And they should be able to make a driverless interface using the HID class and USB. It's just silly to write your own drivers when USB drivers exist on all platforms to interface your hardware with.
I should have posted this anonymously...
on
Self Cleaning Mouse
·
· Score: 1
How hard is it to get a frickin' mouse with a frickin' laser beam on its head?
Slashdot's moderation system is currently inefficient.
Personally, I don't mind some of the jokes. Occasionally they are well-thought out and clever.
Usually, though, it's just noise. I mean, look at the overwhelming OMGSH4RKZ crap going on in these posts.
But occasionally these jokes^Wmemes can be on topic. I don't want them to go away completely, but I will admit they are the reason I apply -2 to all Funny posts.
What I would like to see?
1) The ability to downmod needs to be more limited, as abuse is way too common and telling other mods to "keep an eye out for abuses" prevents them from finding good posts. This will prevent people who go about looking for karma to screw.
2) Funny mods shouldn't affect the score of a comment. This would stop most of the meme shit.
3) Some sort of system to reward people who don't spend all their mod points. This would prevent people from spending their points on posts that are already moderated enough. The reward should be small enough to encourage them not to waste points, but not large enough to encourage hoarding.
You are correct, the average velocity of a given electron in a DC circuit is pitifully slow. I think it takes an hour for an electron to make it from the battery through the starter switch and into the solenoid. This is because the electron starts to take off, runs into an atom and bounces backwards like a bouncy ball, hits something else and bounces forward, etc. Hence why we discuss the average velocity. You might also want to look up drift velocity.
However, the electromotive force (emf, colloquially referred to as voltage) propagates as an electromagnetic wave. The speed that it propagates at is dependent on the permittivity of the material it is propagating through.
IIRC from my VLSI class, if you take into account the permittivity of silicon, electrical signals (emf; voltage) propagate at approximately 2/3rds of the speed of light.
Regardless of my ability to research the definition of "Dead DNS" on my own (and I think I actually succeeded, thanks), I thought perhaps it would be useful to save other slashdotters the effort of hammering Google's servers to figure it out, by doing the following
1) Post a question asking what "Dead DNS" is 2) Get a response 3) Watch that person's response get modded up 4)... 5) PROFIT!
Let me guess - your fingers are broken and you couldn't look it up, either? Or were you just trying to insult me?
But when given a choice between an asshole dropping bombs and an asshole banging an intern and not doing much of anything else, I'd rather have the latter.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Shoot pool, not people. Drop pants, not bombs. Make love, not war.
You say you're the best at programming? Interesting. Have you ever heard of VHDL, or Verilog?
Okay, let's take this a step at a time...
they made me go early since I was so smart
I'm sure "they" held you at gunpoint.
forget that CS theory bullshit
Ah, you're kind of like me. I'm not a big fan of theory, I prefer the application of theory, for which it helps to know a bit of theory.
Or maybe they got lucky and wasted thousands of dollars on learning about Shakespear, atoms, Africa, grammar, and how to turn on a computer instead
Oh! Oh! You forgot to mention expressing their thoughts in a coherent way using paragraphs!
and finally got to programming in year 3
I dunno what four year colleges you looked at, but CS majors where I graduated from were doing C++ their first semester. VB was for the business students, who couldn't cut it in a real programming class. By year 3, we had been taught a few different languages...Java, C#, ASP, etc.
I'll be better at doing my job than any 4 year idiot with a CS degree
Yes, your training may be superior for your job. CS degrees from a good university are certainly superior for other careers.
Oh, right. As far as maxing out the cores, you're relying on a great deal of compiler and hardware mojo that you most likely never learned about. If you can fit your program in the register set, awesome, you can prolly max it out. If you go to L1 cache you'll prolly still be close, but if you can't fit in the L1 your program is going to block on I/O a lot.
You also forget about things like time-sharing pre-emptive operating system kernels which will boot your threads out every now and then, and probably block on some I/O while they're at it.
