GNU is a lot more than some text editors; it's an entire UNIX-type system, sans kernel. It has a compiler, shell, multiple scripting languages, and all the little userland programs that make most Linux distros behave more or less like any commercial UNIX. The only thing missing from the GNU project is a kernel; sorry, RMS, but the HURD isn't quite ready for prime-time yet.
To continue your car analogy, the GNU system is like a car that has everything but an engine; it's got a frame, transmission, suspension, body, interior, and all the rest. If you drop in an engine made by someone else (the Linux kernel), then, hey presto, you've got a great car. It's not quite a car without the engine, but it's most of one.
Finally, as for the whole "GNU/Linux" debate, RMS has some good points. He calls the Linux kernel "Linux" and the entire system "GNU/Linux," because it uses GNU components. I do think that he's fighting a losing battle to try to change what is already common terminology, but from an entirely ideological standpoint, he's probably right.
First, it's an A7V-133 rev. 1.05, sorry for the error. That means it supports XPs up to PR 2100+. Second, my original point was that AMD's specs have remained more constant than Intel's; this is definately true, and no amount of technicalities can change that.
As for your saying that, "In fact, even the newest ASUS motherboard does not support every single Socket A Athlon," take the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe, which a friend just built a box around. Supports Athlons from 700 MHz to 3200+ PR. If I wanted, I could buy that board, drop my current Athlon in it, and be confident I could upgrade to a new CPU in a few months. I wouldn't be confident I could do that with an Intel board, although the spec does seem to be settling down.
By the way, I'm not trolling; I just got a technical detail wrong. However, if you wish to avoid the appearance of trolling, then try to choose a different username. "Natalie's Hot Grits" doesn't exactly sound like someone whose intentions are to do anything other than dangle bait and see who bites (like, say, me).
You're assuming that the machines both have storage that runs at the same speed as the CPUs. If Machine-A and Machine-B have the same speed RAM, then machine-A's penalty is much worse if the branch predictor screws up badly; if we have to get data from RAM, and the RAM is the same speed on both machines, then machine-A takes twice as long to refill its pipeline as machine-B.
I'm typing this on an Athlon 800, with an Asus A7V motherboard (VIA chipset, PC133 RAM). It could run a new Athlon XP with no problem. All it needs is a BIOS patch to display the PR (Athlon XP 2000+, say, instead of Athlon 1.666 GHz). Sure, it wouldn't run it as fast as a DDR system, but that's a function of the chipset and RAM speed.
An upgrade is still an option. As for pin compatability, all Socket A implemenations are pin-compatible with each other, even if for some reason they don't work with certain chips due to chipset issues, like plugging an old non-DDR Athlon into a DDR board. The only physical changes to the Athlon packaging have been SlotA to SocketA, and the new organic substrate introduced with the Athlon XPs (which has no bearing on what socket it fits into). Perhaps it's your information that's wrong.
I am a Christian, and I don't believe that what people like Jerry Falwell or that godhatesfags.com guy say represent the Christian worldview. I ask, how can I battle those who "give me a bad name?" I can tell them that the Bible goes directly against what they say, but that doesn't mean anything to them. They believe what they want to believe, and nothing can change that. They can say what they want to say, and, as an ACLU member and staunch believer in free speech, I can't argue that what they say should be banned; that would be hypocritical on my part.
I don't think most Christians believe that they must force their beliefs on others, either. Rather, most non-fundamentalist Christians I know believe that conversion consists of two things: education and example.
Education simply consists of teaching those who want to know about the beliefs of the church, and accepting as members those who want to join. This may also consist of missionary work, where people are told about Christ. There are no gunpoint conversions here; this is entirely voluntary.
Second, leading by example means doing charity work through the church: working at soup kitchens, shelters for abused children, and the like, and helping church members through difficult times. If people see that the church helps others, and supports its members in times of need, they may feel that the church is an organization which they want to belong.
Out of curiosity, what about Christianity do you find "stupid?" If you are thinking of things like the creation myth, or the laws of Leviticus, remember that not all Christians believe that the bible is always literal. Remember that the Old Testament was, for about a thousand years, the oral tradition of a wandering desert tribe. Obviously, things get a little distorted. Myths of other cultures are worked in, battles are distorted, and tradition becomes divine law.
