R&D is an investment. Too many CEOs can't see it as anything but an expense. This is another fault of the business schools. Just because it's not a "profit centre" doesn't mean it's money down the toilet.
I visited a company that had keypads on the doors. These pads would randomly arrange the digits with LEDs in the keys every time. It was a bit harder to find the keys you needed because they were always in a different place, but even if someone watched from the side they had a very narrow field of view, and this silly thermal approach wouldn't work either because the numbers went away after the door opened - you might know which keys they pressed, but not which digits.
Slashdot comments usually have some input from "both sides". We argue about nuclear power, dark matter, illegal downloading, you name it. Sometimes there is a majority opinion and sometimes it's more divided. I just read all of the top-level comments and all of the subject lines on this and it looks unanimous. There is no debate here, gnome 3 is crap. If slashdot agrees that much, someone fucked up - and bad.
Uh, he does kinda say that the goal is to design a tablet interface.
But he also says touch hasn't really been figured out yet. WTF? admit you're moving to something for cloud-based tablets but touch is an afterthought? Abandon the desktop and "redesign" for something else without actually doing any design. This guy has far too much word vomit and no substance.
If so, that's trivial to disprove. There are about 100 uncontacted tribes of humans in the world. Choose one. Find the shortest path to yourself. There is no path.
Dude, just because the tribe is not in contact with people from our "modern" world, they are most certainly in contact with people from other tribes and they in turn are in contact with other tribes. If not, then inbreeding would have finished them off. So the tribes are connected and at some point there is a link between tribal peoples and non-tribal folks. So when you say "there is no path" I believe you are incorrect. It's probably more than 6 degrees, but there is likely to be a path.
You and GP don't know much about math, do you? This (the Small World problem) is a combinatorial problem and as such a massive computational undertaking, especially for 750,000,000 accounts.
So to undertake a large problem where their computers contain all the data, they opted to involve the users too? You know, just to reduce the problem to a random sample of willing participants and to make the computational burden even higher at each step (user interaction). Yep, seems like a scam to me. And the partnership and user permission means Yahoo will have access to the Facebook friend-graph.
To get rid of the injected HIV you just do a marrow transplant from one of the people who are immune. So it's only a 50% survival rate, what's the big deal;-)
Joking aside, is the modified HIV virus live, replicating and infectious? I don't think unleashing live viruses that have no known cure is a good idea no mater how modified they are.
They are putting CPU, GPU, and Memory controller on the same die. Is it possible they can get a performance boost by changing something on the memory chip? Probably. Is it possible they could get a performance boost by changing the memory while still remaining compatible with regular RAM? In other words a special feature that only their APU knows how to use?
I have a bigger question. Why is this even news? Who cares what desktop environment Linux Torvalds chooses to use? It doesn't mean anything. In that context, he's just another user and has no unique insight or authority to comment on user experience.
The real question is why a few GNOME developers opinions matter more than the users. These people are self-appointed UI experts and they have IMHO destroyed the usability of GNOME, all in an attempt to look like a touch-screen phone interface. And it's actually worse than the Android phone UI that I am already not pleased with. What happened to the HIG? Gone! There are no longer any guidelines or philosophy for GNOME, it's all just some people putting shit together that they think is neat or "fun". Let me tell ya, context switching in a UI is NOT desirable (i.e. going to "activities", or the arbitrary upper left corner "throw all the little windows out there to change applications" bullshit) it's visually jarring and requires a few seconds for a mental context change. Not friendly, not very usable, but ALL decided by a few people who think they know better. So yeah, Linus who has a more recognizable name gets to have his say in public too - without ruining my desktop experience.
And the original article is right -- oil exploration/production and refining have relatively little to do with each other. They don't even profit based on the same numbers. Production profits based on the market value of the particular type of crude. Refining profits based on the "crack spread", the difference in price between a particular refined product and its feedstock. Both fluctuate wildly and independently.
If you're vertically integrated you don't sell your oil on the open market, and you don't refine oil purchased on the open market. You simply pump it out of the ground, refine it, and sell it at the same prices everyone else does (including those who are not vertically integrated). Notice that Exxon/Mobil recently closed gas stations in order to get the balance right. Probably so they didn't have to buy oil at obscene prices. Production and refining/marketing are counter-cyclical in the sense that the "price" of oil determines which business is profitable. IMHO XOM is still looking to buy another company - not split itself up.
This looks stupidly inefficient. Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long.