If I knew every command there was
Aah, the naivete of it all...knowing every command only gets you so far. You must have a skill for learning, and that you will keep you sailing well for a while. But it's the interactions of the commands, the intricacies of the architecture you target, the little things which will haunt you.
Finally, how do you define "the best at programming"? Can you program embedded systems? Certainly the best programmer could target any architecture, and not just a PC...
When you can design memory-mapped peripherals in an FPGA for a USB microcontroller, program the micro to do data acquisition with the FPGA, wire up all the circuits, connect it to a PC, and write a multi-threaded PC application to log the data from the device, then we'll talk about being "the best". I am able to do all these activites thanks to the four-year degree I acquired from an ABET accredited institution. Excluding the circuit design (which is more like a CAD sorta thing) all of the above tasks are programming tasks.
Sure, avoiding the public backlash is nice, but the only reason this is even a problem is because it made the news. If no one talked about it, Dunn wouldn't have had to step down. Therefore it's actually the press and the public that is responsible for this. Capitalism did jack and shit to dissuade them from their unethical actions. They had a shit load of money, and money was at stake, so they spent some money to try and figure out who was leaking.
The ethics of the situation were less important than the potential loss of money - capitalism is directly related to their decision.
...is it any time anyone criticizes capitalism, it turns into "what's your suggestion?" Since I can come up with no better substitute, I should be disqualified from performing a critique?
I purposely avoided saying that we need something better. The point is that capitalism focuses on the profit motive. The profit motive drives corporations to do whatever they need to do to make a buck. This puts the dollar above and beyond morals and ethics. Thus the government needs to step in and regulate in an attempt to put morals and ethics back into business, which only works occasionally due to the fact that the government also subscribes to $ > morals/ethics.
Nowhere does capitalism punish an evil entity. But capitalism, which focuses on the profit motive, certainly does start to give people with shitloads of money the idea that they can get away with anything. Most of them do.
...Dunn hired a third-party who subcontracted an individual who fraudulently collected the phone records.
IMO, Dunn and the third-party should be convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud (or something, anything, just to give the bitch some jail time), and should be forced to hand over the name of the individual who collected the phone records in order to charge him with fraud.
Dunn knew how the phone records were collected. Perkins called her on it. And CERTAINLY the third-party knew what the individual was going to do.
Capitalism gives an incentive for this sort of selfishness that leads to a culture where they believed this was okay for them to do. Sure, such actions could occur under other philosophies; the point is that capitalism provides no disincentive for this behavior.
But I was wondering, could it be that dark matter is just invisible to current methods of detection? Perhaps the energy it radiates is in frequencies above what our current technology can detect? Like...exohertz or something?
I also recall something from some of my signals classes that there is such a phenomenon as negative frequency. Maybe dark matter emits energy in negative frequencies?
I pulled all of the above straight out of my ass, but the point seems valid enough. Obviously we can't detect all electromagnetic phenomena at every frequency range.
What next, you think people will RTFA on slashdot, or want to watch subtitled anime? (personally, I prefer fansubs)
People don't want to read. They're lazy. They want you to talk to them. Listening > Reading. Like listening to audio books while they drive to work, or sit on the train.
Now, if you meant he should have posted the script AND the video, I agree.
Cache coherency is what happens when you have multiple processors, and you have to keep the cache coherent between the two processors if they're working on the same data. i.e. processor A and B are working on a dataset. Processor A modifies variable X, and processor B wants to modify it, but it has to 1) know X is in A's cache and 2) get X from A's cache. Then you get into fun little things like shared cache, write-through operations, etc.
Cache locality is affected by random reads, hence the previous comments comparing ray tracing to databases. Normally, we expect to access the same data more than once (temporal locality), because we frequently use a variable in more than one calculation. We also expect to access data near other data (spatial locality), because we store objects as groups of data and we access multiple members of an object for some calculations.
1) Where did you get 14.5 million units sold? Sony doesn't tell you units sold, they tell you units shipped, which is supposed to be ~20 million. I think Nintendo tells units sold. Also, are you counting DS and DS Lite, or just DS Lite, or just DS, for Nintendo?
