eCos, running in 512KB SRAM and providing one month of battery life
Linux, running in 64MB of SDRAM and providing considerably more than a day of battery life
And yet my 20-year-old 5-function calculator runs for years on a single AA battery. (Its power usage is listed as "0.000075W".) To each their own, I guess, but 5 functions is plenty for me--if I need anything more, that's what my PC is for.
I mean, if you're going to have 'burglarized', why not start doing the same to other words?
Because in other words, the base verb (shoot, shop) came first, and the noun (shooter, shopper) was derived from it. "Burglar", on the other hand, started out as an independent word; "burgle" only came into being through back-formation, so it's no more proper, so to speak, than "burglarize".
That said, Calvin and Hobbes were verbing words, not verbizing then . . .
Re:I don't read spam
on
Spam as Poetry
·
· Score: 3, Informative
What's your excuse for having spam?
I happen to actually have some contact with the outside world.
That's an interesting data point, thanks. I assume that's when not operating?
(My own data point is that I accidentally kicked a 4GB Seagate SCSI drive while copying data from it and caused a head crash. This is why I tend to be leery of using HDs in mobile environments.)
I'd guess he's not encrypting them because they're family photos, but just because he encrypts all his backup data. I do the same, just on general principles--it may be overkill, but better overkill than underkill, no?
Re:Portable HD durability?
on
60GB iPod Coming?
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
I'm well able to read spec sheets, thank you very much. I'm more interested in real-world data. I might also note that "250G" isn't that big a number--even tapping a hard drive with a pencil generates forces on the order of 50G or so, IIRC.
Gedanken experiment: drop an HD onto a hard surface from a height of 1m, it accelerates to ~4.4 m/s (d = at^2/2 => t = sqrt(2d/a), v = at = a*sqrt(2d/a) = sqrt(2da), where d=1m and a=9.8m/s^2). Assume it stops in 1msec, that's 4.4 m/s / 0.001 s = 4400 m/s^2 ~= 450G. So much for that drive, I suppose.
Obviously, the material the drive gets dropped onto makes a significant difference in the amount of shock received, and one would also assume the iPod and similar players have some sort of shock absorber to reduce shocks to the drive in cases like this; without knowing the relevant physical characteristics, the numbers on the spec sheet are useless. So if you have some real-world data on the reliability of these drives, kindly provide it; if not, kindly shut up.
Portable HD durability?
on
60GB iPod Coming?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Something I've always wondered: just how resistant are these HDs to (physical) shocks? If you drop an iPod while it's reading from the disk, for example, will it still work or will you be left with a worthless chunk of metal and plastic? Portable devices tend to get a lot of wear and tear, so I'd tend to stay away from anything using such a seemingly fragile storage medium.
Hmm, good point . . . and I don't happen to have a copy of the spec handy, so I guess for now I'll just assume there's some interpretation of their numbers that makes 300Mbps possible--or that something got lost in translation. (:
How do they get 3bits per cycle? Nyquist frequency limits mean 100MHz could optimally carry 50Mbps, not 6 times that in an actual test.
You're extrapolating from the wrong number. Quoting the article (emphasis mine):
The frequency bandwidths for the test are 100MHz in width with the
4.635GHz radio signal at its center, and 30MHz in width with the 4.9GHz radio signal at its center for the downstream and upstream channels, respectively.
The frequency being used for downstream transmission is 4.635GHz (+/- 50MHz), which implies a Nyquist limit of 2317.5 (+/- 25) Mbps. The 100MHz figure you quote is the bandwidth used by the test, not the frequency.
Not quite: a superball interacts autonomously and quite physically with its environment.
I wouldn't call superballs autonomous--they don't do anything without someone directly acting on them, such as by throwing them. (Or are you referring to a different object? To me, "superball" is one of those bouncy rubber balls I played with as a kid.)
but it brings up the question - exactly what DOES constitute a robot?
How about "a machine that autonomously interacts physically with its environment"? That's probably the closest match to the way I've seen "robot" be used in recent years (caveat: I'm living in Japan). Traditional robots--humanoid things that walk around, talk to you, and so on--obviously do this, but so do industrial robots, for example. I recently saw a news segment about a new "robot" that's designed to help disabled people get into and out of bed (IIRC); all it consisted of was a mechanical arm attached to a frame that assisted the user's movements. On the other hand, jackhammers interact physically with their environment through user control, but I doubt anyone would consider them "robots".
In this particular case, I agree that it's pretty tough to call the machine as is a robot. Suppose, though, that it was able to take shirts one at a time from a pile and put them on its body to iron--how would you classify it then? For me, at least, it would be a tough call.
[Step] 1: Company hires local experts, fairly high regulations yadda yadda. Product cost $X to make. Company charges $Y for product.
[Step] 2: Company decides to cut costs to become "more competitive." They outsource entire operation to a less regulated/expensive part of the world. Product cost $X - 50 to make. Company charges $Y for product.
