It's also quite interesting that the "enterprise" level drives aren't any better than the consumer level drives.
As you know, you can buy different speeds of CPU or RAM. The reason why they come in fast and slow is not because anyone sets out to make a slow CPU. They make one speed of CPU, and then test them. Most of them are duds and get melted down to make new wafers. Some test okay, and they get packaged and shipped. Some test bad at high clock speeds and okay at low clock speeds, and these get packaged as lower-speed CPUs.
Now I don't know much about hard drive manufacturing, but I would guess that there's a similar thing going on here. An "enterprise"-level drive is one that tested better at the factory, but it's designed to the same specs as a consumer-level one.
I realise that this is slashdot, and it's a bit much to ask people to read TFA, but you didn't even read the summary:
He claims that while he is addicted to sex and the internet, he never visited adult sites at work. Age-related issues, he says, are the cause of his filing. IBM, on its part, says that Pacenza was warned during a similar incident several months ago. Pacenza denies this as well.
Let me repeat that: He claims that he did not visit adult sites at work.
Now it may still be a TOS violation if he did it on a work machine (say, on a work notebook). But this isn't about "the right to watch porn rather than working while on the job".
So why bring up the internet addiction claim at all?
First reason is that other disabilities or illnesses are treated differently at IBM, and he feels singled out.
Second reason is that while you and I might know that what you do in the comfort of your own home between you and your consenting hand is nobody's business, a typical jury may not. This claim, assuming it's true, makes it a little easier for a jury to understand.
Third reason is the punishment differential. The couple that had sex on a desk almost certainly couldn't even claim mental illness (sex addiction, perhaps?) as a reason, and they were just transferred. This guy has (so he claims) a mental illness, visited adult chat rooms in his own time, and was fired without (so he claims) so much as a warning.
This well and truly passes the straight face test. He may still be in the wrong, but it's not a silly claim.
Police out of uniform not only don't have to tell people that they're police [...]
They must if they want to do certain things.
Example: If someone points a weapon at you, and you feel in danger, you have a right to defend yourself from the assailant. But this obviously doesn't apply to a police officer trying to arrest you. I would assume that whether or not the police officer identifies themselves would be important here.
Raise your hand if you are the odd IT Admin who would rather 'install more modules', test it, and roll it out to users in the way that we currently have to using Linux, than pop a couple DVD, follow instructions, and with way less knowledge have an Exchange/Outlook solution working in your small business before lunch?
*raises hand*
OK, I'm not an IT Admin any more, but when I was, there is no way that I would roll out a piece of software that I didn't understand the implications of, especially the security implications. But then, I had an understanding boss.
If public folders couldn't be read, that was understood to be a problem that needed to be fixed, but it was no great tragedy. But if someone got in from the outside world and accessed our sensitive documents... then there would be hell to pay.
I hung around the demoscene in 1992-4 or so (go Future Crew!), and the stuff they were doing wasn't higher complexity than Luxo, Jr. They couldn't do curved surfaces, non-Lambertian surfaces were a dream, multiple lights didn't exist and nobody really cared about character animation. My dim recollection was that things hadn't improved in those areas by 1997, though of course, they'd improved in other areas.
In a general sense, computer graphics follow a pattern where someone researches a new method, the ray tracing community adopts it into their tools, refine the technology [...]
Generally speaking nowadays, the researchers use their homebrew raytracers first. Then the next group to adopt the method are the high-end scanline renderers. Then the hobbyists get it.
And it takes ages. Remember the Geforce 3 demo which showed Luxo, Jr in real-time? That's 1986-era computer graphics, finally done in real time in 2001.
Remember that just because a simulated fluid flow "looks" more accurate, that doesn't mean that it is.
In fact, just the opposite. The entertainment industry (e.g. animation/vfx) wants fluids that will obey a director rather than the laws of physics, while remaining as credible as possible.
I have read the SIGGRAPH course notes. They are indeed solving the Navier-Stokes equations. Because this is for the entertainment business, they want to retain as much visual detail as possible while keeping the time step as large as possible.
