What do you think is meant when these departments report losing inventory? That they collectively misplaced it? I suppose the loss prevention teams at major retailers are there to make sure large quantities of merchandise aren't being misplaced around the store as well. Or perhaps the massive employee theft and internal fraud problems that plague the private sector also exist in government, and hot high ticket items fall off the back of trucks or leave the office with someone and never come back.
You are delusional if you believe that there aren't people at every organization that will try their best to rob the place blind. The corollary to that is, you're also delusional if you believe there aren't countries and world leaders that given the opportunity, wouldn't do you harm. Pull your head out of the sand, remove your rose-colored glasses, and get real.
You don't think that someone stealing and selling military hardware on the Internet is a problem? It was explained why Iran was mentioned in the very first line of the article, because they've been actively seeking some of the parts that were available for sale. Burying your head in the sand doesn't make your problems go away.
I have a 15mbps FiOS connection, although on speed tests it can register up to 16mbps. In practice, I very rarely am able to download at a rate of greater than 1 MB/s. Indeed, the only internet service that I am routinely able to download at link speed from is my Usenet provider. Of course, being able to download over 5 gigabytes an hour has its advantages.
I have been able to stream HD video from the few sites that currently support it (Hulu), and that's nice. In general though, I'd say that a 15mbps isn't a huge improvement over 8mbps. It's nothing like moving from 4 to 8.
I hope that everybody that is as upset about this as I am is writing a letter to their congresspeople. You may not think that it is important, but I assure you that it is. If they get enough feedback about an issue they'll take a look at it and see what they can do about it, and something like this would be great for their election PR.
This is, after all, an absolute travesty. Have we no national pride? These robots are, if nothing else, hallmarks of American engineering ingenuity, resilience, quality and craftsmanship. Autonomous craft millions and millions of miles, over 3 light minutes, away that have operated many times longer than their expected lifespan and that continue to provide useful data today should be championed, not retired. These robots represent everything that was, and is, great about America. How can we go from "Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.", the inscription on Columbus' caravels, and Kennedy's quote, "... the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward, and so will space.", to this. This situation is shameful.
I suppose Lyndon Johnson was correct when he said, "It's too bad, but the way American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they'll probably just piss it all away." But he doesn't have to be.
Pageviews and revenue. It is widely held that Facebook is profitable, by some accounts, highly. In addition to that, the demographic generating the pageviews is one of the most difficult to reach with conventional marketing, making them highly valuable.
Expanding on this a little, I know when they were installing FIOS in my neighborhood, all services (cable, telephone, electric) were up and down repeatedly because they kept accidentally cutting lines. Chances are, there isn't some great conspiracy out to get you, but the contractor that is installing/installed the fiber accidentally cut your line, then did a half-assed job fixing it. You should probably call the contractor and let them know they made a mistake, and call Verizon and let them know about the problem as well. Again, when they were installing mine they repeatedly left the contractor information as well as the Verizon installation support number on doorhangers and postcards.
This paper describes how we extended Pixar's RenderMan renderer with ray tracing abilities. In order to ray trace highly complex scenes we use multiresolution geometry and texture caches, and use ray differentials to determine the appropriate resolution. With this method we are able to efficiently ray trace scenes with much more geometry and texture data than there is main memory. Moviequality rendering of scenes of such complexity had only previously been possible with pure scanline rendering algorithms. Adding ray tracing to the renderer enables many additional effects such as accurate reflections, detailed shadows, and ambient occlusion.
The ray tracing functionality has been used in many recent movies, including Pixar's latest movie 'Cars'. This paper also describes some of the practical ray tracing issues from the production of 'Cars'.
Depends on your definition of the real world. In college, I took multiple courses where I never attended the lectures or the discussions, unless there was a test or a quiz scheduled, since I lived over an hour away from campus. After one 300 level comp sci course, I got an e-mail from the professor congratulating me on getting the highest grade in the course, but mentioned that he had tried to find me in the lectures a few times, but could never seem to find me. I sent him a message back explaining that I had never actually attended the lecture.
He sent me another message asking if I thought attendance should be mandatory, and my response was that I wouldn't have been able to get the highest score in the course if I didn't understand the material, and that I thought mandatory attendance only held back people that don't take much from the lectures. He agreed with that logic, and didn't change the course. I think that professors that require mandatory attendance either aren't self starters that are capable of teaching themselves course material without guidance, or are conceited enough to believe that it isn't possible to learn the material without their expert tutelage.
In the real world, I work as a consultant, and I bill almost all of my work with fixed rate firm quotes. I have control over how, when, and what work gets done, and because I'm getting paid the same regardless of the amount of time it takes, I am seriously motivated to get things done as efficiently as possible. Not attending lectures that were unnecessary when I could teach myself the material in less time helped develop this real world skill.
