Surely it's the managers fault by definition... Under what scenario does a project slide to the panic point without it being the managers fault?
If a developer is fucking up, or the schedule is sliding for whatever reason, then it's the managers job to notice it and do something about it before the project becomes late as a result.
Advertisers are not interested in targeting you by name. They are interested in targeting people who are likely to purchase their products. Google can use its database to tell them that those who have recently searched for w, x, and y are likely to be interested in z. For that identities are irrelevant.
Huh? How do you suppose Google then decides when to display those z-targetted ads?!!
or creating a dossier on all the weird shit I've searched for and forwarding it to my boss
Well, they ARE creating that dossier (they've admitted to retaining all search queries), although supposedly anonymized.
The thing is, Google may not be e-mailing it to your boss or anyone else, but since your search history is saved then there's a chance of it getting out. Maybe Google gets acquired by another company who's not interested in your privacy, maybe they get hacked, or a disgruntled ex-employee leaks it... What's the betting that it's totally anonymous anyway since as such it'd be of little use to them for their business of selling targetted advertizing...
There's different ways you could match the pieces to a given photo.
One way would simply to map from the levels curve (pixel brightness vs # pixels plot) of the "puzzle" pieces to the levels curve of your photo. i.e divide the area under your photo's levels curve into 300 squares and assign them in black-to-white order to pieces from the "puzzle" also sorted in black to white order. This would work best if the levels curve of your photo is not totally lopsided compared to the curve of the pieces.
Another way, along the lines you suggest, would be to put aside sufficient(but as few as possible) pieces from the puzzle so that the levels curve of the remainder roughly matches that of your photo, assign pieces to the photo as for the first method, then insert the put aside pieces either as random noise or just as a border or somesuch. This may indeed look better for photos that don't well match the complete set of provided pixels.
You don't need a router to connect nodes within a LAN/SAN (i.e. inside your house) - you only need one to route BETWEEN networks (i.e. from your internal LAN to the internet).
So, interconnect your LAN/SAN according to it's bandwidth needs (maybe just a dumb hub), and connect to the outside world with a router appropriate to your capability to saturate the connection.
Vengeance doesn't have to be unjust or hasty. It's just a matter of getting a fit punishment if you get convicted, not a slap on the wrist. The public won't have any respect for the law if the law doesn't dole out fair punishment. Heinious crimes call for heinious punishment. What's fair about a convicted murderer staying alive when his victim did not?
Inmates rarely escape but they frequently get paroled/released to reoffend. A repeat thief is one thing but a child rapist should be fried to prevent it happening again.
It's more a matter of being realistic. If his router is the only thing preventing him from saturating that 100mps connection, then sure upgrade it, but otherwise there's no point. Just because an ISP will take your money for a fast connection doesn't mean it's going to make what you're trying to use it for any faster! If your work server throttles connections at 10Mbps, then you having an 100Mbps connection and 100Mbps capable router is irrelevant. If you've got three computers simultaneously syncing to work then you'd still get by with a 30mpbs router.
I don't see why you're calling it a BS legal controversy.
At issue was Skype technology that was licensed to eBay, not sold to them along with the rest of Skype. eBay apparently violated the license, hence this eventual settlement.
If eBay had been in the right here they'd have been able to make this go away in court, and $385M (14% of Skype) is way too much to pay to make a legal hassle go away rather than paying to fight it, therefore it seems there was a genuine violation here, not just a baseless controversy.
What GRUB2 left me wondering, like many other 9.10 installers, was why the fuck is it so slow to boot now?! stuck on the "GRUB loading" prompt for a long time before bringing up the boot menu. It turns out to be an acknowledged GRUB2 bug when booting to a different hard drive than the one the MBR is on. I've got what must be a common setup with Windows on my 1st drive and Linux on the 2nd. What's sad it that the bug has been known for a couple of months now. It was enough to make me revert to 9.04 for now since it seems indicative of a lack of testing.
