"When they released it at the bottom of a test pool, its buoyancy combined with its cambered shape generated a forward thrust that made it scoot across the tank."
OK--I'll bet it stopped going forward right around the time it got to the surface of the water.
Uh, your answer makes no sense. If they have money for the replacement coupons (which they do or why would they decide to issue them now) then they have the money for the original (expired) coupons. Get it? They would have even more money if they use my idea because there is less expense in administering it. The problem is that your premise, that they have only a set amount of money for coupons, is false.
"including one stunning ultra-portable with no hinge and a single display for both screen and keyboard"
I saw this mock-up (and the other two) and it is the most stupid thing I've ever seen, with one make-believe OLED display that, when the lid of the device was opened, caused the folded-up display to partially unfold to a length that covered the area normally covered by both the display and keyboard of an ordinary portable. Hard to see the point of this, and even harder to type on the display. (No touch sensitivity was indicated, and even then, no physical keys--you would just be typing on a slick, smooth surface with no tactile feedback whatsoever. The first and second runners-up for "most stupid" were the other two mock-ups.
The display that was being folded repeatedly was tiny (duh), about two inches diagonal, and the degree of folding was rather slight, although the picture appeared to remain good. By "appeared" I mean, as best as I could tell given that the display was tiny and in a case which kept the viewer at some distance. Still, if the idea of a roll-up display isn't inherently stupid, i.e., if you want to try to read your screen while it is curved, then this was an interesting demo.
I just don't buy the "second set of eyes" theory to explain why a passenger is less distracting to the driver than a person on a cell phone doing the same thing. There is something fundamentally different between talking on a cell phone while driving and talking to another passenger. I don't know what it is--something about where your mind is focused, maybe. If you are talking to someone in the car, at worst your mental focus is inside the car (or maybe it's that you can focus on what's outside the car without shortchanging the attention that you feel you need to pay to your passenger), but if you are talking on a phone, your mental focus might as well be on another planet--it is in a possibly imagined place which includes the other person, but that place sure as hell isn't in the car with you or on the road in front of you or on the cars around you. A little vague, I know, but maybe someone can tell me what I'm talking about.
Probably the most useful and unsung symbolic math and plotting programs is LiveMath Maker, http://www.livemath.com/ (formerly known as Theorist).
The interface on this thing is incredible. For those of us who aren't doing mathematics research but who just do yeoman math as engineers and scientists, this thing is unbeatable. Equations are manipulated on-screen without any scripting or programming language. The learning curve is pretty small. You have to see it to believe it. I used it just yesterday to help me understand cubic splines. Unfortunately, the program has not been updated in a long time and looks a little ragged around the edges (no antialiasing of plots, for example).
I first used it around 1988 when it was called Theorist and developed by a fellow called Alan Bonadio. For a while it belonged to the Maple folks and for a number of years it has been supported by someone else http://www.livemath.com/.
Don't be fooled by the slightly odd marketing pitch that you find on their home page, which is oriented to high school students. This thing does pretty much all the math that must of us will ever need. Yes, the lack of a programming language limits its use as a general-purpose tool, but we have other tools for that, don't we?
My experiences with Mathematica are not especially recent. (I researched and wrote two papers using Mathematica in 2000 and was a beta tester in 1988.)
I wonder if these impressions are still valid:
Everything is in one window--same interface in 2000 as in 1988. Very awkward. Have they expanded the interface or is it still one linear "notebook?"
Circa 2000, there was a bug in every Fourier transform algorithm! It involved someone being too clever in computing scale factors in trying to satisfy the several ways to distribute the the 2 pi stuff over forward and inverse transforms. I mentioned this on the Mathematica newsgroup and others responded that they noticed it also. A bug fix presumably eventually came but not in the months/years that I used the program, even though numerous bug reports had been filed. Does Wolfram _ever_ release bug-fix releases or do they still have the mindset that they don't make mistakes?
Circa 2000, there was very little interactivity with graphical objects and _no_ interactivity with mathematical objects (a la LiveMath Maker, http://www.livemath.com/). Has this situation improved?
Despite the humongous documentation, it was just freaking impossible to discover the default values of arguments. Stunning. Has this improved?
Macintosh products have always been competitive, even back to the first one, the 128 KB model in Spring of 1984. The thing is, they tend to be loaded with features. For example, even the first Mac had built-in networking.
Truly, I must be missing something. OS X (the Macintosh operating system) comes on instantly from sleep mode. (In sleep mode on a laptop, battery life is typically several days. However, all Macintoshes have the same sleep mode.)
Macintosh laptops running OS X will wake from sleep and be ready to use before you get the lid open. Just leave your favorite text editor or word processor open when you put it to sleep so it is available in zero seconds.
