This is what happens when capital and goods can freely cross borders but people can't. Capital will simply chase poverty in a never ending circle around the globe.
Except that it is not as simple as that: a lot of Poles used to work in Ireland, which was one of the first EU countries that allowed labor migration from new Eastern EU members. Recently however, due to ecomomy tightening in Ireland, and relative economic boom in Poland, many Polish expatriates are returning eastward.
Labor cost is still important but not as much as it used to be: capital situation, tax incentives, closeness to large markets, etc., are gaining importance as a result of the current crisis.
While 0.993 isn't very good, (0.993)^3 is pretty awsome.
(0.993)^3 would suck actually, resulting in 0.979---but fortunately the error rate is 1-(1-0.993)^3), i.e. a pretty awesome.9999997 (assuming independent errors and such)
My biggest complainst are that I cannot get a static IP on my home wireless while getting DHCP everywhere else
See if you can nail down the DHCP assignment in your home router so that your MAC address will always receive the same IP. In DHCPD on Linux it is a matter of including host records in/etc/dhcpd.conf:
host tango {
hardware ethernet 00:12:3F:12:34:56;
fixed-address 1.2.3.4;
option host-name "tango";}
Your assorted routers/gateways might or might not
support nailing down IP's---I have seen some that have the 'remember this IP assignment' button in their DHCP setup.
It certainly didn't help that they had a case of well-published scientific fraud several years ago, where a researcher (J.H. Schoen, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n) claimed some important results in nanoelectronics, that turned out to be a fabrication. You can imagine that after such a black eye to the institution the funding enthusiasm subsided.
...still leave aluminum oxide all over your skin, which is very much an irritant.
Al2O3, aka sand, is not an irritant. It is very stable chemically, and a very hard substance. The only known health problem with it is silicosis, resulting from breathing in lots of it into your lungs---totally does not apply in this case.
Intel is really pushing Atom now; just last week I went to an Atom seminar for embedded computing folks. They claim 1GHz+-class performance at 3W power usage; I was impressed by a motherboard running a GPS/car automation type realtime app, where not only there was no fan or even a heatsink, but you could touch and hold the finger to the CPU.
They didn't want to say what's the unit price, but it probably won't be in low single dollars like with some ARM variants (STM/LPC)
It's a serious problem... Ant are warm blooded, and are going to like heat
Nitpicking, but ants are insects, and aren't cold-blooded. You were thinking of snakes and lizards perhaps, who are cold-blooded (i.e. don't regulate their internal temperature) and who indeed seek warm spots. I don't think insects show such behavior much---I understand that it's more that they eat some plastics and also insides of computers and such presents them with nice, dark spacious places to nest.
In my opinion, good engineering involves thinking that things _will_ eventually fail, how it can be made to fail _safely_ if possible and figuring out what the acceptable risk is given the cost. Modern engineers don't normally design stuff to last for 1000 years Many widely-used technologies are successful at least in part because of the natural or engineered secondary mechanisms that mitigate failure, or even self-heal. It is easy to forget how important those are, because they don't matter for normal operation, but without such graceful failure mechanisms a lot of technology around us would be much less useful.
Several examples that I can think of:
Regular incandescent lightbulb: since the filament resistance increases with temperature, they are less sensitive to line
voltage variation; since power is V^2/R, excessive voltage doesn't cause runaway power dissipation that would burn
out the lamp quickly. Compare that to semiconductors, such as transistors in power amplifiers, whose resistance decreases with temperature. As a result, they are subject to a thermal runaway, where the more power they shed, the more power flows through them, and one needs special protection circuits. It would have been hard to make such protection cheaply in Edison's times, so lightbulbs wouldn't have succeeded as much as they did.
Incidentally, power MOSFETs have much less thermal runaway, which partly explains why they overtook bipolar transistors
Electrolytic capacitors: any damage to the insulating dielectric layer self-heals by the excess current flowing
across the damaged spot. The tantalum electrolytic caps work the same way, except that under some circumstances,
the heat shedding is faster than repair, and they sometimes blow up in spectacular ways (spilled gunk, chunks flying)
Halogen lightbulbs: a damaged part of the filament gets hotter, causing preferential deposition of metal from
the vapor phase, which self-repairs the damage
Bikes: partly, stable because the gyroscopic torque counteracts small excursions from the vertical balance.
How about the incredible amazing biological healing: I am looking at the healing cut on my finger. 'Nuff said.
