PHP may feel bad compared to currently-popular languages like Ruby and Python, but consider what it was an alternative to when it first came out: ASP and ColdFusion. Can anyone who worked in either of those honestly say that PHP is as bad, let alone worse? I certainly found it less awful than CF for web dev (and that's speaking as someone who'd been getting paid to program since before there was a web).
Honestly, this article is just yet another US sourced scare mongering story.
This. The people asking what the ITU has ever done for them are clearly ignorant of the vital role it plays in the area of communications and technology standards, especially through its ITU-T arm (formerly CCITT). Basically, global standards of the letter-dot-number format are from the ITU. Like T.80, which we know as JPEG. V.34 modems with V.42 error correction. The whole series of G.99x standards, which we know as DSL. H.264 video. H.323 VoIP.
Only recently have things gotten to the point where traveling to a different country no longer requires renting a local mobile phone for the duration of your trip. Without the ITU, we'd still be in those old days - and it might not just be mobile phones that failed to interoperate between countries, but also VoIP, video, images, modems, you name it.
As far as the FUD goes, I'm one of the apparently few Slashdotters who's gotten to see the UN from the inside (I say apparently few because the vast majority of comments make it clear that posters have absolutely no clue what they're talking about, when it comes to the UN). I haven't been to the ITU, but I've seen all kinds of other stuff get negotiated, and the general rule of thumb is this:
No member state (i.e. country) will allow any wording to be agreed that requires it to do anything that it does not want to do, or otherwise jeopardizes its sovereignty.
Remember, the UN tries to work on a consensus basis. Voting is an absolute last resort. So whatever actually gets agreed to is something that almost 200 countries all looked over and said "hmm, let's see, doesn't obligate us to do anything we don't want to do, and probably lets us just keep doing whatever we're doing." This means agreements usually end up being vaguely and weakly worded - and I'm as cynical as anyone about that. On the other hand, vaguely and weakly agreeing to at least be on the same page, so that my phone and my passport can both be useful in the same day, sure beats the alternative.
It's highly ironic, though, that the same people who always spread FUD saying the UN is out to steal American sovereignty (can't happen, for the reasons I just described above) at the same time want control of the Internet to stay in American hands - thus depriving all the other countries of their sovereignty when it comes to how they choose to run the portions of the Internet that lie within their boundaries.
If anything, upcoming discussions at the ITU might lead to more countries exercising their national sovereignty when it comes to the Internet - which I definitely favor, and which I'd expect "pro-sovereignty" Americans to also favor, if I didn't already know them to be hypocrites.
We are forced to jump through official hoops such as CUDA (from Nvidia) and OpenCL (from ATi)
You should fix Wikipedia, which thinks OpenCL originated with... Apple?
I'm inclined to back the one with "Open" in its name, in hopes that it actually will be, but if everybody could get together and hash out a single thing including the best points of CUDA, OpenCL and this new HSA thing (how many times must we invent this particular wheel?) we'd probably all be better off.
ssl.berkeley.edu has been abuzz with all manner of things getting done at higher priority than usual because of this launch. I saw mission control a few years back (this won't be anywhere near the first craft they've controlled, let alone helped build) and I wish my local college had a room like that.;)
Indeed. My town was hit by a tsunami in 1946. They rebuilt. It was hit by another in 1960, they got a clue, and there are now beautiful parks along the ocean where there used to be a neighborhood. I'm just a few minutes' walk from the area that was inundated, and although my house is up a rise and no tsunami has yet come close to it since it was built in 1938, at 1km inland and 13m above sea level, it's still within the "inundation zone" defined by Civil Defense, where total evacuation is enforced if a tsunami is heading for us.
Preparing for temporary sea-level rise due to a tsunami isn't all that different from preparing for permanent sea-level rise. You either build far enough inland that you're at least 1km from the current waterline and 15m up (my house could be oceanfront in a century by worst-case models) or you elevate your structure significantly. Lots of houses near the ocean here are up on stilts, which would help them at least in the case of a small tsunami, but probably not in a big one or permanent sea-level rise.
