I had some buffer overflow problems in my mail client. Silly me. I ran splint and considered hiring another programmer (preferably one who knows what splint is and how to use it).
Now I've changed my mind. Instead of adding engineers who sit at computers and write C, I'm going to add beurocrats who look over their shoulders and produce Word documents.
Fortune 500, here I come!
[this post is close-captioned for the sarcasm impaired. All the previous was SARCASM.]
It's still a power of two. People will have an easier time grasping it. People are used to CPUs doubling registers, addressable memory, etc. so doubling switch state possibilities seems like a natch.
Trinary, or any base not a power of two, will just wierd people out.
The best thing to do is make it as transparent as possible. An 8-quadbit register is the same as a 16-bit register. From the assembly programmer's POV, it should be possible to treat it the same way.
Clintons economic coattails? You realize that the dotcom crash and recession started at the tail end of clinton's administration right?
RTFP! Here is what I said in case you are too lazy to click back:
Then again, when your economic coat tails are really just there because of legacies from previous admins (tax climate and internet boom fueled by DEFENSE research spending which is the one form of government spending that Democrats don't like), who's to blame?
Regardless of where you place the credit (or blame) for the dotcom boom-n-bust, I don't see how I implied that economic conditions don't lag the leadership. The "coat tails", nevertheless, still have political meaning even if they don't have economic meaning. So there is no incongruity for me to believe that the economy lags the administration and to also believe that Clinton had "coat tails" that Gore could have ridden.
Texas? Maybe. Tennessee? Or Arkansas? I mean... if you couldn't campaign effectively on Clinton's economic coat tails, do you really deserve to win? Then again, when your economic coat tails are really just there because of legacies from previous admins (tax climate and internet boom fueled by DEFENSE research spending which is the one form of government spending that Democrats don't like), who's to blame? When your predecessor encourages a weak foreign policy and you get slimed by his corruption (cough..Chinese missiles...Loral Systems...cough...impoverished monks who donate millions...Cough!) Who's fault is that?
Pity. If Gore had remained a senator, not been part of Clinton's corrupt administration, and somehow won the presidency, I think the interplay of his obsessive environmentalism against Congressional lobbyists would have made for some interesting and productive compromises. Not that I would have voted for him, but I wouldn't have been nearly as pissed off about Gore being there as some Democrats are about GWB being there.
At least all the Northerners can still be smug. All the players in the controversy are Southerners!
It sounds like maybe you just needed a heavy-duty bulb. I learned about these when I used to work on cars. You know the lights that mechanics use that have a metal cylinder and a wire screen covering the bulb; the ones you hook on your hood?
When I first got it, I screwed regular bulbs into it, and they kept burning out. I thought maybe something was wrong with it, but the guy at the auto-parts store said "you need a heavy duty bulb". I put that in. No problems after that.
Heavy-duty incandescents cost a little more, but it's not ridiculous.
What causes the early burn-out?
Vibration.
Now, it's possible that the placement of your fixture is such that slamming the door causes vibration that jars the bulb. Ordinary bulbs just can't tolerate much vibration.
Flourescent is probably more vibration tolerent simply because you don't have those delicate tungsten filaments; but if the fixture was vibrating, I wouldn't be surprised if that impacted the life of flourescents somehow.
, Asimo even attended the official dinner. Apparently
You forgot to add that he drank a case of beer and belched flames. Called on his questionable behavior, he turned to the Czech ambassador and instructed him to "bite my shiny metal ass".
The Prime Minister apologized, informing guests that the diplomacy subroutines hadn't been quite worked out yet.
Where did I say 12 was a luxury and that you should only expect 4? I said 12 will take care of almost everything. I said you need 12. I didn't say it was a luxury. I said that most people use their systems in a manner such that 12 is all they will ever need, and that many need only 4. In other words, don't be one of those people that puts words in other people's mouths. That might have passed as rhetoric in college when you had to walk half-way accross campus and read microfiche to check facts. When what I originally said is just a click away, putting words in my mouth just makes you look silly, not me.
