The AC is right. Go read it again - the AC is talking about _reflected_ light. Not looking at the light directly.
The light from typical RGB LEDs is narrow band.
A material that looks blue in sunlight could look a lot darker in the "white" LED light if it does not reflect the narrow band blue from the blue LED. It might even look black as the AC says.
Many of these white LEDs are blue or UV LEDs that stimulate a phosphor coating to produce white light.
Having three Red Green Blue LEDs to create white light might produce a light that appears white to the eye, but might not have the same effect when reflected off material.
The white from the phosphor would generate more of a broad spectrum white, whereas the Red, Green and Blue LEDs would probably create spikes in the Red, Green and Blue spectrum.
So you might have a green material that appears black when you use the "RGB white" LED - just because it does not reflect the Green LED's narrow green, whereas it will appear green in the white from the phosphor white LED.
The phosphor means one more step in light conversion, and that probably means less efficiency.
600kWh a day per home seems quite high, where'd you get that figure from? 25kW sustained. That's like 25 hair dryers/airconditioners or 12 ovens.
Unless you're including the charging electric cars. Even then 40 litres of petrol is about 380 kilowatt hours. While you'd probably want to be able to fully charge your car in one day, you are unlikely to need to do it from zero to full everyday.
But if you can't rewrite messy code so that it's not messy, please leave that mess in one place rather than spreading it into 3 or more _one_use_ "artificial" functions created just to "tidy" things up.
If those functions make sense to other people and not just you, then fine. Otherwise, let's forget about checkThingyA() ok?
What's so readable about having to scroll more to read code written that way? The indentation should identify the blocks already.
IMO it doesn't add any more useful information that a more compact indentation style does. I prefer it more compact vertically while preserving code block indentation (don't want those perl "one liners" that are 20 code lines in one line). If I ever want the lines to be further apart vertically I can always push my nose closer to the screen, doh.
When you start adding comments you see even less of the code on one screen.
I'd rather be able to stare at more code on the screen and let my brain figure it out. A decent editor/IDE will let you identify matching braces and blocks of code.
Of course if you get paid by lines of code things might be different...;)
What you should do is have leaders _lead_ the frontline in _spirit_.
Basically, if leaders are going to send troops on an _offensive_ war (not defensive) there must be a referendum on the war.
If there are not enough votes for the war, those leaders get put on deathrow.
At a convenient time later, a referendum is held to redeem each leader. Leaders that do not get enough votes get executed. For example if too many people stay at home and don't bother voting - the leaders get executed.
If it turns out later that the war was justified, a fancy ceremony is held, and the executed leaders are awarded a purple heart or equivalent, and you have people say nice things about them, cry and that sort of thing.
If it turns out later that the leaders tricked the voters, a referendum can be held (need to get enough signatories to start such a referendum, just to prevent nutters from wasting everyone elses time).
This proposal has many advantages: 1) Even leaders who don't really care about those "young men on the battlefield" will not consider starting a war lightly. 2) The soldiers will know that the leaders want a war enough to risk their own lives for it. 3) The soldiers will know that X% of the population want the war. 4) Those being attacked will know that X% of the attackers believe in the war - so they want a war, they get a war - for sufficiently high X, collateral damage becomes insignificant. They might even be justified in using WMD and other otherwise dubious tactics. If > 90% of the country attacking them want to kill them and their families, what is so wrong about using WMD as long as it does not affect neighbouring countries?
You might consider use of WMD evil, well I consider war evil. If a large majority of the people want a war, then they should get one, and too bad if they get completely wiped out in the process. Right now the problem I see is countries starting wars when most of their citizens don't actually want one.
How about this: if you have been involved in more than one road accident a year (even if it wasn't your fault), you will need to go for another driving test within X weeks. If you don't pass, you lose your license, and you need to start over again.
And the driving test needs to be good enough - must know how to merge at proper speeds, brake in wet conditions etc.
Yes the system is flawed and yes it should be better- but it correctly got you most of the time.
Given such a flawed system the rational thing to do would be to limit your exposure to it - e.g. don't do lots of crimes in the first place. The more crimes you do, the higher your chance of getting caught, and the higher your chance of getting caught for something you didn't do.
If you're not one of those unfortunate blacks in the USA who keep getting caught for "driving own car while black", just stay clean and the odds of you getting jailed for crimes you did not commit will be really low.
As you will see, the sort of DNA and fingerprint testing the cops do is a _farce_. What it _might_ prove is innocence - e.g. if there is no match, then it's likely you didn't do it (note though there are genetic chimeras, which mean you have to be more careful).
