Just rename it "The Internet". You and I know that the web isn't the internet, but the average grandma doesn't. I'm surprised Apple haven't already tried it with Safari.
Just get a bike. Berlin is brilliant for cycling. And if you need to transport something big, just call up any of the many taxi-like services that will take it home in a van for you.
Header files are great when you are writing code to be used by other people (i.e. most oft he time, for a professional). They allow you to separate the public parts of your blob of code from all the private nasty bits you'd rather they didn't see or use. Headers define your code's contract with the outside world, the rest is implementation detail. I'd hate to have to link against code that didn't use them - it would massively increase the learning curve for arbitrary libraries.
C=64 1Mhz 6510 with 64k RAM (38 useable), also fast and efficient
It wasn't fast by any stretch (I had the European PAL spec, which was even slower). If you wanted to use "high resolution" mode (320x200 pixels) then it took minutes to draw even simple curves. If you programmed it using the built-in BASIC, anything non-trivial took minutes or more. The only way you could write anything like a useful program was to use assembler, coding directly to the bare metal. Some of the games resulting were impressive enough for their time, but wouldn't look much today.
The problem isn't sloppy coding, but that expectations are higher - people want photographic fidelity for images and video, interfaces that look good, and the ability to download stuff over the internet quickly. All that takes a lot of processor power, and a certain amount of code. A modern PC is hardly wasting CPU cycles to get its work done (except in the trivial sense that it's using a lot of power for things that some people consider frivolous, like blurry translucent window backgrounds), there isn't a way to speed up our devices by 10x and still have them do what they do. The idea that modern code is wasteful and bloated is a myth.
That's only true if you're only judging it by outright speed, height, etc. Things have continued to improve in terms of efficiency, thrust-to-weight ratio, noise, cleanliness of fuel burn and above all, reliability.
The original RB211 turbofan (the first big fanjet of the type that all modern airliners use) had a total lifetime of 1,000 hours. Nowadays it's >33,000 hours. That's an incredible achievement. In 1970, as a young kid with a keen interest in aviation, I would watch Boeing 707s fly in and out of my local airport, all trailing plumes of black smoke, all whining loudly (and deafeningly, on take-off), and understanding where all the noise protesters that frequently appeared on the news were coming from. Nowadays you don't have that, because noise is just not the problem it was, there's no black smoke, and jets slip in and out of airports really very quietly, when you consider how much power they are producing (which in turn helps them climb away more quickly).
As far as computing is concerned, you're right - there's still plenty of room at the bottom. But the current fabrication technology is reaching its limits. Perhaps jet engine manufacturers in the late 60s couldn't see how they would overcome fundamental limits in materials technology to produce the jets we have today, but they did.
Which is nuts, actually. Hemp is a brilliant raw material with hundreds of practical uses which *should*, if people had any sense of balance, far outweigh the small issue of the cannabinoids. It could probably even be selectively bred to eliminate that aspect, but no, concern about a few potheads sends legislators into a tailspin. This is why we can't have nice things.
Soccer has been sold out to the corporate sector. It's no longer about players and the love of the game, it's just about maximising profit.
Germany, who just won the World Cup, don't tend to do it this way so much - instead they invest in youth soccer training and mentoring, spotting and nurturing young talent. As a result, most of the teams in the Bundesliga are "worth" far, far less in pure financial terms (though I'm not claiming that there isn't a great deal of corporatism there as well, it just hasn't quite reached the same insane levels as the UK for example).
It's sad to see the game that was once the passion of every working class member of society become basically Formula 1 with boots on, with ticket prices only the wealthy can afford.
Why DLNA, in this day and age? It's garbage, with a "lowest common denominator" approach to media files, with only 8.3 filenames and very few supported formats. It's like the companies got together to grudgingly agree a simple standard that would mean they didn't have to do any real work with each other, just a bare minimum that would just about allow interoperability and a minimum of effort to implement.
Show me a) how the brain works (at the intellectual level, not just neurons firing, which is only the hardware, not the software) and b) what IQ means, and c) how the genes influence either a or b.
