the certification involves only certifies adherence to the published api
If a driver is certified to adhere to the API, and still crashes the system, the problem lies in one or more of three possible places: the certification is bogus, the API is flawed, or the underlying OS is buggy.
Nope, not kidney failure. There are a couple of mechanisms -- really messed up blood chemistry is one, or severe generalized tissue swelling, which, in the case of the brain, causes trauma because there's nowhere for it to swell to. Happens if you're drinking water faster than your kidneys (and sweating) can get rid of it.
There was a teenage girl in these parts about a year ago that went into a coma and died from precisely that -- she'd taken ecstasy which made her incredibly thirsty, and downed several liters of water in the course of an hour or so before collapsing. Autopsy report determined that drinking too much water was indeed the cause of death. Kind of sad really, it was at the girl's 16th birthday party.
The aspartame molecule as one, count 'em, one methyl group -- which ain't the same as methanol. (Other than that it's essentially a dipeptide, two amino acids). And there isn't much aspartame in a diet soda -- you'd have to drink many litres of the stuff to equal a spoonful of methanol.
The dose makes the poison. A little bit of methanol won't hurt you. A lot of water will kill you (and I don't mean by drowning -- drinking too much water can kill you).
By the way, know the antidote to drinking methanol? Get drunk. Yep, drinking sufficient ethanol to get you drunk also blocks the metabolic pathways in the liver that convert methanol to formaldehyde.
That ship had the "Mission Accomplished" banner on hand. Apparently it's their custom to hang it out when returning to port after a successful mission deployment. In this case, the ship had been already scheduled to rotate home when it was temporarily redeployed in support of the Iraq mission. It was on its way home again.
The banner was referring to the ship's mission, in other words, and had been stored aboard ship for a long time.
The whole notion of a "truce" is silly. Other than writing better software, how is Linux attacking Microsoft? Nobody on the FLOSS side is, AFAIK, suing Microsoft for anything. Heck, OSS licenses don't even prohibit running so-licensed software on MS operating systems -- which is more than can be said for some MS EULAs regarding non-Windows systems.
So, just what is it they want to stop?
And why should we accept anything less than unconditional surrender?
Yes there are. And Ada != Military either. Sure, the DOD paid for the design of Ada and mandates it in many embedded systems, but plenty of other outfits (including non-US) use it where its characteristics (maintainability, reliability, verifiability) are desireable -- such as in avionics.
True, DO-178B doesn't mandate use of Ada or validation tools like SPARK, and there is some commercial off-the-shelf software that meets DO-178B that's not written in Ada (although that tends to be more at the OS level than at the application level), I just find it surprising that anyone could work in that field without ever touching Ada.
Heck, not that long ago (hmm, seven years, maybe it was that long ago) I had do deal with a team of programmers working on a highway traffic management system whose C++ was rusty to non-existent because they'd just come off a (non-Military) Ada project.
Resisive clothing to aid exercise is actually a bloody good idea.
If you meant "resistive" clothing, Soviet cosmonauts used the idea back on the old Salyut space stations. Lots of built in elastic cords to force the muscles to work harder. The cosmonauts called them "penguin suits", and hated them -- but they worked.
The energy required to charge your laptop is not that great. Assuming a 2Ah/12V battery, that's just 24Wh = 86400 Ws. A 220V/15A circuit can deliver that in just 26 seconds.
Absolutely right.
Trouble is, when you are transforming energy from high to low voltage, your current increases proportionally, so 220V/15A is the same energy as 12V/275A.
But you missed it. This is a capacitor we're charging, not a battery, so there's no need to transform the energy to low voltage to charge the cap (just design the cap for that voltage). Wire the charging circuitry to let it charge at 220V. There's going to have to be circuitry to regulate the output voltage anyway, so design the thing to be charged quickly at high voltage/low amperage, and discharge slowly at low voltage.
No need to have 275A flowing through your laptop at all.
the days of the iAPX-432. Has it really been 30 years?
