Generally, I believe that the lack of personal responsibility for actions being carried out "in the name of a corporation" is the real culprit.
So you're suggesting insubordination?
Thanks, but I'll take putting food on my table to losing my job because my employer's morals and ethics do not align with my own. And, with some of that money from the paycheck that I keep by doing what I'm told, I can even donate to charity, thus minimizing the Karmic backlash.
I agree that they're covering their ass right now, but this is not a hardware/software issue. If it was a hardware issue, they would need to put a different circuit in there.
The hardware, the silicon, the transistors...they are all set right now. This cannot and does not change the actual connections of transistors to each other. The piece that activates this is simply a software driver.
To me, I look at the Bill Of Materials, and I see a draft-n controller. The cost of this draft-n controller goes into the cost of the computer. That the draft-n capabilities are not unlocked is why they can't advertise it, but Apple did buy draft-n silicon, and it will be in some Bill Of Materials somewhere, and that cost will be included in the cost to the consumer.
Now, if Apple put down a b/g controller in their BOM, and then passed that cost on to the consumer, then I can see charging $5 to cover the cost of the higher performance controller.
If Apple put down a b/g/n controller in their BOM, then they already recognized revenues from the n controller, whose cost is passed on to the consumer.
So, either Apple charged you for the cost of the b/g/n controller and didn't give you firmware for it, or they didn't charge you for the b/g/n controller and instead put down a b/g controller in their BOM, in which case charging extra to activate the n controller makes sense, because they didn't recognize revenues from it. However, they could similarly just eat the difference in cost between b/g/n and b/g, and then they don't have to worry about recognizing revenue.
I see this from a developer's perspective. There's a BOM somewhere, and it details how much stuff costs, and that total is used to come up with a cost to the consumer. And, to me, the customer buys the hardware and the software, regardless of what's advertised.
802.11 n was never mentioned and customers got what they paid for as advertised: 802.11 b/g
Uhm, no. The customer got MORE than they paid for - they got 802.11 b/g/draft-n, they are simply unaware of the draft-n part (and even that's a stretch since the Mac rumor sites tore the computers apart and knew about the draft-n abilities for a while now). If I take that chip out of there and put it in somewhere else, it's still a draft-n controller and I can use the draft-n capabilities. I don't care what the computer was advertised as, as long as it wasn't a lie. Facts are facts - Apple bought silicon, and when the customer purchased their computer they bought said silicon from Apple. The truth of the matter is that a customer bought something which had greater powers than advertised - and this is against the law...how?
So if Apple advertised the n and it was not working, then released the patch, then yes they unfairly recognized revenue. That they didn't advertise it means that Apple had to take a hit by purchasing hardware that was above and beyond what was necessary and sold it as something less - taking a loss. I fail to see how eating the cost of superior hardware is unfairly recognizing revenue.
I personally think their engineers weren't able to get draft-n up and running before the release date for the computers, so they left the controller in but disabled the draft-n part in software.
Look up the Hercules Game Theater XP sound card. It was originally a 5.1 sound card. A driver update made it 6.1 by allowing one of the channels of the headphone to drive a speaker. Another driver update made it 7.1 by allowing both headphone channels to drive speakers. SOx wasn't used in that case. So are you telling me that Hercules unfairly recognized revenue on a 7.1 sound card by selling it as a 5.1 sound card and updating it later via firmware?
It doesn't add up. Apple bought and paid for a piece of silicon which can do draft-n. They put this piece of silicon in a motherboard and sold it as a computer to someone. Therefore, this someone bought draft-n hardware.
The product is finished. The silicon is capable of draft-n. This is just $5 for a driver update.
If the program was given in binary form to Wisconsin (and not source code or object code), then there's no way he could link his source code against Iowa's. If he couldn't link against Iowa's code, then perhaps he designed a GUI front-end for it.
Now, I saw nothing in the article stating what modifications he made. But, I ponder...if all he did was design a GUI front-end which does some preprocessing of some data files and then drops them in the right folder for Iowa's program to access later, then he didn't make any modifications to Iowa's program. Thus, legally, he has avoided violating the can't-sell-this clause of the license.