To put it simply, it's the money stupid. It requires a lot more equipment and manpower to offer a high availability service. This extra cost results in higher prices. It can cost 1000% more a month for less than 1% more reliability. Think of a $400 a month T1 with a SLA versus a $40/month cable line. Being sheep has nothing to do with it.
I wouldn't say that. I remember back when my computer could only run a single application at a time, Wordperfect had white text on a blue background (Reveal Codes and dot matrix printers anyone), and was slightly more usable than vim is today, and there was a noticeable lag between my typing and the text appearing on the screen. That wasn't even 20 years ago, that was the early to mid nineties.
I'm looking at my desktop right now, and I'm running no less than 6 different applications including a web browser, an e-mail client, and an IDE. These applications are hundreds of, if not thousands of times more complex than their early counterparts. We can all fondly look back on the good old days, but lets be realistic, I'll take the vastly increased functionality and real-time responsiveness of multiple modern applications over the old stuff any day.
But if you look at actual robots, like the Roomba, you can see they're pretty readily embraced. I have both a Roomba and a Scooba, and I couldn't be happier with them. I was extremely skeptical when I got the Roomba, but I thought for $149 I could at least try it. Sit it down, press the button, go to work, come home to a clean floor, it doesn't get any easier. I know of at least 4 people that have bought these robots after I did, once they saw mine in action.
I think that people, as you were saying, are more concerned that the robots won't work well, than that they are dangerous. Once they know somebody with one or see one in action, it becomes a no brainer.
I was in a similar situation as your friend, but I feel like I got considerably better results by reinstalling XP and installing Launchy. The only Vista feature that I thought was worth having, after disabling Areo and putting classic mode on, was the searchable start menu. Launchy provides the same utility under XP, but performs better than the vista search.
I think you're wrong. I'd love to be outside all day every day in the summer time. If I had the opportunity to make as much/or more as a landscaper as I can as a programmer/sys admin, I'd probably choose to work outside. I'd be in better shape, less stressed out, and in all likelihood happier. This is probably one of the reasons that communism doesn't work.
War has gotten to be incredibly politically expensive. I wonder if we would have entered WWI or WWII if we had the extensive media coverage then that we have now. WWI in particular was quite nasty with the gas, artillery, and charges into machine gun fire. I don't think a conflict with that kind of destruction of human life would last months, let alone years, with the current coverage.
And I'd be willing to bet you're IO bound, not bound by the speed of your network. It is hard to saturate a gigabit link at this point, at least with consumer equipment.
Not only that, but I'm looking at this from a software development prospective. As a small company, when I don't have work for other companies to perform, I code and distribute small software applications. I release some under the GPL, some as shareware, and some for a small fee. If I had to pay an annual fee to protect the copyrights for this IP, it would eat up too much of the revenue. As it stands, some applications can take a few years to pay back the initial time investment, but it works because the investment of that time and thought is protected. Paying to keep my own ideas mine effectively kill small commercial software, especially if increasing scales were used.
The idea is very good. Even not performing assets (i.e. unrented buildings) pay property taxes; of course, if I'm getting $3,000 a month rent from an apartment it is very likely that my property taxes will be higher than if it is a rundown hole in the wall, but even then taxes must be paid.
Buildings pay property taxes to pay for public services, like public works, fire and police protection, road and sidewalk construction, snow removal, animal control, etcetera. What essential services do you plan on providing to my recorded thoughts, ideas, and code?
I touch type and I definitely see a need for this. If it was under $300 I would buy one today if it had support for some of the popular keyboard-shortcut heavy applications I use, like Photoshop, Blender, and perhaps even Eclipse. If I could hold down the control key and have the keyboard show me pictorially what each keys function is, it would be well worth the money.
Case in point. You seem to lack a fundamental understanding of a basic concept. Java is definitely not assembly language. Java code doesn't even translate one-to-one to bytecode, let alone machine code. GCJ can compile java to machine code, or byte code to machine code. In addition, quite a few JVM's and the CLR make use of JIT compilation. If java is an assembly language, then so are ruby and python.
And this is exactly the problem with computer science education today. I don't think I had a well rounded understanding of computer science until after I learned assembly and implemented my own instruction set on an FPGA. Doing that was kind of like hearing the music when the apes touch the obelisk in 2001. When all you know is Java, it's kind of hard for the computer to be anything more than a magical box that run Java. As soon as you implement jump instructions, everything else seems to fall into place.
And this is exactly what the problem is. As soon as someone suggests that there are other factors, and we don't have a complete understanding of the situation, they are shouted down by the environmentalists.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you think is meant when these departments report losing inventory? That they collectively misplaced it? I suppose the loss prevention teams at major retailers are there to make sure large quantities of merchandise aren't being misplaced around the store as well. Or perhaps the massive employee theft and internal fraud problems that plague the private sector also exist in government, and hot high ticket items fall off the back of trucks or leave the office with someone and never come back.
