I don't recall this being an issue in Asimov's stories.
The early robots were programmed with the Three Laws. There was no possibility of
them being anything other than slaves. The Second Law guaranteed that they would do as they
were told, and the First Law made sure they wouldn't resent the fact.
The later (much later) robots were smart enough to figure out the Zeroth Law. Giskard et al
weren't granted rights: they took them.
I went to 64 bits in 2000 on Sun hardware. Whether your OS is Solaris or
Linux, you run a 64 bit kernel and can compile and run programs in
either 32 or 64 bit mode. For a while this meant using different compilers
for building kernels (remember egcs?), but that has long since been
sorted. Other than the usual playing around, it's just now that
I have an application that is crowding 4 GB of address space and could
actually use 64 bits. Either that or rewrite its database interface so it doesn't
mmap() a great big file to save stuff in.:-)
Don't do 64 bits because it's cool and trendy, or because you are
looking for some sort of panacea. Do 64 bits because it solve problems
and creates new opportunities. While it's (naturally) Sun- and Solaris-centric,
Sun's
64 bit migration guide
is a good place to start.
Ironically, some of the worst channels here for excessive commercials
are the cable channels. Much as I love so much of their programming,
BBC Canada is almost unwatchable live, so I record it and skip the ads.
They do the right thing with some shows (e.g.
Spooks), showing them uncut in an expanded time slot.
Others they cut (e.g. Life on Mars), but I'm a regular customer
of various U.K. DVD places and have a multi-system TV and multi-region DVD player.
In the U.K. the BBC is funded by license fees: in effect, a subscription
scheme. I'd be happy to pay a reasonable subscription fee for
my favourite channels (BBC Canada, Discovery) if they'd ditch the ads.
The more ads they show, the more attractive it is to skip them...
...laura, who doesn't care if she never sees another Vonage ad again
The only reason to tie your SDK to a distro is to limit your support
exposure. There is no technical reason to do so. Please try
to be sensible about this: what you're doing, after all, is providing a tarball
of build tools, and a tarball of libraries.
Me? I play with PalmOS (68k/gcc toolchain) and uClinux on Slackware.
I built all the tools and libraries from source.
They work fine.
Yes, you are missing something. It is controlled. Look at how much United Nuclear will sell you.
The prevailing attitude seems to be nuclear == BAD BAD BAD, but, like all
things, they have their uses. Many products use radioactivity, are perfectly safe,
and wouldn't work without it. Another good example is smoke detectors, which
use americium 241 as a controlled source of ions.
In this day and age any scientific dabbling seems to be
viewed with suspicion. Sad.
I *cannot* name a single program CBC carries that I would ever actually want to sit down and watch.
Intelligence. Rick Mercer Report.
At one time this list would have included This Hour Has 22 Minutes and
Royal Canadian Air Farce, but both have slipped badly recently.
I've seen demos of HDTV in stores, and they do indeed look luscious.
But all they ever seem to show is sports and nature programs that
look like the PBS Over... shows. Yawn.
I've heard working conditions are pretty bad in 3rd world shitholes.
I get 20 days per year, plus a week of personal time for appointments,
short-term illness and such. I can carry 15 days over to the next year if
I want to, but rarely do - when I take vacations I come back to work
refreshed, ready to take on new problems, and to come back to
old ones with new energy and insight. That's the point of vacations.
Tragic. Worse is the syndrome where vacations are totally
stressful because you have to get so many things done before you leave,
and will be indundated in fires when you get back. Gross mismanagement, in other words.
I provide emergency contact info when I travel, but it's always on a "this had better
be important" basis. In 6 years they've used it once. Yes, it was important.
Vacations are supposed to be just that: vacations. I'm going to Costa Rica for a week in February
to look at stars, and
won't even have a phone. I'll have a little cabin, a telescope, a pool, cold drinks in the
shade of palm trees, and zillions of stars at night. The last thing I want is to hear from my employers.
Yes, of all the omissions I can think of, Hedy Lamarr is top of the list.
I've always had a soft spot for Lisa Simpson, so I don't mind her being
on the list. Another favourite fictional female geek was
Frankie the pathologist
on Waking the Dead.
