If you don't know what the audience wants to find out from you, you have very little hope and neither have they.
I enjoyed this article - particularly the rubbishing of Tell them what you're going to tell them; then tell them; then tell them what you told them.
This is the mantra they teach you on any presentation course, and yup, it's mostly rubbish. On the other hand, if you are presenting to a group of managers, it is probably valid enough...
I'm not sure how this differs (if at all) from Tom's Root Boot mentioned by 'djn' earlier. You may find this is all you need - burn the CD, insert and switch on computer.
The visibility of the burned track depends on the kind of substrate used on the particular CD blank. Green ones show up best. Pale yellow ones are often almost invisible.
Does this mean that the Yamaha drive will only be effective on green CDs, or does the laser use a different strength to burn the piccies?
There are a few things that might not be captured, such as the speed at which a damper is replaced on the strings when a note or the pedal is released. I don't know if the system accurately reproduces this. Certainly MIDI wouldn't.
I suspect the main difference between a live performance and a performance from a Disklavier is that a live performer is constantly adjusting his touch to account for the individual characteristics of the piano, whereas IFAIK the Disklavier system does not have this feedback loop.
So it would only sound exactly the same if the piano used to play back the performance was identical in touch and tone to the piano that recorded the performance.
Mind you, I doubt if I or many others would notice the difference.
A List Apart have published a workaround for setting a font-size one-smaller than the default size that works in all browsers, using the 'box model fix' technique. Just a pity they don't use it in their own pages. But yes, it does work.
Thanks for your explanation. I really must get around to reading up the relevant MSDN pages sometime.
Hmm. HANDLE CreateEvent(LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpEventAttributes,... Pointer to a SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES structure. Let's see. The SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES structure contains the security descriptor for an object... Ok, what's a security descriptor? Looks like I need to call one of GetSecurityDescriptorControl(), GetSecurityDescriptorDacl(), GetSecurityDescriptorGroup(), GetSecurityDescriptorLength(), or one of the 10 others listed there. I wonder which...
Blow this for a lark.
CreateEvent(NULL, TRUE, FALSE, "MyEvent") will do...
This is not meant to be sarcasm. I think this is what most developers will do when faced with the choice of fully-implementing Microsoft's security system or just passing a NULL pointer.
Which bit don't you agree with? Are you saying that the relative dominance of Windows systems is not a factor at all? My point was that it is a factor. (If you are just saying that it is harder to write a Linux virus, you are not disagreeing with me at all.)
One not-insignificant reason that Linux is safer than Windows is that there are less people trying to write viruses for Linux. The reward of writing a virus is probably something to do with seeing how far it can spread and whether it gets into the news. That's much less likely for a Linux virus if only because there are less machines to spread it. There are some of the same elements to this as in the security through obsolescence argument.
I bet if the 'market share' of Windows and Linux was reversed, there'd be Linux viruses taking advantage of every root expliot available. (Of course, the Open Source world would be quick to patch problems as they appeared, but we know you can't rely on Joe Public to keep his OS up-to-date with all of the latest patches.)
<soapbox>Can we please lose the 'viri' spelling for the plural of virus, please? It's viruses.</soapbox>
That's "more advanced" in the sense of "so complicated no one can really be bothered to figure it out and use it as intended". [Ambiguity intentional.]
Wind turbines are growing in power all the time. The proposed Scroby Sands wind farm 2.5km off the coast of Norfolk, UK, will consist of 38 x 2MW turbines. While that is still much less than a typical single 500MW steam turbine unit, it is not an insignificant amount.
Roughly speaking, of man-made CO2 emissions, roughly half is from industry/power stations, and the other half is vehicle emissions. That's a bit more than a fragment - more like a very significant amount.
There is a big debate on whether the current measured climate change is being caused by human activity, or whether it is something that would have happened anyway. You certainly can't claim the case has been made that it is not due to human activity. In either case, it seems sensible to do something about it before it is too late.
One big advantage of fuel cells is that they fuel can be generated from renewable resources. For example, you could use wind turbines to generate electricity to electrolize water. I think fuel cell reactions are also reversable, so you could put 'green' electricity into a methanol fuel cell to get methanol out. The advantages are obvious compared to using up a finite non-renewable oil resource.
I don't know Flash, so I may be completely off-target here, but that's never stopped anyone on Slashdot before, so here goes...
