I did this on punch cards....
in Fortran, in 1981.
I can think of many more useful Uni projects than this.
3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007
The press release says they are profitable at the corporate level (ie. this is nett profit, not gross profit).
Since the 465M is a low interest loan, that will be accounted for separately, like any loan. However, since they're getting this at low interest, it is worth probably $10M per year as direct bailout.
ie. They're really in a $9M hole.
While she's probably going overboard, I can understand her point to an extent.
Manny colleges etc go on recruiting drives and tell prospective students that all their grads get employment and it's a guaranteed job.
Student graduates but doesn't get job. Perhaps the college has oversold and are not living up to their promises.
"The greatest source of wealth creation is being in the right market early enough. If you aren’t in early enough, you aren’t going to grow with the market."
Quite.
So why bother with Zune or bing?
The only way to successfully enter a market which is already established is to come up with a very significant disruptor. Half-baked "me toos" and "me threes" like Zune and bing don't cut it.
XBox worked, to the extent it has, because MS poured huge money into it and subsidized the hell out of the operation.
What meds is he on? I want some.
So you have to keep your PC running just in case granny wants to show her friends some pictures of her grand kids? Apart from tree hugging power use concerns, that's a security nightmare. Ever running PCs make for nice bot farms. Nothing provides better security than encouraging people to turn off/disconnect their PCs when not in use.
If you really think your photos etc are so valuable that FB is going to sell them then you're either a brilliant photographer (and should probably have a commercial website) or you're deluded.
Bah! USA Today could have done this better.
Used in iphone. They're used in pretty much every cell phone and most smart phones etc will have multiple ARMs (main CPU, phone module, GPS, wifi module,..). ARM are also used in all kinds of kit unrelated to phones.
Chip designer: No, they design cores, not chips. Chip designers that the ARM designs and glob them together with other IP to design chips.
Blueprints: Nobody has done chip blueprints since the 80s.
I guess I could have politely forced myself to laugh at the ARM + leg pun if a four year old had made it.
The problem with specific laws is that they cost far too much to keep up to date and that they don't pass any common sense test.
Making cell phone calls illegal, but allowing VoIP or TETRA radio calls or whatever is plain nonsense.
Banning text messaging, but allowing people to use email or the www to make comments is equally stupid. Then where do you draw the line? Is reading cnn.com really any different to fiddling with your TomTom?
You miss my main point:
It is nearly, if not completely, impossible to boycott Foxconn et al and use the www or a phone etc, since they make everything from ethernet cables to routers, PCs etc. Therefore submitting a comment that you're boycotting Foxconn is just plain retarded since you're using their products to say that you won't use them. Then you're using them again to read the comments.
Gettit?
Sure, I agree that we, as an industry, should exploit these people less and do more for them. But to do that requires that we be prepared to pay more for products or demand that companies take better care of the workers in their product streams. You can achieve that by approaching companies, particularly the big brands, and telling them what you feel.
The same goes for all products that you buy that are made in China etc.
If you're boycotting Foxxcon and their ilk then how the fuck are you watching TV, reading the www, accessing the internet, making phone calls or even typing your ignorant comments?
The Foxxcon workers get treated a lot better than the workers that made most of the stuff you're using to keep yourself comfortable. They'd also rather that you shut up and keep buying the stuff so they have what they consider a bloody good job.
But the truth is that you're going to do nothing! You'd love to make a grandstanding moralistic statement so that you can feel less guilty about your indirect involvement in the process. The part that hurts the most is that this has all been made public. You'd rather all this gory detail was kept hidden behind a factory wall in China and not dragged out in full view.
Your moralistic positioning is as daft as someone that cries about the cruelty in killing animals while chomping into a steak.
Morons the lot of you!
The whole point of surface is to mesmerize so that you don't realise how shit the stuff they're actually selling you is.
