Has little to do with the decimal vs. binary base. If there is a fixed granularity, you don't need floating point. Storing the value as an integer representing tenths of a second (rather than a float representing seconds) removes periodic fractions and rounding errors completely.
Sorry, wrong. What happens if you need to use these values in calculations? Either you will have gross errors due to forcing a particular granularity, or you will have accumulating errors due to repeated rounding. Most likely, you will have both. Using INT/10 in this case is going to fix the problem of accumulating error in the representation of time, but not in any calculations that contain it for exactly the same reasons that a too-short float didn't work in the original design.
As stated in another reply, error analysis is HARD. Simple solutions, even saying that you'll just use quad precision floats everywhere, rarely work as well as anticipated.
Well, in this specific instance a decimal system would have been ok, but it isn't a general answer. The general answer is "make sure your increments are divisible into your number base" . ..
Close. Very close. The general answer is no matter what base you select for time, distance, or any other metric that might accumulate errors, be certain to (a) perform a careful error analysis, (b) include some additional safeguard to control the error if there are potentially large downstream effects.
Just because these computers counted in, say INT/10, and therefore could represent 0.1 seconds exactly does not mean, for example, that the timebase used to drive that counting was accurate and stable. Errors could still accumulate, although probably in a different modality.
Kids, long-term error analysis is HARD. Errors creep in through unlikely paths, even when you think you've been super careful as suggested by the parent post. While selecting a good numeric representation helps in controlling error accumulation, it is not a panacea.
I agree. I like technology. I strongly advocate for the use of advanced technology when appropriate. My research is in some seriously advanced stuff. But I use pencil and paper to take notes.
Why?
The interface has had thousands and thousands of years of development, and is pretty much knocked out as best as it can possibly be, and it's very, very good. The learning curve has already been amortized. While I can type damed fast, perhaps faster than I can write longhand, I can draw diagrams and mathematical expressions thousands of times faster than I can type them. And the act of writing is a central part of learning.
Use the technology appropriate to the task -- in this case, it's pen (or pencil) and paper. If you want to later transcribe things into a searchable database (have we hit the point where our students' brains have become too soft to remember things learned in class, and they must search?), then that process of reviewing your notes will help consolidate the lessons. If you want to really nail it, then take a little voice recording do-dad with you to class and play that back while transcribing your notes. Repeated multi-modal exposure to the material helps reinforce learning.
There's no link to the original study, but it was clear from the article that there was no control group. They had a scented room vs. an unscented room, when what they should have had was a "pleasantly" scented room vs. an "unpleasantly" scented room with a third, unscented room as the control. Then they should have done some feedback questionnaires at the conclusion, in which they could have buried a question or two regarding the participant's scent preferences to see how well the participants' evaluation of the smell of the rooms lined-up with the premise of the study.
This study was actually just a subset of the premise that happy people are more likely to be grateful and donate their time and/or money than unhappy people, and that environmental factors can influence a person's relative happiness. And a demonstration that an attractive woman can get money and resources from a major university to run a useless study.
So you're supposing that the mere scenting of a room, with any scent whatsoever, will increase the chance of ethical behavior? Interesting. Sounds like you need to do a follow-on study, rather than bash the first one without having read the original manuscript. According to the article, they *did* have a feedback questionnaire, and the participants did not notice the scent. More importantly, however, we do not know from the article whether this was a double blind study. The devil is in the details for behavioral studies like this, and an easy way to eliminate many uncontrolled variables is to make it double blind.
Finally, it is rather presumptuous to state that BYU funded the research, especially given the list of three total collaborators come from three different universities. Also, I've personally filled out scores of grant applications from my local institution, private foundations, and national agencies. None of them required or even requested a photograph. I'm therefore highly dubious about your last conclusion.
The mechanism might have something to do with GCRs increasing cloud cover, which diffuses sunlight and increases the efficiency of photosynthesis.
How about cloud cover leads to more precipitation?
Right. Correlation is not causation, no matter how hard you wish it so. Another hypothesis is that GCRs -- since they are observed to vary with the solar cycle -- are an epiphenomenon, and the real driving force is the solar cycle.
Nothing to see here but another ill-thought-out observation of which there are plenty. The 11-year solar cycle also drives the insolation (amount of light hitting the earth), the magnetosphere, the amount of accreted cosmic dust, the aurora borealis, the cloud cover, the sea levels, the mean temperature... saying it's the frelling GCRs that causes growth patterns is pretty far down on the list.
