Wow. I never thought in a thousand years I'd find someone who agreed with me on this (Bittersweet Symphony = ItHot Mtn King). Truly amazing. Rock on, fellow great mind!
It's too odd an hour to do the calculations, but I believe since the mass varies precisely with the dilation, a given amount of thrust will always "accelerate" your dilation by the same amount in final observable intervals... I.E. a given thrust x will speed up "outside time" by y years/sec. Also, massiveness shouldn't prevent the engines from working in a vacuum, only slow them down -- but as noted this should not retard their efficiency since the curve itself is exponential.
I'll do the numbers later, unless someone cares to jump in?
If the pie is twice as big, then a 15% slice of pie is the same size as a former 30% slice of pie. Period.
Heck, I'll even spell out an analogy. Let's say I make 30k a year. Every year I spend 15K buying all the Pop-Tarts at Wal-Mart. With me? I'm spending 50% of my income on pop-tarts. 15K of 30K, 50%.
Now, let's say I get a raise, and now I'm making 60K a year. I like pop-tarts as much as ever, so I keep spending 15K a year buying all the tarts at Wal-Mart. They don't have any more for me to buy, but I'm still buying as many as I always have. Right? 15K = 15K. But now, since I'm making 60K, I'm only spending 25% of my income on Pop-Tarts. 15K = 15K, but 15K/30K = 50% and 15K/60K = 25%.
According to you, I'm spending less on pop-tarts, which is incorrect. Manufacturing has experienced growth and is at record levels. The fact that it has not grown as fast as things like software development or military tech is because these things as economic powers DIDN'T EXIST before a certain point in history.
I would like to request you restate, including the ABSOLUTE SIZE of the economy, so that we may determine how many "manufacturing jobs" there were at any given time. The percentage of the total economy is only relevant taken with facts on the size of the economy (and it's foolish to have to state that explicitly).
There is something of a dissonance, here. You berated someone farther down about bringing up a (valid) objection, retorting with a reference to this sub-thread and how you had answered his objection. Further objections would appear to also be unwelcome, here. There are several fundamental problems with the solution you proposed, and I fail to see how they are 'irrelevant' to its discussion.
Business is not science. A "theoretical" solution has a value of zero if it cannot be implemented. That's something that's easy to lose sight of when in a relatively abstract field like comp. sci. or even just 9-to-5 programming. If GPS allows them to track the drivers and still use the same payroll infrastructure that has been in use for decades, then it's going to take a really strong contender to unseat that idea.
Frankly, I think they're entitled to GPS truck shipments. But assuming that they aren't, paying per delivery only has three possible outcomes:
1) The "maximum" payout is too high, and you have dangerous working conditions. 2) The "maximum" payout is too low, either because of per-stop rates (in which case no one wants to work for you) or because of too-low maximum stops (in which case you are being grossly inefficient) 3) You stay between the two, in which case your drivers are making roughly what they make now, except for the ones that aren't doing the proper volume -- which could have been handled through management to begin with, without restructuring the entire payroll/accounting/tax scale of the entire company.
It is frustrating to see someone present an argument in an initially reasonable light and then dissolve into petulance when resistance is encountered. If you are not prepared to defend your ideas, then they will never be your ideas.
Where do you get the baseline data? How do you control for delivery complexity? How do you determine pay? What do you 'expect' your drivers to handle? How do you handle owner-ops vs. leased trucks? Accidents? Training? Maintenance? What about drivers that perform significantly below the norm -- you're paying them fairly by your own standards, but you're incurring the overhead of maintaining their paperwork. How do you handle long deliveries vs. short deliveries? Hazardous cargo? Insurance? Benefits?
Yeah, so where was the "future of science" during the Bush administration? A decade -- a DECADE -- from now, the money we've spent on the new health care will have JUST BEGUN to catch up to the money that has already been spent on Iraq. What have we gained over there? Not just in terms of science, but in terms of anything?
We've lost an incredible amount of money, gotten many of our people killed, made ourselves look like complete idiots to every nation in the world, and driven our economy deep into the ground. Well, I say 'we', but what I mean is 'the Bush administration.' Obama's aggressive healthcare spending may not be a great way to save money, but at least THIS money is being spent on improving people's lives. All Lord Bush did for us was get us killed and make us look like fools.
I'm going to ignore the mostly inflammatory content of your post, because there is a valid point in there -- that the complexity of a lot of operations are underestimated by those unfamiliar when they are heavily exposed to the end product. On that count, I agree.
