Instead of running a news story on this, they would have done her more good by just telling her she was ignorant and pointing her in the right direction to get information so she can stop being a victim.
Except this is how the current generation of software companies make money. They take advantage of the ignorance of users, so anything which helps someone learn how to use computers properly cuts into their profit margins. They'd rather sell crappy utilities and "services" and more computers and such. This is how the entire computer marketplace is set up.
However, if you read the article closely at the end, both Verizon and the technical college were helpful...so maybe things are not really that bad, though it often seems that way.
First off, it only costs $1(us) at most to manufacture and ship a CD. Probably more like $0.50 or less, perhaps even $0.25. So they are likely making $11 to $11.75 for each CD after the physical costs of creating and moving them.
About marketing: it is a fixed cost which will be the same no matter how the song is distributed, so I don't see how it factors in. Are you saying putting a physical sign at the store is more expensive? I suppose this may be true, but is the cost significant?
As for not making as much on single song download sales vs. multi-song CDs. I imagine they are counting units, not dollars. Perhaps the number of individual songs purchased by download has increased, while the number of full size CD albums with 10 to 12 or more songs has decreased. Not to mention the fact, song for song, the $1 download is usually cheaper, since we are assuming $12 for the CDs[1], and those usually only have 10 to 12 songs. Doing the math (assuming a high $1 for mfg+ship) that is $0.91 to $1.10 per song. Add to that the fact most people don't want to buy every song on a CD, and this means all things being equal, music companies will make more money on average by selling CDs.
And obviously, I am assuming the download stores and physical CD stores both take out the same amount for their profit/costs.
[1] Don't they usually charge $15 to $20 for newly released CDs?
This happens because most (if not all) don't even know what Boardmaker is or what it does.
However, if some of those special ed teachers got together and paid the money they would've spent on Boardmaker to hire some Russian programmers, then maybe there would be an open source version. Better yet, form a non-profit org which collects money from people who want to help autistic children.
Open Source is a do it yourself kind of thing. You can't just sit around and hope what you want comes around with what you want. You have to lobby for it.
But once someone has done the work, it doesn't disappear. I've seen plenty of commercial software become useless because the company decides not to sell it anymore (new copies are not available) and it isn't maintained (won't work on any modern OS). With OSS, if there is any interest at all, someone will keep maintaining it one way or another.
You seem to think Apple, Microsoft and Unix were the only sources of Operating Systems in the 80s and 90s. They weren't. In the 80s, there was the Vic 20/Commodore 64 and the 8bit Ataris (400 to 130XE)...they didn't really have an OS (unless you count Basic), they were really more a hardware platform which programmers often had to hand code.
In the late 80s and early 90s, there was the Amiga, Atari ST, and OS/2. Perhaps others, I can't remember. I think that is also when DR DOS was out too. Late 90s, OS/2 was failing but there was also BeOS.
This may not be all of the consumer OSes, but they are the ones I remember, and they are certainly not limited to just Apple and Microsoft. All of them are completely gone. You have to ask why.
I could go into the reasons why people don't like Microsoft's tactics, but this has been hashed and rehashed on slashdot a thousand times. Wikipedia seems to have a good enough summary of criticisms. No need for me to repeat.
This is modded funny, but there is some insightful method to this madness. I've heard of plenty who have hired people for more idiotic reasons beyond even what they are wearing. (Yes, I get the sexual reference. Still dumb.)
Maybe what you said applies to expensive crap wrote to only run on recent expensive hardware targeted at game geeks, but game developers can make money on the masses too. Take the "casual games" market. They probably sell just as much as (if not more) than the "hardcore spend your entire paycheck to keep up" games.
Plenty of people have older computers and they don't see the point in constantly upgrading nor paying an absurd $60(us) per game. They would buy games as they buy movies and music, if only the game developers would pay attention to them.
If I bought a microwave and it did that, I would probably never buy from the manufacturer again. Maybe if they apoligized for making such a crappy product and it was shown they now don't make defective products anymore. Though even then, if it was the exact same product as another mfg with the same chance for defects and such, I would buy the other guy's product.
Your bar is too low. If you bought it as a charity case or because you want to help out local / new businesses I could understand, but putting up with defective products just because you are too lazy is idiotic. You have to be demanding or the manufacturers will keep putting out crap, and the crappier they are, the more it wastes your time and money in the long run. So if you are lazy, be lazy later rather than now.
