If this is the correct answer, then I would be at an unfair disadvantage answering this question. Because I *listened* in sex ed when they said that using two condoms at the same time was dangerous. It's too likely that air will get caught between the condoms. Some parts will stick and some parts will stretch, leading to two broken condoms.
Indeed. My answer is not to have sex with any them.
Seriously, think about it. Are you gonna trust a condom if you KNOW you're having sex with infected partners? Sorta makes you wonder if it's a good idea even when you *don't* know whether or not they're infected.
I have one of these almost every morning for breakfast:
Julie's Eggie Sandwich:
1 Bagel, your favorite kind, sliced in half like a bun 1 Egg 1 Slice of American Cheese Garlic Salt
Margarine or Butter No-stick cooking spray
Toast the bagel. Spray a cereal bowl with no-stick spray. Crack the egg in the bowl and beat it with a fork. Sprinkle the beaten egg with a pinch of Garlic Salt (Important so the egg doesn't ball up when cooking.) Microwave the egg for 70 to 80 seconds, depending on your microwave. Butter the toasted bagel and assemble the egg and cheese slice into a sandwich. Enjoy!
Variations:
Add Ham, Bacon or Sausage patty to the stack. Try mixing a Tablespoon or so of any of the following into the egg before nuking (cook a few seconds longer, too):
Nuked, Diced Onion and Green Peppers;
Chopped Mushrooms; Diced Tomatoes; Ro-Tel HOT Diced Tomatoes and Peppers (in a can)
Surprisingly, this isn't *that* bad for you - it's as filling as a McMuffin and if you use "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Light", Weight Watchers counts this as 7 or 8 points (depending on bagel), and you get a meat and a dairy serving out of it.
A common integrated processor (CIP), a central "brain" with the equivalent computing throughput of two Cray supercomputers.
THHPBPBPBPT!!!
*That* shows you how old this 'hi-tech' design really is -- they're still using the old Standard Cray Equivalence Benchmark (SCEB) for performance comparision.
How 1988!
What *I* want to know is how many FPS does Q3A pull in 1600x1200 32bit with FSAA enabled!
Not trying to be facetious or anything, but a serious question:
Does anyone out there in/. land know what you have to do to *change* the terms and pricing of patent licenses? For example, what kinds of papers have to be filed, who has to be notified and how much notice must be given, etc.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that patents have to be defended (vigorously?) to be upheld and anyone who let their IP languish for ten years in full public view while it becomes a standard hasn't defended anything, rendering their patent claim invalid.
Yup, that's right. Wal-Mart is FIRST in the world with annual revenues of $219 billion. Microsoft was 175th with revenues of $25 billion.
Ladies and germs, that's an order of magnitude difference in revenue.
Also, notice that the difference between Wal-Mart and #2 (Exxon-Mobil) is $28 billion, which is also > MS revenue. The truth is that Microsoft is "big", but Wal-Mart redfines "biggest". In the accompanying Fortune article, they point out that $220 bil is more than any company ever made in a year. Ever.
This is important because among the long list of gripes people levy against Wal-Mart is their notoriously cutthroat approach to strong-arming manfacturers and distibutors. They dictate what, how, when, where and how much. Unless you own your own country where you can lock them out, you pretty much do what they want or give up the opportunity to have your products sold off their shelves.
Think about it this way. If MS sold eveything they made direct thru Wal-Mart, they would only provide about 10% of Wal-Mart's revenue, and that's at high margins Wal-Mart wouldn't be willing to pay.
WM: "You want to charge us *how much* for WinXP Home Edition? BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! That's, like, a 90% markup over your per-unit costs! You'll take $10 a copy and like it or go elsewhere and take your stupid X-boxen with you.
The two questions to which I wasn't able to find answers while typing this are: what are the top ten US Computer System Retailers (# of units/year) and is Wal-Mart one of them?
I vaguely recall US Robotics doing something like this with their early Sportster modems a few years ago. IIRC, you could turn your $250 Sportster 14.4K into a $400 Courier Dual Standard (HST!) 16.8K by sending a command string that flipped a switch in the firmware and enabled the Courier code. I tried to find a page on it, but the best I was able to do was a few messages archived in Google groups.
Do hardware manufacturers understate the capabilties of their products? I guess the answer is "All the time, man. All the time."
Battlebots doesn't get enough credit. Really, they don't.