She also taught me to the principle of keeping things simple, both from a moral perspective and practical one. I never asked, but I'm sure she preferred vi to emacs. Your grandmother was a fine woman, but I think you forgot the second part: "Keep things as simple as possible, but not simpler".
I bet she preferred Emacs:)
I'm personally sympathetic to the professionalization of software engineering. Basically this would mean that you would need a license to practice, all your code would be signed by its author, and the association would discipline any software author who wrote bad software, either maliciously or accidentally. Although it means hobbyists could no longer tinker
You are creating a false dychotomy: sure the hobbyists can tinker---they just can't be put in charge of large systems where there's money or safety of other people at stake. A good example here is how Maryland regulates electrical work: homeowners can't work on the electrical installation in condos and townhouses, but it's perfectly OK to fix your own electricity in a detached home--if you screw up, you only hurt yourself and your family, rather tban burning down the whole block.
In any case, I agree that the software industry is headed for regulation. It always amazed me how much of a free ride they were getting for deficient products--(insert a predictable analogy of faulty cars and resulting lawsuits). The best part is when the software company comes out with a new version that fixes all bugs and REALLY works, and everybody is expected to buy it again.
The reason why people were putting up with this for so long was the progress that the industry was making, which would be impossible without this leeway. Imagine if the industry practice from around 10 years ago was codified in the software analog of National Electrical Code, a thick rule book that all electricians in the US must follow (conformance is checked by official independent inspections, btw.). Having said that, I think that we'll see a National Software Code sooner or later.
An interesting post, even if it's absolute tosh. OK, and we could stop quoting here---the rest of this post was just more of the condescending attitude. C'mon, it's just a program! The original poster didn't ask for help debugging, optimizing, garbage collecting---he just wants help with understanding the code base. The reply implies that it's impossible to understand the code without the full shampoo treatment (version control, tracing, profiling, instrumenting of memory allocation).
I think this is unwarranted elitism. Call graphs, some runtime analysis (debugger or profiler), and plain old printer/highlighter are excellent tools, and often sufficient. The first program I ever worked on (I actually learned C from reading that code, because the only C book at that time was the Kernighan/Ritchie, and we didn't have it yet) was a Zilog Z80 assembler, and I still have a fanfold printout with my highlights---I am proud to say that I understood everything, except the setjmp/longjmp part.
By the way, anyone who cares about understanding code should know about Literate Programming (http://www.literateprogramming.com), whose guiding principle is that 'source code's main function is to document the algorithm---and it also can be compiled to an executable'. The problem with LP is that there are so many to chose from:
original *web (cweb/nuweb/etc), Doxygen, Perl module comments...
If you have eight cores instead of one, then the performance boost you can get can be anywhere from eight times faster to none at all. If you're lucky you could get so-called superlinear speedup, i.e. speedup by more than eight. Most of the time it's because of caching effects, for instance because one CPU is prefetching the data into a cache, which the other CPU will find immediately instead of waiting for a cache load from memory. Another scenario is when you distribute a large load that exceeds the unified cache, but whose pieces fit into individual CPU caches, or when distributing the load causes the access pattern to avoid cache thashing.
In fact, for most current desktop loads more than two CPUs is an overkill, so before we successfully parallellize those apps, it's quite reasonable to use an extra core for prefetching. This could actually be a relatively painless tweak to the compilers and runtime libs: the compiler knows when code is about to access large data, and starts a separate prefetch thread that reads the data ahead of the main loop in the original thread, so that by the time the main loop gets to it, it's available in the cache.
Why? Going back into orbit requires adding two more burns: one to enter Earth orbit, and another to leave it. Adding a rendezvous with the ISS (or any other floating payload) means an additional 1-2 burns to match the orbital planes, an additional burn to raise or lower your orbit, and God knows how long until the orbits of the two vehicles sync. Look at the space shuttle: even with matching the orbital planes and scheduling launch for an ideal rendezvous profile, it takes them 36-48 hours to catch up with the space station. You are assuming that the spaceship is going to be chasing the landing gear---what if it was the other way around? This way, we don't have to fly the return/rendezvous fuel all the way to Mars---the initial lift could drop off the landing package with the extra fuel in low orbit (or whatever orbit is easiest to manoeuvre from), and keep boosting the main module for its final trajectory. On returning, the main module would need to decelerate into a rendez-vous trajectory, and the landing package would fly up to it.
Security. We had a problem with a salesperson that sent a contract to a client. the client sent it back and accepted it. The salesperson used the file sent back by the customer as the legal document and did not check it for changes. we got SCREWED because the asshole client changed several things silently in their favor.
