Sorry hairyfeet, this rant has nothing to do with Wikipedia's choice to upgrade. You've been taken for a ride by a troll, hook line and sinker. They didn't upgrade because it was someone's pet project or because it was "cool". They upgraded so that they'll maintain a viable upgrade path for the future. For all practical purposes, MySQL's release model right now is broken, so if you're running a serious project, you can't just hope Oracle won't break it for you. Your rant is simply wholly inapplicable to the situation at hand, even though you may otherwise have a point.
You need to be particularly thick, or just trolling, to think that upgrading a database system must only be done because of politics. Protip: just because the successor (MariaDB) is a fork of MySQL doesn't mean the political reason was very important. Not at all, it was merely a nice windfall. They needed to upgrade anyway.
That's where real omnidirectional treadmills come into play. You see, the real thing has a rather large operating area - a few meters diagonally. When you start going in a certain direction, it lets you accelerate and only then pushes you back towards the center. This turns out to be critical in preventing motion sickness. Your position on the treadmill is always being centered, but with a sub-threshold acceleration. Unfortunately, realistically sized omnidirectional treadmills, in spite of being huge beasts, are still too small to keep this sub-threshold acceleration when you have large body accelerations - such as if you were starting to sprint or running and changing your direction quickly, etc. An omnidirectional treadmill large enough to cope with a fit human while still providing restoring accelerations small enough not to make one sick would need an active area of a small apartment (on the order of 100m^2). That gets really expensive, mainly because material and transport costs become ridiculous. You could put together a small omnidirectional treadmill for $250k or thereabouts, if your engineering time is free. Half of that if you have free access to a well equipped fabrication workshop. Further half of that if you can live with it not being pretty under the covers and reusing junkyard automotive parts (mostly axle/bearing assemblies as those are excellent value for the specs).
In a racing game, the game is about racing. Crashes are not the point, more like the counterpoint. Ideally, you want not to crash. In real races, crashes cost time and money and one too many may cost you your sponsorship -- that sport is expensive, without sponsors you'll usually be out of the game real quick. It's not about the crashes!
Way to miss the point. "Dumbing down" the graphics is irrelevant. You could be staring at virtual walls covered with checkerboard texture -- stuff that could be rendered in real time decades ago. The problem is that what you see must match what your own inertial/balance system is otherwise measuring (stuff drom your inner ear and proprioception). Doing that part accurately is hard -- this has nothing to do with quality of the graphics, but with quality of the inertial sensors mounted on the head display, and the latency of the rendering chain. If the game has no 6DOF inertial feedback from the head mounted display, it'll always make you feel pukey, there's no way around it that I know of.
The company said [...] that it was unaware it would be used to convict dissidents.
I have some family members still alive who each spent at least a year in a work camp in Siberia courtesy of Stalin. I guess it'd do some good to get some corporate upper echelons to stay at a work camp in Siberia for a winter or two to get a message what totalitarian regimes are all about. If you read their PR and are all like "Don't know if trolling or just stupid", then a cold clue bat is perhaps the device of choice.
Why on Earth, then, the most formerly successful engineering/development companies were founded and run by, omigosh, the very developers/engineers? HP was doing pretty well under Hewlett and Packard. Same goes for Tektronix, Microsoft, Apple, etc. As soon as the original visionaries are gone, somehow, magically, everything turns to shit. Care to explain that under your glorious theory of business management as a goal in and for itself?
Portable electronics use switching regulators almost exclusively since that's the only way to step down voltage without wasting lots of energy as heat. That's also the only way to step the voltage up -- whether the regulator uses inductors or capacitors as the energy storage buckets.
Sure there are small low drop-out regulators here and there, but the "low drop-out" is the key: those are the linear regulators that can do the job with just a couple tenths of a volt of overhead. You'll most likely not have an LDO powering any power hogs - the CPU, memory and chipset core voltages are all supplied by very tightly regulating switching regulators. Those switchers likely run from some intermediate voltage like 3.3V or 5V, of course.
As for acceptable voltage "swings": modern CPU cores will most likely barf at 5% changes in voltage. You have to regulate better than that, almost an order of magnitude better across load current spanning 95% of rated load. The CPU core power supplies are subject to a rather impressive array of performance tests designed by the CPU vendors, to ensure that the CPUs powered by those supplies will actually work. Modern CPUs are horrible loads: they can swing from tenths of an Ampere of load current to tens of Amperes in a millisecond -- and the other way.
Tell that to all those designers who make power bricks that take anywhere between 90 and 240 VAC on the input. Tell that to all those designers whose laptops happily run over a 10V or larger input supply range, by design. In other words: you have demonstrably no idea what you're talking about. None whatsoever.
