Close but not quite. ADS-B puts a GPS in the aircraft, this is then transmitted to base stations on the ground. So you don't get much benefit out over the ocean.
This is in practice a cheaper and often more accurate radar system. Doing this they can expand their surveillance coverage, better surveillance means you can safely pack the planes in tighter.
If you're trying to record something of any quality, the audio hardware built into computers doesn't even begin to cut it. The latency alone will make you want to throw your machine across the room.
WTF
Why if you are recording something do you care about latency? Who cares if the computer lags behind you by a few seconds. The submitter wants to rip a record, he's not going to care if the audio being written to the hard disk is two seconds delayed to the position of the needle, he's probably sitting outside having a cup of tea anyway.
Latency ONLY matters if you are synchronising the signal to something else. For example if you want to use your computer to take the signal apply an effect and output it on top of the original note. Another common example is DJs using records to control sound output, the latency between moving the record and the output changing is important. Even then, the latency in the sound hardware is negligent compared to the software sound stack and the controlling program.
From TFA "These [predictions] include whether or not North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong II, would dismantle his nation's nuclear arsenal" How stupid do you have to be to believe that he "predicted" this? Everyone and their fucking aunt is watching the news, everyone is reporting on it, the government is doing fucking insane amounts of research and analysis as to what foreign leaders' views are regarding nuclear weapons. It's not that hard to make a guess as to what's going to happen when you have that much information available to you.
It's easy to write someone off to match your view but it's worth looking at what he actually does and the level of detail he goes into.
Another example from his blog was looking at the nuclear situation in Iran, very similar to North Korea. He looks at the latest offering from the international community and predicts if it will be accepted or not. He predicts that it won't be accepted but he goes further and explains why, he also explains the kind of offer that would be accepted. Now the won't be accepted view is the common one (though clearly someone making the offer thought it might be accepted), but it's the level of detail and analysis that differentiates him.
Predicting international relations is a common field but 90% is a very good hit rate. Classical IR theory is quite flawed and wouldn't be nearly that successful.
So yeah, SPAM costs our company alone a minimum of $200 a year just in subscription fees and maintenance. In practice, it's cost a lot more, and has taken us offline.
...
Your story is interesting and it's clearly costing your business money but it still doesn't add up to anywhere near $1000 per email.
Let's say that you have ten people (you stated less than fifteen) and they all recieve 20 spam a day (what you quoted for the CEO). That's roughly 73,000 emails a year.
You listed a one off loss of a $50,000 sale, a one off purchase of a $500 filter and $200 per year maintenance. I'll add in $500 per year per staff member to filter email and general pain. Taking the one offs and assuming they occur every three years we get $55,700 in cost per year.
The magic figure out of all this very rubbery estimation is 76 cents per email. Lets call it a dollar, it's a nice number and nobody will rationally argue that it costs more than $1 (USD) to handle a single piece of spam.
Now let's look at what the legistlation puts him on the hook for and compare it to everyone's favorite boogy man, the copyright infringement minimums.
Cost: Spam = $1, Copyright = $1
Minimum damages: Spam = $1000, Copyright = $750
So there are a few options for people on this site:
Support Spam and Copyright minimum damages
Claim that both are two high and the spammer has been unjustly treated
Openly accept that they hold a hypocritical position
Try to differentiate them somehow, the spammer was attempting to make money even though he wasn't a big business. What about a part time DJ?
Personally I think both are too high. The very concept of a minimum punishment is insane and ties the hands of the Judge. It doesn't work for criminal cases (three strikes etc.) and it doesn't work in these cases. The punishment should be applicable to the details of the particular case, including the damage, financial gain, intent and position and history of the perpatrator.
Step 1. Open a bank account
Step 2. Change banking details with employer, no questions asked as bank account is in correct name.
Step 3. Apply for second mortgage on house, no ID required as bank has already established identity.
Step 4. Apply for credit card, no ID required as bank has already established identity.
