The idea of programming universal remotes has always seemed backwards to me. Why not have your TV/VCR/DVD/Stereo program your remote for you instead (one button triggers a training mode)? Granted companies would have to agree to some remote standard language, but with 2-way communication between remote and home appliance, there are probably lots of interactive features just waiting to be invented. It opens the field to including remote operation to devices not normally set to have remotes (since they wouldn't actually have to bundle a remote). A really robust standard would separate buying appliances and the remotes that control them.
While we're at it, how about a capacitor or something to hold a remote's programming long enough to change the battery?
How about having the TV warn me when my remote's batteries are getting low?
Remote finder (this one has already been done), have the remote beep.
Why do most Universal remotes only have 3-6 devices? Why not 10 or 20, say by hitting a number button after a device button? It's certainly not for lack of memory.
Mostly I want my universal remote to always be able to get to the Menu/Programming/Timer operations. With a trainable remote this should be no problem. Why so many devices and universal remotes are incompatible at this level is beyond me.
While these Uber remotes no doubt address these last 2 points, they seem vast overkill for something that should be simple and flexible, but instead is stupid and obtuse.
Always a small dollop of good news from the Hot Fusion camp every 6 months or so. It gets to seem like a snail race between Z-Pinch, Magnetic Confinement, and Laser Implosion. Now it turns out that Cold Fusion may not be entirely dead (see March 29, 2003 issue of New Scientist, on US Navy research into Cold Fusion -- sorry no online version yet). Add Muon catalyzation , and you have 5 potential avenues to Fusion.
From the outside it looks to be a competition, and mutually exclusive at that. What are the possibilities of hybridizing these methods? Could all 5 approaches come together and cooperate towards solving this puzzle? I can even suggest a few new Fusion approaches of my own.
Fusion is generally considered clean compared to Fission, at least in direct by-products (your containment vessel is another matter due to high-energy neutron bombardment). Could we abandon the completely clean approach to get across the finish line, and then improve towards pure forms of Fusion? By this I mean Fusion-Fission hybrids similar to an H-Bomb, which uses the neutron burst (and heat and compression) from a fission reaction to trigger a fusion reaction. Would seeding our deuterium-tritium pellets with cores of plutonium, or other more unstable isotopes, yield better conversion ratios? Can micro critical masses be achieved by compression with fissionable products? How about micro fission generators, that rely on micro fission explosions. Then like our theoretically perfect fusion reactors, it would be impossible to go critical, because you would never have the fuel density to achieve run away fission (take away the compressive mechanism, no fission).
Anyway I'm just a lay person, but I figure there should be a few good Physicists in the forum, that could answer my core question about whether there a hybrid approaches being tired. I would be especially intrigued to learn if muon catalyzation has been tried with any of the other 4 approaches. For those unfamiliar with muon catalyzation, the essential idea is that an electron can be displaced by a muon for short periods of time, with a subsequent huge reduction in the size of the electron/muon orbital cloud, allowing atoms to come much closer together before mutual repulsion forces them apart. Thus a much lower thermal energy is needed for fusion -- hope I got that right:-)
I think you can detect the intersection of two common promotion techniques here:
1. Define your idea/agenda in a proactive, positive way, ala pro-life vs. anti-abortion or pro-choice vs. pro-abortion.
2. Parasitic exposure to a wider audience, or an audience that is seeking something other than what you have to deliver. Consider this the Spammizing of culture and marketing.
As to this latter trend, the more media channels there are to promulgate a message, the more intense seems to become the competition to exploit them by whatever means.
As an industrial process, 500 degrees (at least if it's Fahrenheit), doesn't
sound all that bad. How about combining this with Geothermal?
We get all our OIL from Yellowstone!
More likely as pointed out by LimpGumpy in the next thread, the process is 85%
efficient, so you can just use 15% of your output once you get the cycle started
BTW, I did read the Discovery article, so as mentioned by others, not likely a hoax.
We all tend to look at the world through the lens of our own experience. It maybe a vicarious experience, but sci-fi is still an experience that widens ones perspective.
I work as a software tester, a task I seem fair well suited for, and which I fair well enjoy. Perhaps it is because in my case I get to occupy some strange in-between world, where I get to do a lot of coding myself (I write programs that run, test, and torture other programs).
I remember reading Jurassic Park, and the programming flaw described in the novel that allowed an undercounting of the dinosaurs on Isle Nubar. Michael Crichton does an excellent job of describing a software system that works in theory, but not in practice. Faulty assumptions about what software will encounter in the field should always be a concern. As a tester or SQA specialist, should never rely on the assurances of coders and designers as to what is the important functioning of a system, and what is an unimportant glitch or missing functionality that will have no impact on end users. It isn't possible to make perfect (large) systems, but reliance on faulty assumptions can be the worst bugs of all, because they will not show up in things like compiler warnings.
No, no, no. If you start with "In Soviet Russia", then the obligatory ending in this context would be:
You don't clone wooly mammoths, wooly mammoths clone you.
-- apologies to Yakov Smirnoff
The trick is finding a niche and making sure you found out what needs to be done and then do it.
