LISP has much higher-level capability than C, but the syntax looks like a super-duper low level piece of crap to me. When it comes to math, RPN is about as low level as you can get.
Henry Ford & Greenfield Village
on
The Geek Atlas
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· Score: 1
No, the only way to really see science is to have a personal connection with the investigators involved. Get a tour of their labs, sit in on a talk by a visiting professor, go to a poster session.
If you want to tour places, stop by the poorly named "Henry Ford Museum". It has little to do with Mr Ford. It's actually a history museum that simply collected artifacts from the industrial revolution. You'll see various pieces of machinery from the 18 and 1900's along with cars, train, planes, sewing machines, typewriters, combines, steam engines, locomotives, etc... Also right next door is Greenfield Village - Mr Ford bought a bunch of buildings and had them moved here. You can tour Thomas Edisons lab, the homes of various historical figures, the home of the Write Brothers (and I believe the actual shop), and many other interesting buildings taken straight out of history and preserved generations. These are not reproductions, they are the actual buildings. There are also demonstrations of how some things were made in the old days, and I believe you can even get a ride in a model T.
I'm sure most people who visit the Detroit area pass on this the way I'd pass on an Elvis museum just because of the name.
A more interesting headline would be: Nearly 4 in 10 companies plan to upgrade to software that doesn't exist yet. Really, how can you plan to roll something out that you haven't evaluated yet? Oh wait, it makes work weather it's good/bad or needed/not. And if it sucks, you can't be blamed for using Microsoft. Now it's all clear to me.
Recently I was looking for a programming construct and ran across closures. As a C/C++ programmer, these were not part of my toolbox or even in my vocabulary. Closures are exactly what I was looking for, but without having learned or used functional languages before, it was surprising to find what I needed is standard stuff for some people. It also took some time to get my head around it. What I wanted to do is highly non-trivial in C or C++.
We were talking about building a competitor to an existing product, and I was outlining what various parts of the system needed to be capable of. When I discovered that a key component is best represented as a closure, it also became painfully obvious that the existing product was not built on the proper abstraction, and this is a large part of the reason it sucks. You can't *properly* or cleanly implement the desired functionality without the right abstraction (or even the right language). This offered additional ammo to the crazy idea of trying to compete with an established player - their product will continue to suck because it is built wrong, so there is an opportunity to build a better mousetrap.
Anyway, this all points to needing to understand the abstract computer science, not the hot language of the day.
I presently work in the Detroit area on software to control ~100kW motor/generators for cars. I'd like to move up to the megawatt range, where do I go? BTW IPM motors are the way to go IMO.
Re:"The magnetic field lines are clearly visible.
on
Sunspots Return
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Yeah, because the field is not uniform the iron filings clump around the actual physical lines. It's the same thing with gravity - the field is not uniform, but concentrated along specific lines protruding out of the earth. Sometimes you get tripped up when you walk through one of the bigger gravitational field lines. Here in Michigan you can clearly feel them when driving your car through them - it feels like the road is all bumpy.
*end sarcasm*
The comment that they are imaginary does suggest that the plasma (or something) on the sun somehow concentrates the field much the way iron filings concentrate them. Once you have filings it concentrates the field and you get more filings attached to the end thus creating lines. Similar must occur on the sun or the lines would not be visible.
The Snow codec is still unfinished, however if Google could put some effort into it perhaps we'd have an unencumbered standard that has as good quality as H.264. Why Google? Because the have the resources, are interested in open standards and open source, and would benefit from the lower bandwidth required. Also, whatever they convert YouTube to will become supported by everyone one way or another. ATM is looks like they're going 264 because Theora doesn't have the same quality per bit.
A general purpose non-disclosive analysis system doesn't yet exist
It does now. That's the point. I don't think the wording in the article is very good. What they're doing is more like simulation of circuits (AND and XOR gates). You can construct a general purpose computer from such gates. You can run a gate-level simulation of such a machine, but your simulation would normally use unencrypted data. This breakthrough allows your simulated machine to use encrypted data, so you feed it encrypted data and you get out encrypted data. All the guy running the simulation knows is the design of the simulated hardware.
