As a former owner of a engineering/high-tech company, I've been involved with recruiting. In doing so, I have been involved with the entire process from A-to-Z - meaning that if I posed an newspaper add, for example (going back a few years) - no one pre-screened the resumes or candidates before me.
My findings are that why yes, we hired much much much fewer women than men. Is it because we were sexist? No. Is it because they were all underqualified, or even less qualified? No.
The cold-hard fact was that only about 10% of the applicants were women. Interestingly enough, (or maybe not), most of these were not native U.S. citizens, but mostly Chinese or Indian women who had come to study in the U.S.
While I am being a "racist" - I might throw in that we never, in our existance as a company, have ever hired a black person.
Was it because they were underqualified, etc. etc. etc.? Again, no.
In my entire career, I have only ever interviewed a single black applicant for an engineering position. (BTW - We actually made this person a good offer, which they accepted, but their existing employer countered it and we lost them.)
My point is that there are less "women and minorities" hired into these positions becasue there are far far far less candidates - not because of any discrimination.
Does discrimination exist in the world? Sure, it does - but to be honest, in the competitive nature of the companies I've been at - and the difficulty in hiring good candidates - I don't think anyone would care if the candidate was a green transsexual with three eyes - if they were a solid candidate - they'd be hired on those grounds.
I've also worked for "Women Owned" companies. This is something that the feds have set up - If your company is at least 51% "woman owned or run" (or minority owned and run) - then you get preferential treatment in dealing with the Feds, and contractors that do business with the Feds. (Like they have to do business with a certain quota of these companies). In my experience, these all have been a smoke-and-mirrors game - Whitey giving his ol' lady a business card that says "CEO" on it, to try and drum up some more business, etc. etc. etc.
Certain people are drawn to certain professions - and that's an individual decision, and there probably is some biological basis in the Men vs. Women thing. Like people have pointed out, should we mandate quotas that H.R. people and Flight Attendents be a certain percent male too?
Now as the "Minorities" go - let's cut to the chase. By "Miniories", we're only talking about certian "Minorities". We're talking about blacks, hispanics, eskimos, Native Americans - and I'm sure some others - but we are NOT talking about Indians, Chinese, or Australians for that matter.
If Congress really wanted to even-out the playing field - they'd be investing money into inner-city schools - like a mile a way from them in DC - which are literally falling apart - and more like prisons than schools. Turn these into places that foster excitement in learning, science and engineering, and are an oasis inside these inner-city slum areas - and you'll see those kids go off to college and become candidates.
Short of doing that - nothing else will ever work. You can give them a billion dollars in college grant money - but if their schools are gang, crime and filth ridden places where they just get locked-up for a few hours a day - then no quota system on the place of the planet will ever balance that out.
Yes, yes, 100% The putting - particularly when you're trying to do very subtle, light putts. And the problem is, as you stated, this is all accelerometer - not the IR stuff.
Didn't even know it was "done"...
on
A Year of GPLv3
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I'm not "joking"..I mean - I don't recall seeing it being used in anything I've come across to-date. I'm not saying it isn't used - or maybe I haven't noticed it.
I think in reality - the fact that Linux didn't use it means that certainly Linux modules didn't too - and it really got gummed up from there.
I have only seen one eBook reader up-close and in-person - a demo on a kiosk at a book store. The display was so "flat" - I thought it was one of those non-functional printed mock-ups! That aspect was impressive.
But that was the beginning and the end of my love for them.
As a tech-geek, 99.9% of my reading is reference materials. If there's a book I use even somewhat often, I generally know what I want to find, what it is, and (vaugley) what it looks like. Thus, searching through the book is generally a matter of flipping through the pages, very quickly - scanning for what I want.
This is something that even Acrobat/PDF's annoy me with.
With the update/redraw time the eBooks take - this is completely out of the question. Furthermore, the UIs don't have any way of making this good. If the update/refresh issue wasn't [an issue], and they had some really cool scroll/jog/zoom capability, that might be another deal. Sort of like an iPhone.
But now we're talking a bit of horsepower to do this.
Getting up on my salt box...
