Not only can you just file/sandpaper the tip of the firing pin, I personally know a forensic scientist who did a Master's Thesis on this very subject, and in his research and testing, he found that the serial numbers wear down enough in just a few shots that they aren't readable on the primers any more.
Interesting! Please could you provide a citation (and link, if it's online) for the thesis? Has he published any papers from his research?
No. We have already passed the point on the strength axis at which the car survives but the occupants die of internal injuries. For cars, what you need is energy absorption to decelerate the car's contents gradually. That means a body that will crumple.
Not exactly. Yes, you want a crumple zone. But you don't want the human occupants to be part of that crumple zone, even if their soft, fleshy bodies might make fairly decent shock absorbers.
What I wondered was, what happens if you take top-notch C++ programmers who dream in pointers, and let them code in VB. What I discovered at Fog Creek was that they become super-efficient coding machines. The code looks pretty good, it's object-oriented and robust, but you don't waste time using tools that are at a level lower than you need. I've spent years writing code for C++/MFC and years writing code in Visual Basic, and let me tell you, VB is just much, much more productive. Michael and I had a good laugh today when we discovered somebody selling a beta crash-reporting product at $5000 for three months that Michael implemented in CityDesk in two days. (And we actually implemented a good part of ours in C++/ATL). And I also guarantee you that our Visual Basic code in CityDesk looks a lot better than most of the code you find written in macho languages like C++, because we're good programmers, and we write comments, and our variable names are well-chosen, and we do things the simple way, not the clever way, and so forth.
Well, thank you for the forgiveness. I indeed think that I've *never* encountered courtesy accidentals not in brackets. I suspect I wouldn't have flinched if the brackets had been there.
Strange, I think I've seen them more often without brackets than with. Grabbing the first score I could find (Beethoven, Piano sonata no. 8, ed. D. F. Tovey, published by ABRSM) I see that none of the accidentals are bracketed. But doubtless it varies between countries, genres, publishers, and so forth.
I ran off to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_(music) which expresses what I think should be the ideal: "Cautionary accidentals or naturals (in parentheses) may be used to clarify ambiguities, but should be held to a minimum."
But do note that Wikipedia presents this as an "alternate system" contrasted with the "tradition [which] is still in use particularly in tonal music".
Worse than that - they're cancelling accidentals in different octaves in different bars in different staves from where they were applied (var. 14, bar 17) - that's just excessive.
I admit that that one seems pretty bizarre to me too. For what it's worth, I've never really liked courtesy accidentals (my mathematical brain disdains such illogical redundancy), but I've always accepted them as a time-hallowed convention.
I also wonder if they have sanity-checking - Just in the first few minutes of listening whilst reading along I noticed a natural modifier to a note which was not sharp (nor flat) according to the key signature, nor which had been modified previously, and therefore did not need the natural sign (e.g. var. 6, bar 16, the middle C). I've not read any music for *many* decades - someone else should have spotted this!
If you've not read any music in decades, I suppose you can be forgiven for not knowing about courtesy accidentals.
But also, if you've not read any music in decades, perhaps you shouldn't be so quick to condemn others' painstaking work purely on the basis on your personal judgement.
Hopefully these improvements to MuseScore will make it easier to use, because so far I have not been able to get much done with it just out of the difficulty of using it. The interface is really unintuitive. I don't think I've ever found a music scoring program that is easy to use.
TFA is a bit light. I'm wondering how you review a score? Was it "muse score software didn't display this note properly", or "the music would sound better if you went up instead of down here, or repeated a theme differently"?
I think it would be along the lines of "this acciacatura is too close" or "this slur is too high", with the occasional "wrong note". As to suggesting improvements to the music itself, you might be about 270 years late for that -- at least if you want JSB to sign off on them:-). Still, nothing to stop you forking the score, I guess.
But the sentence in question was "How come they didn't just use a laser range finder...". Thus:
1. The use of the range-finder, rather than its installation, is in the past tense.
2. The subject of the sentence is "they" (viz. the researchers), rather than "the robot", implying that it is the researchers themselves who should be operating the instrument.
* A steel wriststrap. If you're buying a Casio, do *not* get the black resin strap versions of their watches because they always break within 6 months of use.
