I used to work in a job where people did a lot of telecommutting. It's convenient for running errands that require 2-3 hours absance from work, and it's a great way to sneak in an extra day or two into a vacation... It gets in the way when you need key people for face-to-face design meetings.
As for "IT conform to the 'non-conformist hippy' bit because they have self-esteem problems", that's laughable. I know it's hard to believe, but there is a geek culture, and there are certain ways that we geeks dress, as with every culture. Looking like a sales person does very little to help your career in IT. Personally when I'm hiring (as I'm a geek in a high position; that scares you doesn't it) I dock people if they show up in a suite and tie; I assume they are trying too hard to cover up some lack of skills.
One of the best pieces of interview advice that I've gotten is "act yourself". After reading such a statement, I decided to completely avoid wearing ties to interviews, and even act as goofy as I normally do during work hours. I still dressed up, but I chose to wear something trendy as opposed to something conservative.
It really worked! I landed a sweet job with the best people in the industry!
12 years of Catholic School made me realize just how silly ties are.
Why don't we introduce an atomic-based time system that ISN'T based on the rotation of the earth? Thus, for applications where continuous time is important, we don't confuse the two?
So references were held to the objects in two places - the list of encountered obstacles, and the list of event subscribers. They were being removed from the list of encountered obstacles, but not being unsubscribed from the event.
How do you think event subscription works? Something has to hold a reference to the objects that are subscribed to the event! That thing is going to hold a reference until you unsubscribe the object - it neither knows nor cares about any other list of references you may be maintaining separately, how could it?
This is a coding error. A subtle, non-obvious one perhaps, but a bug nevertheless. It is not an error in the CLR, and in fact the article never paints it as such. That particular bit of spin is wholly down to the submitter.
This kind of error is common with inexperienced C# programmers. I haven't come across any documentation that talks about the need to unregister events.
The first version of.Net had a calendar control that didn't unregister an event handler after it was disposed. If you registered an event on the calendar control, your form would never be collected, unless you used reflection to work around the issue.
At my job, I had to fix a bug where a C# programmer forgot to unregister events in his Dispose method. Fortunately, in our case, the bug manifested itself during simple use cases. As soon as I reminded him that Disposing an object isn't the same as getting it collected, he realized that he needed to unregister his events.
I'm not surprised that this happened in an academic project; it's a good learning mistake.
Hydro? Well...forget about that one. Hydro power options are mostly in use in developed countries.
Nuclear power often needs a hydro component. It's difficult to change the output of a nuclear power plant, so the extra nighttime energy is used to pump water, which is then used during the day to handle peak loads.
Re:Less than obvious solution?
on
Lap Desks
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· Score: 1
Then an amendment to the preceding. Get a RF or Radio Frequency keyboard and mouse. IR is a waste of time, (3-5ft) and bluetooth isn't much better. (Takes quite a while to connect, and sucks batteries like crazy.) RF is usually good for between 10-15 feet.
My keyboard is RF and it's only good for 2-3 feet. It's really oriented towards desktop use, for people who HATE cables. I bought it because it's Microsoft, and I really like Microsoft keyboards and mice.
Oh, and did I mention that to restart the car while moving, you have to put the transmission halfway in between Reverse and Neutral, turn the key, then quickly shift back over into Drive in case the magical transmission gnome decides that you were closer to Reverse than Neutral?
Can't you just pop-start it?
Re:Less than obvious solution?
on
Lap Desks
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· Score: 1
Most HDTVs these days have VGA inputs. A 15-dollar VGA cable should do the trick, and most XP installs will recognize the HD resolution and scale a desktop fairly well.
Such a solution isn't as good as it sounds. My HDTV required a $50 dollar cable because it has RGBHV instead of VGA. Both of my laptops (old Toshiba and new Mac) don't output any 1080 resolutions, so I'm stuck with 480p. Because my TV is a tube, overscan is a problem.
Once you've hooked up the laptop to the tv, get yourself a wireless keyboard with a trackpad built in (like the Logitech Mediaboard Pro and as a bonus, it works with the PS3 too) and you should be set.
My wireless keyboard and mouse only have a 3-foot range, so I ended up having to run a long USB cable to my couch.
Overall, it's a good setup for watching DVDs, AVIs, iTunes, and Pandora. For interactive computing, it's very difficult.