Finally, I can accept that my beliefs may not be correct. I can accept that they are one of many. I can't really justify them, except to repeat what Martin Gardner said about his (non-Christian) beliefs: credo quia consolans; I believe because it consoles me. I believe because I want to. If I die and there is no God at the end of the tunnel, fine. I have lived a good life, I don't have any regrets, I've helped others and tried to help them live a good life. Again, to quote Mr. Gardner,
Beneath the
credo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurd], as Unamuno said, is the credo quia consolans. I believe because it consoles me. The true water of life, he says, is that which assuages our thirst. The true bread is that which satisfies our hunger.
...
I am quite content to confess with Unamuno that I have no basis for my belief in God other than a passionate longing that God exist and that I and others will not cease to exist. Because I believe with my heart that God upholds all things, it follows that I believe that my leap of faith, in a way beyond my comprehension, is God outside of me asking and wanting me to believe, and God within me responding.
While Gardner and I don't agree on the technicalities of belief in God, I think he makes a good point: my belief, like his, is a leap of faith. I want God to exist. I don't want to die and have no part of me go on. If that's "idiotic," so be it. I daresay I would rather be an idiot.
The best game characters I've ever seen were in Planescape: Torment. With the main character a nameless, immortal amnesiac who just woke up in the morgue, and supporting characters like Morte the wisecracking skull, an insane robot, voiced by Dan Castanella (you probably know him as Homer Simpson), or the chaste succubus who acts as madam of the Brothel of Slating Intellectual Lust, (featuring pleasures for the mind, rather than the body), all the characters tend to stick with you.
The neatest thing about the characters in PS:Torment was that they reacted in a plausible way, given their strange situations and surroundings. Everyone has a motivation, and it's not always what you think. Take the character Morte, who I mentioned above. While he seems to be nothing more than rather cliched comic relief in the beginning, his character gains a significant amount of depth.
Foil and sabre fencing, via a Boeing Employees club. I've found that it provides me with not only a good workout, but also trains my reflexes and mind. You have to be able to think very well on your feet, and change your strategy on the fly when what seemed so brilliant 2 seconds ago doesn't work. Just trying to use brute force will fail every time against someone who is quick to think and act. Besides, it's fun to poke and whack people with swords!
I'd imagine that a bandsaw and a sheetfeed scanner would take care of problem number one. Just take off the binding with the saw, put the pages into an industrial scanner with a duplexing unit (to scan both sides) and wait a few hours.
As for running OCR, given the images output from the scanning batch job, I'd imagine that it wouldn't be too hard to write a script to automate OCRing a few hundred images. It might even be possible to automate removal of the superfulous information in the margins (author, title, page numbers).
Proofreading is a challenge, but the nice regular typeface of a book doesn't exactly present an OCR-adverse situation. While some errors are doubtless unavoidable, it would probably be perfectly acceptable to release a book into the wild with, say, one error every two or three pages.
Stitching text files together is ridiculously easy; use cat (even if you're doing this under Windows, Cygwin will give you a perfectly good implementation of UNIX tools).
Diagrams would be harder to deal with, but for many books, they're not necessary. I'd imagine that piracy is confined mostly to bestsellers, not reference works and textbooks.
One thing I see lots of in book piracy, especially on Fasttrack (Kazaa, Grokster), is simply dumping the entire book as a PDF bitmap. This sidesteps the OCR issues entirely, but does result in a 50 or 75 meg download; still, with broadband, size doesn't matter, and it's a good way to preserve layout, graphics and tables.
Remember, also, that ebooks tend to be DRMed to within an inch of their life; they aren't something you can just drop in your Kazaa shared directory without cracking the encryption first and expect the world to be able to read. Also, even after the encryption is cracked, the format issue remains. If it's a PDF or Postscript file, fine, but ebook readers aren't known for adopting open standards (although all the ones I've seen can read ASCII, that's not what they use for their pay-to-read content).