Linux boxes for servers, as that acclerates so will the desktop use of linux
By that same line of reasoning, most browsers should be running *NIX because most of the servers on the Internet run it.
Four years. That's how long I've been on Slashdot (yikes!) and this sounds like the same stuff I heard when I started, and *NIX people still don't get it. They didn't get it when Linux on the desktop was unthinkable, and they still don't get it today.
What is it they don't get?
They don't get the fact that uptime doesn't matter for desktops like it does for servers. They don't get that Windows is a desktop OS.
Yes, you don't want it crashing every five minutes; but you don't need a whole friggin year either.
What do you need?
You need 12 hours. That's it.
Why?
Because that's about as long as most office workers will run their boxes. Most will at least log out after that, and as long as you log out you might as well reboot.
Many office workers require uptime considerably less. Many home users only need about 4 (dinner to bedtime).
As anybody who has used a FS/OSS desktop can attest, getting a desktop stable is no easy task. It's not like an Apache server, which just sits there and spends most of its time spewing files over the network.
Desktops are continuously interacting with the users. Desktop applications are written by a lot more people, using a lot of different languages. Keeping an interactive desktop up is at least an order of magnitude harder than keeping a server up. There's just a lot less control over things, and a lot more complexity.
For MS to waste time on ludicrously long uptimes for desktops just doesn't make sense.
Yes. It's nice. Yes. A "safety factor" means that more people are getting the 12 hours they need, and a few geeks who use Windows for long uptime apps (which is kinda like using a wrench to pound nails) are getting what they want. Terrific. But it's not critical to the success of MS.
Now, security, resistance to all these silly viruses, that is important to their long term success. Fixing that will be hard enough without worrying about uptime.
So in a roundabout way I think we agree more than we disagree. The user interface is less important. I personaly always roll back my settings to the simplest, cleanest, interface, which looks a lot like '95. The interface was done a long time ago. Uptime is nice, but not too important. Getting rid of the viruses is. Licensing that doesn't presume guilt would be nice too.
I haven't been "texted" about any movies; but every reviewer has panned Gigli.
The Hulk didn't appeal to me because... well... I used to watch the series when I was a kid back in the 70s. I guess I got my Hulk fix.
Charlie's Angels? Don't blame texting. Blame JPEG.:) I mean, if that's what you want, why sit through some lame movie for 2 hours? Sex? Yeah, we got sex. We got air and water too. You gotta package it better, or maybe... (gasp) add some plot. Charlie's Angels is to sex what municipal is to water. That, and most of today's moviegoers don't remember Disco first hand, and therefore don't give a rats rear end about Farrah or any of those other now pruny women.
Now, Gigli? I dunno, except that apparently it sucked so bad that it created a persistant low pressure system over the eastern US, giving us unusually high rainfall totals this Summer.
And despite all that rain, nobody wanted to go to the cinema. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why.
Alot of homeless people are paranoid. Track them and feed their paranoia even more. Take away their ability to get aid without being tracked, and what are the alternatives? Theft, robbery, drug dealing, fraud, and other types of property crime.
So then where do they go? Jail.
I wager that the true cost of this program, both social and financial, far outweigh any benefits. As a tax payer, I protest this as an abuse of my money.
We already have the beginning of a distributed power system where industrial customers cogenerate their power. Nevermind hydrogen. It's a red herring. It's just another way to store energy, with advantages and disadvantages just like all the others.
I don't think it will take 30 years to scale cogenerating down to home use. IIRC, GE introduced some cogenerating appliances for home use a couple years ago. There's was no big push on it, but the tech isn't lacking to get these things in the home.
What's needed (as usual) is the right kind of marketing. It's a bit more expensive at the outset to set up cogenerating from your house, and there's some red tape with the electric company, but solar people have been selling back to the grid for years. At optimal times, some solar homes actually get credits on their bills.
