I was thinking; 4 full racks is just good foresight. My office of 20 people had one full rack, and it had a display unit, a PBX unit, a 48 port switch, and the UPS near the bottom. You can stick one or two racks in a former broom closet, but if you're building at a new site, you might as well future proof it while you're at it.
The city of seattle has 400 fiber optic strands going to each municipal building, but only uses one. Does the author of this article suggest that since FiOS only sends one strand to the home, data compression has increased 400 fold since 1996? No -- it's because it's cheap, and you can future proof for only about 10% more.
Yep, my dad got radiation treatment, he got "gamma knife" treatment for brain cancer. You get a special plastic mesh helmet that is specifically molded to your head (for brain cancer paitents, it's molded to other parts for pancreas or breast cancer, etc paitents), and then there are marker dots on the mesh helmet that align with set lasers in the walls. so your body is properly aligned. Then the actual "gamma knife" is placed in the correct position so it creates a red + sign on the targeted area, which matches up with the plastic mesh helmet. Your name is also written on the helmet, and you fetch your own helmet from the same cubbie each time and put it on your own head. A tech makes sure it's secured and double checks that it's your helmet. Not only are you picking out your helmet, but they cross reference your name, and unless you have a very small head, only your helmet is going to properly fit you. The red + sign isn't going to lay "flat" and the laser dots won't line up. It's at least a triple redundancy mode of failure and it seemed to work pretty well. Added bonus: the table looks like that room in the bond movie where bond goes "you expect me to talk?" and the villan responds "no mr bond, i expect you to die! (maniacal laughter). It's kind of neat to do medicine in a room that looks like a bond villian's secret layer.
Right but this is only 300 packets or so from each country. How much data is 300 packets, potentially? 20KB? Bit torrent usually pushes an order of magnitude more data than that.
The subtitles were a bit of a surprise. Can MIT not afford better than built in microphones on cheap laptops? Between her vaugely asian accent, the poor quality of the audio (seriously, you're TELLING people how to do something, the audio is important here - did they record this in a shower stall or something? my netbook's audio sounds 100x better than this), and then apparently some sort of wacky audio encoding basically makes her impossible to understand. People who speak english as a second language aren't going to be able to understand this, thank god they did the subtitles.
I think that the real problem is that 80% (99%? -- that's a serious question) of articles are reworded versions of the same thing - i.e. a press release, or statement. There's almost zero original reporting done, which is why it's a big deal when a NYT science article is on Slashdot - it's actually news. Most news stories are rehashes or developing updates. Why would you read an article that's four sentences of news (which the headline encapsulates) and twelve paragraphs of backstory you're already familiar with? Most details not included in the headline will probably be covered by the evening news, a talking head on sunday afternoon CNN or the family news junkie anyways. There's no major elections coming up soon and everyone currently employed is going to be doing (or not doing) their jobs for a while still.
Personally I skim google news four or five times a day, I will usually click on one or two updates, or a breaking news story a day. Headlines are written now to be so google friendly that all the important information is encapsulated right there. The fact that google news gives you five or six headlines on the same subject allows you to grasp the situation without reading a poorly researched article about a press release and twelve paragraphs of fluff.
It wouldn't be terribly hard to write some software to adjust the frequency of the USB bus down or up a few mhz and then lock it at 500mhz once you synch. Of course now you're carrying in a laptop AND a USB camera. You could even write the software to "autofocus" the camera's synch with the screen using the USB bus so that it's outputting a clear 2D image.
30% is about average compared to European style countries. The main difference being that, they actually use the money and spend it on their citizens in visible ways, like health care and free (or nearly free) higher education.
What's the average daytime temperature in your city? In Houston/Dallas/Fort Worth (about 25 million combined people in Texas), it's easily 80 degrees by 9am from March through October here, and June-September it's well on it's way to 90 degrees (32.2c for you metrics). You'd be drenched in sweat by the time you arrived at work. The "sidewalks" you're walking on line 3-lane in each direction "roads" that cars travel between 45 and 55mph (72-90 kph). In most cases the sidewalk is 1 meter wide and butts right up against the roadway, with a brick wall on the other side. It is less than pleasant to travel anywhere by foot in Houston. Google some videos of the suburban sprawl in Texas. It's not like walking along a 35mph urban road with small blocks and comfortable sidewalks. I have no problem walking everywhere when traveling in well planned cities, but between the weather here and the hostile conditions it's no wonder cars are absolutely required for transportation here. I'd be happy to document this with photos and video if you don't believe me. Miles and miles and miles (hundreds, if not thousands of square miles) of this sort of thing exist in Texas.
