Isn't that what the deflector shield is for - to keep space debris from damaging the ship while at warp?
Ah I see my understanding of trek physics has been incomplete, I thought this was for sub-light operation, but reading up now you are right:)
I saw a few suggestions though that warp works by reducing the apparent mass/inertia of stuff in the warp bubble, so the interaction might be one way: stuff in the bubble can be harmed by interaction with normal matter, but the normal matter doesn't notice the interaction with inertia-less warped matter? *shrug*
When they had the ship with all the Asgard technology, they could have frozen time, reconfigured the ship so that it had a hole in it through which the beam weapon could pass and thus destroy both of the pursuing Ori vessels without issue.
FWIW, if they could move large chunks of the ship around like that, they could probably just move the ship itself out of the way.
Or alternatively, if that section of the ship was non-vital enough that a handful of people could "reconfigure" a hole through it for the beam to pass through, then it probably wouldn't matter so much if the beam just burned through itself.
For Star Trek warp stuff, is it ever really explained how the ship interacts with normal space? It's always seemed to be in some kind of alternate dimension with the "warp bubble" retaining normal space around the ship. So they might just pass through normal matter without effect. Otherwise general debris would be a big problem for the ship navigation even in "empty" space. But still, I bet you'd get some fantastic fireworks if you come out of warp inside another ship's engine core...;)
I personally think Macbooks feel flimsy and I'm hardly alone in this
Have you picked up one of the current unibody models? Those things are solid. And I agree with GP that Apple has a good reputation here beyond the current line -- my old iBook held up great under daily travel in a backpack, whereas my wife's HP has bits and pieces falling off and it barely ever leaves the house.
Seems like a backward argument. You use a specialized server environment issue to justify a "mainstream" user argument, and even then, you're saying that memory capacity is your bottleneck when the extra capacity of 64 bit memory space directly addresses the bottleneck you're complaining about. If you're already tight on space, you'd be screwed on bigger installations without having something to upgrade to, which is kind of the point with the 64 bit stuff.
But as for "most" users, they already have their computers and will stick with being 32 bit. A lot of us who actually do "real" work on our computers are hitting the 4 gb limit, and that's who is buying new machines. As for getting grandma a new machine to check email, it wasn't using that much memory to begin with, it still won't be using that much memory in 64 bit either... non-issue.
I'm not saying memory size doesn't grow at all, but people act like applications on 64 bit machines have double the memory usage, and that is definitely not true. You'd have to write a program consisting only of pointers to size_t's for that to happen.
'long's are not that common to be a significant issue in terms of storage, and they indicate the developer wants maximum range, i.e. the software might do math above 2^32. This is then a functional benefit, not overhead. (although mostly I ever use size_t instead of 'long' since this mostly comes up as an array offset issue, and then goes back to being overhead.)
IMHO BTW, Windows screws the pooch leaving long at 32 bit (a perfect example of sacrificing clean future design for the rest of time for slightly easier porting of legacy code right now), but that's a completely separate issue from performance/overhead.
x86_64 architecture has more registers, which is something of a bottleneck in the i386 architecture. So a lot of programs run faster in 64 bit mode because they can keep more data in registers and not have to keep swapping it in and out of the cache/ram. The increase in overhead is relatively minor... sure pointers are twice as big, but they're trivial compared to the blocks of memory they point to, and that data is often the same as before. (strings, pixels, floats... all still the same size).
If the 64-bit windows app is faster than the 32-bit one, is it really because it needed 64-bits, or because it got rid of the windows-specific limitation of available RAM?
x86_64 architecture has more registers, which is something of a bottleneck in the i386 architecture. So a lot of programs run faster in 64 bit mode because they can keep more data in registers and not have to keep swapping it in and out of the cache/ram. The increase in overhead is relatively minor... sure pointers are twice as big, but they're trivial compared to the blocks of memory they point to, and that data is often the same as before. (strings, pixels, floats... all still the same size).
It is possible to toggle the per-character updates, at least on the sending side so people don't see you typing. I could see some filters being added for the ADD types who get distracted by other people typing too.
It makes my life better because it promotes critical thinking and historical perspective, so when politicians come on and give crap justifications, plans, or promises, "Joe the Plumber" will think for himself and vote appropriately instead of blindly following a party line on brand name.