No, only 25. From introduction, anyway.
The 432 suffered in some respects from the "second sytem" effect, if you consider Burroughs' B6700 (et al) the first system. The 432 clearly borrows much from the B5000-B6700 design -- segmented memory, descriptors, instruction set targeted to high level languages (Extended Algol for Burroughs, Ada for the iAPX-432) -- but they also added a lot of features beyond that. Probably a case of trying to do too much at once, ending up with suboptimal compromises.
Cyrix started the "it's just a number, not really a clock speed" thing years ago with their "686" chips, way before AMD (who was still touting clock speed at the time).
Somewhere around I've probably still got my old Cyrix 686-200 that actually ran at 166MHz and showed up in/proc/cpuinfo at about 100 bogomips -- but for many apps was still comparable to a Pentium-200, probably because the rest of the board architecture (I/O, memory bus) sucked.
And it was my fault. Or perhaps my friend's. We'd gone over to his house after school (this was in Toronto) to watch TV. I turned on the TV and he went into the kitchen to plug in the kettle for some tea. While he was out there the image on the TV started to shrink and flicker as the power went flaky, so I called out to him "unplug the kettle, you're blowing a fuse".
An old Boeing manager once explained to me how some of Boeings design rules of thumb came about.
During WW-II, when Boeing was building bombers, they did a thorough analysis of where the flak damage was on the bombers that made it back after a mission. Then they redesigned or beefed up the parts where there was no damage -- on the principle that aircraft that had taken flak in those places didn't make it back.
They also did things like use four hydraulic lines (routed separately) where the DC-10 used three.
The design itself was flawed. Not structurally, but there was almost no way to actually build the thing as designed -- with a threaded section (for the support nut) in the middle of a 30(?) foot shaft. (Think about it -- for that to work, the threads have to be wider than the shaft.) Petroski discusses this (along with the rest of the disaster) in his book "To Engineer Is Human".
If you're going to design something that's hard to make -- and thus tempt the builders to take shortcuts -- you'd better darn well spell out in detail exactly the steps to take to fabricate it.
A lightning rod on your house doesn't help when the strike hits the power (or phone) lines a half a block away. You're still fried. (And no, the "lightning arrestors" on the phone/power lines are not complete protection -- even assuming they're installed properly.)
And I, for one, want to be absolutely sure that when I tell my computer to power down it does so BEFORE I yank the plugs.
About twenty years ago -- twenty frickin' years ago -- I was evaluating some small UNIX boxes. NCR -- I'm pretty sure it was NCR -- had one with enough battery built in to save the entire state to disk if the power went, and recover once power came back on. This was no laptop, this was a workstation size box.
I put this to the test by starting some processes running and then literally yanking the plug out of the wall socket. Plugged it back in five minutes later and it booted up, restored itself, and even restarted the processes at the exact place they left off. (This was not a matter of the battery keeping it running like a UPS, this was shutting down but keeping a snapshot of the system state.)
How come modern computers can't do that? This is so old that even the patents (if any) have expired. (Okay, snapshotting network state is problematic, but everything else would be good.)
I don't know about the reason for non-winning tickets -- although it's probably related to being able to give out free game pieces. The free game pieces requirement relates to "no purchase necessary" -- if a purchase is necessary, then the contest is considered a lottery and governments frown on competition with their own lotteries.
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the certification involves only certifies adherence to the published api
If a driver is certified to adhere to the API, and still crashes the system, the problem lies in one or more of three possible places: the certification is bogus, the API is flawed, or the underlying OS is buggy.
Microsoft is responsible for all three of those.
they want to charge different people different prices for the same service
So let them. But take away their common-carrier status if they do.
See how they like them apples.
(Losing common-carrier status would make them liable for the content they carry -- copyright infringements, pr0n, whatever...)
more people speak american english than british english,
Don't be so sure. It wouldn't surprise me if more Indians and Chinese speak British english than there are speakers of American english.