Look at gauge and realize that of your 15 batteries, only 2 still have charge (of your 15 gallons, you only have 2 left). Drive up, park the car, turn off the engine, get out and open the hatch (electric styled hatch instead of gas tank hatch), begin dispensing batteries until you see the light indicate that the current battery still has charge (fill the tank until the pump stops), as you place a discharged battery into the "fill station", it dispenses a charged battery, charging you for the new power.
That won't be realistic for a long time. Right now, batteries capable of powering a car just aren't small enough to be swapped as easily as you suggest. My Hybrid's battery is about 10 times as large as your proposed system.
When Tesla gives presentations, they talk about how battery capacity doubles every 5 years. Their claim is that in 5 years, a luxury electric sedan will be able to go 200 miles on a charge. Extrapolating from this prediction, in 10 years it'll do 400 miles, then 800, then 1600, then 3200 in 25 years. Most people do about 3000-6000 miles between oil changes.
What this means is that in about 20 years, the whole concept of fueling or charging a car will be an artifact of the 20th century. Likewise, just as computers keep getting faster, batteries will keep lasting longer. In 50 years, if battery capacity doubles every 2 years, a luxury sedan will be able to go 102,400 miles on a single charge!
Ah yes, eventually I figured out how to do it with my old Toshiba, considering how the default mode was hibernate, and nowhere does it recommend or even mention that an alternate, faster sleep mode was available, and indeed the option was hidden deep within the guts of the OS.
Hibernate used to work perfectly on my old Toshiba. Upon opening the lid, the laptop was fully functional within 20-30 seconds. Frankly, I prefer it to the way my Mac behaves; I'd rather have the extra 5-10 minutes of battery life then instant on.
I wish my Mac had some advanced option that would make it automatically hibernate after having its lid closed for 10 minutes.
Even reputable places do this. Last year, I bought a lot of tickets through Ticketmaster.com, and each and every time they tried to get me to sign up for a free trial of the Rolling Stone.
Well, all of a sudden I started getting FREE copies of the Rolling Stone, so I knew that something fishy was going on. I kept throwing them in the trash for one year, until I got a notice that they were going to charge my credit card. I called them to cancel, but I really should have alerted my credit card that someone was about to fraudulently charge me for something that I never agreed to purchase.
That's... a joke, right?
I'm pretty sure that market forces drive companies in the opposite direction of what you're indicating... they drive companies to use the lowest quality components that they can get away with, while charging as much as the market will allow.
Which is why there are idiots who buy $10,000 tube amps with $100 / foot cables.;)
But it really is true, a $400 reciever is effectivly "perfect" when it comes to home theater:
It's loud enough
It won't have any noticable distortion
It's durable
Anything lower quality won't survive in the market place, and anything higher quality wouldn't make enough profit.
This means that even though the same total amount of renting happens, the movie studios see fewer dollars as a result.
About a year ago, I stumbled into a forum where film makers were talking about current distribution trends. Apparently, Netflix is considered a major distribution venue, and is quite profitable for films that normally wouldn't see a wide distribution. Some independant filmmakers see Netflix as a godsend.
There was some discussion on some of Netflix's constraints; Netflix will only carry DVDs that are at least 1 hour in length. This causes some documentary producers to stick 10-15 minutes of filler into a special edit for Netflix.
Now we know the answer to Fermi's Paradox, or why we're not being bombarded with radio waves from civilizations more advanced then us:
The researchers believe it would be easy to produce such nanotube radios for receiving signals in the 40-400 megahertz range, a range within which most FM radio broadcasts fall.
...
Adds Bruce Kramer, "The application of a fully functioning radio receiver less than 50 millionths of an inch in length and one millionth of an inch in diameter potentially allows the radio control of almost anything, from a single receiver in a living cell to a vast array embedded in an airplane wing."
It appears that high-powered radio waves are banned in advanced civilizations because they are used for ultra-short-range communications. The question to ask is how long will it be until an advanced civilization comes to us and tells us to "shut the fsck up" because our radio waves are too d@mn loud.
The strategy of patent holders must not be to "lay dormant" allowing numerous companies to infringe for a decade, and then when the market reaches critical mass, appear from the shadows with lawsuits.
IANAL, but I thought that such activities were illegal. Specifically, I thought that a patent owner is less able to successfully persecute infringing activities if the patent owner waits a long time.
The way you do it is you take a CD with a couple of songs you typically listen to (also maybe a sample from a movie soundtrack). Important is that it should be something you're familiar with and preferably uses natural instruments (not synthesizers).
