> boys are more than capable of watching kids for a few hours on a Friday night.
I totally agree. Oddly enough, my own sister never let me watch her kids (my cousins) when I was 20-something because I was a single guy and therefore incompetent... but she'd let any 15-year old girl in her neighborhood that she just met watch 'em. Go figure.
There seems to be this unwritten rule that only girls can babysit, and only boys mow lawns. Annoying, but I haven't yet found exceptions. And given how hard it is to find sitters, I've tried!
Maybe it's a cultural thing. Maybe we're all just biased morons:)
> Note that I am in no way implying that bin Laden's relative willingness to die in any way imbues him with any sense of honor or virtue.
Yeah, Joe Bob Briggs (of all people) had a column _years_ ago on this, in reference to people saying 'the suicide bomber did a cowardly terrorist attack'. He pointed out it was many things-- despicable, evil, et cetera-- but that 'cowardly' was not quite a word to use when someone is willing to strap dynamite to their body and blow themself up for the cause.
Further (he points out), calling them 'cowardly' or such is foolish, because then we don't defend appropriately against them. It's easy to defend against a coward-- just bomb their country and they'll cave, right? But a zealot with courage, well, that might not be the right strategy to apply.
Alas, yes, we must be dismissive of our enemies, rather then facing them realistically. Such is current culture. I can see why you've been accused of 'terrorist sympathies' for just pointing out things... in fact, I remember reading that thread!
> Especially since private industry built our modern Internet where the government couldn't.
>Boy, private industry picking up and popularizing a government service
I'm glad you two both agree with me! Or put another way, duh! That's what's supposed to happen! Pure research (which especially these days, is mostly funded by the gov't) comes up with things that US businesses can then bring to market and profit on.
Pure research drives industry. The US Gov't (through military and non-military programs) is the biggest sponsor to pure research. And US industry grows. See a connection?
Oh, wait... neither of you are socialists who want the gov't to actually _compete_ with business, are you? I hope not.
I have to second this-- you do _not_ want electronic monitoring. You _have_ to develop "parental radar". Which really means 'hearing'.
By the time your kids are age 2, you should be able to tell where your kids are in the house or yard, regardless of your own location, instantly and subconsciously. Developing 'eyes in the back of your head' is mostly just sensory awareness of the normal kid noise level and position.
If you go with electronic monitoring (sound or video), you'll have trouble later.
You'll have trouble telling where your toddler drifted to if you go to a house not rigged up like yours, since your own hearing won't be trained.
You'll never be able to handle nightmares at age 2 if you used a baby monitor and didn't develop good child-hearing.
You'll never be able to yell to your 4-year old, "stop doing that!" two rooms away (because you heard silence, and silence=mischief) if you're used to direct feeds.
Your six year old will rule your life once he/she realizes you lack the basic totally sensory awareness parents need to develop.
You'll have a harder time finding them when lost in shopping malls, parks, et cetera, if you didn't develop your parental hearing/radar.
Seriously, my hearing is incredibly sensitive, I feel like Daredevil when my kids are involved. Sure, I might still walk into a truck I didn't hear coming like anyone-- but if my kids are driving it, I'll know!
That said, I did run a video camera out the window so I could be in my study and be sure they were okay out back. It was sometimes handy, but you know, I still relied on my own hearing and parental spider-sense to know when trouble was happening.
If you do video, for $40 you can get a camera plus battery that's smaller than a pack of cards, wireless, color, and runs into a TV. So consider setting up a TV _when they are past age 3_ for outside, but really, don't do in-house monitoring, you'll just kill the natural development of your own senses and instincts.
And don't monitor the babysitter. If you can't trust her to watch the kids sans monitoring, you shouldn't hire her at all. If you trust her, enjoy the time you're paying her for by having a child-free excusion!
> Many of these terrorist leaders would welcome martyrdom in exchange for having their movements grow by the thousands.
Err, more accurately, many terrorists would welcome this. Their leaders, they are smarter. Just like generals send troops, terrorist leaders send terrorists. They rarely want to martyr themselves.
I think it's because a certain large degree of ego is needed to lead. With ego comes stronger self-perservation, a "let others die for the cause" attitude.
Even for radical fundamentalists, this often holds true. Very few terrorist leaders, I'd wager, want a quick martyrdom, especially right now while they are doing well. Martyrdom for leaders is usually a last recourse to avoid accepting defeat.
The article is short on details for why the EFF was dropped. It says, in part:
"the government decided to change the rules and require charities to enforce government blacklists against their own employees in order to be able to participate in the campaign. Charities should not have to investigate their own employees in order to receive these personal funds from government workers."
Umm... what the hell does this mean? Is a 'government blacklist' a secret ops thing, or does it just mean that the charities can't receive contributions from their own employees, or something else?
Since the EFF is demanding action, and the slashdot poster is demanding alternatives, I'll be bossy and demand, well, a clue:)
Sometimes I pre-order because otherwise, I'll _never_ get it. Other times, it's because I like shopping at a good store and figure I'll pre-order so I don't forget or miss out.
