By their very nature geeks (true geeks) will shovel every bell and whistle into a device they can get away with because that is what they do.
The true geek will make it as minimal as possible, stripping out features until you get down to a barebones command line interface. (That's not what grandma wants either.)
It is often marketing departments who are responsible for your DVD player offering you 'premium' or 'sponsored' content recommending particular wines.
Suppose the chance of one lander going wrong is a half. Then if we send two, there's a three-quarters chance that at least one of them will get through. So: for X billion dollars you get a half chance of success; spending twice as much only increases your odds of success from 0.5 to 0.75. It doesn't sound like a good deal. If the probability of one lander's success is higher than a half, the extra benefit from building a second is even less.
And having two landings on Mars (the best outcome, with 0.25 probability) is nice, but not exactly twice as good as one. If you're going to build two launchers then send one to Mars and one to Venus; if one fails then you've explored one of the planets at least, and if both happen to succeed you've got something truly worthwhile for your twice as much spending.
I think there is a difference between facts about the world, such as a photograph of an event that happened, and pictures which are simply entertaining to look at, such as porn, or just intended to shock and cause offence, such as goatse. It may be hard to distinguish in practice because the line is fuzzy - what about the Mohammed bomb cartoon for example? - but that doesn't mean they are exactly the same, as you claim.
I think they're using the scientific meaning of the word maturity, meaning fully grown or fully developed. You can talk about squirrels reaching maturity; this doesn't mean they have responsibility. From one viewpoint mankind is another species of animal. At what age does this species reach maturity?
You might also add - where possible, eliminate a particular class of errors by using libraries or a coding style that doesn't permit them. For example, in C++ use the standard string class rather than hand-rolling char[] arrays and fiddling with pointers. Use new, not malloc(), for allocating memory, since new will throw an exception on failure and most of the time this makes your 'failure path' easier to code and harder to forget.
This may sound obvious but there is a surprising amount of C++ code out there littered with malloc() and pointers, and since programmers are fallible, also with pointer dereferencing errors. Have a look at Stroustrup's book and you'll see that he emphasizes using the safe standard containers like vector and list, using the string class for strings, and that pointer operations are hardly used at all in the early chapters.
I completely agree that you should paranoidly check every return value when using functions that return a special value on error. Once you get used to this, you begin to appreciate more the value of libraries that use exceptions sensibly, or eliminate the possibility of certain kinds of error by not requring the programmer to deal with raw pointers or memory allocation.
I would note, however, that on a typical Linux system malloc() will never return zero in practice; it merrily allocates more memory than your system has, and then your process will be randomly killed off later by the OOM killer. At least on desktops.
On the other hand, the main factor that makes secondhand PCs less desirable in the West is the cost of labour to refurbish them. Rather than finding a secondhand 2 gigabyte hard disk, installing it, testing it and installing the software it costs a lot less to buy a new disk or a new PC. Your time or the time of the computer repair guy is probably worth at least $50 an hour. With cheap labour the economics change, and it may make sense to put a bit more effort into getting older equipment working.
For example, secondhand cars can sell for a lot more in Senegal than in Europe. The labour is available to repair them and keep them running, so a car that would be a useless wreck in the developed world becomes valuable once shipped to Africa. There is a thriving trade in importing used cars to Senegal.
I wonder if you can use the machine as a training aid to learn how to lie better. You could practise telling a lie, and then look at the scan to see what unusual brain activity there was. After a while you will get a feeling for which feelings you experience correspond to which parts of the brain. Then you might be able to gradually train yourself to not experience that brain activity and those feelings. With luck this would also reduce the external physiological signs of lying. You might also start to convince yourself that you were telling the truth.
If you own stock in the company, there should be some way for you to register your displeasure at this decision. I expect that many of the investors who've bought Google stock since the IPO would rather the company changed its behaviour here. (Though I doubt any one investor owns a big enough share to force through a change in policy, except for the founders.)
