Yes I got a call from 'Microsoft' or something like that. This was after, for the first time in my life, I had bought a new computer and sent off the warranty registration. So I thought heck, maybe the OEM does employ people to phone you once you register your new $2000 computer. (That's not what I paid for it, but the list price a couple of years ago.)
The woman at the other end asked me to bring up Event Viewer, which I did, but became annoyed and testy when I pointed out that 'error' messages in the log are entirely normal and counting the number of them is not a useful activity. "If you are so clever", she asked, "can you tell me what an application is?". I declined to answer, so she filled me in: "an application is what unifies your hardware with your software". I guess this was in the script if any mark asks the question about what these event viewer log entries are. Of course I didn't proceed to the remote access website she then wanted me to visit so a 'technician' could take control of my PC.
With hindsight it was silly to even stay on the phone, but I was so chuffed with the idea that buying a new PC might even include some customer support, in this day and age, that I was ready to believe these were people acting for Panasonic who had helpfully decided to call their new customer. Duh....
There are two scenarios here. One is where someone inserts himself in the middle, creams off $0.01, so you pay more but the original seller doesn't receive any more. However, I do not believe that is what happens. (If you place your order in the market to buy at $1.00, why would the seller ignore it and sell to the high-frequency trader who put his order in a millisecond later?)
The other scenario, which I believe the article is talking about, is where bricks are trading at $1.00 and without high-frequency trading, you might be able to buy ten of them for a dollar each. Not by putting in an order for ten at once - that would push the price up - but by being a bit stealthy and buying only one or two at a time. Now, with high frequency traders, somebody will notice that you are buying one or two bricks and guess that you're likely to buy more. They buy some, pushing the price up, and hoping to offload them later. But not all of the difference in price is creamed off by the high frequency trader; most of it goes to the original seller. So instead of buying ten bricks at $1.00 each, you pay $1.10 each, the high frequency trader skims off $0.01, and the seller receives $1.09. So the seller, who might also be an 'ordinary investor', gets a better price for the bricks he is selling.
We always imagine that there is some magic way to interpose yourself in transactions and take a cut, but markets don't work like that. The seller would not bother to trade with the high frequency people unless they were offering at least a slightly better price than he would have got otherwise.
12 volt power bricks are produced in China in enormous numbers. Provided you use a power-efficient CPU like ARM or Intel's forthcoming Haswell chips, there is no cost issue with powering your server from an external PSU or perhaps two of them. Sure, if you want to build a 2006-era PC with a gas-guzzling CPU and massive heatsink, spinning disks and internal fans, it would be expensive to get an external power supply capable of supplying enough current. But today's components such as SSDs are a lot more frugal, provided you're not a 'gamer' who requires the fastest-clocked CPU and GPU possible, and we can expect this trend to continue for a few years at least.
It's not clear that high-frequency trading is applying 'an unseen tax' to individual investors. As many have noted, the broker fees you pay have fallen greatly in the past 30 years, and a lot of that is due to automation. People assume that any price movement due to high-frequency trading must be at the expense of 'the little guy', and the article commits the same fallacy:
They also contend that ordinary investors are paying more for their stocks, not less, because computerized traders pick up information about stock orders and push up prices before orders can be filled.
But hang on a second, who is selling the stock which an 'ordinary investor' wishes to buy? Might it not be an 'ordinary investor' on the other end of the trade too? In which case, if the price is pushed up, one 'ordinary investor' benefits just as much as another one loses.
There are two sides to every trade, a buyer and a seller. A change in price is a gain for one side and a loss for the other. A rise or a fall in prices is not good or bad in itself.
Because you want a laptop running Linux, and you like high-resolution displays, and the Macbook Pro 15" is the only laptop on the market with a high-res display. It's sad that Dell, or HP, or Lenovo are incapable of selling interesting new hardware rather than increasingly crappy me-too copies of what everyone else has, but that's the world we live in.
Quite right. Read The C++ Programming Language. Classes and objects are not explicitly mentioned until quite late on, although the early examples do use standard library concrete types such as string.