OTOH, I also did a 9.04 to 9.10 upgrade via "System Update" in a VirtualBox VM, and that went flawlessly.
Yes, OpenGL on X is GLX which does bring the X benefit (and overhead) of network transparency to OpenGL. Qt also provides the OpenGL paint engine on other platforms where it's direct. But GLX has nothing to do with the XLib drawing API - it's just OpenGL which hopefully will be hardware accelerated at the server, so it does invert the graphics stack and put your (Qt) primitives on top of the 3-D accelerated API as was being discussed.
One thing I've heard talk of is "inverting" the stack to put all primitives on top of the 3D hardware, since that's where most of the hardware performance work has been done.
Or just forget about the X primitives and use OpenGL instead. If you use Qt then you can do this already since Qt supports OpenGL as a drawing engine as an alternative to X.
Someone posted the actual GAO report and it seems that it does, but this is only used for predicting a "where will it be seen next" space-time window (not a precise position) for the radar to search. The trouble was that the time corrdinate was absolute not relative to last position, hence accumulated clock accuracy caused it to eventually look in the wrong place and lose the target.
The way the system is sure it's tracking the target it was given is by predicting where it should be seen next based on speed and diretion, and then only looking for it in a window ("range gate") around that predicted position. The window is a point in space-time and therefore has time coordinates as well as space coordinates, and the problem was that the Patriot system apparently used absolute time since power on to specify the time coordinate, hence the error accumulation. The problem could have been avoided simply by using a time coordinate relative to the last tracked postion rather than an absolute one.
The GAO report also blames the 24 bit registers of the 1970's era hardware as limiting accuracy which is just garbage. A good excuse to a politician perhaps, but there was nothing stopping them from using a 64 bit, or whatever, math library if that would have helped.
Of course the Patriot was being used outside of it's original requirements spec when being used to target SCUDs, so it seems someone really screwed up in not reviewing the design beforehand and determining it's limitations (and fixing them) rather than finding out after the fact when 28 people are dead as a result.
OK, so 10m rather than 3m, but if your accuracy is 100m it doesn't make much difference.
Do you really believe that a realtime missile tracking system is relying on a 0.1 sec time granularity?!
The real real problem with the patriot is that is was built as an anti-aircraft missile not an anti-missile missile and it simply doesn't have enough speed, so all it can do is try to predict the position of an incoming missile and be in the same place when the missile gets there.
It's the reporting that's garbage. It makes no sense at all. A system tracking missiles travelling at Mach 3 is keeping track of time to 0.1 sec accuracy?! Do you really believe that? Wanna buy a bridge?
0.1 sec at Mach 3 is 100m, so you'd have a hope in hell of ever hitting a 3m long target.
The problem isn't the people working for the defence company, who are hard-core PhDs with some very serious domain knowledge. The problem is people like yourself who are so math illiterate as not to be able to fact check a piece-of-shit story!
There's no way a real-time missile tracking system is going to be dealing with time at an accuracy of 0.1 sec.
A Patriot missile travels at about Mach 3 (~1000 m/sec) so a rounding error of 0.05, even without any error accumulation, means you'd be off by 50m in position.
Who knows what the real story is vs the garbage that was reported, but even if there was a cumulative error that's the fault of the programmer rather than a lack of a computers ability to do math. You do your error analysis and use whatever accuracy needed to keep the errors in a tolerable range.
The part about the system running for 100 hours was pure gibberish. Yes, we can all divide that by 0.1 sec, but what on earth does that have to do with a real-time tracking system tracking a target is acquired a few minutes ago?!
A better title for the story rather than "computers can't do math" would be "we can't do tech reporting".
Surely getting a geek to build you an atom bomb, or whatever, is more effective then sending a jock off to wrestle with the enemy.
I've also got to wonder what the survival rate at war is for geeks vs jocks? I'd have to guess the geeks do better, and it's hard to win a war (not to mention somewhat meaningless) if you're dead.