Apparently Bogota, Colombia of all places has something like 170km of bike lanes/paths, even bike-only bridges over highways (particularly the highly visible ones foreigners like me visiting the city see, driving in from the international airport).
The difference between a european (or most south american cities, for that matter) city and an american sprawl city like the houston area (5.7 million people) or Dallas-Fort Worth (6.8 million people) is that american sprawl cities are completely useless for people who want to bike to work, walk to work, or use public transportation. "downtown" simply means "large office buildings and half-million dollar condos"; downtown in sprawl cities is not somewhere you live, it's just a glorified office park. All the amazing green urban inventions in the world aren't going to fix the transit problems created by Houston and DFW areas - they're just too low density.
A car or motorcycle (you're going to die on a motorcycle in Dallas btw) is absolutely required for gainful employment here (it's 80-95 degrees by 9am, 9 months out of the year here). And the population in Texas is booming, so the problem here is only going to get worse. SF, NYC, Chicago are all full, and land (and the cost of living) is cheap in Texas. fortunately Dallas has started to invest in it's infrastructure and you can (sort of) get around the city by bus (until 6:00pm) and the DART rail will take you (like the grandparent post pointed out) to downtown, but if I want to get from my house, to say, walmart, you're either driving, or you're walking 45+ minutes in 90+ degree heat with no shade no breeze and 80% humidity. in most of the suburbs there are only two or three bus lines that cover the main three or four streets, but even here in Plano, a city of 330,000 we have four bus lines, which serve mainly to connect preston road (major road on the far end of town) with the bus terminal and rail station in the "old downtown" part of town. I think one, maybe two buses serve the whole city. i've lived here off and on for almost ten years and I have yet to see a dart bus on the street, but the signs for the bus do exist.
I'm sure this sort of public transit/no-pedestrian city planning nightmare exists in other areas too, I've heard the Phoenix and Las Vegas areas are equally as awful, I'm sure I'm missing plenty of others as well. "Green solutions" just don't work in cities that were "master planned" between 1970 and 2005. These are the same cities that have high SUV and cars per capita rates that cause most of the pollution.
What about the software that interprets the data? The driver to connect the scale to the software? Yeah I bet you could slap together some code in python in a day or two, but it still has to be documented, and verified by the FDA. I'd rather they be too careful, and have a device they can trust, rather than look at some data, notice an anomaly, and dismiss it because "the software is buggy", when in fact it might be significant in that you had a minor stroke and they didn't catch it due to crappy data collection. And then you die. Or are paralyzed. No, I'd rather have the correctly build, specified, and documented devices used on me, thanks. Medical care (quality, not cost/availability)in the US is top notch due to all the checks the FDA has.
exactly. the FDA requires significant documentation of the hardware and software along all lines of the R&D, and manufacturing process. which are actively audited by the FDA. documentation, and documentation compliance is a huge chunk (not the largest, but definitely a line item on their accounting paperwork) of their budget.
I used UMA calling in south america to "phone home" to Dallas and use my regular bucket of minutes. Great deal. Most hotels/hostels have wifi availble, which is where you're going to make a long personal call anyways.
I was a customer with sprint for 4 years. I left them specifically due to how awful their customer service is. It's like wrestling a... very difficult thing to wrestle with every time you need a small thing changed or adjusted. And there's usually a fee for that small adjustment. T-mobile has bent over backwards to help me out in every situation, and has never charged me an additional fee for something. I won't go into details here but here's what I wrote about them last week.
depends what plan you're on. i pay $60 a month for unlimited data (and SMS, and 1000 minutes a month)with tmobile through an old blackberry cell plan with tmobile but i get 3g speeds on any phone i've plugged my sim card into. i don't know what an iphone plan costs but i'm guessing it's more than that. also tmobile allows tethering, be it officially or unofficially. an AT&T serviced iphone would have to do my laundry and clean my bathroom twice weekly for me to switch away from my current plan.
anything above 720P at distances greater than 10' is useless. most people sit 18-24" away from their displays. you can most definitely tell the difference between a 1440x900, 1680x1050 and 1900x1200 pixel 24" diagonal display at 24" distance. you're correct that a 40", 1080p display for sports (i.e. general TV, not video games) in the living room is a waste of money, but for video games you will appreciate the 1080p (gui, etc). high resolutions for 22-27" displays on the desktop is very much wanted and very much useful.
