How many gigabits in one gigabyte? If the answer is not 8 then you're wrong. Now, how many gigabits are sent in one second at 1Gb/s? Again, the only correct answer is 1000000000. Now, how many bits in one gigabit? Once again, 1000000000. Add Byte=Bit*8 to these bits of unit information and you can see that 1GB is 1000000000 Bytes. Just because some ignorant programmers in the 70s thought 1024 was 'close enough' to 1000 doesn't mean its ok for educated people 30 years later to think ~1074 is still close enough to 1000.
Ever use Trove filters on Freshmeat? You can cause certain topics/categories/etc to start out collapsed. This is a great feature, full details of projects you like, just the name of projects you probably wont. Not saying this is the intended use, but to me its an obvious extension of the functionality we are getting.
Then just rent one yourself on those days, STILL cheaper than paying for gas every day. A lot of cities have short term public car rental pass systems, look into that. Your attitude is a symptom of a huge problem with american culture over the past 50 years or so. Cheap fast private transportation is NOT normal. Most sane people in other countries would never consider driving a 90 minute commute. Maybe 90 minutes on a train, but definitely not in a private car. Our cities have developed around it for the better part of a century and it is going to start really hurting us in the very near future as we resist public transportation and cant afford $20/gal gas.
Bicycle, Bus, Train... These are 3 words the average American is going to have to learn to use a lot more in the next 20 years.
Uhm, Yes? You can get a rack for a bike that sits behind you, above the rear wheel. Usually good for 20+ pound loads, that covers at least a week of groceries for me, or a toolbox, or a decent size stack of library books, or my PC (tower, lcd, kb, mouse, cables) when I bike to a LAN party.
With regards to working off-site... Use a company car. Take a pay cut for it, even. You are going to save $2000+/yr in gas, negotiate use of a company vehicle for off-site work in return for a $1000/yr pay cut.
Taking work home with you... not sure what kind of work wont fit in a backpack, but going back later in the car when you can do 18 miles in 20 minutes instead of 90 minutes seems like the obvious solution.
Same with MS and others' EULAs, if MS determines you are in violation of their EULA, and revokes your "rights" to use it, you are legally required to remove the MS software from your system(s). Period. Nothing to discuss. That hurts? Tough shit.
Bzzt, wrong. The "right to use it" is not Microsoft's to revoke. Once I have a legally-produced copy of a piece of software in my hands no law short of the DMCA (sometimes. may it rest in peace, soon, PLEASE) stands in the way of my installing and running it. MS can stop me from making copies, selling copies, renting it, making derivative works, public performance, and a few other things. What they cant stop me from doing is writing a review, installing the software, making a backup copy, running the software, using the cd as a frisbee or the manual as toilet paper, and many many other things.
90 minutes to go 18 miles due to congestion? Suck it up and buy a damn bicycle. Almost anyone can do 15mph on a bike, if youre in decent shape you can pull 20-25 on flat ground. Get a streamlined low rider recumbent, if there are no steep hills on the way, and 30mph is feasible. You will get to work up to twice as fast, get good exercise, AND save a few hundred dollars a month on gas.
Up front cost is anywhere from $50 to $5000 depending on just how nice and fast of a bike you want to get. Your call.
The "it might rain" or "i get sweaty" arguments dont cut it. Carry work clothes, a towel, and personal hygiene products in a backpack. Make a deal with a roadside motel near work to use one of their showers each morning, set me back $3/day last time I had to do that.
In many american high schools calculators are restricted or downright banned on many tests and in many classes. Even straight math courses, but more commonly in math-based science courses.
Memorizing multiplication tables is a bad idea. Take two kids. One memorizes up to 20x20, the other just learns how to do multiplication in their head. The first kid can spit out 17*19 faster, but what happens when you ask them both for 21*23?
Steam does no such thing. I downloaded HL2 from a torrent, installed it under Cedega in Linux, played the single player story, installed a couple of mods, decided I would rather just wait for UT2007 or Savage 2, deleted it.
Bzzt, wrong. Cheap piezo accelerometers are VERY precise compared to what you might be familiar with from just 5 years ago. You do not need 'jerky' movements. Any starting or stopping of motion at all involves acceleration. The gyro in my very small model helicopters outputs digitally in increments of.00001G, and only cost $15.
