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Slashback: Periodicity, Vacuum, Strength
Bratty kids get to sit near the volatile elements. Theodore Gray writes: "About a month ago there was a slashdot lively discussion about my wooden Periodic Table Table. A bunch of slashdot readers sent me elements for it: Thank you slashdot! Two people actually sent me free Ag and Pd, contrary to the jokes in the discussion. I decided the world could stand another periodic table website. Since all the eight dozen other periodic tables on the web have better reference information than mine, I used some Mathematica programs to generate links to many of them for each element. But my site is more beautiful. I'm going for science as art. Mine also has by far the best quality sample photos: High resolution, high quality macro shots of 89 samples so far."
Starts with a crank, too. ripaway writes "With all the recent stories about vaccuum tubes, I find it ironic that I stumbled on this today. Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."
Sounds like material for a Burning Man tent ... nm1m writes "A superstrong composite developed by Brigham Young University scientists and students has received financing for its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers able to more than triple the electrical output of existing steel models. Read the story here."
We mentioned this interesting lattice-looking material a few weeks ago.
Sucking requires a context to be good or bad. Sun Tzu writes "After the recent discussion on bad software, how about a different reason for why software sucks? Maybe we programmers and users don't have it quite so bad after all."
That dadburn whippersnapper, why when I was a boy ... Junks Jerzey writes "I remember reading about Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers five years ago in Wired News. Pretty cool stuff, with an introduction by some guy called John Romero. It was available for a long time as a commercial product that used HTML for formatting, but it's now completely online, as reported by the author."
Score one for us Latter-day Saints. Now if only the comments would last five minutes without obligatory mentions of polygamy, jello, large families, missionaries or cults, we'd have it made.
Got Rhinos?
Sounds like material for a Burning Man tent ... nm1m writes "A superstrong composite developed by Brigham Young University scientists and students has received financing for its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers able to more than triple the electrical output of existing steel models. Read the story here."
Wow. Brigham Young and burning man mentioned in the same sentence?
Having attended one of the above, I can guarantee you this will not be a frequent event.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
.. and safe to have around, so long as you don't eat them (these ones are alpha emitters; alpha particles can't penetrate a sheet of paper). They're also unregulated (in retail quantities) so you don't have to get NRC approval to have them.
Polonium: You can buy photographic negative brushes that contain polonium, from good camera shops. The polonium gives off alpha particles that help to discharge static from the negatives as you brush them. $10-$20.
Americium: Smoke detectors contain Americium-241. A tiny speck of it is in the detector head -- the roughly cylindrical gizmo that looks like a stamped-metal flying saucer. $9
Uranium: pitchblende is comparatively easy to find, and of course the infamous 1970s Fiesta Ware is still to be found (though getting more difficult).
Software development is driven by clueless pointy-hairs, overreaching sales guys who make baseless promises and people who've never had a single software development class or written a single line of code
I realized this at my last company -- I was in a high enough staff position to see the whole tragedy unfold. Features were driven by what the sales team promised, deadlines by what was written into contracts without development's input, and product managers would bypass the release process and give customers internal test versions of the software. The developers were simply issued marching orders and then ignored.
I believe this is the way most crappy software comes about, regardless of how obvious this process is.
Of course, leave it to the geeks and you'll get Mozilla (good, solid, standards-compliant and really, really late). There's a balance between shipping decent software and shipping a product in time to stay alive as a company. id Software has this balance, ION Storm certainly did not.
