I wasn't aware that India was my enemy, nor that multinational corporations are obliged to only hire Americans, or that the Internet's sole function is to produce jobs. Look at all the amazing things I can learn, just by reading slashdot!
I would like to see a mmorpg that takes place in a real ecology, where trees can be planted or cut down, animals can flourish or die out depending on how much they have to eat, etc... Perhaps the players could be dependent on the land for food, water, and shelter.
The downside, though, is that the world would have to have a stable ecology, and be big enough that players can't kill off whole species or otherwise destabilize the system.
However an assembly as large as the space station and typical for the requirement, loses over a mile of altitude a day in earth orbit and will burn up in the atmosphere within 1 year of ceasing to re-adjust its orbit higher.
This isn't something one could easily acquire or build, but I recently saw a demo of an 8-bit relay computer built by one of the professors at my school. It is constructed from 415 relays (electrically actuated mechanical switches) wired together, and is capable of addition, and, or, xor, not, conditional jumps, shift left and a few other misclaneous instructions I can't recall.
I will use the drivers that work, regardless of license.
My experience with Nvidia in this regard has not been great. About half of the time, the drivers install and work perfectly, but sometimes they don't, and it takes a lot of work to try and figure out why. My current setup (amd64 and geforce fx6200TC) required me to apply a patch to the nvidia driver, then installed the files in the wrong place (there is a workaround for that that I wasn't aware of at the time), and now I have a setup that works fine as long as I don't use the Gliedescope or AntSpotlight xscreensavers (in which case the machine locks up hard, often with a message "BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0!" followed by a stacktrace that implicates the nvidia driver as the cause. (for the curious, a more detailed post on fedora forum is here)
I wish the open-source drivers were at least more stable and useable, but they seem to have a tendency display random garbage on the screen from time to time. (I've seen this on three different computers with different Nvidia cards, so I doubt this is a rare occurance.)
I haven't tried ATI, but perhaps I will next time. How are the drivers in that camp these days?
I will use the drivers that work, regardless of license.
My experience with Nvidia in this regard has not been great. About half of the time, the drivers install and work perfectly, but sometimes they don't, and it takes a lot of work to try and figure out why. My current setup (amd64 and geforce fx6200TC) required me to apply a patch to the nvidia driver, then installed the files in the wrong place (there is a workaround for that that I wasn't aware of at the time), and now I have a setup that works fine as long as I don't use the Gliedescope or AntSpotlight xscreensavers (in which case the machine locks up hard, often with a message "BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0!" followed by a stacktrace that implicates the nvidia driver as the cause. (for the curious, a more detailed post on fedora forum is here)
I wish the open-source drivers were at least more stable and useable, but they seem to have a tendency display random garbage on the screen from time to time. (I've seen this on three different computers with different Nvidia cards, so I doubt this is a rare occurance.)
On further inspection, it probably wouldn't be wise to mix a 6MHz channel to a center frequency of 100KHz. Let's say you mix it to 10MHz instead =)
Yes, you may have some difficulty finding sufficient bandwidth at 100Khz to fit a 6Mhz channel. What you originally said is correct, that throughput is proportional to SNR * bandwidth. However, there is less bandwidth available at lower frequencies.
Wimax is for city-sized networks. I wouldn't expect this new technology to work well over long distances or in bad weather; one of the articles indicated they were using milimeter-wavelength frequencies, which puts it somewhere around 100Ghz, which is stopped by water vapor. Wimax uses much lower frequencies (with correspondingly lower data throughput) that can (to some limited extend) go around corners and penetrate fog and rain.
This sounds like free space optics, which in bad weather is only reliable over short distances. This could very well be interesting technology, but my enthusiasm will remain subdued until I hear how well it performs through, say, several hundred meters of thick fog.
I create a bar chart (showing time to completion for various benchmarks) from a spreadsheet. So far so good. Next I consider: gee, it would sure be great if each bar was labeled with its value. For instance, if a bar has the value 86.51, it should have the text "86.51" floating somewhere in its vicinity. Unfortunately, no option to enable such behavior (which seems as though it would be the expected behavior for most users) seems to exist, so I resort to inserting text over the chart.
