Extremely funny (and true. It's always funnier when it's true).
I like the way you subtly brought Trump supporters into the argument.
I would've "liked" or "voted" for you post, but Slashdot is too mind boggling primitive for that. I'm going back to Reddit now... Catch you later.
I'm a Slashdot user with 'Excellent' Karma, but I never see an option for rating a submission or comments. So Slashdot is a broadcast only system where some secret cabal of editors gets to rate things. I go to Reddit if I want to participate.
Too bad Slashdot doesn't have a way of letting users come to consensus on questions like, "do you like this new feature on Slashdot".
But I bet they're using the newest tech fashions in CSS and Javascript for the new beta web pages. Shiny!
"Currently, the best format for such use is FLV (Flash Video), as almost all browsers will display it natively without need of installing extra plugins. It is for example the format used in Google Video."
You can control the size and bit rate (quality) so you can create a widely compatible video, but still make it high quality.
I'm just guessing that the telecom companies' various subpoena-less wiretaps might have saved some internet traffic. And don't tell me that our nation's intelligence services aren't monitoring internet traffic to/from government facilities (if they're not, then they're not doing their job). Some of this stuff has to be saved somewhere.
The article sort of talks about the intrinsic role of time based feedback loops as part of how a node recognizes a pattern. I'm guessing that rather than process a wide bit pattern directly, "nodes" process the wide bit pattern in chunks remembering the node's state based on the previous sequence of chunks and determining the new state based on the previous state and the current new chunk (and maybe neighboring/parent node states?). A feedback/state system like this might naturally process time sequenced info.
Could Groovy replace Java? Some features cryptic
on
Groovy in Action
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For reasons described above, I don't think Groovy will replace Perl anytime soon, but it might make a great teaching language. You can start out very simply and expand into GUI programming, web programming, and any of the other million Java library functions that exist.
In fact, it might make a great replacement for Java. Features that really should've been there from the beginning are no easy to access (ranges, easy to use lists & associative arrays, reasonable string handling)
Although you can start out simply in Groovy, I find some of the funky "iterator attributes calling code snippets declared in 'closures' " to be cryptic. Here's an example (basically from listing 7.23 of the Groovy in Action book, see http://www.benslade.com/projects/java/groovy/Listi ng_7_23_GPath.groovySelfDoc.html for the full example):
for the attribute of the invoice consisting of a list of line items
for each invoice, for each line item in the list, search via "grep" (although it's not using regex's here)
pass the line item into the {}'s via the "aLineItem" parameter (the "->" is the delimeter, weird)
calculate the total cost of the line item via it's totalCostLineItem method
if it matches the greater than condition then, take the name attribute of product attribute of the current line item and return it as a list to be tested by the assert statement.
I'm just starting out so maybe it'll start to make sense to me later, but Groovy's more advanced features are definitely not for beginners or simple scripting applications.
The website pointed to by the article was down.
I know of a lot of acronyms, but I only know of VT in terms of Dec VT terminals. Probably not what this is about.
Does anybody here have an analog HD recorder? If you look carefully, most HD recorders only record an already encoded mpeg2 video data stream.
Also, you have to be specific here, most HD quality analog recorders are recording an analog input onto an analog tape. It's hard to do HD quality analog to digital conversion and mpeg encoding on in realtime and at high bit rates. There are recorders that do it, but they're professional level.
The studios are worried about someone making mpeg2 copies from an analog signal? I think it'll be easier for someone just to setup a HD video camera (under $1000 now) pointing at an HD plasma screen, and make the recording that way. I wonder how much lower quality that would be than low end HD A/D converters feeding mpeg encoders?
Take a look at the book The Ancestor's Tale (all puns intended) for an incredibly insightful look at DNA, genetics, evolutijon, and the history of life on Earth.
The book goes into the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA histories that track the three major migrations in and out of Africa. How most major migrations result in intermingling with the new neighbors (not extermination). How you typically trace your lineage back to a set of a common set of ancestors, but not all ancestors contribute equally (indeed their DNA contributions can genetically get pushed out even if they are your ancestors). How long chains of DNA in humans are an exact copy of the early form of life on Earth, and so on.
Good way to learn about DNA/genetics/evolution too.
