It's an interesting distinction which we weren't able to make a couple of decades ago. When I was a kid, telephones were associated with a location rather than a person. When mobile phones became mainstream in the 1990s, a lot of the old folks regarded them as just fancy toys. To me, a mobile phone just made so much sense, because you usually need to call a person, not a place. OTOH, in many (business) settings it does make sense to call a place rather than a person. It's great to have such choice.
That's part of the reason the new connectors look like they do, they added signal lines without changing the shape of the original connector.
IMHO, a protocol is all about the signal lines. For example, you could add USB lines into a classic serial port, without changing the shape and keeping it backwards compatible.
Besides, it's obvious that USB3 is not as backwards-pluggable as you'd expect. New B and micro plugs won't fit in the old B/micro sockets, even though they still contain the old wiring. It's not surprising, because there's a limit to how many new wires you can cram into the old shape.
Imagine what'll happen with USB4. How much hardware do you think they can keep cramming into the same old plug? Meanwhile, the B/micro plugs would keep getting bigger and bigger.
IMHO, the way USB3 handles backwards compatiblity is just ugly. All this extra hardware, including wiring that complicates board design, just to maintain an illusion of compatibility. Even if the compatibility is provided by keeping the old parts, while bolting the new, incompatible design on the side (as is obvious in the micro plug).
It's ugly because USB 3.0 breaks the original "legacy free" promise. Remember when USB first replaced serial, parallel and PS/2 ports? It didn't do it by bolting them all together in an ugly lump for maximum compatibility -- it was a clean break.
I also think "I could care less" is dumb. I just wanted to point out how zero is not always the lower limit, because obviously this is an important topic to many a Slashdotter.
Frankly, if you mean "I don't care", then by all means say so, there's no need to put it in any fancier terms. Especially when you get it wrong, which is what frequently occurs whilst endeavouring to overliteralize, perchance even hypercorrect matters.
Of course, if you actually say "I don't care about $x", there's still a non-zero level of caring. If you genuinely don't care, you won't even think about it, you just walk away.
Either say "I don't care," or "I could not care less," or be prepared for a misunderstanding.
Not caring would mean a care level of zero. "I could not care less" implies the impossibility of going below zero.
To get over this endless debate, we just need to define "care" properly. To me, "care" is a positive thing with an obvious negative. Say you walk past a kid who is sitting there and crying. If you care, you ask them what's wrong and offer help. If you don't care, you keep walking. You can easily go below this zero level of caring, for example by beating them up or molesting them. Of course, some people may interpret this as a kind of caring -- i.e. taking interest. In this case, we would have to consider "care" as the absolute value, thus legitimizing the impossibility of going below zero.
So far, the options are basically between a real number and a non-negative real. It's really (heh) as far as you can go, because e.g. complex numbers don't have the concept of less or more. Nevertheless, for another fancy insult you might as well say your care level for them is imaginary.
To be fair most pro e-sport players are under 20 years old. Just like most Olympic gymnasts.
Good point, I'm mainly speaking against terms like gaming and gamification. They sound like we need "adult" terms to experience child-like wonder, because we can't admit actually doing/enjoying anything child-like. Also, things like education should be playful and open-minded to begin with, while "gamification" tries to take this boring old education, and make it into another product in a box.
When I was a wee lad, we called it "playing a game". And we liked it!
Later, some of us (a) grew up and quit playing, while others (b) keep on playing, not "a game", but their entire lives, the society and the world. I guess option (c) is gaming, where you can't decide whether to grow up, so you maintain a grown-up facade while consuming game entertainment marketed for grownups.
Back in the day, a lot of manufacturers sold different types of VHS recorders, some with more "features" than others. It turned out that all the "buttons" were there behind the plastic faceplate, and it was just the faceplate itself that determined which were the cheap/feature-less models and which were the more expensive models.
Interesting. This reminds me of some current news sites that are paywalled by CSS, and everything is readable when you disable CSS.
Is it as Ruben Santamarta says, that the plane's satellite communications system can be hacked into via the plane's wifi? Or is it as the manufacturers say, and the hacker would have to have physical access to the hardware and couldn't do much of anything anyway? There's two very different points of view here and I'm not sure how they're supposed to meet up.
It's a bit odd to talk about physical access when speaking about a metal tube flying along at 35,000 feet.
It's not like attacks are going to take place outside the plane.
Last time I checked, electromagnetic waves were a physical phenomenon. The real challenge is getting anything done by unphysical (i.e. supernatural) means.
..just the way I like it. I mean, just because the machine is sitting in one place, doesn't mean I want to waste electricity willy-nilly. Somebody has to pay the electricity bill, bear the heat, and listen to the noise of coolers. By giving the computer more space than a laptop, you can make cooling practically silent and the machine a lot more ergonomic and expandable.