It seems likely that whatever constitutes "intelligence", genes may be a factor. But there's a gulf of understanding the cause and effect between the two right now. That's why it's really just bad science to write about it as if it were a proven fact.
I can assure you it was not for time between nuclear accidents, but don't let that little truth stop you from you from making a slant.
I never claimed it was. I designed the thing; it was pretty clear they meant industrial accident in the normal sense of someone cutting themselves, dropping a hammer on their foot, etc. Nevertheless it struck me as a strange thing to want to put on display, because no matter what value the display showed up to 999, it would either be misinterpreted (e.g. as a nuclear accident) or always look far too low. The only way it would ever be impressive would be if it had a 10-digit display that always showed some very large number (but then that would be dishonest). So what's the point of it? Not for me to question, we were happy to take the customer's money.
I once designed a huge display clock for the reception area of Heysham nuclear power station. The clock had a sweep second hand that traced out a ring of LEDs once per minute, and a counter that showed the number of days since the last industrial accident. The specification called for this counter to have just three digits, which frankly didn't inspire much confidence.
The only part of your post I agreed with was the bit about free energy crap on YouTube.
There is no great conspiracy; there never has been. If small fusion power was feasible, the company that put it on the market would clean up overnight, have an instant monopoly and would put everything else out of business instantly. This hasn't happened, ergo, the technology doesn't exist. Same for super-energy-efficient cars and so on.
Super capacitors can't replace batteries, they just don't have anywhere near the energy density of even current battery technology, which in itself is very poor compared with chemical fuel. What they do have is the ability to take charge quickly, so they could be useful for harvesting waste power in an electric car, e.g. regenerative braking. To hold enough charge to power the car continually long enough for a typical commute would require a semi-trailer's worth of capacitor space.
Yes, the sun does produce all the power we'll ever need - on average >200W/m^2 over the entire earth's surface. That's a lot of power, vastly more than we consume today. The problem is harvesting it - we can't cover the entire earth with solar panels, and if we did, they wouldn't be efficient enough with today's technology. So, since there's no grand conspiracy that we can close down, we'll just have to go back to slow but sure, scientifically tested research in labs. In other words, exactly what we are doing.
OK, I wondered. I'm sure you did. It is short for 'cross Assembler' - the software used to sequence the genome (I skimmed the paper). Not what you thought. No.
I wish I could run this in a Parallels Desktop VM, under 10.9. That would be much more convenient than having to set up a separate boot partition. But right now it appears unsupported... unless someone knows better?
Not necessarily. It's often rendered as an NSGradient having the necessary colours at key positions. A glassy effect typically needs four colours, and they are computed off some base "theme" colour. Nevertheless the time to render this is extremely small, probably no greater than decoding and painting a PNG of the same area.
Because any military aircraft is a "fighter", in simple terms, as opposed to a civilian aircraft. It's just the usual media assumption that their readers are lazy and stupid, and wouldn't know the difference.
Every minute playing chess would be better spent [fill in your personal alternative here]
Perhaps people like, y'know, playing chess as a game? It's interesting, it passes the time, and it's actually quite challenging to become even moderately good at the game. The fact that algorithms can play chess is irrelevant, playing chess is not an activity that humans play algorithmically - they learn to play it intuitively, using pattern recognition and a bit of analysis, not exhaustive analysis and a whole bunch of rules, tables and a large database of known games to draw on. Chess programs employing 'simple' heuristics don't beat every human player - top players can still beat the top programs, though it's getting close. The programs in typical chess implementations do beat novice players, but in turn they are easily beaten once you get better at the game.
It's like saying there's no point playing soccer because a machine that can fire balls into a net could be easily built that would beat a human goalie every time. It really misses the whole point.
crease the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization
What does that even mean? How can you 'crease the fluidity' of anything? Sound suspiciously like typical management-speak, and I don't think that's what MS needs at all.
Not believing in a deity means accepting on faith that the universe came into existence without the help of a deity.
