There's lots of different types of problem solving skills. Some are innate. Some are learned. And practice makes a big difference. What remains to be seen is whether there is any definitive correspondence between "slam" problem solving and real life significant accomplishments. There could be other more important factors. In other words, being terrible at these kind of contests may not be a good predictor of being good at things that count.
I'm thinking more of the numbers they're talking about to reach the $50 thousand price tag. Think more of the traffic in 5th Element rather than those early Popular Science covers. That bears as much to reality as those car commercials showing a car all by itself in some pristine wilderness does to rush hour in any large city.
Ringing cell phones as they enter or are turned on in a security zone. Having a bomb blow up as you try to activate it tends to discourage that kind of activity.
Of course, bomb makers could just put in a manual switch in series with the ringer detonation circuit to wait until the ring before activating that part of the mechanism. Unless there was some kind of random delay before the ring and/or a second ring at random. Add in unpreditability so safetly activating the detonation mechanism becomes unsafe.
Other things to do would be to make the ring circuit only work if the correct impedence was detected. You could get around that but then making bomb denotators would not be an off the shelf solution.
Flying as a mode of transportation only works because there are relatively few aircraft in the air so they can be kept really far apart, and the pilots are well trained.
It is repeatedly demonstrated every single day that ordinary drivers cannot handle 1 dimension in driving, let alone 2 dimensions such as intersections and multi lane roads. 3 dimensions is completely out of the question. Are you totally insane?
Depends on your point of view. If you are talking from the point of view of the whole country then it might not look so bad from that perspective. If you are talking from the view point of an individual who's taking the hit here then it might look different. Especially for older workers who can't take the long view and don't have all the retraining options. Would you spend $100K on a new degree that will take 20 years to pay off if you are only 10 years from retirement, assuming someone would hire a 55 year old college graduate into an entry level position.
Talks cheap if you are not the one paying the piper.
What the attempt is in this area is to come up with experiments where the results are not predictable by wave theory. Either the results appear to show the presense of ghost photons or the interference patterns are not as expected (with interesting conjectures of how that could arise).
Have you ever looked at how conventional warships are made (I've toured thru BIW). There is a lot of welding. A real lot. These ships usually have one or more machine shops on board and everything is fixed with a pipe wrench or by welding. I can just see the machinist's mate taking an oxyacetylene torch to the ships carbon fiber frame.
Open source software is created by who exactly? And how do those programmers make a living?
It's a self solving problem since if all the programmers are put out of work, there will be no way that they can support their open source programming, in a sustainable fashion anyhow.
The more interesting aspect of this will be how the emerging players, India, China, etc..., will support open source long term.
The biggest problem I see with performance is lack of visiblity of performance factors. At the hardware level there is cache (which is supposed to be transparent) and really deep pipelined processors. This can have a major effect on what would otherwise be an optimal algorithm. And the hardware keeps changing, so what may have been optimal at one point will become suboptimal later on.
In software, the biggest problem is lack of performance directives. POSIX pthreads is one of the biggest offenders here. Best performance practices in pthreads are based on how common implementations work. POSIX allows implementations that would cause major performance problems for so called best pthread programming practices. Example, POSIX allows pthread_cond_signal implementations to wake all waiting threads, not just one. There are programs that depend on pthread_cond_signal to wake only one thread for performance in order to avoid "thundering herd" problems. So while standards allow portability of correct programs, whey do not necessarily allow portability of performance.
Maybe. They are licensing some of their patents to Linux, which means it works both ways. I.e. Microsoft can't use certain things from Linux. Linux seems to be part of a shadow IP war between Microsoft and other players. Very strange.
The death penalty works! No witchcraft in Massachusetts since 1692.
There is a whole services for inventors industry out there that would like you to believe the answer is yes. But in reality, individuals making money from their patents is more the exception than the rule. That's because even if you can afford the $20K or so to do a patent, you still have to get people to recognise you have a better mousetrap, which can be difficult (remember patents must be non-obvious). You also have to be able to find infringement and prosecute infringment cases. Hugely expensive, and are your lawyers bigger than their lawyers?
Now, I have a track record of producing patentable ideas that are non trivial and leading edge. One of the things I considered was patenting some of them and starting a business based on the patents. But getting the patents would deplete my savings. I'd still need to have lawyers to protect and enforce them. That would involve getting a venture capitalist who would insist on getting most of the pie. That's a lot of work just to make someone else richer.