If they used less fuzzy tests, the typical degraded evidence at a crime scene might not even match you _conclusively_, EVEN if it was from you. It's like if a cam got a smeared pic of you- it might look like you, but it'll look like lots of other people too.
I know cops make up evidence. Maybe not all the time, but they do. When they _really_ think you did it, they get tempted to make things up.
So the cheap DNA tests, and the "DNA databases" being crap makes things inconvenient for them.
I'm one of those weak-minded Christians, but I can see things from other POVs.
So looking from one of those POVs: 1) What percentage of the population are weak minded? I bet it's > 50%. What do you think? 2) What would you rather them believe- Fox News or the New Testament stuff or the Koran or Scientology?
If you're trying to get them to believe the "There is no God, and we have to deal with all this ourselves" - it doesn't work very well for the weak minded - they'll eventually take up some other form of religion - worship of Money, of Gaia, or something. That's the truth.
The Christianity religion has been quite competitive with the rest. I claim that it causes more good than harm (and I believe that God came up with it, but hey I'm one of those weak minded ones ).
Show me something that has caused more good over hundreds of years. Some may claim Science, Capitalism, or The Free Market is better, but they don't encourage good or bad - they just make doing some things more efficient. They can make it easier for people to do lots of evil, or to do lots of good.
So what will they choose to do? They'll follow the crowd mostly, but in the other cases their consciences and beliefs will influence them.
All we need to do is bury and seal the stuff so people can't easily get in.
Say we screw up big time and billions of people die blah blah blah, and in 10K years a few people dig their way in, get exposed to toxic waste and die. It's not like millions of people will die because of that. Hard to imagine a long queue of people lining up to expose themselves to the waste.
So how about we focus on not getting billions of people killed instead? Let's get some priorities straight here.
You know what's a good way to defend yourself from 12 or even 40 people?
Run.
After all in most cases, it's nothing really that personal - not like they will hunt you down weeks or months later to kill you. It's just at that very moment, they might kill you.
Now if you had to defend someone else then running might not work.
Perhaps one of the many reasons the homicide figure is lower is because they can't kill their hated person twice;).
Based on the statistics it makes more sense to have a burglary/robbery offender list rather than a sex offender list.
Anyway, putting people on such lists is wrong - once they've done their sentence, you have to let them out.
If a country doesn't have confidence in criminals turning over a new leaf, they should do what China does and execute people for all sorts of crimes - e.g. theft, "hooliganism".
"it costs more to provide the cellphone service, so calls must cost more"
Well nowadays that does not appear to be true anymore.
Seems like in the developing nations it is cheaper to set up cellphone service than pull copper (that'll probably get stolen the next day. The new face of copper mining - "Oh was that yours? It's mine now";) ).
Actually if you want to have a better idea of the order events happened, maybe you should use another column where the number keeps incrementing. This is true no matter what DB you use.
Then you do select * from logs where... order by time_column, seq
You say milliseconds would be fine. But maybe 5 years from now when you have a faster system they won't be good enough.
Whereas having a separate column to keep track of the order might be fine, as long as you and the database does it right, and you only have one thing inserting the logs to the DB.
If you have concurrent log insertion, it can get ambiguous when something really did happen. Sometimes you might never really know...
For example if some event happens and because of that A, B, C all log that they are doing some stuff. A might log before it does stuff, and B might log after it does stuff, and C might be written in a faster language, so actually do stuff later, but end up logging before the rest.
It gets more fun - if A, B, C are all far away so that posting the logs over the network takes significant time, you might then have to add another column.
So you end up with: sequence ID, logserver time, logclient time.
To me it's just wrong that copyright (and patent) terms should be getting longer and longer.
Communications and distribution is so much better nowadays than in the old days. Progress is _supposed_ to be getting faster.
So terms should be getting shorter and shorter.
It should be considered an embarassment if anyone needed a 95 year monopoly in order to make enough money to survive. And very poor economics - a clear misallocation of resources.
Anyone who needs a 95 year monopoly in order to survive in this day and age is crap at what they do and should get another job.
Same goes for companies.
If some songwriter/composer can't write something better in 95 years, I don't see why society should encourage such people to continue in their line of work. The economists can tell you that.
It is bad that copyright and patent terms are getting longer and longer instead of getting shorter.
Nowadays communications and distribution is supposed to be so good - so terms should get shorter. If you assume a faster pace of progress, then terms should be getting shorter.
How about 7 years? Too short? Well I think most people should see that even 50 years is way too long.
