Have you ever used the word "God?" Do you know what it really means? If not, is that ironic? Was Slashdot's "irony" really the cause of the utter collapse of civil society as we knew it? How ironic was it for Nietsche in Time magazine to declare God a victim of Nietsche's own nihilism process? The NY Times is running a brilliant article that muddles the confusion around a culturally critical and chronically misused word.
What Intel should have done is to have "PAT" disabled through a physically inaccessable method, such as a different IC package, bondout (though this is probably flip-chip) or an on-chip fuse burnt at test.
There are two points being made in there. One is metastability, the other is Heisenberg.
Metastability is a problem long term in a computer. It can and does result in real and catastrophic errors. There's no way to engineer it out fully nor is it fully deterministic. That was my point. Pull up any paper on the web on metastability and check it out. You need to analyze probabilities.
As for Heisenberg, how is the computer supposed to determine position and momentum when the physical laws of the universe prevent that quantity from being known? It is a computer. How is it supposed to know where things are and how fast they're going when you can't?
You can simulate uncertainty like the poster who replied above says, but where do you get random numbers from? Usually they're generated using a pseudorandom seed. Know how they generate that seed? Sometimes it's cosmic background radiation, sometimes it's system time, sometimes it's other things, but it has to be some definite number. Again, that is the limitation of a deterministic system.
Believe me, I know very much what I'm talking about. Of course, you're too busy insulting me and telling me to shut up. Who looks dumb now for not understanding that there were two points to this article? Besides that, you contradict yourself. If the universe is a simulation, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle exists, it sure has SOMETHING to do with them, doesn't it?
P.S. Your site is very limited. There are much better free alternatives than what you serve. Just thought I'd mention that.
If you cannot simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle, you are going against the fundamental laws of computing as we know it. Computers do what they're told to do. They are based on certain fully known and defined states without which they cannot begin. In fact, all digital logic, when simulated, starts in an inexact or unknown state (an "X") until reset is asserted on the storage elements and all inputs are defined. That includes binary, trinary, and even "analog" computing.
In fact, there is a way for inexactness to happen in regular digital systems, which is metastability. A flip flop (single bit storage element) that does not have a stable input at the time it is clocked. When this happens, the output tends to go unstable, which eventually throws subsequent logic into an unknown state. The way to fix this is to stack flops transparently, thus giving the output of the first flop more time to stabilize. This is based on probabilities, strangely. However, infinite metastability immunity requires an infinite number of cascaded flop stages. And remember - one unstable element can throw an entire chip off track and require a logic reset.
We have enough problems getting computers that we use today to work the way they're supposed to. Simulating the universe? I'll slice that idea up with Occam's razor any day and I'll be happy when I'm as close as h/4pi or whatever the estimate is these days for the uncertainty.
If you need the perfect example of that, you need not look any further than the police crackdown on protesters of the 1998 APEC summit in Canada. The quick summary is that protesters were sitting on a road where the president of Indonesia would be driving through when the cops came up to them, told them to leave. Literally the next second (the video proves this), one Sgt. Stewart of the Royal Canadian Mounted Chimps pepper sprayed the entire crowd. Many of the protestors had to be hospitalized. It is truly one of the most disturbing police actions in Canada in recent memory.
My point is, if people who lawfully assemble and then are given no realistic opportunity to disband when the police/government decide that they don't like what they've seen (because of the economic advantages that would've come due to Indonesia's human rights abuses no doubt), and the subsequent inquiry into the matter is basically a cover-up exercise by the pseudodictatorship in Canada with no punishment for any of the RCMP in question, I doubt the courts in Canada will rule any differently in this case here.
Top that off with mandated minimums of Canadian programming content for each station by the CRTC, and you see that Canada really isn't the place for free speech at all.
If you look at the most ticketed city in the world - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada - there are over 200,000 speeding tickets written per year. This is certainly not normal, and it certainly didn't start out this way. This is also a city that, incidentally, has the highest number of traffic lights in North America.
Red light cameras were then installed with the intention of preventing accidents and catching offenders who would race through red lights. There are at least 37 red light camera today locations in a city of 620,000 people. Now the police have floated the idea of using them not only for red light cameras, but for enforcement of speed at all times.
Some of you are going to say "well don't break the law and you won't get caught" but that's not the problem. The problem is that the government and police have alterior motives. Its mandate under normal circumstances should be to serve its citizens, but who is being served when drivers can continue to act at that moment and not find out until weeks later that they violated the law?
