I learned more about how fields and waves really worked from building antennas from the ARRL handbook, and rewinding bicycle generators than I did from those two courses.
Same here, effectively. However it was some IEEE journal, I believe, that finally helped me make sense of what antennas are really doing and the principles behind designing them to radiate effectively. I saved that journal, though it's stuffed away in a box somewhere, because I thought it is exactly the sort of thing which should be in an ARRL publication somewhere.
Just today, some 15 years after I finished my masters in EE, a coworker filled me in on the basics of how vacuum tubes work. It was almost intuitive once he described their structure, and suddenly the terms "collector" and "emitter" as applied to transistors make much more sense and are much easier to remember. Now granted, there's a widespread demand for engineers who are familiar with designing vacuum tube circuits these days so I can understand why the technology isn't taught, but I think a basic understanding of how they work would go a long way toward helping students understand the operation of transistors.
While my intuition tells me that high school grads are, on the whole, not as well prepared as they should be, there is certainly some improvement that could be done at the college level.
One problem I faced on the path to my EE degree was that in mathematics classes and some engineering classes (particularly electromagnetic fields, communication systems theory, and stochastic signal analysis -- which of course are some of the most math/calculus heavy of the EE curriculum), was that I lacked an intellectual model of what the mathematics was accomplishing. While concepts like derivatives and integrals made a degree of sense because they could be related to velocity, acceleration, position, area, and volume, when I got to the point I was dealing with eigen-this and eigen-that and hermetian-something-or-others I had lost any real-world connection, and my understanding suffered as a result.
The most frustrating and poignant instance of this was the first day of my linear algebra class, which I was taking only as a pre-req for CS class on GUIs, which only needed it to the extent that rotation, translation, and scaling using matrices was involved, and I already knew that much. Anyway, the mathematics professor walks in and announces "I do not care, even one little bit, what this material is used for in the real world. I am here to instruct you in mathematics alone." I looked around the room. In a class of about 25, I believe there were 20 science/engineering students, 4 math students, and one photography major (she was one of those brilliant types who took upper level classes in sciences, math, philosophy, or anything else just for fun). I was somewhat incredulous at the professor's utter disregard for his students' background, abilities, and interests. And just as I expected the course was utterly miserable and tedious, and then there were the bad days.
I contrast that with the math classes I took for Calculus II-IV, and Numerical Systems Analysis. The professors (thank heavens I avoided graduate students) who taught those classes were totally on top of the situation, and made it very clear what we were trying to accomplish with real world examples, or at least didn't veer too incredibly far from intuitive models. I think it helped that in Calc II-IV I had the same professor all through, and he was teaching a pilot course that integrated calculators into the material, so there was a lot of approachable material throughout. This was a stark contrast from the previously mentioned Linear Algebra as well as the Differential Equations I courses.
To this day I hate Linear Algebra and Differential Equations, and I'm 100% convinced it's due to the terrible instructors I dealt with. Which is a shame, because I loved mathematics in high school, and would go beyond my coursework to explore what I could on my own without much additional help from my (incredible) high school teacher, and I had a blast doing it. If I hadn't developed a strong interest in aeronautics and computers I most likely would have pursued a math degree.
The biggest problem I faced throughout my mathematics education, as well as many engineering classes, is that as the course would progress it was building taller and taller upon a shaky foundation. While my arithmetic was bedrock, my algebra was concrete, and my trigonometry was 2x4 construction, the rest was a lot less solid. Calculus felt a lot like building with Tinker-toys, and by the time I got to anything past that it was toothpicks stuck together with Sticky-Tack. As more and more material was piled on top, a lot of it kept slipping off because the stuff underneath it was crumbling. I would have benefited greatly from either better construction (i.e. better instruction), or a lot more hands-on experience with those shaky bits such that they were strongly reinforced.
I'm not sure if that was sarcasm. If it was, ignore the following.
Then turn off dynamic power/thermal management (e.g. Turbo Boost on Intel processors, I'm sure it has fancy marketing names on various GPUs/etc). You'll get consistent performance, at the expense of maximum possible speed.
Such systems typically have a nominal guaranteed rate, which is all you get if you turn off this feature, keeping the hardware within the acceptable maximum continuous-load power/thermal envelope, assuming that your power/thermal engineers abided by the product's design guides. With this you should be able to obtain a minimum guaranteed compute rate, but nothing more.
However when these features are turned on, the hardware is capable of detecting from moment to moment when there is some additional power or thermal margin, sometimes even between different areas of a chip. The hardware will temporarily adjust clock rates and the like to take advantage of that extra head room. With this a little extra performance beyond the guaranteed compute rate is obtained, at the expense of a predictable compute rate.
I'm sure this behavior drives professional benchmarkers batty. I'm not sure how they deal with it -- one setting gets you the best numbers, the other setting gets you reproducible numbers. Which set you use might depend on what marketing wants to sell to a particular customer.
If possible, I usually like to start by getting an overall understanding of the various data structures used to implement the program. Sometimes this can be very helpful, particularly if the code was written by someone who designed the code rather than hacked it together. Ever since I took my first data structures class I have maintained that if you can understand the structures, the algorithms become almost self-evident. However, it's not always tremendously helpful, particularly if the implementor just accreted functionality into the program, or who views a big struct or two full of every little thing the program needs as good engineering. It also tends to break rather badly if the code has had a succession of short-to-medium term caretakers rather than one person maintaining it all along. That seems to be a fairly typical situation in commercial code.
