Anyone can play a scale on a piano. Anyone can figure out what the notes on the music mean. That does not mean that anyone can play Frédéric Chopin's Minute Waltz. More to the point, a "better" piano won't fix this.
Perhaps not, but I'd rather listen to a professional concert pianist play the Minute Waltz on a Steinway grand than a 1980s synthesizer.
So basically, a good tool lets an expert produce better output, but doesn't help a novice.
Sounds about right for coding too...
Someone pretending to be you a few days ago for your lawsuit story.. Said they had a family computer and looked up porn on it.
I saw that photo of eight blazing Core i9 CPUs, bathing in heat-sink grease and wet with cooling water, nestled in a motherboard carrying an entire 256 gigabytes of RAM. I'm still panting today!
Heh - nice:)
You think that's cute, check out a real computer: the 2123BT-HNR from SuperMicro. Yeah, baby! In 2U, you can get 8x 32-core CPUs, 8TB RAM, and 24x NVMe SSDs. Plus some M.2 boot drives and multi-gigabit connectivity.
So, your comment got me wondering when the typewriter was invented. Turns out it was 1868. That's about 400 years after the printing press, so there's a lot of history to look at from *before* the typewriter existed.
I agree with this guy. It's an aesthetic preference, so there's no right or wrong answer. I tend to prefer additional space after the end of a sentence, because it more easily allows me to see the logical break that should be represented by that sentence end. Since computers and displays today are capable of micro-adjustments to character spacing, and they also can tell where sentences end (unlike a typewriter), it's irrelevant how many spaces there are after a period in the source - the text can be (or should be able to be) displayed with my preferred spacing.
If you resize a window horizontally, it will reformat the content to fit the extra space, because the window manager knows how big the display is, and the application knows how big the content is.
I think you're mixing up "modern" and "historic" You see that's how things used to work a while back, but now almost every website is designed for portrait browsing on phones, and if your monitor is any wider than that, all you get is a ton of whitespace on each side of a very narrow content column.
The fix for this is for modern web designers to stop making sites that look like a fucking cash register receipt all the time.
It's so bad, that when I go to the "print view" for a flight itinerary on United.com, it spits out something that's 3" wide and prints on 2-3 pages. For a print view, which I might want to, you know, print. On paper. That's not 3" wide...
And, if you're watching a widescreen format media (which basically everything is unless you're watching a VHS transfer from 20 years ago), then it naturally fits the display.
Unless you're on a modern mobile device, in which case you now have black bars on both sides of the "widescreen" image due to the 2:1 aspect ratios (or worse) of all modern phones.
Which doesn't say anything about whether laptop screens should be narrower. I think this actually argues for phone screens being closer to 16:9 (or 9:16), so that when you rotate them to watch a movie, you get better screen utilization. (That's a difficult prospect anyway, since you might also want to watch a Vistavision 21:9 movie, which will give you top/bottom bars.)
Oh no, applications and web sites have to actually pay attention and realize that all display dimensions aren't 1024x768 any more. Or, If you do have badly behaved content, you can have two windows next to each other because we also can have more than 512MB of RAM. Welcome to 15+ years ago.
The situation was far better 15 years ago. 15 years ago content would flow to whatever size and resolution you chose. 15 years ago I had a higher resolution display than I do now, and it was great, now it would be wasted on whitespace. The web used to display dynamically based on what the user's window size was, what resolution they were using, etc. No modern web "designer" allows that, they lock it all down to what looks best on the one and only display that they tested on, and won't let the content change otherwise.
Agreed. Early on, HTML was used to describe the content and formatting of (mostly) text. That would be the "Text Markup Language" part of HTML. When designers started turning websites into "web apps", and forced them to look the same everywhere (with varying degrees of success), they took away a lot of the freedom the browser had to format the content for the view selected by the user. Now, since many designers target tall skinny phone displays, things look funny for wider "real computer" displays.
As others have said, a laptop needs certain things to function, like a keyboard that human fingers can type on. For me, this means that the minimum width of a laptop is about 12 inches (ideally 13-14", since I like to have a separate numpad). I only need about 9-10" of depth for the keyboard and trackpad, so the minimum screen size for a laptop that has the input devices I need is roughly 14" x 9", less some for the hinges. That's pretty close to a 16:9 aspect ratio.