Rant over. Please go about your business.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
This is indeed an excellent read and well worth the time - if you want some other online books which discuss the earlier days of computing and hacker culture try these
Free As In Freedom - Sam Williams - A biography of Richard Stallman and an excellent read for those who would like to understand the man a bit more or even understand how GNU and Open Source actually happen. I reccomend this to even people who dislike RMS (as i did) as you will understand the man from a new perspective
The Cathedral and the Bazzar- Eric Raymond - This book has been condemmed and praised by many and provides an intersting look at open source and the different models of software - worth a read
Underground : Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier - Sulette Dreyfuss - A great look inside the world of the cracker and very intersting and compelling to read
There are heaps more out there - post them as you find them - BTW if you have a bit of cash to spend i reccomend Hackers by Steven Levy and Fire in the Valley by freiburger and swain for 2 more great books on computer and PC history
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
These guys are pretty good for buying small uranium ore samples to test geiger counters with. They also stock uranium doped glass marbles that really light up under black light. Pretty cool radioactive toys.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I mean, sure there's a market for a high end tube amp in cars. The car, that rather noisy accoustical nightmare that, no matter how you try, you will never ever be able to fit good speakers in. Oh well... but why does the thing have to look so damn.... tacky? Come on. Analog VU meters and the tube exposed, combined with what looks to be a gold finish. Almost as ugly as a Marantz set.
Not that I think modern car stereos look good... give me those they made about 5-10 years ago: decent button layout, single color displays, and no frigging light-shows. *sighs*
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
"People are understandably reluctant to add real engineering discipline to software development..."
... well.. ameteurish. But when they make a model that they have lots of reference of, like the starship Enterprise for example, then they look top notch. Even presented with such a startling comparison, they still refuse to do the design work. Why? Because it adds overhead to their project.
I found this 'alternative reason to why software sucks...' to be true with 3D Animation as well.
As a hobby, I assist people entering into the world of 3D art. My goal is to teach them professional methods to achieve their goals. What I've found interesting, though, is that a lot of them are reluctant to actually design what it is they are building or animating.
With new recruits, I can almost never get them to actually sit down with some paper and design the robot they want to build, for example. What they try to do is just sit down and build it. I'll hear stuff like "Oh I can't draw...", or "It's faster if I just sit down and build it. I know what I want it to look like."
The results? Well, the models they invent are
I really think what happens is that they have in inaccurate impression of what being a 3D artist really entails. This is similar to what Ray said in his post about why software sucks. The sad thing is that until they start taking approaches like designing your model, they'll always look like a 3D newb.
Is there a solution? Well, I have an idea as to how to help both the 3D Artists and the Programmers out there: Make it clear that there is more to their job than just poking keys. I had no idea what all a Software Engineer (I used to call them Programmers...) did until I got a job at a software company. I had the impression in my mind that all they did was write code. The thought of them doing things like 'designing the UI' was alien to me.
Heck, before I got a job doing 3D, I thought all I had to do was build a model as fast as I possibly could. I expected they'd give me 3 days to do what would normally take me a week. I had no idea that they'd actually give me time to design and understand my model before building it. I spent over a year trying to be faster in LW, only to find that faster isn't what they wanted.
In short, I think it's very important to alter the perception out there about what a job really entails. If somebody aspiring to be a programmer knows that they need to pay attention to design and UI, then they'll be far more observant about those aspects during their education. If I had known how much learning to draw would help me with my 3D work, I would have done a lot more drawing exercises in high school.
"Derp de derp."
Yes. Plenty.
The car radio was not invented with the transistor. Motorola, who was originally founded to make "Motor Victrolas", ie. car audio, branched into semiconductors almost as soon as it was seen that they had practical aspects in car radios.
In the beginning, car radios had tubes. Tubes require filament power as well as the power and B+ power. The parallel would be a transistor radio which needs a 9V battery (main power) to power the radio and a whole bunch of 1.5V D cells (filament power) to keep the transistors warm enough to work.
The filaments of appropriate tubes will run happily off 12V, but they still need something from about 90V to 250V for main power (known as B+ or plate supply). Back then, cars ran off 6V or 12V electrical systems, and this had to provide sufficient voltage for the radio. Before transistors and switching power supplies, there was only one way: the vibrator.
Sexual references aside, a vibrator is basically a relay wired to break its circuit when it's turned on. The raspy buzz chopped a circuit on and off, which made DC from the car's electrical system into a pulsetrain which drove a small transformer. The transformer stepped up the voltage and it was rectified in the usual way for the era: a small recifier tube. Of course, this was highly inefficient and noisy.
Never mind that the car radio would take several amps while it was on, and these were in the days before alternators. Less efficient generators and battery technology meant that leaving the radio on for too long while in traffic would run down the battery to the point where the ignition system stopped - and so did you.