Seeing as how he's a cop and not a programmer, I'd venture to guess he may have used VB to make such a front-end.
The reason DACs were cheaper is because it's actually really simple to build a DAC. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistor_Ladder Those R-2R resistor ladders can be built for ridiculously cheap.
DACs actually the basis of modern SAR (Successive-Approximation Register) ADCs.
With a SAR ADC, you do a binary search with a comparator and a DAC against the analog input voltage by using the DAC to successively approximate the analog input voltage. So you use the DAC to output 1/2 of the max, and a comparator then decides whether it's above or below. You store the result in a register, and then move to within a 1/4 of the target voltage, and store the comparator result. Repeat until you have a full binary number.
Higher order ADCs are just a function of better comparators and DACs. Back in the day, it was kind of expensive to have all this digital logic in a circuit (with the registers and comparators and the state machine to control all this).
Actually, they're measuring the charge time of the capacitor. If you look in their patent app at the circuit diagram, you see a tri-state buffer whose input is attached to ground - that's how they force a discharge of the cap.
Then, they let the cap charge up through the variable resistor of the joystick, and once it crosses Vih of the input buffer, said buffer outputs a logic 1.
From my inspection of the patent, it appears that their "invention" is supposed to allow a joystick which operates with a 5 V supply to interface to a circuit which does not operate on a 5 V supply.
This isn't just obvious, it's necessary! Anyone even half-assed skilled in the art would know that you need to do something to connect a 5 V TTL output to a 3.3 V LVTTL input.
Okay, so maybe their something is novel or nonobvious. In fact, it's neither; they're using a tri-state buffer's threshold voltage as a comparator.
Basically, digital logic circuits can have any manner of analog voltages applied to them. Circuit designers specify these voltages as Vil (voltage input low threshold) and Vih (voltage input high threshold). Any input voltage below Vil will generate an digital output voltage below Vol (voltage output low), which is usually interpreted as logic 0. Any input voltage above Vih will, correspondingly, generate a voltage above Voh, which is usually interpreted as logic 1.
They specify that their buffer has hysteresis, so that way it won't suffer from the metastability that usually occurs when you feed a digital circuit an input voltage between Vil and Vih.
Keep in mind that these components are all COTS (common-off-the-shelf) parts.
They just drain a capacitor, which causes the input of the buffer to go below Vil, so the buffer outputs a logic 0, which raises a PCin bit (whose voltage level is not the 5V joystick level), let the capacitor charge through the potentiometer whose resistance is proportional to the current joystick position (which cap is being charged by a 5V supply), and when the charging capacitor exceeds Vih of the input buffer, the buffer outputs a logic 1, causing the PCin bit to go low again.
There's some miscellaneous stuff about resetting, the order in which to apply signals to make the process work, etc. But, basically, the whole patent is bollocks.
I also like how they have a small piece in their patent filing about how those skilled in the art will see obvious ways to modify their patent's invention, and that these modifications are still "in the spirit" of what the patent covers and are thus covered by the patent.
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders" - 1 Corinthians 6:9 So female prostitutes are okay?
This kind of reminds me of a joke I once heard...the limit of an engineer as t tends toward infinity is a manager.
I lucked out, I did Computer Engineering in college and I landed a job doing exactly what I wanted.
However, in my search for an engineering position, I noticed that most places want someone with an M.S. and five years of experience. Does your current employer have a tuition reimbursement plan? If so, get the M.S. while working there, and when you graduate, you'll have an M.S. and probably more than five years of experience. This should allow you to land a job that you actually want.
If, in the mean time, the limit above begins to apply to you, use that as cannon fodder in your interviews. "Yeah, my current employer decided to move me into management despite my pleas to stay in engineering. You guys aren't going to do that, are you?"
Good luck, man. Management is a fate I wouldn't want any engineer to have to suffer.
On a side note, one of my old roommates decided to go management willingly, after getting his degree in Mechanical Engineering. There's something to be said for having a brain-dead easy job, and you can make good use of your engineering skills as a tinkerer in your spare time. For instance, he likes to play with cars. I've found that after a long day of problem solving, debugging, and so forth, I have no desire to do anything mentally challenging; yet I have about four projects I would love to work on.