Book piracy will likely be around as long as dead tree editions are still available; there isn't much there but the effort required to stop potential pirates. While the barrier to entry for piracy is higher than with other forms of media (like, say, CDs), remember that all it takes is one dedicated pirate with access to some fairly common equipment.
While the SEC allows registered trades by insiders, remember that those trades are public knowledge. If I knew that the CEO of a company I own stock in was going to dump all his or her shares, I would plan on doing the same thing; obviously, the CEO knows something I don't and wants to get rid of the shares before something damaging becomes public.
First, the part of the Linux kernel that does "advanced 3D tricks" is called "DRI," the Direct Rendering Infrastructure. It provides a way for userland software (like X) to access 3D hardware accelerators. It's really not much of a "trick;" rather, it's a way for X to access hardware from userland (rather than having to put most of X in the kernel).
Second, I doubt that the "standard" Linux kernel will ever be able to run medical equipment or nuclear power plants. Linux tends to have somewhat experimental code that, while stable compared to many desktop OSes, is really not suited to hyper-reliable situations like these, where reliability is more important than performance. Also, it is not designed with real-time operation in mind. A real-time OS is essential in many industrial control systems (imagine, say, a computer that must begin to open a chemical overflow tank valve 350 ms after its overflow sensor trips) but is of little value in desktop systems. A commercial project a few years ago tried to make Linux real-time; it ended up essentially gutting large portions of the kernel. Finally, Linux is fundamentally a monolithic kernel design. Hyper-reliable OSes like QNX almost always use microkernels, which seperate kernel space almost like most OSes seperate user space and kernel space. This means that one poorly written or malicious kernel module can't write over important areas of memory belonging to other portions of the kernel. While this would seem to be useful in a desktop or server OS, the overhead it causes means that the small reliability gain is offset by a performance hit. Users on the bleeding edge of kernel development can live with a kernel panic now and then; nuclear reactor techs can't. Linux and QNX are designed for two different markets; making Linux as bulletproof as QNX or QNX as general-purpose as Linux are not realistic goals.
Re:For those unfortunate times...
on
42-Volt Autos
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Car batteries are still 12 volts. The alternator outputs 13.8 to charge the battery and run electrical systems while the car is running, but the battery provides 12 volts under normal circumstances. Don't believe me? Go get a multimeter and check your car. The 13.8V system is there to charge a 12V battery.
I was talking about the resistance inside the body. If you were to put needles into your left and right index fingers, then touch the prongs with the needles, you would almost certainly die. Your skin is a fairly good insulator, but once the electricity penetrates it, the body becomes a decent conductor; all the salts, electrolytes and iron in your blood conduct electricity fairly well.
Classful routing terminology is still a useful form of shorthand. If you tell me that MIT has a Class A block, I know immediately that they have a network space the size of Asia, but if you tell me they've got an 8 bit block, I have to pause and think about it for a half second.
As for Cisco teaching classful addressing, that's justifiable. If the terminology is still in use among network folk, Cisco isn't doing a good job if they certify people who don't know how to communicate with their peers. Also, I can tell you that the CCNA exam did have several CIDR questions on it. Certifying someone as a network tech means testing all the knowledge they should know to do their job well. Since classful routing is still in the wild, network techs should know how to deal with it.
Despite what the infomercials say, those things aren't really useful for burning calories or building muscle tone. While they are used in physical therapy, it's more to bring the muscles to a level where the patient can begin to use them for small tasks (like getting an atrophied bicep to lift a few pounds). Daily use builds far more muscle than any TENS machine. Think about it; how is a slight twitching going to help build lots of muscle? If you want to get buffed or lose weight, there's no substitute for exercise.
I know that voltage is important, but it's the amps that kill you. It doesn't matter how many volts your Tesla coil can deliver, it won't stop your heart if it only puts out a couple of milliamps. Of course, those arcs can cause plasma burns and put you in the hospital, so they're not something to play around with, but it most likely won't stop your heart if you're healthy. The reason that high-tension transmission lines are dangerous is that they carry both really high voltages and really large amounts of current. If you provide a 100,000 volt high-tension line with a 5 Kohm path to ground (through your body, assuming slightly damp skin), it will be more than happy to deliver 20 amps of current; enough to turn you into a nice crispy critter.
