The population of England is only 60 million just now - half the population is located in the large cities like Birmingham, Nottingham and London. However, most of the IT industry (around 300,000 people) is located in the Greater London Area or Home Counties. It is easy upgrading central London - that area always seems to be upgraded first, followed by the other university cities like Cambridge, Oxford, Reading and Edinburgh.
However, for those out in the countryside - just two or three miles outside the city bypasses, they probably won't be able to get cable TV, let alone high-speed broadband through DSL. That is the other half of the population. BT has just started to upgrade the trunk lines to the local mini-exchanges from copper to fibre-optic.
I wouldn't say this comment is a troll. There are a lot of issues with trying to write generic source code that can be ported to any architecture or system.
There is pthreads - this allows you to create as many threads as you like, but you can't create a batch of threads in one call or bind specific threads to specific cores. You have to create them separately, with the result that in some tasks the first thread does a whole load of work, then waits for a cache reload, allowing another couple of threads to start. By the time all the work has been done, the remaining threads are created and immediately exit.
Mixing pthreads with C++ is a bit tricky, and you have to watch out for the 128 cache page boundary issue with structures and class objects.
OpenMP is the default standard for multi-processor systems, but you have to design your program around the calls to send and receive data, which may seem to be a bit of an overhead when all the processors are on the same desktop system.
OpenCL seems to be resolving a lot of these issues, like trying to end the distinction between embedded system API's and desktop/server API's.
I played 'Vultures Claw' and 'Vultures Eye' which provide a isometric view of each level based on what the ASCII rendering of 'nethack' would display. Many of the levels are exactly as you would imagine (fire levels with lava, water levels/Jubilex/Astral Planes).
There was a multiplayer 'rogue' like game at the time 'nethack' came out. I can't remember the name, but it was like a multiplayer ASCII version of 'rogue' where people could collect wands and gold while traveling through a maze. The ultimate goal was to find the "Teluma of Rodney" and escape the maze. Players were rendered as diamonds or eyeballs. There were monster characters, "The Others" that were AI controlled with the number depending on level.
Having other people to compete against did change the dynamics of the game as people would form teams to find the quest item and act as bodyguards for each other, rather than simply "yourself vs. the rest of the game world".
I played that a couple of times - my first character ended up on a level with some kind of rapidly multiply dungeon lice unable to progress any further.
The second time I played, my level 3 character stepped on top of a trapdoor, fell all the way to the bottom level (a dark maze), landing on top of the balrog, giving it some damage, walked blindly into the balrog again, killing it, and winning the game.
Every company does this to each other - they always give trade-in offers for their competitors last-generation technology in exchange for their next generation technology. In particular they always take advantage of one company buying out another, and throw some FUD about how that hardware might not be supported in the future.
Those house prices benefited from two events. The first was the oil boom of the 1980's where the oil companies offered high salaries for workers willing to work two weeks on/two weeks off on the oil rigs. Since banks only offered a mortgage at 2.5x annual salary with a 10% deposit, this meant that no one else could afford to buy in the city (a one bedroom flat would now sell for 100K pounds). There was actually a teachers strike to protest the situation that oil-workers were earning more than university graduates. It became more profitable to convert family townhouses into "luxury flats".
The second solution was to relax the mortgage rules so that no deposit was required and that workers could borrow up to 5x annual salary in order to get onto the property ladder to pay for these "luxury flats".
My parents bought their first apartment for 6000 pounds back in 1966. Today, the same property is worth around 200,000 pounds. Salaries followed a similar path. $6/hour then would be like $20/hour now.
The system will be built on "network probes", a standard network infrastructure unit just like a router. Each "network probe" just sits on the network passively recording packets and converting them into a log file. Presumably they will just send the data back to GCHQ to be archived.
The only weakness would seem to be if they picked up the odd stray "ping" multicast, then such a packet might just be propagated as well.
Currently they just record the data of people they have a surveillance warrant for. Now they want to record *everything* down to every "I'll be home in 10 minutes" SMS and that "lol dude" message you sent in bzflag.
1. Purchase a brand new laptop screen from an online supplier - replacing this usually involves
just removing the bezel and about a dozen screws holding the screen onto the lid chassis, and
swapping connectors.