Yeah, I've always just preferred to 'sleep'. I never turn my laptop off, I just close the lid.
The obsession with the boot time benchmark has always struck me as rather strange considering it's something I only do once every month or two.
On the other hand, I guess 'PC's generally go through BIOS check when coming back from a full hibernate, so this would help their response time there. But I've never really noticed significant battery drain on my Mac in normal 'sleep' mode, which then wakes up instantly. *shrug*
I've been thinking about this, I'm not so sure it increases the attack surface. If the Chrome plugin is doing all the loading/parsing/rendering/javascript, then does it matter if IE has security issues in those areas? They're no long exposed because the plugin is doing the processing.
If this is the case, then we're just replacing one attack surface with another instead of exposing both.
Also, I see this as a way to enable user revolt regarding all those corporate mandated IE installations... now they can still be "running IE", but at the same time, not actually using it. Depends on whether the IT lusers have the permissions/fine print set up about installing browser plugins vs. full applications.
so in all 3 cases we spent so much trouble getting the libraries to do the task the exact way we needed it, that it would have been just as easy to create the whole thing from scratch ourselves.
On the upside, if you're fixing bugs or adding features to open projects, you at least have some chance of making progress as a community, vs. inevitably introducing new and interesting bugs in hope of avoiding old and frustrating ones. (unless all of the current choices were really *that* bad...)
I think the "insight" is the sardonic implication that the military will be a major consumer of advances in robotics. A fear which really applies to most advances in science and technology, but perhaps more readily associated with robotics thanks to Hollywood action movies.
So for instance, there are events for obvious things like button presses, but also for seeing an object, sensor updates, power status, etc. Further, there are events for individual stages of vision processing so only the stages which actually have subscribers are computed, and those computations are only performed once per frame regardless of how many behaviors want to use that data.
To be fair, a lot of robotics frameworks do something like this, at the least for expensive processing units like vision.
It's a hard problem, I've also worked on for the last several years. You're combining research problems in AI, computer vision, localization/mapping, motion planning, human interaction, etc.; each of which demands high end hardware to run its computations, but then you want to do it on mobile platforms with tight constraints on power and sensors.
Then in order to modularize things you have to come up with a generic interface for each piece in order to abstract it. I think this aspect in particular kills reusability, because these pieces are all so interdependent. Each module needs internal state from the other modules to interpret its own data, and depending on the implementation used for each module and the actual robot hardware it's running on, some types of data may or may not be available, and some outputs may or may not be possible. It's a combinatorial explosion of different capabilities, which leads many people to write to their current hardware and their own specific implementations.
I entirely agree to make progress we need to address this issue. Asking every researcher to reinvent the wheel in all of the related fields before they can work on their own piece is ludicrous. And it doesn't help that many implementations are very sensitive to robot specific parameters, so even if a research publishes his code for a problem (which IMHO should be part-and-parcel of publishing results), you might still have a hard time running it on different hardware where sensor or motor models differ or may not even apply.
I think (hope) they mean it more in the cultural background sense, like "African-American", "Asian-American", etc., although I suppose if that's really what they meant they should have said "Israeli-American" instead?
So, what happened to personal responsibility? As in people responsible for their own plumbing, electricity, building structural integrity, plastering?
It all breaks down, THEN kick them out of the room.
Yes, actually, that *is* how it works. If people suspect a problem, they call a specialist. Or maybe they know how to do it themselves and don't have to.
The point is, the State doesn't require people to give keys to the State electrician, plumber, building inspecter, etc. to come and go as they please, as a "choice" of living in the State. You're not even required to use their services! You get to choose who and when you want to let in your house. This is an important foundation of our country.
Seriously, you can't expect everyone at a uni to know how to spot an infected machine
Another valuable life skill to learn. Yes they should run an antivirus on windows. They should get to choose which one, including none (which is perfectly viable on Mac and Linux), and learn the consequences when the network scanner detects an infection and kicks them off.
Sure, their machines are their machines, same as the IT department's network is the IT department's network. You don't want to subscribe to their terms and conditions for trying to keep their net secure, just don't hook YOUR machine to THEIR network.