IMO, it would be ludicrous for a manufacturer to make a 14" wide by 25" deep laptop just so it could have a phone-like aspect ratio. A 4:3 aspect could work, but that wouldn't make programming any better (no room for dual side-by-side editors), and it wouldn't make movie watching any better either.
It's a separate partition with a stripped-down Linux on it, and it runs on the same CPU as the main OS. There's a separate power switch used to boot into this partition (which doubles as a NVidia / Intel GPU switcher when running Windows).
Conceptually, you could install something like a kiosk-tuned distro into that partition. That, coupled with an encrypted Windows partition, should protect against most anything you're likely to encounter in a coffee shop or airport.
I demoed something like this in the Mitsubishi booth at CES in January. It worked surprisingly well. I was dubious about actually doing the demo, but came away wondering when I can get a car with this technology.
The (demo) car was smart enough to: automatically open the door as I approached (from a particular angle), with path lighting; automatically adjust the seat and rear-view mirror so that I could see all the HUD's, the rear view, and the other instruments - it may also have adjusted the steering wheel and pedals, I don't remember for sure; determine whether I was ready to assume manual control, using three factors (facing forward, eyes open, and hands on wheel); show an AR overlay of the "street" (like the old "Night Driver" game), including the edge of the road and lane markers; show an AR overlay on the side-mirror displays, highlighting oncoming vehicles; and show a very usable map in the instrument cluster, kind of "under" the instruments and with excellent perspective.
I'm sure there's more that it did. As I said, I was very impressed. I don't generally care about "advancements" like having an app to control your car from your smartphone. This stuff actually looked like it will be very useful.
What exactly is he wrong about? Every application mentioned here allows you to export your data into non-proprietary formats if you want to use other software. The claim that you don't own your data in nonsense.
You're right, up to a point.
A Photoshop file is not just the pixels that end up in the final image though. It may contain multiple layers, alpha blends, titles or annotations, etc. It's more the equivalent of a source code file, and a jpeg or png is the binary output from that source document. This is more evident with video / motion editing software, as the "source" contains many forms of media and script-like descriptions for mixing and transitions.
Unless you can export a source file with full fidelity for all elements, and have similar editing capability to re-generate output (say, an HDR version of an image or a video with titles added), you still don't own your data, you are merely renting access to the source forms of it.
SolidWorks is close to that model now as well. Sage accounting has a perpetual / offline license available, but you can't buy it from them - you have to go through a reseller.
It brings up a question I always ask: Who owns your data?
If you have to keep paying someone in order to access your designs, then you don't really own your data, they do.
I think your post was a perfect example of lack of imagination.
1) You don't imagine any reason other than profit for going into space. 2) You don't imagine anyone wanting to spend the generations (you claim it will take) to set up a colony on Mars. 3) You don't imagine the general public can be interested in space travel for long enough to matter.
This isn't meant as a personal attack, I'm just pointing out that the desire for short-term profit is an unimaginative reason to do anything.
According to the Wikipedia page on The Apollo Program ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), the total cost in 2016 dollars is about $219 B. This is roughly equivalent to the federal budget item for interest on the national debt in 2015 ($229 B, https://www.nationalpriorities... ). Just a little perspective on the "most expensive thing..." comment.
Personally, I would love to go into space. I might chicken out at the last minute*, but for now I think I'd do it. I read Science Fiction and I want to make it Science Fact. I would like to harvest asteroids for materials, use micro-gravity manufacturing techniques, be able to see an eclipse any time I like, perform scientific experiments with better precision than Earth-bound instruments. I'd like to go *because it's there*. In the society we've given ourselves, that boils down to money, which is just depressing as hell.
* I'm thinking about it a bit like bungee jumping - sounds cool, but when you're standing up there wondering if the cord is the right length for your weight, maaaaybe this isn't such a good idea after all.
More or less any industry on the moon would need a "cheap" way of getting mass to Earth. Without that, there's no point in putting the industry on the moon.
So when the BigBadBallBearing company builds their factory on the moon, they will include the means to get their products back to Earth, and those means, like many other tools, can be used for good or bad purposes.
I used to flip through SkyMall just so I could laugh (or cry) at all the stupid things people invented. I couldn't fathom how someone could invent a speaker in the shape of a rock, and then sell it for 3x the price of a normal outdoor speaker. Then there were the pet accessories, tie racks, and a host of other useless crap.
