Reminds me of those Somali pirates that decided it would be a good idea to try to hijack a French corvette. Once they started shooting the French said "Welp, okay" and blew them out of the water.
The key to computer design isn't to give the users the features you think they will find useful; it's to give the users the ability to decide what features they want. That's why computing is so wonderful: if you give people universal Turing machines they can do all sorts of things on them that you never thought of, and thus your product is more useful than it otherwise would be.
Some people just use their netbook as a net-book -- as a gateway to the internet, email, etc. But I'm glad that there's a full computer inside there, on which I can (and do) run all sorts of things: Picasa, GIMP, Olympus Studio, games, etc.
Perhaps somebody, somewhere, wants to run openssh on their iPad -- or Apache. Just because Apple doesn't think it's a good idea doesn't mean that somebody somewhere won't want to do it. This is the whole point of computing -- it's a universal information processing machine.
We've known for quite a while that this sort of thing is possible. All quarks have the exact same strong interactions, after all. This is like strontium displacing calcium in bones -- it's got the same valence structure, it has similar properties, and it's no surprise that it happens.
RHIC is a nifty machine for a lot of reasons. It provides an experimental counterpart to lattice QCD calculations of the equation of state of the quark-gluon plasma, which is the natural state of the universe at very high temperatures. But "OMG! An antistrange wound up in a bound state!" isn't why this machine is worthwhile, even if it does give El Reg something funny to write about.
Strange quarks behave just like down quarks (which are one of the two constituents of protons and neutrons). The only difference is that they have a higher mass.
Y'know how heavy water is just like light water, except one of the hydrogens is replaced with a deuterium atom? This stuff is similar, except one of the down quarks is swapped with a strange.
Unlike deuterium, though, these lambda baryons are unstable, because the strange quark is unstable. They can decay by the weak interaction (the same thing responsible for beta decay) into an up quark and a couple of leptons (electrons and neutrinos). The amount of time that weak decays take is very long compared to the time-scales involved in quark physics, but it's still very short compared to a second.
Automatic transmissions I can understand. I don't have one, but I can understand why some people do. But why are people making cars with as little mechanical linkage between the controls and the car as possible? It seems like it's often more expensive and dangerous. What do you get out of it?
This is why I am not driving a car that will kill me if it bluescreens.
Clutch pedal and gearshift, mechanically linked to the transmission. No goofy electronic key fob -- I want a mechanical action that will open the circuit to the spark plugs (or fuel injectors, or something suitably effective).
Windows Update, by default, installs random DRM bullshit, Windows Media bullshit, WGA bullshit, and lots of other things that are not security patches. That motivates a lot of people to turn it off.
I write software to do computational physics. I'm not doing it right now, because I'm writing lecture notes for a computational physics course. Does that count?
I didn't pitch those ideas years ago because I'm not in the business of building cellphones or touchscreens. If I wanted to build a cellphone that could be held in any orientation I'd have done it. (Actually, it was done years ago by many digital camera manufacturers -- my ancient Panasonic FZ3 does this.)
I'm not arguing against patents, simply bullshit ones.
There's a patent for screen rotation and scaling? That's nuts.
Patented inventions are supposed to be novel and require some genuine inspiration, not something that's obvious. The idea that you can use orientation sensors and linear transforms to make a picture that's always right-side-up and that's different sizes is laughable -- as soon as you decide you want to do it, the way to do it is obvious. Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean that it required any patent-worthy cleverness to do it.
Patents are supposed to encourage invention and innovation by giving people who invent clever novel things a way to profit from them, not a way for some business to lock out competition. The screen-pinch-to-scale thing? Again, pretty obvious. (My eeepc has that on the touchpad, actually.)
As an example, suppose you wanted to make a mouse that could sense rotation/twist as well as translation. Any idiot would realize that an easy way to do this is to put two optical sensors (or balls) on it, one on each side, and do some simple math. Something like this shouldn't be patentable.
One rather ridiculous example is the Four Thirds imaging system. Olympus decided they'd like to use a different size CCD than other camera makers to make a digital SLR, and they actually patented it! They decided what size sensor, what size lens mount, what register distance, etc. to use, and then patented these engineering choices. There's nothing inherently different about the Four Thirds SLR's than any other digital SLR -- they work in the ordinary bog-standard way. (Patent absurdity aside, mine does take nice pictures.)
Patents need to be restricted to real inventions, not simple choices that anybody with a bachelor's degree could have come up with when faced by a problem. Fix this and you fix a lot of the problems with patent trolling.
No, she's not, nor ethical insight. She's a rotten bastard.
But reading the writings of a rotten bastard gives some insight into how rotten bastards operate -- in this case, Sony. They're not going to improve unless forced to at lawyer-point. Thus, lawsuits.
As I understand it this was used only when the computer had no clue what was wrong with the printer, so any actual real message would have been unhelpful too.
I think the idea is that in a crisis situation people miss stuff. But the nag-voice relies upon the assumption that the system designers know better than the user what's important or not. Might be true sometimes, might not be true other times, but the whole point of training people is so they'll know what they need.