Now, too many shops use a bizarre parody of 'just in time' inventory that goes like this:
1) They order 1 copy of "Item X" because it's not a guaranteed hit. 2) They sell their 1 "Item X". No one else sees "Item X", so they don't bother to re-order. 3) They pat themselves on the back for making a good call and not 'overordering' "Item X"-- not realizing they missed sales because _they didn't have it on the shelf!_
Worse, even if you go in asking for something, they will think, "well, this is an odd item, so even though I have a request, I'll only order to fill that request so I'm not overstocked". Again, they lose sales because of no shelf copy.
The person that loved "Item X" tells their friends about it, sure, but those friends walk into the store, don't see it, and say "oh well".
If you have to ask the store to order it, most people figure they might as well just buy it online- it's easier and quicker than waiting for the store to get a copy then treking down to that store.
And then brick-and-mortar places complain about online sellers. What a _good_ store does, is _push_ product. Instead of passively waiting for customers to come and ask for what they want (which online stores do better), a good store makes recommendations.
If you have a good shop, pre-orders are often because the shopkeep has pre-informed you on something (or mentioned something you'd heard about and were curious about), and closed the sale by saying "hey, why don't you pre-order it, so as soon as it comes in you know you'll have a copy!"
Then, it's just like christmas! You go into the shop and *poof*, there's your present! Sure, you bought it yourself, but it's still fun! And the shop stays in business and gets to provide you with good leads for future products.
(A good shop will also use pre-orders as a barometer for likely sellers, and order extras.)
In short, I like my local shop that actually bothers to figure out what I like. I talked with the shopkeep once, about how far he'd go to sell to me based on how much I spend there each month (maybe $100 on average). After you subtract costs and overhead, he figured I bought his family dinner one night each month. So while he'd do normal good service to keep me, at 1 dinner/month, it's not like I should be demanding extra discounts or red carpets. Proportion is necessary.
Wow, there's a $50 entrance fee. If they get 200 entries, that's a neat $10k, plus they get to be judges and see what's really cool so they can hire the people.
With writing and poetry, this is an old scheme (not quite scam, but scheme). Charge for a contest and sell the results.
What's next-- for-pay music auditions for the RIAA? Ooh, I know-- submit your stories to slashdot, just $2 per submission, and if yours is chosen as the best submission of the year, you win! No dups allowed.
Bwah ha ha. Tossing 12MB as a basic data structure is huge-- in a real program, that uses that basic data structure to create others. Plus that's not including visualizing it. Think 2000 targets, each with a dozen mathematical alterations to that structure. Then plot them. 12MB*2000*12*plotting overhead=a lot more than you want to store in ram.
750,000 points when we coded took 12 seconds to gronk through subsequent calculations. On a realtime system, do you want a latency of 12 seconds every time you click on a new target? No. With a faster system and more ram, that latency dropped to unnoticeable, but even then that's because we did clever coding past that.
Since you're all contempty, all I can say is, write a realtime computer program and you'll find that, the smaller you make your most basic data structures, the less ballooning you get. It's people like you who figure they can toss in the kitchen sink at the atomic level that run into trouble when they try to build realtime systems with it.
I wrote: >"if it takes you 3 months to optimize, you'd be better off keeping the slow code, doing another project, and 3 months later just buying a faster PC to run the slow old code:)"
innosent asked: >What ever happened to writing efficient code?
There's slow, and there's efficient. Sometimes brute force and ignorance _is_ better. Here's an example.
We had a routine using an ephemeris. It loaded in the data at 1 minute intervals, since we needed 1 minute resolution accuracy. 3 coordinates for each minute for 6 months = 3/4 million data points. That's a lot of memory overhead.
One programmer wanted to rewrite it so we only loaded some fraction of the points, and interpolated. Problem is, a linear interpolation wasn't fast enough, also, because of how the other data structures generated from the ephemeris were set up, they expected a continuous set (basically we were making advantage of vector calculations, so even if we interpolated, we'd have to make the full vector epheremeris before doing other calculations, and change basically the entirely underlying computation code).
When written, the ephemeris was a memory hog and slowed things down. When it came time to deploy it, though, even though it was dog slow on our original test machines, it was more cost effective to just buy a new $2000 laptop for the project that ran it really speedy. Faster PCs and cheap RAM had won the day.
If we'd gone for the interpolation scheme, it would have cost about 3 months for 1.5 programmers, at a cost to the taxpaper of around $48,000.
So, should we have gone for the more 'efficient' method, which was more complex and thus incured more development time, or go with the brute-force simple approach that saves the taxpayer $48k (and gives the customer a new laptop computer!).
It was an easy call. In real world HPC, you need to always balance resources.
Save your CPU money for the compiler (e.g. PGF90, or what have you), or for development tools, and for more RAM. A good compiler will give you a better handle on numerical accuracy than a 'better' CPU stuck with an off compiler. More RAM will keep you from being stingy in single/double precision allocations.
Also, factor in your work time. A few percentage difference between CPUs won't count nearly as much as the 2 hours you saved because you had a good debugger, or the 4 hours saved because your editor makes it easier to write and jump around your code.