It may be that instead of storing the Flash binary files in CVS, you should really only be storing the scripts/sources/etc that generate the Flash file. This would be analagous to storing the text source files of a C program, but not the generated object files or the executable.
As a general rule, I never store anything that can be regenerated by the build system in a CVS archive.
KDE3/Qt3 change things slightly. You can now use ctrl-C and ctrl-V to copy and paste independently of the current selection. The original behaviour using mouse buttons still works too.
Here's the stuff about noise from the article for those who can't access it anymore:
Another one of the included accessories is the specially designed heatsink. The heatsink includes a heatpipe which goes to a radiator in the fan assembly. At first I was wary about trusting this with the CPU I used (Athlon XP 1800+), but after testing, I was quite confident that this device could cool the CPU very well. I thought I would take the time to go over the heatsink a little bit as well as to give some tips for installing it. First off I would like to comment on the heatsink clip. The clip is not my favorite, though it does clip on to all three tabs of the CPU socket, which is a good thing. The bad thing is that it requires the use of a screwdriver, and some decent force to install. That said, here is the best way to install this heatsink/radiator in the SS40G. It's not that easy the first time, but after another try or two it gets easier, and I thought I would share my experience.
-Snipped bit describing fitting the heatsink and critisizing its design-
To test how well the heatpipe/radiator system worked, I loaded up Quake 3 and let it loop endlessly for 30-45 minutes. Take a look at the table below for the temperatures.
Ambient Temperature 70 F (21 C) 80 F (26.6C) Idle 44 C 48 C Quake 3 47 C 53 C
These are very good temperatures for an Athlon XP 1800+, and the temperatures are within specifications. I was very impressed with the radiator/heatpipe to say the least. It certainly isn't an SK6/Delta, but it also isn't insanely loud either.
Speaking of noise, this is the quietest system from Shuttle yet. The power supply fan is pretty much noiseless, and the Sunon 80mm which the radiator uses is very quiet as well. The BIOS has an option of using what Shuttle is calling the Fan Guardian. What this does is lower the RPM of the radiator fan to a level which when sitting a few feet away you can barely tell it is on. However, running an Athlon XP 1800+ in this situation will not work too well if your ambient temperature is too high. This fast CPU will heat up past the Fan Guardians highest allowed temperature (52 C) pretty easily, and the fan will come back up to speed to keep the CPU cool. Take a look at this table for some measurements of the noise level.
SS40G Above Unit Listening Position Fan @ Low RPM N/A 44 dB* Fan @ High RPM 60 dB 50 dB
CF-S868/gBox Above Unit Listening Position Normal Fan Setting 64 dB 55 dB
Looks like some great noise levels here. Unfortunately, the only sound meter I was able to come up with has a range of 50-126 dB. The 44 dB measurement was from Shuttle during their tests, and it seems that this is pretty close. It may vary +/- 1 dB but I think this is close to what it is. I'm working on locating a meter with a 30-140dB range, and will give you guys an update if I can find one. The SS40G can be absolutely silent with the fan in low RPM mode. Using a Seagate ATA IV hard drive makes for a truly silent, and powerful system. Even with the fan running at full speed, it is still pretty quiet, and if used as a multimedia center where you will be sitting farther away from it than if you are using it as a PC, the noise is hardly noticeable.
Currently I am using the SS40G with an Athlon 850MHz, 512MB Crucial DDR and a 40GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV Hard Drive. I have not had the fan switch to the higher RPM setting once yet, even with an ambient temperature of around 80 F. If you want a silent box for linux, or any use, Shuttle has definitely delivered. Kudos to Shuttle and their innovative heatpipe/radiator solution to keep their system quiet.
It's not quite silent. There are two fans - one (almost silent) for the PSU and a second reasonably quiet one for the CPU radiator, according to the article. It may be quiet but that's not the same thing as silent. Anyway, even without fans you'd still have the noise from the hard disk.
I had Mandrake on my machine until recently. While being pretty good, I had enough niggles with it to make me switch to Gentoo.
For one thing, it had a habit of resetting configuration files I had manually edited - e.g./etc/hosts. The other problem was that I often couldn't find stuff to edit it in the first place.
I'd like to see the gridded approach dropped in favour of free-form planning. Wouldn't it be great if elevation contours, roads, rivers, zones, etc could be spline-based?
