The way I understand it: shock diamond is merely a result you get when you do appropriate solutions to the set of equations that model gas flow. It's like saying that since the Bernoulli effect is well understood, you can easily render, say, the velocity field in a flow that goes into and out of the gap between two pieces of paper. I wasn't even talking about shock diamonds, but about pretty much everything else: the variations in optical density of the smoke are really strikingly similar, at the edge of the flow, to what you see in the games. It almost looks artificial.
You'd be amazed to learn, then, that there coal-fired boilers have improved quite a bit over the last century, in terms of thermal efficiency (the percentage of heat extracted at high temperature), combustion efficiency (the less CO out the stack, the better), cost of operation (autofeed systems, diagnostics), and durability.
Now, since SpaceX is the only company that has ever made space launches so cheap, I'd hardly call it a "modern anachronism". It has never been done that affordably, ever. They are the first ones who apparently grok how to run an integrated aerospace manufacturing and launch business to control costs and schedules.
It's really interesting that if you look at the arguably real shot of the test firing, it seems to look almost like a rendering from a game! It probably means that fire/smoke rendering in games is getting good, or perhaps nature is just recently slacking in presenting itself to us:)
Re:Forward button missing, UI items jump around.
on
Firefox 10 Released
·
· Score: 1
It's out already, make sure you download the binary that has ESR in its filename, it's not the regular binary!
They basically went to "full-hack" mode where nothing is off-limits, and that's what they call "releases". If an add-on or extension breaks -- tough luck.:(
Mozilla handles this issue via so-called update channels. What you describe implies switching from release channel to esr channel. I don't think that there's any way to do it (in a supported fashion) other than just installing the ESR release (it's a different binary from the regular Firefox 10, go look for it on their website). It automatically sets its update channel to esr and that's it.
Re:And FF10 also makes addons compatible by defaul
on
Firefox 10 Released
·
· Score: 1
That updater could be, for all I care, a 50 kilobyte winapi application written in pure C. Its startup overhead would be negligible (a single disk read). Now if they intend the updater to be something that pulls in tens of meabytes of crap just to load and go to sleep, then that's another story...
This is very insightful. It's beyond our perspective, exactly. Just think about what would knowing the "ultimate answer" give us? I always find that people are "looking for answers" that are fairly meaningless, like, say, "what's the meaning of life?". I mean, what the heck, how would knowing the "meaning" of life help us?! How even you'd specify what the "meaning of life" itself means? To me, it seems, there's this way that people have of attaching random adjectives to things, putting question marks behind them, and think it's a valid question just because you can form it. Life has no meaning, it's a biochemical process in a huge system known as biosphere. How could it have meaning? How would it help us to know what meaning it has, even if it was a valid question?
I mentioned milliseconds, not microseconds. At 65mph, 10ms is 1 foot. It's not a very meaningful number, though, because you need to look at relative speeds (closing speed). If there's 6 feet of following distance available in front of you, and we'd want to never go below half of that (2 feet), it's merely 100ms at 20mph closing speed. So tens of milliseconds make all the difference, and it's nothing to scoff at. If I can give myslef an extra foot or two of following distance by lowering my reaction times, how is that bad for my safety? It's not about "not getting there if I don't shave milliseconds", it's about getting there safer by keeping my reaction time as low as reasonably possible. I basically try to drive like on a racetrack while obeying traffic laws -- this doesn't mean that I'm aggressive or unsafe, quite contrary, it means I'm acutely aware of my surroundings and try to use up as little of available safety margins as possible. That's not a bad thing, you know.
I have driven in places where the traffic flow is so heavy that you will have 65 mph flow with 6 feet of following distance, and 50 mph flow with 3 feet of following distance. I don't know how you'd make all those people drive "properly", but that's some ideal that is not achieveable simply due to controller dynamics of a human driver. The only way to modify that is to have plenty of simulator driver training, with recurrent training and evaluation. Good luck getting anyone to pay for that.