One could extrapolate this scenario to monitoring of citizens using a large database. Maybe they'll start photographing from the front and see who's driving the car. Maybe insurance companies would like to raise someone's rates for lending their car to a friend. You know that corporations could eventually get their dirty paws on this information, with some "anonymous filtering" ruse. Maybe some racial profiling? Send cops into areas in real time when a [insert ethnicity here] goes into a [insert other ethnicity here] neighborhood?
Nobody needs this. Not in the UK and certainly not in Edmonton. The balance of its capability does not serve legitimate interests. If you don't fight against it, you are accepting it at face value.
Except for Dangerous Offenders
on
A Tour of Pixar
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If you're declared a dangerous offender, your sentence is "indefinite" which means that it's effectively life without parole. Paul Bernardo, who tortured and killed two young teenage girls in Ontario, received a dangerous offender sentence. He likely will never get out.
Then again, I don't trust the monkeys who run Canada either. If he's ever declared not dangerous, he can be released outright too.
I've said this on every DVD-related topic that I've replied to, but I'll say it again: The quality of the media that you get is the most important factor. Particularly for DVDs, it seems that some of the new exotic high-speed media has to have a firmware revision that includes specific media manufacturer support (e.g. Verbatim 4x DVD+RW).
The brands that I recommend to my clients for all writable media, CD and DVD, are Verbatim, TDK, and Mitsui (and their badge-engineered equivalents), in no particular order. The Mitsui Gold Archive standard are rated at something ridiculous like 200 years useful life. Everything else is of questionable quality and compatibility.
Now, while you may not get or need that much mileage until the next greatest thing, some of the cheaper media (e.g. Ritek) can go on you like crazy, sometimes in under a year. To me, if I'm going to go through the trouble of "backing up" my DVDs, storing my Ogg/MP3 files, or archiving source material for video editing, I'm going to use something that does the job right the first time, not something that I have to worry about dying on me in 2-3 years time. The advantage in cost over a spindle is miniscule compared to potential complete data loss. And I have blanks (Kao CD-Rs come to mind) that have totally died on me that have never even been opened. If I get at least 20-30 years with average abuse, I'll do it. Or I can put my most prized data, movies and music onto DVDs and store them in a safe deposit box at the bank where they likely will last much longer.
I know that there are folks who like DVD+R, but DVD-R is the standard. Just because more DVD+R drives have appeared right now means nothing. Just because Microsoft supports DVD+ standards means nothing. What counts is maximum compatibility, and DVD-R is that beast. It's not the most modern or sexy, but if you have a corporate training video or are duplicating your wedding video for friends, DVD-R is the choice you should make.
Doctors are NOT trained like engineers
on
Build Your Own ECG
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I have always said that if engineering were practiced like medicine is practiced by doctors, people would be dead. Gone due to a bridge or building falling down, or electrocution, or a chemical plant exploding because they rely on what they've seen before rather than what the problem might really be.
Real engineers are thorough thinkers. That is the most fundamental skill one is supposed to learn in engineering. Engineers should think about what the real root cause of the problem is and every possible answer to the problem. While cost is a consideration, an engineer will tell it like it is and tell you that you have to choose between something that works and something that costs what you want it to cost.
Doctors, on the other hand...well, I've gone to doctors telling them that I can't sleep and the first thing they do is want to pump me full of Xanax. They never asked me if there was something wrong going on personally in my life, or if I'm consuming too much caffeine or MSG, or anything. Just wanted to prescribe crap and get me out of their office. Fortunately, I told the doctor I wasn't taking Xanax and promptly found another doctor who sorted it out (too much caffeine). These are the same idiots who prescribe Ritalin to kids who won't behave in class because their parents are too busy stuffing them full of sodas.
But that's my point. As an engineer, it's my job both to identify the root cause of the problem and investigate the most feasible solution. I will never sign off on an engineering document if I feel someone will be in danger, including my reputation. Piss-poor engineers (and, unfortunately, your average doctor) will let it go through. So please, don't make that comparison, because it's patently ridiculous.
We have also investigated the impact of vector size on performance. The EE processor is tailor-made for 4-element vectors, so one could expect performance degradation for longer vectors. In fact, the opposite is found - a consequence of the pipelining built into the VPU. Performance improvement stops once the vectors reach length 16, consistent with the rather shallow pipelines used in the VPU. In Figure 5, we compare the performance of the PIII-600 and Playstation 2 for 32-element single-precision vector dot products. The absolute performance for smaller datasets now tops 150MFLOPS for both the EE and PIII processors. Curiously, one sees a performance hit on the EE once the dataset exceeds 5 million vectors. This is almost certainly a consequence of the small amount of memory available on the PS2.