As for getting a high enough voltage to kill a person, it's not that hard. While dry, clean skin has a fairly high resistance (~100Kohms, not millions), any water at all on the skin picks up the salt excreted out of your pores and becomes an excellent conductor right down into those pores and into your body; your cross-body resistance drops to around ~10Kohms. Through the body, resistance is much, much lower (remember that blood, being basically saltwater with cells in it, conducts electricity well). Although the stories about people being killed by 9V multimeters (one probe in each finger measuring their internal resistance) are probably urban legends, doing the same with 120 VAC would almost certainly stop your heart.
Finally, voltage sources in the thousands of volts aren't that hard to find, even in the average home. The CRT you are probably sitting in front of as you read this runs on about 10,000 volts, and your microwave runs on similar high voltages. While asking either for high enough current to kill you will probably burn them out, they will most likely work long enough to stop your heart.
I don't know of any specific figures, but since heat increases with current, I would imagine that putting a few amps through a body would barbeque it nicely. Anyone up for some long pig?
Incidentally, thermal injuries are one case where high voltage, low current power supplies are dangerous. When you get voltages high enough, you can get a plasma arc across the air (it takes about 10,000 volts to get a decent ~5cm arc going). Plasma is of course extremely hot, and can cause truly nasty burns almost instantly. While it might seem that only Darwin Award shoo-ins would put body parts into a bolt of lightning, electricity can find your body a very convienient path to ground. Always be careful around high voltages! (that's a lesson I've learned through nasty experiences)
It's actually about 250 mA (1 amp=1000 mA) that will kill you reliably. The progression goes as follows, roughly speaking (obviously, it's somewhat different for everyone):
5-10 mA: possible to feel a tingling sensation
10-25 mA: painful sensation
80-100 mA: local muscles contract or spasm uncontrollably. This makes it nearly impossible to let go of the power line; this is where things start to get life-threatening
220-280 mA: heart goes into fibrillation, causing heart attack
Voltage is of course unimportant, except insofar as a certain voltage is required to "pull" the current across your body's resistance.
Nothing is the fourth dimension. Our universe has three space dimensions and one time dimension. You can no more call time the "fourth dimension" than you could call the x, y and z axes the "first," "second" or "third" dimension.
As for spacetime, that comes into play because I lied earlier; there really isn't a distinction between "space" and "time" dimensions. Einstein's equations show us that space and time can be measured in the same units, and that coordinate transforms can be done that "mix" space and time, just like you can "mix" the x and y axes with vectors.
I suggest reading the Feynman Lectures on Physics, or, if you can't afford the whole set, Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces. They're not nearly as easy to read as "general audience" physics texts like Dr. Kaku's, and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces and the full Lectures on Physics require high-school level calculus knowledge. Still, they will help you come to a mathematical rather than intuitive knowledge of relativity and curved space; it was only by reading these books that I really began to grasp Einstein's theories.
Soundex may or may not be crap, but half the calculation work (which is really easy) can be done when the name is written to the DB. Obershelp, on the other hand, requires a search for the largest common pattern, for which no work can be done in advance. Soundex is a matter of converting the name input into a Soundex code (first letter, 3 numbers) then searching the database for that code.
Obershelp/Ratcliffe works well for finding the best match in small sets, but on a large DB, it breaks down completely unless you are willing to dedicate significant time to the search. While better alternatives to Soundex definetely exist, Obershelp/Radcliffe is not one that should be used in large databases.
Blackjack has really good odds if you count cards and follow a good system (in some cases it will be as high as 51%, which is incredibly high for a casino game). Without card counting (which casinos will kick you out for if they catch you), you can get 47-48% odds. You still lose in the long run, but with random fluctuations you can usually make decent money; you just have to know when to leave.
Of course, if you don't have the discipline to memorize and stick to a system, then blackjack can be an incredible money hole. The insurance bet in particular is a bad one to make. Still, blackjack can be a fun game and you at least stand a chance of making decent money, unlike, say, Keno or slots. And if you have some friends to hit the casinos with, you can make serious bank by using the MIT system. Just hope you don't get caught;-).