You are delusional if you believe that there aren't people at every organization that will try their best to rob the place blind. The corollary to that is, you're also delusional if you believe there aren't countries and world leaders that given the opportunity, wouldn't do you harm. Pull your head out of the sand, remove your rose-colored glasses, and get real.
You don't think that someone stealing and selling military hardware on the Internet is a problem? It was explained why Iran was mentioned in the very first line of the article, because they've been actively seeking some of the parts that were available for sale. Burying your head in the sand doesn't make your problems go away.
I have a 15mbps FiOS connection, although on speed tests it can register up to 16mbps. In practice, I very rarely am able to download at a rate of greater than 1 MB/s. Indeed, the only internet service that I am routinely able to download at link speed from is my Usenet provider. Of course, being able to download over 5 gigabytes an hour has its advantages.
I have been able to stream HD video from the few sites that currently support it (Hulu), and that's nice. In general though, I'd say that a 15mbps isn't a huge improvement over 8mbps. It's nothing like moving from 4 to 8.
I hope that everybody that is as upset about this as I am is writing a letter to their congresspeople. You may not think that it is important, but I assure you that it is. If they get enough feedback about an issue they'll take a look at it and see what they can do about it, and something like this would be great for their election PR.
This is, after all, an absolute travesty. Have we no national pride? These robots are, if nothing else, hallmarks of American engineering ingenuity, resilience, quality and craftsmanship. Autonomous craft millions and millions of miles, over 3 light minutes, away that have operated many times longer than their expected lifespan and that continue to provide useful data today should be championed, not retired. These robots represent everything that was, and is, great about America. How can we go from "Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.", the inscription on Columbus' caravels, and Kennedy's quote, "... the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward, and so will space.", to this. This situation is shameful.
I suppose Lyndon Johnson was correct when he said, "It's too bad, but the way American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they'll probably just piss it all away." But he doesn't have to be.
I take it you haven't been inside an engineering college lately.
Pageviews and revenue. It is widely held that Facebook is profitable, by some accounts, highly. In addition to that, the demographic generating the pageviews is one of the most difficult to reach with conventional marketing, making them highly valuable.
Expanding on this a little, I know when they were installing FIOS in my neighborhood, all services (cable, telephone, electric) were up and down repeatedly because they kept accidentally cutting lines. Chances are, there isn't some great conspiracy out to get you, but the contractor that is installing/installed the fiber accidentally cut your line, then did a half-assed job fixing it. You should probably call the contractor and let them know they made a mistake, and call Verizon and let them know about the problem as well. Again, when they were installing mine they repeatedly left the contractor information as well as the Verizon installation support number on doorhangers and postcards.
Take a look at http://graphics.pixar.com/, they sure are producing a lot of papers about ray tracing if that isn't a technique they are using.
Abstract from Ray Tracing for the Movie 'Cars' (pdf warning)
This paper describes how we extended Pixar's RenderMan renderer with ray tracing abilities. In order to ray trace highly complex scenes we use multiresolution geometry and texture caches, and use ray differentials to determine the appropriate resolution. With this method we are able to efficiently ray trace scenes with much more geometry and texture data than there is main memory. Moviequality rendering of scenes of such complexity had only previously been possible with pure scanline rendering algorithms. Adding ray tracing to the renderer enables many additional effects such as accurate reflections, detailed shadows, and ambient occlusion.
The ray tracing functionality has been used in many recent movies, including Pixar's latest movie 'Cars'. This paper also describes some of the practical ray tracing issues from the production of 'Cars'.
Depends on your definition of the real world. In college, I took multiple courses where I never attended the lectures or the discussions, unless there was a test or a quiz scheduled, since I lived over an hour away from campus. After one 300 level comp sci course, I got an e-mail from the professor congratulating me on getting the highest grade in the course, but mentioned that he had tried to find me in the lectures a few times, but could never seem to find me. I sent him a message back explaining that I had never actually attended the lecture.
He sent me another message asking if I thought attendance should be mandatory, and my response was that I wouldn't have been able to get the highest score in the course if I didn't understand the material, and that I thought mandatory attendance only held back people that don't take much from the lectures. He agreed with that logic, and didn't change the course. I think that professors that require mandatory attendance either aren't self starters that are capable of teaching themselves course material without guidance, or are conceited enough to believe that it isn't possible to learn the material without their expert tutelage.
In the real world, I work as a consultant, and I bill almost all of my work with fixed rate firm quotes. I have control over how, when, and what work gets done, and because I'm getting paid the same regardless of the amount of time it takes, I am seriously motivated to get things done as efficiently as possible. Not attending lectures that were unnecessary when I could teach myself the material in less time helped develop this real world skill.