The biggest problem for game makers is that people went from 17-19" 1280x1024 displays (1.6 megapixels, i think, not going to do the math this late) to 21-24" displays at 1680x1050 (2.3 megapixels). The old standard used to be 1024x768. For a long time it was 1280x1024 (small step up). Now the standard (1680x1050) increased by about 50% seemingly overnight. A card (8600GT 512MB) that could push Valve's TF2 (two year old game at this point) at 45-60fps on 1280x1024 no problem with most of the settings at medium-high, now struggles to push the game at 30fps at low settings at 1680x1050. So while cards bumped up in capability, people are buying these cards to play their current games at their old speed/visual quality. We're going to have to wait another year or two before video cards with the capability to push "tomorrow's" games at a modern resolution... for less than $150. ATI is heading in that direction more quickly than nVidia, but video card makers have yet to meet their market with a proper product.
This is how it works in the US as well, its just that we happen to have the formality of presidential primaries. The cannidates are largely chosen and supported by the party. Technically we have write-ins but those rarely, if ever work.
You still have to mail it back to the manufacturer, wait for them to confirm it's broke, and then mail you a new one from china. Plus crack open the computer, and deal with all the MS "you've installed new hardware" BS. For a $40 piece of equipment. Getting a new warranty replacement piece of equipment from a bargain bin manufacturer might take longer than the warranty is good for (three months). Gigabyte and ASUS are better about their parts, but you have to ask yourself "how much BS am I willing to put up with" and "how long am I willing to not have a functional computer while it's replaced for "free"?" before you pick the noname brand.
They don't mention how this compares to high pressure water jets, which I would assume is both faster and cheaper than laser, and doesn't leave any burrs. I'm not an expert in sheet metal forming, so someone feel free to correct me, but while I'm sure EMP will have very specific uses in the future, hydro-cutting will remain a better option in 99% of situations for the forseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking; 4 full racks is just good foresight. My office of 20 people had one full rack, and it had a display unit, a PBX unit, a 48 port switch, and the UPS near the bottom. You can stick one or two racks in a former broom closet, but if you're building at a new site, you might as well future proof it while you're at it.
The city of seattle has 400 fiber optic strands going to each municipal building, but only uses one. Does the author of this article suggest that since FiOS only sends one strand to the home, data compression has increased 400 fold since 1996? No -- it's because it's cheap, and you can future proof for only about 10% more.
I hate marketing.
Yep, my dad got radiation treatment, he got "gamma knife" treatment for brain cancer. You get a special plastic mesh helmet that is specifically molded to your head (for brain cancer paitents, it's molded to other parts for pancreas or breast cancer, etc paitents), and then there are marker dots on the mesh helmet that align with set lasers in the walls. so your body is properly aligned. Then the actual "gamma knife" is placed in the correct position so it creates a red + sign on the targeted area, which matches up with the plastic mesh helmet. Your name is also written on the helmet, and you fetch your own helmet from the same cubbie each time and put it on your own head. A tech makes sure it's secured and double checks that it's your helmet. Not only are you picking out your helmet, but they cross reference your name, and unless you have a very small head, only your helmet is going to properly fit you. The red + sign isn't going to lay "flat" and the laser dots won't line up. It's at least a triple redundancy mode of failure and it seemed to work pretty well. Added bonus: the table looks like that room in the bond movie where bond goes "you expect me to talk?" and the villan responds "no mr bond, i expect you to die! (maniacal laughter). It's kind of neat to do medicine in a room that looks like a bond villian's secret layer.
Right but this is only 300 packets or so from each country. How much data is 300 packets, potentially? 20KB? Bit torrent usually pushes an order of magnitude more data than that.
The subtitles were a bit of a surprise. Can MIT not afford better than built in microphones on cheap laptops? Between her vaugely asian accent, the poor quality of the audio (seriously, you're TELLING people how to do something, the audio is important here - did they record this in a shower stall or something? my netbook's audio sounds 100x better than this), and then apparently some sort of wacky audio encoding basically makes her impossible to understand. People who speak english as a second language aren't going to be able to understand this, thank god they did the subtitles.
Neat concept though.
