Even with gold-plated contacts, you still need wiping action to displace crud. There probably isn't any wiping *inside* the power cord connector since the pins are just spring loaded; the important part that should be wiping is between the two connectors, at the visible contacts. As far as I can tell, there is no wiping action there, although I could imagine with very clever design the spring mechanism on the pins might rotate or, better, laterally displace them as they get compressed, which would serve as a wiping action.
The mycoplasma genes are clearly successful in reproducing themselves in silico raising the possibility that we're seeing the beginnings of an entirely new kind of landscape of infection. One option to combat this kind of virtual infection is to protect databases with the genomic version of antivirus software, a kind of virtual immune system. But this in itself could make things worse by triggering an evolutionary arms race that selects genes most capable of beating the safeguards.
static data don't evolve
The original poster was engaging in self-indulgent free association.
If there's one thing I wish for all laptop power supplies, it's that they would license from Apple (or work around, patent-wise) the magnet attachment system that makes cable--tripping far less dangerous to man or beast, compared to a few years ago.
The connector is called MagSafe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagSafe).
As someone with an EE background, what I've not understood with their design is how they compensate for a lack of wiping action on the contacts. Reliable contacts require wiping between the two surfaces to ensure low resistance; non-wiping contacts have inherently shorter lifetime. Exposed, non-wiping contacts would be expected to fail quite quickly.
Reminds me of the Maybe systems that MIT undergraduates build by hand in 6.004 (or used to, when I was involved) that were then programmed to emulate about 3 or 4 different architectures.
You're assuming that the irradiance is absorbed linearly as a black body by the earth, rather than driving potentially non-linear effects (clouds, ice caps, etc.). Yes, the model might work for the Moon, or other bodies with little-to-no atmosphere that have rigid surfaces fundamentally unchanged by variations in illuminance, but probably won't be that accurate for the Earth.
People are also bad at understanding complex effects, as your post shows. The surface temperature of the Earth is determined by insolation and reflectivity (along with atmospheric composition, oceanic current flow, heat from the core, drag from the moon and sun, etc.); you only considered insolation, and tacitly assumed linearity.
One of the most interesting ideas regarding climate variation is that the albedo (reflectivity) of the earth has a forcing term based on orbital variations; that there is an orbital effect on climate is known. The interesting part comes from *why* --- a colleague of mine published a paper in Nature suggesting that it is because as the Earth orbits the sun, it sweeps out the dust in its lane, and variations in the orbit translate to variations in how much dust gets accreted. He had some very nice core sample data of cosmogenic dust accretion over geological time periods that was, to my eye, quite convincing. Changes in the dust accretion, it was suggested, change the albedo by seeding clouds: more dust means more rain, more rain means less cloud cover, fewer clouds means reduced albedo.
Exactly the same ideas (variations in orbital position and sweeping out the orbital lane) are what allow astronomers to predict how strong a given meteor shower will be each year. Meteor showers are just accretion of somewhat larger grains of dust.
This whole 4 page article came off as a bunch of gum flapping over semantics.
Agreed. It also had a tone of free association. There's no evidence presented that the 18th Century idea of Black Mirrors can be traced to the creation of Photoshop. There's no clear link between the Teleharmonium and streaming music services. And the idea of shaving Edison cylinders morphing into voice mail? That's an easier sell, but still not convincing. The first photographs were painterly because the exposure times limited subject material to those that would be indefinitely still, not because that's all we knew (and meanwhile, the artistic field of painting reacted by exploding into a sequence of genres that is likely the most creative periods ever, but I digress). The article sounds either like someone who has done serious research whose work has been journalistically compressed into sound bites, or someone who sees similarities and assumes causality. I hope it's the former.
Seriously, you should. A friend of mine does this. She spends weeks at a time at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft, with a swimming pool full of scintillator, working 14 hour days, and earns doctoral candidate pay, which is to say, slightly less than your average FedEx driver.
