First of all, starters have a limited lifetime. If you force cars to engage them at nearly every stoplight, they will wear out 10 times faster or more.
I've worn out one starter. Replaced it when the car was 10 years old, and it survived every summer that Phoenix had to throw at it for those 10 years. When it died, how much of that wear was age, and how much was wear and tear in that environment? I'm betting both are a factor. If this idea means that a starter starts to last 8 years instead of 10, I think that's a major win. Especially where roads are salted and bodies rust out before 8 years. If 10% of the car population had to replace a $50 starter every 8 years, I think we're all going to save a lot of gas. And that's if starters haven't improved in the last 20 years, AND if starters aren't made more robust in preparation for this idea.
Second, if my engine shut off at a stoplight in the Texas summer, my air conditioning would not work and I would effectively be baking in an oven.
I'm in Austin now. There are three intersections that I stop at where I can tell I'll be there for more than 30 seconds. More than half the time, I'll stop the engine and save some gas. Yes, there are some times when it starts to get warm (namely the 5:30 commute), but for the most part, it takes as long to heat up as it does to cool down. And not much cooling seems to happen in a stationary car anyway.
I have several patents in my name, filed by my employer. With the business climate the way it is (which is to say, globally flat to slightly rising revenue, improving profits and a rise in stock price because of a constant decline in costs), we're being scrutinized on the patents we do file. If the costs go up even more, we'll file for fewer of them. There's already mounting pressure to keep ideas as "trade secrets".
Professionals are paid for their time. Period. You can slice it however you want, but almost no one works piece meal. Most of those that do are VERY far down the skill ladders.
That view is going to limit you. In my job, the more I can modularize, the more I can automate, the more I can call on previous experience -- that results in being able to work more efficiently. My employer cares that objectives are completed on time. If I can do it in 30 hours a week, and a coworker takes 50, we're judged the same. If I then take on an additional 10 hours of work, I'm a team player working on broad horizons, and I'm going further with my career.
Customer work is similar. 15 years ago, my employer was contracted to deploy workstations for a major engineering firm. The customer was educated -- they knew it took 2 hours to deploy a workstation. They argued about billable hours, etc., the contract was awarded, and I began the work. I built 2 stations that way, spent an hour to ensure I understood the dd command, and each workstation was 15 minutes after that. Of course, the contract stipulated 2 hours of billable hours for every workstation, no more NO LESS.
Even when we're paid by the hour, a good engineer (who is, by definition lazy) will be able to reduce the work necessary by finding common tasks in his job. Nearly every intellectual job has some ability for automation.
(We do Chick-fil-A. Does that count as crap food?)
Yes, that probably counts at crap food. How often do you choose two servings of vegetables and fruit? Salad would count, if you're getting 2 cups of something other than iceberg lettuce (the paper tray liner has more nutrients and more fiber than iceberg lettuce), that's good. Are your kids eating half of what you are (as much, if they're over 13 or so)? Are you avoiding fatty foods (anything fried)? Are you making sure you aren't using more than a tablespoon of salad dressing? Everything I see there, including the salads, are "crap food".
Chick-fil-a has a reputation for being more healthy, and their demographics show that they're a preferred destination for women and mothers in particular. In reality, most of their chicken is fried, and the salads I've seen come with an assload of dressing and a whole bunch of nuts. If your kids will eat only the chicken nuggets (fried...) and then go after the bowl of fruit and drink water with their meal (no sodas or other sugary drinks, and no artificial sugars or caffeine for kids under 13), then it's not too bad.
Any place can be good. Subway markets itself as healthy, but their ingredients aren't that healthy. Get one of their magical 6 sandwiches that are actually low in fat, avoid the cheese and mayo and it's not bad. Pretty void of nutrients, but not bad. Now, if you were at home and made a sandwich with the same amount of meat, but put on spinach and used whole grain (not merely whole wheat) and ate a half cup of grapes for dessert and washed it all down with water, you'd be in a much healthier place.
If I ran XCode to compile PowerPC instructions, ran it on a random iMac, and found it successful, then disassembled the output of my program, how could I detect the presence of Rosetta?
A lightweight dynamic translator, such as Rosetta is difficult to get right, but presents the owner a great deal of flexibility in terms of being able to switch instruction sets. Seems the expertise was already in-house. With something like that, nobody really cares what processor is in there.
I think a lot of the posters here are making some assumptions. Mims, sure, Horowitz & Hill, another good choice.
You need to find a way to just start playing. Once you've played some, you'll need to figure out how to continue in some direction. A breadboard is relatively inexpensive -- it's usually white with a buttload of holes in it. Wikipedia can help you find it. You'll need a power supply -- something that will provide 3, 5, 9 or 12V seems most useful and common. It can be a box that'll hold a couple of AAs or a 9V, or a computer power supply (AT is nice -- ATX means you have to wire two contacts together on the plug). And, of course, wire. And, if there's wire, there's also needle nose pliers -- the Leatherman is a mainstay of those of us who remind you that you can't spell "geek" without "Double E".
Start by making blinking lights. Get a 555 timer and teach yourself how to make it flash at 1 or 10 Hz. Then get a speaker and make it go at 1KHz or 5KHz. You might have little luck with the transition between visual and audible frequencies -- little speakers below 100Hz are ugly, and you will have trouble viewing flashing on a stationary light above 20Hz. If you get a big enough speaker, and have it going at 1Hz with sufficient voltage swings, you can physically see the membrane moving. Adding a little salt or sand to it can make it easier to see that it is moving indirectly at higher frequencies.
