It's explained on GrokLaw more carefully, but in brief: when a trial judge has a magistrate judge handling preliminary discovery-related matters, as in this case, normally the trial judge will just review the magistrate's decisions for obvious and grotesque errors; trivial errors which don't matter much one way or another are just part of having a society run by and filled with fallible human beings rather than inerrant merciless killing machines. Certain classes of decisions by a magistrate judge (going beyond the official authority of the magistrate judge) require that the trial judge review the original motion from the start, "de novo", completely setting aside the magistrate judge's decision and reviewing it from the perspective of the judge with the proper scope of authority.
In this instance, Judge Kimball first found that the motion did not require de novo review; and then reviewed the original motion from the start anyway and found that the magistrate had nailed the correct decision exactly.
How reliable a source would you consider
http://www.sandisk.com/Assets/File/OEM/WhitePapers AndBrochures/CompactFlash/oem-product-line-bro.pdf ?
They specify > 2,000,000 program cycles per block for their Industrial PC card Flash drives and > 300,000 cycles per block for Standard Grade PC card drives (which certainly handily beats the 10,000 figure you're objecting to). Granted, this brochure doesn't list write cycle specifications for the cheap consumer-grade packages, but I doubt they're as bad as ~10,000 cycles.
And from having been intimately involved in the persistent-storage subsystem of a telecommunications product using those Flash cards, that program-cycle specification is per real block, not taking into account the wear-levelling and sparing feature. As I recall (from very dim memory) the PC card devices had about 15% spare capacity for replacement blocks. (That brochure PDF doesn't include that figure, though, so I can't be sure of that figure.)
However, these specifications are for their newest products; four years ago they were nowhere near that good. With a much older revision of this same Flash product (and with, ahem, some highly suboptimal write behavior) we were cooking some Flash disks in mere weeks in the lab...
Phone companies have been doing this since the very beginning.
The Strowger switch[1] was invented in 1888 by someone trying to figure out how to keep the phone company from steering customers to his competitor.
[1] Or the "step by step" switch if you want to investigate a different example of hereditary telephone company malfeasance...
According to someone I know who worked on the orignal "Star Wars" research,... they are actually kinetic weapons
Right. Photons have momentum, specifically E/c (the energy of the photon divided by c, everyone's favorite constant). I'm too lazy to calculate how much momentum would be carried by a 150KW pulse, but it should be a pretty hefty kick in the teeth.
Amusingly enough, the people arguing for highly-polished mirrored surfaces on the incoming missiles are actually making it worse for the missile: reflecting the incoming pulse can up to double the shock, because the missile has to supply the momentum of the outgoing photons.
I understand the concept of drum memory and it's concept of non-moving heads.
What I've often wondered, is why more *movable* stacks of heads aren't packaged into modern hard disks - to my knowledge, they all have just one stack of heads.
Modern hard disks are optimized for precisely one thing: price. Multiple actuator disk drives have been made in the past, but they aren't now because two actuators cost at least twice as much as one.
The market for performance-at-all-costs drives was never large enough to sustain a lot of development, and the ability of RAID technology to obtain some of that performance at nearly none of the cost has pretty much exterminated any hope of radical increases in performance.
That said, however, it wouldn't surprise me if having multiple actuators might not increase the turbulence in the air inside the drive, making it harder to keep the heads flying at low heights. You might therefore wind up trading density for decreased average seek time, which would also cut into throughput (since fewer bits fly past the heads per second).
A reasonably simple solution to that particular problem is to use separate Firewire disks for your RAID instead of disks in a single cabinet. The performance won't be as high, but at least the spindles won't be sharing a power supply. (Substitute USB 2.0 or SATA for Firewire as appropriate.)
Of course, then you get to worry about a lightning strike or fire taking out the disks at the same time.
Seems to me that customers who spend $1500/year would be very attractive to Amazon.