I don't have any liquid nitrogen, but I really, really like french toast. On a MacBook Air with an Ivy Ridge CPU, how many slices would I need to cook simultaneously to match the effects of using LN2?
A native Chinese friend of mine in a city a couple hours from Beijing works for a textbook publisher, and they almost always have someone from Canada around on a multi-year contract to work with their translators. If they're doing a textbook for Chinese people studying English at whatever level, the translators will do their best to put the necessary things into English, and they will predictably massacre all the idioms and half of the rest. And if they're working on translating a textbook from English into Chinese, the translators will be baffled by all kinds of phrases and need them explained.
Being friends, we help each other out with our respective languages, and I've had to explain things like what "track lights" are, and generally fix lots of grammar.
This assumes, of course, that the Anon is not only a native English speaker, but has a high level of proficiency.
Given that cable and DSL providers advertise speeds of "up to" whatever, and hardly anyone even gets close to the "up to" speed they're paying for, I think any change to how pricing works should require the providers to include service-level agreements. Want to make more money off me? Show me the bandwidth.
You can use earth-based telescopes with a similar sort of trick to study Earth's atmosphere, of course. At work last December, we had astronomers using an 8-meter telescope to do high-res spectroscopy of the light reflected off the moon during a total lunar eclipse, since during totality that light has all passed through Earth's atmosphere.
The Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea (home of the world's top multi-band complex of large observatories) is planning to have a bunch of stuff going on for transit day - see their page.
I made a lot of ones using this overall design as a kid, with different wing-edge treatments. Did all kinds of variations on it, too.
I wasn't going for distance or flight-time records - just wanted something that flew decently, had some control surfaces I could tweak, and looked neat.
Twenty-odd years ago I wound up with a design that met those criteria to my satisfaction. I've rarely made anything else since then - and I've never seen anyone else make my design. I'll have to put together instructions sometime.
The Japanese are being resourceful and inventive in the face of horrible circumstances, and have come up with something great.
I am, however, still curious what necessitated the invention of certain TV game shows, the "chewing chewing chewing" song, and anime tentacle monsters.
You're safe - administering SCO (...well, and NT4 at the same gig) was the last straw, and I've now gone about 7 years without being talked into being a sysadmin on anything.:)
Maybe it's just 3-letter names beginning with an S? SCO, SGI and Sun all went rotten.
Actually, I think they may have already build this one.;)
The media coverage of the dedication ceremony for the scope I run quoted the Minister of Something-or-other as saying something along the lines of "if we asked for this much money now, we'd never get it." The national economy had just peaked when they started building it, and by the time it was finished almost a decade later, the economy sucked.
(And at $400 million, it's still the most expensive scope on the planet, twelve years into its lifespan.)
Yep, of course. In fact, the telescope I run at my job had "the largest monolithic mirror ever made" from 1999 until 2004 (when Roger Angel started cranking out 8.4-meter ones). Wasn't considered the largest telescope, of course, because segmented 10-meter mirrors of the Keck twins (1992 and 1996) next door to it were larger overall, just segmented.
That said, using the phrase "world's largest" in the headline before the first concrete pour invites comments like mine.;)
And even if it is completed before TMT and E-ELT, as soon as either of them is completed, it'll lose the title.
Did I mention both TMT and E-ELT are also targeting completion by the end of the decade? Yup.
So, good luck, GMT!
(And it goes without saying that non-optical radio telescopes, which use dishes instead of mirrors, have long been much larger. And that even submillimeter telescopes, which also use dishes, are working on staying larger, with the 25-meter CCAT planned for Chile later this decade.)
Two words: Bill Gates. Two more words: Steve Jobs Two more words: Steve Wozniak.
I dropped out of architecture school at a state university after one semester. Got an ops job, then a BASIC programming job. Tried going back to school (if you count DeVry as school) for telecoms management while working. Tested out of all kinds of entry-level classes and spent my free time sitting in on third-year stuff... let me just say that the OSI model is one of those things that cannot be un-seen. So I did some tech writing, more ops, tech support, consulting, FORTRAN programming, web dev/sysadmin during the dot-com boom, then back to consulting.
