I don't think you read far enough down the page. The no disassembly requirement applies to any Joe Random who wants to take a stab at it. Actual professional data recovery companies don't have that limitation, and have 30 days instead of 3.
But I don't see why they don't just disallow Joe Random outright. There's no point taking the challenge with that limitation. And no point in offering it either.
Electrolytic capacitors are used in the power supply filtering of essentially all circuitry currently in use. These components will be present in a number of places on the circuit boards of both disk drives and memory sticks.
Aluminum electrolytic capacitors are still often seen on motherboards and cards, but I haven't seen one on a hard drive for well over a decade, and I seriously doubt that they've ever been used in a memory stick. I have some old hard drives from the early 1990's sitting right here. Not a single one has any aluminum electrolytic caps. They all use solid tantalum caps instead, which age much better.
Memory sticks don't need much capacitance, and are usually in thin packages (sometimes as thin as SD cards). It's unlikely that any of them would contain any tantalum caps, much less the much taller aluminum electrolytic caps. More likely just a few small value ceramics, or possibly even just some distributed capacitance layers built-in to the IC substrate, with no discrete capacitors at all.
It's even worse than you think. When I saw that the article begins with the words "Both of my Wangs", I was on the back button as quick as I could get to it. Luckily the site was loading slow, so I was able to get out of there before the images loaded. I feel damaged by the mere thought of what those images must have contained. Imagine the mental scarring that would come from actually seeing them.
Whew! That was a close one. Thank God for the Slashdot effect.
There's a little pizza restaurant in a strip mall just down the street that sells large pepperoni pizza's for a bit under $6 each. They sell lots of these, and many customers buy not not much extra besides the cheap pizzas, so it's not likely a loss leader. I'd bet that the bulk of the restaurant's cost for those pizzas is ingredients, labor, and the rent and other overhead of running a pizza restaurant.
The per-pizza cost of powering the oven must be a pretty small part of that $6 retail price. Those solar cells would either have to be of extraordinarily low value, or require much more oven-time than a pizza, for the economics not to work out.
I notice that, to liberals, when the issue is liberal and popular with Americans, then they're a great and wise people, righteous in their anger at the Republicans.
That bias is far from one sided. If you haven't heard right wingers portray liberals as "looney", "stupid", "defeatist", etc., then that must be one huge rock you're hiding under.
This perception is natural to some extent. Everyone thinks that the side they take is the smarter one. If they thought it was the dumb side they wouldn't be on it.
And then there's the skilled but arrogant jerks who deride anyone they think they're better than, which is almost everyone. Just one of those guys can bring dysfunction to what would otherwise have been a productive team. You REALLY don't want to get stuck with one of them on your team project.
And it's a real shame, too. Some of those guys actually are as talented as they believe themselves to be, and if they weren't such assholes, could have made the team better by showing the others better ways to do things. And no, I don't mean hand-holding or playing teacher, but just the influence of having the others see what really good work looks like. Leading by example, in other words.
These guys aren't useless, however. There are problems that are well-suited to single-handed solutions. Just keep them far away from anything that requires close collaboration, and both they and their employer's will be happy.
Hawking may not be the first author that comes to mind when looking for a children's book, but my 10 year old daughter really enjoyed Lucy and Stephen Hawking's book Georgeâ(TM)s Secret Key to the Universe.
A CAD program will be much less productive if you make a user click 5 times to get the same effect as if they just type a hotkey, or have to have some knowledge about the system that may not be completely discoverable.
Of course. That's why any decent UI will have more than one way to do things. There's certainly nothing wrong with having keyboard shortcuts (more than that, there's definitely something wrong with not having them). There's nothing wrong with having a CLI too, though that's not essential. And a nice powerful scripting system for those who really want to get under the hood is essential for any professional quality CAD system. But why should that be a problem? Do you contend that these things are mutually exclusive with logically arranged menus, self-explanatory dialogs, and adherence to familiar UI conventions (right-click context menus, ctrl-c/crtl-x/crtl-v, etc.)?