If following the data structures isn't helpful, then I tend to follow a top-down linear approach. That is I start with main(), get an overall sense for the flow of the program at that level, then start at the beginning again and work my way section by section or line by line through the code (or at least the parts of it that I think I care about). In other words at I first do a high-level read-through until I get the basic idea of what it's trying to do, and then fill in the details of how it does it. I repeat this at each level as I dig deeper into the code. It sort of ends up being a breadth-first summary scan followed by a depth-first extraction of details.
Others have suggested commenting or reformatting code as you go along. My opinion is that if you do so be fully prepared to throw all that work away unless you know you're about to become the head maintainer of the code in question. Original authors don't seem to be able to see how bad their code is because it often isn't bad to them -- their code reflects their mental processes and expertise. It's just not worth the struggle, usually, to even reformat the code underneath them. There's lots and lots of terribly ugly code out there in the world, and almost every time I start looking at something new I call down curses and damnation on the authors. However in the end I just learn to live with it. Unless it's so terribly abhorrent as to actually be broken because of how it's written, I play the code chameleon and modify code following the same nature of ugly as the pre-existing code.
That might be painting supercomputer owners with a bit too broad of a brush.
The NASA Advanced Super Computing Division (www.nas.nasa.gov) is crammed full of supercomputers of various designs (clusters, single-system image behemoths, co-processing, etc) and from everything I've ever heard they run at insanely good utilization levels. If I remember a presentation from one of their chiefs correctly, they achieved this level of utilization not only with great technical management and know-how, but by consolidating a number of disparate less efficient smaller supercomputer centers across NASA. They also have staff whose job it is to work directly with researchers to help them code their supercomputing applications in a manner to get as much performance as possible out of the computer -- greatly improving the poor/inefficient code that a scientist may produce. As a result the division's existence ends up saving NASA money overall, the result of which is that various science organizations are able to spend a greater portion of their funds on core research rather than inefficiently utilized supercomputing resources, a net win for them and for taxpayers.
The other impression I walked away with is that the only obstacle to doing even more science with their supercomputer resources was the dollars to obtain more systems (i.e. the demand for cycles outstrips the center's currently available supercomputer resources). I seem to recall the chief mentioning that today's systems are running calculations that were science-fiction level of impossible 15-20 years ago, and that several researchers have ideas for supercomputing applications that would require capabilities still hundreds or thousands of times better than could be built today. The need for more supercomputing capability, at least at NASA, is effectively boundless.
So I think the parent's portrayal is overly broad. An inefficiently used supercomputer is primarily a management failure, and the quality of management varies from organization to organization, as it does in any field. What I've hard about NAS sounds like they did it right. I have no doubt there are organizations who've done it wrong.
Disclaimer: I work for a major supercomputing company, in particular the one that supplies a huge portion of NAS's hardware.
The U.S. government has recently been saber-rattling about the NSA/DOD/whoever taking on the role of protecting vital national computer interests, particularly against the hacking efforts of China. And now, very atypically and with very little rationale for publicly admitting as much, a number of major technology/web companies have started admitting they've been hacked, allegedly from China.
So, was the U.S. government recognizing a real trend ahead of time, or maybe they had non-public information regarding these activities? Or are the companies being pressured to help create a story that will justify a government takeover of the network security infrastructure?
I distrust coincidences and the timing of these initiatives and disclosures smells a bit odd to me. Expect congressional inquiries into the "growing cybersecurity threat" to be covered on C-SPAN within the next few weeks.
First and probably primarily is security holes from supporting remote employees.
This is definitely not the case, for one safe-to-assume reason and one from Mayer's memo itself.
The safe-to-assume reason is that Yahoo will certainly continue providing remote access to employees for working from home during off-hours, while travelling on company business, and for employees who are on-call. If you have to provide remote access for even one employee some of the time you have the same set of security considerations as if you provide remote access for all employees all of the time.
And Mayer's memo makes reference to employees exercising good judgement about waiting at home for the cable guy situations. This implies that it is recognized there will always be one-off situations where an employee needs to work from home for a particular day, even if they are not allowed to do so as their standard day-to-day situation. So once again, if you provide remote access for even one, you have all the same security considerations as if you allowed every employee to work from home all the time.
I personally think this is just as some other posters have said -- it's a stealth layoff to avoid paying severance by getting people to quit on their own, and the decision will gradually be reversed (or the policy just not enforced) once the desired reductions have been accomplished.
ObSnark: When did Carly change her name to Marissa?
However in the U.S. it would be impossible to gain a conviction on the obstruction charge, because you still don't know which of the twins is committing the crime of obstruction. Due to the Fifth Amendment you can't very well convict someone of obstruction if he was refusing to testify against himself, and it's not possible to determine whether or not he is doing so. There's plenty of reasonable doubt.
The current situation does inure some benefits to the U.S., but in not easily measurable ways which is why they're not talked about all that much.
My observations when I was a college student was that international students would gain a perspective on the U.S., Americans, our life, and our culture which was different from what they expected when they first arrived. I assume when they went back home that this new perspective would cause them to evaluate their own local press and government statements about the U.S. in light of their first-hand experiences and knowledge. I had lab partners from Saudi Arabia, Ghana, and mainland China, all of whom I was able to talk with about perspectives and impressions of the U.S., and I have no doubt that each of them had a more nuanced and healthier view of the U.S. after having lived here.
