Makes sense, but it feels good to get the latest and greatest digicam every two years from Best Buy for just the price of another service plan.
There's nothing dishonest about this. Best Buy puts a 4 year plan on cameras, and if you take > 10k photos per year, like I do, it is nearly impossible for a camera to make it through 4 years without three problems that warrant a trip to the Geek Squad. As long as you have a backup camera to tide you over while they "fix" the problem. Under heavy use, microswitches are the first to go, such as the mode selector. Once the case has been opened up once or twice by their service centers, a whole new can of worms is opened, and the auto focus, zoom, and other switches will start acting up.
By the way, last time I checked, the service plans on the digicams are capped at $149, so you would pay that $149 for a $1000 in store DSLR, and you would also pay $149 for the top-of-the-line $8000 dollar DSLR available from best buy online. Now that's a good deal. IMHO.
Service plans on a computer, especially desktops are completely ridiculous, of course, since the components become so cheap a year after you buy the pc.
Every experience I've had with Office Depot customer service was abysmal.
Last thing I tried to buy from them was two file cabinets. I ordered them for delivery from a brick-and-mortar Office Depot They charged my card, gave me an expected ship date, and, later, notification that the cabinets had shipped. When over a week passed, and they hadn't arrived, I drove back to the store, and they told me that they had shipped already and that I should have them. An hours worth of phone calls later, I find out that they had not actually shipped them yet, and that they just tell everyone that the products have shipped without even looking it up.
When the cabinets did arrive (expensive, $400 two drawer cabinets), I opened both boxes before the truck left and found both of them damaged. The guy from the trucking company that Office Depot contracts in my area, told me that there are like 4 or 5 times more problems with Office Depot stuff than any other company that he delivers for.
I sent them back with the trucker and cancelled my order.
Ordered the same thing from Staples online, and had them two days later.
Dealing with Office Depot is always like this. The only reason to buy from them is if you been in a really good mood for weeks and can't think of any other way to shake it.
Your right of course. I was oversimplifying my description, to get to my wind shear point. A standard descent angle is about 3 degrees, and you would need to tweak power to maintain this.
The mechanics of wind shear is not particularly related to your descent angle to the airport.
I finished reading this book last month. As a former airline pilot, I take some issue with Gladwell's explanations of these aviation incidents.
1) Gladwell's description of the mechanics windshear was inaccurate. Perhaps he understood what he was saying when he wrote it, but the way it reads sound s like he is saying that when a plane is flying into a headwind, the pilots need to use more power, and then if that headwind shears to a tail wind, all of a sudden, the plane is going too fast to land. This is really the opposite of what is true. Pilots don't really care so much about their ground speed as they approach the runway, only their airspeed. You don't use more power going into a head wind, because using more power would increase your airspeed. On really windy days, you can get small airplanes to track backwards over the ground, but they still have a positive airspeed within the normal operating limits. If a headwind shears to a tail wind, you don't have too much momentum, you have too little airspeed.
2) The idea that these non-US countries were less safe to fly in because of their culture of not questioning superiors is also questionable. Each airline has a corporate which ends up defining how crew members interact. Guess what, 40+ years ago, the corporate culture in the airlines in this country (USA) was similar to Korean Air's culture 15 years ago. The US airlines made a point to change their cultures, and safety was enhanced greatly. When the US consultants when to Korean Air, the same thing happened there. But there is no reason to say that the unsafe culture was do to Korean philosophies -- just a less modern attitude toward cockpit resource management.
3) Controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents are always awful to read about. I think Malcolm missed the really big explanation for the CFIT crash that he describes. Historically, the ground proximity warning systems in large aircraft were not vary accurate at all. They were based mostly on rates of change of radar altitude, and were highly prone to calling out warnings when there was no problem, just spurious readings from the radar altimeter. As a result, pilots learned to not take advice from these units seriously. If they had, the accident Gladwell discusses certainly would not have happened. Modern enhanced ground proximity warning systems (eGPWS) use GPS and a database of obstructions, and are very reliable. With a reliable instrument, comes trust, and a pilot today, getting a warning from eGPWS is far less likely to make the same mistake.
If there are so many basic reasoning problems with chapter 7, how many problems are there in chapters outside my areas of expertise?
All this said, I'd recommend the book, it's a NYT bestseller, and it is very well written and thought provoking. It's provoking this discussion, and thats what a good book should do.
If there are too many variables in an experiment that the student can't understand, it won't make the experiment interesting.
If you can set up the experiment so that there is just one variable that the student doesn't understand, now you probably have something interesting.
