The article also said this corvette would be used for anti-submarine warfare - last I checked, subs use sonar, and are very rarely on the surface in a position to use radar.
Well I have to admit I didn't read this article so I don't know if the article talks about what kind of stealth technology the ship has, but I did serve as a Sub Sonar Tech in the U.S. Navy in the early 90's so I can answer the part about what good it might do.
As you said, subs use almost exclusively sonar to find and track other ships, surface or otherwise. However what they use is passive sonar meaning there are 2 methods for being stealthy.
1. The best way is not to be heard, usually by being very very quiet, though this is combined with tactical use of so-called 'layers' where there are sharp differences in the speed of sound caused by temperature and pressure differences. This will refract (bend) the sound waves and if the difference is extreme enough it will even reflect them (this is similar to the effect that causes a windows to reflect some of the light). That's what subs attempt to do, and it's not really an option for surface ships since the aforementioned layers tend to bend sound downwards such that it favors the subs:
Your typical graph of speed of sound (SoS) vs. depth looks something like this:
/ / / / /
\
\
Sound (or any wave for that matter) will bend 'towards' the slower speed (Sonar Techs say 'sound is lazy'). Initially the temperature gradient causes the SoS to follow a corresponding gradient (colder is slower, IIRC 1.8 feet/sec. per 1 degree F difference), and at some point (depending on the temperature conditions) the temperature gradient levels off and pressure becomes the deciding factor (higher pressure is faster). This can even cause the sound to be 'funneled' over great distances as if it were in a tube. The other factor favoring subs here is that propeller noise (through cavitation) is much easier to prevent in higher pressure water, i.e. deep water.
2. The second method is to disguise your sound, for example by making the sound coming from the ship sound more like a rain squall. There are many many sounds in the ocean, and rain is a pretty easy sound to emulate. We once almost got run over by a friendly ship because of this. They couldn't hear us and and we thought it was rain!!
Hmmm.... I spent a bit too long on this post, gotta get back to work:-( Hope it helped.
That's only because none of the current OS's have the ability to navigate through the file tree by right clicking on a folder or drive icon, and getting a list of sub-folders in the pop-up menu that can be navigated through.
Whether the result of a selection in this mode is a change of the contents of the current window, or a new window poping up for that folder, or a selected application starting, or an application associated with a selected document is irrelevent.
Well... I don't know it this completely fits your description, but there are at least 3 places in KDE with similar behaviors:
1 . Right clicking on a folder gives you a both 'copy to' and 'move to' submenus which allow you to drill down into the filesystem via menus. 2. The 'K' menu has a 'Quick Browser' which acts as a browser through either your home directory, the root directory, or the etc directory. 3. A 'Quick Browser' can be added to the taskbar which starts at any directory you want it to.
There might be other possibilities/varieties of this kind of behavior but I haven't bothered to look since I don't really care about this feature.
"The only intuitive thing in the world is the nipple, everything else is learned."
This is a very popular quote, and while it is valid as a warning against confusing the familiar with the intuitive, it isn't accurate.
As any developmental psychologist, psycholinguist, or cognitive scientist -- not to mention any parent -- could tell you, there are many other things which are intuitive. Speaking and walking to name 2 examples. I don't have time to find you links (I should be working:-/) but some search terms off the top of my head: "Noam Chomsky", "Steven Pinker", "George Lakoff" (Particularly the book "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things"), "Jean Piaget", "The Naked Neuron" by Rhawn Joseph, hmmmmm... it's been a while since I was studying:-P Anyway babies aren't blank slates, there are many 'pre-programmed' (for lack of a better term) tendencies which facilitate us learning the things which are useful for survival, like any animal. Humans have brains which are very well suited to learning a variety of things which involve complex manipulation of objects in the physical world, for example. If you ever see a 2-year-old's ability with blocks and such you know he hasn't "just picked it up", his brain is predisposed to learn that kind of thing. In the same way interfaces can - and to some extent do - mimic some of these kinds of activities which come naturally to us; that's 'intuitive' - at least to some degree.
That said, expecting most people to delineate the difference between intuitiveness and familiarity in a PC-based GUI is a grand act of self-delusion. I mean, how many people don't know the basic difference between there, their and they're, as well as how to use them?
I did the parlimentary search using "vice chairman"+"back care"+"parliamentary group", and I get two identical hits, a PDF that has the right answer. Why this took the guy 6 minutes I don't know, unless he was searching on "back"... not a highly competent google user.