The key is to find a way to get your foot in the door. Concentrate on circuits with a chip or two and a very small handful of discrete components -- a half dozen to start with. Don't start complicated, you'll just get discouraged. Once you've enjoyed that, you can start to think about more complex things like RF transmitters / receivers or BASIC stamp type controllers. If you can pick up a cheap oscilloscope and/or frequency generator, both are good tools to have.
And in this stage of learning, precious little should be soldered. You're prototyping exclusively. This stuff shouldn't be put together for more than a few days of playing. Okay, if you go the laser tag route, there's some merit to soldering that instead of worrying about a wire coming out in the middle of a match. Although if you know what you're doing, you can use a dozen or so parts to make a receiver and a gun can be half that (essentially a switch with a 555 timer at 40KHz is good enough for indoor play away from fluorescent lights whose plasma is / was near that frequency).
After my kids are a little older, I'm going to move onto a stamp type controller and some servos. There's a world of fun just waiting for us there.
A 50 year grind to max out, random nerfs and level wipes, and the end game reward is a 2-person Winnebago instance in the Florida server.
If I had a guarantee of a 2 person Winnebago instance on the Florida server, life would be a lot easier to bear, even if I'd prefer 48 other states and a condo. Instead, I worry about actually making it to level 80 and suffering so many wipes and ganks that I'm stuck in the 70s before my subscription runs out.
That's a jet plane, not a car. Sure, it got better landing wheels than normal, and a bit special body, but it's still a goddamn jet plane.
If that's a car, we've had flying cars for over 50 years now.
I can't dispute your point in any meaningful way, but let's consider that it took 11 iterations of failure before 55 had to be simulated to come up with a handful to actually explore with physical models. It seems to me that, no matter what you call it, people are learning something about aerodynamics. Keeping drag low enough to go that fast while minding the bernoulli effect is a pretty big deal. "Car" means it doesn't fly off the track / ground, because when they do, they do so uncontrollably and someone gets killed. The definition holds meaning, although it's obviously not something you're going to buy from Ford or Honda and actually drive to work, midlife crisis or not.
awfuieri3v
4u9388535v
v9tv379vn7
mc20884v05
That's just gibberish, but I could easily write that matrix down on a piece of paper, and then pick a path to take through it(it doesn't even have to be a complicated one, for example I could just use columns 2, 4, and 6)
An attacker should use everything available to him/her to compromise your account. With your gibberish of 10x4 up there, one might immediately assume a random string is necessary. If I assume 8 digits, I'm stuck with 40^8. Immediately, that search space is much lower than (26*26*10*10)^8 (lowercase, uppercase, numbers and a pile of symbols). If I remove duplicates, I'd observe that there are 4 8s, 3 5s, 4 vs, etc, so that's really less than 32^8. If I have reason to believe there's a contiguous path involved, then the problem is far closer to 40*8^7, because once an initial character is chosen, we'll stick with neighbors. An attacker who knows of the existence of your matrix could code up some C and have it standing by to brute force as soon as you enter the matrix.
Better than having a matrix is something never written down. Long known phrases concatenated together with periodic numbers, or even just the first letter of such phrases are far more secure. Muscle memory will make them hard to casually observe.
Instead, work demands I change the password on each of my dozen accounts every 90 days. So, I algorithmically pad the date in case I have to reverse decipher anything I miss. There's no way I could remember a strong password in less than 30 days; even when my password is this simple, it takes me 2 weeks to stop typing the old one. 3 weeks if I have to remember a new year.
At least try to contact people you think might own the copyright and the original authors. Save a copy of anything you send and any response. If you're sued, then you can prove you don't have any malicious intent and you actually tried to do right.
Imagine you're Click and Clack. Someone calls you up and tries to reproduce a sound. As if by magic, you can deduce the problem, how difficult and expensive the solution is, and who's qualified to perform the work. Now imagine you have full control over every sound the engine makes and can in fact make error sounds to make this job easier.
It seems to me that you have two choices for volume ("Was it quiet? Was it loud?"), a few tone questions ("Was it high pitched, low pitched or somewhere in between") and even a few frequency ones ("Was it intermittant? Fast or slow? Was it constant?"). I'm sure that, if you have more variables than that, you can toss in a few more permutations. Just make sure they're easy to pick out.
Also, force the error message not to be dismissed in less than two full minutes with your phone number on the screen.
Of course, having every error message drop some key logs into a database you can query might be a good idea too. Then you can post-process it with a few scripts and call them with the solution.
In 2001, I got my wife a TiVo for our anniversary present. The monthly fee was acceptable. We were two professionals and we had more than enough discretionary income to handle it. I thought it was awesome that the device could talk to our Dish Network satellite decoder over IR. And after setting "thumbs up" and "thumbs down", I really enjoyed the recommended shows when I wanted to watch TV but my wife was too busy to watch the shows we watched together.
That was around the time Enterprise came out, on some network that didn't have a proper affiliate in our area. I called Dish to see if there was a way I could get them to add it, and they refused. Some underpowered antenna 50 miles away claimed they served my zip code. So, I turned to the Internet. I found a web site I could download Enterprise from, and later, I found Limewire. Two years later, I found BitTorrent, and in 2003, the TiVo and Dish subscriptions were cancelled. Star Trek: Enterprise, of all things, forced me to piracy. I had a university ethernet connection from 1995-1999 and I never turned to Napster -- that's got to say something (perhaps about my taste in TV but please forgive me).
I'll admit, it took a few years before I figured out all the automatic feeds for getting BitTorrent shows, but at this point, it works flawlessly.
