Turning it off remotely when you forget to switch it off before you leave?
More broadly, this kind of home automation would be very useful for things like turning the lights on/off remotely (living in a three-story house you get very sick of walking down the stairs to turn off the light you forgot to switch off), turning down the stereo when the phone rings. I can't wait for it to finally happen. Maybe the wireless networking technologies presently being touted will be the catalyst.
That's a nice goal, but the problem is that the different theme engines probably don't line up all that well together - you have to design different bits and pieces for different themes.
The real trick would be to identify the bits that *are* common between, say, GTK+ and QT themes, and let those be shared, and provide a mechanism to allow your theme designers to do the toolkit specific bits.
Or everyone else could stop using (insert non-favourite WM/toolkit here) and switch to (insert favourite WM/toolkit here) the problem would go away . . .:)
The cost of developing verifiably bug-free software is simply not justifiable in many situations, both in terms of financial cost and the restrictions that it places on what you can do.
You try building something under that kind of methodology, and see what the cost to your productivity is.
Nice troll, pal. Are you really trying to say birds will fall out of the sky if we for some reason decided that a few of our physical theories were wrong?
I don't know whether it's generally true, but I know that the GnuCash project builds seperate RPM's for Mandrake and RedHat, because the library versions on each are quite different.
Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder (and with a great cameo by Tim Brooke-Taylor, for all the Brits and Aussies out there). Despite notionally being a children's movie, it contains perhaps the most obvious drug trip I've ever seen in on celluloid.
Aside from the LSD-inspired ride on the chocolate river, it also deserves an award for the worst song in a movie ever - yes, even worse than Gwyneth Paltrow's warblings. The song that Charlie's mother sings to him is truly vomit-inducing.
By the way, if you're looking for something slightly subversive for your children, you could do worse than the book that this movie is based on. Roald Dahl is a wickedly funny author for both adults and children.
That's why the industry is testing the waters with a country music "star" that none of us have heard of.
You might have never heard of Charley Pride, but my grandmother (and probably millions of others) owns several of his cassettes. His most famous song was "Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'". It's fairly amicable country music, but I doubt his core fan base has ever heard of napster.
Like I said, this is a plug. I don't care. It's a cool product (well, possible future product) that I hadn't heard about anywhere else, and I was sufficiently interested to go have a look at the website. I was impressed.
Anyway, VA's stock price is one-squillionth of the ridiculous peaks. Big deal. Do you get some kind of kick out of seeing that? WTF has VA ever done to you? They support k5 - not to mention sourceforge. Do you want *that* to fall over or something?
There are approximately 1.5 billion people on the subcontinent for whom cricket is by far the most important spectator sport - not to mention a large fraction of the populations of England, Australia, and the other test-playing nations.
The reason why your Indian buddies were glued to the cricket is because India played an incredbly exciting and close series of matches against Australia, and very narrowly won the deciding game of the series, after some of the most outstanding individual performances by several players in years (or in a couple of cases, ever).
Oddly enough, there aren't any locally broadcast MLB games. Now cricket is another matter.
Just like I'd bet there'd be a fairly decent market for streamed cricket broadcasts for expats from cricket-playing nations living in the US. I'm amazed no-one's tried it, frankly.
Everybody here has talked about subject matter, but hasn't mentioned much about actually *how* you present the material. I don't know how much history background you have, or who is supervising you, but you will need input from both CS/EE/IS people (to check your technical accuracy), and history, preferably History and Philosophy of Science, to assist you with presenting things in an informative and thought-provoking manner.
While how you'd present things is your call, if I were teaching the course I'd very much try to mention the social context of computing history. For instance the influence the space program had on the development of the integrated circuit.
but as SLi points out it sounds like it is a Steiner tree problem. To be exact, a Euclidean Steiner tree problem, which is in NP-hard.
Yep, that makes sense. I'm still not convinced you'll get the global minimum via the method described, though - it's not something I'll just buy with a handwave.
Additionally, the fact that the graph is embeddable in a 2D Euclidian space does not make a difference. MST is in P, regardless of the weights assigned to the edges.
Quite true, also. I was being careful to state the Euclidian nature of the method he was describing, because there are, as you undoubtedly know, other graph problems where it does make quite a difference.