I always liked building large geometric designs, such as concentric rings of roads for the more upmarket areas of town, maybe with the town hall or the Llama Dome at the centre. But they never really looked quite right with those darned roads only at 45 angles!
Who's going to write the software?
on
Future Computers
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Who is going to write the software for these little beasties? I mean, how many of us are currently even a quarter tapping the potential of the machine on our desktop? (Yes, I know some are - generally those doing massive calculations. I'm talking about the typical user.)
The most pressing limitation of current computing to my mind is the software we have available. Either it has bugs in it, or it doesn't quite allow us to do what we want, or the user interface is klunky and non-intuitive.
Ideally, we'd like computers to work out what we are really trying to do. There are some tasks that can be described in just a few words of English, yet to write a script that current computers could understand would be a significant undertaking.
I remember being impressed the first time I used MacDraw and found that if I duplicate a shape, drag it to a new position and duplicate it again, the next shape automatically appears in an analogous position. But this is just one tiny little example of a program being a bit intuitive and helpful. There are millions of other things programs could do like this, but so few are actually implemented.
Advances in computer hardware make it more possible to run complex AI algorithms in a short time, but someone has still got to write those algorithms. I think currently there is a bigger gap between the software we want and the software we have than there is between the hardware we want and the hardware we have.
Thanks for the quotation. It is a long time since I read the book—18 years to be precise...
I think your point and mine do not contradict each other, provided you do actually believe in such a thing as an objective truth ‘out there’ to which we (though not Big Brother) aspire to get as close as we can.
The fact that an older and less-accurate version of a story existed may well give us additional information about an agency, but it is hard to interpret this information.
It could be that the original story was badly-researched. Or it could be that the agency takes care to provide updates from new information that comes to light.
Similarly no updates could either indicate that the original story was good, or that the agency can't be bothered to correct mistakes.
If you have independent information about the story you might be able to tell the difference, but that is not usual.
Slashdot Mirror
Know thy audience.
If you don't know what the audience wants to find out from you, you have very little hope and neither have they.
I enjoyed this article - particularly the rubbishing of Tell them what you're going to tell them; then tell them; then tell them what you told them.
This is the mantra they teach you on any presentation course, and yup, it's mostly rubbish. On the other hand, if you are presenting to a group of managers, it is probably valid enough...
Does this impregnable XBox by any chance have a ventilation shaft? I think I just may have an idea...
Excellent points! Thank you.
The Gentoo boot CDROM gives you a usable Linux system booting from CDROM. You can download the iso at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gen too/releases/build/1.2/gentoo-ix86-1.2.iso
I'm not sure how this differs (if at all) from Tom's Root Boot mentioned by 'djn' earlier. You may find this is all you need - burn the CD, insert and switch on computer.
The visibility of the burned track depends on the kind of substrate used on the particular CD blank. Green ones show up best. Pale yellow ones are often almost invisible.
Does this mean that the Yamaha drive will only be effective on green CDs, or does the laser use a different strength to burn the piccies?
Thanks for that. I'd seen MIDI implementations with a note-off velocity, but I didn't think it was part of the standard.
There are a few things that might not be captured, such as the speed at which a damper is replaced on the strings when a note or the pedal is released. I don't know if the system accurately reproduces this. Certainly MIDI wouldn't.
I suspect the main difference between a live performance and a performance from a Disklavier is that a live performer is constantly adjusting his touch to account for the individual characteristics of the piano, whereas IFAIK the Disklavier system does not have this feedback loop.
So it would only sound exactly the same if the piano used to play back the performance was identical in touch and tone to the piano that recorded the performance.
Mind you, I doubt if I or many others would notice the difference.
IDE disks? IDE disks? What the bloody hell are IDE disks?
When I were a lad, we 'ad to use 8 inch floppies.
8 inch floppies? You were lucky.
Cut to the Four Yorkshiremen sketch. Is there anyone else here who remembers Phoenix?
A List Apart have published a workaround for setting a font-size one-smaller than the default size that works in all browsers, using the 'box model fix' technique. Just a pity they don't use it in their own pages. But yes, it does work.
Thanks for your explanation. I really must get around to reading up the relevant MSDN pages sometime.
... Pointer to a SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES structure. Let's see. The SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES structure contains the security descriptor for an object... Ok, what's a security descriptor? Looks like I need to call one of GetSecurityDescriptorControl(), GetSecurityDescriptorDacl(), GetSecurityDescriptorGroup(), GetSecurityDescriptorLength(), or one of the 10 others listed there. I wonder which...
