There's not all that much interest in DVD-audio. PC sound systems are generally pretty crappy (yeah, right, that little wall-wart powered speaker really puts out 320 watts like it says on the box!).
There are advantages to putting a lot of audio on a single disk (no more "Wagner ring cycle on convenient 45's" for any readers old enough to remember what a 45 was) but I've never seen a publisher take real advantage of it. MP3's burned as regular data files seem to deal with this pretty nicely already.
Savings account. Paper passbook. I imagine that all the numbers were in some computer somewhere but it sure wasn't networked with anything else.
Student info folder at school. All the grades etc. were kept track of by secretaries and typewriter.
Selective Service registration (I turned 18 my senior year).
The place where I did finally interface with some national databases was when I took the PSAT's. All of a sudden a bazillion colleges were sending me mail. (No, not E-mail!)
Of course, now all my kids got Social Security numbers at birth. If you don't get them one, you can't use them as a deduction...!
The problem with Disney animation in the past decade has been its blockbuster successes.
After something like "Toy Story" or "Finding Nemo" or "Lion King" (which was not originally planned to be such a big hit!), every subsequent animated film gets compared to it. Not just box office revenue, but also reviews, relevance, etc. And of course, none quite measure up. So they cut animation spending, lay off animators, and shut down animation divisions.
The problem isn't that the subsequent films weren't good films. (Well, some weren't. Others were.) But the problem is that the blockbusters were too good.
Disney just has to get back into the cycle where they produce a range of quality animation (allowing some "duds" as well as non-blockbusters to get made). In this business world, where a single non-blockbuster means you shut down the division, this is indeed hard.
If you don't know how to do it, YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO IT ON A COMPUTER
DHS has computer problems, sure, but the agency as a whole is a misguided waste of resources. It's probably better that it's computer systems don't work, otherwise they'd figure out a way to stop Ted Kennedy from driving or using an elevator in addition to not flying.
What difference does it make whether you have backup hardware/network/software ready when the primary doesn't even do the desired job? The government as a whole spends billions every year to attempt to refine ill-defined requirements into working productive systems that fill real needs. The DHS has never succeeded in producing such a system.
It's easy to pick holes in the lack of backup of a system, but it's pointless when the system has no utility to begin with.
Prohibition.... they tried that in the movies and it didn't work!
Can Microsoft even legally sell Windows in Cuba?
on
Cuba Switching to Linux
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm assuming that all Cuban installations of Windows are pirate copies anyway, because it's illegal for US companies to sell to Cuba (very stiff penalties).
Peer review is there to determine scientific correctness, not whether a paper should be published or not.
I have to disagree - I've refereed for several journals, and always one element of review is whether this is the appropriate journal or not.
In a couple cases I know the editor followed my recommendation and had the article published in an affiliated journal which was more appropriate. The "affiliated journal" thing is important, because if it was simply rejected it would've had to be refereed again, slowing down the publishing.
It's rare for the refereeing process to be purely rejectional (is that a word?) - the idea is to help good stuff to publication. In the perfect world the editors, referees, and authors all work together instead of against each other.
It's always been well-known that if you can't get your paper published in a refereed journal, you can probably get it published in some conference proceedings. I've even used this trick while I was in academia.
At the larger conferences they make some attempt at screening out the known crackpots. The amount of effort varies.
Many grad students are employed by the school. This is something they'd collect not on application but on the student showing up to work.
For undergrad financial aid, there's the requirement that male students be checked to be sure they're registered with Selective Service. Some schools use this as an excuse to collect SSN, but I think it's a lame excuse because when I registered at least (many years ago you can tell!) I didn't even have a SSN.
OK, the TSA screwed up. The DHS was involved in covering it up. Big deal. We all know whenever you've got such beauracracies there'll be screwups and coverups.
My big question: how can it do any good to train an expert system to recognize terrorists, when all the sample data is by definition from non-terrorists? I mean, there were no terrorist actions on any Jet Blue flights in that time frame. This data is useful as "known negatives" in the test for terrorists, but where do they get the data for "known positives" to train the system?
I never buy any product that has any advertised rebate offers.