The problem is this is not a corporate network. You serve a residential population with their personal equipment. You are a monopoly ISP, and should be held to a high standard of ethics, especially being at a university. Network access is a practical requirement for doing classwork, for which your users are paying, and I bet they didn't get the acceptable use policy sent with their acceptance letter, putting this on the level of an EULA. There is no "choice" when they require the service and are already locked in, and have no other competitors.
If you don't like that, speak to the people who provide the budget for it, and explain why you think the IT deprt is underfunded.
No, that's YOUR job. Telling your users to do your work for you, and a specific way you tell them to, is a cop out. And then you wind up spending time and money monitoring *that* and dealing with people working around it instead of actually doing the original job watching for real security issues.
But don't expect people to sacrifice everything to make sure you can do everything you want without consequence.
I'm proud to point out to the peanut gallery that at the "real" CMU, people are responsible for their own computers. The University makes virus scanners available, and will kick you off the network if spyware is detected by remote scans, but it's your machine and they're not going to tell you to bend over and install some piece of spyware on it for them.
We also have public IP addresses and no campus-wide filters or firewalls (other than opt-in spam filters and such voluntary measures). This is what you get when you have professionals running your network and not a bunch of Microsoft Certified corporate knee jerkers. Professionals like ours do their jobs to provide a service, so users can do their jobs with minimal interruption.
Non-professionals like apparently at CMich (and a number of others I won't try to list) get in everyone's way and make the users do their jobs for them -- might as well just unplug the uplink, I'm sure that would greatly reduce malware on campus, and make their jobs easier too. Win win!
Hugs to the Carnegie Mellon IT and net admin for not pulling this kind of crap! Too bad we have to hear stories like this to appreciate how much you all rock!:)
What happened to personal responsibility? As in, people are responsible for their own machines. If they get infected, then kick them off the network. You admit you already have tools for scanning vulnerabilities remotely, use those. That's a reasonable policy.
Requiring the use of a specific piece of spyware smacks of corruption to me. I'm sure someone's getting paid for that. What if a student wants to run a different scanner? They have to run two scanners? What if they want to change the configuration, or run a different OS?
Their machines are their machines. Your jurisdiction ends with the network. Punish those who misuse the network, don't pre-emptively force yourself on their machines.
Meh, I agree with Maxo-Texas... most of those screenshots just look like a slight change in position or lighting. Aside from an obvious lens flare in the last shot (which, to me, spoils realism because my eyes don't produce lens flares like a movie camera...), if you showed those images without the labels, I don't think people could identify which was which.
There was a shot with wood planks, but that just looked like a higher resolution texture or bump map was being used, not really very exciting. Makes me wonder if they were just bumping up texture resolutions for the DX10 mode. *shrug*
This coming from a guy who gets annoyed with interlaced video and various other compression artifacts, so I am kinda picky.
I also wish people would ignore this proprietary DirectX crap in the first place and use OpenGL for portability.:-/
I remember that scene! But I think you missed a bit... for one, the "one bite" thing is a little exaggerated, John was eating while they were talking, and tho it was kinda quick, that's really minor.
The more interesting point was that Charlie purposely didn't make any for Sarah, and told her to make more for herself. I saw it as a demonstration of still caring for John and at the same time telling her to shove it.
Wow, and I thought our (US) politicians were corrupt... thanks for showing us how it's done, France!
Maybe we can show your newly unemployed web executive how to be a litigious bastard!
It's great to share cultural differences, I feel all warm and fuzzy now!
As an scientist/engineer, I totally agree. Patents as written by lawyers are totally useless for sharing knowledge. Almost the opposite, they seek to make patents as general as they can get away with, and avoid actually specifying the critical implementation details.
Personally, I think they should just scrap the whole system, it does more harm than good. What little incentive there is to innovate comes from first mover advantage. Patents encourage companies to *stop* innovating and rely on lawyers to block out competitors instead of continuing to innovate. And then by the time the patent expires, it's blindingly obvious anyway (if it wasn't to begin with!), and so there is no public gain for the monopoly granted.
I also rather liked the suggestion I heard on Slashdot a while ago to levy a tax and bidding system on patents to discourage patent trolls and such.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, it's like a game of "cold... warmer... warmer... hot!" for cancer surgery... I can play that game!
Isn't that what the deflector shield is for - to keep space debris from damaging the ship while at warp?