So, basically I just dump most of the stuff into the public domain to hopefully keep other people from patenting it and preventing me from using my own ideas. Looks like somebody may be picking up on one of them. I can't say too much about it, but if it works out, Microsoft is really going to be pissed at me.
it's worth to them. They don't seem to mind spending millions on buying any companies that they think present a threat to them. However they don't seem to spend millions on buying out individual open source contributers to keep them from damaging Microsoft's interests. Probably because by the time they find out, it's too late. Well, ok, some of them work for Microsofts competitors but I know for a fact that some do not.
Happens a lot. And some of it is synchronicity which is why you will see a bunch of people come up with the idea around the same time. Most people never even reinvent an idea let alone invent one. And 1 out of 5 is not bad.
I believe they solicited donations of software patents to use as leverage. Good luck at the $20k cost of doing a patent application. The problem with this is nobody, except SCO, has been seriously going after open source for IP violation. As soon as you withhold licensing of a key technology patent to somebody big like Microsoft, they are going to take their patent porfolio and come down on you hard. How may open source projects do you know can afford several hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend themselves even if the patents are not valid.
Sort of like those animal tranquilizer guns. You could hang around Starbucks looking for anybody who looks like an HR type or hiring manager. Anybody driving a BMW is fair game. Then when they're stunned (you still use the tranquilizer) and in a highly suggestive state, give them your elevator speech. Use RFID tags so you can track your resume. I have a suspicion that they just stash resumes in an unused utility closet, like those letter carriers who are discovered with 6 tons of undelivered mail in their garage.
I don't think they take into account all those people who don't have cable who would have it ala carte. I basically haven't had cable for over 15 years. They've already done their capital outlay. Every subscriber they don't have is lost money. 15 years is a lot of lost money.
Especially those huge patent payments Microsoft has had to make recently. Before you laugh ha-ha, you need to realize those patents aren't going to be free to everyone else now that MS paid a half billion or so for them.
My first car was a Ford. That's why I own a Toyota now. Perhaps the question you should be asking is where the f**k is/was Ford's loyalty to their own customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Andrew Tanenbaum discovers slashdot effect. Adti disputes it, citing that others discovered it first and that Tannenbaum just copied it.
There's lots of different types of problem solving skills. Some are innate. Some are learned. And practice makes a big difference. What remains to be seen is whether there is any definitive correspondence between "slam" problem solving and real life significant accomplishments. There could be other more important factors. In other words, being terrible at these kind of contests may not be a good predictor of being good at things that count.
I'm thinking more of the numbers they're talking about to reach the $50 thousand price tag. Think more of the traffic in 5th Element rather than those early Popular Science covers. That bears as much to reality as those car commercials showing a car all by itself in some pristine wilderness does to rush hour in any large city.
Of course, bomb makers could just put in a manual switch in series with the ringer detonation circuit to wait until the ring before activating that part of the mechanism. Unless there was some kind of random delay before the ring and/or a second ring at random. Add in unpreditability so safetly activating the detonation mechanism becomes unsafe.
Other things to do would be to make the ring circuit only work if the correct impedence was detected. You could get around that but then making bomb denotators would not be an off the shelf solution.
Flying as a mode of transportation only works because there are relatively few aircraft in the air so they can be kept really far apart, and the pilots are well trained.
It is repeatedly demonstrated every single day that ordinary drivers cannot handle 1 dimension in driving, let alone 2 dimensions such as intersections and multi lane roads. 3 dimensions is completely out of the question. Are you totally insane?
are confusing also. There's one for ordinary paper and one for card stock, and they're both in pound units.
Talks cheap if you are not the one paying the piper.
(how's that for a quantum theory like answer)
What the attempt is in this area is to come up with experiments where the results are not predictable by wave theory. Either the results appear to show the presense of ghost photons or the interference patterns are not as expected (with interesting conjectures of how that could arise).
Have you ever looked at how conventional warships are made (I've toured thru BIW). There is a lot of welding. A real lot. These ships usually have one or more machine shops on board and everything is fixed with a pipe wrench or by welding. I can just see the machinist's mate taking an oxyacetylene torch to the ships carbon fiber frame.
