Why would you use armor piercing rounds against a blimp? Wouldn't high explosive rounds make a lot more sense? It's not like you have to be in a hurry, the thing is going to be sitting there for awhile. You have time to go down to storage and pick out the right ammo.
I thought the downside was the need to keep a tank of liquid nitrogen nearby to cool the heads down to superconducting temperatures?
"Near room temperature" superconductors typically still need to be well below zero to operate. Until we get one that can operate at 100C, this idea is a nonstarter for all but maybe some kind of industrial or scientific application.
The end of the article suggests that King Tut may not have fallen off of the chariot and broken his leg because the chariot offers a ride that is too comfortable. This smells like a tremendous leap of logic to me. It's not like the thing was equipped with seatbelts, why would a design that allows for great speed with relative comfort preclude the possibility that maybe he fell out of the thing?
Yeah, wait until you have kids, and a house, and stocks, and charitable contributions...
Doing the taxes on paper is a nightmare these days if you're filling out the long form. You're constantly going back and finding different forms to attach, then having to read long instruction booklets written in tax jargon that never quite tell you if you qualify or not. The system is designed for accountants by accountants and the error rate on pencil and paper filers is quite high as a result.
Wait, what? iFile was great, and I'll be pissed if it's gone. IIRC TurboTax wanted an outrageous amount of money to file state taxes which I laughed at because Virginia has (had?) such an great online system.
Really, ever since Day 1 the Web has been fantastic at putting up forms for people to fill out. The IRS could have built their own website 15 years ago if they wanted, but one feels that they've gotten so cozy with HR Block, Turbotax, Legions of CPAs, etc... that they didn't want to rock the boat. It feels like the buggy whip manufacturers convinced the government that automobiles shouldn't be allowed on public roads because it would hurt their industry. (woo! Car analogy!)
Um, the phosphors don't dim instantly when the beam moves on, especially with older televisions. Heck, some old computers made use of this fact (and specially designed long delay phosphor displays) to let the screen update at a much slower rate than would have been otherwise necessary.
That said, some LCD displays do have a relatively high switching delay, so there can be some noticeable changes when you go from one to the other.
My guess is that each scan requires a considerable amount of processing to render into something we can read on the screen. Probably billions of FFTs or something. You can make a tradeoff between more radiation (cleaner signal) and more math, but previously you would have needed a million dollar supercomputer to do what you can do with $10k worth of GPUs these days, which is how they're saving on radiation.
Well, the market for actual high performance computers is way too small to fund the R&D necessary to build those crazy GPUs. The high performance computing folks should thank their lucky stars that games went in a direction that required more and more processing power (well in excess of what CPUs can provide) and that the GPU companies didn't decide to just leave them out in the cold. There have already been stories of some jagoff putting a few GPUs in a box and outperforming million dollar supercomptuers at some narrow task. They're not going to go away as GPUs get more and more ridiculously overpowered either.
What? The whole point of net neutrality is to prevent ISPs (and the Government) from selectively blocking/degrading certain content. This is the government "deciding what's allowed" on the internet only in the sense that they're saying they aren't allowed to say what's allowed on the internet. Where are people getting these crazy conspiracy theory notions of what Net Neutrality is?
Every time I see someone try to secure a Windows system by revoking "unnecessary" ACLs, they invariably render the system worthless and are forced to reinstall. Windows ACLs may look reasonable on the surface, but they are subtle and vindictive little bastards.
The next field contains a plus (`+') character if the file has an ACL, or
a space (` ') if it does not. The ls utility does not show the actual
ACL; use getfacl(1) to do this.
The problem is domain controllers, which are sometimes forced to use the old algorithm for backwards compatibility purposes. I know when I change my password I get a warning from the domain that my password is being stored differently and that I will not be able to log onto any of the Win95/98 machines we don't have anymore.
Interesting. According to the internet, the average educated adult knows about 20,000 words. Assuming a loose definition of "punctuation" we have about 32 punctuation keys on the keyboard. This means there are around 12,800,000,000 possible passwords under that system. That compares alright (but not spectacularly) to 8 random lowercase letters (208,827,064,576 combinations). It falls completely on its face against requirements like "add random punctuation, numbers, and at least one capital letter (6,095,689,385,410,816 combinations).
