I love my N810. I think, instead of "Internet Tablet" they should market it as a "Pocket Netbook". It has almost the same functionality in 1/8 the volume.
I have not gotten the micro-to-mini SDHC adapters to work in my N810. Looking closely at the differences between the adapter and an actual mini-SDHC card, I see that the contacts on the adapter are slightly recessed, while those on the card are on the bottom surface. Apparently the little wires in my N810 don't come up high enough to reliably make contact with the adapters. I don't know if many others have had this problem.
Agreed. Not distinguishing pointer types that can be null from those that can't was only a billion-dollar mistake. Using null-terminated strings in C and Unix was closer to a trillion-dollar mistake. Almost the entire security industry exists because of it.
I love to blame Microsoft for poor security as much as the next/.er, but as long as we're pointing fingers, some of them should be pointed at Kernighan and Ritchie, for creating and propagating a language in which programs were insecure by default.
I know, I know, K&R are gods, not mere mortals. Well, guess what, maybe they're mortal after all, and they screwed up big time on this one.
"The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we've failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It's viewed as the art of medicine. That's a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer's perspective it's outrageous." We have a thirty-billion-dollar-a-year National Institutes of Health, he pointed out, which has been a remarkable powerhouse of discovery. But we have no billion-dollar National Institute of Health Care Delivery studying how best to incorporate those discoveries into daily practice.
I guess we do, now.
The quote is from a very interesting article on the use of checklists in emergency rooms, how effective they are, and how much the medical culture resists them.
Interesting to compare this to a holographic concentrator. This optical concentrator has a much higher concentration ratio and thus allows the use of much less silicon, but on the other hand it requires a mechanical tracker and a heat sink, which the holographic concentrator does not.
I hope to see both these technologies in production soon. $/W is the big barrier for photovoltaics.
Agreed, conclusions should be drawn with care. But in this case (a) the science seems to be sound and (b) there's no difficulty at all coming up with a mechanism. By the time a male is 50, his sperm cells have divided hundreds of times (I forget the exact number but you can find it). In contrast, a female's ova divide 24 times (IIRC), all but the last in utero, and then sit there waiting to be used.
There's plenty of opportunity for errors to creep in in spermatogenesis over hundreds of replications.
I didn't know about this until just last week, and I'm fifty! But apparently the evidence is pretty good. Search the Web for "paternal age autism" and you'll find a raft of stuff, such as a Washington Post article that says this:
When fathers are in their thirties, children have about 1 1/2 times the risk of developing autism of children of fathers in their teens and twenties. Compared with the offspring of the youngest fathers, children of fathers in their forties have more than five times the risk of developing autism, and children of fathers in their fifties have more than nine times the risk.
This hits home for me since there is actually some possibility I might attempt to father a child or two in the next several years. Food for thought.
On the other hand, at worst the risk is less than 1% per child.
If you're switching in and out of stocks every six months you're going to lose.
That is a very interesting belief. I do not think many professional money managers would share it.
[A] stock is basically a certificate entitling you to a potentially infinite stream of payments, and all the stock price should represent is the present value of those payments.
Yes, except that you left out a very important word: the stock price is the estimated present value of those payments. That estimate is necessarily based on information, and therefore can change as new information emerges. But the propagation of information takes time. If a stock you hold is going down and you don't know why, there's probably a good reason; you just don't know what it is yet.
There's also the critical issue of capital preservation. If you take a 50% loss on your portfolio -- to take an example that would normally sound extreme, but under present market conditions is probably quite common -- you then have to double your money just to get back to where you started. Doubling your money is very hard; even the best would usually take a few years to do it.
For both those reasons, professionals know it's critical to take a loss early, by closing the position before it becomes a much bigger loss.
I urge you to read Van Tharp's Trade Your Way To Financial Freedom, the best book I know on trading the markets.
This isn't funny, it's insightful. [...] If their consumer products stink, you shouldn't be buying the stock
Agreed. The other half is also insightful. Never, ever take more than a 20% loss on a single stock position. Ever! Sell and cut your losses. Really, it's best to do that even before you get to a 20% loss -- between 10% and 15% is better -- but if you haven't done it by 20%, don't think about it any more, just sell. It's psychologically difficult to do, but essential to preserving your capital.
In agreement is shareholder Mike McDonald. McDonald owns 118,000 shares of Microsoft, bought in 2000 at an average price of $36 share (adjusted for splits and dividend payouts). [...]
"I still hold Microsoft so I still hold hope it will achieve what I think is its potential. By now it should have been $100+ per share. We've seen Apple rise [...]. (Funny. I don't even use Windows ⦠I love the Mac.)