The main problem isn't a bottleneck, but it does use up cpu cycles and pseudorandom isn't truely random. There will always be some sort of pattern because you are getting the values from an algorithm. The pattern may give equal true and false values. It may be hard to detect the pattern from the perspective of an outside observer, but the pattern will always be there. This doesn't mean pseudorandom numbers are worthless, it just means you need to know when to use them and when to use something else.
In cryptography, you really want a number any given attacker could not guess, doesn't really matter if it is random. PseudoRNGs have a very high risk an attacker may find a way to guess them. Just like buffer overflows can crack a program, new methods of analysis can crack a pseudorandom number. You can add hidden bits to try and confound an attacker, but this doesn't always work. There may be a pattern in your output, or weak numbers which an attacker can detect if you happen to accidently use them. It would seem to me the output of a noisy circuit would be more difficult to predict, especially if the attacker is halfway around the world.
I would also like to point out many systems run out of random numbers all the time. You can't always rely on variances in keystrokes and disk timing to produce seeds to your random numbers. Why else would there be a need for/dev/urandom in addition to/dev/random?
I don't understand why all PCs don't have hardware random number generators. IIRC, my Atari 130XE even had one. IBM made a mistake when they didn't start out with one in the spec. Or did the US government ask them to not do so? (Now that is a conspiracy theory!)
I believe most critics of the RIAA would be a little more sympathetic to their position if they were pursuing misdemeanor charges for stealing $0.99 songs.
Most critics of the RIAA probably wouldn't even be against file sharing lawsuits if the RIAA only went after actual copyright offenders. Instead they try to sue people who write communications ("P2P") software and spam the internet with bot produced (and often false) DMCA complaints, causing massive problems for just about anyone who wants to do anything on the internet.
Email is a "P2P" protocol, and I'm sure many people use it to infringe RIAA copyrights. Are they going to try and shut down anyone who runs an email server too? After all, most likely every ISP has had some RIAA music pass through their email servers, so by the RIAA's logic, they should be sued for "contributory infringement" and should be required to shut down those servers.
Who knows what technology we would have if the bastards at the RIAA had not harassed so many people. I doubt we would have to use crappy web forums like this. Parasitic behavior by commercial operations have really screwed the internet. Bad patents, spam, legal threats have all reduced it all into a useless cesspool (unless you have lots of money).
Granted, websites are cheap. Mine charges by the bandwidth and storage used, and I've used up only a dollar in the past several months it has been running. But, if it became popular or needed lots of bandwidth, I'd be paying through the nose. P2P allows users to share the cost instead of dumping it all on the publisher. There are also huge risks for lawsuits or threats of lawsuits to your hosting company (so they shut you down), even if you don't do anything wrong.
This is what the big media companies want. I think this is what they did to the radio spectrum. The internet may very well become controled by big media, and individuals will only be allowed to publish on big media sites or other places they can control, or space which big media doesn't care about (such as messages between individuals).
I see. Then it is not surprising the circuit designs only worked for the FPGA it was designed on. You are right, I'm sure most simulators would not be sophisticated enough to take such details into account.
Then again, if someone is doing this kind of work, they would probably need such a simulator to have any repeatable results for any sort of mass manufactured device...
They probably put in the if(1) lines because they were testing various aspects of the program, or maybe some like to turn off various aspects of the program, but don't want to be arsed to write the proper code to select options. I commonly do that in POVray (3d raytracing) scripts when testing, so I don't have to wait for long renders--fog, radiosity, lots of light and such take orders of magnitude more time.
As for the AI adding crap, it is probably more trying random code than truly thinking about how the code should work. This leads to the useful code intertwined with lots of crap code. Unfortunately, there are programmers who write like this too... (cue funny mod)
As for the code not working on other FPGAs, maybe the researcher should not use real chips to check the iterations. A simulated one which conforms to the spec exactly and upon where quirks and such are expected, dies or sends a signal back to the AI program. Testing after the fact on real chips to verify the AI didn't exploit bugs in the simulator would be more proper procedure.
Maybe I have too much of a background in theory, but I am not completely sure why the FPGAs would be so different. Is it race time conditions? Or is the FPGA being used in some analog way? Or does the circuit depend on the exact timing of some input, so the speed / capacitance of each component make a huge difference? Or was the poster talking about FPGAs with different specs?
Crazy things happen when you enter the real world. I remember back when I was in electronics assembly. One would first assume all the solder would wick onto the metal, but the boards would always have tonnes of solder bridges, and we had to carefully examine every component and correct them. Friggin' microprocessors had countless tiny legs too!