Your accuracy will be pretty much the same, you just have to understand how computers represent floats and plan accordingly. Use accurate representations even if they're slower to get the numerical accuracy you need, then optimize the slow parts.
Only optimize the stuff that runs slow. That means profile, don't just guess. You'll often be surprised by where the bottlenecks are.
Higher accuracy usually means more memory (going with doubles rather than floats) or work (converting to integers within your desired floating range to control floating point accuracy). CPU won't be a biggie, but having lots of RAM will help.
If you have a choice between spending 3 months writing and optimizing code, or spending 1 month writing code that isn't optimized, think of what 2 months of runtime will do. If it takes you a while to write the code, just buy your super-accurate machine _after_ coding, when it's time to do your real runs (since chip speeds already increase).
In fact, if it takes you 3 months to optimize, you'd be better off keeping the slow code, doing another project, and 3 months later just buying a faster PC to run the slow old code:)
Given the current media attitude, this will no doubt be spun as "world wants a less firm, less studly leader than Bush so it can do its Francophilic walk-over our fine democratic values."
Alternative spins include "the world wants a nuanced leader who understands the issues", or "the world wants less war", or "the world wants to attack us so they need a senator in charge", or "the world likes red ties more than blue".
Hmm... it'll be interesting, but I think this is mostly a non-fact. World opinion doesn't count much within the US.
If the US takes an isolationist stance, that's not a bad thing. If we'd rather have more UN engagements (i.e. less US soldiers, easier for us to pull out and leave our allies holding the stick, et cetera), though, it might be worth paying attention.
"World wants to send soliders in to fight our battles, but only if we change leaders!" Now that's an odd spin we could try.
Re:I played a mechanical version of pong in the 70
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Mechanical Pong
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· Score: 1
I had one, too. Sold it at a yard sale for, ummm... more than a quarter. 'Course it was broken by that point, too, but hey, even marked 'broken, $1', someone bought it. Wonder if it's on eBay now.
It was pretty lame, especially as you could buy, like, an electronic Pong for your TV. So it's not like someone made mechanical pong, then someone else said "hey, let's computerize it!". No, someone actually said "look at this electronic TV game, I bet we could make a mechanical version that still requires batteries!"
Bush, questions 1-2, 4, 6-15: Yes, but no. Kerry, questions 1, 6-15: Yes, but no. Bush, questions 3, 5: No, but yes. Kerry, questions 2-5: No, but yes.... I can't believe I actually tallied these up.
In Science News, June 14, 2003, Baughman's team of Univ of Texas made a single-walled carbon nanotube fiber composite that's the width of a human hair, and 100 to 200 meters long. The nanotubes are spun with polyvinyl alcohol, and are 4 times tougher than spider silk (the previous record-holder) as well as stronger (can hold more weight).
100-200 meters, that's a length you can do useful stuff. One weird thing is, they weave it in with ordinary cloth to make supercapacitors in clothing (for built-in antenna,s tiny batteries, et cetera). The field is called 'electronic textiles'!
>Can't you just put a big mothertrucking hard disk on one of them and NFS mount it?
Problem then is you're limited to a 'memory speed' equal to NFS. Clusters already want the fasted network connection possible. Making cache available only via internet speeds with cat5 speeds, ugh.
That said, it's always useful to have a big mothertrucking hard disk mounted via NFS, mostly for when the run is done and you want to gather/centralize the data or post-data visualization products.
Half of my cluster hassles are "okay, the run is done, now how the hell do I get my data to useful form?"
> In a two-party system you will automatically get two extreme views, left and right, because the two parties have to exaggerate their differences to get as many voters as they can.
Actually, I think we're getting the opposite effect. We're getting 2 candidates pretty close overall, because they fear distancing themselves too much from the middle states.
It's as if they realize all the far-right and far-left will vote along party lines even if a monkey was running, so they focus their campaignins and platforms to convert the swayable middle.
Cynically, both are rich Yale grads who favor big government, albeit in different ways. While their social agendas are very different, that (surprisingly) hasn't been the major focus lately.
As a friend from England said, 'you keep saying you have a liberal and conservative party. We see it as you have a conservative and a more-conservative party.'
Not stating my own party view, just pointing out that parties seem to drift to center.
> I love in MD which is solid Democrat. I can vote fro either of the two parties and not have much utility in my vote.
Actually, Maryland is a mildly bi-partisan state for presidential elections-- half the time the Dem wins, half the time the Rep wins. Odd, since it's overwhelmingly Dem for senators and reps.
For presidents, it voted Dem in 2000 (57% Dem to 40% Rep), 1996 (54% to 38%), and 1992 (50% to 36%), Rep in 1988 (51% to 48%) and 1984 (53 % to 47%), and Dem in 1980 (47% to 44%).
When the Republicans won, then it was with a 6% margin or less; when the Democrats won, it was overwhelmingly Dem. Given voting history, it could go either way this year.
MD isn't a cinch for either side. (And yes, the governer situation is a really interesting case here. Sort of shows the politician/person can be more important than which party they run under!)
> Good idea, but why not go all the way and just allow voting on the issues directly?
That, alas, goes entirely against the idea of a Republic, and also leads to 'tyranny of the masses'.