If you want to stabilize relations with China and various Muslim areas of the world I think we'd be well served to invite far more of their students to study here so that when they go back home they can correct the thinking of their friends and family. Likewise the Americans who have a chance to study with them will realize that by and large "people are people", dispelling the simplistic "us versus them" mindset we seem to be afflicted with.
Although the following may not all be household names they were either pioneering or at least some of the first widely used software in their categories:
OS/360, TOPS, MULTICS, UNIX, and CP/M for operating systems. NFS, NIS, LDAP, FTP, telnet, ssh, UUCP, talk, and IRC clients and servers for various aspects of networked computing. SCCS, RCS, CVS, Bitkeeper, and git for revision control. Gopher servers and clients as a prelude to web servers and browsers. Napster and Bittorrent for file sharing. Band In A Box, Finale, and Protools for various aspects of music production. Archie as a precursor to web search engines. The switching and accounting software behind the 5ESS switch and other major components of the global telephone system. Compaq's clean-room reengineered BIOS. Lots of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo/Space Shuttle control software.
I'm thankful to have lived in the age when most of the above were first developed and introduced.
I am a middle-aged fan of Def Leppard, a mild tinnitus sufferer (starting as early in childhood as I can remember -- so probably neurological), and a weekend warrior front-of-house sound engineer. I think you are completely correct, and not just because of the dynamic range issues you mention.
Despite being a fan since the Hysteria years, it was only about a year and a half ago that I first went to a Def Leppard concert. Knowing that there could be problems and that I value my hearing, I made sure to bring decent ear protection. The sound for the opening act (Heart) was brutal -- piercing, obnoxious, and you couldn't make out lyrics except where you already knew them. I put in my ear plugs and sat down, waiting for the spectacle to be over.
That all changed when Def Leppard took the stage. The music was loud, but everything was also very clear and pleasantly equalized and mixed. It was easily the best mixed live show I've ever had the privilege of hearing, bested perhaps only by Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables touring companies (which aren't dealing with nearly as high of sound pressure levels). Willing to risk it for the experience of hearing my favorite rock band live for the first time in my life I didn't use hearing protection at all, and while my hearing was certainly desensitized until the next morning, there was never a single moment of pain.
I love my weekend hobby as a live sound guy, and the highest complement I've ever received (from a pro) for a rock-style show was that they were impressed that everything felt nice and loud, and they were so happy that their ears didn't hurt afterward. That's a difficult thing to achieve, so I have nothing but admiration for whoever (most likely Ronan McHugh) mixed Def Leppard's show that night.
It makes some sense to me. What I wager they are hoping to see is substantially improved economic activity in those areas, as well as rising property values, directly attributable to the availability of cheap bandwidth.
If that happens then Google will be able to begin making a case to the public, the FCC, and politicians that the state of U.S. broadband is terrible, and that the country needs to get its act together to improve the situation. If they can point toward the economic uplift of a downtrodden area they are then pushing the right buttons to get all sorts of politicians to agree that increasing bandwidth is a good and necessary thing. The FCC may begin mandating/encouraging higher speeds, and the politicians may even pry open the taxpayer's wallet to help make it happen.
Increasing the amount of data coursing through the Internet is a plus for Google, as the contents/attributes of that data can then be used for advertising, research, product development, and the like. They can only stand to gain from there being more data circulating.
GSM already standardizes on 112 (even in North America - obviously you can also dial your local emergency number too, so 911 works here)
Have you tried it? It certainly doesn't work universally if at all in North America.
Two years ago I attempted to call from my GSM cellular phone to report a drunk driver. Wondering if "112" actually worked like I knew it should for GSM, I tried that number first, however the call didn't go through. I then reverted to 911 and as expected that call went through just fine.
I've been there before as a new board member of a non-profit, and rueger is completely correct that it takes at least a year to understand how an organization works and why things are the way they are. More importantly in your case, it takes that long to suss out the nature of the personalities involved, and know what is important or not to each director so that you know how best to advance your goals and make it a positive thing for everyone involved, but most importantly the organization itself.
More than any of that though, you really need to study what the appropriate and necessary roles of a director are. Start Googling and reading on the subject -- there's lots of good stuff out there. As a director you are entrusted with serious legal responsibility for governance and oversight of the organization and accomplishing its stated mission. Everything you do must serve those ends and must be evaluated in light of them. This is your primary role and duty -- everything else is secondary.
Your legal duty and responsibility is to the organization. Not to the board. Certainly not to Bob. So first you need to identify how the current situation is holding back the board from any or all of its responsibilities for governance, oversight, or accomplishing the organization's mission. Once you understand that you can use it as a basis of a discussion with the board so that the board can decide whether they want to solve the problem. If they decide as an entire board through an adopted motion that they want to solve the problem, then you can work with the stakeholders such as Bob to figure out the "how" part of solving the problem (unless Bob already agrees that it needs fixing, in which case the two of you may be able to work together to approach the board together with a presentation of the problem and a proposed solution). See how that works? Identify the core duty/responsibility, address the problem in achieving that duty/responsibility, determine a course of action through the board's official decisions, then implement that decision while maneuvering in the zone of the personalities involved.