I don't know about FAT32 support but this suggestion isn't so much for the OP as for others who might be interested.
This is not a new feature of Macintoshes--I have used Apple laptops since the mid 1990s and it has always been this way. And they will sleep for nearly a week before draining the battery, at which time they store everything to disk and then shut down.
FWIW (and for some it's a lot), Publicon can create a PDF on OS X in one step from the print dialog. No add-ons from Wolfram or Adobe required since it's part of the OS.
The same is true for _any_other_ program.
Old news to many, but just thought I'd mention it.
I hope they don't bet the company on these patents since, as was discussed on./ less than 24 hours ago, software patents involving digital signals may be invalid. (The field is generally called Digital Signal Processing.)
Many modern compressors (aka compressor/limiters) use multiple frequency bands, typically four or more. The compression is done separately in each band with the results re-combined into a final result. One of the reasons for processing multiple bands is to eliminate pumping in which large dynamic range variations in one band modulate other sounds in inverse fashion--the thumping base causing the female singer's voice to fluctuate in level, for example. Although it is impossible to get heavy dynamic range compression without some degree of this effect, some versions are a bit more discreet about it.
Adding a 19 KHz sine wave would work only to defeat the upper band of a multiband compressor. If this approach works on YouTube it is because they are using a one- or two-band compressor.
Heavy compression ruins virtually all popular music in the form in which it is released. Further compression e.g. by FM radio, internet streams, and YouTube, ruins it a little bit more.
For an interesting discussion of how one artist is pissed off about all of this, Google for Bob Dylan and dynamic range compression.
Microsoft's business model, as we all know, has been to sell second-rate software to unsophisticated customers. But why did this succeed?
I'm at an age when I can begin touting my age as a factor in making arguments, so here is my take on this. Some of us remember the "mainframe" days. My particular experience was working at Motorola's government electronics group during a time when there was a need to upgrade the (that's right, "the") engineering computer. Bids were taken, executives were wined and dined, and a Sperry Univac was bought (replacing a much-loved but very tired Honeywell model). The engineers were livid because the Univac sucked. I actually sat in a small, packed conference room with Sperry bigshots while we berated them on the problems with their computer. Not two years later, the Univac was dumped for---drum roll--an IBM. Engineers were pleased with the new machine.
It was during this period that I first heard the mantra: "You can't be fired for buying IBM." Everyone knew it. It always remained a mystery what influence Sperry was able to exert, but there was always a suspicion of foul play in the decision to get the Univac.
This period was approximately 1982-1984. An IBM PC showed up in my lab. Other small lab computers were showing up, such as HP and an excellent machine from Three Rivers Computer, which engineers were using for suspicious activities such as writing reports. Management became petrified, and a moratorium against the purchase of new personal computers was put into place. (i'm not kidding--I was on a committee to decide what to do about the "problem." One of the subjects we confronted was networking and Ethernet. The consensus of the committee was, Who the hell would ever need 10 Mbps?)
The decision was made (around the time I left the company to return to graduate school). IBM PCs were the official choice of Motorola's government electronic group.
This might sound like a trite explanation, but I have thought about it for many years. I truly believe that such a reasoning was behind much of the success of the IBM PC (and by IBM's decision to farm out the OS, Microsoft).
In (the news coverage of) American politics in recent years, states that tend to vote for Democrats (liberals or socialists in non-American politics) are called "blue states" and states that tend to vote for Republicans (conservatives) are called "red states." The decision to denote such states by color is perhaps useful if a little arbitrary. However, the actual colors chosen are a little odd because the color traditionally associated with socialism and its stronger flavors is red. I know this will strike many as flamebait*, but it is the press which has made these colors stick, and the press in America is quite strongly liberal (the upstart Fox News notwithstanding); one might guess that the decision to color the opposition red was made to invoke anger when news stories about politics are reported.
* Discuss at will, but, for example, after one recent presidential election, a survey was taken of a very large number of journalists and it was found that 88% of them voted for the Democrat (socialist) candidate.
The OS X interface is pretty awful with respect to conforming to Macintosh interface standards. I would guess that I noticed at least a dozen errors within four minutes of use.
I notice that while you can download the complete (daily or weekly) history of companies' stocks to a CSV file, that option is not available for indices such as NASDAQ and Dow Jones Industrials. That kind of shodiness reminds me of, well, Yahoo.
Slashdot Mirror
"When they released it at the bottom of a test pool, its buoyancy combined with its cambered shape generated a forward thrust that made it scoot across the tank."
OK--I'll bet it stopped going forward right around the time it got to the surface of the water.
Remind me--shutting down Fannie Mae is bad in what sense?