2) The GBA is still being manufactured and sold. It's a handheld. I don't see how you can leave it out of a comparison of the market for handheld gaming consoles. Yes it's the previous generation, yes the DS can play GBA games...but it has market share because there is a market, otherwise they wouldn't stock and sell brand new GBAs at GameStop. I don't think I've seen a brand new PS1 in a long time.
3) Even with the trade-ins for the DS Lite, I've heard that there's more used PSPs than used DSs. But this probably depends on your locality. I also wonder how many PSPs got traded in for DS Lites...
MRIs use very sensitive head coils to pick up their signals. The room that the bore is in needs to be enclosed in a pretty good Faraday cage to prevent EMI from messing with the receiver.
Granted, windows aren't a problem in the magnet room, but the doors are. So it becomes interesting to try and develop a door that can seal out the frequencies of interest effectively. It's tough, but some magnet rooms can effectively seal off noise while allowing humans to enter and leave.
And how exactly did they take 40% of the market share? The DS has outsold the PSP, and don't forget that the Game Boy Advance is still an active market, too.
I think it's a bit less than the 40% figure you pulled out of thin air.
Don't forget Nintendo sold the DS and is now selling the DS Lite...do you think Sony could effectively pull off a PSP Lite?
Finally, go take a look at your neighborhood video game trade-in store. Compare their stock of used portables. I think there's a pattern, but it could just be me.
The flush sound button exists because some people were embarassed to take a voracious dump while in the presence of others, and were flushing excessively to cover up the sound. So the designers added a flush-sound button that they can press repeatedly without wasting water.
I can't remember where I read it, or I would give a citation.
That's exactly how I learned to be a responsible adult. My parents gave me my car, but I paid for insurance, etc.
I always advocate giving your children the freedom to make mistakes. Let them know what the mistake will be beforehand, yes, but then let them learn from it if they insist.
Mom 'n' dad also never really cared if I stayed out, once I had my car. The only thing I had to do was call them - "hey guys, I won't be coming home tonight." "Okay sweetie have fun." Do you know how awesome it is when you never have to ask your parents for permission, and you just notify them? It makes life great, and makes friends jealous. And then you feel good about your parents (positive relationships with parents? *gasp* these days that seems pretty rare), and as long as you don't abuse the privilege they let you keep it. Sure, sometimes it was to get drunk, but I knew if I screwed up and got caught that the privilege would be lost, so I just kept that in mind and learned the meaning of "moderation" to ensure I didn't screw up.
I see too many parents control every aspect of their children's lives with an iron fist. They aren't allowed to go anywhere, or hang out with anyone their parents don't like (usually for superficial reasons). All of their decisions are made for them, without even telling them why or trying to explain a reasoning. "Because I said so."
Why must they insist on "protecting" their children? My parents gave me the tools necessary to "protect" myself. When their parents are no longer active in their life, what tools will they use?
I read wikipedia on it, but all I gathered is that it's a protein which causes other proteins to mutate like a chain reaction, thereby causing sickness, and that is how it becomes infectious.
If pirate kingpin's lawyer is not a moron, they will show cause to subpoena tons and tons of records of other 'pirates' that the RIAA have identified, and then ask pointedly why Jane Citizen wasn't sued.
Hm, could it be that Pirate Kingpin has cost the recording industry several orders of magnitude more in losses than Jane's casual downloading, and her P2P downoads might have even inspired her to buy more music?
Slashdot Mirror
Your fingers cover up regular keys, too.
To me, doing OLED buttons at all is kinda silly. I certainly don't look at the keyboard when I type; I haven't for years.
Why not make the OLED's mouse buttons instead?
Two OLED buttons would be just fine.
And they should be able to make a driverless interface using the HID class and USB. It's just silly to write your own drivers when USB drivers exist on all platforms to interface your hardware with.
