Poorly chosen solder tends to grow whiskers and short stuff out. Granted, most of the big chipmakers have their process control down to the point where 20+ year old CPUs still work just like new, but this isn't a box that sits on a desk for its entire lifetime that we're talking about. It'll be abused, battered, vibrated, and sat on (just think what you did to your backpack when you were in school and what your shiny new textbooks looked like at the end of the year). Short of paying technicians $250/hr to inspect every solder joint under a microscope to make sure there's not cracks or shorts or nothin' that'll become a problem, I don't know that we're that good at mass producing microelectronics that are meant to stand up to that kind of punishment yet.
Obsolete? What, does 2 + 2 = 5.4 now to account for inflation? If it were a history text, maybe I'd be less skeptical, but all the math I learned from K to junior year of college had been invented and well-understood for at least the better part of a century. And in high school, I don't think we ever made it past the 1850's.
Correction: the Russians autolanded a shuttle years ago once.
Doing it with the same reliability as a human pilot repeatably and robustly hasn't happened yet. And it'll cost a whole hell of a lot more than it costs to pay a copilot in the near to mid term.
Exactly. I learned quite a bit in classes in undergrad. I learned even more doing a robotics internship with one of my professors. That couldn't have happened online.
One of the weed-out courses on the 'techie' track at a certain Ivy League business school involves the mind-numbingly difficult task of doing all your homework in VBA. If 'business majors' learned proper programming in high school, they'd (1) be better equipped to process the large amounts of numerical data that they might see in their jobs in middle and (eventually) upper management, and (2), would be cured early of any illusions that 2 + 2 = whatever you want it to.
In my high school we had the typing and excel and spreadsheets class too. The one teacher involved in 'technology' education who I suspect had even an inkling of knowing how to code taught the fast-paced and uber-1337 *wait for it* HTML course. Good "alt-tabbing" skills were a requirement to pass. Exact quote.
Then there was my freshman geometry teacher, God bless her, who on the first day of class told us all to get TI-83's, and on the second day started handing out code listings and had a standing policy of 'if you wrote the code on your calculator yourself, you can use it on the test'.
I majored in EE and math, and took some theoretical CS courses too. I also had to do my time taking humanities courses to graduate. Did these courses let me find my voice and teach me eloquence? No. My 11th grade English literature teacher taught me to write good (and I owe her big for that), and before it went all gay and UFO-nut, the History Channel taught me about the world's cultures. Books and Wikipedia do that now.
That's why I always like to use the satellite photos on Google Maps, to make sure that access roads on the map are actually there. Streetview helps too, especially since the map doesn't indicate whether an intersection with a major road has a full traffic light, or if I'll be stuck on a dinky little road trying to turn onto a six-lane highway with my view blocked by overgrown bushes.
At the ripe old age of 24, even I find this ridiculous. If cell phone programmers designed commercial autopilots, no one in their right mind would fly. If they designed ECU software for Toyotas, oh wait.
Of course there's the problem of those private emails revealing naked attempts to massage what qualifies for peer review and who qualifies as a peer to do the reviewing. Sorry. The indignation is not justified.
Yes. It's called the PhD glut. And considering tenured faculty at many universities make 100k+, that sarcastic remark isn't too far off from the truth.
Just got through the first page. The direction that this is going in seems to be overcompensation. No self-respecting scientist or engineer would make input from the nontechnical public as a necessary step to scientific or technological development.
In my opinion, the biggest problems between the scientific establishment and the general public is when the scientists get too big for their britches and start demanding the curtailment of people's freedoms (ie global warming mitigation proposals). The scientific methods involved in studying the climate may well be sound (climategate notwithstanding), and even rightwingnutjobs like me believe in the value of devoting scientific resources to studying the earth's climate. But when the people doing the science forget that policy changes have real consequences, and they forget that (in America, at least) personal freedom is a sacred thing, you have a problem.
This nonsense about involving the public in your thinking from the beginning completely misses the point: it's not that the public has a problem with the science, it's got a problem with activists posing as scientists who demand that I ride my bike to work through the freezing cold to save the planet while they jet around the world "raising awareness", and in the case of loonies like Robert Hanson, on the taxpayer dime, no less.
