I dunno what this cafe's policy is but in general guide dogs (at least here in the uk) are very well behaved due to a combination of good training and carefull selection of dogs to train.
Does it make sense to, for example, haul coal on planes? we (as in Britan France and the USA)did actually supply half a city by air once including rather large ammounts of coal. It only made sense because of very unusual circumstances though.
Afaict there are two main types of journal now. Conventional journals are cheap or free to publish in and make thier money from subscriptions. Open access journals make thier money from article publication fees and make the articles freely availible (which means more people can read it).
Afaict those things work by using a very short reciprocating action so they will cut hard materials but when they touch skin it just moves and doesn't get cut.
The fact of the matter is anything without an FPGA should never be called "real time". 4 microseconds of jitter is laughable when you have an FPGA. I can do 10 nanosecond precision timing on Spartan 3's without batting an eye. But it's not going to make much difference when your "plant" has time constants of seconds or more anyway.
Real time system design is about knowing what your deadlines are and then designing a system in a way that ensures it will always meet those deadlines. Sometimes programmable logic (whether PAL, CPLD or FPGA) is the way to go (simpler stuff or stuff with very short deadlines), sometimes a CPU is a better choice (more complex stuff with longer deadlines), sometimes a hybrid approach of more than one device may be your best bet.
Until the CD, music pretty much did have a limited lifetime. All other mediums wore out Music was easilly copyable from the introduction of casettes so if you kept the originals for occasional use and the copies for playing all the time the lifetime was extremely long.
VHS tape wore out quickly Really? I can't say I can recall ever wearing out a prerecorded vhs tape (blank tapes used for timeshifting is another matter), . Unless you are wating the same thing daily for months on end I don't see this as a practical issue.
What PC based digital copying did do however was threefold
1: it allowed home-recorded copies to be the same quality and nearly as durable (unlike cassettes which were vulnerable to wearing out and snapping) as the originals 2: it removed generation loss, suddenly if one person in a community had a copy everyone in that community could have a copy of the same quality. 3: make copying much faster, CD to tape copying basically had to be done in realtime, tape to tape could be done at about twice realtime. CD to CD with a PC could be done at many times realtime. 4: it opened the door for filesharing networks
This archive could then be restored onto another PC (destroying the archive) Was there anything to stop you simply copying the archive before restoring it?
IANAD but my understanding is it all comes down to (or at least should come down to) risk assesment.
Treating a patient without knowing thier medical history is riskier than treating them with information on thier medical history. Sometimes that risk is worth taking because the alternatives are even worse. Other times it's better to delay treatment so it can be done with full records availible.
Lawyers normally cannot bring a suit themselves on their own, they have to have a client they work for. That person, paying the lawyer, is the douche. If people had to actively seek out and pay a lawyer to take thier case I would agree with you. However that is not the case, there are law firms who actively advertise personal injury services AND do them on a no win no fee basis.
Indeed, the point is that digital copies require management. If the management stops for whatever reason then within a few decades retrival is
Also in addition to managing the data archive you have to deal with archiving software, operating systems and emulators to run that software and possibly cracks to allow the software to be run without contact with the outside world so that the files you have preserved can still be read.
In C++ the pattern is fairly simple, every object must be cleaned up. For objects on the stack that is done automatically. For objects on the heap the programmer can either do it manually, have a single reference responsible for the lifetime of the object (auto_ptr) or use reference counting (shared_ptr).
In java the pattern is a mess, you have to check the docs for every object to see if it needs to be disposed or not and if so you have to manage that disposal manually and of course if you change an object that previously did not require diposal to require it you have to go through ALL code that uses the object and work out how to add disposal code to it.
But they did not do things that made it worse for students Denying students access to less full classes and pushing them into fuller ones definately sounds like making things worse for students to me.
But did the actions they take make things worse for students? Denying students entry to less full classes but letting them into fuller ones purely to improve a metric sounds like making things worse for students to me.
As for the salery increases it depends on how the money was spent. If it's spent on attracting better staff then I suppose it may be in the students interest (though in general I get the impression that tuitition rates in the US are rather out of control). OTOH if it's just spent on a uni-wide pay rise (which was the impression I got from the article) then I don't think it is.