The idea behind the US gov't is that gov't is too complicated for each us to constantly stay informed of and be able to fully judge each issue.
So, instead of requiring every citizen to be fully and accurately informed every day on 200+page bills, we instead use representatives. "I don't know gov't, but I trust that Joe's views are close to mine, and that he'll represent me accurately."
Contrast this to a pure democracy-- say, at the neighborhood level. If the issue is raised to 'evict Mawbid due to fashion sense' and 51% agree, you're screwed. That's tyranny of the masses (corrolary: a good society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.)
In a representative system, though, 51% might vote for Fred, who runs on a Pro-Eviction platform, but Fred will (hopefully) look and say, hey, we don't really have a mandate here, and Mawbid's fashion errors aren't enough to do this.
In short, the republic adds friction and a buffer between the populace and laws. Both are good-- we don't want gov't making instant laws or automatically going with slight majorities.
So voting directly on issues, nope. Voting more accurately for candidates and removing the marketing/advertising of career politicians, that I'm for!
Problem is, real issues like Debt or Fiscal Policy aren't sexy enough to campaign. You can't stake out turf, or slander the others.
"My opponent is sending us into debt. I pledge, if elected, to send us _less_ into debt than he. This is leadership."
Electionining at all levels is always about tangibles. 'Tough on crime', 'tough on terror', 'taking a stand on gay marriage'. Debt isn't cool in that context. No one likes debt, but no one wants to talk about it.
Oddly enough, having researched the issues, I support the candidate I do because he has a record of slashing the budget in a way I agree with, as opposed to the other guy, who slashes stuff I think he could keep.
(Well, I had to mention slash, this is slash-dot!)
They should run elections just by listing all issues candidates mention, but don't list the candidates. You just vote 'yes/no/don't care' for each _issue_ and whichever matches most with a given candidates platform-on-record, they get your vote.
So 'ban on gay marriage' would have yes/no/don't care'. You vote 'yes', that may tally for either candidate-- or both, if they both support it, or neither, if they both don't care or are both against it. And your vote is the tally of all issues, whomever you support most gets your 1 vote.
So, yeah, maybe you'd only find out who you voted for _after_ voting, but it'd be on the real issues, not the spin or marketing of the candidate!
keep it in context, and free, use swag
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Tech Team Traditions?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Keep it simple and relevant. And keep it on the clock. Good morale stuff should a) intermesh with work, b) be during work time, and c) be opt-in.
1) Pass out chinese food menus while your folks are working during the first game, everyone at work picks their order and gets free lunch. Basically, cheap catering during the big events your company is involved in.
2) Get free swag from the teams, make available, i.e. "hey, we just got a box of free Bronco jerseys as a gift, anyone wants them, we'll have a box after the weekly staff meeting, first-come first-serve on sizes". If there aren't enough shirts for all, draw numbers from a hat for those who want one. Note that you're not 'wasting' company dollars on this, so folks won't grumble about 'why that money didn't go to raises instead'.
Seriously, work your connections to get free swag for the staff, and use a slush fund to make things more pleasant during crunch time.
Above all, don't give managers first access at the swag! Show you value the staff first.
"selling PC's... for about $500 each... they'd need to sell 70,000 consoles to make up that revenue."
It's worse than that-- likely they only get 40% of the cost, since they have to sell to distributors, who sell to retailers, who then have to sell at consumers. So the company makes maybe 40% of the cost.
They say you should retail price things at 10x your cost to make money. So they need to make their PCs for $50 to do this... eeps. They have to make them at less than $200 to profit. If revenue-per-item is $200, their profit is the difference between cost-per-unit (including operations cost) and $200.
>If I take a hubcap from your car, squash it into a cube then sell it for scrap, is that fair use?
Well, no, because you're out a hubcap. More accurately, if I see your hubcap, take a photo of it, and win a photo contest with that photo, do you deserve half the prize?
I'd say, no. Even if you'd modded your car with custom hubcaps, because I'd a) only used a portion of your mods and b) presented it within a new work.
The work is not the hubcap, even though it wouldn't be the same work without the hubcap.
The article mentions the sampling of a 3-note riff. While "Name that Tune" does indicate such things are recognizable in the right context, I fear this means any musician who happens to use a short riff that happened to be in some obscure song will suffer too.
I mean, if I do a guitar solo and it happens that 3 notes used several times sound like, oh, 'cat scratch fever' or 'smoke on the water' (same riff, by the way), am I violating ownership?
And this will kill jazz... no more nods to other works in solos?
Next up: any writer who uses 3 words in sequence that appeared in a previous writer's book is now violating that original author's intellectual property and will be sued.
Worse, the article's 'stolen' 3-note riff is only 6 pieces of information-- 3 pitches plus 3 rhythms. They'd downsampled and changed the rhythm, so we're saying anything that is _similar_ to a known bit is at risk.
While the article mentions they'd sampled, I worry that original recreation will be hit with the same law, i.e. getting a session guitarist to redo a riff in a different octave with different phrasing will be seen the same as 'sampling'.
Slashdot Mirror
> boys are more than capable of watching kids for a few hours on a Friday night.