Dude, it's an electric car. It probably has close to 20KWh of storage. That means 20 killowatts for an hour or 1kW for 20 hours - you get the picture. The problem is that the leaf is a pure electric vehicle. Doing this with a Chevy Volt would be better since it could run on gas like a regular generator.
There is some additional cost to make the charging system bidirectional, and there are certainly additional requirements on any system that can push power onto the grid. But yes, this is a neat trick that's not too hard to do once you've got a high power charger on an electric or hybrid car.
The whole point was that people would use the publications to get ideas of things to license.
No, the point was to get inventors to publish how things work. In exchange they were given exclusive rights for a number of years. This is the first I've ever heard of the unfortunate wording you chose (get ideas of things to license). The point was to spread know-how. The sacrifice was limited exclusivity.
Yes, everyone agrees that the patent system as it currently exists is insane. But it is what it is. Ignoring that reality and not stocking up on defensive patents is foolish.
Pooling patents does not give you increased defence. In fact, having them in a 3rd party company is even weaker defensively than holding your own. The only plausible explanations are joint licensing of the lot - like H-264, or to make offensive strikes like MPEG LA was trying to do against WebM. I don't see the commonality between the companies and patents to support the former.
Another way of looking at this is to realize that the pre-release versions of Java 7 have been out there for a long, long time, and nobody from these Apache projects felt like testing their (rather important) open source projects against it, so they could have found and reported the bug earlier.
Umm no. It's not the customers fault for not testing the product. It's Oracles fault. In fact, Oracle could have been using Apache in their test suite - it's not like it's a closed source product. This really raises the question - How does Oracle test Java prior to release?
What? You think there is consensus in a politically charged discussion like this? A wise person looks at some of the research data and tries to understand it himself. A lazy person looks at what appears to be a majority opinion, rejects the apparent minority opinion, and calls it a consensus.
Me? I at least looked at Wikipedia. The claim that increased cloud cover causes warming seemed odd to me since they reflect more sunlight - which they dismiss as "lost to the system". Then I recalled global dimming and looked at the article on pan evaporation rates. They attribute the evaporation rate to a number of factors - humidity dew point, wind, etc.. but they don't mention level of sunlight, which has been shown to be THE dominant factor, even in one of the linked studies. So I can't trust Wikipedia (some would say you're foolish if you do) on this issue. What to do? I'm considering collecting and analyzing my own data. And please feel free to refute the relevance of the small sample of data I want to collect before you even know what the analysis is intended to show....
The most mysterious thing to me, though, is that the scientists, for all their intellectual firepower, don't understand that it's a problem.
That is the core problem. They feel the problem is solved, which leads to something even worse - they feel the software guys are idiots because they keep fucking up their work. We use a lot of Matlab and Simulink too, and the Mathworks uses this to absolutely drive a wedge into the organization. If it can't be done in Simulink, you use the "legacy code tool" to hook in some of that antiquated C-code. They also preach that a "model" is self-documenting, so those guys don't have to write docs or explain anything. And I'm with you on the SCM issues. Management of course listens to the expensive guy with the PhD who wants a $30K tool chain that doesn't work with anything else. All this because of ignorance (a word which unfortunately carries negative connotations).
Maintainable code is not always a requirement since a lot of software written in research labs is intended to be written once and run a handful of times.
Maintainable code is always a requirement. If you feel otherwise, you are part of the problem. In research, there is always someone trying to get a follow-up grant to continue the research - which will re-use what you created. Now if someone else is going to do the work next time, you may interpret the situation as "Maintainable code is not a requirement for this grant/project, or for me". That is a correct interpretation of YOUR requirements, not the code's requirements.
Finally, it is not unusual for engineers to "understand how hard it [will be] to turn [a given] exoskeleton into [the required] self-sufficient robot" only in retrospect, thus it seems quite silly to expect anyone else to understand this at the outset —here I did not say "believe one understands."
It is well understood how hard it will be to turn an exoskeleton into a self-sufficient robot among people who build such robots for a living. This is an analogy where the professional robot-builders are the software guys who get handed the exoskeleton. They know in advance what it takes.
Anti-aliasing, by definition, must be performed in object space or, possibly, in picture space. But it cannot be possibly carried out on an already rendered image. They must be trying to market some glorified blur technique under the anti-aliasing moniker. Nothing new here...
There are no pixels in object space. It's an operation on pixels. But I agree with your second half - it's some new blur method that probably isn't worth it. Nothing to see here - in fact things are harder to see.
It's different from a Gaussian blur or median filter because it attempts to be selective about which edges it blurs, and how it blurs those edges.
