The "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" trailers being broadcast these days show CGI chimpanzees with near-human faces. Even though they're purporting to be animals, I find those images disturbingly deep in the uncanny valley. I probably won't be going to see that movie.
I much preferred the mask and makeup of the 1970s movies. Even though those old actors don't look convincingly "real" in any meaningful sense, at least they don't put me off.
It's been found that people who've undergone Botox treatement are less empathic than people who haven't.
I would suggest that rich and narcissistic people are already less empathic than ordinary people. The UC Berkley found that in general rich people are more selfish than poor people, and it takes a lot of disposable income to be able to afford Botox treatments. People who undergo Botox are also often doing so because they are concerned about their fading youthful appearance, a sign of narcissism, and narcissistic people are by definition more self-absorbed than others.
So how could a study of Botox recipients prove anything other than selfish, self-absorbed people are less empathic than others?
Actually, I wasn't talking about creating a "presentation" like a document or a powerpoint deck, or even writing fancy code. I was only talking about writing automated unit tests.
A suite of well-written automated unit tests does several important things. First, it proves that your modules behave as expected in the test cases. The tests themselves are the documentation that provide clearly written examples of how to properly call the modules. And running the whole test suite gives you confidence that if you make a change anywhere in your code to meet new requirements that all the old tests still pass.
Even if you never present it to anyone or if your requirements never change, if someone were to pick it up next year they could see not only that it still passes the tests, but how you originally intended for it to work.
I'm guessing from your.signature "Prove all things..." that you're already taking the time to prove your code works in other ways. If so, you're probably spending almost the same amount of time that it would take you to write a good, clear, repeatable, automated unit test in the first place (after you're experienced in the skill, of course).
Yes, the initial learning of how to write effective, readable unit tests does take a bit of time, but it's probably nothing you couldn't pick up in a few days. If you're interested, I would recommend asking someone experienced to coach you, as they can help you learn some of the tricks for making your tests clear and readable. And once you grok the practice and learn more as you gain experience, you may move on to even better practices like test driven development. You'll likely be amazed at how much it will help you improve your skills, your code, and your confidence in it.
the old notion of "new = better" is not true anymore by default. More and more the creed is rather "new = better for its maker". Which doesn't necessarily mean that it's better for you, the user.
I completely agree with you here. Newer is not a guarantee of better, although I still think it is generally true for the majority of products.
In TFA's context of television sets, that is where I am arguing that modern technologies are indeed far better for the consumers. We can even consider the case of 3D TV, a feature of a subset of newer TVs that is definitely "better for its maker" in terms of revenue, but potentially worse for its consumers in terms of health. If it's decided in the future that 3D causes eyestrain/headaches/pimples/whatever, concerned users can simply tune into the 2D channels. But the overall TV that remains is still a much higher quality device than any CRT ever was, even if the longevity isn't the same (which has yet to be proven, by the way; all people have offered here are anecdotes that the TV in their mothers' basements used to work for 20 years.)
If you think your programs are for you and you alone, you're probably being irresponsible to your employer. Or if you're self-employed, you're probably being irresponsible to your clients.
You are doing this work for someone else. The systems you're designing are going into a customer's production equipment. You're claiming the next person to come along should just redo the same research you already did, because he could never understand your model. Do you honestly believe the next guy is really that dumb? Perhaps the problem is not with his ability to understand, but rather with the roughness of your model. Consider if your models were constructed from much smaller modules and each module came complete with tests that both document how your models works and proof that they do work, you'd be turning over that value to the next guy without forcing your company (or client) to pay him to redo your work.
As a benefit, you'd not only have the ability to transfer your knowledge to someone else, you'd also have the luxury of being able to hold up that model in court and say "Not only was this system calculated and designed to support these conditions, but here are the tests I ran to prove that the calculations were made correctly. Clearly the system failed due to a different cause, or to these parameters being exceeded far beyond the design limits."
For scientists who do important things other than coding, I don't think it's a good use of their time to learn software engineering best practices. They're sequencing genomes and trying to cure cancer, or discovering the particles that make up the particles that make up the gluons. I'm in favor of letting them focus on that work, and if they knock out some hacked code to support their research, that's good enough. Turn it over to a software developer (or development team) and let them turn it into production code. It's a better use of everyone's time, as everyone is working on the things they do best.
I'm still not sure why there's still such a love of FORTRAN when they could be knocking most of this stuff out better and more rapidly in a 4GL tool such as Mathematica. There seems to be some kind of engineering machismo that prevents people from evolving past the "My prof learned FORTRAN as a kid, and it was good enough for him" stage. They're totally missing parallels in the evolution of technology. Just like they're now using advanced technology like scanning tunneling microscopes instead of optical microscopes, the computer scientists have evolved our tools far beyond punch-card languages.
I totally understand there would be no benefit to them to make a sideways leap to a different 3GL like Java or C#, but seriously, they shouldn't be in the business of structuring code and fighting syntax. They are in the business of higher level thinking and problem solving in a specific domain. Use the higher level tools already!
The point is that it's a one way street. Software engineering is a specialization of engineering science, but most scientists aren't software engineers. A scientist can create the embodiment of an algorithm representing a solution to their problem, but don't think of it in terms of the qualities of reusability, modularity, interface, coupling, cohesion, exception handling, security, data integrity, etc. And they aren't supposed to: they're trained to understand biology, botany, physics, or whatever their field of expertise is, and never studied software engineering.
Think of it in terms of chemistry. A research scientist may create a test tube of a unique compound in the lab, and she would say she's solved the problem. But she would turn it over to a chemical engineer to figure out how to make the stuff in tanker truck quantities. The engineer would understand the performance and limitations of the pumps, mixing tanks, heaters, and catalysts needed to scale the problem up to a factory environment. It's a different job, requiring different knowledge.
All the software engineers I know are perfectly capable of emitting a dense chunk of spaghetti code to solve one task one time, the same as the scientists, but they generally don't because they know spaghetti code is difficult to prove that it will behave correctly, even just the one time it's needed. Unlike non-computer-field-related scientists, they also know better than to call such code "production ready."
