It also makes them slow, expensive, black&white-only and unusable for the Internet or video. A good LCD screen, such as the ones from PixelQi, can give you something very close to the resolution and sunlight readability of ePaper while also giving you color and video and that at a low cost.
E-book readers aren't really meant for fast response suitable for video. They're trying to be really good at displaying books, not video. Speed isn't an issue, but power consumption is. An LCD screen (or anything else that requires a constant charge to be readable) no longer meets one of the biggest benefits of e-ink: battery life is tied to page turns, rather than on-time. It's the ability of e-ink to display a picture without drawing constant power that makes it superior to other technologies for this application.
Personally, I'd rather have a very thin e-ink reader for books with great battery life and a separate, thicker, netbook for the internet with decent battery life, rather than a thicker all-in-one device that does neither task as well. Each has their application, no sense trying to shoehorn additional functionality into a device if it cripples that same device's core functionality.
Not everywhere. My school district my mother teaches at has had mandatory elementary-school typing classes for a decade. They even have key covers to force touch-typing for those who have progressed far enough.
Of course, they also have mandatory spanish lessons as well. It's a pretty well funded district, and not the rule. The school district where my uncle teaches is threatened by budget cuts because their standardized test scores are low, due to a very large number of immigrants who do not know English, and therefor can not effectively take the tests. Typing is the least of their troubles...
While I don't think that this is a free speech issue, it's certainly an issue of being an asshole. Perhaps one could make the case that the offending students should have been removed from the room under the same reasoning that people protesting a protest are required to stay a certain distance away. However, was the lecture a public forum, or a class lecture? In the case of a class lecture (not a public speech), I don't think the 1st ammendment would apply, although the prof should have kicked the unruly students out of the room.
I'd say this has more to do with the way research is done nowadays. It used to be that an individually funded inventor (think Alexander Graham Bell, or Nikolai Tesla) would work in relative secrecy, and the patent application generally happened at the same time as the prototype was demonstratable. Several decades ago this changed to groups, funded through universities or corporations, performing work which generally required a patent before a reasonable demonstration of the technology is possible. Why? First, to prevent being scooped to the patent, and also to maintain interest in the research in order to keep funding.
If we know what to expect from the next wave of technology, it's because we're publicising the development of it.
Right, I'm not claiming that people randomly decided to stop spending, and caused the housing crash. I'm saying the collapse of the debt markets caused consumer spending to drop out (both because of lack of funds and poor consumer confidence), which is what caused the recession to spread to other industries. It's the link between the housing and debt market callapse, and the recession in every other major industry.
I'm not saying we should spend wantonly beyond our means, either. But, part of bringing industry back is getting people spending again. Hopefully responsibly, this time.
Why not just call it "programming"? Whether you're writing code for machine made of sand (silicon) or chemicals should not matter one bit.
Probably for the same reason we separate mathematicians from physicists, and chemists from biologists. There's a lot of specificity in each field that makes specialization worthwhile. Sure, biology is 'just' macro-scale chemistry (which, in turn, is 'just' macro-scale physics), but there are special cases that only happen in cells, as well as a lot of things that never happen in cells.
That doesn't mean that it's a bad thing to have someone with a foot firmly in both fields (computational physics, or biochemistry), but specializing is what allows computer engineers to spend more time on transistors than proteins, while the bioinformatics students learn about RNA without needing to bother with JAVA.
This also explains why it takes time to get out of a recession. People need to spend money for companies to have the income to hire more employees, who can then buy other more stuff.
Unfortunately, raising taxes and taking from those companies makes that process a lot longer. It may even get worse before it gets better depending on how careless congress acts.
Congress is damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they don't act, the recession could last longer or do permanent damage to the economy as companies go out of business. Of course, people will complain either way.
So they pay for it either by taxing (possibly undoing their gains) or increasing the national debt (causing another round of complaints).
Basically, congress gets to decide which end they want to get the tongue lashing from...