So, I have two question:
1. What are the performance stats of the cluster in the/. story?
2. Why would you bother when you could use current commodity hardware for much less? I mean, a P3-600 is interesting, but you could probably drop some Duron 1.4s with a basic mobo and 256MB RAM for less out the door than a PS2. (Note: I'm only asking, please clarify if you have a better idea of what's going on).
Back in 1995 or thereabouts, I read an article that said something to the effect of "T1 speeds in five years for $30? How does that bite you?"
The prediction is both true and false. True in the sense that you can certainly achieve T1 speeds easily for that cost and even less, but false in the sense that greed has both driven prices through the roof and service through the floor.
In Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, broadband cable costs US$30/month with effectively no caps (though egregious uploaders and downloaders do get flagged). In most of the US, the typical cable or DSL provider wants around $50/month for lesser service - even in lower-cost areas. I'll tell you one thing - when I was living in the US, it sure bit my ass.
Cost of change vs. cost of mistakes?
on
Making Change
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· Score: 1
Having an 18 cent coin or a 29 cent coin will confuse the average person greatly to the point that there will be mistakes on both sides - both for cashiers and for customers. In other words, there could be a greater cost of making mistakes due added marginal losses from incorrect change dispensing and payment than of implementing a system that, at least on the surface, would lead to a raw cost decrease by the numbers.
In other words, applying mathematical optimization can often ignore the real end result when implemented on a wide scale.
If you look at Sony's pattern, they've locked up a lot of franchises on their machines as exclusives. You couldn't get a lot of these games on any other system but PS1/PS2. An example of this would be the Grand Theft Auto series
There were some other things like personal grudges too. EA comes to mind during the Dreamcast years when they stated they would not commit to the Dreamcast platform. And, considering the juggernaut that EA is, it's not surprise that there was little to drive the hardware, even though in many ways the PS2 was inferior. But they weren't the only one. Bernie Stolar, who ran the launches of the PS1 for Sony and the Dreamcast for Sega, was fired shortly after both launches. Some developers hated the guy so much they refused to develop for the platform.
Make no mistake though - hardware is not a good business to be in. It's a gamble to commit to a custom architecture, it's cutthroat from a consumer acceptance perspective, and it puts severe cost pressure on the manufacturer of the end product. Most hardware these days is a loss leader. Of course, few development houses will beat Sega's innovation or fun factor in gaming. Software was and always will be Sega's strong suit.
What's interesting here is that this isn't just a handheld gaming platform. Like Ken Kutagari says, this is Sony's Walkman of the 21st Century. That's the reason why it will likely be at least partly successful. Whether it will displace Nintendo is another matter altogether.
I can't remember which spyware apps did this, but they will actually go into the ZoneAlarm config and get through that way. It's scary, but it happens. IIRC I even read about it on/. (imagine that...).
The other way firewalls get bypassed is if the spyware uses something already given permission to tunnel out on a system, like a web browser spyware plug-in would. In that case, what chance do you have of stopping it but to remove it?
Even I had to go back and look. Since this is a movie that was pretty dear to me, I can still appreciated it simply because it was Wil's foray into Sci-Fi, albeit light fare.
Some of the scripts Wil has done have been bad
on
Dancing Barefoot
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Wil's a great actor. I remember him from way back when in Stand By Me, and even from The Last Starfighter. But the worst piece of writing I've seen in nearly any program was a TNG line where he meets Riker in the hallways of the Enterprise-D and says:
"Can I walk with you?"
Gahhh, I still think about it and it makes me cringe...but some folks could mistake the bad writing for bad acting. His revival is much welcomed for me, and that book will probably be an interesting read.
I'm an EE. Actually, a BSEE, and an MSEE, and I have my MBA for good measure too. I knew that I didn't want to work in software and coding, so I took a hardware specialization in ASIC and digital.
Well, lo and behold, after four years in the workforce, two layoffs, slavedrivers at my first job, all that work is being farmed off to Asia, eastern Europe and other low-paying locales. No joke - you can walk to an average ASIC provider with $200,000 and get a 2 Million gate ASIC with an embedded ARM, SRAMS, and ADC/DACs designed turn key. Those types of ASICs with design services used to cost almost ten times that amount. That also includes mask and tooling costs, btw.
In fact, most of the rest of hardware engineering has cratered in the same way. Cheap foreign labor has usurped the profession because electronic devices, like software, have for the most part become non-locale-specific commodities. Those electronic devices only need to pass Underwriters Laboratories or Canadian Standards Association safety certifications, and if they don't they just get redesigned. No engineer in electronics that I have ever known in my short career has needed their Professional Engineering degree, but I'll tell you that none of these guys who would have a product for sale here in North America would sign off on the design documents and be personally liable for them if they were designed outside of the United States and Canada, even under their project control.
