Sears is often described as "A finance company with a retail arm". Though that concept doesn't really apply here, it draws a parallel.
Without going into gruesome detail, I believe Sears is in "The Scam Business". I know, I know - such a large, public (?) company wouldn't pull such shenenagans on such an ongoing basis, would they?
One day I found that may Sears card, which hadn't been used in years was getting charges on it for some "Sears Health Care" insurance plan I never signed up for. Upon calling "Sears" to debate the charge, they refused to remove it from my bill, and I was livid. They told me to "Call the vendor, and debate it with them".
"What?! This is not a regular "Credit-Card", it's my Sears card, you are the vendor." Much to my surprise, despite the recordings that identified themselves as "Sears" when I answered the phone - the people on the phone told me that they were "CitiBank", not "Sears". "Okay" - I thought - so CitiBank bought the credit cards from Sears? This is sort of okay - but I've never heard of a credit card refusing to remove a fraudulent charge. Not only did they do this, but they went as far as to tell me that if "the vendor" did not volintarily remove the charge, I had no recourse.
No...this is too unbelieveable - CitiBank, too? Surely I must be completely confused.
So I reluctantly took the number that CitiBank gave me for "The Vendor", which was something like "Sears Home Health Care" or something and called them. When they guy answered the phone, I immediately demanded to speak to a supervisor and gave no other information. After he reluctantly put me through to a super, the super immediatley came on and agreed to remove the charge and "cancel" the "Health Plan".
Wow - that's interesting - because I never even told him (or anyone) why I was calling, but he knew/assumed this was the case! Are all their calls like this??
I was so blown away by this, I did a little research on the web. It turns out, Sears, and "Sears Home Health" - or whatever, had already settled a class-action lawsuit with the state of California for this type of deal, and had one in the works with Florida. On looking at a few sites on Business scams, on the popup "short-list" of buisinesses they list, both "Sears" and "Sears [whaatever] Health" were always listed!
I refuse to shop at or buy anything from Sears, and enter only to use their bathroom. You probably don't believe my story, or the level of "conspiracy" involved, as I hardly do myself.
My point of this post, is in-fact in response to the original topic: Do you think that a large, public company like Sears risk penalties, suits and their reputation, and would deal in these little petty shenanigans to try to make an extra buck?
I am pretty sure you could do the same thing with a Webcam instead of a Wii Remote.
This is actually a little closer to how a multi touch "surface" does it.
This would merely require - as many DIY multitouch sites mention - removing the IR filter from your Webcam - and perhaps even replacing it with a visible light filter, as to pass IR only.
I don't know this study has anything to do with "robots". Children this age engage in all kinds of "imitative" play. And what are they imitating? Their parents - young kids (like mine) will feed, nurse, change, put to bed, their dolls, stuffed animals, etc. The "robot" is just another vehicle (no pun intended) for this.
That being said, my kids love the Roomba. Before they could even walk, they knew exactly how to turn it on - and would crawl all over the kitchen, chasing it around! My 2-year old son would lie down next to it and put his arm around it! (Until he accidentally turned it on, and he ran screaming away from it smack into a door on the other side of the kitchen!)
I was shocked the other day when I mentioned some thing about turning on the Roomba, and my 14-month old crawled over to it, pressed the "on" button, then the "clean" button - then when it made its "beep-beep-beep" (meaning it's about to start) - she quickly dropped to her hands and crawled quickly away from it, perfectly perpendicular to what would be it's travel-path off it's docking station. I shouldn't have been surprised, her second and third words were "Robot" and "Roomba"!
So, they're toys like any other to the kids - but obviously a lot more fun!:-)
Maybe if your PDA used chips that were build of independent die-bonded cores, this would apply. But for any mass-marketed device, the chips are all single-dye devices. This is both much easier to manufacturer (which yields cheaper parts) and the density is much higher.
The real factor here is Moore's Law. When you can put more and more transistors on a single chip/dye, you have two only have a few (basic) options - (using it for more integrated peripherals,) using it for more cache/memory, or using it for adding more cores.
It is arguable which method will yield faster performance/more power for a given application, but no doubt - as just a few years ago multi-processor (core) machines were reserved for "high-end" or "elite" applications - today, basic workstations or even laptops have them.
Moore's law and basic math can tell you how this will (probably) translate into smaller devices.
