Have you heard of the "Jown Lewis" list of items that an UK MP could claim back as expenses? Not even the MP's themselves were aware of this list which was forced to be released under the Freedom of Information act. Basically it is a list of items that a first-time buyer could only dream of owning. Altogether they add up to around 22,000 pounds or $44,000 of luxury items for a flat or house in London.
Officials at Westminster had previously resisted publishing the list, arguing that members could claim up to the official limits if they became known. But its publication is sure to reignite controversy over MPs' allowances, which are currently subject to a root-and- branch review in the wake of the Derek Conway affair.
The same thing is happening across many cities across the world. In Canada, the poorest people are either way out in the rural provinces or in high-density apartment blocks in the city centres. In the UK, there has been a general trend to demolish the high-rise apartments and go back to low-rise buildings, but we end-up with sink estates on the outskirts of our cities. House and apartment prices have been so high, that first-time buyers have been priced out by a combination of immigration and Londoners buying second homes out in the countryside. But prices are starting to fall now...
I use Linux exclusively at home (I've given up on my Windows partition after upgrading the hard disk drive and not having a Windows installation DVD ie. having only a restoration DVD). My workspace use Windows at work for the desktops and Linux for networked home directories.
Having used both.NET/MFC and Qt for applications development, but would say that Qt is better for designing applications.
I have a general mistrust of Windows, due to not knowing what exactly every process is doing - even with every network service disabled, running a "netstat -a" during the startup process shows a few http connections being made to sites like Akamai.
For installing applications under Windows, many installation CD's simply load in a copy of every system module that they are likely to use. I once installed a AOL CD during a stay abroad. Half my desktop icons and menus were now in a foreign language.
If there is something that is using too much resources (disk space or processing time) like beagle, you can simply use "yum erase" to remove it safely.
The only problem is that whenever a large slashdot discussion page fails to download and appear on the screen, the delay is invariably due to a file called 'http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js' or something similar.
It's interesting to read the local newspapers of the different parts of the world (LA Times, California, West Coast), (Toronto Star, Canada), (New York Times, New York, East Coast).
The LA Times always seems to have these stories with a rich person/poor people theme (gentrification/regeneration of downtown creates homes for wealthy people, but displaces the Mexican community, another story is high school with swimming pool won't let local kids use it during summer holidays). The Toronto Star seems to have these stories where the local politicians are always present when some Hell's Angels den is being busted (even though it was already vacant for months). Scottish newspapers (Edinburgh News,Evening Express) alway seem to have stories about travellers blocking up road lay-bys, park-and-ride zones and city parks. English newspapers alway seem to have stories about people being arrested and jailed for tackling burglars, or anyone refusing to pay their council tax out of poverty gets thrown into jail, while the burglars get hours of commmunity service (Tabloids).
And people said the same with 128+ variable CPU stack frames combined with RISC instruction sets. Nobody is going to be able to do that kind of juggling in their head, so "register scoreboarding" was built into the compilers.
You could try and have a process running on each core, but even on a university server, you will only have a few hundred processes running, so giving every user a single core is still going to underutilize 80% of those cores. And even then many of those processes are hourly cron jobs or daemons running idle most of the time.
The only alternative is to try and break up each module or subroutine into separate tasks that can be run on each core. The most data consuming tasks are signal processing and visualization (1D audio, 2D video, 3D tomography). Breaking up a fast-fourier transform into chunks so that each core can do a single row or column is one way to achieve this. And the same can be done for 3D rendering.
There might be other factors involved. Rockstar Games has produced several titles which have caused controversy in the past and given the game industry bad press (Bully and Hot Coffee lawsuit.
Having a controlling interest over Rockstar might prevent such events happening in the future.
The next title of the game has already been developed, and it is about to be released, with guaranteed profits. It is no surprise that EA sees a quick way to boost their quarterly earnings reports.