In our area, I think the best way to sell this would be "if the power goes out, you've got a clean, quiet natural gas powered backup generator in your basement".
Wouldn't RFID be better for this? A system of cameras and optical recognition is very complicated when all it boils down to is "card dealt to player".
You might have to tune the RFID sigal so that it's weak enough to only trigger within certain parts of the table, or perhaps trigger on only the strongest signal, or perhaps the table would be able to read the position of each card by triangulating signal. Then, it's just a matter of matching the player to where they are sitting at the table. You still need a camera for that, but all you have to do is store a simple video of the player.
Saddam knew, (as does Bush), that it's hard to repress a citizenry when they are armed.
I suppose that's why he handed out weapons before the war. Of course he didn't hand them out to everybody--just the Sunni minority, but that's still an awful lot of people running around with weapons. Ammo is another matter, but I'm sure they could get it. You're not trying to tell me that ammo is unattainable there, are you? Next thing you're going to try and tell me that I can't get marijuana in the US.
Anyway, all of that modern infrastructure, (Power, telecommunications, water, sewage), was blasted out of existence by the invading American forces and it was replaced by. . . You guessed it; Nothing
Infrastructure during Gulf II was not targeted (unlike Gulf I where it was). Saddam loyalists shut off the power grid shortly before troops enterred Baghdad. Looters did the rest. Loyalists continue to play havoc with rebuilding efforts, yet despite their bombing of a critical oil pipeline into Turkey, the first oil still got through (!).
Would the infrastructure be better had we not invaded? Without a doubt. As with Mousallini, the "trains ran on time" under Saddam.
Now, a lot of what I said was bitter humor, poking at the ugly side of things to rile people up. Just as no cable channel presents the whole truth, no commentary presents the whole truth either. Indeed there are Iraqis who didn't loot. We've found unlikely allies in otherwise hostile clerics who urged people to return looted property. In other words, of course the Iraqis are not monolithic. However, I defy you to find any video of people in the US doing the kind of AK-47 firing into the air thing that you routinely see in the middle east. Such scenes characterize the ugly side of their culture, just as Jerry Springer and Black urban riots characterize our ugly side. Unless of course you are suggesting that such videos and photos are faked, in which case I can safely forget about you and put you on the same shelf as the "moon landings were faked" people.
I think we can fix this problem if we all run out into the street and fire AK-47s into the air randomly. I mean, that's what the Iraqis do and they live in the 3rd world where power outages are much more common. So, they must know how to solve these kinds of problems. Oh yeah, and don't forget to chant "Death To America" and blame "the occupiers".
It may not be as effective or brave as volunteering to guard a transmission line or organizing your local community to chip in and purchase a generator so the frail can have AC, but it will help you blow off steam.
Seriously, I wonder how this will play in Iraq. Will it fuel the anti-American sentiment, e.g., "those incompetent bastards can't even keep their own grid running so they should just get out" or will it give them an appreciation for the difficulty of maintaining such a system in a war zone? Will they learn to understand the importance of the volunteer spirit and be shamed by the fact that most New Yorkers, people not reputed for their civility, are generally not tearing their city apart?
That's what we get for being first movers on the electricity thing. All that old copper from the 19th century is out of date. In Asia and other developing parts of the world, all the electricity is cellular.
This sounds like it might be a deliberate cable-to-broadcast gateway. There was something similar in the apartment I lived in 2nd year of college.
However, I think ours was accidental due to lousy wiring of the cable. I got CNN, TBS and a few other channels through the air without paying. The reception wasn't clean, but it was watchable. There was also a strange noise on part of the FM radio band. These signals totally disappeared if you drove beyond spitting distance of the apartment.
In fact, if the sequence [1,2,3,4,5,6] didn't occur then something would be wrong. The "expected value" for the occurance of this is one in a million, assuming that 0-9 is the range we are talking about for each element. That may sound like long odds, but when you grab millions and millions of numbers you expect to see it 1s and 1s of times.
