[flamebait] During the Middle Ages, while gentiles pushed their smart sons into the priesthood and celibacy, the smart Jews became rabbis and had lotsa kids. [/flamebait]
The Izzies have had to become really smart because they're surrounded by people who'd like nothing better than to push them into the sea. As a matter of fact, when they got military gear from the States, the manufacturers often came back and asked them exactly *what* they did with the electronics; it might have had to do with the 88-2 kill ratio over the Bekaa Valley in the early 80s.
It's not only Things That Go Fast And Explode, either: Morel of Israel also does a bang-up job improving speaker designs sourced from the Danish firm Dynaudio, to the point where some of their tweeters are considered among the best in the world.
The same thing holds for chip designers, and don't forget the Russian Jewish exodus into Israel - just because the Soviet fab lines were a couple of Moore generations behind didn't mean their chip guys were slouches. The Israelis took over the Pentium III and designed the Pentium M, whence came Conroe. Motorola (now Freescale) recent DSPs are also Israeli. They know how to Make Stuff Work Better.
Truste? Those douches? They gave Gratis Internet a clean bill of health on privacy while GI sold every email address it could dredge up, not to mention playing nice with any number of mainstream email baggers. A certification from them is just about good enough to wipe your butt with. Nice to see Gator still has the same lofty *ahem* standards it always did.
I'm guessing the VCs realized the IPO would be as popular as shares in Mengele Health Farms, and told manglement to find something else so they could cash out.
Which is a fart in a hurricane if it gets DoD competitive launches. Hell, $FEDGOV pissed away $1.2 billion on X-33 and it never got off the ground, so a few test flights at $6.7 million a pop is a drop in the bucket.
So it's not just me. I read "Out Of Control", and the descriptions of people doing interesting work were larded between pseudo-intellectual speculations which sounded like scrapings from the less intelligent part of the Usenet gene pool. This is more of the same.
Compiled negative results: negative results are already published, often many times. What's so different here?
Triple blind experiments: also known as epidemiology. Holy Christ, he even names an example from the bloody field: smoking vs heart disease!
Combinatorial sweep: Mr haystack, meet Ms needle.
And so on and so on. Some things he proposes are actually retrogressions:
AI proofs? Where is the rigor? Unless the proofs can be repeated by humans, the only thing proven here is the creation of a system with some local self-consistencies.
Wiki-Science also has the same problem with rigor, and adds a dollop of troll-enabling. Imagine a population study with a racist adding "facts" about Jews or Blacks.
Kelly finishes with "zillionics", essentially storing unreduced data, which experimentors would love to have for decades now, but now it's got a whizzy new name! Zzzzzzzillions!
There's more, but you get the idea. If he'd said, hey, the new tech presents some nifty possibilities for analysis and data reduction, and here's where I think these might lead, he might have a chance at people taking the talk seriously instead of wanting to throw a brick at the purple prose. Gaaaaah. I wouldn't be quite so pissed if the talk weren't so bloody hyperbolic, but this kind of stuff sets my teeth on edge because it's like listening to some n00b gassing on about "like wow, man, this is sooooooo coool because my machine works at 3 gigglehurtz so we can get a really good AI and predict the weather & stuff and like save the world n shit".
Not so. Lots of technology, very little science. The state of physics was laughable because most physicists fled to America instead of getting drafted to work on a German bomb or worse going up chimneys. Biology was an outright crime, what with Dr Mengele performing torture disguised as bizarre "experiments".
And even much of their technology was derived from work elsewhere: jet engines were invented in Britain where even during WW2 the Brit state of the art was better than the Ohain engines despite chuckle-headed mismanagement by HM Government, V2 rockets resembled nothing so much as a scaled-up Goddard design, and the Enigma code machine was developed well before the Nazis came to power.
Preach on. In the same town, I refuse to see any movie at the Nine because of the lousy experiences (Lord of the Rings was shown in a chilly room where a piece of gear was buzzing intermittently through the whole flick), twenty minutes of ads, or the inevitable idiots gibbering during the entire presentation. Terrible place. The Nick and Del Mar seem to attract a crowd that's at least heard of evolving past howler monkeys.
It wasn't Declan who wrote the story: it's far too technical for him. Of course, getting the facts straight on something even as simple-minded as politics is a stretch for the guy.
Oppo gets raves for their 971 deck from a number of reviewers, apparently keeping up or even outscoring heavy hitters like the Denon 5910, even though the Oppo's price is less than CA state tax on the Denon.
