The early versions of MySQL were basically SQL wrappers over BerkelyDB. But if you're going to do that, why not make it even lighterweight, like the route that SQLite later took? SQLite was ahead of MySQL in implementing transactions and still had comparable performance.
The second edition, published in 2008, covers many new features that MySQL fans proudly proclaim as an answer to all those critics clamoring for a better-rounded rdbms.
It's not just about the fact that MySQL has those features now. It's that developers and users of it never properly understood why those features are important, and only went along with it when it was shown that you could get them while still getting high scores on artificial benchmarks.
Now that they've at least fixed the fundamental problems, they've traded it for a bunch of new problems, like buggy releases and a questionable future with Sun.
Geothermal and tidal sources are also energy sources besides the sun. Or, if you want to be really pendetic, there's no such thing as an energy source, since the sun/earth/moon/etc. all came about from energy that was already there, thus making the whole universe one big battery. But that's not very useful conceptualization of the universe.
We have net positive energy right now with hydrocarbons, and it's not because of perpetual motion. It's because the energy we put into it (drilling, transport, etc.) is less than we get out when we burn it. That's because the majority of the energy to make the stuff was already put into it by the sun with some geothermal processes thrown in.
Thermodynamics applies to the universe as a whole. You can have net energy production or a decrease in entropy if you're limiting the scale (either in time or space) of your solution.
Believe me, there are plenty of other people out there who are willing to con you that don't rely on your greed.
Care to point some of them out?
The Craigslist Bad Check scam, where the con sends a check for several thousand more than the asking price. They'll email you saying that their secretary made a mistake, but they trust you, so go ahead and cash it and send back the difference. It's a bad check, of course, but your bank won't notice for a few days, and then they'll hold you responsible for the difference, plus the check you just sent back.
The mark isn't working on greed. They don't expect to get anything more than the original asking price. The con works purely on feelings of trust.
If the alternative is coal plants, then windmills are far less deadly to birds than the added carcinogens. A few extra dead birds hitting turbines can be easily replaced in the biosphere. Coal smoke is a more widespread problem.
. . . a highly disadvantageous location in a choke point for bird migrations.
One thing that just clicked in my head: birds likely choose their migration path based on the predominant wind patters. We want to put windmills there for the same reason.
Handled by a CVT, and they have to apply normal brakes for the last few mph anyway. Plus, regenerative braking is limited by how much charge the batteries can handle taking, not the output of the motor-generator.
Little Boy (droped on Hiroshima) converted 600 mg of matter into energy. For the same level of explosion of an anti-matter bomb, you'd need to create 300 mg of anti-matter (since it also annilates with 300 mg of regular matter). Also note that Little Boy was several orders of magnitude smaller in yield than modern bombs.
NASA estimates using 10 mg of anti-matter to get to Mars, at a cost of $250 million to make the stuff using bleeding edge techniques available in 2006. Assuming this new technique drops that by an order of magnitude, and the price scales linearly with the amount of anti-matter you want, then it'll cost (250 / 10) * 30 = $750 million for a Little Boy equivilent.
Conclusion: anti-matter bombs are not cost effective compared to nukes, and are unlikely to ever become so, unless we find a natural source of anti-matter.
!news. Many (most?) well designed AC systems employ heat exchangers.
What's the diff between a rotating and a conventional heat exchanger? Efficiency? Cost? Of course TFA doesn't mention any of it.
That happens a lot when you don't read TFA:
"This system has all the benefits of Airside Economizing, without the exposures of airside economizing like contamination and humidity control."
Not until superconductors are workable. Even in the short runs between servers, DC tends to have higher losses. You're better off spending money on higher efficiency power supplies.
Do you also complain about a Canadian playing a Scottsman? Or an American playing a Russian? I don't really see the problem with someone from the same basic ethnic group playing someone from the same group, even if two different cultures are involved.
Lego is a high-quality product. There have been knockoffs out there for a while, but Lego holds dominant because they have an excelent recipie for the plastic (held as a trade secret) and are fit to extremely tight tolerances. They might be more expensive than Megablocks, but they're worth it.
However, since the federal government will withhold highway maintenance funds for any state with a speed limit not equal to 70mph, the highway speed limit is unchanged.
No. There used to be a limit of 55 mph, but was repealed in 1995. The original reasoning was to limit gas usage during the fuel crisis of the '70s, and at some point also picked up a safety aspect.
Gas usage is probably correct, though a lot depends on engine tuning and the effects of drafting. With modern direct injection and variable valve timing, the difference isn't as clear as it used to be.