Recession means "lack" of spending behavior, not "lack" of money. Often spending on promising technologies has important spin-off applications which bolster the economy / people spend money.
That seems to be the exact opposite problem of what we have in America. We thought we had way more money that we even thought we had. When the magicians disappeared, all the make-believe money that was coursing through the veins of the economy dried up and caused the businesses who were relying on people spending that make-believe money to burn out and fail. It was the lack of money that caused the lack of spending, not the lack of things to buy.
Nope, it's exactly the problem. The economy was cruising right along while people were (over) spending. The entire reason that the auto industry is in tough times is because people have been reducing their spending and putting off their car purchases. The economy was just fine when we were spending money, the problem was the money was from credit based on overvalued assets (such as houses).
This also explains why it takes time to get out of a recession. People need to spend money for companies to have the income to hire more employees, who can then buy other more stuff.
That really depends on why you're running the test in the first place. Yes, general screening would probably be a bad idea as the accuracy is too low, but, if the patient was going to have a cancer test regardless of the situation, the cheap test could serve as a decision aid: you tested positive on the cancer-breath test which warrants more testing or you tested negative so you don't have to worry about it. Without the breath-test, these 17 false positives may have taken the normal cancer test anyways because they come from the subset of people who get cancer screening and not the general population.
There are 4 results, only one of which is beneficial, if you were already planning to take the test.
1) The test correctly diagnoses cancer free, at a fraction of the cost (good)
2) The test correctly diagnoses cancer, in which case it's just an additional test
3) False-positive, leading to stress until the actual test can be taken (bad)
4) False-negative, leading to a loss of early detection, and possibly death (also bad)
Basically, its use is limited significantly due to those false results, assuming it's only 80-some% accurate. Either you make people get further (possibly dangerous and expensive) testing when none is needed, or you convince people they are healthy when they are not. The solution is high accuracy tests only for those at high risk.
The P4 only managed 4 gates at 4GHz because it was 90nm manufacturing. Phenom II and the i7 are 45nm, and the faster gates enable the higher clock speeds naturally and without huge tradeoffs, unlike the P4 where GHz drove development instead of performance.
That worked great for the Pentium 4, didn't it? Faster clock != more instructions per second. The only way to get close to 4GHz on the Pentium was with a 31-stage pipeline. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_pipeline
This means, on an instruction like if(a+b>c){}, the actual branch gets delayed by about 20 cycles if the processor guesses incorrectly whether the if statement should execute or not. Add the overhead due to such a fast clock (the P4 could only have 4 logic gates per pipeline stage due to the speed).
I'll keep my more efficient, better laid out processors over raw GHz, thank you very much.
I'm certain it can be done, but in order to implement it would require a lot of risk analysis. You don't want to be the reason why a tornado isn't detected, and no warning is given.
Of course, I'm not sure how fast these cells move, how large they are, and how quickly a decision needs to be made to issue a warning. I'm also not sure how large these wind farms are that seem to be causing the issues or how close they are to populated areas. "Damn it Jim, I'm an engineer, not a meteorologist!"
As for the source of interference, that would be the blades themselves. The ideal target is condensed water, and metal is much more reflective, making it the brightest signal in the area. So unless the cloud cover is quite low and dense, I would expect the effect vortecies to be negligible.
I would expect the rotors will wash out all velocity data between +/- the tip rotor speed. It would also likely be higher intesity, since metal reflects microwave radiation better than water vapor. It will also likely vary by wind speed, direction, and load conditions, which the doppler system can't determine easily, since the velocity information is overloaded by the rotor velocity, and only the wind farm operators know the actual rotor speed.
Not insurmountable, necessarily, but certainly not simple. Dual-phase radars might help with this, since most wind rotors should have the predictable phase on their reflection. Still, filtering the data well enough to prevent false positives without reducing sensitivity is much more difficult than preventing the issue in the first place.