Students need the background to be able to figure out what has happened in their experiment. If you take the experiment too far out of the realm of their expertise, they will be lost. Its just like asking a High Energy physicist to jump into a complex Solid State physics experiment from scratch in 72 hours. Sure the scientist has taken some solid state back in grad school, but realistically, it just takes some time to get acquainted enough with the material to explain an unexpected result.
...When I was in grad school for physics, and I remember what inspired me when I was an undergraduate.
Forget about all these complicated electrical experiments that the students will feel like they only vaguely understand. First years have no idea what Maxwell's equations are and are probably still very shaky on Kirchhoff. Anything else in Modern Physics, forget it. Many will be overwhelmed because they have no possible way of understanding all the assumptions that went into setting up the experiment. (And you really don't want people questioning whether a meaningful solution can actually be attained).
Have them do something with mechanics. There are plenty of really neat demos that can be done in mechanics that can also be explained to a very high degree without calculus. Something along the lines of the ventomobil, for example. This is cutting edge engineering rather than cutting edge physics, but this is the type of thing that they can understand just by looking at it, and they will have fun pondering questions like: "can it go directly into the wind?" and "can it ever exceed the wind speed?". When you have an intrinsic idea of how things work, exploring the details of something neat will be much more interesting.
The biggest factors here are your enthusiasm, and how well you identify the needs of each student. Physics is a touchy subject for many, and if they get started off on the wrong foot, forget it. They will stop trying. Take your time (really take your time) at the beginning so that no one gets lost, and your students will have lots of fun.
Surely you're Joking is a book about a physicist, but many of its pages involve how Mr. Feynman goes about thinking about Math.
It is a fascinating read, and nothing too difficult for high schoolers.
Circuit City's service plans were a joke. Circuit City stores can do nothing with a covered product. All they do is tell you to call their help line, and when you do, you are talking to an insurance adjuster, not tech support. I had a camera with a bad microswitch on the lens door (if you put any pressure on the door while the camera was on, it would turn off as if you were closing the door.)
I explained the problem to them and the first thing they asked me to do was to remove the battery and wait 24 hours, then put the battery back again. Does that sound logical to you?
Best Buy has hoops to jump through too when something goes bad, but you get to talk to a real person in the store, and the end result (may take a few tries), is always a brand new version of the broken item.
Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
on
The Walking House
·
· Score: 1
Any terrain? Maybe if you live on the plains or desert or tundra. Where I live, in Maine (USA), there is a lot of uninhabited land, but none of it would be accessible by such a device.
The trees and undergrowth are so dense in Northern Maine, that a one mile walk off path might take 3 or 4 hours.
Try finding the confluence point: 46N by 69W, you'll see what I mean.
The only places near me that this thing could possibly travel would be the public roads (and you'd probably have to register it as a farm tractor to legally take it on a public road).
Hey, that's my project! Good idea. I'll look into whether they have ideas for something similar that would work well in third world countries.
--
Kyle Burchesky
H2Opia.org
Now now, give Vista a chance. I tried the pre-release version, and I can confirm from personal experience that Vista DOES EVENTUALLY boot all the way up!
There's no range there? Just good ones and severely misguided ones? What about just misguided, or slightly misguided, or even mostly good? You'd think if 98 percent were good, it would be easy for them to spot and get rid of the 2% of severely misguided police.
Perhaps you should consider what happened to that family before you spew out these flip comments.
This is the problem with law enforcement in this country. Like you, most are severely misguided. Typical. My condolences.
TJX Corp was held accountable when hackers stole credit card data. This is a much more serious case of negligence on the part of the police department. Perhaps they should be banned from using the Internet?
To continue on this off topic subthread, I personally can't wait for a high performance - open source - electric car with motors on each wheel. Think about the possibilities. Expensive hardware like traction control, over/understeering protection, antilock brakes, limited slip differentials, etc, can all be replaced by software. The savings should more than cover the cost of batteries/fuel cells.
I reject the bad car analogy.
a) Buy a new BMW.
b) Hack the ECU (engine control unit) computer and reload it with your own software.
What do you think the BMW service center is going to to with your warrantee (and your blown engine) if they figure out what you did?
Suppose the tweaks you made work, and some how a software update from the mechanic works too, but the combination is fatal to the engine. Should this be covered by warrantee?
True, a hypertransport connection is faster than a PCI-E connection. They probably chose PCI-E x16 because many-many more motherboards have that than have HTX (Hypertransport Expansion Connector) Slots. Although PCIE might be, say 20% slower than HTX, the speed far exceeds the performance of this flash storage device (which is only 800MB/s). The reduced latency of HTX might help you, but in the real world, one has to rely on empirical results. There are some papers about HTX vs PCIE online that can be found with a quick google search.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonono, pipes won't work at all. What you need are tubes... A series of them.