If we sent them a PDF, they cant play that game as all contracts have to be sent to legal for acceptance as the oridional document format. this solved this problem. You seem to believe that it is impossible to change a PDF document. One CAN make changes in PDFs---even if the PDF document is encrypted and set to readonly. Think about it---they could even change GIF images, really. If you want 'inviolable', you would have to use checksums/encryption/authentication of some sort---a MD5 checksum, or SHA hash, or something fancier based on PKI
He was convicted for uploading a movie without having a license to do so.
No, his big problem was redistribution: he uploaded while feeding other bittorrent
clients, therefore falling into a more severe legal category.
The eBay Terms of Service simply do not contain the terms you claim. They claim copyright, and prohibit republishing, so you can't data-mine eBay and create your own auction site made out of eBay listings, but here we are talking about shortcuts to relevant information for personal use. You claim theft, which is a pretty serious charge, and quite unwarranted---by your logic, tearing out a classified page out a newspaper would also be theft.
There are practical ideas for haptic feedback for touchscreens---for instance, it turns out that
live-feedback vibration can fool your sense of touch enough so that it feels like a real button.
http://www.time4.com/time4/microsites/popsci/howit works/cellphone_motor.html
This has been apparently already implemented in Samsung SCH-W559 cellphone.
Micro- nano- what's the difference...
on
Nano Scale Artworks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I wish people wouldn't confuse micro and nano. The article did talk about few nanometer-sized
contraptions, but many of them were really much larger---several hundred micrometers (um). The cool
10 um guitar is only a tiny bit below being visible by naked eye: human hair thickness is usually between 50-100 um (.05-.1 mm).
The difference between 10 nm and 10 micrometers is a factor of 1000 difference in size: it's like
confusing a wristwatch and Big Ben clock tower watch. Even more importantly, nanoscale objects
cross over into a radically different behavior, governed by quantum phenomena and other strange
interactions--they can no longer be described as rigid objects subject to Newtonian mechanics.
Oh, well, I guess this is the New Scientist's answer to sensational journalism in popular press.
O tempora, o mores
I don't like the way they are handling Gnome, ignoring completely the community in order to satisfy Novell's aims and goals (mostly, appease to Windows "converted" users. Pardon me but compared to what? to KDE, whose entire raison d'etre was better Windows compatibility? I for one welcome my Gnome overlords. I got RAM and MHz to run Gnome, and it is usable and good looking.
When constraints preclude Gnome, I use XFCE, but boy it's hard to go back to pre-Gnome stuff.
Please report what IS your favorite desktop, and what specifically bothers you in Gnome. Linus also
dislikes it, but he can explain why, and back it up with patches that address his concerns. I respect that.
The parent article is wrong on several levels, and frankly the
mix of arrogance and ignorance suggests a troll job.
My Bait-O-Meter is pegged on red, but what the heck, in the
interest of keeping the record straight, here are some corrections:
Although we met several technical challenges along the way
(specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we
were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), Linux has Token Ring support for at least six years now (http://www.linuxtr.net/).
Similarly, ext2 filesystems do not need to be defragged, normally, and even if the poster
hit some specific usage patterns that resulted in problems attributable to ext2, making
kernel mods to ext2 would be the wrong thing for a consultant to propose. Finally, even if
it miraculously weren't so (e.g. because the poster brilliantly spotted a simple fix to ext2
that everyone else missed), the idea to keep this fix private happens to be misguided on both
technical and moral grounds, even if GPL wasn't an issue. This is so, because the filesystem code
is a critical infrastructure, and due diligence requires it to be carefully rewieved. Not publishing it would
prevent a peer review by the people who know the area much better than the poster,
even if we assume that he is competent in fact.
GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Nuff said, after a legal consultation they still have no clue even to the proper name of the GPL.
I guess failing on the preliminaries makes further progress difficult...
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. [...]
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever
use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult
position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with
another solution. Yes, they got the meaning of the license completely wrong, too.
It is widely known that a) compiling code with gcc does not require
making the source available, and b) GPL requires making the source
available only if the binary is distributed to the public.
Although it was tought to do, there really was no
option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000. So, they wrote TR and ext2 for Windows (snicker).
I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to
something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".
Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure
it remains only a bit player. 'Shared Source' essentially means that you can peek at MS code, but
it doesn't mean that you can go ahead and deploy modifications. More
importantly, most Intellectual Property rights are retained by Microsoft,
How can anyone complain about IP loss in GPL and at the
same time propose Shared Source, is a mystery. Oh, but it is a troll. OK then.
