There are plenty of toys for adults, and you don't even need an Xbox for that. Just pick up a FPGA development board, and start coding stuff in VHDL or Verilog or something. Throw in a microcontroller, buy an oscilloscope and logic analyser, and you're good to go!
A ship could use an impeller instead of a regular propeller to make the cables / nets option a lot more difficult.
Towing the ship in circles wouldn't be very difficult, until the ships computers start compensating, raise the alarm and throttle up a bit. As far as I know, the Somali pirates mostly use small boats, not impressively powerful towing boats.
Maybe they should just start using some flags on autonomous ships indicating they are equipped with automatic defense systems.
I guess the perpetrators might be found by correlating the buyer/seller data from a number of cases where fraud is reported.
The perpetrators could try to make this more difficult by making the data harder to correlate; pump some stocks that they don't buy or sell, pump some stocks, but intentionally sell outside the obvious window of opportunity, possible at a (small) loss, using multiple, unrelated accounts to buy and sell the stock, etc.
That way, the detectives have to try to find multiple unrelated perpetrators (from their point of view, because of the separate accounts), that have made a significant profit in some of these cases.
I think it's going to take a whole lot of very interesting data mining to find them, based on the stock data only.
This device seems almost completely useless to me for on-the-go anything, unless you also bring along a seperate LCD, which ofcourse needs power, because of the placement of the touchscreen.
I can only imagine the neck strain from looking at the far right of the keyboard to see what I'm typing. If the screen was in the center, or detachable (and re-attachable at the top) it just might be useful.
And aside from that, I've just spend several months doing CAD/CAM work, and my hands routinely hurt from using the mouse and navigator for many hours a day. I don't want to think about how my hands would feel if I had to hold a pen all day long.
While I do agree that computers play an increasingly important role in research and development, it's not the computer doing the design work. The human is doing the design work, and using the computer to verify the design, or optimize it within very specific boundaries.
When the computer calculates that a certain structure is stronger than it needs to be, the designer can adjust it. The computer won't design a completely different structure for you.
If you were to use a computer to generate a design (say, circuit board or application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) layout and trace routing) it's really just running a semi-brute force algorithm, optimized by the programmer to produce suitable but possibly sub-optimal solutions quickly.
Without the engineer staring at the screen, the thing would just sit there. Saying the computer designed the bridge is like saying the space shuttle was designed by the pocket calculators. The computer is a tool, and it requires and intelligent and knowledgeable engineer to produce anything meaningful.
I'm rather impressed they managed to perform even worse than Vista on the Cinebench test. If they keep this up, by the time Windows 7 comes out of beta, it won't run at all!
So, if two corporations, one of which is less than 18 years old (or whatever the local legal age is) merge, and later create a daughter company, that should be considered statutory rape?
I wonder how the Simpsons could be considered "human"? The Ducks are always half naked, but because they are apparently ducks instead of humans, that makes it alright? Those stories are even meant for children! The horror!
What if Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck would be having a wild party with April, May and June Duck?
E = 1/2 M * V^2, so E_car = 44700 / 2 = 22350J E_child = 894 / 2 = 447J
That makes sense, but I think the difference is that the car will still be moving in the same direction after the collision if the child was stationary. The car has lost some kinetic energy because of the collision, and the excess (22350 - 447J) will be the kinetic energy of the car after the collision (assuming the child now has the same speed as the car did before the collision, and no energy has been absorbed by deformation).
So, for the collision, or the state of the child and car after the collision, it doesn't matter which one is moving.
Besides, according to Einstein, it shouldn't matter anyway, because you can choose either the road, the car, or the child as your frame of reference.
Arduino is nice as an introduction to microcontrollers, but there isn't a whole lot worth protecting in the first place; it's a microcontroller with an USB UART, a crystal and voltage regulator. There is nothing novel about the design, it's all copied from the reference designs in the datasheets. The board is nothing any remotely competent electrical engineer couldn't design in a couple of hours.
The Wired article makes it sound like it's a huge advancement in electrical engineering, and they're giving it away!
Digital hardware, like processors and such, are usually designed in a hardware definition language, like VHDL or Verilog, so it's not very different from computer software. Instead of compiling to machine code or byte code, it's compiled (synthesized) into something that can be loaded in an FPGA, or processed further for ASIC production.