I did an important presentation at school a couple of days
after Hedy Lamarr died. Since I was working with satellite data
communications (though not spread spectrum), it gave me an excellent introduction.
1. Buy some really cheap stock at a really cheap price.
2. Hype it to victims.
3. Sell it to victims at inflated prices. Pocket the profit.
4. Victims are now stuck with a worthless stock that they can
only sell at a large loss.
They usually work for the pump and dumper. Everybody else gets screwed.
That's why it's a scam.
The companies are real, and you can look them up on
NASDAQ or
Pink Sheets.
I've looked a few of them up, and they all show an enormous spike in trading, a big spike in price, then a rapid fall.
While there are ways to make money on declining stock value ("short selling"),
you can't do it with the stocks these filth are hyping.
I would think that most devices like that use an AVR or a PIC. Certainly that's been my experience.
They do now. But what did they use prior to that?
Intel really did start something new with the 4004. Anybody who minimizes
the effect it had is just plain silly.
I had the 4004 manuals at the time, but never had the opportunity to play
with the chips themselves. Of course,
now it's easy to emulate one in software. I run Unix V5 and V7 on a simulated PDP-11,
strictly for the hell of it.
...laura who wouldn't mind owning a real PDP-11, but who refuses to pay the electricity
bills for a VAX
You clearly didn't get the point of the DFT then, though that might not have been your fault. The DCT is nothing other than the DFT applied to even functions. Just about everything you need to know about DCTs you'll learn by studying DFTs. But DCTs are a restricted version of DFTs, DFTs are no harder than DCTs, and DFTs are incredibly useful in image processing (I've used them for fast convolution and image alignment via phase correlation), so just studying DCTs is plain stupid.
I see it another way: the Discrete Cosine Transform is a subclass, if you will,
of a Discrete Fourier Transform. So it inherits properties of a DFT, and adds some
properties of its own. The DFT then has certain properties by being a Fourier Transform,
and
by being a discrete transform. The discrete transform is then a special case of an
integral transform. And so on. Hell, there is a whole branch of mathematics
that studies things that are defined
only as integral transforms.
Then you start looking at the concepts over mathemtical constructs other than
real numbers. This is where things like error control coding (algebra with Galois Fields)
and elliptic curve cryptography (algebra with elliptic curves)
come from.
It all fits together. You can mix and match mathematical constructs and find
out interesting things. And that generalization is, to me, what really matters.
I just looked one of the companies (the petroleum one)
up on NASDAQ,
and while their share price was up yesterday, then down today,
the interesting thing is the way the stock has traded more
in the last two days than in the entire previous year. By several orders of
magnitude, in fact.
Until May this year the company was worth approximately nothing
(10 cents a share).
In the last two days they pumped it from $2.95 up to $10.10, then dumped it
down to $4.00. On 60,000-odd shares traded, somebody made a lot of money...and
a lot of people got suckered. I suppose that's why these filth keep doing it. Sad.
You'd think somebody would notice, especially with zero
real news about the company (I checked that too). But even in these
economic times, 60,000 shares just doesn't make NASDAQ's most-active list.
The other annoyance is why they have to send me 15-20 copies of each of their
garbage emails.
Earlier this week it was a clothing company. Now it's some petroleum company.
They seem to have dropped their earlier format: price now $x, reached $y in
last (pump'n'dump) campaign.
But since $x is always much less than $y, it's obvious somebody made a hell of a lot
of money on the way up, and somebody lost a hell of a lot when it tanked.
I still wonder why we bother with DST. At this latitude (49 north)
the summers are plenty light anyway (latest sunset about 2100 PDT,
still light after 2200), and the winters are dark (earliest sunset about 1600 PST), no matter what we do.
It's even more pronounced the further north you go.
I agree with others: Y2K wasn't a joke. There were real issues, but
these were identified and resolved ahead of time. It only looked
like an anticlimax. It wasn't.
...laura, who babysat computers and satellites the evening of 31 December 1999
You're looking for a senior person. But senior people aren't
born; they're made. So what are doing to grow the talent
in your own organization? I assume you have good people. Why aren't
you investing in them?