I think the title is chosen based on "pull" for humans and about 50% search engine optimization
I think that the real problem is that 80% (99%? -- that's a serious question) of articles are reworded versions of the same thing - i.e. a press release, or statement. There's almost zero original reporting done, which is why it's a big deal when a NYT science article is on Slashdot - it's actually news. Most news stories are rehashes or developing updates. Why would you read an article that's four sentences of news (which the headline encapsulates) and twelve paragraphs of backstory you're already familiar with? Most details not included in the headline will probably be covered by the evening news, a talking head on sunday afternoon CNN or the family news junkie anyways. There's no major elections coming up soon and everyone currently employed is going to be doing (or not doing) their jobs for a while still.
Personally I skim google news four or five times a day, I will usually click on one or two updates, or a breaking news story a day. Headlines are written now to be so google friendly that all the important information is encapsulated right there. The fact that google news gives you five or six headlines on the same subject allows you to grasp the situation without reading a poorly researched article about a press release and twelve paragraphs of fluff.
It wouldn't be terribly hard to write some software to adjust the frequency of the USB bus down or up a few mhz and then lock it at 500mhz once you synch. Of course now you're carrying in a laptop AND a USB camera. You could even write the software to "autofocus" the camera's synch with the screen using the USB bus so that it's outputting a clear 2D image.
30% is about average compared to European style countries. The main difference being that, they actually use the money and spend it on their citizens in visible ways, like health care and free (or nearly free) higher education.
What's the average daytime temperature in your city? In Houston/Dallas/Fort Worth (about 25 million combined people in Texas), it's easily 80 degrees by 9am from March through October here, and June-September it's well on it's way to 90 degrees (32.2c for you metrics). You'd be drenched in sweat by the time you arrived at work. The "sidewalks" you're walking on line 3-lane in each direction "roads" that cars travel between 45 and 55mph (72-90 kph). In most cases the sidewalk is 1 meter wide and butts right up against the roadway, with a brick wall on the other side. It is less than pleasant to travel anywhere by foot in Houston. Google some videos of the suburban sprawl in Texas. It's not like walking along a 35mph urban road with small blocks and comfortable sidewalks. I have no problem walking everywhere when traveling in well planned cities, but between the weather here and the hostile conditions it's no wonder cars are absolutely required for transportation here. I'd be happy to document this with photos and video if you don't believe me. Miles and miles and miles (hundreds, if not thousands of square miles) of this sort of thing exist in Texas.
Apparently Bogota, Colombia of all places has something like 170km of bike lanes/paths, even bike-only bridges over highways (particularly the highly visible ones foreigners like me visiting the city see, driving in from the international airport).
The difference between a european (or most south american cities, for that matter) city and an american sprawl city like the houston area (5.7 million people) or Dallas-Fort Worth (6.8 million people) is that american sprawl cities are completely useless for people who want to bike to work, walk to work, or use public transportation. "downtown" simply means "large office buildings and half-million dollar condos"; downtown in sprawl cities is not somewhere you live, it's just a glorified office park. All the amazing green urban inventions in the world aren't going to fix the transit problems created by Houston and DFW areas - they're just too low density.
A car or motorcycle (you're going to die on a motorcycle in Dallas btw) is absolutely required for gainful employment here (it's 80-95 degrees by 9am, 9 months out of the year here). And the population in Texas is booming, so the problem here is only going to get worse. SF, NYC, Chicago are all full, and land (and the cost of living) is cheap in Texas. fortunately Dallas has started to invest in it's infrastructure and you can (sort of) get around the city by bus (until 6:00pm) and the DART rail will take you (like the grandparent post pointed out) to downtown, but if I want to get from my house, to say, walmart, you're either driving, or you're walking 45+ minutes in 90+ degree heat with no shade no breeze and 80% humidity. in most of the suburbs there are only two or three bus lines that cover the main three or four streets, but even here in Plano, a city of 330,000 we have four bus lines, which serve mainly to connect preston road (major road on the far end of town) with the bus terminal and rail station in the "old downtown" part of town. I think one, maybe two buses serve the whole city. i've lived here off and on for almost ten years and I have yet to see a dart bus on the street, but the signs for the bus do exist.
I'm sure this sort of public transit/no-pedestrian city planning nightmare exists in other areas too, I've heard the Phoenix and Las Vegas areas are equally as awful, I'm sure I'm missing plenty of others as well. "Green solutions" just don't work in cities that were "master planned" between 1970 and 2005. These are the same cities that have high SUV and cars per capita rates that cause most of the pollution.
