It would be all correct and perfect in the context of a programmer's work and when I'm programming (especially at a low level, with no access to arbitrary-precision math libraries etc.), I do indeed expect such results. But when I'm using a spreadsheet, I expect it to take care of such details, because they're irrelevant in this context and must not ever be exposed to the user.
Now, I noticed that even in Python log(1000,10) does return 2.(9) - but log10(1000) returns 3. For a programming language, intended for use by programmers well aware of such quirks, this is exceptionally thoughtful and convinient, although Python programmers would do just fine without . For a spreadsheet, making log10(x) just an alias of log(x,10) without any additional logic that ensures a "sensible" result is just sloppiness.
Even worse - Python at least tells me, that the result of log(1000,10) is 2.(9), while Google Docs shows it as 3.0. The exact same 3.0 as if I just typed it in. As far as I can see, there's no way to force it to display the real value of 2.(9). There's no warning, no give-away for the imminent calculation error for the user to see and act accordingly. Yet, the error happens. Good luck tracking it down then - it seems almost impossible to find such a quirk in a complicated formula in Google Docs because you cannot really take a peek at what numbers it's actually working with. They tried to hide the binary representation problem and failed, but that's something you either do properly, or not at all. This definitely is a bug.
No, it isn't. It was just for the visual effect of having the ".00" added, but the same thing happens with no forced formatting. Actually, I think that number formatting is not taken into account by Google Apps when doing actual calculations, not just displaying numbers.
Just about any other application I checked this with (I recall trying OOo, Excel, KSpread, Gnumeric, python, Matlab [which purposely does not do any floating point error correction when not asked to] and Maxima) got it right, so I'm not really convinced that it's something common and hard to avoid. Well, maybe it is common if not corrected for, but definitely not hard to avoid and unheard of. Besides, other multiplies of 10 up to 10E+20 were fine, as were logarithms for several different bases and sets of values.
A1: "=log10(1000)", format for two decimals - equals 3.00 A2: "=trunc(3.00)", format for two decimals - equals 3.00 A3: "=trunc(log10(1000))", format for two decimals - equals... *drumbeat* 2.00, that is, TWO POINT OH OH. Uh, oh.
I decided to call it "Schroedinger's logarithm".
A report on the Google Docs' technical support forum went unanswered...
At my university (specifically, at the Faculty of Electronics, which includes network and systems engineering), this would not work very well, if at all.
First, several absurdly expensive applications like Matlab (yeah, everyone here knows about Octave, but the industry wants students to learn to use Matlab) are available only on the lab servers, and while it's possible to forward the X connection from the server and have them appear on the laptop's desktop (in fact, that's how they work on the lab computers), most Windows-using students can't be bothered even to install and use PuTTY and Xming properly, and even then, using Matlab over a WiFi connection is not for the faint of heart and weak-tempered.
Second, some things are to be accessed only from university-owned computers, such as the IEEE Xplore database and several scientific journals, and there's nothing the university could do about this, it's just how academic licensing works.
There are probably some more cases such as those, so the labs are here to stay for some more time, I think.
You see, hovering is not for those merely initiated, only ones who mastered at least 2/3 of all emacs keyboard shortcuts can attempt this arcane craft that RMS himself uses to aid himself in fendind off ninjas and visiting Cory Doctorow.
We are expecting 1,000+ unique visitors / day. I know that having only one server to serve this number of people is not a great idea, so I began to look into clusters. After a bit of reading I determined that I am looking for high availability, in case of hardware fault, and network load balancing, which will allow the load to be shared among the two to six servers that we hope to purchase.
He got half the issue right - for availability, two servers and a balancing mechanism (actually, full automatic switchover would be more appropriate here than a round-robin style balancer) is a proper solution. And so I wrote "get two of those", appropriately, but regarding some $100 home PC boxes - because the other half of the issue was clearly misunderstood: he seemed to be going to buy six real, expensive servers thinking that he needs them for the job because of their performance, not increased availability. Which is definitely not true, because several orders of magnitude more workload will be handled just fine by a cheap consumer PC, assuming that his scripts and database queries are properly written (but if they're not, not even a supercomputer will help with, say, an exponential-complexity algorithm).
It could be probably argued that a consumer PC will fail sooner than a proper server because of build quality, but it will be cheap to fix or replace as well, whereas a failed server costs a lot even to fix (because of natural monopoly for model-specific parts with limited lifespan like power supplies, which are extremely expensive after the warranty expires), and you can't really just pop in the computer store across the street to get the parts and fix it quickly. Sure, there are additional warranty plans for servers that include sending a technician to the customer's location and fixing things within several hours, but they often cost more than the server itself, not an option in this case.