To put it simply, it's the money stupid. It requires a lot more equipment and manpower to offer a high availability service. This extra cost results in higher prices. It can cost 1000% more a month for less than 1% more reliability. Think of a $400 a month T1 with a SLA versus a $40/month cable line. Being sheep has nothing to do with it.
I wouldn't say that. I remember back when my computer could only run a single application at a time, Wordperfect had white text on a blue background (Reveal Codes and dot matrix printers anyone), and was slightly more usable than vim is today, and there was a noticeable lag between my typing and the text appearing on the screen. That wasn't even 20 years ago, that was the early to mid nineties.
I'm looking at my desktop right now, and I'm running no less than 6 different applications including a web browser, an e-mail client, and an IDE. These applications are hundreds of, if not thousands of times more complex than their early counterparts. We can all fondly look back on the good old days, but lets be realistic, I'll take the vastly increased functionality and real-time responsiveness of multiple modern applications over the old stuff any day.
But if you look at actual robots, like the Roomba, you can see they're pretty readily embraced. I have both a Roomba and a Scooba, and I couldn't be happier with them. I was extremely skeptical when I got the Roomba, but I thought for $149 I could at least try it. Sit it down, press the button, go to work, come home to a clean floor, it doesn't get any easier. I know of at least 4 people that have bought these robots after I did, once they saw mine in action.
I think that people, as you were saying, are more concerned that the robots won't work well, than that they are dangerous. Once they know somebody with one or see one in action, it becomes a no brainer.
You could probably argue that is why the Wii is selling so well.
I was in a similar situation as your friend, but I feel like I got considerably better results by reinstalling XP and installing Launchy. The only Vista feature that I thought was worth having, after disabling Areo and putting classic mode on, was the searchable start menu. Launchy provides the same utility under XP, but performs better than the vista search.
I think you're wrong. I'd love to be outside all day every day in the summer time. If I had the opportunity to make as much/or more as a landscaper as I can as a programmer/sys admin, I'd probably choose to work outside. I'd be in better shape, less stressed out, and in all likelihood happier. This is probably one of the reasons that communism doesn't work.
War has gotten to be incredibly politically expensive. I wonder if we would have entered WWI or WWII if we had the extensive media coverage then that we have now. WWI in particular was quite nasty with the gas, artillery, and charges into machine gun fire. I don't think a conflict with that kind of destruction of human life would last months, let alone years, with the current coverage.
And I'd be willing to bet you're IO bound, not bound by the speed of your network. It is hard to saturate a gigabit link at this point, at least with consumer equipment.
No thanks. If I catch somebody copying it, I'll sue them in the civil court system.
Not only that, but I'm looking at this from a software development prospective. As a small company, when I don't have work for other companies to perform, I code and distribute small software applications. I release some under the GPL, some as shareware, and some for a small fee. If I had to pay an annual fee to protect the copyrights for this IP, it would eat up too much of the revenue. As it stands, some applications can take a few years to pay back the initial time investment, but it works because the investment of that time and thought is protected. Paying to keep my own ideas mine effectively kill small commercial software, especially if increasing scales were used.
The idea is very good. Even not performing assets (i.e. unrented buildings) pay property taxes; of course, if I'm getting $3,000 a month rent from an apartment it is very likely that my property taxes will be higher than if it is a rundown hole in the wall, but even then taxes must be paid.
Buildings pay property taxes to pay for public services, like public works, fire and police protection, road and sidewalk construction, snow removal, animal control, etcetera. What essential services do you plan on providing to my recorded thoughts, ideas, and code?I touch type and I definitely see a need for this. If it was under $300 I would buy one today if it had support for some of the popular keyboard-shortcut heavy applications I use, like Photoshop, Blender, and perhaps even Eclipse. If I could hold down the control key and have the keyboard show me pictorially what each keys function is, it would be well worth the money.
Case in point. You seem to lack a fundamental understanding of a basic concept. Java is definitely not assembly language. Java code doesn't even translate one-to-one to bytecode, let alone machine code. GCJ can compile java to machine code, or byte code to machine code. In addition, quite a few JVM's and the CLR make use of JIT compilation. If java is an assembly language, then so are ruby and python.
And this is exactly the problem with computer science education today. I don't think I had a well rounded understanding of computer science until after I learned assembly and implemented my own instruction set on an FPGA. Doing that was kind of like hearing the music when the apes touch the obelisk in 2001. When all you know is Java, it's kind of hard for the computer to be anything more than a magical box that run Java. As soon as you implement jump instructions, everything else seems to fall into place.
And this is exactly what the problem is. As soon as someone suggests that there are other factors, and we don't have a complete understanding of the situation, they are shouted down by the environmentalists.
Which islands were evacuated on what dates because of global warming?