There's a lot of mish-mashed stuff in my post about various forms of hybrids, thanks for the corrections.
The Civic Hybrid doesn't strike me as a good example of the limits of what a Hybrid can do, but it is a good example of what a "no compromises" hybrid can do. I think the Civic hybrid also has a steel chassis. The different transmission types I pulled from the U.S. government site, and some reviews out on the web... nothing authoritative, they could have been demo models, short-lived production runs or something like that:-)
The Prius is a decent example of a "not quite a normal car" hybrid. I was surprised searching the web to find out that it had a manual transmission.
What's the horsepower on your Hybrid and the rest of the Civics? I couldn't find those numbers to try to match horsepower and fuel efficiency.
That's silly. I was talking about what happens when you don't have a contract:
me:In Canada, as I understand it, unless there is a contract saying otherwise the copyright is in the hands of the entity who hired you to write it -- but you still have some very small rights as the author...
You:Sorry, but you've got things backwords in this case.
And now you're saying: "A "contract of service" is a different thing than a "contract for work". In the former, the contractor just works for the employer for a period of time on whatever she's told to do. In the latter, the specific software to be created is described in the contract"
I think what you're describing is a reasonable description of a situation where there "is a contract saying otherwise"
The Honda Civic Hybrid is an example of a hybrid is set up with the following:
A smaller than normally practical internal combustion engine
A continuously variable transmission to drive the wheels forward
Improved aerodynamics
An Aluminum chasis
Electric motors on each of the wheels to generate power while braking and to assist the IC drivetrain
Energy is lost in the conversion from gas to electricity, it's also lost in the storage in the batteries and the usage from the batteries to the wheels. You konw and I know that while normally this would all be lost in the braking, now it is stored and used to assist with acceleration.
The odd part is that while driving where you aren't using the brakes a lot, the transmission, weight improvements and aerodynamics will be the only improvements in your efficiency. The electrical assist means that your engine can be improbably weak, but I don't know if that necessarily translates to a more efficient engine.
Here's something which nicely describes why I'm skeptical about the true performance of hybrids:
I'm not sure why, but it looks like my 1992 1.5L Civic Hatchback is(was) more fuel efficient (city and highway) than the modern 2004 Civic Hybrid. I don't think U.S. government numbers are right, but they're close enough to try to make some kind of a point:-)
As an aside, I was looking into the hybrid transmissions and from what I could tell... I was wrong, the Honda Insight was manual-only, but the newer hybrids sometimes sell with the choice of an automatic or continuously variable transmission... oddly, the fancy transmission hurts highway fuel efficiency, but it helps in the city.
Note that comparing an aluminum hybrid to a galvanized steel compact, e.g. the Insight to a "regular" car, would not be an apples-to-apples comparison since if you were to remove all the weight from the electrical system (adding hydraulic brakes) and increase the engine size to match the lost horsepower, the new gas car would be more efficient than other gas cars on the road today, and might even be better on the highway than the hybrid. (Although it really should fail to beat the hybrid in the city)
A 2004 Honda Civic Hybrid to a 2004 Honda Civic would be a more reasonable comparison than my 1992 to a 2004... the 2004's have bigger engines and are less fuel efficient. I'd also expect the 2004 hybrid to have more horsepower than my 1992 car... so I'll admit, it's not a fair comparison...
But there may be less expensive, more fuel efficient non-hybrid vehicles on the market.
(In reality, I get about 37MPG on the highway, ~30 in the city... the car _is_ 13 years old)
I can only think that you're imagining some distinction between a "contractor" and an "employee", but there's no such distinction in the copyright act. See Section 13, Subsection 3.
"Where the author of a work was in the employment of some other person under a contract of service or apprenticeship and the work was made in the course of his employment by that person, the person by whom the author was employed shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the first owner of the copyright..."
In Canada, as I understand it, unless there is a contract saying otherwise the copyright is in the hands of the entity who hired you to write it -- but you still have some very small rights as the author... For instance, another individual can't slap their name on the code and declare it their creation, nor can they modify it and leave your name on it without citing that the code was modified. Note that they can remove your name altogether and just leave the copyright notice... which is pretty normal... I've had that done to me with documentation in my workplace many times.