Step 5. Transfer $100,000 via offshore accounts
You'll excuse my ignorance, but from college I remember that usually you have 0-2V represent 0 and 3-5V represent 1. Does a 0 have a corresponding increase in amperage so that it levels out and uses the same amount of power?
It seems you must have missed the complex electronics portion of your college.
5V TTL circuits use 0-0.8V Low and 2.2-5V High (on input), in between the high and low states is undefined. Regardless, modern RAM is almost certainly a 1.8V device externally and internally even less.
Modern RAM (DRAM) works by each bit of memory being a floating charge in a capacitor. When you read the bit the charge is released and read as either a one or zero. I wouldn't want to make assumptions about if a high voltage corresponded to a one or zero, they would choose whichever they felt worked best. This also includes whatever state they initialise the RAM to on power on.
In the ideal no-friction world, floating charge = no current = no power. In our world floating charges leak slowly and have to be topped up, so there is a degree of power being used depending on the high or low state of a given bit. That said, the refresh rate probably has more impact than the value.
In all honesty though, you are barking up the wrong tree. A far greater power issue in the modern computer is the increased power required by all the high speed external connections. Transmission line theory means that as the speeds of links like ethernet have increased the power required to shovel the bits down the line becomes exponentially linked to the speed of transmission. (EMF also becomes a serious issue: Fun game, wrap a GPS antenna in a ethernet cable then plug it in.) So to really save power you should start by unplugging your Gigabit link and hooking up some environmentally friendly 10BASE2 goodness.
I don't think the realization has sunk in that Microsoft may have turned over a new leaf has sunk in for many people yet.
How many times can a leaf be turned over?
Since it's a leaf analogy surely you should realize after it's been turned over once that any future leaf turnings and just going to result in the same old shit.
As someone who has a background as an embedded developer I know where you are coming from. Unfortunately you are looking at it the wrong way, the mental tools you have as an embedded developer are a hinderance here.
When you program online you use different languages to do different jobs. Each language is optimized to do that particular job. This is better because each of those jobs has a very specific domain and a very set interaction layer.
The visual aspects are done in HTML and CSS.
The browser programming is done in Javascript.
You communicate between the client and server using HTTP.
The server programming is done in PHP (or some other serverside language).
The database runs using SQL.
The issues you seem to have is because you haven't clearly seperated the layers in your mind. It isn't helped by all the guides and books promising to teach you all the layers in ten hours. All of these layers take time and practice to master, just like any other field of programming.
I'm sure your brain is also screaming out at the inefficiency of it all. What you have to realise is that while it is inefficient in many ways, most of the don't matter. The big gains are in the ability to tap into the various layers to add value:
Full text search
Support for the blind
Changing styling to allow bigger fonts or higher contrast colours
Scriptability for automated retrieval or monitoring
Modifying websites on the fly, ala Greasemonkey or Adblock
All of these are possible with a full strength application but they have to be coded in each time and generally they don't bother.
Try running a bunch of applications over the X Window protocol. It's limitations will quickly become obvious.
Almost all of the queries performed great, except one query that had sub-second response on average, but a 60 second standard deviation!
Pause and reflect on this for a moment. The average is poor and occasionally it stuffs up so severely that the stddev is pulled out by sixty seconds.
I managed to reproduce this (mean of 1.07s, stddev of 58.4). 3000 results of 1e-30s, one of 3200s (almost 1 hour).
If you need statistics to intepret the above results then you have bigger problems.
If you ACTUALLY get the above results you don't complain about the outlier and get them to rework it. Thank $DEITY, time out at a nanosecond and re-request.
I believe that their focus on open source is at least as substantial as Sun's every was.
I really can't believe this FUD is taking hold. So what if a company funds an open source project?
If they do something nasty, fork the project. If nobody can be arsed to fork it then it clearly wasn't such a big deal. There's NO downside here. If they stop funding development completely it's still better than never funding it at all.