This reminds of a psychology experiment a few decades ago, where the consent form was something like:
I agree to *insert a bunch of things here* including "I agree to be deceived."
Then you became the subject of an experiment that appeared to be one of the other things, but in reality, you were being deceived as part of the experiment.
I'm a behavioral scientist. An experimentalist. When working with behaving subjects one of the things that's harder than anything else is to understand the experiment that you performed. This was brought home during a lecture I saw being given by a very senior faculty member who was describing an experiment that didn't seem to have gone very well at all. After reviewing the not very encouraging and somewhat confusing results, he said, "it took us quite some time to realize that although we had designed and performed this experiment in good faith, the experiment we ACTUALLY had done was quite different than what we intended." The difference was one of how the subjects had interpreted the non-verbal instructions. Viewing the results in the new radically different light made far more sense. Sometimes, it's the experimenter who is the one being deceived!
that doesn't see any real improvement over the old method? Strikes me as a solution waiting for a problem. Sometimes, the good ways are the old ways. sometimes.
You're missing the point by assuming that this technology will be used for forensic uses, like you see on the television. This technology is useful to identify living people (or at least reasonably intact bodies). The US Government currently collects thousands upon thousands of sets of fingerprints each day at the international borders from visiting non-citizens. My best bet is that the 3D technology is aimed at that use.
3D fingerprinting is really not necessary for most crime solving as those recovered from crime scenes are two dimensional.
These efforts to develop 3D fingerprinting are not motivated by forensic uses. They are for identification of whole bodies (let's charitably assume they are also living). Where does the US Government need that most? Border control.
Why waste all the time, money and materials to drag out miles upon miles of superconducting "wire" to get from the generation site to the end user?
1. Solar plants are really big, and land is scarce and/or expensive near urban centers. Few places on the surface of the earth have enough insolation (or, equivalently, the number of sunny days per year) to make solar effective, and they don't happen to be near urban centers.
2. Nuclear plants are big (land, again) and potentially dangerous, so are a bad idea to have near urban centers.
3. Hydro plants are wherever mother nature makes it advantageous to build them, which often isn't near urban centers.
4. Coal / oil / natural gas plants are large (land again), noisy, and pollute the air, so are best put away from urban centers.
5. Wind -- useful wind -- isn't found everywhere, and often not that near urban centers. Many people find the plants unattractive, and they have a tendency to kill birds. Lots of people don't want them near urban centers, even in the places where they might be useful.
So... in essentially every case, the power sources need to be placed some distance from the power drains. And that's completely ignoring the fact that there is already a vast and sophisticated system for sharing load / supply across vastly separated parts of the country to compensate for variations in supply and demand.
High-power transmission lines are not going to go away, ever.
There's no magic. All we're seeing is stupid people getting burned because they didn't use basic due diligence.
Yes, and, no. The people getting burned here are customers, by the many thousands. You can't expect the end-user to know what the DRP / BCP is for a subcontractor of the provider of their wireless communicator data plan. I wouldn't call the end-users stupid, and they are the ones most significantly affected in this case.
Is this ring the source of the dark material on Iapetus?
(Looking at the images of Iapetus, my instant reaction was that it looked exactly like objects that I've spray-painted at an oblique angle -- and by analogy the dark surface MUST be accreted material from a dust cloud.)
The mouse already underwent such a change, when multiple buttons were added.
Hate to break it to you, but what we might consider the first modern mouse (attached to the Xerox Alto computers) had three buttons. Long time ago. Looooooong time ago. (Yes, the very first prototype mouse built by Engelbart had one button; it's not what I would consider the first modern mouse.)
I've loved my HP HDX series laptop. Now, it's probably the largest laptop you will ever buy, but for development it is awesome. It has an 18.4" display, built-in blue ray ROM, and two internal hard drives and an e-sata port for a hot-swappable external. I can easily run two virtual machines at the same time on it (using Vista as the host operating system) and there's enough screen space to arrange your development environment however you want.
If that is too large for you they also have a 16" version of the laptop.
As for its portability, I have hauled it all over Europe via backpack (using one of the giant Rick Steves traveling backpacks). It worked for me, but I'm young and didn't have to walk miles with it or anything. It was just small enough to be used on all the flights I've taken on so far. If it was any larger you'd have to be in business class to use it without interfering with others.
The base 18" version comes in at around $1200.