About ten years ago VM Labs came out with something not too far off conceptually from the Cell - vector instructions, local memory you had to DMA in and out of, 4 processors on a chip. It wasn't floating point, however, and the development tools were best described as rudimentary: the best way of debugging was to deliberately crash the box and examine the register dump barfed back over TCP/IP.
They called a developer's conference in August 1998, where after the presentation a veteran game coder shrugged: "Another weird British assembler programming cult".
The Cell strikes me the same way, and for the same reasons, although Big Blue likely has more development tool budget than VM ever did. Not to take anything away from the smart guys at IBM, but I suspect they'll have a fun time working around the Cell's limitations. I can tell them from experience that DMAed local memory will be much more of a pain in the ass than they can imagine, and unless they can guarantee sync in hardware they'll be wasting a bunch of time schlepping spinlocks in and out of memory. The vector stuff will also be nontrivial: the best way to make that usable, apart from having everyone write vector code from the git-go, would be to provide a stonking great math library in the style of the Intel Integrated Performance Primitives.
As an aside, the PS3 is in the tradition of Sony not caring about who programs their machine: the PS1 was easier to code than the Saturn, which was a true horror, the PS2 upped the difficulty a fair bit, and now even experienced coders are bitching about the PS3. Meanwhile Microsoft is learning from their mistakes: the X360 is easier than the X1, and if you doubt that makes a difference, check out game development budgets and time to delivery. I don't care, really: I eat algorithms and machine code for breakfast, so this just means more jobs and money for me.
I beg to differ. Analog phones (and digital ones for that matter) scale the transmitter power output according to the received signal strength, or when the base station tells them to bump up the transmitter. The modulation scheme being FM has nothing to do with it.
As to believers of the original article, eggs average around 50 grams in weight. It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. One calorie = 4.184 Joules (let's say 4.2 because this is a rough approximation anyway). Room temperature is 20 Celsius, so the difference to boiling is 80 degrees C. You need 4000 calories to bring an egg up to boiling (50 gms * 80 degrees C), or about 17000 Joules. Since a joule is equal to a watt-second, that means your average phone with 1 watt output would need about 4.5 hours to raise the egg to boiling temperature, assuming NO other losses.
I love the VCs bitching about Google. Waaaa, waaa, waaaaa, they treat us like cattle, waaaa waaaa waaa, they won't let us screw them on the IPO, waaa waaa waaa, they buy companies before we get to overprice them, waaa waaa waaa, they won't spend their money on dumb stuff so we can hose them later, waaaaaaaaaaa.
Here's a Free Clue for any VCs reading this: we engineers are laughing our asses off that someone has handed you your severed nuts in a plastic cup, because lots of us lost everything we worked for when you hit us with cramdowns, senior liquidation preferences, and forced empty-suit hires from your vapid coterie of "adult management". Better yet, Google shows us finance & management isn't voodoo, so if one is smart enough to deal with tough code issues, then the money stuff is Yet Another Solvable Problem and we can actually do a reasonable job running our own companies, thank you very fucking much.
The transmitter just happened to be atop an 850 foot mast so the reporter had to take the power and antenna descriptions on trust? Come on. They could've put KABC up there and no-one would be the wiser. I won't believe a word of it until they actually show actual hardware transmitting actual bits. Until then it's a press release.
Those "nasty waveforms" and "cross-modulation effects" are called aliasing, and the analog reconstruction filter removes them - that's why you have a filter after the digital to analog converter in the first place! Yes, the math _does_ know that stuff is there, and it will bite you in the ass if you ignore it when you do certain operations on the signal (I solved that very problem for $DAYJOB last year, as a matter of fact), but those artifacts *will* *not* *show* *up* in any competently designed analog output.
I heard people yell at me every day and it didn't change anything. Those people would get calls over and over and over.
And that's one reason for the DNC list. Another is the number of phone spammers who would either disconnect without acknowledging or verbally abuse people when they asked to be put on the "do-not-solicit" list.
Speaking of getting removed from opt-out lists, would that email address be
I went into engineering school straight out of high school, thinking I was cock of the walk. That was a mistake. I ended up dropping out after looking at a steam table in second year EE class (yes, Virginia, Not-So-Smarty-Pants U had us studying thermo in electrical engineering) then figuring a) there was no friggin' way I would _ever_ use this and b) even less did I need this course hosing my GPA.