So It's really about usability - does anyone even remeber what that even is anymore?! When you could flip though the pages of a book without waiting for some sort of lag - or turn the channel knob on your TV and switch to another channel without waiting for some keypress that was buffered somewhere to get received and re-sync to a new stream - Or pick up your phone to answer it and be able to say "hello" to the person on the other end without some VoIP connection-lag blocking out that first 1/4 second of your call. Or you could by a book or a song, without worrying that you might not be able to read it or listen to it in the future if you loose your machine, or aren't careful to backup your licenses or whatever. Or when I didn't have to spend 5 minutes a day getting rid of the spam in my inbox which actually has a spam filter. Or instead of pressing a single button sitting on my kitchen counter and walking away to hear my phone messages I have to go through the crappy AT&T voicemail menus or whaterver. Or you press the "radio button" on your radio, and the needle jumped to the station, without delay or ambiguitiy over wondering if the radio "got the keypress".
No - I'm not a crotchety old man - I'm really a bonified techy - but It's literally getting to the point where the tiny bit of complexity, and time to deal with some of the "simple" things in life just adds up and adds up and guess what? Every little thing can do more maybe - but it's a pain in the ass to deal with it all.
Repeat after me:
USABILITY
USER EXPERIENCE
Devices should be "responsive" - not "interactive". Like a book - you open it to a page, and it's there - as opposed to "telling" it to go to a page then watching it, waiting for it to do so - so you can continue with the next action. I think there are only 3 companies that get this: Garmin, Apple, and TiVo (with the notable exception of Tivo's new "Home Media" garbage and their Comcast Set-Top boxes).
End soap-box
Okay...you may now mark me as flaimbait/argumentative and/or offtopic.
Yes, but if instead of adding more options, you fork the project any time there's some "mine-is-bigger-than-your" disagreement about some stupid, petty option...
Asperger's (for those just tuning in) results in people not understanding, or picking up on people's social "cues". A lot of this may result in him giving answers to questions which are asinine - but to him - may seem quite logical - as he wouldn't understand why one would find them awkward. People with Asperger's understand things more literally, and can't "read between the lines" as others might.
This said - he may have believed his answers to be very logical - and not understand why someone else wouldn't think the same. Either way, regardless of what he thinks or feels about him - his answers were very out-to-lunch to the point of being unplausable.
If he answered "I don't know how that got there - I must have been framed" to so many of his questions, I'd probably be more apt to possibly believe there was a chance that that was true - but the ridiculous answers he gave - one after another - each one more rediculous than the next...
So maybe Asperger's would lead him to not understand why those answers were so unbelievable - but didn't change the fact that those were his answers. It didn't make him guilty - it just made him a less credible liar.
Judging from the reports I've heard of his "popularity" - even if he was innocent - I don't think there are a whole hell of a lot of people who would be willing to chip in to help him out...
It's not quite a "shoebox" - but same principal. I made a 40-node Mini-ITX datacenter a few years back. Very cheap, low-power, cool (temperature), etc.
When I was in High School (not all that long ago) they had a bottle of mercury - about the size of a shampoo bottle they passed around for all of us to feel how heavy it was.
I remember it was very very heavy - so heavy we could barley lift it. So heavy, that the cheap plastic bottle it was in was bending and warping under its own weight - as if it would have complete broken apart if it wasn't held perfectly upright.
No wonder the shut the place down. (It was the real-life school from the book "Crazy School").
Why can birds, bats and insects do all those crazy thing a plane can do? It has nothing to do with their design, its a common phenomenon often called "Scale Effect". Its like why I can do loops, rolls, stalls, inverted-flight in a remote-control Model DC-10, that could never, ever be done in a real one. Or why smaller animals have higher heart rates, and blink faster than larger ones.
Things like momentum, angular momentum, and "scale" speed do things you wouldn't intuitively think.
One of my favorite thought experiments involves a ten-thousand foot-tall giant. If he jumped down from a platform that was only "knee-high" - his entire body would crumple like a demolished building on impact.
Experiment: Take a matchbox car, pick it up in the air - let's say 10 times its normal height, and drop it on its roof. What happens? Do the same with a real car. What happens then?