If I'm following you correctly, you've got a solution to a particular version of the minimum spanning tree problem (the points are all located in 2-D eucludian space, which is not necessarily true for general problem). That's all fine and dandy, except that the minimum spanning tree problem is not NP-complete. In fact, there is a relatively straightforward polynomial-time algorithm for it.
The difference between a problem with a straightforward polynomial-time solution and an NP-hard problem is often very small. Be careful!
Re:Changing of the role?
on
NSA Inside?
·
· Score: 2
Almost any useful intel now is likely to come from the CIA.
I very much doubt it. Listening in on phone conversations, military radios, and the like is still the NSA's responsibility, and I'd suspect that they're even *more* important now than they were before - for one thing, the massive increase in mobile phone usage must provide the NSA with all sorts of interesting information. . .
Disclaimer: I have no special knowledge in the areas of photo interpretation or geology, but to me there seem to be several common-sense reasons why good imagery doesn't give you all the answers.
Even if you had centimetre-resolution images of Mars, that's not necessarily going to tell you whether canals were formed by water. Why? Because it only shows what's there. It doesn't necessarily show you how it got to be that way.
Secondly, on Earth, you can use aerial imagery of well-known areas to learn what certain features look like, and then extrapolate to other areas. On Mars, we have (by comparison) bugger-all ground-based imagery, let alone extensive studies of geology and the like, to use to do extrapolation.
Penrose's "proofs" are hotly disputed, to say the least. I personally think they're bunk (and I did study some of this stuff this stuff to at least honours level), but his work is so dense I may well be misinterpreting it.
an act which would violate any number of laws within the US and any number of international treaties outside of it )
I wasn't aware of any international treaties that placed limits on espionage activities - the only international treaties I can think of that relates to activities of spies are the Geneva convention (what you can do with spies once you catch them), and the Berne Convention (if they're diplomats, they've got diplomatic immunity). What are you referring to?
A former CIA director explained that this is done for moral reasons, but his article sounds awfully bigot to me...
Yep. The US will use just about any tactic they can get away with to get big contracts for US companies overseas. For instance, the US told Australia that it had to buy submarine combat systems from US companies, instead of a competing European bid, because they wouldn't participate in joint exercises with these submarines if the subs used the non-US software. This, despite the fact that they happily conduct these kind of exercises with their NATO allies, who, shock horror, design their own submarines, tanks, helicopters, and planes, all with their own non-US combat systems.
Like most countries, the US believes in free trade when it suits.
Somebody has written a
Win32 MMIX emulator, complete with source code. If anybody's looking for a project, porting this to Linux/Unix is probably a good one . . .
This article was one of many explaining that the US government has decided to end its policy of deliberately introducing errors to degrade the accuracy of civilian GPS devices, which are now accurate to within 10-20 meter (that's 35-65 feet to all you Yanks out there).
However, if the source code does exist, and does give sufficient information to allow the decoding of the data-correction information, it means that, for anyone with a hacked GPS receiver, they can still get an accurate signal even if the US government turns the scrambling back on.
Why are you slashdotters so paranoid of the NSA? It stands for National Security Agency.
For one reason, it's the National Security Agency. It spies on everyone except Americans, even the allies that agree to host their bases.
For another, the British Government sold a bunch of Enigma machines throughout the third world after WWII. I wouldn't put it past the NSA to pull a similar stunt.
Slashdot Mirror
More broadly, this kind of home automation would be very useful for things like turning the lights on/off remotely (living in a three-story house you get very sick of walking down the stairs to turn off the light you forgot to switch off), turning down the stereo when the phone rings. I can't wait for it to finally happen. Maybe the wireless networking technologies presently being touted will be the catalyst.
Go you big red fire engine!
The real trick would be to identify the bits that *are* common between, say, GTK+ and QT themes, and let those be shared, and provide a mechanism to allow your theme designers to do the toolkit specific bits.
Or everyone else could stop using (insert non-favourite WM/toolkit here) and switch to (insert favourite WM/toolkit here) the problem would go away . . . :)
Go you big red fire engine!
You try building something under that kind of methodology, and see what the cost to your productivity is.
Go you big red fire engine!
Nice troll, pal. Are you really trying to say birds will fall out of the sky if we for some reason decided that a few of our physical theories were wrong?
Go you big red fire engine!
I don't know whether it's generally true, but I know that the GnuCash project builds seperate RPM's for Mandrake and RedHat, because the library versions on each are quite different.