[begin rant] Does anybody think it would be better to have standard's making institutions actually create and implement standards like these? (with enough funding to do it properly).
Just getting a little political here, the "no big government interference/industry knows best" conservative political point of view hasn't worked here. And it's not just an academic question, this sort of thing degrades productivity, which means everybody is less efficient.
Oh sorry, I forgot, there already is a standard GUI interface, from Microsoft. Never mind.
Yes, but was it even really a "best effort" when if was first created?
The article Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty (written in 1980) makes the point that the shuttle design was a kludge from the start, not because the engineers weren't smart enough, but because of typical constraints of politics and money.
The article also has a great quote pointing out how hard it is to build a reusable cargo vehicle for space:
To truly grasp the challenge of building a space shuttle, think about its flight. The ship includes a 60-by-15-foot open space, narrow wings, and a large cabin where men must be provided that delicately slender range of temperatures and pressures they can endure. During ascent, the shuttle must withstand 3 Gs of stress--inertial drag equivalent to three times its own weight. While all five engines are screaming, there will be acoustic vibrations reaching 167 decibels, enough to kill an unprotected person. In orbit, the shuttle will drift through -250F. vacuum, what engineers call the "cold soak." It's cold enough to embrittle and shatter most materials. During reentry, the ship's skin goes from cold soak to 2,700F., hot enough to transform many metals into Silly Putty. Then the shuttle must glide along, under control, at speeds up to Mach 25, three times faster than any other piloted aircraft has ever flown. After reentry, it cascades through the air without power; finally thunking down onto the runway at 220 m.p.h. The like-sized DC-9 lands, with power, at 130 m.p.h. Rockets are throwaway contraptions in part so that no one piece ever has to endure such a wild variety of conditions. The shuttle's design goal is to take this nightmare ride 100 times.
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
What were engineers doing over 2k years ago? How about building the
Antikythera Mechanism (web copy of a June 1959 Scientific American article, p60-7)
An amazingly complex, intricate, and accurate mechanical astronomical
calculation device from 80 BC. Found in a shipwreck
in 1900, and not fully reverse engineered until 1973, there are no
other examples of this level technology in the
ancient world.
"It is hard to exaggerate the singularity of this device,
or its importance in forcing a complete re-evaluation of what had
been believed about technology in the ancient world. For this box
contained some 32 [brass] gears, assembled into a mechanism that
accurately
reproduced the motion of the sun and the moon against the background of
fixed stars, with a differential [gear] giving their relative position
and hence the phases of the moon."
You can see a reconstructed version of the Antikythera Mechanism here.
Another article detailing the probable creation date of the device
based on the construction of the gears can be found here"
..it was more sophisticated than anything like it until the Eighteenth
Century, nearly two thousand years later!"
Another article
makes the conjecture that ancient navigators could have used the
Antikythera Mechanism to determine longitude via the position of the
moon (1800 years before longitude calculation was perfected
in England)
There have been a few examples of fundraising drives for paying a developer to implement features (BSD I think), but has anyone seen any examples of a pledge drive towards funding an open source program feature?
I'm thinking of a pledge drive where I put my credit card down for the pledge and when enough money is pledged, all the pending pledges are "fulfilled" (to use the commercial sales nomenclature).
A pledge drive like this has the benefit making me more likely to pledge, since I know my money will only be taken if the project is going to happen.
I'm not defending Gore's boringness as a politician, but ragging on him about inventing the internet is unfair. What Gore actually said in a Mar 9 1999 interview on CNN was:
"I took the initiative in creating the Internet"
which is very definitely true.
A report by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf (the Vinton Cerf who created the Ethernet networking technology) says:
"Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."
Gore was the major player in converting the military DarpaNet to the private sector NSFNet which is, for all practical purposes, the birth of the Internet as we know it today. That's a really big deal.
The "created the internet" quote is a partisan distortion created by Republican Dick Armey and picked up by the press because the real quote was too boring. Shame on those who ignorantly repeat it.
What I've heard from a lawyer friend here in DC is that the patent office is basically punting on software patents (ie. approving most of them) and letting the courts sort things out afterwards.
Oh gentle lightspawn, you are too nice. Comcast's DVR is so unusable it can only have been designed by corporate marketing people.