However, with poor resolution, there is no way to determine the difference between the known wind turbine and an actual tornado nearby. Especially in a somewhat loosely-packed wind farm, a large area would constantly read positive.
I'm not worried about our ability to filter out false positives, since it is trivial, as you said. I'm more worried about erroneously filtering out an actual tornado in close proximity to wind turbines, which is not trivial at all.
That's not how it works. Assuming 83% is the accuracy for both positives and negatives, and given a group of 100 people, 10 of whom have lung cancer, we would expect on average:
2 patients with cancer will not be detected.
17 cancer-free patients will be told they may have cancer.
If our patients have no increased risk for cancer, then our group of 17 false-positives are suddenly scared into receiving further (possibly expensive) further testing. Our two patients whose cancer was not detected ignore futher testing until it is too late.
Basically, this technique is mostly useless for general screening. Of course, widespread screening generally is a bad idea, due to false positives, so the best bet is always to stick with those with higher risks only. I could see this method gaining use in developing nations where an expensive test is not possible, as the false-negative rate is still smaller than the current rate of undiagnosed cancer. However, dealing with the false-positives is still a bitch.
The salespeople actually reading it is another matter. They have little motivation, since they will sell as many games whether they know what they're talking about or not. The publisher has little leverage to motivate with, either, since they don't directly influence the employee's paychecks.
Hypothetically, if your power grid has been crippled in an emergency and a city is only getting 10% of the necessary power, wouldn't you want to be able to direct the power to the places where it was necessary? This would mean vital communication lines, hospitals, etc.
That said, the 'vital services' shouldn't be on the internet. Seems like this is trying to mitigate the risks created by a bunch of industries building these services on the internet. Basically, it's too late to keep the power companies from having an insecure internet-connected grid, so our next best option is to have the federal government step in to protect them in event of attack. Of course, we should set a deadline to remove all these systems from the internet so this is no longer necessary, but you can't have everything.
As well as any other open source, public domain, creative commons work, or anything that the rights-holder decides to distribute for free.
Why transmit it through file sharing? Easy: bandwidth. The file can reach millions of people for a fraction of the bandwidth, meaning for a fraction of the cost.
Sure, there are tons of reasons:
1) Self documenting.
2) One fewer line of code: "Exit while", rather than "goto end" and "end:"
3) There's no guarantee that, for the line "goto end", the label "end:" will always be exactly where you expect.
4) Too many labels (end1, end2, end42, exit1) makes large programs unsustainable and confusing.
5a) Exit While is linked to your {}'s. If your Exit While has a problem, you know it's because your While loop's scope has an issue.
5b) If your while loop works, and Exit While will boot you to the correct place.
There's absolutely no reason not to let an "Exit While" do all the work for you, when a "goto" is inherently more versitile, and therefor unsafe.
You use gotos when the normal control structures are inadequate somehow.
This is the heart of the issue: control structures are a well defined, easy to follow, hard to fuck-up subset of the things you can do with goto. If you can do it reasonably with a control structure, you shouldn't use goto, because it makes your code more readable. If you can't, then you should consider if your program should be restructured (which is why goto is dangerous to novice programmers). If not, then you can use a goto.
Of course, all bets are off when you're scraping for clock cycles with machine code, but that's not necessary most of the time.
We're still looking for a way to transfer them, since they're not a standard rotational speed in use anymore.
Transfer them at a standard speed and use software to adjust the speed and pitch. This forum thread shows how to do it in Garage Band and mentions several alternatives.
Yeah, that was the idea. The only holdup, last I checked, was finding the hardware to play and record them with relatively little noise. I understand the post-processing, being a musician with some home recording background and an electrical engineer, but I don't have access to the record and a turntable.
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Cool, but e-ink is what makes e-readers so great,
It also makes them slow, expensive, black&white-only and unusable for the Internet or video. A good LCD screen, such as the ones from PixelQi, can give you something very close to the resolution and sunlight readability of ePaper while also giving you color and video and that at a low cost.