[Step] 3: Government gets pissed off that Company is avoiding local income taxes etc and tax company out the wazoo for their offshore operations. Product again costs $X to make. Company charges [$Y + 50] for product.
Step 4: Other Company starts making product. Product still costs $X to make. Other Company charges $Y for product.
Step 5: Company (the first one) goes out of business.
You know what this country really needs? Another presidential election where nobody gets the majority of electoal votes.
You'll probably get it too -- the country is so evenly divided that the winner of the 2004 presidential election will very likely not have a majority. I don't see how it would help, though... two of the last three Presidential elections were won that way (2000 and 1992), and people pretty much shrugged it off each time.
Those were non-majorities of the popular vote, not the electoral vote--there haven't been any elections recently in which an independent candidate has gotten any electoral votes (which would require a majority in a state), as far as I can recall.
Not that it would make much difference anyway--if nobody gets a majority of electoral votes, the House (and Senate, if necessary) vote instead, and it's not hard to predict how such a vote would turn out. (See here for the gory details.)
As a matter of fact, no, I haven't. It strains my eyes.
This is different from any videogame with a decent plot... how?
Count the number of people who primarily play such games. Then count the number of people who play things like Doom, Quake, Super Mario, or Tetris. Come back when you've compared the two populations.
Sony is a Japanese company. Nintendo is a Japanese company. For all they have international branches, you damn well better believe the Japanese market still has importance.
If anything, I'd say Microsoft is tapping the market of people who don't play the kind of games available on the Sony/Nintendo(/Sega) systems, so I doubt Sony or Nintendo have anything to worry about anyway. I have no problem with Microsoft going after their own market. After all, the majority of games released on Japanese consoles have been from Japanese publishers--who tend to publish with a Japanese audience in mind--so if Microsoft can get its hands on Western publishers, I wouldn't be surprised if its games were more widely accepted in the West.
Slashdot Mirror
Spice with -v and -z options as desired.
I managed to catch the transit that way too, here in Tokyo--we're already into the rainy season, so you can guess what that does to the sky.
(At least, I think that black dot on the Sun was Venus. Maybe it was a burned-out optic nerve instead . . .)
eCos, running in 512KB SRAM and providing one month of battery life Linux, running in 64MB of SDRAM and providing considerably more than a day of battery life
And yet my 20-year-old 5-function calculator runs for years on a single AA battery. (Its power usage is listed as "0.000075W".) To each their own, I guess, but 5 functions is plenty for me--if I need anything more, that's what my PC is for.
I mean, if you're going to have 'burglarized', why not start doing the same to other words?
Because in other words, the base verb (shoot, shop) came first, and the noun (shooter, shopper) was derived from it. "Burglar", on the other hand, started out as an independent word; "burgle" only came into being through back-formation, so it's no more proper, so to speak, than "burglarize".
That said, Calvin and Hobbes were verbing words, not verbizing then . . .
What's your excuse for having spam?
I happen to actually have some contact with the outside world.
That's an interesting data point, thanks. I assume that's when not operating?
(My own data point is that I accidentally kicked a 4GB Seagate SCSI drive while copying data from it and caused a head crash. This is why I tend to be leery of using HDs in mobile environments.)
I'd guess he's not encrypting them because they're family photos, but just because he encrypts all his backup data. I do the same, just on general principles--it may be overkill, but better overkill than underkill, no?
I'm well able to read spec sheets, thank you very much. I'm more interested in real-world data. I might also note that "250G" isn't that big a number--even tapping a hard drive with a pencil generates forces on the order of 50G or so, IIRC.
Gedanken experiment: drop an HD onto a hard surface from a height of 1m, it accelerates to ~4.4 m/s (d = at^2/2 => t = sqrt(2d/a), v = at = a*sqrt(2d/a) = sqrt(2da), where d=1m and a=9.8m/s^2). Assume it stops in 1msec, that's 4.4 m/s / 0.001 s = 4400 m/s^2 ~= 450G. So much for that drive, I suppose.
Obviously, the material the drive gets dropped onto makes a significant difference in the amount of shock received, and one would also assume the iPod and similar players have some sort of shock absorber to reduce shocks to the drive in cases like this; without knowing the relevant physical characteristics, the numbers on the spec sheet are useless. So if you have some real-world data on the reliability of these drives, kindly provide it; if not, kindly shut up.
Something I've always wondered: just how resistant are these HDs to (physical) shocks? If you drop an iPod while it's reading from the disk, for example, will it still work or will you be left with a worthless chunk of metal and plastic? Portable devices tend to get a lot of wear and tear, so I'd tend to stay away from anything using such a seemingly fragile storage medium.
Please link your URLs--Slashdot inserts spaces every 50 characters of an unbroken word.
I'm really curious to understand how so many people manage to still have a problem with this.
