Maybe this has something to do with people not actually noticing the difference in sound quality from their equipment. If a critical proportion of people could hear the difference and cared, then there would be demand for it, then there would be more options for it.

Instead, you end up with something like the "Hi-Def TV" revolution that had something like 30% of people with HDTVs, but they weren't watching in HD because they were using the wrong cables, and they didn't even know it

I realized this at the end of winter when I had 8 high-power GPUs running in my condo mining Bitcoins, and my central heating was not running anymore. You put your hand behind one of the quad-GPU computers on full load, and it feels like a blowdryer, running 24 hours per day. Seemed to have no problem heating 1200 sqft. This seems to apply to GPUs more than anything, though. I don't know how many CPU servers can produce 1.5 KW of heat...

Amusingly, I just attended the last class before my final exam in general relativity, and all we talked about was the math behind black holes. Pretty interesting stuff, if only I could've understood all of it...

It turns out that space and time actually switch inside a black hole. Your time vector becomes space-like and your spatial vectors become timelike. What does that mean? I'm not entirely sure, but I do know that there is no escape from hitting the singularity at the very middle of the black hole. Since time is always moving forward, and your radial distance from the center is now your time vector, you have no choice but to eventually hit the middle. So far, what is at the middle of a black hole is still a bit of a mystery.

On a related note, the higher the gravity field you are in, the slower your time moves relative to observers outside that gravity field. Therefore, as you fall into a black hole, you will actually reach the event horizon in a finite amount of time (by your own watch), but a stationary observer from Earth watching you, will see everything slow down exponentially as you get closer to the event horizon. It slows down so much that they never actually see you hit the event horizon--it takes an infinite amount of Earth time for something to hit the event horizon. However, the infalling object experiences only a finite amount of time before getting to the event horizon, and then another finite amount of "time" before hitting the singularity at r=0. What happens there is still a matter of speculation.

I have had a Nexus One for almost a year now, and I absolutely adore it. I was quite disappointed to see that it got mediocre reviews. At worst, internet access can be a little slow (and a bit more latency than I'd like). But it has every sensor in the world, and a decent [enough] battery life. I'm also quite fond of having vanilla Android, because it means upgrade immediately (I got a gingerbread upgrade notification today, actually), and the OS doesn't risk being bastardized by some provider company with less-capable software people than Google.

If my Nexus One broke today, I'd buy a Nexus S in a heartbeat.

My job is image processing, and we are all well aware of the "quirks" of storing images as JPEG. Since it typically uses frequency information, converting to a BMP for a photo editor, and then converting back with some minor modifications introduces all sorts of artifacts into the JPEG coefficients upon recompression. These artifacts can be detected by a program looking for them, and I'm surprised such algorithms are not in use in existing software. And the detection would be able to ignore image resizing...

Of course, this kind of detection can be evaded by someone who understands the compression algorithms and knows how to work around it... but at least it could flag images modified by amateurs. After all, the TFA has the same goal, just it wants to make the "flag" be user-visible, not just rely on a program for detecting and flagging it.

Careful... it's not always about languages. I completely agree that time is going to favor the experienced programmer if it's something like learning C++ when you've only worked in Java. However, it's not always like that.

Take CUDA for instance (NVIDIA-based GPU programming), which is a relatively new technology that is in extraordinarily high demand in my work place (a physics lab). The fact is, learning it is not like learning another language, you have to understand a completely different hardware model, and it takes a level of algorithmic puzzle-solving to find efficient ways to store/move/handle/process data in parallel. The rewards are dramatic, but it can't be conquered by just teaching your old programmer a new language. It's a whole new programming paradigm. Such changes in the nature of the design may be difficult for someone with a lifetime of other experience to mold into.

Of course, you can't move too far in favor of the young guys, because you can't jerk people's salaries around like crazy. It's one reason we frequently have low correlation between salary and "value." If they were perfectly correlated, I'd be making $500k some years, $20k other years, making it impossible for any employee or employer to handle budgeting in any sane way. Is the company going to be able to justify continuing to pay this kid $200k in 5 years when the "hot new tech" is the norm and everyone is making 30% less? Making salaries too flexible adds a level of unsustainability to the entire system.

Wikileaks behavior here is ridiculous, and I don't think we should be supporting them at this point. Trust me, I am all for exposing corruption and illegal behavior, but that's not what Wikileaks released. Every partnership, company, country, etc, must have the ability to have frank internal conversations about various relationship with others, that must be private. Examples:

Clinton instructing diplomats to spy on UN officials : RELEASE
Afghan corruption throughout military operations: RELEASE
Candid assessments about Karzai's leadership : DO NOT RELEASE
Name calling of the Prince of England : DO NOT RELEASE


These extra releases have done nothing but put many countries into very awkward diplomatic relationships, which does nothing to benefit "fighting corruption." Those kinds of releases are stupid and unecessary.