Each to his own. My laptop, that I use for development, has one major criterion: it must be light, because I carry it around with me everywhere. Less important criteria: it must have a full-sized keyboard (so no netbooks). The sweet spot with those two criteria are things like the HP Elite series, such as the 2510p that I have right now. Not the fastest notebook around, and lacks many of the hot swapping features that the OP requested, but when I need stuff that the OP listed, I am invariably sitting at a desk, and a desktop computer does a much better job. More reliable too. For anything that requires serious computation, I ssh into my desktop and do it there. My laptop, as a result, weighs less than 3 lbs, and I can carry it with me everywhere.
Laptops are for portability. Desktops are for everything else. Why confound the two?
My wife and I have a Dell 1710 printer at home, that's a B&W non-duplex model made by Lexmark, and I'm waiting for it to die to replace it with an HP equivalent. The Dell prints great at first, but altogether too quickly , the output becomes shoddy. I've not had such problems with the HP printers in my lab (again, with 25k pages per year at work).
Out of curiosity, are you seeing print quality issues with the OEM toner, or are you using aftermarket toner?
I have a p2015dn with that same problem, only it was after every big document. It was 100% solved by putting more memory in the printer.
Are you sure there isn't a memory leak in the firmware?
No, not sure.
My experience, however, is that after every big (~ 90 MB) document, the printer went in to s-l-o-w mode. After adding more memory, this has yet to happen again. But it is entirely possible there are two issues with the same symptoms.
Get yourself another laser printer, after I bought mine (HP P2015-dn for $300 2 years ago) I haven't looked back. 99.99% of my printing is black and white anyway, I use the crap out of the double sided feature and I love the networked aspect.
My only complaint is that it needs to be restarted every month or so - otherwise it takes 20 minutes to print 1 page.
I have a p2015dn with that same problem, only it was after every big document. It was 100% solved by putting more memory in the printer.
I realize things have changed, but I still stick by HP laser printers. Try to get a midrange one with a network connection and PostScript Level3, and you should hopefully be set.
I'd go one farther. I've bought a handful of printers (4 total) to do some medium-duty printing (25k pages per year). HP's consumer-level stuff is reasonably well-made, but ends up being very expensive in toner. Many people use aftermarket toner for that reason. HP's entry business-level stuff is GREAT. Printers made with an anticipated lifetime of over 100k pages. The newest ones (like the 2055d and related B&W laser printers) are pretty small, too. They speak PS and PCL. You can get off-lease units on eBay for not too much, or wait for one of the sales at tech stores. If you get a used one, the most important thing to watch for is the number of pages on the print path, and try to find one with less than 10k. From time to time HP has trade-in bonus programs where you send them an old printer and get money back, when you buy one of their new ones.
But, if you elect to go the color route, be prepared for sticker shock on the toner. You should expect to start paying 3-4x the money because you'll be buying 4 times as many cartridges. Even if, like most, your printing is primarily black-and-white, you'll be replacing the K (black) cartridge quite often, because for a given size printer, the four carts for color reproduction (CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow, black) hold less than 1/4 the amount of toner each as the single K cartridge in a B&W printer.
My wife and I have a Dell 1710 printer at home, that's a B&W non-duplex model made by Lexmark, and I'm waiting for it to die to replace it with an HP equivalent. The Dell prints great at first, but altogether too quickly , the output becomes shoddy. I've not had such problems with the HP printers in my lab (again, with 25k pages per year at work).
And how would that be measured (non-invasively)? Blood pressure is read by squeezing off the artery and listening and watching for the various points in the pulse. If there is no pulse, there is no measurement.
I think it would work exact the same way: you squeeze off the artery until there's no flow, and then listen for the whoosh to start as you slowly reduce the pressure.
The impedance part, well, perhaps Mr. Pink Corner needs to understand more where resistance comes from. The reason that microwave ovens work at all is that there is a resistive (ie dissipative, lossy, real, call it what you will) component to the impedance of water at those frequencies, dissipating EM energy into heat. Here's a quote from the nicely informative link Mr. Pink Corner provided:
Rather than interacting with the water molecules via a resonance, the microwaves in an oven heat the water by twisting its molecules rapidly back and forth so that they rub against one another. The molecules are heated by the molecular equivalent of sliding or dynamic friction. The choice of 2.45 gigahertz gives the water molecules about the right amount of time to twist in each direction. The precise frequency isn't important, but microwave ovens are required to operate at exactly 2.45 gigahertz so that they don't interfere with communication systems using nearby frequencies.