Nothing is written to disk, so when the system is powered down, the rootkit vanishes into thin air. It is worse than this, actually; Joasia as well as other people points out that malware can be flashed into
BIOS and firmware memory on the motherboard and peripheral cards. This is why it was reported that after several recent
compromises, sensitive government installations opted to completely replace their equipment. Wiping the disks and
reinstalling simply isn't good enough anymmore.
if they manage to get a 3D sensor set working, and cheaply, it will advance a gazillion projects. Wha? 2-axis MEMS single chip accelerometers have been around for years, and 3-axis units
are $5 a pop: http://www.analog.com/en/prod/0,2877,ADXL330,00.ht ml. Dimensions are
4mm by 4mm by 1.5mm, moreless the size of the letter M.
Of course the accelerometer does not directly give out a position; you have to filter
the output, integrate for velocity and then integrate again for position. Not trivial, but
doable.
selection by ability (democratic methods have never worked in the military model). Hmm, democracy is about selecting leaders by their ability (I know, I know, it didn't work out
so well recently:)
Although it sounds very grand when whole countries or states or
cities make a lot of noise about switching to open source software,
if you follow them to the conclusion it always seems to work out the same:
they end up sticking with Microsoft. This is simply untrue---Munich (http://www.muenchen.de/linux) in Germany,
Extremadura state government (http://www.linex.org/) in Spain and Burlington Coat Factory
are just few counterexamples.
It is certainly true that some people might use Linux as a negotiating strategy; in fact,
I would argue that a CIO that doesn't try this manoeuvre is failing due diligence:)
I am sure that there are cases where people failed to execute the Open Source
strategy, and in the resulting retrenchment MS gained the customer back. Management
support is another issue: the first ever FOSS implementation back in mid-1990's
was Greg Wettstein's Roger Maris Cancer Center.
Sadly, a management change resulted in Dr. Greg leaving, and the Center switched
back to MS. No IT implementation is ever finished or permanent, so changes forth and
back should not be a surprise. Really large installations, of course, require some sort of
commercial support which has been hard to come by, but between Novell, IBM and RedHat one
can find it now.
I think it is clear by now that a FOSS switch is quite possible given a reasonable budget,
competent execution and management support---all the factors required for the success of
any project.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what happens when capital and goods can freely cross borders but people can't. Capital will simply chase poverty in a never ending circle around the globe.
Except that it is not as simple as that: a lot of Poles used to work in Ireland, which was one of the first EU countries that allowed labor migration from new Eastern EU members. Recently however, due to ecomomy tightening in Ireland, and relative economic boom in Poland, many Polish expatriates are returning eastward.
Labor cost is still important but not as much as it used to be: capital situation, tax incentives, closeness to large markets, etc., are gaining importance as a result of the current crisis.
Finally we can write spaghetti code that looks like spaghetti.
While 0.993 isn't very good, (0.993)^3 is pretty awsome.
(0.993)^3 would suck actually, resulting in 0.979---but fortunately the error rate is 1-(1-0.993)^3), i.e. a pretty awesome .9999997 (assuming independent errors and such)
My biggest complainst are that I cannot get a static IP on my home wireless while getting DHCP everywhere else
See if you can nail down the DHCP assignment in your home router so that your MAC address will always receive the same IP. In DHCPD on Linux it is a matter of including host records in /etc/dhcpd.conf:
host tango {
hardware ethernet 00:12:3F:12:34:56;
fixed-address 1.2.3.4;
option host-name "tango";}
Your assorted routers/gateways might or might not support nailing down IP's---I have seen some that have the 'remember this IP assignment' button in their DHCP setup.
It certainly didn't help that they had a case of well-published scientific fraud several years ago,
where a researcher (J.H. Schoen, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n)
claimed some important results in nanoelectronics, that turned out to be a fabrication. You can imagine that after such a black eye to the institution the funding enthusiasm subsided.
...still leave aluminum oxide all over your skin, which is very much an irritant.
Al2O3, aka sand, is not an irritant. It is very stable chemically, and a very hard substance. The only known health problem with it is silicosis, resulting from breathing in lots of it into your lungs---totally does not apply in this case.
Intel is really pushing Atom now; just last week I went to an Atom seminar for embedded computing folks. They claim 1GHz+-class performance at 3W power usage; I was impressed by a motherboard running a GPS/car automation type realtime app, where not only there was no fan or even a heatsink, but you could touch and hold the finger to the CPU.