E-book readers aren't really meant for fast response suitable for video. They're trying to be really good at displaying books, not video. Speed isn't an issue, but power consumption is. An LCD screen (or anything else that requires a constant charge to be readable) no longer meets one of the biggest benefits of e-ink: battery life is tied to page turns, rather than on-time. It's the ability of e-ink to display a picture without drawing constant power that makes it superior to other technologies for this application.
Personally, I'd rather have a very thin e-ink reader for books with great battery life and a separate, thicker, netbook for the internet with decent battery life, rather than a thicker all-in-one device that does neither task as well. Each has their application, no sense trying to shoehorn additional functionality into a device if it cripples that same device's core functionality.
Not everywhere. My school district my mother teaches at has had mandatory elementary-school typing classes for a decade. They even have key covers to force touch-typing for those who have progressed far enough.
Of course, they also have mandatory spanish lessons as well. It's a pretty well funded district, and not the rule. The school district where my uncle teaches is threatened by budget cuts because their standardized test scores are low, due to a very large number of immigrants who do not know English, and therefor can not effectively take the tests. Typing is the least of their troubles...
While I don't think that this is a free speech issue, it's certainly an issue of being an asshole. Perhaps one could make the case that the offending students should have been removed from the room under the same reasoning that people protesting a protest are required to stay a certain distance away. However, was the lecture a public forum, or a class lecture? In the case of a class lecture (not a public speech), I don't think the 1st ammendment would apply, although the prof should have kicked the unruly students out of the room.
I'd say this has more to do with the way research is done nowadays. It used to be that an individually funded inventor (think Alexander Graham Bell, or Nikolai Tesla) would work in relative secrecy, and the patent application generally happened at the same time as the prototype was demonstratable. Several decades ago this changed to groups, funded through universities or corporations, performing work which generally required a patent before a reasonable demonstration of the technology is possible. Why? First, to prevent being scooped to the patent, and also to maintain interest in the research in order to keep funding.
If we know what to expect from the next wave of technology, it's because we're publicising the development of it.
Right, I'm not claiming that people randomly decided to stop spending, and caused the housing crash. I'm saying the collapse of the debt markets caused consumer spending to drop out (both because of lack of funds and poor consumer confidence), which is what caused the recession to spread to other industries. It's the link between the housing and debt market callapse, and the recession in every other major industry.
I'm not saying we should spend wantonly beyond our means, either. But, part of bringing industry back is getting people spending again. Hopefully responsibly, this time.
Yup, to follow his (strained) analogy, 6-bits of RNA encode into 5-bits of amino acid (with 10 invalid encodings).
But really, anyone who could follow his analogies should be smart enough to learn the actual biology, so why bother with a broken analogy?
>>>"biological informatics".
Why not just call it "programming"? Whether you're writing code for machine made of sand (silicon) or chemicals should not matter one bit.
Probably for the same reason we separate mathematicians from physicists, and chemists from biologists. There's a lot of specificity in each field that makes specialization worthwhile. Sure, biology is 'just' macro-scale chemistry (which, in turn, is 'just' macro-scale physics), but there are special cases that only happen in cells, as well as a lot of things that never happen in cells.
That doesn't mean that it's a bad thing to have someone with a foot firmly in both fields (computational physics, or biochemistry), but specializing is what allows computer engineers to spend more time on transistors than proteins, while the bioinformatics students learn about RNA without needing to bother with JAVA.
Unfortunately, raising taxes and taking from those companies makes that process a lot longer. It may even get worse before it gets better depending on how careless congress acts.
Congress is damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they don't act, the recession could last longer or do permanent damage to the economy as companies go out of business. Of course, people will complain either way.
So they pay for it either by taxing (possibly undoing their gains) or increasing the national debt (causing another round of complaints).
Basically, congress gets to decide which end they want to get the tongue lashing from...