Contrast this with, say, civil engineering, where the engineer has to stamp his life away on the lower left corner of the blueprint of that bridge or building, and if something goes wrong and it falls down and kills people, it's his ass. Plus, they need to be on-site almost all the time, because they're virtually all locale-specific type of projects at one point or another, particularly when it comes to the geotechnical aspect of it. I sure as hell wouldn't trust someone to design and spec out bridge trusses if they lived somewhere else, nor would I want it to be built on a mound of quicksand (as the Alberta Provincial Legislature was).
What's even more sad is that I've personally seen cover-ups of folks whose consumer electronic devices have burnt up in the end application due to overcurrent latch-up on a power IC, yet nobody needed their P.E./P.Eng. designation. Only in higher voltage power systems design has an EE required his/her professional designation and to stick his/her neck out. Well, that and for those who develop military and aerospace systems. But who cares if a piece of software asserts a line too long or wiggles it the wrong way to send a device into a tizzy, right?
The real solution is to reregulate the profession such that safety, both software and hardware side, become personal liabilities for those who have designed them. Small errors are liabilities for civil, mining, chemical, and mechanical engineers that need to be corrected. Yet small errors in functinoality are things that "we just have to live with" and accept for redesign. You can bet diamonds to dollars that the SW/HW design clowns outside this country have virtually full immunity on a personal if something happens or will at most get fired. Big whoop. Once you change SW/HW engineering to a locale-specific and safety-specific craft for which individuals become personally accountable and necessary locally, you will fundamentally restore dignity to the profession and cauterize the wounds that are causing the outflow of this profession to other countries.
As for me, after a couple of layoffs and general disgruntlement with the profession, I'm going to look at getting into management consulting and using my MBA a bit more. God knows half the companies I used to work for sure need an internal overhaul. But it's cultural- and location-specific type of work, it is very versatile, you can consult for yourself or someone else, and you can't farm most of it out because it needs to be local.
If you were to look at all the RF sources going through the air at any one time, including radio/tv station towers and all of the wide-spectrum junk from that massive nuclear explosion that keeps us warm 93 million miles away, then you should already be paranoid.
Unlicensed transmission devices are already limited to 100mW ERP transmit power. Most modern cell phones are under 600mW maximum IIRC. We probably would have seen much worse already had this been a major problem. What about cordless phones? What about the CRTs, even the low-radiation kind? Those make me more nervous than a simple radio device because we are more frequently and directly exposed to their radiation than a transmitter on a device connected to electronic equipment.
A few years ago, the IEEE Spectrum had an article that addressed the problems of RF from sources like power lines. One of the most interesting conclusions: the radiation along the center axis through an earphone was actually a significant source of radiation to the brain. Does that mean we ban earphones?
Sure, we need to do studies, but I'm suspecting that we won't have to wear tin foil on our heads any time soon, if for no other reason than that we should've already been wearing them a long time ago.
People wouldn't be going to such desperate measures as to build these special kits if Apple would simply sell their hardware at a more reasonable price. Yes, I'm aware that there are warranties, AppleCare, build quality, etc., but the fact is that the alternative - PCs - are a much better value overall. You can buy a PC with virtually all the features of a Mac that is far more powerful for less money.
One of my current conundrums is whether I buy a Mac-based or PC-based video editing solution. Apple's Final Cut Pro is the video editor's dream from an overall cost/benefit perspective, but the render speeds for apps like Adobe After Effects are dreadfully slow relative to the PC equivalents. In addition, I would frequently need to encode using different CODECs. A 3GHz P4 will whip any dual G4 Mac into the ground in raw speed, but the PC-based solutions doesn't have the visibility or legitimacy which some clients require. Still, for someone just starting out and doing small jobs like editing commercials and training videos, I don't think that there's a reason to go with a Mac. I'll get along just fine with Adobe Premiere 7 until I can get the funds to buy a better solution like would exist on a Mac. All MHO of course.
Kodak doesn't make archival media any more. But TDK, Verbatim, and Mitsui (in no particular order) are all I'll recommend now. In particular, the super AZO and the Gold Archive stuff are really good. Remember - one of the goals of the project was to store the video for at least 20 years. In a safety deposit box and with few climate changes, these discs will last a hell of a long time (Mitsui claims 200 years, but even 50 will be good enough for the next big thing).
I won't compromise on media any more. If I'm just casually copying something for someone, I might have a spindle of cheapies, but you need archival-rated media if you want it to last any length of time.
