thirdhaf

6.1 was running on an even more ancient PC from 2001. This was at a former employer so I have no influence over this system any more. The funny thing was that we had ample budget for this project, I think we spent about $10k on a very nice rack-mount SCXI DAQ and about $60k on other equipment but upgrading the computer system driving the whole thing was out of the question due to color-of-money issues and dysfunctional inter-departmental politics.

Hmm, we were still running 6.1 in 2008 which probably explains a lot. (No upgrade path allowed at that time)

LabView IS fun, I've written a couple of drivers and a (physical device) testing GUI with it. As I've been thinking about it more I see two hurdles to overcome with LabView though: - Layout: Spaghetti code becomes a very tangible issue if you don't follow guides on routing religiously. Intro courses only touch on this and LabView code in the wild are rarely clean. These visual routing guides are ORTHOGONAL to good code design practices which you also have to follow to make maintainable and understandable code. - Navigation: There is no VIM or Emacs for LabView code as far as I know. Navigating a codebase and following function references deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole becomes tedious pretty quickly. Visual breakpoints help here but there's no substitute for quick navigation, I never found a Ctags equivalent for this language.

(Caveat, EE turned software engineer ranting)

BTW your Python example app is broken and has been for months. Someone opened an issue on Github (with code to fix) but it's been ignored for months now. https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python/issues/7

It seems like everyone is ignoring or has forgotten the death of Ilya, one of co-founders. Be as disappointed as you like but the psychological toll of this probably has more than a little bearing on the situation.

As long as it's not terribly mission critical I'd suggest a VPS. Since you have a virtualized server you get everything you mentioned (and the responsibility of keeping the damn thin up to date). Take a look at http://lowendbox.com You're likely to find deals in the $20/yr range for small instances with ~128MB RAM. Expect 99% uptime and you'll be pleasantly surprised with the third nine.

If you're on any of the Aluminum MacBooks (2008 included) the specs are actually under-representing what the machine can handle. My Core2 has 8GB RAM and I have yet to feels the need to upgrade other than coveting the new high res display of course. Then again I'm also still using 10.6.8 and with the issues I've heard of there's no compelling reason to upgrade yet.

I'm a big fan of concrete examples so here's one: Let's say you have two points on a line labeled 0 and 1. Let's also suppose there's a special property you're interested in at one of these locations, it minimizes some function, there's a pot of gold there, it's infested with lions, doesn't matter. Since there are only two points it's easy to just check both points and empirically find which one you want.

We can extend this idea easily into 2 dimensions, now we have two axes each consisting of two points along perpendicular lines. Enumerated the points are [0,0], [0,1], [1,0], [1,1] and as you can see there are four of them.

It should also be pretty easy to see that if we extend this further into 3 dimensions that you once again double the number of points in your space to 8. You can see this by starting to enumerate them in the same way: [0,0,0], [0,0,1], [0,1,0], [0,1,1], [1,0,0]...[1,1,1]

From this it should follow that if you extend the problem into n-dimensions you end up with 2^n different points in your search space. If n is a small number, say 30 it's still possible to do an exhaustive search with a computer since 2^30 ~ 10^9 but soon you run out of resources regardless of how much money you're throwing at the problem.

This is the heart of the curse of dimensionality, starting with stupidly easy problems in one dimension quickly gets you in trouble when you want to extend it. This is not to say that we can NEVER deal with high-dimensional problems, two wonderful areas where we are VERY good at solving problems are linear programming and quadratic programming, in the former problems with hundreds of thousands of dimensions are feasible and thousands of dimensions in the case of the latter.

I lost a large bet in 2010 on being able to create a computer program capable of beating my roommate at Go. UCT was my go-to solution to this problem but my opponent was able to beat my creation on a 13x13 board since he spent every free waking moment playing Go against a commercial app on the iPhone. My UCT-based creation ended up beating me but losing against someone who trained intensively for six weeks.

Of course, you need only go to the horse's mouth. [1]

It's been posted before but Jordan, the creator of both Karateka and Prince of Persia, has a wonderful series of journals documenting his travails with video games and the movie industry. [2] As part of this he has a detailed description of his trek out to California and a lot of details on technical obstacles that make you thankful to live in the second decade of the third millennium.

[1] http://jordanmechner.com/wp-content/uploads/1989/10/popsourc...

[2] http://jordanmechner.com/

I've honestly tried to use the man pages for bash before, they are unarguably complete but unfortunately difficult to get started with. The chances of me knowing ahead of time to either search first for "readline" followed "Commands for Moving" or read the full man page until I get to line 2957 is slim.