Power supplies can be flexible at a nominal performance reduction when outside of the "sweet spot" and zero parts cost, if you just design them properly. Most laptops are extremely flexible and will work just fine over a supply range that spans 10V. You'll notice that for many laptops the external power supply provides a voltage much higher than the internal battery. There's just one internal power supply that can take either voltage, there's no extra step-down stage just for the external input. The design is optimized for best efficiency when running from the battery voltage, obviously.
Remove a cell and the voltage potential drops, which plays hell with electronics not ready for that big of a fluctuation.
I don't know what kind of electronics don't use flexible switching power supplies these days, but yeah, if the latest you've seen is stuff from the 80s, then you might have had a point. These days a laptop power supply might use a battery with a total voltage anywhere between 12 and 30V, but all the heavy power consumers besides screen backlight and hard drive actually run on a couple of Volts. The power supplies for many of today's electronics wouldn't even notice if a cell drops out -- everything will keep on working. Heck, my crazy-simple Philips electric toothbrush runs off a single cell and has a step-up switching power converter. I know for a fact that my Macbook runs just fine on a battery with two cells permanently bypassed by a wire.
It does matter because if you properly monitor it, you can not only prevent it from going bad by equalizing the charge on all the cells, but you can also bypass the bad cells. Every modern automotive battery stack has such monitoring and cell bypass. Your electric vehicle will work perfectly fine with a bunch of dead cells. Besides, all this "fancy monitoring" for mobile device battery packs fits in one chip. There are multiple vendors and the market is quite competitive. There is a good reason that charge integration is the way to monitor battery state of charge -- it's the only thing that really works.
As far as I'm concerned, absent an act of war signed by Congress, if you go and shoot people in other countries, they are all civilians even if you happen to call the drones "military drones".
OK, I feel silly, for reasons unknown to me I always thought that "whey protein" was some grain protein. I know wheat!=whey but somehow I thought whey was a ceral! Alas, whey is the watery part of milk that remains after the formation of curds. I stand corrected and I really like learning new stuff from slashdot.
Why would a veggie protein contain casein is beyond me. A google search for hydrolyzed vegetable protein +casein doesn't turn up anything sensible on the first page, so I remain skeptical about that.
I have no background in chemistry at all, but admittedly our high school chemistry teacher taught our class a third hour a week for no compensation. She thought we were promising or something.
You've got no sense of scale, none whatsoever. Wind is a completely renewable natural resource, the Sun provides all of the energy for it. Move Earth away to interstellar space, wait a century or two, and after enjoying liquefaction of oxygen and CO2 snow flurries along the way, there'd be no wind either, with nothing left to create thermal gradients sufficient for wind to be there. Geothermal heat isn't enough.
Alas, with Earth firmly in its orbit around the sun, the wind is here to stay and there's nothing we can do on a global scale to "use up" the wind. You've got your zeroes mixed up.
Catching it in time is the problem. The symptoms are usually mild all the way to the OR, as my surgeon friend says. Kids die precisely because it's very hard to diagnose the symptoms without taking an X-ray or an ultrasound, and somehow diagnostic imaging in the U.S. is frowned upon even if it's just an ultrasound. Those hard magnets are damn easy to see on an ultrasound IIRC.
Swallow one, then swallow a metal ball later and you'll have a problem. It doesn't have to be two magnets. OTOH, every pediatrician's office IMHO should have a digital X-ray so that if there's even a slight chance a kid might have swallowed something bad, things would be checked. It's very easy to die from obstructed or pinched intestines.
In any sort of engineered design that has to pass serious approvals, warnings are treated as a last resort when a hazard cannot be reasonably limited in another way. If a device of any sort can overheat in normal operation, it must have 2-redundant safety thermal cut-offs. If it overheats only as a failure mode (say: a recessed luminaire), then it must have at least a non-redunant thermal cut-off. That'd be minimal engineering for safety, and is what you'll find in sanely designed products -- water heaters, recessed luminaires, motor operated devices, etc.
veggie protein - duh, it's veggie cocoa butter - duh, veggie margarine - dairy! calcium propionate is a simple organic molecule, nothing do with milk blah blah lactone - sounds milky to me recaldent - what? whey protein - veggie milk thistle - thistle is a plant, milk or not it's still a veggie caseinate - sounds milky to me, casein is a milk protein lecithin oleoresin -- sounds veggie to me
The only thing I didn't know about is recaldent, and I didn't bother looking it up.
The 100 warning problem is well known in the process industry. The solution is called alarm optimization. Just as control rooms where things beep all the time lead to accidents, the life where pencils come with warnings makes us dull and leads to accidents as well. In spite of everyone's well meaning...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry hairyfeet, this rant has nothing to do with Wikipedia's choice to upgrade. You've been taken for a ride by a troll, hook line and sinker. They didn't upgrade because it was someone's pet project or because it was "cool". They upgraded so that they'll maintain a viable upgrade path for the future. For all practical purposes, MySQL's release model right now is broken, so if you're running a serious project, you can't just hope Oracle won't break it for you. Your rant is simply wholly inapplicable to the situation at hand, even though you may otherwise have a point.