All in all, I think that I did not state anything substantially incorrect, maybe a bit inaccurate (I was somewhat in hurry, but still wanted to share my thoughts), more like you misunderstood the point I was trying to get across.
I'm sorry, but I have to say that. Don't be offended, please - sooner or later you will look at your submission and laugh really hard, but for now you need to realise that you said something very, very silly. A few people already politely pointed out that 1000 visitors a day is nothing - but seriously, it's such a great magnitude of nothingness that, if you make such a gross misintepretation of your expected traffic, you need to reconsider if you really are the right person for the job *right now* and maybe gain some more experience before trying to spend other people's money on a ton of hardware that will just sit there, idle and consume huge amounts electricity (also paid by other people's money).
I'm serving a 6k/day website (scripting, database, some custom daemons etc.) from a Celeron 1.5GHz with 1GB RAM, and it's still doing almost nothing. If you really have to have some load balancing, get two of those for $100 each.
I think it's intended to be a holding place for Photoshop toolboxes, and for this task it's just the right size. You see, it makes an enormous difference if you can just maximize your work on one screen without obscuring it with any tool windows and put those on a separate screen, especially if you're working with huge, high-resolution images.
Well, that's as close to the public domain as you can get and it's the only way. Short of commiting suicide, there's nothing you can do to make it happen any sooner.
Sure, in practice this particular problem is not that likely to happen and can be ignored with a decent safety margins in almost every situation. However, the general problem with laws (and many related things, especially formal contracts and agreements) is that you should never assume that a loophole of any kind will not be exploited just because of some inherent honesty of the people you're dealing with. Especially when they're not willing to fix it when pointed out, trying to reassure you in a suspiciously nervous way that there's no need to make a fix because it's not like they're going to use it against you, out of goodwill alone.
Unfortunately, the concept of "public domain" is nonexistent in some legal systems. Polish law, for example, is extremely idiotic in this aspect - not only it's not possible in Poland to publish a work anonymously to give it a public domain status (because the law states that for anonymous works, the role of a "temporary" author is to be claimed by default by the "collective copyright management institutions", read "RIAA-alikes", at least until the author decides to announce himself - and their primary objective is of course making money in every way imaginable), it's not even possible for the author to waive his rights to monetary compensation for his works and control over their current and future use - that is, given the wording of the Polish law, it could be argued that, for example, a programmer could revoke a GPL license on an already published piece of code, retroactively. This, sadly, means, that in Poland the "Zero" license means almost nothing - and it could easily be used by a dishonest author to sue someone using his work as if the author really waived his rights to it, and in good faith because of how the license could be perceived.
OK, now, tell me, which one of you was such a wag to steal all the entropy and think it's funny, eh? Put it back at once, before it turns out that we all have "1234" for a root password just by coincidence!
Knowing what some journalists are capable (or rather incapable) of, I'd not be surprised if they had quoted him stating that his name is "Karl Theodor [citation needed] von un zu Guttenberg"...
That's also being disinformed - the Microsoft itself is ENDORSING AND FUNDING Open Source!
Just put the phrase "Microsoft funding apache" in any web search engine. It was on Slashdot a few weeks ago anyway. And show that to your customers. MS's CMPs are telling that Apache is insecure? Well, Microsoft is funding it and telling that it's good, so it looks like those MCPs know crap even about things Microsoft has say in officially and they shouldn't be trusted in those matters, or probably in any matters.
That's kind of logical - sure, some poor so-and-so could in fact get into some trouble this way, but there's absolutely nothing AMD could do to fix that, save for putting an appropriate notice on the box. I mean, AM3 motherboards will use DDR3 memory (which is different from DDR2 even in terms of physical dimensions and pinout, so you can't put a DDR2 module in a DDR3 slot), but AM2 processors can't talk to DDR3 memory because they were not designed to do that, and AMD can't magically fix all those AM2 processors that have been already made to be able to use DDR3. See the problem?
Actually, both licenses are as free for the end user of the code as they could possibly get. The point is that for BSD, "end user of the code" == "a developer using *the code* as in getting the source into his work", whereas for GPL "end user of the code" == "a computer user running the code in an executable form". See? That's what most people bashing themselves up over this can't (or don't want to) realize. And it seems that having both kinds of "end user" granted maximum freedoms by a single license is impossible because those freedoms conflict - certainly, no license like that exists right now. Now, it's up to you to decide which kind of the "end user" you like more and want to give more freedoms to.