And here's another clue about physics, Mr. Pink Corner, when you have a complex impedance, like an RC circuit in a lumped model system, the speed of light through those components is determined by the RC time constant. The speed of light is slowed by the reactive portion of the impedance. In that system. Otherwise the movement of the current would not be impeded and the full voltage would appear at the far side of the C element instantaneously. But it does not: the speed of propagation is slowed, as reflected in the time constant. This becomes especially evident when you look at transmission lines and the impedance of the line determines the propagation speed (as well as the line loss due to heating of the real component of the impedance). Same thing in water, except, as I've been corrected, there is no resonance at 2.45 GHz.
They said it, but I have to wonder. Resonant generally means you have a dimension of order a wavelength. The paint particles are much smaller than the wavelength, so it sounds to me as if they are simply building a Faraday Cage, but with metallic paint, not aluminum foil or metal sheeting.
Note, if you are going to do this, you need to avoid holes the size of a wavelength / 4 or bigger - a few cm for WiFi (12 cm waves). If you like windows you should also put a fine wire mesh on them.
Funny thing about electromagnetic resonance. The wavelength in vacuum / free air matters only... in vacuum / free air. The wavelength of a signal in a different medium, with presumably different dielectric constant and impedance will be... different! Water molecules are famously resonant at 2.45 GHz, that's where microwave ovens operate, despite the vacuum wavelength of 2.45 GHz photons being about 12 cm. The inter- and intra-molecular impedance makes H2O absorb those photons quite well. Water is quite rather opaque at those frequencies, despite being transparent at higher frequencies, say in the visible spectrum, and despite individual H2O molecules being many orders of magnitude smaller than the vacuum wavelength of 2.54 GHz photons.
Futhermore, bear in mind that aluminum oxide is not at all like aluminum. First off, it's an oxide. It's not a metal. It's a quite good insulator, and is used as a common abrasive because of its hardness. With impurities to give it color, it is the primary ingredient in sapphires and rubies. Coating something with aluminum oxide won't create a Faraday cage, but according to the news item, will provide a certain level of frequency-specific shielding.
Genetically engineered whales with a built in cargo hold. You just have to train them well, and take advantage of their natural migration patterns..
Ever watch Farscape? The primary vessel in that sci-fi TV series is a space-faring biomechanoid leviathan, one of a class of spaceships that serve mostly as cargo transport. Yep, that's right, just as you suggest, they are genetically engineered whales!
The reality of the situation was that we couldn't find any names that were not previously registered. When I lamented this fact to a couple of my Net friends, one of them searched the dictionary for words that contained "GNU". And "Cygnus" seemed the one that was least obscene
If you use the command "cat/usr/share/dict/words | grep gnu" then you get (commas added to avoid the lameness filter):
I submitted an idea to Project 10^100. A damned good one too. One that was worth a $1.5 million grant from the US National Institutes of Health. One that was good enough to be selected as a Saatchi and Saatchi World Changing Ideas finalist. The idea will help millions of people, potentially tens of millions. It will, however, not involve the internet, not involve Googly stuff, and won't be all cool and PC. It won't preferentially help people in Africa, or people who are perceived to be underserved by some arbitrary metric. But the NIH thought it was good enough to warrant a New Innovators Award.
The 16 ideas that Google selected are an embarrassment. I can name 20 off the top of my head that are better. Hell, I was in the company of 9 others at the Saatchi and Saatchi celebration that were better right there. There are 54 other New Innovators this year who would also qualify.
With 150,000 submissions, I'm certain Google had some damned fine ones -- the fact that they chose these particular 16 is an indictment of their judging process.
The article's title is "Spyware Prank Exposes Hospital Records".
The actions described are not a prank. They are serious, and illegal by many standards. If the accusations are true, the fellow deserves everything thrown at him. The article's title should be changed to reflect the severity. Installing spyware to keep tabs on your ex-GF is not a prank. It's stalking.
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Has little to do with the decimal vs. binary base. If there is a fixed granularity, you don't need floating point. Storing the value as an integer representing tenths of a second (rather than a float representing seconds) removes periodic fractions and rounding errors completely.
Sorry, wrong. What happens if you need to use these values in calculations? Either you will have gross errors due to forcing a particular granularity, or you will have accumulating errors due to repeated rounding. Most likely, you will have both. Using INT/10 in this case is going to fix the problem of accumulating error in the representation of time, but not in any calculations that contain it for exactly the same reasons that a too-short float didn't work in the original design.