Some CAD systems are actually very good examples of all of these things co-existing, and are also a good example of why these things should coexist. Even for expert, full-time users, very complex software will have some features that are used too infrequently to get committed to motor-memory. And for those occasions, 5 clicks through the menus is vastly more efficient than hunting through a 900 page manual to find that super-efficient one-stroke shortcut. (Unless, of course, the UI design is so awful that you have to go digging through the manual just to figure out the five clicks.)
Other than incompetent UI design, there's no reason a software application, even a complex one like a CAD system, can't be simultaneously easy to learn, easy to use, efficient for the experts, and powerful for whatever it is that it does.
That is sometimes true. But unless you're writing developer tools, quick-n-dirty one-off utilities for your own use, or programs of the "behind the scenes" variety rather than ones with which users directly and regularly interact, then you're just making excuses for a bad UI.
For end-user applications, even complex technical ones like CAD systems, there's no reason at all that a UI can't be easy for a new or occasional user to navigate and simultaneously efficient and powerful for expert users.
The old "serious software for serious users" mantra is rarely anything more than excuse making by programmers who have either too much arrogance or too little skill to design a decent UI.
That is available in the US as a commercial service.
Here's one that I know of: http://www.teladoc.com/
There may be others, but I'm not familiar with them.
I don't think he meant just that it would run on multiple kinds of devices, but that it would operate across and coordinate multiple devices such that the group would behave as it were a single device from the user's perspective.
How do you escape commas? Do you quote the whole column? If so, then how do you escape quotes?
Two simple rules:
1) If the string contains one or more quotes, replace each one with two.
2) If the string contains one or more commas, quotes, or line endings (CR, LF, or CR-LF), then put the entire string in quotes.
When this is handled properly at both the formatting end and the parsing end, data items containing any combination of commas, quotes, and even multiple lines of text, are no problem. It does require a little more sophistication than just reading the file a line at a time and splitting at the commas, but not much more.
Yes, definitely Cosmos. If you could only have one, it should be this one. It was very inspiring when I watched it as a teenager decades ago. And I still find it deeply moving despite being distinctly dated.
I'm not sure why people like to trot out the 6,000 year old theory every time someone mentions the age of the Universe. Perhaps it is because they're seeking an opportunity to tar the faiths of the world with the brush of ignorance. Perhaps their ignorance of religion allows them to believe that all believers think this way.
Or perhaps they're just jabbing a stick at that specific subset that insists that the universe is only a few thousand years old. You know, that "small, minority sect of protestants who insist on interpreting the Bible literally" that you mentioned yourself?
Really, gillbates, the idea that this is somehow a jab at the "majority of Jews", "2 billion Catholics", "nearly 1 billion (maybe more) Muslims", or any other religious persons who do not fall within the set that can be described as "young earth creationists" appears to be entirely your own invention. There's nothing in the original statement that suggests it. Nor is it suggested by the practice of poking fun at creationists in general. There are reasonable criticisms that could be made (uncalled-for, counterproductive, etc.), but yours is not among them. There's no good reason to believe that this kind of jab is targeted at anyone other than those who actually hold the belief that is being ridiculed.
The frontier is and likely always will be assembly, and even though the frontier keeps moving and likely in 5 years the bicycle lamps will be programmable in Java, maybe ballpens will be programmable in assembly.
I don't disagree with your point. There remain many good uses for simple processors and assembly programming. But I think you may have underestimated the technology that can already be had in a ballpen.
This positive feedback effect happens to a considerable extent even without machines that have superintelligence, or even what we'd usually consider intelligence at all. It's happening right now. And has been happening for as long as humans have been making tools. Every generation of technology allows us to build better tools, which in turn helps us develop more sophisticated technology. A great example from fairly recent history, and that is still ongoing, is the development of CAD/CAM/CAE tools, particularly those used for design of electronic hardware (schematic capture, PCB, HDL's, programmable logic compilers, etc.), and the parallel development of software development tools. Once computers became good enough to make usable development tools, those tools helped greatly with the creation of more sophisticated computer technology, which supported better development tools.
Superintelligence may speed this up, but the effect is quite dramatic already.
