I do not know what is the limit of the "wireless spectrum" if there is any. Before this limit is reached, I guess just updating all hardware gears that transmit/route more efficiently is all that is needed.
The limit is given precisely by Shannon's Law, which gives a mathematical limit on the amount of data that can be sent over a given amount of bandwidth. Spectral Efficiency is the amount of bandwidth available in a given wireless spectrum.
1) Give intern new shiny bomb detector 2) Send intern to walk around field for a while 3) Intern blows up 4) Success - bomb detected! 5) Added bonus - bomb removed!
That's the premise of the game Unexploded Cow, only instead of interns, it's cows with Mad Cow Disease.
How would you use broadcast or multicast to distribute an OS? Call me ignorant, but how would you do that in practice?
I used to work in a computer lab at the university I went to. We used Ghost to do exactly that. All the computers in the lab (a few hundred PCs) were booted up off a special floppy (or later, cd) that started up Ghost in listen mode. Then, the central server used multicast to send the OS image to all the clients at once. It took less than an hour, and that was with 100Mb/s Ethernet.
Here's a question: To know which bits have changed, doesn't it need to compare the two files. How does this result in bandwidth savings?
No, because it only sends a hash of the data. The other side computes a hash of it's data, and if the hashes match, the transfer is complete. If The hashes don't match, there is a rolling hash that can verify a partial match, and send only the changed data. There's more info here
In addition to the "Retrieve running apps" and "Reorder running apps" permissions, the new version of the facebook app also requests the "Draw over other apps" (aka the "popup" permission). I'm sticking with the old version, which is intrusive enough, thank you very much.
I'm surprised they don't have a Donate Now button. I know they plan to raise a lot of their money from "philanthropic" (i.e. large) donations, but I think a lot of slashdotters would love to donate a few bucks.
My favorite terrible progress bar was Internet Explorer, back in its early days of essentially being a renamed version of NCSA Mosaic. When attempting to load a site that wasn't available, the progress bar would slowly creep towards complete, despite the server being completely unresponsive. Then after a long while the browser would give up and stop the progress bar. Why on earth would the progress bar move if the server is completely unresponsive? Who programmed this? I would hope that they, like the inventor of Clippy, suffered a terrible death by fire.
Early versions of Netscape had an issue where if a download was getting slow, the speed would creep down and down, until it hit a divide by zero error and crashed the browser.
Water transportation is about 10-30% of the cost of rail or truck, so there's just no impetus to build high speed rail.
So at the end of the day, when planes are faster for passenger movement, water transportation is already available and vastly cheaper for goods movement, why on earth would anyone in the US build high speed rail? What's the advantage?
However, water transportation is vulnerable to droughts, as witnessed by the current problems with barge traffic on the Mississippi River.
Wasted Talent is about an girl getting through engineering school and then in the real world. It's great art and really funny! My personal favorite is hugo-nominated Schlock Mercenary, which I consider the best overall. It's been around a while, and is always funny, and always updates (no missed comics in over 12 years, even when his datacenter exploded). For best artwork, and a great story, I agree with many other posters in saying that multiple-Hugo-winning Girl Genius wins hands down. I do love xkcd, and most of the other ones mentioned. I should also mention Foxtrot, which is not strictly a webcomic (it's also in newspaper syndication). I also read Sluggy Freelance, another really long-running webcomic. Lastly, I like Free Fall, a little less well-known comic about a genetically modified wolf who gets a job as an engineer for a petty crook, and tries to stop the robot apocalypse.
Where do you think all those period cars come from in old films?
If they are truly old films, the cars were contemporary. If they are modern films set in old times, the cars can be CG pretty easily. Even if using practical effects, it's not hard to find an old junker that won't run and put paint on the cleanest side so that side can face the camera as background scenery.
Not a lot of offerings in Linux game engines so far, so this would be a nice addition. Afaik, the only real options are various derivative of older open-sourced Id Software engines, and Ogre3d. Plus Unity recently added the ability to export builds to Linux, but not to develop on Linux.
> Rather, the study determined three factors — reasoning, short-term memory and verbal ability — that combined to create human intelligence or “cognitive profile.”
And IQ tests test 2 of those factors... reasoning (through math), and verbal (through written). They've just discovered that "memory" is important to "cognitive ability."
Saying that IQ is a myth is hyperbole. They've identified that it exists and that it has 3 (instead of 2) components.
When I took an IQ test, there was a memory component.
When Enlightenment came out, it also included ESD, the Enlightened Sound Daemon. Window events could cause sounds, which was nice, but ESD was also a sound multiplexing and remote sound protocol that was way ahead of its time. Now, there are PulseAudio, Jack, Yiff, Phonon, etc. and many people say the whole thing's a big mess. What's your opinion on the current state of sound / mixing on Linux desktops.
I live in rural PA. I voted about 15 minutes before the polls closed, at 7:45 pm. There was no line, I did have to show ID, because I was a first time voter, and the ballot was on a pretty standard touch screen with smart card. The only unusal thing I noticed was a slight UI delay flipping "pages" of the ballot.
Slashdot Mirror
http://xkcd.com/834/
I do not know what is the limit of the "wireless spectrum" if there is any. Before this limit is reached, I guess just updating all hardware gears that transmit/route more efficiently is all that is needed.
The limit is given precisely by Shannon's Law, which gives a mathematical limit on the amount of data that can be sent over a given amount of bandwidth. Spectral Efficiency is the amount of bandwidth available in a given wireless spectrum.
1) Give intern new shiny bomb detector
2) Send intern to walk around field for a while
3) Intern blows up
4) Success - bomb detected!
5) Added bonus - bomb removed!
That's the premise of the game Unexploded Cow, only instead of interns, it's cows with Mad Cow Disease.