Nope, not kidney failure. There are a couple of mechanisms -- really messed up blood chemistry is one, or severe generalized tissue swelling, which, in the case of the brain, causes trauma because there's nowhere for it to swell to. Happens if you're drinking water faster than your kidneys (and sweating) can get rid of it.
There was a teenage girl in these parts about a year ago that went into a coma and died from precisely that -- she'd taken ecstasy which made her incredibly thirsty, and downed several liters of water in the course of an hour or so before collapsing. Autopsy report determined that drinking too much water was indeed the cause of death. Kind of sad really, it was at the girl's 16th birthday party.
The aspartame molecule as one, count 'em, one methyl group -- which ain't the same as methanol. (Other than that it's essentially a dipeptide, two amino acids). And there isn't much aspartame in a diet soda -- you'd have to drink many litres of the stuff to equal a spoonful of methanol.
The dose makes the poison. A little bit of methanol won't hurt you. A lot of water will kill you (and I don't mean by drowning -- drinking too much water can kill you).
By the way, know the antidote to drinking methanol? Get drunk. Yep, drinking sufficient ethanol to get you drunk also blocks the metabolic pathways in the liver that convert methanol to formaldehyde.
That ship had the "Mission Accomplished" banner on hand. Apparently it's their custom to hang it out when returning to port after a successful mission deployment. In this case, the ship had been already scheduled to rotate home when it was temporarily redeployed in support of the Iraq mission. It was on its way home again.
The banner was referring to the ship's mission, in other words, and had been stored aboard ship for a long time.
Good idea. Start with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact (dividing Poland, among others) and then the events of and subsequent to June 22, 1941.
Which is why nobody in their right mind would use Mono for any production code.
The whole notion of a "truce" is silly. Other than writing better software, how is Linux attacking Microsoft? Nobody on the FLOSS side is, AFAIK, suing Microsoft for anything. Heck, OSS licenses don't even prohibit running so-licensed software on MS operating systems -- which is more than can be said for some MS EULAs regarding non-Windows systems.
So, just what is it they want to stop?
And why should we accept anything less than unconditional surrender?
There are a LOT of civilian aircraft
Yes there are. And Ada != Military either. Sure, the DOD paid for the design of Ada and mandates it in many embedded systems, but plenty of other outfits (including non-US) use it where its characteristics (maintainability, reliability, verifiability) are desireable -- such as in avionics.
True, DO-178B doesn't mandate use of Ada or validation tools like SPARK, and there is some commercial off-the-shelf software that meets DO-178B that's not written in Ada (although that tends to be more at the OS level than at the application level), I just find it surprising that anyone could work in that field without ever touching Ada.
Heck, not that long ago (hmm, seven years, maybe it was that long ago) I had do deal with a team of programmers working on a highway traffic management system whose C++ was rusty to non-existent because they'd just come off a (non-Military) Ada project.
Sure. It comes down to "how much of your interpreter can live in the cache?"
If your interpreter is getting cache misses on its code for every interpreted instruction, you can kiss performance goodbye.
Avionics? And you're not coding anything in Ada?
Hmm... I call BS.
What language do you code the interpreter in?
Resisive clothing to aid exercise is actually a bloody good idea.
If you meant "resistive" clothing, Soviet cosmonauts used the idea back on the old Salyut space stations. Lots of built in elastic cords to force the muscles to work harder. The cosmonauts called them "penguin suits", and hated them -- but they worked.
How can one be both a chatty FOOL and INTELLIGENT?
Never been to a Mensa meeting, have you?
The energy required to charge your laptop is not that great. Assuming a 2Ah/12V battery, that's just 24Wh = 86400 Ws. A 220V/15A circuit can deliver that in just 26 seconds.
Absolutely right.
Trouble is, when you are transforming energy from high to low voltage, your current increases proportionally, so 220V/15A is the same energy as 12V/275A.
