I go to scientific conferences and it would be nice to have an ultralight (4 lbs is way too heavy) device which I could carry around all day, take notes on, and then also use it to show other people my data (which is high res so I need 1600x1200 for it to look best). It is the kind of usage that UMPC is supposedly designed for, except it is just slightly too heavy, way too bulky (thick), the screen is too small, and battery life is about a third of what would be useful for a day at the conference center without recharge. Battery life could be improved by having no HDD, using slower RAM, and OLED screen (and of course no wireless and no optical drives). Thickness could be improved by, you guessed it, OLED screen (100 micron thick screens were demonstrated already), solid state HDD, and no optical drives. There is also technology for cell phones to make the casing of the device act as a battery - scale that to tablet level and you've got some major improvements. What I am asking for is for someone to use the best tech out there to squeeze every last bit of utility out of a tablet. No leaps in technology necessary.
Well, it is not so stupid. You wouldn't buy good tech to bury it if it were clearly better. You bury it if it has long term potential but is not competitive yet. A classic example is the Einstein/Szilard refrigerator. It was kinda sorta competitive with existing designs, but it had a major flaw - ammonia leaks were a big problem. This is the kind of stuff you eliminate with a bit more R&D and then you have a competitor to the best fridges. Instead Electrolux bought it and buried it, precisely by not investing in R&D needed to make the design competitive.
Give me something with twice the screen size (and a decent resolution 1600x1200 plz). Make it an OLED for readability and shrink the thickness of the device about twice. Make flash-based HDD and removable (hot-plug) wireless module for low power consumption. Nuke the keyboard (I can lug my own, just give me a few usb ports).
I use this exact system, except my rule 5 is to always have at least a fixed minimum in the account. I also do not bank online because I find that I forget those transactions much more readily than ones where I had to go to the local branch. Thus my imaginary ledger book in my head works well so long as I do not use online banking. It helps that my local branch is between where I work and where I go for lunch so I can stop by any day with no extra effort. Then again, this is why I selected the bank I use in the first place. Oh, and rule 2 is good for students but once you start making any money whatsoever you will need a credit card, just so you can buy a house a couple of years down the line. My rule 2 is : have one credit card and never buy more than $200 worth in any given month on that card (just so you can pay it off on the spot whenever you are at your local branch).
There are quite a few comments to this effect, so I will just reply here. There is plenty of discussion of "a" vs "the" ambiguity on the web, so I will just point to the first link I found on google: http://www.uiowa.edu/~resmeth/miscellaneous/articl e-usage.html Scroll down to the exceptions, or search the page for "the use of articles in English is essentially idiomatic".
Well, how a word ends is not always a good indication. "La table" in french is feminine but you'd be hard pressed to guess without the article. Or better yet, compare russian words kon' (horse, russian masculine) and von' (stink, russian feminine). As for verb conjugation, most Romance and Slavic languages are rather bad. English has a few irregular verbs, but nothing like French. We don't have hundreds of common everyday verbs which are out line, nor do we have the distinction between type I, type II or really irregular verbs. There is nothing logical about Russian conjugation system either. They have two separate classes of verbs to indicate whether an action has or has not been completed. By comparison, English (Romance really) system of auxilliary verbs to specify tenses is very simple (i.e. easily programmable) and flexible. As for gerund, I find your post just plain funny. First you say that the 'ing' form can be confusing then you say there is nothing wrong with gerund. It's one or the other, not both. As for declension, well Russian is not doing away with it, nor is German. Conditionals. OK, go to google, search for "conditional english". First link is rather informative. Notice how there are six forms of conditionals. Look at Past Unreal Conditional. It is the only one using the "had had" construct. This stands out and is irregular. Not surprisingly many people just use one "had" in regular speech. I welcome the comparison of Russian and English with respect to articles. Russians do just fine without them, English speakers use definite and indefinite ones and there is no set of rules that applies everywhere. Indeed, in English you will find situations where both are equally valid. Using a definite or indefinite article, you remove the ambiguity of whether you want "a car" (any car) or "the car" (yeah, that one). This resolution of ambiguity may be undesirable but the language leaves no way to say both. In such situations, the choice of "a" vs "the" can be quite arbitrary. (I live in the US, vs I live in Canada is another example of irregular rules: countries which are a collection of states start with the, regular countries don't. No wonder many people would say I live in Netherlands).
