An Apple III has tremendous surface area. It could dissipate heat plenty well if only the engineers didn't settle on using the face with the smallest surface area for cooling. Not only that, but the heatsink is simply not thick enough. They should have consulted someone with proper experience, perhaps someone used to dealing with thermal design in spacegoing systems. When you don't have convection available, things get "interesting" pretty quickly.
Look, thermal management is no magic. If the management says to do passive cooling, you do just that. If you can't deliver, it's an engineering failure, not management one.
I think that the only really solid, good thing Windows CE was ever good for is industrial automation. It's easy to have a hard-realtime system running on Windows CE. Beckhoff Automation has some PLCs (both Intel and ARM) that run Windows CE and their realtime PLC software (TwinCat).
The fact that it's in COBOL is irrelevant. It most likely runs on old-ish IBM hardware that new-ish IBM hardware can happily emulate, at a fraction of that cost. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I don't think that I'd like to count her "accomplishments" as mine. Being a dumb politican -- doesn't look so good on resume. She is dumb, that doesn't mean she can't "accomplish" much. Snoop Dogg also "accomplished" much, you see.
Another idea that I just don't see all that often: continuous product improvement. One doesn't have to spend the money and effort on coming up with a completely new piece of crap that does exactly what a previous model did or didn't do. Too many consumer products are fire and forget. Once the production run is done, it's done. And I'm not even talking about the electronics. Simple things like strollers: they seem to absolutely have to introduce 'new models', where some design flaws surface every couple of product generations. Like if the design teams had amnesia or something.
-- Ha, ha, ha. The U.S. market obviously demands plenty bad, nearly worthless crap, if one were to judge from what's on the market.
There are simple things like cast-iron hand-cranked meat grinders where the market is saturated with extremely poorly made chinese crap, with absolutely no alternatives. I know, I've tried to buy a new one -- ended up getting a used Porkert instead.
Another simple thing: portable DVD players. I've already had to fix two of them because they had liquids spilled on them. It's not a rare occurence -- they are often used by kids who either don't care or just forget themselves and get unlucky. While the manufacturing quality is perfectly acceptable, the design quality just sucks big time. The clearances between many parts seem randomly chosen, so that either things that rub on each other seize, or they rattle. An no, this isn't a molding issue, it's by design. Molding on the units I looked at was by the book. You can tell that many small cross-section plastic parts, prone to breakage, were designed by people who have no clue or no experience in mechanical design. There are plenty of changes that one could make that would not increase the material costs, but would make those devices much more rugged.
It seems that many U.S. companies that brand products imported from China have no engineering on the other side of the pond, just marketing and purchasing people.
A breathalyzer, from a viewpoint of measurement science, is a joke. For your own good you should request a blood test ASAP. I kid you not. I have had access to several in-calibration breathalyzers and at any point in time it was about a 5% chance I'd be over 0.05 without having a single drink in a week.
To be frank, I'd much rather submit directly to a blood test than to a breathalyzer. The former is usually a reliable test, and taking a small sample of blood isn't really all that invasive.
In a long-winded way -- yes. You have DNA, and then you have regulation of gene expression that is modulated by environmental factors. Even in the womb. Again -- IIRC, I'm not anywhere in this field, this is all based on reading random stuff in Nature and similar high-level papers.
Just because someone was mostly wrong, doesn't mean he was completely wrong. IOW -- many crazy ideas are only 99% crazy;)
Our understanding of genetics has moved well past Darwin's and Mendel's work:) IOW: It's more complex than that. Sunlight affects gene expression, and the probability that a trait will be passed on. This is, apparently, the regulation mechanism here. Mutations are not involved at all.
Having your laptop out not only distracts other students, but is disrespectful and discouraging to professors.
As far as I understand, most lecture participation is optional anyway (or should be!). As long as I can type quietly (if I do type, that is), I can’t see it being distracting or discouraging. I have got A’s in grad school in classes where I was reading Harry Potter most of the time. Using a notebook to work on something else would have been no different.
I'd be careful with skin colour. It takes about 100 generations to go from white to pitch black (or reverse). That's hardly enough to develop what would be a new race, from a genetic standpoint.
The only way I'd buy the "statistical abnormality" flag is if it was based on published, peer-reviewed research. Established research, no less -- not something that just came up a month ago. IOW, this is just an example of some salespeople taking right people out golfing. Happens all the time in education and elsewhere. Probably in the same category as TSA's sniffer machines.
There is only so much you can do without thinking things through. The bad habit you allude to is easy to unlearn by necessity. Once your project is complex enough, clashing imports will be haunting you enough to force a change. IOW: all in due time.