Think "xterm". (Hint: The shell uses Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for its own purposes.)
Hmm, good point . . . and I don't happen to have a copy of the spec handy, so I guess for now I'll just assume there's some interpretation of their numbers that makes 300Mbps possible--or that something got lost in translation. (:
How do they get 3bits per cycle? Nyquist frequency limits mean 100MHz could optimally carry 50Mbps, not 6 times that in an actual test.
You're extrapolating from the wrong number. Quoting the article (emphasis mine):
The frequency being used for downstream transmission is 4.635GHz (+/- 50MHz), which implies a Nyquist limit of 2317.5 (+/- 25) Mbps. The 100MHz figure you quote is the bandwidth used by the test, not the frequency.
Not quite: a superball interacts autonomously and quite physically with its environment.
I wouldn't call superballs autonomous--they don't do anything without someone directly acting on them, such as by throwing them. (Or are you referring to a different object? To me, "superball" is one of those bouncy rubber balls I played with as a kid.)
but it brings up the question - exactly what DOES constitute a robot?
How about "a machine that autonomously interacts physically with its environment"? That's probably the closest match to the way I've seen "robot" be used in recent years (caveat: I'm living in Japan). Traditional robots--humanoid things that walk around, talk to you, and so on--obviously do this, but so do industrial robots, for example. I recently saw a news segment about a new "robot" that's designed to help disabled people get into and out of bed (IIRC); all it consisted of was a mechanical arm attached to a frame that assisted the user's movements. On the other hand, jackhammers interact physically with their environment through user control, but I doubt anyone would consider them "robots".
In this particular case, I agree that it's pretty tough to call the machine as is a robot. Suppose, though, that it was able to take shirts one at a time from a pile and put them on its body to iron--how would you classify it then? For me, at least, it would be a tough call.
4. Get clothes out of washing machine and put in dryer.
In my day they didn't have dryers--we had to hang the clothes up on a line and wait days for them to dry. And then we still had to iron them!
Oh wait--I still don't have a dryer . . .
Would that be the Chinese version?
Though if his server stays up the way it has been and mine blows up I am going to feel sooo stupid . . .
(quoting with corrections)
[Step] 1: Company hires local experts, fairly high regulations yadda yadda. Product cost $X to make. Company charges $Y for product.
[Step] 2: Company decides to cut costs to become "more competitive." They outsource entire operation to a less regulated/expensive part of the world. Product cost $X - 50 to make. Company charges $Y for product.
[Step] 3: Government gets pissed off that Company is avoiding local income taxes etc and tax company out the wazoo for their offshore operations. Product again costs $X to make. Company charges [$Y + 50] for product.
Step 4: Other Company starts making product. Product still costs $X to make. Other Company charges $Y for product.
Step 5: Company (the first one) goes out of business.
You'll probably get it too -- the country is so evenly divided that the winner of the 2004 presidential election will very likely not have a majority. I don't see how it would help, though... two of the last three Presidential elections were won that way (2000 and 1992), and people pretty much shrugged it off each time.
Those were non-majorities of the popular vote, not the electoral vote--there haven't been any elections recently in which an independent candidate has gotten any electoral votes (which would require a majority in a state), as far as I can recall.
Not that it would make much difference anyway--if nobody gets a majority of electoral votes, the House (and Senate, if necessary) vote instead, and it's not hard to predict how such a vote would turn out. (See here for the gory details.)
My UIC account gets NO spam (because I don't give it to anyone :), so I think that responibility is the key to keeping email working.
Unfortunately, those of us who actually do something in the world don't have the option of keeping our addresses secret.
FWIW, I use a custom filter on spam URLs and Windows executables that catches most of the garbage I receive.
You've never read in low light conditions?
As a matter of fact, no, I haven't. It strains my eyes.
This is different from any videogame with a decent plot... how?
Count the number of people who primarily play such games. Then count the number of people who play things like Doom, Quake, Super Mario, or Tetris. Come back when you've compared the two populations.
That's called High Volume Email Deployment, not spam.
Really? I thought the technical term was Strategic High Importance Telecommunications . . .
Yah, playing alone. It's dangerously close to that silly activity ... reading.
Except that reading isn't (as) bad for your eyes, reading encourages thinking and imagination, reading expands knowledge, reading . . .
. . . HIBT?
Sony is a Japanese company. Nintendo is a Japanese company. For all they have international branches, you damn well better believe the Japanese market still has importance.
If anything, I'd say Microsoft is tapping the market of people who don't play the kind of games available on the Sony/Nintendo(/Sega) systems, so I doubt Sony or Nintendo have anything to worry about anyway. I have no problem with Microsoft going after their own market. After all, the majority of games released on Japanese consoles have been from Japanese publishers--who tend to publish with a Japanese audience in mind--so if Microsoft can get its hands on Western publishers, I wouldn't be surprised if its games were more widely accepted in the West.