And, to wax poetic, in return, she gets to see the ripples from god's fingers in the aether. I envy the people who work with her level of dedication on experiments like these.
I agree that Paypal is very similar. However Paypal's exchange rate is fixed at Paypal$1 == US$1, which makes it less risky than Bitcoin.
No, no it is not fixed at all. I've paypal-ed donation money to addresses where I don't even know what continent they live on, much less their country or currency or the fluctuating exchange rate.
Paypal deposits (if you'll allow me to abuse the term "deposit"), which are denominated in USD, get converted into real USD in a bank account at parity when you withdraw them. I think you're confusing that with exchanging Paypal deposits into a currency other than USD, as that rate fluctuates with the world-wide market. Since Paypal money is denominated in USD, you get the same number of USD out if you get your funds in USD. If you elect to get them in euro, New Zealand Dollars, or Mexican Pesos, you get the foreign exchange rate that Paypal offers from USD to that particular currency.
Furthermore, the whole point of sweeping money out of a PP account is to keep PP from making it disappear... Essentially every PP transaction has a risk PP will screw it up, so "$1" on PP is really only worth "95 cents" to a merchant. Close to credit cards, where the merchant eats the CC transaction fee, but closer to personal paper checks, where X percent of them bounce and you get nothing.
Your allusion to risk with Paypal transactions isn't very relevant since Paypal is essentially just acting as a merchant bank (without being a bank), and there are similar risks with any such establishment that a merchant would use. The primary difference here is that Paypal is an unregulated bank that holds a near monopoly on certain markets, and thus has a much lower incentive to keep the customer happy.
Here's a pic of a container ship after going through rough seas: http://i.imgur.com/4ynah.jpg. I'm stunned that those containers are still on board. Looks like they're chained down, but even metal breaks eventually
It appears that there are a few container missing, but holy tiedown, Batman, that's an extra heapload more robust than I would have thought. And imagining the seas that vessel must have endured makes me want to sit down immediately.
I always thought that was the bill-counting mechanism. My uninformed parsing of the sounds leads me to think there are multiple counting passes (for example, if your withdrawal comprises 5, 10, or 15 bills, you can make out 5, 10, or 15 quickly-spaced noises from the bills going through the counter). The trill could easily be a stack-shaker that brings the bills back into an even bundle at the end before sticking them out of the slot. If you've ever been to a bank and seen a manually-operated bill counter in action, I'm imagining ATMs have a similar mechanism internally. But this is all speculation.
Back in the day, on certain machines (specifically Lisp Machines and their derivatives), you could boot up, start your programs, adjust everything to be just-so, and then save the machine state onto a special part of the hard drive called a band. Then, when you next needed to restart the system, you had the option of loading that previously saved state and continuing from there. It meant that mid-1980s machines were about as fast to boot to a customized fully usable state with applications loaded and initialized as my almost-two-decades-later desktop screamer with a solid-state drive.
Relatedly, I miss small appliances (various hand-held devices, along with audio and video equipment, microwave ovens, etc.) that turned on and were instantly ready to operate. Everything these days seems to have a microprocessor that takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to boot up, from cell phones, to mp3 players, DVD players, TVs, etc.
I do note, however, that there is a kind of glass that's (almost) entirely non-reflective. Head down to your local picture framing place (Michaels, for certain, has it) and take a look. Quite why this glass/coating isn't in use on LCD screens right now, I have no idea.
I'm guessing it will be, eventually, on high-end screens at least. It's called anti-reflective (AR) coating, and, as you point out, has been in use in fine art framing for decades. It's the same multi-layer stuff that reduces reflections on eyeglasses and camera lenses. The really good versions (like on B+W lens filters) are really, really good, and clearly overkill for a monitor (if you hold up a B+W UV filter at arm's length, you would swear you're looking through an empty metal ring), but the inexpensive versions would be perfect for monitors. In fact, it would be so perfect that many CRTs used to have AR coating, and it worked quite well. It's just a matter of time for LCDs.