Durability was another issue. Tubes are held in their sockets by friction, and would have a tendency to vibrate out of their sockets, making the radio fail. The "loctal" base was invented to deal with this. It was a base design where the tube's keyway was notched and would hold the tube with a spring on the base. They're a pain in the ass since they always corrode in the locked position and you often break the tube trying to get it out of the socket.
Tubes are basically light bulbs with a whole bunch of closely-spaced wires, grids and sheetmetal electrodes. If they move relative to each other, the electrical characteristics of the tube change - and therefore so does the behavior of the radio. This effect is called "microphonics". Not to mention vibration fatigue causing shorts, cracked glass and vacuum loss, etc. Tubes don't like vibrations. If don't believe me, hit your monitor a few times.
While I love tubes, a car stereo is about the last place they belong.
On this site you can see what a 1930s car radio looked like. Note that the radio was too large to fit in the dashboard and often ended up in the passenger's footwell. A "control head" was a set of remote volume and tuning knobs on the dashboard; they were usually connected by a cable arrangement similar to speedometer or bicycle brake cables.
Background? I collect and restore antique TV sets and 1960s/1970s musclecars. Lots of my friends are into 1930s and 1940s cars, and often get me to fix their vintage tube car radios so that the full experience of driving a car of that era can be preserved.
Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."Even with a modern DC-DC converter powering the B+ circuit, what a profoundly stupid idea.
While I really like the fact that it plays MP3s, this is just more stuff for homiez with gold chains, small cars, and smaller penises.
Can't wait until "Da Bass" people get their hands on this. A car stereo which can bounce quarters on the roof of the car will be more than sufficient to make the tube microphonic. Feedback between the subs and the tube will result in blown subs, toasted amplifiers, and no more din of license plates rattling on every rusting 1984 Prelude at every traffic light.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I found a basket full of buggers out of a few old TV sets on a friend's property last week. They tend to weather the elements pretty well.
Sadly, TV tubes don't tend to be very valuable. With the number of 6GH8As that I have, one would think that I should be a millionaire, but most people don't need a bandpass amplifier for a 1960s color TV.
I've grabbed a few tubes out of the backs of radios, TVs and industrial equipment I've found mostly in (primarily) automotive junkyards. Usually the type number is washed off the glass, making the tube nearly useless. If you can tell a triode from a pentode by looking through the glass, you can make guesses and then careful analysis on the tube tester, but that assumes the tube was good to begin with.
Only TV tube I've ever got like that which was useful and rare enough to warrant the effort was a 6BK4. Fortunately, those are pretty easy to spot through the glass, it looks like a death ray in there. (High voltage triode, designed as a shunt regulator in early (late 1950s) color TV sets.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The second big problem is weak interprocess communication. UNIX is partly responsible for this. Interprocess communication was retrofitted to UNIX in several different ways, most of them bad. The basic problem is that what you usually want is a subroutine call, but what the OS gives you is an I/O operation. If you build a subroutine call on top of an I/O operation, (think Sun RPC, or CORBA) it's slow. This leads to big, monolithic programs that crash all at once, instead of little, intercommunicating ones that contain the damage caused by a bug. It doesn't have to be this way. Take a look at QNX to see this done right.
The third big problem is DMA. The idea that the peripherals see raw address space and can read and write to it dates from the early days of minicomputers, when it required fewer transistors to do it that way. Mainframes had "channels", which connected peripherals to memory in a controlled, secure way. You could take full control of a peripheral on an IBM mainframe, run a driver as a user program, and still not be able to crash the system. With channelized I/O, drivers aren't as privileged. They can only mess up their own peripheral, not the whole system. This improves system stability considerably. IBM tried to put channelized hardware in PCs, but at the same time, they tried to increase their profit margins on peripherals. This killed the IBM PS/2.
Fourth, Microsoft likes a complicated OS. Ballmer has said so publicly. If PCs came with channelized hardware and a microkernel in ROM, the OS would have far less to do, and would be more of a commodity. There'd be alternatives, like KDE and Gnome on Linux, all of which ran the same applications. Standardized interprogram communication, enforced by the kernel and hardware, would make components more pluggable. All this would dent the Microsoft monopoly severely.
