Hey thanks for the info & link. The extended recording time is what I would like a lot since in the end carrying fewer tapes or discs is what makes a difference in the total portable volume of player/discs. I'm still not so convinced about the size; Sony MZE900: 77.7 x 12.7 x 71.0 mm, my Sony Walkman which is really not the smallest Sony Walkman I've ever owned or seen: 72 x 100 x 20 mm. Okay so it's bigger but not all that much. I'd say that the smallest Sony which I had a few years back was less than 15 mm deep.
like I said, for portables MDs do offer some advantages over cassettes like size and quality and instant track jumping. The edge MD has over cassettes in the areas mentioned areen't very large IMO and don't justify the higher price for me. I guess that for you it does and that's cool with me. btw. I don't recall seeing MD players that were smaller than the smallest walkmen I've seen/owned. Could be that I'm just not up to date on the latest portable MD players.
definitely not "huge" in the Netherlands. I see some people using MD walkmans sometimes but I really wouldn't say they are "huge" here.
For me the advantage they offer on terms of sound quality/ease of use over cassetes is just not large enough to justify the higher price. I don't really see the point of the minidisc anyway:
For walkmen they compete with cassettes (I don't like portable cd players (I've got one but I don't really use it as a portable)):
They are smaller although not all that much than cassettes, they offer a little better sound (though not cd quality) and it's walkman anyhow so the sound quality is always gonna been somewhat limited due to earphones / surrounding noise etc. OK, you don't have to rewind a mindisc but my Sony cassette walkman has some track search feature and it doesn't take that long for it to wind/rewind to the next track. For home audio systems they just don't make that much sense when compared to cds especially since nowadays you can get cd audio recorders too. MDs have inferior audio quality and shorter recording span and for home systems there no real size advantage...
I would like them if they could have a longer play ie. recording time. That way I can have a lot more songs on one disc and don't have to carry all these discs/tapes/cds around. A 1/4 cd size disc with 100 or so mp3s would be nice I guess.
Yeah, it's basically about solving partial differential equations defined over large areas. Finite element method is basically a method for solving PDEs. All the following areas use numerical methods for solving the PDEs and thus benefit from cheaper faster computers.
Aerodynamics
Fluid Mechanics
Oceanography
Meteorology
Stress Analysis
Well, that's the ones I know about but there must be a lot more. And not just scientists use these, there must be thousands of engineers working in these fields daily.
uhh, I'm an engineer and do numerical stuff that does require a lot of processing power. Thanks to cheaper faster pcs we can now do stuff that would have been really expensive before. I'm sure there's a lot of engineers like me besides the scientists already mentioned. Granted that I also sometimes wonder what someone needs a dual GHz system for to run excel.
It's a little weird to me: Governments have been able to intercept and read individual's mail for ages and noone has really cared. Now that email is here people are suddenly becoming paranoid. I understand that it might be easier to filter/search email en-masse etc. but that doesn't mean that some of the paranoia is hyped imo.
come on, that's really not a description of what civilization is about. Things like individual freedom may be a part of our modern civilization but they are definitely not essential to civilization. Civilization can take many forms, look at history, there have been so many civilizations and a lot of them had different social structures in which individual freedom may have played a small or large role.
I think what you may have been thinking off is the difference between a primitive or tribal society in which the distinction between the individual and the group is vague and a more advanced or "civilized" society in which there is more distinction between the group and the individual.
Just because a society/civilization recognizes the difference between individual and group does not mean it values individual freedom.
I've suffered from RSI in the past but I'm doing OK now.
According to my physiotherapist the problem with computer work is that far too long is spent in the same position making the same repetitive motions. Acoording to that theory it would actually be more damaging to keep hands at the kb the whole time.
I also don't like to move my hands between the keyboard and mouse and kind of feel it as straining to the muscles if I do it a lot. Maybe the repetitive back and forth movement from keyboard to mouse is what is very damaging.
What I find helpful is to get up and walk around and stretch my muscles regularly.
