On some occasions, the cause can be man-made, but not immediately obvious to the scientists.
There was once a social studies research project which aimed to find out why the young women in one local government owned housing estate had children, and why those in another similar housing estate didn't. The reason - the council rehoused families as soon as they had children.
The most annoying part is that with every new kernel release/upgrade (Red Hat, Fedora Core), you have to reinstall the Nvidia drivers - everything else is more or less autodetect.
While installing these drivers isn't anything more time-consuming than running a shell script, it has to be done for both SMP and the ordinary version of the kernel, requiring in each case/etc/inittab to be edited, the system rebooted in command line mode only, the script run,/etc/inittab to be unedited, and the system rebooted.
For profit reasons, a graphics chip maker wants to cover all possible market segments. For the cheap end of the market, they provide a card with basic functionality ie. four pipelines. For the expensive end of the market, they provide a card with as many pipelines as possible (16, 32, 64). To fill in the space between, they have graphics card with different capabilities - card makers can't really nobble screen resolution or colour depth any more, so they are left with 3D performance. And so they provide cards that have things like overlays, hardware accelerated line drawing and multiple pipelines disabled.
No, I'm not. The UK government is keen to get 50% of all school-leavers into university. Due to the dot com boom, a large number went into Computer Science courses. The increased numbers led to higher student/staff ratios, and university staff responded to the increased pressure, by reducing the difficulty of their courses.
I've been to various interviews where the companies gave the applicants basic C programming tests on how to write list manipulation routines (detect a loop, delete an item, insert an item, which is the faulty pointer algorithm etc...). All due to the fact that the universities were teaching these as predefined (STL etc...), and that there wasn't any need to reinvent the wheel any more.
Too right - it happens in the UK as well. I lost two job vacancies solely because I hadn't used VxWorks or UML in the past.
However, many of those companies who are "major local employers" who do a special deal with their local university, so that the Computer Science courses are custom designed for their needs.As a result, the unique combination of skills taught by these courses, means that they only look to those universities for software engineers, and it helps to "lock in" the graduates to those companies.
today they are using Java, because "it's more practical and aligned with the industry" or some such excuse.
It's easier for the professors to teach because they don't have to worry about having to explain pointers, memory management or the basics of implementing linked lists, queues or stacks.
Seriously, this idea has been implemented. For certain crimes (mugging, burglary), it is possible to predict the likely area from the analysis of the times and locations of previous crimes. The New York police were using this to catch muggers.
The whole population was brainwashed. That's the sad part - even after two nuked cities, they still wanted to keep the war going, all to please the Emperor.
It's a lot easier in the US than the UK. Most large companies in the US seem to offer their employees the choice of a technical vs. management career path (as long as you keep your skills up to date).
In the UK, the only way generous company pension schemes could be maintained was to have a policy of "everyone gets pushed up into management" or "You're only a software engineer until we find someone cheaper". This is particularly true in new industries like entertainment software, and has led to veteran programmers setting up their own companies to escape middlemanagementitis and micromanaging directors who interfere in team member task assignments from the other end of the country.
WTF? Is an ambition to live a "normal, quiet life" something to be derided now?
Yes, by refusing to risk your house/mortgage on a loan guarantee and work long hours away from your family in order to set up a company, you are depriving the economy of much needed job creation.
At least that's the view of the bank economists. Of course, at the first sign that your company looks a bit wobbly, they'll take back the loan and your house quick as a flash, but leave you with the mortgage.
And even if people do take the risk of setting up a company with their wife/partner, they get clobbered for tax avoidance.
a "saftety net", in which we can all get tangled, that ensures that the bureucracy continues to grow at a rate that makes a virulent cancer look static
At the moment in the UK, the shortfall in all pension schemes for public sector workers is currently double that of the entire UK national debt. Around 450 billions pounds.
And at the same time, property taxes for house owners (mainly pensioners and/or retirees) are having to rise to keep the local government schemes running.
Various elderly friends have just moved to DVD from video for their favourite TV shows. Trying to explain DVD region coding and why DVD's purchased from amazon.co.uk will work, while those from amazon.com won't is bad enough, let alone try and make their player multi-region.
Well, I'm not a lawyer, but those sound like pretty specifically defined activities, why not just pass laws against them?
You could try, but the companies would argue that they were genuine patents, until proven otherwise in a court of law. Since the possible profits if they win can go into billions of dollars, there is a good incentive for doing so.