If you absolutely need the computing power of a high-end CPU, then you probably want to figure out how to do the same calculation in a GPU or an FPGA, because those can be much more powerful in many cases, and more power efficient too.
The theory is that the exhaust air from the CPU heatsink spreads out to parts that are more heat-tolerant but still need active cooling, such as the voltage regulators. A VRM that can operate at 100C without trouble can be cooled just fine with a slow flow of 50C exhaust air from the CPU cooling system.
Thanks for pointing this out, I haven't always considered it, though I've noticed the idea on various places, such as GPUs. I also recall the instructions in a passive chipset heatsink that it's supposed to have a CPU fan nearby to work properly.
In practice, people have found that a front-to-back airflow, preferably ducted, is quieter and more effective than a mix of back-to-front, blow-down, and turbulent airflows. It does, however, require actual engineering work, rather than just attaching a bunch of fans to everything.
Agreed. The "bunch of fans" approach is really annoying, and you still see it in quite high-end applications such as Bitcoin mining ASICs. People should remember that it's the airflow that cools things, not the fans themselves -- it's not how many fans you have, it's how you use them;)
In other words, if you use the same volume of copper and the thickness of the fin is half the diameter of the sponge cylinders, you have the exact same surface area. The thinner fins may be weaker, but since the additional fin material on the sides reinforces the structural strength, I assume that's not too big a deal.
I agree with the rest of your argument, especially including the fluid flow part. However, I'm not sure if this part works out, it really depends on other assumptions. For a point load I agree -- the load is spread across the width, at least to some extent. But with a wider surface, you generally experience more load, proportional to the size, and there's no benefit in connecting the fin segment to neighbouring segments. So the cylinder would be stronger in this sense. It's the intuitive idea of increasing the width in the direction of the load, and the other direction won't help.
Slashdot Mirror
"Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain."
IOW, only trust people after witnessing them under brain surgery.
(Or vasectomy / cardiac surgery etc. depending on the person.)
Is it immersive? (another word that desperately needs to die.)
Try immersing it in water.
It's an interesting distinction which we weren't able to make a couple of decades ago. When I was a kid, telephones were associated with a location rather than a person. When mobile phones became mainstream in the 1990s, a lot of the old folks regarded them as just fancy toys. To me, a mobile phone just made so much sense, because you usually need to call a person, not a place. OTOH, in many (business) settings it does make sense to call a place rather than a person. It's great to have such choice.
That's part of the reason the new connectors look like they do, they added signal lines without changing the shape of the original connector.
IMHO, a protocol is all about the signal lines. For example, you could add USB lines into a classic serial port, without changing the shape and keeping it backwards compatible.
Besides, it's obvious that USB3 is not as backwards-pluggable as you'd expect. New B and micro plugs won't fit in the old B/micro sockets, even though they still contain the old wiring. It's not surprising, because there's a limit to how many new wires you can cram into the old shape.
Imagine what'll happen with USB4. How much hardware do you think they can keep cramming into the same old plug? Meanwhile, the B/micro plugs would keep getting bigger and bigger.
IMHO, the way USB3 handles backwards compatiblity is just ugly. All this extra hardware, including wiring that complicates board design, just to maintain an illusion of compatibility. Even if the compatibility is provided by keeping the old parts, while bolting the new, incompatible design on the side (as is obvious in the micro plug).
My point is that "an errata" is probably short for "a notice of errata".
"Trolling is a art" is probably short for "Trolling is a form of art".
It's ugly because USB 3.0 breaks the original "legacy free" promise. Remember when USB first replaced serial, parallel and PS/2 ports? It didn't do it by bolting them all together in an ugly lump for maximum compatibility -- it was a clean break.
I also think "I could care less" is dumb. I just wanted to point out how zero is not always the lower limit, because obviously this is an important topic to many a Slashdotter.
Frankly, if you mean "I don't care", then by all means say so, there's no need to put it in any fancier terms. Especially when you get it wrong, which is what frequently occurs whilst endeavouring to overliteralize, perchance even hypercorrect matters.
Of course, if you actually say "I don't care about $x", there's still a non-zero level of caring. If you genuinely don't care, you won't even think about it, you just walk away.
Either say "I don't care," or "I could not care less," or be prepared for a misunderstanding.
Not caring would mean a care level of zero. "I could not care less" implies the impossibility of going below zero.
To get over this endless debate, we just need to define "care" properly. To me, "care" is a positive thing with an obvious negative. Say you walk past a kid who is sitting there and crying. If you care, you ask them what's wrong and offer help. If you don't care, you keep walking. You can easily go below this zero level of caring, for example by beating them up or molesting them. Of course, some people may interpret this as a kind of caring -- i.e. taking interest. In this case, we would have to consider "care" as the absolute value, thus legitimizing the impossibility of going below zero.