They didn't want to say what's the unit price, but it probably won't be in low single dollars like with some ARM variants (STM/LPC)
It's a serious problem... Ant are warm blooded, and are going to like heat
Nitpicking, but ants are insects, and aren't cold-blooded. You were thinking of snakes and lizards perhaps,
who are cold-blooded (i.e. don't regulate their internal temperature) and who indeed seek warm spots.
I don't think insects show such behavior much---I understand that it's more that they eat some plastics and
also insides of computers and such presents them with nice, dark spacious places to nest.
Incidentally, power MOSFETs have much less thermal runaway, which partly explains why they overtook bipolar transistors
You are creating a false dychotomy: sure the hobbyists can tinker---they just can't be put in charge of large systems where there's money or safety of other people at stake. A good example here is how Maryland regulates electrical work: homeowners can't work on the electrical installation in condos and townhouses, but it's perfectly OK to fix your own electricity in a detached home--if you screw up, you only hurt yourself and your family, rather tban burning down the whole block.
In any case, I agree that the software industry is headed for regulation. It always amazed me how much of a free ride they were getting for deficient products--(insert a predictable analogy of faulty cars and resulting lawsuits). The best part is when the software company comes out with a new version that fixes all bugs and REALLY works, and everybody is expected to buy it again.
The reason why people were putting up with this for so long was the progress that the industry was making, which would be impossible without this leeway. Imagine if the industry practice from around 10 years ago was codified in the software analog of National Electrical Code, a thick rule book that all electricians in the US must follow (conformance is checked by official independent inspections, btw.). Having said that, I think that we'll see a National Software Code sooner or later.
I think this is unwarranted elitism. Call graphs, some runtime analysis (debugger or profiler), and plain old printer/highlighter are excellent tools, and often sufficient. The first program I ever worked on (I actually learned C from reading that code, because the only C book at that time was the Kernighan/Ritchie, and we didn't have it yet) was a Zilog Z80 assembler, and I still have a fanfold printout with my highlights---I am proud to say that I understood everything, except the setjmp/longjmp part.
By the way, anyone who cares about understanding code should know about Literate Programming (http://www.literateprogramming.com), whose guiding principle is that 'source code's main function is to document the algorithm---and it also can be compiled to an executable'. The problem with LP is that there are so many to chose from: original *web (cweb/nuweb/etc), Doxygen, Perl module comments...
He was convicted for uploading a movie without having a license to do so. No, his big problem was redistribution: he uploaded while feeding other bittorrent clients, therefore falling into a more severe legal category.
The eBay Terms of Service simply do not contain the terms you claim. They claim copyright, and prohibit republishing, so you can't data-mine eBay and create your own auction site made out of eBay listings, but here we are talking about shortcuts to relevant information for personal use. You claim theft, which is a pretty serious charge, and quite unwarranted---by your logic, tearing out a classified page out a newspaper would also be theft.
There are practical ideas for haptic feedback for touchscreens---for instance, it turns out that live-feedback vibration can fool your sense of touch enough so that it feels like a real button. http://www.time4.com/time4/microsites/popsci/howit works/cellphone_motor.html
This has been apparently already implemented in Samsung SCH-W559 cellphone.
The difference between 10 nm and 10 micrometers is a factor of 1000 difference in size: it's like confusing a wristwatch and Big Ben clock tower watch. Even more importantly, nanoscale objects cross over into a radically different behavior, governed by quantum phenomena and other strange interactions--they can no longer be described as rigid objects subject to Newtonian mechanics.
Oh, well, I guess this is the New Scientist's answer to sensational journalism in popular press. O tempora, o mores
Please report what IS your favorite desktop, and what specifically bothers you in Gnome. Linus also dislikes it, but he can explain why, and back it up with patches that address his concerns. I respect that.
It is certainly true that some people might use Linux as a negotiating strategy; in fact, I would argue that a CIO that doesn't try this manoeuvre is failing due diligence :)
I am sure that there are cases where people failed to execute the Open Source strategy, and in the resulting retrenchment MS gained the customer back. Management support is another issue: the first ever FOSS implementation back in mid-1990's was Greg Wettstein's Roger Maris Cancer Center. Sadly, a management change resulted in Dr. Greg leaving, and the Center switched back to MS. No IT implementation is ever finished or permanent, so changes forth and back should not be a surprise. Really large installations, of course, require some sort of commercial support which has been hard to come by, but between Novell, IBM and RedHat one can find it now.
I think it is clear by now that a FOSS switch is quite possible given a reasonable budget, competent execution and management support---all the factors required for the success of any project.