I should mention that this is the simplest turn-key solution. It's not necessarily the BEST solution, but for the average schmoe who doesn't want to recreate broadcast archives, it's good.
Also, get a reasonably fast hard drive. 7200RPM with a decent capacity, preferrably dedicated for capture.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever used the word "God?" Do you know what it really means? If not, is that ironic? Was Slashdot's "irony" really the cause of the utter collapse of civil society as we knew it? How ironic was it for Nietsche in Time magazine to declare God a victim of Nietsche's own nihilism process? The NY Times is running a brilliant article that muddles the confusion around a culturally critical and chronically misused word.
(shaking head)
What Intel should have done is to have "PAT" disabled through a physically inaccessable method, such as a different IC package, bondout (though this is probably flip-chip) or an on-chip fuse burnt at test.
That's the limitation on speed.
There are two points being made in there. One is metastability, the other is Heisenberg.
Metastability is a problem long term in a computer. It can and does result in real and catastrophic errors. There's no way to engineer it out fully nor is it fully deterministic. That was my point. Pull up any paper on the web on metastability and check it out. You need to analyze probabilities.
As for Heisenberg, how is the computer supposed to determine position and momentum when the physical laws of the universe prevent that quantity from being known? It is a computer. How is it supposed to know where things are and how fast they're going when you can't?
You can simulate uncertainty like the poster who replied above says, but where do you get random numbers from? Usually they're generated using a pseudorandom seed. Know how they generate that seed? Sometimes it's cosmic background radiation, sometimes it's system time, sometimes it's other things, but it has to be some definite number. Again, that is the limitation of a deterministic system.
Believe me, I know very much what I'm talking about. Of course, you're too busy insulting me and telling me to shut up. Who looks dumb now for not understanding that there were two points to this article? Besides that, you contradict yourself. If the universe is a simulation, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle exists, it sure has SOMETHING to do with them, doesn't it?
P.S. Your site is very limited. There are much better free alternatives than what you serve. Just thought I'd mention that.
If you cannot simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle, you are going against the fundamental laws of computing as we know it. Computers do what they're told to do. They are based on certain fully known and defined states without which they cannot begin. In fact, all digital logic, when simulated, starts in an inexact or unknown state (an "X") until reset is asserted on the storage elements and all inputs are defined. That includes binary, trinary, and even "analog" computing.
In fact, there is a way for inexactness to happen in regular digital systems, which is metastability. A flip flop (single bit storage element) that does not have a stable input at the time it is clocked. When this happens, the output tends to go unstable, which eventually throws subsequent logic into an unknown state. The way to fix this is to stack flops transparently, thus giving the output of the first flop more time to stabilize. This is based on probabilities, strangely. However, infinite metastability immunity requires an infinite number of cascaded flop stages. And remember - one unstable element can throw an entire chip off track and require a logic reset.
We have enough problems getting computers that we use today to work the way they're supposed to. Simulating the universe? I'll slice that idea up with Occam's razor any day and I'll be happy when I'm as close as h/4pi or whatever the estimate is these days for the uncertainty.
If you need the perfect example of that, you need not look any further than the police crackdown on protesters of the 1998 APEC summit in Canada. The quick summary is that protesters were sitting on a road where the president of Indonesia would be driving through when the cops came up to them, told them to leave. Literally the next second (the video proves this), one Sgt. Stewart of the Royal Canadian Mounted Chimps pepper sprayed the entire crowd. Many of the protestors had to be hospitalized. It is truly one of the most disturbing police actions in Canada in recent memory.
My point is, if people who lawfully assemble and then are given no realistic opportunity to disband when the police/government decide that they don't like what they've seen (because of the economic advantages that would've come due to Indonesia's human rights abuses no doubt), and the subsequent inquiry into the matter is basically a cover-up exercise by the pseudodictatorship in Canada with no punishment for any of the RCMP in question, I doubt the courts in Canada will rule any differently in this case here.
Top that off with mandated minimums of Canadian programming content for each station by the CRTC, and you see that Canada really isn't the place for free speech at all.
If you look at the most ticketed city in the world - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada - there are over 200,000 speeding tickets written per year. This is certainly not normal, and it certainly didn't start out this way. This is also a city that, incidentally, has the highest number of traffic lights in North America.
The intention of photo radar was to create traffic safety, but it has done nothing of the sort. Traffic violation seem to keep going up and up, as this webpage will tell you so is the revenue, from $3.5M in 1995 to $14M in 2001. What's worse, photo radar violations don't stop the driver from speeding, nor are the fines used for driver reeducation. They go straight back to the Edmonton Police where they are used to attempt to buy $4M dog kennels and retirement getaways for retired cops in Arizona.