How does this then apply to your situation? In order for the board to perform its oversight and governance functions, as well as preserve business continuity in achieving it's mission, it is important that they have reliable access to all documents which they need. The degree to which it is easy to locate those documents impacts how effective the board members can be at carrying out those duties. And for the important documents reuger mentioned (minutes, budgets, etc), it is extremely critical to have a solid paper trail, particularly if for some reason your secretary of state, the IRS, or J. Random Attorney With Aggrieved Client comes knocking. Maintaining these records is part of your legal "duty of care", and you need to make sure it is done, and done wetech.slashdot.orgt SuperBanana mentioned further above: Once you've identified the weakness that your board is responsible for fixing, operate within the correct procedures of the board to address the issue. Get the item on the agenda. Let Bob present on how he would like to fix it, or have the board discuss how they would like it fixed. As part of this the board should create and vote on motions that direct the next steps that should be taken (e.g. further research, funding for implementing a solution, etc). At this point it doesn't matter any longer if Bob is on board with the approved motions or not -- though hopefully he is and a plan that he's happy with has been adopted. In any case at this point the board's decision is as good as law for the organization: if any director cannot faithfully support and help execute the adopted motion, whether or not they were in favor of the motion in the first place, that director needs to resign. If the director works to undermine the board's decision and doesn't resign, the board needs to remove them post-haste.
This doesn't have to be as heartless in practice as it sounds
There simply isn't enough solar power delivered to the surface of the aircraft, even at 100% conversion efficiency, to move people and luggage using only available sunlight.
Google tells me direct illumination to a surface perpendicular to incoming full intensity sunlight is about 1.4 kW per square meter. Google also tells me that the wing surface area of a 747 is around 5500 square feet. Only half of the 747 wing is directly illuminated by sunlight at any given moment, but the surface of the fuselage could be covered with photocells as well, so 5500 square feet overall is probably a decent estimate for the directly illuminated surface area of the aircraft as a whole. And for hand-wavy purposes lets assume that the entire surface of the 747 is perpendicular to the incoming sunlight (i.e. a planar plane... pun totally intended). And that we have perfectly efficient photocells giving us 100% conversion efficiency. Running the math, this gives us around 715kW under bright direct sunlight, or about 959 horsepower -- the equivalent of 1.5 2012 Ford Shelby GT500's.
Each engine of a 747 generates around 15,000 horsepower at cruise, and around 30,000 at takeoff, and a 747 has four engines. So you need around 125 times the power generated by a perfectly efficient perfectly illuminated solar-powered 747 to get said plane off the ground, and around 65 times the power for cruising. And then you could only fly it in the middle of the day near the equator.
No disrespect to the font designer, but as far as I can tell this is a long-solved solved problem.
Perhaps I'm a font curmudgeon, however I've not found anything that bests Schumacher Clean for everyday console and editor use. I've used it for about 15 years, and I've can't think of a single thing I don't like about it, other than it's a pain to make it and other bitmap fonts available under Ubuntu. It's been a standard part of X distributions for ages and thus it's widely available.
Schumacher Clean just makes me feel all warm and wubbly inside.
Why don't you get the directions beforehand and memorize the route? Have people really become so lazy and mentally dull that they can't do this any more?
This doesn't work so well when any of the following are true: 1. You have several unfamiliar stops to make. 2. Your destination changes mid-course (think sports team manager changing dining plans mid-route). 3. There is road construction on any unfamiliar route. 4. Your destination is not known a priori (think taxi driver).
The way to achieve what you say Linus wants is for him to reject/postpone changes that fall outside RC criteria. "Sorry, the train has left the station. There's another one due to leave at 3.6." When developers learn that the development phase criteria are enforced they will adjust their behavior to fall in line, but contrapositively they will not adjust their behavior if the criteria are not enforced.
My sympathy is miniscule -- if RC-appropriate changes are what he wants then he should reject/postpone the changes in question as falling outside RC criteria instead of kvetching about them. It's a self-made and self-perpetuated problem; developers will abuse largesse only as long as they are allowed to.
Decades ago Cray heated their building in Mendota Heights Minnesota entirely using waste heat from the supercomputers. When they built their new campus a few miles away and sold the old building they had to go through some amount of trouble to retrofit it with heating from conventional fuels.
The MacBook Pro with a Retina Display of 220ppi sounds great, but I have a serious question.
Has Apple fixed the problem with the system font being sized in a fixed number of pixels? My parents' 17" MBP with hi-res display is almost unusable with my parent's aging eyes (or even my middle-aged eyes), and it doesn't have a ppi anywhere near 220. I'm incredulous that Apple has allowed this UI flaw to persist for so long -- my parents cannot be the only ones who would appreciate a larger system font.
I don't know how well it pays, however an avenue to investigate is working for a textbook publisher, writing, editing, or error-checking new versions of textbooks. A roommate of mine in college did this to help pay his way through school, and he thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I'll wager that in this networked age this might even present an opportunity to work from home, which may be important to you if you are thinking of starting a family.
Another line of investigation is to work with local home-schooling cooperatives. They'll often hire teachers to write a math curriculum for them, and conduct weekly classes for the students. In a larger metropolitan area you may even be able to do this with several cooperatives.
Slashdot Mirror
I learned more about how fields and waves really worked from building antennas from the ARRL handbook, and rewinding bicycle generators than I did from those two courses.
Same here, effectively. However it was some IEEE journal, I believe, that finally helped me make sense of what antennas are really doing and the principles behind designing them to radiate effectively. I saved that journal, though it's stuffed away in a box somewhere, because I thought it is exactly the sort of thing which should be in an ARRL publication somewhere.
