Calculus is one sexy and powerful bitch.
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Where do I learn more about this, other than the obvious BS in EE option?
Do your math homework... and if you're not in school, just pick up, read, and do the exercises in a bunch of good calculus and linear algebra textbooks. (The key is to actually *DO* the exercises, math is not a spectator sport!) If you've been away from it for a while, I recommend Sylvanus Thompson's 1910 classic, Calculus Made Easy. Chapter 1 is titled, "To Deliver You From The Preliminary Terrors". The book is still in print.
Calculus sounds terrifying, and most people think of it as a weed-out course. But if you do the exercises, any idiot can get an A+ in it. Only the intelligent see the sheer beauty and elegance of Newton and Leibniz' greatest contribution to the world. And you'll find yourself using it everywhere - calculus is the mathematical equivalent to the speedometer in your car. You could calculate your speed by looking at the odometer and your watch, but the speedometer essentially takes the derivative (finds the rate of change) of your position.
Most of these modulation techniques are based on the mathematical manipulation of sinewaves. You have to have a good understanding of trigonometry, complex numbers and multivariable calculus. Then, Fourier is your Big Friend In High Places.
With the mathematical basis in place, the modulation schemes themselves might be best left to a math degree rather than an EE - though, in my program, the double-degree was only a two credit option.
(Bachelor of Mathematics is also fun; mathematicians are almost always crazy, and it's really great to see how frightened or awestruck Joe Public gets by someone who has a degree in math. Even with "just" the iron ring, you can tap it incessantly on the boardroom table every time the boss says something stupid.)
And I have to tell you - I can't say that I understood all of what the original poster said - I didn't. I stick with EM and power more than the rather abstract modern modulation systems.
"I've balanced the budget for you, but I had to take the square root of a negative number to do it."
- Quoted by memory from Dilbert cartoon e-mailed to me after I described an incident where a friend of mine *actually did that* to our former boss.
Best ice driving car I've ever owned:
1986 Ford Escort LX with automatic
Worst car:
1986 Ford Mustang LX 5.0 with manual (and clutch that was like an on/off switch)
Heh... The problems with that Mustang are the V8 and the clutch! Too much power, and not enough control!
I've driven my '76 Ram in the snow exactly twice. Once I wanted to see what a 440CID (7.2L V8) would do in snow, and the second time, I had to tow a car out of a snowbank.
In either case, the Ram has an automatic transmission. I'd sit there, stopped, and the rear wheel on the torque side would just spin. According to the speedometer, I was doing 15 MPH. If I stomped on the gas, I wouldn't go anywhere. The only way I could get the truck moving in snow was to release the brakes, let it come up to its natural idling speed, then gently give it some fuel. Too hard, and I went sideways...:)
Seriously, though, part of the reason that modern FWD cars *seem* to do well in snow is their complete lack of power. (That, and the weight of the drivetrain on the driven wheels.)
Choose a RWD car with a small engine and a stickshift, and you'll have more control in snow and ice than a FWD car. You *might* get stuck a little more often, but I guarantee that you'll have more control when you need it. The big problem with FWD is that too many things are happening on the front wheels which can upset your already tenuous traction.
That's why cop cars and real performance cars (not Civics with clear taillights, I mean *real* cars) are almost always RWD.
Chevettes are an ideal winter car, except they're such great little cars that I don't like to see 'em get rusted!
My favorite winter beater was a 1983 Dodge Ram D-150 with a Slant-6 and a 4-speed. The body was absolutely toasted, though - my friends nicknamed it "Patches" for all the welded patches to repair the rustholes. Primer red paint...:) Got 25 MPG (in a full-size pickup!) and just ate snow. Used to drive around with a crushed Prelude in the back for winter ballast. When Toronto got hit by a massive snowstorm a couple of years ago, I had a great time. 5 foot tall snowbank? No biggie - just hit the gas! Pissed off some home-boy in a Suzuki Sidekick whose "truck" (as he called it) got stuck getting out of a gas station, and I plowed right through.
Good tires never hurt, either. I love my Firestone Radial ATX LT235-75R15 - the recalled tires - excellent tread pattern, great tread life, and besides if you can't drive through a tread separation (which is less dangerous than a blowout), you probably shouldn't be allowed to drive - only 20 years ago, blowouts were commonplace.
The old Caddy system had much less electronics. They needed today's sophisticated engine management systems to really make it work.
I think so, yeah. The old Caddy 4-6-8 System worked by turning on and off different sets of camshafts with solenoid-operated clutches. Of course, this was hard on the clutches... and it took a moment or two for the valvetrain to come up to speed, so the compression ratio had to be low to avoid interference with the pistons.
Reliability was poor, too.
I'm sure the modern system will use solenoid-operated valves like some race car and concept car engines use. This will allow complete computer control of the valve timing, as well as neat things like shutting down un-needed cylinders.
If the system cycles which cylinders are in use and out of use, it will also keep the engine wearing evenly - which I didn't find on either one of the two 4-6-8 setups that I've rebuilt. (The cylinders which were always running were worn 0.030" greater than the others by constant heat and ring loads.)
*However*, I think that some people are probably expecting that such a system will make a big increase in gas mileage. It WON'T. You still have the load of driving around 2 or 4 extra pistons - which are still contributing friction and inertial loads - even when you're in 4 or 6 cylinder mode. Until GM figures out a way of actually disconnecting those connecting rods on the fly, this modern 4-6-8 system is only a marginal improvement in gas mileage at best.
I think it's only practical in a car which will have completely computer-controlled solenoid-operated valves anyway, since in that case, it's just a software feature requiring no expensive or weird hardware.
Did I miss something? Is there some unwritten rule I missed out on where engineers love crappy, foreign, enviornmentally sound compact cars?
Not the engineers I know. Most of us remember that p = m v^2 when we're car shopping.
I mean, really. A HONDA CIVIC?!?!?
I find it offensive. Half the cylinders are missing, and those that are there, are pointing the wrong way and driving the wrong set of wheels.
I wouldn't use a Honda as more than a winter beater. And not even that, if I had an automatic transmission. (I really don't want automatic creep biasing the same set of wheels where I steer and brake when I'm on an icy surface.)
There's a couple genuinely spiffy cars in that list, but the majority of them...no. Hell, if we wanna generalize engineers, most of us are too damn fat to fit in a Civic anyway.:)
Speak for yourself. I've got a 34" waist... but the problem is that I'm 6'4". I fit better, ironically, into a Fiero than I do into a "full-size" Japanese car like an Accord.