As stated in another reply, error analysis is HARD. Simple solutions, even saying that you'll just use quad precision floats everywhere, rarely work as well as anticipated.
Well, in this specific instance a decimal system would have been ok, but it isn't a general answer. The general answer is "make sure your increments are divisible into your number base" . . .
Close. Very close. The general answer is no matter what base you select for time, distance, or any other metric that might accumulate errors, be certain to (a) perform a careful error analysis, (b) include some additional safeguard to control the error if there are potentially large downstream effects.
Just because these computers counted in, say INT/10, and therefore could represent 0.1 seconds exactly does not mean, for example, that the timebase used to drive that counting was accurate and stable. Errors could still accumulate, although probably in a different modality.
Kids, long-term error analysis is HARD. Errors creep in through unlikely paths, even when you think you've been super careful as suggested by the parent post. While selecting a good numeric representation helps in controlling error accumulation, it is not a panacea.
Does anyone else find it ironic that the "Can-Spam Act" is meant to stop people from spamming, specifically from the false and misleading type?
I believe the intent was to have the first word in CAN-SPAM be a verb, with the meaning of "can" being, "to throw in the trash."
Pencil/paper and digitizing later should be fine.
I agree. I like technology. I strongly advocate for the use of advanced technology when appropriate. My research is in some seriously advanced stuff. But I use pencil and paper to take notes.
Why?
The interface has had thousands and thousands of years of development, and is pretty much knocked out as best as it can possibly be, and it's very, very good. The learning curve has already been amortized. While I can type damed fast, perhaps faster than I can write longhand, I can draw diagrams and mathematical expressions thousands of times faster than I can type them. And the act of writing is a central part of learning.
Use the technology appropriate to the task -- in this case, it's pen (or pencil) and paper. If you want to later transcribe things into a searchable database (have we hit the point where our students' brains have become too soft to remember things learned in class, and they must search?), then that process of reviewing your notes will help consolidate the lessons. If you want to really nail it, then take a little voice recording do-dad with you to class and play that back while transcribing your notes. Repeated multi-modal exposure to the material helps reinforce learning.
Stop typing. Pull out pencil and paper.
There's no link to the original study, but it was clear from the article that there was no control group. They had a scented room vs. an unscented room, when what they should have had was a "pleasantly" scented room vs. an "unpleasantly" scented room with a third, unscented room as the control. Then they should have done some feedback questionnaires at the conclusion, in which they could have buried a question or two regarding the participant's scent preferences to see how well the participants' evaluation of the smell of the rooms lined-up with the premise of the study.
This study was actually just a subset of the premise that happy people are more likely to be grateful and donate their time and/or money than unhappy people, and that environmental factors can influence a person's relative happiness. And a demonstration that an attractive woman can get money and resources from a major university to run a useless study.
So you're supposing that the mere scenting of a room, with any scent whatsoever, will increase the chance of ethical behavior? Interesting. Sounds like you need to do a follow-on study, rather than bash the first one without having read the original manuscript. According to the article, they *did* have a feedback questionnaire, and the participants did not notice the scent. More importantly, however, we do not know from the article whether this was a double blind study. The devil is in the details for behavioral studies like this, and an easy way to eliminate many uncontrolled variables is to make it double blind.
Finally, it is rather presumptuous to state that BYU funded the research, especially given the list of three total collaborators come from three different universities. Also, I've personally filled out scores of grant applications from my local institution, private foundations, and national agencies. None of them required or even requested a photograph. I'm therefore highly dubious about your last conclusion.
The mechanism might have something to do with GCRs increasing cloud cover, which diffuses sunlight and increases the efficiency of photosynthesis.
How about cloud cover leads to more precipitation?
Right. Correlation is not causation, no matter how hard you wish it so. Another hypothesis is that GCRs -- since they are observed to vary with the solar cycle -- are an epiphenomenon, and the real driving force is the solar cycle.
Nothing to see here but another ill-thought-out observation of which there are plenty. The 11-year solar cycle also drives the insolation (amount of light hitting the earth), the magnetosphere, the amount of accreted cosmic dust, the aurora borealis, the cloud cover, the sea levels, the mean temperature ... saying it's the frelling GCRs that causes growth patterns is pretty far down on the list.
This reminds of a psychology experiment a few decades ago, where the consent form was something like:
I agree to *insert a bunch of things here* including "I agree to be deceived."