I guess I wasn't alone - people didn't buy enough of it to keep the company alive.
Now I feel better as an inventor of things that can actually be useful.
Good code must work, but looking nice is optional. Additionally, when debugging code (sometimes code you wrote an hour ago), you need to see not only the code, but what is happening in the hardware. At that point, it's irrelevant whether the code looks nice or not. It's also not always true that good looking code will work. There are errata for microcontrollers (and microprocessors, though those are usually handled at the OS/driver level), so the obvious and beautiful solution may not work at all.
Debugging is what you do when something doesn't work the way you expected. This means that, by definition, the code isn't understandable. If it were understandable, there wouldn't be a problem, right?
Good ideas here, but your first assumption suffers from over-optimization:)
The Core i7 CPU the OP has should be able to do MD5 or SHA256/512 sums at a rate of at least 100 MBytes/second. (See here and here.) Any reasonably modern storage system should be able to feed data that quickly.
At 100 MBytes/sec, 1GB takes 10 seconds, 1TB takes 10,000 seconds. 10,000 seconds is somewhat under 3 hours (800 seconds less), so let's assume 3 hours per TB. With 5TB to hash, it should take around 15 hours, or one overnight plus a little bit.
Surprisingly, it's not that big a problem for a modern PC.
I would make a series of tables as you suggested, split by size. Maybe have separate tables by order of magnitude, FS<1k, 1K<FS<10K, 10K<FS<100k... In each table, store the file size, file path, create/modify date (may not be accurate, but could be useful), and the hash for that file.
After the first run, this will also provide a mechanism for determining if files have changed.
Gases occupy 22.4 liters of volume per mole of material at STP (standard temperature and pressure, which is 300 K, 1 atmosphere pressure). One mole of material weighs as many grams as the sum of the atomic numbers of the atoms in each molecule. Air is mostly Nitrogen, which is atomic number 7 and has an atomic weight of ~14. Since Nitrogen gas has two atoms per molecule, one mole (22.4 liters) of nitrogen weighs about 28 grams.
So if you take a 1000 liter (257 gallon) tank, and get it down to perfect vacuum inside, you will offset about 1250 grams of mass. (28 g/mol * 0.0446 mol/liter * 1000 liters)
There isn't much point in using vacuum as a "flotation ballast".
First, airlocks used in space are used a few dozen times at most before being completely overhauled. The docking connector on a train like this would get more than that much use in a single day, probably in a single morning.
That doesn't seem likely, since you would only use a vacuum-tunnel/4000MPH train for long hauls. Like NY <-> LA. That trip would take about 40 minutes at 0.1G constant acceleration, IIRC. The locks would be used at most once per hour or so.
If you're thinking of airlocks, then you'd have to depressurise and repressurise the train at every station. If you actually mean a tube connected to equal pressures outside of the tube and inside the train, then you're assuming that the seal of something that can be attached and detached, can handle one side moving as the train bounces up and down slightly as people step on and off, and still will have zero leakage.
You're assuming that the vacuum tunnel goes straight into the station. If I were designing the system, I would have the train go through a big airlock or two before getting to the station, so the last mile or so would be at full pressure, and the doors could be just like airplane doors (ie, they seal, but they don't have to attach to anything on the outside).
I hope Google *does* do something to standardize hardware. Specifically, they need to define a standard connector similar in functionality to what every iOS device has.
The fact that you can make a set of speakers or a stereo dock with one connector, and have it work for basically every device out there, is a big win. I know there have been some issues with device thickness which required mechanical adjustments on dock devices, but the electrical connection is the same.
It's hard to overstate just how useful that is. Imagine how great it would be if you could get a charger / speaker set / remote control / keyboard / USB adapter (ever wanted a host port on your device...), etc, and have it work for any device you buy, from any vendor. There might actually be enough of a market so that independent manufacturers would make devices that are meant to work with Android.
To make this work, it has to be done right. The connector spec has to include anything and everything that is likely to be useful, including some generic interfaces (like USB, HDMI, audio, charging, maybe even SATA...). There has to be full OS driver support for every peripheral, including enumeration of handset/tablet capabilities and detection of attached devices and their capabilities.
