I agree. First, 12% means that a lot of sets will be effected, but the additional problem in in who will be effected.
Not necessarily the poor. How about those of us in rural areas who rely on fringe reception? Does a digital over the air signal degrade with distance like analog (eventually you get snow and loss of chroma, but you can still watch it) or does it reach a point where you get blocks of goo or nothing at all?
There are large areas, particularly vacation areas where there is not much TV at all. Also how many campgrounds have cable and how many campers have dishes?
I agree. First, 12% means that a lot of sets will be effected, but the additional problem in in who will be effected.
It's not just poorer people who will lose out. There are large parts of rural America where fringe reception is important. Analog TV signals degrade with distance, but depending on your tolerance for snow and loss of chroma, you can still watch them. Where I live, in rural Mid-Michigan, summer skip brings in signals from all over the state. North of here I imagine quite a few summer vacationers will soon be unhappy to discover that unless you have a dish or cable, there is no TV at all. (I have yet to see a camper with a dish!)
This paper does not explain the "why", but what it really is doing is computing a continued fraction approximation. This is a sequence of fractions with increasing numerators and denominators which approaches a value. It uses a variant of Euclid's algorithm to compute what are known as "partial quotients". Using a recursion formula, it is possible to evaluate these to produce an approximation, called a convergent.
At each step you end up with a rational approximation which alternately overshoots or undershoots. What is interesting is that if you stop at some point, the approximation you have is "best" with respect to the denominator involved.
Although there are more direct ways to derive commonly used fractional approximations for PI, it is illustrative to take a floating point value and compute the first few fractions.
PI is approximately equal to 3.14159. Its integer part is 3. 1/.14159 = 7.0626. So the first approximation is 3 1/7 = 22/7. 1/.0626 = 15.96 So the second approximation is 3 + 1/(7+1/(16-e)) = 355/113, and so on. (Actually I'm cheating a bit, the actual convergents are 3/1, 22/7, 333/106, 355/113 and so on.)
22/7 is quite good considering its small denominator. 355/113 is even better.
Why don't you fix your little problem... and light this candle? -- Alan Shepherd, the first man into space, Gemini program
If this doesn't make you cry you probably had too much homework and too little teaching.
Ouch. While talking to our new receptionist after she was first hired, I found out she was of German ancestry and had some famous relatives. (She was trying to help her oldest child with his homework by looking up her family tree.) I mentioned that there was a very large wave of German immigration into the US in the 19th century. So she asked me "Did they come here to escape Hitler?"
For 90% of what people use a scripting language for, Rexx beats the pants of Perl. it's easy to use and it's _readable_.
Certainly true for the only real application I've written in Rexx. It's a program that uses 10-20 digit integers. Exact arithmetic is more important than speed. While developing and testing the program over several months, I enjoyed being able to insert and remove debugging and diagnostic code with ease. In the process I found and reported a number of bugs in one vendor's implimentation of Rexx.
"Please. You can't fix social problems with technological solutions."
Are you joking? I don't even know where to start. Let's start with this. You are at a computer somewhere in the world. If semiconductors were to vanish tomorrow, wherever you are, your government would collapse...
Specious argument. Dig your self in deeper. It's primarily a people problem, something that narrow minded gadget loving geeks with a sense of entitlement are unable to understand.
Well, if I use a gun in a robbery, that makes it armed robbery. But if I own a gun that is not used in the robber (say it's locked in a safe at home) does any robbery I undertake automatically become armed robbery? I mean, don't you think there should be evidence that I actually used the gun in the robbery?
Actually something like this took place in a high profile local case here where my GF's sister sat on the jury. A criminal was convicted of burglary and home invasion. There was a gun in a bag at the scene (belonging to the home owner) that was not used in the commission of the crime, but the criminal knew it was there. Since he had a long prior record, the gun offense added considerably to his sentence.
Remember Ted Turner's colorized classics? It was a big thing that never really went anywhere, because in the end it just didn't look right.
Bingo. Black and white film is a different art form both in still pictures and in movies. Some of the color choices were so bad the movies looked like cartoons or really bad WWII era color footage. (Maybe ok when recycling mediocre war pictures.)
Must be a real moron because his "blackmail-letter" is a file called attention!!!.txt, containing this:
Some files are coded. To buy decoder mail: n781567@yahoo.com with subject: PGPcoder 000000000032
Sheesh. Any of you youngsters remember the Brain virus? It popped up a message saying essentially "To disinfect your computer contact XYZ computer services at $phone_number, $city, Pakistan." IIRC this virus was frequently distributed through copies of pirated software.