Had you checked any source - even Wikipedia - you would know that Ogg Vorbis is being used extensively in game industry, both for technical superiority (not only that of the codec itself, which could be disputed, but of the library, which is very easy to integrate and fully supported by the Miles Sound System) and legal status. There are no patents on this, so the lawyers (and, consequently, the execs) in the game development studios are happy because they don't have to worry about some random company telling them to pay up a week before release and yet, it costs nothing.
Well, assuming that I understand the summary correctly, one of the most important points of this regulation actually IS improving the level of mandatory information - the rest is just throwing out the most blatantly inefficient devices, and I wouldn't be actually surprised if those same devices tended to be badly engineered in general, so it's possible that nothing of value will be lost anyway...
You just opened a whole new can of worms. From a moral point of view, what most people would call not doing something when it could be done is also a kind of action, mostly equivalent to what people tend to call call doing something (which is really, really arbitrary), especially in terms of responsibility (the practical kind, not legal!). Wether or not your decision actually resulted in a particular physical action of your body or a lack thereof is irrelevant. By this I mean that if you chose to not torture someone given such a choice, you would still be effectively responsible for someone's suffering, just not the inmate's but your family's. Again, maybe not legally, but even that might be possible in some juristictions...
Isn't this obvious? They should give one to Steve Ballmer! He'll just throw it against the wall over and over instead of screwing things up and maybe MS will turn into a decent company, at last...
There actually is a difference. 2.0, high-speed or not, is much easier on the CPU than 1.0 and 1.1 because it allows for a device to wake up the host, instead of the host having to poll the bus every x miliseconds, preventing the CPU from switching into a deeper C-state and saving power.
Much better power management, in many different aspects, which can be important if this particular embedded platform is meant to be battery-powered or used in an unfriendly thermal environment (yes, power efficiency is also a kind of performance metric, just per watt of consumed and emitted power, not per unit of time).
There's more power management support in the drivers, lots of ACPI fixes and improvements, and, most importantly for a platform like Atom (or any x86-based platform in general, when heat and power are a problem), the tickless idle mode, which enables very real and measurable power saving and reduction of generated heat by letting the processor actually do nothing (technically, drop to C3 and further power states) when, well, doing nothing, instead of processing useless interrupts and idling at the normal working power level.
Are you sure you aren't one of those animal rights activists that come out with a protest every time someone starts a debate about a public right to bear arms?...
Slashdot Mirror
It would be all correct and perfect in the context of a programmer's work and when I'm programming (especially at a low level, with no access to arbitrary-precision math libraries etc.), I do indeed expect such results. But when I'm using a spreadsheet, I expect it to take care of such details, because they're irrelevant in this context and must not ever be exposed to the user.
Now, I noticed that even in Python log(1000,10) does return 2.(9) - but log10(1000) returns 3. For a programming language, intended for use by programmers well aware of such quirks, this is exceptionally thoughtful and convinient, although Python programmers would do just fine without . For a spreadsheet, making log10(x) just an alias of log(x,10) without any additional logic that ensures a "sensible" result is just sloppiness.
Even worse - Python at least tells me, that the result of log(1000,10) is 2.(9), while Google Docs shows it as 3.0. The exact same 3.0 as if I just typed it in. As far as I can see, there's no way to force it to display the real value of 2.(9). There's no warning, no give-away for the imminent calculation error for the user to see and act accordingly. Yet, the error happens. Good luck tracking it down then - it seems almost impossible to find such a quirk in a complicated formula in Google Docs because you cannot really take a peek at what numbers it's actually working with. They tried to hide the binary representation problem and failed, but that's something you either do properly, or not at all. This definitely is a bug.
No, it isn't. It was just for the visual effect of having the ".00" added, but the same thing happens with no forced formatting. Actually, I think that number formatting is not taken into account by Google Apps when doing actual calculations, not just displaying numbers.
Just about any other application I checked this with (I recall trying OOo, Excel, KSpread, Gnumeric, python, Matlab [which purposely does not do any floating point error correction when not asked to] and Maxima) got it right, so I'm not really convinced that it's something common and hard to avoid. Well, maybe it is common if not corrected for, but definitely not hard to avoid and unheard of. Besides, other multiplies of 10 up to 10E+20 were fine, as were logarithms for several different bases and sets of values.
Open a new spreadsheet, type in those formulas:
A1: "=log10(1000)", format for two decimals - equals 3.00
A2: "=trunc(3.00)", format for two decimals - equals 3.00
A3: "=trunc(log10(1000))", format for two decimals - equals... *drumbeat* 2.00, that is, TWO POINT OH OH. Uh, oh.
I decided to call it "Schroedinger's logarithm".
A report on the Google Docs' technical support forum went unanswered...
At my university (specifically, at the Faculty of Electronics, which includes network and systems engineering), this would not work very well, if at all.
