order of magnitude. Plus, writing low level software for just about any RISC chip is loads easier than for x86.
Unfortunately, x86 is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Intel killed Alpha, not by buying it, but by doing a great job of pushing cheap x86 performance to the same level as Alpha, often surpassing it in later years. The same thing is happening to the other workstation-class RISC vendors, and, honestly, to Itanium, too. I don't see any reason to believe the march to x86 hemogeny outside the embedded world is likely to slow anytime soon.
This is a very important point that anyone thinking about purchasing a powermac should look into. I have one of the MDD G4s, which these are, and it's far and away the noisiest computer I've ever owned.
It cranks out a little under 50 dB of irritating noise. The iMacs are nice and quiet; the old Cube was silent, these things are beastly loud!
I feel like something of a fool for my purchase now. I went into the purchase thinking "oh, it's an Apple, they're good about making their boxes quiet". If I had known how loud this thing was going to be, I would probably not have purchased it. Apple is not doing anything significant to address the issue, even though virtually every G4 owner I've talked to is extremely unhappy with the white-noise machine they recieved.
So at this point, all I can do is warn anyone thinking about purchasing one of these boxes; if you are seriously thinking about it, make sure you go and personally hear one of these boxen running before you make a decision and plunk down several thousand dollars. Think very hard about whether you want to put up with the racket.
I would also highly recommend checking out this website, which is devoted to g4 noise issues to understand how other people feel about this issue.
The world is not Linux. The world is not free. Why is it automatically assumed by members of this site that everything should be free?
This is part of the problem. In the minds of most people today, there's little to no delineation between intellectual property and physical property.
I believe that the framers (and most people, when they think about it) would not acknowledge a natural right to restrict others from using an idea just because you had it first. That the right to intellectual property is a fundamental, or natural right, is just what Disney, AOL/TW, and just about every other media company on earth would like you to believe.
In reality, the entire point of copyright (and, for that matter, patent law) is to provide incentives to expand the pool of public knowledge.
It's a comprimise to provide incentives to be creative, not an acknowledgement of perpetual ownership of an idea just because you had it first.
Disney Corp wants to keep control of it's very identifiable mascot, Mickey Mouse. And why shouldn't they? What would Walt Disney think if some 40 years after his death, somebody with a computer and an internet connection was making porn cartoons with the characters he created? And nobody could do anything about it.
You're right. No one could do anything about it. But that's part of the bargain! Disney was granted a time period with some exclusive rights to their work. They used that time to (greatly!) profit. At the end of the term, anyone is free to do anything they want with your original creation, within the wide bounds of free speach.
If you want to create something, create something original. Don't depend on the work somebody else did decades ago to be your only creative outlet. It's still legal to get inspiration from other works. And until they take that right away from us, use it. There are still original ideas being created every day.
Under this reasoning, Ford should be paying big time royalties to the estate of Thrack, the homo erectus who invented the wheel. Having unbounded intellectual property rights would not only seriously degrade the quality of life of the average person, it also is dangerously close to creating thought-crime
Slashdot Mirror
Strangely, people seem to be focused on the "OMG it's something that people know how to do already" and missed out on the price point. Yeah, given $15,000, I could develop something that does this by putting together panotools and a commercially available robot arm; that's not the point. The point is, it costs under $300, and that's pretty cool.
Ironically, the people claiming these researchers haven't done their homework seem to have not bothered to look into what claims to novelty are being made, something which is pretty trivial to do. Yes, this builds on a large body of work in photo stitching and superresolution. This is a problem because...?
AFAICT, no single part of this system is radically new or different, but as a whole, it's a pretty neat new thing. It's an interesting, integrated technology that's being made available to the average Joe.
It seems to be the same people that developed the Qwerk, which is a low cost LInux PC with integrated stuff for controlling robots. Same MO: cheap, integrated stuff to push robotic technology to the larger community.
So, please, get off your high horses people, and stop accusing people of laziness or dishonesty without first giving some modicum of effort to understanding what it is you're talking about.
While the numbers for the Linux kernel look pretty good, there's a bit more to this story, I think.