Safety is completely erroneous. Despite Ralph Nader's warning that "history will never forgive Congress for this assault on the sanctity of human life", safety has actually improved. As a corollary, the unrestricted German Autobahn has a better safety record than most European nations, though this isn't entirely comparable to the US due to higher standards of licensing and regular car maintenance.
A sys admin was recently surprised that I didn't use screen. My explaination was that all that C-x stuff reminded me too much of using Emacs.
Moderators are free to mod this Flamebait or Insightful, depending on personal bias.
Re:An example of great game A.I.
on
The State of Game AI
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I suspect that all the devs say they want a great AI in their game, but when deadlines start to come up, AI is one of the first things to get cut. That's why every RTS in history that got a preview in a magazine a year before release promised a "groundbreaking AI", and yet the same game when released still has ore trucks driving around a hill, across three bridges, and through the enemy base, just because that particular piece of ore was the closest in a straight line.
I noticed devs getting slightly clever of late. In C&C: Generals, the initial resource piles are right next to your base, and harvester-type units don't go to resource piles that aren't in a certain range. Plus, the late-game economy depends on things unrelated to those resource piles. So the underlieing problem still exists, but is rarely noticed with the way the game works. Which is some kind of progress, I guess.
By the way... sometimes there's stuff in those packages that you didn't order. I got small packets of gummy bears a few times, and a "complimentary book" (twice). All in all, I can't complain.
Last time I ordered from Amazon, they sent a second box, even though I only ordered one thing. Puzzled, I opened it up, and found a PS3 controller recharger inside. Though the box had an address label for me on it, the invoice inside said it was actually for some guy in Tennessee. (Yes, I did do the honest thing and send it back.)
Every time I order something from Amazon, they find a new and exciting way to screw it up.
Slashdot Mirror
The early versions of MySQL were basically SQL wrappers over BerkelyDB. But if you're going to do that, why not make it even lighterweight, like the route that SQLite later took? SQLite was ahead of MySQL in implementing transactions and still had comparable performance.
MySQL was never the right tool for any job.
The second edition, published in 2008, covers many new features that MySQL fans proudly proclaim as an answer to all those critics clamoring for a better-rounded rdbms.
It's not just about the fact that MySQL has those features now. It's that developers and users of it never properly understood why those features are important, and only went along with it when it was shown that you could get them while still getting high scores on artificial benchmarks.
Now that they've at least fixed the fundamental problems, they've traded it for a bunch of new problems, like buggy releases and a questionable future with Sun.
(Say, as an example, a massive expansion of renewal energy generation capacity and associated technologies and engineering.)
You mean like a solar power satellite system? Or how about a source of He3 for advanced fusion reactors?
Geothermal and tidal sources are also energy sources besides the sun. Or, if you want to be really pendetic, there's no such thing as an energy source, since the sun/earth/moon/etc. all came about from energy that was already there, thus making the whole universe one big battery. But that's not very useful conceptualization of the universe.
We have net positive energy right now with hydrocarbons, and it's not because of perpetual motion. It's because the energy we put into it (drilling, transport, etc.) is less than we get out when we burn it. That's because the majority of the energy to make the stuff was already put into it by the sun with some geothermal processes thrown in.
Thermodynamics applies to the universe as a whole. You can have net energy production or a decrease in entropy if you're limiting the scale (either in time or space) of your solution.
If it didn't have >100% net efficiency, it wouldn't be used.
Sure it does. Most of the current hydrogen (in its raw form) is generated from hydrocarbons.
Believe me, there are plenty of other people out there who are willing to con you that don't rely on your greed.
Care to point some of them out?
The Craigslist Bad Check scam, where the con sends a check for several thousand more than the asking price. They'll email you saying that their secretary made a mistake, but they trust you, so go ahead and cash it and send back the difference. It's a bad check, of course, but your bank won't notice for a few days, and then they'll hold you responsible for the difference, plus the check you just sent back.
The mark isn't working on greed. They don't expect to get anything more than the original asking price. The con works purely on feelings of trust.
If the alternative is coal plants, then windmills are far less deadly to birds than the added carcinogens. A few extra dead birds hitting turbines can be easily replaced in the biosphere. Coal smoke is a more widespread problem.
. . . a highly disadvantageous location in a choke point for bird migrations.
One thing that just clicked in my head: birds likely choose their migration path based on the predominant wind patters. We want to put windmills there for the same reason.
Handled by a CVT, and they have to apply normal brakes for the last few mph anyway. Plus, regenerative braking is limited by how much charge the batteries can handle taking, not the output of the motor-generator.
