(Firefox, Mac) I Cmd-clicked those eBay links to have them open in a background tab. But in addition to opening the new tab in the background, the link hijacked the/. page I was reading and decided to load there as well. How does that work, and how can I prevent it? It's bloody annoying when websites break basic functionality.
You're right. The wording in TFA suggested no repeaters were used, but the Alcatel press release mentions them. So my comment applies more to the NEC effort than this new record.
This is the first time that transoceanic cables can be made that don't need repeaters. The speed is nice, but no repeaters mean that the cable will be a lot cheaper to build and has far fewer parts that can fail. It also won't be enveloped in an electric field that attracts sharks. And finally, it becomes a lot easier to upgrade the cable later: you only need to install new equipment at either end, and don't have to worry about the repeaters being compatible with the new signalling.
The XL1 has a frame made from carbon fibre. You know, the stuff that lets F1 racing drivers survive crashes at 300 km/h with nothing more than bruises. The XL1 also meets European safety standards.
Actually, I think it's second highest bid ceiling plus bid increment. Automatic bid increments continue until only one person can make bids anymore (ie hasn't exceeded his ceiling yet).
Automation is a necessity when you have bidders from all time zones and non-automated bidding requires being awake and at the computer at the end of the bidding period. You also need something to defend against people who bid at T minus 1 second.
Navigation: I have a Volvo V40 that's 10 years old. It has a navigation unit built in. 5 years ago Volvo stopped providing map updates for it. And even if updates were available, its user interface sucks, it's slow and the CD player (it reads the map data from CD) is becoming increasingly unreliable. So yes, I want to be able to upgrade the infotainment, and not be stuck with 10 year-old technology that can't be removed from the car.
What we need is the return of the DIN standard for car stereos, with some additions: 1. a standard video connection to the screen that's usually found at the top the dashboard. 2. a standard protocol and connector so the steering wheel buttons can control the stereo etc.
That works for frequently-used applications. I've got several hundred applications installed, many of which I'll use once or twice a year. I can usually remember that "I have something to solve X", and also that I filed it somewhere in the "audio" folder in my Start menu, but the names of most are long forgotten.
With digital, you get back EXACTLY what you debt, with no degradation. With analog, you can receive a signal even if it can't be received perfectly, because it can receive 0.46 when its not possible to distinguish between 0 and 1.
It's the other way round. With digital, the signal can withstand significant degradation. If noise mangles your 0 to 0.4 and your one to 0.6, you can still distinguish between the two and get back a perfect representation of the input signal. With analog, any noise will degrade the signal irreversibly. A signal of 0.46 plus or minus 0.4 in noise is mangled beyond recognition.
Luckily, the human ear and brain are pretty good at extracting meaning from noisy signals, so even a bad phone connection can still be used to convey some information.
Possibly what you meant is graceful degradation. If the noise grows to more than 0.5, the digital signal abruptly becomes impossible to decipher. An analog channel in these conditions can still be used to convey some information, but at vastly reduced bandwidth. Going back to the bad phone connection, you'll be spending most of your time asking the other party to repeat what they said.
Before the days of affordable accurate clocks [1], the BBC clock [2] kept the country in sync. Accurate timekeeping is vital for radio and TV, so it's no surprise the BBC takes its timekeeping seriously.
1: first, receivers for time signals like DCF77, then NTP
2: in the shape of the time signal on the hour at the start of the radio news, and various clock displays on TV
The infographic in TFA suggests that the two components of the satellite will follow each other at a very short distance. Separation is no more than 24h before impact. You need just enough time that the debris from the impact is out of the way, a couple of seconds would be enough.
Over the past months we've been inundated by "3D printed gun" stories. So much so that a recent poll showed Americans to be (on average) in favor of banning home printing of guns. So congratulation to Cody Wilson and homies, you've succeeded in creating enough noise to make the average American a. aware of your goals, and b. have them oppose you. The people who'd want to regulate 3D printers are beside themselves with evil delight. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
The Netherlands has had a similar scheme ('Chipknip', or chip wallet) since 1996, and is now in the middle of phasing it out. Reasons to cancel it include insufficient popularity (people use their debit card instead) and high costs to convert the current (NL-only) system to European standards. Its popularity wasn't helped by a botched introduction of two competing systems in 1996, which was later followed by a merger. I've used it mainly to pay for parking (parking ticket machines included Chipknip but no debit card facilities). It's convenient, but very insecure (no authentication via PIN or somesuch), so it was only suitable for storing small amounts of money. Still, it virtually eliminated the need to carry cash.