Anti-Aliasing is not supposed to blur edges arbitrarily. I suppose that's why this is selective, but it just seems like a crappy thing to be doing. And while it can be done by a CPU, that's probably not practical - either the CPU is busting it's ass to do rendering and doesn't really have time to make an AA pass, or the GPU did all the rendering and may as well do this too, rather than pass all the data back to CPU.
As for contacts, I agree with you, but a lot of programs require access to the SD card because the device's internal storage is too small to hold all data (meshes, textures, sound, etc.) that pertains to the game.
Agreed. And I have an audio recorder/spectrum analyzer that records to SD. There are obvious cases where it's needed. Installation to SD is one possibility too, but why would something like a Tetris clone need access? I didn't actually see one, but that's the type of thing I see a lot - simple things that don't seem to need what they ask for.
When simple one-player games and such say they require full internet access I think "that may be for ads". When they require access to contacts, SD card, etc... That usually means don't install it. Unfortunately most of the apps I've looked at require full internet access AND access to contacts and don't get installed as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
R&D is an investment. Too many CEOs can't see it as anything but an expense. This is another fault of the business schools. Just because it's not a "profit centre" doesn't mean it's money down the toilet.
Nuf said.
I visited a company that had keypads on the doors. These pads would randomly arrange the digits with LEDs in the keys every time. It was a bit harder to find the keys you needed because they were always in a different place, but even if someone watched from the side they had a very narrow field of view, and this silly thermal approach wouldn't work either because the numbers went away after the door opened - you might know which keys they pressed, but not which digits.
Slashdot comments usually have some input from "both sides". We argue about nuclear power, dark matter, illegal downloading, you name it. Sometimes there is a majority opinion and sometimes it's more divided. I just read all of the top-level comments and all of the subject lines on this and it looks unanimous. There is no debate here, gnome 3 is crap. If slashdot agrees that much, someone fucked up - and bad.
But he also says touch hasn't really been figured out yet. WTF? admit you're moving to something for cloud-based tablets but touch is an afterthought? Abandon the desktop and "redesign" for something else without actually doing any design. This guy has far too much word vomit and no substance.
Dude, just because the tribe is not in contact with people from our "modern" world, they are most certainly in contact with people from other tribes and they in turn are in contact with other tribes. If not, then inbreeding would have finished them off. So the tribes are connected and at some point there is a link between tribal peoples and non-tribal folks. So when you say "there is no path" I believe you are incorrect. It's probably more than 6 degrees, but there is likely to be a path.
So to undertake a large problem where their computers contain all the data, they opted to involve the users too? You know, just to reduce the problem to a random sample of willing participants and to make the computational burden even higher at each step (user interaction). Yep, seems like a scam to me. And the partnership and user permission means Yahoo will have access to the Facebook friend-graph.
To get rid of the injected HIV you just do a marrow transplant from one of the people who are immune. So it's only a 50% survival rate, what's the big deal ;-)
Joking aside, is the modified HIV virus live, replicating and infectious? I don't think unleashing live viruses that have no known cure is a good idea no mater how modified they are.
They are putting CPU, GPU, and Memory controller on the same die. Is it possible they can get a performance boost by changing something on the memory chip? Probably. Is it possible they could get a performance boost by changing the memory while still remaining compatible with regular RAM? In other words a special feature that only their APU knows how to use?
There has been talk of remoting Wayland. Sure the network bandwidth required will be higher than remote X but this isn't 1980.
The real question is why a few GNOME developers opinions matter more than the users. These people are self-appointed UI experts and they have IMHO destroyed the usability of GNOME, all in an attempt to look like a touch-screen phone interface. And it's actually worse than the Android phone UI that I am already not pleased with. What happened to the HIG? Gone! There are no longer any guidelines or philosophy for GNOME, it's all just some people putting shit together that they think is neat or "fun". Let me tell ya, context switching in a UI is NOT desirable (i.e. going to "activities", or the arbitrary upper left corner "throw all the little windows out there to change applications" bullshit) it's visually jarring and requires a few seconds for a mental context change. Not friendly, not very usable, but ALL decided by a few people who think they know better. So yeah, Linus who has a more recognizable name gets to have his say in public too - without ruining my desktop experience.
If you're vertically integrated you don't sell your oil on the open market, and you don't refine oil purchased on the open market. You simply pump it out of the ground, refine it, and sell it at the same prices everyone else does (including those who are not vertically integrated). Notice that Exxon/Mobil recently closed gas stations in order to get the balance right. Probably so they didn't have to buy oil at obscene prices. Production and refining/marketing are counter-cyclical in the sense that the "price" of oil determines which business is profitable. IMHO XOM is still looking to buy another company - not split itself up.