This is somewhat sensible in that the company/person who commissioned the work provided everything which was needed for that software to be authored, including money to compensate your time. If it were not for them, the software would not be written. I think this is very similar to the way it works in the U.S.
The "author" normally must destroy all their copies of the code upon leaving, and they're not allowed to design a similar solution for anyone else. That last aspect is, IMHO, grey, fuzzy and awful... get a contract before doing contract work like this.
I'm surprised it isn't like that in Britain. Canada's laws are normally quite close.
"Normal" infants recognize faces very quickly. It seems to be "instinct".
I think this is a little fuzzier than most people make it out to be, and really odd if done in 2d still shots.
If you show a computer a photo of some guy sitting down at a desk and ask "is this a face?", what you're really asking is... "is this a two-dimensional still projection of a three-dimensional space which contains a partial image of a face which is probably of an object which appears to be that of a human?"
I think projection and interpretation of space is important, the photo on the guy's desk of his kids out at the beach would have to be discarded as an alternate scale where a giant replica office has been wrapped around an ocean setting, or both are valid and the office is suspended over a beach (load up the algorithms to identify this as an office, a beach, a window and then figure out if this is a resonable place to put a window in a building), the Dilbert strips would have to be discarded as "probably out of scale, probably not intended to resemble a human"
I think you're absolutely right, spotting faces in shapes of cars, shapes of houses, cartoon strips, etc should not be completely discarded as "those aren't faces, the AI is wrong!", but instead discarded as "those are probably not intended to resemble humans"
...provided you're not taking the necessary shortcuts to get around limits of computational power.
Yep... and it's not like people relying upon those systems hadn't seen so many worms and viruses that they didn't expect a new one to appear... and it's not like the patch wasn't released.
The kid did something very stupid... but somebody was going to do it, and no amount of deterrants in the world would have stopped them.
Microwave path calculations are easy... I mean kinda... Joe user who thinks that ProductX sucks because Column H spills off the page when printed, or the pie chart has a 3d effect which doesn't work quite the same way is a much harder problem domain... "but I didn't have any problem with that in Excel!"
IMHO, compatability with any buggy or flakey non-spec is just a dangling carrot.
Bah, it would encourage you to make a decision on the open market.
Unchecked piracy has the same effect as market dumping.
Using the public purse to put piracy in check is using taxes to fund a flawed business model... controling piracy selectively is awfully similar to unchecked piracy... which... as I said above.
Maybe it should be illegal for Microsoft to support software pirates?
Most CS programs are B.Sc. programs, they'll want the same math as somebody studying biology, plus some additional numerical methods specific to CS.
A B.A. program in CS will have very little math. It's kind of sad really... but it gives you the data structures and management techniques which most programming assignments require.
Remember a B.Sc. is about science and furthering the field. If you don't understand the math used to develop computer science, you can't really further the field. Think about proving algorithms, encryption, compression, waveforms, statistics, stuff like that.
Now learning how to develop that database front end for the marketing department has little to do with either... but picking up the programming books and immediately understanding the data structures and methods they use to develop the GUI, interface with the relational database backends, manipulate the relational database backends... know the weaknesses and limitations of relational theory... all that stuff which "teach-yourself programming in 21 days" books tell you how to do, but not why you're doing it is a matter of either the arts or science programs.
If you dump the maths and go for a B.A. in CS, some snobs will laugh at you. Best to take the math if you want to do CS. If you flunk all the maths and have nowhere to go then finish with a B.A.
Linus didn't sell the software to the Coast Guard, Microsoft did.
The OS however, is a small part of an IT infrastructure, most places do security in-house and therefore can accept full responsibility for allowing MS products and not protecting against their faults.
Or at least that's how a sane judge would view it.
I don't mean employee-operated software firewalls, that's just silly. Do you really think it secure to trust your clients to run a firewall on their machine?
I mean stuffing a firewall on the employee-facing network, forcing them to use authenticated VPNs or some similar technology from inside the office, and restricting their ability to use various network resources by default (e.g. cut web access, IRC, various chatting clients, all typical tunnelling software, and allow dynamic rules to be slapped down for new worms or trojans...)