How would you use broadcast or multicast to distribute an OS? Call me ignorant, but how would you do that in practice?
I used to work in a computer lab at the university I went to. We used Ghost to do exactly that. All the computers in the lab (a few hundred PCs) were booted up off a special floppy (or later, cd) that started up Ghost in listen mode. Then, the central server used multicast to send the OS image to all the clients at once. It took less than an hour, and that was with 100Mb/s Ethernet.
Here's a question:
To know which bits have changed, doesn't it need to compare the two files. How does this result in bandwidth savings?
No, because it only sends a hash of the data. The other side computes a hash of it's data, and if the hashes match, the transfer is complete. If The hashes don't match, there is a rolling hash that can verify a partial match, and send only the changed data. There's more info here
In addition to the "Retrieve running apps" and "Reorder running apps" permissions, the new version of the facebook app also requests the "Draw over other apps" (aka the "popup" permission). I'm sticking with the old version, which is intrusive enough, thank you very much.
"For example, the latest Intel's microchip, the Ivy Bridge (and soon the Haswell) have circuit-sizes as small as 22nm"
I'll bet on the traces being even smaller than that. You must mean transistor size.
It means feature size. A feature can be part of a transistor, or a circuit trace, or a bunch of other things.
Oh, wait, it's the arcfour key scheduling thing again.
This is an old arcfour weakness, not news. Everybody knows about it (and how to avoid it). The SSL people just never bothered to do it.
According to the slides, this attack works by exploiting a bias in the output of RC4, not the key schedule at all...
How I wish I could recollect of circle round the exact relation Archimede(s) unwound.
Just count the letters in each word.
The one I learned is
How I need a drink, alcoholic of course after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics
I'm surprised they don't have a Donate Now button. I know they plan to raise a lot of their money from "philanthropic" (i.e. large) donations, but I think a lot of slashdotters would love to donate a few bucks.
My favorite terrible progress bar was Internet Explorer, back in its early days of essentially being a renamed version of NCSA Mosaic. When attempting to load a site that wasn't available, the progress bar would slowly creep towards complete, despite the server being completely unresponsive. Then after a long while the browser would give up and stop the progress bar. Why on earth would the progress bar move if the server is completely unresponsive? Who programmed this? I would hope that they, like the inventor of Clippy, suffered a terrible death by fire.
Early versions of Netscape had an issue where if a download was getting slow, the speed would creep down and down, until it hit a divide by zero error and crashed the browser.
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2005-03-16
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
Water transportation is about 10-30% of the cost of rail or truck, so there's just no impetus to build high speed rail.
So at the end of the day, when planes are faster for passenger movement, water transportation is already available and vastly cheaper for goods movement, why on earth would anyone in the US build high speed rail? What's the advantage?
However, water transportation is vulnerable to droughts, as witnessed by the current problems with barge traffic on the Mississippi River.
Wasted Talent is about an girl getting through engineering school and then in the real world. It's great art and really funny! My personal favorite is hugo-nominated Schlock Mercenary, which I consider the best overall. It's been around a while, and is always funny, and always updates (no missed comics in over 12 years, even when his datacenter exploded). For best artwork, and a great story, I agree with many other posters in saying that multiple-Hugo-winning Girl Genius wins hands down. I do love xkcd, and most of the other ones mentioned. I should also mention Foxtrot, which is not strictly a webcomic (it's also in newspaper syndication). I also read Sluggy Freelance, another really long-running webcomic. Lastly, I like Free Fall, a little less well-known comic about a genetically modified wolf who gets a job as an engineer for a petty crook, and tries to stop the robot apocalypse.
Where do you think all those period cars come from in old films?
If they are truly old films, the cars were contemporary. If they are modern films set in old times, the cars can be CG pretty easily. Even if using practical effects, it's not hard to find an old junker that won't run and put paint on the cleanest side so that side can face the camera as background scenery.
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
Not a lot of offerings in Linux game engines so far, so this would be a nice addition. Afaik, the only real options are various derivative of older open-sourced Id Software engines, and Ogre3d. Plus Unity recently added the ability to export builds to Linux, but not to develop on Linux.
I suppose Cube counts.
> Rather, the study determined three factors — reasoning, short-term memory and verbal ability — that combined to create human intelligence or “cognitive profile.”
And IQ tests test 2 of those factors... reasoning (through math), and verbal (through written). They've just discovered that "memory" is important to "cognitive ability."
Saying that IQ is a myth is hyperbole. They've identified that it exists and that it has 3 (instead of 2) components.
When I took an IQ test, there was a memory component.
When Enlightenment came out, it also included ESD, the Enlightened Sound Daemon. Window events could cause sounds, which was nice, but ESD was also a sound multiplexing and remote sound protocol that was way ahead of its time. Now, there are PulseAudio, Jack, Yiff, Phonon, etc. and many people say the whole thing's a big mess. What's your opinion on the current state of sound / mixing on Linux desktops.
I thought a MOOC was the guy who hung out with Thundarr the Barbarian.
I thought it was an analog synthesizer
I live in rural PA. I voted about 15 minutes before the polls closed, at 7:45 pm. There was no line, I did have to show ID, because I was a first time voter, and the ballot was on a pretty standard touch screen with smart card. The only unusal thing I noticed was a slight UI delay flipping "pages" of the ballot.
My postfix server has been voting all day in NJ.
hmm, for some reason, NJ's email voting is suffering major glitches... http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/06/14974588-new-jerseys-email-voting-suffers-major-glitches?lite
I still have no way of verifying my actual votes based on the receipt. Why is that?
so your union / boss / abusive spouse / anyone else who would coerce you can't demand you show them your receipt that you voted for their choice.
Would it be possible to run a desalination plant off of the heat produced by a nuclear reactor?
Yes, the USSR did that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-350_reactor