Conclusion: Automotive engineers need only to look to the good people designing Matchbox cars to learn how to improve safety and strength of vehicles
From the first minute I heard the announcement - not so much about Gates stepping down as CEO - but walking away from his "day-to-day" to focus on his foundation
Starting from nothing, tp (almost) completely dominating the world of computing - where's Microsoft to go from here?
There's branching to other areas, like Mobile devices, Automobiles and Game Consoles - yea, but isn't everyone trying to do that.
Aside from that, what about their "core" business(es) - the next version of the OS
With all that, the world is going "web" - and people like Google are the places to be in that universe
So where does Microsoft go from here? Well - there not going to go away - but in reality, they've plateaued - and that's not going to change.
Gates' "departure" was in inticipation/reaction to that without a doubt. He's not bailing because their "failing" - it was a rush riding to the top - but now they're there, what? It's just more drudgery from here-on-out, it's not going to be anything meaningful or exciting.
There's always the chance of a "Second Life" - like Apple got with the return of Jobs - but in reality, very very few people or companies - even extremely successful ones ever see that - and I think Gates knows it.
In retrospect, I think Windows-95 was perhaps Microsoft's last giant leap (and/or NT from a different perspective) - and everything else has been pretty much momentum from that.
I don't know exactly what the post was intending, but:
The "Web" is a "broadcast Medium", just like Cable, Satellite, Cellular or Radio [Waves].
A "TV" is a viewing device, like a Computer or Cell-Phone
These two categories are perpendicular to each other - for the most part. Devices like TiVo are bridging TVs with the Web.
So, is the "TV" dead? No - and it won't be. Most people don't kick-back and relax by sitting at their desk watching shows with their family on their lap 2 feet in front of their 17" monitor.
You think you're be liberated from outrageous cable-bills from Comcast by watching TV on the web? Think again. Comcast will be your internet provider. What happens when Web-TV gets sooo good that people start dropping their cable-TV service plans? That'll only happen when bandwidth for Web-TV programming is good to replace existing broadcast/cable TV quality. But how will content providers deliver all that Bandwidth to the end users? Who would be best suited to deliver the content on the networks edge? Hmmm...I dunno, people like Comcast?
Comcast is going to make their money from either the subscribers, or as a content provider. If their delivering the web content, and they already deliver Video-on-Demand content in a like-manner - is there any difference?
You're watching a YouTube video on Tivo, or a broadcast show on your computer - or both/either on your web-connected set-top box - suddenly - where's the line??
When you said "Polonium", I immediately read it as "Bolognium", which was an actual element on the complementary Periodic Tables given to Bart Simpson's class by the good people at Oscar Myer
Yea, but "Li-Po" rolls off the tongue so much easier - as in "liposuction"...
You can call it "crap" all you want - but guess what! This technology is really on its way - is very real and tangible
I'm both an engineer and an R/C heli/airplane fan - and I've been pretty amazed at the kind of stuff that's been coming available over just the last few years - and I'm not talking "scientific research" but even commercial products you can find at your local hobby store or mall.
Lets look:
Batteries Crazy advances in odd things like Li-Po batteries and "supercaps" which are very light, small, and can charge very quickly.
Motors Brushless electric motors with much greater power and efficiency. People are literally ripping their gas engines out of their 60-sized helis and replacing them with electric motors and batteries!
Radios Spread-Spectrum radios which provide operation free of glitches and interference.
Wireless Video Probibly because of the new CCD stuff from WebCams and the like - there are a billion wireless video "toys" out even for little kids - RC cars with "spy cameras", VEX robotic kits, etc.
Gyros They keep getting better and better - cheaper and cheaper -helping with stability
Servos Or the lack of 'em! glue a tiny neodyme magnet on a piece of foam and wrap a wire around it a couple times to control you control surface! They sell tiny foam RC planes based on this
Stable Helis Counter-rotating helis that are extremely stable - allowing a complete novice to fly indoors quickly. You can even buy one a Brookstones for $29!
And of course the radios and electronics are of course getting smaller and more integrated. This is an amaizing time for this kind of stuff - I can't wait to see what the next few years will bring!
The curriculum in a BS program, as I have always understood it - isn't designed to necessarily prepare you to enter the workforce with all the "hands-on" technical skills - no matter what discipline its in.