Kick in some port-scan on login method, and incorrectly configured machines will be quickly identified, and may be refused permission to speak with the VPN servers.
You need VPN or IP Sec so that the unauthenticated systems can't sniff local IPs and find other machines to target via broadcasts.
The music is just the reflection of a sad reality.
Today's popular music is the cumulative effect of record sales and marketing. It feeds into the messages the media shoves down everyone's throats...
People need to stop telling kids that the sky is falling. The negative messages coming out of the media is enough to screw with any kid's mind. "You won't have any jobs", "the environment will be squandered by your parents", "everything will be more expensive and harder", "straighten up, fly right and get screwed anyways", "you'll need a degree to work at McDonalds", "if you don't do good in school, you'll be nothing", "you'll be paying for your parents' retirement". Kids have enough of a hard time dealing with zero freedom and zero wealth... a looming non-future and no life experience to question the media is enough to turn anyone into an asshole.
Cut down on the media tripe, deal hard with bullying, and maybe kids could feel a bit more free to be individuals. They won't be afraid to say "hey, I like working with people, I'm going to study retail management. I'm going to try hard in school, and I won't have to act like a gansta so the other kids don't pick on me."
SuSE is pretty good for a "supported" distro. Debian is good all around... unfortunately the marketing droids at Redhat have convinced management that it is important that their distribution be "supported".
We're seeing problems like this: Vendor A gets their feet wet in the Linux arena by targetting Redhat 8. Vendor A supports their product on Redhat 8. Vendor A doesn't want a lot of hassle from this, Redhat 8 is a perfectly valid modern operating system which should continue to be supported until the OS is genuinely outdated.
Redhat announces that support for Redhat 8 is dropping off. Management says "Oh no, we have to migrate to RHEL 2.1". Vendor A says "we haven't migrated to RHEL 2.1, we're still only supporting Redhat 8." Security says "Hey, you can't run that, it's not secure anymore.".
Vendor A is faced with two options: Figure out what this RHEL 2.1 crap is and update their support documents, or dump Linux support. Since Redhat jumped ship for support so quickly, and there was no good reason for the version incresase other than a cash-grab on their part... loyalty goes out the window.
Vendor A drops Linux support, developers targeting Vendor A's product port their apps to the supported version of Unix.
The long-term outlook, I see three scenarios:
1. IBM steps in... "Holy S#$T, our customers are being hosed on Linux support by our friends Redhat! Redhat better fix it or we're going to pick up where they left off... we should also look into buying them, we may as well save the brand if we're keeping their promises. This is bad."
2. Novell steps in "Remember us? We still support your old legacy NetWare stuff, we're a good company who's been around for decades, we're doing this Linux thing with SuSE. Want to try Linux again? We're already the distro of choice on IBM's big iron."
3. Developers never touch Linux again.
(If you're gonig Fedora, you might as well go Debian or even FreeBSD. They have better track records)
Redhat's screwing themselves with this artificial version numbering and BS support tactics. They're going to lose all the developer mindshare they've fought the past 8 years for.
Redhat's going to get bought out or Novell will rise to take their place.
Some legal guy will probably blither that it's about burden of proof. At least in criminal matters.
Police prosecutor: "...the accused was seen walking out of a Best Buy with a DVD player. He was confronted by security, whereupon he said 'I am not the man you're looking for. There is no DVD player. Move along'. Security inexplicably let him go."
Accused: "I havent even watched a movie for 7 years so I dont even have a dvd player. I am not the man you're looking for. There is no DVD player."
That sounds as though you are rationalizing emotions. Feelings aren't at all rational. For some reason he was alone as a youth and it hurt him, but as he grew older he grew to enjoy being alone... It doesn't mean he chose solitude... he was probably like most geeks, a quirky outcast who was difficult to live with.
We're all governed by emotions and horomones. Our bodies and our needs change as we grow older.
... or I'm overanalyzing it and he was just responding to being a geeky kid who's grown up to be shrouded with the media spotlight.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry. Noted: loose vowel.
There's a lot of mish-mashed stuff in my post about various forms of hybrids, thanks for the corrections.