As for panic: what's wrong with training a different response? I presume you're all for proper driver training and education, this should involve training out certain irrational responses. Turning ignition switch to OFF is a bit hazy of a proposition when you're in panic mode: it's pretty damn easy to overshoot and on some cars it will lock up your steering wheel. I'd personally design the steering wheel lock with an override solenoid that's energized as long as there's nonzero speed -- that way you'd nevel lock up the steering wheel when the car is moving. The foot-actuated emergency brake should not have that fucked up locking ratchet, or at least the ratchet should be disabled when the car is moving. At least on the hand-operated brake you can depress the button to disable the ratchet, and that's how I use it. I test my emergency brake every Friday on a particular downhill stretch of road on the way home from work, and I test it in my wife's car every time I drive it (about once a week).
The emergency brake of course lacks anti-lock, but in most cars I drove it's so underpowered (or poorly adjusted) that you'll never lock wheels on dry or even somewhat wet pavement. You'll only lock wheels on poor surfaces (snow/sleet, sand/dirt). I have done the adjustments as well as one could in my cars, but it's still a joke of a brake, practically speaking. Better than nothing, but it gives you stopping distances that are easily 2-3x over what regular brakes would do on dry pavement.
I should have, pretty much said what I implied: any theory that works when applied to human behavior is "good", it doesn't necessarily have to explain it (theories don't do that). So when I mentioned physiology, various branches of psychology, bioinformatics, I implied that other valid method apply too, so one can list statistical modeling, etc.
How the heck you came to this conclusion is beyond me. The glaring thing in the wikipedia link on praxeology is that "Austrian economists argue that they [ economic models and statistical methods] are a flawed, unreliable, and insufficient means of analyzing and testing economic theory.". This is not an opinion, this is a testable claim -- you can tell how good the economic model and statistical methods are at predicting what's going to happen in terms of economy. You can mix and match those with what we know about human behavior, and see how good a particular mixture of methods / subtheories is at giving you predictions. That's what a scientific theory's major point is: to have predictive power. Theories that don't give this are useless, they are not really theories.
What I'm saying is that saying "history repeats itself" is a fairly useless yet true statement: yeah, people do what people always did, big deal. To be really useful though, whatever theories surround such statement must have predictive power. They are useless otherwise. What history offers, essentially, is a bunch of experimental data on human behavior where the conditions are poorly controlled, and where you rarely have any control groups. Anyone doing experimental psychology will tell you that such data are almost useless in isolation. You can of course apply statistical models, and those may have predictive power.
By saying that "history repeats itself" and that we should "learn" from it, there's an implied statement that you can use the past to predict the future. To do this in any way that is not crackpot, you need theories -- in the scientific sense, the latter not necessarily having much in common with nebulous popular notion of "theory". So, please, educate me: show me history texts or papers that propose scientific theories that build on historical facts and that one can use to make testable predictions on future human behavior. History's sole focus is, after all, documentation of past human behavior (I exclude the misnomer known as natural history -- that's just diluting history to cover paleobotany, geology, etc). Historians are like librarians in a way, IMHO. There's not much science to it, but surely it's a practical and necessary thing to be involved in.
It's not about historical illiteracy -- please end with this "history repeats itself" bullshit, it's not helpful in the least -- we know better. We have some theories as to how humans make decisions, and what external and internal factors affect those decisions. To know this doesn't require knowing any history, it's the human nature itself, yet somehow it's all glorified because it happened "ago". I don't know if there'd be consensus as to how much further "we" are to be pushed, but it's not to be determined by looking at history, it's to be determined from what we know about human behavior. History is not a science -- apart from archeology, if you bundle it under history umbrella. History is an art, and it has no theories and no predictive power. Whatever theories I've seen peddled by historians seemed to be material for dissection by students of intro to philosophy of science, and not much else. Enough has happened in the past that "history repeating itself" is a meaningless tautology: sure, someone somewhere messed up (or succeeded) very similarly to what we see now. This clairvoyance isn't, it only works backward, there's no way to pick from historical facts to predict the future unless we apply some, you know, scientific theories to this data. And those theories don't come from history, they come from, you know, science -- like physiology, various branches of psychology, bioinformatics as applied in psychology, etc. History collects data, but by itself it offers little more.
