The trick is that the shutter isn't doing the work; the flash is. It's possible to make very short flash pulses; I think you can make them even shorter than the 1/50,000 second mentioned in the article. As long as most of the light for the photograph comes from the brief but intense flash, the ability to freeze action depends on the flash speed rather than the shutter speed. You actually need to make sure the shutter speed is slow enough that the shutter is guaranteed to be all the way open when the flash triggers (X-sync speed or slower), or only the area behind the open part of the shutter will be exposed. Controlling things using the flash also guarantees that the multiple cameras used for 3D photography will all be taking their pictures at exactly the same instant.
Also note that the limitation you're talking about only applies to focal plane shutters (i.e. those right in front of the film or sensor). It's also possible to use a central shutter that's located right next to the iris of the lens. Central shutters open and close like the lens aperture, but block the lens completely when they're closed. Like the lens aperture, they block light to all parts of the focal plane more or less equally as they open and close, so they don't induce any of the motion effects that focal plane shutters do. Central shutters have their own problems- it's hard to make them work for very short shutter speeds, and they have limited efficiency when you use them that way because they're only completely open for part of the time- but they do eliminate focal plane shutter artifacts and allow you to flash sync at any available shutter speed.
Easy: Economics. You have similar, if not greater, problems conducting controlled experiments, especially in macroeconomics, and there's even more money and politics involved. Economics winds up being closer to theology than it is to science, even though it's something that ought to be amenable to the scientific method.
If you find a journal that is reputable and like it, then "sign it".
Something similar is already formalized in academic publishing. When an author trusts an individual article, he'll cite it as a reference in his own articles. Articles that are important can be cited hundreds or thousands of times, while trivial ones may never be cited at all. If you take all the articles in a journal and see how many times they've been cited on average*, it gives you a good idea of consensus opinion of the quality of the journal. This is the basis of measures like the Impact Factor.
*You may wish to use some method of averaging other than taking the arithmetic mean, which can be skewed by a handful of highly cited papers.
The whole point of forking is that there's something you don't like about the project you're forking from. As long as that's a technical decision rather than a political one, supporting both old and new versions undermines that technical justification, since it sticks you with all the problems of both versions. Not to mention that it adds the complications of making swapping possible. It's a terrible, terrible idea.
Or user stupidity erases the vital data? Or malware starts corrupting your files? Or a disaster destroys the whole computer?
RAID is a great solution to hard drive failure, but it doesn't cover all of the other things that might go wrong. For that, you need a proper off-line backup that can protect you against user or OS problems, ideally one that's located far enough away to recover your data in the event of a disaster. RAID is best in addition to, not as a replacement for, true backups.
You can specify the versions of Android your app will work with. Developers set upper bounds and then forget to update them
But that doesn't make any sense. If Android is so amazingly backward compatible, why even bother specifying the highest compatible version? If you are going to have one, why let the developer set it- and get it wrong so often because they don't bother to check- rather than having the Play Store check compatibility with newer versions of Android as they come out? It's just a mistake waiting to happen.
The most obvious example is Flash, which won't load through the Play store onto my devices running 4.2. That may be Google refusing to install it rather than a true incompatibility, but for the average user the effect is the same: an app that worked on their old device doesn't work on their newer one. The same thing is true of some games.
Android is completely backwards-compatible, so an application you wrote for Android 1.0 or 1.6 will still work on Android 3.x or Android 4.2 (without any changes).
That's odd, because I keep encountering apps that worked on older devices that claim they won't work on my Android 4.2 devices. Maybe that's a certification issue rather than a real compatibility problem, but it shows that upgrading isn't 100% perfect.
Yes. It's because there's lots of iron ore there. It has nothing to do with geological stability, though Minnesota is nicely stable. Of course that stability means that what passes for a mountain there is pretty laughable.
We have no earthquakes, hurricanes, and our buildings don't mysteriously vanish into holes in the ground.
Yes, but you do have floods, blizzards, and pestilential mosquitoes in the summer. Your winters are so miserable that people literally live in giant shopping malls so they don't have to go outside.
We have access to the largest reservoir of fresh water in the world as well.
No you don't. Both Lake Baikal and Lake Tanganyika are larger than Lake Superior by volume, which is the only sensible measure of how much fresh water a lake contains. Lake Baikal has a larger volume than all 5 great lakes combined.