I guess that depends on a few things. Mostly how much it is, if it is money or something else, and whether or not I worked in a team.
Non-monetary prizes are usually ok, as long as they're not worth to much money. Just something nice or useful.
Small money prizes, like, way less than the time spend on the project times a half-decent salary are usually fine. They don't really change anything, I just go out and buy a piece of computer hardware that needed replacement, or a tool or piece of equipment, or electronic parts for a new project. This happened to me twice, I think.
What also happened to me once, is that a small team was driven apart just by the threat of winning a price (not even a whole lot, something like 200 euros per person), because some people were already fighting over how it should be divided, because some people did more work than others. They started fighting over how to measure the performance, how some people put in more effort, while other got more done. A few tried very hard to get more visibility, because they thought that way they would get a bigger piece of the pie. As soon as this started, I quit. The project basically bled to death, and no price was ever won.
I used to code for a living. That makes me money, what I do in my spare time isn't suppost to make me money, because then it wouldn't be spare time anymore. Even when I compete in coding competitions (haven't done that in a long time), I do it because I like the "fight" with other programmers, not because of the prizes. The ones I did participate in, had very small prizes, like, barely enough to cover my travel expenses.
Ok, you have a point. It's just that I hear this sort of thing all the time.
"Why would you do all that work and then give it away?"
For me, as soon as money enters the picture, the fun is (mostly) gone; with money comes responsibility, whoever is providing the money buys the right to demand answers and project deadlines. It's no longer "because I enjoy doing it", but "because he tells me to".
I think he either just doesn't understand this concept, or he ignores it, because frankly, it makes *him* completely irrelevant. It must be very frustrating, being an economist, and people suddenly start doing stuff that's not about money.
He conveniently forgets that a lot of people who contribute to OSS aren't professional programmers during working hours, he is completely ignorant to the fact that there are people who know how to write computer software *outside of the US* (gosh!).
Indeed, why are some people just completely unable to comprehend that not *everyone* is a greedy bastard?
Some people do things, like programming, you know, for fun! Contributing to OSS is not about "back-end revenue" for most people, it's about contributing to a community, about pride, and about intellectual challenges.
I feel sort of sad for him that *his* whole life seems to revolve around money.
Besides, this would basically be a software patent (or at least something implemented in software), which I detest, and I don't have the money or time to file a patent for something like this, and then file a interested party to sell or license it to.
I didn't even think about patents before I posted it; it seems so obvious, that I can't imagine that nobody has thought of this before.
That is exactly my point; it's just that I forget the turn the volume back down at the end of the track, and, if I don't forget, I hate the sudden low volume when I do turn it down. It the player would just gradually turn it down, I probably wouldn't even notice it.
It might even be a bit clever about when to turn it down; most tracks start at a lower volume, so the player could gently reduce the volume as the track starts picking up.
I've noticed, many times, that I start out with a fairly low volume (maybe 10% or so), and when a good song comes along, I turn it up a bit. However, by the end of the song, I don't really notice the higher volume anymore, and the next time I get a good song, I turn it up a bit more, until the player is at its maximum volume.
If I take the earphones out of my ears, put them back in an hour later, and turn on the player, I'll pull them out of my ears as fast as I can because the music is so horribly loud.
So the solution, I think, is having a "volume boost" button, which boosts the volume for the duration of the current track, and gradually decreases to the normal level during the next track, to avoid stacking up the boosts.
As of April 2008, OpenOffice.org does NOT NEED any NEW mirrors from regions that already have a strong download network. We currently ONLY search for new mirrors in areas where the number of download sites is quite low. As of now, this is especially true for Africa or India.
No, they don't need any mirrors...
I'm rather surprised by the OOXML support; does OpenOffice now support it, even before MS does?
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of toys for adults, and you don't even need an Xbox for that. Just pick up a FPGA development board, and start coding stuff in VHDL or Verilog or something. Throw in a microcontroller, buy an oscilloscope and logic analyser, and you're good to go!
I hope the North Koreans love their children, too.
A ship could use an impeller instead of a regular propeller to make the cables / nets option a lot more difficult.
Towing the ship in circles wouldn't be very difficult, until the ships computers start compensating, raise the alarm and throttle up a bit. As far as I know, the Somali pirates mostly use small boats, not impressively powerful towing boats.