There's nothing dishonest about this. Best Buy puts a 4 year plan on cameras, and if you take > 10k photos per year, like I do, it is nearly impossible for a camera to make it through 4 years without three problems that warrant a trip to the Geek Squad. As long as you have a backup camera to tide you over while they "fix" the problem. Under heavy use, microswitches are the first to go, such as the mode selector. Once the case has been opened up once or twice by their service centers, a whole new can of worms is opened, and the auto focus, zoom, and other switches will start acting up.
By the way, last time I checked, the service plans on the digicams are capped at $149, so you would pay that $149 for a $1000 in store DSLR, and you would also pay $149 for the top-of-the-line $8000 dollar DSLR available from best buy online. Now that's a good deal. IMHO.
Service plans on a computer, especially desktops are completely ridiculous, of course, since the components become so cheap a year after you buy the pc.
Last thing I tried to buy from them was two file cabinets. I ordered them for delivery from a brick-and-mortar Office Depot They charged my card, gave me an expected ship date, and, later, notification that the cabinets had shipped. When over a week passed, and they hadn't arrived, I drove back to the store, and they told me that they had shipped already and that I should have them. An hours worth of phone calls later, I find out that they had not actually shipped them yet, and that they just tell everyone that the products have shipped without even looking it up.
When the cabinets did arrive (expensive, $400 two drawer cabinets), I opened both boxes before the truck left and found both of them damaged. The guy from the trucking company that Office Depot contracts in my area, told me that there are like 4 or 5 times more problems with Office Depot stuff than any other company that he delivers for.
I sent them back with the trucker and cancelled my order.
Ordered the same thing from Staples online, and had them two days later.
Dealing with Office Depot is always like this. The only reason to buy from them is if you been in a really good mood for weeks and can't think of any other way to shake it.
The mechanics of wind shear is not particularly related to your descent angle to the airport.
1) Gladwell's description of the mechanics windshear was inaccurate. Perhaps he understood what he was saying when he wrote it, but the way it reads sound s like he is saying that when a plane is flying into a headwind, the pilots need to use more power, and then if that headwind shears to a tail wind, all of a sudden, the plane is going too fast to land. This is really the opposite of what is true. Pilots don't really care so much about their ground speed as they approach the runway, only their airspeed. You don't use more power going into a head wind, because using more power would increase your airspeed. On really windy days, you can get small airplanes to track backwards over the ground, but they still have a positive airspeed within the normal operating limits. If a headwind shears to a tail wind, you don't have too much momentum, you have too little airspeed.
2) The idea that these non-US countries were less safe to fly in because of their culture of not questioning superiors is also questionable. Each airline has a corporate which ends up defining how crew members interact. Guess what, 40+ years ago, the corporate culture in the airlines in this country (USA) was similar to Korean Air's culture 15 years ago. The US airlines made a point to change their cultures, and safety was enhanced greatly. When the US consultants when to Korean Air, the same thing happened there. But there is no reason to say that the unsafe culture was do to Korean philosophies -- just a less modern attitude toward cockpit resource management.
3) Controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents are always awful to read about. I think Malcolm missed the really big explanation for the CFIT crash that he describes. Historically, the ground proximity warning systems in large aircraft were not vary accurate at all. They were based mostly on rates of change of radar altitude, and were highly prone to calling out warnings when there was no problem, just spurious readings from the radar altimeter. As a result, pilots learned to not take advice from these units seriously. If they had, the accident Gladwell discusses certainly would not have happened. Modern enhanced ground proximity warning systems (eGPWS) use GPS and a database of obstructions, and are very reliable. With a reliable instrument, comes trust, and a pilot today, getting a warning from eGPWS is far less likely to make the same mistake.
If there are so many basic reasoning problems with chapter 7, how many problems are there in chapters outside my areas of expertise?
All this said, I'd recommend the book, it's a NYT bestseller, and it is very well written and thought provoking. It's provoking this discussion, and thats what a good book should do.
If there are too many variables in an experiment that the student can't understand, it won't make the experiment interesting.
If you can set up the experiment so that there is just one variable that the student doesn't understand, now you probably have something interesting.