If you're to learn "hands-on" skills to apply towards work, that's what an associates degree, or trade-school is about
Look at it this way - if the world went post-apocalyptic tomorrow, and everyone "knew Java", we'd all be screwed, because no-one would understand all the theory and crap behind compiler design, OS design, carnal maps, finite automina and all the other "fundamentals" on which everything is built. Just like if everyone got their ACE automotive technicians certificates, we'd have no one who knew how to design the cars.
Now I'm not saying that universities don't try to balance out the BS curriculum with real-world, practical stuff - of course they do - but that's the idea.
In my view, school gives you the foundation, and it's up to you to apply it. Reality is, once you get out there, any specific tools, languages, etc. change so fast anyway - a BS degree teaches the foundation, and its up to you to build on it
Disclaimer: I'm an EE drop out - basically completely self-taught - the same rules apply - know the foundation - and your own your own from there.
The word "hero" is thrown around a lot these days...
I believe what they meant, was that the pilots realized that things were going wrong, and the "normal" reaction would be to add thrust. When they realized that they couldn't add thrust, that this would result in loosing airspeed, entering a stall, and crashing
So they realized that an alternative was to lower their angle-of-attack, preventing the stall, and maintaining a bit of airspeed. This would have the unfortunate side affect of landing well-short of the runway (and perhaps airport) and destroying the aircraft - but given the information available - was a bad - but the best alternative
So they implicitly decided the best course of action was to glide the airplane and ditch it in a field - not a decision that would have exactly won them any praise had they read the situation wrong - but it saved everyone
No - I don't think so. The autothrusters responded properly, but they literally just move the throttle levers, to which the engines didn't respond.
The pilots then manually increased throttle - to no avail.
For both engines to malfunction like this at the same time greatly seems to point to a fuel delivery problem.
This does not necessarily mean "running out of gas" - as a plane like this has multiple tanks, valves and pumps, all of which can be configured multiple different ways - which change during the flight.
A simplistic example: they could have been running both engines off one tank - which went dry - though another was full - or both engines were being fed from a common fuel pump which failed, etc. These things *shouldn't* happen - but the investigation will tell...
When I read the article, the mention of the "Success" of Elephants Dream immediately raised my eyebrow.
There is a lot to learn from the "success" of Elephant's Dream.
A movie is more than great visuals, scenery, and Blender wizardry.
Thus, contributions are needed well beyond engineers and animators - like writers.
Open-source needs to be more than just code - but scripts, characters, etc.
I think "success" would be an open-source movie being recognized at least beyond the FOSS-crowd. From that perspective, I wouldn't call it a success. And from within the FOSS-crowd, most people thought it sucked.
Flaimbait me if you want - but you didn't like it either.
-- maybe not of metal, of plastic...-- let's make it really tiny...
-- Maybe I can just burn it in an FPGA, and if I pulse the output pins, they'll actually move from the alternating fields...
-- Maybe I can do this in software, instead of an FPGA
Where is the line between the actual "thing" and the simulation?
Does the "thing" have to physically "move" something to make it "real"? Perhaps there could be a Turing test for that.
What if it was implemented in software - for something in the software, it would pass such a Turing test. For something outside, it might not. So to say if it is a simulation or not depends only on perspective.
So are we on the "outermost" layer? Is there an "outermost" layer? Probably notThe whole world [of physics] is filled with these hints at us - for example of the universe being 10 or 11 dimensions, though we can only observe 3 (or 4).
Things like String Theory describe math and geometry in ways that are pretty much impractical to us, and only make sense from a mathematical perspective. From this vantage point, it looks almost as though we are affects of some bizzare equation or geometry. As almost nonsensical as these models appear to be, they describe more about the universe in better ways than we can possibly perceive. Conecpts of time, space, matter and energy aren't as "tangible" and "absolute" as we perceive.
If you are religious, and believe in a spirit, God, afterlife, heaven, hell, or whatever - than guess what, you agree with this concept - If god is "Everywhere" or "all around us" - then there is a greater tapestry of reality that what we can see - we're just a piece of it.
Wether its mathematics, spirituality, or a bunch of geeks running an MMORPG on a giant supercomputer in another dimension - we're a part of something larger that what we understand - we're in it - and that's probably as close the to definition of a "behavioral simulation" as you can come.