Actually, parent's post is pretty insightful -- if you encounter a person with a prefrontal cortex lesion , the *last* thing you'll notice about their condition is their inability to understand sarcasm.
But it's not a complete suprise that the area thought responsible is in the pre-frontal cortex. Now if someone had discovered this in the occipital lobe, that really would have been a discovery!
Oh good. Now they will be adding jokes to the standard neuro exam:
Even worse are Star Wars promotions at Burger King. These include sign up CDs for AOL with Darth Vader on the front. How appropriate, considering what AOL did to the Internet.
AOL to TW: "Don't underestimate the power of the dark side."
To me, the most interesting point is that this material is being tested as a replacement for expansion joints. This would allow more bridges to be paved with concrete instead of being covered by asphalt.
Michigan is in fact the ideal place to test this stuff. We have
1. Two seasons, winter and road construction.
2. State government that neglects roads and bridges until past the point of needing repair. See recent news stories about chunks of concrete falling down on traffic under freeway overpasses, etc.
Obilgatory story (Score:5, Interesting) by uniqueCondition (769252) on Tuesday March 22, @07:45PM (#12018209) GH Hardy (he wrote A Mathematician's Apology) speaking of Ramanujan:
I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
(London 1940).
A funny co-incidence happened about 10 years ago that brought this story to mind when I moved back from A2 to Detroit. Our new phone number ended in 1729. Of course my GF complained that it would be hard to remember since it was such an un-interesting phone number!
Now add "synergistic on demand agile grid XML" to it, and do your IPO on wall street.
Actually, the University of Wisconsin has a long history of turning academic research into commercial products. Lots of vitamin research was done at the U-W. So when you see vitamin-D in milk, think U-W.
Vitamin-K, think U-W. The generic name of a very popular anti-coagulant (vitamin K antagonist) is Warfarin. WARF = Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation - whose purpose is to handle the commercial applications of research. Guess who has the largest and fanciest building on the Madison campus?
If people start asking intimate questions: "who do you have your telephone with? it's a scam. If they ask "are you the owner of this business" and then ask *another* question about the business it's a scam.
Even legitimate businesses are not much better. I get numerous calls from clueless wankers who want to sell me something but don't bother to take a few seconds to prepare for their sales call by doing some homework about my business. Examples - local TV stations that want me to buy ad time.
Q: Can you send me something on your demographics, coverage area or cost per M?
A: No.
But Mitnick is right about one thing. Technology can always be bypassed by subverting people. Spies have known this since ancient times. (Remember the story of the walls of Jehrico? Rahab the spy was a harlot!)
MSDOS was generally considered something of an improvement.
My memory from the time (C.1981?) is that MS-DOS was considered a crappy low-rent OS (the alternative on the IBM PC being CPM-86 or whatever it was called) -- but cheap.
Cheap usually wins...
I remember that MS DOS 0.x was so bad that IBM rewrote it and released it as PC-DOS.
I did work on a CP/M-86 a bit later. A NEC-APC with 8" floppy disks. At that time operating systems from Digital Research were seen as being much more sophisticated. IIRC, DR had MP/M which allowed multiple concurrent users. It was only with DOS 2.x which had sub-directories and borrowed some *nix features, that DOS was really worth using. Anyone who programmed in that era remembers the horrors of writing programs which used 1.x style FCBs (file control blocks) instead of the much more decent 2.x type file handles.
A side note. One of the CP/M isms that persisted in MS-DOS was using Control-P to toggle console output being echoed to the printer. This still works, somewhat, even in Windows XP!
Actually I once had a very early DOS manual which showed that you could use a CP/M compatability interface built into MS-DOS which maps 8080 registers to the 8086 and does a CALL 5 from DOS.
Here's my guess about the dollar sign. It was borrowed from somewhere else. CP/M resembles various operating systems from Digital Equipment (DEC). Say you are editing in TECO. You use the key to indicate the end of a string. It echoes on the console as $. Also note that $ comes up in *nix style regular expressions as a meta-character meaning end of string.
I did see ads at the time for Q-DOS and SCP (Seattle Computer Products). There was an add-on board for the Apple II that had an 8088 on it that would run Q-DOS. (MS-DOS came later with the "PC-Transporter".)
