Exactly! I had the same view of Pollock until I spent a good half an hour looking at the real thing. A litteral eye-opener.
The other thing I found really helped my appreciation of works like this is hearing another artist talkign about them - not an art critic, but a working artist. They can explain about the techniques and processes and give an even greater appreciation.
Anybody who knows a language should be able to read some code and solve a few problems. You can't expect many interviewees to be able to churn out work up to company standards at the interview
The test in question did not involve writing any code, or require an understanding complex algorithms. It is a well-designed test of the language fundamentals. I do not even expect candidates to get every question exactly right. It soon separates those who understand the principles, but are a bit rusty, from those who have limited practical experience.
This is an excellent argument for the practical interview; instead of just asking questions, have somebody actually show you what they know.
I recently interviewed a couple of Masters graduates who both claimed to be profficient in C. Their accademic background and work experience gave no reason to doubt this. However, when confronted with a practical test, both made fundamental errors and struggled with the more complicated questions.
Apparently not. In a BBC article celebrating 30 years of Hitchhikers, they report that Adams apparently refuted that suggestion:
I don't write jokes in base 13.
It's not just the bandwidth that bothers me, it's the more mundane problems like the guys outside with a backhoe slicing through your cable connection, or the multitude of problems that can occur at your local ISP. If that happens, you're going to be sat looking at a dumb 'terminal' and unable to do anything.
Ok, the backhoe can just as easily take out the power, but currently there seems to be a lot more urgency to get the power back on than there is when the internet connection goes down.
Presumably they are creating fingerprints from the original material and comparing those against uploads. It would be interesting to know how well this copes with different codecs and frame rate changes.
Or do they wait for the uploads to be flagged as infringing and then do a dumb binary compare to prevent deleted files being uploaded again.
The Google translation service gives the option to suggest a better translation. It's more likely that this service operates automatically and it just takes enough people suggesting the same translation to force the change through.
Might be interesting to try. But I would hope that they have monitoring in place to spot a sudden surge in alternative translations.
In a civilised society we have to remember our duty to behave responsibly.
I don't like the security restrictions we are faced with these days, but given that the current
threat to our airports (in the UK we had a carbomb attack on Glasgow airport at
the start of the Summer) we must be prepared to make some sacrifices.
Having looked at the photos, I have to say the police were right to react the way they did...
and Star was very lucky to come away with her life.
Here's some hard browser numbers from a site that I work on that gets about a million visits a month:
These figures are much more interesting to me and its great to see Firefox climbing. Of course, site traffic all depends on the target audience; for example, you'd expect to see a higher (and climbing) usage on sites like Slashdot.
I'd be interested to know if your site is aimed at Joe Public, or is it more focused towards the tech. literate?
Numbers like these are essentialy meaningless. They don't readily translate to installed copies or active users. I've dowloaded Firefox and Thunderbird at least 10 times in the process of setting up new OS installs for family PCs. But that only equates to three users. And of those, I am the only one who actively uses Firefox.
Processor cache....
True. But most, if not all, of the cache lines will have been written to by the time the OS starts to boot. It is not uncommon for the BIOS to have the cache policy set to write-through during memory zeroing - then every cache line will get hit. You would need to know what area of the cache had not been touched by the BIOS (or by CPU self test).
This technique is only usefull for deeply embedded systems where you have control of the hardware from power-on and are able to fingerprint your SRAM.
PCs don't really have user-accessible SRAM (except for on-chip memory in SCSI or Ethernet controllers). Even if this were applicable to DRAM, by the time your OS loads, your DRAM state is already defined.
It's a shame Intel's hardware RNG implemented in their firmware hubs (82802Ax) didn't catch on more.
Is a website the best place to discover that your DNA doesn't match any of your close relatives, as you were expecting it to - that your parents are not your natural parents and you were adopted?
Unfortunately, there are many cases of people not being told that they were adopted and a web site like this is not the ideal way to discover this. You really need an organization that has some form of immediate support for people who receive unexpected surprises.
Rather than just showing four pictures and asking which is the bottle. Why not display four pictures, each rotated by a random, non-integer amount. Then ask what (e.g.) image 3 contains. The images would have to be selected so the object was the obvious focus, but maybe with a noisy background (e.g. grass).
You would also need to mask each image with a circular apperture, to prevent bots doing some guess work.
I appreciate this doesn't help blind users (as another poster commented) but then that is true of existing captchas.
With many of the recent comments on the iPhone suggesting the real acceptance test will be whether your Mum can use it, when I saw the article's title I thought - ah! now they're going to produce a 'large button' version for older users.
I could be that I'm just showing my age, but it doesn't seem right to me that an OS requires a gigabyte of RAM to function. I know they say 512M is the minimum, but I wouldn't want to run with that.
The laptop I'm writing this on (Vista Home Basic) is currently running at almost 600MB used, with Firefox, Thunderbird and AVG running!
Slashdot Mirror
I do hope Santa has a good stock of these come Christmas time. I just have to persuade my wife I really do _need_ one of these.
we finally get to watch the house of cards start to fall
Sadly, I think not. More likely, SCO will just find another deck of cards and carry on playing for some time.
Exactly! I had the same view of Pollock until I spent a good half an hour looking at the real thing. A litteral eye-opener. The other thing I found really helped my appreciation of works like this is hearing another artist talkign about them - not an art critic, but a working artist. They can explain about the techniques and processes and give an even greater appreciation.