Is the problem with the patents themselves, or merely with the way that they are awarded?
The problem with patents is in two areas:
A company can use patents to stifle competition in a particular market, while not actively exploiting that market for their own gain. Perhaps they already have made a considerable investment in one technology, and don't want to throw away that investment due to a new superior and cheaper technology. Instead of making any investment, they just sit there and do nothing, but just harass everyone else (Much like the telephone companies vs. community wireless).
There are also other companies who just buy up patents from bankrupt startups and use them to blackmail other smaller companies for profit.
For a large company with a patent portfolio and lawyers, they can either counter-sue or arrange a cross-license. But for smaller companies, who can do neither, they just end up having to pay up.
Not to mention that it's just a freakin' old card !
Given that TIGA was introduced in 1985 (coming onto 20 years), it can be considered prehistoric!
At 60 MHz, it was briefly a graphics accelerator, but as soon as Intel came out with local bus technology, it became a graphics deaccelerator. It was hard enough getting it to fit inside a PC back then - as the RAM chips actually sat out at an 45 degree angle, they would make contact with the adjacent card.
But it was definitely fun to program - it could do everything that can be done in vertex/fragment programs now (cellular automata, Mandelbrot/Julia set, image compression, triangle rasterisation with a software Z-buffer, even a basic real-time 3D BSP renderer with triangle rasterisation), and there were no 64K memory limitations. And it was the first graphics card to do 24-bit colour with a 4-bit overlay, even when Windows only went up to 16-bit colour.
I thought I'd have mine framed in a block of perspex and keep it as an antique.
Slashdot Mirror
On some occasions, the cause can be man-made, but not immediately obvious to the scientists.
There was once a social studies research project which aimed to find out why the young women in one local government owned housing estate had children, and why those in another similar housing estate didn't. The reason - the council rehoused families as soon as they had children.
Here's another suggestion for improved world safety; Kitchen knives should be banned.
Because it is dated from 2003, as can be seen from the URL:
c lear_fuel_cycle/mining/default.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/world/2003/nu
And it was part of high-school physics to know how nuclear reactors (fission/fusion) work or should work.
And Edinburgh is now Scotland's "Party City" or the "Inspiring Capital".
Voodoo 5 6000 anyone? Is this thing going to require its own external power brick just to the board?
And the thrust from the cooling fans will be enough to power an executive jet.
The most annoying part is that with every new kernel release/upgrade (Red Hat, Fedora Core), you have to reinstall the Nvidia drivers - everything else is more or less autodetect.
/etc/inittab to be edited, the system rebooted in command line mode only, the script run, /etc/inittab to be unedited, and the system rebooted.
While installing these drivers isn't anything more time-consuming than running a shell script, it has to be done for both SMP and the ordinary version of the kernel, requiring in each case
For profit reasons, a graphics chip maker wants to cover all possible market segments. For the cheap end of the market, they provide a card with basic functionality ie. four pipelines. For the expensive end of the market, they provide a card with as many pipelines as possible (16, 32, 64). To fill in the space between, they have graphics card with different capabilities - card makers can't really nobble screen resolution or colour depth any more, so they are left with 3D performance. And so they provide cards that have things like overlays, hardware accelerated line drawing and multiple pipelines disabled.
No, I'm not. The UK government is keen to get 50% of all school-leavers into university. Due to the dot com boom, a large number went into Computer Science courses. The increased numbers led to higher student/staff ratios, and university staff responded to the increased pressure, by reducing the difficulty of their courses.
I've been to various interviews where the companies gave the applicants basic C programming tests on how to write list manipulation routines (detect a loop, delete an item, insert an item, which is the faulty pointer algorithm etc...). All due to the fact that the universities were teaching these as predefined (STL etc...), and that there wasn't any need to reinvent the wheel any more.
Too right - it happens in the UK as well. I lost two job vacancies solely because I hadn't used VxWorks or UML in the past.
However, many of those companies who are "major local employers" who do a special deal with their local university, so that the Computer Science courses are custom designed for their needs.As a result, the unique combination of skills taught by these courses, means that they only look to those universities for software engineers, and it helps to "lock in" the graduates to those companies.
today they are using Java, because "it's more practical and aligned with the industry" or some such excuse.
It's easier for the professors to teach because they don't have to worry about having to explain pointers, memory management or the basics of implementing linked lists, queues or stacks.