I didn't get into IT until I was 30, and am now 44, and see no reason I would stop before 65, in fact I imagine working until 70. I worked 10 years for Wolfram Research, before moving on to SAIC (and this was for better pay). I specialize in test automation. Perhaps my "better pay" would be embarrassing small for you east coast and west coast IT types, but its very good pay for the mid-west, and I squirrel away a good amount in a co-pay 401K and buy a reasonable amount of SAIC stock.
I have been lucky to find jobs that have a scientific flavor. And of course my niche is less about programming paradigm and more about program functionality. I use PERL to script complex tasks in verification along with Android for GUI tasks. At Wolfram I used Mathematica to script and test Mathematica (of course this is only possible because it is a general-purpose language). But I still use sh and csh for some (very short) scripting tasks. I plan on learning more languages in the future (I will omit the rather longish list of past learned languages), but have a very pragmatic attitude about code - you use what gets the job done in the least painful and most maintainable fashion. Don't crucify yourself on the bleeding edge of technology.
For those of you actually in testing (a niche that sometimes garners little respect), my best advise for job security - stay on mission. Perhaps this would apply to other IT areas as well. You have to promote an agenda that is good for the product and the company, and not become the lackeys of the development staff (without becoming quality assurance trolls).
"That's what digital rights management does: it enables business models."
Of course these business models can be as irritating, restrictive, and coercive as all get out.
I can't help but notice that the entertainment industry (including sports), is all about getting more and more money for giving you essentially the same thing. Commodities of all other types become cheaper to purchase, higher in quality, and packed with more functionality. The reason the entertainment industry gets away with this outrageous behavior (other than their huge lobbying efforts in congress) is that by definition entertainment is perceived of as a luxury. If manufacturers of the necessities of life treated consumers this way they would be hauled before congress, and made to explain themselves.
Cable companies tend to be local monopolies and act accordingly. Our local cable is structured such that you can get a 10 dollar basic cable rate, but this only gives you the same channels you can get with a rabbit ear antenna, and at not much higher quality, the next "tier" is over 4 times more expensive. Throwing in a load of crap you probably don't want and making the next bump up to HBO and Showtime seem much more sensible (hell it's only 10 dollars more...). Do you know of any other products that go from entry level to more than 4x plus luxury model with no other steps between? Even with the full service, some ad-supported channels are scrambled. I have paid for "The Sci-Fi" channel, but I can't set my VCR to tape it directly, I have to be sure and leave the Sci-Fi channel on, and record it from my cable box (there is some user unfriendly way to program your cable box for a timed recording, so now you have two things to program, and multiple points of failure possible).
Of course the more money the entertainment industry can make, the more money that can be collected in taxes. Thus the government has the same addiction to increasing entertainment revenues, the same way they are now addicted to increasing gambling and lotto revenues, whether their citizenry spending a disproportionate percentage their income on these things is a good thing or not.
Worst of all is the disdain the industry has for its customers. We have all seen the FBI warning at the beginning of a VCR tape, and accordingly fast-forwarded through. Now comes DVD, and you must sit patently sit through this thing every time (which has been timed for slow readers), and if you try to skip forward, I think in some cases it resets the time out clock. Of late I also get to sit through this warning in two other languages as well. Some DVDs even force you sit through commercials for related projects. I bought this DVD, I own it, it shouldn't lock me out of controlling my DVD player. It also shouldn't surreptitiously put software on my computer if I choose to view it there, nor coerce me into installing special software to view. Guess what, that improved DVD viewer they offer you is likely to break your sound drivers, and if it's your mom or dad, being good citizens by following the DVD instructions, well then they are just screwed, since the DVD distributors really don't have any legitimate reason to be mucking around with your computer's settings, and now every thing is horribly broken (I still have trouble explaining to my dad why the play button on the DVD remote won't play the DVD, and he has to "select" play from the entry screen with the select button).
So now we want to give the over the air broadcasters the power to be just as manipulative and coercive as cable and DVD? Ironic that I took my digital rights for granted until everyone suddenly wants to manage them for me.
Though not a fan, Wesley Refrigeration has a novel cooling method involving dumping crushed ice on the CPU. The Wesley Crusher has not met with much market success yet, though Wesley keeps promising more and better New Generation plans.
The September 11th terrorists engaged all sorts of nervous, suspicious behavior, and security guards didn't notice, or felt in inappropriate to subject them to further scrutiny (yes, yes, they let them get through with box cutters when they shouldn't, yadda, yadda).
Is it appropriate or inappropriate for a human to make the call for further scrutiny based on nervous and suspicious behavior? If it is appropriate, then why is it bad for machines to detect suspicious and nervous behavior in these situations? Despite the reference to "Mind Reading", the technology, whether based on reading brainwaves or other physiologic responses, is really only looking for signs of heightened agitation. Yes there will be false positive (especially at introduction of these technologies), but why are these false positives inherently worse, than false positives by alert security officers detecting suspicious behavior?
For arguments sake, lets assume a 100% accuracy rate in detecting stress or agitation. Should nervous or agitated people be allowed to fly without some attempt to ascertain the source of their agitation?
Now they may have a personal reason they don't wish to divulge.