TiVo only works by the grace of the TV networks. Any pre-emption screws up your show. Sorry. TiVo's monthly fees cost more than any Myth schedule, and when I got my TiVo, the hard drives were practically guaranteed to fail in 3 years, which made the hardware investment pretty tough to understand for anyone with a standalone computer.
TiVo needs to get a deal going with a network. Any of them. Serve commercials and data related to what people watch and how, and make it 100% reliable and legal. In other words, beat Hulu in convenience but follow their lead for everything else. TiVo should pay the same per eyeball fee that any local affiliate charges, and see what they can get for dedicated ads. I bet the service takes off then. I'd go back to legal TV if that happened. At this point, I'm so accustomed to watching TV I downloaded a year before. I only last week found out that Gil Grissom left CSI -- TV shows are so much better when you can watch the same show every night for weeks on end without cliff hangers. You can really get to "know" characters a lot better. I'm hoping to watch all of West Wing this summer.
The message I'm going to send to Blizzard is also quite simple.
Support my Mac (yet again) with another great game (yet again) and I'll buy it on release day (yet again). If my internet is down, I don't even want to touch my computer, so that's no big deal for me. I logged hundreds if not thousands of hours playing the original Starcraft with the woman who ended up being my wife.
With the number of people who will want to play in a LAN, you know the majority of the traffic isn't going to be routed through B.N servers where they'll have to pay for the bandwidth. Most networked apps in this NAT age use a variety of methods to try to learn a real IP address to connect to each other. The first is always "self-reported IP". So, SC2 would hypothetically connect to B.N, authenticate, and then keep 100% of traffic on the LAN, reporting the results of the play to the servers. That way, if some college kid spends the whole year playing on his lan, and then goes home to play against me on B.N, he's got some ladder rank that's going to put him about where he belongs (which is honestly a completely different realm than 33 year old me).
While a stray piece of titanium from a previous jetliner may have shredded the tire and caused the fuel tank to puncture, I think I could more readily argue that the fuel tank having insufficient protection is the real problem. I would prefer to have any kind of tire event keep all passengers, structural elements and fuel tanks intact. Judging from the amount of abuse subsonic jetliners have sustained over the last 40 years, and the fact that Concordes were retrofitted with better tank protection before the economy tanked and they were all grounded, I really have a hard time blaming the tires.
Anything that lets us make transistors faster without paying a huge cost in leakage (power consumption when not switching) is a win.
Go through your timing report, and add up all the transistor switching times. Now cut that by 25%. Add up all the wires, and cut that by... nothing. For any wire dominated path, which is becoming the frequency limitation on modern chips, there's no benefit. The best we can hope for is that the on current is higher for graphene for the same geometry so existing drivers could be smaller, but with graphene at 240nm right now, I don't think we can make any kind of optimistic conclusion yet. Anybody staring at a 240nm MOSFET 15 years ago wouldn't have necessarily concluded we'd have made it to 34nm, let alone had any ideas that we could make it still smaller. IBM may well bring graphene to market in 3 years, but 1.5 years of that would have to be technology development figuring out the current tradeoffs.
However, to a layperson, the article indicates that the benefits of graphene are not transistor size but switching speed. What is to say that graphene-based microprocessors will not reach 30GHz?
Also note the article states current state of the art transistors switch at 25GHz. We don't have processors running at that speed.
The RC delay (resistance x capacitance) of wires is the biggest problem of any complex design today. Even as conductive as copper is, it's not a superconductor. Additionally, every wire is capacitively coupled with nearby wires. For any practical and useful processor design, those wires are going to be close enough for this to be a constraint. If graphene transistors leak less, or have higher on currents, then they can be more powerful, but they're still going to have to fight that RC transmission line.
CPT word processor, 1984 - a dedicated word processing station with 8" floppy disks, a portrait orientation widescreen crisp white CRT measuring 8.5"x11", WYSIWYG and daisy wheel printer. 80WPM. Next question.
Notably without on the fly spelling or grammar highlighting, and zero ability to transparently turn "teh" into "the". "Next question" indeed. You remember the 1984 single purpose word processor without integration into a general purpose computer, without the ability to paste images, screenshots or graphs from a spreadsheet program. And yet you stick by "Word processing was solved in 1984"? Shall I assume you're still using that machine today for professional reasons, and you never find it lacking in any niceties?
And yet for the most part, they don't. That was the point of that post. Most computers provide negative productivity - they're timesinks that let people send email and browse the web instead of doing something useful.
Those time sinks have been around for ages. In modern times, they've been hula hoops, books, comics, video games and countless other things. Computers have certainly become integrated into our modern lifestyle of leisure, and while I certainly agree that bringing a leisure machine into the workplace may have its detriments, I still believe it's a net positive. Gone are the days of relying on a squad of secretaries to synchronize schedules to hold a meeting, now we can do it transparently ourselves. For every person using Netscape when they shouldn't, there's a person who would have been reading a book or a newspaper. Nobody even brings newspapers into the workplace today! Computers aren't the slam dunk productivity multipliers, but saying that they've been stagnant since 1990 when the last database obstacle was overcome is either nieve, foolhardy or pandering to those pining for a time they don't even remember.
Take Boeing. The 787 is a marvel. For all its problems, even if you assume they cost 10% productivity, simply having the computers enabled an airplane to be designed that will add 15-25% efficiency to routes it flies. Given how long it'll fly, that's an immense efficiency multiplier. Winglets weren't even fully understood until computers came along and explained how the vortexes were working. Now that we know, that stuff seems obvious -- but winglets alone add 10% efficiency over an otherwise identical plane without them. And if you design the entire wing around having that feature in the first place, it can be 20-25% shorter, which means less weight and less drag.