The concept is very old, it is called Dead Reckoning. You detect.00001G of acceleration in one direction for.1 second, then 3 seconds of no acceleration, then.00001G of acceleration in the opposite direction for.1 second. Despite having no input during the 3 seconds, you know how fast and in which direction the controller is moving from the initial acceleration. High school kids build robots that use dead reckoning for cm-precision self location over 10m+ mazes.
Also, RE the unemployment survey, whatever sampling method they use is flawed. They claim to sample 60k households every month. Given ~100M households in the US, I would expect the average household to be sampled once every 16 months. A quick also-not-representative survey of the dozen households containing my close friends available by IM right now says that none of them have ever been surveyed, over a span of at least 5 years. Either we are very unlucky, or something about our demographics is underrepresented in that survey.
The documents describing the sampling methodology (http://www.bls.census.gov/cps/bsampdes.htm) seem to be well thought out, and describe excellent sampling techniques, so I can only assume that the system is breaking down somewhere between the documentation and implementation stages.
Yes. The physical office used to comprise the Unemployment Benefits office, where you applied for benefits, and the Employment Assistance office, where available job postings were kept and job hunting assistance was given. The office size was cut in half, no more benefits office, you HAD to apply by phone. All that was left in the physical location was the employment assistance portion.
That the two can interbreed simply means that someone misclassified polar bears a few hundred years ago. They should have been classified as Ursus Arctos Maritimus, making them subspecies cousins of the Brown Bear (Ursus Arctos), Grizzly Bear (Ursus Arctos Horribilis), Kodiak Bear, Mexican Brown Bear, etc.
That all relies on actually being able to GET unemployment benefits. I have tried to apply for unemployment benefits twice in my life. The first time I found a new job before they could start (hooray). The second time, Tennessee had changed to a phone-based application system, and the phone system had NO HOLD QUEUE. I called 4-8 times a day every day for a month (the application window) and got either a busy signal, an "all operators are busy, try again later. CLICK" hangup, or a "our normal business hours are..." message if i messed up and called after 5 PM. I can see how this is advantageous to the government, as it saves money in unemployment payments AND lets them lie about unemployment rates even more than usual. But it sucked for me.
I disagree. I think the names of the alphabetic characters should be as unique and short as possible. One syllable each, and as few consonants as possible sharing the same vowel sound. Em / En, Eff / Ess, Bee / Cee / Dee / E / Gee / Pee / Tee / Vee / Zee... these are HORRIBLE when trying to spell things out to someone. They are the reason we have 'alphabets' like "Alpha Beta Charlie..." etc.
In terms of English specifically, we have 26 letters to share about 10 vowel sounds (depending on dialect, accent, etc), and can vary between Vowel-Consonant (Eff) and Consonant-Vowel (Vee). This means that no three letters should have the same vowel sound and the same pattern, and only very distinguishable consonants should be in the few similar pairs.
Research would have to be done into the linguistic aspects of such a change, of course. The below example is non-optimal, just throwing out all the combinations (basic vowels pronounced as normal):
A Ba (as in bay) Ca (as in cat) Da (as in dart) E Fe (as in fee) Ge (as in get) He (as in hell) I Ji (as in Jill) Ki (as in kite) La (as in lamb) aM (as in aim) aN (as in want) O Po (as in pope) Qo (as in kwon) eR (as in ear) eS (as in mess) eT (as in get) U oV (as in over) oW (as in now) iX (as in fix) Yu (as in you) uZ (as in fuzz)
This arrangement uses most, but not all, of the possible vowel sounds and combinations, which leaves lots of room for improvement, optomization, etc.
Watch the little animated GIF at the top, then try to follow the directions. This cuts 25-50% off the total shoelace tying time, and up to 90% off the time for the actual 'bow' knot (not counting the base knot under the bow).
That site also has a bunch of other knots for different purposes. Boot lacing and tying methods, secure knots, even necktie knots:)
A purely constructed alphabet that would be easy for humans to write and easy for machines to read would involve a group of connected strokes.
--- |\/| | X | |/ \|
---
From the 6 strokes here you have 64 total possible combinations. Discard the 24 that are disjoint and youve still got plenty for 26 letters and 10 numbers.
As to an english-based alphabet, the problem is that so many letters are far too similar, especially b / h / k, i / j, rn / m, and that handwriting is too fluctuous. Capital letters are an obsolete idea that only further complicates things.