12 billion sounds like something a computer could brute force these days, although it depends a lot on the algorithm.
This is also why on Windows you want to have a 15+ character password. For 14 characters and below, Windows stores the passwords as two 7 byte fields for backwards compatibility purposes (darn Windows 95/98!). This is bad because a 7 byte field with just lowercase letters has only 8,031,810,176 combinations, 16 million if you use the full 14 characters, but most people have 8 character passwords for historical reasons (DES salt length of all things), and that last character is basically worthless. It's a bit of a pain, but 15 character passwords can be made reasonable (assuming your security policy doesn't require 25% punctuation or something) and will be stored a much more secure way on Windows hosts.
Impossible to encode three numbers in a product code? That is an interesting assertion. Granted, you'll get longer product numbers, but something like:
[cores][clock][generation] would work don't you think? So a 6 Core Generation 3 (i series) at 3.2 Ghz would be a 6323. A Core2Duo at 2.4Ghz would be 2242. The number even gives you a very very rough estimate of the performance you can expect out of the chip. Marketing will probably insist that the generation number come first however, even though it is the least important of the 3 factors you mentioned.
Graphics cards vendors do something similar, where the first digit of the product is the generation number, and the second is an approximate speed as compared to other graphics cards of the generation. It works alright, although cross-generation comparisons are always muddy.
My school did the honor code thing as well, but it always seemed a bit pointless to me. The people who took it seriously weren't going to cheat anyway, and once you've cheated on a test cheating on an honor code pledge is nothing. Plus, you don't need some fancy honor code to kick someone out for cheating.
That said, I don't think there was a whole lot of cheating in my classes, although I did have a rather lot of technical/mathematical courses that will tend to punish cheaters by simply requiring them to understand all of the previous lessons to make sense of the current one. Even if you can cheat through one test, you'll be boned on the followups, and if you try to cheat every time your chances of getting caught start to go up dramatically, especially if the teacher begins to suspect.
That's one of those classic "design by committee" mission statements that end up bogged down with every single little thing the company does because everybody has their own little fiefdom that they want represented.
My thought: Internet Detectives are going to have a field day with this. Got ganked by a Rogue last night? Search the forums for his character name, find his real name, figure out where he lives, and get him right back with harassing phone calls, pizzas, etc...
Now all we need is for 4Chan to implement the same policy.
If you're making a standard, why not settle on a voltage level and stick with it? Adding a knob is just asking for people to set it wrong and fry their laptop. If you absolutely must have multiple voltages for some reason, then design the brick such that it automatically chooses the correct one. Plus a knob is a moving part, and will break.
If every PC laptop uses the same plug, I would jump for joy. If it was an Apple style "magsafe" style connector I would get down on my knees and fellate each and every member of the standards committee. I've been griping for years now how the connector conspiracy is still going strong in the laptop space and what a pain it is to keep matching power cords to laptops.
Also, a standardized connector would let third parties come in and start making accessories and replacement bricks for a lot less than the highway robbery prices that the brand names charge.
Also, while they're at it, why not spec out a standarized battery compartment? Not everybody has to use it, but if all "regular size" laptops did, that would be a huge win. A standardized modular bay connector would be nice too. Not to mention a standardized docking adapter. It's like laptop manufacturers stopped caring about standardization after PCMCIA/PC-Card/Expresscard and have been more than willing to custom engineer everything every time. It's really annoying and the standardization efforts are long long overdue.
What I don't understand is: If the tickets are all electronic, then why not allow people to cancel? It's not like they're holding a piece of paper that's going to cause a problem at the door. Maybe have a $10 or $20 cancellation fee to discourage people from doing it unless they really need to, but when you have a $150 ticket that you can't use, then it's alright. Also, make it so you can't cancel less than a day in advance, and put the tickets back on the market a few minutes or hours (randomly) after they've been canceled. Seems like a pretty simple thing to do.
Of course this is Ticketbastard we're talking about, so the idea that they'll implement some sort of customer service seems kinda laughable.
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Why would you use armor piercing rounds against a blimp? Wouldn't high explosive rounds make a lot more sense? It's not like you have to be in a hurry, the thing is going to be sitting there for awhile. You have time to go down to storage and pick out the right ammo.