Ah I see my understanding of trek physics has been incomplete, I thought this was for sub-light operation, but reading up now you are right :)
I saw a few suggestions though that warp works by reducing the apparent mass/inertia of stuff in the warp bubble, so the interaction might be one way: stuff in the bubble can be harmed by interaction with normal matter, but the normal matter doesn't notice the interaction with inertia-less warped matter? *shrug*
When they had the ship with all the Asgard technology, they could have frozen time, reconfigured the ship so that it had a hole in it through which the beam weapon could pass and thus destroy both of the pursuing Ori vessels without issue.
FWIW, if they could move large chunks of the ship around like that, they could probably just move the ship itself out of the way.
;)
Or alternatively, if that section of the ship was non-vital enough that a handful of people could "reconfigure" a hole through it for the beam to pass through, then it probably wouldn't matter so much if the beam just burned through itself.
For Star Trek warp stuff, is it ever really explained how the ship interacts with normal space? It's always seemed to be in some kind of alternate dimension with the "warp bubble" retaining normal space around the ship. So they might just pass through normal matter without effect. Otherwise general debris would be a big problem for the ship navigation even in "empty" space. But still, I bet you'd get some fantastic fireworks if you come out of warp inside another ship's engine core...
I personally think Macbooks feel flimsy and I'm hardly alone in this
Have you picked up one of the current unibody models? Those things are solid. And I agree with GP that Apple has a good reputation here beyond the current line -- my old iBook held up great under daily travel in a backpack, whereas my wife's HP has bits and pieces falling off and it barely ever leaves the house.
Seems like a backward argument. You use a specialized server environment issue to justify a "mainstream" user argument, and even then, you're saying that memory capacity is your bottleneck when the extra capacity of 64 bit memory space directly addresses the bottleneck you're complaining about. If you're already tight on space, you'd be screwed on bigger installations without having something to upgrade to, which is kind of the point with the 64 bit stuff.
But as for "most" users, they already have their computers and will stick with being 32 bit. A lot of us who actually do "real" work on our computers are hitting the 4 gb limit, and that's who is buying new machines. As for getting grandma a new machine to check email, it wasn't using that much memory to begin with, it still won't be using that much memory in 64 bit either... non-issue.
I'm not saying memory size doesn't grow at all, but people act like applications on 64 bit machines have double the memory usage, and that is definitely not true. You'd have to write a program consisting only of pointers to size_t's for that to happen.
'long's are not that common to be a significant issue in terms of storage, and they indicate the developer wants maximum range, i.e. the software might do math above 2^32. This is then a functional benefit, not overhead. (although mostly I ever use size_t instead of 'long' since this mostly comes up as an array offset issue, and then goes back to being overhead.)
IMHO BTW, Windows screws the pooch leaving long at 32 bit (a perfect example of sacrificing clean future design for the rest of time for slightly easier porting of legacy code right now), but that's a completely separate issue from performance/overhead.
x86_64 architecture has more registers, which is something of a bottleneck in the i386 architecture. So a lot of programs run faster in 64 bit mode because they can keep more data in registers and not have to keep swapping it in and out of the cache/ram. The increase in overhead is relatively minor... sure pointers are twice as big, but they're trivial compared to the blocks of memory they point to, and that data is often the same as before. (strings, pixels, floats... all still the same size).
If the 64-bit windows app is faster than the 32-bit one, is it really because it needed 64-bits, or because it got rid of the windows-specific limitation of available RAM?
x86_64 architecture has more registers, which is something of a bottleneck in the i386 architecture. So a lot of programs run faster in 64 bit mode because they can keep more data in registers and not have to keep swapping it in and out of the cache/ram. The increase in overhead is relatively minor... sure pointers are twice as big, but they're trivial compared to the blocks of memory they point to, and that data is often the same as before. (strings, pixels, floats... all still the same size).
It is possible to toggle the per-character updates, at least on the sending side so people don't see you typing. I could see some filters being added for the ADD types who get distracted by other people typing too.
It makes my life better because it promotes critical thinking and historical perspective, so when politicians come on and give crap justifications, plans, or promises, "Joe the Plumber" will think for himself and vote appropriately instead of blindly following a party line on brand name.
Yeah, I've always just preferred to 'sleep'. I never turn my laptop off, I just close the lid.