Filliing out the form and sending it in with the hope of getting money is like sending my E-mail address to a spammer to "opt out". They're already in a scummy industry, why should I trust them with anything in the hope of getting something?
I've had many opportunities to work with code that has evolved over several decades. There are two common patterns:
Project was originally a quick hack. It lives well past its prime, gets modded extensively to handle changes going on in the real world (new devices, competition, etc.). Abstractions are added where necessary. Some hacky ugliness lives at fringes, but after umpteen releases and way too much backwards compatibility customers are still buying it.
Project was a grandiose dream by an analyst. Before any functionality exists, everything is abstracted to the max. 10-inch thick binders full of API's are published before the product actually does anything. The abstractions usually turn out to be wrong, and after many years (and little functionality) either the abstractions get twisted around at great expense to reach functionality, or the project dies in heaving paroxysms.
.
Reading the experienced coder's comments is always good. They know the history and want to pass on the lessons learned to whoever will look.
"Deep pockets". If anything happens on a property-owner/leaser's premises, their insurance will probably end up at least defending the lawsuit.
Overall, it's not a bad principle. It means the prorietor has an interest in keeping his customers safe. If it means that he bans dangling power cords, well, that's tough luck for those who want to plug in laptops.
The hot new technology of the day is SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics. Go to http://www.w3.org/ and look it over. Go to http://www.adobe.com/svg/ and see some examples. Then imagine what you can do with your content.
If you've no content, you're not going to appreciate it:-).
For a bumped head or broken arm, the insurance company will pay out nearly automatically for hospital bills. (They will contest additional costs, lost wages, emotional distress, etc. most of the time.) For the laptop thrown to the floor, it's not so clear, but there will be legal costs if the owner decides to sue about it in any event.
The biggest cost to a business will be when someone trips over your charger's power cord. The guy who tripped sues the store for the hazard they allowed on the floor, and you sue the store for a new laptop.
Sure, the store's insurance will cover it, but then they'll get their rates jacked up and probably a clause in the next policy specifically prohibiting customers from plugging in anywhere.
If they put power jacks and tables in good areas, where nobody can trip, this becomes a non-issue...
According to a documentary movie from 3 years ago, we already had this. HAL 9000 sent an astronaout out to help repair the antenna azimuth control board.
Which turned out not to be faulty... hmmm...
Some IBM mainframes are already at this level of self-diagnosis. Where I work, IBM repairmen show up with spare drives for the RAID array when they fail and the array phones IBM to report the fault. We don't know that a drive failed until the field service tech shows up!
The 8088 (the processor used in the original IBM PC) is still current production. (Not made by IBM but by others, remember second-sourcing? Seems like a quant concept today.)
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There's not all that much interest in DVD-audio. PC sound systems are generally pretty crappy (yeah, right, that little wall-wart powered speaker really puts out 320 watts like it says on the box!).
There are advantages to putting a lot of audio on a single disk (no more "Wagner ring cycle on convenient 45's" for any readers old enough to remember what a 45 was) but I've never seen a publisher take real advantage of it. MP3's burned as regular data files seem to deal with this pretty nicely already.
That would be Bad.
- I didn't have a social security number
- I didn't have a driver's license
- I certainly didn't have any credit cards
But I did have a:- Savings account. Paper passbook. I imagine that all the numbers were in some computer somewhere but it sure wasn't networked with anything else.
- Student info folder at school. All the grades etc. were kept track of by secretaries and typewriter.
- Selective Service registration (I turned 18 my senior year).
The place where I did finally interface with some national databases was when I took the PSAT's. All of a sudden a bazillion colleges were sending me mail. (No, not E-mail!)Of course, now all my kids got Social Security numbers at birth. If you don't get them one, you can't use them as a deduction...!
After something like "Toy Story" or "Finding Nemo" or "Lion King" (which was not originally planned to be such a big hit!), every subsequent animated film gets compared to it. Not just box office revenue, but also reviews, relevance, etc. And of course, none quite measure up. So they cut animation spending, lay off animators, and shut down animation divisions.
The problem isn't that the subsequent films weren't good films. (Well, some weren't. Others were.) But the problem is that the blockbusters were too good.