Those aren't rules. That's documentation and guidance maybe but not rules. The mere fact that there is a category "usually [masculine, feminine, neutral]" should tell you that there is no first principles way to determine the gender. Notice also that the "always [masculine, feminine, neutral]" also has exceptions. Latin-derived grammars are usually a pain in the ass because of genders, irregular verbs, and noun cases. German suffers from all of those. English has fewer irregularities (gerund; too many tenses, like the conditional tenses that few people use; rather arbitrary use of "a" vs. "the", etc). That said, I am not aware of a language with a simple consistent grammar with no exceptions to just a few simple rules (unlambda is the only one and that's for computers only).
Several. Like you said, what the Brits did to the natives of America and Australia. The muslims under Mohammed wiped out an entire Jewish tribe in what is now Saudi Arabia. There is genetic research suggesting that Saxons wiped out some natives in the British isles (can dig up reference if you are interested). The Russians wiped out the Cherkess nation, not to mention wholesale displacement of Chechens and Crimean Tatars to Siberia and Central Asia. The Armenian genocide where large portions of what is now Turkey were cleansed of Armenians. There is Kosovo, where the ethnic cleansing of Serbs is almost complete. Should I continue?
Like I said, there is neither victory nor defeat here, just like in Vietnam or Afghanistan. Finding WMD's has been done (more than 500 to date), btw. Kick-starting democracy is a political aim and has nothing to do with a military campaign. Incidentally, the US has not committed genocide (meaning wiping out all or most who live within the conquered territory) in all of its existence. Admittedly, its very existence follows the genocide of Native Americans. So again, holding Iraq (or Somalia or Afghanistan) is very easy but the political leaders choose not to kill all Iraqis. There was a rumour that Soviets wanted to deport all Aghanis to Siberia. Again, they chose not to, but just because they took pity on the locals does not mean they lost. There is a big difference between killing those who would fight you in the open and those who hide behind civillians. In the latter case the way to kill your opponents is to kill all civillians. We can do that, we choose not to.
I think we are gearing up for war with China. The Chinese are rapidly growing their military too. 2020 sounds like a reasonable time frame for the standoff with China to become visible. In any event, the military is going with unmanned devices for the front lines and I think much of the 21st century will be spent performing this upgrade. Unmanned aircraft are fairly easy to make so they get the workup first. But what do you think that whole DARPA challenge was all about - you know, the one where cars had to navigate terrain on their own. Imagine invading Iraq next time without committing a single soldier outside of US borders. IMHO, that's the vision.
We are not being defeated by the weakest nation in the Middle East. We simply have no concept of what we are doing there and hence no way to define victory. If we wanted their land - that's easy. If we wanted their women - again, easy. If we wanted their children for breakfast Mike Tyson style - no problem. The problem is that we went in with no metric of what victory means. Conversely, we cannot be defeated because there is no metric for failure. We went in, killed whoever we wanted, captured some high level guys, killed others, spent as much as we pleased on pointless military meandering, and we will likely leave on our own schedule. Did we kill all who oppose us? No, but we could, we just don't go for genocide. Will we leave Iraq in better shape than before we went in? Maybe, depends on who you ask. You aint gonna make great pottery out of runny shit. We did our best to remove the smelliest bits but the only way to make Iraq a nice place to live in the Western sense is to wipe the slate clean. Again, we can do that, we just choose not to.