Just today, some 15 years after I finished my masters in EE, a coworker filled me in on the basics of how vacuum tubes work. It was almost intuitive once he described their structure, and suddenly the terms "collector" and "emitter" as applied to transistors make much more sense and are much easier to remember. Now granted, there's a widespread demand for engineers who are familiar with designing vacuum tube circuits these days so I can understand why the technology isn't taught, but I think a basic understanding of how they work would go a long way toward helping students understand the operation of transistors.
While my intuition tells me that high school grads are, on the whole, not as well prepared as they should be, there is certainly some improvement that could be done at the college level.
One problem I faced on the path to my EE degree was that in mathematics classes and some engineering classes (particularly electromagnetic fields, communication systems theory, and stochastic signal analysis -- which of course are some of the most math/calculus heavy of the EE curriculum), was that I lacked an intellectual model of what the mathematics was accomplishing. While concepts like derivatives and integrals made a degree of sense because they could be related to velocity, acceleration, position, area, and volume, when I got to the point I was dealing with eigen-this and eigen-that and hermetian-something-or-others I had lost any real-world connection, and my understanding suffered as a result.
The most frustrating and poignant instance of this was the first day of my linear algebra class, which I was taking only as a pre-req for CS class on GUIs, which only needed it to the extent that rotation, translation, and scaling using matrices was involved, and I already knew that much. Anyway, the mathematics professor walks in and announces "I do not care, even one little bit, what this material is used for in the real world. I am here to instruct you in mathematics alone." I looked around the room. In a class of about 25, I believe there were 20 science/engineering students, 4 math students, and one photography major (she was one of those brilliant types who took upper level classes in sciences, math, philosophy, or anything else just for fun). I was somewhat incredulous at the professor's utter disregard for his students' background, abilities, and interests. And just as I expected the course was utterly miserable and tedious, and then there were the bad days.
I contrast that with the math classes I took for Calculus II-IV, and Numerical Systems Analysis. The professors (thank heavens I avoided graduate students) who taught those classes were totally on top of the situation, and made it very clear what we were trying to accomplish with real world examples, or at least didn't veer too incredibly far from intuitive models. I think it helped that in Calc II-IV I had the same professor all through, and he was teaching a pilot course that integrated calculators into the material, so there was a lot of approachable material throughout. This was a stark contrast from the previously mentioned Linear Algebra as well as the Differential Equations I courses.
To this day I hate Linear Algebra and Differential Equations, and I'm 100% convinced it's due to the terrible instructors I dealt with. Which is a shame, because I loved mathematics in high school, and would go beyond my coursework to explore what I could on my own without much additional help from my (incredible) high school teacher, and I had a blast doing it. If I hadn't developed a strong interest in aeronautics and computers I most likely would have pursued a math degree.
The biggest problem I faced throughout my mathematics education, as well as many engineering classes, is that as the course would progress it was building taller and taller upon a shaky foundation. While my arithmetic was bedrock, my algebra was concrete, and my trigonometry was 2x4 construction, the rest was a lot less solid. Calculus felt a lot like building with Tinker-toys, and by the time I got to anything past that it was toothpicks stuck together with Sticky-Tack. As more and more material was piled on top, a lot of it kept slipping off because the stuff underneath it was crumbling. I would have benefited greatly from either better construction (i.e. better instruction), or a lot more hands-on experience with those shaky bits such that they were strongly reinforced.
I'm not sure if that was sarcasm. If it was, ignore the following.
Then turn off dynamic power/thermal management (e.g. Turbo Boost on Intel processors, I'm sure it has fancy marketing names on various GPUs/etc). You'll get consistent performance, at the expense of maximum possible speed.
Such systems typically have a nominal guaranteed rate, which is all you get if you turn off this feature, keeping the hardware within the acceptable maximum continuous-load power/thermal envelope, assuming that your power/thermal engineers abided by the product's design guides. With this you should be able to obtain a minimum guaranteed compute rate, but nothing more.
However when these features are turned on, the hardware is capable of detecting from moment to moment when there is some additional power or thermal margin, sometimes even between different areas of a chip. The hardware will temporarily adjust clock rates and the like to take advantage of that extra head room. With this a little extra performance beyond the guaranteed compute rate is obtained, at the expense of a predictable compute rate.
I'm sure this behavior drives professional benchmarkers batty. I'm not sure how they deal with it -- one setting gets you the best numbers, the other setting gets you reproducible numbers. Which set you use might depend on what marketing wants to sell to a particular customer.
If possible, I usually like to start by getting an overall understanding of the various data structures used to implement the program. Sometimes this can be very helpful, particularly if the code was written by someone who designed the code rather than hacked it together. Ever since I took my first data structures class I have maintained that if you can understand the structures, the algorithms become almost self-evident. However, it's not always tremendously helpful, particularly if the implementor just accreted functionality into the program, or who views a big struct or two full of every little thing the program needs as good engineering. It also tends to break rather badly if the code has had a succession of short-to-medium term caretakers rather than one person maintaining it all along. That seems to be a fairly typical situation in commercial code.