"I'm afraid of flying"
"I just got a divorce"
"I'm moving to a new job"
"I'm afraid of being asked why I'm afraid"
They should just be informed they can/should respond:
"Yes I am feeling some degree of stress for personal reasons."
Many may be surprised to learn they are giving off signs of being stressed, which may of benefit for them to be aware of.
Gun toting terrorists are likely respond with the majority in saying:
"Yes I am feeling some degree of stress for personal reasons"
But they would still have shown up to security screens as requiring extra attention.
While such automated scrutiny is likely to stress some people, especially at introduction, it could potentially make airport checking much quicker for the majority, and even for the minority, since their additional screening occurs immediately, instead of in line with everyone.
I agree there should be checks and balances for the use of such technologies. They are not appropriate for all areas, but to reject them outright in all situations is probably short sighted. Many things in life are a compromise from the ideal. The ideal freedom would be to board all planes with no screening, and having them fall from the sky in some percentage due to terrorism, which would just be the price we pay for complete privacy and freedom. I'm sure x-ray screening technologies were initially seen by some as too intrusive. As threat scales up, so must our technological intervention.
False positives must be assumed to occur, and those people that need further screening must be handled in such a way as not to stigmatize them, stress them further, or alarm other passengers. Even without this technology, near strip searches in front of other boarding passengers fails this requirement.
BTW, I would rather respond to why this would be bad, if the technology works, rather than why it won't work, which in all truth may not work well enough now, but can probably be made to work well enough in the future.
Let my pillorying begin at the hands of/. Freedom Fighers.:-)
Expect and Xtest have already been mentioned. Android runs on top of these and can be
downloaded free for Linux and Unix
See the July 2001 issue of "Dr. Dobb's Journal" for an overview of Android and how to download.
Plays back keyboard and mouse events for most UNIX implementations. (maybe even Mac OS X) It is a little bit roll-your-own Expect to spend some time writing perl to support your android scripts.
Despite criticism that the estimates are too high, due to lower densities elsewhere in the galaxy, I suspect 10% is low for our region, I would guess actual planetary densities to be at 50-90 percent or higher. Remember that the 10% are only confirmed planetary systems nearby. This DOESN'T say the remaining 90% don't have planets, just that we haven't detected them with our relatively crude methods so far.
This is great news for SETI -- it was only a couple of decades ago we had no idea whether planetary systems were relatively common or not.
In fact there was a camp predicting planets to be extemely rare. I guess they have mutated into the "Rare Earth" crowd, and become more specific:-)
If you will look two posts up in this same thread (also by myself, DumbSwede), you will see that I flesh out the verification process, as the original author of this method for Wolfram. With out automatic and reliable verification, this method only uncovers catastrophic error conditions like crashes (which can be a valuable exercise in itself). When thing go wrong, you have to be able to trace back the series of events, so you keep updating a log of every action performed.
As explained the first time, many operations are symmetric, especially in the case of Mathematica, which is why it works so well at Wolfram. In some rare cases a symmetric operation may make and then erase a potential bug find, but it is very, very rare. Most often a bug is amplified when doing a series of symmetric operations. For a simple example, take factoring a polynomial expression, subtracting the original polynomial from the factored one and simplifying should give 0. It won't tell you that the factoring was done correctly, but it will tell the attempted factorization was not equivalent algebraically. More than this, it will tell you if your simplification algorithm was strong enough to find the two expressions equal to Zero after subtraction. One trick to this method is finding non-trivial ways to generate good mathematical examples randomly, for which I spent years coming up with a bag of tricks to do. The other trick is finding a testable pass condition. In the case of symmetric operations, the pass is that you got the original back, or Zero after a Subtraction (if you are testing something mathematical in nature). For the many Matrix operations, you test for properties that hold after a transformation, such as knowing what the determinate should be, or performing a series of events that will eventually lead to an identity matrix.
But don't just think Math here, think any testable property that data should have after a known series of events, even if you generate those events randomly. Hint, you may have generated the events randomly, but you know what they where, and can factor that into creating additional deterministic operations, that lead to a testable property - a property that doesn't need eyeballs to test.
A final note here. The real power of random testing is not that any one test is better than one test by a knowledgeable human - it is that it can do MILLIONS of more tests than a knowledgeable human in a given time frame. Most of the tests will pass, most combinations absurd in their utility, many will be repeated in trivial combinations, BUT if you only find one bug after 1000 tests random tests, you could still potentially find 100 to 1000 bugs a day, remember you only have to eyeball the Failures. Some days I came close to that hundred figure, with 20,000 bugs reported in my tenure at Wolfram. Bugs, you won't see in Mathematica, but most likely would have, without random testing.
OK, A final-final note.
We even mused about a creating a utility for customers to use that would constantly delve Mathematica for obscure hidden bugs during computer idle time, very much like SETI@HOME. The powers to be, didn't want to give the impression to customers that there would be any bugs in the product that should be looked for.
Some people will now be able to guess the identity of DumbSwede, but I was really shocked to see the Wolfram testing method mentioned, because I invented it (for Wolfram at least), back in 1989. Stephen himself gave me credit for this type of testing numerous times, at various conferences, when I was still with the company.