I think I'll stick with gnuplot or similar in the future.
Most wireless cards are about 35 milliwatts. Cell phones usually on a somewhat nearby frequency and, I believe, somewhere between 200-600 milliwatts (someone please correct me if that's wrong) and right next to your head. (As others have pointed out that radio follows the inverse square law, not inverse cube.) Also, the duty cycle is probably less for most wireless applications; if you're just surfing the net, the connection is idle most of the time, and is therefore the wireless card is not transmitting. Therefore, this is indeed silly to worry about if one is going to ignore cell phones.
For the curious, the actual fcc guidelines on permissible RF exposure are here. They seem to be saying that at 2.4 Ghz it's OK to subject a random bystander to 1 milliwatt per square centimeter averaged over 30 minutes, or to subject yourself to 5mW/cm^2 averaged over 6 minutes.
This doesn't seem like such a hard problem, though it would probably entail some interface modifications. I could imagine a drop-down list of characteristics that a page might have (accuracy, neutrality, clarity, writing quality, relevance), and then, say, another drop-down with a 1-5 rating.
Most of the "rating" systems online don't measure quality; they measure popularity.
The average rating for a particular characteristic should be a good indicator of quality, whereas the absolute number of ratings could indicate popularity. (Alternatively, popularity could be determined from frequency of accesses to that page, or by running the pagerank algorithm (assuming Stanford's pagerank patent isn't a hinderance) on the whole wiki.)
Ratings should probably expire after awhile (but only if the page has been edited since the rating was issued), so that the rating is more likely to reflect the current state of the article, rather than some prior state.
You always get five stars on some popular topic that gets a lot of attention anyway, while marginal topics don't.
This is probably what we want to happen, in the case where popularity results in quality. Ratings should draw attention to the low quality of articles on topics that don't attract enough attention.
If you don't believe the Bible is 100% literally true, then how do you know what parts to believe and not believe?
It is sometimes useful to consider how the text got from its original form to us today. For instance, consider Genesis. Its authorship is usually attributed to Moses, and it may have been direct revelation from God, but more likely was a story passed down orally from generation to generation from earlier times that we know little about. We have no way of knowing where the story of creation originated, but it couldn't have been from a direct human witness, as it records events that predate humans.
The Gospels, on the other hand, were written much more recently, and record events that could have been witnessed by many people, and were written not long after the events they describe, and the gospels were written from multiple points of view (John being a first-hand accont, and the other three were probably based off of some intermediate account that is now lost, or perhaps never written down). We also know a lot about the state of the world at the time of Christ, and the time between then and now (at least, a lot more than we know about the early history of Isreal).
In other words, we can better account for the origins of the Gospels, so I consider them to have a higher probability of being true than the events in Genesis. This is perhaps not a very satisfactory answer to either a skeptic or some devout Christians, but is one way of looking at the problem. Another way is to consider that the events in Genesis, while important, are not as critical to core Christian theology as the Gospels, and so it really doesn't matter as much if it is right or wrong.
And just what metal do you think coax cables are made from, hrm?
I wasn't trying to imply that coax was not made of copper, though I can see how it may appear that I was. I am sorry for the confusion, I was merely trying to indicate the conditions under which copper might work. At any rate, I don't think connecting servers together with, say, garden-hose sized LMR-600 cables and nics with N-connectors instead of RJ-45 jacks is going to be the wave of the future, though it is amusing to contemplate. (Does anyone know how the bandwidth and/or Shannon limit for various types of coax compares to that of twisted pair?)
I would guess they would use fiber, since copper just doesn't have that much data capacity (maybe with coax it could be done, but at any rate it would likely require expensive cabling and only work for short distances). Fiber is much better for this sort of thing.