No, they are guaranteed to see downtime for worms and bugs. Linux has more than it's fair share of silly errors and stack buffer overruns abound. Don't believe me? Check out Debian's security announcements for this year alone. And the worms will follow. They were born on Unix. It doesn't matter how configurable or how securable a system can be.
Indeed; no software will ever be perfect. But I think that Unix (Linux being a derivative thereof) has a better ground-up concept for scalability and securability.
I think open source is a double-edged sword here. Open source lets the peer-review process close holes - but at the same time, digging out the source code that a given webserver is running would allow one to look for possible weaknesses.
I personally think Windows is damned securable as long as the person behind the keyboard puts in some effort.
No one knows more about Windows security than Microsoft, and even so, they keep on getting hit by worms and attacks.
Windows is obviously quite securable - I'm sure that www.microsoft.com must be a prime target for crackers - but it feels like security has been tacked on after the fact. Look at Windows' ancestry - single user, single computer, single tasking operating systems (CP/M begat DOS which begat Windows which begat Windows NT). Windows itself grew out of that as a series of additions and major redesigns requiring backward compatibility. By contrast, Unix (and its first-order derivative, Linux) grew out of an environment where one computer cost $12 million and had to be used by 1,800 people simultaneously - security had to be inherent to the earliest designs.
Microsoft has done impressive things within their design constraints, but I still don't see it being much more than a sun-room tacked onto the side of a mobile home. There's still no foundation.
Distribution companies who've helped to develop practical Linux desktops, and who can make money supporting loads of 'em in corporate America
Developers who've also worked to develop Linux and will see more call for custom Linux software based on the greater penetration of their work into the corporate realm
Consultants who will be able to support both the transition and replace MCSEs long-term
Companies who will see less down-time of their systems to things like worms, bugs, nasty licensing schemes and proprietary file formats
lol, that's 1) so fucking rude 2) reckless thinking on your part... you should be suspicious of anyone acting suspiciously... otherwise thanks to stupid asses like yourself the next terrorist act will be perpetrated by some 35 year old blonde mormon from utah who you didn't think twice about selling questionable equipment to...timothy?
Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean "Arab", I mean "Amish". Most modern terrorists are Amish; they're an angry people who feel they've been slighted by all us infidels who use microwave ovens and washing machines.
Imagine being beaten to death with a hoe... Actually, I think people have threatened to do that to me before...
All those gas station attendants in Pennsylvania had better be careful about those horse-drawn wagons filling up with diesel...
Remember latest security flaws on the microsoft platform, and on what massive scale it today happens? That costs fortunes while the legal department of MSFT allows Bill Gates to walk away with a smile.
Interestingly, and on a somewhat related note, that credit card processor, Data Processors International, appears to run IIS as their primary webserver. Now, if that's their front line server despite its notoriety, are they running Microsoft software anywhere else? Probably.
What's the only good reason to run IIS? Almost instant integration with other Microsoft software (like databases full of credit card numbers?).
I'd peg >50% chance that a Microsoft bug had something to do with the fact that millions of credit card numbers were stolen...
Between that and Microsoft's continued arrogance, Bill's 1995 interview retains its relevance.
Seriously, if any of you griping about KDE's interface haven't tried KDE 3.1, you owe it to yourself to try it. Phenomenal...
Waiting for KDE 3.2. KMail will actually have a useful spell checker, which will apparently be available for use in everything KDE, including Konqueror forms (like what I'm using to write this).
The Linux kernel is ready. KDE is almost ready. Then, all we'll need will be apps developers to produce stuff which doesn't feel/look/act/work like bad Windows shareware. (Integration, developers, integration! I need OpenOffice Impress to seamlessly handle videos, and Calc to do a polynomial regression!) Then Linux will actually be ready for the desktop and I'll be able to take that damned page off my site.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but if you have produced chemical or biological agents and you are still using a 12-year-old's toy as a weapons delivery system, you are such an incompetent terrorist that you deserve the misfire your under-powered, chemical-agent-laden hobby rocket is going to produce shortly before those chemical agents are sitributed to a very small area surrounding your person.
I think the engines themselves, being pre-assembled mass-produced products, are likely to be more reliable than the alternative delivery systems. Terrorists have used bomb timers hacked to the alarm outputs of old watches and stuffed into old boom-boxes for years. The model rocket engine will be more reliable, and likely that delivery system will be more reliable than any practical alternate delivery system - kites, hijacking crop-dusters, etc.
Consider the requirements if you want to spray crap over a crowd. Build a model rocket. Instead of the parachute, fill the rocket with the crap you wish to spray. Fire the rocket with a 9V battery and an igniter. When the engine blows the chute ejection charge, your crowd has been sprayed.
If you were a terrorist on a suicide mission, you'd go to the center of the crowd and point it straight up. Otherwise, you'd try to point it away from you.
How could you launch it in a crowd? A small model rocket, capable of 300-500 feet and running off 1/2 A engine, could be fired from a piece of 3" diameter PVC pipe in a briefcase: Flip it open, press the button, and it's done.
As a kid, I used to fire things up to D engines with PVC tubing; I had a very effective shoulder-mount missile launcher.
Model rockets have terrorist applications. That doesn't mean we should ban them, of course. But, let's face facts, we need to be vigilant. If an Arab guy came into my hobby shop, bought some model rockets, and asked me where he could buy 3,000 smoke detectors, I'd be getting his license plates and calling the FBI.
I guess I thought this software always came with my distribution. I've been making a certain gesture at the Linux desktop for some time with no effect.
'Course, the important stuff is already taken care of. Linux applications crash more often that the Windows kernel, so we're good there. And with KDE's blistering speed, you'll approximate the lagged feeling of having a good Windows virus e-mailing all the doc files on your hard disk to everyone in your Outlook address book.
Yes, one way is to transparently proxy to junkbuster and have it rewrite the user agent.
Yeah... Thanks, but that's not really what I was looking for; I'm already running Junkbuster on the LAN at work.
I'm hoping to do it at a NAT level... though, I suppose, if I make all outgoing port 80 run through a given box, it's imperceptable to the user.
Why? I've got 600 bored secretaries here who can at least skew webmasters demographics toward developing for Linux, in the hope that one day something other than the kernel will be ready for the desktops of the masses.