The obsession with the boot time benchmark has always struck me as rather strange considering it's something I only do once every month or two.
On the other hand, I guess 'PC's generally go through BIOS check when coming back from a full hibernate, so this would help their response time there. But I've never really noticed significant battery drain on my Mac in normal 'sleep' mode, which then wakes up instantly. *shrug*
I've been thinking about this, I'm not so sure it increases the attack surface. If the Chrome plugin is doing all the loading/parsing/rendering/javascript, then does it matter if IE has security issues in those areas? They're no long exposed because the plugin is doing the processing.
If this is the case, then we're just replacing one attack surface with another instead of exposing both.
Also, I see this as a way to enable user revolt regarding all those corporate mandated IE installations... now they can still be "running IE", but at the same time, not actually using it. Depends on whether the IT lusers have the permissions/fine print set up about installing browser plugins vs. full applications.
so in all 3 cases we spent so much trouble getting the libraries to do the task the exact way we needed it, that it would have been just as easy to create the whole thing from scratch ourselves.
Beware the eternal optimism of the developer ;)
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001284.html
On the upside, if you're fixing bugs or adding features to open projects, you at least have some chance of making progress as a community, vs. inevitably introducing new and interesting bugs in hope of avoiding old and frustrating ones. (unless all of the current choices were really *that* bad...)
I think the "insight" is the sardonic implication that the military will be a major consumer of advances in robotics. A fear which really applies to most advances in science and technology, but perhaps more readily associated with robotics thanks to Hollywood action movies.
Yup, this is exactly what Tekkotsu does, for example, here is the tutorial page and the event class reference page
So for instance, there are events for obvious things like button presses, but also for seeing an object, sensor updates, power status, etc. Further, there are events for individual stages of vision processing so only the stages which actually have subscribers are computed, and those computations are only performed once per frame regardless of how many behaviors want to use that data.
To be fair, a lot of robotics frameworks do something like this, at the least for expensive processing units like vision.
It's a hard problem, I've also worked on for the last several years. You're combining research problems in AI, computer vision, localization/mapping, motion planning, human interaction, etc.; each of which demands high end hardware to run its computations, but then you want to do it on mobile platforms with tight constraints on power and sensors.
Then in order to modularize things you have to come up with a generic interface for each piece in order to abstract it. I think this aspect in particular kills reusability, because these pieces are all so interdependent. Each module needs internal state from the other modules to interpret its own data, and depending on the implementation used for each module and the actual robot hardware it's running on, some types of data may or may not be available, and some outputs may or may not be possible. It's a combinatorial explosion of different capabilities, which leads many people to write to their current hardware and their own specific implementations.
I entirely agree to make progress we need to address this issue. Asking every researcher to reinvent the wheel in all of the related fields before they can work on their own piece is ludicrous. And it doesn't help that many implementations are very sensitive to robot specific parameters, so even if a research publishes his code for a problem (which IMHO should be part-and-parcel of publishing results), you might still have a hard time running it on different hardware where sensor or motor models differ or may not even apply.
I think (hope) they mean it more in the cultural background sense, like "African-American", "Asian-American", etc., although I suppose if that's really what they meant they should have said "Israeli-American" instead?
So, what happened to personal responsibility? As in people responsible for their own plumbing, electricity, building structural integrity, plastering? It all breaks down, THEN kick them out of the room.
Yes, actually, that *is* how it works. If people suspect a problem, they call a specialist. Or maybe they know how to do it themselves and don't have to.
The point is, the State doesn't require people to give keys to the State electrician, plumber, building inspecter, etc. to come and go as they please, as a "choice" of living in the State. You're not even required to use their services! You get to choose who and when you want to let in your house. This is an important foundation of our country.
Seriously, you can't expect everyone at a uni to know how to spot an infected machine
Another valuable life skill to learn. Yes they should run an antivirus on windows. They should get to choose which one, including none (which is perfectly viable on Mac and Linux), and learn the consequences when the network scanner detects an infection and kicks them off.
Sure, their machines are their machines, same as the IT department's network is the IT department's network. You don't want to subscribe to their terms and conditions for trying to keep their net secure, just don't hook YOUR machine to THEIR network.