Anybody who knows a language should be able to read some code and solve a few problems. You can't expect many interviewees to be able to churn out work up to company standards at the interview
The test in question did not involve writing any code, or require an understanding complex algorithms. It is a well-designed test of the language fundamentals. I do not even expect candidates to get every question exactly right. It soon separates those who understand the principles, but are a bit rusty, from those who have limited practical experience.This is an excellent argument for the practical interview; instead of just asking questions, have somebody actually show you what they know.
I recently interviewed a couple of Masters graduates who both claimed to be profficient in C. Their accademic background and work experience gave no reason to doubt this. However, when confronted with a practical test, both made fundamental errors and struggled with the more complicated questions.Just remember to use cash when paying for this one, else you might find your name on a 'watch' list.
I don't write jokes in base 13.
The TMS link is for a 9U rack of non-volatile DDRRAM, consuming 2.5KW and weighing up to 720lbs, so not quite suitable for the desktop.
The BitMicro article goes on to say that the maximum capacity in a standard 3.5"x1" format is 640GB, so requiring around 2.5" for the full 1TB.
This is Slashdot, so we don't expect facts in the summary to be correct. However, this is still amazing progress.
The Same thing we do every night Pinky. Try to take over the world.
Lets hope they don't get besieged by PETA, who seem to want to protect the rights cockroaches now
It's not just the bandwidth that bothers me, it's the more mundane problems like the guys outside with a backhoe slicing through your cable connection, or the multitude of problems that can occur at your local ISP. If that happens, you're going to be sat looking at a dumb 'terminal' and unable to do anything. Ok, the backhoe can just as easily take out the power, but currently there seems to be a lot more urgency to get the power back on than there is when the internet connection goes down.
Presumably they are creating fingerprints from the original material and comparing those against uploads. It would be interesting to know how well this copes with different codecs and frame rate changes.
Or do they wait for the uploads to be flagged as infringing and then do a dumb binary compare to prevent deleted files being uploaded again.
The Google translation service gives the option to suggest a better translation. It's more likely that this service operates automatically and it just takes enough people suggesting the same translation to force the change through.
Might be interesting to try. But I would hope that they have monitoring in place to spot a sudden surge in alternative translations.
In a civilised society we have to remember our duty to behave responsibly.
...
and Star was very lucky to come away with her life.
I don't like the security restrictions we are faced with these days, but given that the current threat to our airports (in the UK we had a carbomb attack on Glasgow airport at the start of the Summer) we must be prepared to make some sacrifices.
Having looked at the photos, I have to say the police were right to react the way they did
These figures are much more interesting to me and its great to see Firefox climbing. Of course, site traffic all depends on the target audience; for example, you'd expect to see a higher (and climbing) usage on sites like Slashdot.
I'd be interested to know if your site is aimed at Joe Public, or is it more focused towards the tech. literate?
Numbers like these are essentialy meaningless. They don't readily translate to installed copies or active users. I've dowloaded Firefox and Thunderbird at least 10 times in the process of setting up new OS installs for family PCs. But that only equates to three users. And of those, I am the only one who actively uses Firefox.
True. But most, if not all, of the cache lines will have been written to by the time the OS starts to boot. It is not uncommon for the BIOS to have the cache policy set to write-through during memory zeroing - then every cache line will get hit. You would need to know what area of the cache had not been touched by the BIOS (or by CPU self test).
This technique is only usefull for deeply embedded systems where you have control of the hardware from power-on and are able to fingerprint your SRAM. PCs don't really have user-accessible SRAM (except for on-chip memory in SCSI or Ethernet controllers). Even if this were applicable to DRAM, by the time your OS loads, your DRAM state is already defined. It's a shame Intel's hardware RNG implemented in their firmware hubs (82802Ax) didn't catch on more.
TFA talks about SRAM, rather than DRAM. So there's no capacitor involved for data storage - each cell is a transistor-based state machine.
A good portion of it is available via Wikipedia: [R2SiO]n
Is a website the best place to discover that your DNA doesn't match any of your close relatives, as you were expecting it to - that your parents are not your natural parents and you were adopted?
Unfortunately, there are many cases of people not being told that they were adopted and a web site like this is not the ideal way to discover this. You really need an organization that has some form of immediate support for people who receive unexpected surprises.
Rather than just showing four pictures and asking which is the bottle. Why not display four pictures, each rotated by a random, non-integer amount. Then ask what (e.g.) image 3 contains. The images would have to be selected so the object was the obvious focus, but maybe with a noisy background (e.g. grass).
You would also need to mask each image with a circular apperture, to prevent bots doing some guess work.
I appreciate this doesn't help blind users (as another poster commented) but then that is true of existing captchas.
With many of the recent comments on the iPhone suggesting the real acceptance test will be whether your Mum can use it, when I saw the article's title I thought - ah! now they're going to produce a 'large button' version for older users.
My Philips 32" HDTV bought last year came with full schematics - I was really surprised as I'd not seen that for many years.
I could be that I'm just showing my age, but it doesn't seem right to me that an OS requires a gigabyte of RAM to function. I know they say 512M is the minimum, but I wouldn't want to run with that.
The laptop I'm writing this on (Vista Home Basic) is currently running at almost 600MB used, with Firefox, Thunderbird and AVG running!