It's not perfect, but 1.777 is much closer to 1.85 than 1.333. It's not exactly "less still". Or did you mean "you still don't see the whole picture, even with HDTV"? I'd say the 4% missing portion of the image is almost insignificant, compared to the 28% of an SDTV picture. I would agree that useful detail still goes missing when you're talking about 2.35:1, but those films are not as common. In 2009 more than twice as many DVDs were listed as 1.85:1 than in 2.35:1. (According to IMDB for as recent as the wayback machine recorded the page at http://web.archive.org/web/20090624175845/http://www.imdb.com/Sections/DVDs/AspectRatios/ )
But regardless of the technical quibbling (I know, that's why we come to Slashdot), the point is that HDTVs produce a superior quality viewing experience to SDTVs. Long-lasting is only one aspect of a TV. Image quality is another.
I grew up with a circa 1970 Magnavox console TV of the kind everyone says was built in the good old days. Peering through the ventilation holes in the masonite back, I could certainly see ALL the tubes glowing when it was "off". In those days, instant on literally meant the filaments were kept hot the entire time it was plugged in. And the cabinet was always very warm, far more than 10 watts would have emitted. Turn it on, and the cabinet itself went from warm to hot.
At this time, the utility companies were still running advertisements for electricity being "penny cheap". Nobody cared how much power they used.
Product lockdown is a very specialized argument that sort-of applies to a very few specific pieces of old gear, such as phones that trade some functions in exchange for funneling all your money through Apple. But it has little to do with television sets or other products.
If you're going to work so hard to find a specific example where longevity is somehow "good" because it trades some fairly insignificant features for some other fairly insignificant features; you should know it's a lot easier to find many, many counter examples where product longevity seriously increases your risk of injury or death.
Any car built in the 1970s is far less safe than its modern counterparts, thanks to safety improvements made over time. If you are still driving a 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass (on the off chance it didn't rust through by 1980), a head-on collision is much more likely to ram a steering wheel column through your chest than a modern car. Or it's going to crush you inside the passenger compartment, instead of absorbing the energy in computer-designed crumple zones. Or it's going to smash you hard against the dashboard, instead of against a collapsing airbag cushion triggered by a computer chip. Even if that car had amazing longevity of the mechanical components, its safety over time never improved. Cars built in the 80s and 90s were much improved, as their crash survivability was improved. Cars built in the previous decade were better, because they had safety features that helped maintain control in an accident. Cars built in the current decade are even better still, with active systems to help the driver avoid the accidents in the first place.
If you bought a prescription for Vioxx in 2002, do you think it would be a good thing to have stocked up on a lifetime supply of pills? What about buying a drum of long-lasting DDT? Or painting your rooms with gallons of lead paint, because it's so much more durable than latex? Insulating your house with asbestos, the miracle fiber that didn't degrade or rot? At what point did your durable 1970s TV stop emitting X-Ray radiation at its viewers? Does your 1970s vacuum cleaner with its cloth bag filter out harmful particulates, or just recirculate them into your lungs?
Any building erected a decade after another building has had its safety improved by improvements to codes and in building materials and construction practices. The newer the building, the more its occupants are protected against fires, flood, mold, radon, toxins, and/or collapse.
All those old products were shown to cause much more physical harm than their modern counterparts. Longevity simply means you are exposed to more risks over their lifetimes instead of replacing them with safer alternatives.
Closer to your contrived cell phone example, a cell phone from 1991 emitted 600mW of RF energy right next to your skull. Depending on what studies you read, there may or may not be a correlation to cell phone usage and brain cancer. Modern phones are more limited in the amount of energy they're permitted to radiate. The ability to use earbuds and headphones to move the radiation even further away from your brain is now a common option that was not even present on your 1997 Nokia, yet you are claiming that phones like it are somehow better than an iPhone because they're older and lasted longer.
The bottom line is still very simple: longevity does not automatically make a product better. Longevity is not the only attribute you should consider if you're trying to determine quality.
But the lead is inside the crystal matrix of the glass. Its locked in there and short of refining it in a furnace its not coming out.
Not always. Only the newer CRTs were made with leaded glass. Lots of the older CRTs were made with a plain glass envelope with a lead coating on the inside. Once that tube is broken, the raw lead is directly exposed to the environment.
There are a lot more attributes than longevity and maintainability.
There's quality. You're comparing the 525 interlaced lines of SDTV with the 1080 progressive scan lines of an HDTV. You can claim "it's just a TV, it worked fine for all those years", but in reality, the image was substantially worse than HDTV. And with a 16:9 aspect ratio, you see the original movie without the funky pan-and-scan reediting needed to shift perspective to the most important on-screen action.
Price is important: your $400 25" TV set from 1970 cost the equivalent of $2,300 in 2011 dollars. You can get a 26" LCD today for about $200. Even if you replaced one every two years, the LCD is still cheaper.
For efficiency, the tubes powering your hundred pound 25" CRT TV probably drew 300-400 watts while on. Many TVs of the 1970s had "instant on", meaning the filaments of the tubes were kept hot while the TV was "off", drawing perhaps sixty watts of standby current. That feature also led to premature burnout of filaments, requiring more frequent tube replacement. Today's 26" LCD weighs less than 20 pounds, and draws 26 watts while on.
As far as availability goes, well, in 1970 your choice was CRT or nothing. CRTs obviously win in that comparison.
Safety wise, of that hundred pounds of 25" TV set, about 40 pounds of it was lead. The circuit boards were soldered with lead. The entire inside of the back half of the tube, everything but the front screen, was either lined with lead or made with leaded glass in order to catch the electrons after they had excited the phosphors on the front. The phosphors themselves were often made with cadmium. The picture tubes leaked small amounts of X-Ray radiation to its viewers. And when damaged, the picture tubes could implode, causing a glass shrapnel hazard, not to mention the huge static charge the flyback transformers generated inside the tubes.