Dude! You loaded up on the stock of a company whose products you don't even like, and watched it lose half its value without liquidating your position, and you're blaming Bill Gates for your problems???
Re:I think I speak for all of us when...
on
Roland Piquepaille Dies
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You certainly don't speak for me, Anonymous Coward.
I've just glanced briefly at the first patent listed (6,420,139), and at its first couple of claims, and to me it seems they could be summarized as "apply the scientific method to immunization schedules".
While I'm not actually opposed to all patents, even software patents, I do think there are a lot of crap patent applications being submitted (with many of them being granted), and my initial impression is certainly that this is likely to be one of them.
While I do think FP is going to be a big help with multicore, a problem I haven't heard anyone talking about is that when you have several cores allocating heavily, it's going to be a lot of work to clean up after them. I think we're going to need hardware garbage collection, or at least hardware support for GC. It will be nasty and complex because of the concurrency, but I just don't see how else we're going to deal with the allocation rates.
Hardware GC is not new: the Lisp Machines had it, though of course it wasn't concurrent. Everything old is new again...
What I don't understand is why a bounty system hasn't caught on. It seems to me to be the right solution to the problem. A bounty system allows users who desire some new piece of open-source software, or an extension or modification to an existing system, to contribute money to a bounty to be paid to the first person to implement what they want. There are details -- the money has to go into escrow, for instance, and there obviously has to be some acceptance process in case what was implemented was not what was requested -- but that's the general idea.
There are a few Web sites implementing such a system, more or less, that have been around for a few years. All the ones I've looked at seem to be inactive. And I wonder, why don't they catch on?
I think a large part of the answer is that these sites haven't marketed themselves well. To get used, any such site is going to have to answer the question: why should anyone contribute? Potential contributors have to be convinced that it's worth putting a small amount of money into escrow to incrementally increase the chances that what they want will get implemented. That's hard, particularly when it seems reasonably likely that what they want will get implemented anyway. And none of the sites I've seen do a good job of making this case -- indeed, most of them don't even try.
So I'm left to wonder if a more determined effort, backed by a greater awareness of the need for good marketing, might not succeed.
It is trivial to write a program that returns a correct answer for some programs and fails to return an answer for others (either by returning "maybe" or by never halting).
"Trivial"? Only in trivial cases. Recent progress in static analysis and model checking notwithstanding, automating the general analysis of real-world programs -- analyses that programmers do every day (though of course, not always correctly) -- remains an important open problem.
So you're right that the Halting Problem doesn't prove that automating such analyses is impossible -- but it still remains beyond our abilities, even in cases where humans have little trouble.
In a small, aerodynamic car, speed doesn't matter that much. (In a larger vehicle and especially trucks, with their poor aerodynamics, speeds above 60 do start to affect mileage more strongly.)
But how vigorously you accelerate can make a big difference. In the worst of the gas price spike I made a point of accelerating gently and shifting much earlier than usual, and found my mileage improved by 15%.
I'm a left-winger and I used to be all against school vouchers... but now I've seen the light. We need real competition, and we need to bust the teacher's unions to get the bozos out of our school system.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! So good to hear someone (a parent, no less) saying this. Vouchers have always sounded like a great idea to me -- among other things, they make it easier for parents to home-school if they choose. The Democrats like to wave scare stories about religious schools where children learn nothing useful, but I think this is mostly a smoke screen. Parents -- those who care at all -- mostly want their kids to get a good education. I vote for Democrats more than half the time too, but they're wrong, and destructively wrong, on this issue.
This is by far the most important advice I could give you (sorry for the caps, but I'm posting after a lot of other people and wanted you to notice it).
The most important question to ask yourself when entering a negotiation is: what's my fallback if this negotiation fails? If I have another good offer to accept, I'm in a very strong negotiating position. If I don't have any real choice but to accept what they offer, I'm in a very weak position.
So the most important thing you could do has nothing directly to do with your choice. You need to get hopping and find another job opening, preferably two or three, and get offers for them. Quickly! Once you see what those offers consist of, you will have a better idea of your "market value" and can make a sounder decision.
Also this part, "Moreover, they would take ownership of not just to what they'd pay for, but also of my changes leading up to this moment" needs to be crossed out unless they are buying the work you have done so far. Don't give that away for free.
This part jumped out at me too. Sounds like you should name a good solid 5-figure price for this work (which is currently your intellectual property!) and stick to it.
Agreed. Back during the Internet boom my wife, Diane, had surfed to some site and noticed a familiar pattern in the site's URLs (I don't recall the details, but it might have been a standard configuration of IIS and SQL Server or something). She hand-edited the URL in some way, and up popped contents of the site owner's database that should not have been publically accessible. All she did was edit the URL.
