Ooooh. Monochrome red. Now where have I heard of that before? Oh yeah, the Virtual Boy. Does it come with an Ibuprofen feed drip for the constant headaches as well as Mario Tennis?
I'm willing to let some usage statistics be collected if it would help improve my experience. With what I look for on the web, that's different, but if I'm running around their theme park and my activities can be tracked down to when I got on a ride and when I got off, where I just hanged around, and such, as long as it isn't tracable back to me. Unless you're one of those paranoid types, there's nothing wrong with them knowing that much.
With a logo of a bird known primarily for crapping on everything in sight, I'm tempted to go with Microsoft just to spite the few people in the world who don't hate the things.
You don't even need a mirror if you have a missile capable of steering while spinning. It's not pretty, but it can be done. In order to get the laser to work at all, it has to be pointed at one spot on the missile until it weakens it enough that the missile buckles under its thrust, causing it to break up. I think the time needed is about 5 seconds, maybe longer for a solid fueled missile. Add in some insulation, and it doesn't really stand a chance. Sort of like one of those experimental post WWI submarines that the French came up with. Neat, but utterly impractical.
Well, you're about 8000 miles from your subordinates, you cost more than a local manager, you're a different culture, and there ain't anything preventing some guy from Mumbai from being a good manager. Unless you know office politics like a fiend, you might as well clear out your desk.
Whyzit that partisans for most every other language will admit that there are some things that they weren't meant for, like Cobol and graphics programming. However, when it comes to C or C++, it's reasonable to turn everything into a systems project strapped onto another project, and anybody who has any different needs is completely incompetent? I like data structures. I really hate dealing with memory allocation. If my project doesn't really need that extra 10% speed boost, why should I bother dealing with making sure that there are no memory leaks? Yes, I know that there's a feeling of craftsmanship, and I want my code to be bug-free. Knowing that it won't blow up on me in that way at least is worth some cycles. If you're worried about the garbage collector being called at some inopportune moment, try running it simultaneously with an IO block through multithreading.
Or you can disconnect the antenna and strap your transmitter straight to that baby. I think we can get that technology banned in maybe a week with strategic placement of hello.jpg.
This is like the advent of the flying car or the amphibious car. Yeah, it looks cool, but does it justify the marginal increase in cost? Frankly, I'm not putting up waystations every 50 km from here to my bank just to protect the few cents I do have. 128-bit encryption is good enough for now, and if it isn't 4096-bit encryption will be good enough for the next few millenia, assuming Moore's law holds constant. Remember, no matter how fast your computer is, 2^4096 is still a big damn number, and unless you've got a 4096 bit architecture, the coding is going to be truly nasty.
However, when an unmanned mission fails, people don't die. Sure, it may have cost a whole lotta money, and it would probably take years of work to try again, but at least you don't have to worry about anyone getting hurt. If a Delta rocket blows up with a comm sattelite, it doesn't even make the newspaper. You get maybe an accident report in the next Aviation and Space weekly. Everyone remembers where they were when the Challenger and the Columbia went down, but how many people remember the year that the Mars Polar Lander added yet another crater to the landscape, of if it even did? Because of that, you can take shortcuts and worry about the problems later.
To be completely honest, I have a set of CDs with the Red Hat 9 ISOs burned onto them. I figured out that I was doing something wrong after I burned them, but before I used them. It seemed like one file with no directories was an odd way to structure a CD's file structure. Everybody has trouble when they first try something new. Given time and encouragement and the will to do it from both parties you should be able to make anyone a competent user.
I don't mind gold diggers. It's incompetent gold diggers that annoy me. The competent ones can write Point of Sale and Payroll systems until their fingers bleed for all I care, since someone has to do it, and I'd prefer not to if there's another programming job out there.
I'd say that it isn't worth the trouble to try and set up such a system.
First, Moore's law pretty much requires any system that people can purchase central computing power from also has to scale up. How much is one minute of computing time on a VAX worth? Any system that doesn't reinvest its earnings directly into updating the capacity of the system doesn't stand a chance.