:)
I totally agree. Oddly enough, my own sister never let me watch her kids (my cousins) when I was 20-something because I was a single guy and therefore incompetent... but she'd let any 15-year old girl in her neighborhood that she just met watch 'em. Go figure.
There seems to be this unwritten rule that only girls can babysit, and only boys mow lawns. Annoying, but I haven't yet found exceptions. And given how hard it is to find sitters, I've tried!
Maybe it's a cultural thing. Maybe we're all just biased morons
> Note that I am in no way implying that bin Laden's relative willingness to die in any way imbues him with any sense of honor or virtue.
Yeah, Joe Bob Briggs (of all people) had a column _years_ ago on this, in reference to people saying 'the suicide bomber did a cowardly terrorist attack'. He pointed out it was many things-- despicable, evil, et cetera-- but that 'cowardly' was not quite a word to use when someone is willing to strap dynamite to their body and blow themself up for the cause.
Further (he points out), calling them 'cowardly' or such is foolish, because then we don't defend appropriately against them. It's easy to defend against a coward-- just bomb their country and they'll cave, right? But a zealot with courage, well, that might not be the right strategy to apply.
Alas, yes, we must be dismissive of our enemies, rather then facing them realistically. Such is current culture. I can see why you've been accused of 'terrorist sympathies' for just pointing out things... in fact, I remember reading that thread!
> Especially since private industry built our modern Internet where the government couldn't.
>Boy, private industry picking up and popularizing a government service
I'm glad you two both agree with me! Or put another way, duh! That's what's supposed to happen! Pure research (which especially these days, is mostly funded by the gov't) comes up with things that US businesses can then bring to market and profit on.
Pure research drives industry. The US Gov't (through military and non-military programs) is the biggest sponsor to pure research. And US industry grows. See a connection?
Oh, wait... neither of you are socialists who want the gov't to actually _compete_ with business, are you? I hope not.
> Private industry outperforms big government yet again.
The irony of someone writing this using the Internet is incredible.
> our own ears sufficed just as well
I have to second this-- you do _not_ want electronic monitoring. You _have_ to develop "parental radar". Which really means 'hearing'.
By the time your kids are age 2, you should be able to tell where your kids are in the house or yard, regardless of your own location, instantly and subconsciously. Developing 'eyes in the back of your head' is mostly just sensory awareness of the normal kid noise level and position.
If you go with electronic monitoring (sound or video), you'll have trouble later.
You'll have trouble telling where your toddler drifted to if you go to a house not rigged up like yours, since your own hearing won't be trained.
You'll never be able to handle nightmares at age 2 if you used a baby monitor and didn't develop good child-hearing.
You'll never be able to yell to your 4-year old, "stop doing that!" two rooms away (because you heard silence, and silence=mischief) if you're used to direct feeds.
Your six year old will rule your life once he/she realizes you lack the basic totally sensory awareness parents need to develop.
You'll have a harder time finding them when lost in shopping malls, parks, et cetera, if you didn't develop your parental hearing/radar.
Seriously, my hearing is incredibly sensitive, I feel like Daredevil when my kids are involved. Sure, I might still walk into a truck I didn't hear coming like anyone-- but if my kids are driving it, I'll know!
That said, I did run a video camera out the window so I could be in my study and be sure they were okay out back. It was sometimes handy, but you know, I still relied on my own hearing and parental spider-sense to know when trouble was happening.
If you do video, for $40 you can get a camera plus battery that's smaller than a pack of cards, wireless, color, and runs into a TV. So consider setting up a TV _when they are past age 3_ for outside, but really, don't do in-house monitoring, you'll just kill the natural development of your own senses and instincts.
And don't monitor the babysitter. If you can't trust her to watch the kids sans monitoring, you shouldn't hire her at all. If you trust her, enjoy the time you're paying her for by having a child-free excusion!
> Many of these terrorist leaders would welcome martyrdom in exchange for having their movements grow by the thousands.
Err, more accurately, many terrorists would welcome this. Their leaders, they are smarter. Just like generals send troops, terrorist leaders send terrorists. They rarely want to martyr themselves.
I think it's because a certain large degree of ego is needed to lead. With ego comes stronger self-perservation, a "let others die for the cause" attitude.
Even for radical fundamentalists, this often holds true. Very few terrorist leaders, I'd wager, want a quick martyrdom, especially right now while they are doing well. Martyrdom for leaders is usually a last recourse to avoid accepting defeat.
The article is short on details for why the EFF was dropped. It says, in part:
:)
"the government decided to change the rules and require charities to enforce government blacklists against their own employees in order to be able to participate in the campaign. Charities should not have to investigate their own employees in order to receive these personal funds from government workers."
Umm... what the hell does this mean? Is a 'government blacklist' a secret ops thing, or does it just mean that the charities can't receive contributions from their own employees, or something else?
Since the EFF is demanding action, and the slashdot poster is demanding alternatives, I'll be bossy and demand, well, a clue
Sometimes I pre-order because otherwise, I'll _never_ get it. Other times, it's because I like shopping at a good store and figure I'll pre-order so I don't forget or miss out.