What the parent meant was that you don't need a laser, it could be an arc lamp with some electrooptical modulator in front of it. The receiver does not take advantage of the coherency of the light, although the transmitter (target painter) does, in a fashion: it's easier to design glass optics for monochromatic light. As far as I know, it could have used a high-powered LED (or a bunch of them), and perhaps some interference filters to narrow the spectrum a bit more if needed to tweak output power vs. beam divergence due to chromatic aberration.
The predictive outcome is you mention is otherwise known as a scientific theory, and is pretty much what science is all about. I don't care much whether a theory is "reductionist" or "systems", as long as it's a good theory (it works!), it's valuable. I do agree that many science teams could use an outsider systems guy to try an see the big picture better by not being absorbed in the minutiae.
I think that the emergency brake sensor should be used as the override. That's how I'd design it if it were my car, there's no legitimate reason for the engine to apply torque to the wheels when you're doing emergency braking of any sort.
Semi-related: sometimes you don't have a choice where you live and how dense the traffic is. You can either get where you want to, or you won't ever get to where you're going, and not everyone can take the trip a couple of hours before or after the peak time.
Never underestimate resolve of the enemy, though. If there are any technical or tactical deficiencies, and there usually are some, perhaps even initially unanticipated or given little concern, the enemy will find them, and will exploit them. Just look at how drawn out was the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. US's current major deficiency isn't even technical, it's a tactical one: we're not fighting a defensive war where everyone of "theirs" is fair game. We're highly deficient in a theatre where the enemy has civilian support and can easily mingle with civilians, and this seems to have been exploited very well so far. As for technical deficiencies: no firmware is perfect, and no procedure training is perfect either. In a real invasion of US soil, should it come to that, the enemy would surely find all the cracks there are to be found.
Issuing non-idle throttle command (accelerator "down") and braking at the same time may be necessary if you want to obtain absolutely lowest reaction time in regaining wheel torque after braking. When I drive on freeways and need increased margin when changing lanes, I will not only use both feet, but I will maintain the engine speed above the idle speed of the torque converter (it's a car with automatic transmission). That way the engine always drives the transmission, not the other way round, and I don't have to waste time (tens of milliseconds) for the engine to come up to speed before it puts torque on the wheels. Properly using both feet in a car with an automatic transmission is the safest way of driving, in the terms of maintaining lowest possible reaction times.
I'd be seriously pissed if I had to drive a car where depressing accelerator and brake caused the accelerator command to be overridden. It'd make me feel fairly unsafe. I'd perhaps like there to be a "maintain speed" mode, where the engine torque is controlled so that when the brake circuit pressure goes to "idle", the engine produces enough torque to overcome aerodynamic drag and thus maintain constant speed -- that'd be the ideal mode for freeway lane shifting I'd think.
This is not 38 trying to take more of your money, or EA in this case, this is us rewarding people for helping us! If you disagree due to methodology, ok, but that is our intent... companies are still trying to figure out how to receive dollars spent on games they make, when they are bought. Is that wrong?
Since when, you idiot, is a game publisher a tax collector? Because what you intend to do is tax each and every sale of the game on the secondary market. It's not yours to figure out how to "receive" in the first place. You sell it once, get your money, and that's it.
Those amounts are completely insignificant since whatever is concentrated in the solid foods that you eat will completely overwhelm whatever is in the water. The animals and plants that you eat have already done all the mineral picking for you, your water can be pure.
Slashdot Mirror
You've been an unwitting part to insurance fraud. Report the doctor, the insurance company will gladly investigate, I'm sure.