I've had similar luck staying within Matlab by using their profiler. Although I've used C callouts for some high-performance computations (like implementing a fast 2D histogram), I try and stay within Matlab whenever possible as mostly, not always, but mostly, the time spent optimizing a computation would far, far outweigh the time gained from a faster algorithm. If we know from the get-go that a given algorithm will be run many times, or is performance critical, it might be coded up in Matlab to prove correctness, but will ultimately be implemented in C.
Which reminds me about Matlab libraries. They're one of the very best things about writing in Matlab, especially the relative scarcity of bugs and generally high level of algorithmic correctness. But Matlab library routines are often written to be highly forgiving, and if you can specialize them for given data types (eg, by knowing your input is always a row vector), remove the bounds checking, etc., you can typically get a factor of 2 speedup. The Matlab profiler is critical for doing that.
I can't tell you the amount of times I've had Matlab tell me there wasn't enough memory available on my 8GB machine, because I ran out of what it had allocated for me.
Verne, I think you're doing something wrong there. The only time I see that sort of error is when I've done something worthy of a palm-in-face like trying to pre-allocate a 7-D array with 1000 elements per dimension. Yes, you have to be careful how many times copies of large arrays are made, but that's true of any language.
Also, with the newer versions of Matlab, iterations aren't that slow, at least compared with the older versions from a decade ago. You do, however, need to be very careful about accurately pre-allocating arrays to avoid the built-in automatic reallocation that can silently turn your nice O(n) algorithm into O(n^2) or worse.
When web apps pop up a realistic looking XP or Win7 windows claiming virus infection... or the need to run an 'exe' to install a missing codec, it's a good day to be running Linux or OS X. Nothing tells you fraud so much as something that's been polished to a fine point to fool the Windows users.
Good reason to not have the default color scheme on your windows box. Makes it easy to spot the fake popups.
I work from home, in another country, at 1500 kilometers distance from my colleagues. Sure, I could TRY to convince the company to switch to a completely different application that is incompatible with skype, just because I want to use Linux. Or ask my relatives who also live that far away, to do that. But somehow I don't see it happening...
I have a secondary, small desktop box specifically for applications where a Windows environment is required, like your situation: Skype, MS Office Suite, Adobe Acrobat Pro (the real deal, not the reader), MSIE for any web site that seems to be behaving oddly with FF on Linux (including 99.5% of my bureaucratic overhead), etc. My primary workhorse is a Linux box, but because of job-related issues, I am inescapably tied to the Windows experience.
According to the interview with one of the study's authors on NPR today, one of the very important factors is that decaf works as well. Which is to say, the measured benefit probably is not from caffeine.
Might there be an efficient way to frequency scale the signal and bring it down to usable levels? Or does the fact that we're talking about light-scale dimensions mean most of what we think about in terms of EE is not applicable?
One advantage is that phasers carry a whole lot more shots than a pistol, and you don't have to stock ammunition, just maintain a recharge station. Another is that they have selectable power.
Now where is the masking tape? My glasses have broken again... snort-heh-snort-heh.
Thanks for making my point even more explicit. The reality is that computers are powerful enough, and the amounts of money involved large enough, that someone serious about it should consider a complete veridical simulation of every taxpayer. The IRS certainly has the data, but since the exercise would be potentially highly deleterious to their self-preservation, the only way such a study would happen is if it were mandated by Executive Order. Congress isn't going to risk eliminating any of their constituents' favorite loopholes.
Or, we could just make it a flat tax with no exceptions.
Anyone who thinks that there are only 100 representative classes of taxpayers when there are 10,000 pages of tax code (or so it's said), and about 300,000,000 Americans doesn't understand sampling theory very well.