A more interesting question is whether to use singlemode or multimode fiber, if they go that route. Most "normal" lan hardware uses multimode, which in general is good for connections of tens of gigabits over distances of 2km or less. Singlemode fiber, on the other hand, can be used over much longer distances (100km between repeaters, multiple terabits are possible over a single pair using DWDM; SM fiber is commonly used by the telecommunication industry for long-range communication). Singlemode fiber is about equally expensive with multimode, but a little bit more difficult to terminate. The endpoint hardware, though, is more expensive for singlemode (they use lasers instead of leds, I believe) for equivalent speeds, so despite having ~100 times the capacity and ~50 times the range, singlemode is rarely used for links that don't need it.
if you assume that the mod was left in so that it could be found and activated later, you could argue that the ESRB just doesn't have enough teeth to scare developers into revealing everything in their games. (This isn't an uncommon belief, so it can't just be ignored when factoring credibilty over a large group) No teeth = no credibility
I suppose someone has to be the first to test if the ESRB really does have teeth. Rockstar got a lot of bad publicity over this and had their rating revoked, which to me indicates that the system really does work (at least in this instance).
Actually, perhaps this wouldn't be such a bad idea with a bit of modification. Rather than saying "this edit is patrolled", perhaps it should say: "this edit has been approved by users u1, u2,... and uN)" where u1...uN are usernames. Thus an edit approved by someone who is a frequent contributor to an article is distinguishable (to an attentive editor) from an edit approved by a puppet account.
Once the Hot Coffee content was discovered, the ESRB immediately launched an investigation, Vance explained. Concluding that the "bonus" content was a Rockstar creation, the ESRB revoked GTA: San Andreas' rating and demanded that Take-Two correct the content. "We acted swiftly, and decisively to fix the situation and make sure that consumers had correct ratings information once this non-playable content was unlocked," said Vance.
The performance garnered the praise of Senator Clinton for "its quick and thorough investigation" and of Senator Lieberman for its demand for immediate corrective action, but it could not redeem the ESRB's damaged credibility.
How is the ESRB's credibility damaged? They were presented with a fraudulent representation of a game's content, and then they revoked the rating when that became apparent. It seems to me that the system is working as well as anyone can reasonably expect it to, under the circumstances.
The page you link is unclear as to what it means for an edit to be "patrolled". As far as I can tell from the description, "patrolled" is just a tag applied to an edit to mean "this edit has been looked at and approved by someone". If that is the case (I suspect it isn't and that I'm misunderstanding something), then what is to stop a vandalizer from editing a page, and then marking it as patrolled by another account?
Given that Wikipedia articles vary wildly in terms of quality, it seems that it would be useful to present the user with some form of quality metric at the top of each article. This metric could be generated in quite a few ways: number of unique contributors to an article, number of pageviews since the last edit, pagerank of the article within the link structure of wikipedia, or an explicit rating system could be added on (perhaps a "rate this article" and/or a "rate a random article" interface). Is this something that might some day be implemented in MediaWiki, or is this something that many people are likely to be philosophically opposed to?
After speaking with a few heavy Wikipedia contributors at RecentChanges, I got the impression that many editors burn out because they get no recognition or thanks when they do things right, but people complain and argue when they do something they percieve as wrong. Do you think MediaWiki should add some explicit method of indicating agreement with edits or trust of other editors, to give users a simple way of acknowledging an editor's contributions? This could be as simple as an "I agree with this edit" link next to each edit in the page history, and a tally for each user of the number of edits other users have approved. (An "I disagree with this edit" link could be useful as well, for other reasons...)
You can get 11 watt (equivalent to 60 watt incandescent) ones pretty cheap ($1/bulb in a 3-pack, I think) at Ikea.
I have a bunch of those. They also have the nice property that they come on immediately like an incandescent, instead of the noticeable delay that many flourescents have.
Also, the NSA are allowed under FISA to get a warrant after the fact (within 72 hours). How can AT&T possibly be responsible for knowing if the NSA will get a warrant later (assuming that it's AT&T's job to make sure the NSA is following proper procedures)?