It sounds like the problem is that the British government has made two incompatible promises. On the one hand the rules of diplomacy require that an embassy be untouchable. But equally, extradition treaties with Sweden and other countries require that the government do everything possible to extradite a suspect if it receives an extradition request and the request is not successfully challenged in court. Which takes priority?
Perhaps the right answer is for Sweden to negotiate an extradition treaty with Ecuador. But requiring that would set a dangerous precedent - any suspect facing extradition could avoid it just by finding one embassy among hundreds willing to shelter him. You can imagine that undeveloped, cash-strapped countries could even offer this as a paid service; it wouldn't be the first time that overseas embassies have been used for profit-making legal arbitrage. Without the ability to revoke immunity if necessary, it would be impossible for the host country to do anything about it.
It's a strange mindset to see run-time type information, available by standard in widespread languages such as Java and C#, as 'really crazy shit that you can do in C++'. It carries a runtime cost and the only unusual thing about C++ is that you don't have to pay that cost if you don't use it.
There is indeed crazy shit like compile-time Turing-complete template metaprogramming (the 'Vogon liver' that has grown way beyond its original intended purpose) but it's important to distinguish between that and language concepts which are quite normal and accepted in the rest of the world.
GIF compression uses the LZW algorithm which is integer-based, hard to parallelize, and so a very unlikely candidate for speedups using SIMD instructions or GPU acceleration. I doubt Windows 8's improved graphics performance will do anything for GIF (or PNG) images, except perhaps for scaling them up and down after decompression.
I have a small portable PC with an Atom 1.33GHz processor and Windows XP, but I want to view large 16-megapixel JPEGs from a digital camera. So JPEG rendering speed does matter. I found that jpegview.sourceforge.net, a free program that uses Intel's optimized JPEG library, performs better than the standard picture viewer. Even so, it takes a second or two to flip from one image to the next. Anything that can crunch through them faster is welcome.
Having a third party server in the middle is not a problem if the data is encrypted end-to-end. (Of course, you need to know that you are talking to who you think you are, leading to a chicken and egg problem getting the other person's public key.)
On the other hand, if the data isn't encrypted, then even without a third party running the server in the middle the conversation can be eavesdropped as it passes through routers on the Internet.
So the presence or not of a third party server isn't the deciding factor about whether the conversation is secure. End to end encryption is much more important.
Note that the first law is not to injure a human being. Not specifically the robot's owner.
A smartphone which looks after the interests of Apple shareholders by disregarding your own interests may be nasty, but it does not violate Asimov's first law, since in the end Apple shareholders are human beings too.
Of course the real right answer is to fix these broken apps. The Firefox code copes very badly with missing files, even giving assertion failures. (By definition, an assertion failure is always a bug, since it is a 'can never happen' condition which just happened. Assertions should never be used for things outside the program's control, such as the filesystem.)
But given the way the world works, I have to applaud Fedora for finding a pragmatic solution to a real problem.
Set up a mailing list with a list manager such as GNU mailman, and then add it to Gmane to provide a web interface, and searching. (Gmane is also a mail-to-nntp gateway, but you don't have to use that part.)
... though it has to be said, these rights originally did not apply to non-citizens such as black people, so it might be argued they don't fully apply to people who are not US citizens today. No doubt there is a rich body of case law on the topic.
That part of the Constitution says 'no person', not 'no American citizen'. The right to due process does not depend on being a citizen of any particular country.
It would be a gift to headline writers on snarky tech-news sites, who, whenever a new AMD processor was slower than its Intel competitor, would talk about AAA being 'downgraded'.
X forwarding? You mean you've never tried emacs in tty mode? You haven't *lived*!
IMHO, the days of having to use some other editor to make a 'quick change' are past. Modern hardware is so quick that starting emacs to edit a config file is pretty much instant.
4096x2560... not bad at all. It doesn't beat two rotated T221s side by side (total res 4800x3840) but there isn't a 10cm bezel in the middle. OTOH, the T221s have colour.