Are we just a simulation? Bill Clinton would probably say: "It depends on what your definition of 'simulaton' is."
Slashdot Mirror
My findings are that why yes, we hired much much much fewer women than men. Is it because we were sexist? No. Is it because they were all underqualified, or even less qualified? No.
The cold-hard fact was that only about 10% of the applicants were women. Interestingly enough, (or maybe not), most of these were not native U.S. citizens, but mostly Chinese or Indian women who had come to study in the U.S.
While I am being a "racist" - I might throw in that we never, in our existance as a company, have ever hired a black person.
Was it because they were underqualified, etc. etc. etc.? Again, no.
In my entire career, I have only ever interviewed a single black applicant for an engineering position. (BTW - We actually made this person a good offer, which they accepted, but their existing employer countered it and we lost them.)
My point is that there are less "women and minorities" hired into these positions becasue there are far far far less candidates - not because of any discrimination.
Does discrimination exist in the world? Sure, it does - but to be honest, in the competitive nature of the companies I've been at - and the difficulty in hiring good candidates - I don't think anyone would care if the candidate was a green transsexual with three eyes - if they were a solid candidate - they'd be hired on those grounds.
I've also worked for "Women Owned" companies. This is something that the feds have set up - If your company is at least 51% "woman owned or run" (or minority owned and run) - then you get preferential treatment in dealing with the Feds, and contractors that do business with the Feds. (Like they have to do business with a certain quota of these companies). In my experience, these all have been a smoke-and-mirrors game - Whitey giving his ol' lady a business card that says "CEO" on it, to try and drum up some more business, etc. etc. etc.
Certain people are drawn to certain professions - and that's an individual decision, and there probably is some biological basis in the Men vs. Women thing. Like people have pointed out, should we mandate quotas that H.R. people and Flight Attendents be a certain percent male too?
Now as the "Minorities" go - let's cut to the chase. By "Miniories", we're only talking about certian "Minorities". We're talking about blacks, hispanics, eskimos, Native Americans - and I'm sure some others - but we are NOT talking about Indians, Chinese, or Australians for that matter.
If Congress really wanted to even-out the playing field - they'd be investing money into inner-city schools - like a mile a way from them in DC - which are literally falling apart - and more like prisons than schools. Turn these into places that foster excitement in learning, science and engineering, and are an oasis inside these inner-city slum areas - and you'll see those kids go off to college and become candidates.
Short of doing that - nothing else will ever work. You can give them a billion dollars in college grant money - but if their schools are gang, crime and filth ridden places where they just get locked-up for a few hours a day - then no quota system on the place of the planet will ever balance that out.
Yes, yes, 100% The putting - particularly when you're trying to do very subtle, light putts. And the problem is, as you stated, this is all accelerometer - not the IR stuff.
This gives the term "Beta" a bad name.
I'm not "joking"..I mean - I don't recall seeing it being used in anything I've come across to-date. I'm not saying it isn't used - or maybe I haven't noticed it. I think in reality - the fact that Linux didn't use it means that certainly Linux modules didn't too - and it really got gummed up from there.
And who says US students aren't learning valuable "real-world" skills in the classroom!?
But that was the beginning and the end of my love for them.
As a tech-geek, 99.9% of my reading is reference materials. If there's a book I use even somewhat often, I generally know what I want to find, what it is, and (vaugley) what it looks like. Thus, searching through the book is generally a matter of flipping through the pages, very quickly - scanning for what I want.
This is something that even Acrobat/PDF's annoy me with.
With the update/redraw time the eBooks take - this is completely out of the question. Furthermore, the UIs don't have any way of making this good. If the update/refresh issue wasn't [an issue], and they had some really cool scroll/jog/zoom capability, that might be another deal. Sort of like an iPhone.
But now we're talking a bit of horsepower to do this.
Getting up on my salt box...