I am on the record as stating that we've had no productivity increases since the advent of Windows.
Are you even old enough to remember word processors in 1984? Spreadsheets in 1987? I realize you're being funny and quoting someone else who said those things, but seriously stop to think about them.
I remember Word Perfect 5.1 in my 80x24 16 color display running on my 286 with 640KB of RAM. Let me tell you, Word from 1994 was worlds better. WYSIWYG is an amazing accomplishment that wasn't easy to get right. Even in 1994 there were small places where it wasn't perfect -- but being able to see bold or italic text instead of a different font color indicating "imagine this text is italic". Compare Word from a few years later -- on the fly typo correction, spelling and grammar highlights, with suggestions? That's progress.
A spreadsheet in 1987 wasn't usable by a vast majority of people who were sophisticated enough to understand basic table structure. Excel from 1997 had enough of a GUI to help even less sophisticated people use functions instead of just using it as a pretty interface to store numbers.
I'm not a fan of how much bloat has happened, but let's pause and understand what we've gained in the last 20 years. I don't see anybody volunteering to go back to their 286 with vintage software, and there's a reason for that.
Modern computers are able to solve problems only dreamed of 20 years ago. What I can accomplish in terms of text processing with Perl might be an incredibly inefficient use of memory and horsepower, but I can hack something together in an hour that will slog through gigabytes of data and the problem will be solved before a programmer 20 years ago would have been done optimizing the runtime to fit in the available memory. I'd even point to the travesty that is the chip designer's automated place and route toolset -- what's done routinely today wasn't even possible 10 years ago.
If you were going to build a robot car, why not build it out of something you can get real cheap. Like, say, you know, your Grandma's Plymouth Aries K.
They specifically state in the article that they're shooting for real racing speeds. While I don't know what a Plymouth Aries is, I think my grandma has a Reliant. I'm pretty sure that isn't going up Pike's Peak at anything like racing speeds.
The Audi is a car that can let drivers shine, and any flaw in the driving algorithm will be quickly apparent at high speeds. Turned around, with proper tires, it's damn difficult to lose control of an Audi A4 Quattro in the snow at "normal speeds". There's a lot of speed between "racing speeds" and "previously done at 25mph" where Audi can actually hide an incompetent driver made of meat or silicon.
IBM research is typically the traditional 10 years away - but not this one
My VLSI professor was in the forefront of the industry. He had some very good contract with some good R&D firms. One day, he told us that copper might one day replace aluminum as wires in chips. The lower resistance would make a big difference, but nobody had overcome the increased reactance yet. The next day, IBM announced that they had figured it all out. A year later, copper interconnect was being used in chips, and 6 months later, in iBooks. The same professor in a subsequent class was discussing SOI with similar promises of improvements, and similar "nobody has it figured out yet". A few weeks later, IBM came through again with an announcement. 2 years later, there it was in products.
With game changers like SOI and copper, IBM has gone to market in much less than 5 years.
As a former circuit designer, and still a CPU engineer, I can say without hesitation that I don't care about graphene. The transistors aren't the big factor anymore. Sure, smaller transistors are good to increase transistors per die, and reduce the distance between them, but wire RC delay is the big deal. Even if the Ioff goes down and Ion goes up, the speed of the chip isn't going to change much.
Things aren't going to get much better than copper -- it's very good already. Even if they upgraded to slightly lower resistance silver (and talk about a reactive metal!), the delay wouldn't change much. Lower K dielectric would help too. There are some minor improvements that can be done, but we're probably talking 5% here and there, and they probably don't add up to 20%.
Architecture changes are going to be important, from instruction optimization to multiple cores. The automated synthesis tools available also have an amazing amount of potential improvement -- placement and routing is a field with a lot of graph theory headroom. There is a world of difference still between "good enough" synthesis and what can be done by a well trained technician.
Out of 12 trips in the past six years I have been picked out for a random pat-down 11 times. I assume this is because white people who convert to Islam are the most likely to be radicalised in the eyes of the security people.
In 2004-2005, my family and I flew from the US to Japan and back 5 times (10 trips). Based on evidence gained during that period, I believe that native born Americans with Scottish and Irish last names traveling with an infant or toddler are statistically about as likely to blow up an airliner as you are.
Interestingly enough, based on how many times I faced extra screening, I went and learned enough chemistry to figure out how stupid all the extra screening is. If 2 oz is enough to blow a hole in an airliner, no amount of screening that allows clothing will be enough. I can hide 2 oz any number of places that a screener would miss after the first 5 minutes of his 8 hour shift. And if I can hide 2 oz, a bunch of associates who are not directly related to me, but happen to fly through a connecting city with an overlapping layover can ensure that I have way more than 2 oz.
I'm an engineer. The most formal thing I've written in my job has been an e-mail to a patent attorney, and he reworded everything I wrote. Far be it for me to criticize anyone's English ability. I did study Latin for 4 years, German for a year, French for 6 months and I lived in Japan for 15 months, so I have some linguistic ability and experience.
If someone turned in any kind of paper today written in Chaucer's English, they wouldn't even get the courtesy of being laughed at. Why? It turns out, not only is language arbitrary, but syntax and vocabulary are constantly changing. How else did proper Latin get convoluted and convulsed into the atrocity that is French? Those Romance languages didn't start out being proper and with unique and correct syntax, grammar and vocabulary.
Today, yes, emoticons are improper, apostrophes are unwelcome in the third person genderless possessive "its", "cuz" isn't an appropriate abbreviation of the word "because", and abbreviations end in a period to indicate their status. In 100 years? Only 30 years ago, when you were writing a list of things, there was a comma between the second to last item and the "and" preceding the last item. (One, two, three, and four.) Today, that has depreciated to the point of being improper.