1. The climate is not dependant on the weather, it's more like the reverse, the weather is dependant on the climate. When you go to a certain place the climate of that place will tell you what kind of weather to expect.
2. Chaos theory - I've seen it mentioned here a lot but I haven't seen any understanding on it beyond the popular "butterfly flapping" part. It's not about infinite variables, Chaos theory is about solving large systems of differential equations where a small error in the initial conditions can lead towards large errors in the solution. So it's not about anything physical , it's more about instability of the process itself.
I couldn't believe it when the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering set up this site, it's ridiculous IMO since all the other faculties of my university use something that ends in tudelft.nl .
I remeber that philips came out with a cd version of the double cassette-deck (player and burner in one machine) shortly after they sold polygram. Whether that was a coincidence or not I do not know. I don't expect too many bad things from philips since they're not a media company anymore (unlike Sony)
as far as my experience goes the heat output of the cpu varies with it's load. At the office we've got a machine with a thermal sensor on it's cpu. The temperature definitely goes up when doing cpu intensive stuff like solving large systems of equations etc.
You've got a point though you're not right on everything.
Power = energy/time.
therefore: energy = Power * time.
1 Watt is equal to 1 Joule/second.
Joule is the unit for energy, this is the same as a watt-second as you call it.
A watt/hour unit is an energy (energy/time * time) unit because power companies charge for the total amount of energy, not for fluctuating power. Power companies are appropriately named so because they provide power, consumers decide how much power they use. Measuring a powerplants capacity by it's power-generation ability is correct because in theory every powerplant could deliver infinite amounts of energy given infinite time.
In the end to calculate the energy (which you correctly did) you need to multiply the power by time. If lightning lasts for 70 microseconds it generates 5000 * 10^9 * 70*10^-5 = 3.5 * 10^9 Joules. (A Watt-Second is equal to a Joule).
Anyway, this is about the same amount of energy required to lift a 100 ton airplane 3.5 km into the sky. (ignoring friction and engine innefficiency etc.)
yeah, you're right. Still seems like an awful lot though, considering that that is 5000 GigaWatts. Most powerplants produce power in the MegaWatt range IIRC.
that's 5*10^9 Volts * 10^4 Amps = 5*10^13 Watts ? Or 50,000 Gigawatts (for those thinking in Back to the future units). 5*10^13 Watts seems way to much to get out of a lightning bolt.
It's not difficult to make a good OS when you have tons of cash. Think about this:
Bill Gates out of his private fortune could hire a team of 100 the best of the best programmers for say something like 5 years, pay them $1 million a year each. they could start an OS from scratch and build the best OS ever. It would only cost Bill Gates $500 million which is about.8% of his personal fortune. He just could do it you know ?
What is bad about MS is not always (though often) their technology but their aims. For them it's all about making as much cash as they can and making a decent OS is second to that motive. Consumers are getting sick of having to pay tons of cash for each version/updgrade/patch whatever. When you're a business what you want out of software is workability and not to pay MS for each upgrade that you will hope that will finally solve your network problems.
This is why at my company we're moving to Linux; we think it's a bad tradeoff that MS is offering and Linux coincides with our needs better.
I remember that Intel used to have some sort of performance indicator called "iComp" or something like that. Haven't seen it in a while. What they did was actually sort of good although at the time I think they used it to show that a Pentium 75 was actually a lot faster than a 486DX2 66 than the MHz rating would make one think.
the reason they don't sell on speed is because there are speed limits and not many drivers can handle a car that goes 400 km/h.
