While I agree that analog processors probably hold some promise, there is one large issue with them: heat. A major reason why processors get hot in the first place is that after each cycle the state is returned to a neutral position, which usually means grounding the gates to discharge them. This waste energy has a large conversion over to heat. Analog processors can really be thought of digital with multiple states, instead of two. This means that while more work can be done, there is larger values of charge to disapate.
What has always had my curiousity for why it has not been seemly worked on is "reversable" chips. There are essentially two sets for every mechanism and the system toggles back and forth. The discharge of the old system is used to drive the new mechanism; thus, a lot of wasted discharge is conserved for reuse. Reversable chips are reported to generate far, far less heat. I have heard that Intel and others know about this, but it is simply a better immediate investment because consumers are happy paying for the current line of toasters.
He (his office) has to approve the story and make sure it doesn't conflict with someone else's work.
Have you even played Star Wars: Galaxies?? The latest expansion pack is going to include the wookiee planet, and everyone and all wookie buildings are on the ground!
Lucas, et all, are completely unconcerned about about cannon. Lucas just wants to have final say on his play in his toy room.
One of the main complaints of current laws is that there is no intent written into the law. It is an interesting age that using your own computer can instantly be a felony should you mis-type a URL, a trojan from an exploit begins pop-ups or Googled more than you expected.
People seem to think that just because your computer is in your home that you are safe. The computer is a doorway that can let every seedy thing in the world find a way into your house and should be treated as such.
If there is anything that I have learned is: the latest generation of children have be trained to have attention spans measured in nanoseconds. Game play is next to non-existent and is not much farther than pushing the right button in the right order, and half of the game play (or more) is done automatically by the computer.
If a kid today cannot figure out something that goes "wizzzz! Bang!" within 20 seconds of picking up the joystick, it's a dead game. I was playing a game a while back a friend of mine's teenage boy and some of his friends. I had never played the game before and yet promptly started to beat the crap out of them. The concept of feints, parries, timed response, and multiple-attack strategy was simply beyond them. I feigned lack of interest and join the rest of the adults because I felt bad about trying not to show them up. They thought it was cool to mash the buttons.
This is a perfect example of an technological myopia. That the only thing that is necessary to solve the software development is to focus on the project requirments. Anything else is a disparaging waste of effort. A business is about serving people, regardless of what it creates, modifies, delievers or manages. That means having a diverse understanding of the project requirements so that one can figure out what the project requirements are.
Yes, this is one of the reining complaints with companies these days. They can code up a wicked loop, but cannot see anything greater than their job mandate. I've seen a lot of effort in Universities to force CS students to get some business classes so they can at least have some appreciation of what the business is actually about.
I have never said "no" to anyone. First of all, saying "no" is negative and, like it or not, being political is part of the process. What I have always done instead is said, "Sure, I can do that. Give me a day and I'll tell you want it will cost us." If you have actually done correct project planning, it should not be hard to estimate the required changes and put them into the MS Project Gantt chart. Then, you come back and say, "well, after tallying up the documentation requirements, changes in programming shifts, new testing procedures, etc, etc, it will cost us an additional five weeks."
Now, what does this mean? Does it mean the manager is causing us a problem?
You see, software is a business. Just like any other business, it is not about saying "no" at the right time, it is about the evalutation of opportunity costs. Let's just say for the moment that the change is necessary to meet ISO9000 for the company and it must be met in two months or the company is out $10,000,000 on the project as a whole. Guess what? Saying "no" not only makes you look like a non-player, but you're costing the company one hundred times your salary.
As for light on documentation, the systems that I have been apart of have comprised of hundreds of systems and thousands of modules. It is simply not possible to expect every aspect to be changed correctly through communication since no single person has total comprehension of the entire system.
Having many years of successful software project management under my belt, I can tell you it boils down to two concepts: professional training and discipline.
There are a million and one books and surveys and they all say the same thing. First, there is a formal process for the development of anything (not just software). This starts with the formal documentation process and meetings to discover functional and non-functional issues. Second, there is a very strong sense by everyone to want to adjust it a little more. From senior managers who allow scope creap to managers who want steps to be cut to make up time to programmers constantly who rewrite the code because they think they can squeeze 5% more time out of a loop that runs for less than a second in a process.
Most people do not realize that in a successful formal process that the actual time in a software project that is used to build the software should amount to only about 30% of the project's development time. The other 70% is time spent on documentation, meetings, and testing to ensure that the 30% of time used on software delevopement is actually what the company is needing. And, it is discipline that keeps people on the project process in the face of the fear of not getting the project done right. The process has to be allowed to work, both to reach a project end point and to have unobstructed process from which to learn.