Certainly there are aspects of belief and "faith" even in an atheistic viewpoint, because there are some things that we simply don't know and, probably, cannot know. But saying "god did it" is a very absurd fallback, because it begs the obvious, childish, yet profound question, "where did god come from?" Adding another level of complexity to explain away the already difficult complexity we're faced with doesn't make the problem simpler!
It's definitely true. I've had to replace a number of household white-goods items recently - dishwasher, oven and washing machine - which all failed due to bad design. As someone who once did design consumer goods for a living, it was easy to see where the failures had been either engineered in, or negligently ignored.
The washing machine failed due to intermittent contact between the spinning drum and the plastic casing that enclosed it (only a perfectly balanced load would avoid this contact, a rarity in practice). Eventually this wore through, allowing water to be ejected under pressure straight onto the back of the bare PCB that controlled the machine.
The dishwasher failed because the relay that controlled the main heater was underrated for the current draw of the element, leading to heavy contact wear and eventual failure. The PCB tracks connecting the same relay were also undersized and showed signs of delamination from the substrate due to heat. Which failed first was a matter of luck, but one of them definitely would, but after a period of working (3 years in my case).
The oven was the worst. The casing was so badly engineered that hot air from the back of the oven was fan-forced through a gap directly onto the back of the electronics controlling the timer functions, display, etc. This was gradually cooked to the point where the plastic surround that supported the PCB became depolymerised and so it just fell apart one day when the front panel buttons were pressed. The entire PCB was carbonised but somehow still did function, but as the mountings were now disintegrated (not even glueable), it was unrepairable.
It really annoys me that these things are made this way. It's not even cost-cutting, because the faults were not due to reducing costs of materials or construction, it was designed that way. In other words designed to fail. And the problem is people are now brainwashed into believing that five years lifespan for goods like this is OK, even 'doing well'. It's NOT! These things should last 20 years or more. I would definitely buy a brand that could be shown that it was engineered right, and that brand would surely clean up by having a much stronger reputation.
Slashdot Mirror
Just rename it "The Internet". You and I know that the web isn't the internet, but the average grandma doesn't. I'm surprised Apple haven't already tried it with Safari.
Don't click?
Just get a bike. Berlin is brilliant for cycling. And if you need to transport something big, just call up any of the many taxi-like services that will take it home in a van for you.
Header files are great when you are writing code to be used by other people (i.e. most oft he time, for a professional). They allow you to separate the public parts of your blob of code from all the private nasty bits you'd rather they didn't see or use. Headers define your code's contract with the outside world, the rest is implementation detail. I'd hate to have to link against code that didn't use them - it would massively increase the learning curve for arbitrary libraries.
C=64 1Mhz 6510 with 64k RAM (38 useable), also fast and efficient
It wasn't fast by any stretch (I had the European PAL spec, which was even slower). If you wanted to use "high resolution" mode (320x200 pixels) then it took minutes to draw even simple curves. If you programmed it using the built-in BASIC, anything non-trivial took minutes or more. The only way you could write anything like a useful program was to use assembler, coding directly to the bare metal. Some of the games resulting were impressive enough for their time, but wouldn't look much today.
The problem isn't sloppy coding, but that expectations are higher - people want photographic fidelity for images and video, interfaces that look good, and the ability to download stuff over the internet quickly. All that takes a lot of processor power, and a certain amount of code. A modern PC is hardly wasting CPU cycles to get its work done (except in the trivial sense that it's using a lot of power for things that some people consider frivolous, like blurry translucent window backgrounds), there isn't a way to speed up our devices by 10x and still have them do what they do. The idea that modern code is wasteful and bloated is a myth.
Then the rate of improvements fell off a cliff
That's only true if you're only judging it by outright speed, height, etc. Things have continued to improve in terms of efficiency, thrust-to-weight ratio, noise, cleanliness of fuel burn and above all, reliability.