It is fun. I've been using Shapeways to print my designs so I don't need to invest in a printer (and Shapeways has expensive commercial printers that give much better results than a cheap home extruded-PLA printer).
I've been experimenting with 3D printing, and my observations agree with TFA. For starters, 3D CAD is difficult. Designing a 3D object on a 2D screen with 2D controls (mouse) is a lot to get your head wrapped round no matter what. You need to be able to translate between 2D and 3D. Having experience in drawing or creating objects (sculpting, model building, anything) helps.
Second, 3D CAD software is a mess. Simple programs are too simple: you quickly run into the limitations of programs like Sketchup and AutoCAD 123D. Complex programs are expensive and require training, or are free and require more training (Blender). All of them have odd limitations. Try subtracting two shapes from each other. Sounds simple, no? Forget it; it works sometimes, but other subtractions convert your model into a mess of triangular fragments that takes hours to correct. All too often, CAD programs can't create a true arc or circle, but approximate them with lots of straight line segments. This will come back to bite you in the ass later on. There's a whole category of CAD programs that you shouldn't use (surface modelers) because they create lots of problems when preparing the CAD file for 3D printing.
(third) Then there's the software you need to prepare the CAD file for printing. For some reason, 3D printers care about the normal of a surface. Why should that matter? At this stage, you'll find out that your carefully-created CAD drawing is full of problems: holes, degenerate faces, etc. Your preparation software can often fix this, but at the cost of having to learn another language (Meshlab, I'm looking at you). Oh, and those straight line segments? Thanks to those, a simple cone shape consists of 100,000 tiny triangles, and Shapeways has a 10E6 triangle limit, so you have to simplify your model (preferably without sour simplifications becoming visible).
(/rant) When you succeed, there's a big reward. Seeing the 3D drawing you created from scratch come alive as a plastic object is very satisfying. But it is a steep hill to climb.
In my experience, requiring certain books to be read is the quickest way to make people hate them. Or was it just that all of (Dutch) "literature" I was forced to read actually is bloody awful?
They planned for earthquakes and tsunami. What they didn't account for was the size of the 2011 event, which was larger than any in recorded history, as a result the tsunami went right over the sea wall.
The âfire hoseâ(TM) needs to have orders of magnitude more capacity than is needed on average. For this marathon, there were maybe 100,000 people packed into an area that normally sees a few thousand. Letâ(TM)s call it a hundred times more than usual. That means carriers would need to install 100 cell towers in an area currently served by one tower. So the cost to the telco multiplies by 100. And you propose they somehow recover their cost by lowering their prices?
Also, thereâ(TM)s a limited amount of wireless spectrum. Each cell tower canâ(TM)t handle more calls than there are channels available. In your scenario, theyâ(TM)d have to make the coverage area of each tower 100x smaller. Youâ(TM)d end up with a coverage area of maybe 10x10m.
If you read TFA, you'll see that the design process for the F1 was basically to try almost random variations until they found one that worked. These days, we have a much better understanding of what happens in a rocket engine, and much better tools to help with the design of a new engine. So if we did start from scratch, we'd arrive at a working design much sooner. Compare SpaceX' relatively trouble-free entrance into the launcher market with the explosion festival that was NASA's early years.
There's a reason every professional video camera uses a shoulder mount instead these days. The weight may not be as much of an issue now as it was in the U-matic days, but you're still going to get less camera shake when you don't have to balance the camera in one hand.
Slashdot Mirror
GP is referring to this and this.
(Firefox, Mac) I Cmd-clicked those eBay links to have them open in a background tab. But in addition to opening the new tab in the background, the link hijacked the /. page I was reading and decided to load there as well.
How does that work, and how can I prevent it? It's bloody annoying when websites break basic functionality.