In this case, I think wikileaks went waaay too far. Assange just wanted to make history by releasing all of them, because nothing like this has ever become public before. On that note, despite my bitter disagreement with him, it is intensely interesting to see a complete cross-section of classified US diplomatic discussions and assessments, and related communications with otehr governments. Probably not worth the damage done to global "social" health, but I will read every word of it...

In a related hypothetical situation, what would you do if you discovered the encryption key for the 1.4GB file released by Wikileaks labeled "Insurance". Presumably, the file is full of dark, dirty secrets of multiple governments. I would guess the key would be considered worth billions of dollars to some parties, and and multiple assassination attempts on your life by other parties. No really, what do you do??

(this isn't as unrealistic as it sounds... it's entirely possible there's a dead-man switch in the wild that will release the key if Julian Assange doesn't press a button at least once a week. I'd say it's actually likely that the key is already distributed, and the dead-man-switch simply reveals where it is, as it would be kind of useless as "insurance" if the key disappears when Julian Assange does)

...and I read most of the fine article. It puts too much emphasis on quantum entanglement, which is useful for quantum cryptography, but not as important as quantum interference. It's the weird quantum states of the individual qubits that interfere with each other, that make a quantum computer. If you can figure out how to encode information into the quantum state of a qubit, and get a bunch of them to interact in a given way, you get the quantum interference to cancel out the information you don't want, and leave the information that you do want (probabilistically speaking). Unfortunately, the math and creativity needed to encode problems as such requires some truly stellar mathematical/physical thinking, and we wouldn't be having any Quantum code-monkeys like we do with classical computers.

Before people start freaking out about how evil Google is, I wanted to temper the rage by pointing out that Google's involvement is purely passive. Their collection techniques were solely collecting wifi payloads that were visible from the street, and never actually attempted communication with any routers. It would be a completely different story if Google had actively logged into routers and collected data, as that would be a major criminal violation. But they didn't.

I'm not suggesting that saving the data was entirely ethical, but they weren't out there to collect it. If anything, this demonstrates just how ridiculously insecure an unencrypted wifi network is. If you do nothing else, at least use WEP, despite all it's vulnerabilities. It will keep 99% of people out of your network (i.e. the casual neighbor looking for a free connection when their own service is not working).

Graphics cards are used to RENDER video all the time. But, the actual encoding of video has always been done with the CPU, at least up until a few years ago. It's because the encoding itself is a complex algorithm, and GPUs had not really been used to implement arbitrary algorithms before, only the simplistic, high-volume calculations needed to render 2D/3D scenes onto your monitor. It's not until recently that GPUs have become popular for highly-parallelized, general-purpose programming (GP-GPU) that these kinds of patents come about.

Still doesn't mean it should be patented. It's just like all those patents that are for "Patent for doing X... over the internet". It is silly, but not obvious, since GP-GPU is a relatively new field (in the last few years).

Summary is wrong. Quantum algorithms cannot provide "exponential" speedup of any problem. If they could, we would be able to [probably] solve NP-complete problems with quantum computers, and that hasn't been proven yet. The best they can do is "super-polynomial" speedup of classical algorithms.

Google "quantum algorithm zoo" to see all the known algorithms and their speedups (and how unexciting most of them are).

Because people always get it wrong every time a QC article hits slashdot, here's a link to my previous, highly-modded (upwards) post on QC:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1285849&cid=28520061

Quantum computers can do some cool things, but mostly solve problems no one cares much about (except a few of us mathematicians)

I had a similar experience. My girlfriend got a free HP or Canon printer (I don't remember which) with her laptop. Amusingly, her laptop came with Windows 7 and couldn't actually use the printer that came with it. We installed drivers from CD, downloaded drivers, tried troubleshooting... we couldn't get it to work. As a test, I booted an Ubuntu live CD, and it worked within 10s of boot.

Hardware support has definitely become a positive aspect of Ubuntu, no longer the pain in the ass that it used to be for generic Linux. Admittedly, if there's no hardware support, it's a mess to get it... but it seems that there's a massive amount of native support already there, including the default PDF printer which I couldn't live without.

Hah, sorry. I copied this from another QC post I made a while ago, and forgot that the newlines don't transfer (the original is paragraphed). I should've previewed before submitting. Oh well! The original post with paragraphs is below:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1285849&cid=28520061