1) Java is slow Semi-true, java is what you get when you take a language that is slow by design and optimise the hell out of it. Overall perforamnce is reasonable but not brilliant (shootout.alioth.debian.org places it at arround 1.5 to 2 times slower than C). Predictability of performance can be a problem though because instanciating a new class can mess with the inheritance tree and hence the performance of seemingly unrelated code.
2) Java is not yet open source (or only parts of it are or isn't "really" open source) The truth or falseness of this depends on what you consider to be part of java. There is an open-source version and it can pass the platform compatibility tests but it's not entirely the same code as the binary releases and IIRC it lacks implementations of some optional parts of the platform. Also only a limited selection of CPU and OS ports were released. Also last I checked the source for the official java plugin was missing (there are third party ones though I dunno what thier compatibility is like currently).
3) Java is not available in any Linux distro's package manager It is now but this is a fairly recent change. It only made it into debian lenny by the skin of it's teeth.
6) "Java is a heavyweight ball and chain" Semi-true, java is a huge platform that makes it difficult to interact with code written in other languages though there is now a third party library (jna) to make it easier.
7) Sun is charging people to use the new G1 garbage collector. Well that is what thier release notes originaly said though I don't think it was backed up by any statements in a license.
I would guess a developer said something vauge like "don't use this in production without a support contract" and it got misunderstood by the person writing the release notes. If they really wanted to forbid it I'd expect them to be competant enough to do that in the license.
Does it really matter whether it is technically cheating or gaming?
Afaict the main point of ratings is to help students decide where they should go to university. Taking actions that improve ratings while actually making things worse for students is a very bad trend.
with pneumatics I could have quickly ran into an issue if I made a ripple counter for example where the amount of pressure necessary to switch the furthest most element might exceed the abilities of my pump. Sounds like you just need to have some buffers in the design.
Apparent conclusion: Such winning strategies can't exist for long, because if they did, the bookie would go bankrupt quickly. Don't you agree? Afaict bookies base there odds on the number of bets they get for each outcome (such that whoever wins the bookie wins). Therefore if you push things too hard then the odds will adjust such that your strategy no longer works.
However if there is a relatively small value of bets made by rational informed betters and a much larger value made by irrational uninformed betters then things could easilly work out in favour of both the bookies and the rational informed betters.
If we are to believe that the universe does have a set of laws applied to it, then by understanding those rules can lead to models that will predict otherwise seemly irrational universe. It is not feasible to make a perfect simulation of the universe since that it would require a computer more complex than the universe (and therefore unable to exist in our universe) to run and require information that the heisenberg uncertainty principle makes impossible to obtain as an initial state. Even if we could we would have to deal with quantum effects which as far as we can tell so far seem to be random.
So instead of a perfect simulation we have to settle for models based on approximations of reality and imperfect initial conditions. Combine error buildup from the approximations in the model with a chaotic system and you will find that beyond a certain distance out it is not possible to make meaningfull predictions
To assume that this cannot assumes that universe does not have rational rules and is ruled by something else like a supernatural force. or just good old randomness.
Ultimately the labs aren't worth that much I should clarify that I mean they aren't worth many marks. I think they are very worthwhile in terms of both practical experiance gained and showing that the real world isn't perfect.
through the course of the experiment if you keep track of what wasn't working and how you tried to fix it In my experiance unless you were very good at lab work there wasn't time to do any real analysis in the lab so you don't really know how good or bad your results are until you graph them and/or compare them with theoretical results after the lab.
The problem is with those who are grading the lab reports who will only accept the "one true" answer. The other problem is even if they will accept a good writeup of a bad experiment (my experiance is that this probablly will cost you marks over a perfect result but not enough to worry about) this isn't communicated effectively to the students.
Ultimately the labs aren't worth that much but I do think it would be good to have some anti-fudging labs (that is labs where the results the lab marker expects differ from the results the students would expect, maybe do a mystery component test where the mystery component is actually a fairly complex combination of components)
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I dunno what this cafe's policy is but in general guide dogs (at least here in the uk) are very well behaved due to a combination of good training and carefull selection of dogs to train.