The outdated nature of most written languages is mirrored in spoken alphabets. There is absolutely no reason for 'w' to have a 3 syllable name. I have encounterd a number of people who say "www" as "dub dub dub", and I am considering spending a week or two training myself to permanently replace "double-u" with "dub" in my vocabulary (that is how long it took me to unlearn 20 years of tying my shoelaces wastefully and ingraining a better faster way).
Actually, I have. Gaming is my passion. I own more legit copies of games, new and old, than most people have downloaded images of. You name an english-language non-sports game from the past 20 years, odds are better than 50/50 that I have played it.
Fallout was the most non-linear graphical RPG when it came out, by far. Starcraft beat TA in the one way that has kept it alive... custom scenarios. TA's custom unit system doesn't compare to SC's map scripting system (despite it being a pain in the ass to use).
What? If you think Fallout and Starcraft were not in the top 5 games of their years, and among the top 25ish games of all time, then you really don't belong in a discussion about the quality of games. This is not a game preference thing; it can be said objectively that these games embody everything that can be good about games in general, and specific to their genres. They were revolutionary, evolutionary, spawned good sequels (WC3 is a functional sequel to SC, not WC2, regardless of the story), sold insanely well, and pretty much cleaned up by any other metric you care to apply.
Burying it with no warnings is not a solution. Earthquakes would break this idea, although they can be minimized by placement. But even ignoring natural disasters, society could fail, then start over, and reach the ability to dig deep mines without records. We are talking about tens of thousands of years, and digging down a mile is not beyond 1800s-era mining technology.
Do you even read your own links? One of the specific exempt categories:
Computer Employee Exemption
To qualify for the computer employee exemption, the following tests must be met:
The employee must be compensated either on a salary or fee basis (as defined in the regulations) at a rate not less than $455 per week or, if compensated on an hourly basis, at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour;
The employee must be employed as a computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software engineer or other similarly skilled worker in the computer field performing the duties described below;
The employee's primary duty must consist of:
The application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to determine hardware, software or system functional specifications;
The design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing or modification of computer systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to user or system design specifications;
The design, documentation, testing, creation or modification of computer programs related to machine operating systems; or
A combination of the aforementioned duties, the performance of which requires the same level of skills.
$455/wk is a decent wage where I live, and I doubt many programmers make less. Duty #2 pretty much exactly sums up the job of your average programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
I sit correced. The point, however badly voiced, stands.
How many gigabits in one gigabyte? If the answer is not 8 then you're wrong. Now, how many gigabits are sent in one second at 1Gb/s? Again, the only correct answer is 1000000000. Now, how many bits in one gigabit? Once again, 1000000000. Add Byte=Bit*8 to these bits of unit information and you can see that 1GB is 1000000000 Bytes. Just because some ignorant programmers in the 70s thought 1024 was 'close enough' to 1000 doesn't mean its ok for educated people 30 years later to think ~1074 is still close enough to 1000.
Ever use Trove filters on Freshmeat? You can cause certain topics/categories/etc to start out collapsed. This is a great feature, full details of projects you like, just the name of projects you probably wont. Not saying this is the intended use, but to me its an obvious extension of the functionality we are getting.
Then just rent one yourself on those days, STILL cheaper than paying for gas every day. A lot of cities have short term public car rental pass systems, look into that. Your attitude is a symptom of a huge problem with american culture over the past 50 years or so. Cheap fast private transportation is NOT normal. Most sane people in other countries would never consider driving a 90 minute commute. Maybe 90 minutes on a train, but definitely not in a private car. Our cities have developed around it for the better part of a century and it is going to start really hurting us in the very near future as we resist public transportation and cant afford $20/gal gas.
Bicycle, Bus, Train... These are 3 words the average American is going to have to learn to use a lot more in the next 20 years.
Uhm, Yes? You can get a rack for a bike that sits behind you, above the rear wheel. Usually good for 20+ pound loads, that covers at least a week of groceries for me, or a toolbox, or a decent size stack of library books, or my PC (tower, lcd, kb, mouse, cables) when I bike to a LAN party.
With regards to working off-site... Use a company car. Take a pay cut for it, even. You are going to save $2000+/yr in gas, negotiate use of a company vehicle for off-site work in return for a $1000/yr pay cut.
Taking work home with you... not sure what kind of work wont fit in a backpack, but going back later in the car when you can do 18 miles in 20 minutes instead of 90 minutes seems like the obvious solution.