Then you became the subject of an experiment that appeared to be one of the other things, but in reality, you were being deceived as part of the experiment.
I'm a behavioral scientist. An experimentalist. When working with behaving subjects one of the things that's harder than anything else is to understand the experiment that you performed. This was brought home during a lecture I saw being given by a very senior faculty member who was describing an experiment that didn't seem to have gone very well at all. After reviewing the not very encouraging and somewhat confusing results, he said, "it took us quite some time to realize that although we had designed and performed this experiment in good faith, the experiment we ACTUALLY had done was quite different than what we intended." The difference was one of how the subjects had interpreted the non-verbal instructions. Viewing the results in the new radically different light made far more sense. Sometimes, it's the experimenter who is the one being deceived!
that doesn't see any real improvement over the old method? Strikes me as a solution waiting for a problem. Sometimes, the good ways are the old ways. sometimes.
You're missing the point by assuming that this technology will be used for forensic uses, like you see on the television. This technology is useful to identify living people (or at least reasonably intact bodies). The US Government currently collects thousands upon thousands of sets of fingerprints each day at the international borders from visiting non-citizens. My best bet is that the 3D technology is aimed at that use.
3D fingerprinting is really not necessary for most crime solving as those recovered from crime scenes are two dimensional.
These efforts to develop 3D fingerprinting are not motivated by forensic uses. They are for identification of whole bodies (let's charitably assume they are also living). Where does the US Government need that most? Border control.
Why waste all the time, money and materials to drag out miles upon miles of superconducting "wire" to get from the generation site to the end user?
1. Solar plants are really big, and land is scarce and/or expensive near urban centers. Few places on the surface of the earth have enough insolation (or, equivalently, the number of sunny days per year) to make solar effective, and they don't happen to be near urban centers.
2. Nuclear plants are big (land, again) and potentially dangerous, so are a bad idea to have near urban centers.
3. Hydro plants are wherever mother nature makes it advantageous to build them, which often isn't near urban centers.
4. Coal / oil / natural gas plants are large (land again), noisy, and pollute the air, so are best put away from urban centers.
5. Wind -- useful wind -- isn't found everywhere, and often not that near urban centers. Many people find the plants unattractive, and they have a tendency to kill birds. Lots of people don't want them near urban centers, even in the places where they might be useful.
So ... in essentially every case, the power sources need to be placed some distance from the power drains. And that's completely ignoring the fact that there is already a vast and sophisticated system for sharing load / supply across vastly separated parts of the country to compensate for variations in supply and demand.
High-power transmission lines are not going to go away, ever.
There's no magic. All we're seeing is stupid people getting burned because they didn't use basic due diligence.
Yes, and, no. The people getting burned here are customers, by the many thousands. You can't expect the end-user to know what the DRP / BCP is for a subcontractor of the provider of their wireless communicator data plan. I wouldn't call the end-users stupid, and they are the ones most significantly affected in this case.
Is this ring the source of the dark material on Iapetus?
(Looking at the images of Iapetus, my instant reaction was that it looked exactly like objects that I've spray-painted at an oblique angle -- and by analogy the dark surface MUST be accreted material from a dust cloud.)
The mouse already underwent such a change, when multiple buttons were added.
Hate to break it to you, but what we might consider the first modern mouse (attached to the Xerox Alto computers) had three buttons. Long time ago. Looooooong time ago. (Yes, the very first prototype mouse built by Engelbart had one button; it's not what I would consider the first modern mouse.)
I've loved my HP HDX series laptop. Now, it's probably the largest laptop you will ever buy, but for development it is awesome. It has an 18.4" display, built-in blue ray ROM, and two internal hard drives and an e-sata port for a hot-swappable external. I can easily run two virtual machines at the same time on it (using Vista as the host operating system) and there's enough screen space to arrange your development environment however you want.
If that is too large for you they also have a 16" version of the laptop.
As for its portability, I have hauled it all over Europe via backpack (using one of the giant Rick Steves traveling backpacks). It worked for me, but I'm young and didn't have to walk miles with it or anything. It was just small enough to be used on all the flights I've taken on so far. If it was any larger you'd have to be in business class to use it without interfering with others.
The base 18" version comes in at around $1200.