I wonder whether they will offer free Zune carrying beige totty to help liven up the parties. I can see the party room now.... Big screen with Ballmer shouting: party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party,party, party, party.
At 6ft6 that would skin me out of most jobs.
It is fine to have the vertically challenged people in positions of power, but make sure you don't push them around so that they feel forced to play the power card. The Napoleon gene is ruthless.
One of the reasons that tall cops were prefered in the past is because taller & bigger people tend to exude an aura of power without having to assert themselves. A small cop needs to show a bit of agro to get respect.
Well you might first consider that most jobs are complete bullshit anyway and do absolutely nothing productive. Greening the way these people work only gets you half the saving. It would be better to get rid of these jobs and services completely.
A lot of emissions reduction is just creative accounting. Should you consider emissions at the point of generation or point of consumption? If you want to think globally then it has to be at the point of consumption. Politicians often prefer point of production since if a factory is shut down then they can claim a reduction even if the citizens are still consuming the same products made elsewhere.
So you're saying that there is no need to block access to kiddy porn, just take the kiddy porn site down.
Ummm that's quite hard to do if the site is on the other side of the world where your government has no power. The only way to deal with issues like that is to cut access.
up it sure looks like you got done over badly, but that was then and things have moved on a bit. I think most places will be a lot more female friendly now. We can't correct the injustices you might have suffered 20 years ago by giving modern women preferential treatment.
Perhaps though your experience is not just due to being female. Perhaps you're just abrasive etc. If the office culture was to use the Atari for games at lunch time then just saying 'the boys nicked it' is you making sex into an issue.
If things are going in the right direction then government or think-tank interference is quite likely not helping. Society can often fix itself without interference. Here in NZ, most graduate doctors are now female. We don't have many female garbage people, but no doubt that will equalise too with time.
Well it depends who you're talking about.
Most people could do most of their stuff through a browser: writing docs, email, etc., even if they don't yet.
Gamers will spend more time outside their browsers, as will software developers.
But most of MSs money does not come from selling to software developers or home users/gamers. They make their money from office workers - and almost all office related computing can be done through a browser even if it isn't yet.
In fact, most offices would work better through a browser-only interface since that can be locked down tighter. That would make BOFHing simpler too: better security, no viruses, easier backups.
There are far more Linux -on-ARM systems than there are Linux-on-x86 systems. All those Linux-based phones, of which there are many millions, are running Linux on ARM.
The whole point of Chrome OS is that it hides the whole OS from the user. You don't need to understand grep or bash or anything like that, much like Android or a Motorola Linux phone all that hairy-hacker stuff is hidden. You just deal with a nice UI.
Perhaps Louis is right perhaps we need to move away from threads to some functional programming model. But then again perhaps he was just dropped on the head as a child. Dunno about anyone else, but all my attempts to write a device driver in Haskell failed badly.
You're right. The primary purpose of medical research is to make more money.
More and more money is spent on medical procedures than ever before. Twenty years ago hip replacements were rare. Now they're as routine as kids getting their tonsils out. Society, through NHS or private medical insurance, really can't afford to give every citizen an artificial hip.
Keeping people alive beyond their natural lifespan requires exponentially more medical intervention.
Feeding people longevity pills will just keep them alive longer. If the pill also delays aging then it will just delay that ultimate decay.
The only way this technology could reduce expense is to feed people the stuff until they're 65 or 70 - delaying aging and reducing medical expenses - then take the stuff away so that the decay is swift and death comes fast.
I don't know where to start...
Gate's "philanthropy" always comes with strings attached. He's trying to buy karma and little ego-boosting trinkets and cause confusion.
When you're skint then you might buy yourself a coffee cup with your name on it and you have to pay for the whole thing and the sales clerk ignores you.
When you've got billions, then giving $20 million to CMU and they pitch in the rest ($30m+) to buy yourself naming rights on "Gates Center". Every time you go to CMU they roll out the red carpet and generally lick your balls.