Not CO2, CO!
I know I'm feeding a troll, but please get serious. The compression artifacts are quite irrelevant to how it looks.
The way I understand it: shock diamond is merely a result you get when you do appropriate solutions to the set of equations that model gas flow. It's like saying that since the Bernoulli effect is well understood, you can easily render, say, the velocity field in a flow that goes into and out of the gap between two pieces of paper. I wasn't even talking about shock diamonds, but about pretty much everything else: the variations in optical density of the smoke are really strikingly similar, at the edge of the flow, to what you see in the games. It almost looks artificial.
You'd be amazed to learn, then, that there coal-fired boilers have improved quite a bit over the last century, in terms of thermal efficiency (the percentage of heat extracted at high temperature), combustion efficiency (the less CO out the stack, the better), cost of operation (autofeed systems, diagnostics), and durability.
Now, since SpaceX is the only company that has ever made space launches so cheap, I'd hardly call it a "modern anachronism". It has never been done that affordably, ever. They are the first ones who apparently grok how to run an integrated aerospace manufacturing and launch business to control costs and schedules.
It's really interesting that if you look at the arguably real shot of the test firing, it seems to look almost like a rendering from a game! It probably means that fire/smoke rendering in games is getting good, or perhaps nature is just recently slacking in presenting itself to us :)
It's out already, make sure you download the binary that has ESR in its filename, it's not the regular binary!
They basically went to "full-hack" mode where nothing is off-limits, and that's what they call "releases". If an add-on or extension breaks -- tough luck. :(
Mozilla handles this issue via so-called update channels. What you describe implies switching from release channel to esr channel. I don't think that there's any way to do it (in a supported fashion) other than just installing the ESR release (it's a different binary from the regular Firefox 10, go look for it on their website). It automatically sets its update channel to esr and that's it.
That updater could be, for all I care, a 50 kilobyte winapi application written in pure C. Its startup overhead would be negligible (a single disk read). Now if they intend the updater to be something that pulls in tens of meabytes of crap just to load and go to sleep, then that's another story...
This is very insightful. It's beyond our perspective, exactly. Just think about what would knowing the "ultimate answer" give us? I always find that people are "looking for answers" that are fairly meaningless, like, say, "what's the meaning of life?". I mean, what the heck, how would knowing the "meaning" of life help us?! How even you'd specify what the "meaning of life" itself means? To me, it seems, there's this way that people have of attaching random adjectives to things, putting question marks behind them, and think it's a valid question just because you can form it. Life has no meaning, it's a biochemical process in a huge system known as biosphere. How could it have meaning? How would it help us to know what meaning it has, even if it was a valid question?
I mentioned milliseconds, not microseconds. At 65mph, 10ms is 1 foot. It's not a very meaningful number, though, because you need to look at relative speeds (closing speed). If there's 6 feet of following distance available in front of you, and we'd want to never go below half of that (2 feet), it's merely 100ms at 20mph closing speed. So tens of milliseconds make all the difference, and it's nothing to scoff at. If I can give myslef an extra foot or two of following distance by lowering my reaction times, how is that bad for my safety? It's not about "not getting there if I don't shave milliseconds", it's about getting there safer by keeping my reaction time as low as reasonably possible. I basically try to drive like on a racetrack while obeying traffic laws -- this doesn't mean that I'm aggressive or unsafe, quite contrary, it means I'm acutely aware of my surroundings and try to use up as little of available safety margins as possible. That's not a bad thing, you know.
I have driven in places where the traffic flow is so heavy that you will have 65 mph flow with 6 feet of following distance, and 50 mph flow with 3 feet of following distance. I don't know how you'd make all those people drive "properly", but that's some ideal that is not achieveable simply due to controller dynamics of a human driver. The only way to modify that is to have plenty of simulator driver training, with recurrent training and evaluation. Good luck getting anyone to pay for that.