You're right. The wording in TFA suggested no repeaters were used, but the Alcatel press release mentions them. So my comment applies more to the NEC effort than this new record.
This is the first time that transoceanic cables can be made that don't need repeaters. The speed is nice, but no repeaters mean that the cable will be a lot cheaper to build and has far fewer parts that can fail. It also won't be enveloped in an electric field that attracts sharks. And finally, it becomes a lot easier to upgrade the cable later: you only need to install new equipment at either end, and don't have to worry about the repeaters being compatible with the new signalling.
it has to hit the around the 22nd of the month and make landfall close to 8pm
That would be valid only for this month, as the tides don't follow a monthly cycle but a ~ 28-day cycle.
The XL1 has a frame made from carbon fibre. You know, the stuff that lets F1 racing drivers survive crashes at 300 km/h with nothing more than bruises. The XL1 also meets European safety standards.
second lowest bid ceiling plus bid increment
Actually, I think it's second highest bid ceiling plus bid increment. Automatic bid increments continue until only one person can make bids anymore (ie hasn't exceeded his ceiling yet).
Automation is a necessity when you have bidders from all time zones and non-automated bidding requires being awake and at the computer at the end of the bidding period. You also need something to defend against people who bid at T minus 1 second.
Navigation: I have a Volvo V40 that's 10 years old. It has a navigation unit built in. 5 years ago Volvo stopped providing map updates for it. And even if updates were available, its user interface sucks, it's slow and the CD player (it reads the map data from CD) is becoming increasingly unreliable. So yes, I want to be able to upgrade the infotainment, and not be stuck with 10 year-old technology that can't be removed from the car.
What we need is the return of the DIN standard for car stereos, with some additions:
1. a standard video connection to the screen that's usually found at the top the dashboard.
2. a standard protocol and connector so the steering wheel buttons can control the stereo etc.
see Johnny Cash's take on the consequences...
That works for frequently-used applications. I've got several hundred applications installed, many of which I'll use once or twice a year. I can usually remember that "I have something to solve X", and also that I filed it somewhere in the "audio" folder in my Start menu, but the names of most are long forgotten.
Government Attic is offline. Any chance of a mirror?
With digital, you get back EXACTLY what you debt, with no degradation. With analog, you can receive a signal even if it can't be received perfectly, because it can receive 0.46 when its not possible to distinguish between 0 and 1.
It's the other way round. With digital, the signal can withstand significant degradation. If noise mangles your 0 to 0.4 and your one to 0.6, you can still distinguish between the two and get back a perfect representation of the input signal. With analog, any noise will degrade the signal irreversibly. A signal of 0.46 plus or minus 0.4 in noise is mangled beyond recognition.
Luckily, the human ear and brain are pretty good at extracting meaning from noisy signals, so even a bad phone connection can still be used to convey some information.
Possibly what you meant is graceful degradation. If the noise grows to more than 0.5, the digital signal abruptly becomes impossible to decipher. An analog channel in these conditions can still be used to convey some information, but at vastly reduced bandwidth. Going back to the bad phone connection, you'll be spending most of your time asking the other party to repeat what they said.
Before the days of affordable accurate clocks [1], the BBC clock [2] kept the country in sync. Accurate timekeeping is vital for radio and TV, so it's no surprise the BBC takes its timekeeping seriously.
1: first, receivers for time signals like DCF77, then NTP
2: in the shape of the time signal on the hour at the start of the radio news, and various clock displays on TV
The infographic in TFA suggests that the two components of the satellite will follow each other at a very short distance. Separation is no more than 24h before impact. You need just enough time that the debris from the impact is out of the way, a couple of seconds would be enough.
Over the past months we've been inundated by "3D printed gun" stories. So much so that a recent poll showed Americans to be (on average) in favor of banning home printing of guns. So congratulation to Cody Wilson and homies, you've succeeded in creating enough noise to make the average American a. aware of your goals, and b. have them oppose you.
The people who'd want to regulate 3D printers are beside themselves with evil delight. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
Interesting idea. How come this is the first time I've heard about it on /.?