Maybe they should just start using some flags on autonomous ships indicating they are equipped with automatic defense systems.
she's kinda cute...
I guess the perpetrators might be found by correlating the buyer/seller data from a number of cases where fraud is reported.
The perpetrators could try to make this more difficult by making the data harder to correlate; pump some stocks that they don't buy or sell, pump some stocks, but intentionally sell outside the obvious window of opportunity, possible at a (small) loss, using multiple, unrelated accounts to buy and sell the stock, etc.
That way, the detectives have to try to find multiple unrelated perpetrators (from their point of view, because of the separate accounts), that have made a significant profit in some of these cases.
I think it's going to take a whole lot of very interesting data mining to find them, based on the stock data only.
"kicking users off the 'Net after several accusations of copyright infringement"
notice how he used the word "accusations" instead of anything that would imply the necessity of evidence.
This device seems almost completely useless to me for on-the-go anything, unless you also bring along a seperate LCD, which ofcourse needs power, because of the placement of the touchscreen.
I can only imagine the neck strain from looking at the far right of the keyboard to see what I'm typing. If the screen was in the center, or detachable (and re-attachable at the top) it just might be useful.
And aside from that, I've just spend several months doing CAD/CAM work, and my hands routinely hurt from using the mouse and navigator for many hours a day. I don't want to think about how my hands would feel if I had to hold a pen all day long.
Indeed, imagine doing 3D CAD/CAM without a mouse. Do I have to surrender my space navigator, too?
Touch screens royally suck for anything other than clicking really big buttons.
While I do agree that computers play an increasingly important role in research and development, it's not the computer doing the design work. The human is doing the design work, and using the computer to verify the design, or optimize it within very specific boundaries.
When the computer calculates that a certain structure is stronger than it needs to be, the designer can adjust it. The computer won't design a completely different structure for you.
If you were to use a computer to generate a design (say, circuit board or application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) layout and trace routing) it's really just running a semi-brute force algorithm, optimized by the programmer to produce suitable but possibly sub-optimal solutions quickly.
Without the engineer staring at the screen, the thing would just sit there. Saying the computer designed the bridge is like saying the space shuttle was designed by the pocket calculators. The computer is a tool, and it requires and intelligent and knowledgeable engineer to produce anything meaningful.
You mean on 3 of the 4 tests they did?
I'm rather impressed they managed to perform even worse than Vista on the Cinebench test. If they keep this up, by the time Windows 7 comes out of beta, it won't run at all!
So, if two corporations, one of which is less than 18 years old (or whatever the local legal age is) merge, and later create a daughter company, that should be considered statutory rape?
I wonder how the Simpsons could be considered "human"? The Ducks are always half naked, but because they are apparently ducks instead of humans, that makes it alright? Those stories are even meant for children! The horror!
What if Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck would be having a wild party with April, May and June Duck?
And here we were joking about how retarded the idea of filtering all traffic in Australia was.
Not only do they intent to capture every packet, but they also intent to store them and analyze them off-line.
Especially considering the growth of bandwidth usage the past couple of years, this is nothing short of an absurd idea.
E = 1/2 M * V^2, so
E_car = 44700 / 2 = 22350J
E_child = 894 / 2 = 447J
That makes sense, but I think the difference is that the car will still be moving in the same direction after the collision if the child was stationary. The car has lost some kinetic energy because of the collision, and the excess (22350 - 447J) will be the kinetic energy of the car after the collision (assuming the child now has the same speed as the car did before the collision, and no energy has been absorbed by deformation).
So, for the collision, or the state of the child and car after the collision, it doesn't matter which one is moving.
Besides, according to Einstein, it shouldn't matter anyway, because you can choose either the road, the car, or the child as your frame of reference.
Arduino is nice as an introduction to microcontrollers, but there isn't a whole lot worth protecting in the first place; it's a microcontroller with an USB UART, a crystal and voltage regulator. There is nothing novel about the design, it's all copied from the reference designs in the datasheets. The board is nothing any remotely competent electrical engineer couldn't design in a couple of hours.
The Wired article makes it sound like it's a huge advancement in electrical engineering, and they're giving it away!