It is very easy to review your order history to figure out how much you spent on shipping in any given year, so they make it really easy to do the math, too. In my case, let's just say that I didn't get anywhere near all the way through my order history for last year before deciding this was a very attractive offer. (Of course, Christmas tends to stack the deck somewhat. In fact, there may be Amazon customers who don't come anywhere near $1500 per year yet still spend over $79 on rapid shipping at years-end to make sure they don't get the cold shoulder from left-out family members again this year...)
Things like rovers that stay in one place once they become refuse don't seem like much of a problem. Scraps of fabric blowing around in the martian wind seem a little more troublesome to me.
It's OK, they already thought of that. The parachutes are bio-degradable.
Because the Firefox developers followed the Mac user interface guidelines on the Mac version, when you click a link in Firefox with a one-button mouse, it performs the action most commonly expected -- open the page in the current tab. If you click AND HOLD, or if you press the control key, it brings up a contextual menu which offers you a wealth of other choices (new window, new tab, download, bookmark,...).
Many people find the hold-down-one-button paradigm to be easier to learn and use than multiple buttons. Other people find having multiple buttons easier to learn than multiple actions with the same button. Curse Apple for trying to make their computers useful to both kinds of users!
The first mass-marketed personal computer, the Apple II, shipped in 1977, more than 25 years ago. (There were, of course, personal computers before that (I coveted an IMSAI, myself), but they were technology exploration toys, not attempts at reasonably general purpose machines). (Plus there was the PDP-8 that my college roommate had in our dorm room, but that's probably stretching "personal computer" a bit.)
Unless, of course, you are using the word "innovated" in its modern sense, i.e. "has been turned into a monopoly by Microsoft", in which case there are several other things which don't yet belong on their list of "innovations of the past 25 years".
The real point of following a formal process is that, at the end of the project, you know exactly what you did (because it was documented in excruciating detail). If the project goes awry, you look at your process and see where it should have been different.
If, on the other hand, you were just making up the rules as you went along because you wanted to be "flexible", then when you're looking over the smouldering wreckage of your project, you haven't got the faintest idea exactly what you did at any step along the way, much less what you might have done wrong, so all you're left with is the finger pointing, the arbitrary assignment of blame, and the promotion of the incompetant.
(Of course, when the problem with the process turns out that it was designed by moron managers who have no understanding of engineering, your chances of having management correctly diagnose the problem plummet, documented process or no...)
&c is an abbreviation for et cetera which is hundreds of years old. If you want to stop this abomination, you've got a lot of momentum to cope with.
The ampersand glyph is, in fact, derived from a ligature of "et" as written in Carolingian Miniscule lettering.
I think the most polar source control system is Rational's ClearCase. You really love it or really hate.
I guess I'm bipolar then, because I love and hate it.
As others have pointed out, the things Clearcase does well, it does really really well, and it probably does more things well than any other revision control system (certainly more than any revision control system I've used). I frankly think MVFS (the multiversion file system) is the closest thing to magic that I've ever seen in a piece of software; and in general, the things you need to do routinely as a developer are done so transparently and naturally that it's just amazing.
But the things it doesn't do well, it does horrendously. Performance is always a problem (and no matter how carefully you tune your network structure, someone will come along and make a small change and everything falls apart), minor server hiccups can lead to agonizing VOB rebuilds (we used to call this "a Clearcase holiday" at the first place I worked where Clearcase was in use), and the things you don't need to do routinely as a developer (but may have to do routinely as an administrator) can be arcane beyond belief.
After my first work experience with Clearcase, I jokingly told the folks at the next place I went to that I'd only work for them on condition that they wouldn't use Clearcase. They used Source Safe.
It took about four weeks of Source Safe for me to start begging them to consider switching to Clearcase.
The astonishingly high price of Clearcase has side effects that I'm not sure the folks at Rational truly understand (or understood; now it's IBM's turn to misunderstand it). The company I work for now (not the one mentioned previously) also uses Clearcase, and Multisite too. We are stuck with a 4-year out of date version of Clearcase (despite serious bugs and deficiencies) because the cost of incremental upgrades was way too high, and now that it's pretty clear we're going to have to migrate to the latest version, we still can't because of the difficulty of skipping so many revisions. If Rational's business model weren't to hold their customers upside down by the ankles and shake them until money stopped falling out, they might have actually had a more constant revenue stream.
it's a joke, and it's not supposed to be used for encryption
Actually, in a security product I worked on a few years back, I did use ROT-13 for encryption.