In aid of helping others along this path, here's a crib sheet I've found for readline shortcuts. I've been meaning to become more efficient in using bash and this might just be the push I need. http://www.bigsmoke.us/readline/shortcuts

This has been known a while. The earliest paper that I can find describing this phenomenon is from 2009 [1] but I distinctly recall seeing some slides describing R&D results corroborating this at least as far back as 2007.

This is neat stuff in general but sometimes I think people oversell the utility of structured forests of nanomaterials. There are even startups promising the sky based on nanostructured silicon. [2]

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/106/15/6044.full

[2] http://www.bandgap.com/contactus.html

You let your thirteen-year old stay up until midnight for a Facebook registration? That sounds less like a hard-ass and more like an eccentric :-)

Another datum: I sent an IM at 2pm PST and haven't received any response yet. (Looks like quixeychallenge offline the whole time)

It would have been fun to take part but I think the poor guys are swamped.

It seems like one of the prerequisites for a workable micropayment system is an overhaul of interbank payment processing system or establishment of a new one. I have absolutely no knowledge of the current system but I'd be shocked if the same system that manages $100k+ transactions and the risks associated with that can cost effectively process transactions in the <10c range.

There was a comment on the same level as this one referring to flattr.com which seems to be one attempt at a micropayment system. Does anyone have experience with this service or failing that an idea why that comment got absolutely buried under downvotes?

That page is an unmitigated disaster on a mobile device. Round fill-ins to obstruct my fairly small screen, weird auto-snap to ensure I can't get a look at the content I want.

I think this has inspired me to start a wall of shame for mobile device sites!

Well count me in for somewhere between #3 and #9 then :-P

Thank you! Sorry if that came off as antagonistic, I think I really need to start using some form of password manager or another.

Weren't spreadsheets, a la VisiCalc the killer business app for the Apple II?

On a more serious note I'm a true believer in RISK capital. Once your company is actually profitable it seems like a great idea to ensure that you do a bit of R&D in-house.

Worst case scenario you get a nice blurb somewhere about keeping corporate research alive, best case you invent something ridiculously cool.

Their release notes has an incorrect link for the article on memory reduction, they should be linking to:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/09/firefox-7-is-lean-and-fast/

I would request a fix but I can't find a contact on that page and I don't feel like creating another account for their bugfix system right now.

In the hard SF category you may also like Neal Asher's work.

Fantastic! SF Bay Areay by any chance?

I really wanted to use these exact lights for a giant display in some friends' Burning Man camp this year but the G-35's are pretty much impossible to find at the moment. These lights are on my wish list for Christmas :-)

Let's pessimistically assume you have to read all information associated with each file from disk. I suspect this sort of query is IO bound since processing is minimal and assuming we can mostly avoid fragmentation on disk we could feasibly read data at 100MB/s with a consumer level magnetic drive. The article says the data set is 300GB so we could feasibly get this done in an hour.

Correct, but with the caveat that it only really works along the optical axis. Off-axis you get horrible artifacts. If I recall correctly these metamaterials do not have that limitation.

It's probably technically feasible to use this ink as an antenna for an implanted RFID chip, they're not much larger than a grain of sand after all, but do you REALLY want to do that?

Once you have your key of identification implanted you just created a seriously disturbing incentive for someone (without a reader to clone your RFID) to do you grievous harm when they simply want to steal your stuff.

It probably won't happen to you or many other people but it's enough of a concern that I'll put up with the occasional misplaced key instead.

tl;dr I'd love to hack your tattoo and get in your front door.

Well since they have a lot of former Sun engineers working for them I don't really think they have to SAY Solaris. As others have mentioned there are trademarks involved here too. Sun/Oracle have been hemorrhaging talent, particularly the former Fishworks team, for a while now and a lot of those people are ending up in places like Joyent.

Could you explain the gravity assist portion a bit more please? A gravity slingshot only works when you transition from a regime dominated by one body (sun for example) to a regime dominated by another body moving relative to it (Jupiter for many outbound probes).

I guess you could use a scheme similar to Cassini where you're doing multiple gravity assist swings off anything at all to get every last erg of thrust but my gut feeling is that you're not gaining much relative to the delta v needed for your complete voyage.

It would make for a fun app though. Design your own Interstellar Mission!

Prosecutors have absolute immunity which is incredibly difficult to overcome. Even falsifying evidence doesn't seem to do it unless there's a "pattern of abuse" which is practically impossible to prove. http://www.scotuswiki.com/index.php?title=Pottawattamie_Coun...