Hmm. HANDLE CreateEvent(LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpEventAttributes,
Blow this for a lark.
CreateEvent(NULL, TRUE, FALSE, "MyEvent") will do...
This is not meant to be sarcasm. I think this is what most developers will do when faced with the choice of fully-implementing Microsoft's security system or just passing a NULL pointer.
Which bit don't you agree with? Are you saying that the relative dominance of Windows systems is not a factor at all? My point was that it is a factor. (If you are just saying that it is harder to write a Linux virus, you are not disagreeing with me at all.)
One not-insignificant reason that Linux is safer than Windows is that there are less people trying to write viruses for Linux. The reward of writing a virus is probably something to do with seeing how far it can spread and whether it gets into the news. That's much less likely for a Linux virus if only because there are less machines to spread it. There are some of the same elements to this as in the security through obsolescence argument.
I bet if the 'market share' of Windows and Linux was reversed, there'd be Linux viruses taking advantage of every root expliot available. (Of course, the Open Source world would be quick to patch problems as they appeared, but we know you can't rely on Joe Public to keep his OS up-to-date with all of the latest patches.)
<soapbox>Can we please lose the 'viri' spelling for the plural of virus, please? It's viruses.</soapbox>
That's "more advanced" in the sense of "so complicated no one can really be bothered to figure it out and use it as intended". [Ambiguity intentional.]
Wind turbines are growing in power all the time. The proposed Scroby Sands wind farm 2.5km off the coast of Norfolk, UK, will consist of 38 x 2MW turbines. While that is still much less than a typical single 500MW steam turbine unit, it is not an insignificant amount.
Roughly speaking, of man-made CO2 emissions, roughly half is from industry/power stations, and the other half is vehicle emissions. That's a bit more than a fragment - more like a very significant amount.
There is a big debate on whether the current measured climate change is being caused by human activity, or whether it is something that would have happened anyway. You certainly can't claim the case has been made that it is not due to human activity. In either case, it seems sensible to do something about it before it is too late.
One big advantage of fuel cells is that they fuel can be generated from renewable resources. For example, you could use wind turbines to generate electricity to electrolize water. I think fuel cell reactions are also reversable, so you could put 'green' electricity into a methanol fuel cell to get methanol out. The advantages are obvious compared to using up a finite non-renewable oil resource.
I don't know Flash, so I may be completely off-target here, but that's never stopped anyone on Slashdot before, so here goes...
It may be that instead of storing the Flash binary files in CVS, you should really only be storing the scripts/sources/etc that generate the Flash file. This would be analagous to storing the text source files of a C program, but not the generated object files or the executable.
As a general rule, I never store anything that can be regenerated by the build system in a CVS archive.
KDE3/Qt3 change things slightly. You can now use ctrl-C and ctrl-V to copy and paste independently of the current selection. The original behaviour using mouse buttons still works too.
Here's the stuff about noise from the article for those who can't access it anymore:
Another one of the included accessories is the specially designed heatsink. The heatsink includes a heatpipe which goes to a radiator in the fan assembly. At first I was wary about trusting this with the CPU I used (Athlon XP 1800+), but after testing, I was quite confident that this device could cool the CPU very well. I thought I would take the time to go over the heatsink a little bit as well as to give some tips for installing it. First off I would like to comment on the heatsink clip. The clip is not my favorite, though it does clip on to all three tabs of the CPU socket, which is a good thing. The bad thing is that it requires the use of a screwdriver, and some decent force to install. That said, here is the best way to install this heatsink/radiator in the SS40G. It's not that easy the first time, but after another try or two it gets easier, and I thought I would share my experience.
-Snipped bit describing fitting the heatsink and critisizing its design-
To test how well the heatpipe/radiator system worked, I loaded up Quake 3 and let it loop endlessly for 30-45 minutes. Take a look at the table below for the temperatures.
Ambient Temperature 70 F (21 C) 80 F (26.6C)
Idle 44 C 48 C
Quake 3 47 C 53 C
These are very good temperatures for an Athlon XP 1800+, and the temperatures are within specifications. I was very impressed with the radiator/heatpipe to say the least. It certainly isn't an SK6/Delta, but it also isn't insanely loud either.