So It's really about usability - does anyone even remeber what that even is anymore?! When you could flip though the pages of a book without waiting for some sort of lag - or turn the channel knob on your TV and switch to another channel without waiting for some keypress that was buffered somewhere to get received and re-sync to a new stream - Or pick up your phone to answer it and be able to say "hello" to the person on the other end without some VoIP connection-lag blocking out that first 1/4 second of your call. Or you could by a book or a song, without worrying that you might not be able to read it or listen to it in the future if you loose your machine, or aren't careful to backup your licenses or whatever. Or when I didn't have to spend 5 minutes a day getting rid of the spam in my inbox which actually has a spam filter. Or instead of pressing a single button sitting on my kitchen counter and walking away to hear my phone messages I have to go through the crappy AT&T voicemail menus or whaterver. Or you press the "radio button" on your radio, and the needle jumped to the station, without delay or ambiguitiy over wondering if the radio "got the keypress".
No - I'm not a crotchety old man - I'm really a bonified techy - but It's literally getting to the point where the tiny bit of complexity, and time to deal with some of the "simple" things in life just adds up and adds up and guess what? Every little thing can do more maybe - but it's a pain in the ass to deal with it all.
Repeat after me:
USABILITY
USER EXPERIENCE
Devices should be "responsive" - not "interactive". Like a book - you open it to a page, and it's there - as opposed to "telling" it to go to a page then watching it, waiting for it to do so - so you can continue with the next action. I think there are only 3 companies that get this: Garmin, Apple, and TiVo (with the notable exception of Tivo's new "Home Media" garbage and their Comcast Set-Top boxes).
End soap-box
Okay...you may now mark me as flaimbait/argumentative and/or offtopic.
(Someone had to say it..)
Yes, but if instead of adding more options, you fork the project any time there's some "mine-is-bigger-than-your" disagreement about some stupid, petty option...
Asperger's (for those just tuning in) results in people not understanding, or picking up on people's social "cues". A lot of this may result in him giving answers to questions which are asinine - but to him - may seem quite logical - as he wouldn't understand why one would find them awkward. People with Asperger's understand things more literally, and can't "read between the lines" as others might.
This said - he may have believed his answers to be very logical - and not understand why someone else wouldn't think the same. Either way, regardless of what he thinks or feels about him - his answers were very out-to-lunch to the point of being unplausable.
If he answered "I don't know how that got there - I must have been framed" to so many of his questions, I'd probably be more apt to possibly believe there was a chance that that was true - but the ridiculous answers he gave - one after another - each one more rediculous than the next...
So maybe Asperger's would lead him to not understand why those answers were so unbelievable - but didn't change the fact that those were his answers. It didn't make him guilty - it just made him a less credible liar.
Judging from the reports I've heard of his "popularity" - even if he was innocent - I don't think there are a whole hell of a lot of people who would be willing to chip in to help him out...
I still use one as my main server at home.
Picts at:
http://www.bradgoodman.com/pictures/itxblade.jpg
http://www.bradgoodman.com/pictures/itxbladex40.jpg
When I was in High School (not all that long ago) they had a bottle of mercury - about the size of a shampoo bottle they passed around for all of us to feel how heavy it was. I remember it was very very heavy - so heavy we could barley lift it. So heavy, that the cheap plastic bottle it was in was bending and warping under its own weight - as if it would have complete broken apart if it wasn't held perfectly upright. No wonder the shut the place down. (It was the real-life school from the book "Crazy School").
Why can birds, bats and insects do all those crazy thing a plane can do? It has nothing to do with their design, its a common phenomenon often called "Scale Effect". Its like why I can do loops, rolls, stalls, inverted-flight in a remote-control Model DC-10, that could never, ever be done in a real one. Or why smaller animals have higher heart rates, and blink faster than larger ones.
Things like momentum, angular momentum, and "scale" speed do things you wouldn't intuitively think.
One of my favorite thought experiments involves a ten-thousand foot-tall giant. If he jumped down from a platform that was only "knee-high" - his entire body would crumple like a demolished building on impact.
Experiment: Take a matchbox car, pick it up in the air - let's say 10 times its normal height, and drop it on its roof. What happens? Do the same with a real car. What happens then?
Conclusion: Automotive engineers need only to look to the good people designing Matchbox cars to learn how to improve safety and strength of vehicles
From the first minute I heard the announcement - not so much about Gates stepping down as CEO - but walking away from his "day-to-day" to focus on his foundation
Starting from nothing, tp (almost) completely dominating the world of computing - where's Microsoft to go from here?