Same with MS and others' EULAs, if MS determines you are in violation of their EULA, and revokes your "rights" to use it, you are legally required to remove the MS software from your system(s). Period. Nothing to discuss. That hurts? Tough shit.
Bzzt, wrong. The "right to use it" is not Microsoft's to revoke. Once I have a legally-produced copy of a piece of software in my hands no law short of the DMCA (sometimes. may it rest in peace, soon, PLEASE) stands in the way of my installing and running it. MS can stop me from making copies, selling copies, renting it, making derivative works, public performance, and a few other things. What they cant stop me from doing is writing a review, installing the software, making a backup copy, running the software, using the cd as a frisbee or the manual as toilet paper, and many many other things.
90 minutes to go 18 miles due to congestion? Suck it up and buy a damn bicycle. Almost anyone can do 15mph on a bike, if youre in decent shape you can pull 20-25 on flat ground. Get a streamlined low rider recumbent, if there are no steep hills on the way, and 30mph is feasible. You will get to work up to twice as fast, get good exercise, AND save a few hundred dollars a month on gas.
Up front cost is anywhere from $50 to $5000 depending on just how nice and fast of a bike you want to get. Your call.
The "it might rain" or "i get sweaty" arguments dont cut it. Carry work clothes, a towel, and personal hygiene products in a backpack. Make a deal with a roadside motel near work to use one of their showers each morning, set me back $3/day last time I had to do that.
In many american high schools calculators are restricted or downright banned on many tests and in many classes. Even straight math courses, but more commonly in math-based science courses.
Memorizing multiplication tables is a bad idea. Take two kids. One memorizes up to 20x20, the other just learns how to do multiplication in their head. The first kid can spit out 17*19 faster, but what happens when you ask them both for 21*23?
Steam does no such thing. I downloaded HL2 from a torrent, installed it under Cedega in Linux, played the single player story, installed a couple of mods, decided I would rather just wait for UT2007 or Savage 2, deleted it.
Linux Gaming ++
Warez as Demo ++
Steam --
Bzzt, wrong. Cheap piezo accelerometers are VERY precise compared to what you might be familiar with from just 5 years ago. You do not need 'jerky' movements. Any starting or stopping of motion at all involves acceleration. The gyro in my very small model helicopters outputs digitally in increments of .00001G, and only cost $15.
.00001G of acceleration in one direction for .1 second, then 3 seconds of no acceleration, then .00001G of acceleration in the opposite direction for .1 second. Despite having no input during the 3 seconds, you know how fast and in which direction the controller is moving from the initial acceleration. High school kids build robots that use dead reckoning for cm-precision self location over 10m+ mazes.
The concept is very old, it is called Dead Reckoning. You detect
Also, RE the unemployment survey, whatever sampling method they use is flawed. They claim to sample 60k households every month. Given ~100M households in the US, I would expect the average household to be sampled once every 16 months. A quick also-not-representative survey of the dozen households containing my close friends available by IM right now says that none of them have ever been surveyed, over a span of at least 5 years. Either we are very unlucky, or something about our demographics is underrepresented in that survey.
The documents describing the sampling methodology (http://www.bls.census.gov/cps/bsampdes.htm) seem to be well thought out, and describe excellent sampling techniques, so I can only assume that the system is breaking down somewhere between the documentation and implementation stages.
Yes. The physical office used to comprise the Unemployment Benefits office, where you applied for benefits, and the Employment Assistance office, where available job postings were kept and job hunting assistance was given. The office size was cut in half, no more benefits office, you HAD to apply by phone. All that was left in the physical location was the employment assistance portion.
That the two can interbreed simply means that someone misclassified polar bears a few hundred years ago. They should have been classified as Ursus Arctos Maritimus, making them subspecies cousins of the Brown Bear (Ursus Arctos), Grizzly Bear (Ursus Arctos Horribilis), Kodiak Bear, Mexican Brown Bear, etc.
That all relies on actually being able to GET unemployment benefits. I have tried to apply for unemployment benefits twice in my life. The first time I found a new job before they could start (hooray). The second time, Tennessee had changed to a phone-based application system, and the phone system had NO HOLD QUEUE. I called 4-8 times a day every day for a month (the application window) and got either a busy signal, an "all operators are busy, try again later. CLICK" hangup, or a "our normal business hours are..." message if i messed up and called after 5 PM. I can see how this is advantageous to the government, as it saves money in unemployment payments AND lets them lie about unemployment rates even more than usual. But it sucked for me.