If you set font size to exactly 200 per cent then it still snaps to pixel boundaries just as well as normal size. With the apps I use on Windows XP (Firefox, PuTTY, Outlook, Visual Studio) things work pretty well.
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Yes I got a call from 'Microsoft' or something like that. This was after, for the first time in my life, I had bought a new computer and sent off the warranty registration. So I thought heck, maybe the OEM does employ people to phone you once you register your new $2000 computer. (That's not what I paid for it, but the list price a couple of years ago.) The woman at the other end asked me to bring up Event Viewer, which I did, but became annoyed and testy when I pointed out that 'error' messages in the log are entirely normal and counting the number of them is not a useful activity. "If you are so clever", she asked, "can you tell me what an application is?". I declined to answer, so she filled me in: "an application is what unifies your hardware with your software". I guess this was in the script if any mark asks the question about what these event viewer log entries are. Of course I didn't proceed to the remote access website she then wanted me to visit so a 'technician' could take control of my PC. With hindsight it was silly to even stay on the phone, but I was so chuffed with the idea that buying a new PC might even include some customer support, in this day and age, that I was ready to believe these were people acting for Panasonic who had helpfully decided to call their new customer. Duh....
Until a new slightly taller and lighter wax figure is released next year.
The other scenario, which I believe the article is talking about, is where bricks are trading at $1.00 and without high-frequency trading, you might be able to buy ten of them for a dollar each. Not by putting in an order for ten at once - that would push the price up - but by being a bit stealthy and buying only one or two at a time. Now, with high frequency traders, somebody will notice that you are buying one or two bricks and guess that you're likely to buy more. They buy some, pushing the price up, and hoping to offload them later. But not all of the difference in price is creamed off by the high frequency trader; most of it goes to the original seller. So instead of buying ten bricks at $1.00 each, you pay $1.10 each, the high frequency trader skims off $0.01, and the seller receives $1.09. So the seller, who might also be an 'ordinary investor', gets a better price for the bricks he is selling.
We always imagine that there is some magic way to interpose yourself in transactions and take a cut, but markets don't work like that. The seller would not bother to trade with the high frequency people unless they were offering at least a slightly better price than he would have got otherwise.
12 volt power bricks are produced in China in enormous numbers. Provided you use a power-efficient CPU like ARM or Intel's forthcoming Haswell chips, there is no cost issue with powering your server from an external PSU or perhaps two of them. Sure, if you want to build a 2006-era PC with a gas-guzzling CPU and massive heatsink, spinning disks and internal fans, it would be expensive to get an external power supply capable of supplying enough current. But today's components such as SSDs are a lot more frugal, provided you're not a 'gamer' who requires the fastest-clocked CPU and GPU possible, and we can expect this trend to continue for a few years at least.
But hang on a second, who is selling the stock which an 'ordinary investor' wishes to buy? Might it not be an 'ordinary investor' on the other end of the trade too? In which case, if the price is pushed up, one 'ordinary investor' benefits just as much as another one loses.
There are two sides to every trade, a buyer and a seller. A change in price is a gain for one side and a loss for the other. A rise or a fall in prices is not good or bad in itself.
Is there a consumer GPS unit which combines GPS and GLONASS in this way?
Because you want a laptop running Linux, and you like high-resolution displays, and the Macbook Pro 15" is the only laptop on the market with a high-res display. It's sad that Dell, or HP, or Lenovo are incapable of selling interesting new hardware rather than increasingly crappy me-too copies of what everyone else has, but that's the world we live in.
Quite right. Read The C++ Programming Language. Classes and objects are not explicitly mentioned until quite late on, although the early examples do use standard library concrete types such as string.