First, several absurdly expensive applications like Matlab (yeah, everyone here knows about Octave, but the industry wants students to learn to use Matlab) are available only on the lab servers, and while it's possible to forward the X connection from the server and have them appear on the laptop's desktop (in fact, that's how they work on the lab computers), most Windows-using students can't be bothered even to install and use PuTTY and Xming properly, and even then, using Matlab over a WiFi connection is not for the faint of heart and weak-tempered.
Second, some things are to be accessed only from university-owned computers, such as the IEEE Xplore database and several scientific journals, and there's nothing the university could do about this, it's just how academic licensing works.
There are probably some more cases such as those, so the labs are here to stay for some more time, I think.
You see, hovering is not for those merely initiated, only ones who mastered at least 2/3 of all emacs keyboard shortcuts can attempt this arcane craft that RMS himself uses to aid himself in fendind off ninjas and visiting Cory Doctorow.
Offending someone isn't the best way to make them consider your point, is it?
Other than that, you're right.
From the submitted text (emphasis mine):
We are expecting 1,000+ unique visitors / day. I know that having only one server to serve this number of people is not a great idea, so I began to look into clusters. After a bit of reading I determined that I am looking for high availability, in case of hardware fault, and network load balancing, which will allow the load to be shared among the two to six servers that we hope to purchase.
He got half the issue right - for availability, two servers and a balancing mechanism (actually, full automatic switchover would be more appropriate here than a round-robin style balancer) is a proper solution. And so I wrote "get two of those", appropriately, but regarding some $100 home PC boxes - because the other half of the issue was clearly misunderstood: he seemed to be going to buy six real, expensive servers thinking that he needs them for the job because of their performance, not increased availability. Which is definitely not true, because several orders of magnitude more workload will be handled just fine by a cheap consumer PC, assuming that his scripts and database queries are properly written (but if they're not, not even a supercomputer will help with, say, an exponential-complexity algorithm).
It could be probably argued that a consumer PC will fail sooner than a proper server because of build quality, but it will be cheap to fix or replace as well, whereas a failed server costs a lot even to fix (because of natural monopoly for model-specific parts with limited lifespan like power supplies, which are extremely expensive after the warranty expires), and you can't really just pop in the computer store across the street to get the parts and fix it quickly. Sure, there are additional warranty plans for servers that include sending a technician to the customer's location and fixing things within several hours, but they often cost more than the server itself, not an option in this case.
All in all, I think that I did not state anything substantially incorrect, maybe a bit inaccurate (I was somewhat in hurry, but still wanted to share my thoughts), more like you misunderstood the point I was trying to get across.
I'm sorry, but I have to say that. Don't be offended, please - sooner or later you will look at your submission and laugh really hard, but for now you need to realise that you said something very, very silly. A few people already politely pointed out that 1000 visitors a day is nothing - but seriously, it's such a great magnitude of nothingness that, if you make such a gross misintepretation of your expected traffic, you need to reconsider if you really are the right person for the job *right now* and maybe gain some more experience before trying to spend other people's money on a ton of hardware that will just sit there, idle and consume huge amounts electricity (also paid by other people's money).
I'm serving a 6k/day website (scripting, database, some custom daemons etc.) from a Celeron 1.5GHz with 1GB RAM, and it's still doing almost nothing. If you really have to have some load balancing, get two of those for $100 each.
I think it's intended to be a holding place for Photoshop toolboxes, and for this task it's just the right size. You see, it makes an enormous difference if you can just maximize your work on one screen without obscuring it with any tool windows and put those on a separate screen, especially if you're working with huge, high-resolution images.
Well, that's as close to the public domain as you can get and it's the only way. Short of commiting suicide, there's nothing you can do to make it happen any sooner.
Sure, in practice this particular problem is not that likely to happen and can be ignored with a decent safety margins in almost every situation. However, the general problem with laws (and many related things, especially formal contracts and agreements) is that you should never assume that a loophole of any kind will not be exploited just because of some inherent honesty of the people you're dealing with. Especially when they're not willing to fix it when pointed out, trying to reassure you in a suspiciously nervous way that there's no need to make a fix because it's not like they're going to use it against you, out of goodwill alone.
Unfortunately, the concept of "public domain" is nonexistent in some legal systems. Polish law, for example, is extremely idiotic in this aspect - not only it's not possible in Poland to publish a work anonymously to give it a public domain status (because the law states that for anonymous works, the role of a "temporary" author is to be claimed by default by the "collective copyright management institutions", read "RIAA-alikes", at least until the author decides to announce himself - and their primary objective is of course making money in every way imaginable), it's not even possible for the author to waive his rights to monetary compensation for his works and control over their current and future use - that is, given the wording of the Polish law, it could be argued that, for example, a programmer could revoke a GPL license on an already published piece of code, retroactively. This, sadly, means, that in Poland the "Zero" license means almost nothing - and it could easily be used by a dishonest author to sue someone using his work as if the author really waived his rights to it, and in good faith because of how the license could be perceived.