(See my previous rants, I'm currently far too drunk to be copying and pasting URLs.)
Nine people looked at me blankly. One doubled up laughing. Spot the geek!
Here's what we used to do at Litton.
When the boss said something stupid, there'd be a dozen iron rings tapping on the boardroom table.
"No..." [tap tap tap] "...I think the marketing department has sold the customer a product which isn't actually possible with our current understanding of the laws of the universe...
[Going up to the overhead projector to ask a question about a budget issue] "Well Boss, I..." [accidentally tapping iron ring on overhead projector] "...think that this budget is best described in the form of a homogeneous, non-exact linear differential equation of the form..." [tap tap tap of iron ring on overhead projector while writing long differential equation on transparency]
And finally, nothing pisses off the marketing department like asking them to take the square root of a negative number. Except actually being able to do it.
Any particular reason that touching the power supply case or any metal part of the case isn't good enough? It's grounded.
Sure... Well, actually, with standby power and stuff coming out of modern ATX supplies, I'd actually unplug the whole thing before changing a motherboard, adding RAM, etc. Theoretically, all those things *should* be off when the system is, but you don't know what corners were cut on a given motherboard, and let's remember that this is equipment sold primarily to people who don't know any better, at 5% profit margins.
"Can I save $0.02 by omitting that diode? Standby power won't get to the RAM if I put it in, hmm... we're expecting to make 500,000 of this model of motherboard..."
Pull the plug. The monitor itself should still be grounded, and if your monitor is still plugged into the video card, you still have a good ground path to the chassis and the power supply case. It *should* be good.
Seeing as I don't regularly travel from one end of the room to another when doing upgrades, I touch the case, operate, and close up. I'm well aware of how static damage isn't always readily noticable yet I've not had a bad card, cpu, mobo, DIMM, nada... for over 5 years.
Yeah, by holding onto the power supply case, you're still going to control static potential. But even if you pick up a DIMM from beside the computer, the DIMM isn't at ground potential, and therefore a static charge will be transferred when you pick it up. That's why you need to rest all electronic components - DIMMs, video cards, hard disk drives, etc. on the *grounded* static mat.
As you move around - even back and forth in a chair - you'll probably build up a charge of at least a few hundred volts. *You* won't detect the charge when it discharges - the current is too low to feel, and the voltage difference is insufficient to ionize the air and make a spark. However, consider that (even "old" and "low-tech") CMOS electronics are capable of making a watch run for 5 years on the same tiny battery... which means that they like to deal in a hell of a lot less energy than is available with even an imperceptible static discharge.
If you *have* to work without a static strap, unplug the system power, but leave the monitor plugged in, touch static baggies to the chassis of the machine, place parts only on grounded surfaces in the machine while you're handling them, and do it all without letting go of the chassis of the machine. I've done it in the field because I had no other choice, but it's really a lot easier having two hands free. Spend the $10 and get a static strap.
Lemme tell you... try replacing the receiver stage of a radar system, at the top of a ship's mast, while trying to keep one hand on the system ground. (Damned ship was painted so many times that there were no bare grounded surfaces to keep my hand on while I was working!) I forgot my static strap that day... but it's forgivable, the night before I'd unwrapped a pristine new 100 megabyte hard disk drive for one of my home machines.
And when somebody fires up IE because a site they are looking at doesn't work in Mozilla? Or they change their browser ID to make a site that checks the browser type before letting you access it?
I agree, that's a point... (though Mozilla's finally gotten to the point where I can only think of one non-microsoft.com site which doesn't work with Mozilla, and that's because it doesn't like the fact that the term "MSIE" isn't in the user agent string)
However, if I were an ISP looking for a short but sweet way of coping with massive NAT usage, I'd be collecting that list anyway, and shortlisting those users for closer inspection.
Anyone know of any way of transparently replacing the user-agent strings at the NAT box?
Not that I personally care, my ISP kicks ass. They offer a 1.2Mbps DSL service with the option of a static IP address for cheap. And they don't care if you run servers, truly a geek's ISP. www.dsl.ca
Are they cheaper (easier, more convienente) than just getting a new NES in the super-off chance that you do fry something?
Absolutely! If you've ever taken the top off your computer to change a card or add memory, you should damned well be using a static strap, so I'd expect that most Slashdotters would have one anyway.
Actually, the other thing I'd do in one of those NES machines is replace all the electrolytic capacitors. Those things used very cheap components, and electrolytic capacitors have a tendency to fail open or fail leaky after a few years.
Those groups are "underrepresented" among engineers!
Yeah, tell me about it. In my engineering classes, out of about 300 students, we only had two gay guys. Two! And they were both in aerospace engineering.
It was really annoying, because anytime I needed fashion advice, I had to walk all the way to the arts buildings on the other end of campus and start asking random people in the hallways.
In my experience, there are only two kinds of people who can drink harder than engineers: mariners and gay people. I think it would be utterly terrifying to meet a gay marine engineer.
Hey, if he's doing it with absolutely no regard whatsoever for static protection, there's gonna be plenty of blow and pray... and I don't see a single wrist strap in the photos.
*PLEASE* use static protection on anything you're repairing or modding. Why? By the time you see a static electric spark, it's on the order of 3,000V per millimeter. Sure, there's very little current behind it, but it's still more than any one of the millions of MOSFET transistors in a microprocessor or memory chip can handle. And it only takes about 25V to exceed the dielectric strength of the gate-junction layer in a typical MOSFET.
Static damage is seldom obvious. Usually, a damaged system will still boot and appear to work. But one bad transistor out of the millions in a memory chip or CPU can make it intermittent. What if one bit in a RAM chip sometimes spat back a 1, no matter what had been saved there? The computer would probably work just fine... except for the occasional "inexplicable" crash when the CPU tried to execute an instruction read from that RAM location.
A wriststrap and antistatic pad are *so* cheap and save *so many* problems.
I can understand why you think it should be there.. but why would you -want- an underlining spell checker? In general, they are a bad idea, as they don't improve your writing in any way, and by breaking up and interrupting your train of thought constantly, it makes it much harder to write. I always turn the underline feature off.. it's cool for eye candy, but it wasn't a well-thought out feature. When you're trying to get your thoughts down on paper, you do not want constant interruptions.