What about the software that interprets the data? The driver to connect the scale to the software? Yeah I bet you could slap together some code in python in a day or two, but it still has to be documented, and verified by the FDA. I'd rather they be too careful, and have a device they can trust, rather than look at some data, notice an anomaly, and dismiss it because "the software is buggy", when in fact it might be significant in that you had a minor stroke and they didn't catch it due to crappy data collection. And then you die. Or are paralyzed. No, I'd rather have the correctly build, specified, and documented devices used on me, thanks. Medical care (quality, not cost/availability)in the US is top notch due to all the checks the FDA has.
exactly. the FDA requires significant documentation of the hardware and software along all lines of the R&D, and manufacturing process. which are actively audited by the FDA. documentation, and documentation compliance is a huge chunk (not the largest, but definitely a line item on their accounting paperwork) of their budget.
I used UMA calling in south america to "phone home" to Dallas and use my regular bucket of minutes. Great deal. Most hotels/hostels have wifi availble, which is where you're going to make a long personal call anyways.
I was a customer with sprint for 4 years. I left them specifically due to how awful their customer service is. It's like wrestling a... very difficult thing to wrestle with every time you need a small thing changed or adjusted. And there's usually a fee for that small adjustment. T-mobile has bent over backwards to help me out in every situation, and has never charged me an additional fee for something. I won't go into details here but here's what I wrote about them last week.
ahahahahahahahaha if only. there's a reason why sprint is shedding customers faster than the US economy is shedding jobs.
depends what plan you're on. i pay $60 a month for unlimited data (and SMS, and 1000 minutes a month)with tmobile through an old blackberry cell plan with tmobile but i get 3g speeds on any phone i've plugged my sim card into. i don't know what an iphone plan costs but i'm guessing it's more than that. also tmobile allows tethering, be it officially or unofficially. an AT&T serviced iphone would have to do my laundry and clean my bathroom twice weekly for me to switch away from my current plan.
jailbroken iphones work with tmobile's 3G where avalible (every major metro area in the US)
wouldn't this be best done as a slashdot poll?
.
.
(the correct answer, by the way, is Cowboy Neal Mobile)
oops, it was late when i posted that. I meant a 40" TV, which is more or less the standard size. yes, 150" will take advantage to 1080p :P
anything above 720P at distances greater than 10' is useless. most people sit 18-24" away from their displays. you can most definitely tell the difference between a 1440x900, 1680x1050 and 1900x1200 pixel 24" diagonal display at 24" distance. you're correct that a 40", 1080p display for sports (i.e. general TV, not video games) in the living room is a waste of money, but for video games you will appreciate the 1080p (gui, etc). high resolutions for 22-27" displays on the desktop is very much wanted and very much useful.
The biggest problem for game makers is that people went from 17-19" 1280x1024 displays (1.6 megapixels, i think, not going to do the math this late) to 21-24" displays at 1680x1050 (2.3 megapixels). The old standard used to be 1024x768. For a long time it was 1280x1024 (small step up). Now the standard (1680x1050) increased by about 50% seemingly overnight. A card (8600GT 512MB) that could push Valve's TF2 (two year old game at this point) at 45-60fps on 1280x1024 no problem with most of the settings at medium-high, now struggles to push the game at 30fps at low settings at 1680x1050. So while cards bumped up in capability, people are buying these cards to play their current games at their old speed/visual quality. We're going to have to wait another year or two before video cards with the capability to push "tomorrow's" games at a modern resolution... for less than $150. ATI is heading in that direction more quickly than nVidia, but video card makers have yet to meet their market with a proper product.
The real reason DX10 never took off is that nobody could tell the difference between DX9 and DX10 screenshots.
This is how it works in the US as well, its just that we happen to have the formality of presidential primaries. The cannidates are largely chosen and supported by the party. Technically we have write-ins but those rarely, if ever work.
You still have to mail it back to the manufacturer, wait for them to confirm it's broke, and then mail you a new one from china. Plus crack open the computer, and deal with all the MS "you've installed new hardware" BS. For a $40 piece of equipment. Getting a new warranty replacement piece of equipment from a bargain bin manufacturer might take longer than the warranty is good for (three months). Gigabyte and ASUS are better about their parts, but you have to ask yourself "how much BS am I willing to put up with" and "how long am I willing to not have a functional computer while it's replaced for "free"?" before you pick the noname brand.
They don't mention how this compares to high pressure water jets, which I would assume is both faster and cheaper than laser, and doesn't leave any burrs. I'm not an expert in sheet metal forming, so someone feel free to correct me, but while I'm sure EMP will have very specific uses in the future, hydro-cutting will remain a better option in 99% of situations for the forseeable future.