IIRC, Coverity is the commercialization of the "Stanford Checker" static analysis tool. By most accounts, it's a pretty nifty tool. Back when it was still a research project, some of the folks working on it would run it against different parts of the kernel and post the bugs it found to LKML. It was a mutually beneficial relationship--the kernel people fixed a lot of bugs, and the Stanford folks got analysis on the false positives which they then used to improve their tool.
I don't know if the Stanford Checker was used on other FOSS projects.
In the case of the kernel, at least, I would expect that some of the low defect rate can be attributed to that previous experience. I imagine the tool has improved over time, and I know there's been a lot of code added to/changed in the kernel, but still, the past history must help those numbers out significantly.
From personal observations, it seems unlikely that the random selection is uniform. I would guess they do what they call stratified random sampling, and what other people would call profiling.
I work for a university in the middle east. Once, when flying with 6 other people on one way tickets from the US to Qatar, every single one of us was "randomly" selected for extra security. When my parents, who live in the US, came out to visit, they were "randomly" selected for security. Upon returning to the states, they found that they were "randomly" selected for extra security checks on every flight they took for the next year or so. Me? I can recall one flight in the few years since I moved to the middle east in which I was not "randomly" selected for special security.
So I'm guessing that there is a random element to it, but if you meet certain criteria, your probability of selection is pretty close to 1...
I'm hoping to finish up a Ph.D. in Robotics in the next couple of years, so I have some perspective. My background is C.S., and that serves me pretty well. There are not many interesting robots these days which are built and programmed from scratch by a single person. Robotics is by its nature cross disciplinary. You don't need to have the skills of a Mech E, or be a pro at VLSI work to be in the field. It's good to have some knowledge in those areas, but that's primarily to enable you to work effectively with other more hardware-oriented people, not to be a hardware designer. The other point of which you are probably aware is that Robotics/AI is an extraordinarily diverse field, even more so than CS, which itself contains a large variety of options. You'll be better off if you have some narrower focus for long term work, be that data mining, machine learning, biomimetics, or whatever else you want to do.
So I wonder if this is primarily just a clever application of photostitching, or if they actually use superresolution techniques to generate a high-quality image.
Either way, neat hack. But the latter would definitely be the neat*er* hack.
From their results, I'd venture a guess as to the underlying algorithm:
Each song is given a number of points equal to (rating + 1). Then the probability of the song being played is (song rating)/(total points).
Or, to put more succinctly:
prob(song) = (rating)/(n + sum(i=1..n)(rating(i)))That yields probabilities in the given test case of:
5 star - .285 .238 .190 .143 .095 .048
4 star -
3 star -
2 star -
1 star -
0 star -
Which is reasonably close to what the author found. Heck, if I were implementing that feature, it's what I'd try first...
I've actually worked for a number of years on autonomous vehicle technologies, and am more than passingly familiar with most of this stuff.
Wireless ad-hoc traffic information networks run into some major security issues. How do you establish trust? If the trust model is basically wide open, then antisocial people are going to put together systems which look at your route and start telling other cars "Avoid these roads at all costs! It's backed up for miles!", so that their own personal drive is relatively free of cars.
How do you prevent this? Do you require warnings from multiple sources before you believe them? Then you've just increased the required critical mass before usability by an order of magnitude. Do you trust that automobile makers can put together some sort of embedded crypto system that's "secure enough" and "tamper proof"? Well, that's worked so well for the DRM people, hasn't it?
Of course, if you're relying on the wireless system for safety, you're essentially giving the ability to swerve/brake hard to systems you don't own, so the matter of trust becomes even more significant, and liability becomes killer. Any way you tie the systems together to try to keep people safer, there's someone who's going to argue (with a non-negligable probability of success) that you should have done it a different way, and now you owe someone $millions.
In addition, liability is going to keep this stuff down for a while yet. No autonomous system is ever going to be perfect, and when dealing with loss of human life, liability more or less demands perfection. If I could put together a fully autonomous system tomorrow which provably had 99% fewer accidents than human drivers, I'd still get sued by the 1%.
This is the primary reason all remote sensing tech on the market today is in the form of "driver assist". If your system screws up, it's still primarily the driver's responsibility to avoid accidents.