I didn't invent random testing in general, but with a mathematically based language like Mathematica, many operations are symmetric algebraically. If I generate a random algebraic expression, Integrate it, then Differentiate it, then it should then match (after simplification or variable substitutions) the original Integrand. This was the first type of random test that I designed for Wolfram, and man did it find slews of problems with V1.0 versions of Mathematica. Back when I worked part time and was an undergrad at U of I (more clues to who DumbSwede is).
I worked developing scores of other math identity verification procedures for Wolfram over a 10 year period, then sadly, moved on (I use to really enjoy pounding on that code).
Even things like word processors can be tested in this fashion. If you randomly add 10 characters, then delete those 10 characters, should get you the original file back.
Operations do not always have to be symmetric, but they have to have some testable property or identity after a series of events.
While this kind of testing doesn't replace other types of testing, I guarantee it takes you into a whole new bug-space you didn't even guess existed with your software, requiring a more mathematically consistent way of handling data.
On a related note, for GUI based apps, having a way to script equivalent events is a must. Where I work today, we use Android to play back GUI events, but I pre-process the Android scripts, (that I have peppered with replaceable tags) to do things like random testing or repetitive testing over many inputs, rather than have a static GUI test, that can only simulate one very narrow set of events.
My cell phone is often on a charger, either at home or in the car, so no problem with battery drainage.
No doubt being used as a relay would be an opt in proposition with many settings like your laptop sleep and idle modes. For instance, only relay while on a charger, only relay while over 50% charge, only relay 50% as many calls (power equivalent) as actual usage. Etc...
Users to be rewarded by relay discount points in their bills (think frequent flyer miles).
Encryption no more (or less) needed than regular phone. Why hack your relay phone, when you can just buy a scanner?
Maybe my phone will work in this near underground apartment, relaying though the phones above, then out.
More available bandwidth, more calls can get through, by using smaller, but more numerous relay towers, that are closer together, or hop around a tower that is saturated, like often happens Friday nights in this College town.
Huge events (or disasters) less likely to completely jam network (continue hopping until getting to an unsaturated tower).
Mini towers possible, by tying phones into land-lines or cable modems. Again, a customer discount or credit option.
With a diffuse enough network, and mbone like simulcasting, 4G services like mobile HDTV.
Cellphone network compatible laptops should hardly notice the relay drainage, compared to regular greedy CPU use.
There is something that strikes me about it though...
40 of the top Fifty are pure fantasy-escapism (I'm including historical settings as escapism).
Of the remaining 10, about 4 are Action flicks, and 2 are comedies.
Of the 50 only "The Exorcist" qualifies as horror.
So why is Hollywood so obsessed with churning out Action flicks, Comedies and Horror???
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy good examples of any of these three genre.
I can only guess, that the kind of escapism in films I guess most/. like myself crave, are not only great when they succeed, but spectacular failures when they don't.
In addition to all the other explanations about light and distance, is the fact that all though galaxies are far away, they are also very big. One might assume because one can only see a small smudge where Andromada lies in the sky, that it's arc size is small. NOT so! Andromoda is more than 2 full moons wide in apparent size if your eyes were sensitive enough to see its very dim constituent stars. The impressive pictures of Andromoda on astronomy books are not due to great magnification, but to long exposure to gather light. Even if you gather enough light from Pluto, its apparent arc size is still miniscule.
I am a strong SETI supporter, but acknowledge the need for estimating chances of success in order to rationally allocate resources in the quest.
What I find especially troubling here is the implication that since by the author's estimates the odds are low, then the search should be abandoned as a poor use of resources.
Resource allocation has to be balanced against possible return on investment, which in this case is hard to quantify, but possibly huge.
One need to also look at what can be done today at what cost, and what can be done tomorrow at what cost. One can reasonably predict computer price/power ratio to exponentially increase for at least the next 2 decades, if not the next 5 decades. If the computer power needed to reasonably search data (SETI@home aside), won't exist for 5 or 10 years, then plans should be made as to when larger searches should be started, based on when affordable compute time will be available. This is tied up in making best guess estimates on approximate distance to intelligent civilizations, likely broadcast power, distance signal could be detected from, etc...
While there are many factors that can be used to better bound Drakes' equations, has as been pointed out by an earlier poster, one most not assume all factors likely to have helped intelligent life establish here on Earth are required (like the large Moon hypotheses). To add to this, what is not factored in (and cannot be known at this time), are what other life advantageous factors, other planets may have that Earth lacks. While there may be a few strict requirements for life, there are likely hundreds of life promoting effects, of which we do not know what subset Earth has.
OK, I'll bite.
Ha, Ha, I must be Dumb as in DumbSwede.
Why is this a dumb question? The article, which I read in full mentions shrinking radiator footprint as a major application. If this is so important, why haven't other methods been employed to reduce footprint. This is a little off topic, but is raised in the article.
Sounds like this could be used for lots of heat transfer applications, but I have one question.
If radiators on cars and truck create such drag, why not mount them on the front side fenders sideways?
There would be some drag from the protruding fins slicing through air, but much less than air plunging into the engine compartment. Or does the engine need additional cooling besides the circulating coolant?