On an interval scale like Celsius you can't add values. You can't add together 10 degrees and 20 degrees to get a meaningful result. However you can subtract one value from another to get a difference, and add that difference to another scale value.
There are some scales where you can arguably define less-than and greater-than operations but without being able to subtract to find differences. For example if you reckoned temperature just with 'warmer than' and 'colder than'. You might be able to say for certain that today is colder than yesterday, but not to find the difference between the two in a meaningful way and then add that difference to some third temperature. Also, you couldn't count in this scale because you can't measure equality; on some days I could say for sure that it's hotter than it was yesterday, but I could never say that it's *exactly* the same temperature. So for continuous quantities you can have less-than without counting.
You can use temperatures without a zero point, and compare them, and talk about differences between two temperatures. 10 degrees is colder than 15 degrees, and the difference between 10 and 15 degrees is the same as the difference between 15 and 20 degrees. What you can't do is talk about 'twice as hot' or 'twice as cold' or anything involving multiplication.
It's a common mistake though. I spotted a weather forecast saying that one city would be 20 degrees Celsius today, 'twice as hot' as another city where the temperature was only 10 degrees. But what if one city was +5 degrees and the other -5 degrees? Is it still twice as hot - or minus one times as hot? Is 10 degrees infintely hotter than 0 degrees?
You can only talk about 'twice' or 'half' once you have a meaningful zero of temperature, as in the Kelvin scale.
They'd have to rework the i386 compatibility anyway to handle AMD64 instructions. And it would be a real embarassment to have two 64-bit processors on the same die (the failed one and the successful one).
Perhaps it would be easier for Intel to just ship a Xeon processor supporting the AMD64 instructions, and do the Itanic support as a software emulation.
I think what it brings to you as a user is a bit of extra speed in browsing.
Current setup: a website like freshmeat.net that wants to get click statistics turns every link into something like http://freshmeat.net/redirect/xyz.com. You click on that link - your browser makes a request to freshmeat.net, which sends a redirect, and your browser then goes to the correct site xyz.com.
New setup with this 'ping' attribute: the link goes directly to xyz.com. The new page appears quickly and your browser can inform freshmeat.net asynchronously, so you don't have to wait. Also, you can easily turn off pinging with a single UI preference if you are concerned about privacy. With the old way of doing things there is no way for the user to turn it on or off.
There are so many different virtualization projects nowadays. And I keep hearing about magic new CPU features added to the latest Intel or AMD chips which will make virtualization easier than it is today, in some way. Is there a comparative review of the various approaches?
I wonder if you can get the Newton OS running on the Ipod. (Without having to do a full software emulation of the ARM chip on another ARM chip - by some kind of virtualization.)
Still, if no new development is happening on the operating system and there's no source code, the platform is dead by the definition I'd use.
I'm confused. Is Einstein a hardware emulator for the ARM CPU and Newton hardware (vaguely similar to, say, arcem), which requires a copy of the Newton ROM image to run?
Or is it something like Wine, a reimplementation of the Newton OS letting you run existing apps, but only on ARM hardware?
Unless there is work happening on a free reimplementation of the Newton OS, I'd say the platform is pretty much dead.
okay: 32 dollars okay: $32 makes no sense: $32 dollars consider: 5" inches, 40% per cent
Re:My C64 floppy could do that!
on
Scanjet Music
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember there was a cricket game for the BBC Micro that used the 'click' of the relay used for the cassette remote control to approximate the sound of leather on willow. (If your cassette player had a remote control socket you could connect it to the computer and then pause/resume of the tape would be under software control.)
Also, I saw a program published in 'ZX User' or something like that to play music on the ZX80. Despite the fact that the Sinclair ZX80 has no sound chip. I don't know whether it was an April Fool's joke.
Can't you buy a single screen and set up some kind of software emulation to split it into two? Certainly this is possible with X Window (eg two xnests).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think Godwin's Law applies to Holocaust survivors. That's just the way these things work.
Tivo is marketed in Britain as Sky Plus. I don't know if it records terrestrial as well as satellite.