Recession means "lack" of spending behavior, not "lack" of money. Often spending on promising technologies has important spin-off applications which bolster the economy / people spend money.
That seems to be the exact opposite problem of what we have in America. We thought we had way more money that we even thought we had. When the magicians disappeared, all the make-believe money that was coursing through the veins of the economy dried up and caused the businesses who were relying on people spending that make-believe money to burn out and fail. It was the lack of money that caused the lack of spending, not the lack of things to buy.
Nope, it's exactly the problem. The economy was cruising right along while people were (over) spending. The entire reason that the auto industry is in tough times is because people have been reducing their spending and putting off their car purchases. The economy was just fine when we were spending money, the problem was the money was from credit based on overvalued assets (such as houses).
This also explains why it takes time to get out of a recession. People need to spend money for companies to have the income to hire more employees, who can then buy other more stuff.
Erm, actually, for an asteroid big enough to knock out a city, we'd probably have ten years or so notice.
Too bad this spaceship would require a launch 15 years in advance. Don't forget production time if we haven't built one yet!
That really depends on why you're running the test in the first place. Yes, general screening would probably be a bad idea as the accuracy is too low, but, if the patient was going to have a cancer test regardless of the situation, the cheap test could serve as a decision aid: you tested positive on the cancer-breath test which warrants more testing or you tested negative so you don't have to worry about it. Without the breath-test, these 17 false positives may have taken the normal cancer test anyways because they come from the subset of people who get cancer screening and not the general population.
There are 4 results, only one of which is beneficial, if you were already planning to take the test.
1) The test correctly diagnoses cancer free, at a fraction of the cost (good)
2) The test correctly diagnoses cancer, in which case it's just an additional test
3) False-positive, leading to stress until the actual test can be taken (bad)
4) False-negative, leading to a loss of early detection, and possibly death (also bad)
Basically, its use is limited significantly due to those false results, assuming it's only 80-some% accurate. Either you make people get further (possibly dangerous and expensive) testing when none is needed, or you convince people they are healthy when they are not. The solution is high accuracy tests only for those at high risk.
The P4 only managed 4 gates at 4GHz because it was 90nm manufacturing. Phenom II and the i7 are 45nm, and the faster gates enable the higher clock speeds naturally and without huge tradeoffs, unlike the P4 where GHz drove development instead of performance.
That worked great for the Pentium 4, didn't it? Faster clock != more instructions per second. The only way to get close to 4GHz on the Pentium was with a 31-stage pipeline. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_pipeline
This means, on an instruction like if(a+b>c){}, the actual branch gets delayed by about 20 cycles if the processor guesses incorrectly whether the if statement should execute or not. Add the overhead due to such a fast clock (the P4 could only have 4 logic gates per pipeline stage due to the speed).
I'll keep my more efficient, better laid out processors over raw GHz, thank you very much.
I'm certain it can be done, but in order to implement it would require a lot of risk analysis. You don't want to be the reason why a tornado isn't detected, and no warning is given.
Of course, I'm not sure how fast these cells move, how large they are, and how quickly a decision needs to be made to issue a warning. I'm also not sure how large these wind farms are that seem to be causing the issues or how close they are to populated areas. "Damn it Jim, I'm an engineer, not a meteorologist!"
As for the source of interference, that would be the blades themselves. The ideal target is condensed water, and metal is much more reflective, making it the brightest signal in the area. So unless the cloud cover is quite low and dense, I would expect the effect vortecies to be negligible.
I would expect the rotors will wash out all velocity data between +/- the tip rotor speed. It would also likely be higher intesity, since metal reflects microwave radiation better than water vapor. It will also likely vary by wind speed, direction, and load conditions, which the doppler system can't determine easily, since the velocity information is overloaded by the rotor velocity, and only the wind farm operators know the actual rotor speed.
