Are "formal risk analyses" on novel missions worth squat anyhow? I really don't believe whatever number they came up with would be worth anything. They don't really know the risk. Nobody does.
No, but it's funny how the word "polygamy" makes people's heads explode, even though they have no qualms with marrying and divorcing repeatedly, or even just sleeping around.
Second, I doubt that SCO's outcome will adversely any non-manager employee.
Do you suppose it will hurt the executive officers? They're famous now! Check out Carly Fiorina who lead HP to a 50% reduction in value. They paid her 45 million just to go away, prompting an immediate 7% spike in HP stock. Her punishment? Serious consideration for the job of World Bank President!
Once you've "in," nothing matters anymore. In extreme cases you might get fired and be forced to retire in luxury.
though, even then.. solar cell on it's surface might do a better job.
Interesting...
I wonder if one could make a totally passive wireless keyboard with RFID-like technology? It could change its signature with each key pressed, then the computer would poll it at 1KHz or so.
Celsius is a scale where the phase change of water sets the zero (freeing) and 100 (boiling) marks.
We know that, but Celcius is still arbitrary with respect to deciding whether it is comfortable outside. The boiling point has nothing to do with what to wear.
For the Farenheit challenged: 0 is "darn cold" and 100 is "awfully hot." As it happens 0 to 100 is approximately the range of temperatures encountered each year where I grew up, so to me it seems pretty sensible.
I do have one unsolved problem. Currently, I identify and mark Bit Torrent traffic by its use of one of the "standard" TCP ports starting at 6881. But many Bit Torrent users use non-standard ports, presumably to evade filters, and I flag their traffic as normal computer traffic.
In my case, filesharing traffic was the only one that's hard to identify. So my "solution" was to put traffic in the lowest priority by default, and elevate everything I cared about - people browsing my website, scp, my own http requests, ssh, then VOIP, in that order. It would be harder if I wanted a high QoS for some other difficult-to-track network application, such as video games.
What I really want is for the low-level networking libraries to obey an environment variable specifying the ToS flag for every packet that app generates. So for instance:
IP_TOS=0x8 java azureus
IP_TOS=0x10 ssh abcd.com
This would still be helpful only for cooperative environments, but for home setups it would be nice.
It's certainly true you can't control QoS across the Internet, but the assumption here is that the bottleneck is in the customer's uplink to their ISP. I.e. your 256 kbit/s uplink is more likely the problem than the Internet at large.
What Vonage is doing is giving rebates on routers with built-in phone jacks that prioritize the customer's own upstream traffic, favoring VOIP. This way your call will survive if somebody in your house starts web browsing or Johnnie left Kazaa running or your box is a spam zombie.
So is it true that bandwidth across the Internet is generally sufficient so long as the upload to your ISP is good enough? In my experience, yes.
for a very low $5 more a month even provides me with a static IP.
I think it's an absurdity to charge extra NOT to do something, like change an IP address. It's like the phone company charging to not to change your number every month. I guess it's all a matter of expectations though.
If I find a beautiful island with full of pretty chicks, there is no reason I should share it with someone or let someone else use it down the line. Sure, it would be nice of me if I did - but there is NO obligation whatsoever.
There is no obligation on anybody else's part to stay off the island either, because it's not yours. You didn't make it, you don't own it.
You would have a much better example if you referred to something manmade, like a house or a car. Those things do use some natural resources, but they are mostly added value, and the added value is that to which you really have a right - it's what you created.
But what will replace it? My little boy likes to play flash games all the time. In theory Java is better all around, but in practice it doesn't seem to run as well.
On another note... haven't there been phones like this before? What's their claim to being the first?
Does being first really matter? The iPod wasn't the first of its kind, and look how profitable it is.
Combining the functionality of a phone, camera, pda, and Walkman into one is certainly doable technically (many of the components are common - battery, screen, processor, radio transciever). The hard part will be keeping it comprehensible, and making each part work well. My Sony Clie has all but the phone, and I can tell you the software needs a lot of work.