As for panic: what's wrong with training a different response? I presume you're all for proper driver training and education, this should involve training out certain irrational responses. Turning ignition switch to OFF is a bit hazy of a proposition when you're in panic mode: it's pretty damn easy to overshoot and on some cars it will lock up your steering wheel. I'd personally design the steering wheel lock with an override solenoid that's energized as long as there's nonzero speed -- that way you'd nevel lock up the steering wheel when the car is moving. The foot-actuated emergency brake should not have that fucked up locking ratchet, or at least the ratchet should be disabled when the car is moving. At least on the hand-operated brake you can depress the button to disable the ratchet, and that's how I use it. I test my emergency brake every Friday on a particular downhill stretch of road on the way home from work, and I test it in my wife's car every time I drive it (about once a week).
The emergency brake of course lacks anti-lock, but in most cars I drove it's so underpowered (or poorly adjusted) that you'll never lock wheels on dry or even somewhat wet pavement. You'll only lock wheels on poor surfaces (snow/sleet, sand/dirt). I have done the adjustments as well as one could in my cars, but it's still a joke of a brake, practically speaking. Better than nothing, but it gives you stopping distances that are easily 2-3x over what regular brakes would do on dry pavement.
I should have, pretty much said what I implied: any theory that works when applied to human behavior is "good", it doesn't necessarily have to explain it (theories don't do that). So when I mentioned physiology, various branches of psychology, bioinformatics, I implied that other valid method apply too, so one can list statistical modeling, etc.
How the heck you came to this conclusion is beyond me. The glaring thing in the wikipedia link on praxeology is that "Austrian economists argue that they [ economic models and statistical methods] are a flawed, unreliable, and insufficient means of analyzing and testing economic theory.". This is not an opinion, this is a testable claim -- you can tell how good the economic model and statistical methods are at predicting what's going to happen in terms of economy. You can mix and match those with what we know about human behavior, and see how good a particular mixture of methods / subtheories is at giving you predictions. That's what a scientific theory's major point is: to have predictive power. Theories that don't give this are useless, they are not really theories.
What I'm saying is that saying "history repeats itself" is a fairly useless yet true statement: yeah, people do what people always did, big deal. To be really useful though, whatever theories surround such statement must have predictive power. They are useless otherwise. What history offers, essentially, is a bunch of experimental data on human behavior where the conditions are poorly controlled, and where you rarely have any control groups. Anyone doing experimental psychology will tell you that such data are almost useless in isolation. You can of course apply statistical models, and those may have predictive power.
By saying that "history repeats itself" and that we should "learn" from it, there's an implied statement that you can use the past to predict the future. To do this in any way that is not crackpot, you need theories -- in the scientific sense, the latter not necessarily having much in common with nebulous popular notion of "theory". So, please, educate me: show me history texts or papers that propose scientific theories that build on historical facts and that one can use to make testable predictions on future human behavior. History's sole focus is, after all, documentation of past human behavior (I exclude the misnomer known as natural history -- that's just diluting history to cover paleobotany, geology, etc). Historians are like librarians in a way, IMHO. There's not much science to it, but surely it's a practical and necessary thing to be involved in.
It's not about historical illiteracy -- please end with this "history repeats itself" bullshit, it's not helpful in the least -- we know better. We have some theories as to how humans make decisions, and what external and internal factors affect those decisions. To know this doesn't require knowing any history, it's the human nature itself, yet somehow it's all glorified because it happened "ago". I don't know if there'd be consensus as to how much further "we" are to be pushed, but it's not to be determined by looking at history, it's to be determined from what we know about human behavior. History is not a science -- apart from archeology, if you bundle it under history umbrella. History is an art, and it has no theories and no predictive power. Whatever theories I've seen peddled by historians seemed to be material for dissection by students of intro to philosophy of science, and not much else. Enough has happened in the past that "history repeating itself" is a meaningless tautology: sure, someone somewhere messed up (or succeeded) very similarly to what we see now. This clairvoyance isn't, it only works backward, there's no way to pick from historical facts to predict the future unless we apply some, you know, scientific theories to this data. And those theories don't come from history, they come from, you know, science -- like physiology, various branches of psychology, bioinformatics as applied in psychology, etc. History collects data, but by itself it offers little more.