At one point, people thought computers would prevent the evolution of language. I just hope we can prevent Ebonics from actually forming an accepted fork of English.
Your problem is that you don't see much between Facebook and a fully catered company outing.
Once a month, a volunteer from every department gets the department to go to a local bar or local eating establishment. If they're lucky, the manager will cover half the costs, the grunts pick up the rest. My manager orders a few pitchers of Shiner Bock and a few appetizer plates and asks for $5 from everybody. Not everybody attends, and there's more than one person who doesn't drink alcohol, but they have O'Douls or whatever monstrosity, so they're placated.
Of course, the word "volunteer" is important. Once one person does this in one department, and they get to talking, hopefully another department will pick up too. If two departments complete a big project, then two departments can get together and maybe the other one will think it's a good idea and try to do it too.
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I've worn out one starter. Replaced it when the car was 10 years old, and it survived every summer that Phoenix had to throw at it for those 10 years. When it died, how much of that wear was age, and how much was wear and tear in that environment? I'm betting both are a factor. If this idea means that a starter starts to last 8 years instead of 10, I think that's a major win. Especially where roads are salted and bodies rust out before 8 years. If 10% of the car population had to replace a $50 starter every 8 years, I think we're all going to save a lot of gas. And that's if starters haven't improved in the last 20 years, AND if starters aren't made more robust in preparation for this idea.
I'm in Austin now. There are three intersections that I stop at where I can tell I'll be there for more than 30 seconds. More than half the time, I'll stop the engine and save some gas. Yes, there are some times when it starts to get warm (namely the 5:30 commute), but for the most part, it takes as long to heat up as it does to cool down. And not much cooling seems to happen in a stationary car anyway.
I have several patents in my name, filed by my employer. With the business climate the way it is (which is to say, globally flat to slightly rising revenue, improving profits and a rise in stock price because of a constant decline in costs), we're being scrutinized on the patents we do file. If the costs go up even more, we'll file for fewer of them. There's already mounting pressure to keep ideas as "trade secrets".
That view is going to limit you. In my job, the more I can modularize, the more I can automate, the more I can call on previous experience -- that results in being able to work more efficiently. My employer cares that objectives are completed on time. If I can do it in 30 hours a week, and a coworker takes 50, we're judged the same. If I then take on an additional 10 hours of work, I'm a team player working on broad horizons, and I'm going further with my career.
Customer work is similar. 15 years ago, my employer was contracted to deploy workstations for a major engineering firm. The customer was educated -- they knew it took 2 hours to deploy a workstation. They argued about billable hours, etc., the contract was awarded, and I began the work. I built 2 stations that way, spent an hour to ensure I understood the dd command, and each workstation was 15 minutes after that. Of course, the contract stipulated 2 hours of billable hours for every workstation, no more NO LESS.
Even when we're paid by the hour, a good engineer (who is, by definition lazy) will be able to reduce the work necessary by finding common tasks in his job. Nearly every intellectual job has some ability for automation.
Yes, that probably counts at crap food. How often do you choose two servings of vegetables and fruit? Salad would count, if you're getting 2 cups of something other than iceberg lettuce (the paper tray liner has more nutrients and more fiber than iceberg lettuce), that's good. Are your kids eating half of what you are (as much, if they're over 13 or so)? Are you avoiding fatty foods (anything fried)? Are you making sure you aren't using more than a tablespoon of salad dressing? Everything I see there, including the salads, are "crap food".
Chick-fil-a has a reputation for being more healthy, and their demographics show that they're a preferred destination for women and mothers in particular. In reality, most of their chicken is fried, and the salads I've seen come with an assload of dressing and a whole bunch of nuts. If your kids will eat only the chicken nuggets (fried...) and then go after the bowl of fruit and drink water with their meal (no sodas or other sugary drinks, and no artificial sugars or caffeine for kids under 13), then it's not too bad.
Any place can be good. Subway markets itself as healthy, but their ingredients aren't that healthy. Get one of their magical 6 sandwiches that are actually low in fat, avoid the cheese and mayo and it's not bad. Pretty void of nutrients, but not bad. Now, if you were at home and made a sandwich with the same amount of meat, but put on spinach and used whole grain (not merely whole wheat) and ate a half cup of grapes for dessert and washed it all down with water, you'd be in a much healthier place.
Disclaimer: I preach. I do not practice.
I'll have what she's having!
If I ran XCode to compile PowerPC instructions, ran it on a random iMac, and found it successful, then disassembled the output of my program, how could I detect the presence of Rosetta?
A lightweight dynamic translator, such as Rosetta is difficult to get right, but presents the owner a great deal of flexibility in terms of being able to switch instruction sets. Seems the expertise was already in-house. With something like that, nobody really cares what processor is in there.
I think a lot of the posters here are making some assumptions. Mims, sure, Horowitz & Hill, another good choice.
You need to find a way to just start playing. Once you've played some, you'll need to figure out how to continue in some direction. A breadboard is relatively inexpensive -- it's usually white with a buttload of holes in it. Wikipedia can help you find it. You'll need a power supply -- something that will provide 3, 5, 9 or 12V seems most useful and common. It can be a box that'll hold a couple of AAs or a 9V, or a computer power supply (AT is nice -- ATX means you have to wire two contacts together on the plug). And, of course, wire. And, if there's wire, there's also needle nose pliers -- the Leatherman is a mainstay of those of us who remind you that you can't spell "geek" without "Double E".