Apples and oranges. Modern office workers spend 1/3 of their day working so they can enjoy material benefits far beyond what the hunter-gatherers can. Thanks to excess productivity, modern people can do things like write books, create and build machines, teach, learn, and many other things that hunter-gatherer societies just don't have time for. Tell me, what are the hunter-gatherer's children doing while the modern office worker's children are spending 1/3 of their day getting an education (class time + homework)? Hunting and gathering, perhaps?
I'm sure that any who wish to have a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the modern world could accomplish it with far less than a 40 hour work week.
Slashdot Mirror
You get what you want. Someone else gets what they want. What's to get bent out of shape over?
Or vacuum tubes.
"asking price" != "market value"
I don't think you read far enough down the page. The no disassembly requirement applies to any Joe Random who wants to take a stab at it. Actual professional data recovery companies don't have that limitation, and have 30 days instead of 3.
But I don't see why they don't just disallow Joe Random outright. There's no point taking the challenge with that limitation. And no point in offering it either.
Aluminum electrolytic capacitors are still often seen on motherboards and cards, but I haven't seen one on a hard drive for well over a decade, and I seriously doubt that they've ever been used in a memory stick. I have some old hard drives from the early 1990's sitting right here. Not a single one has any aluminum electrolytic caps. They all use solid tantalum caps instead, which age much better.
Memory sticks don't need much capacitance, and are usually in thin packages (sometimes as thin as SD cards). It's unlikely that any of them would contain any tantalum caps, much less the much taller aluminum electrolytic caps. More likely just a few small value ceramics, or possibly even just some distributed capacitance layers built-in to the IC substrate, with no discrete capacitors at all.
It's even worse than you think. When I saw that the article begins with the words "Both of my Wangs", I was on the back button as quick as I could get to it. Luckily the site was loading slow, so I was able to get out of there before the images loaded. I feel damaged by the mere thought of what those images must have contained. Imagine the mental scarring that would come from actually seeing them.
Whew! That was a close one. Thank God for the Slashdot effect.
There's a little pizza restaurant in a strip mall just down the street that sells large pepperoni pizza's for a bit under $6 each. They sell lots of these, and many customers buy not not much extra besides the cheap pizzas, so it's not likely a loss leader. I'd bet that the bulk of the restaurant's cost for those pizzas is ingredients, labor, and the rent and other overhead of running a pizza restaurant.
The per-pizza cost of powering the oven must be a pretty small part of that $6 retail price. Those solar cells would either have to be of extraordinarily low value, or require much more oven-time than a pizza, for the economics not to work out.
That bias is far from one sided. If you haven't heard right wingers portray liberals as "looney", "stupid", "defeatist", etc., then that must be one huge rock you're hiding under.
This perception is natural to some extent. Everyone thinks that the side they take is the smarter one. If they thought it was the dumb side they wouldn't be on it.
YOU FORTH LOVE IF HONK THEN
And then there's the skilled but arrogant jerks who deride anyone they think they're better than, which is almost everyone. Just one of those guys can bring dysfunction to what would otherwise have been a productive team. You REALLY don't want to get stuck with one of them on your team project.
And it's a real shame, too. Some of those guys actually are as talented as they believe themselves to be, and if they weren't such assholes, could have made the team better by showing the others better ways to do things. And no, I don't mean hand-holding or playing teacher, but just the influence of having the others see what really good work looks like. Leading by example, in other words.
These guys aren't useless, however. There are problems that are well-suited to single-handed solutions. Just keep them far away from anything that requires close collaboration, and both they and their employer's will be happy.
You must work for the NASA administration.
Hawking may not be the first author that comes to mind when looking for a children's book, but my 10 year old daughter really enjoyed Lucy and Stephen Hawking's book Georgeâ(TM)s Secret Key to the Universe.
See http://nymag.com/family/kids/39565/
Of course. That's why any decent UI will have more than one way to do things. There's certainly nothing wrong with having keyboard shortcuts (more than that, there's definitely something wrong with not having them). There's nothing wrong with having a CLI too, though that's not essential. And a nice powerful scripting system for those who really want to get under the hood is essential for any professional quality CAD system. But why should that be a problem? Do you contend that these things are mutually exclusive with logically arranged menus, self-explanatory dialogs, and adherence to familiar UI conventions (right-click context menus, ctrl-c/crtl-x/crtl-v, etc.)?