Go you big red fire engine!
So does Japan, for that matter.
Go you big red fire engine!
Aside from the LSD-inspired ride on the chocolate river, it also deserves an award for the worst song in a movie ever - yes, even worse than Gwyneth Paltrow's warblings. The song that Charlie's mother sings to him is truly vomit-inducing.
By the way, if you're looking for something slightly subversive for your children, you could do worse than the book that this movie is based on. Roald Dahl is a wickedly funny author for both adults and children.
Go you big red fire engine!
You might have never heard of Charley Pride, but my grandmother (and probably millions of others) owns several of his cassettes. His most famous song was "Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'". It's fairly amicable country music, but I doubt his core fan base has ever heard of napster.
Thanks, Mr Coward, that was very useful. I watched the Aussies kick arse in the second one day game and set things back to normal . . . :)
Anyway, VA's stock price is one-squillionth of the ridiculous peaks. Big deal. Do you get some kind of kick out of seeing that? WTF has VA ever done to you? They support k5 - not to mention sourceforge. Do you want *that* to fall over or something?
The reason why your Indian buddies were glued to the cricket is because India played an incredbly exciting and close series of matches against Australia, and very narrowly won the deciding game of the series, after some of the most outstanding individual performances by several players in years (or in a couple of cases, ever).
Just like I'd bet there'd be a fairly decent market for streamed cricket broadcasts for expats from cricket-playing nations living in the US. I'm amazed no-one's tried it, frankly.
While how you'd present things is your call, if I were teaching the course I'd very much try to mention the social context of computing history. For instance the influence the space program had on the development of the integrated circuit.
Quite true, also. I was being careful to state the Euclidian nature of the method he was describing, because there are, as you undoubtedly know, other graph problems where it does make quite a difference.
The difference between a problem with a straightforward polynomial-time solution and an NP-hard problem is often very small. Be careful!
I very much doubt it. Listening in on phone conversations, military radios, and the like is still the NSA's responsibility, and I'd suspect that they're even *more* important now than they were before - for one thing, the massive increase in mobile phone usage must provide the NSA with all sorts of interesting information. . .
Penicillin. The Pill.
Disclaimer: I have no special knowledge in the areas of photo interpretation or geology, but to me there seem to be several common-sense reasons why good imagery doesn't give you all the answers.
Even if you had centimetre-resolution images of Mars, that's not necessarily going to tell you whether canals were formed by water. Why? Because it only shows what's there. It doesn't necessarily show you how it got to be that way.
Secondly, on Earth, you can use aerial imagery of well-known areas to learn what certain features look like, and then extrapolate to other areas. On Mars, we have (by comparison) bugger-all ground-based imagery, let alone extensive studies of geology and the like, to use to do extrapolation.
Penrose's "proofs" are hotly disputed, to say the least. I personally think they're bunk (and I did study some of this stuff this stuff to at least honours level), but his work is so dense I may well be misinterpreting it.
I wasn't aware of any international treaties that placed limits on espionage activities - the only international treaties I can think of that relates to activities of spies are the Geneva convention (what you can do with spies once you catch them), and the Berne Convention (if they're diplomats, they've got diplomatic immunity). What are you referring to?
Yep. The US will use just about any tactic they can get away with to get big contracts for US companies overseas. For instance, the US told Australia that it had to buy submarine combat systems from US companies, instead of a competing European bid, because they wouldn't participate in joint exercises with these submarines if the subs used the non-US software. This, despite the fact that they happily conduct these kind of exercises with their NATO allies, who, shock horror, design their own submarines, tanks, helicopters, and planes, all with their own non-US combat systems.
Like most countries, the US believes in free trade when it suits.
Somebody has written a Win32 MMIX emulator, complete with source code. If anybody's looking for a project, porting this to Linux/Unix is probably a good one . . .
However, if the source code does exist, and does give sufficient information to allow the decoding of the data-correction information, it means that, for anyone with a hacked GPS receiver, they can still get an accurate signal even if the US government turns the scrambling back on.
I also should point out that that many /.ers, including myself, aren't American.
For one reason, it's the National Security Agency. It spies on everyone except Americans, even the allies that agree to host their bases.
For another, the British Government sold a bunch of Enigma machines throughout the third world after WWII. I wouldn't put it past the NSA to pull a similar stunt.