Still, I don't see Canada in danger of being occupied by some ther county. You've got some border dispute over some dinky little island but the military you have is enough since Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, and whatever else you've got there are in no danger of being bombed Dresden or Hiroshima style. The reason US needs a large military is that we are trying to be the world's policeman, controlling the flow of goods (e.g. oil), and coordinating operations like the war on drugs. We are in the business of projecting power, you are not. As a side note, there was one other nation which tried to be the world's policeman - Russia. After the defeat of Napoleon, Russians were to Europe what US is to the world. Result: all European powers conspired to limit Russian influence and by the time of Crimean war the country was in decay. Ever since, Russia has been regarded with hostility and could only get into the big boys club after big military victories (e.g. WW2) only to be promptly dumped again as soon as possible. What I am saying is that it is a bad idea (long term) to be a world's policeman. So be glad you are not in this business.
Something bothered me about your post, so I re-read it a few times. I have figured it out finally. It is the fact that you have telnet and security in the same sentence.
There is already a company making pantyhose by that name. In that case the name makes sense, both functionally and in terms of getting erections. But for a tech company??? Do their servers need motivation to stay up?
I doubt they would do it, but with a bit of cleanup it could be a decent site. Just remove all images from the right side of the screen, kill the ads in the middle of the frame, and finally remove the junk at the bottom of the page (nobody's gonna look there anyways so might as well save bandwidth). As it is, the site is too busy and it is hard to focus on the stories. Story selection seems weird - it is just news. Nothing to provoke a serious discussion. The commenting link is very small, as if the designers were afraid someone might actually post a comment. I also don't get their voting system. It'd be one thing for me to rate the story on a scale, say from 1 to 10 and then post the average rating next to the story. That way user input has some meaning. But what does it mean that 10 people voted for a story? Ten out of how many? How is that related to the quality of the post? Bottom line: it is not crazy for AOL to run a community discussion website - forums were their core business for a while. But this website shows that that they have surprisingly little clue about their core business.
I will wait a couple of years. My price point is $50 for the burner and $2 per 50Gb disk. So as soon as prices come down by an order of magnitude I will start caring (well, aside from the fact that 50Gb disks are not out yet - expected this Christmas season at the earliest).
Fair enough. My point was that he does publish in refereed journals and his publications are at least somewhat related to climate. Whether he is respectable reference in the specific area is for anyone to decide, just let's not get to the level of ad hominem attacks, especially when they border on libel. But again, I am not saying he is an expert in this area of research (I am not such an expert myself, so my opinion of him is not an uninformed one anyways).
Disclaimer: I am not a climate expert, not even close. I also happen to believe that global warming is real.
Having said that, science cannot progress without sceptics. In this case the sceptics are funded by the oil industry. But their very existence is good for science and climate research. It is fairly (surpisingly) easy to propose a plausible theory and have many, even most people on your side. What is hard is to convince the last few sceptics. You need very direct evidence which so far is lacking. For instance: are air temperatures the highest they have ever been since the emrgence of multicellular organisms on Earth? If not, then global warming is within natural limits and is nothing to worry about. At the worst we will have a truly mass extinction - that has happened before.
I know you are trolling but still... What you use to join metal pieces depends on the application. Riveting and bolting does not work when you want a hermetic enclosure, e.g. for UHV chambers. Bonding has the same problem and also is often bad in cases where vibration and extreme stress can affect the structure. Welding is an extremely important process for many manufacturers and must be taken into account when you want to evaluate the viability of any material to replace steel as _the_ key industrial material.
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I go to scientific conferences and it would be nice to have an ultralight (4 lbs is way too
heavy) device which I could carry around all day, take notes on, and then also use it to show
other people my data (which is high res so I need 1600x1200 for it to look best). It is the
kind of usage that UMPC is supposedly designed for, except it is just slightly too heavy, way
too bulky (thick), the screen is too small, and battery life is about a third of what would be
useful for a day at the conference center without recharge.