You have job environments where people browse porn or view images which make others uncomfortable.
While personally I think this is a deeper cultural issue that needs to be addressed I do accept that blocking porn is an acceptable short term measure. One persons desire to look at boobies is vastly outweighed by the right of other's to feel comfortable in their work environment. Especially in an open plan office.
While I'm all for this project - tell me again HOW those books are going to get to an OLPC-using kid's hands?
As other posters have pointed out - there's the issue of indexing this stuff properly.
And there's still distribution to think about.
The standard OPLC deployment includes a school server.
The model used for reference material such as Wikipedia, text books or this is to put the material on the school server. All the XOs in the area have fast wireless access and the school server has the hard drive space to store and serve all the data.
The good thing about Winmodem-like cellphones is... um... er... uh... well, I'm sure there's something good about it.
It's cheaper. Cost is the God in consumer electronics upon which everything else is sacrificed. The could be saving up to $5 per phone doing it this way. Ship 20 million phones and that's $100 million dollars in the bank. The effort made in consumer electronics to save four cents (over 10 million units) would probably make your head spin.
The difference in the two approaches isn't as much as you are making out to be. The dedicated radio chip is still running a microprocessor written in software. By combining the two processors in the single package you save cost and space (more cost).
The major downside to this is debugging the radio processing where it's interfered with by other actions on the phone, having two cores probably helps a lot with this. That said, assigning three engineers full time for a year to figure it out is trivial compared to the savings you get.
(I spent a year of my life fixing a 'creative' electronic circuit that saved us 8 cents per board).
You are assuming perfect knowledge and rational behaviour. Which is a nice theoretical approximation but the rest of us live in the real world.
The problem is that the power usage is not a factor most people consider compared to screen size, trim colour and brightness level. Even if you do care about the power usage there have been deceptive practices such as ultralow idle levels which aren't used 90% of the time.
A compulsory minimum will get rid of the dodgy TVs and people won't have to worry about it. As a nice added bonus the standards will mean most manufacturers will comply and the rest of the world will also benefit (see the way RoHS has been adopted world wide).
I've heard some amusing stories of people who had pacemakers implanted in the 80s and never had to have them maintained, so they were never recorded.
Now you have a very dead body in the morgue who still has a heart beat and "no pacemaker".
Shortly followed by the guys with geiger counters and plastic suits.
I would expect that every US president would be nominated. Possible by standard US policy, having nobel prize winners is good PR.
Just because the nomination closes on the February 1st doesn't mean that's when the decision is made or that they don't examine his actions after that date.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that a GC-based, VM-based language that has layers of intermediate execution is going to be slower than is required for a trading system."
Actually, this is only true in an ever decreasing set of circumstances.
See here for an explanation of some of the common reasons why this is often not the case:
A large scale trading system like this one is one of those circumstances. The latency has to be low, the throughput is high. They are spending enough on hardware that having a programmer optimize a few functions is very worthwhile. Certainly enough that they wouldn't think a 20% performance decrease was "very reasonable".
There are ways of optimizing.NET further, like writing chunks of the code in C. But one really has to consider how much of the application you want written in this way. Clearly in this case the optimizations weren't sufficient.
Not the only ISP, Internode and others have been vocal in their opposition.
Internode had a staffer leak a pile of information on the filter which they neglected to punish him for.
Having read the article, it's clear that the designer has no idea how virtual worlds and especially Second Life (SL) and its many clones like Opensim work. He's making up a legal theory about virtual property and artist rights in virtual worlds that simply doesn't exist, yet. It's wishful thinking.
It's not virtual property, it's intellectual property and courts have plenty of experience dealing with it.
The way that the program distributes temporary copies, the fact that it's a virtual world and that's it's an open sourced simulator are completely irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Close but not quite. ADS-B puts a GPS in the aircraft, this is then transmitted to base stations on the ground. So you don't get much benefit out over the ocean.