Disney just has to get back into the cycle where they produce a range of quality animation (allowing some "duds" as well as non-blockbusters to get made). In this business world, where a single non-blockbuster means you shut down the division, this is indeed hard.
DHS has computer problems, sure, but the agency as a whole is a misguided waste of resources. It's probably better that it's computer systems don't work, otherwise they'd figure out a way to stop Ted Kennedy from driving or using an elevator in addition to not flying.
It's easy to pick holes in the lack of backup of a system, but it's pointless when the system has no utility to begin with.
Prohibition.... they tried that in the movies and it didn't work!
I'm assuming that all Cuban installations of Windows are pirate copies anyway, because it's illegal for US companies to sell to Cuba (very stiff penalties).
I have to disagree - I've refereed for several journals, and always one element of review is whether this is the appropriate journal or not.
In a couple cases I know the editor followed my recommendation and had the article published in an affiliated journal which was more appropriate. The "affiliated journal" thing is important, because if it was simply rejected it would've had to be refereed again, slowing down the publishing.
It's rare for the refereeing process to be purely rejectional (is that a word?) - the idea is to help good stuff to publication. In the perfect world the editors, referees, and authors all work together instead of against each other.
At the larger conferences they make some attempt at screening out the known crackpots. The amount of effort varies.
For undergrad financial aid, there's the requirement that male students be checked to be sure they're registered with Selective Service. Some schools use this as an excuse to collect SSN, but I think it's a lame excuse because when I registered at least (many years ago you can tell!) I didn't even have a SSN.
My big question: how can it do any good to train an expert system to recognize terrorists, when all the sample data is by definition from non-terrorists? I mean, there were no terrorist actions on any Jet Blue flights in that time frame. This data is useful as "known negatives" in the test for terrorists, but where do they get the data for "known positives" to train the system?
They were on Irix up until a few years ago.
I never buy any product that has any advertised rebate offers.
Filliing out the form and sending it in with the hope of getting money is like sending my E-mail address to a spammer to "opt out". They're already in a scummy industry, why should I trust them with anything in the hope of getting something?
- Project was originally a quick hack. It lives well past its prime, gets modded extensively to handle changes going on in the real world (new devices, competition, etc.). Abstractions are added where necessary. Some hacky ugliness lives at fringes, but after umpteen releases and way too much backwards compatibility customers are still buying it.
- Project was a grandiose dream by an analyst. Before any functionality exists, everything is abstracted to the max. 10-inch thick binders full of API's are published before the product actually does anything. The abstractions usually turn out to be wrong, and after many years (and little functionality) either the abstractions get twisted around at great expense to reach functionality, or the project dies in heaving paroxysms.
. Reading the experienced coder's comments is always good. They know the history and want to pass on the lessons learned to whoever will look.Isn't turning your typical 20 year old driver into a 70 year old driver actually an improvement?
Overall, it's not a bad principle. It means the prorietor has an interest in keeping his customers safe. If it means that he bans dangling power cords, well, that's tough luck for those who want to plug in laptops.
If you've no content, you're not going to appreciate it :-).
For a bumped head or broken arm, the insurance company will pay out nearly automatically for hospital bills. (They will contest additional costs, lost wages, emotional distress, etc. most of the time.) For the laptop thrown to the floor, it's not so clear, but there will be legal costs if the owner decides to sue about it in any event.
Sure, the store's insurance will cover it, but then they'll get their rates jacked up and probably a clause in the next policy specifically prohibiting customers from plugging in anywhere.
If they put power jacks and tables in good areas, where nobody can trip, this becomes a non-issue...
Which turned out not to be faulty... hmmm...
Some IBM mainframes are already at this level of self-diagnosis. Where I work, IBM repairmen show up with spare drives for the RAID array when they fail and the array phones IBM to report the fault. We don't know that a drive failed until the field service tech shows up!
Dude, that's almost as funny as the guy who built a glass case around a 10K ohm resistor with a sign that reads "DANGER! 10000 ohms!"
I don't have a face!
My cat already has a PhD!
The 8088 (the processor used in the original IBM PC) is still current production. (Not made by IBM but by others, remember second-sourcing? Seems like a quant concept today.)