Look, I'm sure that Minnesota is a nice place. It seemed nice when I visited. But it has its own set of problems, and it lacks things that other places have that people who live there really enjoy. I'm glad you like it there, but don't try to impose your ideas of what an ideal place looks like on everyone else.
I think you're leaving out some of the good stuff. The moon landings and the Large Hadron Collider make me feel a bit better about what humans are able to achieve. And it's not as if we're done yet, either.
The point isn't to have things that need energy harvest it as they go, which is what XKCD's photosynthesizing cows are doing. Instead, it's to devote large areas to collecting sunlight, use the energy to synthesize energetic chemicals, and then use those energy-dense chemicals as a source of energy in other places.
This is essentially what people are talking about with biofuels. It's just that with biofuels we're depending on plants to do the energy storage for us rather than directly storing it ourselves. Biofuels have the advantage that growing plants is cheap- the plants build themselves- and the disadvantage that photosynthesis is inefficient and a lot of the energy the plants collect goes into maintenance rather than energy storage. Using solar energy to generate fuels directly may be more efficient but has much higher capital costs.
Regarding the rating and heat I think it make total sense to at least be able to put a similar power rated light-bulb in the same fixture considering the higher efficiency. I'm not 100% sure it work like that but I can't understand why it shouldn't. Using LEDs those cooling fins get hot but then again a regular lightbulb get very hot to.
The big difference is that LEDs (and CFLs) will fail at much lower temperatures than incandescents. The sensitive part of the incandescent bulb is the filament, and it's the part that gets really hot, so the fixture will usually fail before the bulb does. LEDs and CFLs contain electronics that can fail at relatively low temperatures, so you have to be a lot more careful about where you mount them. If LEDs weren't temperature sensitive, they wouldn't need the big cooling fins.
Or as I would put it, if RMS is the backbone of the free software world, it is more important that he be stiff than that he be flexible.
That's a neat quote, but the analogy is imperfect. You don't want a limp noodle for a backbone, but you don't want a rigid rod, either. A real backbone has to have some flexibility or you won't be able to turn your head, bend down to tie your shoes, or do lots of other vital daily activities. That's why doctors don't like to perform spinal fusion surgery until they've exhausted less drastic approaches.
To continue the analogy, maybe RMS is too far on the inflexible side to be a good backbone. He obviously has some flexibility- he recommends licenses other than the GPL in some cases and is even willing to accept proprietary software for specific, limited purposes- but he may be too rigidly ideological to be the main leader of the movement he founded. He seems to be unwilling or unable to look around and see some of the new stuff that's out there. Someone like Linus Torvalds may be a better leader. He obviously has a strong commitment to Free Software, but he has been flexible enough to try more things (e.g. working with Bitkeeper), and I think it's made him more effective.
but his desire to prioritize the "freedom" of systems over those systems actually doing anything useful is totally unreasonable.
That's a great theory, but it doesn't agree with actual practice. In practice, freedom is a very important part of doing things that are useful. With proprietary software, you are limited to what the authors' decide to give you. Proprietary software authors routinely leave out important features or include anti-features like spyware because they make more money that way. With free software, the main limit is on what the authors can produce, not on what is in their best interest to provide you.
Software freedom is so much less important than other forms of freedom (freedom from slavery, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc) in the real world that I can't take his writing seriously.
Where does he suggest that free software is more important than those freedoms? I haven't seen it in any of his writings. And if you're just saying that he should concentrate on other kinds of freedom because software freedom is too low on the scale to be worth the effort, that's a bad argument. Things that are worth having are worth having even if there are other things that are more important. The amount of effort RMS has put into free software would be a drop in the bucket compared to all the effort that's gone into the kinds of basic human rights you mention, but he has produced real and important results for that relatively modest effort. He has almost certainly done more real good by creating a new concept of freedom than he would have by joining an existing cause.
If you want to get a decently priced higher resolution display, you can try getting one of the cheap Korean WQHD (1440p) displays; they sell for around $300 on Ebay. They're a bare bones monitor- a single Dual-link DVI input, no speakers, etc.- but the actual screen is just as good as you'd get in a much more expensive name brand model. I think it's actually the same part, just packaged as cheaply as possible.
And acceleration despite a relatively wimpy engine is on major problem that hybrids are designed to tackle. The electric motor isn't enough to drive you very far or very fast on its own, but combining the power of the relatively wimpy internal combustion engine with the power of a relatively wimpy electric motor gives you enough power to merge onto a freeway or go up a steep hill with some confidence. When you don't need that extra power, the relatively wimpy engine is well chosen to give you good fuel economy at highway cruising speed.