The part I get a kick out of is that just because people write software or run a company that they somehow think they just ought to know why projects work. If complex systems were just so easy, why would we need formal training? After all, anyone can build a bridge successfully without training, right? I am not being hard on people, though. I had this exact same though years ago and what I figured out is that the vast majority of the software industry is so poorly trained that it doesn't even realize that it poorly trained.
Successful software development books have been around for more than 30 years. Go read! Better than that, get a university degree. The more liberal the better. Honestly, it is worth it. Here is a good place to start: Systems Analysis and Design by Kendall and Kendall (ISBN 0-13-041571-5)
My state of Missouri decided to "get tough" with Nintendo's price fixing back in the late 1980's, I belive. I signed in for the class action suit and everything. Being young, I had the nievity to believe that this would change things. The state "won," and I got a certificate for $10 off my next game purchase. Wow, Missouri punished Nintendo with a game sale and state-wide advertisments.
The only think that Microsoft didn't manage to do in this case was tie the deal to new purchases; otherwise, it's Microsoft laughing, not rumbles from Mt. St. Helens over there.
IANAL, but it seems pretty clear to me that a level of understanding was meant and not upheld contractually. I think it is fair to say that being a consultant is not being told "this is what we are up to." Additionally, I would think you could sue for some form of damage of intellectual property. If companies are not left with a bad taste in their mouth, they will continue to go on crapping on writers. Hopefully on a side note, this may spark enough interest that someone else may want to do justice with your work. If you do, I think you'll already recognize that you need absolute veto power or no deal in the future.
Best wishes and thank you for giving your work to the world,
Heisenburg bugs are a rite of passage in the computer world. They result from the production environment being different from the development environment. For instance, a debugger may initialize all memory in the process space to zero. An errant loop control now happens to be set properly, so no error occurs; however, in the production environment, whatever is left over in memory is used, which means the loop wanders off into nomansland and crashes. Always initialize your variables, period! Even in languages that automatically do it for you so that you are aware to what they are initialized.
Color me daft, but I'm not sure how 70MBps is going to do a whole lot of good. They're arguing that they will be able to support 60-70 businesses. Given that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses in metropolitan areas, can we honestly expect this to provide any usable service? Does this thing have a couple hundred channels available? Or, is it the first ISP and five dozen companies wins?
You are not alone. When an intellectual property right holder has something or sells something, they want to treat it as a property. But, they want to treat the generator or the consumer as a licenser who is subject to a contract. It's been a very devastating road in U.S. that has been very well used to raise the barrier of entry to competition.
As one person noted, it is interesting that I.P. is the only thing that can be of someone else (generated from common activities), be treated as a loss of property even though it was never produced (piracy), kept as private property (trademarked in a sense), patented to prevent people from reproducing something that they are not allowed to see, and sold as a license to which you must agree without opening the product.
I have a very, very hard time believing that the founding fathers had in any shape for form intended this nightmare.
At this point, companies enforce the idea that anything that they can get their hands on is theirs.
Until we recognize that just because I gave you my information it does not mean that it is no longer mine, privacy will always take a second place to corporate interests. And, since corporate interests run America, it follows that it will not change.
What is more important is not what corporate America is doing, but how to get the Federal government back into the hands of and for its citizens; although, I really do not think that is possible. Whether you agree with the politics or not, it is suggestive to say that about 50% of the populace believes that Bush's policies are acceptable, which basically includes allowing businesses to ignore any ethical concerns (Halliburton, Microsoft, etc). You can't change corporate America with only 50% of the vote.
Yes and no. The President is bound by all laws, but he cannot be tried while in office. He must either finish his position in office or be impeached and removed from office before he can be tried; however, it seems to be standing policy by each new president to pardon the previous president, as each wants the same from the following president. I wouldn't count on Bush being tried in a court of law unless he personally killed someone, in cold blood, with 10 witnesses, and was caught grinning into the camera.
I keep hearing about cheap VOIP being the bane of the phone industry, but when I actually look around for services I am always disappointed. My local land line runs about $22/month with no long-distance attached. I can buy a Sam's card and get 3.4 cents/min anywhere in the U.S. I'm lucky if I make 30 mins of calls in a month. Yet, every one of the VOIP services wants to charge $30-50 a month. Granted it's unlimited calling, but you'd have to be regularly making five hours of calls a month to even break even, let alone be getting a better deal! Doesn't anyone just have simple service that actually competes with phone lines anywhere? The closest thing I have seen is Skype, but there is no dealing in to it. I'd love to have skype's simple pay on use system.