Unlike those other WWF-inspired hype and showbiz chainsaw shows, BB is still a game show about design and engineering. I wish they'd get some less obnoxious announcers and lose the babes doing the in-the-pits interviews (I know, I know, but The Man Show comes on right after it, right? Can't you do your oogling then?)
The other show that really deserves credit for this sort of thing is Junkyard Wars on TLC -- leave it to the Brits to come up with an entire game show about engineering, AND it's an hour long. This is better than The Secret Life Of Machines *AND* Connections.
Too bad more network programming crudholes can't do math or we'd see more of this sort of thing.
Is there a page out there that details which websites sell your email addresses? It would be rather useful.
Personally I nominate hotmail.com - unless you're telling me that ibtagmrq@hotmail.com is a popular name.
For the life of me, I can't understand how anyone can even *use* a service that is so hopelessly targeted as Hotmail.
I have a hotmail account (created just before MS bought them) which I use for exactly one purpose: I give it out to assheads who demand an email address on a web registration or reply form.
Now, this was not my intention when I opened the account; originally, I hoped to use it to *replace* my Yahoo! email account because several people recommended it as a slightly-more-functional alternative.
However,
After I opened the hotmail account and verified I could log in, I went away and forgot about it. When I came back a week later, my mailbox was full - there were over 200 (!) SPAMs waiting for me. This, by the way, without telling a single person about the new address or sending a single email from the account.
The spammers beat me before I even got to the starting line with Hotmail. A lot of them come in with randomly generated recipient lists, so MS doesn't even have to sell addresses - they've got random number generators for that. In fact, this might be the ONE argument in favor of ridiculous email addresses like "superbob8337264fromtulsa@hotmail.com, because I'm sure that the longer your email address, the fewer SPAMs you get, even by only a couple.
.005256 minutes down/year ~= (HALF A MILLISECOND/YEAR!!!!)
Half a milliminute...I'm so disgusted in myself, I hate pedantic pricks that correct people on simple and obvious mistakes.
I'm so disgusted in myself. I hate when I piss off pedantic pricks with simple and obvious mistakes. Oh well, back to building that Space Shuttle booster rocket! Anyway, thanks for the correction - I completely stepped in 'mea culpa'.
Like Car Alarms, if it goes off all the time, people will just ignore it -- At some point, the noise drowns out the signal.
Yup, yup, I *know* what you mean!
I've got RAID array in my office that's part of the main production file server and there's this alarm that's been going off for, like, 16 MONTHS on the thing. Don't worry, it's not important - it's only a fan in the back of the drive tray that gets stuck sometimes, then it works itself loose and everything goes back to norm@#&$%@#$89d sifsd00JE{PGJE....
Stated more succinctly: correlation does not imply causality.
The non-rigorous*** empirical "sciences" (basically everything except Physics and sometimes Chemistry and occasionally Biology) are notorious for:
1) confusing correlation with causality 2) failing to implement proper experimental control groups 3) releasing results to general public without proper peer review 4) releasing results to general public before results are independently confirmed 5) Fitting N data points on a plot with an N-1 degree polynomial ("Hey, look! My thesis is perfect! The data matches the curve EXACTLY!!! Hello, Ph.D.!") 6) Am I missing anything?
...and that's how you get stuff like 'Eating oat bran *MAY* prevent cancer!' on your Cheerios box.
It's like these people never actually studied the scientific method when they got their degrees! What I've come to realize is that there are groups of people who are more interested in the weight the scientific method carries (toward advancing their goals) than in using the scientific method to uncover facts.
One of my pet peeves is when your some dude in a TV show says "There has to be some kind of scientific explanation for this!"
Anyone who publishes results like this without describing their experimental methods and techniques - especially when they claim to have uncovered a causal relationship - deserves to be ignored. His conclusions might ultimately be right, but he's not doing science.
*** NOTE: "Non-rigorous" means "no underlying mathematical theory required" -- think Psychology, Sociology, etc...
Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one.
DUDE DUDE DUDE DUDE DUDE!!!!!
From the "Pascal" document you referenced in that link up there:
Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language
Brian W. Kernighan, April 2, 1981 AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974 ....
1981?!?!
I believe you've discovered the OLDEST actively published document on the web!!!
(P.S. Anyone know if BWK is still alive? What's he doin' these days?)
Ditto when California started having rolling blackouts. Big raspberries from the Fed, because the Shrub knows California wouldn't vote for him if he was rolling out the red carpet in front of Jesus Christ for the Second Coming.