I'm not a complete pessimist. I don't think the issues I'm raising are insoluable, and I believe we'll have good autonomous systems eventually. I just think the problems are fundamentally hard, and the legal environment doesn't help; it may be a few decades before the more exotic stuff gets into production cars.
As a Comp Sci major, I must warn you that your post sucks. It has massive massive editing errors (bizzare? Corectly? it's?). It could have been an excellent post, but it falls quite short. Its spelling and prose falls far short.
Anyone know of a good barebones online storage service? There are companies like xdrive that provide fancy interfaces to 5GB of storage for ~$10/month, but I'm wondering if there's a company catering to geeks that sells a bit more storage for a bit less with some minimal interface (ssh?). I've had no luck digging up any such company on my own; anyone else find something interesting?
This comes out of AMD's aquisition of Rich Witek's startup (named Alchemy). Rich Witek was one of the original guys working on the Alpha chip (among other projects). Alchemy originally targetted PDA's with their low power MIPS32 processors and on-chip peripheral support.
Interestingly, Dan Dobberpuhl, another Digital alumnus who was influential in the Alpha project, also founded his own company to make MIPS based processers, though for a slightly different target market. That company was SiByte, and was acquired by Broadcom in 2000 or 2001. He has since moved on to start PASemi, which seems to be in the same general business.
Digital may be gone, but it's engineers are still making waves!
When referring to packaging, FBGA is usually Fine Ball Grid Array. I really doubt it's a typo. From the programmers point of view, the package virtually never significant.
Overall, this sounds remarkably similar to picoJava, which, last I checked, was going nowhere, and for good reason.
Designing bytecode formats for VMs is not really the same as designing opcodes for microprocessors -- shoehorning hardware that way is painful and generally results in less elegant, more expensive designs.
OTOH, the bytecodes in question aren't really significantly worse than, say, x86, and look where that is today...
Settings | Configure Editor | Indentation
Nope, sorry. Those control how the editor defaults to indenting a block, but never let you bind a key (like, say, tab) to re-indent the current line of code, or the current block of code.
Serves you right for not being a vi fan - there's already a vim kpart :).
Hey, I said I was not trying to start a flamewar, you vim-using scum-sucking infidel! :)
Since I wanted to see what the fuss was about, I recently grabbed the most recent KDevelop and took it for a spin. It's got a ton of really, really cool stuff in there. Integration with valgrind is sweet. The debugger integration is a Good Thing. The reasonably intuitive API documentation access is great. The integration with QT designer is beautiful.
If I were just starting to code, I'd probably use Kdevelop.
However, I found over the course of a couple of painful days that I'm too dependent on some features of emacs to make the switch worthwhile. Quick searching. Tab indentation. Keyboard split buffers. Mouseless cut and paste.
Some of these have equivalents in Kdevelop that would just require relearning a different way to work, which is fine, if somewhat aggravating in my personal case. But some, like tab indentation, don't. So I'm back in good old emacs.
I hear that there may be an effort to embed emacs as one of the source code editor options, in which case I'd definitely switch. I'd probably even switch if there were some reasonable emacs-like bindings in Kate. It looks like a really cool tool generally, and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to make a switch sometime in the not too distant future.
It was definitely harder for me to get in the door for that first job, though. I got lucky in many respects, whereas other folks from higher profile programs had an easier in. For the most part, though, I agree with the folks here saying your first job matters more than your degree. After my first job, experience and social networking were definitely more important than the degree itself.
On the other hand, I didn't want to finish with a B.S., I wanted to go back to grad school and eventually get into teaching at the college level. So after having been a part of the workforce for a few years, I applied to Ph.D. programs at several well known schools.
Despite my having very good grades and excellent references, most of them turned me down flat. I'm reasonable sure the primary reason was my undergraduate degree -- when you're competing with 9 other people for one slot in the program, it's easy to get tossed out for not having a degree from a well known university. My work supervisor at the time got his Ph.D. in CS from CMU, one of the programs to which I was applying. He wrote one of my recommendations. I got in. I think if he hadn't, they probably would have turned me away because of my undergraduate degree as well.