The original RB211 turbofan (the first big fanjet of the type that all modern airliners use) had a total lifetime of 1,000 hours. Nowadays it's >33,000 hours. That's an incredible achievement. In 1970, as a young kid with a keen interest in aviation, I would watch Boeing 707s fly in and out of my local airport, all trailing plumes of black smoke, all whining loudly (and deafeningly, on take-off), and understanding where all the noise protesters that frequently appeared on the news were coming from. Nowadays you don't have that, because noise is just not the problem it was, there's no black smoke, and jets slip in and out of airports really very quietly, when you consider how much power they are producing (which in turn helps them climb away more quickly).
As far as computing is concerned, you're right - there's still plenty of room at the bottom. But the current fabrication technology is reaching its limits. Perhaps jet engine manufacturers in the late 60s couldn't see how they would overcome fundamental limits in materials technology to produce the jets we have today, but they did.
Which is nuts, actually. Hemp is a brilliant raw material with hundreds of practical uses which *should*, if people had any sense of balance, far outweigh the small issue of the cannabinoids. It could probably even be selectively bred to eliminate that aspect, but no, concern about a few potheads sends legislators into a tailspin. This is why we can't have nice things.
Soccer has been sold out to the corporate sector. It's no longer about players and the love of the game, it's just about maximising profit.
Germany, who just won the World Cup, don't tend to do it this way so much - instead they invest in youth soccer training and mentoring, spotting and nurturing young talent. As a result, most of the teams in the Bundesliga are "worth" far, far less in pure financial terms (though I'm not claiming that there isn't a great deal of corporatism there as well, it just hasn't quite reached the same insane levels as the UK for example).
It's sad to see the game that was once the passion of every working class member of society become basically Formula 1 with boots on, with ticket prices only the wealthy can afford.
Why DLNA, in this day and age? It's garbage, with a "lowest common denominator" approach to media files, with only 8.3 filenames and very few supported formats. It's like the companies got together to grudgingly agree a simple standard that would mean they didn't have to do any real work with each other, just a bare minimum that would just about allow interoperability and a minimum of effort to implement.
why is intellectual variability so verboten
Show me a) how the brain works (at the intellectual level, not just neurons firing, which is only the hardware, not the software) and b) what IQ means, and c) how the genes influence either a or b.
It seems likely that whatever constitutes "intelligence", genes may be a factor. But there's a gulf of understanding the cause and effect between the two right now. That's why it's really just bad science to write about it as if it were a proven fact.
I can assure you it was not for time between nuclear accidents, but don't let that little truth stop you from you from making a slant.
I never claimed it was. I designed the thing; it was pretty clear they meant industrial accident in the normal sense of someone cutting themselves, dropping a hammer on their foot, etc. Nevertheless it struck me as a strange thing to want to put on display, because no matter what value the display showed up to 999, it would either be misinterpreted (e.g. as a nuclear accident) or always look far too low. The only way it would ever be impressive would be if it had a 10-digit display that always showed some very large number (but then that would be dishonest). So what's the point of it? Not for me to question, we were happy to take the customer's money.
I once designed a huge display clock for the reception area of Heysham nuclear power station. The clock had a sweep second hand that traced out a ring of LEDs once per minute, and a counter that showed the number of days since the last industrial accident. The specification called for this counter to have just three digits, which frankly didn't inspire much confidence.
The only part of your post I agreed with was the bit about free energy crap on YouTube.
There is no great conspiracy; there never has been. If small fusion power was feasible, the company that put it on the market would clean up overnight, have an instant monopoly and would put everything else out of business instantly. This hasn't happened, ergo, the technology doesn't exist. Same for super-energy-efficient cars and so on.
Super capacitors can't replace batteries, they just don't have anywhere near the energy density of even current battery technology, which in itself is very poor compared with chemical fuel. What they do have is the ability to take charge quickly, so they could be useful for harvesting waste power in an electric car, e.g. regenerative braking. To hold enough charge to power the car continually long enough for a typical commute would require a semi-trailer's worth of capacitor space.
Yes, the sun does produce all the power we'll ever need - on average >200W/m^2 over the entire earth's surface. That's a lot of power, vastly more than we consume today. The problem is harvesting it - we can't cover the entire earth with solar panels, and if we did, they wouldn't be efficient enough with today's technology. So, since there's no grand conspiracy that we can close down, we'll just have to go back to slow but sure, scientifically tested research in labs. In other words, exactly what we are doing.