Having never been sued, is it normal for civil suits to serve notice by mail? (certified or not). Somehow a piece of mail, even one you have to sign for doesn't seem quite as effective as someone handing you a notice and saying
"You have been served." I have had to sign for mailings that were nothing more than vacation scams to Florida.
Ally McBeal would never mail a lawsuit notice.
Taking a job is a lot like investing.
The more risk exposure the greater the potential reward.
These people rolled the dice and lost. Boo hoo.
I stayed in the Midwest after graduating from the U of I,
with a rather unglamours tech job (which I still enjoy by the way).
Less pay than on the coasts, but a much lower cost of living area.
I confess that just before the dot com bust I considered moving off
to the west coast to play with the big boys, but now it seems I made the
far smarter move by staying put.
Speaking of moving, there other areas of the country with tech jobs -- still unfilled,
because the coasts ate up all the good talent. Now maybe talent will be more
evenly distributed across the country. `Course you'll have to give up that
I-Made-It techie life style in the valley.
Slashdot Mirror
While we're at it, how about a capacitor or something to hold a remote's programming long enough to change the battery?
How about having the TV warn me when my remote's batteries are getting low?
Remote finder (this one has already been done), have the remote beep.
Why do most Universal remotes only have 3-6 devices? Why not 10 or 20, say by hitting a number button after a device button? It's certainly not for lack of memory.
Mostly I want my universal remote to always be able to get to the Menu/Programming/Timer operations. With a trainable remote this should be no problem. Why so many devices and universal remotes are incompatible at this level is beyond me.
While these Uber remotes no doubt address these last 2 points, they seem vast overkill for something that should be simple and flexible, but instead is stupid and obtuse.
From the outside it looks to be a competition, and mutually exclusive at that. What are the possibilities of hybridizing these methods? Could all 5 approaches come together and cooperate towards solving this puzzle? I can even suggest a few new Fusion approaches of my own.
Fusion is generally considered clean compared to Fission, at least in direct by-products (your containment vessel is another matter due to high-energy neutron bombardment). Could we abandon the completely clean approach to get across the finish line, and then improve towards pure forms of Fusion? By this I mean Fusion-Fission hybrids similar to an H-Bomb, which uses the neutron burst (and heat and compression) from a fission reaction to trigger a fusion reaction. Would seeding our deuterium-tritium pellets with cores of plutonium, or other more unstable isotopes, yield better conversion ratios? Can micro critical masses be achieved by compression with fissionable products? How about micro fission generators, that rely on micro fission explosions. Then like our theoretically perfect fusion reactors, it would be impossible to go critical, because you would never have the fuel density to achieve run away fission (take away the compressive mechanism, no fission).
Anyway I'm just a lay person, but I figure there should be a few good Physicists in the forum, that could answer my core question about whether there a hybrid approaches being tired. I would be especially intrigued to learn if muon catalyzation has been tried with any of the other 4 approaches. For those unfamiliar with muon catalyzation, the essential idea is that an electron can be displaced by a muon for short periods of time, with a subsequent huge reduction in the size of the electron/muon orbital cloud, allowing atoms to come much closer together before mutual repulsion forces them apart. Thus a much lower thermal energy is needed for fusion -- hope I got that right :-)
1. Define your idea/agenda in a proactive, positive way, ala pro-life vs. anti-abortion or pro-choice vs. pro-abortion.
2. Parasitic exposure to a wider audience, or an audience that is seeking something other than what you have to deliver. Consider this the Spammizing of culture and marketing.
As to this latter trend, the more media channels there are to promulgate a message, the more intense seems to become the competition to exploit them by whatever means.
We get all our OIL from Yellowstone!
More likely as pointed out by LimpGumpy in the next thread, the process is 85% efficient, so you can just use 15% of your output once you get the cycle started
BTW, I did read the Discovery article, so as mentioned by others, not likely a hoax.
I work as a software tester, a task I seem fair well suited for, and which I fair well enjoy. Perhaps it is because in my case I get to occupy some strange in-between world, where I get to do a lot of coding myself (I write programs that run, test, and torture other programs).
I remember reading Jurassic Park, and the programming flaw described in the novel that allowed an undercounting of the dinosaurs on Isle Nubar. Michael Crichton does an excellent job of describing a software system that works in theory, but not in practice. Faulty assumptions about what software will encounter in the field should always be a concern. As a tester or SQA specialist, should never rely on the assurances of coders and designers as to what is the important functioning of a system, and what is an unimportant glitch or missing functionality that will have no impact on end users. It isn't possible to make perfect (large) systems, but reliance on faulty assumptions can be the worst bugs of all, because they will not show up in things like compiler warnings.
then the obligatory ending in this context would be:
You don't clone wooly mammoths, wooly mammoths clone you.
-- apologies to Yakov Smirnoff
I didn't get into IT until I was 30, and am now 44, and see no reason I would stop before 65, in fact I imagine working until 70. I worked 10 years for Wolfram Research, before moving on to SAIC (and this was for better pay). I specialize in test automation. Perhaps my "better pay" would be embarrassing small for you east coast and west coast IT types, but its very good pay for the mid-west, and I squirrel away a good amount in a co-pay 401K and buy a reasonable amount of SAIC stock.
