Interesting. I think with LyX open I can keep up with anyone handwriting almost any math, perhaps with a few hours worth of practice if I'm rusty at the moment.
I mostly agree. A meeting half-way, for me, would be for students to print out the handout notes, formatted such that there are breaks between paragraphs for you to write your own notes in.
There's an easy solution for that. Just write your notes down on Surface Pro. As much as I adore Apple hardware, Surface Pro is about the only PC that I'm willing to put up with. I'm kinda sad in fact that it's not an Apple product. It's fucking fantastic for note taking and drawing. There's nothing else like it. I mean it. Surface Pro with Autodesks's Sketchbook Pro is pretty much all I'm using for my engineering sketches and diagrams - it has replaced my paper notebook and scratch paper. After a couple of weeks it's quite amazing how cool my notes look, even though I'm not a very artsy person at all.
They've been optimized to hell and back. Adding 10% more mass to them would make their life practically infinite. Alas, those 10% were optimized out, at quite a significant cost, too, since you need some fairly heavyweight modelling tools to pull that off. Heavyweight as $100k per seat, that is. I'd imagine you might pay more for this "infinite" life in gas than in costs of whatever repairs are needed, so it still may be a net win. Well, the companies doing those modeling tools definitely always win:)
AFAIK, modern automotive transmission and engine design practice models all those "little" things that are routinely overlooked when you design stationary machines with factors of safety above 4. An automotive transmission these days is designed like a helicopter transmission would be, except that the safety factors and nominal overhaul periods are higher, but they are still fairly well modeled. If you do it by an undergrad textbook aided by design codes, or even by an "experienced" engineer, you may get a design where the real factor of safety and real life ranges between 1/4 to 4x of what you intended. You do an automotive or an aerospace design, and you're between 1/1.3 to 1.5/1, and the tools you use to pull that off cost more than the education of yourself and a bunch of your buddies, combined. I don't know if it's a good thing...
On an early 2008 17" MBP running XP in VMware Fusion at minimum backlight, I'd routinely get 7-8 hours of use on transpacific flights on a new battery. Of course the DVD, Wifi, Ethernet and USB systems were powered down.
I've been running a Linux desktop from well before KDE was out, then hopped onto KDE 1 and kept on it till KDE 4 came out. The things on the horizon were becoming progressively worse in KDE-land midway through the 3.x series. As soon as KDE 4 was out, the horizon was here and not there, and I've reluctantly switched to Windows XP at work, and very soon thereafter to a Mac. I've switched to an iMac at home about the time of KDE 3.5.7. Just the fact that I know how to tinker with things to keep them going doesn't mean I should be an overpaid technician working on my computer all the time, so I can't but agree with you. I'd much rather do other, more interesting things, things that actually bring my employer money. I still use a lot of open source software, just that I didn't have to fuck about with my computer since 2007 or so at home, and IIRC since early 2009 at work.
I'll feed the troll a bit. The least reliable part of a removable RAM module is the connector (from the POV of data corruption). Lose the connector and your reliability goes up by almost an order of magnitude. I think for at least a decade removable RAM modules have been just a dumb thing to have in a portable computer. They take up lots of volume and are just a pain to deal with, engineering-wise. Normally it becomes cheap enough to max out your RAM within 1-2 years after purchase, so just deal with it and put the max RAM on the board on day one.
It's not about using them continuously, it's just that a bigger power supply will be less efficient when used at a lower power. Apple has IMHO reasonably chosen the 85W power level for their laptop power supplies. Just think what runs off that power supply, and you'll notice that without having the battery as a big honking capacitor to ride you through the peak use there's no way you can have anywhere near peak use. It's IMHO a valid engineering decision. Think about how many tens of millions of magsafe adapters are out there. They'd need to be around twice the power (~150W) in order to have enough capacity to power the following: - monitor with backlight at full brightness - USB ports at full power (~8W) - firewire/thunderbolt ports at full power (up to 20W!) - ethernet, - WiFi, - fans, - quad-core CPU, - GPU, - hard drive, - DVD - battery charger (~40W for this alone!)
Yet in normal use (web browsing), the laptop may be consuming about 40W, give or take. You really wouldn't want to have 150W magsafe bricks running at 25% capacity most of the time - they'd probably be only 65-70% efficient, compared to the same load on an 85W brick where it's 80%+ efficient. World-wide, it amounts to a lott of extra wasted watthours:)
It's a portable. Your battery is not supposed to be completely worn. The "nonreplaceable" ones are merely not ordinarily user-replaceable. People replace them all the time anyway.
What a terrible design. Why on earth would you scale back the clock speed when there is actually less load on the charger?