For test purposes, you see. I wanted to be able to verify that the encryption algorithm was correctly negotiated and hooked into the data stream while being able to detect missing or added bytes. The actual product used your choice of AES or 3DES, but ROT-13 actually makes a pretty good "nearly null" algorithm for testing.
And no, we didn't store the password anywhere, clear or XORed. I can't confidently swear our product was perfectly secure, but I'm reasonably confident we didn't design in any really boneheaded errors.
It's gotta be the compression they're using. After all, they can fit 709 hours onto a 400GB disk, so an hour of video takes up about half a gigabyte -- not 4.7GB.
This is not going to be an hour of full-quality video.
To be more specific, it used to be the magazine of the MIT Alumni Association. Actually, it still is, but at some point along the way (late 80s, as I recall) the Alumni Association decided that they could make some extra money by turning TechRev into a "general interest" magazine, where "general interest" turns out to be (all too often) "puff pieces and barely concealed advertisements by and for high-tech CEOs". You used to be able to routinely find thoughtful journalistic articles about science and technology in it (but not scientific papers as such); now it's little more than cheerleading.
MIT '83
Re:Sequels and time frames
on
Sims 2 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
However, The Sims 2 is a complete rewrite of the game engine, rather than a rehash with substantially the same engine and game assets.
The timeliness of The Sims 2 probably has more to do with the fact that EA was able to buy enough time to develop the game properly by releasing the last couple of expansions (can anything seriously argue that The Sims Makin' Magic was anything other than a cynical attempt to milk two fads at once?) and The Sims Online. It's a lot easier to bring a project in on time if you don't have Marketing saying "Three years is too long, finish it in two years!"
It also helps a lot that they do know how late the first one was, and more importantly, why. Remember Fred Brooks' motto, "Plan to throw one away."
pc world is what it is because the wide variety of developers(and hardware manufacturers)..
The PC world is what it is because of the wide variety of hardware manufacturers all making exactly the same crap for one-tenth of a cent less per unit than each other. The only way to make a profit in such an environment is volume. No Windows == no volume == no profit. Each and every clone manufacturer is going to roll over on this.
it shouldn't take that long for ibm and others to realise the potential market opening
A market opening for a market less than one-tenth the size of the Windows market. Yeah, that'll attract manufacturers alright -- just ask any Mac user how they like the Mac Half Life port.</bitter> If you're lucky, you will still see some non-Trustworthy Computing motherboards, but they'll be a lot more expensive because the volume will be a lot less.
i'd imagine ms would be kicked to fucking moon in court(at least in europe) if they really tried to pull something
Oh yeah. That worked really well the last two times it happened.
They have more than one Software Engineering cours
on
MIT Everyware
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, 6.033 "Computer Systems Engineering" is not (yet) one of the OpenCourseWare subject, which is really sad. At least when I took it, it was much more valuable (to me, anyway) than the lab course 6.170. The first two lectures of 6.033 (then) did not even mention computers, except in passing.
Granted, neither course explicitly covered "irrational behavior from customers, customers with other priorities than you", etc., but you certainly get a reasonably complete picture the the development process out of these two courses (and I can firmly assure you that no MIT student lacks for exposure to "the pressure of deadlines"...).
I should point out that I graduated from MIT 20 years ago, so their engineering courses could well have gone to hell since then. Even MIT's engineering department is subject to the usual fads and fancies of the industry, or even fads and fancies of its own invention: the year after I took 6.170 (using PL/1) they started using a custom-designed language with all of the important software-engineering features built in to it (CLU, which I'm sure you've all heard of...). Even so, the principles are really the important part (I've never used PL/1 since), assuming your students are sharp enough to be taught principles and not rote mechanical repetition...
Slashdot Mirror
"I wonder what this switch does?"