He clearly wasn't a master googler. Still, while I certainly think the comparison in the article is skewed, don't forget that the article itself, not to mention the slashdotting it's getting now is itself influencing google's results, so your results are unlikely to be the same as the participant's.
That's an interesting addendum to this comparison all by itself. Everytime someone does the work in finding a specific piece of information, that information becomes easier to find. That's true of books too, of course, but I think google's advantage here is clear.
The side effects (diverting of resources as you said ) are the problem in this, not the direct effects.
Well sure. But most people acknowledge a moral responsibility for predictable side-effects of their actions, and the law certainly sees a legal responsibility: If someone dies as the result of a felony, it can be considered murder (IANAL, etc.)
So those side-effects are not merely relevant, they are what it's all about. This is exactly the reason that 'yelling "fire" in a crowded theater' example is always used as an example of a (justifiable) limit on free-speech; The almost inevitable consequence of you yelling "fire" will be panic where people get trampled. Yell "Thief" and you don't get anything like the same effect.
Saying something is "unusable" without updates is just plain asinine though. I guess nobody could use those XP boxes for the year or so before SP 1 came out, right?
Well yeah. But that was before the Internet had been flooded by exploits for holes which have been patched by SP 1. I *did* say "For all intents and purposes..." which is, I concede, a bit too strong. I just meant for practical everyday use on the Internet it's not safe to use.
However, if you bought a XP cd today, it would have probably SP 1 included
The only advantage of linux in this case is more frequent updates, nothing more.
You say this like it's no big deal, like "The only advantage of this piece of steak is that it hasn't been sitting in the sun for a couple of days". But this is specifically one of the things that suck about MS. Even a couple of years after XP came out I still can't get a newer install version of XP which includes any of the security patches or updated drivers?
And frankly, if it took you 4 hours to install the "service packs," all one of them, you either have no idea what you're doing or a slow connection, neither of which are Microsoft's responsibility.
Sure it is. They are selling a product which is for all intents and purposes unusable without a massive download. If you were sold any other kind of product which required additional parts, you would never consider getting those parts to you to *not* be the responsibility of the manufacturer. I mean, it's not like Microsoft's margins are paper thin, right?
I think you're referring to "PaperClip". I used that programs extensively while in University. From reveal codes to 80 column preview it was great!
Definitely the best word-processor in the 8-bit world hands down. Man you just gave me a severe case of nostalgia;-) However it had one annoying thing which was that joystick-port dongle (at least on the Atari version). It didn't fit well and would fall out on occasion:-P Ah, memories....
-chris
Re:Microsoft's most valuable soldier in Word Wars
on
The War Of The Word
·
· Score: 1
It doesn't mean that its time to move to better standards for document storage, but at the time microsoft developed this software (Ie., in the days of word 3.0 onwards) pretty much nobody stored documents in XML (for space reasons alone - Hard drive capacities of 20-40 Megabytes were common).
I would think that processor speed is a bigger factor. XML parsing can (depending on the parser and language of course) eat a lot of CPU; size on the other hand tends to favor XML over Office formats in my experience. Just compare the size of equivalent OO.org and MS Word documents, or even the same document via importing it.
No kidding. Orange County? Since when is that the center of learning and science?
Berkeley alone has produced over 14 Nobel prize winners, and that was the count in the 80's when I still lived there. Don't mix up kooky political correctness for lack of education. Here's an example from the Census Bureau (excerpt from Original table):
Percent of People With a Bachelor's Degree or More Population 25 Years and Over (County Level):
Rank County Percent Lower Bound Upper Bound 8 San Francisco County, CA 47.8 46.6 49.0 17 San Mateo County, CA 43.0 40.4 45.6 18 Santa Clara County, CA 42.9 41.3 44.6 36 Santa Cruz County, CA 40.0 35.7 44.3 38 Alameda County, CA 39.6 38.0 41.3 54 Contra Costa County, CA 35.9 33.9 37.9
The above are all Bay Area. Then we have the top-ranking Southern Californian county:
69 Orange County, CA 33.0 31.8 34.2
But these statistics aren't necessary for anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the 2 regions. PonyHome mentions more than enough further examples. I'm just curious why you would expect Orange County of all places to beat the Bay Area in education. Money? maybe. Conservatism? sure. But, education? ROFL.
-chris
BTW @PonyHome: There is *no* other "Bay Area"; just areas which have bays.;-)
Nice way to quote out of context. If you want to convince people of Clinton's 'badness' at least let them make their judgment based on the whole quote. Unfortunately, all I can seem to find in Google are mostly pages with the inflammatory fragment you have. The most complete I can find is: "We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately own handguns and rifles... that we are unable to think about reality."
