In the UK, the usual reason is that the political party in power is getting donations from the directors of the technology companies (usually in the home counties) that benefit from these contracts.
I believe the USA has invent several terms for such events, "boondoggle" and "pork barrel politics".
Face recognition software works by process the T shapes area of the face defined by the eyes, nose and mouth. A pair of sunglasses and a beard should make this technology redundant.
Consequently, anyone looking like a band member of ZZ top must be placed on the suspicious persons lists.
In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.
In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and created new military-style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. Ultimately, although these practices did not bring about the return of the airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war, they did have the effect of eradicating most of the religious practices that had existed prior to the war.
Over the last seventy-five years most cargo cults have disappeared. Yet, the John Frum cult is still active on the island of Tanna, Vanuatu.
That happened with the UNIX workstation vendors as well. Before GNU C/C++, they could charge three or four figure sums for their compiler tools. There would be educational, commercial and high-performance editions each with a separate annual license. Then GNU C came along and they were forced to give the compilers away for free. Of course, the solution to this problem has been for the vendors to develop their own programming languages and license the IP (Java,.NET).
I am curious - do the laws of physics change depend upon which macro language is used?
Most of the most cited papers I have seen always describe their system in terms of pure mathematics rather than any particular programming language, and the scientists will avoid using the standard functions of the commercial packages, and use their own instead.
I once saw a ray-tracer written using Excel. The first column stored the shape type, the second column defined the procedural shader (another spreadsheet macro). The third to tenth column stored the various parameters of the implicit shape, and the remaining columns defined translation, and orientation.
That kind of thinking handles itself well to GPU programming when you are trying to store everything inside a single texture.
Excel is probably used because it is a very simple to generate. For the headers, you just write a series of tab separated strings. For every new row, you just take a newline and separate the columns by tabs. Extremely simple to read and write in any language.
Many supervisors will advise students to perform their research using lots of little scripts or command line programs written in C. In that way, things can be changed simple by slotting out one program and replacing it with another. Unfortunately, in the worse case, you could find students writing separate programs to handle different fixed amounts of data.
I prefer using C++, as it is extremely simple to create dynamically sized arrays using templates.
Bay windows are my favourite, along with skylights in attic rooms and plate glass wall conservatories -it's really cool being inside when there's a heavy rain storm and seeing the rain falling all around, but still remaining dry. Cats seem to find it entertaining as well.
Some friends had stained glass windows for their apartment staircase - large rectangular windows with the edges replaced with stained glass - red for the corners, blue for the horizontal rectangles and yellow for the vertical rectangles. It created amazing sunbeam and shadows during the day.
Looks like that would be enough capacity for a second generation Domesday Project. The first version only allowed every school to provide a few pages of text and a couple of images (total memory = 1.2 Gigabytes).
1. Different burners have different formats. You have to be sure that when you have completed a backup, that it has been "closed" and prepared for use as a generic CD-ROM. Your worst nightmare is being in some remote location unable to get a replacement drive that reads the exact same formats (Roxio/DirectCD/Nero) as your previous one.
2. It's hard to remember the exact compatibility's between different CD and DVD formats DVD-R/DVD+R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW 16x/8x/4x/2x, DVD players and the various different materials.
3. You are never quite sure whether a backup will have enough space to save a full backup unless the amount of data is substantially less that the free space available on a partially used DVD or CD. CD's don't really have that much space when it comes to saving large zip files.
4. CD's and DVD's can be permanently damaged through a simple scratch with anything metal while being removed from the drive bay.
If you have an external hard disk drive, then you don't have to worry about such problems - the format doesn't need to be "finished", the worst hassle you have is to syncing the drives, and you can use a RAID array for additional security should one drive fail.
Ask Slashdot: Can I Use Linux For Destroying The Ozone Layer? Posted by brian on Wed May 28, 12:41 PM from the have fun hitting reload page dept. ScissorJammer asks "I just started playing around with Linux and it looks very powerful. I started thinking that this program might be perfect for my plans of destroying the ozone layer. Has any other Slashdot user tried using Linux in this way, or is the Open Source community not really into destroying the ozone layer? Either way I'd like to hear your views."
Trailer For Indiana Jones Sequel Released Posted by brian on Wed May 28, 12:44 PM from the have fun hitting reload page dept. Angel writes "The new trailer for teh upcoming Indiana Jones sequel has been relaesed. This time starring Albert Einstein and Bruce Perens. Let's hope in this one that Albert Einstein can take teh bad guys and behead them with a guillotine. Go grab it before it gets Slashdotted."