Environmentally, it wasn't until this century that the EPA required they be kept from landfills, meaning the older landfills and junkyards (built before modern containment landfills were invented) will remain filled with every TV disposed of from the 1940s through the 1990s. Once broken, the lead-lined CRTs will readily leach lead into the environment. The leaded glass may leach much more slowly, but it still does leach over time. Older LCD TVs have cold cathode fluorescent tubes containing a bit of mercury vapor, while newer ones are using LEDs for illumination. A RoHS compliant LCD TV is not going to risk damaging the environment nearly as much as a CRT.
Even if it seems like they were "built to last", they delivered a much lower-quality product wrapped in a dangerous and highly toxic shell, at ten times the price.
Longevity may be a desirable attribute, but it's certainly not the only important attribute.
They don't want that though, the minute you have a prefect digital copy you don't have to keep buying the same shit everytime we get a new technology to play it, and they certainly don't want that at all ^^
This.
If buying CDs was "only buying the rights to listen to the music", our license would extend to whatever form of media it were on. The "rights" I bought to listen to Stairway to Heaven in the 1970s were never advertised as expiring, nothing in the album packaging or liner notes indicated that these rights would expire, therefore they should have extended beyond the vinyl to the CDs I acquired in the 1980s, or the MP3 I download from iTunes today.
They have proven this is not the case, because they charged me full price for the CD even though I owned the vinyl. If I truly owned the rights to listen to the music, I should have only had to pay a few dollars for the conversion to digital and the different media. But no, I paid exactly the same price as someone who didn't previously own the music on vinyl.
Either we're licensing the rights to listen, which should extend across media, or we're buying the bits and own them. They shouldn't get it both ways.
...the energy cannot be used to power homes or industry; it can only be used to inflate bagpipes.
If only they could use it to power distilleries, they'd surround their entire coastline with these machines!
I keed, I keed! Scotland is a gorgeous, scenic country, (OK, well, at least the Highlands were gorgeous,) and despite their penchant for trying to trick you into eating haggis, most of the people I met there were very friendly.
One thing is that you shouldn't worry about the scanners. The airplane you are about to board is going to expose you to hundreds of times more radiation during the flight that the backscatter scanners. That's not to say whether or not they're healthy for a TSA agent to operate next to for 8 hours a day for five years, but for the traveler, they are simply not exposed to enough radiation to change their risk of harm in a statistically measurable fashion.
Of course, buying the scanners consumed $370 million dollars worth of OUR MONEY, over a dollar for every American, pissed away on a device that has prevented exactly ZERO terrorists from doing anything the metal detectors weren't already catching. That's ZERO value for our money. You would have gotten more utility and value from your money if you had wiped your ass with a dollar bill and flushed it.
That said, did you notice how the post you responded to used the word "contraband" instead of "weapons"? I don't give a greasy fart whether the guy next to me is carrying 10 pounds of cocaine. It's not my problem. I don't care about contraband. And you better not make me stand in a goddamn hour-long line to search for coke, because IT DOESN'T MATTER TO MY SAFETY. Contraband is a bullshit argument.
I also don't even care if someone boards the damn plane with a knife. I used to carry them on planes every time I flew, and strangely enough they didn't cause a terrorist incident. Knives are only dangerous on a plane if you're trying to shave in turbulence.
If someone wants to use a knife on a plane to threaten someone, he's going to have me and about a dozen other pissed off guys to contend with. I'll take my chances with a knife or even soak up the bullets in his gun before letting the plane my family is on go down in a crash for his fucking crazy cause. And that attitude is not mine alone. Another box cutter fueled 9/11 just isn't going to happen.
The TSA should be cut immediately by 50%, and the backscatter machines donated to some clever third world country engineering school to re-equip them as medical X-ray devices so at least someone can get some use from them.
As for the politicians who supported the USA PATRIOT act? They should never hold another term in any office in this country. They can go run for office in Saudi Arabia for all I care, but they're not American patriots, and don't deserve the flags they pompously wear on their lapels.
#1. There were probably spies involved; or how else would they have gotten the signing keys from the Chinese factories?
However, the article better answers your question #1 with this paragraph:
Although this was new in itself — control systems aren’t a traditional hacker target, because there’s no obvious financial gain in hacking them — what Stuxnet did to the Simatic systems wasn’t new. It appeared to be simply stealing configuration and design data from the systems, presumably to allow a competitor to duplicate a factory’s production layout. Stuxnet looked like just another case of industrial espionage.
So Stuxnet itself was deployed to various targets in Iran, and in the first versions of the payload the virus delivered, every Siemens box it landed on it would send out its configuration back to the perpetrator's servers. There are probably not too many of these Siemens controllers in use in Iran, and a centrifuge plant would have had a very distinctive signature. Thousands of high speed frequency controllers in a single factory would be a giveaway to someone looking for them. This could have been based on a good guess, or it could have been insider knowledge that Siemens systems were used to control Natanz. This information could even have been shared by Siemens engineers, who had worked with the Department of Homeland Security in 2008 [wired.com] to analyze security flaws in their Step7 software.
#2 is best answered from other sources, which can charitably be described as "speculative". By piecing together circumstantial evidence, there is supposedly a smoking gun. When Libya gave up her nuclear ambitions in 2003 to help improve her relationship with the rest of the world, one of the conditions was that they turn over all their nuclear processing equipment to the U.S. This included all their centrifuges and bomb designs. The Zippe-type centrifuges used in the Arab world all were manufactured in Pakistan in the 1980s from the design of Dr. A.Q. Khan, the infamous Pakistani nuclear scientist. The U.S. supposedly had scientists trying to figure out how to make them work, but were unable to get them going, and asked England for assistance. England also did not have good luck with them, but someone shared a few with Israel, who allegedly figured out the parameters to make them work. This is just some of the gun smoke people have claimed to have smelled.