The Civic Hybrid doesn't strike me as a good example of the limits of what a Hybrid can do, but it is a good example of what a "no compromises" hybrid can do. I think the Civic hybrid also has a steel chassis. The different transmission types I pulled from the U.S. government site, and some reviews out on the web... nothing authoritative, they could have been demo models, short-lived production runs or something like that :-)
The Prius is a decent example of a "not quite a normal car" hybrid. I was surprised searching the web to find out that it had a manual transmission.
What's the horsepower on your Hybrid and the rest of the Civics? I couldn't find those numbers to try to match horsepower and fuel efficiency.
That's silly. I was talking about what happens when you don't have a contract:
And now you're saying: "A "contract of service" is a different thing than a "contract for work". In the former, the contractor just works for the employer for a period of time on whatever she's told to do. In the latter, the specific software to be created is described in the contract"
I think what you're describing is a reasonable description of a situation where there "is a contract saying otherwise"
The Honda Civic Hybrid is an example of a hybrid is set up with the following:
Energy is lost in the conversion from gas to electricity, it's also lost in the storage in the batteries and the usage from the batteries to the wheels. You konw and I know that while normally this would all be lost in the braking, now it is stored and used to assist with acceleration.
The odd part is that while driving where you aren't using the brakes a lot, the transmission, weight improvements and aerodynamics will be the only improvements in your efficiency. The electrical assist means that your engine can be improbably weak, but I don't know if that necessarily translates to a more efficient engine.
Here's something which nicely describes why I'm skeptical about the true performance of hybrids:
1992 Civic line:_ Civic.shtml
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/1992_Honda
2004 Civic line (including hybrids)_ Civic.shtml
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2004_Honda
I'm not sure why, but it looks like my 1992 1.5L Civic Hatchback is(was) more fuel efficient (city and highway) than the modern 2004 Civic Hybrid. I don't think U.S. government numbers are right, but they're close enough to try to make some kind of a point :-)
As an aside, I was looking into the hybrid transmissions and from what I could tell... I was wrong, the Honda Insight was manual-only, but the newer hybrids sometimes sell with the choice of an automatic or continuously variable transmission... oddly, the fancy transmission hurts highway fuel efficiency, but it helps in the city.
Note that comparing an aluminum hybrid to a galvanized steel compact, e.g. the Insight to a "regular" car, would not be an apples-to-apples comparison since if you were to remove all the weight from the electrical system (adding hydraulic brakes) and increase the engine size to match the lost horsepower, the new gas car would be more efficient than other gas cars on the road today, and might even be better on the highway than the hybrid. (Although it really should fail to beat the hybrid in the city)
A 2004 Honda Civic Hybrid to a 2004 Honda Civic would be a more reasonable comparison than my 1992 to a 2004... the 2004's have bigger engines and are less fuel efficient. I'd also expect the 2004 hybrid to have more horsepower than my 1992 car... so I'll admit, it's not a fair comparison...
But there may be less expensive, more fuel efficient non-hybrid vehicles on the market.
(In reality, I get about 37MPG on the highway, ~30 in the city... the car _is_ 13 years old)
I can only think that you're imagining some distinction between a "contractor" and an "employee", but there's no such distinction in the copyright act. See Section 13, Subsection 3.
"Where the author of a work was in the employment of some other person under a contract of service or apprenticeship and the work was made in the course of his employment by that person, the person by whom the author was employed shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the first owner of the copyright..."
In Canada, as I understand it, unless there is a contract saying otherwise the copyright is in the hands of the entity who hired you to write it -- but you still have some very small rights as the author... For instance, another individual can't slap their name on the code and declare it their creation, nor can they modify it and leave your name on it without citing that the code was modified. Note that they can remove your name altogether and just leave the copyright notice... which is pretty normal... I've had that done to me with documentation in my workplace many times.
This is somewhat sensible in that the company/person who commissioned the work provided everything which was needed for that software to be authored, including money to compensate your time. If it were not for them, the software would not be written. I think this is very similar to the way it works in the U.S.
The "author" normally must destroy all their copies of the code upon leaving, and they're not allowed to design a similar solution for anyone else. That last aspect is, IMHO, grey, fuzzy and awful... get a contract before doing contract work like this.
I'm surprised it isn't like that in Britain. Canada's laws are normally quite close.