The problem is this is not a corporate network. You serve a residential population with their personal equipment. You are a monopoly ISP, and should be held to a high standard of ethics, especially being at a university. Network access is a practical requirement for doing classwork, for which your users are paying, and I bet they didn't get the acceptable use policy sent with their acceptance letter, putting this on the level of an EULA. There is no "choice" when they require the service and are already locked in, and have no other competitors.
If you don't like that, speak to the people who provide the budget for it, and explain why you think the IT deprt is underfunded.
No, that's YOUR job. Telling your users to do your work for you, and a specific way you tell them to, is a cop out. And then you wind up spending time and money monitoring *that* and dealing with people working around it instead of actually doing the original job watching for real security issues.
But don't expect people to sacrifice everything to make sure you can do everything you want without consequence.
Yes, exactly what I would say to you.
I'm proud to point out to the peanut gallery that at the "real" CMU, people are responsible for their own computers. The University makes virus scanners available, and will kick you off the network if spyware is detected by remote scans, but it's your machine and they're not going to tell you to bend over and install some piece of spyware on it for them.
:)
We also have public IP addresses and no campus-wide filters or firewalls (other than opt-in spam filters and such voluntary measures). This is what you get when you have professionals running your network and not a bunch of Microsoft Certified corporate knee jerkers. Professionals like ours do their jobs to provide a service, so users can do their jobs with minimal interruption.
Non-professionals like apparently at CMich (and a number of others I won't try to list) get in everyone's way and make the users do their jobs for them -- might as well just unplug the uplink, I'm sure that would greatly reduce malware on campus, and make their jobs easier too. Win win!
Hugs to the Carnegie Mellon IT and net admin for not pulling this kind of crap! Too bad we have to hear stories like this to appreciate how much you all rock!
What happened to personal responsibility? As in, people are responsible for their own machines. If they get infected, then kick them off the network. You admit you already have tools for scanning vulnerabilities remotely, use those. That's a reasonable policy.
Requiring the use of a specific piece of spyware smacks of corruption to me. I'm sure someone's getting paid for that. What if a student wants to run a different scanner? They have to run two scanners? What if they want to change the configuration, or run a different OS?
Their machines are their machines. Your jurisdiction ends with the network. Punish those who misuse the network, don't pre-emptively force yourself on their machines.
Meh, I agree with Maxo-Texas... most of those screenshots just look like a slight change in position or lighting. Aside from an obvious lens flare in the last shot (which, to me, spoils realism because my eyes don't produce lens flares like a movie camera...), if you showed those images without the labels, I don't think people could identify which was which.
:-/
There was a shot with wood planks, but that just looked like a higher resolution texture or bump map was being used, not really very exciting. Makes me wonder if they were just bumping up texture resolutions for the DX10 mode. *shrug*
This coming from a guy who gets annoyed with interlaced video and various other compression artifacts, so I am kinda picky.
I also wish people would ignore this proprietary DirectX crap in the first place and use OpenGL for portability.
Digg it for popular support! http://digg.com/general_sciences/Proof_of_evolution_Just_define_dog_breeds_as_species
I remember that scene! But I think you missed a bit... for one, the "one bite" thing is a little exaggerated, John was eating while they were talking, and tho it was kinda quick, that's really minor.
The more interesting point was that Charlie purposely didn't make any for Sarah, and told her to make more for herself. I saw it as a demonstration of still caring for John and at the same time telling her to shove it.
Wow, and I thought our (US) politicians were corrupt... thanks for showing us how it's done, France!
Maybe we can show your newly unemployed web executive how to be a litigious bastard!
It's great to share cultural differences, I feel all warm and fuzzy now!
As an scientist/engineer, I totally agree. Patents as written by lawyers are totally useless for sharing knowledge. Almost the opposite, they seek to make patents as general as they can get away with, and avoid actually specifying the critical implementation details.
Personally, I think they should just scrap the whole system, it does more harm than good. What little incentive there is to innovate comes from first mover advantage. Patents encourage companies to *stop* innovating and rely on lawyers to block out competitors instead of continuing to innovate. And then by the time the patent expires, it's blindingly obvious anyway (if it wasn't to begin with!), and so there is no public gain for the monopoly granted.
I also rather liked the suggestion I heard on Slashdot a while ago to levy a tax and bidding system on patents to discourage patent trolls and such.