Secondly, latency. I like playing video games that require twitch reflexes. Waiting for information to be sent to other players is one thing, but waiting for it to reach the computer itself means that any person playing a game would look like a drunken sailor to an outside observer. Sluggish response to the user in a program means that this would be limited to batch processing in all practicality.
Thirdly, a terminal isn't much cheaper than a cheap computer, and the cheap computer won't have the disadvantages of a terminal, so given a choice, most rational people would choose a computer.
However, there are uses other than the mass market, or perhaps in specific segments of the mass market. If I'm trying to use a genetic algorithm to optimize some problem, like optimal assembly language statement packing, then I'll need lots of power. I could upload that problem to some big computer and get my results back in a couple of hours. Similar things could be done in the matter of outsourcing compiler farms. I just don't see everyone dumping their computer for one in a central area. It's just too inconvenient.
Structured Computer Organization by Tannenbaum mentions the Connection Machine, which had 65,536 1-bit processors working in parallel. It was in the 3rd edition, but not in the 4th, and it was designed to work with VAXen. Needless to say, it wasn't spectacularly popular.
I wouldn't burn any algorithm to a chip in an adversarial system. Sure, you can do it faster with a custom chip, but they just have to change the challenge enough to screw up the chip, and it's several million dollars down the drain in development costs. However, I agree that a Neural Network would have potential as long as you can break it up into single letter chunks.
Let's look at some of the characteristics of the challenge shown.
1. The characters chosen are on average darker than the background.
2. The characters are only a subset of the alphabet, reducing the amount of things a computer would need to search for.
3. No letter overlaps another letter.
4. There is always at least one pixel between each of the letters.
Given this, I think that the problem is solvable, but I doubt that it's solvable in a practical amount of time.
Slashdot Mirror
The end of Sons of Liberty really got me. Not the talking as much as what really happened? If art is supposed to make you think, that made me think.
Ooooh. Monochrome red. Now where have I heard of that before? Oh yeah, the Virtual Boy. Does it come with an Ibuprofen feed drip for the constant headaches as well as Mario Tennis?
I'm willing to let some usage statistics be collected if it would help improve my experience. With what I look for on the web, that's different, but if I'm running around their theme park and my activities can be tracked down to when I got on a ride and when I got off, where I just hanged around, and such, as long as it isn't tracable back to me. Unless you're one of those paranoid types, there's nothing wrong with them knowing that much.
With a logo of a bird known primarily for crapping on everything in sight, I'm tempted to go with Microsoft just to spite the few people in the world who don't hate the things.
You don't even need a mirror if you have a missile capable of steering while spinning. It's not pretty, but it can be done. In order to get the laser to work at all, it has to be pointed at one spot on the missile until it weakens it enough that the missile buckles under its thrust, causing it to break up. I think the time needed is about 5 seconds, maybe longer for a solid fueled missile. Add in some insulation, and it doesn't really stand a chance. Sort of like one of those experimental post WWI submarines that the French came up with. Neat, but utterly impractical.
Yeah, I think that they had 2 undergrads working full time to empty all the bit buckets that were getting filled.
Well, you're about 8000 miles from your subordinates, you cost more than a local manager, you're a different culture, and there ain't anything preventing some guy from Mumbai from being a good manager. Unless you know office politics like a fiend, you might as well clear out your desk.
Whyzit that partisans for most every other language will admit that there are some things that they weren't meant for, like Cobol and graphics programming. However, when it comes to C or C++, it's reasonable to turn everything into a systems project strapped onto another project, and anybody who has any different needs is completely incompetent? I like data structures. I really hate dealing with memory allocation. If my project doesn't really need that extra 10% speed boost, why should I bother dealing with making sure that there are no memory leaks? Yes, I know that there's a feeling of craftsmanship, and I want my code to be bug-free. Knowing that it won't blow up on me in that way at least is worth some cycles. If you're worried about the garbage collector being called at some inopportune moment, try running it simultaneously with an IO block through multithreading.
Or you can disconnect the antenna and strap your transmitter straight to that baby. I think we can get that technology banned in maybe a week with strategic placement of hello.jpg.