I've been less impressed by the Scooba (iRobot's mopping robot) than Roomba. It's slow, requires quite a bit of maintenance on every use, and can't cover a very large area on a single tank of water. I haven't found that it saves much time compared to scrubbing the floor by hand.
That's nice, but they've got a long way to go to compete with the La Brea Tar Pits. When they were building a new parking site for the LA County Museum, they found an almost complete mammoth skeleton, not just one tooth. That and a whole bunch of other incredibly cool fossils. One more reason to prefer Southern California.
Actually, looking at phones, Android is the market leader.
Now it is, but would it have gotten there if everyone had the attitude that they needed to pick the market leader or nothing? Maybe the iPhone would have managed to overtake the Blackberry that way- it was clearly more popular from the day it was introduced- but Android took a long time to get really competitive. Would Google have kept pursuing that market for as long as they did if nobody bought their phones until they were better than the iPhone? Would they have been able to make them competitive with the iPhone if they hadn't been selling enough phones to get some useful customer feedback?
You might want to try reading the report. It's not about what the companies themselves do with the data, it's about their willingness to provide data to the government. They give some detail about what the different categories mean, and they seem at least somewhat relevant. It's certainly better than knowing nothing.
Is there a serious problem with authors sharing names?
Yes, there is. I work in a fairly small field, but there's still another researcher in my area who has the same first and last name; it causes great confusion when I get sales calls that were intended for the other guy. And that's the same first and last; usually people are listed only by their last name and initial(s). Within a narrow field, there are generally only a few institutions where a lot of the work gets done.
And counting on institution or contact institution is a bad way of tracking researchers because it changes. People change institutions regularly, especially early in their careers. It's standard practice to move when getting a postdoc because it offers a chance to broaden your experience and share your skills. Of course that increases the chance that potentially confusable people will wind up with publications at the same institution as well as making institution less helpful for tracking an individual researcher. And that leaves out things like people changing their names when they get married, taking a new name when they immigrate, etc. that can make tracking by name problematic.
Or constant, for that matter. Even in academia, some people (mostly women) still change their names when they marry, which can add to the confusion. Imagine tracking all the papers by Mary Jane Smith nee Jones. Having a unique personal ID would solve the changing name problem as well as the non-unique name problem.
While this is undoubtedly an important study, their findings are going to have to be replicated somehow in a larger, more diverse set of subjects. They're looking at just 182 people and, while it's not mentioned explicitly in the article, it appears they're all men. We know from other studies that there are anatomical differences in men's brains compared to women's brains, and even between left handed and right handed men. It would be very interesting to see, for example, a FMRI study to see if the structures play the same role in all patients.
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The trick is that the shutter isn't doing the work; the flash is. It's possible to make very short flash pulses; I think you can make them even shorter than the 1/50,000 second mentioned in the article. As long as most of the light for the photograph comes from the brief but intense flash, the ability to freeze action depends on the flash speed rather than the shutter speed. You actually need to make sure the shutter speed is slow enough that the shutter is guaranteed to be all the way open when the flash triggers (X-sync speed or slower), or only the area behind the open part of the shutter will be exposed. Controlling things using the flash also guarantees that the multiple cameras used for 3D photography will all be taking their pictures at exactly the same instant.
Also note that the limitation you're talking about only applies to focal plane shutters (i.e. those right in front of the film or sensor). It's also possible to use a central shutter that's located right next to the iris of the lens. Central shutters open and close like the lens aperture, but block the lens completely when they're closed. Like the lens aperture, they block light to all parts of the focal plane more or less equally as they open and close, so they don't induce any of the motion effects that focal plane shutters do. Central shutters have their own problems- it's hard to make them work for very short shutter speeds, and they have limited efficiency when you use them that way because they're only completely open for part of the time- but they do eliminate focal plane shutter artifacts and allow you to flash sync at any available shutter speed.
Easy: Economics. You have similar, if not greater, problems conducting controlled experiments, especially in macroeconomics, and there's even more money and politics involved. Economics winds up being closer to theology than it is to science, even though it's something that ought to be amenable to the scientific method.
Something similar is already formalized in academic publishing. When an author trusts an individual article, he'll cite it as a reference in his own articles. Articles that are important can be cited hundreds or thousands of times, while trivial ones may never be cited at all. If you take all the articles in a journal and see how many times they've been cited on average*, it gives you a good idea of consensus opinion of the quality of the journal. This is the basis of measures like the Impact Factor.