Comcast's DVR has none of the core "I like this program, automatically record it for me next time" features found in Tivo.
There's no concept of recurring recording of your favorite shows.
The resolution for the graphics on the program guide is so course only a few lines of channel info fit on the screen at once. And a big chunk of the screen is allocated to horribly low quality ads.
Yes Comcast was big and stubborn enough to stick it to Tivo, even if that required sticking it to their own customers.
Can a bunch of us buy Comcast stock and then raise a ruckus at a stockholders meeting?
"Since DHS has settled on MS
OSes (read some irony here), AND you have
a security clearance, then I wouldn't wonder
that you are getting calls from headhunters
every day"
Actually, I heard rumors that the military is looking at Mac's because they view the massive amount of MS windows based viruses and worms as a security risk.
In Oliver Sacks' book
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
a patient who has what is probably a micro-stroke suddenly "hears" marching music from her childhood that she hasn't thought about in years. The music isn't particuarly pleasant, unpleasant, or in anyway significant, but she keeps hearing it for several weeks (asking the doctor to speak up during interviews)
Also, for brain surgery, it's common to map out very specific functions via localized electrical stimulation to the exposed brain (with oral feedback from the conscious patient!). This is done so the surgeon can minimize damage to vital areas.
Probably most functions/behaviors/memories are not simple and localized, but a few seem to be. Certainly the ones that are localized could be easily disabled/killed through physical/chemical trauma.
If done for nefarious reasons this would be a horrific thing to do. Sort of a micro-lobotomy.
The book "Under the Radar" covers this big time.
on
Bootstrapping Start-ups
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The book
Under the Radar by Arnold Kling (available on
Amazon.com) goes into the subject of low overhead startups in great detail. The book has the subtitle "Starting Your Net Business Without Venture Capital".
One of the big points made in the book is that the incredible overhead of venture capitalists can, and often does, sink a startup company.
The book covers
Arnold Kling's attempt to start
homefair.com (an online real estate service) way before anybody had a clue about what the Internet could do for real estate. It's funny/frustrating to read how many clueless bankers and real estate agents blew him off.
There is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve teaching and learning, yet school districts are cutting programs -- music, art, physical education -- that enrich children's lives to make room for this dubious nostrum, and the Clinton Administration has embraced the goal of "computers in every classroom" with credulous and costly enthusiasm
...I demanded that my last contract - which stated that my
full productive capacity belonged to my employer - be modified to make it clear that work I did on my time was my own.
Good think you added the contract exception, otherwise they might have claimed your first born;)
Having worked in a large operations environment which I probably shouldn't name (AOL), I feel justified in saying that, in general hardware/firmware based raid controllers work great except in a few very unusual circumstances where they screw up and nuke a whole logical disk.
Specifically, you gotta watch for the following type of weird case:
You have a flaky disk (probably bad but not bad enough to be marked as bad by the raid controller).
The sys admin will tries various unix level things to fix/check the disk
The system gets rebooted either intentionally or because the operating system is getting hosed.
On reboot, the raid controller chooses the flaky/bad disk as primary and attempts to remirror the other (formerly good) disk using the bad disk as the primary disk.
The formerly good disk is now overwritten with the bad disk data and the whole thing then melts down.
This is not a common scenario (it happened only a few times with hundreds of systems over a few years), but it's one that's pretty hard to test for. You can have controller firmware bugs that stay hidden for years before they popup. Sometimes the firmware works fine, but the sys admin gets confused with all the garbage errors flying at him/her and chooses the wrong disk as the primary.
My experience with this was on relatively large HP/Sun/SGI database servers.
Hardware/firmware mirroring is great the vast majority of the time. But if you're a truly paranoid sys admin, I'd recommend loosely coupled hot spare replication.
When I say loosely coupled, I mean don't replicate low level disk block by disk block, since that can just replicate possible corruption. Instead, replicate at the logical filesystem write level.
If you're really really paranoid, the replication queue should have a few hour delay so you can cut if off if an application level error deletes massive data (but where you can quickly flush the queue in a failover situation)
I'm not a sys admin, but a database weannie, so I don't know which Unix level products are currently good for this.