How hard is it to get a frickin' mouse with a frickin' laser beam on its head?
Wonder if that correlates to obesity.
"Hey boss, c'mere! I got our engine-on-a-chip to work!"
*boss meanders on over*
*turbine stops spinning*
*boss walks away grumbling*
"Bbbbbut it worked! Really, it did!"
(PS: did anyone notice the "No Karma Bonus" checkbox?)
Slashdot's moderation system is currently inefficient.
Personally, I don't mind some of the jokes. Occasionally they are well-thought out and clever.
Usually, though, it's just noise. I mean, look at the overwhelming OMGSH4RKZ crap going on in these posts.
But occasionally these jokes^Wmemes can be on topic. I don't want them to go away completely, but I will admit they are the reason I apply -2 to all Funny posts.
What I would like to see?
1) The ability to downmod needs to be more limited, as abuse is way too common and telling other mods to "keep an eye out for abuses" prevents them from finding good posts. This will prevent people who go about looking for karma to screw.
2) Funny mods shouldn't affect the score of a comment. This would stop most of the meme shit.
3) Some sort of system to reward people who don't spend all their mod points. This would prevent people from spending their points on posts that are already moderated enough. The reward should be small enough to encourage them not to waste points, but not large enough to encourage hoarding.
You are correct, the average velocity of a given electron in a DC circuit is pitifully slow. I think it takes an hour for an electron to make it from the battery through the starter switch and into the solenoid. This is because the electron starts to take off, runs into an atom and bounces backwards like a bouncy ball, hits something else and bounces forward, etc. Hence why we discuss the average velocity. You might also want to look up drift velocity.
However, the electromotive force (emf, colloquially referred to as voltage) propagates as an electromagnetic wave. The speed that it propagates at is dependent on the permittivity of the material it is propagating through.
IIRC from my VLSI class, if you take into account the permittivity of silicon, electrical signals (emf; voltage) propagate at approximately 2/3rds of the speed of light.
Regardless of my ability to research the definition of "Dead DNS" on my own (and I think I actually succeeded, thanks), I thought perhaps it would be useful to save other slashdotters the effort of hammering Google's servers to figure it out, by doing the following
...
1) Post a question asking what "Dead DNS" is
2) Get a response
3) Watch that person's response get modded up
4)
5) PROFIT!
Let me guess - your fingers are broken and you couldn't look it up, either? Or were you just trying to insult me?
Okay. The words "Dead DNS" are in quotations. Obviously this isn't common parlance.
Can I get a definition? Please? Pretty please, with sugar on top, clean the fucking car?
I agree wholeheartedly.
Shoot pool, not people. Drop pants, not bombs. Make love, not war.
Oooo, you're feisty.
You say you're the best at programming? Interesting. Have you ever heard of VHDL, or Verilog?
Okay, let's take this a step at a time...
they made me go early since I was so smart
I'm sure "they" held you at gunpoint.
forget that CS theory bullshit
Ah, you're kind of like me. I'm not a big fan of theory, I prefer the application of theory, for which it helps to know a bit of theory.
Or maybe they got lucky and wasted thousands of dollars on learning about Shakespear, atoms, Africa, grammar, and how to turn on a computer instead
Oh! Oh! You forgot to mention expressing their thoughts in a coherent way using paragraphs!
and finally got to programming in year 3
I dunno what four year colleges you looked at, but CS majors where I graduated from were doing C++ their first semester. VB was for the business students, who couldn't cut it in a real programming class. By year 3, we had been taught a few different languages...Java, C#, ASP, etc.
I'll be better at doing my job than any 4 year idiot with a CS degree
Yes, your training may be superior for your job. CS degrees from a good university are certainly superior for other careers.
Oh, right. As far as maxing out the cores, you're relying on a great deal of compiler and hardware mojo that you most likely never learned about. If you can fit your program in the register set, awesome, you can prolly max it out. If you go to L1 cache you'll prolly still be close, but if you can't fit in the L1 your program is going to block on I/O a lot.