Spent five years hanging out with rock & roll bands, mixing sound, having a jolly old time, and returned to EE school when I wanted to sharpen up my technical chops. In the interim, they'd dropped the thermo requirement in favour of microprocessor machine language, so the coursework was also a damn sight more relevant.
Got my degree, got to work, and haven't looked back. Sometimes a body just needs a bit of perspective to get his butt in gear.
Accuracy In Media claimed, among other things, that Walter Cronkite was a Soviet dupe. They seem to have a fixation with Communists, seeing reds under every bed and in every story to the left of Mussolini. Plus, for added fun sprinkles, they're funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the same guy behind a number of other extreme-right organisations.
In other words, if AIM told me the sun rose in the east, I'd check with a compass just to be sure - their version of "accuracy" is hewn from the same wood as "compassionate" conservatism.
Polymoog wasn't his. David Luce designed that one.
I read a David Luce paper in Journal Of The Audio engineering Society. Nice measurements of musical instrument spectra, completely faulty mechanism for describing how they changed with amplitude.
Here's a link to a good history of Moog Music, including how Luce was chosen to run the outfit after Moog left. http://www.synthmuseum.com/moog/
Even if you don't use the big-buck CRM packages mentioned in the article, if you're running a business the logical choice is to avoid the risk of extortion and/or business disruption by choosing open source and telling the BSA to stick it where the moon don't shine.
Kevin Mitnick prowls around some machines, steals nothing, damages nothing, yet spends four years in jail waiting for his trial, gets a five year sentence, and has to stay away from computers for another few years, while this fucknuts steals a subscriber list for spammers and gets a slap on the wrist? Doesn't even have to stay away from other people's mail servers? Riiight.
Slashdot Mirror
[flamebait]
a pj/apj89/hurley.html
During the Middle Ages, while gentiles pushed their smart sons into the priesthood and celibacy, the smart Jews became rabbis and had lotsa kids.
[/flamebait]
The Izzies have had to become really smart because they're surrounded by people who'd like nothing better than to push them into the sea. As a matter of fact, when they got military gear from the States, the manufacturers often came back and asked them exactly *what* they did with the electronics; it might have had to do with the 88-2 kill ratio over the Bekaa Valley in the early 80s.
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/
It's not only Things That Go Fast And Explode, either: Morel of Israel also does a bang-up job improving speaker designs sourced from the Danish firm Dynaudio, to the point where some of their tweeters are considered among the best in the world.
The same thing holds for chip designers, and don't forget the Russian Jewish exodus into Israel - just because the Soviet fab lines were a couple of Moore generations behind didn't mean their chip guys were slouches. The Israelis took over the Pentium III and designed the Pentium M, whence came Conroe. Motorola (now Freescale) recent DSPs are also Israeli. They know how to Make Stuff Work Better.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TRAVEL/03/31/airport.secur ity.waste.ap/
Truste? Those douches? They gave Gratis Internet a clean bill of health on privacy while GI sold every email address it could dredge up, not to mention playing nice with any number of mainstream email baggers. A certification from them is just about good enough to wipe your butt with. Nice to see Gator still has the same lofty *ahem* standards it always did.
I'm guessing the VCs realized the IPO would be as popular as shares in Mengele Health Farms, and told manglement to find something else so they could cash out.
Which is a fart in a hurricane if it gets DoD competitive launches. Hell, $FEDGOV pissed away $1.2 billion on X-33 and it never got off the ground, so a few test flights at $6.7 million a pop is a drop in the bucket.
So it's not just me. I read "Out Of Control", and the descriptions of people doing interesting work were larded between pseudo-intellectual speculations which sounded like scrapings from the less intelligent part of the Usenet gene pool. This is more of the same.
Compiled negative results: negative results are already published, often many times. What's so different here?
Triple blind experiments: also known as epidemiology. Holy Christ, he even names an example from the bloody field: smoking vs heart disease!
Combinatorial sweep: Mr haystack, meet Ms needle.
And so on and so on. Some things he proposes are actually retrogressions:
AI proofs? Where is the rigor? Unless the proofs can be repeated by humans, the only thing proven here is the creation of a system with some local self-consistencies.
Wiki-Science also has the same problem with rigor, and adds a dollop of troll-enabling. Imagine a population study with a racist adding "facts" about Jews or Blacks.
Kelly finishes with "zillionics", essentially storing unreduced data, which experimentors would love to have for decades now, but now it's got a whizzy new name! Zzzzzzzillions!