Battery life could be improved by having no HDD, using slower RAM, and OLED screen (and of course
no wireless and no optical drives). Thickness could be improved by, you guessed it, OLED
screen (100 micron thick screens were demonstrated already), solid state HDD, and no optical
drives. There is also technology for cell phones to make the casing of the device act as a
battery - scale that to tablet level and you've got some major improvements.
What I am asking for is for someone to use the best tech out there to squeeze every last bit of
utility out of a tablet. No leaps in technology necessary.
Well, it is not so stupid. You wouldn't buy good tech to bury it if it were
clearly better. You bury it if it has long term potential but is not competitive
yet. A classic example is the Einstein/Szilard refrigerator. It was kinda sorta
competitive with existing designs, but it had a major flaw - ammonia leaks were
a big problem. This is the kind of stuff you eliminate with a bit more R&D and then
you have a competitor to the best fridges. Instead Electrolux bought it and buried
it, precisely by not investing in R&D needed to make the design competitive.
Give me something with twice the screen size (and a decent resolution 1600x1200 plz).
Make it an OLED for readability and shrink the thickness of the device about twice.
Make flash-based HDD and removable (hot-plug) wireless module for low power consumption.
Nuke the keyboard (I can lug my own, just give me a few usb ports).
I use this exact system, except my rule 5 is to always have at least a fixed minimum
in the account.
I also do not bank online because I find that I forget those transactions much more
readily than ones where I had to go to the local branch. Thus my imaginary ledger
book in my head works well so long as I do not use online banking. It helps that
my local branch is between where I work and where I go for lunch so I can stop
by any day with no extra effort. Then again, this is why I selected the bank I use
in the first place.
Oh, and rule 2 is good for students but once you start making any money whatsoever
you will need a credit card, just so you can buy a house a couple of years down the
line. My rule 2 is : have one credit card and never buy more than $200 worth in any
given month on that card (just so you can pay it off on the spot whenever you are
at your local branch).
There are quite a few comments to this effect, so I will just reply here.l e-usage.html
There is plenty of discussion of "a" vs "the" ambiguity on the web, so I will just
point to the first link I found on google:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~resmeth/miscellaneous/artic
Scroll down to the exceptions, or search the page for "the use of articles in English
is essentially idiomatic".
Well, how a word ends is not always a good indication. "La table" in french is feminine but
you'd be hard pressed to guess without the article. Or better yet, compare russian words
kon' (horse, russian masculine) and von' (stink, russian feminine).
As for verb conjugation, most Romance and Slavic languages are rather bad. English has a few
irregular verbs, but nothing like French. We don't have hundreds of common everyday verbs
which are out line, nor do we have the distinction between type I, type II or really
irregular verbs. There is nothing logical about Russian conjugation system either. They have
two separate classes of verbs to indicate whether an action has or has not been completed.
By comparison, English (Romance really) system of auxilliary verbs to specify tenses is very
simple (i.e. easily programmable) and flexible.
As for gerund, I find your post just plain funny. First you say that the 'ing' form can be
confusing then you say there is nothing wrong with gerund. It's one or the other, not both.
As for declension, well Russian is not doing away with it, nor is German.
Conditionals. OK, go to google, search for "conditional english". First link is rather
informative. Notice how there are six forms of conditionals. Look at Past Unreal Conditional.
It is the only one using the "had had" construct. This stands out and is irregular. Not
surprisingly many people just use one "had" in regular speech.
I welcome the comparison of Russian and English with respect to articles. Russians do just
fine without them, English speakers use definite and indefinite ones and there is no set of
rules that applies everywhere. Indeed, in English you will find situations where both are equally
valid. Using a definite or indefinite article, you remove the ambiguity of whether you want
"a car" (any car) or "the car" (yeah, that one). This resolution of ambiguity may be undesirable
but the language leaves no way to say both. In such situations, the choice of "a" vs "the" can
be quite arbitrary. (I live in the US, vs I live in Canada is another example of irregular rules:
countries which are a collection of states start with the, regular countries don't. No wonder
many people would say I live in Netherlands).