Ugghhhh. Does EVERYONE have to use this analogy when talking about discussions held here? Actually, yes. Being an electrical engineer, I'm kind of fond of the Signal to Noise Ratio. On top of that, the analogy is, well...accurate. So I see no compelling reason not to use it.
To me, people like you who refer to trolls, spammers and first posters as "noise" are the one causing the 'noise' (or problem, as anyone else would call it) So are you trying to say that the trolls/spammers/etc are helping the discussion and the only harm is by people like me who complain about the inadequacies of the moderation system? Oh, right, and obviously "anyone else" wouldn't call it a problem, because you say that EVERYONE on slashdot uses the SNR analogy.
it's not like hijacking an article to have a completely offtopic discussion about the moderation here is helping at all. You call this hijacking a discussion? If anyone hijacked it, it was the AC whose post resulted in 11 off-topic responses. And from the looks of things, there's plenty of "discussion" going on elsewhere, anyway.
And I think it does help, a tiny bit. It certainly helps more than no discussion about the moderation system at all. I would imagine that meta-moderation was added only because of people bitching about the flaws of the moderation system.
When I moderate, I spend every point on people who I believe were wrongly modded down. Usually they're new people who are now posting at score 0 because some prick screwed them. So trust me, I know how the system works, and I make it a POINT to search out and counter abuses when I get a chance.
Modding down only works if the person is purposely trying to push the discussion in the wrong direction and many people are going to fall for it. There are simply not enough mod points to mod every offtopic comment down. Look at the sibling posts; less than half of all this offtopic nonsense was modded down. This is hardly an effective use of moderation points that could have otherwise elevated constructive comments above the threshold of 1.
Sad, my correction has a higher score than your obviously more informative post.
See, I wouldn't mind being Informative and Funny for a total score of 5, but to be all informative? I didn't intend for your post to get modded down. You gave WAY more shit, and yeah you were correct; even without reading the article I recognized that what you said sounds like a great method of acquiring a good guess for the Newton-Raphson method I learned in Calc.
Such is the horror of slashdot's moderation system. They're giving mod points to people, who probably don't read articles, to moderate a discussion of other people (would that be (~RTFA)^2?), according to rules that they probably haven't read.
I don't know what might be better, or if this is like capitalism and the least evil?
Not actually a bad idea. The relative speeds between the two vehicles shouldn't result in anything lethal; hell, it might not even bust a hole in the radiator, or chip the windshield. But the sound will definitely catch them off guard.
Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to place a small object ejection device on your car. Place it near a tire, so you're just "kicking up" rocks. To shoot objects, use a solenoid. Make it so it tries to bounce it off the ground, and use a potentiometer and a MOSFET to control the power, and another pot hooked up to a servo to control the angle of ejection. Imagine doing the testing so that you can set reasonable values for the pot's min and max..don't hit your own car!
This way they don't see you throw it out the window.
Sometimes they really get to me. Then I have a few fist-sized rocks. Roll them out the sunroof and they'll fall off the back. This is definitely illegal. You know, I laughed out loud when you added the definitely illegal disclaimer. Then I realized that you sort of needed to, because some people might think that's okay.
Reminds me of what my brother does. He rides a motorcycle, and people are real pricks when you ride a motorcycle, so he keeps a bag of ball bearings on his bike.
I don't see the point in modding useless things down.
There will never be enough mod points to mod all the noise down to -1. It should be assumed that at level 1 there will be a mixture of noise and signal, and anyone interested in pure signal should set their thresholds higher. The purpose of downmodding ought to be preventing people from posting stupid antagonizing shit over and over again, or to prevent a troll from carrying the discussion in the wrong direction by having everyone reply to it.
Can anyone (specifically you, Mr. Coward) tell me why a useless comment deserves a score lower than 1?
Is YouTube distributing the videos, or reproducing/performing them for the public?
In a way, the only real difference is scale. Public performance is limited by the size of the arena, which largest venues are still orders of magnitude smaller than YouTube's possible audience. YouTube can be used by anyone in the world with a connection to the Internet and a reasonable PC.
