IIRC from a numerical math course, 1/sqrt(x) is also used to calculate sqrt(x), by multiplying with x or taking the inverse, because its calculation is easier than that of sqrt(x) itself.
The plural of Lego is Lego NOT Legos! I'm getting fed up with every slashdot article on Lego getting this wrong, and a huge portion of the debate being about the pluralisation not the story.
Finally, there is nothing magical about making 100 Ohm UTP cable. It's been around for dozens of years and is the most common specification. It is certainly MUCH SUPERIOR FOR CARRYING DIGITAL SIGNALS compared to coaxial cable, which attenuates and degrades the digital waveforms over distance due to its inherent capacitance characteristics.
This is just bullshit. There is NO relation between the cable impedance and the attenuation (*). The attenuation will be determined by the conductivity of the wires and the dielectric in between. Coax cable with air dielectric will likely outperform twisted pair, though I am too lazy to look up the figures. This "capatitance characteristics" is also BS. Coax can easily be made to work upto tens of GHz. What's the cutoff of utp Cat7? 600MHz?
Besides, coax will theoretically not radiate any signal while twisted pair will, although this is limited due to the twisting. Coax is therefor WAY superior.
(*) I know losses will lead to a small reactive component but this is not really important here.
Digital either works or it doesn't. A five dollar hdmi cable will work as good as the fifty dollar hdmi cable. Monster may help on analog audio, but doesn't do jack for digital.
This is a myth.
Not so. I once wanted to change the connectors on a (bad) coax cable. It turned out not to be shielded at all, but just had an 'outer' single wire instead of a braid. If your cables are leaking/capturing external noise, if the cable's impedance is not matched and hence leads to reflections, digital transmission will be degraded too. Maybe enough, maybe not enough. So yes, digital 'works' or 'not works', but using bad cables may lead to not working.
To make matters worse, cars on many of the smallest side streets still qualify for priority over those on major thoroughfares -- so long as they are coming from the right. That forces drivers on many boulevards to slam on their brakes without warning, and some get rear-ended as a result.
I call bullshit. The number of roadsigns in Belgium is *far* from low. A crossroad between a minor road and a rather importanty one is nearly always governed by a 'give way' sign and a 'priority' sign. On the contrary: we (I am Belgian) are planning to *reduce* the number of trafficsigns because on some places it is absurdly high!
As for losing your right of way when stopping: indeed, when you come from a priority road and are foolish enough to stop (i.e. wheels no longer turning) for a minor road to give way to one not entitled to it (creating a dangerous situation, btw), you lose your right of way. Most people know this and while they may slow down (which is not the same) they won't stop. At a crossroad _not_ gouverned by priorities, priority from the right counts, and many times this is even indicated by a sign (!!!) to indicate this. This sign is in fact unneeded, and just there to remind people that may think they are on a priority road.
Lots of things are poorly arranged around here. Imho a lack of stop signs is not one of them.
Why should anyone be able to ruin your finances by just knowing some numbers?
Because otherwise you would not be able to use all these nifty on-line things, and would need to go to the bank everytime you wanted to transfer money. The problem is not in the use of numbers, but in recklessness.
Why does it need to move to look around? This makes it a bit more humanoid and opens up the possibility for James Bond to sneak past when it is not watching, but wouldn't it be easier to have multiple fixed cameras to cover all directions? This would also eliminate the need to filter out the robot's own movement and make detection of moving objects easier.
Secondly, you can make a point without being demeaning and assuming anything about my age.
Indeed. He could only judge you based upon your apparent age as reflected by your post. In case you are old enough to have had the opportunity to grow up and learn some manners -but apparently didn't- well all the worse I would say.
Bear in mind that you imply that e.g. Einstein and many others were idiots. Not "of another opinion than yours", but idiots.
As for the first one, I don't know (Latin has this kind of property), but I'm quite surprised you could split up "New York"
They probably wouldn't do this becaus it is a name (novo Eboraco, btw), but in general adjectives can be separated from the word they refer to, to add some stress.
If you compress a single track of a song into an mp3 (or ogg or whatever) does it compress better than compressing multiple tracks mixed together? It's my understanding that the first step of compressing a wav to mp3 is to seperate out all the sound tracks. This being an imprecise process, wouldn't you get better results if the sound tracks were already seperated?