Hospitals have "postmortem" conferences in which they discuss cases in which patients die. (I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on T.V.) - but from my understanding - the premise is that these discussions are someone "off-the-record", and try to be open and frank - the reason being - they are an important learning tool. I don't know that this "secrecy" (for lack of a better word) works to protect people in cases of extreme negligence or neglect - but that's the basic idea
The FAA, NTSB, ATC, Military and NASA all have their various "official" reporting systems for accidents, runway incursions, near misses, etc. etc. - but the idea behind this survey was to get a little bit more of a "frank" idea of what's going on - if stuff isn't reported - if incedents don't need to be reported - and to check if there are problems in the system.
(As a student-pilot) I firmly believe that pilots, if interviewed anonymously, would be more than willing to offer any information, or bend anyone's ear as to what the problems are and how to make things safer. If people are "on-the-record" doing this - everyone jumps into the "CYA" mentality.
Are you just looking for someone to blame, or do you really want to know the truth??
I think you're equating the LKML communities/personality/egos warp your thinking of what OSS is really all about. Most cool stuff just starts with a dude tinkering around - a few people find out - and they decide to get involved and help too.
something can "move through space" but not move through time
This is (mathematically) what light does, or something without mass can do.
an object cannot go from having a world line with time-like tangent vector to one with space-like tangent vector (and these are 4-vectors we're talking about). This is why I'm trying to explain to you that what the OP said is hopelessly incorrect.
I agree, 100%.
I didn't read the paper - my remarks were towards Slashdot's explanation of it - particularly the first sentence.
"The Universe is about to flip from having three dimensions of space and one of time to having four dimensions of space.
My remark was, that relativity has already treated space and time as a single 4-dimensional unit.
"means that only massless objects (such as light itself) travel at the speed of light"
True - but through space - and such objects do not move through time at all - or they "never age".
The faster one moves through space, the slower they are through time. The vector sum of the three spacial velocities, and the one timewise velocity always equals "C".
As the other person pointed out, speed is relative - so if you are looking at these velocity vectors, they are relative themselves, because velocity itself is relative. (I also wanted to avoid this entire topic.)
Relativity, in a nutshell, states that everything in our universe is moving at a constant speed (i.e. the speed of light,) through a 4-dimensional space-time (or spacetime).
Einstein explicitly refers to space and time as spacetime - a single unit, with four dimensions. All mathematics in relativity treat space (3) and time (4) as equal four-dimensional vectors.
You can actually go back to everything in "classical" (Newtonian) physics, and rewrite all the equations (like velocity, acceleration, force, gravity, etc) that refer to space and time (differently and separately), treating them as a single 4-d vector, and it not only works - but take into account all kinds of phenomena that we don't observe in our daily life, but which has been predicted and experimentally verified, all starting back around 80 years go (or so).
Relativity talks of space and time as a single 4-dimensional 'spacetime'.
M-Theory, Superstrings, p-Branes, and a billion other theories all say there are 10 (or 11) dimensions, including things like two-dimensional "time" and "imaginary-time" dimensions, smaller "curled-up" spacial dimensions, etc.
Also:
Apple completely alienated and discouraged developers. If Apple's "developer evangelism" guru Guy Kawasaki was around for it he would have rolled over in his grave (provided he was of course, dead).
The Newton SDK was $800.00! So maybe if your developing in a corporate/commercial sense, the $800 entry fee isn't too much - but this completely killed any "grassroots" development community initiative. Without that - there's no software out there for it - except for a very limited number of commercial (i.e. expensive) Apps due to the fact that it's only professional for-profit developers who are (spending money to) develop those apps...etc..etc..etc..
P.S.
Don't make the same [sort of] mistake with the iPhone!
I think they they have 4 different thruster groups/tanks that can thrust the satellite in a multitude of *different* axises/directions. By carefully calculating when/where/how they apply the thrust (i.e. being more discerning - waiting for the satellite to reach specific positions and orientations) - they can better *balance* which thrusters (and therefore tanks) are used for a given maneuver - thus giving themselves (best-case) 4 times the life out of a satellite.
"PCI" or "PCI" ?
on
PCI Compliance
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't think this is talking about the "PCI" that most of us know and love...:-O
TMA!
Bye-Bye Myth!!! Thanks anyway!
I guess that untrusting feeling I've had which made me leave my TiVo active despite having MythTV finally makes sense!
>:-\
I liked it better when it was called "Oragami"......no, wait...when it was called "eMate"...
Hasn't this been done (and failed) a thousand times?!
[Nod "yes"]
Won't anyone *ever* learn?!?
Yes - it is at very high levels that TOE becomes important and relavent - and the market right now is small - but why should that matter? It is obviously large enough that many NIC vendors, Microsoft, and many people building high-performance networking systems are running into these limitations.