I find it to be quite the opposite. I stop when I've mistyped a word, or when I think I've misspelled something. With an unerlining spellchecker, I can, without anything more than a glance back at the word to see if it's underlined, decide whether it's okay.
This is quite the opposite to a spellchecker which makes you manually Accept Changes / Ignore every technical word, URL or foreign name you might happen to find in an e-mail which you're sending. Evaluating each word, out of context ("I misspelled Hello?... No, wait, that's the quoted text, English is Gunther's third language...") is slow and tedious compared to a glance.
For me, it's a good feature. Based on its popularity in predominant desktop operating systems, most end-users seem to agree that it either simplifies life or increases productivity.
Of course, it doesn't need to actually underline; highlighting, reverse video, etc. would all work just as well for me...:)
I really don't know where you get this. Evolution has an underlining spell checker, and has for a long time! You need gnome-spell installed on your system, and if you are using Evolution 1.2 you need to go into the settings and enable the spell checker. (On my computer I have a choice of American, British, or Canadian English checking.)
For sure! Evolution is beautiful. It's full-featured and well-planned.
The only problem is with speed. When I installed it on my PIII-500, it took *8 minutes* for it to close the mailboxes and exit when I was finished using it.
*Eight minutes.*
That needs work, and it's far from the only speed issue I encountered with Evolution. And that's why I use KMail - I need to get stuff done with my computers. It's also why I don't feel that Evolution is ready for the big leagues.
If it takes a PIII-500 to power an e-mail client, what would it take to power a CAD workstation with solid modelling?
To be honest, I thought I'd documented the problem on my website?
P.S. GNOME is still playing catch-up to become as nice as Windows. But the 2.2 release goes a long way. It's really nice! The desktop is almost there; we just need applications and a good default setup, and even naive users will be happy to use it.
It's beautiful. So is KDE 3.1. Both are getting there.
Primarily the problems are with un-related applications of poor quality, missing features, etc.
I *am* a Linux evangelist, and to be a good salesman, you really have to believe in your product. I do. Linux will conquer (or konquer) the desktop someday; my worry is that we're currently selling the masses on an unfinished (and not quite ready) product.... which puts us in the same league as Microsoft. (Can anyone say Windows 95A, boys and girls?)
As soon as they've sent me email they've solicited my response.
What I want is a legal opinion.
I have a webserver and a mail server. The webserver clearly states in public form that none of the e-mail addresses on this server wish to be contacted for advertising purposes.
I would like to create a page offering to do instant security audits. To have your machine tested, simply send an e-mail to the address offered on the page. My script will then find the sending IP address, ping it to make sure it's live, then test it with every known network attack against a Windows machine. Afterwards, send it a ping, and report back whether or not the machine is still working.
Of course, spammers won't send e-mail to it, since the e-mail address is very specifically something like "your_computer_will_crash_if_you_send_mail_to_this _address@domain.com", and therefore will have no reason to complain about such a philanthropically-offered security testing system.
No, apps under 2000/XP (and lets forget about 98/ME - may as well have a one hour timer on the reset switch) are not more reliable. Apps can lock up the OS. Completely. No way out but reset.
As you've suggested, we'll ignore Win95/98/Me.
Yes, this is true. Some things can lock up the OS. Mostly, though, this is owning to security failures or badly written device drivers (ATI comes immediately to mind...).
If you find that a particular linux app locks your desktop, you can 3 finger salute to get to a command prompt. Not that it happens very often.
What does Joe User do from there? I get support calls from people who forget what they're supposed to do at login prompts, they're going to know to type "startx" to get the GUI back?
Even so, yeah, the bigger problems with Linux apps is not that they lock up the desktop (though there should be an easy point-and-click remedy to that to put features on par with Windows). Linux apps usually just disappear when they crash, which is pretty frequent.
Not only that, but if a particular Linux app does this more often than you like, you are likely to be able to quickly find a nice free replacement app on the net with a few minutes of looking.
Maybe if all I need is vi or emacs, sure.
What if I need a spreadsheet with basic data analysis tools and the ability to import Excel files? These aren't too weird requirements for spreadsheet users, and there's only one that I know of: Gnumeric.
How about an e-mail client with passive spellchecking and the ability to draw characters onto the screen at least as fast as I can type them? Since I don't have a 2.8GHz P4, Evolution won't do it, and neither will KMail, though there are about a dozen for Windows which do that.
Video player which will open most formats? Xine or mplayer. But my distro is the most common one on the face of the earth, it comes with an unsupported and weird-assed version of GCC, so I can't run mplayer.
My options are running a little thin.
I find it ironic that you get so emotionally attached to Windows.
Oh, I wish you could only know how much I hate Windows.
Your language gets stronger with every post.
My frustration grows stronger with every post.
Your claims that I represent what's wrong with linux ring hollow. You imnsho, are what's wrong with Linux. Narrow minded users that want everything exactly the same as it is in Windows and are unwilling to try another paradigm.
I don't want everything the same as Windows. All I want is applications that work reliably, that can do the same things as their Windows counterparts, and which don't look like shit.
We have *none* of those things. But hey, xine is skinnable, and that's all that really matters, right?
Funny that a so called power user like yourself doesn't like Linux, yet, my mother, with almost no computer experience, is fine with it on her desktop.
I'm sure her requirements are less than mine.
She's probably never seen a spellchecker, so one that makes her manually intervene with every potentially mis-spelled word is still an excellent innovation.
She's probably still blown away by kcalc, so we won't ask her about her preferences in a spreadsheet.
And since she's still amazed that this magic box can transport video by the telephone line, we won't have counted on her to notice that xine won't endlessly repeat that little 20-second video of her grandson puking that she was e-mailed.
I put it to you that you are far too rigid and set in your ways.
My demands are less than most people making actual IT purchasing decisions. They're simple:
Linux and its applications must work reliably.
Linux' applications must have equivalent features to those of their windows counterparts.
Applications, KDE/Gnome default color schemes, etc. must not look like they were designed by a 14-year-old Run Lola Run fan from East Berlin.
The next time try ctrl+alt+backspace to kill X. Not an ideal solution, but doesn't require a reboot.
True, and indeed I do that. I think my concern is that most users aren't gonna know to "startx" again immediately after that.
This is where the Task Manager built into Windows makes control of crashed/hung processes easier, and it's embarrassing that of all the things for Windows to do better than a Unix derivative, it's that user-level process control should be one of them.