Does it make sense to, for example, haul coal on planes?
we (as in Britan France and the USA)did actually supply half a city by air once including rather large ammounts of coal. It only made sense because of very unusual circumstances though.
Afaict there are two main types of journal now. Conventional journals are cheap or free to publish in and make thier money from subscriptions. Open access journals make thier money from article publication fees and make the articles freely availible (which means more people can read it).
Afaict those things work by using a very short reciprocating action so they will cut hard materials but when they touch skin it just moves and doesn't get cut.
The fact of the matter is anything without an FPGA should never be called "real time". 4 microseconds of jitter is laughable when you have an FPGA. I can do 10 nanosecond precision timing on Spartan 3's without batting an eye.
But it's not going to make much difference when your "plant" has time constants of seconds or more anyway.
Real time system design is about knowing what your deadlines are and then designing a system in a way that ensures it will always meet those deadlines. Sometimes programmable logic (whether PAL, CPLD or FPGA) is the way to go (simpler stuff or stuff with very short deadlines), sometimes a CPU is a better choice (more complex stuff with longer deadlines), sometimes a hybrid approach of more than one device may be your best bet.
d) crack the drm on the copy you already have
If you are going to link to a complaint at least link to one about the right comic strip.
Until the CD, music pretty much did have a limited lifetime. All other mediums wore out
Music was easilly copyable from the introduction of casettes so if you kept the originals for occasional use and the copies for playing all the time the lifetime was extremely long.
VHS tape wore out quickly
Really? I can't say I can recall ever wearing out a prerecorded vhs tape (blank tapes used for timeshifting is another matter), . Unless you are wating the same thing daily for months on end I don't see this as a practical issue.
What PC based digital copying did do however was threefold
1: it allowed home-recorded copies to be the same quality and nearly as durable (unlike cassettes which were vulnerable to wearing out and snapping) as the originals
2: it removed generation loss, suddenly if one person in a community had a copy everyone in that community could have a copy of the same quality.
3: make copying much faster, CD to tape copying basically had to be done in realtime, tape to tape could be done at about twice realtime. CD to CD with a PC could be done at many times realtime.
4: it opened the door for filesharing networks
This archive could then be restored onto another PC (destroying the archive)
Was there anything to stop you simply copying the archive before restoring it?
IANAD but my understanding is it all comes down to (or at least should come down to) risk assesment.
Treating a patient without knowing thier medical history is riskier than treating them with information on thier medical history. Sometimes that risk is worth taking because the alternatives are even worse. Other times it's better to delay treatment so it can be done with full records availible.
Lawyers normally cannot bring a suit themselves on their own, they have to have a client they work for. That person, paying the lawyer, is the douche.
If people had to actively seek out and pay a lawyer to take thier case I would agree with you. However that is not the case, there are law firms who actively advertise personal injury services AND do them on a no win no fee basis.
Indeed, the point is that digital copies require management. If the management stops for whatever reason then within a few decades retrival is
Also in addition to managing the data archive you have to deal with archiving software, operating systems and emulators to run that software and possibly cracks to allow the software to be run without contact with the outside world so that the files you have preserved can still be read.
In C++ the pattern is fairly simple, every object must be cleaned up. For objects on the stack that is done automatically. For objects on the heap the programmer can either do it manually, have a single reference responsible for the lifetime of the object (auto_ptr) or use reference counting (shared_ptr).
In java the pattern is a mess, you have to check the docs for every object to see if it needs to be disposed or not and if so you have to manage that disposal manually and of course if you change an object that previously did not require diposal to require it you have to go through ALL code that uses the object and work out how to add disposal code to it.
But they did not do things that made it worse for students
Denying students access to less full classes and pushing them into fuller ones definately sounds like making things worse for students to me.
But did the actions they take make things worse for students?
Denying students entry to less full classes but letting them into fuller ones purely to improve a metric sounds like making things worse for students to me.
As for the salery increases it depends on how the money was spent. If it's spent on attracting better staff then I suppose it may be in the students interest (though in general I get the impression that tuitition rates in the US are rather out of control). OTOH if it's just spent on a uni-wide pay rise (which was the impression I got from the article) then I don't think it is.
