Dunno about the rest of you lot, but I could drink 3 beers and then go jogging. Maybe the reason why we keep seeing "cell phone use"=="intoxication" is because we've set the bar pretty low for the definition of drunk.
So MS or whoever will be spinning the saga in a year or two as "hey, they were still looking, that's a lot of code", and make it out as a travesty of justice.
I doubt anyone will be saying that. Reason being - you file a lawsuit against someone after you discover that they have injured you in some way. Nobody files a suit and then looks for their injury. Except SCO, for some bizarre reason.
Agile puts the emphasis on producing demonstrable iterations of a game almost immediately into production
So what this does basically is get something that just barely works up for review as quickly as possible. Like throwing a lump of clay on a table and saying, "There's a vase in here, somewhere."
This IMHO will do two things. First, it will give SW managers a warm feeling caused primarily from too much optimism. "All the engineers have to do is shape that clay a bit, and it's a vase! We're ahead of schedule!" Two, since they will think they're ahead of schedule, they'll report to their superiors about how they already "have a working prototype of a vase" and that'll bump up the schedule.
The engineers who actually have to implement things will know better. And they're the ones who will get stuck with the deadline. The agile pony show where you show your manager something that boots but doesn't have 98% of the functionality in it will bite you in the rear later on.
This method doesn't seem well suited to making software. However, it does seem well suited to making managers feel good. I'd avoid it.
I can see where you're going with this, and I agree somewhat. Your second point does make sense - we've been bubble-wrapping society for many many years now and it does have a cumulative effect. It's good in moderation - children do need to be protected somewhat. If it wasn't for this trend we wouldn't have child labor laws, for example. But over-protecting them is also harmful, IMHO. I agree with the George Carlin approach to childhood - if you sanitize everything your kids will have weak immune systems later on in life and get sicker with greater frequency. Same goes for dangerous situations. I can handle a crisis well, and part of the credit goes to my being in perilous situations early and often.
But I must disagree somewhat with your first point.
Corporate entities decided what was cool when you were a kid, too. And the adults of your time hated your music as much as you hate the kids of today's, and for the exact same reasons. Nothing has changed.
Things were different when I was a kid, and after thinking about it for a day I've come up with a way to describe it better. I'll use Led Zeppelin as an example. They weren't my favorite but they illustrate the point well.
Back in the day those guys could get away with anything they pleased. They could check into a 5 star hotel, order crates of champagne, invite half of New York to their place and tear holes in the walls. Then tell their liason to the recording industry, "Deal with it - we're Led Zeppelin. Pay the bills. We've got better things to do. And if you don't like it, well Fuck You - we're Led Zeppelin. Who else are you going to get to fill Madison Square Garden next week? I didn't think so." They were in charge. And as a result, their music was exactly what they wanted, with no compromises. Just imagine a recording exec telling those guys, "Hey - about this Kashmir song...it's a bit long to be on the radio. Could you trim it to under 3 and a half minutes?"
Today it's not the bands that are calling the shots, it's the execs. That's the difference.
Best example of that is American Idol. Stars today are manufactured items, like Bic lighters. And just as disposable. Since they know that, they know that they have to obey their recording industry people. They're in charge now, not the musicians - and the music shows it.
If any musician these days gives the execs any trouble, well they're SOL - they can just manufacture some other musician/group/whatever to replace them with minimal effort. Kashmir would never have been written today. The execs would do a projection on it, study the revenue hit they'd take by not having the song fit under 3 and a half minutes, and nix it. And if the band argues, well then it's adios and we'll get someone else who looks and sounds exactly like you to take your place. The fans today wouldn't even notice the switch most likely.
It's a shame really. Kids today will never know the joy of seeing a truly huge band. They're extinct now.
As an adult, I am subject to a wider variety of feelings and emotions than a 6 year old. Being an adult is more subtle - we gain access to joys that a child couldn't even understand. When you're six, you know happy, sad, fear, hungry, tired. As an adult you also can experience bemusement, irony, sarcasm, terror, bliss, longing, melancholy, and a host of other things that make the experience of just living through your day more deep and meaningful. Your mental palette is larger. Yes, it means you can be hurt or suffer in larger ways than a child. But you can also rise above them in ways a child could not. The game is bigger, so the rewards are bigger.
