I'd guess that somebody said "If we fudge this, this, and this we could shave off a couple kilobytes and all the browsers out there will still render it properly." When you consider the Google homepage gets something like infinity hits per day—it adds up.
Actually, 1 Terabit/s = 125GByte/s. So that 25GB cap would take... Wait for it... 0.2 seconds of continuous downloading:)
Then again, by the time bandwidth like that is cheap enough for us, it'll be cheap for the telcos as well, and we'll probably be moaning about the petabyte bandwidth caps on our $20/mo plans.
Set a pendulum in motion and you'll inevitably give it an ellipsoidal motion, which naturally tends to precess. That's bad news if you want to build a Foucalt Pendulum, a bob attached to a long wire swinging in a vertical plane that appears to rotate as the Earth spins beneath it. The natural precession always tends to swamp the rotation due to the Earth's motion
Set a pendulum in motion and you'll inevitably give it an ellipsoidal motion, which naturally tends to precess.
What if I pull the pendulum using a string, tie the string to a fixed object, wait for the pendulum to stop moving, then cut the string?
Or any of a hundred other methods; that's just the first that came to mind.
I'd be more concerned about vibrations, friction effects, poor suspension system, etc. that affect the precession of a small pendulum after it starts swinging. Fortunately this device seems to counteract those forces as well.
No, but Cuba doesn't get significantly warmer than the Galapagos islands. Cuba is 20 degrees farther north.
And coastal regions never get as hot (or as cold) as more land-locked areas; Cuban summers are mild compared to inland parts of the southwestern US, Africa, Australia, etc.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. I can't wait until we have more and more Democracy.
In the history of the US, the electoral college has overridden with the popular vote three times:
George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000... which I won't go into here.
Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland in 1888... Whose mismanagement of the economy led to him being replaced by his own predecessor (Cleveland) after one term.
Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden in the scandal-ridden election of 1876... Who ordered federal troops to put down striking railroad workers across the eastern US, killing scores. He also served a single term.
In theory, the electoral college allows us to avoid the perils of mob rule and elect noble leaders unpopular with the cruel, unwashed masses.
Why should my tax dollars be used to purposefully enrich a private corporation? Microsoft no longer gets the limelight. Was there any bidding done in order to select YouTube? What's wrong with our public officials? I wonder what Steve Ballmer is thinking right now.
It's always good to see methane captured and burned into carbon dioxide, since CH4 (methane) is a far stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. On top of that, you can do useful work with the energy—like power a bus fleet—which saves even more carbon emissions.
Converting operating systems to report data in base 10 would require rewriting a few functions.
Converting humans to understand data in binary would take at least a lifetime, a concerted effort from all educators worldwide, rewriting every mathematical treatise and textbook ever written, and unquestioning cooperation from all human beings on the planet.
Argument 2:
We can date human civilization back around 7,000 years. We can date the decimal system to at least 5,000 years ago.
We've been using binary computers for roughly 70 years. We may have forgotten about binary computers in another 70 years.....
I agree with you—base 10 isn't better than base 16, or 20, or 8, or 2, or 37. But it's more practical. Everybody is familiar with it.
That's the thing about the world: You usually have to reject the perfect-yet-utterly-impractical solution for the somewhat-flawed-yet-works-for-everybody solution. Or, in a word, compromise.
Define "computer science", though. Nobody is talking about designing CPUs with a base-10 architecture, or building 1000-bit-wide buses, or padding 32 bits per pixel out to a nice round 100 bits per pixel.
Even if the software industry adopts SI units and prefixes, Computers will still operate using their own native bases, and computer scientists will still be using the most sensible base for their work.
On the other hand, everybody else has a much easier time understanding base 10. If the SI prefixes are adopted, when computers display information to "everybody else" the computers would convert to proper base 10 (which is, I hear, the official base of "everybody else").
Right now we've got a kludge of a solution that's neither quite binary nor quite decimal. decimal_number x 2^10 (or 2^20, or 2^30...) isn't natural in any base, and was only chosen because it was an easier-to-compute alternative to a true decimal conversion. Nobody's doing themselves any favors sticking with it. Computer scientists would be better served with the native base, and normal users would be better served with base 10.