Since when the hell does California want anything to do with Jesus Christ?
....which reminds me of a joke....
How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. Californians don't screw in light bulbs - they screw in hot tubs.
I believe (based on my own highly irrational speculation as well as anecdotes from the MS & IBM OS/2 collaboration - where MS apparently understood OS/2 internals better than IBM's engineers ever did.) that MS probably does have a secret Linux unit operating right now tearing through the source code and gathering 'information' - hell, they probably know more about the Linux kernel than Linus does. I suspect they're also porting unofficial hush-hush Linux version of Office and IE, and probably also a.Net CLI,.Net server and Exchange Server, maybe even their own desktop environment running on top of X. With their R budget, they'd be nuts not to, especially considering that they consider Linux to be a threat.
Now, for those of you who think I've gone all loopy: NO, I don't expect that we're ever going to see 'MS Office for Linux', 'IE for MS-XWindows' or 'MS Linux.net' or anything similar at Comp-USA. If any of this stuff exists, I am quite certain MS is working on it to make their own platform better, and not to join the Linux universe - look how they strung out the Java platform.
I hope there's somebody with some engineering background out there that can clear something up for me. Back in the day, we were taught from experience that serial (like an RS232) is slow and parallel (like the centronics printer interface) is fast. Yet, lately technology is turning back to serial encoding for high-speed performance interfaces like USB, S-ATA, FireWire, etc.
Is there a particular reason why parallel is being abandoned for new technology? Is it just too complicated to be efficient at high speeds or what?
...sort of... when he got out of the service. He decided he wanted to do something different (he was a Navy engineer, IIRC - he told us this story like 12 years ago when I was one of his students) and started going through his old books from school to figure out what he liked. Eventually, he found one on algebra (group theory) and picked a hard problem in the book he had never understood. Starting with page 1, he worked through everything in the book until he'd solved it - completely - by himself - working alone - with no timetables. When he finished, several months had passed and he was having the time of his life. He started taking formal classes at the University, and is now (was at the time) a full Professor at BGSU.
I guess the point is that math still needs you if you still need math.
I hope your post is a joke. You round 0 down? To what?
My apologies if I missed the sarcasm. I was always taught to round 5s to the nearest even digit.
No, not a joke - I'm serious. This is pretty basic (and common) mathematic thinking. In fact, it's starting to bug me how many people (including the brainiacs at MS) are in your camp on this. Ultimately, I believe the problem is that the intellectual neophyte that came up with this idea forgot to consider the case where ROUND() hits a zero digit, so (of course) the statistics are off and he tries to correct by 'splitting' the case where ROUND() hits a 5 digit. Stupid. It's a perception problem more than anything else, but it does expose a lack of formal mathematical training because (believe me) these kind of 'trivial' cases come up *all* the time in formal function definitions.
Yes, you round 0 'down' to 0. What's the problem - ROUND(0) isn't defined? There are ten digits between 0 and 9 (inclusive). The ROUND() function divides this space in half - half of the digits can be considered rounding down and half of them rounding up. There is no need to consider 0 an exclusively special case and start pulling statistics (of all things) about the number 5 into this. If it bothers you that ROUND(0) is considered rounding down, I'm not sure what to tell you, except that rounding YOUR way divides the rounding possibilities into three categories (up, down, none) that throw off the statistics even worse because neither the up OR down case ever hits 50% utilization. (Nobody seems too concerned in this debate what percentage of the cases shouldn't be rounded at all!)
My basis for defining ROUND(0) as ROUNDING DOWN is based entirely on understanding what the rounding function actually does. (Ironically, I best learned this taking lab measurements in physics, not math.)
More formally, it's a bit easier to see if you define your rounding function something like this:
ROUND(X) = TRUNCATE(X+1) if tenths digit is 5,6,7,8,9; TRUNCATE (X) otherwise.
In my opinion, you were taught incorrectly.
Re:Not a bug
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That's not a bug. It's a more accurate way to round off numbers. If you always round 5 up, that means you round 5 out of 9 numbers up, and 4 out of 9 numbers down. This can cause problems if you're rounding lots of numbers.
NO!!!!!!
Please don't take this as a flame, because I'm not upset with you, just the ignoramuses that came up with this scheme. This is a stupid way define ROUND(), and I disagree entirely with the justifiction because ROUND() has to be defined in the case that the digit is a zero, right?