OK, now, tell me, which one of you was such a wag to steal all the entropy and think it's funny, eh? Put it back at once, before it turns out that we all have "1234" for a root password just by coincidence!
Knowing what some journalists are capable (or rather incapable) of, I'd not be surprised if they had quoted him stating that his name is "Karl Theodor [citation needed] von un zu Guttenberg"...
That's also being disinformed - the Microsoft itself is ENDORSING AND FUNDING Open Source!
Just put the phrase "Microsoft funding apache" in any web search engine. It was on Slashdot a few weeks ago anyway. And show that to your customers. MS's CMPs are telling that Apache is insecure? Well, Microsoft is funding it and telling that it's good, so it looks like those MCPs know crap even about things Microsoft has say in officially and they shouldn't be trusted in those matters, or probably in any matters.
That's kind of logical - sure, some poor so-and-so could in fact get into some trouble this way, but there's absolutely nothing AMD could do to fix that, save for putting an appropriate notice on the box. I mean, AM3 motherboards will use DDR3 memory (which is different from DDR2 even in terms of physical dimensions and pinout, so you can't put a DDR2 module in a DDR3 slot), but AM2 processors can't talk to DDR3 memory because they were not designed to do that, and AMD can't magically fix all those AM2 processors that have been already made to be able to use DDR3. See the problem?
Actually, both licenses are as free for the end user of the code as they could possibly get. The point is that for BSD, "end user of the code" == "a developer using *the code* as in getting the source into his work", whereas for GPL "end user of the code" == "a computer user running the code in an executable form". See? That's what most people bashing themselves up over this can't (or don't want to) realize. And it seems that having both kinds of "end user" granted maximum freedoms by a single license is impossible because those freedoms conflict - certainly, no license like that exists right now. Now, it's up to you to decide which kind of the "end user" you like more and want to give more freedoms to.
Uninformed troll you are, sir.
Had you checked any source - even Wikipedia - you would know that Ogg Vorbis is being used extensively in game industry, both for technical superiority (not only that of the codec itself, which could be disputed, but of the library, which is very easy to integrate and fully supported by the Miles Sound System) and legal status. There are no patents on this, so the lawyers (and, consequently, the execs) in the game development studios are happy because they don't have to worry about some random company telling them to pay up a week before release and yet, it costs nothing.
Well, assuming that I understand the summary correctly, one of the most important points of this regulation actually IS improving the level of mandatory information - the rest is just throwing out the most blatantly inefficient devices, and I wouldn't be actually surprised if those same devices tended to be badly engineered in general, so it's possible that nothing of value will be lost anyway...
You just opened a whole new can of worms. From a moral point of view, what most people would call not doing something when it could be done is also a kind of action, mostly equivalent to what people tend to call call doing something (which is really, really arbitrary), especially in terms of responsibility (the practical kind, not legal!). Wether or not your decision actually resulted in a particular physical action of your body or a lack thereof is irrelevant. By this I mean that if you chose to not torture someone given such a choice, you would still be effectively responsible for someone's suffering, just not the inmate's but your family's. Again, maybe not legally, but even that might be possible in some juristictions...
Isn't this obvious? They should give one to Steve Ballmer! He'll just throw it against the wall over and over instead of screwing things up and maybe MS will turn into a decent company, at last...
There actually is a difference. 2.0, high-speed or not, is much easier on the CPU than 1.0 and 1.1 because it allows for a device to wake up the host, instead of the host having to poll the bus every x miliseconds, preventing the CPU from switching into a deeper C-state and saving power.
Much better power management, in many different aspects, which can be important if this particular embedded platform is meant to be battery-powered or used in an unfriendly thermal environment (yes, power efficiency is also a kind of performance metric, just per watt of consumed and emitted power, not per unit of time).
There's more power management support in the drivers, lots of ACPI fixes and improvements, and, most importantly for a platform like Atom (or any x86-based platform in general, when heat and power are a problem), the tickless idle mode, which enables very real and measurable power saving and reduction of generated heat by letting the processor actually do nothing (technically, drop to C3 and further power states) when, well, doing nothing, instead of processing useless interrupts and idling at the normal working power level.
Are you sure you aren't one of those animal rights activists that come out with a protest every time someone starts a debate about a public right to bear arms?...