There's design, there's engineering, and there's style.
Pencils are great for style and design.
CADs are great for engineering and design.
When you're working from a picture in your mind of what the house should look like, a pencil sketch is the fastest way to record it.
When you're working from a notion in your mind of how a house should function and be laid out, a pencil would let you sketch it out quickly, but you probably will want to soon render it into the CAD to do additional fine tuning edits.
When it comes time to actually make the prints, the CAD system *should* help you specify dimensions accurately and help you view the final product with precision.
Of course, this is all just IMO. I'm not an architect. What do I know?
I have an NEC Daylite E120 laptop which works great outdoors with the sun beating directly onto the LCD. I don't know if 35 degC sustained is going to kill it over the long term, but a notebook that was designed to be for outdoor use would, I expect, do better than many.
The Panasonic Toughbook series is also supposedly rugged.
It's a question of "envelope management". Fly-By-Wire systems can be made to impose hard limits (reportedly the Airbus approach) or soft limits (Boeing).
With soft limits, the normal limits can be exceeded when the pilot assertively pushes beyond normal range of control inputs. This allows, for example, the temporarily "hopping" that you described, or to allow an emergency collision avoidance that would put excessive stresses on the airframe.
There are certains skills that go away when they lose their relevance.
Radio operators don't need to know morse code anymore. And sailors have given up the astrolabe.
And we don't write in the fancy scripts favored by monks copying scripture.
Cursives will be with us for a while yet, because we still have a need to write with pen and paper, but when there is no longer a need for it, it effectively will go away.
Me, personally, I found computers to actually improve my penmanship because I started to pay attention to fonts... Heck, to this day, when I write my e-mail address, I write in Courier...
So, if Visa is the first mover, do they essentially "own" the wallet because the lazy consumer wouldn't want to bother pulling out a different card?
And what happens if there are multiple cards that are contactless? Do I have to pick one out? What's the point of this, then?
My building uses contactless badges. Ironically, we have a badge for the building and another for the garage. I can't keep both cards in the wallet because they interfere with each other.
Finally, is Phillips proposing to make cars run off the card? Wow. Imagine starting your car just by sitting down...
54 Mbps is signal rate. 20 Mbps is data rate
on
802.11g Slows Down
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Guys, The 54Mbps is the signal rate of the 802.11g modulation scheme. With the per-packet overhead, the effective data rate is around 20 Mbps, and they're trying to clarify that to consumers.
FastEthernet is 100 Mbps, right? Well, actually, the signal rate on 100Base-TX is 125 Mbps. It takes 5 bits on the cable to carry 4 bits of actual payload data.
Yeah, well, some of us see the potential in new technology and become enthusiastic supporters.
I used CompuServe and (later) the Internet to send e-mail and conduct research, long before most people knew what a modem was.
I bought CD players when all my friends said cassette tapes were fine and that I was being an audio snob.
I loved the Mac GUI when it came out, and recognized its appeal to the masses. The command-line snobs pooh-poohed it as a silly toy.
I supported OS/2 when it brought powerful object-oriented UI to the PC desktop. (Well, okay, I lost out on that one -- but it was the precursor to Windows 95 and all that followed.)
I now have a Segway. So it's not perfect for everyone. What *is*? But it works for my own particular set of circumstances, and I think it can be a good fit for a lot of other people.
BTW, people didn't see the reason for bicycles ~140 years ago. Sears sold them through catalogs for $25 in 1897. That's equivalent to $2,200 in today's dollars.
Hell, 100 year ago, people thought cars were useless toys for the idle rich. Why get those horseless carraige things when you could buy a perfectly good and reliable horse? The Model-T started out selling for about $75,000 [again in today's dollars] -- it took about 12 years to come down to about $20,000.
The Segway has only been available to the public for about 6 months. Give it time and let the market decide. 100 years from now, it'll either be a common sight that nobody thinks much about, or it will have been a curiosity that happend for a brief moment in history.
Ooohhh I know what I'll patent now - a giant speaker to mount under the rear with a continuous-loop recording of a highly-amplified bumble-bee, just to make it sound like it has an engine. Then it'll sell:)
The sad thing is that Detroit actually has studied adding electrically generated engine noise to make cars sound more beefy, because that's what consumers supposedly want - a beefier sounding car.
It's no fun being anti-social if there isn't the social to be anti- against.:-)
But, really, I think most people don't walk because it is boring or takes more time than they'd care to spend.
I was reading a study by a transportation planner in Minneapolis. It compared public transit ridership percentage as a function of wait-time. If there's no waiting to get on a bus/train/etc., the ridership would be 30%. But make the wait 5 minutes, and the ridership drops below 1%. People just don't want to "sit there".