The last computer class I had actually taken was in 7th grade.
So... what your degree is in, what kind of degree you have, and indeed, whether you have a degree at all, may matter less than other factors.
In the last several years, I've transitioned from pure IT into technical roles within space science and policy, where my IT skills and background are invaluable, but where I no longer have to care about dot-dot releases. And I went to grad school in one of those fields. (No, I never finished undergrad. Hell, I never finished freshman year. The grad school folks looked at my CV and decided they didn't care.)
Yep, I've seen some pretty dark darkness in rural parts of Kenya and Uganda, to be sure.
(Sucky places to get a flat tire, though, I must say.)
Depending on the country, there might be a fair bit of smoke in the air from people using wood for fuel, which would be a problem at certain wavelengths.
The continent of Africa, as a whole, is woefully underdeveloped for astronomy (like it is for lots of other things). Yes, South Africa has some decent stuff, like SALT, based on the Hobby-Eberley scope in Texas, which is quite large. And the Canaries have plenty of observatories near Africa, but they're under Spanish control. A SKA would probably include some outlying dishes one or even two countries removed from South Africa, which would help make science more visible in those countries as well./Biased since I work in astronomy and am married to an African.;)
Slashdot Mirror
PHP may feel bad compared to currently-popular languages like Ruby and Python, but consider what it was an alternative to when it first came out: ASP and ColdFusion. Can anyone who worked in either of those honestly say that PHP is as bad, let alone worse? I certainly found it less awful than CF for web dev (and that's speaking as someone who'd been getting paid to program since before there was a web).
Honestly, this article is just yet another US sourced scare mongering story.
This. The people asking what the ITU has ever done for them are clearly ignorant of the vital role it plays in the area of communications and technology standards, especially through its ITU-T arm (formerly CCITT). Basically, global standards of the letter-dot-number format are from the ITU. Like T.80, which we know as JPEG. V.34 modems with V.42 error correction. The whole series of G.99x standards, which we know as DSL. H.264 video. H.323 VoIP.
Only recently have things gotten to the point where traveling to a different country no longer requires renting a local mobile phone for the duration of your trip. Without the ITU, we'd still be in those old days - and it might not just be mobile phones that failed to interoperate between countries, but also VoIP, video, images, modems, you name it.
As far as the FUD goes, I'm one of the apparently few Slashdotters who's gotten to see the UN from the inside (I say apparently few because the vast majority of comments make it clear that posters have absolutely no clue what they're talking about, when it comes to the UN). I haven't been to the ITU, but I've seen all kinds of other stuff get negotiated, and the general rule of thumb is this:
No member state (i.e. country) will allow any wording to be agreed that requires it to do anything that it does not want to do, or otherwise jeopardizes its sovereignty.
Remember, the UN tries to work on a consensus basis. Voting is an absolute last resort. So whatever actually gets agreed to is something that almost 200 countries all looked over and said "hmm, let's see, doesn't obligate us to do anything we don't want to do, and probably lets us just keep doing whatever we're doing." This means agreements usually end up being vaguely and weakly worded - and I'm as cynical as anyone about that. On the other hand, vaguely and weakly agreeing to at least be on the same page, so that my phone and my passport can both be useful in the same day, sure beats the alternative.
It's highly ironic, though, that the same people who always spread FUD saying the UN is out to steal American sovereignty (can't happen, for the reasons I just described above) at the same time want control of the Internet to stay in American hands - thus depriving all the other countries of their sovereignty when it comes to how they choose to run the portions of the Internet that lie within their boundaries.
If anything, upcoming discussions at the ITU might lead to more countries exercising their national sovereignty when it comes to the Internet - which I definitely favor, and which I'd expect "pro-sovereignty" Americans to also favor, if I didn't already know them to be hypocrites.
"...an optimal replacement for traditional dual head 5 megapixel monitor installations."