So you are saying other doctors would approve of your pharmaceutical whore doctor? You are saying medical review boards would approve of a doctor taking bribes from these companies when it would put his or her patients at risk? I don't think so.
Yet, in the IT field I am seeing plenty of "professionals" who think it is okay to take advantage of anyone who doesn't understand computers, to the point of selling the shoddiest crap I've ever seen. They've even indoctrinated most users into thinking computers are supposed to be quirky and strange.
Funny you should mention auto mechanics. In my original post, I was going to compare the IT field with scumbag auto mechanics.
It's taking advantage of people who don't have technical knowledge about the subject. I suppose the IT sector loves to do this, but in most fields it is frowned upon...at least in professional circles. What would you think if, say, a doctor did this?
Anyway, I am in the market for a cheap printer. What would be the best $50 laser printer for a Linux user? I've seen them around, but I am not sure which one to buy.
I have a better idea. Why shouldn't ISPs charge for outgoing usage? Or for excessive outgoing usage? They just need a way for users to check their usage and also send an email when usage spikes.
This way everyone pays for what they send (much like the postal service or long distance telephone), and if anyone gets a virus or trojan, they will be damn sure to fix it. Unfortunately, the ISPs would use this to screw over people just like cell phone companies do.
Maybe I haven't done enough work in the "enterprise", but wouldn't a script in a cron job be more appropriate here? Program it to check for a new.torrent file every day (or an appropriate frequency), and when new, start bittorent.
Off the top of my lame head, I can think of at least two easy ways to check for new torrents. The easiest would be to just download the previous torrent file, and cmp it with the old one.
The second would be to write a python script which keeps track of the etag or modification time of your.torrent update. It is easy, just read Chapter 11 of Dive into Python. Section 11.6 appears to have what you want.
Well, when you find a decent package manager, please tell me. Debian's seems to have constant massive problems with breaking dependencies to the point where installing some packages requires manually adding each dependency, if I can get them to install at all. Someone (maybe me) needs to write a decent package manager. And RedHat...well, that is made by redhat. Don't even get me started on them.
What is really crappy about the package manager situation: are they really needed that badly? If some project decides to use an obscure library, why don't they just include it with the package in the first place? Most of the time only the one (or two) project uses it. It made it so I could not install some of the Debian projects I wanted anyway, because even though the projects were on disc, they required huge deps from the internet. I am stuck on dialup, installing them would have taken forever.
In fact, MSwin doesn't have this problem because every program I've seen, they package all the required libraries with the program (except for the "standard" MS ones). I've seen a few projects written for Linux or Posix which do this, but not many. Most of them expect you to hunt down deps or have your package manager do this for you...assuming it works. Another problem with this way of packaging, what happens when one of your dep's web page disappears? (happens with older projects sometimes) Your project is useless to people unless they can find a copy of that dep.
All the package managing systems have huge problems. Slackware works best for me because I usually just install nearly everything from the first disk (don't use KDE / Gnome), and programs I download are usually source only anyway.
Realtime priority causes lockups if the program isn't written properly. Believe me, I've tried it out on several programs (the X server, mplayer, and others) with disastrous consequences.
What you probably want is the nice value. Giving the X server say -5 or -10 does seem to help a little. Then again, what you want is immediate response, which tuning the kernel's number of timer ticks per second (CONFIG_HZ) and turning on kernel preemption helps much more. I think both are new in kernel 2.6.x. This increases overhead and possibly risk unstability, but your perceived speed will increase.
With mplayer, back when I had the ticks per second at 100, I noticed frames would sometimes stall then skip through really fast for a split second. At higher speeds (300 or 1000) the problem disappeared.
I had the same problem as you. Living in my parents attic, it was so hot..even in winter. One day while playing doom, I had an idea: Use the chainsaw to free the heat. It took some blood and sweat, but I got the job done. Fly Mr. Heatie, fly!
Back on topic: With all these people trying to control the internet and the FCC auctioning off all the airwaves, I'm ready to become a freebander. Why not just create a radio networking card which uses the analog TV freqs the FCC took away....okay, that would be a bad idea, they'd probably just track us all down.
Then again, maybe playing with pringles cans and "legit" wireless networking, we can interface with our neighbors. Something has to work, or am I just a kook?
I think your idea for adding screenshots and such to repositories is a good idea, and not just for the less skilled users. More information can only be helpful, plus if a package maintainer or the developer bothered to create an icon and some screenshots, then it shows the program is worth effort.