I can't even tell you how annoying it was to walk around at CES and see thousands of devices meant to work with iCrap, and basically nothing that was meant to work with Android devices (that wasn't made by the manufacturer of the Android device). It's even more annoying to go to an electronics store looking for something like portable speakers - about 95% of them have iPod docks, but less than half have a miniphone connector to plug into a headphone port.
Get with it, Google. The software is about equal, but there will never be a "peripheral ecosystem" unless there are hardware connection standards.
Um. This has nothing to do with the path separator and everything to do with the C language.
In C, the character '\' is the escape character. That's how you can print newlines ('\n'), tabs ('\t'), and other things. SInce the backslash has a special meaning sometimes, you have to escape it with a backslash if you want one in your string.
To get the string literal "C:\command.com" in your program, you have to declare it as "C:\\command.com" in the C source.
The reflective part of a mirror is behind the glass, so the thickness is realy irrelevant. There is a point in the fact the mirrors are not curved so some misalignment would result. It seems to work well enough though.
Actually, if he's using rear surface mirrors, then the thickness is more important.
Most glass reflects about 5% off each surface, so the energy from the front surface of the glass is not being directed at the same point as that from the read surface - it's off by the thickness of the glass. (actually, it'll be the thickness of the glass times the sine of the angle of incidence, I think)
Additionally, some of the energy gets absorbed by the glass, and the thicker it is, the more energy is absorbed.
Neither of those effects is particularly huge, but they are dependent on the thickness of the glass. Both effects are eliminated by using front surface mirrors instead.
The title talks about employees using their higher performance machines rather than their work slowpokes.
The story talks about companies changing from using PCs/workstations as the computing devices to using servers with virtual machines and remote access. The actual execution of code is done on the server, so the performance of the remote "terminal" mostly irrelevant. There are benefits to the centralized approach (mainframes, anyone?), but higher performance by using personal speed demon machines isn't one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone can play a scale on a piano. Anyone can figure out what the notes on the music mean. That does not mean that anyone can play Frédéric Chopin's Minute Waltz. More to the point, a "better" piano won't fix this.
Perhaps not, but I'd rather listen to a professional concert pianist play the Minute Waltz on a Steinway grand than a 1980s synthesizer.
So basically, a good tool lets an expert produce better output, but doesn't help a novice. Sounds about right for coding too ...
I saw that photo of eight blazing Core i9 CPUs, bathing in heat-sink grease and wet with cooling water, nestled in a motherboard carrying an entire 256 gigabytes of RAM. I'm still panting today!
Heh - nice :)
You think that's cute, check out a real computer: the 2123BT-HNR from SuperMicro. Yeah, baby! In 2U, you can get 8x 32-core CPUs, 8TB RAM, and 24x NVMe SSDs. Plus some M.2 boot drives and multi-gigabit connectivity.
So, your comment got me wondering when the typewriter was invented. Turns out it was 1868. That's about 400 years after the printing press, so there's a lot of history to look at from *before* the typewriter existed.
And here's an article that does just that:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
I agree with this guy. It's an aesthetic preference, so there's no right or wrong answer. I tend to prefer additional space after the end of a sentence, because it more easily allows me to see the logical break that should be represented by that sentence end. Since computers and displays today are capable of micro-adjustments to character spacing, and they also can tell where sentences end (unlike a typewriter), it's irrelevant how many spaces there are after a period in the source - the text can be (or should be able to be) displayed with my preferred spacing.
If you resize a window horizontally, it will reformat the content to fit the extra space, because the window manager knows how big the display is, and the application knows how big the content is.
I think you're mixing up "modern" and "historic" You see that's how things used to work a while back, but now almost every website is designed for portrait browsing on phones, and if your monitor is any wider than that, all you get is a ton of whitespace on each side of a very narrow content column.
The fix for this is for modern web designers to stop making sites that look like a fucking cash register receipt all the time. It's so bad, that when I go to the "print view" for a flight itinerary on United.com, it spits out something that's 3" wide and prints on 2-3 pages. For a print view, which I might want to, you know, print. On paper. That's not 3" wide ...
And, if you're watching a widescreen format media (which basically everything is unless you're watching a VHS transfer from 20 years ago), then it naturally fits the display.
Unless you're on a modern mobile device, in which case you now have black bars on both sides of the "widescreen" image due to the 2:1 aspect ratios (or worse) of all modern phones.