Ah yes, the traditional dual head 5 megapixel monitor installation that your grandparents all have...
We are forced to jump through official hoops such as CUDA (from Nvidia) and OpenCL (from ATi)
You should fix Wikipedia, which thinks OpenCL originated with... Apple?
I'm inclined to back the one with "Open" in its name, in hopes that it actually will be, but if everybody could get together and hash out a single thing including the best points of CUDA, OpenCL and this new HSA thing (how many times must we invent this particular wheel?) we'd probably all be better off.
ssl.berkeley.edu has been abuzz with all manner of things getting done at higher priority than usual because of this launch. I saw mission control a few years back (this won't be anywhere near the first craft they've controlled, let alone helped build) and I wish my local college had a room like that. ;)
The DuraVision FDH3601 from EIZO is one example.
Expect to pay tens of thousands of dollars for it, though - these are targeted at oil companies and government.
Conveniently, the latest Intel chipsets can apparently handle such "4K" resolutions.
Indeed. My town was hit by a tsunami in 1946. They rebuilt. It was hit by another in 1960, they got a clue, and there are now beautiful parks along the ocean where there used to be a neighborhood. I'm just a few minutes' walk from the area that was inundated, and although my house is up a rise and no tsunami has yet come close to it since it was built in 1938, at 1km inland and 13m above sea level, it's still within the "inundation zone" defined by Civil Defense, where total evacuation is enforced if a tsunami is heading for us.
Preparing for temporary sea-level rise due to a tsunami isn't all that different from preparing for permanent sea-level rise. You either build far enough inland that you're at least 1km from the current waterline and 15m up (my house could be oceanfront in a century by worst-case models) or you elevate your structure significantly. Lots of houses near the ocean here are up on stilts, which would help them at least in the case of a small tsunami, but probably not in a big one or permanent sea-level rise.
I don't have any liquid nitrogen, but I really, really like french toast. On a MacBook Air with an Ivy Ridge CPU, how many slices would I need to cook simultaneously to match the effects of using LN2?
And what would dogs want with foosball tables and beanba... okay, okay, I'll grant you the beanbag chairs.
A native Chinese friend of mine in a city a couple hours from Beijing works for a textbook publisher, and they almost always have someone from Canada around on a multi-year contract to work with their translators. If they're doing a textbook for Chinese people studying English at whatever level, the translators will do their best to put the necessary things into English, and they will predictably massacre all the idioms and half of the rest. And if they're working on translating a textbook from English into Chinese, the translators will be baffled by all kinds of phrases and need them explained.
Being friends, we help each other out with our respective languages, and I've had to explain things like what "track lights" are, and generally fix lots of grammar.
This assumes, of course, that the Anon is not only a native English speaker, but has a high level of proficiency.
Given that cable and DSL providers advertise speeds of "up to" whatever, and hardly anyone even gets close to the "up to" speed they're paying for, I think any change to how pricing works should require the providers to include service-level agreements. Want to make more money off me? Show me the bandwidth.
You can use earth-based telescopes with a similar sort of trick to study Earth's atmosphere, of course. At work last December, we had astronomers using an 8-meter telescope to do high-res spectroscopy of the light reflected off the moon during a total lunar eclipse, since during totality that light has all passed through Earth's atmosphere.
The Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea (home of the world's top multi-band complex of large observatories) is planning to have a bunch of stuff going on for transit day - see their page.
Sadly, I'll be in DC. :(
I made a lot of ones using this overall design as a kid, with different wing-edge treatments. Did all kinds of variations on it, too.
I wasn't going for distance or flight-time records - just wanted something that flew decently, had some control surfaces I could tweak, and looked neat.
Twenty-odd years ago I wound up with a design that met those criteria to my satisfaction. I've rarely made anything else since then - and I've never seen anyone else make my design. I'll have to put together instructions sometime.
The Japanese are being resourceful and inventive in the face of horrible circumstances, and have come up with something great.
I am, however, still curious what necessitated the invention of certain TV game shows, the "chewing chewing chewing" song, and anime tentacle monsters.