In other words,
digits 0,1,2,3,4 get rounded DOWN
digits 5,6,7,8,9 get rounded UP
See - it's completely even without this odd/even cockamamie bullstuff. In fact, this definition of ROUND() throws off the statistics because it inappropriately weights the UP/DOWN results (either 50/50 or 60/40) based on info that is irrelevant to the ROUND() process.
It's like the people who coded this function never studied actual math and don't understand that the trivial case (zero) counts!
I'm sorry, I don't usually go off like this but when something this simple gets this fscked up, it really frosts my wheaties.
you have a chip ON THE mobo that tells you if you can run an application. what if you're disconnected from any network? the chip must have some key that, applied to the application, will make it usable. Or will decrypt the application. Or will act as a general key to allow the cpu to run some code.
This is one of the things about recent MS strategy that most bothers me. I believe one of their goals is to turn your PC into something that cannot function without a live internet connection. I'm not sure if it's because they can't monitor/control something they aren't connected to, or if it's because they honestly believe that *we* believe our computers are useless without the internet connection. I don't really care which it is, it's the encapsulated attitude that *they* are going to decide how I use *my* PC that bothers me.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is the correct answer, then I would be at an unfair disadvantage answering this question. Because I *listened* in sex ed when they said that using two condoms at the same time was dangerous. It's too likely that air will get caught between the condoms. Some parts will stick and some parts will stretch, leading to two broken condoms.
Indeed. My answer is not to have sex with any them.
Seriously, think about it. Are you gonna trust a condom if you KNOW you're having sex with infected partners? Sorta makes you wonder if it's a good idea even when you *don't* know whether or not they're infected.
Julie's Eggie Sandwich:
1 Bagel, your favorite kind, sliced in half like a bun
1 Egg
1 Slice of American Cheese
Garlic Salt Margarine or Butter
No-stick cooking spray
Toast the bagel. Spray a cereal bowl with no-stick spray. Crack the egg in the bowl and beat it with a fork. Sprinkle the beaten egg with a pinch of Garlic Salt (Important so the egg doesn't ball up when cooking.) Microwave the egg for 70 to 80 seconds, depending on your microwave. Butter the toasted bagel and assemble the egg and cheese slice into a sandwich. Enjoy!
Variations:
Add Ham, Bacon or Sausage patty to the stack.
Try mixing a Tablespoon or so of any of the following into the egg before nuking (cook a few seconds longer, too):
Surprisingly, this isn't *that* bad for you - it's as filling as a McMuffin and if you use "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Light", Weight Watchers counts this as 7 or 8 points (depending on bagel), and you get a meat and a dairy serving out of it.
Technologies incorporated in the F-22 include:
A common integrated processor (CIP), a central "brain" with the equivalent computing throughput of two Cray supercomputers.
THHPBPBPBPT!!!
*That* shows you how old this 'hi-tech' design really is -- they're still using the old Standard Cray Equivalence Benchmark (SCEB) for performance comparision.
How 1988!
What *I* want to know is how many FPS does Q3A pull in 1600x1200 32bit with FSAA enabled!
Not trying to be facetious or anything, but a serious question:
/. land know what you have to do to *change* the terms and pricing of patent licenses? For example, what kinds of papers have to be filed, who has to be notified and how much notice must be given, etc.
Does anyone out there in
I seem to recall reading somewhere that patents have to be defended (vigorously?) to be upheld and anyone who let their IP languish for ten years in full public view while it becomes a standard hasn't defended anything, rendering their patent claim invalid.
I believe you're asking about Worlcraft.
Back in the day, though, I spent so much time with the Pinball Construction Set I grew flippers.
What the hell would she be doing giving commentary for LotR?
Dude, same reason for the Britney Spears commentary on disc 22 - because she's h0t!
[...*please* tell me you left the humor-meter running...]
Well, I hate to break it to you, but this is not a rumor. See: http://www.elgato.com/eyeTV/index.html [elgato.com] for more details.
Ok, so if it's designed to be plugged into a Mac, why does it have a USB port instead of FireWire? Don't tell me Apple's given up already!
I also suspect that Walmart's license negotiations with Microsoft may be more difficult in the future....
Not that Wal-Mart is any sort of "Mecca High-Technologique", but Microsoft needs Wal-Mart a LOT more than Wal-Mart needs Microsoft. Why?
Check this out.