I sure hope they don't stop reinventing this "convergence device" wheel until they get it right.
Actually, for what it's worth I'm writing a game in my free time which already splits rendering and (physics/game logic) into two threads.
I don't think that's the right way to do it. If you do coarse-grained multithreading like that, giving each thread a different job to do, you'll surely be wasting a lot of cpu because either the physics or the graphics will be much more time consuming than the other. Currently most games only budget around 15% of the CPU for physics.
In other words, the idea of dividing a program into semantically distinct "tasks" is totally separate from distributing workload across threads. Trying to accomplish both at the same time by multithreading will quickly fall apart of the number of cores per chip starts increasing exponentially.
I really think the future is on fine-grained parallelism that isn't even apparent to most application programmers. Just as current GPUs have multiple graphics pipelines and OpenGL programmers don't have to worry about it. So for instance there will be a multithreaded collision detection library that you call. An mp3 encoder will use a separate thread for each frame of audio.
Correctly multithreading up at the level of application logic is horribly difficult. People who think it's easy just don't know yet how many race conditions their code has, and haven't worried about what happens in exceptional conditions.
People say not everything can be multithreaded. This is true, but IMHO most needs for high performance arise when you're doing operations on billions of similar objects. You can't sit down and write straight-line sequential code that will take a long time to execute on a modern CPU, they're too fast. To bog things down you need looping, which implies regularity and the potential for parallelism.
Look at all the human brain can do with its horribly slow processing units, through parallelism.
It sounds to me like you're conflating data compression with dynamic range compression. They might possibly be related, but they're certainly not the same thing. I would expect data compression algorithms such as mp3 to have trouble accurately reproducing high frequency detail, not variations in loudness.
I'd say the great failing of UML or other design languages or symbology is only that it is not tied to code in such a way that code changes back-propagate to the design document.
Well, Rational had (has?) their idea of "round-trip design," which in practice meant you could generate diagrams from code.
We never found that useful, but what we did do was generate all header and implementation files from the diagrams. To change the class, you changed the diagram and regenrated the files. This way ensured the diagrams accurately reflected the static interdependecies among classes.
All the real logic was in the code blocks, of course, which the tool simply copied verbatim from version to version.
Was it useful? I guess so. I'm not sure it was more useful than the same information extracted into in a textual document more like Javadoc though.
Anyways, yeah, you need requirements and specifications too. But don't forget those requirements and specifications are just as buggy as code that's never been compiled or run, because that's exactly what they are - very high level pseudocode, that can't be subjected to the rigor of execution in themselves.
Which makes me beat my head against the wall. I'm stuck with using Abiword for when I need to open Word documents, or...GASP... opening them on my PC with Office2k.
If it's functionality rather than matching widgets that you want, can't you use an X build?
I personally won't buy lossy formats. I don't consider them good enough quality for what I listen to. (Classical) But many people will, especially for pop and rock.
I've hear this before - the idea that Classical music requires better quality reproduction - and I'm interested in the justification for that.
What I notice, personally, is that a lot of classical recordings seem to be of inferior technical quality, probably because the sources (classical instruments) are all analog. Also, individually miking and mixing that many instruments would be awfully hard. Then too, many classical recordings are old, and as late as 20 years ago many were recorded to analog media with noticeable hiss.
Popular music, whether or not it's any good, has awfully high production quality because "popular" == $$$.
Don't get me wrong, you don't judge the quality of music by the quality of the recording. But since technical quality is what we're discussing at the moment, why does classical require better reproduction? More discerning fans? Rigid expectations about what particular instruments ought to sound like?
The facts also include the fact that the President of the United States believes that the constitution is null and void for anyone he personally deems to be an "Enemy Combatant," US Citizen or no.
Yes this is the administration's position, but didn't the Supreme Court knock that down?