A couple of other thoughts:
Make sure resumes that come in are evaluated by something
other than HR droids who only count buzzwords. Are you looking for people who
really have
done precisely the things you're looking for, or are you looking for people
who have done a useful subset, and have demonstrated an ability to pick up what they need to fill
in the blanks?
Anybody who is even remotely qualified for the position is probably
in a pretty good situation right now. I know I am. I'm doing some of the
coolest shit I've ever done, am having a great time doing it, and
am well paid. I have lots of toys to play with, and a boss
who expects me to amuse myself with side projects (no, I don't work for Google).
It's obviously best to simply give up and leave, rather than actually stand up and do something about changing your country.
This has been my position for a long time: you fucked it up, you fix it. Kindly refrain from exporting
your problems to other countries. We have our own problems, thank you, and we do not need yours.
Whenever I visit other countries I always try to get an idea of what it might
be like to live there. This includes a trip to the supermarket, which can
be most illuminating.
My results range from
"I like it here and would like to get to know it better" (e.g. France, Australia) to "Not even on a bet!"
(U.S.A.). After a day to pick up the accent I pass for a native in England. In total I've been to
10 countries, and they have all been interesting.
I'm planning a trip to
Russia in 2008,
and am looking forward to it. Brushing up on my Russian, with sometimes interesting
results in the shower in the morning ("Ya prodolzhayu prostiye dvizhen'ya..." Oops. Blush.)
...laura, proudly Canadian
Re:Voyager worked (still works?) like that
on
A Single Pixel Camera
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Early space cameras were single pixel and scanned their surroundings by their rotation.
Low-orbit weather satellites work this way too.
They have a rotating mirror
that scans the image on to a single-pixel sensor, then the spacecraft's motion
provides the Y dimension. These things take really cool pictures. I use
a modified Radio Shack scanner and my computer (with its sound card) to receive them.
I've toyed with mechanical scanning for a couple of applications:
making a high speed camera, and turning an infrared thermometer into
a FLIR imager. The price tags on real FLIR cameras (like the one they
used on Mythbusters when they were screwing with infrared alarms)
have too many digits.:-(
There is law on this, and it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
In the British series
Spy one episode dealt with what they
half-jokingly called Garbology, with the recruits working through simulated
bags of household garbage to build up profiles of who lived in the house.
It was emphasized that
MI5 could do this for real, but as
ordinary civilians, they couldn't, so they had to fake it.
Our system in Canada, low-tech that it is, seems to work. The fact
that our last two elections were inconclusive, producing minority governments,
is nothing to do with how we voted. We knew the results in about 2 hours.
Last time I was the first person
to vote at my polling place (on the way to work that morning) and got to look
inside the ballot box to verify that it was indeed empty, then
seal it, before casting my ballot. How much more democracy do you want?
The only impediment to deplying such is a system in the U.S. is
one of logistics, to allow for 10 times as many voters. This shouldn't
be a major issue.
Being a little older than the average/. type, I remember
Apollo 11 firsthand.
The timing to me has always sounded like "That's one small step for
man...(pause 1)...one giant leap...(pause 2)...for mankind...(burst of static)". There are thus three
places for missing words.
Yes, WarGames took some dramatic license. But except for the silly
talking computer, it wasn't all that bad, particularly considering when it was made.
I always wondered where the money came from to buy all the
fancy computer gear, considering that it was (in 1983) worth about
the same as a nice used car.
I'm reminded of the display at Parkes
about The Dish, where they talk about the things that really
happened, and the things that made a good story.
There is a line between dramatic license and badness. Personally, I don't think WarGames
crossed that line.
No, you don't need to know set theory to write web applications with SQL, but a computer science curriculum is not designed to prepare you for writing web apps, or sticking together a few pre-written frameworks into a finished product with a small amount of glue code. If that's the end result you desire, then you probably don't need a degree in computer science.
I work with communications stuff,
and I really do need to know, and use, all the group theory and Fourier transform stuff I did at school.
One product line I work with uses Reed-Solomon codes. Encoded with the usual Galois field representation
stuff,
and decoded at the other end with the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm. The performance is defined
and analyzed in terms of Fourier transforms.