Down at the bottom, at the foundations of personal computers, those are the problems. And that's why software sucks.
Always wanted to play with Mathematica, never could afford it. Now I hear from a guy who uses it as an HTML editor! I think I'll have him killed.
I know you didn't ask, but to spread knowledge, here we go:
Although in English, calling one who practices Islam (Submission to God) a Muslim (One who submits) seems a curious usage issue, in Arabic it makes perfect sense. Almost all words in the Arabic language are formed by 3 consonant stems. In this case, it's SLM , which implies submission. From this you form iSLaM and muSLiM in much the same way you form Christianity and Christian from the root word Christ in English.
The problems with this statement are going to be tough to clear up for those just joining the Mormon debates. When Joseph Smith died, he threw the proverbial boquet into the drunken bridesmaid horde. He never left clear instructions on who was to succeed him, and he had a tendency to make crazy promises to keep people happy. In short, there were about ten people who thought they should lead the Church, each with their own valid claims of authority (see "Origins of Power," by D. Michael Quinn).
Brigham Young just happened to be really charismatic, and got the majority of the early Mormons to accept his authority above other claimants (Sidney Rigdon, James Strang, Samuel Smith, Joseph Smith III). The victors rewrote the history books to demonstrate their legitimacy.
If you want a truly unambiguous name, call yourself the Brighamites. Each of the other splinter groups (gun-toting polygamists included) have every bit as much right to call themselves Mormons/Latter-day Saints as Brigham Young's followers do.
Yes, Mormon was a real person. And the Native Americans really are dark-skinned Jews, and the early inhabitants of this continent really did use steel in large quantities, and really raised cattle and corn and wheat, and really rode horses into battle. The fact that there's no more archaeological evidence for any of these cultural items shouldn't unsettle you. After all, you have a testimony.
According to the Articles of Faith (also LDS scripture), Mormons believe the Bible to be the Word of God insofar as it has been translated correctly. But Mormons also believe that the modern Bible was so thoroughly mangled by "wicked and corrupt priests" that the Bible actually became a stumbling block to those who wanted to find God. Smith made numerous revisions to the Bible to make it more theologically acceptable to him (and included a prophecy of his own birth). Of course, none of these revisions match up with the earliest copies of the books of the Bible.
As a die-hard atheist, I could really care less. But Mormons get a lot of flack from mainstream Christians for minimizing the differences between themselves and traditional Christianity, especially when they smell a conversion.
Oh, the Book of Abraham--purported to have been the writings of Abraham, the Patriarch of Israel--were really an Egyptian funeral book called "The Book of Breathings," written for a man named Horus. Joseph Smith got suckered, and so did his (now 12,000,000 strong) flock.
Polygamy was actually discontinued less than 100 years ago, in 1905. Mormons generally claim that the practice ended in 1890, but plural marriages were still being approved by the President of the Church and other apostles for fifteen years afterwards. Finally, with the second Manifesto, the Church got serious. Now they don't even allow plural marriage in areas of the world where it's legal.
To make things more complicated, Mormons still believe in polygamy in the afterlife. A widower can choose to be married to a second woman "for eternity" without affecting his marriage to his first wife.
Correction: Tom Green has nothing to do with the clean-cut young men on bicycles, the pretty white buildings you see from the freeway, the 2002 Winter Olympics, the commercials on TV for a free Bible, or anything else put out by the Corporation of the President. But in their zeal to distance themselves from polygamy, your presidency ignores the fact that early LDS theology left the door wide open for the Tom Greens of the world. The word "Mormon" can and does encompass all the supposedly illegitimate splinter groups.
The basic feeling of the Corporate Church towards the term "Mormons" is as follows: You can't use it to refer to us. You can't use it to refer to anybody else. They've tried some laughable PR blitzes to change the common usage, and it's never worked.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
But don't fret. Joseph Smith himself loved persecution:
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Posts like this make me wish for a long-overdue moderation option:
-1 Stupid