The idea that secret laws are compatible with democracy is laughable.
People think about what others think because it's rational. Honestly, which do you think makes more people wealthy: 1) IT 2) marrying well.
As for the "myths"... they are not myths. I do spend a lot of a lot of time at a computer terminal! Unfortunately for me I was already doing that in Highschool because that's what I like to do. Now I do work that is very interesting and exciting... to me. But it's not what people in general would think of as an exciting place.
I don't see why do we keep trying to push girls into technical jobs? Tech jobs are no better than any other type of job. Holding back people who want to do something is wrong. But pushing kids towards something they don't want is little better.
Recording video losslessly would be stupid anyhow. For the same bitrate, you could get a much better picture by using a higher resolution camera and lossy compression.
if the location of this project is near a humid location, the ammount of hot air moving upwards might also create clouds and then rain.
Well I guess we won't really know until we try, but I don't see why this would happen; from what I can tell this system wouldn't add to the total amount of air heating at all, rather it concentrates the heating on a smaller volume of air in a somewhat confined space, so the energy is easier to harness. But the same amount of sunshine would have been coming down, and the same amount of air going up, in any case. In fact, the turbine will remove some energy from the air (that's the whole point), so if anything it seems there is less hot air rising overall.
I don't like "this is a dupe" posts. I don't see the point, since by definition if you didn't already know, you don't care (because it isn't a dupe for you).
I'm not saying a nuclear disaster would be worse than a wardrobe malfunction. But let's not pretend the government doesn't know this. The government spends many, many millions of dollars per year on nuclear safety (see NRC homepage) and every aspect of nuclear anything is regulated down to dotting i's and crossing t's. That's not to say they're doing enough or the problem is solved, only that nuclear power is already regulated far more than I would ever want TV to be, whereas the Rolling Stone article implies the opposite.
What annoys me is that the MSNBC article has no content. Instead of *interviewing* a cryptographer, why didn't they just hire him to do an experiment on the iPod in question and settle the matter once and for all? Instead we are left to have this big speculation-fest.
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Are "formal risk analyses" on novel missions worth squat anyhow? I really don't believe whatever number they came up with would be worth anything. They don't really know the risk. Nobody does.
Once you've "in," nothing matters anymore. In extreme cases you might get fired and be forced to retire in luxury.
I wonder if one could make a totally passive wireless keyboard with RFID-like technology? It could change its signature with each key pressed, then the computer would poll it at 1KHz or so.
For the Farenheit challenged: 0 is "darn cold" and 100 is "awfully hot." As it happens 0 to 100 is approximately the range of temperatures encountered each year where I grew up, so to me it seems pretty sensible.
What I really want is for the low-level networking libraries to obey an environment variable specifying the ToS flag for every packet that app generates. So for instance:
IP_TOS=0x8 java azureus
IP_TOS=0x10 ssh abcd.com
This would still be helpful only for cooperative environments, but for home setups it would be nice.
What Vonage is doing is giving rebates on routers with built-in phone jacks that prioritize the customer's own upstream traffic, favoring VOIP. This way your call will survive if somebody in your house starts web browsing or Johnnie left Kazaa running or your box is a spam zombie.
So is it true that bandwidth across the Internet is generally sufficient so long as the upload to your ISP is good enough? In my experience, yes.
You would have a much better example if you referred to something manmade, like a house or a car. Those things do use some natural resources, but they are mostly added value, and the added value is that to which you really have a right - it's what you created.
But what will replace it? My little boy likes to play flash games all the time. In theory Java is better all around, but in practice it doesn't seem to run as well.
Combining the functionality of a phone, camera, pda, and Walkman into one is certainly doable technically (many of the components are common - battery, screen, processor, radio transciever). The hard part will be keeping it comprehensible, and making each part work well. My Sony Clie has all but the phone, and I can tell you the software needs a lot of work.
I sure hope they don't stop reinventing this "convergence device" wheel until they get it right.