I've never understood this whole math-phobia shit anyway. All science requires mathematics.
If it doesn't require mathematics, it's not science.
Sometimes it seems that the telemarketers are getting too efficient
for their own good. Like when the phone rings, it's dead air, and
they apparently expect me to wait until some human catches
up to their phone dialling robot.
If I'm in a good mood I hang up.
If I'm not, I don't.
I have told a few persistent callers the answer is NO, the answer was NO
the last six times they called, the answer will always
be NO, and just what part of NO do they not understand? Do not call me again. Ever.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't recall this being an issue in Asimov's stories.
The early robots were programmed with the Three Laws. There was no possibility of them being anything other than slaves. The Second Law guaranteed that they would do as they were told, and the First Law made sure they wouldn't resent the fact.
The later (much later) robots were smart enough to figure out the Zeroth Law. Giskard et al weren't granted rights: they took them.
...laura
I went to 64 bits in 2000 on Sun hardware. Whether your OS is Solaris or Linux, you run a 64 bit kernel and can compile and run programs in either 32 or 64 bit mode. For a while this meant using different compilers for building kernels (remember egcs?), but that has long since been sorted. Other than the usual playing around, it's just now that I have an application that is crowding 4 GB of address space and could actually use 64 bits. Either that or rewrite its database interface so it doesn't mmap() a great big file to save stuff in. :-)
Don't do 64 bits because it's cool and trendy, or because you are looking for some sort of panacea. Do 64 bits because it solve problems and creates new opportunities. While it's (naturally) Sun- and Solaris-centric, Sun's 64 bit migration guide is a good place to start.
...laura
Ironically, some of the worst channels here for excessive commercials are the cable channels. Much as I love so much of their programming, BBC Canada is almost unwatchable live, so I record it and skip the ads. They do the right thing with some shows (e.g. Spooks), showing them uncut in an expanded time slot. Others they cut (e.g. Life on Mars), but I'm a regular customer of various U.K. DVD places and have a multi-system TV and multi-region DVD player.
In the U.K. the BBC is funded by license fees: in effect, a subscription scheme. I'd be happy to pay a reasonable subscription fee for my favourite channels (BBC Canada, Discovery) if they'd ditch the ads. The more ads they show, the more attractive it is to skip them...
...laura, who doesn't care if she never sees another Vonage ad again
The only reason to tie your SDK to a distro is to limit your support exposure. There is no technical reason to do so. Please try to be sensible about this: what you're doing, after all, is providing a tarball of build tools, and a tarball of libraries.
Me? I play with PalmOS (68k/gcc toolchain) and uClinux on Slackware. I built all the tools and libraries from source. They work fine.
...laura
Yes, you are missing something. It is controlled. Look at how much United Nuclear will sell you.
The prevailing attitude seems to be nuclear == BAD BAD BAD, but, like all things, they have their uses. Many products use radioactivity, are perfectly safe, and wouldn't work without it. Another good example is smoke detectors, which use americium 241 as a controlled source of ions.
In this day and age any scientific dabbling seems to be viewed with suspicion. Sad.
...laura
Intelligence. Rick Mercer Report.
At one time this list would have included This Hour Has 22 Minutes and Royal Canadian Air Farce, but both have slipped badly recently.
I've seen demos of HDTV in stores, and they do indeed look luscious. But all they ever seem to show is sports and nature programs that look like the PBS Over... shows. Yawn.
...laura
I've heard working conditions are pretty bad in 3rd world shitholes.
I get 20 days per year, plus a week of personal time for appointments, short-term illness and such. I can carry 15 days over to the next year if I want to, but rarely do - when I take vacations I come back to work refreshed, ready to take on new problems, and to come back to old ones with new energy and insight. That's the point of vacations.
...laura
Tragic. Worse is the syndrome where vacations are totally stressful because you have to get so many things done before you leave, and will be indundated in fires when you get back. Gross mismanagement, in other words.
I provide emergency contact info when I travel, but it's always on a "this had better be important" basis. In 6 years they've used it once. Yes, it was important.
Vacations are supposed to be just that: vacations. I'm going to Costa Rica for a week in February to look at stars, and won't even have a phone. I'll have a little cabin, a telescope, a pool, cold drinks in the shade of palm trees, and zillions of stars at night. The last thing I want is to hear from my employers.