First, Skype and VOIP provide better than phone quality experience, which means a wider frequency range. They attempt to offset some of this cost by compression. Phone line quality really is sucky, but it's hard to notice because the thin band it covers is in the frequency range that is most used by voice.
Second, TCP/IP's design is such that there is no guarentee of transport. If a packet is lost, it is the obligation of the sender to resend. Yes, you have 33.6k, but if you have a high enough drop rate then it may cost you double your outgoing bandwidth to keep the data going out. Phone lines have dedicated bandwidth that, if things are running right, you are guarenteed voice packet delivery.
As part of ethics class, it was required to consider: What is freedom? You are absolutely right that most people spout off "I can say anything here in the U.S.! That's freedom!" But, you can't. One cannot lie in court, one cannot say false and malicious things against people, one cannot say words that will likely incite or generate a public disturbance, and so on.
For every "freedom" we grant ourselves we must give up a freedom in cost. If we grant ourselves the ability to say anything, then anyone can say anything without merit. A common critique of "free speech" is that it leads to relativism, where there are so many people who say so many things (often contradictory and intentionally misleading) that it becomes practically impossible for any person to figure out what is true or not. In the end, people just accept practically everything they hear if it supports their opinion and rant if it doesn't. Not every country, in fact most don't, want the outcome we have in the U.S. and do not have an interest in letting anyone say just anything.
Personal opinion: You're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Allow free speech and it only takes a small number of people who are willing to twist things so far out of context that it becomes impossible to have an informed opinion (Bush v Kerry comes to mind). Disallow free speech and people will eventually come to a norm and threaten those who cross it regardless if it has merit or not (France on Nazism). As an American, I would like to say that freedom to speak is blessed thing, but with free speech being used to attempt to defend any action from responsibility these days, I'm not terribly sure we can tout this horn much longer.
Lucas' reality check bounced.
on
Star Wars on DVD
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
From the man who refuses to release original editions and continues to "rice" out his movies said this about movie purity:
"Star Wars" creator George Lucas, who testified with Steven Spielberg before Congress in the 1980s against colorization and other forms of alteration, said the process yanks such slapstick performers as the Stooges out of the black-and-white universe they belong in.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that analog processors probably hold some promise, there is one large issue with them: heat. A major reason why processors get hot in the first place is that after each cycle the state is returned to a neutral position, which usually means grounding the gates to discharge them. This waste energy has a large conversion over to heat. Analog processors can really be thought of digital with multiple states, instead of two. This means that while more work can be done, there is larger values of charge to disapate.
What has always had my curiousity for why it has not been seemly worked on is "reversable" chips. There are essentially two sets for every mechanism and the system toggles back and forth. The discharge of the old system is used to drive the new mechanism; thus, a lot of wasted discharge is conserved for reuse. Reversable chips are reported to generate far, far less heat. I have heard that Intel and others know about this, but it is simply a better immediate investment because consumers are happy paying for the current line of toasters.
Have you even played Star Wars: Galaxies?? The latest expansion pack is going to include the wookiee planet, and everyone and all wookie buildings are on the ground!
Lucas, et all, are completely unconcerned about about cannon. Lucas just wants to have final say on his play in his toy room.
English->Cat: Meow!
One of the main complaints of current laws is that there is no intent written into the law. It is an interesting age that using your own computer can instantly be a felony should you mis-type a URL, a trojan from an exploit begins pop-ups or Googled more than you expected.
People seem to think that just because your computer is in your home that you are safe. The computer is a doorway that can let every seedy thing in the world find a way into your house and should be treated as such.
The Earth's most hated pejorative (Bill Gates) linked to the universe's (Belgium)... Go figure.
If there is anything that I have learned is: the latest generation of children have be trained to have attention spans measured in nanoseconds. Game play is next to non-existent and is not much farther than pushing the right button in the right order, and half of the game play (or more) is done automatically by the computer.
If a kid today cannot figure out something that goes "wizzzz! Bang!" within 20 seconds of picking up the joystick, it's a dead game. I was playing a game a while back a friend of mine's teenage boy and some of his friends. I had never played the game before and yet promptly started to beat the crap out of them. The concept of feints, parries, timed response, and multiple-attack strategy was simply beyond them. I feigned lack of interest and join the rest of the adults because I felt bad about trying not to show them up. They thought it was cool to mash the buttons.