Yes, main thing though is: 1) he's better than most of those CEOs out there in knowing how stuff should look, feel and operate - those other CEOs have no clue in that area, and the smart ones know it and let other people handle it, rather than pretend they are Steve Jobs. 2) There are millions of people with $$$ who like what he allows out of Apple, and willing to pay a premium for it (even if it means putting up with lack of certain features etc).
Only works if you have "taste"
on
Inside Steve's Brain
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You can emulate being a despot. You can emulate being a perfectionist.
But can you emulate _taste_?
Say what you want about Steve Jobs. To me the big difference is Steve Jobs has _taste_.
If you work for him and he yells at you because the product you designed just has the wrong curves on the corners, or too many ugly screws visible, or it's "too klunky", deep down you know that it is likely that he is _right_. And so you respect that.
And when he finally tells you it is insanely great - though that might be an exaggeration, you at least know you've made something better than a Dell;).
In contrast if it were some other CEO screaming at you. What are the odds that CEO has taste?
From what I see a lot of CEOs can't even tell good from bad, so how are they going to tell "merely good" from "insanely great"?
It's like trying to emulate a top despotic perfectionist chef, but having no taste. You can yell at your kitchen staff all you want, good luck making something great.
I personally don't think you need a despot to produce a great product, but the people in charge of making it need to know the difference between good and great, and be allowed to make it great. Most bosses don't seem to care - they want to release the product ASAP.
BTW, I've never been at Apple nor do I know people there, but I wonder sometimes if working for Apple might be a bit like being married to an abusive spouse who can be very very good at times, insanely great even;).
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So how did you like the Itanic? ;)
Because the more trees you chop down and replant to create all those boxes, the more CO2 you remove from the atmosphere.
:)
As long as you landfill the boxes aka sequester the carbon, you are removing CO2.
The AC is right. Go read it again - the AC is talking about _reflected_ light. Not looking at the light directly.
The light from typical RGB LEDs is narrow band.
A material that looks blue in sunlight could look a lot darker in the "white" LED light if it does not reflect the narrow band blue from the blue LED. It might even look black as the AC says.
"and almost all the bad ones were made in China"
;)
Were almost all the good ones were made in China too?
Many of these white LEDs are blue or UV LEDs that stimulate a phosphor coating to produce white light.
Having three Red Green Blue LEDs to create white light might produce a light that appears white to the eye, but might not have the same effect when reflected off material.
The white from the phosphor would generate more of a broad spectrum white, whereas the Red, Green and Blue LEDs would probably create spikes in the Red, Green and Blue spectrum.
So you might have a green material that appears black when you use the "RGB white" LED - just because it does not reflect the Green LED's narrow green, whereas it will appear green in the white from the phosphor white LED.
The phosphor means one more step in light conversion, and that probably means less efficiency.
600kWh a day per home seems quite high, where'd you get that figure from? 25kW sustained. That's like 25 hair dryers/airconditioners or 12 ovens.
Unless you're including the charging electric cars. Even then 40 litres of petrol is about 380 kilowatt hours. While you'd probably want to be able to fully charge your car in one day, you are unlikely to need to do it from zero to full everyday.
I suppose that's true in general.
But if you can't rewrite messy code so that it's not messy, please leave that mess in one place rather than spreading it into 3 or more _one_use_ "artificial" functions created just to "tidy" things up.
If those functions make sense to other people and not just you, then fine. Otherwise, let's forget about checkThingyA() ok?
What's so readable about having to scroll more to read code written that way? The indentation should identify the blocks already.
;)
IMO it doesn't add any more useful information that a more compact indentation style does. I prefer it more compact vertically while preserving code block indentation (don't want those perl "one liners" that are 20 code lines in one line). If I ever want the lines to be further apart vertically I can always push my nose closer to the screen, doh.
When you start adding comments you see even less of the code on one screen.
I'd rather be able to stare at more code on the screen and let my brain figure it out. A decent editor/IDE will let you identify matching braces and blocks of code.
Of course if you get paid by lines of code things might be different...
You can know how to eat without knowing how to cook.
It's silly to expect people to take time to learn how to cook before complaining that the Linux stew lacks something.
But it's fair to ignore complainers who just say "it's bad" without giving anything useful.
My suggestion is that leaders wanting to send others to die, should have to risk their own lives first for the war: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=619491&cid=24263283
This puts them in the frontline, leading the charge in spirit.
In modern times it is not necessary to have your "kings" leading the charge physically. In fact it is likely to be counterproductive.