Some CAD systems are actually very good examples of all of these things co-existing, and are also a good example of why these things should coexist. Even for expert, full-time users, very complex software will have some features that are used too infrequently to get committed to motor-memory. And for those occasions, 5 clicks through the menus is vastly more efficient than hunting through a 900 page manual to find that super-efficient one-stroke shortcut. (Unless, of course, the UI design is so awful that you have to go digging through the manual just to figure out the five clicks.)
Other than incompetent UI design, there's no reason a software application, even a complex one like a CAD system, can't be simultaneously easy to learn, easy to use, efficient for the experts, and powerful for whatever it is that it does.
That is sometimes true. But unless you're writing developer tools, quick-n-dirty one-off utilities for your own use, or programs of the "behind the scenes" variety rather than ones with which users directly and regularly interact, then you're just making excuses for a bad UI.
For end-user applications, even complex technical ones like CAD systems, there's no reason at all that a UI can't be easy for a new or occasional user to navigate and simultaneously efficient and powerful for expert users.
The old "serious software for serious users" mantra is rarely anything more than excuse making by programmers who have either too much arrogance or too little skill to design a decent UI.
That is available in the US as a commercial service. Here's one that I know of: http://www.teladoc.com/ There may be others, but I'm not familiar with them.
I don't think he meant just that it would run on multiple kinds of devices, but that it would operate across and coordinate multiple devices such that the group would behave as it were a single device from the user's perspective.
1) If the string contains one or more quotes, replace each one with two.
2) If the string contains one or more commas, quotes, or line endings (CR, LF, or CR-LF), then put the entire string in quotes.
When this is handled properly at both the formatting end and the parsing end, data items containing any combination of commas, quotes, and even multiple lines of text, are no problem. It does require a little more sophistication than just reading the file a line at a time and splitting at the commas, but not much more.
Yes, definitely Cosmos. If you could only have one, it should be this one. It was very inspiring when I watched it as a teenager decades ago. And I still find it deeply moving despite being distinctly dated.
From the summary: "...done in late February and early March..."
Really, gillbates, the idea that this is somehow a jab at the "majority of Jews", "2 billion Catholics", "nearly 1 billion (maybe more) Muslims", or any other religious persons who do not fall within the set that can be described as "young earth creationists" appears to be entirely your own invention. There's nothing in the original statement that suggests it. Nor is it suggested by the practice of poking fun at creationists in general. There are reasonable criticisms that could be made (uncalled-for, counterproductive, etc.), but yours is not among them. There's no good reason to believe that this kind of jab is targeted at anyone other than those who actually hold the belief that is being ridiculed.
This positive feedback effect happens to a considerable extent even without machines that have superintelligence, or even what we'd usually consider intelligence at all. It's happening right now. And has been happening for as long as humans have been making tools. Every generation of technology allows us to build better tools, which in turn helps us develop more sophisticated technology. A great example from fairly recent history, and that is still ongoing, is the development of CAD/CAM/CAE tools, particularly those used for design of electronic hardware (schematic capture, PCB, HDL's, programmable logic compilers, etc.), and the parallel development of software development tools. Once computers became good enough to make usable development tools, those tools helped greatly with the creation of more sophisticated computer technology, which supported better development tools.
Superintelligence may speed this up, but the effect is quite dramatic already.
The EDS cat herding commercial: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8
Apples and oranges. Modern office workers spend 1/3 of their day working so they can enjoy material benefits far beyond what the hunter-gatherers can. Thanks to excess productivity, modern people can do things like write books, create and build machines, teach, learn, and many other things that hunter-gatherer societies just don't have time for. Tell me, what are the hunter-gatherer's children doing while the modern office worker's children are spending 1/3 of their day getting an education (class time + homework)? Hunting and gathering, perhaps?
I'm sure that any who wish to have a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the modern world could accomplish it with far less than a 40 hour work week.