However, in this instance, at least, the concern is misplaced. I do have experience with cross-platform development, including any game-related subsystem you care to name (video, audio, mouse/kb/controller input, networking, file/data access, et cetera). The problem IS a trivial one if it is planned and accounted for, rather than a last-minute decision.
For 99% of development studios, it goes something like this: use DirectX, porting is a nightmare. Use SDL/OpenGL, porting is changing less than 5% of your code (and for non-'exotic' applications, 0%). Some things are -designed- to allow portability; it should be no surprise that they enable it. This is quite simply a field that UNIX-alikes have been dealing with for a long time, and Windows applications have not.
I can see where this is news for Microsoft, king of platform-specific APIs. For those of us accustomed to developing using, say, SDL and OpenGL, this isn't news at all, as a properly written program using said libraries will need literally zero changes between several platforms. The input bit is tricky, but 90% reuse is low, I would think.
As for this "adaptation" of providing low-res samples to "put on the web", it's idiotic at best. Anything that's worth looking at on my standard 24' should be at least 1-1.5 MP. That will look fine printed on a 9*13. Conversely, something that doesn't look fine on a 9*13 will look like a stamp on my screen, in which case it's a scam again.
This is nonsense. A 1.5 MP image in the common aspect is about 1440x1080. You are asserting that that is sufficient quality for a photo print, which is false, and that that is suitable for web distribution, which is false.
For the print you are advocating, 9x13 at 1.5MP is less than 150dpi. For nice-looking (i.e. "my new wife deserves better than cheap crap") prints you want 300dpi minimum, and anything up to 600 would be noticeable by an untrained observer (i.e., your new wife). 9x13s need good hardware backing them up, which is part of what you are paying for when you hire a photographer.
For viewing on the web, 1440x1080 is certainly a nice viewing size for local photos, but is entirely inappropriate for web albums, where images should be kept smaller (800x600 is a solid choice with modern compression, or 960x600 for a 16:10 crop). Said web-ready pictures are not going to look good on paper, and your insistence that they are is a demonstration of why photographers have to maintain control of their work -- so that people don't make fuzzy 1MP 9x13s and call the quality of the photography into question.
That's not even remotely relevant. A pig has the same ratio to a (say) small dog as your car would to your average modern sedan, yet the pig and dog would both likely survive even a relatively fast collision. It's mass multiplied by velocity, and yes, if you hit something of any weight, you're dead. True, you will probably take a lot of people with you because of your steel deathtrap, but it won't do a thing to keep your spine from absorbing the impact, which has to go somewhere.
This. They posted some "concept screenshots"? This is what the hype-first build-later development model of Natal (and many things these days, but definitely Natal) gets you.
I mean, concept screenshots. Geez. Don't dignify this crap with the term 'cancelled'.
I run two to three Firefox windows with dozens of tabs 24/7, with active browsing of a variety of content types (Flash, images, embedded video, text, heavy scripting, AJAX, et cetera) for many hours daily, and a wide variety of addons installed. This particular install of firefox has been running for a little over a year.
My about:crashes is blank.
The randomness of failures suggests that Firefox writes to a random location memory that is important in some systems and not others. That's crucial in an unstable, poorly designed OS like Windows XP. Linux merely throws Firefox off the system.
This is ridiculous. You're obviously talking about things you don't know anything about -- concerning programs or OS's to start with, let alone Firefox specifically or the function thereof.
Yes, I've always found it difficult to click the picture of google with the drop-down arrow and select another search provider from the many options present. And even worse is when I want to add another one, like MS's latest cash cow, requiring me to then click "Manage search engines..." and then "Get more search engines". Whole thing is counter-intuitive, I tell ya.
On the gains, didn't something happen recently to lock a lot of smartphones into Bing? Can't remember the article.
Yeah, I always wondered how you are supposed to drive your car when holding the brake down keeps it from moving...
Ok, that was a really bad analogy, but I would think the ability to, on short notice, sacrifice the ability to see to gain the ability to not be blinded by robot lasers would be invaluable -- no one is forcing you to run around blind. You get to decide when the tradeoff is worth it.
(Haven't read the book, in all honesty; this just struck me as odd)
So they're now in the process of teaching it what body parts look like, i.e. they are only this moment developing the actual platform? As in, they really have no idea what their final specsheet is going to look like because their software for the device -- the one that has been announced to operate entirely in software -- is not anywhere near complete?
What overoptimistic soldiers of fortune are developing for this thing? What's the API? Grand promises from Microsoft on what it might be capable of if practice conforms exactly to theory?