So, YouTube could potentially target more people more easily than a public performance. But a public performance is guaranteed to impact a number of people (all those within hearing or seeing distance), whereas a YouTube video might never be watched by anyone.
You make an excellent post. Congrats.
As for forseeability and its relationship to responsibility, let me give you a true example. My nephew leant his college roommate his laptop to do a last minute paper. The roommate left the laptop open on the floor and went to bed. My nephew came in late at night, and very considerately did not turn on the light. As a result he stumbled over his laptop and broke the screen. The roommtate contended he wasn't at fault, because it was my nephew who stepped on his own laptop.
A reasonable person would predict that a laptop left open on the floor in a darkened room probably would come to harm. (emphasis mine) Yes, a reasonable person would predict that. But this was a college student who was probably up late writing the last minute paper, and when he was going to bed the open laptop probably provided enough illumination for him to think that it is visible in the dark room easily.
That he was probably tired may have assisted in forgetting about the power-saving mode. Or maybe he was ignorant of power-saving mode at all - you can never tell what someone knows these days.
Though, having been a college student...I would shuffle my feet around if I were in the dark, to avoid stepping on anything that may have found itself on the floor, because I would expect the typical college student to have a disproportionate chance of leaving shit on the floor that shouldn't be there. I'd also use my cell phone to provide the little illumination it could.
A good example of the duty of reasonable care is the recent spate of stories about databases of personal information being stolen because they were on laptops or removable media. The argument that absolves P2P sharers from responsiblity for forseeable copying would also absolve the agencies in these cases from responsibility for forseeable identity theft. That's such a brilliant idea that it almost made me teary-eyed. Excellent comparison.
So you say the unpredictable part is the assumption of floating point representation in sign, mantissa and exponent terms, which can vary from architecture to architecture. I highly doubt that the 32-bit floating point representation of numbers is going to vary from architecture to architecture. AFAIK any architecture that uses 32-bit floats uses the IEEE 754 standard.
Now, IF they make a better floating point standard (I doubt it; this one is perfect in many ways), the only thing you really need is a new magic number.
And IF they wanted to use double precision numbers...they probably care about precision and wouldn't be using a routine that is only good for approximation.
My Senior project for college involved building a modified PS2 controller. We called it the DualHack as a pun on DualShock. It did a lot of cool stuff.
1) Variable-speed rapid-fire, for those games who test their input to see if rapid-fire is being used and disqualify the input. I had plans for changing the rate slowly, like say instead of 3 frames all the time, it could be 2 frames sometimes, and 4 frames other times, so that way it's not constant. I had four modes of rapid fire; off, semi-automatic (fires when you press it), fully automatic (fires until you turn it off full auto), and one-shot (fires when you press and hold the button, and then goes to the off state when you release the button). One shot was good if you needed to rapid fire once, but didn't want to turn semi-auto on and off.
2) Real-time macro recording up to 127 buttons per macro, with macros assignable to all buttons. If a game was scripted (Megaman Anniversary Collection), you could record yourself playing it, and then play that sequence back. It kept all the pauses between presses, and it kept the length of each press. Also good for fighting games, or recording the cheat codes for GTA3. My partner made a GUI that you could use to hand-tweak your macros, save them to a file, and load them later. I also had plans for implementing analog stick rotation macros, since some games ask you to rotate the analog stick as fast as you can.
3) Button Mapping allowed you to reconfigure the pad however you want. Let's say they give you no way to make use of R3. Make R3 square, or something like that. Or let's say they made jump triangle for some god awful reason, and you prefer jump to be x, but they don't let you configure that. You could manually map jump to x. I played a prank on my partner and switched the dpad and face buttons (triangle was up, up was triangle, etc). Boy that was interesting.
4) Throttle. Stole this from a joystick and stuck it on the controller for racing games.
5) Motion sensitive steering. My project was done during the 04/05 school year, before Nintendo told anyone about the motion sensitive Revolution controller. I stuck a 2-axis accelerometer on the back of the DualHack, and made an alogrithm that mapped the current orientation of the controller with respect to gravity onto the left analog stick's horizontal axis. It was pretty sweet. I even hijacked class once; before the professor showed up we had it set up, and he just watched and played through class starting, and then we just gave up and messed with it all class.