The Netherlands has had a similar scheme ('Chipknip', or chip wallet) since 1996, and is now in the middle of phasing it out. Reasons to cancel it include insufficient popularity (people use their debit card instead) and high costs to convert the current (NL-only) system to European standards. Its popularity wasn't helped by a botched introduction of two competing systems in 1996, which was later followed by a merger.
I've used it mainly to pay for parking (parking ticket machines included Chipknip but no debit card facilities). It's convenient, but very insecure (no authentication via PIN or somesuch), so it was only suitable for storing small amounts of money. Still, it virtually eliminated the need to carry cash.
$1000 would get you a pretty big box from Shapeways, even in stainless steel at current prices a BOE calculation gives me a 30x15 cm box.
It is fun. I've been using Shapeways to print my designs so I don't need to invest in a printer (and Shapeways has expensive commercial printers that give much better results than a cheap home extruded-PLA printer).
I've been experimenting with 3D printing, and my observations agree with TFA.
For starters, 3D CAD is difficult. Designing a 3D object on a 2D screen with 2D controls (mouse) is a lot to get your head wrapped round no matter what. You need to be able to translate between 2D and 3D. Having experience in drawing or creating objects (sculpting, model building, anything) helps.
Second, 3D CAD software is a mess. Simple programs are too simple: you quickly run into the limitations of programs like Sketchup and AutoCAD 123D. Complex programs are expensive and require training, or are free and require more training (Blender).
All of them have odd limitations. Try subtracting two shapes from each other. Sounds simple, no? Forget it; it works sometimes, but other subtractions convert your model into a mess of triangular fragments that takes hours to correct.
All too often, CAD programs can't create a true arc or circle, but approximate them with lots of straight line segments. This will come back to bite you in the ass later on.
There's a whole category of CAD programs that you shouldn't use (surface modelers) because they create lots of problems when preparing the CAD file for 3D printing.
(third) Then there's the software you need to prepare the CAD file for printing. For some reason, 3D printers care about the normal of a surface. Why should that matter?
At this stage, you'll find out that your carefully-created CAD drawing is full of problems: holes, degenerate faces, etc. Your preparation software can often fix this, but at the cost of having to learn another language (Meshlab, I'm looking at you).
Oh, and those straight line segments? Thanks to those, a simple cone shape consists of 100,000 tiny triangles, and Shapeways has a 10E6 triangle limit, so you have to simplify your model (preferably without sour simplifications becoming visible).
(/rant)
When you succeed, there's a big reward. Seeing the 3D drawing you created from scratch come alive as a plastic object is very satisfying. But it is a steep hill to climb.
In my experience, requiring certain books to be read is the quickest way to make people hate them. Or was it just that all of (Dutch) "literature" I was forced to read actually is bloody awful?
They planned for earthquakes and tsunami. What they didn't account for was the size of the 2011 event, which was larger than any in recorded history, as a result the tsunami went right over the sea wall.
The âfire hoseâ(TM) needs to have orders of magnitude more capacity than is needed on average. For this marathon, there were maybe 100,000 people packed into an area that normally sees a few thousand. Letâ(TM)s call it a hundred times more than usual. That means carriers would need to install 100 cell towers in an area currently served by one tower. So the cost to the telco multiplies by 100. And you propose they somehow recover their cost by lowering their prices?
Also, thereâ(TM)s a limited amount of wireless spectrum. Each cell tower canâ(TM)t handle more calls than there are channels available. In your scenario, theyâ(TM)d have to make the coverage area of each tower 100x smaller. Youâ(TM)d end up with a coverage area of maybe 10x10m.
If you read TFA, you'll see that the design process for the F1 was basically to try almost random variations until they found one that worked. These days, we have a much better understanding of what happens in a rocket engine, and much better tools to help with the design of a new engine. So if we did start from scratch, we'd arrive at a working design much sooner. Compare SpaceX' relatively trouble-free entrance into the launcher market with the explosion festival that was NASA's early years.
There's a reason every professional video camera uses a shoulder mount instead these days. The weight may not be as much of an issue now as it was in the U-matic days, but you're still going to get less camera shake when you don't have to balance the camera in one hand.