Since when is "the number of possible configurations of a 10-bit sequence" relevant to anything? 1024 is It was picked as a rough approximation of 1000 in the early days of binary computers, because users couldn't make sense of the raw binary data and an accurate decimal conversion was too computationally intensive. It was a kludge from day 1.
And even in the "computer world", measurements don't magically work out to be powers of two. Clock speeds, network speeds, platter density—all of these are limited by the manufacturing technology and the laws of physics, not binary math, so calculations aren't fundamentally any "cleaner" in binary than they are in decimal. The only reason why binary is used in the computer world is that computers do math in binary (or, to be pedantic, hexadecimal).
It makes sense for computers to do internal calculations in their own native base. But by that same admission, it makes sense for humans to do math in their own "native" base, which is almost universally base 10. So when a computer presents data to a human, it should present it in the most human-readable format possible.
I agree with you on one thing: SI prefixes aren't right because they're "official". They're right because they let you do math in your head.
Congratulations. You have just stated that powers of 10 are "arbitrary metrics created by beaurocrats[sic] on a power trip."
Let me explain this in simple terms:
Powers are two are convenient for machines.
Powers of ten are convenient for humans.
It's bad form to present data in an inconvenient format for the user (which, presumably, is human) no matter how "computationally convenient" your algorithm may be. You can use binary calculations all you want behind the scenes, but convert it to a format designed for human comprehension before displaying it to a human.
Yes. Curse those evil companies, trying to replace our God-given units—like Furlongs, Hogsheads, and Binary Thousands—with evil, communist SI units. The fiends will stop at nothing to pollute the American way of life!
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, that explains the "no more brown" bit.
Well, maybe not his entire campaign, but they're not all bad.
Bombardier?
I'd guess that somebody said "If we fudge this, this, and this we could shave off a couple kilobytes and all the browsers out there will still render it properly." When you consider the Google homepage gets something like infinity hits per day—it adds up.
Actually, 1 Terabit/s = 125GByte/s. So that 25GB cap would take... Wait for it... 0.2 seconds of continuous downloading :)
Then again, by the time bandwidth like that is cheap enough for us, it'll be cheap for the telcos as well, and we'll probably be moaning about the petabyte bandwidth caps on our $20/mo plans.
Yeah, TFA explains the issues pretty well. I was disputing the summary's poor description of the problem.
Thanks for not even reading the summary.
What if I pull the pendulum using a string, tie the string to a fixed object, wait for the pendulum to stop moving, then cut the string?
Or any of a hundred other methods; that's just the first that came to mind.
I'd be more concerned about vibrations, friction effects, poor suspension system, etc. that affect the precession of a small pendulum after it starts swinging. Fortunately this device seems to counteract those forces as well.
No, but Cuba doesn't get significantly warmer than the Galapagos islands. Cuba is 20 degrees farther north.
And coastal regions never get as hot (or as cold) as more land-locked areas; Cuban summers are mild compared to inland parts of the southwestern US, Africa, Australia, etc.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. I can't wait until we have more and more Democracy.
In the history of the US, the electoral college has overridden with the popular vote three times:
George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000... which I won't go into here.
Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland in 1888... Whose mismanagement of the economy led to him being replaced by his own predecessor (Cleveland) after one term.
Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden in the scandal-ridden election of 1876... Who ordered federal troops to put down striking railroad workers across the eastern US, killing scores. He also served a single term.
In theory, the electoral college allows us to avoid the perils of mob rule and elect noble leaders unpopular with the cruel, unwashed masses.
In practice, however, that's a load of shit.
Somehow I have a hard time picturing penguins in Cuba.
I don't.
Why should my tax dollars be used to purposefully enrich a private corporation? Microsoft no longer gets the limelight. Was there any bidding done in order to select YouTube? What's wrong with our public officials? I wonder what Steve Ballmer is thinking right now.
How much does it cost to post videos on YouTube?
Sadly, I was thinking more along the lines of Pokemon ...
If I understand TFA correctly, if someone else gains access to your phone and your google login, they can activate Latitude and use it to track you.