You really need a 5.1 source to test subwoofers. Most CDs have low/loud bass filtered out. If you happen to come across the 5.1 bootleg of Rubber Soul, you'll know what I mean.
That they top it off with a $400 receiver, and completely dodge the notion of getting into separates (other than to say that it's complicated and they haven't really listened to anything), makes it lose all credibility. The cable and power conditioning sections are a joke - they steadfastly refuse to entertain any alternatives to Monster Cable (hint: almost all the alternatives are better values for the money; just because you can get Monster Cable on sale doesn't make it a good value - their markup tends to be 3x-4x that of other cable manufacturers).
Ever read a book on amplifer design?
The first chapter on amplifier design states that $400 recievers are perfect. This is because market forces drive companies like Sony and RCA to have the best quality components at the lowest possible price.
Seperates only make sense when you need to go much louder then a reference home theater.
The same is, for the most part, true with digital audio as well. You're either going to get a perfect signal or horrible pops and static. There really isn't an in-between, and you're certainly not going to get harmonic distortion. Admittedly digital audio does not feature error correction, so marginal connections are more likely to give you problems, but it's not going to be subtle.
Not quite...
The digital audio standards allow some flexibility in the sampling rate; IE, your CD player can fluxuate between 44.09khz and 44.11khz. Your reciever will play back the samples at the speed that it recieves it. Of course, the fluctuation is much less then the fluctuation that occurs in the natural warping of a vinyl record...
If I remember correctly, the specific sampling rates aren't part of the SPDIF spec, you could theoretically send a 39khz signal or a 46khz signal to a reciever and it would handle it.
But I'm not sure you need an exchangable card to do that... Let's say that each player has its own unique key, as opposed to a manufacturer's key in CSS. Assuming that you anticipate that 1 billion unique players are made, and that each key is 32-bits, you only need to dedicate 4 gigabytes of each disk to providing encryption keys. A player's key can be revoked, all other players will work.
I do agree that copy protection is futile, at least on media that's intended for wide distribution.
This raises an interesting point... why don't the movie moguls just go to a smart card based system? All hardware players are shipped with a SIM that comes from the distributors, software players require a reader hooked up to the PC. If a key is cracked, the SIM range is blocked on future discs, and a person needs to get their SIM replaced but can keep the same hardware.
Why? Well, it's too complex and expensive. Who wants to buy a device that requires you to change a card every 2-3 weeks when such "upgrades" provide no tangible advantage? I won't!
Besides, I think AACS allows for some kind of a soft update to be silently distributed on newer disks. I'm not 100% sure of this, however.
OS X isn't significantly more stable than Linux and the BSDs (or even Windows NT), so that argument is just another lie from the Apple fanboys. Why, oh why, do you people feel the need to spin every possible marketing decision from Apple as being somehow good for the consumer?
One of the reasons why Windows was historically unstable was because of third-party drivers. Historically, these drivers were of varying quality. Some Windows computers came with bad drivers pre-installed out-of-the-box.
OSX, on the other hand, doesn't need to rely on third-party drivers for default hardware configurations. Apple is able to ensure that every Mac sold with OSX has rock-solid drivers.
I've owned a domain name for a number of years now. Other than using a P.O. Box for the contact info. I've never had any problems with fraud or abuse. I get the occasional offer to buy it (its a somewhat popular name) but nothing I'd consider to be a nuisance.
I used to get telemarketers asking to speak to the "owner of the andrewrondeau.com/clothedandy.com domain" every 12-18 months. I immediatly ask if the caller has a business relationship with me, which the caller does not answer. At this point, I state, "This call is illegal. It is illegal to telemarket to cell phones, and it is against the WHOIS terms of service to use the data for marketing purposes."
In the recent year, I registered 2.coms with DynDNS to use with a web server that I'm developing. About 45 days after each domain was registered, I got a renewal letter from an offial-sounding company prompting me to renew my service.
The truth of the matter is that vinyl records are crap compared to CD's in every measurable way - distortion, dynamic range, frequency response, signal to noise ratio, you name it. Are they perfect? No, that does not exist in technology. The Redbook standard is a tad short of the maximum theoretical dynamic range and frequency response the human ear is capable of. The conversion of digital data back to analog is tricky to get right. But it is superior to vinyl.