OK, I wondered. I'm sure you did. It is short for 'cross Assembler' - the software used to sequence the genome (I skimmed the paper). Not what you thought. No.
No shit.
I wish I could run this in a Parallels Desktop VM, under 10.9. That would be much more convenient than having to set up a separate boot partition. But right now it appears unsupported... unless someone knows better?
Not necessarily. It's often rendered as an NSGradient having the necessary colours at key positions. A glassy effect typically needs four colours, and they are computed off some base "theme" colour. Nevertheless the time to render this is extremely small, probably no greater than decoding and painting a PNG of the same area.
You need to watch this: http://youtu.be/P6MOnehCOUw
Laughs aside, I guess the point is, conspiracies just don't scale.
So why do all the media call the SU-25 a fighter?
Because any military aircraft is a "fighter", in simple terms, as opposed to a civilian aircraft. It's just the usual media assumption that their readers are lazy and stupid, and wouldn't know the difference.
Perhaps people like, y'know, playing chess as a game? It's interesting, it passes the time, and it's actually quite challenging to become even moderately good at the game. The fact that algorithms can play chess is irrelevant, playing chess is not an activity that humans play algorithmically - they learn to play it intuitively, using pattern recognition and a bit of analysis, not exhaustive analysis and a whole bunch of rules, tables and a large database of known games to draw on. Chess programs employing 'simple' heuristics don't beat every human player - top players can still beat the top programs, though it's getting close. The programs in typical chess implementations do beat novice players, but in turn they are easily beaten once you get better at the game.
It's like saying there's no point playing soccer because a machine that can fire balls into a net could be easily built that would beat a human goalie every time. It really misses the whole point.
What does that even mean? How can you 'crease the fluidity' of anything? Sound suspiciously like typical management-speak, and I don't think that's what MS needs at all.
Also in the news, we have Unicode! Slashdot, have you heard of it?
It is news, because it's in Düsseldorf! Frankfurt is so last century.
Certainly there are aspects of belief and "faith" even in an atheistic viewpoint, because there are some things that we simply don't know and, probably, cannot know. But saying "god did it" is a very absurd fallback, because it begs the obvious, childish, yet profound question, "where did god come from?" Adding another level of complexity to explain away the already difficult complexity we're faced with doesn't make the problem simpler!
Stupid is as stupid prays.
It's definitely true. I've had to replace a number of household white-goods items recently - dishwasher, oven and washing machine - which all failed due to bad design. As someone who once did design consumer goods for a living, it was easy to see where the failures had been either engineered in, or negligently ignored.
The washing machine failed due to intermittent contact between the spinning drum and the plastic casing that enclosed it (only a perfectly balanced load would avoid this contact, a rarity in practice). Eventually this wore through, allowing water to be ejected under pressure straight onto the back of the bare PCB that controlled the machine.
The dishwasher failed because the relay that controlled the main heater was underrated for the current draw of the element, leading to heavy contact wear and eventual failure. The PCB tracks connecting the same relay were also undersized and showed signs of delamination from the substrate due to heat. Which failed first was a matter of luck, but one of them definitely would, but after a period of working (3 years in my case).
The oven was the worst. The casing was so badly engineered that hot air from the back of the oven was fan-forced through a gap directly onto the back of the electronics controlling the timer functions, display, etc. This was gradually cooked to the point where the plastic surround that supported the PCB became depolymerised and so it just fell apart one day when the front panel buttons were pressed. The entire PCB was carbonised but somehow still did function, but as the mountings were now disintegrated (not even glueable), it was unrepairable.
It really annoys me that these things are made this way. It's not even cost-cutting, because the faults were not due to reducing costs of materials or construction, it was designed that way. In other words designed to fail. And the problem is people are now brainwashed into believing that five years lifespan for goods like this is OK, even 'doing well'. It's NOT! These things should last 20 years or more. I would definitely buy a brand that could be shown that it was engineered right, and that brand would surely clean up by having a much stronger reputation.