Try sending a million 1316-byte packets a second from user-space to a 10Gbe NIC and watch the kernel totally choke on it. The NIC is *more* than capable of doing this - the hardware is *more* than capabilities of doing this - even the NIC drivers can handle this -
but at many many points in the stack - it can't - alloc'ing and freeing a million SKBs a second - certianly the infamous user->kernel space copy, etc....and I gave you an easy example - try this with *receives* and the problem gets a thousand-times worse.
It's great to have design principals - but I actually have to get this stuff to *work* everyday - and I don't even want to get into what I have to do to get it done.
If you don't want to be subject to how a NIC vendor does X or Y - but a different NIC - or turn off their TOE.
This hits the nail right on the head - and here's another example:
There has been somewhat of a "battle" (maybe that's a strong word) over support for TOEs (TCP Offload Engines) - or any network stack offload engine - within the kernel.
A TOE would bypass all/most of the network stack to allow sockets to talk directly to hardware [for example] to achieve an array of performance advantages.
The Linux guys will not allow for any support of TOEs in the Kernel. (I/O-AT is not an offload engine!) A summary of primary reasons include "security issues" and "mixture of non-GPL (the card's firmware) into the Kernel", though one could argue you could apply these same issues to *any* card you plug into your PC, that runs its own firmware and can bus-master.
The point being - users of the kernel (end-users, developers, commercial and OEMs) and NIC vendors now have to scramble around to find ways to try to appease the Linux community - comply with GPL - and/or hack around the kernel, stack, hardware and user-apps - all to still get the performance that the Linux stack is sorley lacking.
You can argue the merits of stack-design, layers, etc. - but in the end, the performance isn't there - and the technologies that are actually *available* to make it - but people don't *want* to include them.
This seems to me as more of a political argument than a technical one.
So what's Linux's "competitor's" take on all this? Microsoft's "Chimney" - an API to allow exactly that.
Oh my!!
I thought this was an obvious typo - but when I looked at the product photo - yup - some bizzare keyboard layout I've never seen!!
This is one way to kill a product real quick!
I never would have thought of that!!!
The Caps-Lock key is good for one thing - accidentally getting pressed - messing you up a little under normal circumstances - or a LOT if your entering a password!
Not the best implementation of this I've seen - perhaps the WORST.
For one, Java based IDE's always SUCK - their the worst of all worlds. They NEVER have the look-and-feel of your native system, no matter WHAT system your using, and are ALWAYS slow as hell.
Number two - do most of my native work in JavaScript - I could even take doing it in Java - but to have an environment where I work in Java, and it compiles everything over to JavaScript?
Slashdot Mirror
Without going into gruesome detail, I believe Sears is in "The Scam Business". I know, I know - such a large, public (?) company wouldn't pull such shenenagans on such an ongoing basis, would they?
One day I found that may Sears card, which hadn't been used in years was getting charges on it for some "Sears Health Care" insurance plan I never signed up for. Upon calling "Sears" to debate the charge, they refused to remove it from my bill, and I was livid. They told me to "Call the vendor, and debate it with them".
"What?! This is not a regular "Credit-Card", it's my Sears card, you are the vendor." Much to my surprise, despite the recordings that identified themselves as "Sears" when I answered the phone - the people on the phone told me that they were "CitiBank", not "Sears". "Okay" - I thought - so CitiBank bought the credit cards from Sears? This is sort of okay - but I've never heard of a credit card refusing to remove a fraudulent charge. Not only did they do this, but they went as far as to tell me that if "the vendor" did not volintarily remove the charge, I had no recourse.
No...this is too unbelieveable - CitiBank, too? Surely I must be completely confused.
So I reluctantly took the number that CitiBank gave me for "The Vendor", which was something like "Sears Home Health Care" or something and called them. When they guy answered the phone, I immediately demanded to speak to a supervisor and gave no other information. After he reluctantly put me through to a super, the super immediatley came on and agreed to remove the charge and "cancel" the "Health Plan".
Wow - that's interesting - because I never even told him (or anyone) why I was calling, but he knew/assumed this was the case! Are all their calls like this??
I was so blown away by this, I did a little research on the web. It turns out, Sears, and "Sears Home Health" - or whatever, had already settled a class-action lawsuit with the state of California for this type of deal, and had one in the works with Florida. On looking at a few sites on Business scams, on the popup "short-list" of buisinesses they list, both "Sears" and "Sears [whaatever] Health" were always listed!