Finding a good project which works and does what I need isn't always easy. I've seen plenty of cruft out there on freshmeat, and I think even some in my short try of Debian and Ubuntu's repository. I tried Synaptic, but it didn't seem too helpful except in certain situations. Mostly I tried to find out package names and use apt-get. Perhaps there are better package manager front ends, but my experience sucked. I am back on Slackware, though I may install an Ubuntu partition to chroot soon... (Some projects just require too many interdepen-dance-dancies!)
I would say Animal Crossing would work. It seems to be more for toddlers. It teaches very simple social skills, allows them to take care of their town and see the consumerist lifestyle in all its glory. (Really, half the game is buying expensive crap and selling it for a loss.) Okay, the last part isn't so great, but I think overall it would be good for a young gamer. Oh yeah, you can run around the town, so that alone may keep him satisfied.
As for the person who started this ask slashdot, I agree with the people who say use an old computer with a kid keyboard and mouse. I would also add put the computer and monitor in a locked, well ventilated cabinet.
You'll need glass so your kid can see the monitor, so use something safe (plexiglass?), not regular glass. At that age, you need safety, power doesn't matter. Even if the computer is slow, I doubt the kid will notice too much as he will be figuring out how to use it....then again, if it stalls for to long, he may get mad. Then you may need to take it away.
I don't know what this prodigy crap everyone is talking about. I think even 2 isn't too young to start. You may not notice them learning, but it may build concepts for them down the road...
Flamebait? I think one of the mods has been listening to clerics a bit too much.
I didn't know the term precious snowflake. I think that was started with the boomer generation. When I was a kid, there were lots of parents doing that at my school, and lots of teachers complaining about it.
Most of the people who graduated from my high school could barely read at a 3rd grade level. Now they've done the same thing with math. No wonder they no longer teach anything, too many people would complain!
Though it is also wrong teaching techniques. Whole word reading is for ancient Egyptian and Chinese. "Discovery Math" was supposed to be a logic program supplemental to a real math program, it was not designed to be a math program. In fact, when I heard about it ten years ago, I looked up the publisher's website, and they said exactly that.
I probably learned much more from programming books than from any schooling. It isn't Americans who can't be taught, it is the schooling system which does not teach. In fact, most teachers seem to think they are just babysitters.
More on topic, I played and watched plenty of violent video games and movies as a teenager. I had two psycho abusive parents. (One bipolar and one unknown because she won't get treatment for her condition--probably psychopathic personality disorder.) I've been thinking for a while, and I probably had HUS and my first stroke as a child because countless times they force fed me undercooked tainted meat (among other things) and wouldn't take me to a doctor when I was rolling on the floor in pain and vomiting. Yet I haven't killed anyone (but probably should have).
Not caring about others makes a person a psychopath, not video games, movies and such. People can play blame games, but censorship is not any answer. Parental and personal responsibility are the answer.
You have good points. I agree you shouldn't be prejudice against specific people because of something which may apply to a group, but I meant the Chinese government and Chinese companies.
All those problems are caused by either the action or inaction of those two entities. Granted, one shouldn't make blanket statements (not all Chinese companies are bad), but with such an environment, one cannot trust chinese products or chinese IP addresses.
At some point, you have to say boycott and block them all, which is what I am starting to do. I also read in a report (was it the one in this article?) the Chinese are using prison labor and trying to get around US import laws against such labor. The Chinese government also requires massive censorship (while hiding it), so I don't see why blocking chinese IPs will make things worse for them. Maybe they will then start to ask why they can't access anything outside of their country.
It also says something that the scumbags in the US who are attacking computers have to go through China. It says US ISPs/government are watching criminals, while Chinese ISPs/governemnt are not.
Electronics manufacturing is not done in the US? Then what is Wolf Electronix? Were the semiconductor facilities run by Intel and Philips just my imagination? Holy shit! I must be really fucked up to have hallucinated all that!
If that is true, then why have I received tons of scans from Chinese IP addresses? When I last looked at my firewall logs, most portscanning crap came from China, so I blocked a bunch of Chinese subnets.
What about the people injured or murdered by fake epogen and tainted food? Are the Chinese private sector and military out of control, or is this a deliberate effort?
Either way, this is a good reason for me to have an unfriendly attitude toward China. Maybe this is propaganda, but there must be some truth to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Except this is how the current generation of software companies make money. They take advantage of the ignorance of users, so anything which helps someone learn how to use computers properly cuts into their profit margins. They'd rather sell crappy utilities and "services" and more computers and such. This is how the entire computer marketplace is set up.