Not insurmountable, necessarily, but certainly not simple. Dual-phase radars might help with this, since most wind rotors should have the predictable phase on their reflection. Still, filtering the data well enough to prevent false positives without reducing sensitivity is much more difficult than preventing the issue in the first place.
However, with poor resolution, there is no way to determine the difference between the known wind turbine and an actual tornado nearby. Especially in a somewhat loosely-packed wind farm, a large area would constantly read positive.
I'm not worried about our ability to filter out false positives, since it is trivial, as you said. I'm more worried about erroneously filtering out an actual tornado in close proximity to wind turbines, which is not trivial at all.
That's not how it works. Assuming 83% is the accuracy for both positives and negatives, and given a group of 100 people, 10 of whom have lung cancer, we would expect on average:
2 patients with cancer will not be detected.
17 cancer-free patients will be told they may have cancer.
If our patients have no increased risk for cancer, then our group of 17 false-positives are suddenly scared into receiving further (possibly expensive) further testing. Our two patients whose cancer was not detected ignore futher testing until it is too late.
Basically, this technique is mostly useless for general screening. Of course, widespread screening generally is a bad idea, due to false positives, so the best bet is always to stick with those with higher risks only. I could see this method gaining use in developing nations where an expensive test is not possible, as the false-negative rate is still smaller than the current rate of undiagnosed cancer. However, dealing with the false-positives is still a bitch.
Ideally, the largest game retailer in the US wouldn't be Walmart. ;)
The salespeople actually reading it is another matter. They have little motivation, since they will sell as many games whether they know what they're talking about or not. The publisher has little leverage to motivate with, either, since they don't directly influence the employee's paychecks.
Hypothetically, if your power grid has been crippled in an emergency and a city is only getting 10% of the necessary power, wouldn't you want to be able to direct the power to the places where it was necessary? This would mean vital communication lines, hospitals, etc.
That said, the 'vital services' shouldn't be on the internet. Seems like this is trying to mitigate the risks created by a bunch of industries building these services on the internet. Basically, it's too late to keep the power companies from having an insecure internet-connected grid, so our next best option is to have the federal government step in to protect them in event of attack. Of course, we should set a deadline to remove all these systems from the internet so this is no longer necessary, but you can't have everything.
As well as any other open source, public domain, creative commons work, or anything that the rights-holder decides to distribute for free.
Why transmit it through file sharing? Easy: bandwidth. The file can reach millions of people for a fraction of the bandwidth, meaning for a fraction of the cost.
Sure, there are tons of reasons:
1) Self documenting.
2) One fewer line of code: "Exit while", rather than "goto end" and "end:"
3) There's no guarantee that, for the line "goto end", the label "end:" will always be exactly where you expect.
4) Too many labels (end1, end2, end42, exit1) makes large programs unsustainable and confusing.
5a) Exit While is linked to your {}'s. If your Exit While has a problem, you know it's because your While loop's scope has an issue.
5b) If your while loop works, and Exit While will boot you to the correct place.
There's absolutely no reason not to let an "Exit While" do all the work for you, when a "goto" is inherently more versitile, and therefor unsafe.
I learned long ago that regular math and financial math follow very different rules.
You use gotos when the normal control structures are inadequate somehow.
This is the heart of the issue: control structures are a well defined, easy to follow, hard to fuck-up subset of the things you can do with goto. If you can do it reasonably with a control structure, you shouldn't use goto, because it makes your code more readable. If you can't, then you should consider if your program should be restructured (which is why goto is dangerous to novice programmers). If not, then you can use a goto.
Of course, all bets are off when you're scraping for clock cycles with machine code, but that's not necessary most of the time.
Transfer them at a standard speed and use software to adjust the speed and pitch. This forum thread shows how to do it in Garage Band and mentions several alternatives.
Yeah, that was the idea. The only holdup, last I checked, was finding the hardware to play and record them with relatively little noise. I understand the post-processing, being a musician with some home recording background and an electrical engineer, but I don't have access to the record and a turntable.