Each to his own. My laptop, that I use for development, has one major criterion: it must be light, because I carry it around with me everywhere. Less important criteria: it must have a full-sized keyboard (so no netbooks). The sweet spot with those two criteria are things like the HP Elite series, such as the 2510p that I have right now. Not the fastest notebook around, and lacks many of the hot swapping features that the OP requested, but when I need stuff that the OP listed, I am invariably sitting at a desk, and a desktop computer does a much better job. More reliable too. For anything that requires serious computation, I ssh into my desktop and do it there. My laptop, as a result, weighs less than 3 lbs, and I can carry it with me everywhere.
Laptops are for portability. Desktops are for everything else. Why confound the two?
My wife and I have a Dell 1710 printer at home, that's a B&W non-duplex model made by Lexmark, and I'm waiting for it to die to replace it with an HP equivalent. The Dell prints great at first, but altogether too quickly , the output becomes shoddy. I've not had such problems with the HP printers in my lab (again, with 25k pages per year at work).
Out of curiosity, are you seeing print quality issues with the OEM toner, or are you using aftermarket toner?
OEM toner, surprisingly.
I have a p2015dn with that same problem, only it was after every big document. It was 100% solved by putting more memory in the printer.
Are you sure there isn't a memory leak in the firmware?
No, not sure.
My experience, however, is that after every big (~ 90 MB) document, the printer went in to s-l-o-w mode. After adding more memory, this has yet to happen again. But it is entirely possible there are two issues with the same symptoms.
Get yourself another laser printer, after I bought mine (HP P2015-dn for $300 2 years ago) I haven't looked back. 99.99% of my printing is black and white anyway, I use the crap out of the double sided feature and I love the networked aspect.
My only complaint is that it needs to be restarted every month or so - otherwise it takes 20 minutes to print 1 page.
I have a p2015dn with that same problem, only it was after every big document. It was 100% solved by putting more memory in the printer.
I realize things have changed, but I still stick by HP laser printers. Try to get a midrange one with a network connection and PostScript Level3, and you should hopefully be set.
I'd go one farther. I've bought a handful of printers (4 total) to do some medium-duty printing (25k pages per year). HP's consumer-level stuff is reasonably well-made, but ends up being very expensive in toner. Many people use aftermarket toner for that reason. HP's entry business-level stuff is GREAT. Printers made with an anticipated lifetime of over 100k pages. The newest ones (like the 2055d and related B&W laser printers) are pretty small, too. They speak PS and PCL. You can get off-lease units on eBay for not too much, or wait for one of the sales at tech stores. If you get a used one, the most important thing to watch for is the number of pages on the print path, and try to find one with less than 10k. From time to time HP has trade-in bonus programs where you send them an old printer and get money back, when you buy one of their new ones.
But, if you elect to go the color route, be prepared for sticker shock on the toner. You should expect to start paying 3-4x the money because you'll be buying 4 times as many cartridges. Even if, like most, your printing is primarily black-and-white, you'll be replacing the K (black) cartridge quite often, because for a given size printer, the four carts for color reproduction (CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow, black) hold less than 1/4 the amount of toner each as the single K cartridge in a B&W printer.
My wife and I have a Dell 1710 printer at home, that's a B&W non-duplex model made by Lexmark, and I'm waiting for it to die to replace it with an HP equivalent. The Dell prints great at first, but altogether too quickly , the output becomes shoddy. I've not had such problems with the HP printers in my lab (again, with 25k pages per year at work).
And how would that be measured (non-invasively)? Blood pressure is read by squeezing off the artery and listening and watching for the various points in the pulse. If there is no pulse, there is no measurement.
I think it would work exact the same way: you squeeze off the artery until there's no flow, and then listen for the whoosh to start as you slowly reduce the pressure.
I stand corrected on the water resonance part.
The impedance part, well, perhaps Mr. Pink Corner needs to understand more where resistance comes from. The reason that microwave ovens work at all is that there is a resistive (ie dissipative, lossy, real, call it what you will) component to the impedance of water at those frequencies, dissipating EM energy into heat. Here's a quote from the nicely informative link Mr. Pink Corner provided:
Rather than interacting with the water molecules via a resonance, the microwaves in an oven heat the water by twisting its molecules rapidly back and forth so that they rub against one another. The molecules are heated by the molecular equivalent of sliding or dynamic friction. The choice of 2.45 gigahertz gives the water molecules about the right amount of time to twist in each direction. The precise frequency isn't important, but microwave ovens are required to operate at exactly 2.45 gigahertz so that they don't interfere with communication systems using nearby frequencies.