And speaking of the palette, food is an excellent way of describing the difference. As a 6 year old, all you crave is candy. Big ugly blocks of sugar. As an adult, you're complex enough to tell the difference between good sushi and bad. Really expertly done fresh sushi with fresh ground wasabi and some nice sake on the side is sublime, and that's the joy of it, and a child could never understand it. Think of how many things there are like that.
Another good reason - look at what you would have to go through today. At the risk of sounding like an Auld Farte, think about how bad teenagers have it today. All the good music is gone. Pepsi decides what is cool these days. You have three choices basically. Stupid thumping gangsta rap whose only function is to shake your car's quarter panels, bubblegum crap pop, or Nu Metal where guys with long hair get up in front of the mike, blast the distortion and whine about their relationships.
And you can't do anything fun or dangerous in this bubble-wrap world we've made. As soon as one kid gets hurt doing something it gets outlawed or regulated past the point of any fun whatsoever. How many childhood memories do you have where you were experiencing both big fun and mild danger at the same time? Are their any stories you have about your childhood that you haven't told your parents yet because you don't want to give them a heart attack? Kids today will never have those kinds of vivid childhood memories. We've outlawed them.
If God All-Mighty came down from the clouds and told me he would be willing to make me a six year old again, I would politely decline. I've got it better now than I've ever had it, and I feel genuinely sorry for children born in this time.
You sure I missed something? I might have, because 150nm does seem awfully tiny, but we are talking 500GHz here. If I've screwed up let me know what I did wrong up there, I'd really like to know.
She has both anterior and posterior uveitis. Primary treatment for these is steroid injections directly into the eye. It treats the swelling but the side result is nearly immediate and total cataracts. So she's also had lens replacement surgery in both eyes. Next up is laser surgery to remove secondary cataracts. False lenses will collect material in the eye as a film which has to be removed periodically with a laser. Oh yeah, she's also <35 years old.
All that, and she still has about 20/25 to 20/30 vision.
So it's my gut feeling that you'd have to screw up pretty darn bad to have a lasik procedure go awry. I agree with your advice to shop around - there are good and bad eye doctors out there. But if someone does as you suggest and do their research and pick a good one they shouldn't worry about anything bad happening. I'm sure it's "Bob's discount lasik center and donut shoppe" that is throwing off the averages.
I can't imagine what it would take to design a microprocessor using this technique. At 500GHz, a quarter-wave antenna is only 150 nanometers. If you imagine a square wave at 500GHZ, the next 3 Fourier terms imply quarter wave antennas of lengths of 50, 30, and 22 nanometers. Designing a cpu where you have to allow for transmission effects on the nanometer scale will be extremely challenging, I'd imagine.
It's looking for "the reflectivity and shape of the image sensors", right? Well, just put a couple dozen of them on your hat. The system won't know what to target.
Get yourself an SVGA cable and a recent graphics card. Run the second port of the card to your TV. Use a y-splitter to get your soundcard output there, or install a second sound card.
I've had that very thought. If everyone watching contributes some of their uplink bandwidth, then that should do it. Only problem would be latency. Not everybody in the group has a cablemodem, not everybody in the group is "nearby", and if you miss video frame "x" it could be a while before it shows up from another peer. That would make the broadcast lag.
But yeah, in lieu of multicast or explicit multicast being implemented at the routers, this is a good idea.
Yeah, I know it's part of the spec but IIRC most of the routers on the net aren't configured to pass on multicast packets. That's why the BBC says that you have to be in the UK, and have a net connection from their list of approved partner ISPs. If you're on a different ISP, the packets will be dropped.
Still it's cool that someone out there is trying to do this - multicast rocks. I can't wait for it to become more widespread.