I personally would like to know what is left out by the ellipses, but it is still a radically different statement from what you have.
KDE session management is terrible. Why? Because it only works with programs that are aware of it. Programs like gvim and Mozilla do not remember their state properly.
And this is KDE's problem? As far as I know KDE uses an X standard for session management, meaning that non-KDE apps (e.g. nedit) can correctly restore their state when KDE restarts. IOW this isn't some KDE gimmick which only works with KDE apps. If those programs don't implement that capability then that's more of an indictment of those programs, not KDE.
I'm sorry I offended you. You were sharing information. I shared some information. I guess you didn't want to be informed on that subject. Once again, I wasn't trying to be offensive about it, just correct.:-)
OK then... drawing current over a wire will create a voltage drop across the wire, equal to the amount of current flowing (in amps) multiplied by the resistance of the wire (in ohms).
No. You don't cause a slope by drawing the water down a stream. The difference in gravitational potential *causes* the stream to flow downhill if a slope is there. You can't 'draw' a current over a wire - anymore than you can get water to flow along a flat surface (without pumps and such) - except by creating differing electrical potential at the 2 ends, i.e. there is a different voltage level at each end.
I'm not trying to argue about the effects you describe, just the causality: first there must be a voltage difference, then current flows.
Now, sending current over wires makes voltage, and in this case, that voltage is seen on every grounded item in the house!! Electrical fields everywhere.
ummmmm... no. Having different voltages at the ends of a wire creates current. Voltage is just the potential.
No the presence of the field isn't enough. The electrons have to be moved through the field at a 90 degree angle, which is why generators have to be *turned*. Who's forgetting their highschool physics?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
The article also said this corvette would be used for anti-submarine warfare - last I checked, subs use sonar, and are very rarely on the surface in a position to use radar.
/
/
/
/
/
:-( Hope it helped.
Well I have to admit I didn't read this article so I don't know if the article talks about what kind of stealth technology the ship has, but I did serve as a Sub Sonar Tech in the U.S. Navy in the early 90's so I can answer the part about what good it might do.
As you said, subs use almost exclusively sonar to find and track other ships, surface or otherwise. However what they use is passive sonar meaning there are 2 methods for being stealthy.
1. The best way is not to be heard, usually by being very very quiet, though this is combined with tactical use of so-called 'layers' where there are sharp differences in the speed of sound caused by temperature and pressure differences. This will refract (bend) the sound waves and if the difference is extreme enough it will even reflect them (this is similar to the effect that causes a windows to reflect some of the light). That's what subs attempt to do, and it's not really an option for surface ships since the aforementioned layers tend to bend sound downwards such that it favors the subs:
Your typical graph of speed of sound (SoS) vs. depth looks something like this:
\
\
Sound (or any wave for that matter) will bend 'towards' the slower speed (Sonar Techs say 'sound is lazy'). Initially the temperature gradient causes the SoS to follow a corresponding gradient (colder is slower, IIRC 1.8 feet/sec. per 1 degree F difference), and at some point (depending on the temperature conditions) the temperature gradient levels off and pressure becomes the deciding factor (higher pressure is faster). This can even cause the sound to be 'funneled' over great distances as if it were in a tube.
The other factor favoring subs here is that propeller noise (through cavitation) is much easier to prevent in higher pressure water, i.e. deep water.
2. The second method is to disguise your sound, for example by making the sound coming from the ship sound more like a rain squall. There are many many sounds in the ocean, and rain is a pretty easy sound to emulate. We once almost got run over by a friendly ship because of this. They couldn't hear us and and we thought it was rain!!
Hmmm.... I spent a bit too long on this post, gotta get back to work
-chris
Bah, slashdot isn't a "news for nerds" or a "geek" site anymore, it's just a soapbox for OSS philosophy.
I see you haven't gotten the obligatory "You're new here aren't you" reply yet so allow me:
You're new here aren't you?
-chris
:-)
This joke can hardly be improved (in both humor and insight), but how about 'leash' instead of 'lash'?
-chris
That's only because none of the current OS's have the ability to navigate through the file tree by right clicking on a folder or drive icon, and getting a list of sub-folders in the pop-up menu that can be navigated through.
Whether the result of a selection in this mode is a change of the contents of the current window, or a new window poping up for that folder, or a selected application starting, or an application associated with a selected document is irrelevent.