Their interpretation of that is: Latitude is dangerous. I'd interpret it as giving others access to your hardware and your account is dangerous.
But that's why I'm just a computer geek and they're a multi-national organization.
Google [Chaotic good] + Microsoft [Chaotic Evil] = Chaotic Neutral...aw crap, we're boned.
Chaotic Neutral? Does that mean they'll put John de Lancie in charge?
It's fortunate that methane is odorless, then.
It's always good to see methane captured and burned into carbon dioxide, since CH4 (methane) is a far stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. On top of that, you can do useful work with the energy—like power a bus fleet—which saves even more carbon emissions.
I was thinking "Doctor Octopus".
But that could get expensive fast. How much does each atom cost?
Argument 1:
Converting operating systems to report data in base 10 would require rewriting a few functions.
Converting humans to understand data in binary would take at least a lifetime, a concerted effort from all educators worldwide, rewriting every mathematical treatise and textbook ever written, and unquestioning cooperation from all human beings on the planet.
Argument 2:
We can date human civilization back around 7,000 years. We can date the decimal system to at least 5,000 years ago.
We've been using binary computers for roughly 70 years. We may have forgotten about binary computers in another 70 years. ....
I agree with you—base 10 isn't better than base 16, or 20, or 8, or 2, or 37. But it's more practical. Everybody is familiar with it.
That's the thing about the world: You usually have to reject the perfect-yet-utterly-impractical solution for the somewhat-flawed-yet-works-for-everybody solution. Or, in a word, compromise.
Define "computer science", though. Nobody is talking about designing CPUs with a base-10 architecture, or building 1000-bit-wide buses, or padding 32 bits per pixel out to a nice round 100 bits per pixel.
Even if the software industry adopts SI units and prefixes, Computers will still operate using their own native bases, and computer scientists will still be using the most sensible base for their work.
On the other hand, everybody else has a much easier time understanding base 10. If the SI prefixes are adopted, when computers display information to "everybody else" the computers would convert to proper base 10 (which is, I hear, the official base of "everybody else").
Right now we've got a kludge of a solution that's neither quite binary nor quite decimal. decimal_number x 2^10 (or 2^20, or 2^30...) isn't natural in any base, and was only chosen because it was an easier-to-compute alternative to a true decimal conversion. Nobody's doing themselves any favors sticking with it. Computer scientists would be better served with the native base, and normal users would be better served with base 10.
Since when is "the number of possible configurations of a 10-bit sequence" relevant to anything? 1024 is It was picked as a rough approximation of 1000 in the early days of binary computers, because users couldn't make sense of the raw binary data and an accurate decimal conversion was too computationally intensive. It was a kludge from day 1.
And even in the "computer world", measurements don't magically work out to be powers of two. Clock speeds, network speeds, platter density—all of these are limited by the manufacturing technology and the laws of physics, not binary math, so calculations aren't fundamentally any "cleaner" in binary than they are in decimal. The only reason why binary is used in the computer world is that computers do math in binary (or, to be pedantic, hexadecimal).
It makes sense for computers to do internal calculations in their own native base. But by that same admission, it makes sense for humans to do math in their own "native" base, which is almost universally base 10. So when a computer presents data to a human, it should present it in the most human-readable format possible.
I agree with you on one thing: SI prefixes aren't right because they're "official". They're right because they let you do math in your head.
Congratulations. You have just stated that powers of 10 are "arbitrary metrics created by beaurocrats[sic] on a power trip."
Let me explain this in simple terms:
Powers are two are convenient for machines.
Powers of ten are convenient for humans.
It's bad form to present data in an inconvenient format for the user (which, presumably, is human) no matter how "computationally convenient" your algorithm may be. You can use binary calculations all you want behind the scenes, but convert it to a format designed for human comprehension before displaying it to a human.
Yes. Curse those evil companies, trying to replace our God-given units—like Furlongs, Hogsheads, and Binary Thousands—with evil, communist SI units. The fiends will stop at nothing to pollute the American way of life!
ONCE AND FOR ALL!
Perhaps the jobless C developers are now writing open-source apps, hoping to improve their résumés.