And here's another clue about physics, Mr. Pink Corner, when you have a complex impedance, like an RC circuit in a lumped model system, the speed of light through those components is determined by the RC time constant. The speed of light is slowed by the reactive portion of the impedance. In that system. Otherwise the movement of the current would not be impeded and the full voltage would appear at the far side of the C element instantaneously. But it does not: the speed of propagation is slowed, as reflected in the time constant. This becomes especially evident when you look at transmission lines and the impedance of the line determines the propagation speed (as well as the line loss due to heating of the real component of the impedance). Same thing in water, except, as I've been corrected, there is no resonance at 2.45 GHz.
They said it, but I have to wonder. Resonant generally means you have a dimension of order a wavelength. The paint particles are much smaller than the wavelength, so it sounds to me as if they are simply building a Faraday Cage, but with metallic paint, not aluminum foil or metal sheeting.
Note, if you are going to do this, you need to avoid holes the size of a wavelength / 4 or bigger - a few cm for WiFi (12 cm waves). If you like windows you should also put a fine wire mesh on them.
Funny thing about electromagnetic resonance. The wavelength in vacuum / free air matters only ... in vacuum / free air. The wavelength of a signal in a different medium, with presumably different dielectric constant and impedance will be ... different! Water molecules are famously resonant at 2.45 GHz, that's where microwave ovens operate, despite the vacuum wavelength of 2.45 GHz photons being about 12 cm. The inter- and intra-molecular impedance makes H2O absorb those photons quite well. Water is quite rather opaque at those frequencies, despite being transparent at higher frequencies, say in the visible spectrum, and despite individual H2O molecules being many orders of magnitude smaller than the vacuum wavelength of 2.54 GHz photons.
Futhermore, bear in mind that aluminum oxide is not at all like aluminum. First off, it's an oxide. It's not a metal. It's a quite good insulator, and is used as a common abrasive because of its hardness. With impurities to give it color, it is the primary ingredient in sapphires and rubies. Coating something with aluminum oxide won't create a Faraday cage, but according to the news item, will provide a certain level of frequency-specific shielding.
Genetically engineered whales with a built in cargo hold. You just have to train them well, and take advantage of their natural migration patterns..
Ever watch Farscape? The primary vessel in that sci-fi TV series is a space-faring biomechanoid leviathan, one of a class of spaceships that serve mostly as cargo transport. Yep, that's right, just as you suggest, they are genetically engineered whales!
I got a chuckle from this gem:
The reality of the situation was that we couldn't find any names that were not previously registered. When I lamented this fact to a couple of my Net friends, one of them searched the dictionary for words that contained "GNU". And "Cygnus" seemed the one that was least obscene
If you use the command "cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep gnu" then you get (commas added to avoid the lameness filter):
agnus, agnuses, bagnut, Cygnus, cygnus, double-magnum, Elaeagnus, encoignure, encoignures,
gnu, gnus, hognut, hognuts, ingnue, interregnum, interregnums, lignum, lignums,
Magnum, magnum, magnums, Magnus, Magnuson, Magnusson,
pignus, pignut, pignuts, regnum, rignum, signum, Spagnuoli, spagnuolo,
Sphagnum, sphagnum, sphagnums, spignut, stagnum, tignum, triregnum
So, yeah, I gotta agree. Either oddly obscene, or too oddly impractical, although I might have selected tignum instead of cygnus.
I submitted an idea to Project 10^100. A damned good one too. One that was worth a $1.5 million grant from the US National Institutes of Health. One that was good enough to be selected as a Saatchi and Saatchi World Changing Ideas finalist. The idea will help millions of people, potentially tens of millions. It will, however, not involve the internet, not involve Googly stuff, and won't be all cool and PC. It won't preferentially help people in Africa, or people who are perceived to be underserved by some arbitrary metric. But the NIH thought it was good enough to warrant a New Innovators Award.
The 16 ideas that Google selected are an embarrassment. I can name 20 off the top of my head that are better. Hell, I was in the company of 9 others at the Saatchi and Saatchi celebration that were better right there. There are 54 other New Innovators this year who would also qualify.
With 150,000 submissions, I'm certain Google had some damned fine ones -- the fact that they chose these particular 16 is an indictment of their judging process.
The article's title is "Spyware Prank Exposes Hospital Records".
The actions described are not a prank. They are serious, and illegal by many standards. If the accusations are true, the fellow deserves everything thrown at him. The article's title should be changed to reflect the severity. Installing spyware to keep tabs on your ex-GF is not a prank. It's stalking.