I have been lucky to find jobs that have a scientific flavor. And of course my niche is less about programming paradigm and more about program functionality. I use PERL to script complex tasks in verification along with Android for GUI tasks. At Wolfram I used Mathematica to script and test Mathematica (of course this is only possible because it is a general-purpose language). But I still use sh and csh for some (very short) scripting tasks. I plan on learning more languages in the future (I will omit the rather longish list of past learned languages), but have a very pragmatic attitude about code - you use what gets the job done in the least painful and most maintainable fashion. Don't crucify yourself on the bleeding edge of technology.
For those of you actually in testing (a niche that sometimes garners little respect), my best advise for job security - stay on mission. Perhaps this would apply to other IT areas as well. You have to promote an agenda that is good for the product and the company, and not become the lackeys of the development staff (without becoming quality assurance trolls).
Of course these business models can be as irritating, restrictive, and coercive as all get out.
I can't help but notice that the entertainment industry (including sports), is all about getting more and more money for giving you essentially the same thing. Commodities of all other types become cheaper to purchase, higher in quality, and packed with more functionality. The reason the entertainment industry gets away with this outrageous behavior (other than their huge lobbying efforts in congress) is that by definition entertainment is perceived of as a luxury. If manufacturers of the necessities of life treated consumers this way they would be hauled before congress, and made to explain themselves.
Cable companies tend to be local monopolies and act accordingly. Our local cable is structured such that you can get a 10 dollar basic cable rate, but this only gives you the same channels you can get with a rabbit ear antenna, and at not much higher quality, the next "tier" is over 4 times more expensive. Throwing in a load of crap you probably don't want and making the next bump up to HBO and Showtime seem much more sensible (hell it's only 10 dollars more...). Do you know of any other products that go from entry level to more than 4x plus luxury model with no other steps between? Even with the full service, some ad-supported channels are scrambled. I have paid for "The Sci-Fi" channel, but I can't set my VCR to tape it directly, I have to be sure and leave the Sci-Fi channel on, and record it from my cable box (there is some user unfriendly way to program your cable box for a timed recording, so now you have two things to program, and multiple points of failure possible).
Of course the more money the entertainment industry can make, the more money that can be collected in taxes. Thus the government has the same addiction to increasing entertainment revenues, the same way they are now addicted to increasing gambling and lotto revenues, whether their citizenry spending a disproportionate percentage their income on these things is a good thing or not.
Worst of all is the disdain the industry has for its customers. We have all seen the FBI warning at the beginning of a VCR tape, and accordingly fast-forwarded through. Now comes DVD, and you must sit patently sit through this thing every time (which has been timed for slow readers), and if you try to skip forward, I think in some cases it resets the time out clock. Of late I also get to sit through this warning in two other languages as well. Some DVDs even force you sit through commercials for related projects. I bought this DVD, I own it, it shouldn't lock me out of controlling my DVD player. It also shouldn't surreptitiously put software on my computer if I choose to view it there, nor coerce me into installing special software to view. Guess what, that improved DVD viewer they offer you is likely to break your sound drivers, and if it's your mom or dad, being good citizens by following the DVD instructions, well then they are just screwed, since the DVD distributors really don't have any legitimate reason to be mucking around with your computer's settings, and now every thing is horribly broken (I still have trouble explaining to my dad why the play button on the DVD remote won't play the DVD, and he has to "select" play from the entry screen with the select button).
So now we want to give the over the air broadcasters the power to be just as manipulative and coercive as cable and DVD? Ironic that I took my digital rights for granted until everyone suddenly wants to manage them for me.
Though not a fan, Wesley Refrigeration has a novel cooling method involving dumping crushed ice on the CPU. The Wesley Crusher has not met with much market success yet, though Wesley keeps promising more and better New Generation plans.
Oh My God -- Slashdot killed Stephen King
You Bastards
The September 11th terrorists engaged all sorts of nervous, suspicious behavior, and security guards didn't notice, or felt in inappropriate to subject them to further scrutiny (yes, yes, they let them get through with box cutters when they shouldn't, yadda, yadda).
Is it appropriate or inappropriate for a human to make the call for further scrutiny based on nervous and suspicious behavior? If it is appropriate, then why is it bad for machines to detect suspicious and nervous behavior in these situations? Despite the reference to "Mind Reading", the technology, whether based on reading brainwaves or other physiologic responses, is really only looking for signs of heightened agitation. Yes there will be false positive (especially at introduction of these technologies), but why are these false positives inherently worse, than false positives by alert security officers detecting suspicious behavior?
For arguments sake, lets assume a 100% accuracy rate in detecting stress or agitation. Should nervous or agitated people be allowed to fly without some attempt to ascertain the source of their agitation?
Now they may have a personal reason they don't wish to divulge.
"I'm afraid of flying"
"I just got a divorce"
"I'm moving to a new job"
"I'm afraid of being asked why I'm afraid"
They should just be informed they can/should respond:
"Yes I am feeling some degree of stress for personal reasons."
Many may be surprised to learn they are giving off signs of being stressed, which may of benefit for them to be aware of.