Red light cameras were then installed with the intention of preventing accidents and catching offenders who would race through red lights. There are at least 37 red light camera today locations in a city of 620,000 people. Now the police have floated the idea of using them not only for red light cameras, but for enforcement of speed at all times.
Some of you are going to say "well don't break the law and you won't get caught" but that's not the problem. The problem is that the government and police have alterior motives. Its mandate under normal circumstances should be to serve its citizens, but who is being served when drivers can continue to act at that moment and not find out until weeks later that they violated the law?
One could extrapolate this scenario to monitoring of citizens using a large database. Maybe they'll start photographing from the front and see who's driving the car. Maybe insurance companies would like to raise someone's rates for lending their car to a friend. You know that corporations could eventually get their dirty paws on this information, with some "anonymous filtering" ruse. Maybe some racial profiling? Send cops into areas in real time when a [insert ethnicity here] goes into a [insert other ethnicity here] neighborhood?
Nobody needs this. Not in the UK and certainly not in Edmonton. The balance of its capability does not serve legitimate interests. If you don't fight against it, you are accepting it at face value.
If you're declared a dangerous offender, your sentence is "indefinite" which means that it's effectively life without parole. Paul Bernardo, who tortured and killed two young teenage girls in Ontario, received a dangerous offender sentence. He likely will never get out.
Then again, I don't trust the monkeys who run Canada either. If he's ever declared not dangerous, he can be released outright too.
I've said this on every DVD-related topic that I've replied to, but I'll say it again: The quality of the media that you get is the most important factor. Particularly for DVDs, it seems that some of the new exotic high-speed media has to have a firmware revision that includes specific media manufacturer support (e.g. Verbatim 4x DVD+RW). The brands that I recommend to my clients for all writable media, CD and DVD, are Verbatim, TDK, and Mitsui (and their badge-engineered equivalents), in no particular order. The Mitsui Gold Archive standard are rated at something ridiculous like 200 years useful life. Everything else is of questionable quality and compatibility. Now, while you may not get or need that much mileage until the next greatest thing, some of the cheaper media (e.g. Ritek) can go on you like crazy, sometimes in under a year. To me, if I'm going to go through the trouble of "backing up" my DVDs, storing my Ogg/MP3 files, or archiving source material for video editing, I'm going to use something that does the job right the first time, not something that I have to worry about dying on me in 2-3 years time. The advantage in cost over a spindle is miniscule compared to potential complete data loss. And I have blanks (Kao CD-Rs come to mind) that have totally died on me that have never even been opened. If I get at least 20-30 years with average abuse, I'll do it. Or I can put my most prized data, movies and music onto DVDs and store them in a safe deposit box at the bank where they likely will last much longer. I know that there are folks who like DVD+R, but DVD-R is the standard. Just because more DVD+R drives have appeared right now means nothing. Just because Microsoft supports DVD+ standards means nothing. What counts is maximum compatibility, and DVD-R is that beast. It's not the most modern or sexy, but if you have a corporate training video or are duplicating your wedding video for friends, DVD-R is the choice you should make.
I have always said that if engineering were practiced like medicine is practiced by doctors, people would be dead. Gone due to a bridge or building falling down, or electrocution, or a chemical plant exploding because they rely on what they've seen before rather than what the problem might really be.
Real engineers are thorough thinkers. That is the most fundamental skill one is supposed to learn in engineering. Engineers should think about what the real root cause of the problem is and every possible answer to the problem. While cost is a consideration, an engineer will tell it like it is and tell you that you have to choose between something that works and something that costs what you want it to cost.
Doctors, on the other hand...well, I've gone to doctors telling them that I can't sleep and the first thing they do is want to pump me full of Xanax. They never asked me if there was something wrong going on personally in my life, or if I'm consuming too much caffeine or MSG, or anything. Just wanted to prescribe crap and get me out of their office. Fortunately, I told the doctor I wasn't taking Xanax and promptly found another doctor who sorted it out (too much caffeine). These are the same idiots who prescribe Ritalin to kids who won't behave in class because their parents are too busy stuffing them full of sodas.
But that's my point. As an engineer, it's my job both to identify the root cause of the problem and investigate the most feasible solution. I will never sign off on an engineering document if I feel someone will be in danger, including my reputation. Piss-poor engineers (and, unfortunately, your average doctor) will let it go through. So please, don't make that comparison, because it's patently ridiculous.
1. What are the performance stats of the cluster in the
2. Why would you bother when you could use current commodity hardware for much less? I mean, a P3-600 is interesting, but you could probably drop some Duron 1.4s with a basic mobo and 256MB RAM for less out the door than a PS2. (Note: I'm only asking, please clarify if you have a better idea of what's going on).