Take a look here. According to the page, after the player wins a certain number of "double or nothing" games, the outcome is always a loss. The machine will not allow players to win more than 25 pounds (30 if you choose the other game available, which also has a loss point programmed in).
Also, note that casinos are based on statistics, not on regulating individual payouts. While on the whole the casino will always win due to the massive scale it operates on, there is the opportunity for individual players to beat the odds and leave with more money than they came in with. Not allowing the player to win, with no element of chance whatsoever, is illegal almost everywhere. I imagine that this would fall under fraud laws at the very least, due to the fact that these machines are advertised as gambling devices based on random events.
I'm not familiar with British gambling laws either, but they make one accusation that is particularly damning: some machines have a "double or nothing" feature after a big payout; one of the site's accusations is that the "double or nothing" games are rigged so the player never wins. Still, some of this does seem fishy: their ROMs seem to feature cabinet art and other machine decorations rather than just display outputs, and the tests have been statistical rather than based on the programming.
A really convincing argument would be based on the ROM's internal code rather than on statistical analyses of the emulator output. After all, as long as an emulator is used, there is no way to know whether the ROM really has "cheater code" built in, or whether it's an emulator bug that is causing the analyses to come up wrong.
If you read my post all the way through, you would have noticed that I said that its use in DSL and cable modem connections is pointless (it provides little extra security, but wastes bandwidth and irritates end users). PPPoE is a good choice here because public wireless access can't authenticate based on physical links; there must be some way to ensure that a user's resources aren't being stolen. This is where PPP and RADIUS authentication come in handy, and this is what makes PPPoE a reasonable solution for wireless 802.11x.
Looks like someone finally found a use for PPPoE! I've wanted that damned protocol to die for quite a while, but I can see it being useful in this situation. DSL, on the other hand, is where it deserves to die a painful death, along with whatever suits decided that "emulating the dial-up experience" is better than an always-on connection.
Hmm, medicine must be bullshit. After all, it's built on biology, which is built on chemistry, which is built on physics. Doctors obviously know nothing any half-decent physicist would know!
Also, computer science is not simple. Just like you say that EE is "a hell of a lot more than circuts," computer science is a hell of a lot more than programming. A detailed understanding of compsci consists of a good understanding of the underlying EE principles, and an excellent understanding of algorithm analysis (which is not just understanding big-O notation, a misconception I have found many EEs have). Computer science is neither simple nor easy. It is an abstraction, but is a useful one.
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To continue your car analogy, the GNU system is like a car that has everything but an engine; it's got a frame, transmission, suspension, body, interior, and all the rest. If you drop in an engine made by someone else (the Linux kernel), then, hey presto, you've got a great car. It's not quite a car without the engine, but it's most of one.
Finally, as for the whole "GNU/Linux" debate, RMS has some good points. He calls the Linux kernel "Linux" and the entire system "GNU/Linux," because it uses GNU components. I do think that he's fighting a losing battle to try to change what is already common terminology, but from an entirely ideological standpoint, he's probably right.
As for your saying that, "In fact, even the newest ASUS motherboard does not support every single Socket A Athlon," take the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe, which a friend just built a box around. Supports Athlons from 700 MHz to 3200+ PR. If I wanted, I could buy that board, drop my current Athlon in it, and be confident I could upgrade to a new CPU in a few months. I wouldn't be confident I could do that with an Intel board, although the spec does seem to be settling down.
By the way, I'm not trolling; I just got a technical detail wrong. However, if you wish to avoid the appearance of trolling, then try to choose a different username. "Natalie's Hot Grits" doesn't exactly sound like someone whose intentions are to do anything other than dangle bait and see who bites (like, say, me).
You're assuming that the machines both have storage that runs at the same speed as the CPUs. If Machine-A and Machine-B have the same speed RAM, then machine-A's penalty is much worse if the branch predictor screws up badly; if we have to get data from RAM, and the RAM is the same speed on both machines, then machine-A takes twice as long to refill its pipeline as machine-B.