"Normal" infants recognize faces very quickly. It seems to be "instinct".
I think this is a little fuzzier than most people make it out to be, and really odd if done in 2d still shots.
If you show a computer a photo of some guy sitting down at a desk and ask "is this a face?", what you're really asking is... "is this a two-dimensional still projection of a three-dimensional space which contains a partial image of a face which is probably of an object which appears to be that of a human?"
I think projection and interpretation of space is important, the photo on the guy's desk of his kids out at the beach would have to be discarded as an alternate scale where a giant replica office has been wrapped around an ocean setting, or both are valid and the office is suspended over a beach (load up the algorithms to identify this as an office, a beach, a window and then figure out if this is a resonable place to put a window in a building), the Dilbert strips would have to be discarded as "probably out of scale, probably not intended to resemble a human"
I think you're absolutely right, spotting faces in shapes of cars, shapes of houses, cartoon strips, etc should not be completely discarded as "those aren't faces, the AI is wrong!", but instead discarded as "those are probably not intended to resemble humans"
...provided you're not taking the necessary shortcuts to get around limits of computational power.
Yep... and it's not like people relying upon those systems hadn't seen so many worms and viruses that they didn't expect a new one to appear... and it's not like the patch wasn't released.
The kid did something very stupid... but somebody was going to do it, and no amount of deterrants in the world would have stopped them.
microwave path calculation tool
Microwave path calculations are easy... I mean kinda... Joe user who thinks that ProductX sucks because Column H spills off the page when printed, or the pie chart has a 3d effect which doesn't work quite the same way is a much harder problem domain... "but I didn't have any problem with that in Excel!"
IMHO, compatability with any buggy or flakey non-spec is just a dangling carrot.
Bah, it would encourage you to make a decision on the open market.
Unchecked piracy has the same effect as market dumping.
Using the public purse to put piracy in check is using taxes to fund a flawed business model... controling piracy selectively is awfully similar to unchecked piracy... which... as I said above.
Maybe it should be illegal for Microsoft to support software pirates?
I mean, a B.Sc.? or a B.A.?
Most CS programs are B.Sc. programs, they'll want the same math as somebody studying biology, plus some additional numerical methods specific to CS.
A B.A. program in CS will have very little math. It's kind of sad really... but it gives you the data structures and management techniques which most programming assignments require.
Remember a B.Sc. is about science and furthering the field. If you don't understand the math used to develop computer science, you can't really further the field. Think about proving algorithms, encryption, compression, waveforms, statistics, stuff like that.
Now learning how to develop that database front end for the marketing department has little to do with either... but picking up the programming books and immediately understanding the data structures and methods they use to develop the GUI, interface with the relational database backends, manipulate the relational database backends... know the weaknesses and limitations of relational theory... all that stuff which "teach-yourself programming in 21 days" books tell you how to do, but not why you're doing it is a matter of either the arts or science programs.
If you dump the maths and go for a B.A. in CS, some snobs will laugh at you. Best to take the math if you want to do CS. If you flunk all the maths and have nowhere to go then finish with a B.A.
Linus didn't sell the software to the Coast Guard, Microsoft did.
The OS however, is a small part of an IT infrastructure, most places do security in-house and therefore can accept full responsibility for allowing MS products and not protecting against their faults.
Or at least that's how a sane judge would view it.
Occam's Razor: they're geeks out looking for sand worms.
Nope, in an unjust world he'd get +5 Funny too.
I don't mean employee-operated software firewalls, that's just silly. Do you really think it secure to trust your clients to run a firewall on their machine?
I mean stuffing a firewall on the employee-facing network, forcing them to use authenticated VPNs or some similar technology from inside the office, and restricting their ability to use various network resources by default (e.g. cut web access, IRC, various chatting clients, all typical tunnelling software, and allow dynamic rules to be slapped down for new worms or trojans...)
Kick in some port-scan on login method, and incorrectly configured machines will be quickly identified, and may be refused permission to speak with the VPN servers.
You need VPN or IP Sec so that the unauthenticated systems can't sniff local IPs and find other machines to target via broadcasts.
That kind of stuff is too new.
Those mobile people with their infected machines do occasionally come into the office and plug-in.