Yup, that's right. Wal-Mart is FIRST in the world with annual revenues of $219 billion. Microsoft was 175th with revenues of $25 billion.
Ladies and germs, that's an order of magnitude difference in revenue.
Also, notice that the difference between Wal-Mart and #2 (Exxon-Mobil) is $28 billion, which is also > MS revenue. The truth is that Microsoft is "big", but Wal-Mart redfines "biggest". In the accompanying Fortune article, they point out that $220 bil is more than any company ever made in a year. Ever.
This is important because among the long list of gripes people levy against Wal-Mart is their notoriously cutthroat approach to strong-arming manfacturers and distibutors. They dictate what, how, when, where and how much. Unless you own your own country where you can lock them out, you pretty much do what they want or give up the opportunity to have your products sold off their shelves.
Think about it this way. If MS sold eveything they made direct thru Wal-Mart, they would only provide about 10% of Wal-Mart's revenue, and that's at high margins Wal-Mart wouldn't be willing to pay.
WM: "You want to charge us *how much* for WinXP Home Edition? BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! That's, like, a 90% markup over your per-unit costs! You'll take $10 a copy and like it or go elsewhere and take your stupid X-boxen with you.
The two questions to which I wasn't able to find answers while typing this are: what are the top ten US Computer System Retailers (# of units/year) and is Wal-Mart one of them?
Anyone know?
I vaguely recall US Robotics doing something like this with their early Sportster modems a few years ago. IIRC, you could turn your $250 Sportster 14.4K into a $400 Courier Dual Standard (HST!) 16.8K by sending a command string that flipped a switch in the firmware and enabled the Courier code. I tried to find a page on it, but the best I was able to do was a few messages archived in Google groups.
Do hardware manufacturers understate the capabilties of their products? I guess the answer is "All the time, man. All the time."
Battlebots doesn't get enough credit. Really, they don't.
Unlike those other WWF-inspired hype and showbiz chainsaw shows, BB is still a game show about design and engineering. I wish they'd get some less obnoxious announcers and lose the babes doing the in-the-pits interviews (I know, I know, but The Man Show comes on right after it, right? Can't you do your oogling then?)
The other show that really deserves credit for this sort of thing is Junkyard Wars on TLC -- leave it to the Brits to come up with an entire game show about engineering, AND it's an hour long. This is better than The Secret Life Of Machines *AND* Connections.
Too bad more network programming crudholes can't do math or we'd see more of this sort of thing.
Is there a page out there that details which websites sell your email addresses? It would be rather useful.
Personally I nominate hotmail.com - unless you're telling me that ibtagmrq@hotmail.com is a popular name.
For the life of me, I can't understand how anyone can even *use* a service that is so hopelessly targeted as Hotmail.
I have a hotmail account (created just before MS bought them) which I use for exactly one purpose: I give it out to assheads who demand an email address on a web registration or reply form.
Now, this was not my intention when I opened the account; originally, I hoped to use it to *replace* my Yahoo! email account because several people recommended it as a slightly-more-functional alternative.
However,
After I opened the hotmail account and verified I could log in, I went away and forgot about it. When I came back a week later, my mailbox was full - there were over 200 (!) SPAMs waiting for me. This, by the way, without telling a single person about the new address or sending a single email from the account.
The spammers beat me before I even got to the starting line with Hotmail. A lot of them come in with randomly generated recipient lists, so MS doesn't even have to sell addresses - they've got random number generators for that. In fact, this might be the ONE argument in favor of ridiculous email addresses like "superbob8337264fromtulsa@hotmail.com, because I'm sure that the longer your email address, the fewer SPAMs you get, even by only a couple.
.005256 minutes down/year ~= (HALF A MILLISECOND/YEAR!!!!)
...I'm so disgusted in myself, I hate pedantic pricks that correct people on simple and obvious mistakes.
Half a milliminute
I'm so disgusted in myself. I hate when I piss off pedantic pricks with simple and obvious mistakes. Oh well, back to building that Space Shuttle booster rocket! Anyway, thanks for the correction - I completely stepped in 'mea culpa'.
Like Car Alarms, if it goes off all the time, people will just ignore it -- At some point, the noise drowns out the signal.
Yup, yup, I *know* what you mean!
I've got RAID array in my office that's part of the main production file server and there's this alarm that's been going off for, like, 16 MONTHS on the thing. Don't worry, it's not important - it's only a fan in the back of the drive tray that gets stuck sometimes, then it works itself loose and everything goes back to norm@#&$%@#$89d sifsd00JE{PGJE....