...laura
Yes, of all the omissions I can think of, Hedy Lamarr is top of the list.
I've always had a soft spot for Lisa Simpson, so I don't mind her being on the list. Another favourite fictional female geek was Frankie the pathologist on Waking the Dead.
I did an important presentation at school a couple of days after Hedy Lamarr died. Since I was working with satellite data communications (though not spread spectrum), it gave me an excellent introduction.
...laura, geek
Just to reiterate what these scum are doing:
1. Buy some really cheap stock at a really cheap price.
2. Hype it to victims.
3. Sell it to victims at inflated prices. Pocket the profit.
4. Victims are now stuck with a worthless stock that they can only sell at a large loss.
They usually work for the pump and dumper. Everybody else gets screwed. That's why it's a scam.
The companies are real, and you can look them up on NASDAQ or Pink Sheets. I've looked a few of them up, and they all show an enormous spike in trading, a big spike in price, then a rapid fall.
While there are ways to make money on declining stock value ("short selling"), you can't do it with the stocks these filth are hyping.
...laura
They do now. But what did they use prior to that?
Intel really did start something new with the 4004. Anybody who minimizes the effect it had is just plain silly.
I had the 4004 manuals at the time, but never had the opportunity to play with the chips themselves. Of course, now it's easy to emulate one in software. I run Unix V5 and V7 on a simulated PDP-11, strictly for the hell of it.
...laura who wouldn't mind owning a real PDP-11, but who refuses to pay the electricity bills for a VAX
I see it another way: the Discrete Cosine Transform is a subclass, if you will, of a Discrete Fourier Transform. So it inherits properties of a DFT, and adds some properties of its own. The DFT then has certain properties by being a Fourier Transform, and by being a discrete transform. The discrete transform is then a special case of an integral transform. And so on. Hell, there is a whole branch of mathematics that studies things that are defined only as integral transforms.
Then you start looking at the concepts over mathemtical constructs other than real numbers. This is where things like error control coding (algebra with Galois Fields) and elliptic curve cryptography (algebra with elliptic curves) come from.
It all fits together. You can mix and match mathematical constructs and find out interesting things. And that generalization is, to me, what really matters.
...laura
I just looked one of the companies (the petroleum one) up on NASDAQ, and while their share price was up yesterday, then down today, the interesting thing is the way the stock has traded more in the last two days than in the entire previous year. By several orders of magnitude, in fact.
Until May this year the company was worth approximately nothing (10 cents a share). In the last two days they pumped it from $2.95 up to $10.10, then dumped it down to $4.00. On 60,000-odd shares traded, somebody made a lot of money...and a lot of people got suckered. I suppose that's why these filth keep doing it. Sad.
You'd think somebody would notice, especially with zero real news about the company (I checked that too). But even in these economic times, 60,000 shares just doesn't make NASDAQ's most-active list.
...laura
The other annoyance is why they have to send me 15-20 copies of each of their garbage emails. Earlier this week it was a clothing company. Now it's some petroleum company.
They seem to have dropped their earlier format: price now $x, reached $y in last (pump'n'dump) campaign. But since $x is always much less than $y, it's obvious somebody made a hell of a lot of money on the way up, and somebody lost a hell of a lot when it tanked.
...laura
I find it ironic that Vista RC1 runs better on a fake PC than on a real one. :-)
...laura, VMware Server under Slackware 10.2
I still wonder why we bother with DST. At this latitude (49 north) the summers are plenty light anyway (latest sunset about 2100 PDT, still light after 2200), and the winters are dark (earliest sunset about 1600 PST), no matter what we do. It's even more pronounced the further north you go.
I agree with others: Y2K wasn't a joke. There were real issues, but these were identified and resolved ahead of time. It only looked like an anticlimax. It wasn't.
...laura, who babysat computers and satellites the evening of 31 December 1999
You're looking for a senior person. But senior people aren't born; they're made. So what are doing to grow the talent in your own organization? I assume you have good people. Why aren't you investing in them?