I've been under the impression that a 12" record could sound better then a CD if it was mastered at a very loud level and at 45 RPM. (Of course, it would only have about 5 minutes of playback time per side.)
The thing that I like about vinyl is that an acheologist can figure out how to play it... We're better off putting LPs into a time capsule then CDs or DRMed DVDs.
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I used to work in a job where people did a lot of telecommutting. It's convenient for running errands that require 2-3 hours absance from work, and it's a great way to sneak in an extra day or two into a vacation... It gets in the way when you need key people for face-to-face design meetings.
One of the best pieces of interview advice that I've gotten is "act yourself". After reading such a statement, I decided to completely avoid wearing ties to interviews, and even act as goofy as I normally do during work hours. I still dressed up, but I chose to wear something trendy as opposed to something conservative.
It really worked! I landed a sweet job with the best people in the industry!
12 years of Catholic School made me realize just how silly ties are.
Why don't we introduce an atomic-based time system that ISN'T based on the rotation of the earth? Thus, for applications where continuous time is important, we don't confuse the two?
This kind of error is common with inexperienced C# programmers. I haven't come across any documentation that talks about the need to unregister events.
The first version of .Net had a calendar control that didn't unregister an event handler after it was disposed. If you registered an event on the calendar control, your form would never be collected, unless you used reflection to work around the issue.
At my job, I had to fix a bug where a C# programmer forgot to unregister events in his Dispose method. Fortunately, in our case, the bug manifested itself during simple use cases. As soon as I reminded him that Disposing an object isn't the same as getting it collected, he realized that he needed to unregister his events.
I'm not surprised that this happened in an academic project; it's a good learning mistake.
Nuclear power often needs a hydro component. It's difficult to change the output of a nuclear power plant, so the extra nighttime energy is used to pump water, which is then used during the day to handle peak loads.
My keyboard is RF and it's only good for 2-3 feet. It's really oriented towards desktop use, for people who HATE cables. I bought it because it's Microsoft, and I really like Microsoft keyboards and mice.
Can't you just pop-start it?
Such a solution isn't as good as it sounds. My HDTV required a $50 dollar cable because it has RGBHV instead of VGA. Both of my laptops (old Toshiba and new Mac) don't output any 1080 resolutions, so I'm stuck with 480p. Because my TV is a tube, overscan is a problem.
Once you've hooked up the laptop to the tv, get yourself a wireless keyboard with a trackpad built in (like the Logitech Mediaboard Pro and as a bonus, it works with the PS3 too) and you should be set.My wireless keyboard and mouse only have a 3-foot range, so I ended up having to run a long USB cable to my couch.
Overall, it's a good setup for watching DVDs, AVIs, iTunes, and Pandora. For interactive computing, it's very difficult.
That won't be realistic for a long time. Right now, batteries capable of powering a car just aren't small enough to be swapped as easily as you suggest. My Hybrid's battery is about 10 times as large as your proposed system.
When Tesla gives presentations, they talk about how battery capacity doubles every 5 years. Their claim is that in 5 years, a luxury electric sedan will be able to go 200 miles on a charge. Extrapolating from this prediction, in 10 years it'll do 400 miles, then 800, then 1600, then 3200 in 25 years. Most people do about 3000-6000 miles between oil changes.
What this means is that in about 20 years, the whole concept of fueling or charging a car will be an artifact of the 20th century. Likewise, just as computers keep getting faster, batteries will keep lasting longer. In 50 years, if battery capacity doubles every 2 years, a luxury sedan will be able to go 102,400 miles on a single charge!
Hibernate used to work perfectly on my old Toshiba. Upon opening the lid, the laptop was fully functional within 20-30 seconds. Frankly, I prefer it to the way my Mac behaves; I'd rather have the extra 5-10 minutes of battery life then instant on.
I wish my Mac had some advanced option that would make it automatically hibernate after having its lid closed for 10 minutes.
Even reputable places do this. Last year, I bought a lot of tickets through Ticketmaster.com, and each and every time they tried to get me to sign up for a free trial of the Rolling Stone.
Well, all of a sudden I started getting FREE copies of the Rolling Stone, so I knew that something fishy was going on. I kept throwing them in the trash for one year, until I got a notice that they were going to charge my credit card. I called them to cancel, but I really should have alerted my credit card that someone was about to fraudulently charge me for something that I never agreed to purchase.