Start by making blinking lights. Get a 555 timer and teach yourself how to make it flash at 1 or 10 Hz. Then get a speaker and make it go at 1KHz or 5KHz. You might have little luck with the transition between visual and audible frequencies -- little speakers below 100Hz are ugly, and you will have trouble viewing flashing on a stationary light above 20Hz. If you get a big enough speaker, and have it going at 1Hz with sufficient voltage swings, you can physically see the membrane moving. Adding a little salt or sand to it can make it easier to see that it is moving indirectly at higher frequencies.
The key is to find a way to get your foot in the door. Concentrate on circuits with a chip or two and a very small handful of discrete components -- a half dozen to start with. Don't start complicated, you'll just get discouraged. Once you've enjoyed that, you can start to think about more complex things like RF transmitters / receivers or BASIC stamp type controllers. If you can pick up a cheap oscilloscope and/or frequency generator, both are good tools to have.
And in this stage of learning, precious little should be soldered. You're prototyping exclusively. This stuff shouldn't be put together for more than a few days of playing. Okay, if you go the laser tag route, there's some merit to soldering that instead of worrying about a wire coming out in the middle of a match. Although if you know what you're doing, you can use a dozen or so parts to make a receiver and a gun can be half that (essentially a switch with a 555 timer at 40KHz is good enough for indoor play away from fluorescent lights whose plasma is / was near that frequency).
After my kids are a little older, I'm going to move onto a stamp type controller and some servos. There's a world of fun just waiting for us there.
If I had a guarantee of a 2 person Winnebago instance on the Florida server, life would be a lot easier to bear, even if I'd prefer 48 other states and a condo. Instead, I worry about actually making it to level 80 and suffering so many wipes and ganks that I'm stuck in the 70s before my subscription runs out.
I can't dispute your point in any meaningful way, but let's consider that it took 11 iterations of failure before 55 had to be simulated to come up with a handful to actually explore with physical models. It seems to me that, no matter what you call it, people are learning something about aerodynamics. Keeping drag low enough to go that fast while minding the bernoulli effect is a pretty big deal. "Car" means it doesn't fly off the track / ground, because when they do, they do so uncontrollably and someone gets killed. The definition holds meaning, although it's obviously not something you're going to buy from Ford or Honda and actually drive to work, midlife crisis or not.
An attacker should use everything available to him/her to compromise your account. With your gibberish of 10x4 up there, one might immediately assume a random string is necessary. If I assume 8 digits, I'm stuck with 40^8. Immediately, that search space is much lower than (26*26*10*10)^8 (lowercase, uppercase, numbers and a pile of symbols). If I remove duplicates, I'd observe that there are 4 8s, 3 5s, 4 vs, etc, so that's really less than 32^8. If I have reason to believe there's a contiguous path involved, then the problem is far closer to 40*8^7, because once an initial character is chosen, we'll stick with neighbors. An attacker who knows of the existence of your matrix could code up some C and have it standing by to brute force as soon as you enter the matrix.
Better than having a matrix is something never written down. Long known phrases concatenated together with periodic numbers, or even just the first letter of such phrases are far more secure. Muscle memory will make them hard to casually observe.
Instead, work demands I change the password on each of my dozen accounts every 90 days. So, I algorithmically pad the date in case I have to reverse decipher anything I miss. There's no way I could remember a strong password in less than 30 days; even when my password is this simple, it takes me 2 weeks to stop typing the old one. 3 weeks if I have to remember a new year.
At least try to contact people you think might own the copyright and the original authors. Save a copy of anything you send and any response. If you're sued, then you can prove you don't have any malicious intent and you actually tried to do right.
Imagine you're Click and Clack. Someone calls you up and tries to reproduce a sound. As if by magic, you can deduce the problem, how difficult and expensive the solution is, and who's qualified to perform the work. Now imagine you have full control over every sound the engine makes and can in fact make error sounds to make this job easier.
It seems to me that you have two choices for volume ("Was it quiet? Was it loud?"), a few tone questions ("Was it high pitched, low pitched or somewhere in between") and even a few frequency ones ("Was it intermittant? Fast or slow? Was it constant?"). I'm sure that, if you have more variables than that, you can toss in a few more permutations. Just make sure they're easy to pick out.
Also, force the error message not to be dismissed in less than two full minutes with your phone number on the screen.
Of course, having every error message drop some key logs into a database you can query might be a good idea too. Then you can post-process it with a few scripts and call them with the solution.
Clever. Then you can ask what porn star(s) were on the screen at the time.
In 2001, I got my wife a TiVo for our anniversary present. The monthly fee was acceptable. We were two professionals and we had more than enough discretionary income to handle it. I thought it was awesome that the device could talk to our Dish Network satellite decoder over IR. And after setting "thumbs up" and "thumbs down", I really enjoyed the recommended shows when I wanted to watch TV but my wife was too busy to watch the shows we watched together.
That was around the time Enterprise came out, on some network that didn't have a proper affiliate in our area. I called Dish to see if there was a way I could get them to add it, and they refused. Some underpowered antenna 50 miles away claimed they served my zip code. So, I turned to the Internet. I found a web site I could download Enterprise from, and later, I found Limewire. Two years later, I found BitTorrent, and in 2003, the TiVo and Dish subscriptions were cancelled. Star Trek: Enterprise, of all things, forced me to piracy. I had a university ethernet connection from 1995-1999 and I never turned to Napster -- that's got to say something (perhaps about my taste in TV but please forgive me).
I'll admit, it took a few years before I figured out all the automatic feeds for getting BitTorrent shows, but at this point, it works flawlessly.