*You may wish to use some method of averaging other than taking the arithmetic mean, which can be skewed by a handful of highly cited papers.
The whole point of forking is that there's something you don't like about the project you're forking from. As long as that's a technical decision rather than a political one, supporting both old and new versions undermines that technical justification, since it sticks you with all the problems of both versions. Not to mention that it adds the complications of making swapping possible. It's a terrible, terrible idea.
Or user stupidity erases the vital data? Or malware starts corrupting your files? Or a disaster destroys the whole computer?
RAID is a great solution to hard drive failure, but it doesn't cover all of the other things that might go wrong. For that, you need a proper off-line backup that can protect you against user or OS problems, ideally one that's located far enough away to recover your data in the event of a disaster. RAID is best in addition to, not as a replacement for, true backups.
But that doesn't make any sense. If Android is so amazingly backward compatible, why even bother specifying the highest compatible version? If you are going to have one, why let the developer set it- and get it wrong so often because they don't bother to check- rather than having the Play Store check compatibility with newer versions of Android as they come out? It's just a mistake waiting to happen.
The most obvious example is Flash, which won't load through the Play store onto my devices running 4.2. That may be Google refusing to install it rather than a true incompatibility, but for the average user the effect is the same: an app that worked on their old device doesn't work on their newer one. The same thing is true of some games.
That's odd, because I keep encountering apps that worked on older devices that claim they won't work on my Android 4.2 devices. Maybe that's a certification issue rather than a real compatibility problem, but it shows that upgrading isn't 100% perfect.
Yes. It's because there's lots of iron ore there. It has nothing to do with geological stability, though Minnesota is nicely stable. Of course that stability means that what passes for a mountain there is pretty laughable.
Yes, but you do have floods, blizzards, and pestilential mosquitoes in the summer. Your winters are so miserable that people literally live in giant shopping malls so they don't have to go outside.
No you don't. Both Lake Baikal and Lake Tanganyika are larger than Lake Superior by volume, which is the only sensible measure of how much fresh water a lake contains. Lake Baikal has a larger volume than all 5 great lakes combined.
Look, I'm sure that Minnesota is a nice place. It seemed nice when I visited. But it has its own set of problems, and it lacks things that other places have that people who live there really enjoy. I'm glad you like it there, but don't try to impose your ideas of what an ideal place looks like on everyone else.
I think you're leaving out some of the good stuff. The moon landings and the Large Hadron Collider make me feel a bit better about what humans are able to achieve. And it's not as if we're done yet, either.
The point isn't to have things that need energy harvest it as they go, which is what XKCD's photosynthesizing cows are doing. Instead, it's to devote large areas to collecting sunlight, use the energy to synthesize energetic chemicals, and then use those energy-dense chemicals as a source of energy in other places.
This is essentially what people are talking about with biofuels. It's just that with biofuels we're depending on plants to do the energy storage for us rather than directly storing it ourselves. Biofuels have the advantage that growing plants is cheap- the plants build themselves- and the disadvantage that photosynthesis is inefficient and a lot of the energy the plants collect goes into maintenance rather than energy storage. Using solar energy to generate fuels directly may be more efficient but has much higher capital costs.
The big difference is that LEDs (and CFLs) will fail at much lower temperatures than incandescents. The sensitive part of the incandescent bulb is the filament, and it's the part that gets really hot, so the fixture will usually fail before the bulb does. LEDs and CFLs contain electronics that can fail at relatively low temperatures, so you have to be a lot more careful about where you mount them. If LEDs weren't temperature sensitive, they wouldn't need the big cooling fins.
That's a neat quote, but the analogy is imperfect. You don't want a limp noodle for a backbone, but you don't want a rigid rod, either. A real backbone has to have some flexibility or you won't be able to turn your head, bend down to tie your shoes, or do lots of other vital daily activities. That's why doctors don't like to perform spinal fusion surgery until they've exhausted less drastic approaches.
To continue the analogy, maybe RMS is too far on the inflexible side to be a good backbone. He obviously has some flexibility- he recommends licenses other than the GPL in some cases and is even willing to accept proprietary software for specific, limited purposes- but he may be too rigidly ideological to be the main leader of the movement he founded. He seems to be unwilling or unable to look around and see some of the new stuff that's out there. Someone like Linus Torvalds may be a better leader. He obviously has a strong commitment to Free Software, but he has been flexible enough to try more things (e.g. working with Bitkeeper), and I think it's made him more effective.