Those aren't rules. That's documentation and guidance maybe but not rules.
The mere fact that there is a category "usually [masculine, feminine, neutral]"
should tell you that there is no first principles way to determine the gender.
Notice also that the "always [masculine, feminine, neutral]" also has exceptions.
Latin-derived grammars are usually a pain in the ass because of genders, irregular
verbs, and noun cases. German suffers from all of those. English has fewer
irregularities (gerund; too many tenses, like the conditional tenses that few
people use; rather arbitrary use of "a" vs. "the", etc). That said, I am not
aware of a language with a simple consistent grammar with no exceptions to just
a few simple rules (unlambda is the only one and that's for computers only).
When is the launch date? Any idea on pricing?
Several. Like you said, what the Brits did to the natives of
America and Australia. The muslims under Mohammed wiped out
an entire Jewish tribe in what is now Saudi Arabia. There is
genetic research suggesting that Saxons wiped out some natives
in the British isles (can dig up reference if you are interested).
The Russians wiped out the Cherkess nation, not to mention
wholesale displacement of Chechens and Crimean Tatars to Siberia
and Central Asia. The Armenian genocide where large portions of
what is now Turkey were cleansed of Armenians. There is Kosovo,
where the ethnic cleansing of Serbs is almost complete.
Should I continue?
Like I said, there is neither victory nor defeat here, just like in Vietnam or Afghanistan.
Finding WMD's has been done (more than 500 to date), btw. Kick-starting democracy is a political
aim and has nothing to do with a military campaign.
Incidentally, the US has not committed genocide (meaning wiping out all or most who live within
the conquered territory) in all of its existence. Admittedly, its very existence follows the
genocide of Native Americans. So again, holding Iraq (or Somalia or Afghanistan) is very easy but
the political leaders choose not to kill all Iraqis. There was a rumour that Soviets wanted to
deport all Aghanis to Siberia. Again, they chose not to, but just because they took pity on the
locals does not mean they lost.
There is a big difference between killing those who would fight you in the open and those who hide
behind civillians. In the latter case the way to kill your opponents is to kill all civillians.
We can do that, we choose not to.
I think we are gearing up for war with China. The Chinese are
rapidly growing their military too. 2020 sounds like a reasonable
time frame for the standoff with China to become visible.
In any event, the military is going with unmanned devices for the
front lines and I think much of the 21st century will be spent
performing this upgrade. Unmanned aircraft are fairly easy to
make so they get the workup first. But what do you think that
whole DARPA challenge was all about - you know, the one where
cars had to navigate terrain on their own. Imagine invading
Iraq next time without committing a single soldier outside of US
borders. IMHO, that's the vision.
We are not being defeated by the weakest nation in the Middle East.
We simply have no concept of what we are doing there and hence no
way to define victory. If we wanted their land - that's easy.
If we wanted their women - again, easy. If we wanted their children
for breakfast Mike Tyson style - no problem. The problem is that
we went in with no metric of what victory means. Conversely,
we cannot be defeated because there is no metric for failure. We
went in, killed whoever we wanted, captured some high level guys,
killed others, spent as much as we pleased on pointless military
meandering, and we will likely leave on our own schedule.
Did we kill all who oppose us? No, but we could, we just don't go
for genocide.
Will we leave Iraq in better shape than before we went in? Maybe,
depends on who you ask. You aint gonna make great pottery out of
runny shit. We did our best to remove the smelliest bits but the
only way to make Iraq a nice place to live in the Western sense is
to wipe the slate clean. Again, we can do that, we just choose not
to.
Still, I don't see Canada in danger of being occupied by some
ther county. You've got some border dispute over some dinky
little island but the military you have is enough since
Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, and whatever else you've got there
are in no danger of being bombed Dresden or Hiroshima style.