Digital hardware, like processors and such, are usually designed in a hardware definition language, like VHDL or Verilog, so it's not very different from computer software. Instead of compiling to machine code or byte code, it's compiled (synthesized) into something that can be loaded in an FPGA, or processed further for ASIC production.
I guess that depends on a few things. Mostly how much it is, if it is money or something else, and whether or not I worked in a team.
Non-monetary prizes are usually ok, as long as they're not worth to much money. Just something nice or useful.
Small money prizes, like, way less than the time spend on the project times a half-decent salary are usually fine. They don't really change anything, I just go out and buy a piece of computer hardware that needed replacement, or a tool or piece of equipment, or electronic parts for a new project. This happened to me twice, I think.
What also happened to me once, is that a small team was driven apart just by the threat of winning a price (not even a whole lot, something like 200 euros per person), because some people were already fighting over how it should be divided, because some people did more work than others. They started fighting over how to measure the performance, how some people put in more effort, while other got more done. A few tried very hard to get more visibility, because they thought that way they would get a bigger piece of the pie. As soon as this started, I quit. The project basically bled to death, and no price was ever won.
I used to code for a living. That makes me money, what I do in my spare time isn't suppost to make me money, because then it wouldn't be spare time anymore. Even when I compete in coding competitions (haven't done that in a long time), I do it because I like the "fight" with other programmers, not because of the prizes. The ones I did participate in, had very small prizes, like, barely enough to cover my travel expenses.
Ok, you have a point. It's just that I hear this sort of thing all the time.
"Why would you do all that work and then give it away?"
For me, as soon as money enters the picture, the fun is (mostly) gone; with money comes responsibility, whoever is providing the money buys the right to demand answers and project deadlines. It's no longer "because I enjoy doing it", but "because he tells me to".
I think he either just doesn't understand this concept, or he ignores it, because frankly, it makes *him* completely irrelevant. It must be very frustrating, being an economist, and people suddenly start doing stuff that's not about money.
He conveniently forgets that a lot of people who contribute to OSS aren't professional programmers during working hours, he is completely ignorant to the fact that there are people who know how to write computer software *outside of the US* (gosh!).
Besides, WTF does Myspace have to do with OSS?
Indeed, why are some people just completely unable to comprehend that not *everyone* is a greedy bastard?
Some people do things, like programming, you know, for fun! Contributing to OSS is not about "back-end revenue" for most people, it's about contributing to a community, about pride, and about intellectual challenges.
I feel sort of sad for him that *his* whole life seems to revolve around money.
To late, I guess, since it's published now.
Besides, this would basically be a software patent (or at least something implemented in software), which I detest, and I don't have the money or time to file a patent for something like this, and then file a interested party to sell or license it to.
I didn't even think about patents before I posted it; it seems so obvious, that I can't imagine that nobody has thought of this before.
That is exactly my point; it's just that I forget the turn the volume back down at the end of the track, and, if I don't forget, I hate the sudden low volume when I do turn it down. It the player would just gradually turn it down, I probably wouldn't even notice it.
It might even be a bit clever about when to turn it down; most tracks start at a lower volume, so the player could gently reduce the volume as the track starts picking up.
I've noticed, many times, that I start out with a fairly low volume (maybe 10% or so), and when a good song comes along, I turn it up a bit. However, by the end of the song, I don't really notice the higher volume anymore, and the next time I get a good song, I turn it up a bit more, until the player is at its maximum volume.
If I take the earphones out of my ears, put them back in an hour later, and turn on the player, I'll pull them out of my ears as fast as I can because the music is so horribly loud.
So the solution, I think, is having a "volume boost" button, which boosts the volume for the duration of the current track, and gradually decreases to the normal level during the next track, to avoid stacking up the boosts.
As of April 2008, OpenOffice.org does NOT NEED any NEW mirrors from regions that already have a strong download network. We currently ONLY search for new mirrors in areas where the number of download sites is quite low. As of now, this is especially true for Africa or India.
No, they don't need any mirrors... I'm rather surprised by the OOXML support; does OpenOffice now support it, even before MS does?
How about, if you don't trust your kid to drive responsibly in the first place, don't give them a key at all?
I get a sad feeling thinking about the poor photons on the event horizons, desperately trying to escape, but suspended in space for all eternity.