This is in practice a cheaper and often more accurate radar system. Doing this they can expand their surveillance coverage, better surveillance means you can safely pack the planes in tighter.
If you're trying to record something of any quality, the audio hardware built into computers doesn't even begin to cut it. The latency alone will make you want to throw your machine across the room.
WTF
Why if you are recording something do you care about latency? Who cares if the computer lags behind you by a few seconds. The submitter wants to rip a record, he's not going to care if the audio being written to the hard disk is two seconds delayed to the position of the needle, he's probably sitting outside having a cup of tea anyway.
Latency ONLY matters if you are synchronising the signal to something else. For example if you want to use your computer to take the signal apply an effect and output it on top of the original note. Another common example is DJs using records to control sound output, the latency between moving the record and the output changing is important. Even then, the latency in the sound hardware is negligent compared to the software sound stack and the controlling program.
From TFA "These [predictions] include whether or not North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong II, would dismantle his nation's nuclear arsenal" How stupid do you have to be to believe that he "predicted" this? Everyone and their fucking aunt is watching the news, everyone is reporting on it, the government is doing fucking insane amounts of research and analysis as to what foreign leaders' views are regarding nuclear weapons. It's not that hard to make a guess as to what's going to happen when you have that much information available to you.
It's easy to write someone off to match your view but it's worth looking at what he actually does and the level of detail he goes into.
Another example from his blog was looking at the nuclear situation in Iran, very similar to North Korea. He looks at the latest offering from the international community and predicts if it will be accepted or not. He predicts that it won't be accepted but he goes further and explains why, he also explains the kind of offer that would be accepted. Now the won't be accepted view is the common one (though clearly someone making the offer thought it might be accepted), but it's the level of detail and analysis that differentiates him.
Predicting international relations is a common field but 90% is a very good hit rate. Classical IR theory is quite flawed and wouldn't be nearly that successful.
...
So yeah, SPAM costs our company alone a minimum of $200 a year just in subscription fees and maintenance. In practice, it's cost a lot more, and has taken us offline.
...
Your story is interesting and it's clearly costing your business money but it still doesn't add up to anywhere near $1000 per email.
Let's say that you have ten people (you stated less than fifteen) and they all recieve 20 spam a day (what you quoted for the CEO). That's roughly 73,000 emails a year.
You listed a one off loss of a $50,000 sale, a one off purchase of a $500 filter and $200 per year maintenance. I'll add in $500 per year per staff member to filter email and general pain. Taking the one offs and assuming they occur every three years we get $55,700 in cost per year.
The magic figure out of all this very rubbery estimation is 76 cents per email. Lets call it a dollar, it's a nice number and nobody will rationally argue that it costs more than $1 (USD) to handle a single piece of spam.
Now let's look at what the legistlation puts him on the hook for and compare it to everyone's favorite boogy man, the copyright infringement minimums.
Cost: Spam = $1, Copyright = $1
Minimum damages: Spam = $1000, Copyright = $750
So there are a few options for people on this site:
Personally I think both are too high. The very concept of a minimum punishment is insane and ties the hands of the Judge. It doesn't work for criminal cases (three strikes etc.) and it doesn't work in these cases. The punishment should be applicable to the details of the particular case, including the damage, financial gain, intent and position and history of the perpatrator.
Getting tired of kdawsons scaremongering bullshit.
Can we have it corrected please, the headline reads like it has already happened ?
RTFA
Today, we used the details of two victims to open transaction accounts online with Australian financial institutions.
Step 1. Open a bank account
Step 2. Change banking details with employer, no questions asked as bank account is in correct name.
Step 3. Apply for second mortgage on house, no ID required as bank has already established identity.
Step 4. Apply for credit card, no ID required as bank has already established identity.
Step 5. Transfer $100,000 via offshore accounts
quot
You'll excuse my ignorance, but from college I remember that usually you have 0-2V represent 0 and 3-5V represent 1. Does a 0 have a corresponding increase in amperage so that it levels out and uses the same amount of power?