Good wrist straps are designed to break to protect you..
Maybe so, but that does not mean that a wrist strap is good just because it breaks.
If you're buying a Casio, do *not* get the black resin strap versions of their watches because they always break within 6 months of use. They may be up to 10 pounds cheaper, but the straps aren't replaceable and I learned this to my cost with two broken-strap resin versions of the watch before I switched to the steel strap.
I've actually managed to get the strap replaced on a 12 quid Casio (this one or very similar). Strap + labour cost slightly more than the watch, but at the time I was far from anywhere that could have sold me another one at a sane price.
As a mathematician and hobbyist iOS developer, it really sucks that so much great mathematics software is GPLed. You can't port Octave, for example, to the iPad as its license is incompatible with Apples terms.
... or, to look at it from a slightly different viewpoint, it really sucks that Apple have chosen to make their terms incompatible with the GPL.
However, in most engineering R&D environments, MATLAB support is important for collaboration, and here is where Octave could be useful were it more comparable to MATLAB.
Have you tried the recent-ish 3.6 release? I gather that it's made major improvements in Matlab compatibility. I'm interested because I'm going to be working on some Matlab stuff soon, and am wondering whether I could get away with porting it to Octave.
Asking for donation of at least $50,000.00 just to port free software onto Android is another
Did you read the list of deliverables near the top of the project page? I wouldn't agree to do that lot for $50,000. Then again, if anyone reckons it's outrageous, they could always set up a Kickstarter with the same deliverables and, say, a $5,000 goal. Or $500, $50, whatever you think is reasonable.
And, of course, the nice thing about Kickstarter is that it's voluntary. Nobody's forcing you and me to pay, even though we'll reap the benefits if it gets funded. If everyone agrees that it's a rip-off, it won't get funded, simple as that.
Not big money? That's more than most of us make in a year, before taxes.
According to the timeline on the kickstarter page, the project will run until "Fall 2013", so the equivalent pre-tax annual income would be more like $35,000. I'd say that's pretty cheap for an experienced developer.
Five editions? Of course, it's an ebook, they can claim it's a new edition every time they make an edit and press the save button.
Huh? Are we talking about the same book? As is clear from the very Amazon page you linked to, the French editions were old-fashioned dead-tree books.
Considering that they call their book a bestseller (during a tiny little period of time on amazon.fr)...
As I understand it, their characterization of the book as a "best-seller right from the start" wass mainly based on the fact that the first edition sold out in four months. As for being the top seller on Amazon.fr, the Ulule page says "It was even the most sold book on Amazon.fr for an entire morning." So they're entirely upfront that the top ranking was only for a short time. (Still, though. For one morning it was selling better than Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code, or whatever. Not bad for a book about Debian.)
And who is their publisher anyway?
The French publisher was Eyrolles, again easily ascertained from the very Amazon page you linked to. According to Wikipedia, Eyrolles was founded in 1925 and has over 200 employees and annual revenues exceeding 50 million euro, so I'm fairly sure they're not just a front for two dodgy authors and a double-sided laser printer. You can find the latest edition on the publisher's website here.
[Blah blah lots of stuff about Lulu]
I don't really see what relevance this has to the French editions which you were criticising in your initial post. I thought we were debating whether the French editions had sold well, rather than discussing the publishing model for the new English edition.
So how does your system apply to the original question -- sharing the passwords among multiple users? Do you all copy out the relevant parts of each other's notebooks and memorize each other's rules? Or do you tell each other the unencrypted passwords and re-encrypt them individually using personal rule-sets?
During most of my career in pure physics I got negative results, which were always hell to publish... if scientists don't report on them they will continue to seem like good ideas to people who haven't tried them, who will then waste effort on trying them, and fail to publish them when they don't work...
I agree entirely. It's infuriating to think of the wasted effort of thousands of scientists worldwide repeating each other's mistakes, just because negative results often aren't considered publishable. I think there's growing awareness of this, though. A physicist friend recently pointed me at the Journal of Unsolved Questions ( http://junq.info/ ) which is attempting to correct this bias. His advice was along these lines: ‘It's a great place to publish interesting negative results, because they've just started so there's not a lot of competition for publication, but as soon as the world figures out what a good idea this is, their impact factor's going to start taking off’. Worth a shot, I suppose.