Dude, it's an electric car. It probably has close to 20KWh of storage. That means 20 killowatts for an hour or 1kW for 20 hours - you get the picture. The problem is that the leaf is a pure electric vehicle. Doing this with a Chevy Volt would be better since it could run on gas like a regular generator. There is some additional cost to make the charging system bidirectional, and there are certainly additional requirements on any system that can push power onto the grid. But yes, this is a neat trick that's not too hard to do once you've got a high power charger on an electric or hybrid car.
No, the point was to get inventors to publish how things work. In exchange they were given exclusive rights for a number of years. This is the first I've ever heard of the unfortunate wording you chose (get ideas of things to license). The point was to spread know-how. The sacrifice was limited exclusivity.
Pooling patents does not give you increased defence. In fact, having them in a 3rd party company is even weaker defensively than holding your own. The only plausible explanations are joint licensing of the lot - like H-264, or to make offensive strikes like MPEG LA was trying to do against WebM. I don't see the commonality between the companies and patents to support the former.
Door dings can just be bumped out. Carbon fiber will crack. Ask anyone who does body work on some of the newer cars.
Umm no. It's not the customers fault for not testing the product. It's Oracles fault. In fact, Oracle could have been using Apache in their test suite - it's not like it's a closed source product. This really raises the question - How does Oracle test Java prior to release?
What? You think there is consensus in a politically charged discussion like this? A wise person looks at some of the research data and tries to understand it himself. A lazy person looks at what appears to be a majority opinion, rejects the apparent minority opinion, and calls it a consensus.
Me? I at least looked at Wikipedia. The claim that increased cloud cover causes warming seemed odd to me since they reflect more sunlight - which they dismiss as "lost to the system". Then I recalled global dimming and looked at the article on pan evaporation rates. They attribute the evaporation rate to a number of factors - humidity dew point, wind, etc.. but they don't mention level of sunlight, which has been shown to be THE dominant factor, even in one of the linked studies. So I can't trust Wikipedia (some would say you're foolish if you do) on this issue. What to do? I'm considering collecting and analyzing my own data. And please feel free to refute the relevance of the small sample of data I want to collect before you even know what the analysis is intended to show....
That is the core problem. They feel the problem is solved, which leads to something even worse - they feel the software guys are idiots because they keep fucking up their work. We use a lot of Matlab and Simulink too, and the Mathworks uses this to absolutely drive a wedge into the organization. If it can't be done in Simulink, you use the "legacy code tool" to hook in some of that antiquated C-code. They also preach that a "model" is self-documenting, so those guys don't have to write docs or explain anything. And I'm with you on the SCM issues. Management of course listens to the expensive guy with the PhD who wants a $30K tool chain that doesn't work with anything else. All this because of ignorance (a word which unfortunately carries negative connotations).
Maintainable code is always a requirement. If you feel otherwise, you are part of the problem. In research, there is always someone trying to get a follow-up grant to continue the research - which will re-use what you created. Now if someone else is going to do the work next time, you may interpret the situation as "Maintainable code is not a requirement for this grant/project, or for me". That is a correct interpretation of YOUR requirements, not the code's requirements.
It is well understood how hard it will be to turn an exoskeleton into a self-sufficient robot among people who build such robots for a living. This is an analogy where the professional robot-builders are the software guys who get handed the exoskeleton. They know in advance what it takes.
There are no pixels in object space. It's an operation on pixels. But I agree with your second half - it's some new blur method that probably isn't worth it. Nothing to see here - in fact things are harder to see.
Anti-Aliasing is not supposed to blur edges arbitrarily. I suppose that's why this is selective, but it just seems like a crappy thing to be doing. And while it can be done by a CPU, that's probably not practical - either the CPU is busting it's ass to do rendering and doesn't really have time to make an AA pass, or the GPU did all the rendering and may as well do this too, rather than pass all the data back to CPU.
Agreed. And I have an audio recorder/spectrum analyzer that records to SD. There are obvious cases where it's needed. Installation to SD is one possibility too, but why would something like a Tetris clone need access? I didn't actually see one, but that's the type of thing I see a lot - simple things that don't seem to need what they ask for.
When simple one-player games and such say they require full internet access I think "that may be for ads". When they require access to contacts, SD card, etc... That usually means don't install it. Unfortunately most of the apps I've looked at require full internet access AND access to contacts and don't get installed as a result.