Which is why there are idiots who buy $10,000 tube amps with $100 / foot cables. ;)
But it really is true, a $400 reciever is effectivly "perfect" when it comes to home theater:
Anything lower quality won't survive in the market place, and anything higher quality wouldn't make enough profit.
About a year ago, I stumbled into a forum where film makers were talking about current distribution trends. Apparently, Netflix is considered a major distribution venue, and is quite profitable for films that normally wouldn't see a wide distribution. Some independant filmmakers see Netflix as a godsend.
There was some discussion on some of Netflix's constraints; Netflix will only carry DVDs that are at least 1 hour in length. This causes some documentary producers to stick 10-15 minutes of filler into a special edit for Netflix.
Now we know the answer to Fermi's Paradox, or why we're not being bombarded with radio waves from civilizations more advanced then us:
The researchers believe it would be easy to produce such nanotube radios for receiving signals in the 40-400 megahertz range, a range within which most FM radio broadcasts fall....
Adds Bruce Kramer, "The application of a fully functioning radio receiver less than 50 millionths of an inch in length and one millionth of an inch in diameter potentially allows the radio control of almost anything, from a single receiver in a living cell to a vast array embedded in an airplane wing."It appears that high-powered radio waves are banned in advanced civilizations because they are used for ultra-short-range communications. The question to ask is how long will it be until an advanced civilization comes to us and tells us to "shut the fsck up" because our radio waves are too d@mn loud.
IANAL, but I thought that such activities were illegal. Specifically, I thought that a patent owner is less able to successfully persecute infringing activities if the patent owner waits a long time.
You really need a 5.1 source to test subwoofers. Most CDs have low/loud bass filtered out. If you happen to come across the 5.1 bootleg of Rubber Soul, you'll know what I mean.
Ever read a book on amplifer design?
The first chapter on amplifier design states that $400 recievers are perfect. This is because market forces drive companies like Sony and RCA to have the best quality components at the lowest possible price.
Seperates only make sense when you need to go much louder then a reference home theater.
Not quite...
The digital audio standards allow some flexibility in the sampling rate; IE, your CD player can fluxuate between 44.09khz and 44.11khz. Your reciever will play back the samples at the speed that it recieves it. Of course, the fluctuation is much less then the fluctuation that occurs in the natural warping of a vinyl record...
If I remember correctly, the specific sampling rates aren't part of the SPDIF spec, you could theoretically send a 39khz signal or a 46khz signal to a reciever and it would handle it.
My tounge was planted firmly in my cheek.
But I'm not sure you need an exchangable card to do that... Let's say that each player has its own unique key, as opposed to a manufacturer's key in CSS. Assuming that you anticipate that 1 billion unique players are made, and that each key is 32-bits, you only need to dedicate 4 gigabytes of each disk to providing encryption keys. A player's key can be revoked, all other players will work.
I do agree that copy protection is futile, at least on media that's intended for wide distribution.
Why? Well, it's too complex and expensive. Who wants to buy a device that requires you to change a card every 2-3 weeks when such "upgrades" provide no tangible advantage? I won't!
Besides, I think AACS allows for some kind of a soft update to be silently distributed on newer disks. I'm not 100% sure of this, however.
One of the reasons why Windows was historically unstable was because of third-party drivers. Historically, these drivers were of varying quality. Some Windows computers came with bad drivers pre-installed out-of-the-box.
OSX, on the other hand, doesn't need to rely on third-party drivers for default hardware configurations. Apple is able to ensure that every Mac sold with OSX has rock-solid drivers.
I used to get telemarketers asking to speak to the "owner of the andrewrondeau.com/clothedandy.com domain" every 12-18 months. I immediatly ask if the caller has a business relationship with me, which the caller does not answer. At this point, I state, "This call is illegal. It is illegal to telemarket to cell phones, and it is against the WHOIS terms of service to use the data for marketing purposes."
In the recent year, I registered 2 .coms with DynDNS to use with a web server that I'm developing. About 45 days after each domain was registered, I got a renewal letter from an offial-sounding company prompting me to renew my service.
I've been under the impression that a 12" record could sound better then a CD if it was mastered at a very loud level and at 45 RPM. (Of course, it would only have about 5 minutes of playback time per side.)
The thing that I like about vinyl is that an acheologist can figure out how to play it... We're better off putting LPs into a time capsule then CDs or DRMed DVDs.
Which is why I hate web-based slide shows. They either switch the slides too fast, or take too long to read.