As for the paternity of DOS, Kildall wrote CP/M in PL/M, a dialect of PL/I that was actually itself written in FORTRAN. (You can get the source from any one of a number of web sites which feature software from DR.) Patterson wrote an OS with a similar interface . CP/M's system calls were well described in manuals available to anyone who had CP/M.
As to source for CP/M - probably not. But IBM did provide ASM source for its ROM BIOS in one of its tech reference manuals.
Note that these characters are in PET-ASCII. Lower and upper case are interchanged due to the way the PET/C-64 keyboard works.
This made for lots of fun uploading files to a C-64 based BBS which required reversing the case before sending so they would display properly.
As for strange data transfer media, I'm sure almost everyone here is too young to remember paper tape. Also for a short time, there was a type of bar code reader (Cauzin Softstrip) which read in programs printed in magazines. You could either type in the program listing or scan it in. (Not that you really need yet another BASIC program to keep your recipe cards in order.)
my take is: what's the point? Oakland is one of the richest counties in the U.S.A.
Patterson is a big name politician who loves technology. Does any one remember if "Automation Alley", which Patterson promoted heavily, lived up to its promises? It's really about attracting business, and expanding the tax rolls.
As a former resident of Oakland county, I take Patterson with a _large_ grain of salt.
I have to say my interest in the article plunged through the floor when I saw the example using Bush/WMDs as the subject. I immediately realized I'm either reading something written by a college student or someone who has not matured much beyond that. How gauche.
*College student?* I wrote this kind of stuff back in *grade school* in 1962 in FORTRAN except back then it was JFK.
_flame on_ Considering the commercial, political and generally juvenile slide slashdot has taken lately, this is about par for the course. _flame off_
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. First, 12% means that a lot of sets will be effected, but the additional problem in in who will be effected.
Not necessarily the poor. How about those of us in rural areas who rely on fringe reception? Does a digital over the air signal degrade with distance like analog (eventually you get snow and loss of chroma, but you can still watch it) or does it reach a point where you get blocks of goo or nothing at all?
There are large areas, particularly vacation areas where there is not much TV at all. Also how many campgrounds have cable and how many campers have dishes?
I agree. First, 12% means that a lot of sets will be effected, but the additional problem in in who will be effected.
It's not just poorer people who will lose out. There are large parts of rural America where fringe reception is important. Analog TV signals degrade with distance, but depending on your tolerance for snow and loss of chroma, you can still watch them. Where I live, in rural Mid-Michigan, summer skip brings in signals from all over the state. North of here I imagine quite a few summer vacationers will soon be unhappy to discover that unless you have a dish or cable, there is no TV at all. (I have yet to see a camper with a dish!)
Link to a PDF
This paper does not explain the "why", but what it really is doing is computing a continued fraction approximation. This is a sequence of fractions with increasing numerators and denominators which approaches a value. It uses a variant of Euclid's algorithm to compute what are known as "partial quotients". Using a recursion formula, it is possible to evaluate these to produce an approximation, called a convergent.
At each step you end up with a rational approximation which alternately overshoots or undershoots. What is interesting is that if you stop at some point, the approximation you have is "best" with respect to the denominator involved.
Although there are more direct ways to derive commonly used fractional approximations for PI, it is illustrative to take a floating point value and compute the first few fractions.
PI is approximately equal to 3.14159. Its integer part is 3. 1/.14159 = 7.0626. So the first approximation is 3 1/7 = 22/7. 1/.0626 = 15.96 So the second approximation is 3 + 1/(7+1/(16-e)) = 355/113, and so on. (Actually I'm cheating a bit, the actual convergents are
3/1, 22/7, 333/106, 355/113 and so on.)
22/7 is quite good considering its small denominator. 355/113 is even better.
It results in things like the current /. fortune:
Why don't you fix your little problem... and light this candle? -- Alan Shepherd, the first man into space, Gemini program
If this doesn't make you cry you probably had too much homework and too little teaching.
Ouch. While talking to our new receptionist after she was first hired, I found out she was of German ancestry and had some famous relatives. (She was trying to help her oldest child with his homework by looking up her family tree.) I mentioned that there was a very large wave of German immigration into the US in the 19th century. So she asked me "Did they come here to escape Hitler?"
For 90% of what people use a scripting language for, Rexx beats the pants of Perl. it's easy to use and it's _readable_.