If following the data structures isn't helpful, then I tend to follow a top-down linear approach. That is I start with main(), get an overall sense for the flow of the program at that level, then start at the beginning again and work my way section by section or line by line through the code (or at least the parts of it that I think I care about). In other words at I first do a high-level read-through until I get the basic idea of what it's trying to do, and then fill in the details of how it does it. I repeat this at each level as I dig deeper into the code. It sort of ends up being a breadth-first summary scan followed by a depth-first extraction of details.
Others have suggested commenting or reformatting code as you go along. My opinion is that if you do so be fully prepared to throw all that work away unless you know you're about to become the head maintainer of the code in question. Original authors don't seem to be able to see how bad their code is because it often isn't bad to them -- their code reflects their mental processes and expertise. It's just not worth the struggle, usually, to even reformat the code underneath them. There's lots and lots of terribly ugly code out there in the world, and almost every time I start looking at something new I call down curses and damnation on the authors. However in the end I just learn to live with it. Unless it's so terribly abhorrent as to actually be broken because of how it's written, I play the code chameleon and modify code following the same nature of ugly as the pre-existing code.
That might be painting supercomputer owners with a bit too broad of a brush.
The NASA Advanced Super Computing Division (www.nas.nasa.gov) is crammed full of supercomputers of various designs (clusters, single-system image behemoths, co-processing, etc) and from everything I've ever heard they run at insanely good utilization levels. If I remember a presentation from one of their chiefs correctly, they achieved this level of utilization not only with great technical management and know-how, but by consolidating a number of disparate less efficient smaller supercomputer centers across NASA. They also have staff whose job it is to work directly with researchers to help them code their supercomputing applications in a manner to get as much performance as possible out of the computer -- greatly improving the poor/inefficient code that a scientist may produce. As a result the division's existence ends up saving NASA money overall, the result of which is that various science organizations are able to spend a greater portion of their funds on core research rather than inefficiently utilized supercomputing resources, a net win for them and for taxpayers.
The other impression I walked away with is that the only obstacle to doing even more science with their supercomputer resources was the dollars to obtain more systems (i.e. the demand for cycles outstrips the center's currently available supercomputer resources). I seem to recall the chief mentioning that today's systems are running calculations that were science-fiction level of impossible 15-20 years ago, and that several researchers have ideas for supercomputing applications that would require capabilities still hundreds or thousands of times better than could be built today. The need for more supercomputing capability, at least at NASA, is effectively boundless.
So I think the parent's portrayal is overly broad. An inefficiently used supercomputer is primarily a management failure, and the quality of management varies from organization to organization, as it does in any field. What I've hard about NAS sounds like they did it right. I have no doubt there are organizations who've done it wrong.
Disclaimer: I work for a major supercomputing company, in particular the one that supplies a huge portion of NAS's hardware.
The U.S. government has recently been saber-rattling about the NSA/DOD/whoever taking on the role of protecting vital national computer interests, particularly against the hacking efforts of China. And now, very atypically and with very little rationale for publicly admitting as much, a number of major technology/web companies have started admitting they've been hacked, allegedly from China.
So, was the U.S. government recognizing a real trend ahead of time, or maybe they had non-public information regarding these activities? Or are the companies being pressured to help create a story that will justify a government takeover of the network security infrastructure?
I distrust coincidences and the timing of these initiatives and disclosures smells a bit odd to me. Expect congressional inquiries into the "growing cybersecurity threat" to be covered on C-SPAN within the next few weeks.
First and probably primarily is security holes from supporting remote employees.
This is definitely not the case, for one safe-to-assume reason and one from Mayer's memo itself.
The safe-to-assume reason is that Yahoo will certainly continue providing remote access to employees for working from home during off-hours, while travelling on company business, and for employees who are on-call. If you have to provide remote access for even one employee some of the time you have the same set of security considerations as if you provide remote access for all employees all of the time.
And Mayer's memo makes reference to employees exercising good judgement about waiting at home for the cable guy situations. This implies that it is recognized there will always be one-off situations where an employee needs to work from home for a particular day, even if they are not allowed to do so as their standard day-to-day situation. So once again, if you provide remote access for even one, you have all the same security considerations as if you allowed every employee to work from home all the time.
I personally think this is just as some other posters have said -- it's a stealth layoff to avoid paying severance by getting people to quit on their own, and the decision will gradually be reversed (or the policy just not enforced) once the desired reductions have been accomplished.
ObSnark: When did Carly change her name to Marissa?
However in the U.S. it would be impossible to gain a conviction on the obstruction charge, because you still don't know which of the twins is committing the crime of obstruction. Due to the Fifth Amendment you can't very well convict someone of obstruction if he was refusing to testify against himself, and it's not possible to determine whether or not he is doing so. There's plenty of reasonable doubt.
The current situation does inure some benefits to the U.S., but in not easily measurable ways which is why they're not talked about all that much.
My observations when I was a college student was that international students would gain a perspective on the U.S., Americans, our life, and our culture which was different from what they expected when they first arrived. I assume when they went back home that this new perspective would cause them to evaluate their own local press and government statements about the U.S. in light of their first-hand experiences and knowledge. I had lab partners from Saudi Arabia, Ghana, and mainland China, all of whom I was able to talk with about perspectives and impressions of the U.S., and I have no doubt that each of them had a more nuanced and healthier view of the U.S. after having lived here.
If you want to stabilize relations with China and various Muslim areas of the world I think we'd be well served to invite far more of their students to study here so that when they go back home they can correct the thinking of their friends and family. Likewise the Americans who have a chance to study with them will realize that by and large "people are people", dispelling the simplistic "us versus them" mindset we seem to be afflicted with.