I would like to repeat for emphasis -- they are now teaching it what body parts look like. What have they been doing those demos with? What are they basing its expected resolution on? They aren't done writing the code for the thing yet. Any idiot can say "when I finish this spreadsheet it's going to automatically fill any kind of pattern you can think of" and it's another entirely to implement, optimize, and debug.
I've always thought Natal was overhyped, but it's amazing how overhyped it is, it turns out.
KISS is retarded. Because simplicity does not always equal efficiency. Efficiency equals efficiency. Plain KISS makes you end up with stuff that is too “simple” to be useful, like Clippy, MS Bob, or Notepad. The other extreme is just as stupid, and gives you things like VI and Emacs, with a wall as a learning “curve”.
The optimum is obvious: Balanced in the middle, relative to the user’s needs. More power when he needs it, less complexity when he doesn’t.
I, for one, don’t call anything that does not at least have boolean operations, property fields (like “site:slashdot.org”) and regular expressions a search that fits my needs and level of power.
Are people who want less somehow better? Or why are they preferred? Rhetorical question. I know why they are preferred: Because they are louder, and think they are entitled to get it pre-chewed.
Also, what is the point of allowing only one way? Nobody is better. Add a multiple-choice element, that lets you choose plain text, boolean-enhanced (like google) and full regexps. Makes everyone happy, hurts nobody.
Maybe next time you don’t apply KISS to your method of searching for a solution.:)
There is nothing simple about Clippy or MS Bob; those have nothing to do with KISS methodologies. Notepad, on the other hand, is simple, and is very, very useful.
You are advocating a search box that supports booleans, properties, and regex, with radio buttons to swap between types. Imagine for a moment you are a user hitting that page. What are these buttons for, you might ask. What happens if I select boolean-enhanced and put in a query without boolean operators? What will it default to? Who writes the documentation? How long are you prepared to spend debugging?
Carpenters, even in the modern age, don't want hammers with swappable heads, or electronically adjusting wrenches. They just want a normal hammer, and a normal wrench. People who use computers don't want or need pages and pages of options. People who want less are not somehow better -- but people who are somehow better typically want less.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. I never thought in a thousand years I'd find someone who agreed with me on this (Bittersweet Symphony = ItHot Mtn King). Truly amazing. Rock on, fellow great mind!
Link is slashdotted, anyone have a mirror?
It's too odd an hour to do the calculations, but I believe since the mass varies precisely with the dilation, a given amount of thrust will always "accelerate" your dilation by the same amount in final observable intervals... I.E. a given thrust x will speed up "outside time" by y years/sec. Also, massiveness shouldn't prevent the engines from working in a vacuum, only slow them down -- but as noted this should not retard their efficiency since the curve itself is exponential.
I'll do the numbers later, unless someone cares to jump in?
Is this a troll I'm just not seeing?
If the pie is twice as big, then a 15% slice of pie is the same size as a former 30% slice of pie. Period.
Heck, I'll even spell out an analogy. Let's say I make 30k a year. Every year I spend 15K buying all the Pop-Tarts at Wal-Mart. With me? I'm spending 50% of my income on pop-tarts. 15K of 30K, 50%.
Now, let's say I get a raise, and now I'm making 60K a year. I like pop-tarts as much as ever, so I keep spending 15K a year buying all the tarts at Wal-Mart. They don't have any more for me to buy, but I'm still buying as many as I always have. Right? 15K = 15K. But now, since I'm making 60K, I'm only spending 25% of my income on Pop-Tarts. 15K = 15K, but 15K/30K = 50% and 15K/60K = 25%.
According to you, I'm spending less on pop-tarts, which is incorrect. Manufacturing has experienced growth and is at record levels. The fact that it has not grown as fast as things like software development or military tech is because these things as economic powers DIDN'T EXIST before a certain point in history.
This is classic prevarication with statistics.
I would like to request you restate, including the ABSOLUTE SIZE of the economy, so that we may determine how many "manufacturing jobs" there were at any given time. The percentage of the total economy is only relevant taken with facts on the size of the economy (and it's foolish to have to state that explicitly).
If you had any idea how hard I'm laughing... thanks :)
There is something of a dissonance, here. You berated someone farther down about bringing up a (valid) objection, retorting with a reference to this sub-thread and how you had answered his objection. Further objections would appear to also be unwelcome, here. There are several fundamental problems with the solution you proposed, and I fail to see how they are 'irrelevant' to its discussion.
Business is not science. A "theoretical" solution has a value of zero if it cannot be implemented. That's something that's easy to lose sight of when in a relatively abstract field like comp. sci. or even just 9-to-5 programming. If GPS allows them to track the drivers and still use the same payroll infrastructure that has been in use for decades, then it's going to take a really strong contender to unseat that idea.