Could someone with an 8th grade math education please post the amounts of downtime 1 through 9 9s are, please?!
.9 .1 52560 minutes down/year ~= 36 days down/yr
.99 .01 5256 minutes down/year ~= 3.5 days down/yr
.999 .001 525.6 minutes down/year ~= 9 hours down/yr
.9999 .0001 52.56 minutes down/year ~= 1 hour down/yr
.99999 .00001 5.256 minutes down/year ~= 5 minutes down/yr
.999999 .000001 .5256 minutes down/year ~= 32 seconds down/yr
.9999999 .0000001 .05256 minutes down/year ~= 3.2 seconds down/yr
.99999999 .00000001 .005256 minutes down/year ~= (HALF A MILLISECOND/YEAR!!!!)
.999999999 .000000001 .0005256 minutes down/year ~= How long it takes for one of these locally hosted sites to get /.'ed
365 days * 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour = 525600 minutes/year.
%uptime %downtime Fuzzy description of downtime
r0ck 0n!!!!!
...and that's how you get stuff like 'Eating oat bran *MAY* prevent cancer!' on your Cheerios box.
Stated more succinctly: correlation does not imply causality.
The non-rigorous*** empirical "sciences" (basically everything except Physics and sometimes Chemistry and occasionally Biology) are notorious for:
1) confusing correlation with causality
2) failing to implement proper experimental control groups
3) releasing results to general public without proper peer review
4) releasing results to general public before results are independently confirmed
5) Fitting N data points on a plot with an N-1 degree polynomial ("Hey, look! My thesis is perfect! The data matches the curve EXACTLY!!! Hello, Ph.D.!")
6) Am I missing anything?
It's like these people never actually studied the scientific method when they got their degrees! What I've come to realize is that there are groups of people who are more interested in the weight the scientific method carries (toward advancing their goals) than in using the scientific method to uncover facts.
One of my pet peeves is when your some dude in a TV show says "There has to be some kind of scientific explanation for this!"
Wrong.
"Explanations" aren't "scientific" -- "Methods" are.
Anyone who publishes results like this without describing their experimental methods and techniques - especially when they claim to have uncovered a causal relationship - deserves to be ignored. His conclusions might ultimately be right, but he's not doing science.
*** NOTE: "Non-rigorous" means "no underlying mathematical theory required" -- think Psychology, Sociology, etc...
DUDE DUDE DUDE DUDE DUDE!!!!!
From the "Pascal" document you referenced in that link up there:
1981?!?!
I believe you've discovered the OLDEST actively published document on the web!!!
(P.S. Anyone know if BWK is still alive? What's he doin' these days?)
How old is your keyboard?
a) new
b) 1-2 years
c) 3-4 years
d) 5-8 years
e) 8-10 years
f) >10 years
g) Keyboard? I use the Apple CowboyNeal Lightpen!
Believe it or not, I'm typing this on the same Northgate Omnikey 102 I bought twelve years ago - in December, 1990!
Ditto when California started having rolling blackouts. Big raspberries from the Fed, because the Shrub knows California wouldn't vote for him if he was rolling out the red carpet in front of Jesus Christ for the Second Coming.
....which reminds me of a joke....
Since when the hell does California want anything to do with Jesus Christ?
How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
None. Californians don't screw in light bulbs - they screw in hot tubs.
I believe (based on my own highly irrational speculation as well as anecdotes from the MS & IBM OS/2 collaboration - where MS apparently understood OS/2 internals better than IBM's engineers ever did.) that MS probably does have a secret Linux unit operating right now tearing through the source code and gathering 'information' - hell, they probably know more about the Linux kernel than Linus does. I suspect they're also porting unofficial hush-hush Linux version of Office and IE, and probably also a .Net CLI, .Net server and Exchange Server, maybe even their own desktop environment running on top of X. With their R budget, they'd be nuts not to, especially considering that they consider Linux to be a threat.
Now, for those of you who think I've gone all loopy: NO, I don't expect that we're ever going to see 'MS Office for Linux', 'IE for MS-XWindows' or 'MS Linux.net' or anything similar at Comp-USA. If any of this stuff exists, I am quite certain MS is working on it to make their own platform better, and not to join the Linux universe - look how they strung out the Java platform.