What you should do is have leaders _lead_ the frontline in _spirit_.
Basically, if leaders are going to send troops on an _offensive_ war (not defensive) there must be a referendum on the war.
If there are not enough votes for the war, those leaders get put on deathrow.
At a convenient time later, a referendum is held to redeem each leader. Leaders that do not get enough votes get executed. For example if too many people stay at home and don't bother voting - the leaders get executed.
If it turns out later that the war was justified, a fancy ceremony is held, and the executed leaders are awarded a purple heart or equivalent, and you have people say nice things about them, cry and that sort of thing.
If it turns out later that the leaders tricked the voters, a referendum can be held (need to get enough signatories to start such a referendum, just to prevent nutters from wasting everyone elses time).
This proposal has many advantages:
1) Even leaders who don't really care about those "young men on the battlefield" will not consider starting a war lightly.
2) The soldiers will know that the leaders want a war enough to risk their own lives for it.
3) The soldiers will know that X% of the population want the war.
4) Those being attacked will know that X% of the attackers believe in the war - so they want a war, they get a war - for sufficiently high X, collateral damage becomes insignificant. They might even be justified in using WMD and other otherwise dubious tactics. If > 90% of the country attacking them want to kill them and their families, what is so wrong about using WMD as long as it does not affect neighbouring countries?
You might consider use of WMD evil, well I consider war evil. If a large majority of the people want a war, then they should get one, and too bad if they get completely wiped out in the process. Right now the problem I see is countries starting wars when most of their citizens don't actually want one.
How about this: if you have been involved in more than one road accident a year (even if it wasn't your fault), you will need to go for another driving test within X weeks. If you don't pass, you lose your license, and you need to start over again.
And the driving test needs to be good enough - must know how to merge at proper speeds, brake in wet conditions etc.
I think Singapore and China too - mobile phone users pay to make and receive calls.
Yes the system is flawed and yes it should be better- but it correctly got you most of the time.
Given such a flawed system the rational thing to do would be to limit your exposure to it - e.g. don't do lots of crimes in the first place. The more crimes you do, the higher your chance of getting caught, and the higher your chance of getting caught for something you didn't do.
If you're not one of those unfortunate blacks in the USA who keep getting caught for "driving own car while black", just stay clean and the odds of you getting jailed for crimes you did not commit will be really low.
As you will see, the sort of DNA and fingerprint testing the cops do is a _farce_. What it _might_ prove is innocence - e.g. if there is no match, then it's likely you didn't do it (note though there are genetic chimeras, which mean you have to be more careful).
If they used less fuzzy tests, the typical degraded evidence at a crime scene might not even match you _conclusively_, EVEN if it was from you. It's like if a cam got a smeared pic of you- it might look like you, but it'll look like lots of other people too.
I know cops make up evidence. Maybe not all the time, but they do. When they _really_ think you did it, they get tempted to make things up.
So the cheap DNA tests, and the "DNA databases" being crap makes things inconvenient for them.
I'm one of those weak-minded Christians, but I can see things from other POVs.
So looking from one of those POVs:
1) What percentage of the population are weak minded? I bet it's > 50%. What do you think?
2) What would you rather them believe- Fox News or the New Testament stuff or the Koran or Scientology?
If you're trying to get them to believe the "There is no God, and we have to deal with all this ourselves" - it doesn't work very well for the weak minded - they'll eventually take up some other form of religion - worship of Money, of Gaia, or something. That's the truth.
The Christianity religion has been quite competitive with the rest. I claim that it causes more good than harm (and I believe that God came up with it, but hey I'm one of those weak minded ones ).
Show me something that has caused more good over hundreds of years. Some may claim Science, Capitalism, or The Free Market is better, but they don't encourage good or bad - they just make doing some things more efficient. They can make it easier for people to do lots of evil, or to do lots of good.
So what will they choose to do? They'll follow the crowd mostly, but in the other cases their consciences and beliefs will influence them.
Some people might trust RELOADED more than they trust Ubisoft or at least whoever Ubisoft outsources their DRM to.
;).
I'd personally trust many of these "scene" hackers more than I'd trust Sony to not to try to pwn my machine.
That's not to say I'd trust them that much
I agree, I don't see why this is such a big deal.
All we need to do is bury and seal the stuff so people can't easily get in.
Say we screw up big time and billions of people die blah blah blah, and in 10K years a few people dig their way in, get exposed to toxic waste and die. It's not like millions of people will die because of that. Hard to imagine a long queue of people lining up to expose themselves to the waste.