Now, too many shops use a bizarre parody of 'just in time' inventory that goes like this:
1) They order 1 copy of "Item X" because it's not a guaranteed hit.
2) They sell their 1 "Item X". No one else sees "Item X", so they don't bother to re-order.
3) They pat themselves on the back for making a good call and not 'overordering' "Item X"-- not realizing they missed sales because _they didn't have it on the shelf!_
Worse, even if you go in asking for something, they will think, "well, this is an odd item, so even though I have a request, I'll only order to fill that request so I'm not overstocked". Again, they lose sales because of no shelf copy.
The person that loved "Item X" tells their friends about it, sure, but those friends walk into the store, don't see it, and say "oh well".
If you have to ask the store to order it, most people figure they might as well just buy it online- it's easier and quicker than waiting for the store to get a copy then treking down to that store.
And then brick-and-mortar places complain about online sellers. What a _good_ store does, is _push_ product. Instead of passively waiting for customers to come and ask for what they want (which online stores do better), a good store makes recommendations.
If you have a good shop, pre-orders are often because the shopkeep has pre-informed you on something (or mentioned something you'd heard about and were curious about), and closed the sale by saying "hey, why don't you pre-order it, so as soon as it comes in you know you'll have a copy!"
Then, it's just like christmas! You go into the shop and *poof*, there's your present! Sure, you bought it yourself, but it's still fun! And the shop stays in business and gets to provide you with good leads for future products.
(A good shop will also use pre-orders as a barometer for likely sellers, and order extras.)
In short, I like my local shop that actually bothers to figure out what I like. I talked with the shopkeep once, about how far he'd go to sell to me based on how much I spend there each month (maybe $100 on average). After you subtract costs and overhead, he figured I bought his family dinner one night each month. So while he'd do normal good service to keep me, at 1 dinner/month, it's not like I should be demanding extra discounts or red carpets. Proportion is necessary.
Wow, there's a $50 entrance fee. If they get 200 entries, that's a neat $10k, plus they get to be judges and see what's really cool so they can hire the people.
With writing and poetry, this is an old scheme (not quite scam, but scheme). Charge for a contest and sell the results.
What's next-- for-pay music auditions for the RIAA? Ooh, I know-- submit your stories to slashdot, just $2 per submission, and if yours is chosen as the best submission of the year, you win! No dups allowed.
> 750,000 points is NOTHING.
Bwah ha ha. Tossing 12MB as a basic data structure is huge-- in a real program, that uses that basic data structure to create others. Plus that's not including visualizing it. Think 2000 targets, each with a dozen mathematical alterations to that structure. Then plot them. 12MB*2000*12*plotting overhead=a lot more than you want to store in ram.
750,000 points when we coded took 12 seconds to gronk through subsequent calculations. On a realtime system, do you want a latency of 12 seconds every time you click on a new target? No. With a faster system and more ram, that latency dropped to unnoticeable, but even then that's because we did clever coding past that.
Since you're all contempty, all I can say is, write a realtime computer program and you'll find that, the smaller you make your most basic data structures, the less ballooning you get. It's people like you who figure they can toss in the kitchen sink at the atomic level that run into trouble when they try to build realtime systems with it.
I wrote: :)"
>"if it takes you 3 months to optimize, you'd be better off keeping the slow code, doing another project, and 3 months later just buying a faster PC to run the slow old code
innosent asked:
>What ever happened to writing efficient code?
There's slow, and there's efficient. Sometimes brute force and ignorance _is_ better. Here's an example.
We had a routine using an ephemeris. It loaded in the data at 1 minute intervals, since we needed 1 minute resolution accuracy. 3 coordinates for each minute for 6 months = 3/4 million data points. That's a lot of memory overhead.
One programmer wanted to rewrite it so we only loaded some fraction of the points, and interpolated. Problem is, a linear interpolation wasn't fast enough, also, because of how the other data structures generated from the ephemeris were set up, they expected a continuous set (basically we were making advantage of vector calculations, so even if we interpolated, we'd have to make the full vector epheremeris before doing other calculations, and change basically the entirely underlying computation code).
When written, the ephemeris was a memory hog and slowed things down. When it came time to deploy it, though, even though it was dog slow on our original test machines, it was more cost effective to just buy a new $2000 laptop for the project that ran it really speedy. Faster PCs and cheap RAM had won the day.
If we'd gone for the interpolation scheme, it would have cost about 3 months for 1.5 programmers, at a cost to the taxpaper of around $48,000.
So, should we have gone for the more 'efficient' method, which was more complex and thus incured more development time, or go with the brute-force simple approach that saves the taxpayer $48k (and gives the customer a new laptop computer!).
It was an easy call. In real world HPC, you need to always balance resources.
Save your CPU money for the compiler (e.g. PGF90, or what have you), or for development tools, and for more RAM. A good compiler will give you a better handle on numerical accuracy than a 'better' CPU stuck with an off compiler. More RAM will keep you from being stingy in single/double precision allocations.
:)
Also, factor in your work time. A few percentage difference between CPUs won't count nearly as much as the 2 hours you saved because you had a good debugger, or the 4 hours saved because your editor makes it easier to write and jump around your code.