New Distributed Computing Project Will Try To Help Retrieve The Amulet Of Yendor Posted by brian on Wed May 28, 12:45 PM from the have fun hitting reload page dept. Distributed computing projects have been used in searching for aliens, and decapitating zombies. Now, Nvidia has announced a new program that will allow you to use your spare computing cycles in helping to help retrieve the Amulet of Yednor. Versions are available for Internet Explorer so download adn start crunching.
Europe is doing pretty much the same. Russia is recovering nicely from their economic doldrums.
House prices are falling in the UK since the credit crunch. Although depending who you ask, some will say that they were overpriced, and estate agents will say that they were undervalued. At least now, people will not have to take a mortgage 10 times their salary just to buy a studio flat.
Food prices are going up because of the rising cost of fuel, which is more to do with the declining value of the dollar than anything else. Dollars are the international currency for exchange for many of the countries in the developing world. They have to convert their currency into dollars before purchasing anything else, and as the USA continues to print dollars to pay for the war in Iraq, these countries find their money is worth less.
Then you also have other countries deciding to grow biofuels instead of rice or wheat to sell on the international markets.
They develop Java hardware for internet applications . Presumably this is for commercial organisations where it is more important to get a functional application designed and assembled than to design/test and implement a completely optimised C++ application.
The author has developed a programming methodology class for parallel programming in Java. In this system, a single application can have 700+ separate threads running (user input, background tasks, dialog windows, scripts, automatic undo logging).
With such applications you will often have a array of variables that are accessible by all threads (eg. current processing modes of the application).
To preserve the integrity of the system, you need to only allow one thread to write to each variable at any time. If you have a single read/write lock for all the variables, you will end up with large number of threads queuing up in a suspended state waiting to read a variable, while one thread writes.
The author uses the Load-Link/Store Conditional pair of instructions to guarantee that the new value is written to all locations. Load-Link loads the value from memory. Store-Conditional only writes the value back if no other write requests have been performed on that location, otherwise it fails.
Check-And-Set only replaces the variable with a new value if the value of the variable matches a previously read old value.
Using these methods (having the writer check for any changes) eliminates the need for suspending threads when trying to read shared variables.
You do - you have a screening process that requires people to demonstrate that they are willing to adopt middle class values (having a smaller family in order to gain a higher education level).
In the 1950's the UK brought over many skilled textile workers from India (pre-independence Pakistan), then allowed the manufacturing industry to go back to Far East. Many adapted and went onto university and become middle class. But you have a small percentage who just prefer to live off benefits and bring their wives over from Pakistan. Then they have large families, and continue the cycle. Now, 10% of each English city is Muslim, with Leicester having 20% (in another 10 years, Leicester will have a Muslim majority).
Not really. The LA Times had an article where all the city mayors were arranged around a map of LA. One set of mayors were given casino chips reflecting the expected growth of the Mexican population in Southern California. The other set of mayors were given casino chips reflecting how much land they had available for urban development. Their task? Exchange the two sets of casino chips so that the two amounts balanced out. Needless to say, the mayors owning agricultural land were not happy.
The philosophy of the Mexicans is to get out of high-school as fast as possible, get a job and buy a house and start a family. Basically, they will have a large family (5+ children before they are 30), while the middle class families will have two children after they are 30. At that rate, in 60 years, you have 25 Mexican families, while you only have 4 middle class families.
Since neighbourhoods were never really designed for that population density, you have resource conflicts and gangs forming.
They just won a lawsuit requiring the state of California to provide them with similar funding to the private high schools in LA. And many community hospitals (60+) have been forced to close due to demands being placed upon them.
The system creates a hash key based upon an analysis of the encrypted software and hardware combined together. If this matches a third party checksum, then the third party releases the decryption key to the encrypted software.
This would make sense for networked console games or PC's with broadband connections.
Slashdot Mirror
Solar powered zeppelins - might be a bit slower than an airplane, but why hurry :)
In the UK, the usual reason is that the political party in power is getting donations from the directors of the technology companies (usually in the home counties) that benefit from these contracts.
I believe the USA has invent several terms for such events, "boondoggle" and "pork barrel politics".
Face recognition software works by process the T shapes area of the face defined by the eyes, nose and mouth. A pair of sunglasses and a beard should make this technology redundant.
Consequently, anyone looking like a band member of ZZ top must be placed on the suspicious persons lists.
During World War II, aviators experienced the effects of cargo cult beliefs
The most widely known period of cargo cult activity, however, was in the years during and after World War II. First the Japanese arrived with a great deal of unknown equipment and later Allied forces also used the islands in the same way. The vast amounts of war matériel that were airdropped onto these islands during the Pacific campaign against the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen Westerners or Japanese before. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons, and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers. Some of it was shared with the islanders who were their guides and hosts. With the end of the war the airbases were abandoned, and "cargo" was no longer being dropped.