Multicast isn't implemented currently in the IPv4 internet (it's in the spec but not implemented for the most part), so he's going to have to wait for IPv6 before any streaming TV show becomes possible. Currently, all we can guarantee is unicast, and the numbers are dismal for that.
As an example, from this page, if you have a 2 frame per second video at 320x240, you're probably going to use 35kbps. From the master bandwidth chart, a T1 line has 1.544Mbps. Divide through, and you'll see your T1 can service about 44 customers. A T3 can service 1278.
Now look up the prices on how much a T3 will cost you. And realize that with that you're serving about 1300 customers. Scale it and you'll see why video isn't a winning game yet, money-wise.
IPv6 multicast is going to happen first before streaming video becomes financially feasable.
Things are either black or white, up or down, good or bad. There are no shades of grey.
Can't we just say that there are different objects in the universe that have similar properties? What's wrong with saying an object is 30% like the planet we're on, but 70% like Jupiter?
Must everything have a category?
It's a real flaw in western thinking. We can't just simply let things be - we have to pin them to cork boards like preserved butterflies. Why not just describe what you find as you found it? Nature doesn't fit things into categories, why should we?
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I mean, c'mon editors - get with it! How many times are you going to link to that?
Slashdot Mirror
They keep changing the definition of legally intoxicated.
Dunno about the rest of you lot, but I could drink 3 beers and then go jogging. Maybe the reason why we keep seeing "cell phone use"=="intoxication" is because we've set the bar pretty low for the definition of drunk.
Sorry, but that gave me a chuckle. Reliability, compatibility and security are still in beta.
So MS or whoever will be spinning the saga in a year or two as "hey, they were still looking, that's a lot of code", and make it out as a travesty of justice.
I doubt anyone will be saying that. Reason being - you file a lawsuit against someone after you discover that they have injured you in some way. Nobody files a suit and then looks for their injury. Except SCO, for some bizarre reason.
A good point. Especially if the agile methodology works somewhere else. Have a reference to an article where agile works well?
BTW - not putting you on the spot, if it sounds that way. I'm actually curious. Especially to hear from programmers who like being in this system.
From the blurb:
Agile puts the emphasis on producing demonstrable iterations of a game almost immediately into production
So what this does basically is get something that just barely works up for review as quickly as possible. Like throwing a lump of clay on a table and saying, "There's a vase in here, somewhere."
This IMHO will do two things. First, it will give SW managers a warm feeling caused primarily from too much optimism. "All the engineers have to do is shape that clay a bit, and it's a vase! We're ahead of schedule!" Two, since they will think they're ahead of schedule, they'll report to their superiors about how they already "have a working prototype of a vase" and that'll bump up the schedule.
The engineers who actually have to implement things will know better. And they're the ones who will get stuck with the deadline. The agile pony show where you show your manager something that boots but doesn't have 98% of the functionality in it will bite you in the rear later on.
This method doesn't seem well suited to making software. However, it does seem well suited to making managers feel good. I'd avoid it.
I can see where you're going with this, and I agree somewhat. Your second point does make sense - we've been bubble-wrapping society for many many years now and it does have a cumulative effect. It's good in moderation - children do need to be protected somewhat. If it wasn't for this trend we wouldn't have child labor laws, for example. But over-protecting them is also harmful, IMHO. I agree with the George Carlin approach to childhood - if you sanitize everything your kids will have weak immune systems later on in life and get sicker with greater frequency. Same goes for dangerous situations. I can handle a crisis well, and part of the credit goes to my being in perilous situations early and often.
But I must disagree somewhat with your first point.
Corporate entities decided what was cool when you were a kid, too. And the adults of your time hated your music as much as you hate the kids of today's, and for the exact same reasons. Nothing has changed.
Things were different when I was a kid, and after thinking about it for a day I've come up with a way to describe it better. I'll use Led Zeppelin as an example. They weren't my favorite but they illustrate the point well.