Little Boy (droped on Hiroshima) converted 600 mg of matter into energy. For the same level of explosion of an anti-matter bomb, you'd need to create 300 mg of anti-matter (since it also annilates with 300 mg of regular matter). Also note that Little Boy was several orders of magnitude smaller in yield than modern bombs.
NASA estimates using 10 mg of anti-matter to get to Mars, at a cost of $250 million to make the stuff using bleeding edge techniques available in 2006. Assuming this new technique drops that by an order of magnitude, and the price scales linearly with the amount of anti-matter you want, then it'll cost (250 / 10) * 30 = $750 million for a Little Boy equivilent.
Conclusion: anti-matter bombs are not cost effective compared to nukes, and are unlikely to ever become so, unless we find a natural source of anti-matter.
This is the first time I've actually LOL'd at a 'dept' line in a while. Self-employment makes for all sorts of wonderful tax-deductable gadgets.
Completely wrong. Stress increases focus on a singular task, while creativity needs to look at how many bits fit together.
!news. Many (most?) well designed AC systems employ heat exchangers. What's the diff between a rotating and a conventional heat exchanger? Efficiency? Cost? Of course TFA doesn't mention any of it.
That happens a lot when you don't read TFA:
"This system has all the benefits of Airside Economizing, without the exposures of airside economizing like contamination and humidity control."
Not until superconductors are workable. Even in the short runs between servers, DC tends to have higher losses. You're better off spending money on higher efficiency power supplies.
http://event.on24.com/event/95/75/4/rt/1/documents/player_docanchr_1/wp63_fr.pdf
Do you also complain about a Canadian playing a Scottsman? Or an American playing a Russian? I don't really see the problem with someone from the same basic ethnic group playing someone from the same group, even if two different cultures are involved.
Lego is a high-quality product. There have been knockoffs out there for a while, but Lego holds dominant because they have an excelent recipie for the plastic (held as a trade secret) and are fit to extremely tight tolerances. They might be more expensive than Megablocks, but they're worth it.
However, since the federal government will withhold highway maintenance funds for any state with a speed limit not equal to 70mph, the highway speed limit is unchanged.
No. There used to be a limit of 55 mph, but was repealed in 1995. The original reasoning was to limit gas usage during the fuel crisis of the '70s, and at some point also picked up a safety aspect.
Gas usage is probably correct, though a lot depends on engine tuning and the effects of drafting. With modern direct injection and variable valve timing, the difference isn't as clear as it used to be.
Safety is completely erroneous. Despite Ralph Nader's warning that "history will never forgive Congress for this assault on the sanctity of human life", safety has actually improved. As a corollary, the unrestricted German Autobahn has a better safety record than most European nations, though this isn't entirely comparable to the US due to higher standards of licensing and regular car maintenance.
Since GÃdel proved that a formal system must be either incomplete or inconsistent . . .
There's a third possibility, which is "not powerful enough to be really interesting".
A sys admin was recently surprised that I didn't use screen. My explaination was that all that C-x stuff reminded me too much of using Emacs.
Moderators are free to mod this Flamebait or Insightful, depending on personal bias.
I suspect that all the devs say they want a great AI in their game, but when deadlines start to come up, AI is one of the first things to get cut. That's why every RTS in history that got a preview in a magazine a year before release promised a "groundbreaking AI", and yet the same game when released still has ore trucks driving around a hill, across three bridges, and through the enemy base, just because that particular piece of ore was the closest in a straight line.
I noticed devs getting slightly clever of late. In C&C: Generals, the initial resource piles are right next to your base, and harvester-type units don't go to resource piles that aren't in a certain range. Plus, the late-game economy depends on things unrelated to those resource piles. So the underlieing problem still exists, but is rarely noticed with the way the game works. Which is some kind of progress, I guess.
If I'm going to risk accidently slashing my wrists, there better be a better reward than a 1GB memory card that I already paid for.
More to the point:
By the way... sometimes there's stuff in those packages that you didn't order. I got small packets of gummy bears a few times, and a "complimentary book" (twice). All in all, I can't complain.
Last time I ordered from Amazon, they sent a second box, even though I only ordered one thing. Puzzled, I opened it up, and found a PS3 controller recharger inside. Though the box had an address label for me on it, the invoice inside said it was actually for some guy in Tennessee. (Yes, I did do the honest thing and send it back.)
Every time I order something from Amazon, they find a new and exciting way to screw it up.
Thus simuntaniously proving that 23% of Texans are inbred degenerates.