The true geek will make it as minimal as possible, stripping out features until you get down to a barebones command line interface. (That's not what grandma wants either.)
It is often marketing departments who are responsible for your DVD player offering you 'premium' or 'sponsored' content recommending particular wines.
Suppose the chance of one lander going wrong is a half. Then if we send two, there's a three-quarters chance that at least one of them will get through. So: for X billion dollars you get a half chance of success; spending twice as much only increases your odds of success from 0.5 to 0.75. It doesn't sound like a good deal. If the probability of one lander's success is higher than a half, the extra benefit from building a second is even less.
And having two landings on Mars (the best outcome, with 0.25 probability) is nice, but not exactly twice as good as one. If you're going to build two launchers then send one to Mars and one to Venus; if one fails then you've explored one of the planets at least, and if both happen to succeed you've got something truly worthwhile for your twice as much spending.
I think there is a difference between facts about the world, such as a photograph of an event that happened, and pictures which are simply entertaining to look at, such as porn, or just intended to shock and cause offence, such as goatse. It may be hard to distinguish in practice because the line is fuzzy - what about the Mohammed bomb cartoon for example? - but that doesn't mean they are exactly the same, as you claim.
I think they're using the scientific meaning of the word maturity, meaning fully grown or fully developed. You can talk about squirrels reaching maturity; this doesn't mean they have responsibility. From one viewpoint mankind is another species of animal. At what age does this species reach maturity?
You might also add - where possible, eliminate a particular class of errors by using libraries or a coding style that doesn't permit them. For example, in C++ use the standard string class rather than hand-rolling char[] arrays and fiddling with pointers. Use new, not malloc(), for allocating memory, since new will throw an exception on failure and most of the time this makes your 'failure path' easier to code and harder to forget.
This may sound obvious but there is a surprising amount of C++ code out there littered with malloc() and pointers, and since programmers are fallible, also with pointer dereferencing errors. Have a look at Stroustrup's book and you'll see that he emphasizes using the safe standard containers like vector and list, using the string class for strings, and that pointer operations are hardly used at all in the early chapters.
I completely agree that you should paranoidly check every return value when using functions that return a special value on error. Once you get used to this, you begin to appreciate more the value of libraries that use exceptions sensibly, or eliminate the possibility of certain kinds of error by not requring the programmer to deal with raw pointers or memory allocation.
I would note, however, that on a typical Linux system malloc() will never return zero in practice; it merrily allocates more memory than your system has, and then your process will be randomly killed off later by the OOM killer. At least on desktops.
If you just want to run Linux under Windows, why not CoLinux?
On the other hand, the main factor that makes secondhand PCs less desirable in the West is the cost of labour to refurbish them. Rather than finding a secondhand 2 gigabyte hard disk, installing it, testing it and installing the software it costs a lot less to buy a new disk or a new PC. Your time or the time of the computer repair guy is probably worth at least $50 an hour. With cheap labour the economics change, and it may make sense to put a bit more effort into getting older equipment working.
For example, secondhand cars can sell for a lot more in Senegal than in Europe. The labour is available to repair them and keep them running, so a car that would be a useless wreck in the developed world becomes valuable once shipped to Africa. There is a thriving trade in importing used cars to Senegal.
I wonder if you can use the machine as a training aid to learn how to lie better. You could practise telling a lie, and then look at the scan to see what unusual brain activity there was. After a while you will get a feeling for which feelings you experience correspond to which parts of the brain. Then you might be able to gradually train yourself to not experience that brain activity and those feelings. With luck this would also reduce the external physiological signs of lying. You might also start to convince yourself that you were telling the truth.
If you own stock in the company, there should be some way for you to register your displeasure at this decision. I expect that many of the investors who've bought Google stock since the IPO would rather the company changed its behaviour here. (Though I doubt any one investor owns a big enough share to force through a change in policy, except for the founders.)
I did once analyse titles of British TV programmes to find keywords that make me more or less likely to want to watch a show.