Back in the day those guys could get away with anything they pleased. They could check into a 5 star hotel, order crates of champagne, invite half of New York to their place and tear holes in the walls. Then tell their liason to the recording industry, "Deal with it - we're Led Zeppelin. Pay the bills. We've got better things to do. And if you don't like it, well Fuck You - we're Led Zeppelin. Who else are you going to get to fill Madison Square Garden next week? I didn't think so." They were in charge. And as a result, their music was exactly what they wanted, with no compromises. Just imagine a recording exec telling those guys, "Hey - about this Kashmir song...it's a bit long to be on the radio. Could you trim it to under 3 and a half minutes?"
Today it's not the bands that are calling the shots, it's the execs. That's the difference.
Best example of that is American Idol. Stars today are manufactured items, like Bic lighters. And just as disposable. Since they know that, they know that they have to obey their recording industry people. They're in charge now, not the musicians - and the music shows it.
If any musician these days gives the execs any trouble, well they're SOL - they can just manufacture some other musician/group/whatever to replace them with minimal effort. Kashmir would never have been written today. The execs would do a projection on it, study the revenue hit they'd take by not having the song fit under 3 and a half minutes, and nix it. And if the band argues, well then it's adios and we'll get someone else who looks and sounds exactly like you to take your place. The fans today wouldn't even notice the switch most likely.
It's a shame really. Kids today will never know the joy of seeing a truly huge band. They're extinct now.
As an adult, I am subject to a wider variety of feelings and emotions than a 6 year old. Being an adult is more subtle - we gain access to joys that a child couldn't even understand. When you're six, you know happy, sad, fear, hungry, tired. As an adult you also can experience bemusement, irony, sarcasm, terror, bliss, longing, melancholy, and a host of other things that make the experience of just living through your day more deep and meaningful. Your mental palette is larger. Yes, it means you can be hurt or suffer in larger ways than a child. But you can also rise above them in ways a child could not. The game is bigger, so the rewards are bigger.
And speaking of the palette, food is an excellent way of describing the difference. As a 6 year old, all you crave is candy. Big ugly blocks of sugar. As an adult, you're complex enough to tell the difference between good sushi and bad. Really expertly done fresh sushi with fresh ground wasabi and some nice sake on the side is sublime, and that's the joy of it, and a child could never understand it. Think of how many things there are like that.
Another good reason - look at what you would have to go through today. At the risk of sounding like an Auld Farte, think about how bad teenagers have it today. All the good music is gone. Pepsi decides what is cool these days. You have three choices basically. Stupid thumping gangsta rap whose only function is to shake your car's quarter panels, bubblegum crap pop, or Nu Metal where guys with long hair get up in front of the mike, blast the distortion and whine about their relationships.
And you can't do anything fun or dangerous in this bubble-wrap world we've made. As soon as one kid gets hurt doing something it gets outlawed or regulated past the point of any fun whatsoever. How many childhood memories do you have where you were experiencing both big fun and mild danger at the same time? Are their any stories you have about your childhood that you haven't told your parents yet because you don't want to give them a heart attack? Kids today will never have those kinds of vivid childhood memories. We've outlawed them.
If God All-Mighty came down from the clouds and told me he would be willing to make me a six year old again, I would politely decline. I've got it better now than I've ever had it, and I feel genuinely sorry for children born in this time.
The program, called Qbox, performs very complex quantum calculations to simulate the behaviour of thousands of atoms in three dimensions.
"Molest me not with this pocket calcualtor stuff."
C = 300,000,000 m/s. Ooops. Good grief but I need some coffee.
Am I? Crap. I did do the math in a hurry. Lemme see...
Wavelength = C/F = 300,000 m/s / 500,000,000,000 cycles/s = 0.0000006 meters/cycle.
0.0000006 * 1000 = 0.0006 millimeters
.0006mm * 1000 = 0.6 micrometers
0.6um * 1000 = 600 nanometers
Quarter wave = 600nm/4 = 150 nanometers.
You sure I missed something? I might have, because 150nm does seem awfully tiny, but we are talking 500GHz here. If I've screwed up let me know what I did wrong up there, I'd really like to know.