As a card-carrying RightwingNutjob, I find anything written by Chris Mooney to be suspect to begin with.
That said, I'll take a look at the paper, but with a big fat cube of NaCl sitting right next to my monitor.
Given how much digital horsepower you have to put in a flat panel screen anyway, at some point the TV will turn into something that looks like your desktop PC, where instead of having external scsi cards for your external CD burner, and a firewire port for your external TV tuner, you'll have internal CD bays and internal tuner cards. My prediction is that the final word in the standard might be an internal PCI-like bus in the TV that accepts standard devices like DVD drives, cable TV cards, etc that have a standard interface amount manufactures, so that you only need one cable for power instead of a bunch for different media converters.
I've been able to print from off-site for years. I just have to tunnel in through a firewall to get at my printer so that I don't act as the building charity copy center, but how is any of this new?
No disagreement on the latter point, but killing in the name of bringing peace and freedom to all rubs me as less wrong than killing in the name of some strongman's pronouncements about the word of God.
Damn right. Global warming legislation has the potential to make some people very powerful and other people very rich. Humans being greedy, fallible, manipulative, and power-hungry SOBs, need to have be put under a microscope whenever they suggest changes in the law that have the potential to benefit them this way. Add to the fact that global warming laws can potentially screw over everyone else in the process (ie Al Gore gets to jet around the country 'raising awareness' while we have to ride our bikes to work through the freezing cold), and you need a fucking femtoscope to make sure that even scientists are making dispassionate claims and not trying to ride the wave and be caught on the privileged side of the divide laws like this can create.
Yeah, but programming it to do it is real hard. Yeah, it's for damn sure that a system like this isn't ready for prime time, but it's still an accomplishment.
The math geek in me says that that's an engineering problem with the G and B channels on existing displays, since three independent measurements should mean that you only need three independent signal sources.
Slashdot Mirror
Poorly chosen solder tends to grow whiskers and short stuff out. Granted, most of the big chipmakers have their process control down to the point where 20+ year old CPUs still work just like new, but this isn't a box that sits on a desk for its entire lifetime that we're talking about. It'll be abused, battered, vibrated, and sat on (just think what you did to your backpack when you were in school and what your shiny new textbooks looked like at the end of the year). Short of paying technicians $250/hr to inspect every solder joint under a microscope to make sure there's not cracks or shorts or nothin' that'll become a problem, I don't know that we're that good at mass producing microelectronics that are meant to stand up to that kind of punishment yet.
Obsolete? What, does 2 + 2 = 5.4 now to account for inflation? If it were a history text, maybe I'd be less skeptical, but all the math I learned from K to junior year of college had been invented and well-understood for at least the better part of a century. And in high school, I don't think we ever made it past the 1850's.
Correction: the Russians autolanded a shuttle years ago once.
Doing it with the same reliability as a human pilot repeatably and robustly hasn't happened yet. And it'll cost a whole hell of a lot more than it costs to pay a copilot in the near to mid term.
Also, buttons labeled 'Eject Warp Core' or 'Eject Operator' are a must. You can even implement the latter...
Works every time
Exactly. I learned quite a bit in classes in undergrad. I learned even more doing a robotics internship with one of my professors. That couldn't have happened online.
One of the weed-out courses on the 'techie' track at a certain Ivy League business school involves the mind-numbingly difficult task of doing all your homework in VBA. If 'business majors' learned proper programming in high school, they'd (1) be better equipped to process the large amounts of numerical data that they might see in their jobs in middle and (eventually) upper management, and (2), would be cured early of any illusions that 2 + 2 = whatever you want it to.
In my high school we had the typing and excel and spreadsheets class too. The one teacher involved in 'technology' education who I suspect had even an inkling of knowing how to code taught the fast-paced and uber-1337 *wait for it* HTML course. Good "alt-tabbing" skills were a requirement to pass. Exact quote.
Then there was my freshman geometry teacher, God bless her, who on the first day of class told us all to get TI-83's, and on the second day started handing out code listings and had a standing policy of 'if you wrote the code on your calculator yourself, you can use it on the test'.