Once they got the centrifuges running, they figured out possible ways to sabotage them via their SCADA network. They worm that was deployed sped them up beyond their maximum operating speed for a few minutes (theoretically to stress them beyond their manufactured capabilities, hopefully causing them to fail), then suddenly slowed them down to a near stop (theoretically to collapse the column of separated uranium hexafluoride, undoing the prior few week's worth of work), and finally returned them to their normal run speed.
#3, what's the end game? The simplest answer is that Iran has a finite number of centrifuges, and they could have been trying to destroy as many as possible as quickly as they could without attracting attention. Or it could have been to delay Iran's enrichment by a few years in an embarrassing way.
The Natanz plant also may not have been the only target. In other accounts I've read, Langner supposedly disassembled a different payload in Stuxnet that they hypothesized would have fully opened the control valves on the Bushehr nuclear reactor's steam turbine, all while reporting normal temperatures, pressures, and speeds back to the operator consoles. If true, this could have spun the 75 foot turbine shaft so fast it would have exploded with enough force to destroy the generating plant building as effectively as if a bomb had been dropped directly on it.
Consider that the current regime in Iran is only 32 years old, fairly unpopular even among her own people, and is not particularly stable. If they sabotaged or destroyed Iran's nuclear capabilities while Ahmadinejad was in charge, it's possible it might have weakened him enough to topple him.
If "I am defined by what I consume" (from 'you are what you eat') then my shopping history is user data. And as far as my bank is concerned, that's a pretty good definition of their customers.
Your builder friend's fan array would obviously be plenty big enough to overpower the natural convection, and sounds like it accomplished his primary task of filtering the air, so it's a good solution for him. My biggest complaint is noise, and since more noise is generated by higher RPM fans, and larger fans move the same amount of air at lower RPMs, I run the largest fans my case supports (120mm) at the lowest speeds capable of keeping the system cool. To control them I run a thermal feedback fan controller program (SpeedFan) that operates the fans at the minimum speed necessary to keep the case cool according to the system's internal thermometers. And while I believe using natural convection allows the fans to run slower, reducing noise, I've never actually measured how well it would work in a reverse airflow configuration. Perhaps I should. Perhaps I've been wasting time worrying about the wrong things!
I'm not sure that the "automated cleaning cycle" would be effective. First, I'd be afraid of blowing a dust bunny that is trying to leave the case, and is barely clinging to a fan guard, back into a heat sink. Most of the gunk I find built up on my fan blades and shrouds has a "sticky" component to it, and can't be dislodged by the motion of air. They generally need to be cleaned mechanically with an old toothbrush using soap and water. If the fan blades were detachable, I'd run them through the dishwasher on an air-dry cycle.
I just wish I knew what the sticky component of the dust is here at home. At the machine shop, it was obviously coolant mist thrown by the high speed grinding wheels flooded with water (cyclonic hoods helped tremendously there.) It might be pet dander or proteins, as we have a couple of small, non-shedding dogs. It might be particles of my wife's aerosol hair spray (hmm...the machine is less than eight feet away across the hall when both doors are open, and she uses it daily,) or the bathroom deodorizer sprays. Or it might just be the nature of dust in a 50% humidity environment. It could even be mold or mildew.
In general, I try to position the intake fans lower in the cabinet, (blowing in onto hot spots like hard drives and graphics cards,) with the exhaust fans blowing out the top and top-back. Since hot air rises, I figure it's best not to fight the natural convection.
And you can easily apply a filter to any intake fan. I did this to our machine shop PCs back in the 1980s and 90s. I just sandwiched a layer of of 1/4" open cell foam filter material between a purchased chrome wire fan guard and the fan airflow slots originally punched in the case, followed by the fan itself still mounted inside the case. To make cleaning and changing the filter easier, I only held the fan guard down with two opposing corner screws, leaving the other two screws in their original positions holding the fan to the case. By removing one screw, I could pivot the fan guard away from the filter and remove it for cleaning.
While it may sound ugly as described, taking care to cut the filters square using a paper cutter helped make them look like factory parts, and the purchased chrome fan guards made for a clean installation. If I didn't have to clean them so often, I would have sandwiched them inside the cabinet where they would have been invisible.
The real trick was to remember to clean them before they completely blocked up. There were no case fan monitors back then, and no thermal sensors to warn you when things were getting ugly. Heck, the 80286 and 80386 CPUs of the day had only passive heat sinks, when they had heat sinks at all.
Shearing or snapping a fiberglass board will still cause the release of some tiny fibers of glass that are of the kind responsible for causing the various forms of silicosis. It's not as much as a saw, nor nearly as much as a grinder, of course, but it's still not necessarily a "safe" amount of exposure, as no amount of exposure is considered safe.
That said, snipping a board a year probably won't lead to a problem. But sawing and grinding fiberglass boards while working on craft projects could certainly a health-threatening amount of exposure. While not quite as dangerous as asbestos, where cases of mesothelioma have been documented following workers with as little as a one-to-three month exposure to asbestos, silicosis is also incurable and can lead to death. There's no value in exposing yourself to the dust produced, only risk.
Wet sawing the boards in a flood of water is probably the safest way to cut them. For added safety, do your cutting outdoors, instead of inside the house.
We lost an uncle to mesothelioma two years ago. He was a plumber all his life, and had obviously installed and removed asbestos pipe insulation in his career. He did not even make it to his well-deserved retirement. I wouldn't wish that fate on anyone.
I don't think that time-wasting is the issue at stake. I think he's actually unemployed and out of money and needs to save his $$$, and canceling his connection seems like the result of a logical conclusion that it's a luxury he could do without.
Hey, if it was me and my choice was Internet access vs. feeding my kids, guess which one is going to win, every time? I'd sure miss them, but we could probably Skype and email each other.
No, it certainly isn't pocket-sized. If you were to show up at a concert with one, even the most cursory obligatory no-liquor-inside pat-down would find it.
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The "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" trailers being broadcast these days show CGI chimpanzees with near-human faces. Even though they're purporting to be animals, I find those images disturbingly deep in the uncanny valley. I probably won't be going to see that movie.