Previous approaches are based on techniques developed for astrophysics, meteorology and oceanography, where you don't care so much about the small-scale detail. To overcome this, previous approaches either modelled more viscous fluids, such as melting wax (see House of Wax for onex example) where there fine-scale detail dissipates quickly anyway, or went to some trouble to mimic the propagation of the detail. One common approach, for example, is to take the curl of the velocity field ("vorticity"), advect it, then add a bit back. Yeah, it looks pretty good.
The main advances of this approach are two-fold. One is that instead of using Lagrangian particles or an Eulerian grid, they're using a simplicial grid which matches exactly the geometry of the environment, which means that interactions with the environment are exact.
Secondly, and this is the key bit, rather than separate "a bit" of the vorticity, they treat it as a completely separate variable. The advantage is that the vorticity field, being the curl of a vector field, is inherently divergence-free. Previous techniques had to manually zero-out the divergence in a separate step, which was usually the expensive part.
OK, if you didn't understand that, think about what's happening physically. The fluids that you generally care about in visual effects/animation are incompressible at the scales that you care about. Think of a glass of water, for example. Water in a glass isn't really incompressible, but it is close enough because the "speed of sound" in water is huge, when you consider the size of a glass and the length of a single frame of film.
So the water is effectively incompressible, which means it has an effectively infinite spend of sound. That means that if you "push" it in one place, then for the water to conserve its volume/mass (volume is proportional to mass in an incompressible fluid, remember), displacement elsewhere will have to happen instantaneously. That means that in general, you can't just make decisions locally; there needs to be a step in the solver which propagates these pressure effects over the whole fluid in one step.
The advance of this new method is hard to explain, but it uses a formulation that avoids this error-prone step completely. It's not free, since it requires that you convert between vorticity and flux. And it's hard to see how you'd model some of the more difficult forces like surface tension. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless.
Well, for a start, there's the time spent with the SEC. A company that's quick in noticing is going to report it. A company that's not quick is going to be investigated. Then there's the irate scammed investors who are naturally going to assume that the company is involved, even though they're almost always not.
If you don't think that an SEC investigation (even a small one) plus a whole lot of people threatening lawsuits is going to hurt a small company, then you've probably never worked at one. Time is money, though legal fees are even more money.
One other thought occurred to me. If I was a budding corporate raider, watching spams might be quite lucrative. The price will drop after the dump, so buy up big and break up the company. No, I don't know if this has ever happened.
That's not true. The company that's being pumped-and-dumped can lose big-time.
Remember that the companies being targeted are all fairly small. At the very least, a small company which had to deal with a scam like this would have to invest effort in that that it couldn't invest in actually doing business and trying to be profitable. At worst, the share price could go so low in the aftermath that the consequences could be extremely damaging.
Why would you think that it's ethical to profit off of someone else's scam? Why would you think it's ethical to help make spam profitable? Why would you think that it was ethical to possibly ruin an innocent start-up company?
More to the point, why are we even discussing this?
I guess there are advantages to being the defector in the prisoner's dilemma, but then, there are advantages to biting the hand that feeds you: you briefly get an extra mouthful of meat.
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
But certainly I wouldn't *expect* 0 to be false (or even true) in any language. But in any language with boolean values (which even most C-clones have) there is no reason to write code that even cares.
Actually, in George Boole's monograph, 0 is false and 1 is true. You literally can't get more Boolean than that.
The reason why it makes sense is that it's a limiting case of probability theory. Something with a probability is 0 definitely cannot happen, so it's "false". Something with a probability of 1 will definitely happen, so it's "true".
And this is why all such formulas, assuming they have any accuracy at all, have limited power of prediction. Humans are not rational actors; they are arbitrary and capricious. Human behaviour is complex, and beyond our basic needs (hungry => find food), very little of it can be reduced to simple formula.
Every time that Mythbusters talks about energy in "foot-pounds", I get confused. The US uses at least ft lbf, calories and BTUs for what is essentially the same thing. I think that I roughly know what a calorie is, but I'm damned if I know how that relates to foot pound-force.
In most metric places, there are only two: Joules and kilowatt hours, and the latter is only used for energy company billing purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
Who wrote them? These people.
I still maintain that you'd see sparking if you were firing at a Man of Steel.
Aren't incendiary rounds illegal? Water or no water, surely that would be concern enough.