So how about we focus on not getting billions of people killed instead? Let's get some priorities straight here.
You know what's a good way to defend yourself from 12 or even 40 people?
Run.
After all in most cases, it's nothing really that personal - not like they will hunt you down weeks or months later to kill you. It's just at that very moment, they might kill you.
Now if you had to defend someone else then running might not work.
Looks like GP was right.
;).
Perhaps one of the many reasons the homicide figure is lower is because they can't kill their hated person twice
Based on the statistics it makes more sense to have a burglary/robbery offender list rather than a sex offender list.
Anyway, putting people on such lists is wrong - once they've done their sentence, you have to let them out.
If a country doesn't have confidence in criminals turning over a new leaf, they should do what China does and execute people for all sorts of crimes - e.g. theft, "hooliganism".
"it costs more to provide the cellphone service, so calls must cost more"
;) ).
Well nowadays that does not appear to be true anymore.
Seems like in the developing nations it is cheaper to set up cellphone service than pull copper (that'll probably get stolen the next day. The new face of copper mining - "Oh was that yours? It's mine now"
Actually if you want to have a better idea of the order events happened, maybe you should use another column where the number keeps incrementing. This is true no matter what DB you use.
... order by time_column, seq
Then you do select * from logs where
You say milliseconds would be fine. But maybe 5 years from now when you have a faster system they won't be good enough.
Whereas having a separate column to keep track of the order might be fine, as long as you and the database does it right, and you only have one thing inserting the logs to the DB.
If you have concurrent log insertion, it can get ambiguous when something really did happen. Sometimes you might never really know...
For example if some event happens and because of that A, B, C all log that they are doing some stuff. A might log before it does stuff, and B might log after it does stuff, and C might be written in a faster language, so actually do stuff later, but end up logging before the rest.
It gets more fun - if A, B, C are all far away so that posting the logs over the network takes significant time, you might then have to add another column.
So you end up with: sequence ID, logserver time, logclient time.
Whoopee.
To me it's just wrong that copyright (and patent) terms should be getting longer and longer.
Communications and distribution is so much better nowadays than in the old days.
Progress is _supposed_ to be getting faster.
So terms should be getting shorter and shorter.
It should be considered an embarassment if anyone needed a 95 year monopoly in order to make enough money to survive. And very poor economics - a clear misallocation of resources.
This 95 year thing is bad, maybe even evil.
Anyone who needs a 95 year monopoly in order to survive in this day and age is crap at what they do and should get another job.
Same goes for companies.
If some songwriter/composer can't write something better in 95 years, I don't see why society should encourage such people to continue in their line of work. The economists can tell you that.
It is bad that copyright and patent terms are getting longer and longer instead of getting shorter.
Nowadays communications and distribution is supposed to be so good - so terms should get shorter.
If you assume a faster pace of progress, then terms should be getting shorter.
How about 7 years? Too short? Well I think most people should see that even 50 years is way too long.
95 years is ridiculous.
"Sometimes, it's good...others, maybe not."
Yes, main thing though is:
1) he's better than most of those CEOs out there in knowing how stuff should look, feel and operate - those other CEOs have no clue in that area, and the smart ones know it and let other people handle it, rather than pretend they are Steve Jobs.
2) There are millions of people with $$$ who like what he allows out of Apple, and willing to pay a premium for it (even if it means putting up with lack of certain features etc).
You can emulate being a despot. You can emulate being a perfectionist.
;).
;).
But can you emulate _taste_?
Say what you want about Steve Jobs. To me the big difference is Steve Jobs has _taste_.
If you work for him and he yells at you because the product you designed just has the wrong curves on the corners, or too many ugly screws visible, or it's "too klunky", deep down you know that it is likely that he is _right_. And so you respect that.
And when he finally tells you it is insanely great - though that might be an exaggeration, you at least know you've made something better than a Dell
In contrast if it were some other CEO screaming at you. What are the odds that CEO has taste?
From what I see a lot of CEOs can't even tell good from bad, so how are they going to tell "merely good" from "insanely great"?
It's like trying to emulate a top despotic perfectionist chef, but having no taste. You can yell at your kitchen staff all you want, good luck making something great.
I personally don't think you need a despot to produce a great product, but the people in charge of making it need to know the difference between good and great, and be allowed to make it great. Most bosses don't seem to care - they want to release the product ASAP.
BTW, I've never been at Apple nor do I know people there, but I wonder sometimes if working for Apple might be a bit like being married to an abusive spouse who can be very very good at times, insanely great even