I much preferred the mask and makeup of the 1970s movies. Even though those old actors don't look convincingly "real" in any meaningful sense, at least they don't put me off.
It's been found that people who've undergone Botox treatement are less empathic than people who haven't.
I would suggest that rich and narcissistic people are already less empathic than ordinary people. The UC Berkley found that in general rich people are more selfish than poor people, and it takes a lot of disposable income to be able to afford Botox treatments. People who undergo Botox are also often doing so because they are concerned about their fading youthful appearance, a sign of narcissism, and narcissistic people are by definition more self-absorbed than others.
So how could a study of Botox recipients prove anything other than selfish, self-absorbed people are less empathic than others?
Actually, I wasn't talking about creating a "presentation" like a document or a powerpoint deck, or even writing fancy code. I was only talking about writing automated unit tests.
A suite of well-written automated unit tests does several important things. First, it proves that your modules behave as expected in the test cases. The tests themselves are the documentation that provide clearly written examples of how to properly call the modules. And running the whole test suite gives you confidence that if you make a change anywhere in your code to meet new requirements that all the old tests still pass.
Even if you never present it to anyone or if your requirements never change, if someone were to pick it up next year they could see not only that it still passes the tests, but how you originally intended for it to work.
I'm guessing from your .signature "Prove all things..." that you're already taking the time to prove your code works in other ways. If so, you're probably spending almost the same amount of time that it would take you to write a good, clear, repeatable, automated unit test in the first place (after you're experienced in the skill, of course).
Yes, the initial learning of how to write effective, readable unit tests does take a bit of time, but it's probably nothing you couldn't pick up in a few days. If you're interested, I would recommend asking someone experienced to coach you, as they can help you learn some of the tricks for making your tests clear and readable. And once you grok the practice and learn more as you gain experience, you may move on to even better practices like test driven development. You'll likely be amazed at how much it will help you improve your skills, your code, and your confidence in it.
the old notion of "new = better" is not true anymore by default. More and more the creed is rather "new = better for its maker". Which doesn't necessarily mean that it's better for you, the user.
I completely agree with you here. Newer is not a guarantee of better, although I still think it is generally true for the majority of products.
In TFA's context of television sets, that is where I am arguing that modern technologies are indeed far better for the consumers. We can even consider the case of 3D TV, a feature of a subset of newer TVs that is definitely "better for its maker" in terms of revenue, but potentially worse for its consumers in terms of health. If it's decided in the future that 3D causes eyestrain/headaches/pimples/whatever, concerned users can simply tune into the 2D channels. But the overall TV that remains is still a much higher quality device than any CRT ever was, even if the longevity isn't the same (which has yet to be proven, by the way; all people have offered here are anecdotes that the TV in their mothers' basements used to work for 20 years.)
If you think your programs are for you and you alone, you're probably being irresponsible to your employer. Or if you're self-employed, you're probably being irresponsible to your clients.
You are doing this work for someone else. The systems you're designing are going into a customer's production equipment. You're claiming the next person to come along should just redo the same research you already did, because he could never understand your model. Do you honestly believe the next guy is really that dumb? Perhaps the problem is not with his ability to understand, but rather with the roughness of your model. Consider if your models were constructed from much smaller modules and each module came complete with tests that both document how your models works and proof that they do work, you'd be turning over that value to the next guy without forcing your company (or client) to pay him to redo your work.
As a benefit, you'd not only have the ability to transfer your knowledge to someone else, you'd also have the luxury of being able to hold up that model in court and say "Not only was this system calculated and designed to support these conditions, but here are the tests I ran to prove that the calculations were made correctly. Clearly the system failed due to a different cause, or to these parameters being exceeded far beyond the design limits."
For scientists who do important things other than coding, I don't think it's a good use of their time to learn software engineering best practices. They're sequencing genomes and trying to cure cancer, or discovering the particles that make up the particles that make up the gluons. I'm in favor of letting them focus on that work, and if they knock out some hacked code to support their research, that's good enough. Turn it over to a software developer (or development team) and let them turn it into production code. It's a better use of everyone's time, as everyone is working on the things they do best.
I'm still not sure why there's still such a love of FORTRAN when they could be knocking most of this stuff out better and more rapidly in a 4GL tool such as Mathematica. There seems to be some kind of engineering machismo that prevents people from evolving past the "My prof learned FORTRAN as a kid, and it was good enough for him" stage. They're totally missing parallels in the evolution of technology. Just like they're now using advanced technology like scanning tunneling microscopes instead of optical microscopes, the computer scientists have evolved our tools far beyond punch-card languages.
I totally understand there would be no benefit to them to make a sideways leap to a different 3GL like Java or C#, but seriously, they shouldn't be in the business of structuring code and fighting syntax. They are in the business of higher level thinking and problem solving in a specific domain. Use the higher level tools already!
The point is that it's a one way street. Software engineering is a specialization of engineering science, but most scientists aren't software engineers. A scientist can create the embodiment of an algorithm representing a solution to their problem, but don't think of it in terms of the qualities of reusability, modularity, interface, coupling, cohesion, exception handling, security, data integrity, etc. And they aren't supposed to: they're trained to understand biology, botany, physics, or whatever their field of expertise is, and never studied software engineering.
Think of it in terms of chemistry. A research scientist may create a test tube of a unique compound in the lab, and she would say she's solved the problem. But she would turn it over to a chemical engineer to figure out how to make the stuff in tanker truck quantities. The engineer would understand the performance and limitations of the pumps, mixing tanks, heaters, and catalysts needed to scale the problem up to a factory environment. It's a different job, requiring different knowledge.
All the software engineers I know are perfectly capable of emitting a dense chunk of spaghetti code to solve one task one time, the same as the scientists, but they generally don't because they know spaghetti code is difficult to prove that it will behave correctly, even just the one time it's needed. Unlike non-computer-field-related scientists, they also know better than to call such code "production ready."
HDTV = 16:9 = 1.777.