Let's see... umm... A MS basher is someone who believes that half the bugs belong to MS. A MS apologist is someone who believes half the bugs belong to somebody else.
Of course if you want to avoid emotional implications when describing the glass, you say "it's 50% water and 50% air". Likewise for this, except...
If half the *code* in your system is written by somebody else, and they are responsable for half the bugs, then that tells you that you and the other guy are equally competent.
Of course, you can spin those statistics anyway you like to suit your needs. Some programs are historicly more difficult to write than others. You could evaluate binary bytes, LOC, or number of binary files to get the spin you want.
I'm willing to wager that MS and its partners are equally competent, since they draw on similar pools of talent. If there is any significant differential, things will tend to regress to the mean of proportional bugginess. For example, if a given vendor always writes buggy code they will eventually be replaced. If MS can't write something, they will eventually buy a company that can.
Yeah, but you can plug a Mac into an alien space ship the size of a city, type a few simple commands, and bring down the entire alien infrastructure. Until they can do that, Intel chips are still 2nd best.
...that the insertion of extra vowels is used to indicate that the speaker is Brittish, or at the very least, not from the USA.
In particular the spellings of "flavor" and "color" are used to convey the nationality of the 1st person, much as pronouns are used to convey the gender of the 3rd person.
And of course don't forget that these two words are spelled "flozbit" and "calkak" to indidate Turkish speakers of English.
It all depends on where you draw your control volume boundary (or mass), and how you define efficiency. If you define efficiency as energy into the device divided by heat energy into the room, then efficiencies > 100% are indeed possible with heat pumps as you describe.
I didn't get into this, but I also believe some electric heaters are far less than 100% efficient. In particular, the radiant heaters have poor efficiencies. How can that be?
I define my control mass as the air in the room. Radiant heaters heat anything with LOS to the beam. Much of that includes the walls and the floor. On a concrete slab, the floor can be a very effective heat sink. Windows are particularly bad.
The thing you notice about radiant heaters is that you get warm standing right in front of one, but as soon as you turn it off you get cold fairly quickly. Some radiant heaters add fans to help transfer some heat to the air, but that makes accoustic noise, and the transfer is over a very small surface area. Most of the heat is still radiant.
When I lived in a poorly heated apartment, I bought an oil-filled "electric radiator". This type of heater is cold when you first turn it on, which is probably frustrating for a lot of people, and discourages them from getting one. However, it has a large surface area and transfers all its heat directly to the air. Since it's sitting on the floor the heat rises and you get convection around the room too. Loss only occurs when heat is transferred from air-to-surface which is much less efficient than sending infrared beams directly to the surface, since only a small portion of the warm air contacts the walls at any given time, whereas the infrared beams go straight to the walls.
I would close the door to my room and 45 minutes later it would be warm and toasty. My room-mates with their beam heaters never had that kind of warmth. Better yet, since the air in my room was heated, it would retain the warmth long after the heater was off.
I used an electric timer to turn the heater on at 6 AM every morning. When I woke up at 7 I had no "morning shivers". The only problem was the low amps in our old place. Breakers tripped routinely... ah... those were the days.
I still have the heater boxed up in the basement of my current, adequately heated abode.
So pay heed young college students living off-campus! If you are in a cold old house like I was, stay away from those stupid little radiant heaters.
Slashdot Mirror
I had some buffer overflow problems in my mail client. Silly me. I ran splint and considered hiring another programmer (preferably one who knows what splint is and how to use it).
Now I've changed my mind. Instead of adding engineers who sit at computers and write C, I'm going to add beurocrats who look over their shoulders and produce Word documents.
Fortune 500, here I come!
[this post is close-captioned for the sarcasm impaired. All the previous was SARCASM.]
It's still a power of two. People will have an easier time grasping it. People are used to CPUs doubling registers, addressable memory, etc. so doubling switch state possibilities seems like a natch.