An upgrade is still an option. As for pin compatability, all Socket A implemenations are pin-compatible with each other, even if for some reason they don't work with certain chips due to chipset issues, like plugging an old non-DDR Athlon into a DDR board. The only physical changes to the Athlon packaging have been SlotA to SocketA, and the new organic substrate introduced with the Athlon XPs (which has no bearing on what socket it fits into). Perhaps it's your information that's wrong.
I don't think most Christians believe that they must force their beliefs on others, either. Rather, most non-fundamentalist Christians I know believe that conversion consists of two things: education and example.
Education simply consists of teaching those who want to know about the beliefs of the church, and accepting as members those who want to join. This may also consist of missionary work, where people are told about Christ. There are no gunpoint conversions here; this is entirely voluntary.
Second, leading by example means doing charity work through the church: working at soup kitchens, shelters for abused children, and the like, and helping church members through difficult times. If people see that the church helps others, and supports its members in times of need, they may feel that the church is an organization which they want to belong.
Out of curiosity, what about Christianity do you find "stupid?" If you are thinking of things like the creation myth, or the laws of Leviticus, remember that not all Christians believe that the bible is always literal. Remember that the Old Testament was, for about a thousand years, the oral tradition of a wandering desert tribe. Obviously, things get a little distorted. Myths of other cultures are worked in, battles are distorted, and tradition becomes divine law.
Finally, I can accept that my beliefs may not be correct. I can accept that they are one of many. I can't really justify them, except to repeat what Martin Gardner said about his (non-Christian) beliefs: credo quia consolans; I believe because it consoles me. I believe because I want to. If I die and there is no God at the end of the tunnel, fine. I have lived a good life, I don't have any regrets, I've helped others and tried to help them live a good life. Again, to quote Mr. Gardner,
While Gardner and I don't agree on the technicalities of belief in God, I think he makes a good point: my belief, like his, is a leap of faith. I want God to exist. I don't want to die and have no part of me go on. If that's "idiotic," so be it. I daresay I would rather be an idiot.The neatest thing about the characters in PS:Torment was that they reacted in a plausible way, given their strange situations and surroundings. Everyone has a motivation, and it's not always what you think. Take the character Morte, who I mentioned above. While he seems to be nothing more than rather cliched comic relief in the beginning, his character gains a significant amount of depth.
And of course, who can forget Minsc from Baldur's Gate, and his miniature giant space hamster Boo? "Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes!"
Foil and sabre fencing, via a Boeing Employees club. I've found that it provides me with not only a good workout, but also trains my reflexes and mind. You have to be able to think very well on your feet, and change your strategy on the fly when what seemed so brilliant 2 seconds ago doesn't work. Just trying to use brute force will fail every time against someone who is quick to think and act. Besides, it's fun to poke and whack people with swords!
- I'd imagine that a bandsaw and a sheetfeed scanner would take care of problem number one. Just take off the binding with the saw, put the pages into an industrial scanner with a duplexing unit (to scan both sides) and wait a few hours.
- As for running OCR, given the images output from the scanning batch job, I'd imagine that it wouldn't be too hard to write a script to automate OCRing a few hundred images. It might even be possible to automate removal of the superfulous information in the margins (author, title, page numbers).
- Proofreading is a challenge, but the nice regular typeface of a book doesn't exactly present an OCR-adverse situation. While some errors are doubtless unavoidable, it would probably be perfectly acceptable to release a book into the wild with, say, one error every two or three pages.
- Stitching text files together is ridiculously easy; use cat (even if you're doing this under Windows, Cygwin will give you a perfectly good implementation of UNIX tools).
- Diagrams would be harder to deal with, but for many books, they're not necessary. I'd imagine that piracy is confined mostly to bestsellers, not reference works and textbooks.