This was all accomplished with a PIC 18F452 microcontroller and two buttons. Most aftermarket modded controllers put the buttons on the top, where the thumbs have to use them. This was annoying, because the thumb is already used to hit the majority of buttons.
So I stuck my buttons underneath, where the middle finger rests when holding the controller. This way you could press the auxiliary buttons in combination with any other button on the pad.
I also had four types of button presses. A single press, a double press (like a single click vs. double click), a long press (like the long press you use to force your computer to turn off), and a hold press (like the shift key - it would modify the button that you press if you're holding it down while you press the next button).
Sure, with the extra buttons using a finger that never had to hit buttons and the various types of presses for each button, it was way too complicated for the average newb. But I loved it.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're suggesting insubordination?
Thanks, but I'll take putting food on my table to losing my job because my employer's morals and ethics do not align with my own. And, with some of that money from the paycheck that I keep by doing what I'm told, I can even donate to charity, thus minimizing the Karmic backlash.
Do you think she went commando so she could steal some panties from wherever she bought them, by wearing them out the door?
I agree that they're covering their ass right now, but this is not a hardware/software issue. If it was a hardware issue, they would need to put a different circuit in there.
The hardware, the silicon, the transistors...they are all set right now. This cannot and does not change the actual connections of transistors to each other. The piece that activates this is simply a software driver.
To me, I look at the Bill Of Materials, and I see a draft-n controller. The cost of this draft-n controller goes into the cost of the computer. That the draft-n capabilities are not unlocked is why they can't advertise it, but Apple did buy draft-n silicon, and it will be in some Bill Of Materials somewhere, and that cost will be included in the cost to the consumer.
Now, if Apple put down a b/g controller in their BOM, and then passed that cost on to the consumer, then I can see charging $5 to cover the cost of the higher performance controller.
If Apple put down a b/g/n controller in their BOM, then they already recognized revenues from the n controller, whose cost is passed on to the consumer.
So, either Apple charged you for the cost of the b/g/n controller and didn't give you firmware for it, or they didn't charge you for the b/g/n controller and instead put down a b/g controller in their BOM, in which case charging extra to activate the n controller makes sense, because they didn't recognize revenues from it. However, they could similarly just eat the difference in cost between b/g/n and b/g, and then they don't have to worry about recognizing revenue.
I see this from a developer's perspective. There's a BOM somewhere, and it details how much stuff costs, and that total is used to come up with a cost to the consumer. And, to me, the customer buys the hardware and the software, regardless of what's advertised.
Uhm, no. The customer got MORE than they paid for - they got 802.11 b/g/draft-n, they are simply unaware of the draft-n part (and even that's a stretch since the Mac rumor sites tore the computers apart and knew about the draft-n abilities for a while now). If I take that chip out of there and put it in somewhere else, it's still a draft-n controller and I can use the draft-n capabilities. I don't care what the computer was advertised as, as long as it wasn't a lie. Facts are facts - Apple bought silicon, and when the customer purchased their computer they bought said silicon from Apple. The truth of the matter is that a customer bought something which had greater powers than advertised - and this is against the law...how?
So if Apple advertised the n and it was not working, then released the patch, then yes they unfairly recognized revenue. That they didn't advertise it means that Apple had to take a hit by purchasing hardware that was above and beyond what was necessary and sold it as something less - taking a loss. I fail to see how eating the cost of superior hardware is unfairly recognizing revenue.
I personally think their engineers weren't able to get draft-n up and running before the release date for the computers, so they left the controller in but disabled the draft-n part in software.
Look up the Hercules Game Theater XP sound card. It was originally a 5.1 sound card. A driver update made it 6.1 by allowing one of the channels of the headphone to drive a speaker. Another driver update made it 7.1 by allowing both headphone channels to drive speakers. SOx wasn't used in that case. So are you telling me that Hercules unfairly recognized revenue on a 7.1 sound card by selling it as a 5.1 sound card and updating it later via firmware?