This can be taken one step further. If you simulate a programmable computer - not just a fixed algorithm - then the guy running the simulation won't even know what *algorithm* he's running in addition to not knowing what the data is since the program is just encrypted data. I've been toying with this for a while without knowing the proper name for it:-) And no, I never found a method that could handle both AND and XOR, so I look forward to reading more about this.
we believe that we succeeded in our project because we clearly demonstrated very early on to the people in place that they would find a new interesting job in the final constellation. That generated their full commitment to the project!
Every person involved can now go out and be a consultant to other companies that want to migrate off their old Cobol codebase.
Sure, they show a picture of some crappy neighborhood in the city. Just north, Oakland county is one of the richest in the nation. The other suburbs are just fine too. Let's set Detroit aside for a moment and consider Michigan in general. Some points:
1) We've got more coastline than California - and it's fresh water.
2) We've got 4 seasons (which is good or bad depending on your preference).
3) More second homes than any other state (most on the water).
4) We've don't get earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, termites, poisonous spiders/snakes.
5) We do get the occasional tornado, but far less than most of the midwest.
6) Education: we've got plenty of geek-schools.
7) Manufacturing. Does anyone care? We can build anything here - tech included
8) We've got an enormous set of technically capable people just waiting for companies to set up shop here.
Outside the 139 square miles of Detroit, Michigan is a paradise compared to a lot of places.
It would seem much easier to vacuum distill benzene out of the buckywire product than iron
Except that the Benzene is holding the buckballs together - it's part of the wire. The iron is not part of the end product, just the process. TFA has a nice picture showing 2 balls held together by a nice benzene ring with a few other atoms.
Is anyone working on completing the snow codec? I thought it was supposed to actually compete with 264, or was that just hype too? If it's not hype perhaps Google could finish it and use that for Youtube.
I download it from Google. I redistribute FFMPEG under terms of the GPL. I get sued by someone for distributing something they hold a patent for. I in turn sue google on the grounds that their licensing terms indicated this would be OK and it's not. I'm not sure what the specifics would be, and it doesn't seem likely. However, I suspect anyone wanting to use FFMPEG for commercial purposes without a patent license would now get it from Google.
It's the ostrich philosophy - if you can't see it, it can't see you. If all incoming waves (light or sound) are diverted around the object, then it can't "see" anything. If it absorbs some, then it will appear dark against it's background. Granted, it doesn't take much light to feed a camera, but how do you make an exception for a little bit of it?
After the improvements, get the following data together:
1) Energy density - including ventilation
2) Physical expansion during charge/discharge.
3) Degradation with each cycle - i.e. how many recharges before capacity is reduced xx%.
4) Performance over temperature range (-20C to say 60C)
5) Durability of the material.
The list goes on and on. It sounds like a nice lab experiment at this time.
When you're aiming for realtime photon mapping, you start with a ray tracer that's already fairly optimised. Then you make the photons work. Then you optimise some more.
Is quicksort still all the rage? For my time critical stuff I use heap-sort because it's execution time is O(n*log(n)) whereas quicksort is worst case O(n*n) but typically O(n*log(n)). I've always wondered about this because most quicksorts are usually faster in practice than heapsort, but that's an average. Can anyone clarify this for me?
To answer your question - no. If Linux were BSD licensed, it would have essentially been another BSD Unix. The big Unixes could use code from BSD if they wanted and they kept themselves closed and eventually died (except for IBMs Unix). BSD itself is not nearly as well supported as Linux.
Copyright law covers distribution, not private usage, and this is private usage.
So it's OK to rent a movie from Blockbuster, make a copy and return it? The copy is for private usage. I don't think it works that way. If the students paper is returned to them, then the copy being kept is illegal - AND it's being used commercially, not privately. I bet they make yet another copy to send to customers when a match is found too.
Agreed. The title should not say "Quantum Theory May Explain Wishful Thinking" but rather "Quantum Theory Can *Model* Wishful Thinking". As we know, Quantum theory doesn't even explain quantum mechanics, it just models it really well.
Last I checked, gnash worked with youtube. I don't use it now because it doesn't handle all the flash crap that other people in the house want. Youtube is supported though.
You guys don't get it. The whole reason to use RF energy - instead of just using mirrors to redirect light - is so people won't notice when the beam moves around. The incentive to keep it on target is that they collect more energy and make more money - it's odd that the profit motive in this case would work toward a safer system - actually just safer on average, so they need that invisible beam;-)
So these app stores are providing an outlet for you with millions of users. That does more to spread the word than anything the indie developers are doing. If the devs have a marketing budget, they should get off the closed platforms and start marketing - or stay on there but realize your revenue per copy is low. That said, the point of these things isn't to promote independent developers, it to make the platform more interesting to as many people as possible with the least cost. They didn't make the iPhone for *you*.