I hope there's somebody with some engineering background out there that can clear something up for me. Back in the day, we were taught from experience that serial (like an RS232) is slow and parallel (like the centronics printer interface) is fast. Yet, lately technology is turning back to serial encoding for high-speed performance interfaces like USB, S-ATA, FireWire, etc.
Is there a particular reason why parallel is being abandoned for new technology? Is it just too complicated to be efficient at high speeds or what?
What did I miss?
Sorry, my prof was named Weber - Wally Weber.
...sort of... when he got out of the service. He decided he wanted to do something different (he was a Navy engineer, IIRC - he told us this story like 12 years ago when I was one of his students) and started going through his old books from school to figure out what he liked. Eventually, he found one on algebra (group theory) and picked a hard problem in the book he had never understood. Starting with page 1, he worked through everything in the book until he'd solved it - completely - by himself - working alone - with no timetables. When he finished, several months had passed and he was having the time of his life. He started taking formal classes at the University, and is now (was at the time) a full Professor at BGSU.
I guess the point is that math still needs you if you still need math.
I hope your post is a joke. You round 0 down? To what?
My apologies if I missed the sarcasm. I was always taught to round 5s to the nearest even digit.
No, not a joke - I'm serious. This is pretty basic (and common) mathematic thinking. In fact, it's starting to bug me how many people (including the brainiacs at MS) are in your camp on this. Ultimately, I believe the problem is that the intellectual neophyte that came up with this idea forgot to consider the case where ROUND() hits a zero digit, so (of course) the statistics are off and he tries to correct by 'splitting' the case where ROUND() hits a 5 digit. Stupid. It's a perception problem more than anything else, but it does expose a lack of formal mathematical training because (believe me) these kind of 'trivial' cases come up *all* the time in formal function definitions.
Yes, you round 0 'down' to 0. What's the problem - ROUND(0) isn't defined? There are ten digits between 0 and 9 (inclusive). The ROUND() function divides this space in half - half of the digits can be considered rounding down and half of them rounding up. There is no need to consider 0 an exclusively special case and start pulling statistics (of all things) about the number 5 into this. If it bothers you that ROUND(0) is considered rounding down, I'm not sure what to tell you, except that rounding YOUR way divides the rounding possibilities into three categories (up, down, none) that throw off the statistics even worse because neither the up OR down case ever hits 50% utilization. (Nobody seems too concerned in this debate what percentage of the cases shouldn't be rounded at all!)
My basis for defining ROUND(0) as ROUNDING DOWN is based entirely on understanding what the rounding function actually does. (Ironically, I best learned this taking lab measurements in physics, not math.)
More formally, it's a bit easier to see if you define your rounding function something like this:
ROUND(X) = TRUNCATE(X+1) if tenths digit is 5,6,7,8,9; TRUNCATE (X) otherwise.
In my opinion, you were taught incorrectly.
That's not a bug. It's a more accurate way to round off numbers. If you always round 5 up, that means you round 5 out of 9 numbers up, and 4 out of 9 numbers down. This can cause problems if you're rounding lots of numbers.
NO!!!!!!
Please don't take this as a flame, because I'm not upset with you, just the ignoramuses that came up with this scheme. This is a stupid way define ROUND(), and I disagree entirely with the justifiction because ROUND() has to be defined in the case that the digit is a zero, right?
In other words,
digits 0,1,2,3,4 get rounded DOWN
digits 5,6,7,8,9 get rounded UP
See - it's completely even without this odd/even cockamamie bullstuff. In fact, this definition of ROUND() throws off the statistics because it inappropriately weights the UP/DOWN results (either 50/50 or 60/40) based on info that is irrelevant to the ROUND() process.
It's like the people who coded this function never studied actual math and don't understand that the trivial case (zero) counts!
I'm sorry, I don't usually go off like this but when something this simple gets this fscked up, it really frosts my wheaties.
you have a chip ON THE mobo that tells you if you can run an application. what if you're disconnected from any network? the chip must have some key that, applied to the application, will make it usable. Or will decrypt the application. Or will act as a general key to allow the cpu to run some code.
This is one of the things about recent MS strategy that most bothers me. I believe one of their goals is to turn your PC into something that cannot function without a live internet connection. I'm not sure if it's because they can't monitor/control something they aren't connected to, or if it's because they honestly believe that *we* believe our computers are useless without the internet connection. I don't really care which it is, it's the encapsulated attitude that *they* are going to decide how I use *my* PC that bothers me.