Don't be so quick to spend your money, there are most likely better books on this topic. The book was never a "bestseller" even in French (except for a very brief window of time on Amazon.com when the author had his entire family and all his friends buy the same book at the same time).
I don't really have a vested interest in this (don't do much system administration these days, little time or inclination to read the book). But it seems that this book has been through five editions in the past eight years. I don't see why the publishers would agree to print a new edition unless they'd made money on the previous one -- or are Hertzog and Mas getting their friends and family to buy up the entire print run of each edition?
Still, now that the whole thing's online, I suppose everyone can try before they buy.
They use a lot of electricity. Unless Microsoft is planning to buy "carbon offset" credits, so they can pollute and yet just handwave it away.
It seems they're taking the obvious step of trying to make sure that the power comes from carbon-neutral sources. From TFWhitepaper linked from TFA:
we are considering a portfolio of approaches, including: Signing long-term renewable power purchase agreements... Investing capital in new renewable energy projects... Connecting data centers directly to innovative energy sources...
"Urine and feces are processed in the thigh pads" - Leit Kynes
Yeah.... I bought the whole urine deal, but not the feces processing. I have pinched some loafs that I seriously doubt any technology, that is wearable, could process into anything useful.
How the fuck can the suit process corn? Corn chips just magically come out of a pocket?
I always assumed that the "processing" just extracted water, leaving some kind of dessicated shit powder that gets dumped. Far more plausible than reprocessing shit into food, though scarcely comfortable or fragrant. In Dune the smell of a Fremen sietch is described as an assault on the nostrils... I think we can guess why.
Slashdot Mirror
Functioning alarm clocks are pretty cheap. Acquiring one might have constituted a sensible investment in your career.
Not only can you just file/sandpaper the tip of the firing pin, I personally know a forensic scientist who did a Master's Thesis on this very subject, and in his research and testing, he found that the serial numbers wear down enough in just a few shots that they aren't readable on the primers any more.
Interesting! Please could you provide a citation (and link, if it's online) for the thesis? Has he published any papers from his research?
No. We have already passed the point on the strength axis at which the car survives but the occupants die of internal injuries. For cars, what you need is energy absorption to decelerate the car's contents gradually. That means a body that will crumple.
Not exactly. Yes, you want a crumple zone. But you don't want the human occupants to be part of that crumple zone, even if their soft, fleshy bodies might make fairly decent shock absorbers.
See also Joel Spolsky:
What I wondered was, what happens if you take top-notch C++ programmers who dream in pointers, and let them code in VB. What I discovered at Fog Creek was that they become super-efficient coding machines. The code looks pretty good, it's object-oriented and robust, but you don't waste time using tools that are at a level lower than you need. I've spent years writing code for C++/MFC and years writing code in Visual Basic, and let me tell you, VB is just much, much more productive. Michael and I had a good laugh today when we discovered somebody selling a beta crash-reporting product at $5000 for three months that Michael implemented in CityDesk in two days. (And we actually implemented a good part of ours in C++/ATL). And I also guarantee you that our Visual Basic code in CityDesk looks a lot better than most of the code you find written in macho languages like C++, because we're good programmers, and we write comments, and our variable names are well-chosen, and we do things the simple way, not the clever way, and so forth.
Well, thank you for the forgiveness. I indeed think that I've *never* encountered courtesy accidentals not in brackets. I suspect I wouldn't have flinched if the brackets had been there.
Strange, I think I've seen them more often without brackets than with. Grabbing the first score I could find (Beethoven, Piano sonata no. 8, ed. D. F. Tovey, published by ABRSM) I see that none of the accidentals are bracketed. But doubtless it varies between countries, genres, publishers, and so forth.
I ran off to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_(music) which expresses what I think should be the ideal: "Cautionary accidentals or naturals (in parentheses) may be used to clarify ambiguities, but should be held to a minimum."
But do note that Wikipedia presents this as an "alternate system" contrasted with the "tradition [which] is still in use particularly in tonal music".