Uh, your answer makes no sense. If they have money for the replacement coupons (which they do or why would they decide to issue them now) then they have the money for the original (expired) coupons. Get it? They would have even more money if they use my idea because there is less expense in administering it. The problem is that your premise, that they have only a set amount of money for coupons, is false.
Why do I have to request new coupons to replace my expired ones? Why doesn't the Congress just force the expired ones to be honored?
"including one stunning ultra-portable with no hinge and a single display for both screen and keyboard"
I saw this mock-up (and the other two) and it is the most stupid thing I've ever seen, with one make-believe OLED display that, when the lid of the device was opened, caused the folded-up display to partially unfold to a length that covered the area normally covered by both the display and keyboard of an ordinary portable. Hard to see the point of this, and even harder to type on the display. (No touch sensitivity was indicated, and even then, no physical keys--you would just be typing on a slick, smooth surface with no tactile feedback whatsoever. The first and second runners-up for "most stupid" were the other two mock-ups.
The display that was being folded repeatedly was tiny (duh), about two inches diagonal, and the degree of folding was rather slight, although the picture appeared to remain good. By "appeared" I mean, as best as I could tell given that the display was tiny and in a case which kept the viewer at some distance. Still, if the idea of a roll-up display isn't inherently stupid, i.e., if you want to try to read your screen while it is curved, then this was an interesting demo.
Apparently the author of TFA is immune to irony, stating that his favorite language is C.
"Any thoughts on this matter or could you explain why the system is acting this way?"
Leaky browsers.
I just don't buy the "second set of eyes" theory to explain why a passenger is less distracting to the driver than a person on a cell phone doing the same thing. There is something fundamentally different between talking on a cell phone while driving and talking to another passenger. I don't know what it is--something about where your mind is focused, maybe. If you are talking to someone in the car, at worst your mental focus is inside the car (or maybe it's that you can focus on what's outside the car without shortchanging the attention that you feel you need to pay to your passenger), but if you are talking on a phone, your mental focus might as well be on another planet--it is in a possibly imagined place which includes the other person, but that place sure as hell isn't in the car with you or on the road in front of you or on the cars around you. A little vague, I know, but maybe someone can tell me what I'm talking about.
Probably the most useful and unsung symbolic math and plotting programs is LiveMath Maker, http://www.livemath.com/ (formerly known as Theorist).
The interface on this thing is incredible. For those of us who aren't doing mathematics research but who just do yeoman math as engineers and scientists, this thing is unbeatable. Equations are manipulated on-screen without any scripting or programming language. The learning curve is pretty small. You have to see it to believe it. I used it just yesterday to help me understand cubic splines. Unfortunately, the program has not been updated in a long time and looks a little ragged around the edges (no antialiasing of plots, for example).
I first used it around 1988 when it was called Theorist and developed by a fellow called Alan Bonadio. For a while it belonged to the Maple folks and for a number of years it has been supported by someone else http://www.livemath.com/.
Don't be fooled by the slightly odd marketing pitch that you find on their home page, which is oriented to high school students. This thing does pretty much all the math that must of us will ever need. Yes, the lack of a programming language limits its use as a general-purpose tool, but we have other tools for that, don't we?
My experiences with Mathematica are not especially recent. (I researched and wrote two papers using Mathematica in 2000 and was a beta tester in 1988.)
I wonder if these impressions are still valid:
Everything is in one window--same interface in 2000 as in 1988. Very awkward. Have they expanded the interface or is it still one linear "notebook?"
Circa 2000, there was a bug in every Fourier transform algorithm! It involved someone being too clever in computing scale factors in trying to satisfy the several ways to distribute the the 2 pi stuff over forward and inverse transforms. I mentioned this on the Mathematica newsgroup and others responded that they noticed it also. A bug fix presumably eventually came but not in the months/years that I used the program, even though numerous bug reports had been filed. Does Wolfram _ever_ release bug-fix releases or do they still have the mindset that they don't make mistakes?
Circa 2000, there was very little interactivity with graphical objects and _no_ interactivity with mathematical objects (a la LiveMath Maker, http://www.livemath.com/). Has this situation improved?
Despite the humongous documentation, it was just freaking impossible to discover the default values of arguments. Stunning. Has this improved?
Why not get someone with experience, such as Al Gore?
Macintosh products have always been competitive, even back to the first one, the 128 KB model in Spring of 1984. The thing is, they tend to be loaded with features. For example, even the first Mac had built-in networking.
Truly, I must be missing something. OS X (the Macintosh operating system) comes on instantly from sleep mode. (In sleep mode on a laptop, battery life is typically several days. However, all Macintoshes have the same sleep mode.)
Macintosh laptops running OS X will wake from sleep and be ready to use before you get the lid open. Just leave your favorite text editor or word processor open when you put it to sleep so it is available in zero seconds.