2. If the screen has just lost illumination from a failed fluorescent tube, you might be able to
repair it yourself. There are guides on how to replace the fluorescent tube.
3. You could try sending your PC to a PC repair shop - but they will charge you $100 for
inspection, component price as #1, and another few hundred $$$ for work time.
4. Keep looking around for online retailers and E-bay, and see if anyone has a reconditioned
screen - it might have a slight scratch or defect, but otherwise usable.
My hardware engineering professor once told us this story.
One time the air force were looking for a visual system to detect airmen who had parachuted into the ocean. The requirements were that the visual system should have a 180 field of view in order to detect a single point of orange to a distance of several miles, be able to work within a fixed temperature range, require the minimum of maintenance and be vibration resistant. Two solutions were proposed.
The first system was a real-time video system with multiple processors and cameras. This would be built from industrial PC's and reinforced chassis with a power supply from the aircraft.
The second system consisted of a couple of detachable cages on each side of the helicopter. Each cage was air-conditioned using the warm air from the engine, had a window and a row of pecking buttons. The pigeons were trained to peck the button whenever they saw a point of orange light. Whenever three or more pigeons started pecking, an alarm would go off in the cabin.
During tests, the pigeon based system had a higher accuracy rate than the electronic system.
so he didn't have to listen to them complain about the fonts or colors.
Didn't the software support personal configuration files so that users could select their own default fonts and colors? There is nothing more annoying that having fonts that constantly change between updates according to the personal preferences of whoever put together this months bug-fix update. A font like "Battlestar Galactica" may look cool when rendered with a chrome finish, but it doesn't go down to well when sending this months progress report to the CEO.
Ther was this interesting effect called artifacting that was noticeable when you had the "high resolution" video mode active. This was a 320x160 or 320x200 resolution with a 1 bit/pixel. Even though you set the background to black and the foreground to white, depending upon the location of the pixel relative to the RGB mask of the TV, the pixel would either take on a white, yellow, red, or blue hue. By using the right pixel pattern, it was possible to create a color image even though the frame buffer was just a large bitmap.
Wouldn't it be better for the supermarket to simply not rearrange their store all the damn time?
Amen. There is nothing worse than getting every item on your list except one, going to the far end of the hypermarket/supermarket (20+ aisles) and finding out - yes, they have rearranged the layout - what you thought was "packet/instant meals" has now been categorized as "international foods" and is now on a top/bottom shelf somewhere in the middle of the store. But not to worry, the store have placed guides with maps at the corner of every 5th aisle to help people find their way around.
AOL has already dumped their dialup modem pools, as some of my diehard dialup modem relatives found out, but they managed to make the switch to broadband rather painlessly. All AOL really do now is offer a portal with an E-mail service. Given the competition that Times Warner Cable is facing from other companies, it really looks like AOL is just an overhead on Times Warner's annual financial report.
Phorm wants to have a nice big data pipe between the gateway of every ISP and the rest of the Internet. Having access to this stream of data will allow Phorm to identify what every web page user is reading, commenting on, and downloading. From all of this information, Phorm claims that will be able to build up a profile of what each Internet user may be currently interested in buying. From this profile, Phorm will then be able to add customized adverts in the banner space of each webpage that the user views, rather than just give a random advert. Phorm also claim that they will be able to keep the identify of the user/IP address separate from the data.
If this was the real reason, that it would be easier to put some keywords in the link to the banner adverts related to the web page currently being viewed.
Because the home office is involved, there is a suspicion that this "profiled advertising" is nothing more than a cover story for full internet surveillance.
If you go to Time Warner Cable website, enter the area code and order just Cable and High Speed Online, the total price is around $102.85 month (Digital Cable + Road Runner Turbo @ upto 15 Mpbs download / 2Mbps upload).
Now, despite being begged to introduce Cable service in this area, Time Warner refused. Now they are being undercut by someone offering a better service for half the price. No wonder they are steaming.