Worse than that - they're cancelling accidentals in different octaves in different bars in different staves from where they were applied (var. 14, bar 17) - that's just excessive.
I admit that that one seems pretty bizarre to me too. For what it's worth, I've never really liked courtesy accidentals (my mathematical brain disdains such illogical redundancy), but I've always accepted them as a time-hallowed convention.
I also wonder if they have sanity-checking - Just in the first few minutes of listening whilst reading along I noticed a natural modifier to a note which was not sharp (nor flat) according to the key signature, nor which had been modified previously, and therefore did not need the natural sign (e.g. var. 6, bar 16, the middle C). I've not read any music for *many* decades - someone else should have spotted this!
If you've not read any music in decades, I suppose you can be forgiven for not knowing about courtesy accidentals.
But also, if you've not read any music in decades, perhaps you shouldn't be so quick to condemn others' painstaking work purely on the basis on your personal judgement.
Hopefully these improvements to MuseScore will make it easier to use, because so far I have not been able to get much done with it just out of the difficulty of using it. The interface is really unintuitive. I don't think I've ever found a music scoring program that is easy to use.
Have you tried Sibelius?
TFA is a bit light. I'm wondering how you review a score? Was it "muse score software didn't display this note properly", or "the music would sound better if you went up instead of down here, or repeated a theme differently"?
I think it would be along the lines of "this acciacatura is too close" or "this slur is too high", with the occasional "wrong note". As to suggesting improvements to the music itself, you might be about 270 years late for that -- at least if you want JSB to sign off on them :-). Still, nothing to stop you forking the score, I guess.
But the robot is already built.
But the sentence in question was "How come they didn't just use a laser range finder...". Thus:
1. The use of the range-finder, rather than its installation, is in the past tense.
2. The subject of the sentence is "they" (viz. the researchers), rather than "the robot", implying that it is the researchers themselves who should be operating the instrument.
He was talking about a laser range finder operated by the rover. Wake up !
Then why was he using the past tense? The rover won't even be there till 2014.
* A steel wriststrap. If you're buying a Casio, do *not* get the black resin strap versions of their watches because they always break within 6 months of use.
Good wrist straps are designed to break to protect you. .
Maybe so, but that does not mean that a wrist strap is good just because it breaks.
If you're buying a Casio, do *not* get the black resin strap versions of their watches because they always break within 6 months of use. They may be up to 10 pounds cheaper, but the straps aren't replaceable and I learned this to my cost with two broken-strap resin versions of the watch before I switched to the steel strap.
I've actually managed to get the strap replaced on a 12 quid Casio (this one or very similar). Strap + labour cost slightly more than the watch, but at the time I was far from anywhere that could have sold me another one at a sane price.
As a mathematician and hobbyist iOS developer, it really sucks that so much great mathematics software is GPLed. You can't port Octave, for example, to the iPad as its license is incompatible with Apples terms.
... or, to look at it from a slightly different viewpoint, it really sucks that Apple have chosen to make their terms incompatible with the GPL.
However, in most engineering R&D environments, MATLAB support is important for collaboration, and here is where Octave could be useful were it more comparable to MATLAB.
Have you tried the recent-ish 3.6 release? I gather that it's made major improvements in Matlab compatibility. I'm interested because I'm going to be working on some Matlab stuff soon, and am wondering whether I could get away with porting it to Octave.
Asking for donation of at least $50,000.00 just to port free software onto Android is another
Did you read the list of deliverables near the top of the project page? I wouldn't agree to do that lot for $50,000. Then again, if anyone reckons it's outrageous, they could always set up a Kickstarter with the same deliverables and, say, a $5,000 goal. Or $500, $50, whatever you think is reasonable.
And, of course, the nice thing about Kickstarter is that it's voluntary. Nobody's forcing you and me to pay, even though we'll reap the benefits if it gets funded. If everyone agrees that it's a rip-off, it won't get funded, simple as that.
Not big money? That's more than most of us make in a year, before taxes.
According to the timeline on the kickstarter page, the project will run until "Fall 2013", so the equivalent pre-tax annual income would be more like $35,000. I'd say that's pretty cheap for an experienced developer.