It seems you must have missed the complex electronics portion of your college.
5V TTL circuits use 0-0.8V Low and 2.2-5V High (on input), in between the high and low states is undefined. Regardless, modern RAM is almost certainly a 1.8V device externally and internally even less.
Modern RAM (DRAM) works by each bit of memory being a floating charge in a capacitor. When you read the bit the charge is released and read as either a one or zero. I wouldn't want to make assumptions about if a high voltage corresponded to a one or zero, they would choose whichever they felt worked best. This also includes whatever state they initialise the RAM to on power on.
In the ideal no-friction world, floating charge = no current = no power. In our world floating charges leak slowly and have to be topped up, so there is a degree of power being used depending on the high or low state of a given bit. That said, the refresh rate probably has more impact than the value.
In all honesty though, you are barking up the wrong tree. A far greater power issue in the modern computer is the increased power required by all the high speed external connections. Transmission line theory means that as the speeds of links like ethernet have increased the power required to shovel the bits down the line becomes exponentially linked to the speed of transmission. (EMF also becomes a serious issue: Fun game, wrap a GPS antenna in a ethernet cable then plug it in.) So to really save power you should start by unplugging your Gigabit link and hooking up some environmentally friendly 10BASE2 goodness.
Australia recently released rankings of all our schools.
Chifley College Dunheved Campus was the worst ranked school in Sydney.
As you can see, the school isn't very inspiring
I don't think the realization has sunk in that Microsoft may have turned over a new leaf has sunk in for many people yet.
How many times can a leaf be turned over?
Since it's a leaf analogy surely you should realize after it's been turned over once that any future leaf turnings and just going to result in the same old shit.
As someone who has a background as an embedded developer I know where you are coming from. Unfortunately you are looking at it the wrong way, the mental tools you have as an embedded developer are a hinderance here.
When you program online you use different languages to do different jobs. Each language is optimized to do that particular job. This is better because each of those jobs has a very specific domain and a very set interaction layer.
The issues you seem to have is because you haven't clearly seperated the layers in your mind. It isn't helped by all the guides and books promising to teach you all the layers in ten hours. All of these layers take time and practice to master, just like any other field of programming.
I'm sure your brain is also screaming out at the inefficiency of it all. What you have to realise is that while it is inefficient in many ways, most of the don't matter. The big gains are in the ability to tap into the various layers to add value:
All of these are possible with a full strength application but they have to be coded in each time and generally they don't bother.
Try running a bunch of applications over the X Window protocol. It's limitations will quickly become obvious.
The Conan Doyle family would like your pity.
They were forced to obtain and maintain the copyright on the Sherlock Holmes stories. It's so terribly hard managing all those bank accounts.
In fact, Jean Conan Doyle said that "Sherlock Holmes was the Conan Doyle family curse."
I certainly feel something for the family now.
From TFA:
Almost all of the queries performed great, except one query that had sub-second response on average, but a 60 second standard deviation!
Pause and reflect on this for a moment. The average is poor and occasionally it stuffs up so severely that the stddev is pulled out by sixty seconds.
I managed to reproduce this (mean of 1.07s, stddev of 58.4). 3000 results of 1e-30s, one of 3200s (almost 1 hour).
If you need statistics to intepret the above results then you have bigger problems.
If you ACTUALLY get the above results you don't complain about the outlier and get them to rework it. Thank $DEITY, time out at a nanosecond and re-request.
Is IBM no longer a big US company?
I believe that their focus on open source is at least as substantial as Sun's every was.
I really can't believe this FUD is taking hold. So what if a company funds an open source project?
If they do something nasty, fork the project. If nobody can be arsed to fork it then it clearly wasn't such a big deal. There's NO downside here. If they stop funding development completely it's still better than never funding it at all.
You have job environments where people browse porn or view images which make others uncomfortable.