The reason US needs a large military is that we are trying to be
the world's policeman, controlling the flow of goods (e.g. oil),
and coordinating operations like the war on drugs. We are in the
business of projecting power, you are not.
As a side note, there was one other nation which tried to be the
world's policeman - Russia. After the defeat of Napoleon, Russians
were to Europe what US is to the world. Result: all European
powers conspired to limit Russian influence and by the time of
Crimean war the country was in decay. Ever since, Russia has been
regarded with hostility and could only get into the big boys
club after big military victories (e.g. WW2) only to be promptly
dumped again as soon as possible. What I am saying is that it is
a bad idea (long term) to be a world's policeman. So be glad you
are not in this business.
Let's start with the one I care about most: ...
CMYK support in Inkscape is
Can someone post a detailed comparison of features between Inkscape and Illustrator.
Which features are still missing (aside from PDF capabilities)?
Something bothered me about your post, so I re-read it a
few times. I have figured it out finally. It is the fact
that you have telnet and security in the same sentence.
There is already a company making pantyhose by that name. In that case the name makes
sense, both functionally and in terms of getting erections. But for a tech company???
Do their servers need motivation to stay up?
What would be the gain-bandwidth for a current amplifier built with this technology?
Uh-ha, and for another $5000 you can even get it calibrated and certified (well, maybe
you'll have room to squeeze in some short warranty).
I doubt they would do it, but with a bit of cleanup it could be a decent site.
Just remove all images from the right side of the screen, kill the ads in the
middle of the frame, and finally remove the junk at the bottom of the page
(nobody's gonna look there anyways so might as well save bandwidth).
As it is, the site is too busy and it is hard to focus on the stories. Story
selection seems weird - it is just news. Nothing to provoke a serious
discussion. The commenting link is very small, as if the designers were
afraid someone might actually post a comment.
I also don't get their voting system. It'd be one thing for me to rate the
story on a scale, say from 1 to 10 and then post the average rating next to
the story. That way user input has some meaning. But what does it mean that
10 people voted for a story? Ten out of how many? How is that related to the
quality of the post?
Bottom line: it is not crazy for AOL to run a community discussion website -
forums were their core business for a while. But this website shows that that
they have surprisingly little clue about their core business.
I will wait a couple of years. My price point is $50 for the burner and $2 per 50Gb disk.
So as soon as prices come down by an order of magnitude I will start caring (well, aside
from the fact that 50Gb disks are not out yet - expected this Christmas season at the
earliest).
Fair enough. My point was that he does publish in refereed
journals and his publications are at least somewhat related
to climate. Whether he is respectable reference in the specific
area is for anyone to decide, just let's not get to the
level of ad hominem attacks, especially when they border on
libel. But again, I am not saying he is an expert in this
area of research (I am not such an expert myself, so my opinion
of him is not an uninformed one anyways).
Disclaimer: I am not a climate expert, not even close. I also happen to believe that global warming
is real.
Having said that, science cannot progress without sceptics. In this case the sceptics are funded by
the oil industry. But their very existence is good for science and climate research. It is fairly
(surpisingly) easy to propose a plausible theory and have many, even most people on your side. What
is hard is to convince the last few sceptics. You need very direct evidence which so far is lacking.
For instance: are air temperatures the highest they have ever been since the emrgence of multicellular
organisms on Earth? If not, then global warming is within natural limits and is nothing to worry
about. At the worst we will have a truly mass extinction - that has happened before.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_4.htm
Actually, sounds like he does publish pretty much on the subject
in peer reviewed journals, including Science.
I know you are trolling but still...
What you use to join metal pieces depends on the application.
Riveting and bolting does not work when you want a hermetic
enclosure, e.g. for UHV chambers. Bonding has the same problem
and also is often bad in cases where vibration and extreme
stress can affect the structure.
Welding is an extremely important process for many manufacturers
and must be taken into account when you want to evaluate the
viability of any material to replace steel as _the_ key
industrial material.