Trinary, or any base not a power of two, will just wierd people out.
The best thing to do is make it as transparent as possible. An 8-quadbit register is the same as a 16-bit register. From the assembly programmer's POV, it should be possible to treat it the same way.
Clintons economic coattails? You realize that the dotcom crash and recession started at the tail end of clinton's administration right?
RTFP! Here is what I said in case you are too lazy to click back:
Then again, when your economic coat tails are really just there because of legacies from previous admins (tax climate and internet boom fueled by DEFENSE research spending which is the one form of government spending that Democrats don't like), who's to blame?
Regardless of where you place the credit (or blame) for the dotcom boom-n-bust, I don't see how I implied that economic conditions don't lag the leadership. The "coat tails", nevertheless, still have political meaning even if they don't have economic meaning. So there is no incongruity for me to believe that the economy lags the administration and to also believe that Clinton had "coat tails" that Gore could have ridden.
Texas? Maybe. Tennessee? Or Arkansas? I mean... if you couldn't campaign effectively on Clinton's economic coat tails, do you really deserve to win? Then again, when your economic coat tails are really just there because of legacies from previous admins (tax climate and internet boom fueled by DEFENSE research spending which is the one form of government spending that Democrats don't like), who's to blame? When your predecessor encourages a weak foreign policy and you get slimed by his corruption (cough..Chinese missiles...Loral Systems...cough...impoverished monks who donate millions...Cough!) Who's fault is that?
Pity. If Gore had remained a senator, not been part of Clinton's corrupt administration, and somehow won the presidency, I think the interplay of his obsessive environmentalism against Congressional lobbyists would have made for some interesting and productive compromises. Not that I would have voted for him, but I wouldn't have been nearly as pissed off about Gore being there as some Democrats are about GWB being there.
At least all the Northerners can still be smug. All the players in the controversy are Southerners!
I used to change my porch light every month
It sounds like maybe you just needed a heavy-duty bulb. I learned about these when I used to work on cars. You know the lights that mechanics use that have a metal cylinder and a wire screen covering the bulb; the ones you hook on your hood?
When I first got it, I screwed regular bulbs into it, and they kept burning out. I thought maybe something was wrong with it, but the guy at the auto-parts store said "you need a heavy duty bulb". I put that in. No problems after that.
Heavy-duty incandescents cost a little more, but it's not ridiculous.
What causes the early burn-out?
Vibration.
Now, it's possible that the placement of your fixture is such that slamming the door causes vibration that jars the bulb. Ordinary bulbs just can't tolerate much vibration.
Flourescent is probably more vibration tolerent simply because you don't have those delicate tungsten filaments; but if the fixture was vibrating, I wouldn't be surprised if that impacted the life of flourescents somehow.
Grrrr... Just when I thought I found a job that couldn't be H1-B'd, automated, or downsized. Guess I'll just have to steal stuff.
, Asimo even attended the official dinner. Apparently
You forgot to add that he drank a case of beer and belched flames. Called on his questionable behavior, he turned to the Czech ambassador and instructed him to "bite my shiny metal ass".
The Prime Minister apologized, informing guests that the diplomacy subroutines hadn't been quite worked out yet.
may certainly be a crime
Although I unequivocally vascilate in my tentative resolve to post this, I must probably agree with you.
Just remember: You can't let too much water out of the nuclear reactor.*
(*from a classic bit with Ed Asner on SNL)
12 hours is a luxury and 'WE' don't get it????
Where did I say 12 was a luxury and that you should only expect 4? I said 12 will take care of almost everything. I said you need 12. I didn't say it was a luxury. I said that most people use their systems in a manner such that 12 is all they will ever need, and that many need only 4. In other words, don't be one of those people that puts words in other people's mouths. That might have passed as rhetoric in college when you had to walk half-way accross campus and read microfiche to check facts. When what I originally said is just a click away, putting words in my mouth just makes you look silly, not me.