Certainly true for the only real application I've written in Rexx. It's a program that uses 10-20 digit integers. Exact arithmetic is more important than speed. While developing and testing the program over several months, I enjoyed being able to insert and remove debugging and diagnostic code with ease. In the process I found and reported a number of bugs in one vendor's implimentation of Rexx.
"Please. You can't fix social problems with technological solutions."
Are you joking? I don't even know where to start. Let's start with this. You are at a computer somewhere in the world. If semiconductors were to vanish tomorrow, wherever you are, your government would collapse...
Specious argument. Dig your self in deeper. It's primarily a people problem, something that narrow minded gadget loving geeks with a sense of entitlement are unable to understand.
Easy Solution: Make people buy something to use wifi, and propose a 2-hour limit, or however much you deem necessary
Please. You can't fix social problems with technological solutions.
I have a penis*. Therefore, in a rape case, this can be construed as criminal intent.
Yes, you've been attending the lectures of Professor MacKinnon at the University of Michigan Law school again.
Well, if I use a gun in a robbery, that makes it armed robbery. But if I own a gun that is not used in the robber (say it's locked in a safe at home) does any robbery I undertake automatically become armed robbery? I mean, don't you think there should be evidence that I actually used the gun in the robbery?
Actually something like this took place in a high profile local case here where my GF's sister sat on the jury. A criminal was convicted of burglary and home invasion. There was a gun in a bag at the scene (belonging to the home owner) that was not used in the commission of the crime, but the criminal knew it was there. Since he had a long prior record, the gun offense added considerably to his sentence.
Remember Ted Turner's colorized classics? It was a big thing that never really went anywhere, because in the end it just didn't look right.
Bingo. Black and white film is a different art form both in still pictures and in movies. Some of the color choices were so bad the movies looked like cartoons or really bad WWII era color footage. (Maybe ok when recycling mediocre war pictures.)
Must be a real moron because his "blackmail-letter" is a file called attention!!!.txt, containing this:
Some files are coded.
To buy decoder mail: n781567@yahoo.com
with subject: PGPcoder 000000000032
Sheesh. Any of you youngsters remember the Brain virus? It popped up a message saying essentially "To disinfect your computer contact XYZ computer services at $phone_number, $city, Pakistan." IIRC this virus was frequently distributed through copies of pirated software.
Actually, parent's post is pretty insightful -- if you encounter a person with a prefrontal cortex lesion , the *last* thing you'll notice about their condition is their inability to understand sarcasm.
But it's not a complete suprise that the area thought responsible is in the pre-frontal cortex.
Now if someone had discovered this in the occipital lobe, that really would have been a discovery!
Oh good. Now they will be adding jokes to the standard neuro exam:
"Two medical students walk into a bar...."
Even worse are Star Wars promotions at Burger King. These include sign up CDs for AOL with Darth Vader on the front. How appropriate, considering what AOL did to the Internet.
AOL to TW: "Don't underestimate the power of the dark side."
It's a flawed analysis. They study implies that these people otherwise wouldn't have these days off.
Actually it's a stupid story. Why don't they write a story about lost productivity around November 15th - the start of hunting season?
To me, the most interesting point is that this material is being tested as a replacement for expansion joints. This would allow more bridges to be paved with concrete instead of being covered by asphalt.
Michigan is in fact the ideal place to test this stuff. We have
1. Two seasons, winter and road construction.
2. State government that neglects roads and bridges until past the point of needing repair.
See recent news stories about chunks of concrete falling down on traffic under freeway overpasses, etc.
Obilgatory story (Score:5, Interesting)
by uniqueCondition (769252) on Tuesday March 22, @07:45PM (#12018209)
GH Hardy (he wrote A Mathematician's Apology) speaking of Ramanujan:
I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
(London 1940).
A funny co-incidence happened about 10 years ago that brought this story to mind when I moved back from A2 to Detroit. Our new phone number ended in 1729. Of course my GF complained that it would be hard to remember since it was such an un-interesting phone number!
Now add "synergistic on demand agile grid XML" to it, and do your IPO on wall street.
Actually, the University of Wisconsin has a long history of turning academic research into commercial products. Lots of vitamin research was done at the U-W. So when you see vitamin-D in milk, think U-W.
Vitamin-K, think U-W. The generic name of a very popular anti-coagulant (vitamin K antagonist) is Warfarin. WARF = Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation - whose purpose is to handle the commercial applications of research. Guess who has the largest and fanciest building on the Madison campus?