You need to be particularly thick, or just trolling, to think that upgrading a database system must only be done because of politics. Protip: just because the successor (MariaDB) is a fork of MySQL doesn't mean the political reason was very important. Not at all, it was merely a nice windfall. They needed to upgrade anyway.
That's where real omnidirectional treadmills come into play. You see, the real thing has a rather large operating area - a few meters diagonally. When you start going in a certain direction, it lets you accelerate and only then pushes you back towards the center. This turns out to be critical in preventing motion sickness. Your position on the treadmill is always being centered, but with a sub-threshold acceleration. Unfortunately, realistically sized omnidirectional treadmills, in spite of being huge beasts, are still too small to keep this sub-threshold acceleration when you have large body accelerations - such as if you were starting to sprint or running and changing your direction quickly, etc. An omnidirectional treadmill large enough to cope with a fit human while still providing restoring accelerations small enough not to make one sick would need an active area of a small apartment (on the order of 100m^2). That gets really expensive, mainly because material and transport costs become ridiculous. You could put together a small omnidirectional treadmill for $250k or thereabouts, if your engineering time is free. Half of that if you have free access to a well equipped fabrication workshop. Further half of that if you can live with it not being pretty under the covers and reusing junkyard automotive parts (mostly axle/bearing assemblies as those are excellent value for the specs).
Facebook does quite well doing just the opposite, thank you very much.
In a racing game, the game is about racing. Crashes are not the point, more like the counterpoint. Ideally, you want not to crash. In real races, crashes cost time and money and one too many may cost you your sponsorship -- that sport is expensive, without sponsors you'll usually be out of the game real quick. It's not about the crashes!
Eat a banana :)
Way to miss the point. "Dumbing down" the graphics is irrelevant. You could be staring at virtual walls covered with checkerboard texture -- stuff that could be rendered in real time decades ago. The problem is that what you see must match what your own inertial/balance system is otherwise measuring (stuff drom your inner ear and proprioception). Doing that part accurately is hard -- this has nothing to do with quality of the graphics, but with quality of the inertial sensors mounted on the head display, and the latency of the rendering chain. If the game has no 6DOF inertial feedback from the head mounted display, it'll always make you feel pukey, there's no way around it that I know of.
IBM might have denied while knowing back then, but today's execs will most likely just genuinely be as clueless as the quote implies.
The company said [...] that it was unaware it would be used to convict dissidents.
I have some family members still alive who each spent at least a year in a work camp in Siberia courtesy of Stalin. I guess it'd do some good to get some corporate upper echelons to stay at a work camp in Siberia for a winter or two to get a message what totalitarian regimes are all about. If you read their PR and are all like "Don't know if trolling or just stupid", then a cold clue bat is perhaps the device of choice.
Why on Earth, then, the most formerly successful engineering/development companies were founded and run by, omigosh, the very developers/engineers? HP was doing pretty well under Hewlett and Packard. Same goes for Tektronix, Microsoft, Apple, etc. As soon as the original visionaries are gone, somehow, magically, everything turns to shit. Care to explain that under your glorious theory of business management as a goal in and for itself?
Portable electronics use switching regulators almost exclusively since that's the only way to step down voltage without wasting lots of energy as heat. That's also the only way to step the voltage up -- whether the regulator uses inductors or capacitors as the energy storage buckets.
Sure there are small low drop-out regulators here and there, but the "low drop-out" is the key: those are the linear regulators that can do the job with just a couple tenths of a volt of overhead. You'll most likely not have an LDO powering any power hogs - the CPU, memory and chipset core voltages are all supplied by very tightly regulating switching regulators. Those switchers likely run from some intermediate voltage like 3.3V or 5V, of course.
As for acceptable voltage "swings": modern CPU cores will most likely barf at 5% changes in voltage. You have to regulate better than that, almost an order of magnitude better across load current spanning 95% of rated load. The CPU core power supplies are subject to a rather impressive array of performance tests designed by the CPU vendors, to ensure that the CPUs powered by those supplies will actually work. Modern CPUs are horrible loads: they can swing from tenths of an Ampere of load current to tens of Amperes in a millisecond -- and the other way.
Tell that to all those designers who make power bricks that take anywhere between 90 and 240 VAC on the input. Tell that to all those designers whose laptops happily run over a 10V or larger input supply range, by design. In other words: you have demonstrably no idea what you're talking about. None whatsoever.