There's more, but you get the idea. If he'd said, hey, the new tech presents some nifty possibilities for analysis and data reduction, and here's where I think these might lead, he might have a chance at people taking the talk seriously instead of wanting to throw a brick at the purple prose. Gaaaaah. I wouldn't be quite so pissed if the talk weren't so bloody hyperbolic, but this kind of stuff sets my teeth on edge because it's like listening to some n00b gassing on about "like wow, man, this is sooooooo coool because my machine works at 3 gigglehurtz so we can get a really good AI and predict the weather & stuff and like save the world n shit".
Not so. Lots of technology, very little science. The state of physics was laughable because most physicists fled to America instead of getting drafted to work on a German bomb or worse going up chimneys. Biology was an outright crime, what with Dr Mengele performing torture disguised as bizarre "experiments".
And even much of their technology was derived from work elsewhere: jet engines were invented in Britain where even during WW2 the Brit state of the art was better than the Ohain engines despite chuckle-headed mismanagement by HM Government, V2 rockets resembled nothing so much as a scaled-up Goddard design, and the Enigma code machine was developed well before the Nazis came to power.
Preach on. In the same town, I refuse to see any movie at the Nine because of the lousy experiences (Lord of the Rings was shown in a chilly room where a piece of gear was buzzing intermittently through the whole flick), twenty minutes of ads, or the inevitable idiots gibbering during the entire presentation. Terrible place. The Nick and Del Mar seem to attract a crowd that's at least heard of evolving past howler monkeys.
Nature DRM? How does Monsanto suing farmers for sowing their land with second generation seeds of its products sound?
0 22602.cfms /0311/msg00010.htmln to&quart=Su2005
http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/bigbeans
http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchive
http://www.chattoogariver.org/index.php?req=monsa
It wasn't Declan who wrote the story: it's far too technical for him. Of course, getting the facts straight on something even as simple-minded as politics is a stretch for the guy.
Oppo gets raves for their 971 deck from a number of reviewers, apparently keeping up or even outscoring heavy hitters like the Denon 5910, even though the Oppo's price is less than CA state tax on the Denon.
About ten years ago VM Labs came out with something not too far off conceptually from the Cell - vector instructions, local memory you had to DMA in and out of, 4 processors on a chip. It wasn't floating point, however, and the development tools were best described as rudimentary: the best way of debugging was to deliberately crash the box and examine the register dump barfed back over TCP/IP.
They called a developer's conference in August 1998, where after the presentation a veteran game coder shrugged: "Another weird British assembler programming cult".
The Cell strikes me the same way, and for the same reasons, although Big Blue likely has more development tool budget than VM ever did. Not to take anything away from the smart guys at IBM, but I suspect they'll have a fun time working around the Cell's limitations. I can tell them from experience that DMAed local memory will be much more of a pain in the ass than they can imagine, and unless they can guarantee sync in hardware they'll be wasting a bunch of time schlepping spinlocks in and out of memory. The vector stuff will also be nontrivial: the best way to make that usable, apart from having everyone write vector code from the git-go, would be to provide a stonking great math library in the style of the Intel Integrated Performance Primitives.
As an aside, the PS3 is in the tradition of Sony not caring about who programs their machine: the PS1 was easier to code than the Saturn, which was a true horror, the PS2 upped the difficulty a fair bit, and now even experienced coders are bitching about the PS3. Meanwhile Microsoft is learning from their mistakes: the X360 is easier than the X1, and if you doubt that makes a difference, check out game development budgets and time to delivery. I don't care, really: I eat algorithms and machine code for breakfast, so this just means more jobs and money for me.
For his next downhill run, some of the moguls should be pop-ups: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouncing_betty
If a ball player can do it, why not?
0 9soxdaley,1,4279384.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack =1&cset=true
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0602
I beg to differ. Analog phones (and digital ones for that matter) scale the transmitter power output according to the received signal strength, or when the base station tells them to bump up the transmitter. The modulation scheme being FM has nothing to do with it.
As to believers of the original article, eggs average around 50 grams in weight. It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. One calorie = 4.184 Joules (let's say 4.2 because this is a rough approximation anyway). Room temperature is 20 Celsius, so the difference to boiling is 80 degrees C. You need 4000 calories to bring an egg up to boiling (50 gms * 80 degrees C), or about 17000 Joules. Since a joule is equal to a watt-second, that means your average phone with 1 watt output would need about 4.5 hours to raise the egg to boiling temperature, assuming NO other losses.