However, if you read the article closely at the end, both Verizon and the technical college were helpful...so maybe things are not really that bad, though it often seems that way.
First off, it only costs $1(us) at most to manufacture and ship a CD. Probably more like $0.50 or less, perhaps even $0.25. So they are likely making $11 to $11.75 for each CD after the physical costs of creating and moving them.
About marketing: it is a fixed cost which will be the same no matter how the song is distributed, so I don't see how it factors in. Are you saying putting a physical sign at the store is more expensive? I suppose this may be true, but is the cost significant?
As for not making as much on single song download sales vs. multi-song CDs. I imagine they are counting units, not dollars. Perhaps the number of individual songs purchased by download has increased, while the number of full size CD albums with 10 to 12 or more songs has decreased. Not to mention the fact, song for song, the $1 download is usually cheaper, since we are assuming $12 for the CDs[1], and those usually only have 10 to 12 songs. Doing the math (assuming a high $1 for mfg+ship) that is $0.91 to $1.10 per song. Add to that the fact most people don't want to buy every song on a CD, and this means all things being equal, music companies will make more money on average by selling CDs.
And obviously, I am assuming the download stores and physical CD stores both take out the same amount for their profit/costs. [1] Don't they usually charge $15 to $20 for newly released CDs?
This happens because most (if not all) don't even know what Boardmaker is or what it does.
However, if some of those special ed teachers got together and paid the money they would've spent on Boardmaker to hire some Russian programmers, then maybe there would be an open source version. Better yet, form a non-profit org which collects money from people who want to help autistic children.
Open Source is a do it yourself kind of thing. You can't just sit around and hope what you want comes around with what you want. You have to lobby for it. But once someone has done the work, it doesn't disappear. I've seen plenty of commercial software become useless because the company decides not to sell it anymore (new copies are not available) and it isn't maintained (won't work on any modern OS). With OSS, if there is any interest at all, someone will keep maintaining it one way or another.
You seem to think Apple, Microsoft and Unix were the only sources of Operating Systems in the 80s and 90s. They weren't. In the 80s, there was the Vic 20/Commodore 64 and the 8bit Ataris (400 to 130XE)...they didn't really have an OS (unless you count Basic), they were really more a hardware platform which programmers often had to hand code.
In the late 80s and early 90s, there was the Amiga, Atari ST, and OS/2. Perhaps others, I can't remember. I think that is also when DR DOS was out too. Late 90s, OS/2 was failing but there was also BeOS.
This may not be all of the consumer OSes, but they are the ones I remember, and they are certainly not limited to just Apple and Microsoft. All of them are completely gone. You have to ask why.
I could go into the reasons why people don't like Microsoft's tactics, but this has been hashed and rehashed on slashdot a thousand times. Wikipedia seems to have a good enough summary of criticisms. No need for me to repeat.
This is modded funny, but there is some insightful method to this madness. I've heard of plenty who have hired people for more idiotic reasons beyond even what they are wearing. (Yes, I get the sexual reference. Still dumb.)
Maybe what you said applies to expensive crap wrote to only run on recent expensive hardware targeted at game geeks, but game developers can make money on the masses too. Take the "casual games" market. They probably sell just as much as (if not more) than the "hardcore spend your entire paycheck to keep up" games.
Plenty of people have older computers and they don't see the point in constantly upgrading nor paying an absurd $60(us) per game. They would buy games as they buy movies and music, if only the game developers would pay attention to them.
If I bought a microwave and it did that, I would probably never buy from the manufacturer again. Maybe if they apoligized for making such a crappy product and it was shown they now don't make defective products anymore. Though even then, if it was the exact same product as another mfg with the same chance for defects and such, I would buy the other guy's product.
Your bar is too low. If you bought it as a charity case or because you want to help out local / new businesses I could understand, but putting up with defective products just because you are too lazy is idiotic. You have to be demanding or the manufacturers will keep putting out crap, and the crappier they are, the more it wastes your time and money in the long run. So if you are lazy, be lazy later rather than now.
The main problem isn't a bottleneck, but it does use up cpu cycles and pseudorandom isn't truely random. There will always be some sort of pattern because you are getting the values from an algorithm. The pattern may give equal true and false values. It may be hard to detect the pattern from the perspective of an outside observer, but the pattern will always be there. This doesn't mean pseudorandom numbers are worthless, it just means you need to know when to use them and when to use something else.