While personally I think this is a deeper cultural issue that needs to be addressed I do accept that blocking porn is an acceptable short term measure. One persons desire to look at boobies is vastly outweighed by the right of other's to feel comfortable in their work environment. Especially in an open plan office.
Who would have thought that the Simpson Gene would be so wide spread.
While I'm all for this project - tell me again HOW those books are going to get to an OLPC-using kid's hands?
As other posters have pointed out - there's the issue of indexing this stuff properly.
And there's still distribution to think about.
The standard OPLC deployment includes a school server.
The model used for reference material such as Wikipedia, text books or this is to put the material on the school server. All the XOs in the area have fast wireless access and the school server has the hard drive space to store and serve all the data.
The good thing about Winmodem-like cellphones is... um... er... uh... well, I'm sure there's something good about it.
It's cheaper. Cost is the God in consumer electronics upon which everything else is sacrificed. The could be saving up to $5 per phone doing it this way. Ship 20 million phones and that's $100 million dollars in the bank. The effort made in consumer electronics to save four cents (over 10 million units) would probably make your head spin.
The difference in the two approaches isn't as much as you are making out to be. The dedicated radio chip is still running a microprocessor written in software. By combining the two processors in the single package you save cost and space (more cost).
The major downside to this is debugging the radio processing where it's interfered with by other actions on the phone, having two cores probably helps a lot with this. That said, assigning three engineers full time for a year to figure it out is trivial compared to the savings you get.
(I spent a year of my life fixing a 'creative' electronic circuit that saved us 8 cents per board).
You are assuming perfect knowledge and rational behaviour. Which is a nice theoretical approximation but the rest of us live in the real world.
The problem is that the power usage is not a factor most people consider compared to screen size, trim colour and brightness level. Even if you do care about the power usage there have been deceptive practices such as ultralow idle levels which aren't used 90% of the time.
A compulsory minimum will get rid of the dodgy TVs and people won't have to worry about it. As a nice added bonus the standards will mean most manufacturers will comply and the rest of the world will also benefit (see the way RoHS has been adopted world wide).
There's still a few of them out there though.
I've heard some amusing stories of people who had pacemakers implanted in the 80s and never had to have them maintained, so they were never recorded. Now you have a very dead body in the morgue who still has a heart beat and "no pacemaker". Shortly followed by the guys with geiger counters and plastic suits.
I would expect that every US president would be nominated. Possible by standard US policy, having nobel prize winners is good PR.
Just because the nomination closes on the February 1st doesn't mean that's when the decision is made or that they don't examine his actions after that date.
Or remember before that when the Dvorak layout was being pushed as a better way to type?
Dvorak was and still is a better layout to QWERTY to type with.
The fact that it hasn't become commercially successful doesn't make the concept incorrect.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that a GC-based, VM-based language that has layers of intermediate execution is going to be slower than is required for a trading system."
Actually, this is only true in an ever decreasing set of circumstances.
See here for an explanation of some of the common reasons why this is often not the case:
http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchmark.html
...
A large scale trading system like this one is one of those circumstances. The latency has to be low, the throughput is high. They are spending enough on hardware that having a programmer optimize a few functions is very worthwhile. Certainly enough that they wouldn't think a 20% performance decrease was "very reasonable".
There are ways of optimizing .NET further, like writing chunks of the code in C. But one really has to consider how much of the application you want written in this way. Clearly in this case the optimizations weren't sufficient.
Not the only ISP, Internode and others have been vocal in their opposition. Internode had a staffer leak a pile of information on the filter which they neglected to punish him for.
Having read the article, it's clear that the designer has no idea how virtual worlds and especially Second Life (SL) and its many clones like Opensim work. He's making up a legal theory about virtual property and artist rights in virtual worlds that simply doesn't exist, yet. It's wishful thinking.
It's not virtual property, it's intellectual property and courts have plenty of experience dealing with it.
The way that the program distributes temporary copies, the fact that it's a virtual world and that's it's an open sourced simulator are completely irrelevant.