We now return to the very recent slashdot story about the epic fail of college bookstores trying to charge more per page than the college library charges for photocopying service.
All they need to do is add enough fluff to get the book below 10 cents per page. Aren't editors good for anything anymore? If the dumbest spammers can figure out how to insert nonsense into email spam, how come book editors can't figure it out?
I've been at my new job since April and have yet to connect to the voicemail system and initialize my box. I'm that frickin' serious about not taking phone calls. Wait... Am I crazy here?
Five plus years here, still haven't set up voicemail.
In the days before RS-232 we had current loop, which was basically the same idea, but used "current flow"/"no current flow" instead of RS-232 +15V/-15V to signal zeros and ones.
MIDI 1.0 is a current loop serial port that runs at a bizarre baud rate 31250 bps. Yet it uses a nice standard async protocol of 8N1 just like a serial port.
Depending on the peculiar non-standardness of your serial port, it might, with minimal hacking, be made to work MIDI.
Take a UART chip, add a RS-232 level shifter like a MAX-232 or those ancient 1489 1488 level shifters, add a DB-25 and you've got a RS-232 port. Take the same UART chip, add some optoisolators and resistors, wire to a 5 pin DIN jack, and you're got a MIDI port. Not as different as you'd think. The software is a bit different of course.
Or working the other way around, on the Atari ST, the MIDI ports could be connected in a "MIDI null modem"-ish cable, and you could play multiplayer games, although I never owned a ST.
You could of course use this to make your enemy overestimate the number of tanks you have by incrementing serial numbers by a random number between 1 and 10 each time you make a tank.
You can also serial number stamp a critical part that is often F-ed up. So one factory creates and stamps 100 serial numbers on raw engine block iron castings, then ships them to factory #2 where the machinists and allied bombers F up about 50 of them. Ta Da, analysis shows you shipped 100 tank engines based on engine block serial numbers, even if only 50 actually made it out the door.
The mistake they made was looking at middle manager numeric metric goal achievements. Anyone in modern corporate America knows it possible to generate amazing numbers, yet not really accomplish anything.
I have faith they were meeting the appropriate metric goals at a 1400 tanks/month pace for diversity training, staff meetings, coffee consumption, memos distributed per week, slashdot first posts, etc, yet at the same time have faith that they only shipped like 5 working tanks out the door.
minimum-variance unbiased estimator (MVUE, or UMVU estimator)
I think this only works if most of the tanks that are no longer in service, are in your collection of serial numbers. If you send your first 1K produced to the western front and the next 1K produced to the eastern front, the US/English/etc are going to calculate a number about 1/2 as high as the Russians.
So, in theory either the Germans sent certain model of tank only to certain fronts, or the western and eastern guys were sharing data, or maybe the Germans sent all the odds west and all the evens east or something.
You get more meditative observation of symmetry and pattern matching out of the simple rules of Go, than the relatively much more complicated rules of Chess.
Go is more about the patterns of pieces whereas Chess is more about the interactions between the different rulesets for pieces.
The board for checkers is way too small to develop exciting patterns to watch.
One more thing, there is a minority of scientists who believe that building a quantum computer will turn out to be out-and-out impossible.
However, if those scientists are right, the implication of not being able to build such a machine is that quantum mechanics itself, as a description of nature, is wrong. Either way, the stakes could not be higher.
One possible failure mode is the theoretical power required could exceed the light fluxs of the visible universe, that would be a bummer. Maybe in true supercomputer style, a formerly computational problem is merely converted into an I/O problem, the interface to the classical world might be too slow/imprecise/analog/noisy/random to pull useful results out of it. Nothing wrong with quantum theory at all, just not possible to interface usefully with the greater classical world.
Or the more practical engineering/accounting failure mode where it would simply be cheaper / faster / more efficient to use mass produced classical processor, possibly for any problem.
Microwaves are sitting at a higher wavelength than UV/extreme UV which is in use today so I don't see this being useful for patterning for semiconductors.
but we are rapidly entering a world that is smartphone-centric
So I've heard, for about ten years, from the "tech journalist" crowd. But only from them, not the rest of the world. Most folks simply nod their head in unthinking agreement, or simply ignore them, but no one believes them.
You must be from a more civilized country. Around here the breakdown is about 90% know its a scam, 5% are the Kool Aid drinkers whom think they'll retire rich and haven't figured out the hollywood accounting scams that mean they'll never actually get a penny, and 5% wish they could be Kool Aid drinkers but are too new to have even been asked to write the book.
It takes upwards of 15 minute to print a single chapter
Kind of misses the point of an ebook, making it more of a publish yourself at home. The other issue, is unless you get ink and paper for free (aka printing it at work) a hardcover will probably be cheaper.
The irony of this proposal is that many professors, realizing that book prices are just obscene in the academic market, are preparing their own materials and giving them to the students for the cost of printing them.