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't aware that India was my enemy, nor that multinational corporations are obliged to only hire Americans, or that the Internet's sole function is to produce jobs. Look at all the amazing things I can learn, just by reading slashdot!
I would like to see a mmorpg that takes place in a real ecology, where trees can be planted or cut down, animals can flourish or die out depending on how much they have to eat, etc... Perhaps the players could be dependent on the land for food, water, and shelter.
The downside, though, is that the world would have to have a stable ecology, and be big enough that players can't kill off whole species or otherwise destabilize the system.
Talk of the nation, may 26
This isn't something one could easily acquire or build, but I recently saw a demo of an 8-bit relay computer built by one of the professors at my school. It is constructed from 415 relays (electrically actuated mechanical switches) wired together, and is capable of addition, and, or, xor, not, conditional jumps, shift left and a few other misclaneous instructions I can't recall.
My experience with Nvidia in this regard has not been great. About half of the time, the drivers install and work perfectly, but sometimes they don't, and it takes a lot of work to try and figure out why. My current setup (amd64 and geforce fx6200TC) required me to apply a patch to the nvidia driver, then installed the files in the wrong place (there is a workaround for that that I wasn't aware of at the time), and now I have a setup that works fine as long as I don't use the Gliedescope or AntSpotlight xscreensavers (in which case the machine locks up hard, often with a message "BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0!" followed by a stacktrace that implicates the nvidia driver as the cause. (for the curious, a more detailed post on fedora forum is here)
I wish the open-source drivers were at least more stable and useable, but they seem to have a tendency display random garbage on the screen from time to time. (I've seen this on three different computers with different Nvidia cards, so I doubt this is a rare occurance.)
I haven't tried ATI, but perhaps I will next time. How are the drivers in that camp these days?
My experience with Nvidia in this regard has not been great. About half of the time, the drivers install and work perfectly, but sometimes they don't, and it takes a lot of work to try and figure out why. My current setup (amd64 and geforce fx6200TC) required me to apply a patch to the nvidia driver, then installed the files in the wrong place (there is a workaround for that that I wasn't aware of at the time), and now I have a setup that works fine as long as I don't use the Gliedescope or AntSpotlight xscreensavers (in which case the machine locks up hard, often with a message "BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0!" followed by a stacktrace that implicates the nvidia driver as the cause. (for the curious, a more detailed post on fedora forum is here)
I wish the open-source drivers were at least more stable and useable, but they seem to have a tendency display random garbage on the screen from time to time. (I've seen this on three different computers with different Nvidia cards, so I doubt this is a rare occurance.)
Wimax is for city-sized networks. I wouldn't expect this new technology to work well over long distances or in bad weather; one of the articles indicated they were using milimeter-wavelength frequencies, which puts it somewhere around 100Ghz, which is stopped by water vapor. Wimax uses much lower frequencies (with correspondingly lower data throughput) that can (to some limited extend) go around corners and penetrate fog and rain.
This sounds like free space optics, which in bad weather is only reliable over short distances. This could very well be interesting technology, but my enthusiasm will remain subdued until I hear how well it performs through, say, several hundred meters of thick fog.
I create a bar chart (showing time to completion for various benchmarks) from a spreadsheet. So far so good. Next I consider: gee, it would sure be great if each bar was labeled with its value. For instance, if a bar has the value 86.51, it should have the text "86.51" floating somewhere in its vicinity. Unfortunately, no option to enable such behavior (which seems as though it would be the expected behavior for most users) seems to exist, so I resort to inserting text over the chart.
I think I'll stick with gnuplot or similar in the future.
The article makes no mention of congestion avoidance. Does SCTP use AIMD like TCP? Is it TCP-friendly?
For the curious, the actual fcc guidelines on permissible RF exposure are here. They seem to be saying that at 2.4 Ghz it's OK to subject a random bystander to 1 milliwatt per square centimeter averaged over 30 minutes, or to subject yourself to 5mW/cm^2 averaged over 6 minutes.