Which doesn't say anything about whether laptop screens should be narrower. I think this actually argues for phone screens being closer to 16:9 (or 9:16), so that when you rotate them to watch a movie, you get better screen utilization. (That's a difficult prospect anyway, since you might also want to watch a Vistavision 21:9 movie, which will give you top/bottom bars.)
Oh no, applications and web sites have to actually pay attention and realize that all display dimensions aren't 1024x768 any more. Or, If you do have badly behaved content, you can have two windows next to each other because we also can have more than 512MB of RAM. Welcome to 15+ years ago.
The situation was far better 15 years ago. 15 years ago content would flow to whatever size and resolution you chose. 15 years ago I had a higher resolution display than I do now, and it was great, now it would be wasted on whitespace. The web used to display dynamically based on what the user's window size was, what resolution they were using, etc. No modern web "designer" allows that, they lock it all down to what looks best on the one and only display that they tested on, and won't let the content change otherwise.
Agreed. Early on, HTML was used to describe the content and formatting of (mostly) text. That would be the "Text Markup Language" part of HTML. When designers started turning websites into "web apps", and forced them to look the same everywhere (with varying degrees of success), they took away a lot of the freedom the browser had to format the content for the view selected by the user. Now, since many designers target tall skinny phone displays, things look funny for wider "real computer" displays.
As others have said, a laptop needs certain things to function, like a keyboard that human fingers can type on. For me, this means that the minimum width of a laptop is about 12 inches (ideally 13-14", since I like to have a separate numpad). I only need about 9-10" of depth for the keyboard and trackpad, so the minimum screen size for a laptop that has the input devices I need is roughly 14" x 9", less some for the hinges. That's pretty close to a 16:9 aspect ratio.
IMO, it would be ludicrous for a manufacturer to make a 14" wide by 25" deep laptop just so it could have a phone-like aspect ratio. A 4:3 aspect could work, but that wouldn't make programming any better (no room for dual side-by-side editors), and it wouldn't make movie watching any better either.
.
FTFY.
I have that on my UL80VT.
It's a separate partition with a stripped-down Linux on it, and it runs on the same CPU as the main OS. There's a separate power switch used to boot into this partition (which doubles as a NVidia / Intel GPU switcher when running Windows).
Conceptually, you could install something like a kiosk-tuned distro into that partition. That, coupled with an encrypted Windows partition, should protect against most anything you're likely to encounter in a coffee shop or airport.
I demoed something like this in the Mitsubishi booth at CES in January.
It worked surprisingly well. I was dubious about actually doing the demo, but came away wondering when I can get a car with this technology.
The (demo) car was smart enough to:
automatically open the door as I approached (from a particular angle), with path lighting;
automatically adjust the seat and rear-view mirror so that I could see all the HUD's, the rear view, and the other instruments - it may also have adjusted the steering wheel and pedals, I don't remember for sure;
determine whether I was ready to assume manual control, using three factors (facing forward, eyes open, and hands on wheel);
show an AR overlay of the "street" (like the old "Night Driver" game), including the edge of the road and lane markers;
show an AR overlay on the side-mirror displays, highlighting oncoming vehicles; and
show a very usable map in the instrument cluster, kind of "under" the instruments and with excellent perspective.
I'm sure there's more that it did. As I said, I was very impressed. I don't generally care about "advancements" like having an app to control your car from your smartphone. This stuff actually looked like it will be very useful.
And why does it want to be a pig farmer?
What exactly is he wrong about? Every application mentioned here allows you to export your data into non-proprietary formats if you want to use other software. The claim that you don't own your data in nonsense.
You're right, up to a point.
A Photoshop file is not just the pixels that end up in the final image though. It may contain multiple layers, alpha blends, titles or annotations, etc. It's more the equivalent of a source code file, and a jpeg or png is the binary output from that source document. This is more evident with video / motion editing software, as the "source" contains many forms of media and script-like descriptions for mixing and transitions.
Unless you can export a source file with full fidelity for all elements, and have similar editing capability to re-generate output (say, an HDR version of an image or a video with titles added), you still don't own your data, you are merely renting access to the source forms of it.
SolidWorks is close to that model now as well.
Sage accounting has a perpetual / offline license available, but you can't buy it from them - you have to go through a reseller.