That's a great theory, but it doesn't agree with actual practice. In practice, freedom is a very important part of doing things that are useful. With proprietary software, you are limited to what the authors' decide to give you. Proprietary software authors routinely leave out important features or include anti-features like spyware because they make more money that way. With free software, the main limit is on what the authors can produce, not on what is in their best interest to provide you.
Where does he suggest that free software is more important than those freedoms? I haven't seen it in any of his writings. And if you're just saying that he should concentrate on other kinds of freedom because software freedom is too low on the scale to be worth the effort, that's a bad argument. Things that are worth having are worth having even if there are other things that are more important. The amount of effort RMS has put into free software would be a drop in the bucket compared to all the effort that's gone into the kinds of basic human rights you mention, but he has produced real and important results for that relatively modest effort. He has almost certainly done more real good by creating a new concept of freedom than he would have by joining an existing cause.
If you want to get a decently priced higher resolution display, you can try getting one of the cheap Korean WQHD (1440p) displays; they sell for around $300 on Ebay. They're a bare bones monitor- a single Dual-link DVI input, no speakers, etc.- but the actual screen is just as good as you'd get in a much more expensive name brand model. I think it's actually the same part, just packaged as cheaply as possible.
Intimidation. It's a lot easier to find space to merge over when everyone wants to get out of your way for fear of being crushed like a bug.
And acceleration despite a relatively wimpy engine is on major problem that hybrids are designed to tackle. The electric motor isn't enough to drive you very far or very fast on its own, but combining the power of the relatively wimpy internal combustion engine with the power of a relatively wimpy electric motor gives you enough power to merge onto a freeway or go up a steep hill with some confidence. When you don't need that extra power, the relatively wimpy engine is well chosen to give you good fuel economy at highway cruising speed.
I've been less impressed by the Scooba (iRobot's mopping robot) than Roomba. It's slow, requires quite a bit of maintenance on every use, and can't cover a very large area on a single tank of water. I haven't found that it saves much time compared to scrubbing the floor by hand.
That's nice, but they've got a long way to go to compete with the La Brea Tar Pits. When they were building a new parking site for the LA County Museum, they found an almost complete mammoth skeleton, not just one tooth. That and a whole bunch of other incredibly cool fossils. One more reason to prefer Southern California.
Now it is, but would it have gotten there if everyone had the attitude that they needed to pick the market leader or nothing? Maybe the iPhone would have managed to overtake the Blackberry that way- it was clearly more popular from the day it was introduced- but Android took a long time to get really competitive. Would Google have kept pursuing that market for as long as they did if nobody bought their phones until they were better than the iPhone? Would they have been able to make them competitive with the iPhone if they hadn't been selling enough phones to get some useful customer feedback?
Sounds like a win all around, then. The cheaters get their "special" world, and the non-cheaters don't have to deal with them. What's not to like?
You might want to try reading the report. It's not about what the companies themselves do with the data, it's about their willingness to provide data to the government. They give some detail about what the different categories mean, and they seem at least somewhat relevant. It's certainly better than knowing nothing.
Yes, there is. I work in a fairly small field, but there's still another researcher in my area who has the same first and last name; it causes great confusion when I get sales calls that were intended for the other guy. And that's the same first and last; usually people are listed only by their last name and initial(s). Within a narrow field, there are generally only a few institutions where a lot of the work gets done.
And counting on institution or contact institution is a bad way of tracking researchers because it changes. People change institutions regularly, especially early in their careers. It's standard practice to move when getting a postdoc because it offers a chance to broaden your experience and share your skills. Of course that increases the chance that potentially confusable people will wind up with publications at the same institution as well as making institution less helpful for tracking an individual researcher. And that leaves out things like people changing their names when they get married, taking a new name when they immigrate, etc. that can make tracking by name problematic.
Or constant, for that matter. Even in academia, some people (mostly women) still change their names when they marry, which can add to the confusion. Imagine tracking all the papers by Mary Jane Smith nee Jones. Having a unique personal ID would solve the changing name problem as well as the non-unique name problem.
While this is undoubtedly an important study, their findings are going to have to be replicated somehow in a larger, more diverse set of subjects. They're looking at just 182 people and, while it's not mentioned explicitly in the article, it appears they're all men. We know from other studies that there are anatomical differences in men's brains compared to women's brains, and even between left handed and right handed men. It would be very interesting to see, for example, a FMRI study to see if the structures play the same role in all patients.