Because there's no way an 85W charger can power a monitor, a hard drive, possibly a DVD drive, a quad core CPU and a GPU, all running at full blast. Never mind all the other "stuff" that's there, like the ethernet adapter, the WiFi adapter, the USB hosts, etc. Just the three USB2 ports need to budget about 8W of power from the magsafe jack, when you include inefficiencies. That's almost 10% of available power!
It shows that you don't know the details of Apple's power delivery architecture. Magsafe-equipped Apple laptops are intentionally crippled in that the charger is artificially disabled if you use an unauthorized one. There's a chip in the magsafe plug that connects to the middle pin and is interrogated by the system management on the mainboard. If the interrogation fails, you can still use the power source, but the charger is disabled.
All it takes not to charge the battery is to cover the middle magsafe pin. I've done it by keeping in use one charger with a bad magsafe plug where the chip had died. Died how? Ah, exposure to the saliva of a 1 year old, he liked to lick those plugs, they admittedly taste "funny" since they are energized:)
That way you have the best of both worlds: you don't lose your work if the magsafe plug is kicked loose, and you don't charge the battery if you don't want to. Win-Win.
And you bump the magsafe jack and poof goes your session. Yeah, that's one of those "you can't have your cake and eat it too" kinds of decisions, where there's no compromise that would solve both problems. Namely, that of ripping the power receptacles off the boards and keeping the power plugged in at all times unless explicitly removed. They've made, IMHO, the sane choice of assuming that people do keep the batteries in, so inadvertent power removal is of no consequence.
There is no such thing as a battery test. Had you referred to the fine code, you'd have noticed that the logger merely trivially logs the data already available and exposed through the iokit registry. About the only thing I can think of is that it'd be a bit more power efficient to code it up in a small ObjC utility so that the effort taken by 'ioreg -l' to enumerate all of the data and format it as text is avoided. I may do that, in fact.
Not very practical on Apples:( You then bump the magsafe jack off, and poof goes your session. It's less of an annoyance if you work mostly in VMs and snapshot them regularly (every 10 minutes or so), but it's still a hassle.
Given that you now have eight CV joints to take care of, and a whole bunch of coolant piping going under the car, I don't think that's such a good idea at all. Mounting the motors directly at the wheels, as unsprung mass, is crazy as well - the handling would be piss poor, and you're replacing CV shafts and joints with flex hoses for coolant and flexible high voltage, high current electrical wiring. I've had such "genius" ideas as a young teenager, I've since learned enough engineering to know better.
Alas, I'll gladly take the good old differential and transfer cases. You overdesign those just a little bit and their life becomes essentially infinite. Another good think you take out of machine design:)
Now an automatic transmission might need to be overhauled (you should have been taking care of it to begin with if you got it new)
And pray tell, what is it that you'd consider "taking care of it to begin with" on a modern car? FYI, many modern cars come with sealed automatic transmissions without a dipstick. There's a breather element to equalize internal pressure with the outside, and that's about it. A modern automatic transmission is designed to be service-free. You should explicitly NOT do anything to it.
In other words: it might be more practical for me to go the 5 miles to work by ejecting myself (somehow) along a ballistic trajectory, and using a parasail for terminal deceleration and guidance:)
Ah, must have never been in a slum, then. For some reason or another, the few slums I've been in are often arranged around straight or almost straight paths, paralleled together, with the shacks sharing one or more walls, or at least being built very close to each other. The population densities there probably beat a lot of western mid-rise residential neighborhoods (8-12 stories). Three of the walls are thus usually out of commission, any windows there wouldn't let much light in, unless the neighbor's shack was ablaze:/ The front wall faces an often narrow "street". There'll be "stuff" hanging in said street, say tarps to keep the scorching sunlight out, or laundry, produce and occasional meat drying, etc. Thus, not much light is reaching the front wall either. Really the roof is the only option, and some discarded metal and bottles are about as affordable as they get. The caulking is a bit more of an expense, but presumably one could scavenge something from trash leaving the construction sites. Remember that opened caulking containers have a finite shelf life, and slum kids are professional scavengers, for lack of a better term.
The way those lights are meant to be installed is. 1. A bottle is caulked into a piece of metal that is shaped to match the grooves/waves in the roof. The metal has a circular hole cut out with a diameter a couple cm smaller than the diameter of the bottle. Radial slots are cut along the circumference of the hole. The resulting tabs are then bent up at right angle. Those tabs are then caulked to the bottle, and caulked over. 2. A roughly bottle-diameter hole is cut into the roof, and the assembly from #1 is caulked onto the roof. The assembly #1 is the replaceable assembly, and it can be "reverted" to a bottle-less version by using a variant without, you know, the bottle installed in it.
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Interesting. I think with LyX open I can keep up with anyone handwriting almost any math, perhaps with a few hours worth of practice if I'm rusty at the moment.
I mostly agree. A meeting half-way, for me, would be for students to print out the handout notes, formatted such that there are breaks between paragraphs for you to write your own notes in.