The mugger may just opt for amputation as a quicker means of getting the RFID chip than just poking around for it.
Open source software is created by who exactly? And how do those programmers make a living?
It's a self solving problem since if all the programmers are put out of work, there will be no way that they can support their open source programming, in a sustainable fashion anyhow.
The more interesting aspect of this will be how the emerging players, India, China, etc..., will support open source long term.
It's called RCU. Linus made sure that Linux had a permanent license for the specific GPL'ed contribution before he would allow it in.
The biggest problem I see with performance is lack of visiblity of performance factors. At the hardware level there is cache (which is supposed to be transparent) and really deep pipelined processors. This can have a major effect on what would otherwise be an optimal algorithm. And the hardware keeps changing, so what may have been optimal at one point will become suboptimal later on.
In software, the biggest problem is lack of performance directives. POSIX pthreads is one of the biggest offenders here. Best performance practices in pthreads are based on how common implementations work. POSIX allows implementations that would cause major performance problems for so called best pthread programming practices. Example, POSIX allows pthread_cond_signal implementations to wake all waiting threads, not just one. There are programs that depend on pthread_cond_signal to wake only one thread for performance in order to avoid "thundering herd" problems. So while standards allow portability of correct programs, whey do not necessarily allow portability of performance.
We need explicit performance directives.
Maybe. They are licensing some of their patents to Linux, which means it works both ways. I.e. Microsoft can't use certain things from Linux. Linux seems to be part of a shadow IP war between Microsoft and other players. Very strange.
The death penalty works! No witchcraft in Massachusetts since 1692.
Now, I have a track record of producing patentable ideas that are non trivial and leading edge. One of the things I considered was patenting some of them and starting a business based on the patents. But getting the patents would deplete my savings. I'd still need to have lawyers to protect and enforce them. That would involve getting a venture capitalist who would insist on getting most of the pie. That's a lot of work just to make someone else richer.
So, basically I just dump most of the stuff into the public domain to hopefully keep other people from patenting it and preventing me from using my own ideas. Looks like somebody may be picking up on one of them. I can't say too much about it, but if it works out, Microsoft is really going to be pissed at me.
a link on the Homier site. I was expecting to see lovely fjords, but no, it was Global Outsourcing.
it's worth to them. They don't seem to mind spending millions on buying any companies that they think present a threat to them. However they don't seem to spend millions on buying out individual open source contributers to keep them from damaging Microsoft's interests. Probably because by the time they find out, it's too late. Well, ok, some of them work for Microsofts competitors but I know for a fact that some do not.
Happens a lot. And some of it is synchronicity which is why you will see a bunch of people come up with the idea around the same time. Most people never even reinvent an idea let alone invent one. And 1 out of 5 is not bad.
I believe they solicited donations of software patents to use as leverage. Good luck at the $20k cost of doing a patent application. The problem with this is nobody, except SCO, has been seriously going after open source for IP violation. As soon as you withhold licensing of a key technology patent to somebody big like Microsoft, they are going to take their patent porfolio and come down on you hard. How may open source projects do you know can afford several hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend themselves even if the patents are not valid.
Sort of like those animal tranquilizer guns. You could hang around Starbucks looking for anybody who looks like an HR type or hiring manager. Anybody driving a BMW is fair game. Then when they're stunned (you still use the tranquilizer) and in a highly suggestive state, give them your elevator speech. Use RFID tags so you can track your resume. I have a suspicion that they just stash resumes in an unused utility closet, like those letter carriers who are discovered with 6 tons of undelivered mail in their garage.
then won't need bullets. Of course you will need to be wearing your tinfoil hat when you use this.
I don't think they take into account all those people who don't have cable who would have it ala carte. I basically haven't had cable for over 15 years. They've already done their capital outlay. Every subscriber they don't have is lost money. 15 years is a lot of lost money.
Especially those huge patent payments Microsoft has had to make recently. Before you laugh ha-ha, you need to realize those patents aren't going to be free to everyone else now that MS paid a half billion or so for them.
People who appear to be talking to themselves have always been regarded as social outcasts. Sure that's God (or your sister-in-law) talking to you.
My first car was a Ford. That's why I own a Toyota now. Perhaps the question you should be asking is where the f**k is/was Ford's loyalty to their own customers.