Linux boxes for servers, as that acclerates so will the desktop use of linux
By that same line of reasoning, most browsers should be running *NIX because most of the servers on the Internet run it.
In other words, you still don't get it.
Desktop!=Server
It's so simple, but people on /. don't get it.
Four years. That's how long I've been on Slashdot (yikes!) and this sounds like the same stuff I heard when I started, and *NIX people still don't get it. They didn't get it when Linux on the desktop was unthinkable, and they still don't get it today.
What is it they don't get?
They don't get the fact that uptime doesn't matter for desktops like it does for servers. They don't get that Windows is a desktop OS.
Yes, you don't want it crashing every five minutes; but you don't need a whole friggin year either.
What do you need?
You need 12 hours. That's it.
Why?
Because that's about as long as most office workers will run their boxes. Most will at least log out after that, and as long as you log out you might as well reboot.
Many office workers require uptime considerably less. Many home users only need about 4 (dinner to bedtime).
As anybody who has used a FS/OSS desktop can attest, getting a desktop stable is no easy task. It's not like an Apache server, which just sits there and spends most of its time spewing files over the network.
Desktops are continuously interacting with the users. Desktop applications are written by a lot more people, using a lot of different languages. Keeping an interactive desktop up is at least an order of magnitude harder than keeping a server up. There's just a lot less control over things, and a lot more complexity.
For MS to waste time on ludicrously long uptimes for desktops just doesn't make sense.
Yes. It's nice. Yes. A "safety factor" means that more people are getting the 12 hours they need, and a few geeks who use Windows for long uptime apps (which is kinda like using a wrench to pound nails) are getting what they want. Terrific. But it's not critical to the success of MS.
Now, security, resistance to all these silly viruses, that is important to their long term success. Fixing that will be hard enough without worrying about uptime.
So in a roundabout way I think we agree more than we disagree. The user interface is less important. I personaly always roll back my settings to the simplest, cleanest, interface, which looks a lot like '95. The interface was done a long time ago. Uptime is nice, but not too important. Getting rid of the viruses is. Licensing that doesn't presume guilt would be nice too.
I haven't been "texted" about any movies; but every reviewer has panned Gigli.
The Hulk didn't appeal to me because... well... I used to watch the series when I was a kid back in the 70s. I guess I got my Hulk fix.
Charlie's Angels? Don't blame texting. Blame JPEG. :) I mean, if that's what you want, why sit through some lame movie for 2 hours? Sex? Yeah, we got sex. We got air and water too. You gotta package it better, or maybe... (gasp) add some plot. Charlie's Angels is to sex what municipal is to water. That, and most of today's moviegoers don't remember Disco first hand, and therefore don't give a rats rear end about Farrah or any of those other now pruny women.
Now, Gigli? I dunno, except that apparently it sucked so bad that it created a persistant low pressure system over the eastern US, giving us unusually high rainfall totals this Summer.
And despite all that rain, nobody wanted to go to the cinema. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why.
Excellent post.
Alot of homeless people are paranoid. Track them and feed their paranoia even more. Take away their ability to get aid without being tracked, and what are the alternatives? Theft, robbery, drug dealing, fraud, and other types of property crime.
So then where do they go? Jail.
I wager that the true cost of this program, both social and financial, far outweigh any benefits. As a tax payer, I protest this as an abuse of my money.
We already have the beginning of a distributed power system where industrial customers cogenerate their power. Nevermind hydrogen. It's a red herring. It's just another way to store energy, with advantages and disadvantages just like all the others.
I don't think it will take 30 years to scale cogenerating down to home use. IIRC, GE introduced some cogenerating appliances for home use a couple years ago. There's was no big push on it, but the tech isn't lacking to get these things in the home.
What's needed (as usual) is the right kind of marketing. It's a bit more expensive at the outset to set up cogenerating from your house, and there's some red tape with the electric company, but solar people have been selling back to the grid for years. At optimal times, some solar homes actually get credits on their bills.