Slashdot Mirror
Extremely funny (and true. It's always funnier when it's true). I like the way you subtly brought Trump supporters into the argument. I would've "liked" or "voted" for you post, but Slashdot is too mind boggling primitive for that. I'm going back to Reddit now... Catch you later.
I'm a Slashdot user with 'Excellent' Karma, but I never see an option for rating a submission or comments. So Slashdot is a broadcast only system where some secret cabal of editors gets to rate things. I go to Reddit if I want to participate. Too bad Slashdot doesn't have a way of letting users come to consensus on questions like, "do you like this new feature on Slashdot". But I bet they're using the newest tech fashions in CSS and Javascript for the new beta web pages. Shiny!
Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping it sounds like "shaping" is throttling based on packet type that kicks in when bit rates get to high.
http://www.ffmpegx.com/flv.html
From the website:
"Currently, the best format for such use is FLV (Flash Video), as almost all browsers will display it natively without need of installing extra plugins. It is for example the format used in Google Video."
You can control the size and bit rate (quality) so you can create a widely compatible video, but still make it high quality.
I'm just guessing that the telecom companies' various subpoena-less wiretaps might have saved some internet traffic. And don't tell me that our nation's intelligence services aren't monitoring internet traffic to/from government facilities (if they're not, then they're not doing their job). Some of this stuff has to be saved somewhere.
The article sort of talks about the intrinsic role of time based feedback loops as part of how a node recognizes a pattern. I'm guessing that rather than process a wide bit pattern directly, "nodes" process the wide bit pattern in chunks remembering the node's state based on the previous sequence of chunks and determining the new state based on the previous state and the current new chunk (and maybe neighboring/parent node states?). A feedback/state system like this might naturally process time sequenced info.
In fact, it might make a great replacement for Java. Features that really should've been there from the beginning are no easy to access (ranges, easy to use lists & associative arrays, reasonable string handling)
Although you can start out simply in Groovy, I find some of the funky "iterator attributes calling code snippets declared in 'closures' " to be cryptic. Here's an example (basically from listing 7.23 of the Groovy in Action book, see http://www.benslade.com/projects/java/groovy/Listi ng_7_23_GPath.groovySelfDoc.html for the full example):
I think this says:
I'm just starting out so maybe it'll start to make sense to me later, but Groovy's more advanced features are definitely not for beginners or simple scripting applications.
Ben Slade
Chevy Chase, MD
The website pointed to by the article was down. I know of a lot of acronyms, but I only know of VT in terms of Dec VT terminals. Probably not what this is about.
Also, you have to be specific here, most HD quality analog recorders are recording an analog input onto an analog tape. It's hard to do HD quality analog to digital conversion and mpeg encoding on in realtime and at high bit rates. There are recorders that do it, but they're professional level.
The studios are worried about someone making mpeg2 copies from an analog signal? I think it'll be easier for someone just to setup a HD video camera (under $1000 now) pointing at an HD plasma screen, and make the recording that way. I wonder how much lower quality that would be than low end HD A/D converters feeding mpeg encoders?
The book goes into the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA histories that track the three major migrations in and out of Africa. How most major migrations result in intermingling with the new neighbors (not extermination). How you typically trace your lineage back to a set of a common set of ancestors, but not all ancestors contribute equally (indeed their DNA contributions can genetically get pushed out even if they are your ancestors). How long chains of DNA in humans are an exact copy of the early form of life on Earth, and so on.
Good way to learn about DNA/genetics/evolution too.
Just getting a little political here, the "no big government interference/industry knows best" conservative political point of view hasn't worked here. And it's not just an academic question, this sort of thing degrades productivity, which means everybody is less efficient.
Oh sorry, I forgot, there already is a standard GUI interface, from Microsoft. Never mind.
The article Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty (written in 1980) makes the point that the shuttle design was a kludge from the start, not because the engineers weren't smart enough, but because of typical constraints of politics and money.
The article also has a great quote pointing out how hard it is to build a reusable cargo vehicle for space:
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
Which Mambo? The open source version or the corporate version by Miro?
If you're interested in a quick video screen capture overview of Drupal, take a look at this Shockwave tutorial that I'm working on.