SDTV = 4:3 = 1.333.
It's not perfect, but 1.777 is much closer to 1.85 than 1.333. It's not exactly "less still". Or did you mean "you still don't see the whole picture, even with HDTV"? I'd say the 4% missing portion of the image is almost insignificant, compared to the 28% of an SDTV picture. I would agree that useful detail still goes missing when you're talking about 2.35:1, but those films are not as common. In 2009 more than twice as many DVDs were listed as 1.85:1 than in 2.35:1. (According to IMDB for as recent as the wayback machine recorded the page at http://web.archive.org/web/20090624175845/http://www.imdb.com/Sections/DVDs/AspectRatios/ )
But regardless of the technical quibbling (I know, that's why we come to Slashdot), the point is that HDTVs produce a superior quality viewing experience to SDTVs. Long-lasting is only one aspect of a TV. Image quality is another.
I grew up with a circa 1970 Magnavox console TV of the kind everyone says was built in the good old days. Peering through the ventilation holes in the masonite back, I could certainly see ALL the tubes glowing when it was "off". In those days, instant on literally meant the filaments were kept hot the entire time it was plugged in. And the cabinet was always very warm, far more than 10 watts would have emitted. Turn it on, and the cabinet itself went from warm to hot.
At this time, the utility companies were still running advertisements for electricity being "penny cheap". Nobody cared how much power they used.
Product lockdown is a very specialized argument that sort-of applies to a very few specific pieces of old gear, such as phones that trade some functions in exchange for funneling all your money through Apple. But it has little to do with television sets or other products.
If you're going to work so hard to find a specific example where longevity is somehow "good" because it trades some fairly insignificant features for some other fairly insignificant features; you should know it's a lot easier to find many, many counter examples where product longevity seriously increases your risk of injury or death.
Any car built in the 1970s is far less safe than its modern counterparts, thanks to safety improvements made over time. If you are still driving a 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass (on the off chance it didn't rust through by 1980), a head-on collision is much more likely to ram a steering wheel column through your chest than a modern car. Or it's going to crush you inside the passenger compartment, instead of absorbing the energy in computer-designed crumple zones. Or it's going to smash you hard against the dashboard, instead of against a collapsing airbag cushion triggered by a computer chip. Even if that car had amazing longevity of the mechanical components, its safety over time never improved. Cars built in the 80s and 90s were much improved, as their crash survivability was improved. Cars built in the previous decade were better, because they had safety features that helped maintain control in an accident. Cars built in the current decade are even better still, with active systems to help the driver avoid the accidents in the first place.
If you bought a prescription for Vioxx in 2002, do you think it would be a good thing to have stocked up on a lifetime supply of pills? What about buying a drum of long-lasting DDT? Or painting your rooms with gallons of lead paint, because it's so much more durable than latex? Insulating your house with asbestos, the miracle fiber that didn't degrade or rot? At what point did your durable 1970s TV stop emitting X-Ray radiation at its viewers? Does your 1970s vacuum cleaner with its cloth bag filter out harmful particulates, or just recirculate them into your lungs?
Any building erected a decade after another building has had its safety improved by improvements to codes and in building materials and construction practices. The newer the building, the more its occupants are protected against fires, flood, mold, radon, toxins, and/or collapse.
All those old products were shown to cause much more physical harm than their modern counterparts. Longevity simply means you are exposed to more risks over their lifetimes instead of replacing them with safer alternatives.
Closer to your contrived cell phone example, a cell phone from 1991 emitted 600mW of RF energy right next to your skull. Depending on what studies you read, there may or may not be a correlation to cell phone usage and brain cancer. Modern phones are more limited in the amount of energy they're permitted to radiate. The ability to use earbuds and headphones to move the radiation even further away from your brain is now a common option that was not even present on your 1997 Nokia, yet you are claiming that phones like it are somehow better than an iPhone because they're older and lasted longer.
The bottom line is still very simple: longevity does not automatically make a product better. Longevity is not the only attribute you should consider if you're trying to determine quality.
But the lead is inside the crystal matrix of the glass. Its locked in there and short of refining it in a furnace its not coming out.
Not always. Only the newer CRTs were made with leaded glass. Lots of the older CRTs were made with a plain glass envelope with a lead coating on the inside. Once that tube is broken, the raw lead is directly exposed to the environment.
There are a lot more attributes than longevity and maintainability.
There's quality. You're comparing the 525 interlaced lines of SDTV with the 1080 progressive scan lines of an HDTV. You can claim "it's just a TV, it worked fine for all those years", but in reality, the image was substantially worse than HDTV. And with a 16:9 aspect ratio, you see the original movie without the funky pan-and-scan reediting needed to shift perspective to the most important on-screen action.
Price is important: your $400 25" TV set from 1970 cost the equivalent of $2,300 in 2011 dollars. You can get a 26" LCD today for about $200. Even if you replaced one every two years, the LCD is still cheaper.
For efficiency, the tubes powering your hundred pound 25" CRT TV probably drew 300-400 watts while on. Many TVs of the 1970s had "instant on", meaning the filaments of the tubes were kept hot while the TV was "off", drawing perhaps sixty watts of standby current. That feature also led to premature burnout of filaments, requiring more frequent tube replacement. Today's 26" LCD weighs less than 20 pounds, and draws 26 watts while on.
As far as availability goes, well, in 1970 your choice was CRT or nothing. CRTs obviously win in that comparison.
Safety wise, of that hundred pounds of 25" TV set, about 40 pounds of it was lead. The circuit boards were soldered with lead. The entire inside of the back half of the tube, everything but the front screen, was either lined with lead or made with leaded glass in order to catch the electrons after they had excited the phosphors on the front. The phosphors themselves were often made with cadmium. The picture tubes leaked small amounts of X-Ray radiation to its viewers. And when damaged, the picture tubes could implode, causing a glass shrapnel hazard, not to mention the huge static charge the flyback transformers generated inside the tubes.