This is like the advent of the flying car or the amphibious car. Yeah, it looks cool, but does it justify the marginal increase in cost? Frankly, I'm not putting up waystations every 50 km from here to my bank just to protect the few cents I do have. 128-bit encryption is good enough for now, and if it isn't 4096-bit encryption will be good enough for the next few millenia, assuming Moore's law holds constant. Remember, no matter how fast your computer is, 2^4096 is still a big damn number, and unless you've got a 4096 bit architecture, the coding is going to be truly nasty.
It makes perfectly good drain cleaner.
If you're using a secure tunnel, I'd suggest switching to wolverines.
However, when an unmanned mission fails, people don't die. Sure, it may have cost a whole lotta money, and it would probably take years of work to try again, but at least you don't have to worry about anyone getting hurt. If a Delta rocket blows up with a comm sattelite, it doesn't even make the newspaper. You get maybe an accident report in the next Aviation and Space weekly. Everyone remembers where they were when the Challenger and the Columbia went down, but how many people remember the year that the Mars Polar Lander added yet another crater to the landscape, of if it even did? Because of that, you can take shortcuts and worry about the problems later.
Well, if they don't start toeing the line soon enough, Berkeley's residents will be there on their own virtues.
To be completely honest, I have a set of CDs with the Red Hat 9 ISOs burned onto them. I figured out that I was doing something wrong after I burned them, but before I used them. It seemed like one file with no directories was an odd way to structure a CD's file structure. Everybody has trouble when they first try something new. Given time and encouragement and the will to do it from both parties you should be able to make anyone a competent user.
I don't mind gold diggers. It's incompetent gold diggers that annoy me. The competent ones can write Point of Sale and Payroll systems until their fingers bleed for all I care, since someone has to do it, and I'd prefer not to if there's another programming job out there.
I'd say that it isn't worth the trouble to try and set up such a system. First, Moore's law pretty much requires any system that people can purchase central computing power from also has to scale up. How much is one minute of computing time on a VAX worth? Any system that doesn't reinvest its earnings directly into updating the capacity of the system doesn't stand a chance. Secondly, latency. I like playing video games that require twitch reflexes. Waiting for information to be sent to other players is one thing, but waiting for it to reach the computer itself means that any person playing a game would look like a drunken sailor to an outside observer. Sluggish response to the user in a program means that this would be limited to batch processing in all practicality. Thirdly, a terminal isn't much cheaper than a cheap computer, and the cheap computer won't have the disadvantages of a terminal, so given a choice, most rational people would choose a computer. However, there are uses other than the mass market, or perhaps in specific segments of the mass market. If I'm trying to use a genetic algorithm to optimize some problem, like optimal assembly language statement packing, then I'll need lots of power. I could upload that problem to some big computer and get my results back in a couple of hours. Similar things could be done in the matter of outsourcing compiler farms. I just don't see everyone dumping their computer for one in a central area. It's just too inconvenient.
Structured Computer Organization by Tannenbaum mentions the Connection Machine, which had 65,536 1-bit processors working in parallel. It was in the 3rd edition, but not in the 4th, and it was designed to work with VAXen. Needless to say, it wasn't spectacularly popular.
Porn. Lots and lots of porn. Between all the Slashdotters, I bet we could put any other repository of smut to shame.
I wouldn't burn any algorithm to a chip in an adversarial system. Sure, you can do it faster with a custom chip, but they just have to change the challenge enough to screw up the chip, and it's several million dollars down the drain in development costs. However, I agree that a Neural Network would have potential as long as you can break it up into single letter chunks. Let's look at some of the characteristics of the challenge shown. 1. The characters chosen are on average darker than the background. 2. The characters are only a subset of the alphabet, reducing the amount of things a computer would need to search for. 3. No letter overlaps another letter. 4. There is always at least one pixel between each of the letters. Given this, I think that the problem is solvable, but I doubt that it's solvable in a practical amount of time.
It's pretty much a Palm Pilot with a 3D chip to me. It seems too weak compared to other systems to really compete, but maybe I'm missing something.
And we're supposed to win wars with this kind of attitude?