Some of the data transfers really seems wasteful. I download a Linux DVD ISO file, burn it onto a DVD, install the system on a new hard disk drive, then download another couple of Gigabytes of updates. Wouldn't be simpler to just have an installation DVD that creates a minimal system which then downloads the latest version of each module.
And that DVD is really only used once and then forgotten about.
To be honest, I don't think they get any training - I had to show them that the metal box in the external hard disk drive enclosure was the same thing as the hard disk drive in my laptop.
You don't even want to know want happened to the biology student who wanted to study the effect of air travel on the maturation of cheese, and placed a temperature probe inside a block of cheese wrapped in clingfilm.
If you rent an apartment and don't have a South facing balcony or window, then you don't have the option to switch to satellite. Although, you do have the option of cancelling the higher rate cable subscriptions, if there are any. If you do have a south facing balcony, then you can purchase a Portable Satellite Dish" and set that up. One of my neighbours had fitted a full blown satellite dish onto an old halogen lamp stand. In my university, someone actually bolted a 1 metre satellite dish on to the wheel base of a old office chair.
I've worked in IT support departments like that. The main problem was that they were paranoid that if they let any user do something that was non-standard, they would get into deep **** if anything went wrong. If they created a modem dial-up pool for remote workers, would they start being hacked into? This problem was solved by giving remote workers private ISDN links.
If they gave people admin rights to their own desktop systems, will they only use these accounts for maintenance or will they treat it as the default account and inadvertently end up installing spyware and spamware? The IT department had enough problems with people writing their passwords and usernames on yellow post-it notes stuck on their monitors.
If people were allowed to copy databases on their work laptops, would they take care of these systems or would they end up losing company records?
You've got to remember the rapid speed at which new electronic gadgets come on the market. On the salary of an airport security guard, they're probably not going to be able to go to those trade conferences every year... some common ones:
The deduction logic thus works as follows:
External USB hard disk drive cases = flat metallic objects => body armour
Fisheye camera lens = circular metallic object => land mine or grenade
Computer cables = long thin stretchy objects with connectors at each end => detonation cord
Back the early 1990's, the recruitment agencies and employers were looking for people with 5 to 10 years experience of Windows 3.0/3.1.
And during the start of this decade (2001-2002), just when the dom-com bubble burst, employers were sending out the same job vacancy to every possible recruiter they could find, thus creating a mirage of job vacancies, each of which would be described slightly differently, but the location was identical. The most deceitful was the advert where the agency would advertise "We are looking for a software engineer with 10-15 years experience...", and helpfully omit the "looking to move into full-time project management" bit.
When you see job descriptions that are so specific down to the qualifications, API's, hardware, and software experience required that is a dead giveaway that they already know the person that they want.
Otherwise if the job sounds too good to be true, they are probably phishing for new ideas, or just sending out general job descriptions and not real vacancies.
I see many roads are torn apart. not sure what they are digging up and doing but they are NOT planting fiber, that much is clear.
Probably Nitrogen lines. Not sure why they are there, but I used to see all these red flags all over the green space in front of each building with a "danger, gas line" warning message, or something similar.
The big issue with ID cards isn't that you get an ID card with a serial number, your name and photograph on it. The big problem (at least in the UK), is that all the government databases will be linked together using this information; *EVERTHING* from medical records, property ownership, car ownership, travel history, current residential location, employer, purchase histories (thank you private databases).
There is enough information available for any government employee to determine when you are on holiday or away on a business trip to know when to send their mates round to burgle your home.
Stuff - Terrorists need stuff. Houses, flats, apartments, terrorists need somewhere to store all their stuff. Have you seen someone collecting large amounts of stuff for no obvious reason?
They are trying to have bags such that the laptop is on one side, and the cables and such are on the other. How, exactly, would you propose modifying X-Ray scanners such that they can make two pictures from one scan of two overlaying objects? I'm pretty sure you could make a lot of money if you had an answer to that.