One thing I see lots of in book piracy, especially on Fasttrack (Kazaa, Grokster), is simply dumping the entire book as a PDF bitmap. This sidesteps the OCR issues entirely, but does result in a 50 or 75 meg download; still, with broadband, size doesn't matter, and it's a good way to preserve layout, graphics and tables.Remember, also, that ebooks tend to be DRMed to within an inch of their life; they aren't something you can just drop in your Kazaa shared directory without cracking the encryption first and expect the world to be able to read. Also, even after the encryption is cracked, the format issue remains. If it's a PDF or Postscript file, fine, but ebook readers aren't known for adopting open standards (although all the ones I've seen can read ASCII, that's not what they use for their pay-to-read content).
Book piracy will likely be around as long as dead tree editions are still available; there isn't much there but the effort required to stop potential pirates. While the barrier to entry for piracy is higher than with other forms of media (like, say, CDs), remember that all it takes is one dedicated pirate with access to some fairly common equipment.
While the SEC allows registered trades by insiders, remember that those trades are public knowledge. If I knew that the CEO of a company I own stock in was going to dump all his or her shares, I would plan on doing the same thing; obviously, the CEO knows something I don't and wants to get rid of the shares before something damaging becomes public.
Second, I doubt that the "standard" Linux kernel will ever be able to run medical equipment or nuclear power plants. Linux tends to have somewhat experimental code that, while stable compared to many desktop OSes, is really not suited to hyper-reliable situations like these, where reliability is more important than performance. Also, it is not designed with real-time operation in mind. A real-time OS is essential in many industrial control systems (imagine, say, a computer that must begin to open a chemical overflow tank valve 350 ms after its overflow sensor trips) but is of little value in desktop systems. A commercial project a few years ago tried to make Linux real-time; it ended up essentially gutting large portions of the kernel. Finally, Linux is fundamentally a monolithic kernel design. Hyper-reliable OSes like QNX almost always use microkernels, which seperate kernel space almost like most OSes seperate user space and kernel space. This means that one poorly written or malicious kernel module can't write over important areas of memory belonging to other portions of the kernel. While this would seem to be useful in a desktop or server OS, the overhead it causes means that the small reliability gain is offset by a performance hit. Users on the bleeding edge of kernel development can live with a kernel panic now and then; nuclear reactor techs can't. Linux and QNX are designed for two different markets; making Linux as bulletproof as QNX or QNX as general-purpose as Linux are not realistic goals.
Car batteries are still 12 volts. The alternator outputs 13.8 to charge the battery and run electrical systems while the car is running, but the battery provides 12 volts under normal circumstances. Don't believe me? Go get a multimeter and check your car. The 13.8V system is there to charge a 12V battery.
I was talking about the resistance inside the body. If you were to put needles into your left and right index fingers, then touch the prongs with the needles, you would almost certainly die. Your skin is a fairly good insulator, but once the electricity penetrates it, the body becomes a decent conductor; all the salts, electrolytes and iron in your blood conduct electricity fairly well.
As for Cisco teaching classful addressing, that's justifiable. If the terminology is still in use among network folk, Cisco isn't doing a good job if they certify people who don't know how to communicate with their peers. Also, I can tell you that the CCNA exam did have several CIDR questions on it. Certifying someone as a network tech means testing all the knowledge they should know to do their job well. Since classful routing is still in the wild, network techs should know how to deal with it.
Despite what the infomercials say, those things aren't really useful for burning calories or building muscle tone. While they are used in physical therapy, it's more to bring the muscles to a level where the patient can begin to use them for small tasks (like getting an atrophied bicep to lift a few pounds). Daily use builds far more muscle than any TENS machine. Think about it; how is a slight twitching going to help build lots of muscle? If you want to get buffed or lose weight, there's no substitute for exercise.
As for getting a high enough voltage to kill a person, it's not that hard. While dry, clean skin has a fairly high resistance (~100Kohms, not millions), any water at all on the skin picks up the salt excreted out of your pores and becomes an excellent conductor right down into those pores and into your body; your cross-body resistance drops to around ~10Kohms. Through the body, resistance is much, much lower (remember that blood, being basically saltwater with cells in it, conducts electricity well). Although the stories about people being killed by 9V multimeters (one probe in each finger measuring their internal resistance) are probably urban legends, doing the same with 120 VAC would almost certainly stop your heart.