You're safe - administering SCO (...well, and NT4 at the same gig) was the last straw, and I've now gone about 7 years without being talked into being a sysadmin on anything. :)
Maybe it's just 3-letter names beginning with an S? SCO, SGI and Sun all went rotten.
How's SMC doing?
Back in the mid-late '90s, I was a dedicated SGI user, working on an Indy with PhotoShop 3.0 and all that good stuff.
I'm disappointed to see SGI apparently taking the SCO path here.
(Ironically, I administered a SCO OpenSewer box far more recently than I got to use any SGI kit.)
Actually, I think they may have already build this one. ;)
The media coverage of the dedication ceremony for the scope I run quoted the Minister of Something-or-other as saying something along the lines of "if we asked for this much money now, we'd never get it." The national economy had just peaked when they started building it, and by the time it was finished almost a decade later, the economy sucked.
(And at $400 million, it's still the most expensive scope on the planet, twelve years into its lifespan.)
Yep, of course. In fact, the telescope I run at my job had "the largest monolithic mirror ever made" from 1999 until 2004 (when Roger Angel started cranking out 8.4-meter ones). Wasn't considered the largest telescope, of course, because segmented 10-meter mirrors of the Keck twins (1992 and 1996) next door to it were larger overall, just segmented.
That said, using the phrase "world's largest" in the headline before the first concrete pour invites comments like mine. ;)
and only if, it's completed before the (larger) Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii, and the (larger still) European Extremely Large Telescope in Chile.
And even if it is completed before TMT and E-ELT, as soon as either of them is completed, it'll lose the title.
Did I mention both TMT and E-ELT are also targeting completion by the end of the decade? Yup.
So, good luck, GMT!
(And it goes without saying that non-optical radio telescopes, which use dishes instead of mirrors, have long been much larger. And that even submillimeter telescopes, which also use dishes, are working on staying larger, with the 25-meter CCAT planned for Chile later this decade.)
That's really, really nearby... if you define 'nearby' like the Nearby Supernova Factory I'm in - 400 million to 1 billion light years.
This one is only 15.4 million light years away. So close it could practically order pizza.
Two words: Bill Gates.
Two more words: Steve Jobs
Two more words: Steve Wozniak.
I dropped out of architecture school at a state university after one semester. Got an ops job, then a BASIC programming job. Tried going back to school (if you count DeVry as school) for telecoms management while working. Tested out of all kinds of entry-level classes and spent my free time sitting in on third-year stuff... let me just say that the OSI model is one of those things that cannot be un-seen. So I did some tech writing, more ops, tech support, consulting, FORTRAN programming, web dev/sysadmin during the dot-com boom, then back to consulting.
The last computer class I had actually taken was in 7th grade.
So... what your degree is in, what kind of degree you have, and indeed, whether you have a degree at all, may matter less than other factors.
In the last several years, I've transitioned from pure IT into technical roles within space science and policy, where my IT skills and background are invaluable, but where I no longer have to care about dot-dot releases. And I went to grad school in one of those fields. (No, I never finished undergrad. Hell, I never finished freshman year. The grad school folks looked at my CV and decided they didn't care.)
Yep, I've seen some pretty dark darkness in rural parts of Kenya and Uganda, to be sure.
(Sucky places to get a flat tire, though, I must say.)
Depending on the country, there might be a fair bit of smoke in the air from people using wood for fuel, which would be a problem at certain wavelengths.
Yeah, what Larry said.
Although it's kind of cute to get work newsletters where the plain-text part is empty, so my mailer just displays "This message has no content."
The continent of Africa, as a whole, is woefully underdeveloped for astronomy (like it is for lots of other things). Yes, South Africa has some decent stuff, like SALT, based on the Hobby-Eberley scope in Texas, which is quite large. And the Canaries have plenty of observatories near Africa, but they're under Spanish control. A SKA would probably include some outlying dishes one or even two countries removed from South Africa, which would help make science more visible in those countries as well. /Biased since I work in astronomy and am married to an African. ;)