Yep... using simple sentences is a must. Simple in every way : short, simple sentence structure, unambiguous vocabulary, etc, etc. However, even when doing this it can be a crap shoot whether the output is any good.
I use Google translate quite a lot for eBay transactions, and I've found the only way to get decent output is by iterative trial. Start with something simple as you suggest, but then translate it first to the target language and back into English to see how good it is (of course it may be the translation back into English that is corrupting a decent translation to the target language, but what else can you do?). If it's not good, then simplify further, or just choose different words or sentence structre and try again, and again...
Even with its shortcomings, it is pretty amazing that computers now let us communicate with people with which we share no common language, who of course thanks to the internet may be across the other side of the world. This stuff creeps up on you, but when you stop to think about it, it's an almost magical power that computers have given us!
Speech recognition and natural language processing are very specialized fields. Just having a bunch of very smart software engineers (as Google does) will only get you so far without the specialized domain knowledge and domain-specific experience. Presumably Google has a few speech and natural language experts, but it's only these few that any more specialized competitor needs to best - not the whole of Google.
AFAIK Google's current translation approach is mostly a dumb brute force approach of replacing the largest chunks possible in the source document with matching chunks from a massive human translated database they've built up. Presumably they fall back to a gramatical approach to fill in the cracks.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely it's the managers fault by definition... Under what scenario does a project slide to the panic point without it being the managers fault?
If a developer is fucking up, or the schedule is sliding for whatever reason, then it's the managers job to notice it and do something about it before the project becomes late as a result.
Advertisers are not interested in targeting you by name. They are interested in targeting people who are likely to purchase their products. Google can use its database to tell them that those who have recently searched for w, x, and y are likely to be interested in z. For that identities are irrelevant.
Huh? How do you suppose Google then decides when to display those z-targetted ads?!!
or creating a dossier on all the weird shit I've searched for and forwarding it to my boss
Well, they ARE creating that dossier (they've admitted to retaining all search queries), although supposedly anonymized.
The thing is, Google may not be e-mailing it to your boss or anyone else, but since your search history is saved then there's a chance of it getting out. Maybe Google gets acquired by another company who's not interested in your privacy, maybe they get hacked, or a disgruntled ex-employee leaks it... What's the betting that it's totally anonymous anyway since as such it'd be of little use to them for their business of selling targetted advertizing...
There's different ways you could match the pieces to a given photo.
One way would simply to map from the levels curve (pixel brightness vs # pixels plot) of the "puzzle" pieces to the levels curve of your photo. i.e divide the area under your photo's levels curve into 300 squares and assign them in black-to-white order to pieces from the "puzzle" also sorted in black to white order. This would work best if the levels curve of your photo is not totally lopsided compared to the curve of the pieces.
Another way, along the lines you suggest, would be to put aside sufficient(but as few as possible) pieces from the puzzle so that the levels curve of the remainder roughly matches that of your photo, assign pieces to the photo as for the first method, then insert the put aside pieces either as random noise or just as a border or somesuch. This may indeed look better for photos that don't well match the complete set of provided pixels.
There are biodedgradable plastics, you know. Polymers != Non-biodegradable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodegradable_plastic
Yes, it is IT101, and you apparently failed it.
You don't need a router to connect nodes within a LAN/SAN (i.e. inside your house) - you only need one to route BETWEEN networks (i.e. from your internal LAN to the internet).
So, interconnect your LAN/SAN according to it's bandwidth needs (maybe just a dumb hub), and connect to the outside world with a router appropriate to your capability to saturate the connection.
Vengeance doesn't have to be unjust or hasty. It's just a matter of getting a fit punishment if you get convicted, not a slap on the wrist. The public won't have any respect for the law if the law doesn't dole out fair punishment. Heinious crimes call for heinious punishment. What's fair about a convicted murderer staying alive when his victim did not?