Sounds like something that atheists and theists can both like, actually.
Atheists: Religion is just an evolved trait!
Theists: (The) God(s|ess) gave us an innate belief in him/her/them!
Right here. You'll also need to grab the Windows Driver Kit. Then you're all set.
OK, well, you're all set if you're only using a 32 bit machine. If you have a 64 bit machine, you might want to consider giving up instead.
As you know, you can buy different speeds of CPU or RAM. The reason why they come in fast and slow is not because anyone sets out to make a slow CPU. They make one speed of CPU, and then test them. Most of them are duds and get melted down to make new wafers. Some test okay, and they get packaged and shipped. Some test bad at high clock speeds and okay at low clock speeds, and these get packaged as lower-speed CPUs.
Now I don't know much about hard drive manufacturing, but I would guess that there's a similar thing going on here. An "enterprise"-level drive is one that tested better at the factory, but it's designed to the same specs as a consumer-level one.
I realise that this is slashdot, and it's a bit much to ask people to read TFA, but you didn't even read the summary:
Let me repeat that: He claims that he did not visit adult sites at work.
Now it may still be a TOS violation if he did it on a work machine (say, on a work notebook). But this isn't about "the right to watch porn rather than working while on the job".
So why bring up the internet addiction claim at all?
First reason is that other disabilities or illnesses are treated differently at IBM, and he feels singled out.
Second reason is that while you and I might know that what you do in the comfort of your own home between you and your consenting hand is nobody's business, a typical jury may not. This claim, assuming it's true, makes it a little easier for a jury to understand.
Third reason is the punishment differential. The couple that had sex on a desk almost certainly couldn't even claim mental illness (sex addiction, perhaps?) as a reason, and they were just transferred. This guy has (so he claims) a mental illness, visited adult chat rooms in his own time, and was fired without (so he claims) so much as a warning.
This well and truly passes the straight face test. He may still be in the wrong, but it's not a silly claim.
They must if they want to do certain things.
Example: If someone points a weapon at you, and you feel in danger, you have a right to defend yourself from the assailant. But this obviously doesn't apply to a police officer trying to arrest you. I would assume that whether or not the police officer identifies themselves would be important here.
*raises hand*
OK, I'm not an IT Admin any more, but when I was, there is no way that I would roll out a piece of software that I didn't understand the implications of, especially the security implications. But then, I had an understanding boss.
If public folders couldn't be read, that was understood to be a problem that needed to be fixed, but it was no great tragedy. But if someone got in from the outside world and accessed our sensitive documents... then there would be hell to pay.
I hung around the demoscene in 1992-4 or so (go Future Crew!), and the stuff they were doing wasn't higher complexity than Luxo, Jr. They couldn't do curved surfaces, non-Lambertian surfaces were a dream, multiple lights didn't exist and nobody really cared about character animation. My dim recollection was that things hadn't improved in those areas by 1997, though of course, they'd improved in other areas.
I definitely agree with the AVR. It has lots of nice Linux tools, and has models with just about everything on board, including FPGA.
Generally speaking nowadays, the researchers use their homebrew raytracers first. Then the next group to adopt the method are the high-end scanline renderers. Then the hobbyists get it.
And it takes ages. Remember the Geforce 3 demo which showed Luxo, Jr in real-time? That's 1986-era computer graphics, finally done in real time in 2001.
In fact, just the opposite. The entertainment industry (e.g. animation/vfx) wants fluids that will obey a director rather than the laws of physics, while remaining as credible as possible.
I have read the SIGGRAPH course notes. They are indeed solving the Navier-Stokes equations. Because this is for the entertainment business, they want to retain as much visual detail as possible while keeping the time step as large as possible.
Previous approaches are based on techniques developed for astrophysics, meteorology and oceanography, where you don't care so much about the small-scale detail. To overcome this, previous approaches either modelled more viscous fluids, such as melting wax (see House of Wax for onex example) where there fine-scale detail dissipates quickly anyway, or went to some trouble to mimic the propagation of the detail. One common approach, for example, is to take the curl of the velocity field ("vorticity"), advect it, then add a bit back. Yeah, it looks pretty good.