I majored in EE and math, and took some theoretical CS courses too. I also had to do my time taking humanities courses to graduate. Did these courses let me find my voice and teach me eloquence? No. My 11th grade English literature teacher taught me to write good (and I owe her big for that), and before it went all gay and UFO-nut, the History Channel taught me about the world's cultures. Books and Wikipedia do that now.
The government can neither confirm or deny your insightful observation.
That's why I always like to use the satellite photos on Google Maps, to make sure that access roads on the map are actually there. Streetview helps too, especially since the map doesn't indicate whether an intersection with a major road has a full traffic light, or if I'll be stuck on a dinky little road trying to turn onto a six-lane highway with my view blocked by overgrown bushes.
At the ripe old age of 24, even I find this ridiculous. If cell phone programmers designed commercial autopilots, no one in their right mind would fly. If they designed ECU software for Toyotas, oh wait.
Of course there's the problem of those private emails revealing naked attempts to massage what qualifies for peer review and who qualifies as a peer to do the reviewing. Sorry. The indignation is not justified.
Yes. It's called the PhD glut. And considering tenured faculty at many universities make 100k+, that sarcastic remark isn't too far off from the truth.
Just got through the first page. The direction that this is going in seems to be overcompensation. No self-respecting scientist or engineer would make input from the nontechnical public as a necessary step to scientific or technological development.
In my opinion, the biggest problems between the scientific establishment and the general public is when the scientists get too big for their britches and start demanding the curtailment of people's freedoms (ie global warming mitigation proposals). The scientific methods involved in studying the climate may well be sound (climategate notwithstanding), and even rightwingnutjobs like me believe in the value of devoting scientific resources to studying the earth's climate. But when the people doing the science forget that policy changes have real consequences, and they forget that (in America, at least) personal freedom is a sacred thing, you have a problem.
This nonsense about involving the public in your thinking from the beginning completely misses the point: it's not that the public has a problem with the science, it's got a problem with activists posing as scientists who demand that I ride my bike to work through the freezing cold to save the planet while they jet around the world "raising awareness", and in the case of loonies like Robert Hanson, on the taxpayer dime, no less.
As a card-carrying RightwingNutjob, I find anything written by Chris Mooney to be suspect to begin with. That said, I'll take a look at the paper, but with a big fat cube of NaCl sitting right next to my monitor.
Given how much digital horsepower you have to put in a flat panel screen anyway, at some point the TV will turn into something that looks like your desktop PC, where instead of having external scsi cards for your external CD burner, and a firewire port for your external TV tuner, you'll have internal CD bays and internal tuner cards. My prediction is that the final word in the standard might be an internal PCI-like bus in the TV that accepts standard devices like DVD drives, cable TV cards, etc that have a standard interface amount manufactures, so that you only need one cable for power instead of a bunch for different media converters.
I've been able to print from off-site for years. I just have to tunnel in through a firewall to get at my printer so that I don't act as the building charity copy center, but how is any of this new?
Obstacle courses like that taught me about fault tolerant realtime code.
No disagreement on the latter point, but killing in the name of bringing peace and freedom to all rubs me as less wrong than killing in the name of some strongman's pronouncements about the word of God.
Damn right. Global warming legislation has the potential to make some people very powerful and other people very rich. Humans being greedy, fallible, manipulative, and power-hungry SOBs, need to have be put under a microscope whenever they suggest changes in the law that have the potential to benefit them this way. Add to the fact that global warming laws can potentially screw over everyone else in the process (ie Al Gore gets to jet around the country 'raising awareness' while we have to ride our bikes to work through the freezing cold), and you need a fucking femtoscope to make sure that even scientists are making dispassionate claims and not trying to ride the wave and be caught on the privileged side of the divide laws like this can create.
Manifest Destiny ... look it up. Think of it as a democratic jihad.
Better a democratic jihad than a theocratic jihad.
Yeah, but programming it to do it is real hard. Yeah, it's for damn sure that a system like this isn't ready for prime time, but it's still an accomplishment.
Stargate SG1.
The math geek in me says that that's an engineering problem with the G and B channels on existing displays, since three independent measurements should mean that you only need three independent signal sources.