It doesn't add up. Apple bought and paid for a piece of silicon which can do draft-n. They put this piece of silicon in a motherboard and sold it as a computer to someone. Therefore, this someone bought draft-n hardware.
The product is finished. The silicon is capable of draft-n. This is just $5 for a driver update.
If the program was given in binary form to Wisconsin (and not source code or object code), then there's no way he could link his source code against Iowa's. If he couldn't link against Iowa's code, then perhaps he designed a GUI front-end for it.
Now, I saw nothing in the article stating what modifications he made. But, I ponder...if all he did was design a GUI front-end which does some preprocessing of some data files and then drops them in the right folder for Iowa's program to access later, then he didn't make any modifications to Iowa's program. Thus, legally, he has avoided violating the can't-sell-this clause of the license.
Seeing as how he's a cop and not a programmer, I'd venture to guess he may have used VB to make such a front-end.
I think everyone else agrees with you.
So...the only thing that changed is what day we do jump forward/fall back, and that's it?
The reason DACs were cheaper is because it's actually really simple to build a DAC. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistor_Ladder Those R-2R resistor ladders can be built for ridiculously cheap.
DACs actually the basis of modern SAR (Successive-Approximation Register) ADCs.
With a SAR ADC, you do a binary search with a comparator and a DAC against the analog input voltage by using the DAC to successively approximate the analog input voltage. So you use the DAC to output 1/2 of the max, and a comparator then decides whether it's above or below. You store the result in a register, and then move to within a 1/4 of the target voltage, and store the comparator result. Repeat until you have a full binary number.
Higher order ADCs are just a function of better comparators and DACs. Back in the day, it was kind of expensive to have all this digital logic in a circuit (with the registers and comparators and the state machine to control all this).
Actually, they're measuring the charge time of the capacitor. If you look in their patent app at the circuit diagram, you see a tri-state buffer whose input is attached to ground - that's how they force a discharge of the cap.
Then, they let the cap charge up through the variable resistor of the joystick, and once it crosses Vih of the input buffer, said buffer outputs a logic 1.
You're still right in spirit, though.
From my inspection of the patent, it appears that their "invention" is supposed to allow a joystick which operates with a 5 V supply to interface to a circuit which does not operate on a 5 V supply.
This isn't just obvious, it's necessary! Anyone even half-assed skilled in the art would know that you need to do something to connect a 5 V TTL output to a 3.3 V LVTTL input.
Okay, so maybe their something is novel or nonobvious. In fact, it's neither; they're using a tri-state buffer's threshold voltage as a comparator.
Basically, digital logic circuits can have any manner of analog voltages applied to them. Circuit designers specify these voltages as Vil (voltage input low threshold) and Vih (voltage input high threshold). Any input voltage below Vil will generate an digital output voltage below Vol (voltage output low), which is usually interpreted as logic 0. Any input voltage above Vih will, correspondingly, generate a voltage above Voh, which is usually interpreted as logic 1.
They specify that their buffer has hysteresis, so that way it won't suffer from the metastability that usually occurs when you feed a digital circuit an input voltage between Vil and Vih.
Keep in mind that these components are all COTS (common-off-the-shelf) parts.
They just drain a capacitor, which causes the input of the buffer to go below Vil, so the buffer outputs a logic 0, which raises a PCin bit (whose voltage level is not the 5V joystick level), let the capacitor charge through the potentiometer whose resistance is proportional to the current joystick position (which cap is being charged by a 5V supply), and when the charging capacitor exceeds Vih of the input buffer, the buffer outputs a logic 1, causing the PCin bit to go low again.
There's some miscellaneous stuff about resetting, the order in which to apply signals to make the process work, etc. But, basically, the whole patent is bollocks.
I also like how they have a small piece in their patent filing about how those skilled in the art will see obvious ways to modify their patent's invention, and that these modifications are still "in the spirit" of what the patent covers and are thus covered by the patent.
IANAPharmacologist, but even I know that COX-2 inhibitors are bad news. See sibling.
And this makes sense...how?
This kind of reminds me of a joke I once heard...the limit of an engineer as t tends toward infinity is a manager.