Inmates rarely escape but they frequently get paroled/released to reoffend. A repeat thief is one thing but a child rapist should be fried to prevent it happening again.
It's more a matter of being realistic. If his router is the only thing preventing him from saturating that 100mps connection, then sure upgrade it, but otherwise there's no point. Just because an ISP will take your money for a fast connection doesn't mean it's going to make what you're trying to use it for any faster! If your work server throttles connections at 10Mbps, then you having an 100Mbps connection and 100Mbps capable router is irrelevant. If you've got three computers simultaneously syncing to work then you'd still get by with a 30mpbs router.
What website do you expect to give you more than a 30Mbps connection?!
You may need 100Mps internal to your house, but a switch or even dumb hub would be sufficient for that. Why do you need to route at that speed?
I'll glad they're going to kill this worthless loser so my tax dollars arn't wasted feeding him in jail.
The death penalty serves two purposes:
1) Public safety - PERMANTENTLY makes sure sickos like this never do it again
2) Public vengeance - creates a lawful society by creating lawful just punishment for heinious crimes
Had to look that one up...
It's an abbreviation ("coltan", actually) for columbite-tantalite, the primary ore from which niobium (formerly columbium) and tantalum are refined.
The summary should have stuck to elements rather than mixing elements and ores. I'm sure most of have head or niobium and tantalum, but "col-tan" ???
Go seems to be basically the start of an improved version of C, rather than an improved version of C++
It sounds more like it has more in common with C# than C++.
http://golang.org/doc/go_for_cpp_programmers.html
I don't see why you're calling it a BS legal controversy.
At issue was Skype technology that was licensed to eBay, not sold to them along with the rest of Skype. eBay apparently violated the license, hence this eventual settlement.
If eBay had been in the right here they'd have been able to make this go away in court, and $385M (14% of Skype) is way too much to pay to make a legal hassle go away rather than paying to fight it, therefore it seems there was a genuine violation here, not just a baseless controversy.
What GRUB2 left me wondering, like many other 9.10 installers, was why the fuck is it so slow to boot now?! stuck on the "GRUB loading" prompt for a long time before bringing up the boot menu. It turns out to be an acknowledged GRUB2 bug when booting to a different hard drive than the one the MBR is on. I've got what must be a common setup with Windows on my 1st drive and Linux on the 2nd. What's sad it that the bug has been known for a couple of months now. It was enough to make me revert to 9.04 for now since it seems indicative of a lack of testing.
OTOH, I also did a 9.04 to 9.10 upgrade via "System Update" in a VirtualBox VM, and that went flawlessly.
Yes, OpenGL on X is GLX which does bring the X benefit (and overhead) of network transparency to OpenGL. Qt also provides the OpenGL paint engine on other platforms where it's direct. But GLX has nothing to do with the XLib drawing API - it's just OpenGL which hopefully will be hardware accelerated at the server, so it does invert the graphics stack and put your (Qt) primitives on top of the 3-D accelerated API as was being discussed.
One thing I've heard talk of is "inverting" the stack to put all primitives on top of the 3D hardware, since that's where most of the hardware performance work has been done.
Or just forget about the X primitives and use OpenGL instead. If you use Qt then you can do this already since Qt supports OpenGL as a drawing engine as an alternative to X.
Someone posted the actual GAO report and it seems that it does, but this is only used for predicting a "where will it be seen next" space-time window (not a precise position) for the radar to search. The trouble was that the time corrdinate was absolute not relative to last position, hence accumulated clock accuracy caused it to eventually look in the wrong place and lose the target.
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/gao/im92026.htm
Someone posted the actual GAO report on this, which makes a bit more sense than the gibberish TechRadar arcticle.
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/gao/im92026.htm
The way the system is sure it's tracking the target it was given is by predicting where it should be seen next based on speed and diretion, and then only looking for it in a window ("range gate") around that predicted position. The window is a point in space-time and therefore has time coordinates as well as space coordinates, and the problem was that the Patriot system apparently used absolute time since power on to specify the time coordinate, hence the error accumulation. The problem could have been avoided simply by using a time coordinate relative to the last tracked postion rather than an absolute one.