If people start asking intimate questions: "who do you have your telephone with? it's a scam. If they ask "are you the owner of this business" and then ask *another* question about the business it's a scam.
Even legitimate businesses are not much better. I get numerous calls from clueless wankers who want to sell me something but don't bother to take a few seconds to prepare for their sales call by doing some homework about my business. Examples - local TV stations that want me to buy ad time.
Q: Can you send me something on your demographics, coverage area or cost per M?
A: No.
But Mitnick is right about one thing. Technology can always be bypassed by subverting people. Spies have known this since ancient times. (Remember the story of the walls of Jehrico? Rahab the spy was a harlot!)
MSDOS was generally considered something of an improvement.
My memory from the time (C.1981?) is that MS-DOS was considered a crappy low-rent OS (the alternative on the IBM PC being CPM-86 or whatever it was called) -- but cheap.
Cheap usually wins...
I remember that MS DOS 0.x was so bad that IBM rewrote it and released it as PC-DOS.
I did work on a CP/M-86 a bit later. A NEC-APC with 8" floppy disks. At that time operating systems from Digital Research were seen as being much more sophisticated. IIRC, DR had MP/M which allowed multiple concurrent users. It was only with DOS 2.x which had sub-directories and borrowed some *nix features, that DOS was really worth using. Anyone who programmed in that era remembers the horrors of writing programs which used 1.x style FCBs (file control blocks) instead of the much more decent 2.x type file handles.
Slashdot ate my "alt-mode" aka "escape key".
A side note. One of the CP/M isms that persisted in MS-DOS was using Control-P to toggle console output being echoed to the printer. This still works, somewhat, even in Windows XP!
Maybe you're thinking of the fact that the MS-DOS's Print String function use the dollar sign as a string terminator?
CP/M: MVI C,9 ; LXI D,MSG ; CALL 5
DOS: MOV AH,9 ; MOV DX, OFFSET MSG ; INT 21
Actually I once had a very early DOS manual which showed that you could use a CP/M compatability interface built into MS-DOS which maps 8080 registers to the 8086 and does a CALL 5 from DOS.
Here's my guess about the dollar sign. It was borrowed from somewhere else. CP/M resembles various operating systems from Digital Equipment (DEC). Say you are editing in TECO. You use the key to indicate the end of a string. It echoes on the console as $. Also note that $ comes up in *nix style regular expressions as a meta-character meaning end of string.
I did see ads at the time for Q-DOS and SCP (Seattle Computer Products). There was an add-on board for the Apple II that had an 8088 on it that would run Q-DOS. (MS-DOS came later with the "PC-Transporter".)
As for the paternity of DOS, Kildall wrote CP/M in PL/M, a dialect of PL/I that was actually itself written in FORTRAN. (You can get the source from any one of a number of web sites which feature software from DR.) Patterson wrote an OS with a similar interface . CP/M's system calls were well described in manuals available to anyone who had CP/M.
As to source for CP/M - probably not. But IBM did provide ASM source for its ROM BIOS in one of its tech reference manuals.
LDA #115
JSR $FFD2
Note that these characters are in PET-ASCII. Lower and upper case are interchanged due to the way the PET/C-64 keyboard works.
This made for lots of fun uploading files to a C-64 based BBS which required reversing the case before sending so they would display properly.
As for strange data transfer media, I'm sure almost everyone here is too young to remember paper tape. Also for a short time, there was a type of bar code reader (Cauzin Softstrip) which read in programs printed in magazines. You could either type in the program listing or scan it in.
(Not that you really need yet another BASIC program to keep your recipe cards in order.)
my take is: what's the point? Oakland is one of the richest counties in the U.S.A.
Patterson is a big name politician who loves technology. Does any one remember if "Automation Alley", which Patterson promoted heavily, lived up to its promises? It's really about attracting business, and expanding the tax rolls.
As a former resident of Oakland county, I take Patterson with a _large_ grain of salt.
"18 months in a Minnesota prison may only seem like 2000 years."
Add a regular diet of lutefisk to the sentence!
I have to say my interest in the article plunged through the floor when I saw the example using Bush/WMDs as the subject. I immediately realized I'm either reading something written by a college student or someone who has not matured much beyond that. How gauche.
*College student?* I wrote this kind of stuff back in *grade school* in 1962 in FORTRAN except back then it was JFK.
_flame on_
Considering the commercial, political and generally juvenile slide slashdot has taken lately, this is about par for the course.
_flame off_