Slashdot Mirror
LISP has much higher-level capability than C, but the syntax looks like a super-duper low level piece of crap to me. When it comes to math, RPN is about as low level as you can get.
If you want to tour places, stop by the poorly named "Henry Ford Museum". It has little to do with Mr Ford. It's actually a history museum that simply collected artifacts from the industrial revolution. You'll see various pieces of machinery from the 18 and 1900's along with cars, train, planes, sewing machines, typewriters, combines, steam engines, locomotives, etc... Also right next door is Greenfield Village - Mr Ford bought a bunch of buildings and had them moved here. You can tour Thomas Edisons lab, the homes of various historical figures, the home of the Write Brothers (and I believe the actual shop), and many other interesting buildings taken straight out of history and preserved generations. These are not reproductions, they are the actual buildings. There are also demonstrations of how some things were made in the old days, and I believe you can even get a ride in a model T.
I'm sure most people who visit the Detroit area pass on this the way I'd pass on an Elvis museum just because of the name.
A more interesting headline would be: Nearly 4 in 10 companies plan to upgrade to software that doesn't exist yet. Really, how can you plan to roll something out that you haven't evaluated yet? Oh wait, it makes work weather it's good/bad or needed/not. And if it sucks, you can't be blamed for using Microsoft. Now it's all clear to me.
Recently I was looking for a programming construct and ran across closures. As a C/C++ programmer, these were not part of my toolbox or even in my vocabulary. Closures are exactly what I was looking for, but without having learned or used functional languages before, it was surprising to find what I needed is standard stuff for some people. It also took some time to get my head around it. What I wanted to do is highly non-trivial in C or C++.
We were talking about building a competitor to an existing product, and I was outlining what various parts of the system needed to be capable of. When I discovered that a key component is best represented as a closure, it also became painfully obvious that the existing product was not built on the proper abstraction, and this is a large part of the reason it sucks. You can't *properly* or cleanly implement the desired functionality without the right abstraction (or even the right language). This offered additional ammo to the crazy idea of trying to compete with an established player - their product will continue to suck because it is built wrong, so there is an opportunity to build a better mousetrap.
Anyway, this all points to needing to understand the abstract computer science, not the hot language of the day.
I presently work in the Detroit area on software to control ~100kW motor/generators for cars. I'd like to move up to the megawatt range, where do I go? BTW IPM motors are the way to go IMO.
Yeah, because the field is not uniform the iron filings clump around the actual physical lines. It's the same thing with gravity - the field is not uniform, but concentrated along specific lines protruding out of the earth. Sometimes you get tripped up when you walk through one of the bigger gravitational field lines. Here in Michigan you can clearly feel them when driving your car through them - it feels like the road is all bumpy.
*end sarcasm*
The comment that they are imaginary does suggest that the plasma (or something) on the sun somehow concentrates the field much the way iron filings concentrate them. Once you have filings it concentrates the field and you get more filings attached to the end thus creating lines. Similar must occur on the sun or the lines would not be visible.
The Snow codec is still unfinished, however if Google could put some effort into it perhaps we'd have an unencumbered standard that has as good quality as H.264. Why Google? Because the have the resources, are interested in open standards and open source, and would benefit from the lower bandwidth required. Also, whatever they convert YouTube to will become supported by everyone one way or another. ATM is looks like they're going 264 because Theora doesn't have the same quality per bit.
It does now. That's the point. I don't think the wording in the article is very good. What they're doing is more like simulation of circuits (AND and XOR gates). You can construct a general purpose computer from such gates. You can run a gate-level simulation of such a machine, but your simulation would normally use unencrypted data. This breakthrough allows your simulated machine to use encrypted data, so you feed it encrypted data and you get out encrypted data. All the guy running the simulation knows is the design of the simulated hardware.
:-) And no, I never found a method that could handle both AND and XOR, so I look forward to reading more about this.
This can be taken one step further. If you simulate a programmable computer - not just a fixed algorithm - then the guy running the simulation won't even know what *algorithm* he's running in addition to not knowing what the data is since the program is just encrypted data. I've been toying with this for a while without knowing the proper name for it
Every person involved can now go out and be a consultant to other companies that want to migrate off their old Cobol codebase.