1) Normally the individual 'tracks' talked about here are the different instruments/singing voices. These are not normally available separately, unless at the reconding studio (and maybe now for this Peter Gabriel thing). There would be no gain in compressing together because they are completely different.
2) The 'coding tracks together and gain'-thing holds for stereo tracks. The left and right channel are very similar. Forthis reason FM radio transmits a L+R signal (so you can receive it on a mono radio) and also a L-R signal, which is also demodulated by a stereo radio. From these two you can obtain L and R separately. An MP3 encoder therefore offers the possibility to either code L and R separately, or code L+R and L-R separately. Because L and R are likely to be similar, the L-R signal doesn't contain a lot of information and can therefore be compressed more easily.
3) MP3 compression itself exists of two steps (explained by others here), being:
- perceptual coding (i.e. separating the sound into different frequency bands and throwing away information you won't hear because your ears are overpowered by the rest).
- a lossless coding step of the information left after the above step (similar to.zip etc).
You raise a good point here. Probably the situation is ok, but there's no sense in being naive, something that especially people on/. should be aware of. On the other hand I can imagine Wilson would lose some dignity in displaying his poor financial situation to a 'harsh mecaenas' who wants to see some evidence.
A possible elegant solution would be to organise conferences/invited talks where Mr Wilson could come to, and (over)pay him to do so. For his fans this would be an extra incentive to support him, the moneyflow would be more transparent _without_ need for proof and Wilson would not be embarassed for being a beggar.
If you really appreciate Mr. Wilson and if you have any influence, organise something he could still do and be proud of.
There's no such thing as an 'internet addiction'. I've searched on the Wikipedia, Google, seriouspathology.gov, addiction.net and kinkymovies.com for ten hours straight - non of them have ever heard of it.
I always warn people I know who are vacationing in Europe -- avoid Belgium. Who knows what else they will try to persecute you for there.
Hello??? This should be modded funny instead. Nowhere in Belgium, or as far as I know any other Western European country do you see (street) advertisements for lawyers. Afaik Belgian doctors don't stop their practice because thye can't afford insurance (or at least it is not common). To the best of my knowledge no fastfood chain has been sued for serving hot coffee, fat meals etc...
Better stay in the US (assuming you're from there...)
Do you have any IDEA how much time it would take to put together a quality course, with nothing but original materials? Not to mention grading students' work? I mean REALLY grading it - paying attention to the individual foibles of each student and trying to treat them like distinct human beings and not just a row of numbers on a grade sheet?
Amen to that. Just talking about grading exams, I want to avoid seeing two students afterwards asking why the one got 14/20 while another with comparable answers got an 12/20. So far, all students who ever complained about their grades (only a few) left without discussion. Giving fair grades is difficult. Writing your own course takes a lot of time, especially if you want to include all original examples and make all original drawings. It can therefore be frustrating to see that some students (at least apparently) don't even take a day or so to _read_ the course that maybe took many hundreds of hours to write.
Obviously a professor writing a course consults other works (and preferable refers to them), but this material is then thought over, combined with own insights and experiences... a far cry from blatant copying.
Maybe Hotmail has its problems (advertisements, banners etc) but should it really be in a list together with the greatest crap ever produced? Either they have lost a large userbase or many hypocrites participated in the voting.
Solving a crossword in under 12 minutes was the entrance exam.
Of course this was an entrance exam for a _very_ specific line of work: code breaking. There you need to find patterns, complete partial words etc. It seems like a perfect match for the needs of the job.
I think the ability to solve puzzles is tightly correlated with the skill set desired by IT. Because it takes an inquisitive and unrelenting mind to hit the hardest puzzles. If they like to do this for fun, surely they can do it well for a living.
This goes for almost any job in which you have to solve problems, not only IT.
Unless you are working with 3d datasets (or games), there really isn't much (if any) advantage to a 3d environment.
Moreover: how well do most humans perform in 3D? We like to think we are smart, but how many people have problems reading a map upside down (which still is only 2D), finding the shortest route from one point to another in a (complex) building?... All I'm saying is: our brain is adapted to our 2D eyes, there is a good chance '3D computing' will be too difficult for many (most likely including me).
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC from a numerical math course, 1/sqrt(x) is also used to calculate sqrt(x), by multiplying with x or taking the inverse, because its calculation is easier than that of sqrt(x) itself.
The plural of Lego is Lego NOT Legos! I'm getting fed up with every slashdot article on Lego getting this wrong, and a huge portion of the debate being about the pluralisation not the story.