I thought the downside was the need to keep a tank of liquid nitrogen nearby to cool the heads down to superconducting temperatures?
"Near room temperature" superconductors typically still need to be well below zero to operate. Until we get one that can operate at 100C, this idea is a nonstarter for all but maybe some kind of industrial or scientific application.
The end of the article suggests that King Tut may not have fallen off of the chariot and broken his leg because the chariot offers a ride that is too comfortable. This smells like a tremendous leap of logic to me. It's not like the thing was equipped with seatbelts, why would a design that allows for great speed with relative comfort preclude the possibility that maybe he fell out of the thing?
Yeah, wait until you have kids, and a house, and stocks, and charitable contributions...
Doing the taxes on paper is a nightmare these days if you're filling out the long form. You're constantly going back and finding different forms to attach, then having to read long instruction booklets written in tax jargon that never quite tell you if you qualify or not. The system is designed for accountants by accountants and the error rate on pencil and paper filers is quite high as a result.
Wait, what? iFile was great, and I'll be pissed if it's gone. IIRC TurboTax wanted an outrageous amount of money to file state taxes which I laughed at because Virginia has (had?) such an great online system. Really, ever since Day 1 the Web has been fantastic at putting up forms for people to fill out. The IRS could have built their own website 15 years ago if they wanted, but one feels that they've gotten so cozy with HR Block, Turbotax, Legions of CPAs, etc... that they didn't want to rock the boat. It feels like the buggy whip manufacturers convinced the government that automobiles shouldn't be allowed on public roads because it would hurt their industry. (woo! Car analogy!)
Um, the phosphors don't dim instantly when the beam moves on, especially with older televisions. Heck, some old computers made use of this fact (and specially designed long delay phosphor displays) to let the screen update at a much slower rate than would have been otherwise necessary. That said, some LCD displays do have a relatively high switching delay, so there can be some noticeable changes when you go from one to the other.
The thing is, there should be a lot of near mint Virtual Boy hardware out there just waiting for someone to be interested in it.
As I understand it, this is one of Fred Phelps primary sources of income. He literally gets beaten up for a living.
My guess is that each scan requires a considerable amount of processing to render into something we can read on the screen. Probably billions of FFTs or something. You can make a tradeoff between more radiation (cleaner signal) and more math, but previously you would have needed a million dollar supercomputer to do what you can do with $10k worth of GPUs these days, which is how they're saving on radiation.
Well, the market for actual high performance computers is way too small to fund the R&D necessary to build those crazy GPUs. The high performance computing folks should thank their lucky stars that games went in a direction that required more and more processing power (well in excess of what CPUs can provide) and that the GPU companies didn't decide to just leave them out in the cold. There have already been stories of some jagoff putting a few GPUs in a box and outperforming million dollar supercomptuers at some narrow task. They're not going to go away as GPUs get more and more ridiculously overpowered either.
What? The whole point of net neutrality is to prevent ISPs (and the Government) from selectively blocking/degrading certain content. This is the government "deciding what's allowed" on the internet only in the sense that they're saying they aren't allowed to say what's allowed on the internet. Where are people getting these crazy conspiracy theory notions of what Net Neutrality is?
Every time I see someone try to secure a Windows system by revoking "unnecessary" ACLs, they invariably render the system worthless and are forced to reinstall. Windows ACLs may look reasonable on the surface, but they are subtle and vindictive little bastards.
This is from ls(1) on FreeBSD 7.3-STABLE
The problem is domain controllers, which are sometimes forced to use the old algorithm for backwards compatibility purposes. I know when I change my password I get a warning from the domain that my password is being stored differently and that I will not be able to log onto any of the Win95/98 machines we don't have anymore.
Interesting. According to the internet, the average educated adult knows about 20,000 words. Assuming a loose definition of "punctuation" we have about 32 punctuation keys on the keyboard. This means there are around 12,800,000,000 possible passwords under that system. That compares alright (but not spectacularly) to 8 random lowercase letters (208,827,064,576 combinations). It falls completely on its face against requirements like "add random punctuation, numbers, and at least one capital letter (6,095,689,385,410,816 combinations).
12 billion sounds like something a computer could brute force these days, although it depends a lot on the algorithm.