I don't know about FAT32 support but this suggestion isn't so much for the OP as for others who might be interested.
This is not a new feature of Macintoshes--I have used Apple laptops since the mid 1990s and it has always been this way. And they will sleep for nearly a week before draining the battery, at which time they store everything to disk and then shut down.
Oooh...Tabs _above_ the address bar. Now that's true innovation.
FWIW (and for some it's a lot), Publicon can create a PDF on OS X in one step from the print dialog. No add-ons from Wolfram or Adobe required since it's part of the OS.
The same is true for _any_other_ program.
Old news to many, but just thought I'd mention it.
I hope they don't bet the company on these patents since, as was discussed on ./ less than 24 hours ago, software patents involving digital signals may be invalid. (The field is generally called Digital Signal Processing.)
Many modern compressors (aka compressor/limiters) use multiple frequency bands, typically four or more. The compression is done separately in each band with the results re-combined into a final result. One of the reasons for processing multiple bands is to eliminate pumping in which large dynamic range variations in one band modulate other sounds in inverse fashion--the thumping base causing the female singer's voice to fluctuate in level, for example. Although it is impossible to get heavy dynamic range compression without some degree of this effect, some versions are a bit more discreet about it.
Adding a 19 KHz sine wave would work only to defeat the upper band of a multiband compressor. If this approach works on YouTube it is because they are using a one- or two-band compressor.
Heavy compression ruins virtually all popular music in the form in which it is released. Further compression e.g. by FM radio, internet streams, and YouTube, ruins it a little bit more.
For an interesting discussion of how one artist is pissed off about all of this, Google for Bob Dylan and dynamic range compression.
If you don't want people to read your blog, stop putting it on the internet.
How twisted is that that a company that is bending over backward to help its customers is accused of invading someone's privacy.
Microsoft's business model, as we all know, has been to sell second-rate software to unsophisticated customers. But why did this succeed?
I'm at an age when I can begin touting my age as a factor in making arguments, so here is my take on this. Some of us remember the "mainframe" days. My particular experience was working at Motorola's government electronics group during a time when there was a need to upgrade the (that's right, "the") engineering computer. Bids were taken, executives were wined and dined, and a Sperry Univac was bought (replacing a much-loved but very tired Honeywell model). The engineers were livid because the Univac sucked. I actually sat in a small, packed conference room with Sperry bigshots while we berated them on the problems with their computer. Not two years later, the Univac was dumped for---drum roll--an IBM. Engineers were pleased with the new machine.
It was during this period that I first heard the mantra: "You can't be fired for buying IBM." Everyone knew it. It always remained a mystery what influence Sperry was able to exert, but there was always a suspicion of foul play in the decision to get the Univac.
This period was approximately 1982-1984. An IBM PC showed up in my lab. Other small lab computers were showing up, such as HP and an excellent machine from Three Rivers Computer, which engineers were using for suspicious activities such as writing reports. Management became petrified, and a moratorium against the purchase of new personal computers was put into place. (i'm not kidding--I was on a committee to decide what to do about the "problem." One of the subjects we confronted was networking and Ethernet. The consensus of the committee was, Who the hell would ever need 10 Mbps?)
The decision was made (around the time I left the company to return to graduate school). IBM PCs were the official choice of Motorola's government electronic group.
This might sound like a trite explanation, but I have thought about it for many years. I truly believe that such a reasoning was behind much of the success of the IBM PC (and by IBM's decision to farm out the OS, Microsoft).
"You can't be fired for buying IBM."
This is why I've long referred to the No Child Left Behind program as No Child Gets Ahead.
In (the news coverage of) American politics in recent years, states that tend to vote for Democrats (liberals or socialists in non-American politics) are called "blue states" and states that tend to vote for Republicans (conservatives) are called "red states." The decision to denote such states by color is perhaps useful if a little arbitrary. However, the actual colors chosen are a little odd because the color traditionally associated with socialism and its stronger flavors is red. I know this will strike many as flamebait*, but it is the press which has made these colors stick, and the press in America is quite strongly liberal (the upstart Fox News notwithstanding); one might guess that the decision to color the opposition red was made to invoke anger when news stories about politics are reported.
* Discuss at will, but, for example, after one recent presidential election, a survey was taken of a very large number of journalists and it was found that 88% of them voted for the Democrat (socialist) candidate.
The OS X interface is pretty awful with respect to conforming to Macintosh interface standards. I would guess that I noticed at least a dozen errors within four minutes of use.
"perplex and confound creationists"
_Nothing_ perplexes or confounds creationists.,
I notice that while you can download the complete (daily or weekly) history of companies' stocks to a CSV file, that option is not available for indices such as NASDAQ and Dow Jones Industrials. That kind of shodiness reminds me of, well, Yahoo.