Gun toting terrorists are likely respond with the majority in saying:
"Yes I am feeling some degree of stress for personal reasons"
But they would still have shown up to security screens as requiring extra attention.
While such automated scrutiny is likely to stress some people, especially at introduction, it could potentially make airport checking much quicker for the majority, and even for the minority, since their additional screening occurs immediately, instead of in line with everyone.
I agree there should be checks and balances for the use of such technologies. They are not appropriate for all areas, but to reject them outright in all situations is probably short sighted. Many things in life are a compromise from the ideal. The ideal freedom would be to board all planes with no screening, and having them fall from the sky in some percentage due to terrorism, which would just be the price we pay for complete privacy and freedom. I'm sure x-ray screening technologies were initially seen by some as too intrusive. As threat scales up, so must our technological intervention.
False positives must be assumed to occur, and those people that need further screening must be handled in such a way as not to stigmatize them, stress them further, or alarm other passengers. Even without this technology, near strip searches in front of other boarding passengers fails this requirement.
BTW, I would rather respond to why this would be bad, if the technology works, rather than why it won't work, which in all truth may not work well enough now, but can probably be made to work well enough in the future.
Let my pillorying begin at the hands of /. Freedom Fighers. :-)
Android runs on top of these and can be downloaded free for Linux and Unix
See the July 2001 issue of "Dr. Dobb's Journal"
for an overview of Android and how to download.
Plays back keyboard and mouse events for most UNIX implementations. (maybe even Mac OS X)
It is a little bit roll-your-own
Expect to spend some time writing perl to support your android scripts.
This is great news for SETI -- it was only a couple of decades ago we had no idea whether planetary systems were relatively common or not. In fact there was a camp predicting planets to be extemely rare. I guess they have mutated into the "Rare Earth" crowd, and become more specific :-)
If he can get the first suit to stick, then watch out for the second suit he brings -- now with precedence ;-)
As explained the first time, many operations are symmetric, especially in the case of Mathematica, which is why it works so well at Wolfram. In some rare cases a symmetric operation may make and then erase a potential bug find, but it is very, very rare. Most often a bug is amplified when doing a series of symmetric operations. For a simple example, take factoring a polynomial expression, subtracting the original polynomial from the factored one and simplifying should give 0. It won't tell you that the factoring was done correctly, but it will tell the attempted factorization was not equivalent algebraically. More than this, it will tell you if your simplification algorithm was strong enough to find the two expressions equal to Zero after subtraction. One trick to this method is finding non-trivial ways to generate good mathematical examples randomly, for which I spent years coming up with a bag of tricks to do. The other trick is finding a testable pass condition. In the case of symmetric operations, the pass is that you got the original back, or Zero after a Subtraction (if you are testing something mathematical in nature). For the many Matrix operations, you test for properties that hold after a transformation, such as knowing what the determinate should be, or performing a series of events that will eventually lead to an identity matrix.
But don't just think Math here, think any testable property that data should have after a known series of events, even if you generate those events randomly. Hint, you may have generated the events randomly, but you know what they where, and can factor that into creating additional deterministic operations, that lead to a testable property - a property that doesn't need eyeballs to test.
A final note here. The real power of random testing is not that any one test is better than one test by a knowledgeable human - it is that it can do MILLIONS of more tests than a knowledgeable human in a given time frame. Most of the tests will pass, most combinations absurd in their utility, many will be repeated in trivial combinations, BUT if you only find one bug after 1000 tests random tests, you could still potentially find 100 to 1000 bugs a day, remember you only have to eyeball the Failures. Some days I came close to that hundred figure, with 20,000 bugs reported in my tenure at Wolfram. Bugs, you won't see in Mathematica, but most likely would have, without random testing.
OK, A final-final note.
We even mused about a creating a utility for customers to use that would constantly delve Mathematica for obscure hidden bugs during computer idle time, very much like SETI@HOME. The powers to be, didn't want to give the impression to customers that there would be any bugs in the product that should be looked for.
I was really shocked to see the Wolfram testing method mentioned, because
I invented it (for Wolfram at least), back in 1989. Stephen himself gave me
credit for this type of testing numerous times, at various conferences, when I was still with the company.
I didn't invent random testing in general, but with a mathematically based
language like Mathematica, many operations are symmetric algebraically.
If I generate a random algebraic expression, Integrate it, then Differentiate it,
then it should then match (after simplification or variable substitutions) the original
Integrand. This was the first type of random test that I designed for Wolfram, and
man did it find slews of problems with V1.0 versions of Mathematica. Back when I worked part time
and was an undergrad at U of I (more clues to who DumbSwede is).
I worked developing scores of other math identity verification procedures for Wolfram
over a 10 year period, then sadly, moved on (I use to really enjoy pounding on that code).
Even things like word processors can be tested in this fashion. If you randomly add 10 characters, then
delete those 10 characters, should get you the original file back.
Operations do not always have to be symmetric, but they have to have some testable property or
identity after a series of events.
While this kind of testing doesn't replace other types of testing, I guarantee it takes you into
a whole new bug-space you didn't even guess existed with your software, requiring a more mathematically
consistent way of handling data.