So I do think what program you're in does matter. It's also been my recent experience that the undergrads at the high profile program really do learn a lot more than I did in my undergraduate program. That doesn't mean it's true in all cases, but it certainly is true in my limited experience.
When I first applied to undergrad programs, I was accepted at several well-known programs, but I decided I wanted to go to smaller, more personal school instead. I liked the program I was in, but if I had a chance to do it over again, I would choose a different school.
Shorter summary: Granter of degree is not destiny, but is an important component of same.
Hope that helps!
Certainly for lower capacities (e.g. 10 TB), there are much, much cheaper turnkey solutions in the form of the XServe RAID from Apple, not to mention the stuff Promise sells.
So long as the holder of the domain makes it clear he is not affiliated with the compaign that the URL would imply, I don't see a problem with it. Looking over this site, I think it's sufficiently clear that it's not actually being run by the candidate being mocked.
On the other hand, looking over this site and seeing how it's done make me dislike Floyd more than Van Hollen. But I'm not in that district, so...
I don't see how this is significantly different than www.gwbush.com (currently defunct), although gwbush.com was a bit cleverer.
Scott Johnson, of Power Line writes about how working to undo the damage of the Patriot Act is such a left wing position:
The concept of secrecy during wartime does not seem like much of a theme with which to scandalize average citizens. Average citizens might be more interested in seeking the thread that connects left-wing legal outfits such as the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights. The thread that is apparent to me from my visit to the Guild convention is the assault on the critical legal components of the defense of the United States from its Islamofascist enemies in the name of a Constitution that in reality they hate.
I don't have much firsthand experience with The Weekly Standard. It has the reputation of tilting conservative, but not in the rabid, right-is-good-left-is-bad style of, say, Newsmax. So I'll give this one a pass.
Little Green Footballs, on the other hand, is a lair of unrepudiated scoundrals. I don't think I can do better a better job illustrating that than this quiz.
Calling LGF and Power Line critical, at least as in critical thinking is as much a misnomer as calling the seat of power during the largest expansion of government in the past 50 years a conservative administration
This is almost certainly using a technique usually called called super-resolution. The basic idea is:
- Take multiple offset images with a low resolution sensor (usually a motion sweep)
- Stitch the images together
- In the overlapping areas, you can now generate the most probable underlying pixels at a higher resolution.
You can read about some of the underlying ideas here and here. It's a pretty cool area of research.The demand just isn't there. I think an 8GB CF card is cool, but I think anyone that believes they NEED one at that price point is either a loony, or has an extremely specialized application.
Granted, this is slashdot, so there's likely to be a high proportion of both types on here anyways. :)
Methinks your simulations may have been a bit pessimistic. I use 3-axis IMU's frequently, and find the local errors to be very reasonable. Even without basic filtering, you can see locally smooth motion for good stretches of time.
Of course, the long term error is unbounded, making it more or less useless for a transatlantic flight. You need to incorporate other global positioning sensing techniques with bounded absolute error to do reasonable global positioning. Combining the data of these two kinds of sensors is nontrivial, but the basic methods are well documented.
The only reason you wouldn't want to use GPS in an ocean crossing is if you are afraid a Bad Guy might be jamming the signals.
Agreed. There's no reason I can see that they can't live with errors on the order of 10's of meters.
Let me put this in layman's terms.
I've heard about these things called neural nets, and you, like, train them and stuff, and then they can do anything! I've never actually implemented a neural net, and don't understand how they work, but I'm sure I could put one together to solve this particular problem in 3, 4 hours tops.
Neural nets != panacea. If things were as straightforward as you describe, we would have had autonomous urban driving many years ago.
For most computer vision code, Matlab is a must for prototyping. It's useful in other areas, and, if you know how to use it, reasonably fast. If you're doing particularly involved matrix manipulations, it takes a lot of work to come up with C/C++ code that will work faster then well-written matlab code.
Personally, I also use Mathematica for doing real math work. If I need to derive something that's particularly complex, then Mathematica's notebook style is really nice to work with, and it makes possible extremely clear and concise mathematical arguments while limiting stupid human errors when doing drudgery like taking derivatives and the like.