Wow, that was great! You weren't even _trying_ to troll Slashdot, the fish just jumped into the bucket. Congratulations.
I love the VCs bitching about Google. Waaaa, waaa, waaaaa, they treat us like cattle, waaaa waaaa waaa, they won't let us screw them on the IPO, waaa waaa waaa, they buy companies before we get to overprice them, waaa waaa waaa, they won't spend their money on dumb stuff so we can hose them later, waaaaaaaaaaa.
Here's a Free Clue for any VCs reading this: we engineers are laughing our asses off that someone has handed you your severed nuts in a plastic cup, because lots of us lost everything we worked for when you hit us with cramdowns, senior liquidation preferences, and forced empty-suit hires from your vapid coterie of "adult management". Better yet, Google shows us finance & management isn't voodoo, so if one is smart enough to deal with tough code issues, then the money stuff is Yet Another Solvable Problem and we can actually do a reasonable job running our own companies, thank you very fucking much.
The transmitter just happened to be atop an 850 foot mast so the reporter had to take the power and antenna descriptions on trust? Come on. They could've put KABC up there and no-one would be the wiser. I won't believe a word of it until they actually show actual hardware transmitting actual bits. Until then it's a press release.
Those "nasty waveforms" and "cross-modulation effects" are called aliasing, and the analog reconstruction filter removes them - that's why you have a filter after the digital to analog converter in the first place! Yes, the math _does_ know that stuff is there, and it will bite you in the ass if you ignore it when you do certain operations on the signal (I solved that very problem for $DAYJOB last year, as a matter of fact), but those artifacts *will* *not* *show* *up* in any competently designed analog output.
I heard people yell at me every day and it didn't change anything. Those people would get calls over and over and over.
And that's one reason for the DNC list. Another is the number of phone spammers who would either disconnect without acknowledging or verbally abuse people when they asked to be put on the "do-not-solicit" list.
Speaking of getting removed from opt-out lists, would that email address be
mailto:jake@bgohio.org
by any chance?
I went into engineering school straight out of high school, thinking I was cock of the walk. That was a mistake. I ended up dropping out after looking at a steam table in second year EE class (yes, Virginia, Not-So-Smarty-Pants U had us studying thermo in electrical engineering) then figuring a) there was no friggin' way I would _ever_ use this and b) even less did I need this course hosing my GPA.
Spent five years hanging out with rock & roll bands, mixing sound, having a jolly old time, and returned to EE school when I wanted to sharpen up my technical chops. In the interim, they'd dropped the thermo requirement in favour of microprocessor machine language, so the coursework was also a damn sight more relevant.
Got my degree, got to work, and haven't looked back. Sometimes a body just needs a bit of perspective to get his butt in gear.
Accuracy In Media claimed, among other things, that Walter Cronkite was a Soviet dupe. They seem to have a fixation with Communists, seeing reds under every bed and in every story to the left of Mussolini. Plus, for added fun sprinkles, they're funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the same guy behind a number of other extreme-right organisations.
In other words, if AIM told me the sun rose in the east, I'd check with a compass just to be sure - their version of "accuracy" is hewn from the same wood as "compassionate" conservatism.
Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_in_Media
for a fuller story.
I dunno about The Onion not being real news. They called this one pretty well:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28784
"Bush: Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over." -- Onion, Jan 17/2001.
Polymoog wasn't his. David Luce designed that one.
I read a David Luce paper in Journal Of The Audio engineering Society. Nice measurements of musical instrument spectra, completely faulty mechanism for describing how they changed with amplitude.
Here's a link to a good history of Moog Music, including how Luce was chosen to run the outfit after Moog left.
http://www.synthmuseum.com/moog/
If you run a Windows shop and mess up on a few licences, even by accident, the BSA will come down on you like a ton of bricks.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html
As a matter of fact, they can screw up your operations by merely conducting an audit during your busiest season:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-996210.html
Even if you don't use the big-buck CRM packages mentioned in the article, if you're running a business the logical choice is to avoid the risk of extortion and/or business disruption by choosing open source and telling the BSA to stick it where the moon don't shine.
Kevin Mitnick prowls around some machines, steals nothing, damages nothing, yet spends four years in jail waiting for his trial, gets a five year sentence, and has to stay away from computers for another few years, while this fucknuts steals a subscriber list for spammers and gets a slap on the wrist? Doesn't even have to stay away from other people's mail servers? Riiight.