I used to have a lot problems with my xorg.conf file every time Nvidia updated their Linux drivers. Mainly because the only way at the time was to use.run files which were basically shell scripts. These would overwrite everything X related - they would mess up the driver specifications in the xorg.conf file. After spending the good part of an evening trying to figure out why I wasn't getting the full resolution screen, I learnt to back up my xorg.conf, let the.run file do its magic, then do a diff between the old and new xorg.conf file. Another time, the kernel developers updated the kernel to use an 8K stack from an 4K stack - that messed up Nvidia drivers as well.
Fortunately, updating Nvidia drivers is far easier now - just use 'yum update' .
Slashdot Mirror
The game might have been called 'grid' - it came with a distribution of Solaris around 1986-1990.
The population of England is only 60 million just now - half the population is located in the large cities like Birmingham, Nottingham and London. However, most of the IT industry (around 300,000 people) is located in the Greater London Area or Home Counties. It is easy upgrading central London - that area always seems to be upgraded first, followed by the other university cities like Cambridge, Oxford, Reading and Edinburgh.
However, for those out in the countryside - just two or three miles outside the city bypasses, they probably won't be able to get cable TV, let alone high-speed broadband through DSL. That is the other half of the population. BT has just started to upgrade the trunk lines to the local mini-exchanges from copper to fibre-optic.
I wouldn't say this comment is a troll. There are a lot of issues with trying to write generic source code that can be ported to any architecture or system.
There is pthreads - this allows you to create as many threads as you like, but you can't create a batch of threads in one call or bind specific threads to specific cores. You have to create them separately, with the result that in some tasks the first thread does a whole load of work, then waits for a cache reload, allowing another couple of threads to start. By the time all the work has been done, the remaining threads are created and immediately exit.
Mixing pthreads with C++ is a bit tricky, and you have to watch out for the 128 cache page boundary issue with structures and class objects.
OpenMP is the default standard for multi-processor systems, but you have to design your program around the calls to send and receive data, which may seem to be a bit of an overhead when all the processors are on the same desktop system.
OpenCL seems to be resolving a lot of these issues, like trying to end the distinction between embedded system API's and desktop/server API's.
I played 'Vultures Claw' and 'Vultures Eye' which provide a isometric view of each level based on what the ASCII rendering of 'nethack' would display. Many of the levels are exactly as you would imagine (fire levels with lava, water levels/Jubilex/Astral Planes).
There was a multiplayer 'rogue' like game at the time 'nethack' came out. I can't remember the name, but it was like a multiplayer ASCII version of 'rogue' where people could collect wands and gold while traveling through a maze. The ultimate
goal was to find the "Teluma of Rodney" and escape the maze. Players were rendered as diamonds or eyeballs. There were monster characters, "The Others" that were AI controlled with the number depending on level.
Having other people to compete against did change the dynamics of the game as people would form teams to find the quest item and act as bodyguards for each other, rather than simply "yourself vs. the rest of the game world".
I played that a couple of times - my first character ended up on a level with some kind of rapidly multiply dungeon lice unable to progress any further.
The second time I played, my level 3 character stepped on top of a trapdoor, fell all the way to the bottom level (a dark maze), landing on top of the balrog, giving it some damage, walked blindly into the balrog again, killing it, and winning the game.
Some medical locum's are paid 150 pounds/hour.
Though the top 40 list of professions by average salary is as follows:
(from Best Paid Jobs)
£94,293 Brokers
£77,931 Financial managers and chartered secretaries
£63,664 Aircraft pilots and flight engineers
£58,802 Managers (mining and energy)
£54,950 Managers (research and development)
£54,241 Police officers (inspector and above)
£54,029 Managers (marketing and sales)
£52,049 Lawyers, judges and coroners
£51,911 Air traffic controllers
£50,649 Legal professionals
£49,717 Personnel and industrial relations managers
£49,148 Managers (purchasing managers)
£48,787 IT strategy and planning professionals
£48,258 Managers (advertising and PR)
£47,517 Management counsultants and economists
£46,718 Finance and investment analysts
£44,755 Local government officers (senior)
£44,204 Financial and accountant technicians
£43,810 Fire, ambulance and prison officers (senior)
£43,744 Managers (construction)
£43,569 Managers (production and works)
£43,009 Physicists, geologists and meteorologists
£42,800 Broadcasting associate professionals
£42,487 Surveyors (chartered)
£40,678 Managers (property, housing and land)
£39,930 Mangers and owners in other areas
£39,108 Town planners
£38,714 Managers (pharmacy)
£38,559 Architects
£38,372 Managers (hospital and health service)
£37,916 Engineers (electrical)
£37,868 Management accountants
£37,624 Officials of special interest organisations
£37,533 Managers (transport and distribution)
£37,320 Accountants (chartered and certified)
£37,231 Train drivers
£37,228 Managers (quality assurance)
£36,982 Engineers (mechanical)
£36,805 Managers (customer care)
£36,651 Software professionals
£36,433 Coal miners
Every company does this to each other - they always give trade-in offers for their competitors last-generation technology in exchange for their next generation technology.