Well ok, not mine exactly but my wife's.
She has both anterior and posterior uveitis. Primary treatment for these is steroid injections directly into the eye. It treats the swelling but the side result is nearly immediate and total cataracts. So she's also had lens replacement surgery in both eyes. Next up is laser surgery to remove secondary cataracts. False lenses will collect material in the eye as a film which has to be removed periodically with a laser. Oh yeah, she's also <35 years old.
All that, and she still has about 20/25 to 20/30 vision.
So it's my gut feeling that you'd have to screw up pretty darn bad to have a lasik procedure go awry. I agree with your advice to shop around - there are good and bad eye doctors out there. But if someone does as you suggest and do their research and pick a good one they shouldn't worry about anything bad happening. I'm sure it's "Bob's discount lasik center and donut shoppe" that is throwing off the averages.
I can't imagine what it would take to design a microprocessor using this technique. At 500GHz, a quarter-wave antenna is only 150 nanometers. If you imagine a square wave at 500GHZ, the next 3 Fourier terms imply quarter wave antennas of lengths of 50, 30, and 22 nanometers. Designing a cpu where you have to allow for transmission effects on the nanometer scale will be extremely challenging, I'd imagine.
False positives.
It's looking for "the reflectivity and shape of the image sensors", right? Well, just put a couple dozen of them on your hat. The system won't know what to target.
And that's that. Simple.
And it's not shipping yet either.
"So next time you see one being sold on eBay from Hong Kong, give the cops a call."
First thing I thought was, "Well, I might call and I might not - depends on what the reserve price is." ;^)
That's so 1980's! =)
Get yourself an SVGA cable and a recent graphics card. Run the second port of the card to your TV. Use a y-splitter to get your soundcard output there, or install a second sound card.
And quite playable. See Daphne.
You'll need to locate the graphic files yourself, of course. But anyone who has done the Mame thing should know how to do that.
I've had that very thought. If everyone watching contributes some of their uplink bandwidth, then that should do it. Only problem would be latency. Not everybody in the group has a cablemodem, not everybody in the group is "nearby", and if you miss video frame "x" it could be a while before it shows up from another peer. That would make the broadcast lag.
But yeah, in lieu of multicast or explicit multicast being implemented at the routers, this is a good idea.
Yeah, I know it's part of the spec but IIRC most of the routers on the net aren't configured to pass on multicast packets. That's why the BBC says that you have to be in the UK, and have a net connection from their list of approved partner ISPs. If you're on a different ISP, the packets will be dropped.
Still it's cool that someone out there is trying to do this - multicast rocks. I can't wait for it to become more widespread.
Multicast isn't implemented currently in the IPv4 internet (it's in the spec but not implemented for the most part), so he's going to have to wait for IPv6 before any streaming TV show becomes possible. Currently, all we can guarantee is unicast, and the numbers are dismal for that.
As an example, from this page, if you have a 2 frame per second video at 320x240, you're probably going to use 35kbps. From the master bandwidth chart, a T1 line has 1.544Mbps. Divide through, and you'll see your T1 can service about 44 customers. A T3 can service 1278.
Now look up the prices on how much a T3 will cost you. And realize that with that you're serving about 1300 customers. Scale it and you'll see why video isn't a winning game yet, money-wise.
IPv6 multicast is going to happen first before streaming video becomes financially feasable.
Linux is dead. Now, when will BSD be ready for the desktop?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
Things are either black or white, up or down, good or bad. There are no shades of grey.
Can't we just say that there are different objects in the universe that have similar properties? What's wrong with saying an object is 30% like the planet we're on, but 70% like Jupiter?
Must everything have a category?
It's a real flaw in western thinking. We can't just simply let things be - we have to pin them to cork boards like preserved butterflies. Why not just describe what you find as you found it? Nature doesn't fit things into categories, why should we?
...the article is clearly a dupe.
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Version Information: Microsoft
I mean, c'mon editors - get with it! How many times are you going to link to that?
These are good questions.