In other words, the idea of dividing a program into semantically distinct "tasks" is totally separate from distributing workload across threads. Trying to accomplish both at the same time by multithreading will quickly fall apart of the number of cores per chip starts increasing exponentially.
I really think the future is on fine-grained parallelism that isn't even apparent to most application programmers. Just as current GPUs have multiple graphics pipelines and OpenGL programmers don't have to worry about it. So for instance there will be a multithreaded collision detection library that you call. An mp3 encoder will use a separate thread for each frame of audio.
Correctly multithreading up at the level of application logic is horribly difficult. People who think it's easy just don't know yet how many race conditions their code has, and haven't worried about what happens in exceptional conditions.
People say not everything can be multithreaded. This is true, but IMHO most needs for high performance arise when you're doing operations on billions of similar objects. You can't sit down and write straight-line sequential code that will take a long time to execute on a modern CPU, they're too fast. To bog things down you need looping, which implies regularity and the potential for parallelism.
Look at all the human brain can do with its horribly slow processing units, through parallelism.
It sounds to me like you're conflating data compression with dynamic range compression. They might possibly be related, but they're certainly not the same thing. I would expect data compression algorithms such as mp3 to have trouble accurately reproducing high frequency detail, not variations in loudness.
We never found that useful, but what we did do was generate all header and implementation files from the diagrams. To change the class, you changed the diagram and regenrated the files. This way ensured the diagrams accurately reflected the static interdependecies among classes. All the real logic was in the code blocks, of course, which the tool simply copied verbatim from version to version.
Was it useful? I guess so. I'm not sure it was more useful than the same information extracted into in a textual document more like Javadoc though.
Anyways, yeah, you need requirements and specifications too. But don't forget those requirements and specifications are just as buggy as code that's never been compiled or run, because that's exactly what they are - very high level pseudocode, that can't be subjected to the rigor of execution in themselves.
What I notice, personally, is that a lot of classical recordings seem to be of inferior technical quality, probably because the sources (classical instruments) are all analog. Also, individually miking and mixing that many instruments would be awfully hard. Then too, many classical recordings are old, and as late as 20 years ago many were recorded to analog media with noticeable hiss.
Popular music, whether or not it's any good, has awfully high production quality because "popular" == $$$.
Don't get me wrong, you don't judge the quality of music by the quality of the recording. But since technical quality is what we're discussing at the moment, why does classical require better reproduction? More discerning fans? Rigid expectations about what particular instruments ought to sound like?
The idea that secret laws are compatible with democracy is laughable.
As for the "myths"... they are not myths. I do spend a lot of a lot of time at a computer terminal! Unfortunately for me I was already doing that in Highschool because that's what I like to do. Now I do work that is very interesting and exciting... to me. But it's not what people in general would think of as an exciting place.
I don't see why do we keep trying to push girls into technical jobs? Tech jobs are no better than any other type of job. Holding back people who want to do something is wrong. But pushing kids towards something they don't want is little better.
Recording video losslessly would be stupid anyhow. For the same bitrate, you could get a much better picture by using a higher resolution camera and lossy compression.
I don't like "this is a dupe" posts. I don't see the point, since by definition if you didn't already know, you don't care (because it isn't a dupe for you).
I'm not saying a nuclear disaster would be worse than a wardrobe malfunction. But let's not pretend the government doesn't know this. The government spends many, many millions of dollars per year on nuclear safety (see NRC homepage) and every aspect of nuclear anything is regulated down to dotting i's and crossing t's. That's not to say they're doing enough or the problem is solved, only that nuclear power is already regulated far more than I would ever want TV to be, whereas the Rolling Stone article implies the opposite.
What annoys me is that the MSNBC article has no content. Instead of *interviewing* a cryptographer, why didn't they just hire him to do an experiment on the iPod in question and settle the matter once and for all? Instead we are left to have this big speculation-fest.