It brings up a question I always ask: Who owns your data?
If you have to keep paying someone in order to access your designs, then you don't really own your data, they do.
I think your post was a perfect example of lack of imagination.
1) You don't imagine any reason other than profit for going into space.
2) You don't imagine anyone wanting to spend the generations (you claim it will take) to set up a colony on Mars.
3) You don't imagine the general public can be interested in space travel for long enough to matter.
This isn't meant as a personal attack, I'm just pointing out that the desire for short-term profit is an unimaginative reason to do anything.
According to the Wikipedia page on The Apollo Program ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), the total cost in 2016 dollars is about $219 B. This is roughly equivalent to the federal budget item for interest on the national debt in 2015 ($229 B, https://www.nationalpriorities... ). Just a little perspective on the "most expensive thing ..." comment.
Personally, I would love to go into space. I might chicken out at the last minute*, but for now I think I'd do it. I read Science Fiction and I want to make it Science Fact. I would like to harvest asteroids for materials, use micro-gravity manufacturing techniques, be able to see an eclipse any time I like, perform scientific experiments with better precision than Earth-bound instruments. I'd like to go *because it's there*. In the society we've given ourselves, that boils down to money, which is just depressing as hell.
* I'm thinking about it a bit like bungee jumping - sounds cool, but when you're standing up there wondering if the cord is the right length for your weight, maaaaybe this isn't such a good idea after all.
https://promotions.newegg.com/...
More or less any industry on the moon would need a "cheap" way of getting mass to Earth. Without that, there's no point in putting the industry on the moon.
So when the BigBadBallBearing company builds their factory on the moon, they will include the means to get their products back to Earth, and those means, like many other tools, can be used for good or bad purposes.
Somewhere, there's a computer that's "Preparing to configure Windows" after it rebooted in the middle of a flight scheduling run.
Or stuck at a BIOS prompt saying "No keyboard found, press F1 to continue."
If you can't handle the distinction between murder and killing, then, again, just stop.
How do you define the difference between murder and killing?
There are many possible differentiators, here are a couple that come to mind:
Murder is killing for no reason.
Murder is killing for no *good* reason.
I'm just curious as to how you might distinguish between the two without resorting to something like "I know it when I see it".
https://www.superbrightleds.co...:
I used to flip through SkyMall just so I could laugh (or cry) at all the stupid things people invented. I couldn't fathom how someone could invent a speaker in the shape of a rock, and then sell it for 3x the price of a normal outdoor speaker. Then there were the pet accessories, tie racks, and a host of other useless crap.
I guess I wasn't alone - people didn't buy enough of it to keep the company alive.
Now I feel better as an inventor of things that can actually be useful.
Good code must work, but looking nice is optional. Additionally, when debugging code (sometimes code you wrote an hour ago), you need to see not only the code, but what is happening in the hardware. At that point, it's irrelevant whether the code looks nice or not. It's also not always true that good looking code will work. There are errata for microcontrollers (and microprocessors, though those are usually handled at the OS/driver level), so the obvious and beautiful solution may not work at all.
Debugging is what you do when something doesn't work the way you expected. This means that, by definition, the code isn't understandable. If it were understandable, there wouldn't be a problem, right?
The Core i7 CPU the OP has should be able to do MD5 or SHA256/512 sums at a rate of at least 100 MBytes/second. (See here and here.) Any reasonably modern storage system should be able to feed data that quickly.
At 100 MBytes/sec, 1GB takes 10 seconds, 1TB takes 10,000 seconds. 10,000 seconds is somewhat under 3 hours (800 seconds less), so let's assume 3 hours per TB. With 5TB to hash, it should take around 15 hours, or one overnight plus a little bit.
Surprisingly, it's not that big a problem for a modern PC.
I would make a series of tables as you suggested, split by size. Maybe have separate tables by order of magnitude, FS<1k, 1K<FS<10K, 10K<FS<100k ... In each table, store the file size, file path, create/modify date (may not be accurate, but could be useful), and the hash for that file.
After the first run, this will also provide a mechanism for determining if files have changed.