In this instance, Judge Kimball first found that the motion did not require de novo review; and then reviewed the original motion from the start anyway and found that the magistrate had nailed the correct decision exactly.
And from having been intimately involved in the persistent-storage subsystem of a telecommunications product using those Flash cards, that program-cycle specification is per real block, not taking into account the wear-levelling and sparing feature. As I recall (from very dim memory) the PC card devices had about 15% spare capacity for replacement blocks. (That brochure PDF doesn't include that figure, though, so I can't be sure of that figure.)
However, these specifications are for their newest products; four years ago they were nowhere near that good. With a much older revision of this same Flash product (and with, ahem, some highly suboptimal write behavior) we were cooking some Flash disks in mere weeks in the lab...
Phone companies have been doing this since the very beginning. The Strowger switch[1] was invented in 1888 by someone trying to figure out how to keep the phone company from steering customers to his competitor. [1] Or the "step by step" switch if you want to investigate a different example of hereditary telephone company malfeasance...
Right. Photons have momentum, specifically E/c (the energy of the photon divided by c, everyone's favorite constant). I'm too lazy to calculate how much momentum would be carried by a 150KW pulse, but it should be a pretty hefty kick in the teeth.
Amusingly enough, the people arguing for highly-polished mirrored surfaces on the incoming missiles are actually making it worse for the missile: reflecting the incoming pulse can up to double the shock, because the missile has to supply the momentum of the outgoing photons.
The market for performance-at-all-costs drives was never large enough to sustain a lot of development, and the ability of RAID technology to obtain some of that performance at nearly none of the cost has pretty much exterminated any hope of radical increases in performance.
That said, however, it wouldn't surprise me if having multiple actuators might not increase the turbulence in the air inside the drive, making it harder to keep the heads flying at low heights. You might therefore wind up trading density for decreased average seek time, which would also cut into throughput (since fewer bits fly past the heads per second).
Of course, then you get to worry about a lightning strike or fire taking out the disks at the same time.
It is very easy to review your order history to figure out how much you spent on shipping in any given year, so they make it really easy to do the math, too. In my case, let's just say that I didn't get anywhere near all the way through my order history for last year before deciding this was a very attractive offer. (Of course, Christmas tends to stack the deck somewhat. In fact, there may be Amazon customers who don't come anywhere near $1500 per year yet still spend over $79 on rapid shipping at years-end to make sure they don't get the cold shoulder from left-out family members again this year...)
(OK, that happened to an iBook which wouldn't be likely to get the fancy extra features anyway... But I can dream, can't I?)
What?
DOH!
Many people find the hold-down-one-button paradigm to be easier to learn and use than multiple buttons. Other people find having multiple buttons easier to learn than multiple actions with the same button. Curse Apple for trying to make their computers useful to both kinds of users!
"have become widely used since 1980". Always look for the weasel words.
Unless, of course, you are using the word "innovated" in its modern sense, i.e. "has been turned into a monopoly by Microsoft", in which case there are several other things which don't yet belong on their list of "innovations of the past 25 years".
If, on the other hand, you were just making up the rules as you went along because you wanted to be "flexible", then when you're looking over the smouldering wreckage of your project, you haven't got the faintest idea exactly what you did at any step along the way, much less what you might have done wrong, so all you're left with is the finger pointing, the arbitrary assignment of blame, and the promotion of the incompetant.
(Of course, when the problem with the process turns out that it was designed by moron managers who have no understanding of engineering, your chances of having management correctly diagnose the problem plummet, documented process or no...)
&c is an abbreviation for et cetera which is hundreds of years old. If you want to stop this abomination, you've got a lot of momentum to cope with. The ampersand glyph is, in fact, derived from a ligature of "et" as written in Carolingian Miniscule lettering.
I guess I'm bipolar then, because I love and hate it.
As others have pointed out, the things Clearcase does well, it does really really well, and it probably does more things well than any other revision control system (certainly more than any revision control system I've used). I frankly think MVFS (the multiversion file system) is the closest thing to magic that I've ever seen in a piece of software; and in general, the things you need to do routinely as a developer are done so transparently and naturally that it's just amazing.