It is very easy to get a patent for an existing idea by just changing the usage scenario.
Even though face recognition on a computer is well known, and you and I know that a mobile phone is just a computer in a different box, face recognition on mobile phone is sufficiently novel to get a patent.
Of course many people will say that this is a problem with software patents, but the same issue applies to all patents. Whenever a new widget or technology comes along there are a rash of new patents.
Gluing table legs to table tops is well known, but invent these new things called chairs and suddenly you can patent gluing chair legs to chair seats.
It's not just software patents, it is the whole patent system that's broken.
USPTO makes pots of cash for Uncle Sam and patent lawyers make pots of cash through applications. But the real money for patent lawyers comes when a patent is challenged.... that's the big win. Thus crap patents are worth more to them than good ones.
For any change to happen, the patent system experts, ie the existing practitioners, would be consulted and they would have to want the change. Since the status quo is serving them very well, they won't steer the USPTO towards change.
You're quite right that grep awk fuk -9 does hinder the uptake of Linux. However that shit can be readily wrapped into something hidden from the user. That is something that is particularly easy to do if distros are custom rolled for netbooks etc. Look at Android phones. They run on Linux and you don't need to grep or awk them.
Something like Android on a netbook could be great. That does everything most people need most of the time.
The only thing that keeps Windows a "must have" in the household are games. Linux can do everything else.
To make netbooks a reality, we need to dump x86 and move to ARM. That is possible with Linux but not XP.
Scene: Perp 1 and Perp 2 are driving along...
Perp 1 (passenger) :"We need some money. We need to rob somebody. I wonder who?"
Perp 2(driver): "Let me think a bit...".
[Little yellow petrol pump lights up on dash]
Perp 2: "Hey! A little gas pump just lit up on the dash."
Perp 1: "It must be a message from God. We need to rob a gas station!."
...
Real Computer Science is a real science and explains the fundamental limitations to sorting efficiency, compiler theory etc. Turing et al. (he could half get this prize).
It's just that real computer computer science is not taught.
Learning to program at university might be carried out by the computer science faculty, but that does not make it computer science. Computer science, as taught at universities, should really be an engineering discipline (ie. computer engineering or software engineering).
The 60s might have seen a lot of interest in space, but that was for two main political reasons:
* The Space Race was a contest between USSR and USA. USA started on the back foot and wanted to show it was better than USSR at a time when the USA population were very frightened: digging shelters and teaching nuclear drills at schools. Big rockets provided a satisfying feeling of power.
* USA politicians wanted something to divert eyes from Vietnam.
The result of this was a huge national uptake of space fixation. A model orbiter hung from the ceiling in 60% of boys' bedrooms and kids would dress up with tinfoil and goldfish bowls to go to show and tell or fancy dress parties.
All the excitement helped bring kids to science and engineering.
But space is of itself relatively boring and pointless and the excitement soon wore off. Apollo 11 got lots of TV coverage etc, but by Apollo 12 it was yawns all around and back to regular programming.
Going to the moon again, or another planet, just won't capture attention and there's no real payoff.
All the people I know that have died of diseases before reaching 40 were fitness junkies that died of various cancers etc.
All the under 40s I know that have died of other causes were also fit. The 2 guys that got killed in the Army were fit, but we can probably discount death by high speed metal from this survey. The motor cyclist was fit too, even the suicide bloke was fit.
All the fat bastards are still going strong.
Server farm != super computer.
Server farms distribute the load after which each server is reasonably independent.
A super computer still tries to act and work as a single machine, crunching on a single problem.
I expect many super computers are involved in crunching climate models. If you're modelling the atmosphere as (10km)^3 parcels of air in increments of 1 day, then changing to (1km)^3 at 1 hour requires 24000 x more calculations to crunch the same basic model and allows more precise calculation. Some of these models crunch for months at a time.
GIGO of course, unless you precisely understand what all the variables are, you'll just get bullshit results to 20 decimal places.