Your accuracy will be pretty much the same, you just have to understand how computers represent floats and plan accordingly. Use accurate representations even if they're slower to get the numerical accuracy you need, then optimize the slow parts.
Only optimize the stuff that runs slow. That means profile, don't just guess. You'll often be surprised by where the bottlenecks are.
Higher accuracy usually means more memory (going with doubles rather than floats) or work (converting to integers within your desired floating range to control floating point accuracy). CPU won't be a biggie, but having lots of RAM will help.
If you have a choice between spending 3 months writing and optimizing code, or spending 1 month writing code that isn't optimized, think of what 2 months of runtime will do. If it takes you a while to write the code, just buy your super-accurate machine _after_ coding, when it's time to do your real runs (since chip speeds already increase).
In fact, if it takes you 3 months to optimize, you'd be better off keeping the slow code, doing another project, and 3 months later just buying a faster PC to run the slow old code
All this off the top of my head, hope it helps.
Given the current media attitude, this will no doubt be spun as "world wants a less firm, less studly leader than Bush so it can do its Francophilic walk-over our fine democratic values."
Alternative spins include "the world wants a nuanced leader who understands the issues", or "the world wants less war", or "the world wants to attack us so they need a senator in charge", or "the world likes red ties more than blue".
Hmm... it'll be interesting, but I think this is mostly a non-fact. World opinion doesn't count much within the US.
If the US takes an isolationist stance, that's not a bad thing. If we'd rather have more UN engagements (i.e. less US soldiers, easier for us to pull out and leave our allies holding the stick, et cetera), though, it might be worth paying attention.
"World wants to send soliders in to fight our battles, but only if we change leaders!" Now that's an odd spin we could try.
I had one, too. Sold it at a yard sale for, ummm... more than a quarter. 'Course it was broken by that point, too, but hey, even marked 'broken, $1', someone bought it. Wonder if it's on eBay now.
:)
It was pretty lame, especially as you could buy, like, an electronic Pong for your TV. So it's not like someone made mechanical pong, then someone else said "hey, let's computerize it!". No, someone actually said "look at this electronic TV game, I bet we could make a mechanical version that still requires batteries!"
I think I had fun
For those who didn't RTFA, here's the answers:
... I can't believe I actually tallied these up.
Bush, questions 1-2, 4, 6-15: Yes, but no.
Kerry, questions 1, 6-15: Yes, but no.
Bush, questions 3, 5: No, but yes.
Kerry, questions 2-5: No, but yes.
In Science News, June 14, 2003, Baughman's team of Univ of Texas made a single-walled carbon nanotube fiber composite that's the width of a human hair, and 100 to 200 meters long. The nanotubes are spun with polyvinyl alcohol, and are 4 times tougher than spider silk (the previous record-holder) as well as stronger (can hold more weight).
100-200 meters, that's a length you can do useful stuff. One weird thing is, they weave it in with ordinary cloth to make supercapacitors in clothing (for built-in antenna,s tiny batteries, et cetera). The field is called 'electronic textiles'!
>Can't you just put a big mothertrucking hard disk on one of them and NFS mount it?
Problem then is you're limited to a 'memory speed' equal to NFS. Clusters already want the fasted network connection possible. Making cache available only via internet speeds with cat5 speeds, ugh.
That said, it's always useful to have a big mothertrucking hard disk mounted via NFS, mostly for when the run is done and you want to gather/centralize the data or post-data visualization products.
Half of my cluster hassles are "okay, the run is done, now how the hell do I get my data to useful form?"
> In a two-party system you will automatically get two extreme views, left and right, because the two parties have to exaggerate their differences to get as many voters as they can.
Actually, I think we're getting the opposite effect. We're getting 2 candidates pretty close overall, because they fear distancing themselves too much from the middle states.
It's as if they realize all the far-right and far-left will vote along party lines even if a monkey was running, so they focus their campaignins and platforms to convert the swayable middle.
Cynically, both are rich Yale grads who favor big government, albeit in different ways. While their social agendas are very different, that (surprisingly) hasn't been the major focus lately.
As a friend from England said, 'you keep saying you have a liberal and conservative party. We see it as you have a conservative and a more-conservative party.'
Not stating my own party view, just pointing out that parties seem to drift to center.
> I love in MD which is solid Democrat. I can vote fro either of the two parties and not have much utility in my vote.
Actually, Maryland is a mildly bi-partisan state for presidential elections-- half the time the Dem wins, half the time the Rep wins. Odd, since it's overwhelmingly Dem for senators and reps.
For presidents, it voted Dem in 2000 (57% Dem to 40% Rep), 1996 (54% to 38%), and 1992 (50% to 36%), Rep in 1988 (51% to 48%) and 1984 (53 % to 47%), and Dem in 1980 (47% to 44%).
When the Republicans won, then it was with a 6% margin or less; when the Democrats won, it was overwhelmingly Dem. Given voting history, it could go either way this year.
MD isn't a cinch for either side. (And yes, the governer situation is a really interesting case here. Sort of shows the politician/person can be more important than which party they run under!)
Hi,
> Good idea, but why not go all the way and just allow voting on the issues directly?