Slashdot Mirror
Even with gold-plated contacts, you still need wiping action to displace crud. There probably isn't any wiping *inside* the power cord connector since the pins are just spring loaded; the important part that should be wiping is between the two connectors, at the visible contacts. As far as I can tell, there is no wiping action there, although I could imagine with very clever design the spring mechanism on the pins might rotate or, better, laterally displace them as they get compressed, which would serve as a wiping action.
that part is nonsensical:
The mycoplasma genes are clearly successful in reproducing themselves in silico raising the possibility that we're seeing the beginnings of an entirely new kind of landscape of infection. One option to combat this kind of virtual infection is to protect databases with the genomic version of antivirus software, a kind of virtual immune system. But this in itself could make things worse by triggering an evolutionary arms race that selects genes most capable of beating the safeguards.
static data don't evolve
The original poster was engaging in self-indulgent free association.
If there's one thing I wish for all laptop power supplies, it's that they would license from Apple (or work around, patent-wise) the magnet attachment system that makes cable--tripping far less dangerous to man or beast, compared to a few years ago.
The connector is called MagSafe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagSafe).
As someone with an EE background, what I've not understood with their design is how they compensate for a lack of wiping action on the contacts. Reliable contacts require wiping between the two surfaces to ensure low resistance; non-wiping contacts have inherently shorter lifetime. Exposed, non-wiping contacts would be expected to fail quite quickly.
That's scary because it sounds so plausible. Well done, sir!
That was a better written review than Taco's.
Thanks!
Reminds me of the Maybe systems that MIT undergraduates build by hand in 6.004 (or used to, when I was involved) that were then programmed to emulate about 3 or 4 different architectures.
You're assuming that the irradiance is absorbed linearly as a black body by the earth, rather than driving potentially non-linear effects (clouds, ice caps, etc.). Yes, the model might work for the Moon, or other bodies with little-to-no atmosphere that have rigid surfaces fundamentally unchanged by variations in illuminance, but probably won't be that accurate for the Earth.
People are also bad at understanding complex effects, as your post shows. The surface temperature of the Earth is determined by insolation and reflectivity (along with atmospheric composition, oceanic current flow, heat from the core, drag from the moon and sun, etc.); you only considered insolation, and tacitly assumed linearity.
One of the most interesting ideas regarding climate variation is that the albedo (reflectivity) of the earth has a forcing term based on orbital variations; that there is an orbital effect on climate is known. The interesting part comes from *why* --- a colleague of mine published a paper in Nature suggesting that it is because as the Earth orbits the sun, it sweeps out the dust in its lane, and variations in the orbit translate to variations in how much dust gets accreted. He had some very nice core sample data of cosmogenic dust accretion over geological time periods that was, to my eye, quite convincing. Changes in the dust accretion, it was suggested, change the albedo by seeding clouds: more dust means more rain, more rain means less cloud cover, fewer clouds means reduced albedo.
Exactly the same ideas (variations in orbital position and sweeping out the orbital lane) are what allow astronomers to predict how strong a given meteor shower will be each year. Meteor showers are just accretion of somewhat larger grains of dust.
This whole 4 page article came off as a bunch of gum flapping over semantics.
Agreed. It also had a tone of free association. There's no evidence presented that the 18th Century idea of Black Mirrors can be traced to the creation of Photoshop. There's no clear link between the Teleharmonium and streaming music services. And the idea of shaving Edison cylinders morphing into voice mail? That's an easier sell, but still not convincing. The first photographs were painterly because the exposure times limited subject material to those that would be indefinitely still, not because that's all we knew (and meanwhile, the artistic field of painting reacted by exploding into a sequence of genres that is likely the most creative periods ever, but I digress). The article sounds either like someone who has done serious research whose work has been journalistically compressed into sound bites, or someone who sees similarities and assumes causality. I hope it's the former.
Enough with the Bitcoin spam!
Seriously, you should. A friend of mine does this. She spends weeks at a time at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft, with a swimming pool full of scintillator, working 14 hour days, and earns doctoral candidate pay, which is to say, slightly less than your average FedEx driver.