I refuse to shop at or buy anything from Sears, and enter only to use their bathroom. You probably don't believe my story, or the level of "conspiracy" involved, as I hardly do myself.
My point of this post, is in-fact in response to the original topic: Do you think that a large, public company like Sears risk penalties, suits and their reputation, and would deal in these little petty shenanigans to try to make an extra buck?
Yes, they damn well, would.
This is actually a little closer to how a multi touch "surface" does it.
This would merely require - as many DIY multitouch sites mention - removing the IR filter from your Webcam - and perhaps even replacing it with a visible light filter, as to pass IR only.
I don't know this study has anything to do with "robots". Children this age engage in all kinds of "imitative" play. And what are they imitating? Their parents - young kids (like mine) will feed, nurse, change, put to bed, their dolls, stuffed animals, etc. The "robot" is just another vehicle (no pun intended) for this.
That being said, my kids love the Roomba. Before they could even walk, they knew exactly how to turn it on - and would crawl all over the kitchen, chasing it around! My 2-year old son would lie down next to it and put his arm around it! (Until he accidentally turned it on, and he ran screaming away from it smack into a door on the other side of the kitchen!)
I was shocked the other day when I mentioned some thing about turning on the Roomba, and my 14-month old crawled over to it, pressed the "on" button, then the "clean" button - then when it made its "beep-beep-beep" (meaning it's about to start) - she quickly dropped to her hands and crawled quickly away from it, perfectly perpendicular to what would be it's travel-path off it's docking station. I shouldn't have been surprised, her second and third words were "Robot" and "Roomba"!
So, they're toys like any other to the kids - but obviously a lot more fun! :-)
The real factor here is Moore's Law. When you can put more and more transistors on a single chip/dye, you have two only have a few (basic) options - (using it for more integrated peripherals,) using it for more cache/memory, or using it for adding more cores.
It is arguable which method will yield faster performance/more power for a given application, but no doubt - as just a few years ago multi-processor (core) machines were reserved for "high-end" or "elite" applications - today, basic workstations or even laptops have them.
Moore's law and basic math can tell you how this will (probably) translate into smaller devices.
I'm talking about commercial pilots - who would be afraid (or prohibited) from speaking up by their employers.
The FAA, NTSB, ATC, Military and NASA all have their various "official" reporting systems for accidents, runway incursions, near misses, etc. etc. - but the idea behind this survey was to get a little bit more of a "frank" idea of what's going on - if stuff isn't reported - if incedents don't need to be reported - and to check if there are problems in the system.
(As a student-pilot) I firmly believe that pilots, if interviewed anonymously, would be more than willing to offer any information, or bend anyone's ear as to what the problems are and how to make things safer. If people are "on-the-record" doing this - everyone jumps into the "CYA" mentality.
Are you just looking for someone to blame, or do you really want to know the truth??
Don't let all the prima-donna crap get you down!
This is (mathematically) what light does, or something without mass can do.
an object cannot go from having a world line with time-like tangent vector to one with space-like tangent vector (and these are 4-vectors we're talking about). This is why I'm trying to explain to you that what the OP said is hopelessly incorrect.I agree, 100%.
I didn't read the paper - my remarks were towards Slashdot's explanation of it - particularly the first sentence.
"The Universe is about to flip from having three dimensions of space and one of time to having four dimensions of space.My remark was, that relativity has already treated space and time as a single 4-dimensional unit.
True - but through space - and such objects do not move through time at all - or they "never age".
The faster one moves through space, the slower they are through time. The vector sum of the three spacial velocities, and the one timewise velocity always equals "C".
As the other person pointed out, speed is relative - so if you are looking at these velocity vectors, they are relative themselves, because velocity itself is relative. (I also wanted to avoid this entire topic.)
Relativity, in a nutshell, states that everything in our universe is moving at a constant speed (i.e. the speed of light,) through a 4-dimensional space-time (or spacetime).
Einstein explicitly refers to space and time as spacetime - a single unit, with four dimensions. All mathematics in relativity treat space (3) and time (4) as equal four-dimensional vectors.
You can actually go back to everything in "classical" (Newtonian) physics, and rewrite all the equations (like velocity, acceleration, force, gravity, etc) that refer to space and time (differently and separately), treating them as a single 4-d vector, and it not only works - but take into account all kinds of phenomena that we don't observe in our daily life, but which has been predicted and experimentally verified, all starting back around 80 years go (or so).
Again, Nothing new here...
Relativity talks of space and time as a single 4-dimensional 'spacetime'.