But the things it doesn't do well, it does horrendously. Performance is always a problem (and no matter how carefully you tune your network structure, someone will come along and make a small change and everything falls apart), minor server hiccups can lead to agonizing VOB rebuilds (we used to call this "a Clearcase holiday" at the first place I worked where Clearcase was in use), and the things you don't need to do routinely as a developer (but may have to do routinely as an administrator) can be arcane beyond belief.
After my first work experience with Clearcase, I jokingly told the folks at the next place I went to that I'd only work for them on condition that they wouldn't use Clearcase. They used Source Safe.
It took about four weeks of Source Safe for me to start begging them to consider switching to Clearcase.
The astonishingly high price of Clearcase has side effects that I'm not sure the folks at Rational truly understand (or understood; now it's IBM's turn to misunderstand it). The company I work for now (not the one mentioned previously) also uses Clearcase, and Multisite too. We are stuck with a 4-year out of date version of Clearcase (despite serious bugs and deficiencies) because the cost of incremental upgrades was way too high, and now that it's pretty clear we're going to have to migrate to the latest version, we still can't because of the difficulty of skipping so many revisions. If Rational's business model weren't to hold their customers upside down by the ankles and shake them until money stopped falling out, they might have actually had a more constant revenue stream.
For test purposes, you see. I wanted to be able to verify that the encryption algorithm was correctly negotiated and hooked into the data stream while being able to detect missing or added bytes. The actual product used your choice of AES or 3DES, but ROT-13 actually makes a pretty good "nearly null" algorithm for testing.
And no, we didn't store the password anywhere, clear or XORed. I can't confidently swear our product was perfectly secure, but I'm reasonably confident we didn't design in any really boneheaded errors.
I think.
It's gotta be the compression they're using. After all, they can fit 709 hours onto a 400GB disk, so an hour of video takes up about half a gigabyte -- not 4.7GB. This is not going to be an hour of full-quality video.
MIT '83
The timeliness of The Sims 2 probably has more to do with the fact that EA was able to buy enough time to develop the game properly by releasing the last couple of expansions (can anything seriously argue that The Sims Makin' Magic was anything other than a cynical attempt to milk two fads at once?) and The Sims Online. It's a lot easier to bring a project in on time if you don't have Marketing saying "Three years is too long, finish it in two years!"
It also helps a lot that they do know how late the first one was, and more importantly, why. Remember Fred Brooks' motto, "Plan to throw one away."
"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
Hell, I'd be happy to get new versions of AppleWorks, period!
Also referred to as the "Noise Emitting Diode".
The PC world is what it is because of the wide variety of hardware manufacturers all making exactly the same crap for one-tenth of a cent less per unit than each other. The only way to make a profit in such an environment is volume. No Windows == no volume == no profit. Each and every clone manufacturer is going to roll over on this.
it shouldn't take that long for ibm and others to realise the potential market opening
A market opening for a market less than one-tenth the size of the Windows market. Yeah, that'll attract manufacturers alright -- just ask any Mac user how they like the Mac Half Life port.</bitter> If you're lucky, you will still see some non-Trustworthy Computing motherboards, but they'll be a lot more expensive because the volume will be a lot less.
i'd imagine ms would be kicked to fucking moon in court(at least in europe) if they really tried to pull something
Oh yeah. That worked really well the last two times it happened.
Granted, neither course explicitly covered "irrational behavior from customers, customers with other priorities than you", etc., but you certainly get a reasonably complete picture the the development process out of these two courses (and I can firmly assure you that no MIT student lacks for exposure to "the pressure of deadlines"...).
I should point out that I graduated from MIT 20 years ago, so their engineering courses could well have gone to hell since then. Even MIT's engineering department is subject to the usual fads and fancies of the industry, or even fads and fancies of its own invention: the year after I took 6.170 (using PL/1) they started using a custom-designed language with all of the important software-engineering features built in to it (CLU, which I'm sure you've all heard of...). Even so, the principles are really the important part (I've never used PL/1 since), assuming your students are sharp enough to be taught principles and not rote mechanical repetition...