Frankly, I think they're entitled to GPS truck shipments. But assuming that they aren't, paying per delivery only has three possible outcomes:
1) The "maximum" payout is too high, and you have dangerous working conditions.
2) The "maximum" payout is too low, either because of per-stop rates (in which case no one wants to work for you) or because of too-low maximum stops (in which case you are being grossly inefficient)
3) You stay between the two, in which case your drivers are making roughly what they make now, except for the ones that aren't doing the proper volume -- which could have been handled through management to begin with, without restructuring the entire payroll/accounting/tax scale of the entire company.
It is frustrating to see someone present an argument in an initially reasonable light and then dissolve into petulance when resistance is encountered. If you are not prepared to defend your ideas, then they will never be your ideas.
Where do you get the baseline data? How do you control for delivery complexity? How do you determine pay? What do you 'expect' your drivers to handle? How do you handle owner-ops vs. leased trucks? Accidents? Training? Maintenance? What about drivers that perform significantly below the norm -- you're paying them fairly by your own standards, but you're incurring the overhead of maintaining their paperwork. How do you handle long deliveries vs. short deliveries? Hazardous cargo? Insurance? Benefits?
Yeah, so where was the "future of science" during the Bush administration? A decade -- a DECADE -- from now, the money we've spent on the new health care will have JUST BEGUN to catch up to the money that has already been spent on Iraq. What have we gained over there? Not just in terms of science, but in terms of anything?
We've lost an incredible amount of money, gotten many of our people killed, made ourselves look like complete idiots to every nation in the world, and driven our economy deep into the ground. Well, I say 'we', but what I mean is 'the Bush administration.' Obama's aggressive healthcare spending may not be a great way to save money, but at least THIS money is being spent on improving people's lives. All Lord Bush did for us was get us killed and make us look like fools.
This is a little off topic, but that's a great site you linked about the federal budget. I highly recommend anyone reading this give it a visit.
I'm going to ignore the mostly inflammatory content of your post, because there is a valid point in there -- that the complexity of a lot of operations are underestimated by those unfamiliar when they are heavily exposed to the end product. On that count, I agree.
However, in this instance, at least, the concern is misplaced. I do have experience with cross-platform development, including any game-related subsystem you care to name (video, audio, mouse/kb/controller input, networking, file/data access, et cetera). The problem IS a trivial one if it is planned and accounted for, rather than a last-minute decision.
For 99% of development studios, it goes something like this: use DirectX, porting is a nightmare. Use SDL/OpenGL, porting is changing less than 5% of your code (and for non-'exotic' applications, 0%). Some things are -designed- to allow portability; it should be no surprise that they enable it. This is quite simply a field that UNIX-alikes have been dealing with for a long time, and Windows applications have not.
I can see where this is news for Microsoft, king of platform-specific APIs. For those of us accustomed to developing using, say, SDL and OpenGL, this isn't news at all, as a properly written program using said libraries will need literally zero changes between several platforms. The input bit is tricky, but 90% reuse is low, I would think.
This is nonsense. A 1.5 MP image in the common aspect is about 1440x1080. You are asserting that that is sufficient quality for a photo print, which is false, and that that is suitable for web distribution, which is false.
For the print you are advocating, 9x13 at 1.5MP is less than 150dpi. For nice-looking (i.e. "my new wife deserves better than cheap crap") prints you want 300dpi minimum, and anything up to 600 would be noticeable by an untrained observer (i.e., your new wife). 9x13s need good hardware backing them up, which is part of what you are paying for when you hire a photographer. For viewing on the web, 1440x1080 is certainly a nice viewing size for local photos, but is entirely inappropriate for web albums, where images should be kept smaller (800x600 is a solid choice with modern compression, or 960x600 for a 16:10 crop). Said web-ready pictures are not going to look good on paper, and your insistence that they are is a demonstration of why photographers have to maintain control of their work -- so that people don't make fuzzy 1MP 9x13s and call the quality of the photography into question.
Oooh, good one...
The difference between "large vehicle" and "train" is rather like the difference between "fire" and "hydrogen bomb" as far as road collisions go.
That's not even remotely relevant. A pig has the same ratio to a (say) small dog as your car would to your average modern sedan, yet the pig and dog would both likely survive even a relatively fast collision. It's mass multiplied by velocity, and yes, if you hit something of any weight, you're dead. True, you will probably take a lot of people with you because of your steel deathtrap, but it won't do a thing to keep your spine from absorbing the impact, which has to go somewhere.