Although the following may not all be household names they were either pioneering or at least some of the first widely used software in their categories:
OS/360, TOPS, MULTICS, UNIX, and CP/M for operating systems.
NFS, NIS, LDAP, FTP, telnet, ssh, UUCP, talk, and IRC clients and servers for various aspects of networked computing.
SCCS, RCS, CVS, Bitkeeper, and git for revision control.
Gopher servers and clients as a prelude to web servers and browsers.
Napster and Bittorrent for file sharing.
Band In A Box, Finale, and Protools for various aspects of music production.
Archie as a precursor to web search engines.
The switching and accounting software behind the 5ESS switch and other major components of the global telephone system.
Compaq's clean-room reengineered BIOS.
Lots of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo/Space Shuttle control software.
I'm thankful to have lived in the age when most of the above were first developed and introduced.
I am a middle-aged fan of Def Leppard, a mild tinnitus sufferer (starting as early in childhood as I can remember -- so probably neurological), and a weekend warrior front-of-house sound engineer. I think you are completely correct, and not just because of the dynamic range issues you mention.
Despite being a fan since the Hysteria years, it was only about a year and a half ago that I first went to a Def Leppard concert. Knowing that there could be problems and that I value my hearing, I made sure to bring decent ear protection. The sound for the opening act (Heart) was brutal -- piercing, obnoxious, and you couldn't make out lyrics except where you already knew them. I put in my ear plugs and sat down, waiting for the spectacle to be over.
That all changed when Def Leppard took the stage. The music was loud, but everything was also very clear and pleasantly equalized and mixed. It was easily the best mixed live show I've ever had the privilege of hearing, bested perhaps only by Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables touring companies (which aren't dealing with nearly as high of sound pressure levels). Willing to risk it for the experience of hearing my favorite rock band live for the first time in my life I didn't use hearing protection at all, and while my hearing was certainly desensitized until the next morning, there was never a single moment of pain.
I love my weekend hobby as a live sound guy, and the highest complement I've ever received (from a pro) for a rock-style show was that they were impressed that everything felt nice and loud, and they were so happy that their ears didn't hurt afterward. That's a difficult thing to achieve, so I have nothing but admiration for whoever (most likely Ronan McHugh) mixed Def Leppard's show that night.
It makes some sense to me. What I wager they are hoping to see is substantially improved economic activity in those areas, as well as rising property values, directly attributable to the availability of cheap bandwidth.
If that happens then Google will be able to begin making a case to the public, the FCC, and politicians that the state of U.S. broadband is terrible, and that the country needs to get its act together to improve the situation. If they can point toward the economic uplift of a downtrodden area they are then pushing the right buttons to get all sorts of politicians to agree that increasing bandwidth is a good and necessary thing. The FCC may begin mandating/encouraging higher speeds, and the politicians may even pry open the taxpayer's wallet to help make it happen.
Increasing the amount of data coursing through the Internet is a plus for Google, as the contents/attributes of that data can then be used for advertising, research, product development, and the like. They can only stand to gain from there being more data circulating.
GSM already standardizes on 112 (even in North America - obviously you can also dial your local emergency number too, so 911 works here)
Have you tried it? It certainly doesn't work universally if at all in North America.
Two years ago I attempted to call from my GSM cellular phone to report a drunk driver. Wondering if "112" actually worked like I knew it should for GSM, I tried that number first, however the call didn't go through. I then reverted to 911 and as expected that call went through just fine.
What rueger said.
I've been there before as a new board member of a non-profit, and rueger is completely correct that it takes at least a year to understand how an organization works and why things are the way they are. More importantly in your case, it takes that long to suss out the nature of the personalities involved, and know what is important or not to each director so that you know how best to advance your goals and make it a positive thing for everyone involved, but most importantly the organization itself.
More than any of that though, you really need to study what the appropriate and necessary roles of a director are. Start Googling and reading on the subject -- there's lots of good stuff out there. As a director you are entrusted with serious legal responsibility for governance and oversight of the organization and accomplishing its stated mission. Everything you do must serve those ends and must be evaluated in light of them. This is your primary role and duty -- everything else is secondary.
Your legal duty and responsibility is to the organization. Not to the board. Certainly not to Bob. So first you need to identify how the current situation is holding back the board from any or all of its responsibilities for governance, oversight, or accomplishing the organization's mission. Once you understand that you can use it as a basis of a discussion with the board so that the board can decide whether they want to solve the problem. If they decide as an entire board through an adopted motion that they want to solve the problem, then you can work with the stakeholders such as Bob to figure out the "how" part of solving the problem (unless Bob already agrees that it needs fixing, in which case the two of you may be able to work together to approach the board together with a presentation of the problem and a proposed solution). See how that works? Identify the core duty/responsibility, address the problem in achieving that duty/responsibility, determine a course of action through the board's official decisions, then implement that decision while maneuvering in the zone of the personalities involved.