It sounds like the problem is that the British government has made two incompatible promises. On the one hand the rules of diplomacy require that an embassy be untouchable. But equally, extradition treaties with Sweden and other countries require that the government do everything possible to extradite a suspect if it receives an extradition request and the request is not successfully challenged in court. Which takes priority? Perhaps the right answer is for Sweden to negotiate an extradition treaty with Ecuador. But requiring that would set a dangerous precedent - any suspect facing extradition could avoid it just by finding one embassy among hundreds willing to shelter him. You can imagine that undeveloped, cash-strapped countries could even offer this as a paid service; it wouldn't be the first time that overseas embassies have been used for profit-making legal arbitrage. Without the ability to revoke immunity if necessary, it would be impossible for the host country to do anything about it.
It's a strange mindset to see run-time type information, available by standard in widespread languages such as Java and C#, as 'really crazy shit that you can do in C++'. It carries a runtime cost and the only unusual thing about C++ is that you don't have to pay that cost if you don't use it. There is indeed crazy shit like compile-time Turing-complete template metaprogramming (the 'Vogon liver' that has grown way beyond its original intended purpose) but it's important to distinguish between that and language concepts which are quite normal and accepted in the rest of the world.
GIF compression uses the LZW algorithm which is integer-based, hard to parallelize, and so a very unlikely candidate for speedups using SIMD instructions or GPU acceleration. I doubt Windows 8's improved graphics performance will do anything for GIF (or PNG) images, except perhaps for scaling them up and down after decompression.
I have a small portable PC with an Atom 1.33GHz processor and Windows XP, but I want to view large 16-megapixel JPEGs from a digital camera. So JPEG rendering speed does matter. I found that jpegview.sourceforge.net, a free program that uses Intel's optimized JPEG library, performs better than the standard picture viewer. Even so, it takes a second or two to flip from one image to the next. Anything that can crunch through them faster is welcome.
Having a third party server in the middle is not a problem if the data is encrypted end-to-end. (Of course, you need to know that you are talking to who you think you are, leading to a chicken and egg problem getting the other person's public key.) On the other hand, if the data isn't encrypted, then even without a third party running the server in the middle the conversation can be eavesdropped as it passes through routers on the Internet. So the presence or not of a third party server isn't the deciding factor about whether the conversation is secure. End to end encryption is much more important.
So which Android devices let you plug in a DVD player (by USB, say) to play movies or rip them (probably without recompression) to local storage?
A smartphone which looks after the interests of Apple shareholders by disregarding your own interests may be nasty, but it does not violate Asimov's first law, since in the end Apple shareholders are human beings too.
Of course the real right answer is to fix these broken apps. The Firefox code copes very badly with missing files, even giving assertion failures. (By definition, an assertion failure is always a bug, since it is a 'can never happen' condition which just happened. Assertions should never be used for things outside the program's control, such as the filesystem.) But given the way the world works, I have to applaud Fedora for finding a pragmatic solution to a real problem.
I love how "for security reasons" is the new euphemism meaning "for completely stupid reasons".
Set up a mailing list with a list manager such as GNU mailman, and then add it to Gmane to provide a web interface, and searching. (Gmane is also a mail-to-nntp gateway, but you don't have to use that part.)
... though it has to be said, these rights originally did not apply to non-citizens such as black people, so it might be argued they don't fully apply to people who are not US citizens today. No doubt there is a rich body of case law on the topic.
That part of the Constitution says 'no person', not 'no American citizen'. The right to due process does not depend on being a citizen of any particular country.
Which ARM instructions are microcoded?
It would be a gift to headline writers on snarky tech-news sites, who, whenever a new AMD processor was slower than its Intel competitor, would talk about AAA being 'downgraded'.
X forwarding? You mean you've never tried emacs in tty mode? You haven't *lived*! IMHO, the days of having to use some other editor to make a 'quick change' are past. Modern hardware is so quick that starting emacs to edit a config file is pretty much instant.
4096x2560... not bad at all. It doesn't beat two rotated T221s side by side (total res 4800x3840) but there isn't a 10cm bezel in the middle. OTOH, the T221s have colour.
If you set font size to exactly 200 per cent then it still snaps to pixel boundaries just as well as normal size. With the apps I use on Windows XP (Firefox, PuTTY, Outlook, Visual Studio) things work pretty well.