I can just imagine someone flying home with a broken attitude sensor, or altimeter, hearing "Pull up! You are about to crash!" in German over and over and over again. It's like that goddamn beeper on my car that lets me know whenever I don't have the seatbelt buckled over my groceries.
This is one of the first things I noticed about Linux, too.
On Windows, you either get some bullshit that doesn't mean anything ("Limited or no network connectivity", "Windows has encountered an error") or a hex dump. The first doesn't give any information, and the last doesn't give any useful information.
On Linux, when something breaks, it fucking tells you what broke. Sometimes what broke is fairly technical, and I may not understand what exactly the message means ("wtf is/dev/wumpus?"), but if it's a complicated technical issue I'm going to have to google to figure it out anyway.
Right now, my not-very-technically-sophisticated mother has an issue I'm trying to fix from 1500 miles away over the phone: "Windows can not boot due to a hard drive configuration error." WTF does that mean? Clearly it can read the boot sector.
Seconded. I sold a '94 Saturn last year that had been parked in the Arizona sun for many years. (Got rid of it due to multiple electronics failures and an engine oil leak that'd not be worth it to fix). Survived the sunlight just fine.
And the plastic body panels were GREAT. Lightweight and dent-proof.
Meanwhile, Germany (where it is always cloudy, and where the government recognizes the need for renewable energy) is pushing solar like crazy, and Arizona (where it is always sunny, and where the governor has no conception of future beyond a few years) is burning coal.
I buy things for my household that I expect to keep for many years, like cars and major appliances. Why can't solar power be the same way?
If a solar installation can repay itself in 15 years, then either buy one or borrow money and then buy one, just like you do with any other big residential purchase.
I was about to comment on the absurdity of "single-frequency incident light" until I saw that TFA had it right. I figure this can slip as a typo or brain-o rather than something out of ignorance.
I don't understand why the break-even time on solar has to be on the order of a handful of years for it to be economically feasible.
The break-even time for nuclear is over a decade, and it's pretty long for hydro projects too. So why do we insist that solar has to turn a profit Real Quick Now?
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More that the pirates can't figure out what's a warship and what isn't.
The French actually have quite the military these days.
Reminds me of those Somali pirates that decided it would be a good idea to try to hijack a French corvette. Once they started shooting the French said "Welp, okay" and blew them out of the water.
The key to computer design isn't to give the users the features you think they will find useful; it's to give the users the ability to decide what features they want. That's why computing is so wonderful: if you give people universal Turing machines they can do all sorts of things on them that you never thought of, and thus your product is more useful than it otherwise would be.
Some people just use their netbook as a net-book -- as a gateway to the internet, email, etc. But I'm glad that there's a full computer inside there, on which I can (and do) run all sorts of things: Picasa, GIMP, Olympus Studio, games, etc.
Perhaps somebody, somewhere, wants to run openssh on their iPad -- or Apache. Just because Apple doesn't think it's a good idea doesn't mean that somebody somewhere won't want to do it. This is the whole point of computing -- it's a universal information processing machine.
This stuff is simpler than high school chemistry (making nuclei out of nucleons, made out of quarks), actually.
We've known for quite a while that this sort of thing is possible. All quarks have the exact same strong interactions, after all. This is like strontium displacing calcium in bones -- it's got the same valence structure, it has similar properties, and it's no surprise that it happens.
RHIC is a nifty machine for a lot of reasons. It provides an experimental counterpart to lattice QCD calculations of the equation of state of the quark-gluon plasma, which is the natural state of the universe at very high temperatures. But "OMG! An antistrange wound up in a bound state!" isn't why this machine is worthwhile, even if it does give El Reg something funny to write about.
No.
Strange quarks behave just like down quarks (which are one of the two constituents of protons and neutrons). The only difference is that they have a higher mass.
Y'know how heavy water is just like light water, except one of the hydrogens is replaced with a deuterium atom? This stuff is similar, except one of the down quarks is swapped with a strange.
Unlike deuterium, though, these lambda baryons are unstable, because the strange quark is unstable. They can decay by the weak interaction (the same thing responsible for beta decay) into an up quark and a couple of leptons (electrons and neutrinos). The amount of time that weak decays take is very long compared to the time-scales involved in quark physics, but it's still very short compared to a second.
What's the appeal of these drive-by-wire cars?
Automatic transmissions I can understand. I don't have one, but I can understand why some people do. But why are people making cars with as little mechanical linkage between the controls and the car as possible? It seems like it's often more expensive and dangerous. What do you get out of it?
This is why I am not driving a car that will kill me if it bluescreens.
Clutch pedal and gearshift, mechanically linked to the transmission. No goofy electronic key fob -- I want a mechanical action that will open the circuit to the spark plugs (or fuel injectors, or something suitably effective).
No, this is why government should not be dumb.
Windows Update, by default, installs random DRM bullshit, Windows Media bullshit, WGA bullshit, and lots of other things that are not security patches. That motivates a lot of people to turn it off.