In particular they always take advantage of one company buying out another, and throw some FUD about how that hardware might not be supported in the future.
Those house prices benefited from two events. The first was the oil boom of the 1980's where the oil companies offered high salaries for workers willing to work two weeks on/two weeks off on the oil rigs. Since banks only offered a mortgage at 2.5x annual salary with a 10% deposit, this meant that no one else could afford to buy in the city (a one bedroom flat would now sell for 100K pounds). There was actually a teachers strike to protest the situation that oil-workers were earning more than university graduates. It became more profitable to convert family townhouses into "luxury flats".
The second solution was to relax the mortgage rules so that no deposit was required and that workers could borrow up to 5x annual salary in order to get onto the property ladder to pay for these "luxury flats".
My parents bought their first apartment for 6000 pounds back in 1966. Today, the same property is worth around 200,000 pounds. Salaries followed a similar path. $6/hour then would be like $20/hour now.
The system will be built on "network probes", a standard network infrastructure unit just like a router. Each "network probe" just sits on the network passively recording packets and converting them into a log file. Presumably they will just send the data back to GCHQ to be archived.
The only weakness would seem to be if they picked up the odd stray "ping" multicast, then such a packet might just be propagated as well.
Currently they just record the data of people they have a surveillance warrant for. Now they want to record *everything* down to every "I'll be home in 10 minutes" SMS and that "lol dude" message you sent in bzflag.
There are several options you can do:
1. Purchase a brand new laptop screen from an online supplier - replacing this usually involves
just removing the bezel and about a dozen screws holding the screen onto the lid chassis, and
swapping connectors.
2. If the screen has just lost illumination from a failed fluorescent tube, you might be able to
repair it yourself. There are guides on how to replace the fluorescent tube.
3. You could try sending your PC to a PC repair shop - but they will charge you $100 for
inspection, component price as #1, and another few hundred $$$ for work time.
4. Keep looking around for online retailers and E-bay, and see if anyone has a reconditioned
screen - it might have a slight scratch or defect, but otherwise usable.
My hardware engineering professor once told us this story.
One time the air force were looking for a visual system to detect airmen who had parachuted into the ocean. The requirements were that the visual system should have a 180 field of view in order to detect a single point of orange to a distance of several miles, be able to work within a fixed temperature range, require the minimum of maintenance and be vibration resistant. Two solutions were proposed.
The first system was a real-time video system with multiple processors and cameras. This would be built from industrial PC's and reinforced chassis with a power supply from the aircraft.
The second system consisted of a couple of detachable cages on each side of the helicopter. Each cage was air-conditioned using the warm air from the engine, had a window and a row of pecking buttons. The pigeons were trained to peck the button whenever they saw a point of orange light. Whenever three or more pigeons started pecking, an alarm would go off in the cabin.
During tests, the pigeon based system had a higher accuracy rate than the electronic system.
so he didn't have to listen to them complain about the fonts or colors.
Didn't the software support personal configuration files so that users could select their own default fonts and colors? There is nothing more annoying that having fonts that constantly
change between updates according to the personal preferences of whoever put together this months bug-fix update. A font like "Battlestar Galactica" may look cool when rendered with a chrome finish, but it doesn't go down to well when sending this months progress report to the CEO.