In cryptography, you really want a number any given attacker could not guess, doesn't really matter if it is random. PseudoRNGs have a very high risk an attacker may find a way to guess them. Just like buffer overflows can crack a program, new methods of analysis can crack a pseudorandom number. You can add hidden bits to try and confound an attacker, but this doesn't always work. There may be a pattern in your output, or weak numbers which an attacker can detect if you happen to accidently use them. It would seem to me the output of a noisy circuit would be more difficult to predict, especially if the attacker is halfway around the world.
I would also like to point out many systems run out of random numbers all the time. You can't always rely on variances in keystrokes and disk timing to produce seeds to your random numbers. Why else would there be a need for /dev/urandom in addition to /dev/random?
I don't understand why all PCs don't have hardware random number generators. IIRC, my Atari 130XE even had one. IBM made a mistake when they didn't start out with one in the spec. Or did the US government ask them to not do so? (Now that is a conspiracy theory!)
Most critics of the RIAA probably wouldn't even be against file sharing lawsuits if the RIAA only went after actual copyright offenders. Instead they try to sue people who write communications ("P2P") software and spam the internet with bot produced (and often false) DMCA complaints, causing massive problems for just about anyone who wants to do anything on the internet.
Email is a "P2P" protocol, and I'm sure many people use it to infringe RIAA copyrights. Are they going to try and shut down anyone who runs an email server too? After all, most likely every ISP has had some RIAA music pass through their email servers, so by the RIAA's logic, they should be sued for "contributory infringement" and should be required to shut down those servers.
Who knows what technology we would have if the bastards at the RIAA had not harassed so many people. I doubt we would have to use crappy web forums like this. Parasitic behavior by commercial operations have really screwed the internet. Bad patents, spam, legal threats have all reduced it all into a useless cesspool (unless you have lots of money).
Granted, websites are cheap. Mine charges by the bandwidth and storage used, and I've used up only a dollar in the past several months it has been running. But, if it became popular or needed lots of bandwidth, I'd be paying through the nose. P2P allows users to share the cost instead of dumping it all on the publisher. There are also huge risks for lawsuits or threats of lawsuits to your hosting company (so they shut you down), even if you don't do anything wrong.
This is what the big media companies want. I think this is what they did to the radio spectrum. The internet may very well become controled by big media, and individuals will only be allowed to publish on big media sites or other places they can control, or space which big media doesn't care about (such as messages between individuals).
I see. Then it is not surprising the circuit designs only worked for the FPGA it was designed on. You are right, I'm sure most simulators would not be sophisticated enough to take such details into account.
Then again, if someone is doing this kind of work, they would probably need such a simulator to have any repeatable results for any sort of mass manufactured device...
They probably put in the if(1) lines because they were testing various aspects of the program, or maybe some like to turn off various aspects of the program, but don't want to be arsed to write the proper code to select options. I commonly do that in POVray (3d raytracing) scripts when testing, so I don't have to wait for long renders--fog, radiosity, lots of light and such take orders of magnitude more time.
As for the AI adding crap, it is probably more trying random code than truly thinking about how the code should work. This leads to the useful code intertwined with lots of crap code. Unfortunately, there are programmers who write like this too... (cue funny mod)
As for the code not working on other FPGAs, maybe the researcher should not use real chips to check the iterations. A simulated one which conforms to the spec exactly and upon where quirks and such are expected, dies or sends a signal back to the AI program. Testing after the fact on real chips to verify the AI didn't exploit bugs in the simulator would be more proper procedure.
Maybe I have too much of a background in theory, but I am not completely sure why the FPGAs would be so different. Is it race time conditions? Or is the FPGA being used in some analog way? Or does the circuit depend on the exact timing of some input, so the speed / capacitance of each component make a huge difference? Or was the poster talking about FPGAs with different specs?
Crazy things happen when you enter the real world. I remember back when I was in electronics assembly. One would first assume all the solder would wick onto the metal, but the boards would always have tonnes of solder bridges, and we had to carefully examine every component and correct them. Friggin' microprocessors had countless tiny legs too!
So you are saying other doctors would approve of your pharmaceutical whore doctor? You are saying medical review boards would approve of a doctor taking bribes from these companies when it would put his or her patients at risk? I don't think so.