Five editions? Of course, it's an ebook, they can claim it's a new edition every time they make an edit and press the save button.
Huh? Are we talking about the same book? As is clear from the very Amazon page you linked to, the French editions were old-fashioned dead-tree books.
Considering that they call their book a bestseller (during a tiny little period of time on amazon.fr)...
As I understand it, their characterization of the book as a "best-seller right from the start" wass mainly based on the fact that the first edition sold out in four months. As for being the top seller on Amazon.fr, the Ulule page says "It was even the most sold book on Amazon.fr for an entire morning." So they're entirely upfront that the top ranking was only for a short time. (Still, though. For one morning it was selling better than Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code, or whatever. Not bad for a book about Debian.)
And who is their publisher anyway?
The French publisher was Eyrolles, again easily ascertained from the very Amazon page you linked to. According to Wikipedia, Eyrolles was founded in 1925 and has over 200 employees and annual revenues exceeding 50 million euro, so I'm fairly sure they're not just a front for two dodgy authors and a double-sided laser printer. You can find the latest edition on the publisher's website here.
[Blah blah lots of stuff about Lulu]
I don't really see what relevance this has to the French editions which you were criticising in your initial post. I thought we were debating whether the French editions had sold well, rather than discussing the publishing model for the new English edition.
So how does your system apply to the original question -- sharing the passwords among multiple users? Do you all copy out the relevant parts of each other's notebooks and memorize each other's rules? Or do you tell each other the unencrypted passwords and re-encrypt them individually using personal rule-sets?
During most of my career in pure physics I got negative results, which were always hell to publish... if scientists don't report on them they will continue to seem like good ideas to people who haven't tried them, who will then waste effort on trying them, and fail to publish them when they don't work...
I agree entirely. It's infuriating to think of the wasted effort of thousands of scientists worldwide repeating each other's mistakes, just because negative results often aren't considered publishable. I think there's growing awareness of this, though. A physicist friend recently pointed me at the Journal of Unsolved Questions ( http://junq.info/ ) which is attempting to correct this bias. His advice was along these lines: ‘It's a great place to publish interesting negative results, because they've just started so there's not a lot of competition for publication, but as soon as the world figures out what a good idea this is, their impact factor's going to start taking off’. Worth a shot, I suppose.
Don't be so quick to spend your money, there are most likely better books on this topic. The book was never a "bestseller" even in French (except for a very brief window of time on Amazon.com when the author had his entire family and all his friends buy the same book at the same time).
I don't really have a vested interest in this (don't do much system administration these days, little time or inclination to read the book). But it seems that this book has been through five editions in the past eight years. I don't see why the publishers would agree to print a new edition unless they'd made money on the previous one -- or are Hertzog and Mas getting their friends and family to buy up the entire print run of each edition?
Still, now that the whole thing's online, I suppose everyone can try before they buy.
They use a lot of electricity. Unless Microsoft is planning to buy "carbon offset" credits, so they can pollute and yet just handwave it away.
It seems they're taking the obvious step of trying to make sure that the power comes from carbon-neutral sources. From TFWhitepaper linked from TFA:
we are considering a portfolio of approaches, including: Signing long-term renewable power purchase agreements... Investing capital in new renewable energy projects... Connecting data centers directly to innovative energy sources...
Read all about it here.
I can only say: good on you.
No, the original site corrected it after the submission was made: see the Google cache at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ftechzwn.com%2F2012%2F02%2Finterview-filmmakers-tell-of-the-home-video-revolution%2F .
"Urine and feces are processed in the thigh pads" - Leit Kynes
Yeah.... I bought the whole urine deal, but not the feces processing. I have pinched some loafs that I seriously doubt any technology, that is wearable, could process into anything useful.
How the fuck can the suit process corn? Corn chips just magically come out of a pocket?
I always assumed that the "processing" just extracted water, leaving some kind of dessicated shit powder that gets dumped. Far more plausible than reprocessing shit into food, though scarcely comfortable or fragrant. In Dune the smell of a Fremen sietch is described as an assault on the nostrils... I think we can guess why.
If you don't want your manhole to explode, stop eating vindaloo.