Ratings should probably expire after awhile (but only if the page has been edited since the rating was issued), so that the rating is more likely to reflect the current state of the article, rather than some prior state.
This is probably what we want to happen, in the case where popularity results in quality. Ratings should draw attention to the low quality of articles on topics that don't attract enough attention.It is sometimes useful to consider how the text got from its original form to us today. For instance, consider Genesis. Its authorship is usually attributed to Moses, and it may have been direct revelation from God, but more likely was a story passed down orally from generation to generation from earlier times that we know little about. We have no way of knowing where the story of creation originated, but it couldn't have been from a direct human witness, as it records events that predate humans.
The Gospels, on the other hand, were written much more recently, and record events that could have been witnessed by many people, and were written not long after the events they describe, and the gospels were written from multiple points of view (John being a first-hand accont, and the other three were probably based off of some intermediate account that is now lost, or perhaps never written down). We also know a lot about the state of the world at the time of Christ, and the time between then and now (at least, a lot more than we know about the early history of Isreal).
In other words, we can better account for the origins of the Gospels, so I consider them to have a higher probability of being true than the events in Genesis. This is perhaps not a very satisfactory answer to either a skeptic or some devout Christians, but is one way of looking at the problem. Another way is to consider that the events in Genesis, while important, are not as critical to core Christian theology as the Gospels, and so it really doesn't matter as much if it is right or wrong.
A more interesting question is whether to use singlemode or multimode fiber, if they go that route. Most "normal" lan hardware uses multimode, which in general is good for connections of tens of gigabits over distances of 2km or less. Singlemode fiber, on the other hand, can be used over much longer distances (100km between repeaters, multiple terabits are possible over a single pair using DWDM; SM fiber is commonly used by the telecommunication industry for long-range communication). Singlemode fiber is about equally expensive with multimode, but a little bit more difficult to terminate. The endpoint hardware, though, is more expensive for singlemode (they use lasers instead of leds, I believe) for equivalent speeds, so despite having ~100 times the capacity and ~50 times the range, singlemode is rarely used for links that don't need it.
Actually, perhaps this wouldn't be such a bad idea with a bit of modification. Rather than saying "this edit is patrolled", perhaps it should say: "this edit has been approved by users u1, u2, ... and uN)" where u1...uN are usernames. Thus an edit approved by someone who is a frequent contributor to an article is distinguishable (to an attentive editor) from an edit approved by a puppet account.
How is the ESRB's credibility damaged? They were presented with a fraudulent representation of a game's content, and then they revoked the rating when that became apparent. It seems to me that the system is working as well as anyone can reasonably expect it to, under the circumstances.
The page you link is unclear as to what it means for an edit to be "patrolled". As far as I can tell from the description, "patrolled" is just a tag applied to an edit to mean "this edit has been looked at and approved by someone". If that is the case (I suspect it isn't and that I'm misunderstanding something), then what is to stop a vandalizer from editing a page, and then marking it as patrolled by another account?
Given that Wikipedia articles vary wildly in terms of quality, it seems that it would be useful to present the user with some form of quality metric at the top of each article. This metric could be generated in quite a few ways: number of unique contributors to an article, number of pageviews since the last edit, pagerank of the article within the link structure of wikipedia, or an explicit rating system could be added on (perhaps a "rate this article" and/or a "rate a random article" interface). Is this something that might some day be implemented in MediaWiki, or is this something that many people are likely to be philosophically opposed to?
After speaking with a few heavy Wikipedia contributors at RecentChanges, I got the impression that many editors burn out because they get no recognition or thanks when they do things right, but people complain and argue when they do something they percieve as wrong. Do you think MediaWiki should add some explicit method of indicating agreement with edits or trust of other editors, to give users a simple way of acknowledging an editor's contributions? This could be as simple as an "I agree with this edit" link next to each edit in the page history, and a tally for each user of the number of edits other users have approved. (An "I disagree with this edit" link could be useful as well, for other reasons...)