Finally, there is nothing magical about making 100 Ohm UTP cable. It's been around for dozens of years and is the most common specification. It is certainly MUCH SUPERIOR FOR CARRYING DIGITAL SIGNALS compared to coaxial cable, which attenuates and degrades the digital waveforms over distance due to its inherent capacitance characteristics.
This is just bullshit. There is NO relation between the cable impedance and the attenuation (*). The attenuation will be determined by the conductivity of the wires and the dielectric in between. Coax cable with air dielectric will likely outperform twisted pair, though I am too lazy to look up the figures. This "capatitance characteristics" is also BS. Coax can easily be made to work upto tens of GHz. What's the cutoff of utp Cat7? 600MHz? Besides, coax will theoretically not radiate any signal while twisted pair will, although this is limited due to the twisting. Coax is therefor WAY superior.
(*) I know losses will lead to a small reactive component but this is not really important here.
Digital either works or it doesn't. A five dollar hdmi cable will work as good as the fifty dollar hdmi cable. Monster may help on analog audio, but doesn't do jack for digital. This is a myth.
Not so. I once wanted to change the connectors on a (bad) coax cable. It turned out not to be shielded at all, but just had an 'outer' single wire instead of a braid. If your cables are leaking/capturing external noise, if the cable's impedance is not matched and hence leads to reflections, digital transmission will be degraded too. Maybe enough, maybe not enough. So yes, digital 'works' or 'not works', but using bad cables may lead to not working.
So fast you almost can't see it!
To make matters worse, cars on many of the smallest side streets still qualify for priority over those on major thoroughfares -- so long as they are coming from the right. That forces drivers on many boulevards to slam on their brakes without warning, and some get rear-ended as a result.
I call bullshit. The number of roadsigns in Belgium is *far* from low. A crossroad between a minor road and a rather importanty one is nearly always governed by a 'give way' sign and a 'priority' sign. On the contrary: we (I am Belgian) are planning to *reduce* the number of trafficsigns because on some places it is absurdly high!
As for losing your right of way when stopping: indeed, when you come from a priority road and are foolish enough to stop (i.e. wheels no longer turning) for a minor road to give way to one not entitled to it (creating a dangerous situation, btw), you lose your right of way. Most people know this and while they may slow down (which is not the same) they won't stop. At a crossroad _not_ gouverned by priorities, priority from the right counts, and many times this is even indicated by a sign (!!!) to indicate this. This sign is in fact unneeded, and just there to remind people that may think they are on a priority road.
Lots of things are poorly arranged around here. Imho a lack of stop signs is not one of them.
Why should anyone be able to ruin your finances by just knowing some numbers?
Because otherwise you would not be able to use all these nifty on-line things, and would need to go to the bank everytime you wanted to transfer money. The problem is not in the use of numbers, but in recklessness.
Possibly for the simple reason that many people don't see the "big picture" and have no idea of the risk they are exposing themselves to.
So when the dupe shows up tomorrow, we will know the experiment is a success today.
No, because this experiment conveys no new information. We already know the story is going to be duped...
Why does it need to move to look around? This makes it a bit more humanoid and opens up the possibility for James Bond to sneak past when it is not watching, but wouldn't it be easier to have multiple fixed cameras to cover all directions? This would also eliminate the need to filter out the robot's own movement and make detection of moving objects easier.
Secondly, you can make a point without being demeaning and assuming anything about my age.
Indeed. He could only judge you based upon your apparent age as reflected by your post. In case you are old enough to have had the opportunity to grow up and learn some manners -but apparently didn't- well all the worse I would say.
Bear in mind that you imply that e.g. Einstein and many others were idiots. Not "of another opinion than yours", but idiots.
Color scheme is uglier in some places (compare Tokyo road view in both Google and Live).
This is /. Around here we don't care about ugly colourschemes.
Because obviously all those engineers and scientists usually in orbit aren't nerds...
As for the first one, I don't know (Latin has this kind of property), but I'm quite surprised you could split up "New York"
They probably wouldn't do this becaus it is a name (novo Eboraco, btw), but in general adjectives can be separated from the word they refer to, to add some stress.
If you compress a single track of a song into an mp3 (or ogg or whatever) does it compress better than compressing multiple tracks mixed together? It's my understanding that the first step of compressing a wav to mp3 is to seperate out all the sound tracks. This being an imprecise process, wouldn't you get better results if the sound tracks were already seperated?