This is a perfect example of an technological myopia. That the only thing that is necessary to solve the software development is to focus on the project requirments. Anything else is a disparaging waste of effort. A business is about serving people, regardless of what it creates, modifies, delievers or manages. That means having a diverse understanding of the project requirements so that one can figure out what the project requirements are.
Yes, this is one of the reining complaints with companies these days. They can code up a wicked loop, but cannot see anything greater than their job mandate. I've seen a lot of effort in Universities to force CS students to get some business classes so they can at least have some appreciation of what the business is actually about.
I have never said "no" to anyone. First of all, saying "no" is negative and, like it or not, being political is part of the process. What I have always done instead is said, "Sure, I can do that. Give me a day and I'll tell you want it will cost us." If you have actually done correct project planning, it should not be hard to estimate the required changes and put them into the MS Project Gantt chart. Then, you come back and say, "well, after tallying up the documentation requirements, changes in programming shifts, new testing procedures, etc, etc, it will cost us an additional five weeks."
Now, what does this mean? Does it mean the manager is causing us a problem?
You see, software is a business. Just like any other business, it is not about saying "no" at the right time, it is about the evalutation of opportunity costs. Let's just say for the moment that the change is necessary to meet ISO9000 for the company and it must be met in two months or the company is out $10,000,000 on the project as a whole. Guess what? Saying "no" not only makes you look like a non-player, but you're costing the company one hundred times your salary.
As for light on documentation, the systems that I have been apart of have comprised of hundreds of systems and thousands of modules. It is simply not possible to expect every aspect to be changed correctly through communication since no single person has total comprehension of the entire system.
Having many years of successful software project management under my belt, I can tell you it boils down to two concepts: professional training and discipline.
There are a million and one books and surveys and they all say the same thing. First, there is a formal process for the development of anything (not just software). This starts with the formal documentation process and meetings to discover functional and non-functional issues. Second, there is a very strong sense by everyone to want to adjust it a little more. From senior managers who allow scope creap to managers who want steps to be cut to make up time to programmers constantly who rewrite the code because they think they can squeeze 5% more time out of a loop that runs for less than a second in a process.
Most people do not realize that in a successful formal process that the actual time in a software project that is used to build the software should amount to only about 30% of the project's development time. The other 70% is time spent on documentation, meetings, and testing to ensure that the 30% of time used on software delevopement is actually what the company is needing. And, it is discipline that keeps people on the project process in the face of the fear of not getting the project done right. The process has to be allowed to work, both to reach a project end point and to have unobstructed process from which to learn.
The part I get a kick out of is that just because people write software or run a company that they somehow think they just ought to know why projects work. If complex systems were just so easy, why would we need formal training? After all, anyone can build a bridge successfully without training, right? I am not being hard on people, though. I had this exact same though years ago and what I figured out is that the vast majority of the software industry is so poorly trained that it doesn't even realize that it poorly trained.
Successful software development books have been around for more than 30 years. Go read! Better than that, get a university degree. The more liberal the better. Honestly, it is worth it. Here is a good place to start: Systems Analysis and Design by Kendall and Kendall (ISBN 0-13-041571-5)
My state of Missouri decided to "get tough" with Nintendo's price fixing back in the late 1980's, I belive. I signed in for the class action suit and everything. Being young, I had the nievity to believe that this would change things. The state "won," and I got a certificate for $10 off my next game purchase. Wow, Missouri punished Nintendo with a game sale and state-wide advertisments.
The only think that Microsoft didn't manage to do in this case was tie the deal to new purchases; otherwise, it's Microsoft laughing, not rumbles from Mt. St. Helens over there.
Oh, wrong site.. Sorry.
IANAL, but it seems pretty clear to me that a level of understanding was meant and not upheld contractually. I think it is fair to say that being a consultant is not being told "this is what we are up to." Additionally, I would think you could sue for some form of damage of intellectual property. If companies are not left with a bad taste in their mouth, they will continue to go on crapping on writers. Hopefully on a side note, this may spark enough interest that someone else may want to do justice with your work. If you do, I think you'll already recognize that you need absolute veto power or no deal in the future.
Best wishes and thank you for giving your work to the world,
Heisenburg bugs are a rite of passage in the computer world. They result from the production environment being different from the development environment. For instance, a debugger may initialize all memory in the process space to zero. An errant loop control now happens to be set properly, so no error occurs; however, in the production environment, whatever is left over in memory is used, which means the loop wanders off into nomansland and crashes. Always initialize your variables, period! Even in languages that automatically do it for you so that you are aware to what they are initialized.