Finally, voltage sources in the thousands of volts aren't that hard to find, even in the average home. The CRT you are probably sitting in front of as you read this runs on about 10,000 volts, and your microwave runs on similar high voltages. While asking either for high enough current to kill you will probably burn them out, they will most likely work long enough to stop your heart.
Incidentally, thermal injuries are one case where high voltage, low current power supplies are dangerous. When you get voltages high enough, you can get a plasma arc across the air (it takes about 10,000 volts to get a decent ~5cm arc going). Plasma is of course extremely hot, and can cause truly nasty burns almost instantly. While it might seem that only Darwin Award shoo-ins would put body parts into a bolt of lightning, electricity can find your body a very convienient path to ground. Always be careful around high voltages! (that's a lesson I've learned through nasty experiences)
- 5-10 mA: possible to feel a tingling sensation
- 10-25 mA: painful sensation
- 80-100 mA: local muscles contract or spasm uncontrollably. This makes it nearly impossible to let go of the power line; this is where things start to get life-threatening
- 220-280 mA: heart goes into fibrillation, causing heart attack
Voltage is of course unimportant, except insofar as a certain voltage is required to "pull" the current across your body's resistance.As for spacetime, that comes into play because I lied earlier; there really isn't a distinction between "space" and "time" dimensions. Einstein's equations show us that space and time can be measured in the same units, and that coordinate transforms can be done that "mix" space and time, just like you can "mix" the x and y axes with vectors.
I suggest reading the Feynman Lectures on Physics, or, if you can't afford the whole set, Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces. They're not nearly as easy to read as "general audience" physics texts like Dr. Kaku's, and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces and the full Lectures on Physics require high-school level calculus knowledge. Still, they will help you come to a mathematical rather than intuitive knowledge of relativity and curved space; it was only by reading these books that I really began to grasp Einstein's theories.
Obershelp/Ratcliffe works well for finding the best match in small sets, but on a large DB, it breaks down completely unless you are willing to dedicate significant time to the search. While better alternatives to Soundex definetely exist, Obershelp/Radcliffe is not one that should be used in large databases.
Of course, if you don't have the discipline to memorize and stick to a system, then blackjack can be an incredible money hole. The insurance bet in particular is a bad one to make. Still, blackjack can be a fun game and you at least stand a chance of making decent money, unlike, say, Keno or slots. And if you have some friends to hit the casinos with, you can make serious bank by using the MIT system. Just hope you don't get caught ;-).
Also, note that casinos are based on statistics, not on regulating individual payouts. While on the whole the casino will always win due to the massive scale it operates on, there is the opportunity for individual players to beat the odds and leave with more money than they came in with. Not allowing the player to win, with no element of chance whatsoever, is illegal almost everywhere. I imagine that this would fall under fraud laws at the very least, due to the fact that these machines are advertised as gambling devices based on random events.
A really convincing argument would be based on the ROM's internal code rather than on statistical analyses of the emulator output. After all, as long as an emulator is used, there is no way to know whether the ROM really has "cheater code" built in, or whether it's an emulator bug that is causing the analyses to come up wrong.
If you read my post all the way through, you would have noticed that I said that its use in DSL and cable modem connections is pointless (it provides little extra security, but wastes bandwidth and irritates end users). PPPoE is a good choice here because public wireless access can't authenticate based on physical links; there must be some way to ensure that a user's resources aren't being stolen. This is where PPP and RADIUS authentication come in handy, and this is what makes PPPoE a reasonable solution for wireless 802.11x.
Looks like someone finally found a use for PPPoE! I've wanted that damned protocol to die for quite a while, but I can see it being useful in this situation. DSL, on the other hand, is where it deserves to die a painful death, along with whatever suits decided that "emulating the dial-up experience" is better than an always-on connection.
Also, computer science is not simple. Just like you say that EE is "a hell of a lot more than circuts," computer science is a hell of a lot more than programming. A detailed understanding of compsci consists of a good understanding of the underlying EE principles, and an excellent understanding of algorithm analysis (which is not just understanding big-O notation, a misconception I have found many EEs have). Computer science is neither simple nor easy. It is an abstraction, but is a useful one.