I hear Maple and MathCad are both good, too, but I've never used them.
That doesn't mean it's the best solution. Merely the one that's going to win. Architecturally speaking, x86 is one of the biggest loads of crap to come along since...well...hmmm...I can't think of anything crappier off the top of my head.
Extreme register pressure. Segmentation models that make you want to retch. Hacks (PAE, anyone?) that leave any sane designer gibbering incoherently.
If you read the thead, Linus' main argument seems to be "to get good performance, all the other architectures have had to do complex things in hardware, so there's no real hardware simplification in going with a 'better' architectural design. Plus variable length opcodes are a natural cache optimization!"
I respect Linus a great deal, but he's talking out of his ass here. I agree that IA-64 may be best relegated to some academic's wet dream, but just about any of the major RISC architectures are big wins over x86. Intel and AMD have worked miracles with x86 to get it to run fast, but at a staggering engineering cost. The teams working on RISC chips tend to be a fraction of the size to come out with a high-performance chip. If the RISC houses had an engineering team of comperable size (and access to the same bleeding edge lithography processes) it would easily be worth an extra 25% in performance, minimum.
If you look in the embedded world, just about anything that requires serious embedded performance is RISC based (MIPS/ARM, mostly), simply because it decreases the engineering work involved by an order of magnitude. Plus, writing low level software for just about any RISC chip is loads easier than for x86.
Unfortunately, x86 is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Intel killed Alpha, not by buying it, but by doing a great job of pushing cheap x86 performance to the same level as Alpha, often surpassing it in later years. The same thing is happening to the other workstation-class RISC vendors, and, honestly, to Itanium, too. I don't see any reason to believe the march to x86 hemogeny outside the embedded world is likely to slow anytime soon.
It cranks out a little under 50 dB of irritating noise. The iMacs are nice and quiet; the old Cube was silent, these things are beastly loud!
I feel like something of a fool for my purchase now. I went into the purchase thinking "oh, it's an Apple, they're good about making their boxes quiet". If I had known how loud this thing was going to be, I would probably not have purchased it. Apple is not doing anything significant to address the issue, even though virtually every G4 owner I've talked to is extremely unhappy with the white-noise machine they recieved.
So at this point, all I can do is warn anyone thinking about purchasing one of these boxes; if you are seriously thinking about it, make sure you go and personally hear one of these boxen running before you make a decision and plunk down several thousand dollars. Think very hard about whether you want to put up with the racket.
I would also highly recommend checking out this website, which is devoted to g4 noise issues to understand how other people feel about this issue.
This is part of the problem. In the minds of most people today, there's little to no delineation between intellectual property and physical property.
I believe that the framers (and most people, when they think about it) would not acknowledge a natural right to restrict others from using an idea just because you had it first. That the right to intellectual property is a fundamental, or natural right, is just what Disney, AOL/TW, and just about every other media company on earth would like you to believe.
In reality, the entire point of copyright (and, for that matter, patent law) is to provide incentives to expand the pool of public knowledge. It's a comprimise to provide incentives to be creative, not an acknowledgement of perpetual ownership of an idea just because you had it first.
Disney Corp wants to keep control of it's very identifiable mascot, Mickey Mouse. And why shouldn't they? What would Walt Disney think if some 40 years after his death, somebody with a computer and an internet connection was making porn cartoons with the characters he created? And nobody could do anything about it.
You're right. No one could do anything about it. But that's part of the bargain! Disney was granted a time period with some exclusive rights to their work. They used that time to (greatly!) profit. At the end of the term, anyone is free to do anything they want with your original creation, within the wide bounds of free speach.
If you want to create something, create something original. Don't depend on the work somebody else did decades ago to be your only creative outlet. It's still legal to get inspiration from other works. And until they take that right away from us, use it. There are still original ideas being created every day.
Under this reasoning, Ford should be paying big time royalties to the estate of Thrack, the homo erectus who invented the wheel. Having unbounded intellectual property rights would not only seriously degrade the quality of life of the average person, it also is dangerously close to creating thought-crime