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Where do I learn more about this, other than the obvious BS in EE option?
Do your math homework... and if you're not in school, just pick up, read, and do the exercises in a bunch of good calculus and linear algebra textbooks. (The key is to actually *DO* the exercises, math is not a spectator sport!) If you've been away from it for a while, I recommend Sylvanus Thompson's 1910 classic, Calculus Made Easy. Chapter 1 is titled, "To Deliver You From The Preliminary Terrors". The book is still in print.
Calculus sounds terrifying, and most people think of it as a weed-out course. But if you do the exercises, any idiot can get an A+ in it. Only the intelligent see the sheer beauty and elegance of Newton and Leibniz' greatest contribution to the world. And you'll find yourself using it everywhere - calculus is the mathematical equivalent to the speedometer in your car. You could calculate your speed by looking at the odometer and your watch, but the speedometer essentially takes the derivative (finds the rate of change) of your position.
Most of these modulation techniques are based on the mathematical manipulation of sinewaves. You have to have a good understanding of trigonometry, complex numbers and multivariable calculus. Then, Fourier is your Big Friend In High Places.
With the mathematical basis in place, the modulation schemes themselves might be best left to a math degree rather than an EE - though, in my program, the double-degree was only a two credit option.
(Bachelor of Mathematics is also fun; mathematicians are almost always crazy, and it's really great to see how frightened or awestruck Joe Public gets by someone who has a degree in math. Even with "just" the iron ring, you can tap it incessantly on the boardroom table every time the boss says something stupid.)
And I have to tell you - I can't say that I understood all of what the original poster said - I didn't. I stick with EM and power more than the rather abstract modern modulation systems.
"I've balanced the budget for you, but I had to take the square root of a negative number to do it."- Quoted by memory from Dilbert cartoon e-mailed to me after I described an incident where a friend of mine *actually did that* to our former boss.
Best ice driving car I've ever owned: 1986 Ford Escort LX with automatic Worst car: 1986 Ford Mustang LX 5.0 with manual (and clutch that was like an on/off switch)
Heh... The problems with that Mustang are the V8 and the clutch! Too much power, and not enough control!
I've driven my '76 Ram in the snow exactly twice. Once I wanted to see what a 440CID (7.2L V8) would do in snow, and the second time, I had to tow a car out of a snowbank.
In either case, the Ram has an automatic transmission. I'd sit there, stopped, and the rear wheel on the torque side would just spin. According to the speedometer, I was doing 15 MPH. If I stomped on the gas, I wouldn't go anywhere. The only way I could get the truck moving in snow was to release the brakes, let it come up to its natural idling speed, then gently give it some fuel. Too hard, and I went sideways... :)
Seriously, though, part of the reason that modern FWD cars *seem* to do well in snow is their complete lack of power. (That, and the weight of the drivetrain on the driven wheels.)
Choose a RWD car with a small engine and a stickshift, and you'll have more control in snow and ice than a FWD car. You *might* get stuck a little more often, but I guarantee that you'll have more control when you need it. The big problem with FWD is that too many things are happening on the front wheels which can upset your already tenuous traction.
That's why cop cars and real performance cars (not Civics with clear taillights, I mean *real* cars) are almost always RWD.
Chevettes are an ideal winter car, except they're such great little cars that I don't like to see 'em get rusted!
My favorite winter beater was a 1983 Dodge Ram D-150 with a Slant-6 and a 4-speed. The body was absolutely toasted, though - my friends nicknamed it "Patches" for all the welded patches to repair the rustholes. Primer red paint... :) Got 25 MPG (in a full-size pickup!) and just ate snow. Used to drive around with a crushed Prelude in the back for winter ballast. When Toronto got hit by a massive snowstorm a couple of years ago, I had a great time. 5 foot tall snowbank? No biggie - just hit the gas! Pissed off some home-boy in a Suzuki Sidekick whose "truck" (as he called it) got stuck getting out of a gas station, and I plowed right through.
Good tires never hurt, either. I love my Firestone Radial ATX LT235-75R15 - the recalled tires - excellent tread pattern, great tread life, and besides if you can't drive through a tread separation (which is less dangerous than a blowout), you probably shouldn't be allowed to drive - only 20 years ago, blowouts were commonplace.
The old Caddy system had much less electronics. They needed today's sophisticated engine management systems to really make it work.
I think so, yeah. The old Caddy 4-6-8 System worked by turning on and off different sets of camshafts with solenoid-operated clutches. Of course, this was hard on the clutches... and it took a moment or two for the valvetrain to come up to speed, so the compression ratio had to be low to avoid interference with the pistons.
Reliability was poor, too.
I'm sure the modern system will use solenoid-operated valves like some race car and concept car engines use. This will allow complete computer control of the valve timing, as well as neat things like shutting down un-needed cylinders.
If the system cycles which cylinders are in use and out of use, it will also keep the engine wearing evenly - which I didn't find on either one of the two 4-6-8 setups that I've rebuilt. (The cylinders which were always running were worn 0.030" greater than the others by constant heat and ring loads.)
*However*, I think that some people are probably expecting that such a system will make a big increase in gas mileage. It WON'T. You still have the load of driving around 2 or 4 extra pistons - which are still contributing friction and inertial loads - even when you're in 4 or 6 cylinder mode. Until GM figures out a way of actually disconnecting those connecting rods on the fly, this modern 4-6-8 system is only a marginal improvement in gas mileage at best.
I think it's only practical in a car which will have completely computer-controlled solenoid-operated valves anyway, since in that case, it's just a software feature requiring no expensive or weird hardware.
Did I miss something? Is there some unwritten rule I missed out on where engineers love crappy, foreign, enviornmentally sound compact cars?
Not the engineers I know. Most of us remember that p = m v^2 when we're car shopping.
I mean, really. A HONDA CIVIC?!?!?I find it offensive. Half the cylinders are missing, and those that are there, are pointing the wrong way and driving the wrong set of wheels.
I wouldn't use a Honda as more than a winter beater. And not even that, if I had an automatic transmission. (I really don't want automatic creep biasing the same set of wheels where I steer and brake when I'm on an icy surface.)
There's a couple genuinely spiffy cars in that list, but the majority of them...no. Hell, if we wanna generalize engineers, most of us are too damn fat to fit in a Civic anyway.Speak for yourself. I've got a 34" waist... but the problem is that I'm 6'4". I fit better, ironically, into a Fiero than I do into a "full-size" Japanese car like an Accord.