TiVo only works by the grace of the TV networks. Any pre-emption screws up your show. Sorry. TiVo's monthly fees cost more than any Myth schedule, and when I got my TiVo, the hard drives were practically guaranteed to fail in 3 years, which made the hardware investment pretty tough to understand for anyone with a standalone computer.
TiVo needs to get a deal going with a network. Any of them. Serve commercials and data related to what people watch and how, and make it 100% reliable and legal. In other words, beat Hulu in convenience but follow their lead for everything else. TiVo should pay the same per eyeball fee that any local affiliate charges, and see what they can get for dedicated ads. I bet the service takes off then. I'd go back to legal TV if that happened. At this point, I'm so accustomed to watching TV I downloaded a year before. I only last week found out that Gil Grissom left CSI -- TV shows are so much better when you can watch the same show every night for weeks on end without cliff hangers. You can really get to "know" characters a lot better. I'm hoping to watch all of West Wing this summer.
The message I'm going to send to Blizzard is also quite simple.
Support my Mac (yet again) with another great game (yet again) and I'll buy it on release day (yet again). If my internet is down, I don't even want to touch my computer, so that's no big deal for me. I logged hundreds if not thousands of hours playing the original Starcraft with the woman who ended up being my wife.
With the number of people who will want to play in a LAN, you know the majority of the traffic isn't going to be routed through B.N servers where they'll have to pay for the bandwidth. Most networked apps in this NAT age use a variety of methods to try to learn a real IP address to connect to each other. The first is always "self-reported IP". So, SC2 would hypothetically connect to B.N, authenticate, and then keep 100% of traffic on the LAN, reporting the results of the play to the servers. That way, if some college kid spends the whole year playing on his lan, and then goes home to play against me on B.N, he's got some ladder rank that's going to put him about where he belongs (which is honestly a completely different realm than 33 year old me).
While a stray piece of titanium from a previous jetliner may have shredded the tire and caused the fuel tank to puncture, I think I could more readily argue that the fuel tank having insufficient protection is the real problem. I would prefer to have any kind of tire event keep all passengers, structural elements and fuel tanks intact. Judging from the amount of abuse subsonic jetliners have sustained over the last 40 years, and the fact that Concordes were retrofitted with better tank protection before the economy tanked and they were all grounded, I really have a hard time blaming the tires.
Go through your timing report, and add up all the transistor switching times. Now cut that by 25%. Add up all the wires, and cut that by... nothing. For any wire dominated path, which is becoming the frequency limitation on modern chips, there's no benefit. The best we can hope for is that the on current is higher for graphene for the same geometry so existing drivers could be smaller, but with graphene at 240nm right now, I don't think we can make any kind of optimistic conclusion yet. Anybody staring at a 240nm MOSFET 15 years ago wouldn't have necessarily concluded we'd have made it to 34nm, let alone had any ideas that we could make it still smaller. IBM may well bring graphene to market in 3 years, but 1.5 years of that would have to be technology development figuring out the current tradeoffs.
Also note the article states current state of the art transistors switch at 25GHz. We don't have processors running at that speed.
The RC delay (resistance x capacitance) of wires is the biggest problem of any complex design today. Even as conductive as copper is, it's not a superconductor. Additionally, every wire is capacitively coupled with nearby wires. For any practical and useful processor design, those wires are going to be close enough for this to be a constraint. If graphene transistors leak less, or have higher on currents, then they can be more powerful, but they're still going to have to fight that RC transmission line.
Notably without on the fly spelling or grammar highlighting, and zero ability to transparently turn "teh" into "the". "Next question" indeed. You remember the 1984 single purpose word processor without integration into a general purpose computer, without the ability to paste images, screenshots or graphs from a spreadsheet program. And yet you stick by "Word processing was solved in 1984"? Shall I assume you're still using that machine today for professional reasons, and you never find it lacking in any niceties?
Those time sinks have been around for ages. In modern times, they've been hula hoops, books, comics, video games and countless other things. Computers have certainly become integrated into our modern lifestyle of leisure, and while I certainly agree that bringing a leisure machine into the workplace may have its detriments, I still believe it's a net positive. Gone are the days of relying on a squad of secretaries to synchronize schedules to hold a meeting, now we can do it transparently ourselves. For every person using Netscape when they shouldn't, there's a person who would have been reading a book or a newspaper. Nobody even brings newspapers into the workplace today! Computers aren't the slam dunk productivity multipliers, but saying that they've been stagnant since 1990 when the last database obstacle was overcome is either nieve, foolhardy or pandering to those pining for a time they don't even remember.
Take Boeing. The 787 is a marvel. For all its problems, even if you assume they cost 10% productivity, simply having the computers enabled an airplane to be designed that will add 15-25% efficiency to routes it flies. Given how long it'll fly, that's an immense efficiency multiplier. Winglets weren't even fully understood until computers came along and explained how the vortexes were working. Now that we know, that stuff seems obvious -- but winglets alone add 10% efficiency over an otherwise identical plane without them. And if you design the entire wing around having that feature in the first place, it can be 20-25% shorter, which means less weight and less drag.
Are you even old enough to remember word processors in 1984? Spreadsheets in 1987? I realize you're being funny and quoting someone else who said those things, but seriously stop to think about them.
I remember Word Perfect 5.1 in my 80x24 16 color display running on my 286 with 640KB of RAM. Let me tell you, Word from 1994 was worlds better. WYSIWYG is an amazing accomplishment that wasn't easy to get right. Even in 1994 there were small places where it wasn't perfect -- but being able to see bold or italic text instead of a different font color indicating "imagine this text is italic". Compare Word from a few years later -- on the fly typo correction, spelling and grammar highlights, with suggestions? That's progress.