There's branching to other areas, like Mobile devices, Automobiles and Game Consoles - yea, but isn't everyone trying to do that.
Aside from that, what about their "core" business(es) - the next version of the OS
With all that, the world is going "web" - and people like Google are the places to be in that universe
So where does Microsoft go from here? Well - there not going to go away - but in reality, they've plateaued - and that's not going to change.
Gates' "departure" was in inticipation/reaction to that without a doubt. He's not bailing because their "failing" - it was a rush riding to the top - but now they're there, what? It's just more drudgery from here-on-out, it's not going to be anything meaningful or exciting.
There's always the chance of a "Second Life" - like Apple got with the return of Jobs - but in reality, very very few people or companies - even extremely successful ones ever see that - and I think Gates knows it.
In retrospect, I think Windows-95 was perhaps Microsoft's last giant leap (and/or NT from a different perspective) - and everything else has been pretty much momentum from that.
I don't know exactly what the post was intending, but:
The "Web" is a "broadcast Medium", just like Cable, Satellite, Cellular or Radio [Waves].
A "TV" is a viewing device, like a Computer or Cell-Phone
These two categories are perpendicular to each other - for the most part. Devices like TiVo are bridging TVs with the Web.
So, is the "TV" dead? No - and it won't be. Most people don't kick-back and relax by sitting at their desk watching shows with their family on their lap 2 feet in front of their 17" monitor.
You think you're be liberated from outrageous cable-bills from Comcast by watching TV on the web? Think again. Comcast will be your internet provider. What happens when Web-TV gets sooo good that people start dropping their cable-TV service plans? That'll only happen when bandwidth for Web-TV programming is good to replace existing broadcast/cable TV quality. But how will content providers deliver all that Bandwidth to the end users? Who would be best suited to deliver the content on the networks edge? Hmmm...I dunno, people like Comcast?
Comcast is going to make their money from either the subscribers, or as a content provider. If their delivering the web content, and they already deliver Video-on-Demand content in a like-manner - is there any difference?
You're watching a YouTube video on Tivo, or a broadcast show on your computer - or both/either on your web-connected set-top box - suddenly - where's the line??
When you said "Polonium", I immediately read it as "Bolognium", which was an actual element on the complementary Periodic Tables given to Bart Simpson's class by the good people at Oscar Myer
Yea, but "Li-Po" rolls off the tongue so much easier - as in "liposuction"...
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all night...
You can call it "crap" all you want - but guess what! This technology is really on its way - is very real and tangible
I'm both an engineer and an R/C heli/airplane fan - and I've been pretty amazed at the kind of stuff that's been coming available over just the last few years - and I'm not talking "scientific research" but even commercial products you can find at your local hobby store or mall.
Lets look:
Batteries Crazy advances in odd things like Li-Po batteries and "supercaps" which are very light, small, and can charge very quickly.
Motors Brushless electric motors with much greater power and efficiency. People are literally ripping their gas engines out of their 60-sized helis and replacing them with electric motors and batteries!
Radios Spread-Spectrum radios which provide operation free of glitches and interference.
Wireless Video Probibly because of the new CCD stuff from WebCams and the like - there are a billion wireless video "toys" out even for little kids - RC cars with "spy cameras", VEX robotic kits, etc.
Gyros They keep getting better and better - cheaper and cheaper -helping with stability
Servos Or the lack of 'em! glue a tiny neodyme magnet on a piece of foam and wrap a wire around it a couple times to control you control surface! They sell tiny foam RC planes based on this
Stable Helis Counter-rotating helis that are extremely stable - allowing a complete novice to fly indoors quickly. You can even buy one a Brookstones for $29!
And of course the radios and electronics are of course getting smaller and more integrated. This is an amaizing time for this kind of stuff - I can't wait to see what the next few years will bring!
The curriculum in a BS program, as I have always understood it - isn't designed to necessarily prepare you to enter the workforce with all the "hands-on" technical skills - no matter what discipline its in.