It's not theory, it's oversimplification. Theory properly takes into account atmospheric scattering due to suspended particulates ;)
What the parent meant was that you don't need a laser, it could be an arc lamp with some electrooptical modulator in front of it. The receiver does not take advantage of the coherency of the light, although the transmitter (target painter) does, in a fashion: it's easier to design glass optics for monochromatic light. As far as I know, it could have used a high-powered LED (or a bunch of them), and perhaps some interference filters to narrow the spectrum a bit more if needed to tweak output power vs. beam divergence due to chromatic aberration.
Agreed.
Very well said, quite insightful. Thanks!
The predictive outcome is you mention is otherwise known as a scientific theory, and is pretty much what science is all about. I don't care much whether a theory is "reductionist" or "systems", as long as it's a good theory (it works!), it's valuable. I do agree that many science teams could use an outsider systems guy to try an see the big picture better by not being absorbed in the minutiae.
I think that the emergency brake sensor should be used as the override. That's how I'd design it if it were my car, there's no legitimate reason for the engine to apply torque to the wheels when you're doing emergency braking of any sort.
Semi-related: sometimes you don't have a choice where you live and how dense the traffic is. You can either get where you want to, or you won't ever get to where you're going, and not everyone can take the trip a couple of hours before or after the peak time.
Never underestimate resolve of the enemy, though. If there are any technical or tactical deficiencies, and there usually are some, perhaps even initially unanticipated or given little concern, the enemy will find them, and will exploit them. Just look at how drawn out was the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. US's current major deficiency isn't even technical, it's a tactical one: we're not fighting a defensive war where everyone of "theirs" is fair game. We're highly deficient in a theatre where the enemy has civilian support and can easily mingle with civilians, and this seems to have been exploited very well so far. As for technical deficiencies: no firmware is perfect, and no procedure training is perfect either. In a real invasion of US soil, should it come to that, the enemy would surely find all the cracks there are to be found.
Issuing non-idle throttle command (accelerator "down") and braking at the same time may be necessary if you want to obtain absolutely lowest reaction time in regaining wheel torque after braking. When I drive on freeways and need increased margin when changing lanes, I will not only use both feet, but I will maintain the engine speed above the idle speed of the torque converter (it's a car with automatic transmission). That way the engine always drives the transmission, not the other way round, and I don't have to waste time (tens of milliseconds) for the engine to come up to speed before it puts torque on the wheels. Properly using both feet in a car with an automatic transmission is the safest way of driving, in the terms of maintaining lowest possible reaction times.
I'd be seriously pissed if I had to drive a car where depressing accelerator and brake caused the accelerator command to be overridden. It'd make me feel fairly unsafe. I'd perhaps like there to be a "maintain speed" mode, where the engine torque is controlled so that when the brake circuit pressure goes to "idle", the engine produces enough torque to overcome aerodynamic drag and thus maintain constant speed -- that'd be the ideal mode for freeway lane shifting I'd think.
This is not 38 trying to take more of your money, or EA in this case, this is us rewarding people for helping us! If you disagree due to methodology, ok, but that is our intent... companies are still trying to figure out how to receive dollars spent on games they make, when they are bought. Is that wrong?
Since when, you idiot, is a game publisher a tax collector? Because what you intend to do is tax each and every sale of the game on the secondary market. It's not yours to figure out how to "receive" in the first place. You sell it once, get your money, and that's it.
Those amounts are completely insignificant since whatever is concentrated in the solid foods that you eat will completely overwhelm whatever is in the water. The animals and plants that you eat have already done all the mineral picking for you, your water can be pure.