Speaking of noise, this is the quietest system from Shuttle yet. The power supply fan is pretty much noiseless, and the Sunon 80mm which the radiator uses is very quiet as well. The BIOS has an option of using what Shuttle is calling the Fan Guardian. What this does is lower the RPM of the radiator fan to a level which when sitting a few feet away you can barely tell it is on. However, running an Athlon XP 1800+ in this situation will not work too well if your ambient temperature is too high. This fast CPU will heat up past the Fan Guardians highest allowed temperature (52 C) pretty easily, and the fan will come back up to speed to keep the CPU cool. Take a look at this table for some measurements of the noise level.
SS40G Above Unit Listening Position
Fan @ Low RPM N/A 44 dB*
Fan @ High RPM 60 dB 50 dB
CF-S868/gBox Above Unit Listening Position
Normal Fan Setting 64 dB 55 dB
Looks like some great noise levels here. Unfortunately, the only sound meter I was able to come up with has a range of 50-126 dB. The 44 dB measurement was from Shuttle during their tests, and it seems that this is pretty close. It may vary +/- 1 dB but I think this is close to what it is. I'm working on locating a meter with a 30-140dB range, and will give you guys an update if I can find one. The SS40G can be absolutely silent with the fan in low RPM mode. Using a Seagate ATA IV hard drive makes for a truly silent, and powerful system. Even with the fan running at full speed, it is still pretty quiet, and if used as a multimedia center where you will be sitting farther away from it than if you are using it as a PC, the noise is hardly noticeable.
Currently I am using the SS40G with an Athlon 850MHz, 512MB Crucial DDR and a 40GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV Hard Drive. I have not had the fan switch to the higher RPM setting once yet, even with an ambient temperature of around 80 F. If you want a silent box for linux, or any use, Shuttle has definitely delivered. Kudos to Shuttle and their innovative heatpipe/radiator solution to keep their system quiet.
It's not quite silent. There are two fans - one (almost silent) for the PSU and a second reasonably quiet one for the CPU radiator, according to the article. It may be quiet but that's not the same thing as silent. Anyway, even without fans you'd still have the noise from the hard disk.
I had Mandrake on my machine until recently. While being pretty good, I had enough niggles with it to make me switch to Gentoo.
/etc/hosts. The other problem was that I often couldn't find stuff to edit it in the first place.
For one thing, it had a habit of resetting configuration files I had manually edited - e.g.
I'd like to see the gridded approach dropped in favour of free-form planning. Wouldn't it be great if elevation contours, roads, rivers, zones, etc could be spline-based?
I always liked building large geometric designs, such as concentric rings of roads for the more upmarket areas of town, maybe with the town hall or the Llama Dome at the centre. But they never really looked quite right with those darned roads only at 45 angles!
Who is going to write the software for these little beasties? I mean, how many of us are currently even a quarter tapping the potential of the machine on our desktop? (Yes, I know some are - generally those doing massive calculations. I'm talking about the typical user.)
The most pressing limitation of current computing to my mind is the software we have available. Either it has bugs in it, or it doesn't quite allow us to do what we want, or the user interface is klunky and non-intuitive.
Ideally, we'd like computers to work out what we are really trying to do. There are some tasks that can be described in just a few words of English, yet to write a script that current computers could understand would be a significant undertaking.
I remember being impressed the first time I used MacDraw and found that if I duplicate a shape, drag it to a new position and duplicate it again, the next shape automatically appears in an analogous position. But this is just one tiny little example of a program being a bit intuitive and helpful. There are millions of other things programs could do like this, but so few are actually implemented.
Advances in computer hardware make it more possible to run complex AI algorithms in a short time, but someone has still got to write those algorithms. I think currently there is a bigger gap between the software we want and the software we have than there is between the hardware we want and the hardware we have.
Has anybody tried to run Quicken with WINE?
Sorry to state the obvious, but see this.
Thanks for the quotation. It is a long time since I read the book—18 years to be precise...
I think your point and mine do not contradict each other, provided you do actually believe in such a thing as an objective truth ‘out there’ to which we (though not Big Brother) aspire to get as close as we can.
The fact that an older and less-accurate version of a story existed may well give us additional information about an agency, but it is hard to interpret this information.
It could be that the original story was badly-researched. Or it could be that the agency takes care to provide updates from new information that comes to light.
Similarly no updates could either indicate that the original story was good, or that the agency can't be bothered to correct mistakes.
If you have independent information about the story you might be able to tell the difference, but that is not usual.