In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.
In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and created new military-style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. Ultimately, although these practices did not bring about the return of the airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war, they did have the effect of eradicating most of the religious practices that had existed prior to the war.
Over the last seventy-five years most cargo cults have disappeared. Yet, the John Frum cult is still active on the island of Tanna, Vanuatu.
That happened with the UNIX workstation vendors as well. Before GNU C/C++, they could charge three or four figure sums for their compiler tools. There would be educational, commercial and high-performance editions each with a separate annual license. Then GNU C came along and they were forced to give the compilers away for free. .NET).
Of course, the solution to this problem has been for the vendors to develop their own programming languages and license the IP (Java,
Who cares if internally the offset is calculated as I*100+J or I+J*100?
:)
Perspective projection and transformation matrices do
I am curious - do the laws of physics change depend upon which macro language is used?
Most of the most cited papers I have seen always describe their system in terms of pure mathematics rather than any particular programming language, and the scientists will avoid using the standard functions of the commercial packages, and use their own instead.
I once saw a ray-tracer written using Excel. The first column stored the shape type, the second column defined the procedural shader (another spreadsheet macro). The third to tenth column stored the various parameters of the implicit shape, and the remaining columns defined translation, and orientation.
That kind of thinking handles itself well to GPU programming when you are trying to store everything inside a single texture.
Excel is probably used because it is a very simple to generate. For the headers, you just write a series of tab separated strings. For every new row, you just take a newline and separate the columns by tabs. Extremely simple to read and write in any language.
Many supervisors will advise students to perform their research using lots of little scripts or command line programs written in C. In that way, things can be changed simple by slotting out one program and replacing it with another. Unfortunately, in the worse case, you could find students writing separate programs to handle different fixed amounts of data.
I prefer using C++, as it is extremely simple to create dynamically sized arrays using templates.
Bay windows are my favourite, along with skylights in attic rooms and plate glass wall conservatories -it's really cool being inside when there's a heavy rain storm and seeing the rain falling all around, but still remaining dry. Cats seem to find it entertaining as well.
Some friends had stained glass windows for their apartment staircase - large rectangular windows with the edges replaced with stained glass - red for the corners, blue for the horizontal rectangles and yellow for the vertical rectangles. It created amazing sunbeam and shadows during the day.
Looks like that would be enough capacity for a second generation Domesday Project. The first version only allowed every school to provide a few pages of text and a couple of images (total memory = 1.2 Gigabytes).
The problems with CD/DVD burners:
1. Different burners have different formats. You have to be sure that when you have completed a backup, that it has been "closed" and prepared for use as a generic CD-ROM. Your worst nightmare is being in some remote location unable to get a replacement drive that reads the exact same formats (Roxio/DirectCD/Nero) as your previous one.
2. It's hard to remember the exact compatibility's between different CD and DVD formats DVD-R/DVD+R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW 16x/8x/4x/2x, DVD players and the various different materials.
This is to such an extent that numerous sites have sprung up to provide compatibility lists between players and DVD's.
3. You are never quite sure whether a backup will have enough space to save a full backup unless the amount of data is substantially less that the free space available on a partially used DVD or CD. CD's don't really have that much space when it comes to saving large zip files.
4. CD's and DVD's can be permanently damaged through a simple scratch with anything metal while being removed from the drive bay.
If you have an external hard disk drive, then you don't have to worry about such problems - the format doesn't need to be "finished", the worst hassle you have is to syncing the drives, and you can use a RAID array for additional security should one drive fail.
Have you seen the slashdot story generator:
Ask Slashdot: Can I Use Linux For Destroying The Ozone Layer?
Posted by brian on Wed May 28, 12:41 PM
from the have fun hitting reload page dept.
ScissorJammer asks "I just started playing around with Linux and it looks very powerful. I started thinking that this program might be perfect for my plans of destroying the ozone layer. Has any other Slashdot user tried using Linux in this way, or is the Open Source community not really into destroying the ozone layer? Either way I'd like to hear your views."
Trailer For Indiana Jones Sequel Released
Posted by brian on Wed May 28, 12:44 PM
from the have fun hitting reload page dept.
Angel writes "The new trailer for teh upcoming Indiana Jones sequel has been relaesed. This time starring Albert Einstein and Bruce Perens. Let's hope in this one that Albert Einstein can take teh bad guys and behead them with a guillotine. Go grab it before it gets Slashdotted."