Have the bag constructed from two partitions that are velcro-stripped or zipped together. These can be pulled apart so that the cables can be separated from the laptop without removing either. The latter method would allow for a third compartment to be created, while the first method would probably need at least three strips or one giant A4 sized strip.
Spacetime curves according to how much mass is nearby. Most of the matter in the universe seems to be clumped together into galaxies. So, there are vast areas of the universe where there doesn't seem to be any mass, and so consequently we must conclude that it must be flat.
When it comes to ray-tracing complex shapes using spline patches, the recommended approach is to tessellate the geometry into triangles and then ray-trace the collection of triangles, using octrees for optimization (just test a single cube for ray-intersection than a whole set of triangles).
Graphics cards already do something similar with deferred rendering. They sort the projected triangles according to position on the screen, and render groups of triangles into a local cached copy of the framebuffer. Only when all the triangles for that area have been rendered, is it written back to the main framebuffer. Another optimisation is to render the entire scene without texture-mapping just to get the Z-buffer data, then do a second-pass to get the texture data. This saves wasting multiple texture passes on each pixel. Reflection and refraction can already be handled using cube-maps. So using graphics hardware is as good as a two-ray deep ray-tracer.
It's only when you need inter-object reflections to large depth that ray-tracing really has an advantage (although there are programming techniques to do that with graphics cards too).
It doesn't seem too different from the way mobile phones are locked to their network provider (Subsidy passwords), where each phone has a eight digit combination to prevent it from being used with other SIM cards.
But the simplest solution for the foreign manufacturer, would be to disable the bit of the chip that creates the random 64-bit digit code in the first place (cut out its power or clock line). Then the 64-bit digit code will be all zeros or ones, and only one code needs to be guessed.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you heard of the "Jown Lewis" list of items that an UK MP could claim back as expenses? Not even the MP's themselves were aware of this list which was forced to be released under the Freedom of Information act. Basically it is a list of items that a first-time buyer could only dream of owning. Altogether they add up to around 22,000 pounds or $44,000 of luxury items for a flat or house in London.
Officials at Westminster had previously resisted publishing the list, arguing that members could claim up to the official limits if they became known. But its publication is sure to reignite controversy over MPs' allowances, which are currently subject to a root-and- branch review in the wake of the Derek Conway affair.
The same thing is happening across many cities across the world. In Canada, the poorest people are either way out in the rural provinces or in high-density apartment blocks in the city centres. In the UK, there has been a general trend to demolish the high-rise apartments and go back to low-rise buildings, but we end-up with sink estates on the outskirts of our cities. House and apartment prices have been so high, that first-time buyers have been priced out by a combination of immigration and Londoners buying second homes out in the countryside. But prices are starting to fall now...
I use Linux exclusively at home (I've given up on my Windows partition after upgrading the hard disk drive and not having a Windows installation DVD ie. having only a restoration DVD). My workspace use Windows at work for the desktops and Linux for networked home directories.
.NET/MFC and Qt for applications development, but would say that Qt is better for designing applications.
Having used both
I have a general mistrust of Windows, due to not knowing what exactly every process is doing - even with every network service disabled, running a "netstat -a" during the startup process shows a few http connections being made to sites like Akamai.
For installing applications under Windows, many installation CD's simply load in a copy of every system module that they are likely to use. I once installed a AOL CD during a stay abroad. Half my desktop icons and menus were now in a foreign language.
If there is something that is using too much resources (disk space or processing time) like beagle, you can simply use "yum erase" to
remove it safely.
Here are some more case mods (these are categorized as the Weirdest case mods).
The Fan Case Mod
Soviet TV Case mod
And Borg cubes, guitars, BBQ, beer cases and
toasters, Darth vader helmets and F117 flight decks
The only problem is that whenever a large slashdot discussion page fails to download and appear on the screen, the delay is invariably due to a file called 'http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js' or something similar.
It's interesting to read the local newspapers of the different parts of the world (LA Times, California, West Coast), (Toronto Star, Canada), (New York Times, New York, East Coast).