On BMWs and Mercs the numbers usually indicate the volume of the engine ie. BMW 325 has 2.5 litres, 540 has 4.0 litres, Mercedes e320 has 3.2 litres etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey thanks for the info & link. The extended recording time is what I would like a lot since in the end carrying fewer tapes or discs is what makes a difference in the total portable volume of player/discs. I'm still not so convinced about the size; Sony MZE900: 77.7 x 12.7 x 71.0 mm, my Sony Walkman which is really not the smallest Sony Walkman I've ever owned or seen: 72 x 100 x 20 mm. Okay so it's bigger but not all that much. I'd say that the smallest Sony which I had a few years back was less than 15 mm deep.
a little bit like what IBM has in mind with Linux?
like I said, for portables MDs do offer some advantages over cassettes like size and quality and instant track jumping. The edge MD has over cassettes in the areas mentioned areen't very large IMO and don't justify the higher price for me. I guess that for you it does and that's cool with me. btw. I don't recall seeing MD players that were smaller than the smallest walkmen I've seen/owned. Could be that I'm just not up to date on the latest portable MD players.
definitely not "huge" in the Netherlands. I see some people using MD walkmans sometimes but I really wouldn't say they are "huge" here.
For me the advantage they offer on terms of sound quality/ease of use over cassetes is just not large enough to justify the higher price. I don't really see the point of the minidisc anyway:
For walkmen they compete with cassettes (I don't like portable cd players (I've got one but I don't really use it as a portable)):
They are smaller although not all that much than cassettes, they offer a little better sound (though not cd quality) and it's walkman anyhow so the sound quality is always gonna been somewhat limited due to earphones / surrounding noise etc. OK, you don't have to rewind a mindisc but my Sony cassette walkman has some track search feature and it doesn't take that long for it to wind/rewind to the next track. For home audio systems they just don't make that much sense when compared to cds especially since nowadays you can get cd audio recorders too. MDs have inferior audio quality and shorter recording span and for home systems there no real size advantage...
I would like them if they could have a longer play ie. recording time. That way I can have a lot more songs on one disc and don't have to carry all these discs/tapes/cds around. A 1/4 cd size disc with 100 or so mp3s would be nice I guess.
Yeah, it's basically about solving partial differential equations defined over large areas. Finite element method is basically a method for solving PDEs. All the following areas use numerical methods for solving the PDEs and thus benefit from cheaper faster computers.
Aerodynamics
Fluid Mechanics
Oceanography
Meteorology
Stress Analysis
Well, that's the ones I know about but there must be a lot more. And not just scientists use these, there must be thousands of engineers working in these fields daily.
uhh, I'm an engineer and do numerical stuff that does require a lot of processing power. Thanks to cheaper faster pcs we can now do stuff that would have been really expensive before. I'm sure there's a lot of engineers like me besides the scientists already mentioned.
Granted that I also sometimes wonder what someone needs a dual GHz system for to run excel.
it's sleeping
ah, ok like that, I didn't realize that. Thanks for explaining...
so do you encrypt your regular mail as well ?
It's a little weird to me: Governments have been able to intercept and read individual's mail for ages and noone has really cared. Now that email is here people are suddenly becoming paranoid. I understand that it might be easier to filter/search email en-masse etc. but that doesn't mean that some of the paranoia is hyped imo.
come on, that's really not a description of what civilization is about. Things like individual freedom may be a part of our modern civilization but they are definitely not essential to civilization. Civilization can take many forms, look at history, there have been so many civilizations and a lot of them had different social structures in which individual freedom may have played a small or large role.
I think what you may have been thinking off is the difference between a primitive or tribal society in which the distinction between the individual and the group is vague and a more advanced or "civilized" society in which there is more distinction between the group and the individual.
Just because a society/civilization recognizes the difference between individual and group does not mean it values individual freedom.
I've suffered from RSI in the past but I'm doing OK now.
According to my physiotherapist the problem with computer work is that far too long is spent in the same position making the same repetitive motions. Acoording to that theory it would actually be more damaging to keep hands at the kb the whole time.
I also don't like to move my hands between the keyboard and mouse and kind of feel it as straining to the muscles if I do it a lot. Maybe the repetitive back and forth movement from keyboard to mouse is what is very damaging.
What I find helpful is to get up and walk around and stretch my muscles regularly.