New Distributed Computing Project Will Try To Help Retrieve The Amulet Of Yendor
Posted by brian on Wed May 28, 12:45 PM
from the have fun hitting reload page dept.
Distributed computing projects have been used in searching for aliens, and decapitating zombies. Now, Nvidia has announced a new program that will allow you to use your spare computing cycles in helping to help retrieve the Amulet of Yednor. Versions are available for Internet Explorer so download adn start crunching.
Daylight robbery with a smile :)
Are houses the same sizes? Do they have somewhere quiet to study? That's my theory anyway.
The color you get when you mix yellow and green.
Europe is doing pretty much the same. Russia is recovering nicely from their economic doldrums.
House prices are falling in the UK since the credit crunch. Although depending who you ask, some will say that they were overpriced, and estate agents will say that they were undervalued. At least now, people will not have to take a mortgage 10 times their salary just to buy a studio flat.
Food prices are going up because of the rising cost of fuel, which is more to do with the declining value of the dollar than anything else. Dollars are the international currency for exchange for many of the countries in the developing world. They have to convert their currency into dollars before purchasing anything else, and as the USA continues to print dollars to pay for the war in Iraq, these countries find their money is worth less.
Then you also have other countries deciding to grow biofuels instead of rice or wheat to sell on the international markets.
Europe is also having fuel tax protests
You mean we're trapped inside a giant Asteroids-3D screen level?
They develop Java hardware for internet applications . Presumably this is for commercial organisations where it is more important to get a functional application designed and assembled than to design/test and implement a completely optimised C++ application.
The author has developed a programming methodology class for parallel programming in Java. In this system, a single application can have 700+ separate threads running (user input, background tasks, dialog windows, scripts, automatic undo logging).
With such applications you will often have a array of variables that are accessible by all threads (eg. current processing modes of the application).
To preserve the integrity of the system, you need to only allow one thread to write to each variable at any time. If you have a single read/write lock for all the variables, you will end up with large number of threads queuing up in a suspended state waiting to read a variable, while one thread writes.
The author uses the Load-Link/Store Conditional pair of instructions to guarantee that the new value is written to all locations. Load-Link loads the value from memory. Store-Conditional only writes the value back if no other write requests have been performed on that location, otherwise it fails.
Check-And-Set only replaces the variable with a new value if the value of the variable matches a previously read old value.
Using these methods (having the writer check for any changes) eliminates the need for suspending threads when trying to read shared variables.
Martian weather forecasting rock
o Rock has dust on it - there has been a martian sand storm
o Rock is swaying back and forth slighly - a martian sand storm is brewing
o Rock cannot be seen - there is a martian sand storm
o Rock is white - there is frozen water on Mars
o Rock is levitating - There is a UFO with an anti-gravity beam
o Rock is floating - Rock is in orbit around planet
o Rock has gone - UFO has been here and removed rock
You do - you have a screening process that requires people to demonstrate that they are willing to adopt middle class values (having a smaller family in order to gain a higher education level).
In the 1950's the UK brought over many skilled textile workers from India (pre-independence Pakistan), then allowed the manufacturing industry to go back to Far East. Many adapted and went onto university and become middle class. But you have a small percentage who just prefer to live off benefits and bring their wives over from Pakistan. Then they have large families, and continue the cycle. Now, 10% of each English city is Muslim, with Leicester having 20% (in another 10 years, Leicester will have a Muslim majority).
Not really. The LA Times had an article where all the city mayors were arranged around a map of LA. One set of mayors were given casino chips reflecting the expected growth of the Mexican population in Southern California. The other set of mayors were given casino chips reflecting how much land they had available for urban development. Their task? Exchange the two sets of casino chips so that the two amounts balanced out. Needless to say, the mayors owning agricultural land were not happy.
The philosophy of the Mexicans is to get out of high-school as fast as possible, get a job and buy a house and start a family. Basically, they will have a large family (5+ children before they are 30), while the middle class families will have two children after they are 30. At that rate, in 60 years, you have 25 Mexican families, while you only have 4 middle class families.
Since neighbourhoods were never really designed for that population density, you have resource conflicts and gangs forming.
They just won a lawsuit requiring the state of California to provide them with similar funding to the private high schools in LA. And many community hospitals (60+) have been forced to close due to demands being placed upon them.
A new argument about immigration
Summer tends to be the conference season - SIGGRAPH etc...
TPM = Trusted Platform Module.
The system creates a hash key based upon an analysis of the encrypted software and hardware combined together. If this matches a third party checksum, then the third party releases the decryption key to the encrypted software.
This would make sense for networked console games or PC's with broadband connections.