Ther was this interesting effect called artifacting that was noticeable when you had the "high resolution" video mode active. This was a 320x160 or 320x200 resolution with a 1 bit/pixel. Even though you set the background to black and the foreground to white, depending upon the location of the pixel relative to the RGB mask of the TV, the pixel would either take on a white, yellow, red, or blue hue. By using the right pixel pattern, it was possible to create a color image even though the frame buffer was just a large bitmap.
Wouldn't it be better for the supermarket to simply not rearrange their store all the damn time?
Amen. There is nothing worse than getting every item on your list except one, going to the far end of the hypermarket/supermarket (20+ aisles) and finding out - yes, they have rearranged the layout - what you thought was "packet/instant meals" has now been categorized as "international foods" and is now on a top/bottom shelf somewhere in the middle of the store. But not to worry, the store have placed guides with maps at the corner of every 5th aisle to help people find their way around.
AOL has already dumped their dialup modem pools, as some of my diehard dialup modem relatives found out, but they managed to make the switch to broadband rather painlessly. All AOL really do now is offer a portal with an E-mail service. Given the competition that Times Warner Cable is facing from other companies, it really looks like AOL is just an overhead on Times Warner's annual financial report.
There is another problem that different areas in the country are usually guaranteed to vote for a particular party. A company called ACORN have categorized the population into different Demographic Groups. Anyone in the public sector or at or below poverty level and minimum wage is guaranteed to vote Labour in order to keep their jobs or council housing and benefits (The Benefits Industry). Anyone who financially well off and in the private sector is guaranteed to vote Conservative. Anyone who isn't in these two categories will vote for the other parties (UKIP, BNP or Liberal Democrats). Labour have been trying to manipulate immigration policy and housing to flood previously safe Conservative seats with Labour voters.
Phorm wants to have a nice big data pipe between the gateway of every ISP and the rest of the Internet. Having access to this stream of data will allow Phorm to identify what every web page user is reading, commenting on, and downloading. From all of this information, Phorm claims that will be able to build up a profile of what each Internet user may be currently interested in buying. From this profile, Phorm will then be able to add customized adverts in the banner space of each webpage that the user views, rather than just give a random advert. Phorm also claim that they will be able to keep the identify of the user/IP address separate from the data.
If this was the real reason, that it would be easier to put some keywords in the link to the banner adverts related to the web page currently being viewed.
However, once Phorm have access to this data stream, they have the potential to build up a complete profile about everyone from Emails, login pages to banks and any billing service, to comments posted on discussion groups and forums.
The danger is that this information may be taken out of context (remember the fuss made when TiVo attempted to identify what type of programs viewers would be interested in from the programs they
have already recorded.
Because the home office is involved, there is a suspicion that this "profiled advertising" is nothing more than a cover story for full internet surveillance.
The Home Office
The Home Office is the lead government department for immigration and passports, drugs policy, counter-terrorism and the police.
The Home Office is the lead government department for immigration and passports, drugs policy, counter-terrorism and the police.
Odd how they are taking responsibility for approving the use of Phorm for "advertising purposes".
If you go to Time Warner Cable website, enter the area code and order just Cable and High Speed Online, the total price is around $102.85 month (Digital Cable + Road Runner Turbo @ upto 15 Mpbs download / 2Mbps upload).
Now, despite being begged to introduce Cable service in this area, Time Warner refused. Now they are being undercut by someone offering a better service for half the price. No wonder they are steaming.
That's what the output of 'tshark -i etho' generates:
30.234150 Cisco_xx:yy:zz -> Broadcast ARP Who has aa.bb.ccc.ddd? Tell eee.fff.ggg.hhh
I used to have a lot problems with my xorg.conf file every time Nvidia updated their Linux drivers. Mainly because the only way at the time was to use .run files which were basically shell scripts. These would overwrite everything X related - they would mess up the driver specifications in the xorg.conf file. After spending the good part of an evening trying to figure out why I wasn't getting the full resolution screen, I learnt to back up my xorg.conf, let the .run file do its magic, then do a diff between the old and new xorg.conf file. Another time, the kernel developers updated the kernel to use an 8K stack from an 4K stack - that messed up Nvidia drivers as well.
Fortunately, updating Nvidia drivers is far easier now - just use 'yum update' .