This. They posted some "concept screenshots"? This is what the hype-first build-later development model of Natal (and many things these days, but definitely Natal) gets you.
I mean, concept screenshots. Geez. Don't dignify this crap with the term 'cancelled'.
I think he was replying to the AC (modnuked to -1) made in reply to your post.
Dude. There have been threading calls on "other OSs" long before Microsoft butchered the design. You're misinformed or shilling.
Also, ffs, take an english class. The way you write makes me think you might actually be an MS coder trying to turf a little.
I run two to three Firefox windows with dozens of tabs 24/7, with active browsing of a variety of content types (Flash, images, embedded video, text, heavy scripting, AJAX, et cetera) for many hours daily, and a wide variety of addons installed. This particular install of firefox has been running for a little over a year.
My about:crashes is blank.
The randomness of failures suggests that Firefox writes to a random location memory that is important in some systems and not others. That's crucial in an unstable, poorly designed OS like Windows XP. Linux merely throws Firefox off the system.
This is ridiculous. You're obviously talking about things you don't know anything about -- concerning programs or OS's to start with, let alone Firefox specifically or the function thereof.
Yes, I've always found it difficult to click the picture of google with the drop-down arrow and select another search provider from the many options present. And even worse is when I want to add another one, like MS's latest cash cow, requiring me to then click "Manage search engines..." and then "Get more search engines". Whole thing is counter-intuitive, I tell ya.
On the gains, didn't something happen recently to lock a lot of smartphones into Bing? Can't remember the article.
Yeah, I always wondered how you are supposed to drive your car when holding the brake down keeps it from moving...
Ok, that was a really bad analogy, but I would think the ability to, on short notice, sacrifice the ability to see to gain the ability to not be blinded by robot lasers would be invaluable -- no one is forcing you to run around blind. You get to decide when the tradeoff is worth it.
(Haven't read the book, in all honesty; this just struck me as odd)
So they're now in the process of teaching it what body parts look like, i.e. they are only this moment developing the actual platform? As in, they really have no idea what their final specsheet is going to look like because their software for the device -- the one that has been announced to operate entirely in software -- is not anywhere near complete?
What overoptimistic soldiers of fortune are developing for this thing? What's the API? Grand promises from Microsoft on what it might be capable of if practice conforms exactly to theory?
I would like to repeat for emphasis -- they are now teaching it what body parts look like. What have they been doing those demos with? What are they basing its expected resolution on? They aren't done writing the code for the thing yet. Any idiot can say "when I finish this spreadsheet it's going to automatically fill any kind of pattern you can think of" and it's another entirely to implement, optimize, and debug.
I've always thought Natal was overhyped, but it's amazing how overhyped it is, it turns out.
KISS is retarded. Because simplicity does not always equal efficiency. Efficiency equals efficiency. Plain KISS makes you end up with stuff that is too “simple” to be useful, like Clippy, MS Bob, or Notepad. The other extreme is just as stupid, and gives you things like VI and Emacs, with a wall as a learning “curve”.
The optimum is obvious: Balanced in the middle, relative to the user’s needs. More power when he needs it, less complexity when he doesn’t.
I, for one, don’t call anything that does not at least have boolean operations, property fields (like “site:slashdot.org”) and regular expressions a search that fits my needs and level of power.
Are people who want less somehow better? Or why are they preferred?
Rhetorical question. I know why they are preferred: Because they are louder, and think they are entitled to get it pre-chewed.
Also, what is the point of allowing only one way? Nobody is better.
Add a multiple-choice element, that lets you choose plain text, boolean-enhanced (like google) and full regexps. Makes everyone happy, hurts nobody.
Maybe next time you don’t apply KISS to your method of searching for a solution. :)
There is nothing simple about Clippy or MS Bob; those have nothing to do with KISS methodologies. Notepad, on the other hand, is simple, and is very, very useful.
You are advocating a search box that supports booleans, properties, and regex, with radio buttons to swap between types. Imagine for a moment you are a user hitting that page. What are these buttons for, you might ask. What happens if I select boolean-enhanced and put in a query without boolean operators? What will it default to? Who writes the documentation? How long are you prepared to spend debugging?
Carpenters, even in the modern age, don't want hammers with swappable heads, or electronically adjusting wrenches. They just want a normal hammer, and a normal wrench. People who use computers don't want or need pages and pages of options. People who want less are not somehow better -- but people who are somehow better typically want less.
Mod parent down. You don't actually cook spaghetti in a microwave.
(I'm kidding! I'm kidding! Don't mod parent down!)