And, to wax poetic, in return, she gets to see the ripples from god's fingers in the aether. I envy the people who work with her level of dedication on experiments like these.
I agree that Paypal is very similar. However Paypal's exchange rate is fixed at Paypal$1 == US$1, which makes it less risky than Bitcoin.
No, no it is not fixed at all. I've paypal-ed donation money to addresses where I don't even know what continent they live on, much less their country or currency or the fluctuating exchange rate.
Paypal deposits (if you'll allow me to abuse the term "deposit"), which are denominated in USD, get converted into real USD in a bank account at parity when you withdraw them. I think you're confusing that with exchanging Paypal deposits into a currency other than USD, as that rate fluctuates with the world-wide market. Since Paypal money is denominated in USD, you get the same number of USD out if you get your funds in USD. If you elect to get them in euro, New Zealand Dollars, or Mexican Pesos, you get the foreign exchange rate that Paypal offers from USD to that particular currency.
Furthermore, the whole point of sweeping money out of a PP account is to keep PP from making it disappear... Essentially every PP transaction has a risk PP will screw it up, so "$1" on PP is really only worth "95 cents" to a merchant. Close to credit cards, where the merchant eats the CC transaction fee, but closer to personal paper checks, where X percent of them bounce and you get nothing.
Your allusion to risk with Paypal transactions isn't very relevant since Paypal is essentially just acting as a merchant bank (without being a bank), and there are similar risks with any such establishment that a merchant would use. The primary difference here is that Paypal is an unregulated bank that holds a near monopoly on certain markets, and thus has a much lower incentive to keep the customer happy.
Here's a pic of a container ship after going through rough seas: http://i.imgur.com/4ynah.jpg. I'm stunned that those containers are still on board. Looks like they're chained down, but even metal breaks eventually
It appears that there are a few container missing, but holy tiedown, Batman, that's an extra heapload more robust than I would have thought. And imagining the seas that vessel must have endured makes me want to sit down immediately.
I always thought that was the bill-counting mechanism. My uninformed parsing of the sounds leads me to think there are multiple counting passes (for example, if your withdrawal comprises 5, 10, or 15 bills, you can make out 5, 10, or 15 quickly-spaced noises from the bills going through the counter). The trill could easily be a stack-shaker that brings the bills back into an even bundle at the end before sticking them out of the slot. If you've ever been to a bank and seen a manually-operated bill counter in action, I'm imagining ATMs have a similar mechanism internally. But this is all speculation.
Back in the day, on certain machines (specifically Lisp Machines and their derivatives), you could boot up, start your programs, adjust everything to be just-so, and then save the machine state onto a special part of the hard drive called a band. Then, when you next needed to restart the system, you had the option of loading that previously saved state and continuing from there. It meant that mid-1980s machines were about as fast to boot to a customized fully usable state with applications loaded and initialized as my almost-two-decades-later desktop screamer with a solid-state drive.
Relatedly, I miss small appliances (various hand-held devices, along with audio and video equipment, microwave ovens, etc.) that turned on and were instantly ready to operate. Everything these days seems to have a microprocessor that takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to boot up, from cell phones, to mp3 players, DVD players, TVs, etc.
Yeah, when can we get instant-on working again?
I do note, however, that there is a kind of glass that's (almost) entirely non-reflective. Head down to your local picture framing place (Michaels, for certain, has it) and take a look. Quite why this glass/coating isn't in use on LCD screens right now, I have no idea.
I'm guessing it will be, eventually, on high-end screens at least. It's called anti-reflective (AR) coating, and, as you point out, has been in use in fine art framing for decades. It's the same multi-layer stuff that reduces reflections on eyeglasses and camera lenses. The really good versions (like on B+W lens filters) are really, really good, and clearly overkill for a monitor (if you hold up a B+W UV filter at arm's length, you would swear you're looking through an empty metal ring), but the inexpensive versions would be perfect for monitors. In fact, it would be so perfect that many CRTs used to have AR coating, and it worked quite well. It's just a matter of time for LCDs.