Yet, in the IT field I am seeing plenty of "professionals" who think it is okay to take advantage of anyone who doesn't understand computers, to the point of selling the shoddiest crap I've ever seen. They've even indoctrinated most users into thinking computers are supposed to be quirky and strange.
Funny you should mention auto mechanics. In my original post, I was going to compare the IT field with scumbag auto mechanics.
It's taking advantage of people who don't have technical knowledge about the subject. I suppose the IT sector loves to do this, but in most fields it is frowned upon...at least in professional circles. What would you think if, say, a doctor did this?
Anyway, I am in the market for a cheap printer. What would be the best $50 laser printer for a Linux user? I've seen them around, but I am not sure which one to buy.
I have a better idea. Why shouldn't ISPs charge for outgoing usage? Or for excessive outgoing usage? They just need a way for users to check their usage and also send an email when usage spikes.
This way everyone pays for what they send (much like the postal service or long distance telephone), and if anyone gets a virus or trojan, they will be damn sure to fix it. Unfortunately, the ISPs would use this to screw over people just like cell phone companies do.
Maybe I haven't done enough work in the "enterprise", but wouldn't a script in a cron job be more appropriate here? Program it to check for a new .torrent file every day (or an appropriate frequency), and when new, start bittorent.
Off the top of my lame head, I can think of at least two easy ways to check for new torrents. The easiest would be to just download the previous torrent file, and cmp it with the old one.
The second would be to write a python script which keeps track of the etag or modification time of your .torrent update. It is easy, just read Chapter 11 of Dive into Python. Section 11.6 appears to have what you want.
Well, when you find a decent package manager, please tell me. Debian's seems to have constant massive problems with breaking dependencies to the point where installing some packages requires manually adding each dependency, if I can get them to install at all. Someone (maybe me) needs to write a decent package manager. And RedHat...well, that is made by redhat. Don't even get me started on them.
What is really crappy about the package manager situation: are they really needed that badly? If some project decides to use an obscure library, why don't they just include it with the package in the first place? Most of the time only the one (or two) project uses it. It made it so I could not install some of the Debian projects I wanted anyway, because even though the projects were on disc, they required huge deps from the internet. I am stuck on dialup, installing them would have taken forever.
In fact, MSwin doesn't have this problem because every program I've seen, they package all the required libraries with the program (except for the "standard" MS ones). I've seen a few projects written for Linux or Posix which do this, but not many. Most of them expect you to hunt down deps or have your package manager do this for you...assuming it works. Another problem with this way of packaging, what happens when one of your dep's web page disappears? (happens with older projects sometimes) Your project is useless to people unless they can find a copy of that dep.
All the package managing systems have huge problems. Slackware works best for me because I usually just install nearly everything from the first disk (don't use KDE / Gnome), and programs I download are usually source only anyway.
Realtime priority causes lockups if the program isn't written properly. Believe me, I've tried it out on several programs (the X server, mplayer, and others) with disastrous consequences.
What you probably want is the nice value. Giving the X server say -5 or -10 does seem to help a little. Then again, what you want is immediate response, which tuning the kernel's number of timer ticks per second (CONFIG_HZ) and turning on kernel preemption helps much more. I think both are new in kernel 2.6.x. This increases overhead and possibly risk unstability, but your perceived speed will increase.
With mplayer, back when I had the ticks per second at 100, I noticed frames would sometimes stall then skip through really fast for a split second. At higher speeds (300 or 1000) the problem disappeared.
You may be interested in: Which is better -- the preempt patch, or the low-latency patch? Both! .... Feature: Robert Love Explains Variable HZ
I had the same problem as you. Living in my parents attic, it was so hot..even in winter. One day while playing doom, I had an idea: Use the chainsaw to free the heat. It took some blood and sweat, but I got the job done. Fly Mr. Heatie, fly!
Back on topic: With all these people trying to control the internet and the FCC auctioning off all the airwaves, I'm ready to become a freebander. Why not just create a radio networking card which uses the analog TV freqs the FCC took away. ...okay, that would be a bad idea, they'd probably just track us all down.
Then again, maybe playing with pringles cans and "legit" wireless networking, we can interface with our neighbors. Something has to work, or am I just a kook?
I think your idea for adding screenshots and such to repositories is a good idea, and not just for the less skilled users. More information can only be helpful, plus if a package maintainer or the developer bothered to create an icon and some screenshots, then it shows the program is worth effort.