1) Normally the individual 'tracks' talked about here are the different instruments/singing voices. These are not normally available separately, unless at the reconding studio (and maybe now for this Peter Gabriel thing). There would be no gain in compressing together because they are completely different.
2) The 'coding tracks together and gain'-thing holds for stereo tracks. The left and right channel are very similar. Forthis reason FM radio transmits a L+R signal (so you can receive it on a mono radio) and also a L-R signal, which is also demodulated by a stereo radio. From these two you can obtain L and R separately. An MP3 encoder therefore offers the possibility to either code L and R separately, or code L+R and L-R separately. Because L and R are likely to be similar, the L-R signal doesn't contain a lot of information and can therefore be compressed more easily.
3) MP3 compression itself exists of two steps (explained by others here), being: .zip etc).
- perceptual coding (i.e. separating the sound into different frequency bands and throwing away information you won't hear because your ears are overpowered by the rest).
- a lossless coding step of the information left after the above step (similar to
You raise a good point here. Probably the situation is ok, but there's no sense in being naive, something that especially people on /. should be aware of. On the other hand I can imagine Wilson would lose some dignity in displaying his poor financial situation to a 'harsh mecaenas' who wants to see some evidence.
A possible elegant solution would be to organise conferences/invited talks where Mr Wilson could come to, and (over)pay him to do so. For his fans this would be an extra incentive to support him, the moneyflow would be more transparent _without_ need for proof and Wilson would not be embarassed for being a beggar.
If you really appreciate Mr. Wilson and if you have any influence, organise something he could still do and be proud of.
An even more obvious application: individual gameplay on a single screen.
There's no such thing as an 'internet addiction'. I've searched on the Wikipedia, Google, seriouspathology.gov, addiction.net and kinkymovies.com for ten hours straight - non of them have ever heard of it.
I always warn people I know who are vacationing in Europe -- avoid Belgium. Who knows what else they will try to persecute you for there.
Hello??? This should be modded funny instead. Nowhere in Belgium, or as far as I know any other Western European country do you see (street) advertisements for lawyers. Afaik Belgian doctors don't stop their practice because thye can't afford insurance (or at least it is not common). To the best of my knowledge no fastfood chain has been sued for serving hot coffee, fat meals etc...
Better stay in the US (assuming you're from there...)
Do you have any IDEA how much time it would take to put together a quality course, with nothing but original materials? Not to mention grading students' work? I mean REALLY grading it - paying attention to the individual foibles of each student and trying to treat them like distinct human beings and not just a row of numbers on a grade sheet?
Amen to that. Just talking about grading exams, I want to avoid seeing two students afterwards asking why the one got 14/20 while another with comparable answers got an 12/20. So far, all students who ever complained about their grades (only a few) left without discussion. Giving fair grades is difficult. Writing your own course takes a lot of time, especially if you want to include all original examples and make all original drawings. It can therefore be frustrating to see that some students (at least apparently) don't even take a day or so to _read_ the course that maybe took many hundreds of hours to write.
Obviously a professor writing a course consults other works (and preferable refers to them), but this material is then thought over, combined with own insights and experiences... a far cry from blatant copying.
Thanks for this great gem. This catchy hymn will be in my head for at least a week...
Maybe Hotmail has its problems (advertisements, banners etc) but should it really be in a list together with the greatest crap ever produced? Either they have lost a large userbase or many hypocrites participated in the voting.
Solving a crossword in under 12 minutes was the entrance exam.
Of course this was an entrance exam for a _very_ specific line of work: code breaking. There you need to find patterns, complete partial words etc. It seems like a perfect match for the needs of the job.
I think the ability to solve puzzles is tightly correlated with the skill set desired by IT. Because it takes an inquisitive and unrelenting mind to hit the hardest puzzles. If they like to do this for fun, surely they can do it well for a living.
This goes for almost any job in which you have to solve problems, not only IT.
One core for OS, daemons and to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
You mean: "One core for BSOD"?
Moreover: how well do most humans perform in 3D? We like to think we are smart, but how many people have problems reading a map upside down (which still is only 2D), finding the shortest route from one point to another in a (complex) building?... All I'm saying is: our brain is adapted to our 2D eyes, there is a good chance '3D computing' will be too difficult for many (most likely including me).