I've had similar luck staying within Matlab by using their profiler. Although I've used C callouts for some high-performance computations (like implementing a fast 2D histogram), I try and stay within Matlab whenever possible as mostly, not always, but mostly, the time spent optimizing a computation would far, far outweigh the time gained from a faster algorithm. If we know from the get-go that a given algorithm will be run many times, or is performance critical, it might be coded up in Matlab to prove correctness, but will ultimately be implemented in C.
Which reminds me about Matlab libraries. They're one of the very best things about writing in Matlab, especially the relative scarcity of bugs and generally high level of algorithmic correctness. But Matlab library routines are often written to be highly forgiving, and if you can specialize them for given data types (eg, by knowing your input is always a row vector), remove the bounds checking, etc., you can typically get a factor of 2 speedup. The Matlab profiler is critical for doing that.
I can't tell you the amount of times I've had Matlab tell me there wasn't enough memory available on my 8GB machine, because I ran out of what it had allocated for me.
Verne, I think you're doing something wrong there. The only time I see that sort of error is when I've done something worthy of a palm-in-face like trying to pre-allocate a 7-D array with 1000 elements per dimension. Yes, you have to be careful how many times copies of large arrays are made, but that's true of any language.
Also, with the newer versions of Matlab, iterations aren't that slow, at least compared with the older versions from a decade ago. You do, however, need to be very careful about accurately pre-allocating arrays to avoid the built-in automatic reallocation that can silently turn your nice O(n) algorithm into O(n^2) or worse.
When web apps pop up a realistic looking XP or Win7 windows claiming virus infection... or the need to run an 'exe' to install a missing codec, it's a good day to be running Linux or OS X. Nothing tells you fraud so much as something that's been polished to a fine point to fool the Windows users.
Good reason to not have the default color scheme on your windows box. Makes it easy to spot the fake popups.
Seriously? News articles where tweets are being used as a primary source?
That's it, I'm giving up on Slashdot. It's jumped the shark.
I work from home, in another country, at 1500 kilometers distance from my colleagues. Sure, I could TRY to convince the company to switch to a completely different application that is incompatible with skype, just because I want to use Linux. Or ask my relatives who also live that far away, to do that. But somehow I don't see it happening...
I have a secondary, small desktop box specifically for applications where a Windows environment is required, like your situation: Skype, MS Office Suite, Adobe Acrobat Pro (the real deal, not the reader), MSIE for any web site that seems to be behaving oddly with FF on Linux (including 99.5% of my bureaucratic overhead), etc. My primary workhorse is a Linux box, but because of job-related issues, I am inescapably tied to the Windows experience.
According to the interview with one of the study's authors on NPR today, one of the very important factors is that decaf works as well. Which is to say, the measured benefit probably is not from caffeine.
Might there be an efficient way to frequency scale the signal and bring it down to usable levels? Or does the fact that we're talking about light-scale dimensions mean most of what we think about in terms of EE is not applicable?
One advantage is that phasers carry a whole lot more shots than a pistol, and you don't have to stock ammunition, just maintain a recharge station. Another is that they have selectable power.
Now where is the masking tape? My glasses have broken again ... snort-heh-snort-heh.
Thanks for making my point even more explicit. The reality is that computers are powerful enough, and the amounts of money involved large enough, that someone serious about it should consider a complete veridical simulation of every taxpayer. The IRS certainly has the data, but since the exercise would be potentially highly deleterious to their self-preservation, the only way such a study would happen is if it were mandated by Executive Order. Congress isn't going to risk eliminating any of their constituents' favorite loopholes.
Or, we could just make it a flat tax with no exceptions.
Anyone who thinks that there are only 100 representative classes of taxpayers when there are 10,000 pages of tax code (or so it's said), and about 300,000,000 Americans doesn't understand sampling theory very well.