So far, the options are basically between a real number and a non-negative real. It's really (heh) as far as you can go, because e.g. complex numbers don't have the concept of less or more. Nevertheless, for another fancy insult you might as well say your care level for them is imaginary.
To be fair most pro e-sport players are under 20 years old. Just like most Olympic gymnasts.
Good point, I'm mainly speaking against terms like gaming and gamification. They sound like we need "adult" terms to experience child-like wonder, because we can't admit actually doing/enjoying anything child-like. Also, things like education should be playful and open-minded to begin with, while "gamification" tries to take this boring old education, and make it into another product in a box.
When I was a wee lad, we called it "playing a game". And we liked it!
Later, some of us (a) grew up and quit playing, while others (b) keep on playing, not "a game", but their entire lives, the society and the world. I guess option (c) is gaming, where you can't decide whether to grow up, so you maintain a grown-up facade while consuming game entertainment marketed for grownups.
US dollar is a Fiat currency. Bitcoin is a Ferrari currency.
Back in the day, a lot of manufacturers sold different types of VHS recorders, some with more "features" than others. It turned out that all the "buttons" were there behind the plastic faceplate, and it was just the faceplate itself that determined which were the cheap/feature-less models and which were the more expensive models.
Interesting. This reminds me of some current news sites that are paywalled by CSS, and everything is readable when you disable CSS.
the 'name of god' (jehovah, for those not afraid of being stoned)
Whoa. At first I thought you meant stoned as in a spiritual state, and only then I recalled that Brian movie.
(If a man lies with a man as with a woman, they both must be stoned... :-P)
"Extra dimensions are the epicycles of Modern Physics" -- Mark Maughan
Why the HELL doesn't Sheldon just set up autodeposit?!?
Maybe all those uncashed checks are $ 2.56 each, from Dr. Knuth.
Only Penny is ever in need of cash.
OMG, so that's why they named her Penny, rather than something like Trillian.
You can't touch sound waves or memories, but this MC Hammer earworm feels painfully real...
I'm sure any self-respecting geek would prefer "Eels on a Hovercraft".
Is it as Ruben Santamarta says, that the plane's satellite communications system can be hacked into via the plane's wifi? Or is it as the manufacturers say, and the hacker would have to have physical access to the hardware and couldn't do much of anything anyway? There's two very different points of view here and I'm not sure how they're supposed to meet up.
It's a bit odd to talk about physical access when speaking about a metal tube flying along at 35,000 feet.
It's not like attacks are going to take place outside the plane.
Last time I checked, electromagnetic waves were a physical phenomenon. The real challenge is getting anything done by unphysical (i.e. supernatural) means.
Dude, Linux is a text adventure game. Just use HJKL.
I came (snickers) here to see all the "your mom" jokes. I can't believe there are none so far.
Boring.
I claim rights to the title "Eels on a Hovercraft".
If you absolutely need the computing power of a high-end CPU, then you probably want to figure out how to do the same calculation in a GPU or an FPGA, because those can be much more powerful in many cases, and more power efficient too.
The theory is that the exhaust air from the CPU heatsink spreads out to parts that are more heat-tolerant but still need active cooling, such as the voltage regulators. A VRM that can operate at 100C without trouble can be cooled just fine with a slow flow of 50C exhaust air from the CPU cooling system.
Thanks for pointing this out, I haven't always considered it, though I've noticed the idea on various places, such as GPUs. I also recall the instructions in a passive chipset heatsink that it's supposed to have a CPU fan nearby to work properly.
In practice, people have found that a front-to-back airflow, preferably ducted, is quieter and more effective than a mix of back-to-front, blow-down, and turbulent airflows. It does, however, require actual engineering work, rather than just attaching a bunch of fans to everything.
Agreed. The "bunch of fans" approach is really annoying, and you still see it in quite high-end applications such as Bitcoin mining ASICs. People should remember that it's the airflow that cools things, not the fans themselves -- it's not how many fans you have, it's how you use them ;)
In other words, if you use the same volume of copper and the thickness of the fin is half the diameter of the sponge cylinders, you have the exact same surface area. The thinner fins may be weaker, but since the additional fin material on the sides reinforces the structural strength, I assume that's not too big a deal.
I agree with the rest of your argument, especially including the fluid flow part. However, I'm not sure if this part works out, it really depends on other assumptions. For a point load I agree -- the load is spread across the width, at least to some extent. But with a wider surface, you generally experience more load, proportional to the size, and there's no benefit in connecting the fin segment to neighbouring segments. So the cylinder would be stronger in this sense. It's the intuitive idea of increasing the width in the direction of the load, and the other direction won't help.