What were engineers doing over 2k years ago? How about building the Antikythera Mechanism (web copy of a June 1959 Scientific American article, p60-7)
An amazingly complex, intricate, and accurate mechanical astronomical calculation device from 80 BC. Found in a shipwreck in 1900, and not fully reverse engineered until 1973, there are no other examples of this level technology in the ancient world.
"It is hard to exaggerate the singularity of this device, or its importance in forcing a complete re-evaluation of what had been believed about technology in the ancient world. For this box contained some 32 [brass] gears, assembled into a mechanism that accurately reproduced the motion of the sun and the moon against the background of fixed stars, with a differential [gear] giving their relative position and hence the phases of the moon."
You can see a reconstructed version of the Antikythera Mechanism here. Another article detailing the probable creation date of the device based on the construction of the gears can be found here"
Another article makes the conjecture that ancient navigators could have used the Antikythera Mechanism to determine longitude via the position of the moon (1800 years before longitude calculation was perfected in England)
Ben in DCI'm thinking of a pledge drive where I put my credit card down for the pledge and when enough money is pledged, all the pending pledges are "fulfilled" (to use the commercial sales nomenclature).
A pledge drive like this has the benefit making me more likely to pledge, since I know my money will only be taken if the project is going to happen.
Ben in DC
A report by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf (the Vinton Cerf who created the Ethernet networking technology) says:
Gore was the major player in converting the military DarpaNet to the private sector NSFNet which is, for all practical purposes, the birth of the Internet as we know it today. That's a really big deal.
The "created the internet" quote is a partisan distortion created by Republican Dick Armey and picked up by the press because the real quote was too boring. Shame on those who ignorantly repeat it.
This might be one of the reasons that the volume of patent related lawsuits is going through the roof. See the graph patent lawsuits per year (from the article A radical cure for the ailing U.S. patent system)
Ben in DC
Oh gentle lightspawn, you are too nice. Comcast's DVR is so unusable it can only have been designed by corporate marketing people.
Comcast's DVR has none of the core "I like this program, automatically record it for me next time" features found in Tivo.
There's no concept of recurring recording of your favorite shows.
The resolution for the graphics on the program guide is so course only a few lines of channel info fit on the screen at once. And a big chunk of the screen is allocated to horribly low quality ads.
Yes Comcast was big and stubborn enough to stick it to Tivo, even if that required sticking it to their own customers.
Can a bunch of us buy Comcast stock and then raise a ruckus at a stockholders meeting?
Ben in DC
PublicMailbox at benslade dot.com
This is just hearsay though.
Ben in DC
Also, for brain surgery, it's common to map out very specific functions via localized electrical stimulation to the exposed brain (with oral feedback from the conscious patient!). This is done so the surgeon can minimize damage to vital areas.
Probably most functions/behaviors/memories are not simple and localized, but a few seem to be. Certainly the ones that are localized could be easily disabled/killed through physical/chemical trauma.
If done for nefarious reasons this would be a horrific thing to do. Sort of a micro-lobotomy.
One of the big points made in the book is that the incredible overhead of venture capitalists can, and often does, sink a startup company.
The book covers Arnold Kling's attempt to start homefair.com (an online real estate service) way before anybody had a clue about what the Internet could do for real estate. It's funny/frustrating to read how many clueless bankers and real estate agents blew him off.
Good think you added the contract exception, otherwise they might have claimed your first born ;)
Specifically, you gotta watch for the following type of weird case:
This is not a common scenario (it happened only a few times with hundreds of systems over a few years), but it's one that's pretty hard to test for. You can have controller firmware bugs that stay hidden for years before they popup. Sometimes the firmware works fine, but the sys admin gets confused with all the garbage errors flying at him/her and chooses the wrong disk as the primary.
My experience with this was on relatively large HP/Sun/SGI database servers.
Hardware/firmware mirroring is great the vast majority of the time. But if you're a truly paranoid sys admin, I'd recommend loosely coupled hot spare replication.
When I say loosely coupled, I mean don't replicate low level disk block by disk block, since that can just replicate possible corruption. Instead, replicate at the logical filesystem write level.
If you're really really paranoid, the replication queue should have a few hour delay so you can cut if off if an application level error deletes massive data (but where you can quickly flush the queue in a failover situation)
I'm not a sys admin, but a database weannie, so I don't know which Unix level products are currently good for this.