Gases occupy 22.4 liters of volume per mole of material at STP (standard temperature and pressure, which is 300 K, 1 atmosphere pressure). One mole of material weighs as many grams as the sum of the atomic numbers of the atoms in each molecule. Air is mostly Nitrogen, which is atomic number 7 and has an atomic weight of ~14. Since Nitrogen gas has two atoms per molecule, one mole (22.4 liters) of nitrogen weighs about 28 grams.
So if you take a 1000 liter (257 gallon) tank, and get it down to perfect vacuum inside, you will offset about 1250 grams of mass. (28 g/mol * 0.0446 mol/liter * 1000 liters)
There isn't much point in using vacuum as a "flotation ballast".
First, airlocks used in space are used a few dozen times at most before being completely overhauled. The docking connector on a train like this would get more than that much use in a single day, probably in a single morning.
That doesn't seem likely, since you would only use a vacuum-tunnel/4000MPH train for long hauls. Like NY <-> LA. That trip would take about 40 minutes at 0.1G constant acceleration, IIRC.
The locks would be used at most once per hour or so.
If you're thinking of airlocks, then you'd have to depressurise and repressurise the train at every station. If you actually mean a tube connected to equal pressures outside of the tube and inside the train, then you're assuming that the seal of something that can be attached and detached, can handle one side moving as the train bounces up and down slightly as people step on and off, and still will have zero leakage.
You're assuming that the vacuum tunnel goes straight into the station. If I were designing the system, I would have the train go through a big airlock or two before getting to the station, so the last mile or so would be at full pressure, and the doors could be just like airplane doors (ie, they seal, but they don't have to attach to anything on the outside).
I hope Google *does* do something to standardize hardware. Specifically, they need to define a standard connector similar in functionality to what every iOS device has.
The fact that you can make a set of speakers or a stereo dock with one connector, and have it work for basically every device out there, is a big win. I know there have been some issues with device thickness which required mechanical adjustments on dock devices, but the electrical connection is the same.
It's hard to overstate just how useful that is. Imagine how great it would be if you could get a charger / speaker set / remote control / keyboard / USB adapter (ever wanted a host port on your device ...), etc, and have it work for any device you buy, from any vendor. There might actually be enough of a market so that independent manufacturers would make devices that are meant to work with Android.
To make this work, it has to be done right. The connector spec has to include anything and everything that is likely to be useful, including some generic interfaces (like USB, HDMI, audio, charging, maybe even SATA ...). There has to be full OS driver support for every peripheral, including enumeration of handset/tablet capabilities and detection of attached devices and their capabilities.
I can't even tell you how annoying it was to walk around at CES and see thousands of devices meant to work with iCrap, and basically nothing that was meant to work with Android devices (that wasn't made by the manufacturer of the Android device). It's even more annoying to go to an electronics store looking for something like portable speakers - about 95% of them have iPod docks, but less than half have a miniphone connector to plug into a headphone port.
Get with it, Google. The software is about equal, but there will never be a "peripheral ecosystem" unless there are hardware connection standards.
Um. This has nothing to do with the path separator and everything to do with the C language.
In C, the character '\' is the escape character. That's how you can print newlines ('\n'), tabs ('\t'), and other things. SInce the backslash has a special meaning sometimes, you have to escape it with a backslash if you want one in your string.
To get the string literal "C:\command.com" in your program, you have to declare it as "C:\\command.com" in the C source.
The reflective part of a mirror is behind the glass, so the thickness is realy irrelevant. There is a point in the fact the mirrors are not curved so some misalignment would result. It seems to work well enough though.
Actually, if he's using rear surface mirrors, then the thickness is more important.
Most glass reflects about 5% off each surface, so the energy from the front surface of the glass is not being directed at the same point as that from the read surface - it's off by the thickness of the glass. (actually, it'll be the thickness of the glass times the sine of the angle of incidence, I think)
Additionally, some of the energy gets absorbed by the glass, and the thicker it is, the more energy is absorbed.
Neither of those effects is particularly huge, but they are dependent on the thickness of the glass. Both effects are eliminated by using front surface mirrors instead.
The title talks about employees using their higher performance machines rather than their work slowpokes.
The story talks about companies changing from using PCs/workstations as the computing devices to using servers with virtual machines and remote access. The actual execution of code is done on the server, so the performance of the remote "terminal" mostly irrelevant. There are benefits to the centralized approach (mainframes, anyone?), but higher performance by using personal speed demon machines isn't one of them.