Power supplies can be flexible at a nominal performance reduction when outside of the "sweet spot" and zero parts cost, if you just design them properly. Most laptops are extremely flexible and will work just fine over a supply range that spans 10V. You'll notice that for many laptops the external power supply provides a voltage much higher than the internal battery. There's just one internal power supply that can take either voltage, there's no extra step-down stage just for the external input. The design is optimized for best efficiency when running from the battery voltage, obviously.
Remove a cell and the voltage potential drops, which plays hell with electronics not ready for that big of a fluctuation.
I don't know what kind of electronics don't use flexible switching power supplies these days, but yeah, if the latest you've seen is stuff from the 80s, then you might have had a point. These days a laptop power supply might use a battery with a total voltage anywhere between 12 and 30V, but all the heavy power consumers besides screen backlight and hard drive actually run on a couple of Volts. The power supplies for many of today's electronics wouldn't even notice if a cell drops out -- everything will keep on working. Heck, my crazy-simple Philips electric toothbrush runs off a single cell and has a step-up switching power converter. I know for a fact that my Macbook runs just fine on a battery with two cells permanently bypassed by a wire.
It does matter because if you properly monitor it, you can not only prevent it from going bad by equalizing the charge on all the cells, but you can also bypass the bad cells. Every modern automotive battery stack has such monitoring and cell bypass. Your electric vehicle will work perfectly fine with a bunch of dead cells. Besides, all this "fancy monitoring" for mobile device battery packs fits in one chip. There are multiple vendors and the market is quite competitive. There is a good reason that charge integration is the way to monitor battery state of charge -- it's the only thing that really works.
As far as I'm concerned, absent an act of war signed by Congress, if you go and shoot people in other countries, they are all civilians even if you happen to call the drones "military drones".
OK, I feel silly, for reasons unknown to me I always thought that "whey protein" was some grain protein. I know wheat!=whey but somehow I thought whey was a ceral! Alas, whey is the watery part of milk that remains after the formation of curds. I stand corrected and I really like learning new stuff from slashdot.
Why would a veggie protein contain casein is beyond me. A google search for hydrolyzed vegetable protein +casein doesn't turn up anything sensible on the first page, so I remain skeptical about that.
I have no background in chemistry at all, but admittedly our high school chemistry teacher taught our class a third hour a week for no compensation. She thought we were promising or something.
You've got no sense of scale, none whatsoever. Wind is a completely renewable natural resource, the Sun provides all of the energy for it. Move Earth away to interstellar space, wait a century or two, and after enjoying liquefaction of oxygen and CO2 snow flurries along the way, there'd be no wind either, with nothing left to create thermal gradients sufficient for wind to be there. Geothermal heat isn't enough.
Alas, with Earth firmly in its orbit around the sun, the wind is here to stay and there's nothing we can do on a global scale to "use up" the wind. You've got your zeroes mixed up.
Two thousandths of a percent :)
A toy which consists of marvelling at the strength of attraction between magnets has a little educative value.
Not sure if troll or just stupid :(
Catching it in time is the problem. The symptoms are usually mild all the way to the OR, as my surgeon friend says. Kids die precisely because it's very hard to diagnose the symptoms without taking an X-ray or an ultrasound, and somehow diagnostic imaging in the U.S. is frowned upon even if it's just an ultrasound. Those hard magnets are damn easy to see on an ultrasound IIRC.
Swallow one, then swallow a metal ball later and you'll have a problem. It doesn't have to be two magnets. OTOH, every pediatrician's office IMHO should have a digital X-ray so that if there's even a slight chance a kid might have swallowed something bad, things would be checked. It's very easy to die from obstructed or pinched intestines.
In any sort of engineered design that has to pass serious approvals, warnings are treated as a last resort when a hazard cannot be reasonably limited in another way. If a device of any sort can overheat in normal operation, it must have 2-redundant safety thermal cut-offs. If it overheats only as a failure mode (say: a recessed luminaire), then it must have at least a non-redunant thermal cut-off. That'd be minimal engineering for safety, and is what you'll find in sanely designed products -- water heaters, recessed luminaires, motor operated devices, etc.
veggie protein - duh, it's veggie
cocoa butter - duh, veggie
margarine - dairy!
calcium propionate is a simple organic molecule, nothing do with milk
blah blah lactone - sounds milky to me
recaldent - what?
whey protein - veggie
milk thistle - thistle is a plant, milk or not it's still a veggie
caseinate - sounds milky to me, casein is a milk protein
lecithin oleoresin -- sounds veggie to me
The only thing I didn't know about is recaldent, and I didn't bother looking it up.
The 100 warning problem is well known in the process industry. The solution is called alarm optimization. Just as control rooms where things beep all the time lead to accidents, the life where pencils come with warnings makes us dull and leads to accidents as well. In spite of everyone's well meaning...