Maybe not aluminum foil, but falling masonry and building materials.
and people are constanty job hopping in the company every year or two (or being restructured)
IBM wasn't nicknamed "I've Been Moved" for nothing.
Seriously, this idea has been implemented. For certain crimes (mugging, burglary), it is possible to predict the likely area from the analysis of the times and locations of previous crimes. The New York police were using this to catch muggers.
The whole population was brainwashed. That's the sad part - even after two nuked cities, they still wanted to keep the war going, all to please the Emperor.
It's a lot easier in the US than the UK. Most large companies in the US seem to offer their employees the choice of a technical vs. management career path (as long as you keep your skills up to date).
In the UK, the only way generous company pension schemes could be maintained was to have a policy of "everyone gets pushed up into management" or "You're only a software engineer until we find someone cheaper". This is particularly true in new industries like entertainment software, and has led to veteran programmers setting up their own companies to escape middlemanagementitis and micromanaging directors who interfere in team member task assignments from the other end of the country.
WTF? Is an ambition to live a "normal, quiet life" something to be derided now?
Yes, by refusing to risk your house/mortgage on a loan guarantee and work long hours away from your family in order to set up a company, you are depriving the economy of much needed job creation.
At least that's the view of the bank economists. Of course, at the first sign that your company looks a bit wobbly, they'll take back the loan and your house quick as a flash, but leave you with the mortgage.
And even if people do take the risk of setting up a company with their wife/partner, they get clobbered for tax avoidance.
a "saftety net", in which we can all get tangled, that ensures that the bureucracy continues to grow at a rate that makes a virulent cancer look static
At the moment in the UK, the shortfall in all pension schemes for public sector workers is currently double that of the entire UK national debt. Around 450 billions pounds.
And at the same time, property taxes for house owners (mainly pensioners and/or retirees) are having to rise to keep the local government schemes running.
And European directors earn 25 times as much as their workers.
Various elderly friends have just moved to DVD from video for their favourite TV shows. Trying to explain DVD region coding and why DVD's purchased from amazon.co.uk will work, while those from amazon.com won't is bad enough, let alone try and make their player multi-region.
Well, I'm not a lawyer, but those sound like pretty specifically defined activities, why not just pass laws against them?
You could try, but the companies would argue that they were genuine patents, until proven otherwise in a court of law. Since the possible profits if they win can go into billions of dollars, there is a good incentive for doing so.
A good example is the Rambus vs. Infineon, Hynix and Micron patent dispute which dragged on for five years, and was eventually settled at least with one company.
Is the problem with the patents themselves, or merely with the way that they are awarded?
The problem with patents is in two areas:
A company can use patents to stifle competition in a particular market, while not actively exploiting that market for their own gain. Perhaps they already have made a considerable investment in one technology, and don't want to throw away that investment due to a new superior and cheaper technology. Instead of making any investment, they just sit there and do nothing, but just harass everyone else (Much like the telephone companies vs. community wireless).
There are also other companies who just buy up patents from bankrupt startups and use them to blackmail other smaller companies for profit.
For a large company with a patent portfolio and lawyers, they can either counter-sue or arrange a cross-license. But for smaller companies, who can do neither, they just end up having to pay up.
In that case, we will put the bracelets around their necks instead, or implant it in their heads.
Imagine a Beowulf clucker of those
We call that a chicken farm.
After drop rocks made of unstable atomic metals...
Throw rock made of unstable atomic metal with tube pushed by fire.
Not to mention that it's just a freakin' old card !
Given that TIGA was introduced in 1985 (coming onto 20 years), it can be considered prehistoric!
At 60 MHz, it was briefly a graphics accelerator, but as soon as Intel came out with local bus technology, it became a graphics deaccelerator. It was hard enough getting it to fit inside a PC back then - as the RAM chips actually sat out at an 45 degree angle, they would make contact with the adjacent card.
But it was definitely fun to program - it could do everything that can be done in vertex/fragment programs now (cellular automata, Mandelbrot/Julia set, image compression, triangle rasterisation with a software Z-buffer, even a basic real-time 3D BSP renderer with triangle rasterisation), and there were no 64K memory limitations. And it was the first graphics card to do 24-bit colour with a 4-bit overlay, even when Windows only went up to 16-bit colour.
I thought I'd have mine framed in a block of perspex and keep it as an antique.