The GAO report also blames the 24 bit registers of the 1970's era hardware as limiting accuracy which is just garbage. A good excuse to a politician perhaps, but there was nothing stopping them from using a 64 bit, or whatever, math library if that would have helped.
Of course the Patriot was being used outside of it's original requirements spec when being used to target SCUDs, so it seems someone really screwed up in not reviewing the design beforehand and determining it's limitations (and fixing them) rather than finding out after the fact when 28 people are dead as a result.
OK, so 10m rather than 3m, but if your accuracy is 100m it doesn't make much difference.
Do you really believe that a realtime missile tracking system is relying on a 0.1 sec time granularity?!
The real real problem with the patriot is that is was built as an anti-aircraft missile not an anti-missile missile and it simply doesn't have enough speed, so all it can do is try to predict the position of an incoming missile and be in the same place when the missile gets there.
It's the reporting that's garbage. It makes no sense at all. A system tracking missiles travelling at Mach 3 is keeping track of time to 0.1 sec accuracy?! Do you really believe that? Wanna buy a bridge?
0.1 sec at Mach 3 is 100m, so you'd have a hope in hell of ever hitting a 3m long target.
The problem isn't the people working for the defence company, who are hard-core PhDs with some very serious domain knowledge. The problem is people like yourself who are so math illiterate as not to be able to fact check a piece-of-shit story!
There's no way a real-time missile tracking system is going to be dealing with time at an accuracy of 0.1 sec.
A Patriot missile travels at about Mach 3 (~1000 m/sec) so a rounding error of 0.05, even without any error accumulation, means you'd be off by 50m in position.
Who knows what the real story is vs the garbage that was reported, but even if there was a cumulative error that's the fault of the programmer rather than a lack of a computers ability to do math. You do your error analysis and use whatever accuracy needed to keep the errors in a tolerable range.
The part about the system running for 100 hours was pure gibberish. Yes, we can all divide that by 0.1 sec, but what on earth does that have to do with a real-time tracking system tracking a target is acquired a few minutes ago?!
A better title for the story rather than "computers can't do math" would be "we can't do tech reporting".
Surely getting a geek to build you an atom bomb, or whatever, is more effective then sending a jock off to wrestle with the enemy.
I've also got to wonder what the survival rate at war is for geeks vs jocks? I'd have to guess the geeks do better, and it's hard to win a war (not to mention somewhat meaningless) if you're dead.
Yep... using simple sentences is a must. Simple in every way : short, simple sentence structure, unambiguous vocabulary, etc, etc. However, even when doing this it can be a crap shoot whether the output is any good.
I use Google translate quite a lot for eBay transactions, and I've found the only way to get decent output is by iterative trial. Start with something simple as you suggest, but then translate it first to the target language and back into English to see how good it is (of course it may be the translation back into English that is corrupting a decent translation to the target language, but what else can you do?). If it's not good, then simplify further, or just choose different words or sentence structre and try again, and again...
Even with its shortcomings, it is pretty amazing that computers now let us communicate with people with which we share no common language, who of course thanks to the internet may be across the other side of the world. This stuff creeps up on you, but when you stop to think about it, it's an almost magical power that computers have given us!
Speech recognition and natural language processing are very specialized fields. Just having a bunch of very smart software engineers (as Google does) will only get you so far without the specialized domain knowledge and domain-specific experience. Presumably Google has a few speech and natural language experts, but it's only these few that any more specialized competitor needs to best - not the whole of Google.
AFAIK Google's current translation approach is mostly a dumb brute force approach of replacing the largest chunks possible in the source document with matching chunks from a massive human translated database they've built up. Presumably they fall back to a gramatical approach to fill in the cracks.