Color me daft, but I'm not sure how 70MBps is going to do a whole lot of good. They're arguing that they will be able to support 60-70 businesses. Given that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses in metropolitan areas, can we honestly expect this to provide any usable service? Does this thing have a couple hundred channels available? Or, is it the first ISP and five dozen companies wins?
You are not alone. When an intellectual property right holder has something or sells something, they want to treat it as a property. But, they want to treat the generator or the consumer as a licenser who is subject to a contract. It's been a very devastating road in U.S. that has been very well used to raise the barrier of entry to competition.
As one person noted, it is interesting that I.P. is the only thing that can be of someone else (generated from common activities), be treated as a loss of property even though it was never produced (piracy), kept as private property (trademarked in a sense), patented to prevent people from reproducing something that they are not allowed to see, and sold as a license to which you must agree without opening the product.
I have a very, very hard time believing that the founding fathers had in any shape for form intended this nightmare.
At this point, companies enforce the idea that anything that they can get their hands on is theirs.
Until we recognize that just because I gave you my information it does not mean that it is no longer mine, privacy will always take a second place to corporate interests. And, since corporate interests run America, it follows that it will not change.
What is more important is not what corporate America is doing, but how to get the Federal government back into the hands of and for its citizens; although, I really do not think that is possible. Whether you agree with the politics or not, it is suggestive to say that about 50% of the populace believes that Bush's policies are acceptable, which basically includes allowing businesses to ignore any ethical concerns (Halliburton, Microsoft, etc). You can't change corporate America with only 50% of the vote.
Yes and no. The President is bound by all laws, but he cannot be tried while in office. He must either finish his position in office or be impeached and removed from office before he can be tried; however, it seems to be standing policy by each new president to pardon the previous president, as each wants the same from the following president. I wouldn't count on Bush being tried in a court of law unless he personally killed someone, in cold blood, with 10 witnesses, and was caught grinning into the camera.
Since these types of things always have to have some predictions, my two cents are: Mario and Sonic, and John Carmack and Shigeru Miyamoto.
Topic: I really can't think of anyone else who have have had greater impact. Discuss.
This appears insightful.
Yeah. I tripped across them before, but they don't service my city. =(
I keep hearing about cheap VOIP being the bane of the phone industry, but when I actually look around for services I am always disappointed. My local land line runs about $22/month with no long-distance attached. I can buy a Sam's card and get 3.4 cents/min anywhere in the U.S. I'm lucky if I make 30 mins of calls in a month. Yet, every one of the VOIP services wants to charge $30-50 a month. Granted it's unlimited calling, but you'd have to be regularly making five hours of calls a month to even break even, let alone be getting a better deal! Doesn't anyone just have simple service that actually competes with phone lines anywhere? The closest thing I have seen is Skype, but there is no dealing in to it. I'd love to have skype's simple pay on use system.
Two reasons:
First, Skype and VOIP provide better than phone quality experience, which means a wider frequency range. They attempt to offset some of this cost by compression. Phone line quality really is sucky, but it's hard to notice because the thin band it covers is in the frequency range that is most used by voice.
Second, TCP/IP's design is such that there is no guarentee of transport. If a packet is lost, it is the obligation of the sender to resend. Yes, you have 33.6k, but if you have a high enough drop rate then it may cost you double your outgoing bandwidth to keep the data going out. Phone lines have dedicated bandwidth that, if things are running right, you are guarenteed voice packet delivery.
As part of ethics class, it was required to consider: What is freedom? You are absolutely right that most people spout off "I can say anything here in the U.S.! That's freedom!" But, you can't. One cannot lie in court, one cannot say false and malicious things against people, one cannot say words that will likely incite or generate a public disturbance, and so on.
For every "freedom" we grant ourselves we must give up a freedom in cost. If we grant ourselves the ability to say anything, then anyone can say anything without merit. A common critique of "free speech" is that it leads to relativism, where there are so many people who say so many things (often contradictory and intentionally misleading) that it becomes practically impossible for any person to figure out what is true or not. In the end, people just accept practically everything they hear if it supports their opinion and rant if it doesn't. Not every country, in fact most don't, want the outcome we have in the U.S. and do not have an interest in letting anyone say just anything.
Personal opinion: You're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Allow free speech and it only takes a small number of people who are willing to twist things so far out of context that it becomes impossible to have an informed opinion (Bush v Kerry comes to mind). Disallow free speech and people will eventually come to a norm and threaten those who cross it regardless if it has merit or not (France on Nazism). As an American, I would like to say that freedom to speak is blessed thing, but with free speech being used to attempt to defend any action from responsibility these days, I'm not terribly sure we can tout this horn much longer.