A couple of other thoughts:
Make sure resumes that come in are evaluated by something other than HR droids who only count buzzwords. Are you looking for people who really have done precisely the things you're looking for, or are you looking for people who have done a useful subset, and have demonstrated an ability to pick up what they need to fill in the blanks?
Anybody who is even remotely qualified for the position is probably in a pretty good situation right now. I know I am. I'm doing some of the coolest shit I've ever done, am having a great time doing it, and am well paid. I have lots of toys to play with, and a boss who expects me to amuse myself with side projects (no, I don't work for Google).
Why would I want to move? Tell me.
...laura
This has been my position for a long time: you fucked it up, you fix it. Kindly refrain from exporting your problems to other countries. We have our own problems, thank you, and we do not need yours.
Whenever I visit other countries I always try to get an idea of what it might be like to live there. This includes a trip to the supermarket, which can be most illuminating.
My results range from "I like it here and would like to get to know it better" (e.g. France, Australia) to "Not even on a bet!" (U.S.A.). After a day to pick up the accent I pass for a native in England. In total I've been to 10 countries, and they have all been interesting.
I'm planning a trip to Russia in 2008, and am looking forward to it. Brushing up on my Russian, with sometimes interesting results in the shower in the morning ("Ya prodolzhayu prostiye dvizhen'ya..." Oops. Blush.)
...laura, proudly Canadian
Low-orbit weather satellites work this way too. They have a rotating mirror that scans the image on to a single-pixel sensor, then the spacecraft's motion provides the Y dimension. These things take really cool pictures. I use a modified Radio Shack scanner and my computer (with its sound card) to receive them.
I've toyed with mechanical scanning for a couple of applications: making a high speed camera, and turning an infrared thermometer into a FLIR imager. The price tags on real FLIR cameras (like the one they used on Mythbusters when they were screwing with infrared alarms) have too many digits. :-(
...laura
There is law on this, and it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
In the British series Spy one episode dealt with what they half-jokingly called Garbology, with the recruits working through simulated bags of household garbage to build up profiles of who lived in the house. It was emphasized that MI5 could do this for real, but as ordinary civilians, they couldn't, so they had to fake it.
...laura
Our system in Canada, low-tech that it is, seems to work. The fact that our last two elections were inconclusive, producing minority governments, is nothing to do with how we voted. We knew the results in about 2 hours.
Last time I was the first person to vote at my polling place (on the way to work that morning) and got to look inside the ballot box to verify that it was indeed empty, then seal it, before casting my ballot. How much more democracy do you want?
The only impediment to deplying such is a system in the U.S. is one of logistics, to allow for 10 times as many voters. This shouldn't be a major issue.
...laura
Being a little older than the average /. type, I remember
Apollo 11 firsthand.
The timing to me has always sounded like "That's one small step for man...(pause 1)...one giant leap...(pause 2)...for mankind...(burst of static)". There are thus three places for missing words.
...laura
Yes, WarGames took some dramatic license. But except for the silly talking computer, it wasn't all that bad, particularly considering when it was made. I always wondered where the money came from to buy all the fancy computer gear, considering that it was (in 1983) worth about the same as a nice used car.
I'm reminded of the display at Parkes about The Dish, where they talk about the things that really happened, and the things that made a good story.
There is a line between dramatic license and badness. Personally, I don't think WarGames crossed that line.
...laura
I work with communications stuff, and I really do need to know, and use, all the group theory and Fourier transform stuff I did at school. One product line I work with uses Reed-Solomon codes. Encoded with the usual Galois field representation stuff, and decoded at the other end with the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm. The performance is defined and analyzed in terms of Fourier transforms.
I've never understood this whole math-phobia shit anyway. All science requires mathematics. If it doesn't require mathematics, it's not science.
...laura
Sometimes it seems that the telemarketers are getting too efficient for their own good. Like when the phone rings, it's dead air, and they apparently expect me to wait until some human catches up to their phone dialling robot.
If I'm in a good mood I hang up.
If I'm not, I don't.
I have told a few persistent callers the answer is NO, the answer was NO the last six times they called, the answer will always be NO, and just what part of NO do they not understand? Do not call me again. Ever.
They haven't.
...laura, possibly on to something