Back in 1995 or thereabouts, I read an article that said something to the effect of "T1 speeds in five years for $30? How does that bite you?"
The prediction is both true and false. True in the sense that you can certainly achieve T1 speeds easily for that cost and even less, but false in the sense that greed has both driven prices through the roof and service through the floor.
In Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, broadband cable costs US$30/month with effectively no caps (though egregious uploaders and downloaders do get flagged). In most of the US, the typical cable or DSL provider wants around $50/month for lesser service - even in lower-cost areas. I'll tell you one thing - when I was living in the US, it sure bit my ass.
Having an 18 cent coin or a 29 cent coin will confuse the average person greatly to the point that there will be mistakes on both sides - both for cashiers and for customers. In other words, there could be a greater cost of making mistakes due added marginal losses from incorrect change dispensing and payment than of implementing a system that, at least on the surface, would lead to a raw cost decrease by the numbers.
In other words, applying mathematical optimization can often ignore the real end result when implemented on a wide scale.
...and I'll show you a hard drive that will have no recoverable data on it.
If you look at Sony's pattern, they've locked up a lot of franchises on their machines as exclusives. You couldn't get a lot of these games on any other system but PS1/PS2. An example of this would be the Grand Theft Auto series
There were some other things like personal grudges too. EA comes to mind during the Dreamcast years when they stated they would not commit to the Dreamcast platform. And, considering the juggernaut that EA is, it's not surprise that there was little to drive the hardware, even though in many ways the PS2 was inferior. But they weren't the only one. Bernie Stolar, who ran the launches of the PS1 for Sony and the Dreamcast for Sega, was fired shortly after both launches. Some developers hated the guy so much they refused to develop for the platform.
Make no mistake though - hardware is not a good business to be in. It's a gamble to commit to a custom architecture, it's cutthroat from a consumer acceptance perspective, and it puts severe cost pressure on the manufacturer of the end product. Most hardware these days is a loss leader. Of course, few development houses will beat Sega's innovation or fun factor in gaming. Software was and always will be Sega's strong suit.
What's interesting here is that this isn't just a handheld gaming platform. Like Ken Kutagari says, this is Sony's Walkman of the 21st Century. That's the reason why it will likely be at least partly successful. Whether it will displace Nintendo is another matter altogether.
I can't remember which spyware apps did this, but they will actually go into the ZoneAlarm config and get through that way. It's scary, but it happens. IIRC I even read about it on /. (imagine that...).
The other way firewalls get bypassed is if the spyware uses something already given permission to tunnel out on a system, like a web browser spyware plug-in would. In that case, what chance do you have of stopping it but to remove it?
Both those sites have excellent reviews of players, media, writers, CODECs, conversions and everything in between.
Even I had to go back and look. Since this is a movie that was pretty dear to me, I can still appreciated it simply because it was Wil's foray into Sci-Fi, albeit light fare.
Wil's a great actor. I remember him from way back when in Stand By Me, and even from The Last Starfighter. But the worst piece of writing I've seen in nearly any program was a TNG line where he meets Riker in the hallways of the Enterprise-D and says:
"Can I walk with you?"
Gahhh, I still think about it and it makes me cringe...but some folks could mistake the bad writing for bad acting. His revival is much welcomed for me, and that book will probably be an interesting read.
I'm an EE. Actually, a BSEE, and an MSEE, and I have my MBA for good measure too. I knew that I didn't want to work in software and coding, so I took a hardware specialization in ASIC and digital.
Well, lo and behold, after four years in the workforce, two layoffs, slavedrivers at my first job, all that work is being farmed off to Asia, eastern Europe and other low-paying locales. No joke - you can walk to an average ASIC provider with $200,000 and get a 2 Million gate ASIC with an embedded ARM, SRAMS, and ADC/DACs designed turn key. Those types of ASICs with design services used to cost almost ten times that amount. That also includes mask and tooling costs, btw.
In fact, most of the rest of hardware engineering has cratered in the same way. Cheap foreign labor has usurped the profession because electronic devices, like software, have for the most part become non-locale-specific commodities. Those electronic devices only need to pass Underwriters Laboratories or Canadian Standards Association safety certifications, and if they don't they just get redesigned. No engineer in electronics that I have ever known in my short career has needed their Professional Engineering degree, but I'll tell you that none of these guys who would have a product for sale here in North America would sign off on the design documents and be personally liable for them if they were designed outside of the United States and Canada, even under their project control.