You also forget about things like time-sharing pre-emptive operating system kernels which will boot your threads out every now and then, and probably block on some I/O while they're at it.
If I knew every command there was
Aah, the naivete of it all...knowing every command only gets you so far. You must have a skill for learning, and that you will keep you sailing well for a while. But it's the interactions of the commands, the intricacies of the architecture you target, the little things which will haunt you.
Finally, how do you define "the best at programming"? Can you program embedded systems? Certainly the best programmer could target any architecture, and not just a PC...
When you can design memory-mapped peripherals in an FPGA for a USB microcontroller, program the micro to do data acquisition with the FPGA, wire up all the circuits, connect it to a PC, and write a multi-threaded PC application to log the data from the device, then we'll talk about being "the best". I am able to do all these activites thanks to the four-year degree I acquired from an ABET accredited institution. Excluding the circuit design (which is more like a CAD sorta thing) all of the above tasks are programming tasks.
Sure, avoiding the public backlash is nice, but the only reason this is even a problem is because it made the news. If no one talked about it, Dunn wouldn't have had to step down. Therefore it's actually the press and the public that is responsible for this. Capitalism did jack and shit to dissuade them from their unethical actions. They had a shit load of money, and money was at stake, so they spent some money to try and figure out who was leaking.
The ethics of the situation were less important than the potential loss of money - capitalism is directly related to their decision.
...is it any time anyone criticizes capitalism, it turns into "what's your suggestion?" Since I can come up with no better substitute, I should be disqualified from performing a critique?
I purposely avoided saying that we need something better. The point is that capitalism focuses on the profit motive. The profit motive drives corporations to do whatever they need to do to make a buck. This puts the dollar above and beyond morals and ethics. Thus the government needs to step in and regulate in an attempt to put morals and ethics back into business, which only works occasionally due to the fact that the government also subscribes to $ > morals/ethics.
Nowhere does capitalism punish an evil entity. But capitalism, which focuses on the profit motive, certainly does start to give people with shitloads of money the idea that they can get away with anything. Most of them do.
...Dunn hired a third-party who subcontracted an individual who fraudulently collected the phone records.
IMO, Dunn and the third-party should be convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud (or something, anything, just to give the bitch some jail time), and should be forced to hand over the name of the individual who collected the phone records in order to charge him with fraud.
Dunn knew how the phone records were collected. Perkins called her on it. And CERTAINLY the third-party knew what the individual was going to do.
Capitalism gives an incentive for this sort of selfishness that leads to a culture where they believed this was okay for them to do. Sure, such actions could occur under other philosophies; the point is that capitalism provides no disincentive for this behavior.
IANAP, just a computer engineer.
But I was wondering, could it be that dark matter is just invisible to current methods of detection? Perhaps the energy it radiates is in frequencies above what our current technology can detect? Like...exohertz or something?
I also recall something from some of my signals classes that there is such a phenomenon as negative frequency. Maybe dark matter emits energy in negative frequencies?
I pulled all of the above straight out of my ass, but the point seems valid enough. Obviously we can't detect all electromagnetic phenomena at every frequency range.
What next, you think people will RTFA on slashdot, or want to watch subtitled anime? (personally, I prefer fansubs)
People don't want to read. They're lazy. They want you to talk to them. Listening > Reading. Like listening to audio books while they drive to work, or sit on the train.
Now, if you meant he should have posted the script AND the video, I agree.
Parent is correct.
Cache coherency is what happens when you have multiple processors, and you have to keep the cache coherent between the two processors if they're working on the same data. i.e. processor A and B are working on a dataset. Processor A modifies variable X, and processor B wants to modify it, but it has to 1) know X is in A's cache and 2) get X from A's cache. Then you get into fun little things like shared cache, write-through operations, etc.
Cache locality is affected by random reads, hence the previous comments comparing ray tracing to databases. Normally, we expect to access the same data more than once (temporal locality), because we frequently use a variable in more than one calculation. We also expect to access data near other data (spatial locality), because we store objects as groups of data and we access multiple members of an object for some calculations.