I write software to do computational physics. I'm not doing it right now, because I'm writing lecture notes for a computational physics course. Does that count?
I didn't pitch those ideas years ago because I'm not in the business of building cellphones or touchscreens. If I wanted to build a cellphone that could be held in any orientation I'd have done it. (Actually, it was done years ago by many digital camera manufacturers -- my ancient Panasonic FZ3 does this.)
I'm not arguing against patents, simply bullshit ones.
I didn't say that, only that anybody with basic training (i.e. a bachelor's) could solve a lot of these problems.
Certainly it's not required.
There's a patent for screen rotation and scaling? That's nuts.
Patented inventions are supposed to be novel and require some genuine inspiration, not something that's obvious. The idea that you can use orientation sensors and linear transforms to make a picture that's always right-side-up and that's different sizes is laughable -- as soon as you decide you want to do it, the way to do it is obvious. Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean that it required any patent-worthy cleverness to do it.
Patents are supposed to encourage invention and innovation by giving people who invent clever novel things a way to profit from them, not a way for some business to lock out competition. The screen-pinch-to-scale thing? Again, pretty obvious. (My eeepc has that on the touchpad, actually.)
As an example, suppose you wanted to make a mouse that could sense rotation/twist as well as translation. Any idiot would realize that an easy way to do this is to put two optical sensors (or balls) on it, one on each side, and do some simple math. Something like this shouldn't be patentable.
One rather ridiculous example is the Four Thirds imaging system. Olympus decided they'd like to use a different size CCD than other camera makers to make a digital SLR, and they actually patented it! They decided what size sensor, what size lens mount, what register distance, etc. to use, and then patented these engineering choices. There's nothing inherently different about the Four Thirds SLR's than any other digital SLR -- they work in the ordinary bog-standard way. (Patent absurdity aside, mine does take nice pictures.)
Patents need to be restricted to real inventions, not simple choices that anybody with a bachelor's degree could have come up with when faced by a problem. Fix this and you fix a lot of the problems with patent trolling.
The defect is in the game, being programmed in such a way that it requires a network connection. This is a "defect in materials or workmanship", no?
Sadly the US-lawyer-mentality, while damaging as all hell generally, is what's needed here.
It takes two civilized people to solve a problem, not one civilized person and Sony.
No, she's not, nor ethical insight. She's a rotten bastard.
But reading the writings of a rotten bastard gives some insight into how rotten bastards operate -- in this case, Sony. They're not going to improve unless forced to at lawyer-point. Thus, lawsuits.
As I understand it this was used only when the computer had no clue what was wrong with the printer, so any actual real message would have been unhelpful too.
I think the idea is that in a crisis situation people miss stuff. But the nag-voice relies upon the assumption that the system designers know better than the user what's important or not. Might be true sometimes, might not be true other times, but the whole point of training people is so they'll know what they need.
I can just imagine someone flying home with a broken attitude sensor, or altimeter, hearing "Pull up! You are about to crash!" in German over and over and over again. It's like that goddamn beeper on my car that lets me know whenever I don't have the seatbelt buckled over my groceries.
This is one of the first things I noticed about Linux, too.
On Windows, you either get some bullshit that doesn't mean anything ("Limited or no network connectivity", "Windows has encountered an error") or a hex dump. The first doesn't give any information, and the last doesn't give any useful information.
On Linux, when something breaks, it fucking tells you what broke. Sometimes what broke is fairly technical, and I may not understand what exactly the message means ("wtf is /dev/wumpus?"), but if it's a complicated technical issue I'm going to have to google to figure it out anyway.
Right now, my not-very-technically-sophisticated mother has an issue I'm trying to fix from 1500 miles away over the phone: "Windows can not boot due to a hard drive configuration error." WTF does that mean? Clearly it can read the boot sector.
There's plastic, and then there's plastic. Some modern plastics are quite durable.
Seconded. I sold a '94 Saturn last year that had been parked in the Arizona sun for many years. (Got rid of it due to multiple electronics failures and an engine oil leak that'd not be worth it to fix). Survived the sunlight just fine.
And the plastic body panels were GREAT. Lightweight and dent-proof.
Meanwhile, Germany (where it is always cloudy, and where the government recognizes the need for renewable energy) is pushing solar like crazy, and Arizona (where it is always sunny, and where the governor has no conception of future beyond a few years) is burning coal.
wtf?
I buy things for my household that I expect to keep for many years, like cars and major appliances. Why can't solar power be the same way?
If a solar installation can repay itself in 15 years, then either buy one or borrow money and then buy one, just like you do with any other big residential purchase.
I was about to comment on the absurdity of "single-frequency incident light" until I saw that TFA had it right. I figure this can slip as a typo or brain-o rather than something out of ignorance.
I don't understand why the break-even time on solar has to be on the order of a handful of years for it to be economically feasible.
The break-even time for nuclear is over a decade, and it's pretty long for hydro projects too. So why do we insist that solar has to turn a profit Real Quick Now?