On a related note, for GUI based apps, having a way to script equivalent events is a must.
Where I work today, we use Android to play back GUI events, but I pre-process the Android scripts,
(that I have peppered with replaceable tags) to do things like random testing or repetitive testing over
many inputs, rather than have a static GUI test, that can only simulate one very narrow set of events.
My cell phone is often on a charger, either at home or in the car, so no problem with battery drainage. No doubt being used as a relay would be an opt in proposition with many settings like your laptop sleep and idle modes. For instance, only relay while on a charger, only relay while over 50% charge, only relay 50% as many calls (power equivalent) as actual usage. Etc...
Users to be rewarded by relay discount points in their bills (think frequent flyer miles).
Encryption no more (or less) needed than regular phone. Why hack your relay phone, when you can just buy a scanner?
Maybe my phone will work in this near underground apartment, relaying though the phones above, then out.
More available bandwidth, more calls can get through, by using smaller, but more numerous relay towers, that are closer together, or hop around a tower that is saturated, like often happens Friday nights in this College town.
Huge events (or disasters) less likely to completely jam network (continue hopping until getting to an unsaturated tower).
Mini towers possible, by tying phones into land-lines or cable modems. Again, a customer discount or credit option.
With a diffuse enough network, and mbone like simulcasting, 4G services like mobile HDTV.
Cellphone network compatible laptops should hardly notice the relay drainage, compared to regular greedy CPU use.
There is something that strikes me about it though...
40 of the top Fifty are pure fantasy-escapism
(I'm including historical settings as escapism).
Of the remaining 10, about 4 are Action flicks, and 2 are comedies.
Of the 50 only "The Exorcist" qualifies as horror.
So why is Hollywood so obsessed with churning out Action flicks, Comedies and Horror??? Don't get me wrong, I enjoy good examples of any of these three genre. /. like myself crave, are not only great when they succeed, but spectacular failures when they don't.
I can only guess, that the kind of escapism in films I guess most
In addition to all the other explanations about light and distance, is the fact that all though galaxies are far away, they are also very big. One might assume because one can only see a small smudge where Andromada lies in the sky, that it's arc size is small. NOT so! Andromoda is more than 2 full moons wide in apparent size if your eyes were sensitive enough to see its very dim constituent stars. The impressive pictures of Andromoda on astronomy books are not due to great magnification, but to long exposure to gather light. Even if you gather enough light from Pluto, its apparent arc size is still miniscule.
Gets someone needs to code a defence against entries that make the html tables too wide.
What I find especially troubling here is the implication that since by the author's estimates the odds are low, then the search should be abandoned as a poor use of resources.
Resource allocation has to be balanced against possible return on investment, which in this case is hard to quantify, but possibly huge.
One need to also look at what can be done today at what cost, and what can be done tomorrow at what cost. One can reasonably predict computer price/power ratio to exponentially increase for at least the next 2 decades, if not the next 5 decades. If the computer power needed to reasonably search data (SETI@home aside), won't exist for 5 or 10 years, then plans should be made as to when larger searches should be started, based on when affordable compute time will be available. This is tied up in making best guess estimates on approximate distance to intelligent civilizations, likely broadcast power, distance signal could be detected from, etc...
While there are many factors that can be used to better bound Drakes' equations, has as been pointed out by an earlier poster, one most not assume all factors likely to have helped intelligent life establish here on Earth are required (like the large Moon hypotheses). To add to this, what is not factored in (and cannot be known at this time), are what other life advantageous factors, other planets may have that Earth lacks. While there may be a few strict requirements for life, there are likely hundreds of life promoting effects, of which we do not know what subset Earth has.
OK, I'll bite.
Ha, Ha, I must be Dumb as in DumbSwede.
Why is this a dumb question? The article, which I read in full mentions shrinking radiator footprint as a major application. If this is so important, why haven't other methods been employed to reduce footprint. This is a little off topic, but is raised in the article.
Sounds like this could be used for lots of heat transfer applications, but I have one question. If radiators on cars and truck create such drag, why not mount them on the front side fenders sideways? There would be some drag from the protruding fins slicing through air, but much less than air plunging into the engine compartment. Or does the engine need additional cooling besides the circulating coolant?
Having never been sued, is it normal for civil suits to serve notice by mail? (certified or not). Somehow a piece of mail, even one you have to sign for doesn't seem quite as effective as someone handing you a notice and saying "You have been served." I have had to sign for mailings that were nothing more than vacation scams to Florida. Ally McBeal would never mail a lawsuit notice.
Taking a job is a lot like investing.
The more risk exposure the greater the potential reward.
These people rolled the dice and lost. Boo hoo.
I stayed in the Midwest after graduating from the U of I,
with a rather unglamours tech job (which I still enjoy by the way).
Less pay than on the coasts, but a much lower cost of living area.
I confess that just before the dot com bust I considered moving off
to the west coast to play with the big boys, but now it seems I made the
far smarter move by staying put.
Speaking of moving, there other areas of the country with tech jobs -- still unfilled,
because the coasts ate up all the good talent. Now maybe talent will be more
evenly distributed across the country. `Course you'll have to give up that
I-Made-It techie life style in the valley.