Well... I don't know it this completely fits your description, but there are at least 3 places in KDE with similar behaviors:
1 . Right clicking on a folder gives you a both 'copy to' and 'move to' submenus which allow you to drill down into the filesystem via menus.
2. The 'K' menu has a 'Quick Browser' which acts as a browser through either your home directory, the root directory, or the etc directory.
3. A 'Quick Browser' can be added to the taskbar which starts at any directory you want it to.
There might be other possibilities/varieties of this kind of behavior but I haven't bothered to look since I don't really care about this feature.
-chris
On Solaris it isn't a question of Gnome or KDE, it's a question of Common Desktop or Gnome
Why is that? KDE is available for Solaris too.
-chris
Cool :-) Very fitting anecdote.
-chris
"The only intuitive thing in the world is the nipple, everything else is learned."
:-/) but some search terms off the top of my head: "Noam Chomsky", "Steven Pinker", "George Lakoff" (Particularly the book "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things"), "Jean Piaget", "The Naked Neuron" by Rhawn Joseph, hmmmmm... it's been a while since I was studying :-P Anyway babies aren't blank slates, there are many 'pre-programmed' (for lack of a better term) tendencies which facilitate us learning the things which are useful for survival, like any animal. Humans have brains which are very well suited to learning a variety of things which involve complex manipulation of objects in the physical world, for example. If you ever see a 2-year-old's ability with blocks and such you know he hasn't "just picked it up", his brain is predisposed to learn that kind of thing. In the same way interfaces can - and to some extent do - mimic some of these kinds of activities which come naturally to us; that's 'intuitive' - at least to some degree.
This is a very popular quote, and while it is valid as a warning against confusing the familiar with the intuitive, it isn't accurate.
As any developmental psychologist, psycholinguist, or cognitive scientist -- not to mention any parent -- could tell you, there are many other things which are intuitive. Speaking and walking to name 2 examples. I don't have time to find you links (I should be working
That said, expecting most people to delineate the difference between intuitiveness and familiarity in a PC-based GUI is a grand act of self-delusion. I mean, how many people don't know the basic difference between there, their and they're, as well as how to use them?
heh, can't argue with that.
-chris
I did the parlimentary search using "vice chairman"+"back care"+"parliamentary group", and I get two identical hits, a PDF that has the right answer. Why this took the guy 6 minutes I don't know, unless he was searching on "back" ... not a highly competent google user.
He clearly wasn't a master googler. Still, while I certainly think the comparison in the article is skewed, don't forget that the article itself, not to mention the slashdotting it's getting now is itself influencing google's results, so your results are unlikely to be the same as the participant's.
That's an interesting addendum to this comparison all by itself. Everytime someone does the work in finding a specific piece of information, that information becomes easier to find. That's true of books too, of course, but I think google's advantage here is clear.
-chris
Yeah, but the packet loss really is a downer.
;-)
Oh, I don't know about that... I know one or two geeks who could stand to lose a few packets
-chris
The side effects (diverting of resources as you said ) are the problem in this, not the direct effects.
Well sure. But most people acknowledge a moral responsibility for predictable side-effects of their actions, and the law certainly sees a legal responsibility: If someone dies as the result of a felony, it can be considered murder (IANAL, etc.)
So those side-effects are not merely relevant, they are what it's all about. This is exactly the reason that 'yelling "fire" in a crowded theater' example is always used as an example of a (justifiable) limit on free-speech; The almost inevitable consequence of you yelling "fire" will be panic where people get trampled. Yell "Thief" and you don't get anything like the same effect.
-chris
Saying something is "unusable" without updates is just plain asinine though. I guess nobody could use those XP boxes for the year or so before SP 1 came out, right?
Well yeah. But that was before the Internet had been flooded by exploits for holes which have been patched by SP 1. I *did* say "For all intents and purposes..." which is, I concede, a bit too strong. I just meant for practical everyday use on the Internet it's not safe to use.
However, if you bought a XP cd today, it would have probably SP 1 included
I admit I didn't know that. mea culpa.
And if emergency services respond to the "bomb" instead of 'just' a heart-attack victim?
Diverting resources meant to save lives because of a hoax *can* be deadly. I'm sure there's plenty of further examples...
-chris
The only advantage of linux in this case is more frequent updates, nothing more.