Environmentally, it wasn't until this century that the EPA required they be kept from landfills, meaning the older landfills and junkyards (built before modern containment landfills were invented) will remain filled with every TV disposed of from the 1940s through the 1990s. Once broken, the lead-lined CRTs will readily leach lead into the environment. The leaded glass may leach much more slowly, but it still does leach over time. Older LCD TVs have cold cathode fluorescent tubes containing a bit of mercury vapor, while newer ones are using LEDs for illumination. A RoHS compliant LCD TV is not going to risk damaging the environment nearly as much as a CRT.
Even if it seems like they were "built to last", they delivered a much lower-quality product wrapped in a dangerous and highly toxic shell, at ten times the price.
Longevity may be a desirable attribute, but it's certainly not the only important attribute.
Why is it on Slashdot that every time someone mentions cross-species genetic experiments, the example that many people choose is human-goat?
I wonder what Freud would have to say about that. :-)
They don't want that though, the minute you have a prefect digital copy you don't have to keep buying the same shit everytime we get a new technology to play it, and they certainly don't want that at all ^^
This.
If buying CDs was "only buying the rights to listen to the music", our license would extend to whatever form of media it were on. The "rights" I bought to listen to Stairway to Heaven in the 1970s were never advertised as expiring, nothing in the album packaging or liner notes indicated that these rights would expire, therefore they should have extended beyond the vinyl to the CDs I acquired in the 1980s, or the MP3 I download from iTunes today.
They have proven this is not the case, because they charged me full price for the CD even though I owned the vinyl. If I truly owned the rights to listen to the music, I should have only had to pay a few dollars for the conversion to digital and the different media. But no, I paid exactly the same price as someone who didn't previously own the music on vinyl.
Either we're licensing the rights to listen, which should extend across media, or we're buying the bits and own them. They shouldn't get it both ways.
...the energy cannot be used to power homes or industry; it can only be used to inflate bagpipes.
If only they could use it to power distilleries, they'd surround their entire coastline with these machines!
I keed, I keed! Scotland is a gorgeous, scenic country, (OK, well, at least the Highlands were gorgeous,) and despite their penchant for trying to trick you into eating haggis, most of the people I met there were very friendly.
One thing is that you shouldn't worry about the scanners. The airplane you are about to board is going to expose you to hundreds of times more radiation during the flight that the backscatter scanners. That's not to say whether or not they're healthy for a TSA agent to operate next to for 8 hours a day for five years, but for the traveler, they are simply not exposed to enough radiation to change their risk of harm in a statistically measurable fashion.
Of course, buying the scanners consumed $370 million dollars worth of OUR MONEY, over a dollar for every American, pissed away on a device that has prevented exactly ZERO terrorists from doing anything the metal detectors weren't already catching. That's ZERO value for our money. You would have gotten more utility and value from your money if you had wiped your ass with a dollar bill and flushed it.
That said, did you notice how the post you responded to used the word "contraband" instead of "weapons"? I don't give a greasy fart whether the guy next to me is carrying 10 pounds of cocaine. It's not my problem. I don't care about contraband. And you better not make me stand in a goddamn hour-long line to search for coke, because IT DOESN'T MATTER TO MY SAFETY. Contraband is a bullshit argument.
I also don't even care if someone boards the damn plane with a knife. I used to carry them on planes every time I flew, and strangely enough they didn't cause a terrorist incident. Knives are only dangerous on a plane if you're trying to shave in turbulence.
If someone wants to use a knife on a plane to threaten someone, he's going to have me and about a dozen other pissed off guys to contend with. I'll take my chances with a knife or even soak up the bullets in his gun before letting the plane my family is on go down in a crash for his fucking crazy cause. And that attitude is not mine alone. Another box cutter fueled 9/11 just isn't going to happen.
The TSA should be cut immediately by 50%, and the backscatter machines donated to some clever third world country engineering school to re-equip them as medical X-ray devices so at least someone can get some use from them.
As for the politicians who supported the USA PATRIOT act? They should never hold another term in any office in this country. They can go run for office in Saudi Arabia for all I care, but they're not American patriots, and don't deserve the flags they pompously wear on their lapels.
#1. There were probably spies involved; or how else would they have gotten the signing keys from the Chinese factories?
However, the article better answers your question #1 with this paragraph:
Although this was new in itself — control systems aren’t a traditional hacker target, because there’s no obvious financial gain in hacking them — what Stuxnet did to the Simatic systems wasn’t new. It appeared to be simply stealing configuration and design data from the systems, presumably to allow a competitor to duplicate a factory’s production layout. Stuxnet looked like just another case of industrial espionage.
So Stuxnet itself was deployed to various targets in Iran, and in the first versions of the payload the virus delivered, every Siemens box it landed on it would send out its configuration back to the perpetrator's servers. There are probably not too many of these Siemens controllers in use in Iran, and a centrifuge plant would have had a very distinctive signature. Thousands of high speed frequency controllers in a single factory would be a giveaway to someone looking for them. This could have been based on a good guess, or it could have been insider knowledge that Siemens systems were used to control Natanz. This information could even have been shared by Siemens engineers, who had worked with the Department of Homeland Security in 2008 [wired.com] to analyze security flaws in their Step7 software.
#2 is best answered from other sources, which can charitably be described as "speculative". By piecing together circumstantial evidence, there is supposedly a smoking gun. When Libya gave up her nuclear ambitions in 2003 to help improve her relationship with the rest of the world, one of the conditions was that they turn over all their nuclear processing equipment to the U.S. This included all their centrifuges and bomb designs. The Zippe-type centrifuges used in the Arab world all were manufactured in Pakistan in the 1980s from the design of Dr. A.Q. Khan, the infamous Pakistani nuclear scientist. The U.S. supposedly had scientists trying to figure out how to make them work, but were unable to get them going, and asked England for assistance. England also did not have good luck with them, but someone shared a few with Israel, who allegedly figured out the parameters to make them work. This is just some of the gun smoke people have claimed to have smelled.