This is also why some people take local roads to avoid the rush-hour parking lot, even if in reality they actually take more time taking the detour.
When I first came to this country from Japan, one of the first things I marvelled at (less than 1 hour in the country) was the expansive freeway system and how quickly it moved.
And then I noticed all the drivers weaving between lanes without signaling, and generally not moving over to the right after passing.
It seems like we like doing things as we damn well please!:)
This is NOT about Segways. It's about light-weight electric cars. A "car like" golf-carts, I suppose. See some examples here.
It works for me. Not for everyone.
on
Rent a Segway
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The Segway is as "pointless" as the horseless carriage and the velocipeds from 100-120 years ago.
In 1897, the Sears Catalog sold "safety bicycles" (i.e., pedal-and-chain style, versus the big "penny farthing" type) for $25. That's equivalent to about $2,200 year-2003 dollars.
The Segway dropped from $10,000 two years ago, to $7,000 last year, to $5,000 now. Give it time.
It will find its place in the spectrum of transportation choices. Some people will always walk. Some people will always drive gas-guzzling SUV's and exotic cars that cost more than my 2 bedroom home. Most people will find something in between.
All this talk of ionic and HEPA air filters is missing the first question: where is the dust coming from? Maybe you can take steps to reduce the ingress of dust into the lab. Maybe you need to punihs people for leaving the lab room door open to the dirty outside air...
If it's a university computer lab in a realtively modern centrally-ventilated building, it might just be enough to have a positive-pressure airflow of filtered air to push the dust out of the room. You might be able to hang the charge to the Buildings & Ground's account.
The article didn't address the power output of such vibration-based generators. I suspect the output to be very weak -- on the order of a milliamp or so. Not good enough for any continuously operating device; but good enough for "chirping" devices that occasional report sensor readings.
What would really be nice to see is a comparison chart to show compatible docking collars... I mean, seriously, they don't expect to moor disparate ships with rope, do they?
Somewhere in the dark back corner of my memory, I seemed to recall that Apple had some kind of trademark/copyright issue with the Macintosh name. Vaguely, I think there was some kind of agreement that Apple could use the "McIntosh" name as long as Apple was not in the music business...
Get hardware assisted WEP
on
How Stable is WEP?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I've been working with about 8 different 802.11b cards testing out Access Point mode in HostAP for Linux.
I can tell you straight off that the high-end cards are worth their money in performance if you are serious about WiFi. My favorite right now is the Cisco Aironet 350. It has power. It has range. It has rich management features. And it is fast. I was consistently pounding out 4.2 Mbit/sec under iperf, while the next step down were Orinoco Gold's pumping out about 3.6 Mbit/sec.
The cheaper DLink and Linksys cards, in comparison, would sustain only about 2.2 Mbit/sec.
Finally, it may be that the particular firmware in your card may be buggy. The HostAP mailing list occasionally talk of such problems.
Some cards actually rely on the host CPU to do the WEP encryption/decryption. In such cases, your performance will suffer, especially on slower machines.
The wireless router, too, may be at fault. It may be that WEP is improperly implemented.
The best way to tell what's going on is to take your client card and test it with another AP; and to test another card with your AP. That might help identify the culprit.
BTW, not related to WEP, but there's another reason to buy more expensive 802.11b cards... You might be in a hostile radio environment. Cheapers cards likely have less sensitive detectors and degrades much more readily due to interference or weak signals (due to distance). As errors stack up at the higher bit rates, your station will get downgraded to lower speeds.
I've owned my Okidata 810e/PS for more than 8 years now, and it's still making beautiful b/w laser prints. The toner continues to be readily available, and it's fast enough for my daily use. Just awesome.
I think I got lucky -- I bought the printer at a time when printers were no longer being manufactured like tanks, but wasn't being price-squeezed to be built like throw-away floppies. (Around the mid-90's.)
This seems to happen with lots of technology products -- the first ones are overbuilt and clunky, and then there's a "sweet spot" period, and then it turns into mass-market goo.
Peter Benchley wrote about it in Beast
on
Calamari Anyone?
·
· Score: 1
The author of Jaws also wrote about Beast about the giant squid with hooks -- http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679 403558/qid=1049352172/sr=1-13/ref=sr_1_13/104-8943 369-5878333?v=glance&s=books
Slashdot Mirror
There's design, there's engineering, and there's style.
Pencils are great for style and design.
CADs are great for engineering and design.
When you're working from a picture in your mind of what the house should look like, a pencil sketch is the fastest way to record it.
When you're working from a notion in your mind of how a house should function and be laid out, a pencil would let you sketch it out quickly, but you probably will want to soon render it into the CAD to do additional fine tuning edits.