So of course she wrote to the site's webmaster -- and of course they replied in a hostile manner.
Clueless.
I'm well aware many Slashdotters could tell a similar story. Particularly during the Internet boom, there were zillions of sites with incompetent administrators.
Slashdot Mirror
I love my N810. I think, instead of "Internet Tablet" they should market it as a "Pocket Netbook". It has almost the same functionality in 1/8 the volume.
I have not gotten the micro-to-mini SDHC adapters to work in my N810. Looking closely at the differences between the adapter and an actual mini-SDHC card, I see that the contacts on the adapter are slightly recessed, while those on the card are on the bottom surface. Apparently the little wires in my N810 don't come up high enough to reliably make contact with the adapters. I don't know if many others have had this problem.
Agreed. Not distinguishing pointer types that can be null from those that can't was only a billion-dollar mistake. Using null-terminated strings in C and Unix was closer to a trillion-dollar mistake. Almost the entire security industry exists because of it.
I love to blame Microsoft for poor security as much as the next /.er, but as long as we're pointing fingers, some of them should be pointed at Kernighan and Ritchie, for creating and propagating a language in which programs were insecure by default.
I know, I know, K&R are gods, not mere mortals. Well, guess what, maybe they're mortal after all, and they screwed up big time on this one.
You could put it even more pointedly: doctors' egos.
I guess we do, now.
The quote is from a very interesting article on the use of checklists in emergency rooms, how effective they are, and how much the medical culture resists them.
Interesting to compare this to a holographic concentrator. This optical concentrator has a much higher concentration ratio and thus allows the use of much less silicon, but on the other hand it requires a mechanical tracker and a heat sink, which the holographic concentrator does not.
I hope to see both these technologies in production soon. $/W is the big barrier for photovoltaics.
Agreed, conclusions should be drawn with care. But in this case (a) the science seems to be sound and (b) there's no difficulty at all coming up with a mechanism. By the time a male is 50, his sperm cells have divided hundreds of times (I forget the exact number but you can find it). In contrast, a female's ova divide 24 times (IIRC), all but the last in utero, and then sit there waiting to be used.
There's plenty of opportunity for errors to creep in in spermatogenesis over hundreds of replications.
As I recall, that kind of thing was controlled for. Dig up the papers yourself; it's not hard.
I didn't know about this until just last week, and I'm fifty! But apparently the evidence is pretty good. Search the Web for "paternal age autism" and you'll find a raft of stuff, such as a Washington Post article that says this:
This hits home for me since there is actually some possibility I might attempt to father a child or two in the next several years. Food for thought.
On the other hand, at worst the risk is less than 1% per child.
If you're switching in and out of stocks every six months you're going to lose.
That is a very interesting belief. I do not think many professional money managers would share it.
[A] stock is basically a certificate entitling you to a potentially infinite stream of payments, and all the stock price should represent is the present value of those payments.
Yes, except that you left out a very important word: the stock price is the estimated present value of those payments. That estimate is necessarily based on information, and therefore can change as new information emerges. But the propagation of information takes time. If a stock you hold is going down and you don't know why, there's probably a good reason; you just don't know what it is yet.
There's also the critical issue of capital preservation. If you take a 50% loss on your portfolio -- to take an example that would normally sound extreme, but under present market conditions is probably quite common -- you then have to double your money just to get back to where you started. Doubling your money is very hard; even the best would usually take a few years to do it.
For both those reasons, professionals know it's critical to take a loss early, by closing the position before it becomes a much bigger loss.
I urge you to read Van Tharp's Trade Your Way To Financial Freedom, the best book I know on trading the markets.
This isn't funny, it's insightful. [...] If their consumer products stink, you shouldn't be buying the stock
Agreed. The other half is also insightful. Never, ever take more than a 20% loss on a single stock position. Ever! Sell and cut your losses. Really, it's best to do that even before you get to a 20% loss -- between 10% and 15% is better -- but if you haven't done it by 20%, don't think about it any more, just sell. It's psychologically difficult to do, but essential to preserving your capital.
From TFA:
Dude! You loaded up on the stock of a company whose products you don't even like, and watched it lose half its value without liquidating your position, and you're blaming Bill Gates for your problems???
You certainly don't speak for me, Anonymous Coward.
R.I.P. Roland.
I've just glanced briefly at the first patent listed (6,420,139), and at its first couple of claims, and to me it seems they could be summarized as "apply the scientific method to immunization schedules".
While I'm not actually opposed to all patents, even software patents, I do think there are a lot of crap patent applications being submitted (with many of them being granted), and my initial impression is certainly that this is likely to be one of them.