Firewalling all client workstations is pretty new, but with the number of notebooks out there, it is becoming absolutely necessary.
Wireless technology has already done a good job describing the problem of untrustworthy business-only networks.
The music is just the reflection of a sad reality.
Today's popular music is the cumulative effect of record sales and marketing. It feeds into the messages the media shoves down everyone's throats...
People need to stop telling kids that the sky is falling. The negative messages coming out of the media is enough to screw with any kid's mind. "You won't have any jobs", "the environment will be squandered by your parents", "everything will be more expensive and harder", "straighten up, fly right and get screwed anyways", "you'll need a degree to work at McDonalds", "if you don't do good in school, you'll be nothing", "you'll be paying for your parents' retirement". Kids have enough of a hard time dealing with zero freedom and zero wealth... a looming non-future and no life experience to question the media is enough to turn anyone into an asshole.
Cut down on the media tripe, deal hard with bullying, and maybe kids could feel a bit more free to be individuals. They won't be afraid to say "hey, I like working with people, I'm going to study retail management. I'm going to try hard in school, and I won't have to act like a gansta so the other kids don't pick on me."
SuSE is pretty good for a "supported" distro. Debian is good all around... unfortunately the marketing droids at Redhat have convinced management that it is important that their distribution be "supported".
We're seeing problems like this: Vendor A gets their feet wet in the Linux arena by targetting Redhat 8. Vendor A supports their product on Redhat 8. Vendor A doesn't want a lot of hassle from this, Redhat 8 is a perfectly valid modern operating system which should continue to be supported until the OS is genuinely outdated.
Redhat announces that support for Redhat 8 is dropping off. Management says "Oh no, we have to migrate to RHEL 2.1". Vendor A says "we haven't migrated to RHEL 2.1, we're still only supporting Redhat 8." Security says "Hey, you can't run that, it's not secure anymore.".
Vendor A is faced with two options: Figure out what this RHEL 2.1 crap is and update their support documents, or dump Linux support. Since Redhat jumped ship for support so quickly, and there was no good reason for the version incresase other than a cash-grab on their part... loyalty goes out the window.
Vendor A drops Linux support, developers targeting Vendor A's product port their apps to the supported version of Unix.
The long-term outlook, I see three scenarios:
1. IBM steps in... "Holy S#$T, our customers are being hosed on Linux support by our friends Redhat! Redhat better fix it or we're going to pick up where they left off... we should also look into buying them, we may as well save the brand if we're keeping their promises. This is bad."
2. Novell steps in "Remember us? We still support your old legacy NetWare stuff, we're a good company who's been around for decades, we're doing this Linux thing with SuSE. Want to try Linux again? We're already the distro of choice on IBM's big iron."
3. Developers never touch Linux again.
(If you're gonig Fedora, you might as well go Debian or even FreeBSD. They have better track records)
Redhat's screwing themselves with this artificial version numbering and BS support tactics. They're going to lose all the developer mindshare they've fought the past 8 years for.
Redhat's going to get bought out or Novell will rise to take their place.
Bah! There are no lesser shows!
What if an organization gave you $5.
Some legal guy will probably blither that it's about burden of proof. At least in criminal matters.
Police prosecutor: "...the accused was seen walking out of a Best Buy with a DVD player. He was confronted by security, whereupon he said 'I am not the man you're looking for. There is no DVD player. Move along'. Security inexplicably let him go."
Accused: "I havent even watched a movie for 7 years so I dont even have a dvd player. I am not the man you're looking for. There is no DVD player."
Patch submission:
31337, 0
>> #define license_author_is_blacklisted !license_author_is_not_blacklisted
Woohoo, we could be kernel contributors :-)
That sounds as though you are rationalizing emotions. Feelings aren't at all rational. For some reason he was alone as a youth and it hurt him, but as he grew older he grew to enjoy being alone... It doesn't mean he chose solitude... he was probably like most geeks, a quirky outcast who was difficult to live with.
We're all governed by emotions and horomones. Our bodies and our needs change as we grow older.
... or I'm overanalyzing it and he was just responding to being a geeky kid who's grown up to be shrouded with the media spotlight.
Do you really think he chose solitude?