Once they got the centrifuges running, they figured out possible ways to sabotage them via their SCADA network. They worm that was deployed sped them up beyond their maximum operating speed for a few minutes (theoretically to stress them beyond their manufactured capabilities, hopefully causing them to fail), then suddenly slowed them down to a near stop (theoretically to collapse the column of separated uranium hexafluoride, undoing the prior few week's worth of work), and finally returned them to their normal run speed.
#3, what's the end game? The simplest answer is that Iran has a finite number of centrifuges, and they could have been trying to destroy as many as possible as quickly as they could without attracting attention. Or it could have been to delay Iran's enrichment by a few years in an embarrassing way.
The Natanz plant also may not have been the only target. In other accounts I've read, Langner supposedly disassembled a different payload in Stuxnet that they hypothesized would have fully opened the control valves on the Bushehr nuclear reactor's steam turbine, all while reporting normal temperatures, pressures, and speeds back to the operator consoles. If true, this could have spun the 75 foot turbine shaft so fast it would have exploded with enough force to destroy the generating plant building as effectively as if a bomb had been dropped directly on it.
Consider that the current regime in Iran is only 32 years old, fairly unpopular even among her own people, and is not particularly stable. If they sabotaged or destroyed Iran's nuclear capabilities while Ahmadinejad was in charge, it's possible it might have weakened him enough to topple him.
Get off my Astroturf.
If "I am defined by what I consume" (from 'you are what you eat') then my shopping history is user data. And as far as my bank is concerned, that's a pretty good definition of their customers.
Your builder friend's fan array would obviously be plenty big enough to overpower the natural convection, and sounds like it accomplished his primary task of filtering the air, so it's a good solution for him. My biggest complaint is noise, and since more noise is generated by higher RPM fans, and larger fans move the same amount of air at lower RPMs, I run the largest fans my case supports (120mm) at the lowest speeds capable of keeping the system cool. To control them I run a thermal feedback fan controller program (SpeedFan) that operates the fans at the minimum speed necessary to keep the case cool according to the system's internal thermometers. And while I believe using natural convection allows the fans to run slower, reducing noise, I've never actually measured how well it would work in a reverse airflow configuration. Perhaps I should. Perhaps I've been wasting time worrying about the wrong things!
I'm not sure that the "automated cleaning cycle" would be effective. First, I'd be afraid of blowing a dust bunny that is trying to leave the case, and is barely clinging to a fan guard, back into a heat sink. Most of the gunk I find built up on my fan blades and shrouds has a "sticky" component to it, and can't be dislodged by the motion of air. They generally need to be cleaned mechanically with an old toothbrush using soap and water. If the fan blades were detachable, I'd run them through the dishwasher on an air-dry cycle.
I just wish I knew what the sticky component of the dust is here at home. At the machine shop, it was obviously coolant mist thrown by the high speed grinding wheels flooded with water (cyclonic hoods helped tremendously there.) It might be pet dander or proteins, as we have a couple of small, non-shedding dogs. It might be particles of my wife's aerosol hair spray (hmm...the machine is less than eight feet away across the hall when both doors are open, and she uses it daily,) or the bathroom deodorizer sprays. Or it might just be the nature of dust in a 50% humidity environment. It could even be mold or mildew.
In general, I try to position the intake fans lower in the cabinet, (blowing in onto hot spots like hard drives and graphics cards,) with the exhaust fans blowing out the top and top-back. Since hot air rises, I figure it's best not to fight the natural convection.
And you can easily apply a filter to any intake fan. I did this to our machine shop PCs back in the 1980s and 90s. I just sandwiched a layer of of 1/4" open cell foam filter material between a purchased chrome wire fan guard and the fan airflow slots originally punched in the case, followed by the fan itself still mounted inside the case. To make cleaning and changing the filter easier, I only held the fan guard down with two opposing corner screws, leaving the other two screws in their original positions holding the fan to the case. By removing one screw, I could pivot the fan guard away from the filter and remove it for cleaning.
While it may sound ugly as described, taking care to cut the filters square using a paper cutter helped make them look like factory parts, and the purchased chrome fan guards made for a clean installation. If I didn't have to clean them so often, I would have sandwiched them inside the cabinet where they would have been invisible.
The real trick was to remember to clean them before they completely blocked up. There were no case fan monitors back then, and no thermal sensors to warn you when things were getting ugly. Heck, the 80286 and 80386 CPUs of the day had only passive heat sinks, when they had heat sinks at all.
tin snips
Shearing or snapping a fiberglass board will still cause the release of some tiny fibers of glass that are of the kind responsible for causing the various forms of silicosis. It's not as much as a saw, nor nearly as much as a grinder, of course, but it's still not necessarily a "safe" amount of exposure, as no amount of exposure is considered safe.
That said, snipping a board a year probably won't lead to a problem. But sawing and grinding fiberglass boards while working on craft projects could certainly a health-threatening amount of exposure. While not quite as dangerous as asbestos, where cases of mesothelioma have been documented following workers with as little as a one-to-three month exposure to asbestos, silicosis is also incurable and can lead to death. There's no value in exposing yourself to the dust produced, only risk.
Wet sawing the boards in a flood of water is probably the safest way to cut them. For added safety, do your cutting outdoors, instead of inside the house.
We lost an uncle to mesothelioma two years ago. He was a plumber all his life, and had obviously installed and removed asbestos pipe insulation in his career. He did not even make it to his well-deserved retirement. I wouldn't wish that fate on anyone.
A subtle insertion of goatse ...
You seriously ought to rephrase that statement.
I don't think that time-wasting is the issue at stake. I think he's actually unemployed and out of money and needs to save his $$$, and canceling his connection seems like the result of a logical conclusion that it's a luxury he could do without.
Hey, if it was me and my choice was Internet access vs. feeding my kids, guess which one is going to win, every time? I'd sure miss them, but we could probably Skype and email each other.
No, it certainly isn't pocket-sized. If you were to show up at a concert with one, even the most cursory obligatory no-liquor-inside pat-down would find it.