I lucked out, I did Computer Engineering in college and I landed a job doing exactly what I wanted.
However, in my search for an engineering position, I noticed that most places want someone with an M.S. and five years of experience. Does your current employer have a tuition reimbursement plan? If so, get the M.S. while working there, and when you graduate, you'll have an M.S. and probably more than five years of experience. This should allow you to land a job that you actually want.
If, in the mean time, the limit above begins to apply to you, use that as cannon fodder in your interviews. "Yeah, my current employer decided to move me into management despite my pleas to stay in engineering. You guys aren't going to do that, are you?"
Good luck, man. Management is a fate I wouldn't want any engineer to have to suffer.
On a side note, one of my old roommates decided to go management willingly, after getting his degree in Mechanical Engineering. There's something to be said for having a brain-dead easy job, and you can make good use of your engineering skills as a tinkerer in your spare time. For instance, he likes to play with cars. I've found that after a long day of problem solving, debugging, and so forth, I have no desire to do anything mentally challenging; yet I have about four projects I would love to work on.
And I think it does help, a tiny bit. It certainly helps more than no discussion about the moderation system at all. I would imagine that meta-moderation was added only because of people bitching about the flaws of the moderation system.
When I moderate, I spend every point on people who I believe were wrongly modded down. Usually they're new people who are now posting at score 0 because some prick screwed them. So trust me, I know how the system works, and I make it a POINT to search out and counter abuses when I get a chance.
Modding down only works if the person is purposely trying to push the discussion in the wrong direction and many people are going to fall for it. There are simply not enough mod points to mod every offtopic comment down. Look at the sibling posts; less than half of all this offtopic nonsense was modded down. This is hardly an effective use of moderation points that could have otherwise elevated constructive comments above the threshold of 1.
Sad, my correction has a higher score than your obviously more informative post.
See, I wouldn't mind being Informative and Funny for a total score of 5, but to be all informative? I didn't intend for your post to get modded down. You gave WAY more shit, and yeah you were correct; even without reading the article I recognized that what you said sounds like a great method of acquiring a good guess for the Newton-Raphson method I learned in Calc.
Such is the horror of slashdot's moderation system. They're giving mod points to people, who probably don't read articles, to moderate a discussion of other people (would that be (~RTFA)^2?), according to rules that they probably haven't read.
I don't know what might be better, or if this is like capitalism and the least evil?
Not actually a bad idea. The relative speeds between the two vehicles shouldn't result in anything lethal; hell, it might not even bust a hole in the radiator, or chip the windshield. But the sound will definitely catch them off guard.
Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to place a small object ejection device on your car. Place it near a tire, so you're just "kicking up" rocks. To shoot objects, use a solenoid. Make it so it tries to bounce it off the ground, and use a potentiometer and a MOSFET to control the power, and another pot hooked up to a servo to control the angle of ejection. Imagine doing the testing so that you can set reasonable values for the pot's min and max..don't hit your own car!
This way they don't see you throw it out the window.
PS: your sig is hilarious
Reminds me of what my brother does. He rides a motorcycle, and people are real pricks when you ride a motorcycle, so he keeps a bag of ball bearings on his bike.
I don't see the point in modding useless things down.
There will never be enough mod points to mod all the noise down to -1. It should be assumed that at level 1 there will be a mixture of noise and signal, and anyone interested in pure signal should set their thresholds higher. The purpose of downmodding ought to be preventing people from posting stupid antagonizing shit over and over again, or to prevent a troll from carrying the discussion in the wrong direction by having everyone reply to it.
Can anyone (specifically you, Mr. Coward) tell me why a useless comment deserves a score lower than 1?
That last part didn't render right.
(1 = mantissa 2; the non-fractional portion is also implied, so the bits of the mantissa are actually just the fractional portion)
Should be
(1 <= mantissa < 2; the non-fractional portion is also implied, so the bits of the mantissa are actually just the fractional portion)
That's a very neat question right there.
Is YouTube distributing the videos, or reproducing/performing them for the public?