There's a lot of wisdom in that sentence. Kudos!
There's an easy solution for that. Just write your notes down on Surface Pro. As much as I adore Apple hardware, Surface Pro is about the only PC that I'm willing to put up with. I'm kinda sad in fact that it's not an Apple product. It's fucking fantastic for note taking and drawing. There's nothing else like it. I mean it. Surface Pro with Autodesks's Sketchbook Pro is pretty much all I'm using for my engineering sketches and diagrams - it has replaced my paper notebook and scratch paper. After a couple of weeks it's quite amazing how cool my notes look, even though I'm not a very artsy person at all.
They've been optimized to hell and back. Adding 10% more mass to them would make their life practically infinite. Alas, those 10% were optimized out, at quite a significant cost, too, since you need some fairly heavyweight modelling tools to pull that off. Heavyweight as $100k per seat, that is. I'd imagine you might pay more for this "infinite" life in gas than in costs of whatever repairs are needed, so it still may be a net win. Well, the companies doing those modeling tools definitely always win :)
AFAIK, modern automotive transmission and engine design practice models all those "little" things that are routinely overlooked when you design stationary machines with factors of safety above 4. An automotive transmission these days is designed like a helicopter transmission would be, except that the safety factors and nominal overhaul periods are higher, but they are still fairly well modeled. If you do it by an undergrad textbook aided by design codes, or even by an "experienced" engineer, you may get a design where the real factor of safety and real life ranges between 1/4 to 4x of what you intended. You do an automotive or an aerospace design, and you're between 1/1.3 to 1.5/1, and the tools you use to pull that off cost more than the education of yourself and a bunch of your buddies, combined. I don't know if it's a good thing...
Install menumeters and make sure you don't have a CPU hog.
95% of what?
The software is not querying the battery any more nor less. It's querying it at a fixed rate, and when you ask, you get the most recent query.
Even on the glued-in ones, it takes a bit of practice with a heat gun to extract the battery. No big deal.
You can change the battery yourself :)
On an early 2008 17" MBP running XP in VMware Fusion at minimum backlight, I'd routinely get 7-8 hours of use on transpacific flights on a new battery. Of course the DVD, Wifi, Ethernet and USB systems were powered down.
I've been running a Linux desktop from well before KDE was out, then hopped onto KDE 1 and kept on it till KDE 4 came out. The things on the horizon were becoming progressively worse in KDE-land midway through the 3.x series. As soon as KDE 4 was out, the horizon was here and not there, and I've reluctantly switched to Windows XP at work, and very soon thereafter to a Mac. I've switched to an iMac at home about the time of KDE 3.5.7. Just the fact that I know how to tinker with things to keep them going doesn't mean I should be an overpaid technician working on my computer all the time, so I can't but agree with you. I'd much rather do other, more interesting things, things that actually bring my employer money. I still use a lot of open source software, just that I didn't have to fuck about with my computer since 2007 or so at home, and IIRC since early 2009 at work.
I'll feed the troll a bit. The least reliable part of a removable RAM module is the connector (from the POV of data corruption). Lose the connector and your reliability goes up by almost an order of magnitude. I think for at least a decade removable RAM modules have been just a dumb thing to have in a portable computer. They take up lots of volume and are just a pain to deal with, engineering-wise. Normally it becomes cheap enough to max out your RAM within 1-2 years after purchase, so just deal with it and put the max RAM on the board on day one.
It's not about using them continuously, it's just that a bigger power supply will be less efficient when used at a lower power. Apple has IMHO reasonably chosen the 85W power level for their laptop power supplies. Just think what runs off that power supply, and you'll notice that without having the battery as a big honking capacitor to ride you through the peak use there's no way you can have anywhere near peak use. It's IMHO a valid engineering decision. Think about how many tens of millions of magsafe adapters are out there. They'd need to be around twice the power (~150W) in order to have enough capacity to power the following:
- monitor with backlight at full brightness
- USB ports at full power (~8W)
- firewire/thunderbolt ports at full power (up to 20W!)
- ethernet,
- WiFi,
- fans,
- quad-core CPU,
- GPU,
- hard drive,
- DVD
- battery charger (~40W for this alone!)
Yet in normal use (web browsing), the laptop may be consuming about 40W, give or take. You really wouldn't want to have 150W magsafe bricks running at 25% capacity most of the time - they'd probably be only 65-70% efficient, compared to the same load on an 85W brick where it's 80%+ efficient. World-wide, it amounts to a lott of extra wasted watthours :)
It's a portable. Your battery is not supposed to be completely worn. The "nonreplaceable" ones are merely not ordinarily user-replaceable. People replace them all the time anyway.
What a terrible design. Why on earth would you scale back the clock speed when there is actually less load on the charger?