In our area, I think the best way to sell this would be "if the power goes out, you've got a clean, quiet natural gas powered backup generator in your basement".
Wouldn't RFID be better for this? A system of cameras and optical recognition is very complicated when all it boils down to is "card dealt to player".
You might have to tune the RFID sigal so that it's weak enough to only trigger within certain parts of the table, or perhaps trigger on only the strongest signal, or perhaps the table would be able to read the position of each card by triangulating signal. Then, it's just a matter of matching the player to where they are sitting at the table. You still need a camera for that, but all you have to do is store a simple video of the player.
Geniuses like Tesla are like gold mines. They produce as much crap as anybody else, it's just that their crap has nuggets of gold in it.
Saddam knew, (as does Bush), that it's hard to repress a citizenry when they are armed.
I suppose that's why he handed out weapons before the war. Of course he didn't hand them out to everybody--just the Sunni minority, but that's still an awful lot of people running around with weapons. Ammo is another matter, but I'm sure they could get it. You're not trying to tell me that ammo is unattainable there, are you? Next thing you're going to try and tell me that I can't get marijuana in the US.
Anyway, all of that modern infrastructure, (Power, telecommunications, water, sewage), was blasted out of existence by the invading American forces and it was replaced by. . . You guessed it; Nothing
Infrastructure during Gulf II was not targeted (unlike Gulf I where it was). Saddam loyalists shut off the power grid shortly before troops enterred Baghdad. Looters did the rest. Loyalists continue to play havoc with rebuilding efforts, yet despite their bombing of a critical oil pipeline into Turkey, the first oil still got through (!).
Would the infrastructure be better had we not invaded? Without a doubt. As with Mousallini, the "trains ran on time" under Saddam.
Now, a lot of what I said was bitter humor, poking at the ugly side of things to rile people up. Just as no cable channel presents the whole truth, no commentary presents the whole truth either. Indeed there are Iraqis who didn't loot. We've found unlikely allies in otherwise hostile clerics who urged people to return looted property. In other words, of course the Iraqis are not monolithic. However, I defy you to find any video of people in the US doing the kind of AK-47 firing into the air thing that you routinely see in the middle east. Such scenes characterize the ugly side of their culture, just as Jerry Springer and Black urban riots characterize our ugly side. Unless of course you are suggesting that such videos and photos are faked, in which case I can safely forget about you and put you on the same shelf as the "moon landings were faked" people.
I think we can fix this problem if we all run out into the street and fire AK-47s into the air randomly. I mean, that's what the Iraqis do and they live in the 3rd world where power outages are much more common. So, they must know how to solve these kinds of problems. Oh yeah, and don't forget to chant "Death To America" and blame "the occupiers".
It may not be as effective or brave as volunteering to guard a transmission line or organizing your local community to chip in and purchase a generator so the frail can have AC, but it will help you blow off steam.
Seriously, I wonder how this will play in Iraq. Will it fuel the anti-American sentiment, e.g., "those incompetent bastards can't even keep their own grid running so they should just get out" or will it give them an appreciation for the difficulty of maintaining such a system in a war zone? Will they learn to understand the importance of the volunteer spirit and be shamed by the fact that most New Yorkers, people not reputed for their civility, are generally not tearing their city apart?
The cynic in me says they won't.
If any Iraqi can read this, prove me wrong.
That's what we get for being first movers on the electricity thing. All that old copper from the 19th century is out of date. In Asia and other developing parts of the world, all the electricity is cellular.
This sounds like it might be a deliberate cable-to-broadcast gateway. There was something similar in the apartment I lived in 2nd year of college.
However, I think ours was accidental due to lousy wiring of the cable. I got CNN, TBS and a few other channels through the air without paying. The reception wasn't clean, but it was watchable. There was also a strange noise on part of the FM radio band. These signals totally disappeared if you drove beyond spitting distance of the apartment.