20 years ago I had a EE-type professor whom gave us photocopies of about 2 to 3 pages out of perhaps a hundred books in the field. Yes several hundred pages of photocopies per semester. In his opinion it was within his fair rights use to copy small snippets out of each book for purely educational purposes. We also spent a lot of time doing educational / editorial compare -n- contrast the treatment of class AB amplifier second order harmonic analysis in this book vs that book, etc etc. He also delighted in providing copies of US military training course manuals which he claimed he paid for in his taxes thus could photocopy freely. I can verify that at least some US military enlisted electronics classes are college level work.
They can borrow them at the library (frequently on reserve) and save money
In ye olden days, when we could get 5 cent per page photocopies, the university bookstore never seemed to sell any any books that cost much more than 5 cents per page, if you know what I mean.
The response of the professors/TAs/instructors was highly variable.
The publishing industry solution was wait for photocopy prices to raise to like ten cents or whatever it is now, and also bulk the heck out of the books like a walmart customer on HFCS. So, a 600 page calculus tome is going to cost me $60 to photocopy or $80 new... may as well buy it.
However their have been attempted attacks so unlike your tiger and elephant repelling rock there is data to suggest that their is a real threat still.
The problem remains that 99.99999% of the thwarted attempted attacks have been retired military officers trying to carry tiny little swiss army knives on their keychain, and mothers trying to carry bulk supplies of baby formula onto the plane. Thats what happens when you let people set their own metric of success.
bio-compatible LED arrays that can... be implanted under the skin
they could also be incorporated into consumer goods, robotics
What kind of robot needs bio-compatible LED arrays? What kind of consumer good ends up implanted under the skin? Even 7 of 9 would technically be a cyborg as opposed to robot.
I suppose you could embed very high efficiency red and blue LEDs and some algae in your lungs, and run the LEDs off stored body fat...
Slashdot Mirror
We now return to the very recent slashdot story about the epic fail of college bookstores trying to charge more per page than the college library charges for photocopying service.
All they need to do is add enough fluff to get the book below 10 cents per page. Aren't editors good for anything anymore? If the dumbest spammers can figure out how to insert nonsense into email spam, how come book editors can't figure it out?
I've been at my new job since April and have yet to connect to the voicemail system and initialize my box. I'm that frickin' serious about not taking phone calls. Wait... Am I crazy here?
Five plus years here, still haven't set up voicemail.
In the days before RS-232 we had current loop, which was basically the same idea, but used "current flow"/"no current flow" instead of RS-232 +15V/-15V to signal zeros and ones.
MIDI 1.0 is a current loop serial port that runs at a bizarre baud rate 31250 bps. Yet it uses a nice standard async protocol of 8N1 just like a serial port.
Depending on the peculiar non-standardness of your serial port, it might, with minimal hacking, be made to work MIDI.
Take a UART chip, add a RS-232 level shifter like a MAX-232 or those ancient 1489 1488 level shifters, add a DB-25 and you've got a RS-232 port. Take the same UART chip, add some optoisolators and resistors, wire to a 5 pin DIN jack, and you're got a MIDI port. Not as different as you'd think. The software is a bit different of course.
Or working the other way around, on the Atari ST, the MIDI ports could be connected in a "MIDI null modem"-ish cable, and you could play multiplayer games, although I never owned a ST.
You forgot to mention that any PC title multiplayer has always been stuffed full of cheaters.
Also the first tank serial # should not be 1.
Try something like 24370239.
And count down, not up. That'll confuse the hell out of them.
Um, Sputnik was launched in 1957.
Small problem, that was a USSR sat not CIA. I suppose the CIA could have been ahead of their time in outsourcing...
You could of course use this to make your enemy overestimate the number of tanks you have by incrementing serial numbers by a random number between 1 and 10 each time you make a tank.
You can also serial number stamp a critical part that is often F-ed up. So one factory creates and stamps 100 serial numbers on raw engine block iron castings, then ships them to factory #2 where the machinists and allied bombers F up about 50 of them. Ta Da, analysis shows you shipped 100 tank engines based on engine block serial numbers, even if only 50 actually made it out the door.
The mistake they made was looking at middle manager numeric metric goal achievements. Anyone in modern corporate America knows it possible to generate amazing numbers, yet not really accomplish anything.
I have faith they were meeting the appropriate metric goals at a 1400 tanks/month pace for diversity training, staff meetings, coffee consumption, memos distributed per week, slashdot first posts, etc, yet at the same time have faith that they only shipped like 5 working tanks out the door.
in the 1950s
so they started looking at satellite photos of the Russian bombers
Hmm. Correct theory, but wrong implementation.
minimum-variance unbiased estimator (MVUE, or UMVU estimator)
I think this only works if most of the tanks that are no longer in service, are in your collection of serial numbers. If you send your first 1K produced to the western front and the next 1K produced to the eastern front, the US/English/etc are going to calculate a number about 1/2 as high as the Russians.
So, in theory either the Germans sent certain model of tank only to certain fronts, or the western and eastern guys were sharing data, or maybe the Germans sent all the odds west and all the evens east or something.
I have to ask: why is Go superior to Chess?