How does this then apply to your situation? In order for the board to perform its oversight and governance functions, as well as preserve business continuity in achieving it's mission, it is important that they have reliable access to all documents which they need. The degree to which it is easy to locate those documents impacts how effective the board members can be at carrying out those duties. And for the important documents reuger mentioned (minutes, budgets, etc), it is extremely critical to have a solid paper trail, particularly if for some reason your secretary of state, the IRS, or J. Random Attorney With Aggrieved Client comes knocking. Maintaining these records is part of your legal "duty of care", and you need to make sure it is done, and done wetech.slashdot.orgt SuperBanana mentioned further above: Once you've identified the weakness that your board is responsible for fixing, operate within the correct procedures of the board to address the issue. Get the item on the agenda. Let Bob present on how he would like to fix it, or have the board discuss how they would like it fixed. As part of this the board should create and vote on motions that direct the next steps that should be taken (e.g. further research, funding for implementing a solution, etc). At this point it doesn't matter any longer if Bob is on board with the approved motions or not -- though hopefully he is and a plan that he's happy with has been adopted. In any case at this point the board's decision is as good as law for the organization: if any director cannot faithfully support and help execute the adopted motion, whether or not they were in favor of the motion in the first place, that director needs to resign. If the director works to undermine the board's decision and doesn't resign, the board needs to remove them post-haste.
This doesn't have to be as heartless in practice as it sounds
This is why: http://what-if.xkcd.com/17/
There simply isn't enough solar power delivered to the surface of the aircraft, even at 100% conversion efficiency, to move people and luggage using only available sunlight.
Google tells me direct illumination to a surface perpendicular to incoming full intensity sunlight is about 1.4 kW per square meter. Google also tells me that the wing surface area of a 747 is around 5500 square feet. Only half of the 747 wing is directly illuminated by sunlight at any given moment, but the surface of the fuselage could be covered with photocells as well, so 5500 square feet overall is probably a decent estimate for the directly illuminated surface area of the aircraft as a whole. And for hand-wavy purposes lets assume that the entire surface of the 747 is perpendicular to the incoming sunlight (i.e. a planar plane... pun totally intended). And that we have perfectly efficient photocells giving us 100% conversion efficiency. Running the math, this gives us around 715kW under bright direct sunlight, or about 959 horsepower -- the equivalent of 1.5 2012 Ford Shelby GT500's.
Each engine of a 747 generates around 15,000 horsepower at cruise, and around 30,000 at takeoff, and a 747 has four engines. So you need around 125 times the power generated by a perfectly efficient perfectly illuminated solar-powered 747 to get said plane off the ground, and around 65 times the power for cruising. And then you could only fly it in the middle of the day near the equator.
No disrespect to the font designer, but as far as I can tell this is a long-solved solved problem.
Perhaps I'm a font curmudgeon, however I've not found anything that bests Schumacher Clean for everyday console and editor use. I've used it for about 15 years, and I've can't think of a single thing I don't like about it, other than it's a pain to make it and other bitmap fonts available under Ubuntu. It's been a standard part of X distributions for ages and thus it's widely available.
Schumacher Clean just makes me feel all warm and wubbly inside.
I think the interesting part of this is that this laser pulse is no longer than approximately 2 wavelengths.
Wikipedia tells me "extreme ultraviolet" is from 120nm to 10nm. Google tells me "(the speed of light / (10 nm)) * (67 attoseconds)" is 2.0086094686.
Wow. Just wow.
Yes, but was he awarded the promised six pence?
Why don't you get the directions beforehand and memorize the route? Have people really become so lazy and mentally dull that they can't do this any more?
This doesn't work so well when any of the following are true:
1. You have several unfamiliar stops to make.
2. Your destination changes mid-course (think sports team manager changing dining plans mid-route).
3. There is road construction on any unfamiliar route.
4. Your destination is not known a priori (think taxi driver).
The way to achieve what you say Linus wants is for him to reject/postpone changes that fall outside RC criteria. "Sorry, the train has left the station. There's another one due to leave at 3.6." When developers learn that the development phase criteria are enforced they will adjust their behavior to fall in line, but contrapositively they will not adjust their behavior if the criteria are not enforced.
My sympathy is miniscule -- if RC-appropriate changes are what he wants then he should reject/postpone the changes in question as falling outside RC criteria instead of kvetching about them. It's a self-made and self-perpetuated problem; developers will abuse largesse only as long as they are allowed to.
Decades ago Cray heated their building in Mendota Heights Minnesota entirely using waste heat from the supercomputers. When they built their new campus a few miles away and sold the old building they had to go through some amount of trouble to retrofit it with heating from conventional fuels.
What's old is new again.
The MacBook Pro with a Retina Display of 220ppi sounds great, but I have a serious question.
Has Apple fixed the problem with the system font being sized in a fixed number of pixels? My parents' 17" MBP with hi-res display is almost unusable with my parent's aging eyes (or even my middle-aged eyes), and it doesn't have a ppi anywhere near 220. I'm incredulous that Apple has allowed this UI flaw to persist for so long -- my parents cannot be the only ones who would appreciate a larger system font.
I don't know how well it pays, however an avenue to investigate is working for a textbook publisher, writing, editing, or error-checking new versions of textbooks. A roommate of mine in college did this to help pay his way through school, and he thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I'll wager that in this networked age this might even present an opportunity to work from home, which may be important to you if you are thinking of starting a family.
Another line of investigation is to work with local home-schooling cooperatives. They'll often hire teachers to write a math curriculum for them, and conduct weekly classes for the students. In a larger metropolitan area you may even be able to do this with several cooperatives.
Came for the paranoid demonetization of liberals
I'm more than happy to allow liberals to demonetize themselves, so long as they quit trying to demonetize me. :D
What AC said. It's the one and only comment on this story you need to read.