That, alas, goes entirely against the idea of a Republic, and also leads to 'tyranny of the masses'.
The idea behind the US gov't is that gov't is too complicated for each us to constantly stay informed of and be able to fully judge each issue.
So, instead of requiring every citizen to be fully and accurately informed every day on 200+page bills, we instead use representatives. "I don't know gov't, but I trust that Joe's views are close to mine, and that he'll represent me accurately."
Contrast this to a pure democracy-- say, at the neighborhood level. If the issue is raised to 'evict Mawbid due to fashion sense' and 51% agree, you're screwed. That's tyranny of the masses (corrolary: a good society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.)
In a representative system, though, 51% might vote for Fred, who runs on a Pro-Eviction platform, but Fred will (hopefully) look and say, hey, we don't really have a mandate here, and Mawbid's fashion errors aren't enough to do this.
In short, the republic adds friction and a buffer between the populace and laws. Both are good-- we don't want gov't making instant laws or automatically going with slight majorities.
So voting directly on issues, nope. Voting more accurately for candidates and removing the marketing/advertising of career politicians, that I'm for!
Problem is, real issues like Debt or Fiscal Policy aren't sexy enough to campaign. You can't stake out turf, or slander the others.
"My opponent is sending us into debt. I pledge, if elected, to send us _less_ into debt than he. This is leadership."
Electionining at all levels is always about tangibles. 'Tough on crime', 'tough on terror', 'taking a stand on gay marriage'. Debt isn't cool in that context. No one likes debt, but no one wants to talk about it.
Oddly enough, having researched the issues, I support the candidate I do because he has a record of slashing the budget in a way I agree with, as opposed to the other guy, who slashes stuff I think he could keep.
(Well, I had to mention slash, this is slash-dot!)
They should run elections just by listing all issues candidates mention, but don't list the candidates. You just vote 'yes/no/don't care' for each _issue_ and whichever matches most with a given candidates platform-on-record, they get your vote.
So 'ban on gay marriage' would have yes/no/don't care'. You vote 'yes', that may tally for either candidate-- or both, if they both support it, or neither, if they both don't care or are both against it. And your vote is the tally of all issues, whomever you support most gets your 1 vote.
So, yeah, maybe you'd only find out who you voted for _after_ voting, but it'd be on the real issues, not the spin or marketing of the candidate!
Keep it simple and relevant. And keep it on the clock. Good morale stuff should a) intermesh with work, b) be during work time, and c) be opt-in.
1) Pass out chinese food menus while your folks are working during the first game, everyone at work picks their order and gets free lunch. Basically, cheap catering during the big events your company is involved in.
2) Get free swag from the teams, make available, i.e. "hey, we just got a box of free Bronco jerseys as a gift, anyone wants them, we'll have a box after the weekly staff meeting, first-come first-serve on sizes". If there aren't enough shirts for all, draw numbers from a hat for those who want one. Note that you're not 'wasting' company dollars on this, so folks won't grumble about 'why that money didn't go to raises instead'.
Seriously, work your connections to get free swag for the staff, and use a slush fund to make things more pleasant during crunch time.
Above all, don't give managers first access at the swag! Show you value the staff first.
"selling PC's ... for about $500 each ... they'd need to sell 70,000 consoles to make up that revenue."
:)
It's worse than that-- likely they only get 40% of the cost, since they have to sell to distributors, who sell to retailers, who then have to sell at consumers. So the company makes maybe 40% of the cost.
They say you should retail price things at 10x your cost to make money. So they need to make their PCs for $50 to do this... eeps. They have to make them at less than $200 to profit. If revenue-per-item is $200, their profit is the difference between cost-per-unit (including operations cost) and $200.
They're screwed
>If I take a hubcap from your car, squash it into a cube then sell it for scrap, is that fair use?
Well, no, because you're out a hubcap. More accurately, if I see your hubcap, take a photo of it, and win a photo contest with that photo, do you deserve half the prize?
I'd say, no. Even if you'd modded your car with custom hubcaps, because I'd a) only used a portion of your mods and b) presented it within a new work.
The work is not the hubcap, even though it wouldn't be the same work without the hubcap.
The article mentions the sampling of a 3-note riff. While "Name that Tune" does indicate such things are recognizable in the right context, I fear this means any musician who happens to use a short riff that happened to be in some obscure song will suffer too.
I mean, if I do a guitar solo and it happens that 3 notes used several times sound like, oh, 'cat scratch fever' or 'smoke on the water' (same riff, by the way), am I violating ownership?
And this will kill jazz... no more nods to other works in solos?
Next up: any writer who uses 3 words in sequence that appeared in a previous writer's book is now violating that original author's intellectual property and will be sued.
Worse, the article's 'stolen' 3-note riff is only 6 pieces of information-- 3 pitches plus 3 rhythms. They'd downsampled and changed the rhythm, so we're saying anything that is _similar_ to a known bit is at risk.
While the article mentions they'd sampled, I worry that original recreation will be hit with the same law, i.e. getting a session guitarist to redo a riff in a different octave with different phrasing will be seen the same as 'sampling'.