You know what? Simulating stuff is just another way of saying that we're running a mathematical model. Such models are typically mixes of discrete and continuous equations. The latter require discretization and solving with some sort of a differential equation solver. So while their proposal may use vague terms, in the end you "just" end solving lots and lots of differential equations. To see what is the state of the art here, just go to, say, the tool page of the Modelica Association. Modelica is a language in which you define your model, and then you need a compiler that can actually execute the model, thus run the simulation. The best tools out there (say Dymola) can tackle between 10^5 and 10^6 equations. As far as I can tell, significant theoretical and practical breakthroughs need to be made before we can even approach the performance of special-purpose endlessly tweaked and optimized simulators (like weather models) with a general purpose simulator that would allow modeling "just about anything" -- say, weather, geology, hydro, information, power grid, etc., all coupled together as necessary for FuturICT.
Try Python. It's the only language I can think of that's similarly easy -- namely you can accomplish anything you want with zero fluff. If you want to, you can write in pure procedural style without creating a single class of your own. It'd be easy to transplant your QBasic knowledge into Python, and then learn more tricks (object orientation, functional programming features, iterators and generators, etc).
Major malfunction my ass. That was the hilarious bit you've picked up on just as I wanted you to. Don't you see the ridiculousness of it? It's no worse and no better than the Indian response. It belongs in a comedy skit.
Any attempts at explanations in the heat of the moment make no sense, because you'd be pretty much making shit up. No one explained anything right after Challenger's blow-up, and you'll hardly find anyone anywhere explaining anything before the formal investigation gets going and they have an inkling as to what happened. If you want to listen to some hilarity, find Challenger broadcasts on youtube, right after the explosion.
As for the "launch going South" and the "monkeys" at the consoles: the launch is controlled by on-board systems as soon as the umbilicals retract. You could, pretty much, shut everything down in the command center and go home just then, as far as the launch vehicle is concerned. Payload is another matter, but then it's often controlled from a different control center. The people at the consoles -- after the liftoff -- are there pretty much only to make sure they get all the telemetry -- that's one of the real assets from every launch, and worth millions of dollars easy.
So, once again: past-liftoff, the only souls on the ground you care about in an unmanned mission are the payload controllers and range safety.
As for riding on trains like monkeys: I'd take that any day over the sue-happy, mind-the-hot-beverage and don't-let-toddlers-play-with-plastic-baggies warn-people-or-else mentality, thankyouverymuch.
Slashdot Mirror
An Apple III has tremendous surface area. It could dissipate heat plenty well if only the engineers didn't settle on using the face with the smallest surface area for cooling. Not only that, but the heatsink is simply not thick enough. They should have consulted someone with proper experience, perhaps someone used to dealing with thermal design in spacegoing systems. When you don't have convection available, things get "interesting" pretty quickly.
Look, thermal management is no magic. If the management says to do passive cooling, you do just that. If you can't deliver, it's an engineering failure, not management one.
I think that the only really solid, good thing Windows CE was ever good for is industrial automation. It's easy to have a hard-realtime system running on Windows CE. Beckhoff Automation has some PLCs (both Intel and ARM) that run Windows CE and their realtime PLC software (TwinCat).
The fact that it's in COBOL is irrelevant. It most likely runs on old-ish IBM hardware that new-ish IBM hardware can happily emulate, at a fraction of that cost. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Negative impact, that is.
I don't think that I'd like to count her "accomplishments" as mine. Being a dumb politican -- doesn't look so good on resume. She is dumb, that doesn't mean she can't "accomplish" much. Snoop Dogg also "accomplished" much, you see.
Another idea that I just don't see all that often: continuous product improvement. One doesn't have to spend the money and effort on coming up with a completely new piece of crap that does exactly what a previous model did or didn't do. Too many consumer products are fire and forget. Once the production run is done, it's done. And I'm not even talking about the electronics. Simple things like strollers: they seem to absolutely have to introduce 'new models', where some design flaws surface every couple of product generations. Like if the design teams had amnesia or something.
I have subordinates and I actually like learning new stuff from them. So please don't make all bosses stupid, self-centered jerks.
With 25 developers, you should have customary code reviews before things get merged into production.
Nobody puts up with bad products anymore.
-- Ha, ha, ha. The U.S. market obviously demands plenty bad, nearly worthless crap, if one were to judge from what's on the market.
There are simple things like cast-iron hand-cranked meat grinders where the market is saturated with extremely poorly made chinese crap, with absolutely no alternatives. I know, I've tried to buy a new one -- ended up getting a used Porkert instead.
Another simple thing: portable DVD players. I've already had to fix two of them because they had liquids spilled on them. It's not a rare occurence -- they are often used by kids who either don't care or just forget themselves and get unlucky. While the manufacturing quality is perfectly acceptable, the design quality just sucks big time. The clearances between many parts seem randomly chosen, so that either things that rub on each other seize, or they rattle. An no, this isn't a molding issue, it's by design. Molding on the units I looked at was by the book. You can tell that many small cross-section plastic parts, prone to breakage, were designed by people who have no clue or no experience in mechanical design. There are plenty of changes that one could make that would not increase the material costs, but would make those devices much more rugged.