The LA Times always seems to have these stories with a rich person/poor people theme (gentrification/regeneration of downtown creates homes for wealthy people, but displaces the Mexican community, another story is high school with swimming pool won't let local kids use it during summer holidays). The Toronto Star seems to have these stories where the local politicians are always present when some Hell's Angels den is being busted (even though it was already vacant for months). Scottish newspapers (Edinburgh News,Evening Express) alway seem to have stories about travellers blocking up road lay-bys, park-and-ride zones and city parks. English newspapers alway seem to have stories about people being arrested and jailed for tackling burglars, or anyone refusing to pay their council tax out of poverty gets thrown into jail, while the burglars get hours of commmunity service (Tabloids).
And people said the same with 128+ variable CPU stack frames combined with RISC instruction sets. Nobody is going to be able to do that kind of juggling in their head, so "register scoreboarding" was built into the compilers.
You could try and have a process running on each core, but even on a university server, you will only have a few hundred processes running, so giving every user a single core is still going to underutilize 80% of those cores. And even then many of those processes are hourly cron jobs or daemons running idle most of the time.
The only alternative is to try and break up each module or subroutine into separate tasks that can be run on each core. The most data consuming tasks are signal processing and visualization (1D audio, 2D video, 3D tomography). Breaking up a fast-fourier transform into chunks so that each core can do a single row or column is one way to achieve this. And the same can be done for 3D rendering.
There might be other factors involved. Rockstar Games has produced several titles which have caused controversy in the past and given the game industry bad press (Bully and Hot Coffee lawsuit.
Having a controlling interest over Rockstar might prevent such events happening in the future.
It might be possible to boot off a memory stick - most of the laptops in the shops don't have floppy disk drives, but they do have memory stick slots.
The next title of the game has already been developed, and it is about to be released, with guaranteed profits. It is no surprise that EA sees a quick way to boost their quarterly earnings reports.
Some of the data transfers really seems wasteful. I download a Linux DVD ISO file, burn it onto a DVD, install the system on a new hard disk drive, then download another couple of Gigabytes of updates. Wouldn't be simpler to just have an installation DVD that creates a minimal system which then downloads the latest version of each module.
And that DVD is really only used once and then forgotten about.
To be honest, I don't think they get any training - I had to show them that the metal box in the external hard disk drive enclosure was the same thing as the hard disk drive in my laptop.
You don't even want to know want happened to the biology student who wanted to study the effect of air travel on the maturation of cheese, and placed a temperature probe inside a block of cheese wrapped in clingfilm.
If you rent an apartment and don't have a South facing balcony or window, then you don't have the option to switch to satellite. Although, you do have the option of cancelling the higher rate cable subscriptions, if there are any. If you do have a south facing balcony, then you can purchase a Portable Satellite Dish" and set that up. One of my neighbours had fitted a full blown satellite dish onto an old halogen lamp stand. In my university, someone actually bolted a 1 metre satellite dish on to the wheel base of a old office chair.
I've worked in IT support departments like that. The main problem was that they were paranoid that if they let any user do something that was non-standard, they would get into deep **** if anything went wrong. If they created a modem dial-up pool for remote workers, would they start being hacked into? This problem was solved by giving remote workers private ISDN links.
If they gave people admin rights to their own desktop systems, will they only use these accounts for maintenance or will they treat it as the default account and inadvertently end up installing spyware and spamware? The IT department had enough problems with people writing their passwords and usernames on yellow post-it notes stuck on their monitors.
If people were allowed to copy databases on their work laptops, would they take care of these systems or would they end up losing company records?
You've got to remember the rapid speed at which new electronic gadgets come on the market. On the salary of an airport security guard, they're probably not going to be able to go to those trade conferences every year ... some common ones:
The deduction logic thus works as follows:
External USB hard disk drive cases = flat metallic objects => body armour
Fisheye camera lens = circular metallic object => land mine or grenade
Computer cables = long thin stretchy objects with connectors at each end => detonation cord
Back the early 1990's, the recruitment agencies and employers were looking for people with 5 to 10 years experience of Windows 3.0/3.1.