A spreadsheet in 1987 wasn't usable by a vast majority of people who were sophisticated enough to understand basic table structure. Excel from 1997 had enough of a GUI to help even less sophisticated people use functions instead of just using it as a pretty interface to store numbers.
I'm not a fan of how much bloat has happened, but let's pause and understand what we've gained in the last 20 years. I don't see anybody volunteering to go back to their 286 with vintage software, and there's a reason for that.
Modern computers are able to solve problems only dreamed of 20 years ago. What I can accomplish in terms of text processing with Perl might be an incredibly inefficient use of memory and horsepower, but I can hack something together in an hour that will slog through gigabytes of data and the problem will be solved before a programmer 20 years ago would have been done optimizing the runtime to fit in the available memory. I'd even point to the travesty that is the chip designer's automated place and route toolset -- what's done routinely today wasn't even possible 10 years ago.
They specifically state in the article that they're shooting for real racing speeds. While I don't know what a Plymouth Aries is, I think my grandma has a Reliant. I'm pretty sure that isn't going up Pike's Peak at anything like racing speeds.
The Audi is a car that can let drivers shine, and any flaw in the driving algorithm will be quickly apparent at high speeds. Turned around, with proper tires, it's damn difficult to lose control of an Audi A4 Quattro in the snow at "normal speeds". There's a lot of speed between "racing speeds" and "previously done at 25mph" where Audi can actually hide an incompetent driver made of meat or silicon.
My VLSI professor was in the forefront of the industry. He had some very good contract with some good R&D firms. One day, he told us that copper might one day replace aluminum as wires in chips. The lower resistance would make a big difference, but nobody had overcome the increased reactance yet. The next day, IBM announced that they had figured it all out. A year later, copper interconnect was being used in chips, and 6 months later, in iBooks. The same professor in a subsequent class was discussing SOI with similar promises of improvements, and similar "nobody has it figured out yet". A few weeks later, IBM came through again with an announcement. 2 years later, there it was in products.
With game changers like SOI and copper, IBM has gone to market in much less than 5 years.
As a former circuit designer, and still a CPU engineer, I can say without hesitation that I don't care about graphene. The transistors aren't the big factor anymore. Sure, smaller transistors are good to increase transistors per die, and reduce the distance between them, but wire RC delay is the big deal. Even if the Ioff goes down and Ion goes up, the speed of the chip isn't going to change much.
Things aren't going to get much better than copper -- it's very good already. Even if they upgraded to slightly lower resistance silver (and talk about a reactive metal!), the delay wouldn't change much. Lower K dielectric would help too. There are some minor improvements that can be done, but we're probably talking 5% here and there, and they probably don't add up to 20%.
Architecture changes are going to be important, from instruction optimization to multiple cores. The automated synthesis tools available also have an amazing amount of potential improvement -- placement and routing is a field with a lot of graph theory headroom. There is a world of difference still between "good enough" synthesis and what can be done by a well trained technician.
In 2004-2005, my family and I flew from the US to Japan and back 5 times (10 trips). Based on evidence gained during that period, I believe that native born Americans with Scottish and Irish last names traveling with an infant or toddler are statistically about as likely to blow up an airliner as you are.
Interestingly enough, based on how many times I faced extra screening, I went and learned enough chemistry to figure out how stupid all the extra screening is. If 2 oz is enough to blow a hole in an airliner, no amount of screening that allows clothing will be enough. I can hide 2 oz any number of places that a screener would miss after the first 5 minutes of his 8 hour shift. And if I can hide 2 oz, a bunch of associates who are not directly related to me, but happen to fly through a connecting city with an overlapping layover can ensure that I have way more than 2 oz.
I'm an engineer. The most formal thing I've written in my job has been an e-mail to a patent attorney, and he reworded everything I wrote. Far be it for me to criticize anyone's English ability. I did study Latin for 4 years, German for a year, French for 6 months and I lived in Japan for 15 months, so I have some linguistic ability and experience.
If someone turned in any kind of paper today written in Chaucer's English, they wouldn't even get the courtesy of being laughed at. Why? It turns out, not only is language arbitrary, but syntax and vocabulary are constantly changing. How else did proper Latin get convoluted and convulsed into the atrocity that is French? Those Romance languages didn't start out being proper and with unique and correct syntax, grammar and vocabulary.
Today, yes, emoticons are improper, apostrophes are unwelcome in the third person genderless possessive "its", "cuz" isn't an appropriate abbreviation of the word "because", and abbreviations end in a period to indicate their status. In 100 years? Only 30 years ago, when you were writing a list of things, there was a comma between the second to last item and the "and" preceding the last item. (One, two, three, and four.) Today, that has depreciated to the point of being improper.
At one point, people thought computers would prevent the evolution of language. I just hope we can prevent Ebonics from actually forming an accepted fork of English.
Your problem is that you don't see much between Facebook and a fully catered company outing.
Once a month, a volunteer from every department gets the department to go to a local bar or local eating establishment. If they're lucky, the manager will cover half the costs, the grunts pick up the rest. My manager orders a few pitchers of Shiner Bock and a few appetizer plates and asks for $5 from everybody. Not everybody attends, and there's more than one person who doesn't drink alcohol, but they have O'Douls or whatever monstrosity, so they're placated.
Of course, the word "volunteer" is important. Once one person does this in one department, and they get to talking, hopefully another department will pick up too. If two departments complete a big project, then two departments can get together and maybe the other one will think it's a good idea and try to do it too.