When it comes time to actually make the prints, the CAD system *should* help you specify dimensions accurately and help you view the final product with precision.
Of course, this is all just IMO. I'm not an architect. What do I know?
I have an NEC Daylite E120 laptop which works great outdoors with the sun beating directly onto the LCD. I don't know if 35 degC sustained is going to kill it over the long term, but a notebook that was designed to be for outdoor use would, I expect, do better than many.
The Panasonic Toughbook series is also supposedly rugged.
oops, left out the link.
It's a question of "envelope management". Fly-By-Wire systems can be made to impose hard limits (reportedly the Airbus approach) or soft limits (Boeing).
With soft limits, the normal limits can be exceeded when the pilot assertively pushes beyond normal range of control inputs. This allows, for example, the temporarily "hopping" that you described, or to allow an emergency collision avoidance that would put excessive stresses on the airframe.
There are certains skills that go away when they lose their relevance.
Radio operators don't need to know morse code anymore. And sailors have given up the astrolabe.
And we don't write in the fancy scripts favored by monks copying scripture.
Cursives will be with us for a while yet, because we still have a need to write with pen and paper, but when there is no longer a need for it, it effectively will go away.
Me, personally, I found computers to actually improve my penmanship because I started to pay attention to fonts... Heck, to this day, when I write my e-mail address, I write in Courier...
If you expect to need computers while outdoors (geology majors, film school, etc.), consider getting a NEC Versa Daylite E120.
Not the best bang-for-the-buck laptop, but my god how wonderful it is to be able to work under direct sunlight! And it is a nice lightweight unit.
The screen is just shy of adequate indoors, however, so make sure you consider that.
Heck, if 10 relatives can all share a small apartment, they can certainly share a small IP allocation.
So, if Visa is the first mover, do they essentially "own" the wallet because the lazy consumer wouldn't want to bother pulling out a different card?
And what happens if there are multiple cards that are contactless? Do I have to pick one out? What's the point of this, then?
My building uses contactless badges. Ironically, we have a badge for the building and another for the garage. I can't keep both cards in the wallet because they interfere with each other.
Finally, is Phillips proposing to make cars run off the card? Wow. Imagine starting your car just by sitting down...
Guys,
The 54Mbps is the signal rate of the 802.11g modulation scheme. With the per-packet overhead, the effective data rate is around 20 Mbps, and they're trying to clarify that to consumers.
FastEthernet is 100 Mbps, right? Well, actually, the signal rate on 100Base-TX is 125 Mbps. It takes 5 bits on the cable to carry 4 bits of actual payload data.
Yeah, well, some of us see the potential in new technology and become enthusiastic supporters.
I used CompuServe and (later) the Internet to send e-mail and conduct research, long before most people knew what a modem was.
I bought CD players when all my friends said cassette tapes were fine and that I was being an audio snob.
I loved the Mac GUI when it came out, and recognized its appeal to the masses. The command-line snobs pooh-poohed it as a silly toy.
I supported OS/2 when it brought powerful object-oriented UI to the PC desktop. (Well, okay, I lost out on that one -- but it was the precursor to Windows 95 and all that followed.)
I now have a Segway. So it's not perfect for everyone. What *is*? But it works for my own particular set of circumstances, and I think it can be a good fit for a lot of other people.
BTW, people didn't see the reason for bicycles ~140 years ago. Sears sold them through catalogs for $25 in 1897. That's equivalent to $2,200 in today's dollars.
Hell, 100 year ago, people thought cars were useless toys for the idle rich. Why get those horseless carraige things when you could buy a perfectly good and reliable horse? The Model-T started out selling for about $75,000 [again in today's dollars] -- it took about 12 years to come down to about $20,000.
The Segway has only been available to the public for about 6 months. Give it time and let the market decide. 100 years from now, it'll either be a common sight that nobody thinks much about, or it will have been a curiosity that happend for a brief moment in history.
The sad thing is that Detroit actually has studied adding electrically generated engine noise to make cars sound more beefy, because that's what consumers supposedly want - a beefier sounding car.
It's no fun being anti-social if there isn't the social to be anti- against. :-)
But, really, I think most people don't walk because it is boring or takes more time than they'd care to spend.
I was reading a study by a transportation planner in Minneapolis. It compared public transit ridership percentage as a function of wait-time. If there's no waiting to get on a bus/train/etc., the ridership would be 30%. But make the wait 5 minutes, and the ridership drops below 1%. People just don't want to "sit there".
This is also why some people take local roads to avoid the rush-hour parking lot, even if in reality they actually take more time taking the detour.