In a way, the only real difference is scale. Public performance is limited by the size of the arena, which largest venues are still orders of magnitude smaller than YouTube's possible audience. YouTube can be used by anyone in the world with a connection to the Internet and a reasonable PC.
So, YouTube could potentially target more people more easily than a public performance. But a public performance is guaranteed to impact a number of people (all those within hearing or seeing distance), whereas a YouTube video might never be watched by anyone.
That he was probably tired may have assisted in forgetting about the power-saving mode. Or maybe he was ignorant of power-saving mode at all - you can never tell what someone knows these days.
Though, having been a college student...I would shuffle my feet around if I were in the dark, to avoid stepping on anything that may have found itself on the floor, because I would expect the typical college student to have a disproportionate chance of leaving shit on the floor that shouldn't be there. I'd also use my cell phone to provide the little illumination it could. A good example of the duty of reasonable care is the recent spate of stories about databases of personal information being stolen because they were on laptops or removable media. The argument that absolves P2P sharers from responsiblity for forseeable copying would also absolve the agencies in these cases from responsibility for forseeable identity theft. That's such a brilliant idea that it almost made me teary-eyed. Excellent comparison.
Do you eventually "steal" the car back?
Now, IF they make a better floating point standard (I doubt it; this one is perfect in many ways), the only thing you really need is a new magic number.
And IF they wanted to use double precision numbers...they probably care about precision and wouldn't be using a routine that is only good for approximation.
My Senior project for college involved building a modified PS2 controller. We called it the DualHack as a pun on DualShock. It did a lot of cool stuff.
1) Variable-speed rapid-fire, for those games who test their input to see if rapid-fire is being used and disqualify the input. I had plans for changing the rate slowly, like say instead of 3 frames all the time, it could be 2 frames sometimes, and 4 frames other times, so that way it's not constant. I had four modes of rapid fire; off, semi-automatic (fires when you press it), fully automatic (fires until you turn it off full auto), and one-shot (fires when you press and hold the button, and then goes to the off state when you release the button). One shot was good if you needed to rapid fire once, but didn't want to turn semi-auto on and off.
2) Real-time macro recording up to 127 buttons per macro, with macros assignable to all buttons. If a game was scripted (Megaman Anniversary Collection), you could record yourself playing it, and then play that sequence back. It kept all the pauses between presses, and it kept the length of each press. Also good for fighting games, or recording the cheat codes for GTA3. My partner made a GUI that you could use to hand-tweak your macros, save them to a file, and load them later. I also had plans for implementing analog stick rotation macros, since some games ask you to rotate the analog stick as fast as you can.
3) Button Mapping allowed you to reconfigure the pad however you want. Let's say they give you no way to make use of R3. Make R3 square, or something like that. Or let's say they made jump triangle for some god awful reason, and you prefer jump to be x, but they don't let you configure that. You could manually map jump to x. I played a prank on my partner and switched the dpad and face buttons (triangle was up, up was triangle, etc). Boy that was interesting.
4) Throttle. Stole this from a joystick and stuck it on the controller for racing games.
5) Motion sensitive steering. My project was done during the 04/05 school year, before Nintendo told anyone about the motion sensitive Revolution controller. I stuck a 2-axis accelerometer on the back of the DualHack, and made an alogrithm that mapped the current orientation of the controller with respect to gravity onto the left analog stick's horizontal axis. It was pretty sweet. I even hijacked class once; before the professor showed up we had it set up, and he just watched and played through class starting, and then we just gave up and messed with it all class.
This was all accomplished with a PIC 18F452 microcontroller and two buttons. Most aftermarket modded controllers put the buttons on the top, where the thumbs have to use them. This was annoying, because the thumb is already used to hit the majority of buttons.
So I stuck my buttons underneath, where the middle finger rests when holding the controller. This way you could press the auxiliary buttons in combination with any other button on the pad.
I also had four types of button presses. A single press, a double press (like a single click vs. double click), a long press (like the long press you use to force your computer to turn off), and a hold press (like the shift key - it would modify the button that you press if you're holding it down while you press the next button).
Sure, with the extra buttons using a finger that never had to hit buttons and the various types of presses for each button, it was way too complicated for the average newb. But I loved it.