No, they are guaranteed to see downtime for worms and bugs. Linux has more than it's fair share of silly errors and stack buffer overruns abound. Don't believe me? Check out Debian's security announcements for this year alone. And the worms will follow. They were born on Unix. It doesn't matter how configurable or how securable a system can be.
Indeed; no software will ever be perfect. But I think that Unix (Linux being a derivative thereof) has a better ground-up concept for scalability and securability.
I think open source is a double-edged sword here. Open source lets the peer-review process close holes - but at the same time, digging out the source code that a given webserver is running would allow one to look for possible weaknesses.
I personally think Windows is damned securable as long as the person behind the keyboard puts in some effort.No one knows more about Windows security than Microsoft, and even so, they keep on getting hit by worms and attacks.
Windows is obviously quite securable - I'm sure that www.microsoft.com must be a prime target for crackers - but it feels like security has been tacked on after the fact. Look at Windows' ancestry - single user, single computer, single tasking operating systems (CP/M begat DOS which begat Windows which begat Windows NT). Windows itself grew out of that as a series of additions and major redesigns requiring backward compatibility. By contrast, Unix (and its first-order derivative, Linux) grew out of an environment where one computer cost $12 million and had to be used by 1,800 people simultaneously - security had to be inherent to the earliest designs.
Microsoft has done impressive things within their design constraints, but I still don't see it being much more than a sun-room tacked onto the side of a mobile home. There's still no foundation.
I wonder, when Linux takes 90% of PC OS market, whom will DOJ sue?
Probably Linus should consider moving back to Finland...
Then
For sure!
Profit for...
It's win-win for everyone except Microsoft.
lol, that's 1) so fucking rude 2) reckless thinking on your part... you should be suspicious of anyone acting suspiciously... otherwise thanks to stupid asses like yourself the next terrorist act will be perpetrated by some 35 year old blonde mormon from utah who you didn't think twice about selling questionable equipment to
Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean "Arab", I mean "Amish". Most modern terrorists are Amish; they're an angry people who feel they've been slighted by all us infidels who use microwave ovens and washing machines.
Imagine being beaten to death with a hoe... Actually, I think people have threatened to do that to me before...
All those gas station attendants in Pennsylvania had better be careful about those horse-drawn wagons filling up with diesel...
Remember latest security flaws on the microsoft platform, and on what massive scale it today happens? That costs fortunes while the legal department of MSFT allows Bill Gates to walk away with a smile.
Interestingly, and on a somewhat related note, that credit card processor, Data Processors International, appears to run IIS as their primary webserver. Now, if that's their front line server despite its notoriety, are they running Microsoft software anywhere else? Probably.
What's the only good reason to run IIS? Almost instant integration with other Microsoft software (like databases full of credit card numbers?).
I'd peg >50% chance that a Microsoft bug had something to do with the fact that millions of credit card numbers were stolen...
Between that and Microsoft's continued arrogance, Bill's 1995 interview retains its relevance.
Seriously, if any of you griping about KDE's interface haven't tried KDE 3.1, you owe it to yourself to try it. Phenomenal...
Waiting for KDE 3.2. KMail will actually have a useful spell checker, which will apparently be available for use in everything KDE, including Konqueror forms (like what I'm using to write this).
The Linux kernel is ready. KDE is almost ready. Then, all we'll need will be apps developers to produce stuff which doesn't feel/look/act/work like bad Windows shareware. (Integration, developers, integration! I need OpenOffice Impress to seamlessly handle videos, and Calc to do a polynomial regression!) Then Linux will actually be ready for the desktop and I'll be able to take that damned page off my site.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but if you have produced chemical or biological agents and you are still using a 12-year-old's toy as a weapons delivery system, you are such an incompetent terrorist that you deserve the misfire your under-powered, chemical-agent-laden hobby rocket is going to produce shortly before those chemical agents are sitributed to a very small area surrounding your person.
I think the engines themselves, being pre-assembled mass-produced products, are likely to be more reliable than the alternative delivery systems. Terrorists have used bomb timers hacked to the alarm outputs of old watches and stuffed into old boom-boxes for years. The model rocket engine will be more reliable, and likely that delivery system will be more reliable than any practical alternate delivery system - kites, hijacking crop-dusters, etc.
Consider the requirements if you want to spray crap over a crowd. Build a model rocket. Instead of the parachute, fill the rocket with the crap you wish to spray. Fire the rocket with a 9V battery and an igniter. When the engine blows the chute ejection charge, your crowd has been sprayed.
If you were a terrorist on a suicide mission, you'd go to the center of the crowd and point it straight up. Otherwise, you'd try to point it away from you.
How could you launch it in a crowd? A small model rocket, capable of 300-500 feet and running off 1/2 A engine, could be fired from a piece of 3" diameter PVC pipe in a briefcase: Flip it open, press the button, and it's done.
As a kid, I used to fire things up to D engines with PVC tubing; I had a very effective shoulder-mount missile launcher.
Model rockets have terrorist applications. That doesn't mean we should ban them, of course. But, let's face facts, we need to be vigilant. If an Arab guy came into my hobby shop, bought some model rockets, and asked me where he could buy 3,000 smoke detectors, I'd be getting his license plates and calling the FBI.
I guess I thought this software always came with my distribution. I've been making a certain gesture at the Linux desktop for some time with no effect.
Yeah.... thank you, thank you.
How about some useful features instead? Integration between applications so that xine can play a video file from an Impress presentation, or any number of the other things Windows users take for granted that either don't work or aren't even under development for Linux.
'Course, the important stuff is already taken care of. Linux applications crash more often that the Windows kernel, so we're good there. And with KDE's blistering speed, you'll approximate the lagged feeling of having a good Windows virus e-mailing all the doc files on your hard disk to everyone in your Outlook address book.
Yes, one way is to transparently proxy to junkbuster and have it rewrite the user agent.
Yeah... Thanks, but that's not really what I was looking for; I'm already running Junkbuster on the LAN at work.
I'm hoping to do it at a NAT level... though, I suppose, if I make all outgoing port 80 run through a given box, it's imperceptable to the user.
Why? I've got 600 bored secretaries here who can at least skew webmasters demographics toward developing for Linux, in the hope that one day something other than the kernel will be ready for the desktops of the masses.