It seems that many U.S. companies that brand products imported from China have no engineering on the other side of the pond, just marketing and purchasing people.
Frankly said it's not much of a business if they can't at least wish for where they'll be in 5 years.
A breathalyzer, from a viewpoint of measurement science, is a joke. For your own good you should request a blood test ASAP. I kid you not. I have had access to several in-calibration breathalyzers and at any point in time it was about a 5% chance I'd be over 0.05 without having a single drink in a week.
Amen.
To be frank, I'd much rather submit directly to a blood test than to a breathalyzer. The former is usually a reliable test, and taking a small sample of blood isn't really all that invasive.
In a long-winded way -- yes. You have DNA, and then you have regulation of gene expression that is modulated by environmental factors. Even in the womb. Again -- IIRC, I'm not anywhere in this field, this is all based on reading random stuff in Nature and similar high-level papers.
Just because someone was mostly wrong, doesn't mean he was completely wrong. IOW -- many crazy ideas are only 99% crazy ;)
Our understanding of genetics has moved well past Darwin's and Mendel's work :) IOW: It's more complex than that. Sunlight affects gene expression, and the probability that a trait will be passed on. This is, apparently, the regulation mechanism here. Mutations are not involved at all.
Carolyn sez:
Having your laptop out not only distracts other students, but is disrespectful and discouraging to professors.
As far as I understand, most lecture participation is optional anyway (or should be!). As long as I can type quietly (if I do type, that is), I can’t see it being distracting or discouraging. I have got A’s in grad school in classes where I was reading Harry Potter most of the time. Using a notebook to work on something else would have been no different.
I'd be careful with skin colour. It takes about 100 generations to go from white to pitch black (or reverse). That's hardly enough to develop what would be a new race, from a genetic standpoint.
The only way I'd buy the "statistical abnormality" flag is if it was based on published, peer-reviewed research. Established research, no less -- not something that just came up a month ago. IOW, this is just an example of some salespeople taking right people out golfing. Happens all the time in education and elsewhere. Probably in the same category as TSA's sniffer machines.
There is only so much you can do without thinking things through. The bad habit you allude to is easy to unlearn by necessity. Once your project is complex enough, clashing imports will be haunting you enough to force a change. IOW: all in due time.
You know what? Simulating stuff is just another way of saying that we're running a mathematical model. Such models are typically mixes of discrete and continuous equations. The latter require discretization and solving with some sort of a differential equation solver. So while their proposal may use vague terms, in the end you "just" end solving lots and lots of differential equations. To see what is the state of the art here, just go to, say, the tool page of the Modelica Association. Modelica is a language in which you define your model, and then you need a compiler that can actually execute the model, thus run the simulation. The best tools out there (say Dymola) can tackle between 10^5 and 10^6 equations. As far as I can tell, significant theoretical and practical breakthroughs need to be made before we can even approach the performance of special-purpose endlessly tweaked and optimized simulators (like weather models) with a general purpose simulator that would allow modeling "just about anything" -- say, weather, geology, hydro, information, power grid, etc., all coupled together as necessary for FuturICT.
I don't see why introducing namespaces is bad. Turtle stuff is in the turtle namespace, thus the prefix. Easy to explain.
Try Python. It's the only language I can think of that's similarly easy -- namely you can accomplish anything you want with zero fluff. If you want to, you can write in pure procedural style without creating a single class of your own. It'd be easy to transplant your QBasic knowledge into Python, and then learn more tricks (object orientation, functional programming features, iterators and generators, etc).
Major malfunction my ass. That was the hilarious bit you've picked up on just as I wanted you to. Don't you see the ridiculousness of it? It's no worse and no better than the Indian response. It belongs in a comedy skit.
You're a doubly-confirmed fucking moron.
Any attempts at explanations in the heat of the moment make no sense, because you'd be pretty much making shit up. No one explained anything right after Challenger's blow-up, and you'll hardly find anyone anywhere explaining anything before the formal investigation gets going and they have an inkling as to what happened. If you want to listen to some hilarity, find Challenger broadcasts on youtube, right after the explosion.
As for the "launch going South" and the "monkeys" at the consoles: the launch is controlled by on-board systems as soon as the umbilicals retract. You could, pretty much, shut everything down in the command center and go home just then, as far as the launch vehicle is concerned. Payload is another matter, but then it's often controlled from a different control center. The people at the consoles -- after the liftoff -- are there pretty much only to make sure they get all the telemetry -- that's one of the real assets from every launch, and worth millions of dollars easy.
So, once again: past-liftoff, the only souls on the ground you care about in an unmanned mission are the payload controllers and range safety.
As for riding on trains like monkeys: I'd take that any day over the sue-happy, mind-the-hot-beverage and don't-let-toddlers-play-with-plastic-baggies warn-people-or-else mentality, thankyouverymuch.