Bank of Georgetown
5236 44th Street
Washington, DC 20015
Everyone who cares about freedom in the US should chip in. I'm going to (despite being quite strapped at the moment).
While I do think FP is going to be a big help with multicore, a problem I haven't heard anyone talking about is that when you have several cores allocating heavily, it's going to be a lot of work to clean up after them. I think we're going to need hardware garbage collection, or at least hardware support for GC. It will be nasty and complex because of the concurrency, but I just don't see how else we're going to deal with the allocation rates.
Hardware GC is not new: the Lisp Machines had it, though of course it wasn't concurrent. Everything old is new again...
"I disapprove of what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" -Voltaire
... as long as you spell it right :)
What I don't understand is why a bounty system hasn't caught on. It seems to me to be the right solution to the problem. A bounty system allows users who desire some new piece of open-source software, or an extension or modification to an existing system, to contribute money to a bounty to be paid to the first person to implement what they want. There are details -- the money has to go into escrow, for instance, and there obviously has to be some acceptance process in case what was implemented was not what was requested -- but that's the general idea.
There are a few Web sites implementing such a system, more or less, that have been around for a few years. All the ones I've looked at seem to be inactive. And I wonder, why don't they catch on?
I think a large part of the answer is that these sites haven't marketed themselves well. To get used, any such site is going to have to answer the question: why should anyone contribute? Potential contributors have to be convinced that it's worth putting a small amount of money into escrow to incrementally increase the chances that what they want will get implemented. That's hard, particularly when it seems reasonably likely that what they want will get implemented anyway. And none of the sites I've seen do a good job of making this case -- indeed, most of them don't even try.
So I'm left to wonder if a more determined effort, backed by a greater awareness of the need for good marketing, might not succeed.
Your thoughts, please.
It is trivial to write a program that returns a correct answer for some programs and fails to return an answer for others (either by returning "maybe" or by never halting).
"Trivial"? Only in trivial cases. Recent progress in static analysis and model checking notwithstanding, automating the general analysis of real-world programs -- analyses that programmers do every day (though of course, not always correctly) -- remains an important open problem.
So you're right that the Halting Problem doesn't prove that automating such analyses is impossible -- but it still remains beyond our abilities, even in cases where humans have little trouble.
In a small, aerodynamic car, speed doesn't matter that much. (In a larger vehicle and especially trucks, with their poor aerodynamics, speeds above 60 do start to affect mileage more strongly.)
But how vigorously you accelerate can make a big difference. In the worst of the gas price spike I made a point of accelerating gently and shifting much earlier than usual, and found my mileage improved by 15%.
I'm a left-winger and I used to be all against school vouchers... but now I've seen the light. We need real competition, and we need to bust the teacher's unions to get the bozos out of our school system.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! So good to hear someone (a parent, no less) saying this. Vouchers have always sounded like a great idea to me -- among other things, they make it easier for parents to home-school if they choose. The Democrats like to wave scare stories about religious schools where children learn nothing useful, but I think this is mostly a smoke screen. Parents -- those who care at all -- mostly want their kids to get a good education. I vote for Democrats more than half the time too, but they're wrong, and destructively wrong, on this issue.
This is by far the most important advice I could give you (sorry for the caps, but I'm posting after a lot of other people and wanted you to notice it).
The most important question to ask yourself when entering a negotiation is: what's my fallback if this negotiation fails? If I have another good offer to accept, I'm in a very strong negotiating position. If I don't have any real choice but to accept what they offer, I'm in a very weak position.
So the most important thing you could do has nothing directly to do with your choice. You need to get hopping and find another job opening, preferably two or three, and get offers for them. Quickly! Once you see what those offers consist of, you will have a better idea of your "market value" and can make a sounder decision.
Also this part, "Moreover, they would take ownership of not just to what they'd pay for, but also of my changes leading up to this moment" needs to be crossed out unless they are buying the work you have done so far. Don't give that away for free.
This part jumped out at me too. Sounds like you should name a good solid 5-figure price for this work (which is currently your intellectual property!) and stick to it.
Agreed. Back during the Internet boom my wife, Diane, had surfed to some site and noticed a familiar pattern in the site's URLs (I don't recall the details, but it might have been a standard configuration of IIS and SQL Server or something). She hand-edited the URL in some way, and up popped contents of the site owner's database that should not have been publically accessible. All she did was edit the URL.
So of course she wrote to the site's webmaster -- and of course they replied in a hostile manner.
Clueless.
I'm well aware many Slashdotters could tell a similar story. Particularly during the Internet boom, there were zillions of sites with incompetent administrators.
You insensitive clod!
(Yes, really. It was 1969.)