(See my previous rants, I'm currently far too drunk to be copying and pasting URLs.)
Nine people looked at me blankly. One doubled up laughing. Spot the geek!
Here's what we used to do at Litton.
When the boss said something stupid, there'd be a dozen iron rings tapping on the boardroom table.
"No..." [tap tap tap] "...I think the marketing department has sold the customer a product which isn't actually possible with our current understanding of the laws of the universe...
[Going up to the overhead projector to ask a question about a budget issue] "Well Boss, I..." [accidentally tapping iron ring on overhead projector] "...think that this budget is best described in the form of a homogeneous, non-exact linear differential equation of the form..." [tap tap tap of iron ring on overhead projector while writing long differential equation on transparency]
And finally, nothing pisses off the marketing department like asking them to take the square root of a negative number. Except actually being able to do it.
Any particular reason that touching the power supply case or any metal part of the case isn't good enough? It's grounded.
Sure... Well, actually, with standby power and stuff coming out of modern ATX supplies, I'd actually unplug the whole thing before changing a motherboard, adding RAM, etc. Theoretically, all those things *should* be off when the system is, but you don't know what corners were cut on a given motherboard, and let's remember that this is equipment sold primarily to people who don't know any better, at 5% profit margins.
"Can I save $0.02 by omitting that diode? Standby power won't get to the RAM if I put it in, hmm... we're expecting to make 500,000 of this model of motherboard..."
Pull the plug. The monitor itself should still be grounded, and if your monitor is still plugged into the video card, you still have a good ground path to the chassis and the power supply case. It *should* be good.
Seeing as I don't regularly travel from one end of the room to another when doing upgrades, I touch the case, operate, and close up. I'm well aware of how static damage isn't always readily noticable yet I've not had a bad card, cpu, mobo, DIMM, nada... for over 5 years.Yeah, by holding onto the power supply case, you're still going to control static potential. But even if you pick up a DIMM from beside the computer, the DIMM isn't at ground potential, and therefore a static charge will be transferred when you pick it up. That's why you need to rest all electronic components - DIMMs, video cards, hard disk drives, etc. on the *grounded* static mat.
As you move around - even back and forth in a chair - you'll probably build up a charge of at least a few hundred volts. *You* won't detect the charge when it discharges - the current is too low to feel, and the voltage difference is insufficient to ionize the air and make a spark. However, consider that (even "old" and "low-tech") CMOS electronics are capable of making a watch run for 5 years on the same tiny battery... which means that they like to deal in a hell of a lot less energy than is available with even an imperceptible static discharge.
If you *have* to work without a static strap, unplug the system power, but leave the monitor plugged in, touch static baggies to the chassis of the machine, place parts only on grounded surfaces in the machine while you're handling them, and do it all without letting go of the chassis of the machine. I've done it in the field because I had no other choice, but it's really a lot easier having two hands free. Spend the $10 and get a static strap.
Lemme tell you... try replacing the receiver stage of a radar system, at the top of a ship's mast, while trying to keep one hand on the system ground. (Damned ship was painted so many times that there were no bare grounded surfaces to keep my hand on while I was working!) I forgot my static strap that day... but it's forgivable, the night before I'd unwrapped a pristine new 100 megabyte hard disk drive for one of my home machines.
And when somebody fires up IE because a site they are looking at doesn't work in Mozilla? Or they change their browser ID to make a site that checks the browser type before letting you access it?
I agree, that's a point... (though Mozilla's finally gotten to the point where I can only think of one non-microsoft.com site which doesn't work with Mozilla, and that's because it doesn't like the fact that the term "MSIE" isn't in the user agent string)
However, if I were an ISP looking for a short but sweet way of coping with massive NAT usage, I'd be collecting that list anyway, and shortlisting those users for closer inspection.
Anyone know of any way of transparently replacing the user-agent strings at the NAT box?
Not that I personally care, my ISP kicks ass. They offer a 1.2Mbps DSL service with the option of a static IP address for cheap. And they don't care if you run servers, truly a geek's ISP. www.dsl.ca
Are they cheaper (easier, more convienente) than just getting a new NES in the super-off chance that you do fry something?
Absolutely! If you've ever taken the top off your computer to change a card or add memory, you should damned well be using a static strap, so I'd expect that most Slashdotters would have one anyway.
Actually, the other thing I'd do in one of those NES machines is replace all the electrolytic capacitors. Those things used very cheap components, and electrolytic capacitors have a tendency to fail open or fail leaky after a few years.
Those groups are "underrepresented" among engineers!
Yeah, tell me about it. In my engineering classes, out of about 300 students, we only had two gay guys. Two! And they were both in aerospace engineering.
It was really annoying, because anytime I needed fashion advice, I had to walk all the way to the arts buildings on the other end of campus and start asking random people in the hallways.
In my experience, there are only two kinds of people who can drink harder than engineers: mariners and gay people. I think it would be utterly terrifying to meet a gay marine engineer.
I wonder if Cathy Rogers liked my Junkyard Wars entry tape from a couple of years ago. Bobo hates cans. And sometimes garlic cloves, too.
No more Blow and Pray!
Hey, if he's doing it with absolutely no regard whatsoever for static protection, there's gonna be plenty of blow and pray... and I don't see a single wrist strap in the photos.
*PLEASE* use static protection on anything you're repairing or modding. Why? By the time you see a static electric spark, it's on the order of 3,000V per millimeter. Sure, there's very little current behind it, but it's still more than any one of the millions of MOSFET transistors in a microprocessor or memory chip can handle. And it only takes about 25V to exceed the dielectric strength of the gate-junction layer in a typical MOSFET.
Static damage is seldom obvious. Usually, a damaged system will still boot and appear to work. But one bad transistor out of the millions in a memory chip or CPU can make it intermittent. What if one bit in a RAM chip sometimes spat back a 1, no matter what had been saved there? The computer would probably work just fine... except for the occasional "inexplicable" crash when the CPU tried to execute an instruction read from that RAM location.
A wriststrap and antistatic pad are *so* cheap and save *so many* problems.
I can understand why you think it should be there.. but why would you -want- an underlining spell checker? In general, they are a bad idea, as they don't improve your writing in any way, and by breaking up and interrupting your train of thought constantly, it makes it much harder to write. I always turn the underline feature off.. it's cool for eye candy, but it wasn't a well-thought out feature. When you're trying to get your thoughts down on paper, you do not want constant interruptions.