1) Where did you get 14.5 million units sold? Sony doesn't tell you units sold, they tell you units shipped, which is supposed to be ~20 million. I think Nintendo tells units sold. Also, are you counting DS and DS Lite, or just DS Lite, or just DS, for Nintendo?
2) The GBA is still being manufactured and sold. It's a handheld. I don't see how you can leave it out of a comparison of the market for handheld gaming consoles. Yes it's the previous generation, yes the DS can play GBA games...but it has market share because there is a market, otherwise they wouldn't stock and sell brand new GBAs at GameStop. I don't think I've seen a brand new PS1 in a long time.
3) Even with the trade-ins for the DS Lite, I've heard that there's more used PSPs than used DSs. But this probably depends on your locality. I also wonder how many PSPs got traded in for DS Lites...
3a) Picking nits, isn't EB now owned by GameStop?
MRIs use very sensitive head coils to pick up their signals. The room that the bore is in needs to be enclosed in a pretty good Faraday cage to prevent EMI from messing with the receiver.
Granted, windows aren't a problem in the magnet room, but the doors are. So it becomes interesting to try and develop a door that can seal out the frequencies of interest effectively. It's tough, but some magnet rooms can effectively seal off noise while allowing humans to enter and leave.
He did say relative failure.
And how exactly did they take 40% of the market share? The DS has outsold the PSP, and don't forget that the Game Boy Advance is still an active market, too.
I think it's a bit less than the 40% figure you pulled out of thin air.
Don't forget Nintendo sold the DS and is now selling the DS Lite...do you think Sony could effectively pull off a PSP Lite?
Finally, go take a look at your neighborhood video game trade-in store. Compare their stock of used portables. I think there's a pattern, but it could just be me.
The flush sound button exists because some people were embarassed to take a voracious dump while in the presence of others, and were flushing excessively to cover up the sound. So the designers added a flush-sound button that they can press repeatedly without wasting water.
I can't remember where I read it, or I would give a citation.
That's exactly how I learned to be a responsible adult. My parents gave me my car, but I paid for insurance, etc.
I always advocate giving your children the freedom to make mistakes. Let them know what the mistake will be beforehand, yes, but then let them learn from it if they insist.
Mom 'n' dad also never really cared if I stayed out, once I had my car. The only thing I had to do was call them - "hey guys, I won't be coming home tonight." "Okay sweetie have fun." Do you know how awesome it is when you never have to ask your parents for permission, and you just notify them? It makes life great, and makes friends jealous. And then you feel good about your parents (positive relationships with parents? *gasp* these days that seems pretty rare), and as long as you don't abuse the privilege they let you keep it. Sure, sometimes it was to get drunk, but I knew if I screwed up and got caught that the privilege would be lost, so I just kept that in mind and learned the meaning of "moderation" to ensure I didn't screw up.
I see too many parents control every aspect of their children's lives with an iron fist. They aren't allowed to go anywhere, or hang out with anyone their parents don't like (usually for superficial reasons). All of their decisions are made for them, without even telling them why or trying to explain a reasoning. "Because I said so."
Why must they insist on "protecting" their children? My parents gave me the tools necessary to "protect" myself. When their parents are no longer active in their life, what tools will they use?
Can someone explain what a prion is?
I read wikipedia on it, but all I gathered is that it's a protein which causes other proteins to mutate like a chain reaction, thereby causing sickness, and that is how it becomes infectious.
what option do they have except to sue everyone?
Oh, I dunno, how about properly investigate the defendant before filing suit?
If pirate kingpin's lawyer is not a moron, they will show cause to subpoena tons and tons of records of other 'pirates' that the RIAA have identified, and then ask pointedly why Jane Citizen wasn't sued.
Hm, could it be that Pirate Kingpin has cost the recording industry several orders of magnitude more in losses than Jane's casual downloading, and her P2P downoads might have even inspired her to buy more music?