You say this like it's no big deal, like "The only advantage of this piece of steak is that it hasn't been sitting in the sun for a couple of days". But this is specifically one of the things that suck about MS. Even a couple of years after XP came out I still can't get a newer install version of XP which includes any of the security patches or updated drivers?
And frankly, if it took you 4 hours to install the "service packs," all one of them, you either have no idea what you're doing or a slow connection, neither of which are Microsoft's responsibility.
Sure it is. They are selling a product which is for all intents and purposes unusable without a massive download. If you were sold any other kind of product which required additional parts, you would never consider getting those parts to you to *not* be the responsibility of the manufacturer. I mean, it's not like Microsoft's margins are paper thin, right?
-chris
I think you're referring to "PaperClip". I used that programs extensively while in University. From reveal codes to 80 column preview it was great!
;-) However it had one annoying thing which was that joystick-port dongle (at least on the Atari version). It didn't fit well and would fall out on occasion :-P Ah, memories....
Definitely the best word-processor in the 8-bit world hands down. Man you just gave me a severe case of nostalgia
-chris
It doesn't mean that its time to move to better standards for document storage, but at the time microsoft developed this software (Ie., in the days of word 3.0 onwards) pretty much nobody stored documents in XML (for space reasons alone - Hard drive capacities of 20-40 Megabytes were common).
I would think that processor speed is a bigger factor. XML parsing can (depending on the parser and language of course) eat a lot of CPU; size on the other hand tends to favor XML over Office formats in my experience. Just compare the size of equivalent OO.org and MS Word documents, or even the same document via importing it.
-Chris
Berkeley alone has produced over 14 Nobel prize winners, and that was the count in the 80's when I still lived there. Don't mix up kooky political correctness for lack of education. Here's an example from the Census Bureau (excerpt from Original table):
Percent of People With a Bachelor's Degree or More
Population 25 Years and Over (County Level):The above are all Bay Area. Then we have the top-ranking Southern Californian county:But these statistics aren't necessary for anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the 2 regions. PonyHome mentions more than enough further examples. I'm just curious why you would expect Orange County of all places to beat the Bay Area in education. Money? maybe. Conservatism? sure. But, education? ROFL.
-chris
BTW @PonyHome: There is *no* other "Bay Area"; just areas which have bays.
Nice way to quote out of context. If you want to convince people of Clinton's 'badness' at least let them make their judgment based on the whole quote. Unfortunately, all I can seem to find in Google are mostly pages with the inflammatory fragment you have. The most complete I can find is:
"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately own handguns and rifles... that we are unable to think about reality."
I personally would like to know what is left out by the ellipses, but it is still a radically different statement from what you have.
-chris
There's Konqueror 3.2 (ducks) ;-)
Has as-you-type spellchecking as well as in the context menu.
-Chris
KDE session management is terrible. Why? Because it only works with programs that are aware of it. Programs like gvim and Mozilla do not remember their state properly.
And this is KDE's problem? As far as I know KDE uses an X standard for session management, meaning that non-KDE apps (e.g. nedit) can correctly restore their state when KDE restarts. IOW this isn't some KDE gimmick which only works with KDE apps. If those programs don't implement that capability then that's more of an indictment of those programs, not KDE.
-chris
Move that hole a little down to the side of one end for that sprinkler action... ;-)
-chris
I'm sorry I offended you. You were sharing information. I shared some information. I guess you didn't want to be informed on that subject. Once again, I wasn't trying to be offensive about it, just correct. :-)
Cheers,
-chris
OK then... drawing current over a wire will create a voltage drop across the wire, equal to the amount of current flowing (in amps) multiplied by the resistance of the wire (in ohms).
No. You don't cause a slope by drawing the water down a stream. The difference in gravitational potential *causes* the stream to flow downhill if a slope is there. You can't 'draw' a current over a wire - anymore than you can get water to flow along a flat surface (without pumps and such) - except by creating differing electrical potential at the 2 ends, i.e. there is a different voltage level at each end.
I'm not trying to argue about the effects you describe, just the causality: first there must be a voltage difference, then current flows.
- chris
Now, sending current over wires makes voltage, and in this case, that voltage is seen on every grounded item in the house!! Electrical fields everywhere.
ummmmm... no. Having different voltages at the ends of a wire creates current. Voltage is just the potential.
-chris
No the presence of the field isn't enough. The electrons have to be moved through the field at a 90 degree angle, which is why generators have to be *turned*. Who's forgetting their highschool physics? ;-)
-chris
Oops. I'm not quite sure anymore how I read it like I did. I was tired yesterday. Ignore me.
-chris