...", and helpfully omit the "looking to move into full-time project management" bit.
And during the start of this decade (2001-2002), just when the dom-com bubble burst, employers were sending out the same job vacancy to every possible recruiter they could find, thus creating a mirage of job vacancies, each of which would be described slightly differently, but the location was identical. The most deceitful was the advert where the agency would advertise "We are looking for a software engineer with 10-15 years experience
When you see job descriptions that are so specific down to the qualifications, API's, hardware, and software experience required that is a dead giveaway that they already know the person that they want.
Otherwise if the job sounds too good to be true, they are probably phishing for new ideas, or just sending out general job descriptions and not real vacancies.
I see many roads are torn apart. not sure what they are digging up and doing but they are NOT planting fiber, that much is clear.
Probably Nitrogen lines. Not sure why they are there, but I used to see all these red flags all over the green space in front of each building with a "danger, gas line" warning message, or something similar.
The big issue with ID cards isn't that you get an ID card with a serial number, your name and photograph on it. The big problem (at least in the UK), is that all the government databases will be linked together using this information; *EVERTHING* from medical records, property ownership, car ownership, travel history, current residential location, employer, purchase histories (thank you private databases).
There is enough information available for any government employee to determine when you are on holiday or away on a business trip to know when to send their mates round to burgle your home.
Not forgetting:
Stuff - Terrorists need stuff. Houses, flats, apartments, terrorists need somewhere to store all their stuff. Have you seen someone collecting large amounts of stuff for no obvious reason?
They are trying to have bags such that the laptop is on one side, and the cables and such are on the other. How, exactly, would you propose modifying X-Ray scanners such that they can make two pictures from one scan of two overlaying objects? I'm pretty sure you could make a lot of money if you had an answer to that.
Have the bag constructed from two partitions that are velcro-stripped or zipped together. These can be pulled apart so that the cables can be separated from the laptop without removing either. The latter method would allow for a third compartment to be created, while the first method would probably need at least three strips or one giant A4 sized strip.
You might like They're made out of meat, a short movie directed by Stephen O'Regan.
Spacetime curves according to how much mass is nearby. Most of the matter in the universe seems to be clumped together into galaxies. So, there are vast areas of the universe where there doesn't seem to be any mass, and so consequently we must conclude that it must be flat.
When it comes to ray-tracing complex shapes using spline patches, the recommended approach is to tessellate the geometry into triangles and then ray-trace the collection of triangles, using octrees for optimization (just test a single cube for ray-intersection than a whole set of triangles).
Graphics cards already do something similar with deferred rendering. They sort the projected triangles according to position on the screen, and render groups of triangles into a local cached copy of the framebuffer. Only when all the triangles for that area have been rendered, is it written back to the main framebuffer. Another optimisation is to render the entire scene without texture-mapping just to get the Z-buffer data, then do a second-pass to get the texture data. This saves wasting multiple texture passes on each pixel. Reflection and refraction can already be handled using cube-maps.
So using graphics hardware is as good as a two-ray deep ray-tracer.
It's only when you need inter-object reflections to large depth that ray-tracing really has an advantage (although there are programming techniques to do that with graphics cards too).
It doesn't seem too different from the way mobile phones are locked to their network provider (Subsidy passwords), where each phone has a eight digit combination to prevent it from being used with other SIM cards.
But the simplest solution for the foreign manufacturer, would be to disable the bit of the chip that creates the random 64-bit digit code in the first place (cut out its power or clock line). Then the 64-bit digit code will be all zeros or ones, and only one code needs to be guessed.
There is evidence that our planet has been hit by gamma ray bursts before - the radiation leaves microscopic trails in chert.
Paleo-indian Catastrophe
America got nuked in 12,500BC