In any city where there's at least a moderate mix of housing and shops, walking two miles is kinda fun.
Walking two miles on empty sidewalks in a bedroom community, however, is not so fun.
This country was designed and built in a very energy wasteful manner and still operates under that mindset. We've GOT to change.
Yes. American's hypergrowth happened, in part, because this country is resource-abundant.
There are two issues here.
1) We need more efficient and clean ways to generate energy.
2) We need more efficient ways of using that energy.
Ideally, we can do both simultaneously. But making improvements in either category is better than the status quo.
Very nice! I wonder what the biggest challenge to this system is -- the pressure containment or system reliability, I'd imagine.
Yeah. Good luck telling that to most Americans!
:)
When I first came to this country from Japan, one of the first things I marvelled at (less than 1 hour in the country) was the expansive freeway system and how quickly it moved.
And then I noticed all the drivers weaving between lanes without signaling, and generally not moving over to the right after passing.
It seems like we like doing things as we damn well please!
This is NOT about Segways. It's about light-weight electric cars. A "car like" golf-carts, I suppose. See some examples here.
The Segway is as "pointless" as the horseless carriage and the velocipeds from 100-120 years ago.
In 1897, the Sears Catalog sold "safety bicycles" (i.e., pedal-and-chain style, versus the big "penny farthing" type) for $25. That's equivalent to about $2,200 year-2003 dollars.
The Segway dropped from $10,000 two years ago, to $7,000 last year, to $5,000 now. Give it time.
It will find its place in the spectrum of transportation choices. Some people will always walk. Some people will always drive gas-guzzling SUV's and exotic cars that cost more than my 2 bedroom home. Most people will find something in between.
All this talk of ionic and HEPA air filters is missing the first question: where is the dust coming from? Maybe you can take steps to reduce the ingress of dust into the lab. Maybe you need to punihs people for leaving the lab room door open to the dirty outside air...
If it's a university computer lab in a realtively modern centrally-ventilated building, it might just be enough to have a positive-pressure airflow of filtered air to push the dust out of the room. You might be able to hang the charge to the Buildings & Ground's account.
The article didn't address the power output of such vibration-based generators. I suspect the output to be very weak -- on the order of a milliamp or so. Not good enough for any continuously operating device; but good enough for "chirping" devices that occasional report sensor readings.
What would really be nice to see is a comparison chart to show compatible docking collars... I mean, seriously, they don't expect to moor disparate ships with rope, do they?
Somewhere in the dark back corner of my memory, I seemed to recall that Apple had some kind of trademark/copyright issue with the Macintosh name. Vaguely, I think there was some kind of agreement that Apple could use the "McIntosh" name as long as Apple was not in the music business...
I've been working with about 8 different 802.11b cards testing out Access Point mode in HostAP for Linux.
I can tell you straight off that the high-end cards are worth their money in performance if you are serious about WiFi. My favorite right now is the Cisco Aironet 350. It has power. It has range. It has rich management features. And it is fast. I was consistently pounding out 4.2 Mbit/sec under iperf, while the next step down were Orinoco Gold's pumping out about 3.6 Mbit/sec.
The cheaper DLink and Linksys cards, in comparison, would sustain only about 2.2 Mbit/sec.
Finally, it may be that the particular firmware in your card may be buggy. The HostAP mailing list occasionally talk of such problems.
Some cards actually rely on the host CPU to do the WEP encryption/decryption. In such cases, your performance will suffer, especially on slower machines.
The wireless router, too, may be at fault. It may be that WEP is improperly implemented.
The best way to tell what's going on is to take your client card and test it with another AP; and to test another card with your AP. That might help identify the culprit.
BTW, not related to WEP, but there's another reason to buy more expensive 802.11b cards... You might be in a hostile radio environment. Cheapers cards likely have less sensitive detectors and degrades much more readily due to interference or weak signals (due to distance). As errors stack up at the higher bit rates, your station will get downgraded to lower speeds.
I've owned my Okidata 810e/PS for more than 8 years now, and it's still making beautiful b/w laser prints. The toner continues to be readily available, and it's fast enough for my daily use. Just awesome.
I think I got lucky -- I bought the printer at a time when printers were no longer being manufactured like tanks, but wasn't being price-squeezed to be built like throw-away floppies. (Around the mid-90's.)
This seems to happen with lots of technology products -- the first ones are overbuilt and clunky, and then there's a "sweet spot" period, and then it turns into mass-market goo.
The author of Jaws also wrote about Beast about the giant squid with hooks -- http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679 403558/qid=1049352172/sr=1-13/ref=sr_1_13/104-8943 369-5878333?v=glance&s=books