This is also why on Windows you want to have a 15+ character password. For 14 characters and below, Windows stores the passwords as two 7 byte fields for backwards compatibility purposes (darn Windows 95/98!). This is bad because a 7 byte field with just lowercase letters has only 8,031,810,176 combinations, 16 million if you use the full 14 characters, but most people have 8 character passwords for historical reasons (DES salt length of all things), and that last character is basically worthless. It's a bit of a pain, but 15 character passwords can be made reasonable (assuming your security policy doesn't require 25% punctuation or something) and will be stored a much more secure way on Windows hosts.
Impossible to encode three numbers in a product code? That is an interesting assertion. Granted, you'll get longer product numbers, but something like:
[cores][clock][generation] would work don't you think? So a 6 Core Generation 3 (i series) at 3.2 Ghz would be a 6323. A Core2Duo at 2.4Ghz would be 2242. The number even gives you a very very rough estimate of the performance you can expect out of the chip. Marketing will probably insist that the generation number come first however, even though it is the least important of the 3 factors you mentioned.
Graphics cards vendors do something similar, where the first digit of the product is the generation number, and the second is an approximate speed as compared to other graphics cards of the generation. It works alright, although cross-generation comparisons are always muddy.
Well, the cop could see if the brake lights were on. That would be a good first indication.
IIRC they're one of the largest game companies in the US. They're also made out of pure evil, which makes the google investment puzzling at best.
My school did the honor code thing as well, but it always seemed a bit pointless to me. The people who took it seriously weren't going to cheat anyway, and once you've cheated on a test cheating on an honor code pledge is nothing. Plus, you don't need some fancy honor code to kick someone out for cheating.
That said, I don't think there was a whole lot of cheating in my classes, although I did have a rather lot of technical/mathematical courses that will tend to punish cheaters by simply requiring them to understand all of the previous lessons to make sense of the current one. Even if you can cheat through one test, you'll be boned on the followups, and if you try to cheat every time your chances of getting caught start to go up dramatically, especially if the teacher begins to suspect.
That's one of those classic "design by committee" mission statements that end up bogged down with every single little thing the company does because everybody has their own little fiefdom that they want represented.
My thought: Internet Detectives are going to have a field day with this. Got ganked by a Rogue last night? Search the forums for his character name, find his real name, figure out where he lives, and get him right back with harassing phone calls, pizzas, etc...
Now all we need is for 4Chan to implement the same policy.
If you're making a standard, why not settle on a voltage level and stick with it? Adding a knob is just asking for people to set it wrong and fry their laptop. If you absolutely must have multiple voltages for some reason, then design the brick such that it automatically chooses the correct one. Plus a knob is a moving part, and will break.
If every PC laptop uses the same plug, I would jump for joy. If it was an Apple style "magsafe" style connector I would get down on my knees and fellate each and every member of the standards committee. I've been griping for years now how the connector conspiracy is still going strong in the laptop space and what a pain it is to keep matching power cords to laptops.
Also, a standardized connector would let third parties come in and start making accessories and replacement bricks for a lot less than the highway robbery prices that the brand names charge.
Also, while they're at it, why not spec out a standarized battery compartment? Not everybody has to use it, but if all "regular size" laptops did, that would be a huge win. A standardized modular bay connector would be nice too. Not to mention a standardized docking adapter. It's like laptop manufacturers stopped caring about standardization after PCMCIA/PC-Card/Expresscard and have been more than willing to custom engineer everything every time. It's really annoying and the standardization efforts are long long overdue.
What's with the Undertaker hate? That seems totally random. Sure they're in a grim profession, but most are quite professional.
What I don't understand is: If the tickets are all electronic, then why not allow people to cancel? It's not like they're holding a piece of paper that's going to cause a problem at the door. Maybe have a $10 or $20 cancellation fee to discourage people from doing it unless they really need to, but when you have a $150 ticket that you can't use, then it's alright. Also, make it so you can't cancel less than a day in advance, and put the tickets back on the market a few minutes or hours (randomly) after they've been canceled. Seems like a pretty simple thing to do.
Of course this is Ticketbastard we're talking about, so the idea that they'll implement some sort of customer service seems kinda laughable.