Sure, they show a picture of some crappy neighborhood in the city. Just north, Oakland county is one of the richest in the nation. The other suburbs are just fine too. Let's set Detroit aside for a moment and consider Michigan in general. Some points:
1) We've got more coastline than California - and it's fresh water.
2) We've got 4 seasons (which is good or bad depending on your preference).
3) More second homes than any other state (most on the water).
4) We've don't get earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, termites, poisonous spiders/snakes.
5) We do get the occasional tornado, but far less than most of the midwest.
6) Education: we've got plenty of geek-schools.
7) Manufacturing. Does anyone care? We can build anything here - tech included
8) We've got an enormous set of technically capable people just waiting for companies to set up shop here.
Outside the 139 square miles of Detroit, Michigan is a paradise compared to a lot of places.
Except that the Benzene is holding the buckballs together - it's part of the wire. The iron is not part of the end product, just the process. TFA has a nice picture showing 2 balls held together by a nice benzene ring with a few other atoms.
Is anyone working on completing the snow codec? I thought it was supposed to actually compete with 264, or was that just hype too? If it's not hype perhaps Google could finish it and use that for Youtube.
I download it from Google. I redistribute FFMPEG under terms of the GPL. I get sued by someone for distributing something they hold a patent for. I in turn sue google on the grounds that their licensing terms indicated this would be OK and it's not. I'm not sure what the specifics would be, and it doesn't seem likely. However, I suspect anyone wanting to use FFMPEG for commercial purposes without a patent license would now get it from Google.
It's the ostrich philosophy - if you can't see it, it can't see you. If all incoming waves (light or sound) are diverted around the object, then it can't "see" anything. If it absorbs some, then it will appear dark against it's background. Granted, it doesn't take much light to feed a camera, but how do you make an exception for a little bit of it?
Does he think an average user can tell the weather his OS is stored in on-board flash, solid state drive, or iron oxide? Right, I didn't think so.
After the improvements, get the following data together:
1) Energy density - including ventilation
2) Physical expansion during charge/discharge.
3) Degradation with each cycle - i.e. how many recharges before capacity is reduced xx%.
4) Performance over temperature range (-20C to say 60C)
5) Durability of the material.
The list goes on and on. It sounds like a nice lab experiment at this time.
When you're aiming for realtime photon mapping, you start with a ray tracer that's already fairly optimised. Then you make the photons work. Then you optimise some more.
Is quicksort still all the rage? For my time critical stuff I use heap-sort because it's execution time is O(n*log(n)) whereas quicksort is worst case O(n*n) but typically O(n*log(n)). I've always wondered about this because most quicksorts are usually faster in practice than heapsort, but that's an average. Can anyone clarify this for me?
To answer your question - no. If Linux were BSD licensed, it would have essentially been another BSD Unix. The big Unixes could use code from BSD if they wanted and they kept themselves closed and eventually died (except for IBMs Unix). BSD itself is not nearly as well supported as Linux.
So it's OK to rent a movie from Blockbuster, make a copy and return it? The copy is for private usage. I don't think it works that way. If the students paper is returned to them, then the copy being kept is illegal - AND it's being used commercially, not privately. I bet they make yet another copy to send to customers when a match is found too.
Except that when you get pulled over it's because you have *already* done something wrong.
Agreed. The title should not say "Quantum Theory May Explain Wishful Thinking" but rather "Quantum Theory Can *Model* Wishful Thinking". As we know, Quantum theory doesn't even explain quantum mechanics, it just models it really well.
Last I checked, gnash worked with youtube. I don't use it now because it doesn't handle all the flash crap that other people in the house want. Youtube is supported though.
You guys don't get it. The whole reason to use RF energy - instead of just using mirrors to redirect light - is so people won't notice when the beam moves around. The incentive to keep it on target is that they collect more energy and make more money - it's odd that the profit motive in this case would work toward a safer system - actually just safer on average, so they need that invisible beam ;-)
So these app stores are providing an outlet for you with millions of users. That does more to spread the word than anything the indie developers are doing. If the devs have a marketing budget, they should get off the closed platforms and start marketing - or stay on there but realize your revenue per copy is low. That said, the point of these things isn't to promote independent developers, it to make the platform more interesting to as many people as possible with the least cost. They didn't make the iPhone for *you*.