M-Theory, Superstrings, p-Branes, and a billion other theories all say there are 10 (or 11) dimensions, including things like two-dimensional "time" and "imaginary-time" dimensions, smaller "curled-up" spacial dimensions, etc.
The Newton SDK was $800.00! So maybe if your developing in a corporate/commercial sense, the $800 entry fee isn't too much - but this completely killed any "grassroots" development community initiative. Without that - there's no software out there for it - except for a very limited number of commercial (i.e. expensive) Apps due to the fact that it's only professional for-profit developers who are (spending money to) develop those apps...etc..etc..etc..
P.S.
Don't make the same [sort of] mistake with the iPhone!
P.S. These are existing units in space - can't do anything about the tanks not being interconnected now!
I think they they have 4 different thruster groups/tanks that can thrust the satellite in a multitude of *different* axises/directions. By carefully calculating when/where/how they apply the thrust (i.e. being more discerning - waiting for the satellite to reach specific positions and orientations) - they can better *balance* which thrusters (and therefore tanks) are used for a given maneuver - thus giving themselves (best-case) 4 times the life out of a satellite.
I don't think this is talking about the "PCI" that most of us know and love... :-O
TMA!
Bye-Bye Myth!!! Thanks anyway! I guess that untrusting feeling I've had which made me leave my TiVo active despite having MythTV finally makes sense! >:-\
I liked it better when it was called "Oragami"... ...no, wait...when it was called "eMate"...
Hasn't this been done (and failed) a thousand times?!
[Nod "yes"]
Won't anyone *ever* learn?!?
Yes - it is at very high levels that TOE becomes important and relavent - and the market right now is small - but why should that matter? It is obviously large enough that many NIC vendors, Microsoft, and many people building high-performance networking systems are running into these limitations.
...and I gave you an easy example - try this with *receives* and the problem gets a thousand-times worse.
Try sending a million 1316-byte packets a second from user-space to a 10Gbe NIC and watch the kernel totally choke on it. The NIC is *more* than capable of doing this - the hardware is *more* than capabilities of doing this - even the NIC drivers can handle this -
but at many many points in the stack - it can't - alloc'ing and freeing a million SKBs a second - certianly the infamous user->kernel space copy, etc.
It's great to have design principals - but I actually have to get this stuff to *work* everyday - and I don't even want to get into what I have to do to get it done.
If you don't want to be subject to how a NIC vendor does X or Y - but a different NIC - or turn off their TOE.
This hits the nail right on the head - and here's another example:
There has been somewhat of a "battle" (maybe that's a strong word) over support for TOEs (TCP Offload Engines) - or any network stack offload engine - within the kernel.
A TOE would bypass all/most of the network stack to allow sockets to talk directly to hardware [for example] to achieve an array of performance advantages.
The Linux guys will not allow for any support of TOEs in the Kernel. (I/O-AT is not an offload engine!) A summary of primary reasons include "security issues" and "mixture of non-GPL (the card's firmware) into the Kernel", though one could argue you could apply these same issues to *any* card you plug into your PC, that runs its own firmware and can bus-master.
The point being - users of the kernel (end-users, developers, commercial and OEMs) and NIC vendors now have to scramble around to find ways to try to appease the Linux community - comply with GPL - and/or hack around the kernel, stack, hardware and user-apps - all to still get the performance that the Linux stack is sorley lacking.
You can argue the merits of stack-design, layers, etc. - but in the end, the performance isn't there - and the technologies that are actually *available* to make it - but people don't *want* to include them.
This seems to me as more of a political argument than a technical one.
So what's Linux's "competitor's" take on all this? Microsoft's "Chimney" - an API to allow exactly that.
At least someone is thinking "outside-the-box".
What, no keyboard? Do they even understand the people this is trying to appeal to?
Oh my!! I thought this was an obvious typo - but when I looked at the product photo - yup - some bizzare keyboard layout I've never seen!! This is one way to kill a product real quick!
I never would have thought of that!!! The Caps-Lock key is good for one thing - accidentally getting pressed - messing you up a little under normal circumstances - or a LOT if your entering a password!
"Ding dong, the witch is dead!!" ;-)
We get a promise in writing that we'll never see a T.V. commercial with Sally Struthers whining about poor kids with no laptops...
For one, Java based IDE's always SUCK - their the worst of all worlds. They NEVER have the look-and-feel of your native system, no matter WHAT system your using, and are ALWAYS slow as hell.
Number two - do most of my native work in JavaScript - I could even take doing it in Java - but to have an environment where I work in Java, and it compiles everything over to JavaScript?
Am I missing something???