1. The climate is not dependant on the weather, it's more like the reverse, the weather is dependant on the climate. When you go to a certain place the climate of that place will tell you what kind of weather to expect.
2. Chaos theory - I've seen it mentioned here a lot but I haven't seen any understanding on it beyond the popular "butterfly flapping" part. It's not about infinite variables, Chaos theory is about solving large systems of differential equations where a small error in the initial conditions can lead towards large errors in the solution. So it's not about anything physical , it's more about instability of the process itself.
I couldn't believe it when the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering set up this site, it's ridiculous IMO since all the other faculties of my university use something that ends in tudelft.nl .
I remeber that philips came out with a cd version of the double cassette-deck (player and burner in one machine) shortly after they sold polygram. Whether that was a coincidence or not I do not know. I don't expect too many bad things from philips since they're not a media company anymore (unlike Sony)
that's pretty funny...
as far as my experience goes the heat output of the cpu varies with it's load. At the office we've got a machine with a thermal sensor on it's cpu. The temperature definitely goes up when doing cpu intensive stuff like solving large systems of equations etc.
Everything and everyone already has numbers linked to it/him/her. It's been going on for a while too.
I spent most of my time playing with Legos together with my brother or friends. I think I had more fun playing together than playing on my own.
hey man, you stole my account. Did you really have to make it public in a place like /. ?
You've got a point though you're not right on everything.
Power = energy/time.
therefore: energy = Power * time.
1 Watt is equal to 1 Joule/second.
Joule is the unit for energy, this is the same as a watt-second as you call it.
A watt/hour unit is an energy (energy/time * time) unit because power companies charge for the total amount of energy, not for fluctuating power. Power companies are appropriately named so because they provide power, consumers decide how much power they use. Measuring a powerplants capacity by it's power-generation ability is correct because in theory every powerplant could deliver infinite amounts of energy given infinite time.
In the end to calculate the energy (which you correctly did) you need to multiply the power by time. If lightning lasts for 70 microseconds it generates 5000 * 10^9 * 70*10^-5 = 3.5 * 10^9 Joules. (A Watt-Second is equal to a Joule).
Anyway, this is about the same amount of energy required to lift a 100 ton airplane 3.5 km into the sky. (ignoring friction and engine innefficiency etc.)
yeah, you're right. Still seems like an awful lot though, considering that that is 5000 GigaWatts. Most powerplants produce power in the MegaWatt range IIRC.
that's 5*10^9 Volts * 10^4 Amps = 5*10^13 Watts ?
Or 50,000 Gigawatts (for those thinking in Back to the future units). 5*10^13 Watts seems way to much to get out of a lightning bolt.
It's not difficult to make a good OS when you have tons of cash. Think about this: .8% of his personal fortune. He just could do it you know ?
Bill Gates out of his private fortune could hire a team of 100 the best of the best programmers for say something like 5 years, pay them $1 million a year each. they could start an OS from scratch and build the best OS ever. It would only cost Bill Gates $500 million which is about
What is bad about MS is not always (though often) their technology but their aims. For them it's all about making as much cash as they can and making a decent OS is second to that motive. Consumers are getting sick of having to pay tons of cash for each version/updgrade/patch whatever. When you're a business what you want out of software is workability and not to pay MS for each upgrade that you will hope that will finally solve your network problems.
This is why at my company we're moving to Linux; we think it's a bad tradeoff that MS is offering and Linux coincides with our needs better.
I remember that Intel used to have some sort of performance indicator called "iComp" or something like that. Haven't seen it in a while. What they did was actually sort of good although at the time I think they used it to show that a Pentium 75 was actually a lot faster than a 486DX2 66 than the MHz rating would make one think.
the reason they don't sell on speed is because there are speed limits and not many drivers can handle a car that goes 400 km/h.
On BMWs and Mercs the numbers usually indicate the volume of the engine ie. BMW 325 has 2.5 litres, 540 has 4.0 litres, Mercedes e320 has 3.2 litres etc.