Students need the background to be able to figure out what has happened in their experiment. If you take the experiment too far out of the realm of their expertise, they will be lost. Its just like asking a High Energy physicist to jump into a complex Solid State physics experiment from scratch in 72 hours. Sure the scientist has taken some solid state back in grad school, but realistically, it just takes some time to get acquainted enough with the material to explain an unexpected result.
Forget about all these complicated electrical experiments that the students will feel like they only vaguely understand. First years have no idea what Maxwell's equations are and are probably still very shaky on Kirchhoff. Anything else in Modern Physics, forget it. Many will be overwhelmed because they have no possible way of understanding all the assumptions that went into setting up the experiment. (And you really don't want people questioning whether a meaningful solution can actually be attained).
Have them do something with mechanics. There are plenty of really neat demos that can be done in mechanics that can also be explained to a very high degree without calculus. Something along the lines of the ventomobil, for example. This is cutting edge engineering rather than cutting edge physics, but this is the type of thing that they can understand just by looking at it, and they will have fun pondering questions like: "can it go directly into the wind?" and "can it ever exceed the wind speed?". When you have an intrinsic idea of how things work, exploring the details of something neat will be much more interesting.
The biggest factors here are your enthusiasm, and how well you identify the needs of each student. Physics is a touchy subject for many, and if they get started off on the wrong foot, forget it. They will stop trying. Take your time (really take your time) at the beginning so that no one gets lost, and your students will have lots of fun.
Surely you're Joking is a book about a physicist, but many of its pages involve how Mr. Feynman goes about thinking about Math. It is a fascinating read, and nothing too difficult for high schoolers.
Circuit City's service plans were a joke. Circuit City stores can do nothing with a covered product. All they do is tell you to call their help line, and when you do, you are talking to an insurance adjuster, not tech support. I had a camera with a bad microswitch on the lens door (if you put any pressure on the door while the camera was on, it would turn off as if you were closing the door.) I explained the problem to them and the first thing they asked me to do was to remove the battery and wait 24 hours, then put the battery back again. Does that sound logical to you? Best Buy has hoops to jump through too when something goes bad, but you get to talk to a real person in the store, and the end result (may take a few tries), is always a brand new version of the broken item.
The trees and undergrowth are so dense in Northern Maine, that a one mile walk off path might take 3 or 4 hours.
Try finding the confluence point: 46N by 69W, you'll see what I mean.
The only places near me that this thing could possibly travel would be the public roads (and you'd probably have to register it as a farm tractor to legally take it on a public road).
I hear soybeans and arctic ice are really hot right now.
Hey, that's my project! Good idea. I'll look into whether they have ideas for something similar that would work well in third world countries. -- Kyle Burchesky H2Opia.org
I always wondered why there were no moths in outer space. This explains everything!
Now now, give Vista a chance. I tried the pre-release version, and I can confirm from personal experience that Vista DOES EVENTUALLY boot all the way up!
Maybe, just maybe, they will be transparent internally to their own developers. (if they think of it at the time)
Just make sure the kernel reports the correct time elapsed if the length of a jiffie decreases :)
There's no range there? Just good ones and severely misguided ones? What about just misguided, or slightly misguided, or even mostly good? You'd think if 98 percent were good, it would be easy for them to spot and get rid of the 2% of severely misguided police.
Perhaps you should consider what happened to that family before you spew out these flip comments. This is the problem with law enforcement in this country. Like you, most are severely misguided. Typical. My condolences.
TJX Corp was held accountable when hackers stole credit card data. This is a much more serious case of negligence on the part of the police department. Perhaps they should be banned from using the Internet?
To continue on this off topic subthread, I personally can't wait for a high performance - open source - electric car with motors on each wheel. Think about the possibilities. Expensive hardware like traction control, over/understeering protection, antilock brakes, limited slip differentials, etc, can all be replaced by software. The savings should more than cover the cost of batteries/fuel cells.
I reject the bad car analogy. a) Buy a new BMW. b) Hack the ECU (engine control unit) computer and reload it with your own software. What do you think the BMW service center is going to to with your warrantee (and your blown engine) if they figure out what you did? Suppose the tweaks you made work, and some how a software update from the mechanic works too, but the combination is fatal to the engine. Should this be covered by warrantee?
True, a hypertransport connection is faster than a PCI-E connection. They probably chose PCI-E x16 because many-many more motherboards have that than have HTX (Hypertransport Expansion Connector) Slots. Although PCIE might be, say 20% slower than HTX, the speed far exceeds the performance of this flash storage device (which is only 800MB/s). The reduced latency of HTX might help you, but in the real world, one has to rely on empirical results. There are some papers about HTX vs PCIE online that can be found with a quick google search.
No, that's the jar...