On an interval scale like Celsius you can't add values. You can't add together 10 degrees and 20 degrees to get a meaningful result. However you can subtract one value from another to get a difference, and add that difference to another scale value.
There are some scales where you can arguably define less-than and greater-than operations but without being able to subtract to find differences. For example if you reckoned temperature just with 'warmer than' and 'colder than'. You might be able to say for certain that today is colder than yesterday, but not to find the difference between the two in a meaningful way and then add that difference to some third temperature. Also, you couldn't count in this scale because you can't measure equality; on some days I could say for sure that it's hotter than it was yesterday, but I could never say that it's *exactly* the same temperature. So for continuous quantities you can have less-than without counting.
You can use temperatures without a zero point, and compare them, and talk about differences between two temperatures. 10 degrees is colder than 15 degrees, and the difference between 10 and 15 degrees is the same as the difference between 15 and 20 degrees. What you can't do is talk about 'twice as hot' or 'twice as cold' or anything involving multiplication.
It's a common mistake though. I spotted a weather forecast saying that one city would be 20 degrees Celsius today, 'twice as hot' as another city where the temperature was only 10 degrees. But what if one city was +5 degrees and the other -5 degrees? Is it still twice as hot - or minus one times as hot? Is 10 degrees infintely hotter than 0 degrees?
You can only talk about 'twice' or 'half' once you have a meaningful zero of temperature, as in the Kelvin scale.
They'd have to rework the i386 compatibility anyway to handle AMD64 instructions. And it would be a real embarassment to have two 64-bit processors on the same die (the failed one and the successful one).
Perhaps it would be easier for Intel to just ship a Xeon processor supporting the AMD64 instructions, and do the Itanic support as a software emulation.
I think what it brings to you as a user is a bit of extra speed in browsing.
Current setup: a website like freshmeat.net that wants to get click statistics turns every link into something like http://freshmeat.net/redirect/xyz.com. You click on that link - your browser makes a request to freshmeat.net, which sends a redirect, and your browser then goes to the correct site xyz.com.
New setup with this 'ping' attribute: the link goes directly to xyz.com. The new page appears quickly and your browser can inform freshmeat.net asynchronously, so you don't have to wait. Also, you can easily turn off pinging with a single UI preference if you are concerned about privacy. With the old way of doing things there is no way for the user to turn it on or off.
There are so many different virtualization projects nowadays. And I keep hearing about magic new CPU features added to the latest Intel or AMD chips which will make virtualization easier than it is today, in some way. Is there a comparative review of the various approaches?
(I still miss running dosemu... that was fun...)
I wonder if you can get the Newton OS running on the Ipod. (Without having to do a full software emulation of the ARM chip on another ARM chip - by some kind of virtualization.)
Still, if no new development is happening on the operating system and there's no source code, the platform is dead by the definition I'd use.
I'm confused. Is Einstein a hardware emulator for the ARM CPU and Newton hardware (vaguely similar to, say, arcem), which requires a copy of the Newton ROM image to run?
Or is it something like Wine, a reimplementation of the Newton OS letting you run existing apps, but only on ARM hardware?
Unless there is work happening on a free reimplementation of the Newton OS, I'd say the platform is pretty much dead.
okay: 32 dollars
okay: $32
makes no sense: $32 dollars
consider: 5" inches, 40% per cent
I remember there was a cricket game for the BBC Micro that used the 'click' of the relay used for the cassette remote control to approximate the sound of leather on willow. (If your cassette player had a remote control socket you could connect it to the computer and then pause/resume of the tape would be under software control.)
Also, I saw a program published in 'ZX User' or something like that to play music on the ZX80. Despite the fact that the Sinclair ZX80 has no sound chip. I don't know whether it was an April Fool's joke.
Can't you buy a single screen and set up some kind of software emulation to split it into two? Certainly this is possible with X Window (eg two xnests).
You're complaining about this on Slashdot of all places?
Do you believe that Microsoft and MSN should obey the law and avoid illegal practices?
If so, doesn't that apply just as much in China as in America?