Contrast this with, say, civil engineering, where the engineer has to stamp his life away on the lower left corner of the blueprint of that bridge or building, and if something goes wrong and it falls down and kills people, it's his ass. Plus, they need to be on-site almost all the time, because they're virtually all locale-specific type of projects at one point or another, particularly when it comes to the geotechnical aspect of it. I sure as hell wouldn't trust someone to design and spec out bridge trusses if they lived somewhere else, nor would I want it to be built on a mound of quicksand (as the Alberta Provincial Legislature was).
What's even more sad is that I've personally seen cover-ups of folks whose consumer electronic devices have burnt up in the end application due to overcurrent latch-up on a power IC, yet nobody needed their P.E./P.Eng. designation. Only in higher voltage power systems design has an EE required his/her professional designation and to stick his/her neck out. Well, that and for those who develop military and aerospace systems. But who cares if a piece of software asserts a line too long or wiggles it the wrong way to send a device into a tizzy, right?
The real solution is to reregulate the profession such that safety, both software and hardware side, become personal liabilities for those who have designed them. Small errors are liabilities for civil, mining, chemical, and mechanical engineers that need to be corrected. Yet small errors in functinoality are things that "we just have to live with" and accept for redesign. You can bet diamonds to dollars that the SW/HW design clowns outside this country have virtually full immunity on a personal if something happens or will at most get fired. Big whoop. Once you change SW/HW engineering to a locale-specific and safety-specific craft for which individuals become personally accountable and necessary locally, you will fundamentally restore dignity to the profession and cauterize the wounds that are causing the outflow of this profession to other countries.
As for me, after a couple of layoffs and general disgruntlement with the profession, I'm going to look at getting into management consulting and using my MBA a bit more. God knows half the companies I used to work for sure need an internal overhaul. But it's cultural- and location-specific type of work, it is very versatile, you can consult for yourself or someone else, and you can't farm most of it out because it needs to be local.
If you were to look at all the RF sources going through the air at any one time, including radio/tv station towers and all of the wide-spectrum junk from that massive nuclear explosion that keeps us warm 93 million miles away, then you should already be paranoid.
Unlicensed transmission devices are already limited to 100mW ERP transmit power. Most modern cell phones are under 600mW maximum IIRC. We probably would have seen much worse already had this been a major problem. What about cordless phones? What about the CRTs, even the low-radiation kind? Those make me more nervous than a simple radio device because we are more frequently and directly exposed to their radiation than a transmitter on a device connected to electronic equipment.
A few years ago, the IEEE Spectrum had an article that addressed the problems of RF from sources like power lines. One of the most interesting conclusions: the radiation along the center axis through an earphone was actually a significant source of radiation to the brain. Does that mean we ban earphones?
Sure, we need to do studies, but I'm suspecting that we won't have to wear tin foil on our heads any time soon, if for no other reason than that we should've already been wearing them a long time ago.
People wouldn't be going to such desperate measures as to build these special kits if Apple would simply sell their hardware at a more reasonable price. Yes, I'm aware that there are warranties, AppleCare, build quality, etc., but the fact is that the alternative - PCs - are a much better value overall. You can buy a PC with virtually all the features of a Mac that is far more powerful for less money.
One of my current conundrums is whether I buy a Mac-based or PC-based video editing solution. Apple's Final Cut Pro is the video editor's dream from an overall cost/benefit perspective, but the render speeds for apps like Adobe After Effects are dreadfully slow relative to the PC equivalents. In addition, I would frequently need to encode using different CODECs. A 3GHz P4 will whip any dual G4 Mac into the ground in raw speed, but the PC-based solutions doesn't have the visibility or legitimacy which some clients require. Still, for someone just starting out and doing small jobs like editing commercials and training videos, I don't think that there's a reason to go with a Mac. I'll get along just fine with Adobe Premiere 7 until I can get the funds to buy a better solution like would exist on a Mac. All MHO of course.
Kodak doesn't make archival media any more. But TDK, Verbatim, and Mitsui (in no particular order) are all I'll recommend now. In particular, the super AZO and the Gold Archive stuff are really good. Remember - one of the goals of the project was to store the video for at least 20 years. In a safety deposit box and with few climate changes, these discs will last a hell of a long time (Mitsui claims 200 years, but even 50 will be good enough for the next big thing).
I won't compromise on media any more. If I'm just casually copying something for someone, I might have a spindle of cheapies, but you need archival-rated media if you want it to last any length of time.
I should mention that this is the simplest turn-key solution. It's not necessarily the BEST solution, but for the average schmoe who doesn't want to recreate broadcast archives, it's good.
Also, get a reasonably fast hard drive. 7200RPM with a decent capacity, preferrably dedicated for capture.