In fact, if the sequence [1,2,3,4,5,6] didn't occur then something would be wrong. The "expected value" for the occurance of this is one in a million, assuming that 0-9 is the range we are talking about for each element. That may sound like long odds, but when you grab millions and millions of numbers you expect to see it 1s and 1s of times.
Let's see... umm... A MS basher is someone who believes that half the bugs belong to MS. A MS apologist is someone who believes half the bugs belong to somebody else.
Of course if you want to avoid emotional implications when describing the glass, you say "it's 50% water and 50% air". Likewise for this, except...
If half the *code* in your system is written by somebody else, and they are responsable for half the bugs, then that tells you that you and the other guy are equally competent.
Of course, you can spin those statistics anyway you like to suit your needs. Some programs are historicly more difficult to write than others. You could evaluate binary bytes, LOC, or number of binary files to get the spin you want.
I'm willing to wager that MS and its partners are equally competent, since they draw on similar pools of talent. If there is any significant differential, things will tend to regress to the mean of proportional bugginess. For example, if a given vendor always writes buggy code they will eventually be replaced. If MS can't write something, they will eventually buy a company that can.
Yeah, but you can plug a Mac into an alien space ship the size of a city, type a few simple commands, and bring down the entire alien infrastructure. Until they can do that, Intel chips are still 2nd best.
Dead straight serious until about halfway down, then a very casual reference to sex with CmdrTaco, then it continues on in the serious tone.
I don't think I've ever seen one quite like it.
Best of all, he pulled up to at least +4 before anyone recognized the troll.
Mod as you will, but sometimes trolls are a work of art, and this one clearly is a nice troll.
...that the insertion of extra vowels is used to indicate that the speaker is Brittish, or at the very least, not from the USA.
In particular the spellings of "flavor" and "color" are used to convey the nationality of the 1st person, much as pronouns are used to convey the gender of the 3rd person.
And of course don't forget that these two words are spelled "flozbit" and "calkak" to indidate Turkish speakers of English.
It all depends on where you draw your control volume boundary (or mass), and how you define efficiency. If you define efficiency as energy into the device divided by heat energy into the room, then efficiencies > 100% are indeed possible with heat pumps as you describe.
I didn't get into this, but I also believe some electric heaters are far less than 100% efficient. In particular, the radiant heaters have poor efficiencies. How can that be?
I define my control mass as the air in the room. Radiant heaters heat anything with LOS to the beam. Much of that includes the walls and the floor. On a concrete slab, the floor can be a very effective heat sink. Windows are particularly bad.
The thing you notice about radiant heaters is that you get warm standing right in front of one, but as soon as you turn it off you get cold fairly quickly. Some radiant heaters add fans to help transfer some heat to the air, but that makes accoustic noise, and the transfer is over a very small surface area. Most of the heat is still radiant.
When I lived in a poorly heated apartment, I bought an oil-filled "electric radiator". This type of heater is cold when you first turn it on, which is probably frustrating for a lot of people, and discourages them from getting one. However, it has a large surface area and transfers all its heat directly to the air. Since it's sitting on the floor the heat rises and you get convection around the room too. Loss only occurs when heat is transferred from air-to-surface which is much less efficient than sending infrared beams directly to the surface, since only a small portion of the warm air contacts the walls at any given time, whereas the infrared beams go straight to the walls.
I would close the door to my room and 45 minutes later it would be warm and toasty. My room-mates with their beam heaters never had that kind of warmth. Better yet, since the air in my room was heated, it would retain the warmth long after the heater was off.
I used an electric timer to turn the heater on at 6 AM every morning. When I woke up at 7 I had no "morning shivers". The only problem was the low amps in our old place. Breakers tripped routinely... ah... those were the days.
I still have the heater boxed up in the basement of my current, adequately heated abode.
So pay heed young college students living off-campus! If you are in a cold old house like I was, stay away from those stupid little radiant heaters.