You get more meditative observation of symmetry and pattern matching out of the simple rules of Go, than the relatively much more complicated rules of Chess.
Go is more about the patterns of pieces whereas Chess is more about the interactions between the different rulesets for pieces.
The board for checkers is way too small to develop exciting patterns to watch.
One more thing, there is a minority of scientists who believe that building a quantum computer will turn out to be out-and-out impossible.
However, if those scientists are right, the implication of not being able to build such a machine is that quantum mechanics itself, as a description of nature, is wrong. Either way, the stakes could not be higher.
One possible failure mode is the theoretical power required could exceed the light fluxs of the visible universe, that would be a bummer. Maybe in true supercomputer style, a formerly computational problem is merely converted into an I/O problem, the interface to the classical world might be too slow/imprecise/analog/noisy/random to pull useful results out of it. Nothing wrong with quantum theory at all, just not possible to interface usefully with the greater classical world.
Or the more practical engineering/accounting failure mode where it would simply be cheaper / faster / more efficient to use mass produced classical processor, possibly for any problem.
Titled, "My dating criteria, by Anonymous Coward"
Microwaves are sitting at a higher wavelength than UV/extreme UV which is in use today so I don't see this being useful for patterning for semiconductors.
Lower wavelength. Right conclusion anyway.
but we are rapidly entering a world that is smartphone-centric
So I've heard, for about ten years, from the "tech journalist" crowd. But only from them, not the rest of the world. Most folks simply nod their head in unthinking agreement, or simply ignore them, but no one believes them.
slashdot, we're showing our age
aka wisdom
You must be from a more civilized country. Around here the breakdown is about 90% know its a scam, 5% are the Kool Aid drinkers whom think they'll retire rich and haven't figured out the hollywood accounting scams that mean they'll never actually get a penny, and 5% wish they could be Kool Aid drinkers but are too new to have even been asked to write the book.
It takes upwards of 15 minute to print a single chapter
Kind of misses the point of an ebook, making it more of a publish yourself at home. The other issue, is unless you get ink and paper for free (aka printing it at work) a hardcover will probably be cheaper.
The irony of this proposal is that many professors, realizing that book prices are just obscene in the academic market, are preparing their own materials and giving them to the students for the cost of printing them.
20 years ago I had a EE-type professor whom gave us photocopies of about 2 to 3 pages out of perhaps a hundred books in the field. Yes several hundred pages of photocopies per semester. In his opinion it was within his fair rights use to copy small snippets out of each book for purely educational purposes. We also spent a lot of time doing educational / editorial compare -n- contrast the treatment of class AB amplifier second order harmonic analysis in this book vs that book, etc etc. He also delighted in providing copies of US military training course manuals which he claimed he paid for in his taxes thus could photocopy freely. I can verify that at least some US military enlisted electronics classes are college level work.
They can borrow them at the library (frequently on reserve) and save money
In ye olden days, when we could get 5 cent per page photocopies, the university bookstore never seemed to sell any any books that cost much more than 5 cents per page, if you know what I mean.
The response of the professors/TAs/instructors was highly variable.
The publishing industry solution was wait for photocopy prices to raise to like ten cents or whatever it is now, and also bulk the heck out of the books like a walmart customer on HFCS. So, a 600 page calculus tome is going to cost me $60 to photocopy or $80 new... may as well buy it.
Whats a "watch"? I haven't seen anyone wearing one since the 90s
However their have been attempted attacks so unlike your tiger and elephant repelling rock there is data to suggest that their is a real threat still.
The problem remains that 99.99999% of the thwarted attempted attacks have been retired military officers trying to carry tiny little swiss army knives on their keychain, and mothers trying to carry bulk supplies of baby formula onto the plane. Thats what happens when you let people set their own metric of success.
bio-compatible LED arrays that can ... be implanted under the skin
they could also be incorporated into consumer goods, robotics
What kind of robot needs bio-compatible LED arrays? What kind of consumer good ends up implanted under the skin? Even 7 of 9 would technically be a cyborg as opposed to robot.
I suppose you could embed very high efficiency red and blue LEDs and some algae in your lungs, and run the LEDs off stored body fat...
The lady will ask "Why does it say "YAD" on it? It'll get hard and spell out "You Are Doomed!"
Maybe one of those UV LEDs would help with birth control. Then again sunburn inside there might be painful.
Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features.
What browser are they talking about?
Heres my request / requirement:
A better "adblock plus" than adblock plus
AND a better "firebug" than firebug
AND a better "ghostery" than ghostery
AND a better "ie tab plus" than ie tab plus
AND a better "firefox sync" than firefox sync
AND a better "flashblock" than flashblock
AND a better "noscript" than noscript
the result of this select query is .... (insert beavis voice from B+B) "uh uhuh huh chrome runs javascript 10 ms faster huh huhuhuh"
Gnome has held GNU/Linux back for nearly 10 years now.
Started 1997, first release 1999, more like 11 to 13 years rather than nearly 10 years.