Because there's no way an 85W charger can power a monitor, a hard drive, possibly a DVD drive, a quad core CPU and a GPU, all running at full blast. Never mind all the other "stuff" that's there, like the ethernet adapter, the WiFi adapter, the USB hosts, etc. Just the three USB2 ports need to budget about 8W of power from the magsafe jack, when you include inefficiencies. That's almost 10% of available power!
It shows that you don't know the details of Apple's power delivery architecture. Magsafe-equipped Apple laptops are intentionally crippled in that the charger is artificially disabled if you use an unauthorized one. There's a chip in the magsafe plug that connects to the middle pin and is interrogated by the system management on the mainboard. If the interrogation fails, you can still use the power source, but the charger is disabled.
All it takes not to charge the battery is to cover the middle magsafe pin. I've done it by keeping in use one charger with a bad magsafe plug where the chip had died. Died how? Ah, exposure to the saliva of a 1 year old, he liked to lick those plugs, they admittedly taste "funny" since they are energized :)
That way you have the best of both worlds: you don't lose your work if the magsafe plug is kicked loose, and you don't charge the battery if you don't want to. Win-Win.
And you bump the magsafe jack and poof goes your session. Yeah, that's one of those "you can't have your cake and eat it too" kinds of decisions, where there's no compromise that would solve both problems. Namely, that of ripping the power receptacles off the boards and keeping the power plugged in at all times unless explicitly removed. They've made, IMHO, the sane choice of assuming that people do keep the batteries in, so inadvertent power removal is of no consequence.
There is no such thing as a battery test. Had you referred to the fine code, you'd have noticed that the logger merely trivially logs the data already available and exposed through the iokit registry. About the only thing I can think of is that it'd be a bit more power efficient to code it up in a small ObjC utility so that the effort taken by 'ioreg -l' to enumerate all of the data and format it as text is avoided. I may do that, in fact.
Not very practical on Apples :( You then bump the magsafe jack off, and poof goes your session. It's less of an annoyance if you work mostly in VMs and snapshot them regularly (every 10 minutes or so), but it's still a hassle.
Given that you now have eight CV joints to take care of, and a whole bunch of coolant piping going under the car, I don't think that's such a good idea at all. Mounting the motors directly at the wheels, as unsprung mass, is crazy as well - the handling would be piss poor, and you're replacing CV shafts and joints with flex hoses for coolant and flexible high voltage, high current electrical wiring. I've had such "genius" ideas as a young teenager, I've since learned enough engineering to know better.
Alas, I'll gladly take the good old differential and transfer cases. You overdesign those just a little bit and their life becomes essentially infinite. Another good think you take out of machine design :)
Now an automatic transmission might need to be overhauled (you should have been taking care of it to begin with if you got it new)
And pray tell, what is it that you'd consider "taking care of it to begin with" on a modern car? FYI, many modern cars come with sealed automatic transmissions without a dipstick. There's a breather element to equalize internal pressure with the outside, and that's about it. A modern automatic transmission is designed to be service-free. You should explicitly NOT do anything to it.
In other words: it might be more practical for me to go the 5 miles to work by ejecting myself (somehow) along a ballistic trajectory, and using a parasail for terminal deceleration and guidance :)
Ah, must have never been in a slum, then. For some reason or another, the few slums I've been in are often arranged around straight or almost straight paths, paralleled together, with the shacks sharing one or more walls, or at least being built very close to each other. The population densities there probably beat a lot of western mid-rise residential neighborhoods (8-12 stories). Three of the walls are thus usually out of commission, any windows there wouldn't let much light in, unless the neighbor's shack was ablaze :/ The front wall faces an often narrow "street". There'll be "stuff" hanging in said street, say tarps to keep the scorching sunlight out, or laundry, produce and occasional meat drying, etc. Thus, not much light is reaching the front wall either. Really the roof is the only option, and some discarded metal and bottles are about as affordable as they get. The caulking is a bit more of an expense, but presumably one could scavenge something from trash leaving the construction sites. Remember that opened caulking containers have a finite shelf life, and slum kids are professional scavengers, for lack of a better term.
The way those lights are meant to be installed is. 1. A bottle is caulked into a piece of metal that is shaped to match the grooves/waves in the roof. The metal has a circular hole cut out with a diameter a couple cm smaller than the diameter of the bottle. Radial slots are cut along the circumference of the hole. The resulting tabs are then bent up at right angle. Those tabs are then caulked to the bottle, and caulked over. 2. A roughly bottle-diameter hole is cut into the roof, and the assembly from #1 is caulked onto the roof. The assembly #1 is the replaceable assembly, and it can be "reverted" to a bottle-less version by using a variant without, you know, the bottle installed in it.
The places that sell it near the slums where it's actually used may not even have any online presence.