Finding a good project which works and does what I need isn't always easy. I've seen plenty of cruft out there on freshmeat, and I think even some in my short try of Debian and Ubuntu's repository. I tried Synaptic, but it didn't seem too helpful except in certain situations. Mostly I tried to find out package names and use apt-get. Perhaps there are better package manager front ends, but my experience sucked. I am back on Slackware, though I may install an Ubuntu partition to chroot soon... (Some projects just require too many interdepen-dance-dancies!)
I would say Animal Crossing would work. It seems to be more for toddlers. It teaches very simple social skills, allows them to take care of their town and see the consumerist lifestyle in all its glory. (Really, half the game is buying expensive crap and selling it for a loss.) Okay, the last part isn't so great, but I think overall it would be good for a young gamer. Oh yeah, you can run around the town, so that alone may keep him satisfied.
As for the person who started this ask slashdot, I agree with the people who say use an old computer with a kid keyboard and mouse. I would also add put the computer and monitor in a locked, well ventilated cabinet.
You'll need glass so your kid can see the monitor, so use something safe (plexiglass?), not regular glass. At that age, you need safety, power doesn't matter. Even if the computer is slow, I doubt the kid will notice too much as he will be figuring out how to use it. ...then again, if it stalls for to long, he may get mad. Then you may need to take it away.
I don't know what this prodigy crap everyone is talking about. I think even 2 isn't too young to start. You may not notice them learning, but it may build concepts for them down the road...
Flamebait? I think one of the mods has been listening to clerics a bit too much.
I didn't know the term precious snowflake. I think that was started with the boomer generation. When I was a kid, there were lots of parents doing that at my school, and lots of teachers complaining about it.
Most of the people who graduated from my high school could barely read at a 3rd grade level. Now they've done the same thing with math. No wonder they no longer teach anything, too many people would complain!
Though it is also wrong teaching techniques. Whole word reading is for ancient Egyptian and Chinese. "Discovery Math" was supposed to be a logic program supplemental to a real math program, it was not designed to be a math program. In fact, when I heard about it ten years ago, I looked up the publisher's website, and they said exactly that.
I probably learned much more from programming books than from any schooling. It isn't Americans who can't be taught, it is the schooling system which does not teach. In fact, most teachers seem to think they are just babysitters.
More on topic, I played and watched plenty of violent video games and movies as a teenager. I had two psycho abusive parents. (One bipolar and one unknown because she won't get treatment for her condition--probably psychopathic personality disorder.) I've been thinking for a while, and I probably had HUS and my first stroke as a child because countless times they force fed me undercooked tainted meat (among other things) and wouldn't take me to a doctor when I was rolling on the floor in pain and vomiting. Yet I haven't killed anyone (but probably should have).
Not caring about others makes a person a psychopath, not video games, movies and such. People can play blame games, but censorship is not any answer. Parental and personal responsibility are the answer.
You have good points. I agree you shouldn't be prejudice against specific people because of something which may apply to a group, but I meant the Chinese government and Chinese companies.
All those problems are caused by either the action or inaction of those two entities. Granted, one shouldn't make blanket statements (not all Chinese companies are bad), but with such an environment, one cannot trust chinese products or chinese IP addresses.
At some point, you have to say boycott and block them all, which is what I am starting to do. I also read in a report (was it the one in this article?) the Chinese are using prison labor and trying to get around US import laws against such labor. The Chinese government also requires massive censorship (while hiding it), so I don't see why blocking chinese IPs will make things worse for them. Maybe they will then start to ask why they can't access anything outside of their country.
It also says something that the scumbags in the US who are attacking computers have to go through China. It says US ISPs/government are watching criminals, while Chinese ISPs/governemnt are not.
Electronics manufacturing is not done in the US? Then what is Wolf Electronix? Were the semiconductor facilities run by Intel and Philips just my imagination? Holy shit! I must be really fucked up to have hallucinated all that!
If that is true, then why have I received tons of scans from Chinese IP addresses? When I last looked at my firewall logs, most portscanning crap came from China, so I blocked a bunch of Chinese subnets.
What about the people injured or murdered by fake epogen and tainted food? Are the Chinese private sector and military out of control, or is this a deliberate effort?
Either way, this is a good reason for me to have an unfriendly attitude toward China. Maybe this is propaganda, but there must be some truth to it.
This sounds like a good plan! Have it implemented ASAP!
Some people actually do this thing called "work." They don't have time to waste on a low level idiot who doesn't know anything.
Nor do they have time to waste on NDAs when they are not needed. It pays to be paranoid, but being too paranoid wastes time and money.