The main advances of this approach are two-fold. One is that instead of using Lagrangian particles or an Eulerian grid, they're using a simplicial grid which matches exactly the geometry of the environment, which means that interactions with the environment are exact.
Secondly, and this is the key bit, rather than separate "a bit" of the vorticity, they treat it as a completely separate variable. The advantage is that the vorticity field, being the curl of a vector field, is inherently divergence-free. Previous techniques had to manually zero-out the divergence in a separate step, which was usually the expensive part.
OK, if you didn't understand that, think about what's happening physically. The fluids that you generally care about in visual effects/animation are incompressible at the scales that you care about. Think of a glass of water, for example. Water in a glass isn't really incompressible, but it is close enough because the "speed of sound" in water is huge, when you consider the size of a glass and the length of a single frame of film.
So the water is effectively incompressible, which means it has an effectively infinite spend of sound. That means that if you "push" it in one place, then for the water to conserve its volume/mass (volume is proportional to mass in an incompressible fluid, remember), displacement elsewhere will have to happen instantaneously. That means that in general, you can't just make decisions locally; there needs to be a step in the solver which propagates these pressure effects over the whole fluid in one step.
The advance of this new method is hard to explain, but it uses a formulation that avoids this error-prone step completely. It's not free, since it requires that you convert between vorticity and flux. And it's hard to see how you'd model some of the more difficult forces like surface tension. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless.
Yeah, I saw his work on Terminator 3, too. It looked like a real melting gynoid from the future!
Sigh.
OK, let's get serious now. Repeat after me: There is nothing "realistic" about the entertainment industry.
Some corollaries:
Well, for a start, there's the time spent with the SEC. A company that's quick in noticing is going to report it. A company that's not quick is going to be investigated. Then there's the irate scammed investors who are naturally going to assume that the company is involved, even though they're almost always not.
If you don't think that an SEC investigation (even a small one) plus a whole lot of people threatening lawsuits is going to hurt a small company, then you've probably never worked at one. Time is money, though legal fees are even more money.
One other thought occurred to me. If I was a budding corporate raider, watching spams might be quite lucrative. The price will drop after the dump, so buy up big and break up the company. No, I don't know if this has ever happened.
That's not true. The company that's being pumped-and-dumped can lose big-time.
Remember that the companies being targeted are all fairly small. At the very least, a small company which had to deal with a scam like this would have to invest effort in that that it couldn't invest in actually doing business and trying to be profitable. At worst, the share price could go so low in the aftermath that the consequences could be extremely damaging.
Why would you think that it's ethical to profit off of someone else's scam? Why would you think it's ethical to help make spam profitable? Why would you think that it was ethical to possibly ruin an innocent start-up company?
More to the point, why are we even discussing this?
I guess there are advantages to being the defector in the prisoner's dilemma, but then, there are advantages to biting the hand that feeds you: you briefly get an extra mouthful of meat.
There are many search warrants that allow you to look through my papers, but I've never heard of one that lets you scribble on the backs of them.
No, but you can store your data on an optical delay tube. My, how far we've come!.
Actually, in George Boole's monograph, 0 is false and 1 is true. You literally can't get more Boolean than that.
The reason why it makes sense is that it's a limiting case of probability theory. Something with a probability is 0 definitely cannot happen, so it's "false". Something with a probability of 1 will definitely happen, so it's "true".
All right. I guess I can spare one and still be feared.
And this is why all such formulas, assuming they have any accuracy at all, have limited power of prediction. Humans are not rational actors; they are arbitrary and capricious. Human behaviour is complex, and beyond our basic needs (hungry => find food), very little of it can be reduced to simple formula.
Just ask a quant.
Every time that Mythbusters talks about energy in "foot-pounds", I get confused. The US uses at least ft lbf, calories and BTUs for what is essentially the same thing. I think that I roughly know what a calorie is, but I'm damned if I know how that relates to foot pound-force.
In most metric places, there are only two: Joules and kilowatt hours, and the latter is only used for energy company billing purposes.
Whoops, you're right.
Okay, then. How many foot-pounds in a calorie? That's a conversion that does happen.
For comparison: one metre-kilogram = one Coulomb-Volt = one Watt-second = one Joule.