But you missed it. This is a capacitor we're charging, not a battery, so there's no need to transform the energy to low voltage to charge the cap (just design the cap for that voltage). Wire the charging circuitry to let it charge at 220V. There's going to have to be circuitry to regulate the output voltage anyway, so design the thing to be charged quickly at high voltage/low amperage, and discharge slowly at low voltage.
No need to have 275A flowing through your laptop at all.
the days of the iAPX-432. Has it really been 30 years?
No, only 25. From introduction, anyway.
The 432 suffered in some respects from the "second sytem" effect, if you consider Burroughs' B6700 (et al) the first system. The 432 clearly borrows much from the B5000-B6700 design -- segmented memory, descriptors, instruction set targeted to high level languages (Extended Algol for Burroughs, Ada for the iAPX-432) -- but they also added a lot of features beyond that. Probably a case of trying to do too much at once, ending up with suboptimal compromises.
Oh well, it was a nice idea.
Cyrix started the "it's just a number, not really a clock speed" thing years ago with their "686" chips, way before AMD (who was still touting clock speed at the time).
/proc/cpuinfo at about 100 bogomips -- but for many apps was still comparable to a Pentium-200, probably because the rest of the board architecture (I/O, memory bus) sucked.
Somewhere around I've probably still got my old Cyrix 686-200 that actually ran at 166MHz and showed up in
A single protective relay tripped in Ontario,
And it was my fault. Or perhaps my friend's. We'd gone over to his house after school (this was in Toronto) to watch TV. I turned on the TV and he went into the kitchen to plug in the kettle for some tea. While he was out there the image on the TV started to shrink and flicker as the power went flaky, so I called out to him "unplug the kettle, you're blowing a fuse".
If I'd only said that a few moments sooner...
An old Boeing manager once explained to me how some of Boeings design rules of thumb came about.
During WW-II, when Boeing was building bombers, they did a thorough analysis of where the flak damage was on the bombers that made it back after a mission. Then they redesigned or beefed up the parts where there was no damage -- on the principle that aircraft that had taken flak in those places didn't make it back.
They also did things like use four hydraulic lines (routed separately) where the DC-10 used three.
The design itself was flawed. Not structurally, but there was almost no way to actually build the thing as designed -- with a threaded section (for the support nut) in the middle of a 30(?) foot shaft. (Think about it -- for that to work, the threads have to be wider than the shaft.) Petroski discusses this (along with the rest of the disaster) in his book "To Engineer Is Human".
If you're going to design something that's hard to make -- and thus tempt the builders to take shortcuts -- you'd better darn well spell out in detail exactly the steps to take to fabricate it.
A lightning rod on your house doesn't help when the strike hits the power (or phone) lines a half a block away. You're still fried. (And no, the "lightning arrestors" on the phone/power lines are not complete protection -- even assuming they're installed properly.)
And I, for one, want to be absolutely sure that when I tell my computer to power down it does so BEFORE I yank the plugs.
About twenty years ago -- twenty frickin' years ago -- I was evaluating some small UNIX boxes. NCR -- I'm pretty sure it was NCR -- had one with enough battery built in to save the entire state to disk if the power went, and recover once power came back on. This was no laptop, this was a workstation size box.
I put this to the test by starting some processes running and then literally yanking the plug out of the wall socket. Plugged it back in five minutes later and it booted up, restored itself, and even restarted the processes at the exact place they left off. (This was not a matter of the battery keeping it running like a UPS, this was shutting down but keeping a snapshot of the system state.)
How come modern computers can't do that? This is so old that even the patents (if any) have expired. (Okay, snapshotting network state is problematic, but everything else would be good.)
I don't know about the reason for non-winning tickets -- although it's probably related to being able to give out free game pieces. The free game pieces requirement relates to "no purchase necessary" -- if a purchase is necessary, then the contest is considered a lottery and governments frown on competition with their own lotteries.
so tasty that it's being fished to extinction.
Hmm, sounds like I should try it while I still have the chance.