I find it to be quite the opposite. I stop when I've mistyped a word, or when I think I've misspelled something. With an unerlining spellchecker, I can, without anything more than a glance back at the word to see if it's underlined, decide whether it's okay.
This is quite the opposite to a spellchecker which makes you manually Accept Changes / Ignore every technical word, URL or foreign name you might happen to find in an e-mail which you're sending. Evaluating each word, out of context ("I misspelled Hello? ... No, wait, that's the quoted text, English is Gunther's third language...") is slow and tedious compared to a glance.
For me, it's a good feature. Based on its popularity in predominant desktop operating systems, most end-users seem to agree that it either simplifies life or increases productivity.
Of course, it doesn't need to actually underline; highlighting, reverse video, etc. would all work just as well for me... :)
I really don't know where you get this. Evolution has an underlining spell checker, and has for a long time! You need gnome-spell installed on your system, and if you are using Evolution 1.2 you need to go into the settings and enable the spell checker. (On my computer I have a choice of American, British, or Canadian English checking.)
For sure! Evolution is beautiful. It's full-featured and well-planned.
The only problem is with speed. When I installed it on my PIII-500, it took *8 minutes* for it to close the mailboxes and exit when I was finished using it.
*Eight minutes.*
That needs work, and it's far from the only speed issue I encountered with Evolution. And that's why I use KMail - I need to get stuff done with my computers. It's also why I don't feel that Evolution is ready for the big leagues.
If it takes a PIII-500 to power an e-mail client, what would it take to power a CAD workstation with solid modelling?
To be honest, I thought I'd documented the problem on my website?
P.S. GNOME is still playing catch-up to become as nice as Windows. But the 2.2 release goes a long way. It's really nice! The desktop is almost there; we just need applications and a good default setup, and even naive users will be happy to use it.It's beautiful. So is KDE 3.1. Both are getting there.
Primarily the problems are with un-related applications of poor quality, missing features, etc.
I *am* a Linux evangelist, and to be a good salesman, you really have to believe in your product. I do. Linux will conquer (or konquer) the desktop someday; my worry is that we're currently selling the masses on an unfinished (and not quite ready) product.... which puts us in the same league as Microsoft. (Can anyone say Windows 95A, boys and girls?)
As soon as they've sent me email they've solicited my response.
What I want is a legal opinion.
I have a webserver and a mail server. The webserver clearly states in public form that none of the e-mail addresses on this server wish to be contacted for advertising purposes.
I would like to create a page offering to do instant security audits. To have your machine tested, simply send an e-mail to the address offered on the page. My script will then find the sending IP address, ping it to make sure it's live, then test it with every known network attack against a Windows machine. Afterwards, send it a ping, and report back whether or not the machine is still working.
Of course, spammers won't send e-mail to it, since the e-mail address is very specifically something like "your_computer_will_crash_if_you_send_mail_to_this _address@domain.com", and therefore will have no reason to complain about such a philanthropically-offered security testing system.
Legal counsel please?
No, apps under 2000/XP (and lets forget about 98/ME - may as well have a one hour timer on the reset switch) are not more reliable. Apps can lock up the OS. Completely. No way out but reset.
As you've suggested, we'll ignore Win95/98/Me.
Yes, this is true. Some things can lock up the OS. Mostly, though, this is owning to security failures or badly written device drivers (ATI comes immediately to mind...).
If you find that a particular linux app locks your desktop, you can 3 finger salute to get to a command prompt. Not that it happens very often.What does Joe User do from there? I get support calls from people who forget what they're supposed to do at login prompts, they're going to know to type "startx" to get the GUI back?
Even so, yeah, the bigger problems with Linux apps is not that they lock up the desktop (though there should be an easy point-and-click remedy to that to put features on par with Windows). Linux apps usually just disappear when they crash, which is pretty frequent.
Not only that, but if a particular Linux app does this more often than you like, you are likely to be able to quickly find a nice free replacement app on the net with a few minutes of looking.Maybe if all I need is vi or emacs, sure.
What if I need a spreadsheet with basic data analysis tools and the ability to import Excel files? These aren't too weird requirements for spreadsheet users, and there's only one that I know of: Gnumeric.
How about an e-mail client with passive spellchecking and the ability to draw characters onto the screen at least as fast as I can type them? Since I don't have a 2.8GHz P4, Evolution won't do it, and neither will KMail, though there are about a dozen for Windows which do that.
Video player which will open most formats? Xine or mplayer. But my distro is the most common one on the face of the earth, it comes with an unsupported and weird-assed version of GCC, so I can't run mplayer.
My options are running a little thin.
I find it ironic that you get so emotionally attached to Windows.Oh, I wish you could only know how much I hate Windows.
Your language gets stronger with every post.My frustration grows stronger with every post.
Your claims that I represent what's wrong with linux ring hollow. You imnsho, are what's wrong with Linux. Narrow minded users that want everything exactly the same as it is in Windows and are unwilling to try another paradigm.I don't want everything the same as Windows. All I want is applications that work reliably, that can do the same things as their Windows counterparts, and which don't look like shit.
We have *none* of those things. But hey, xine is skinnable, and that's all that really matters, right?
Funny that a so called power user like yourself doesn't like Linux, yet, my mother, with almost no computer experience, is fine with it on her desktop.I'm sure her requirements are less than mine.
She's probably never seen a spellchecker, so one that makes her manually intervene with every potentially mis-spelled word is still an excellent innovation.
She's probably still blown away by kcalc, so we won't ask her about her preferences in a spreadsheet.
And since she's still amazed that this magic box can transport video by the telephone line, we won't have counted on her to notice that xine won't endlessly repeat that little 20-second video of her grandson puking that she was e-mailed.
I put it to you that you are far too rigid and set in your ways.My demands are less than most people making actual IT purchasing decisions. They're simple:
Those are my requirements. Rigid? No.
The next time try ctrl+alt+backspace to kill X. Not an ideal solution, but doesn't require a reboot.
True, and indeed I do that. I think my concern is that most users aren't gonna know to "startx" again immediately after that.
This is where the Task Manager built into Windows makes control of crashed/hung processes easier, and it's embarrassing that of all the things for Windows to do better than a Unix derivative, it's that user-level process control should be one of them.