1) Java is slow
Semi-true, java is what you get when you take a language that is slow by design and optimise the hell out of it. Overall perforamnce is reasonable but not brilliant (shootout.alioth.debian.org places it at arround 1.5 to 2 times slower than C). Predictability of performance can be a problem though because instanciating a new class can mess with the inheritance tree and hence the performance of seemingly unrelated code.
2) Java is not yet open source (or only parts of it are or isn't "really" open source)
The truth or falseness of this depends on what you consider to be part of java. There is an open-source version and it can pass the platform compatibility tests but it's not entirely the same code as the binary releases and IIRC it lacks implementations of some optional parts of the platform. Also only a limited selection of CPU and OS ports were released. Also last I checked the source for the official java plugin was missing (there are third party ones though I dunno what thier compatibility is like currently).
3) Java is not available in any Linux distro's package manager
It is now but this is a fairly recent change. It only made it into debian lenny by the skin of it's teeth.
6) "Java is a heavyweight ball and chain"
Semi-true, java is a huge platform that makes it difficult to interact with code written in other languages though there is now a third party library (jna) to make it easier.
7) Sun is charging people to use the new G1 garbage collector.
Well that is what thier release notes originaly said though I don't think it was backed up by any statements in a license.
I would guess a developer said something vauge like "don't use this in production without a support contract" and it got misunderstood by the person writing the release notes. If they really wanted to forbid it I'd expect them to be competant enough to do that in the license.
Does it really matter whether it is technically cheating or gaming?
Afaict the main point of ratings is to help students decide where they should go to university. Taking actions that improve ratings while actually making things worse for students is a very bad trend.
with pneumatics I could have quickly ran into an issue if I made a ripple counter for example where the amount of pressure necessary to switch the furthest most element might exceed the abilities of my pump.
Sounds like you just need to have some buffers in the design.
Apparent conclusion: Such winning strategies can't exist for long, because if they did, the bookie would go bankrupt quickly. Don't you agree?
Afaict bookies base there odds on the number of bets they get for each outcome (such that whoever wins the bookie wins). Therefore if you push things too hard then the odds will adjust such that your strategy no longer works.
However if there is a relatively small value of bets made by rational informed betters and a much larger value made by irrational uninformed betters then things could easilly work out in favour of both the bookies and the rational informed betters.
If we are to believe that the universe does have a set of laws applied to it, then by understanding those rules can lead to models that will predict otherwise seemly irrational universe.
It is not feasible to make a perfect simulation of the universe since that it would require a computer more complex than the universe (and therefore unable to exist in our universe) to run and require information that the heisenberg uncertainty principle makes impossible to obtain as an initial state. Even if we could we would have to deal with quantum effects which as far as we can tell so far seem to be random.
So instead of a perfect simulation we have to settle for models based on approximations of reality and imperfect initial conditions. Combine error buildup from the approximations in the model with a chaotic system and you will find that beyond a certain distance out it is not possible to make meaningfull predictions
To assume that this cannot assumes that universe does not have rational rules and is ruled by something else like a supernatural force.
or just good old randomness.
Indeed, when it comes to anything safety crtical KISS is a good principle to follow as it will make it much easier to ensure safety.
The linked article has no pictures and the one posted here looks like a higher voltage line than is mentioned in the story to me.
Ultimately the labs aren't worth that much
I should clarify that I mean they aren't worth many marks. I think they are very worthwhile in terms of both practical experiance gained and showing that the real world isn't perfect.
through the course of the experiment if you keep track of what wasn't working and how you tried to fix it
In my experiance unless you were very good at lab work there wasn't time to do any real analysis in the lab so you don't really know how good or bad your results are until you graph them and/or compare them with theoretical results after the lab.
The problem is with those who are grading the lab reports who will only accept the "one true" answer.
The other problem is even if they will accept a good writeup of a bad experiment (my experiance is that this probablly will cost you marks over a perfect result but not enough to worry about) this isn't communicated effectively to the students.
Ultimately the labs aren't worth that much but I do think it would be good to have some anti-fudging labs (that is labs where the results the lab marker expects differ from the results the students would expect, maybe do a mystery component test where the mystery component is actually a fairly complex combination of components)