If you're to learn "hands-on" skills to apply towards work, that's what an associates degree, or trade-school is about
Look at it this way - if the world went post-apocalyptic tomorrow, and everyone "knew Java", we'd all be screwed, because no-one would understand all the theory and crap behind compiler design, OS design, carnal maps, finite automina and all the other "fundamentals" on which everything is built. Just like if everyone got their ACE automotive technicians certificates, we'd have no one who knew how to design the cars.
Now I'm not saying that universities don't try to balance out the BS curriculum with real-world, practical stuff - of course they do - but that's the idea.
In my view, school gives you the foundation, and it's up to you to apply it. Reality is, once you get out there, any specific tools, languages, etc. change so fast anyway - a BS degree teaches the foundation, and its up to you to build on it
Disclaimer: I'm an EE drop out - basically completely self-taught - the same rules apply - know the foundation - and your own your own from there.
The word "hero" is thrown around a lot these days...
I believe what they meant, was that the pilots realized that things were going wrong, and the "normal" reaction would be to add thrust. When they realized that they couldn't add thrust, that this would result in loosing airspeed, entering a stall, and crashing
So they realized that an alternative was to lower their angle-of-attack, preventing the stall, and maintaining a bit of airspeed. This would have the unfortunate side affect of landing well-short of the runway (and perhaps airport) and destroying the aircraft - but given the information available - was a bad - but the best alternative
So they implicitly decided the best course of action was to glide the airplane and ditch it in a field - not a decision that would have exactly won them any praise had they read the situation wrong - but it saved everyone
The pilots then manually increased throttle - to no avail.
For both engines to malfunction like this at the same time greatly seems to point to a fuel delivery problem.
This does not necessarily mean "running out of gas" - as a plane like this has multiple tanks, valves and pumps, all of which can be configured multiple different ways - which change during the flight.
A simplistic example: they could have been running both engines off one tank - which went dry - though another was full - or both engines were being fed from a common fuel pump which failed, etc. These things *shouldn't* happen - but the investigation will tell...
There is a lot to learn from the "success" of Elephant's Dream.
A movie is more than great visuals, scenery, and Blender wizardry.
Thus, contributions are needed well beyond engineers and animators - like writers.
Open-source needs to be more than just code - but scripts, characters, etc.
I think "success" would be an open-source movie being recognized at least beyond the FOSS-crowd. From that perspective, I wouldn't call it a success. And from within the FOSS-crowd, most people thought it sucked.
Flaimbait me if you want - but you didn't like it either.
Sorry..someone had to! :-O
-- Let's build an engine....
-- no, a tiny engine...
-- maybe not of metal, of plastic...-- let's make it really tiny...
-- Maybe I can just burn it in an FPGA, and if I pulse the output pins, they'll actually move from the alternating fields...
-- Maybe I can do this in software, instead of an FPGA
Where is the line between the actual "thing" and the simulation?
Does the "thing" have to physically "move" something to make it "real"? Perhaps there could be a Turing test for that.
What if it was implemented in software - for something in the software, it would pass such a Turing test. For something outside, it might not. So to say if it is a simulation or not depends only on perspective.
So are we on the "outermost" layer? Is there an "outermost" layer? Probably notThe whole world [of physics] is filled with these hints at us - for example of the universe being 10 or 11 dimensions, though we can only observe 3 (or 4).
Things like String Theory describe math and geometry in ways that are pretty much impractical to us, and only make sense from a mathematical perspective. From this vantage point, it looks almost as though we are affects of some bizzare equation or geometry. As almost nonsensical as these models appear to be, they describe more about the universe in better ways than we can possibly perceive. Conecpts of time, space, matter and energy aren't as "tangible" and "absolute" as we perceive.
If you are religious, and believe in a spirit, God, afterlife, heaven, hell, or whatever - than guess what, you agree with this concept - If god is "Everywhere" or "all around us" - then there is a greater tapestry of reality that what we can see - we're just a piece of it.
Wether its mathematics, spirituality, or a bunch of geeks running an MMORPG on a giant supercomputer in another dimension - we're a part of something larger that what we understand - we're in it - and that's probably as close the to definition of a "behavioral simulation" as you can come.
Are we just a simulation? Bill Clinton would probably say: "It depends on what your definition of 'simulaton' is."