I disagree. I think the names of the alphabetic characters should be as unique and short as possible. One syllable each, and as few consonants as possible sharing the same vowel sound. Em / En, Eff / Ess, Bee / Cee / Dee / E / Gee / Pee / Tee / Vee / Zee... these are HORRIBLE when trying to spell things out to someone. They are the reason we have 'alphabets' like "Alpha Beta Charlie..." etc.
In terms of English specifically, we have 26 letters to share about 10 vowel sounds (depending on dialect, accent, etc), and can vary between Vowel-Consonant (Eff) and Consonant-Vowel (Vee). This means that no three letters should have the same vowel sound and the same pattern, and only very distinguishable consonants should be in the few similar pairs.
Research would have to be done into the linguistic aspects of such a change, of course. The below example is non-optimal, just throwing out all the combinations (basic vowels pronounced as normal):
A
Ba (as in bay)
Ca (as in cat)
Da (as in dart)
E
Fe (as in fee)
Ge (as in get)
He (as in hell)
I
Ji (as in Jill)
Ki (as in kite)
La (as in lamb)
aM (as in aim)
aN (as in want)
O
Po (as in pope)
Qo (as in kwon)
eR (as in ear)
eS (as in mess)
eT (as in get)
U
oV (as in over)
oW (as in now)
iX (as in fix)
Yu (as in you)
uZ (as in fuzz)
This arrangement uses most, but not all, of the possible vowel sounds and combinations, which leaves lots of room for improvement, optomization, etc.
The solution to that problem is trivial. Just run each case on more than one independent FPGA and average (or some other function) the results.
http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm
:)
Watch the little animated GIF at the top, then try to follow the directions. This cuts 25-50% off the total shoelace tying time, and up to 90% off the time for the actual 'bow' knot (not counting the base knot under the bow).
That site also has a bunch of other knots for different purposes. Boot lacing and tying methods, secure knots, even necktie knots
A purely constructed alphabet that would be easy for humans to write and easy for machines to read would involve a group of connected strokes.
/|
---
|\
| X |
|/ \|
---
From the 6 strokes here you have 64 total possible combinations. Discard the 24 that are disjoint and youve still got plenty for 26 letters and 10 numbers.
As to an english-based alphabet, the problem is that so many letters are far too similar, especially b / h / k, i / j, rn / m, and that handwriting is too fluctuous. Capital letters are an obsolete idea that only further complicates things.
The outdated nature of most written languages is mirrored in spoken alphabets. There is absolutely no reason for 'w' to have a 3 syllable name. I have encounterd a number of people who say "www" as "dub dub dub", and I am considering spending a week or two training myself to permanently replace "double-u" with "dub" in my vocabulary (that is how long it took me to unlearn 20 years of tying my shoelaces wastefully and ingraining a better faster way).
Actually, I have. Gaming is my passion. I own more legit copies of games, new and old, than most people have downloaded images of. You name an english-language non-sports game from the past 20 years, odds are better than 50/50 that I have played it.
Fallout was the most non-linear graphical RPG when it came out, by far. Starcraft beat TA in the one way that has kept it alive... custom scenarios. TA's custom unit system doesn't compare to SC's map scripting system (despite it being a pain in the ass to use).
What? If you think Fallout and Starcraft were not in the top 5 games of their years, and among the top 25ish games of all time, then you really don't belong in a discussion about the quality of games. This is not a game preference thing; it can be said objectively that these games embody everything that can be good about games in general, and specific to their genres. They were revolutionary, evolutionary, spawned good sequels (WC3 is a functional sequel to SC, not WC2, regardless of the story), sold insanely well, and pretty much cleaned up by any other metric you care to apply.
Burying it with no warnings is not a solution. Earthquakes would break this idea, although they can be minimized by placement. But even ignoring natural disasters, society could fail, then start over, and reach the ability to dig deep mines without records. We are talking about tens of thousands of years, and digging down a mile is not beyond 1800s-era mining technology.
Not popular, but enduring. Compare 1600s Navajo to 2000s Navajo, then do the same with English (THE popular language).
$455/wk is a decent wage where I live, and I doubt many programmers make less. Duty #2 pretty much exactly sums up the job of your average programmer.