This week the BBC had a one-hour special on Curiosity. Despite entirely too much focus on "ZOMG the landing sequence is soo complicated" (*) it's worth watching (**) as it gives an overview of the whole project.
*: Deplorably, even Horizon has fallen prey to the same decline we've seen on the Discover and NatGeo channels, where documentaries are poisoned with faux suspense at the expense of information. In this case, Horizon forgets to mention WHY the landing sequence is so complicated.
**: finding the torrent is left as an exercise for the reader.
A random Google result for Concorde has the following: Fuel Consumption (at Idle Power) 1100 kgs/hr (302 Gallons/hr) Fuel Consumption (at Full Power) 10500 kgs/hr (2885 Gallons/hr) Fuel Consumption (at Full Re-heated power) 22500 kgs/hr (6180 Gallons/hr)
I can buy the '2 tons' figure if it includes takeoff (which is done with reheat). Otherwise, you'd have to taxi around for at least an hour to burn 2 tons of fuel.
Apple changed the iPod dock connector somewhere around the fifth generation iPod, so my old dock accessories won't work with new iPods. I haven't seen adapters to solve this.
In my experience, magnetic tape will start to stick together if you don't use it for a long time. I once tried playing back an open-reel tape that had been lying around for 10 years. Even a Studer PR99 (with 3 drive motors at several hundred W each) had trouble peeling the tape from the reel, and afterwards I had to clean the machine as the tape had dumped half of its magnetic layer as dust.
Same thing with audio cassettes, my deck has trouble fast-forwarding those and can't keep the tape at nominal speed when playing back.
The Reveal Codes function seemed great, because in WP you really needed it. Every now and then WP would mess up the formatting codes and you'd need to delve in and fix them manually. Of course you could also use Reveal Codes to make an even bigger mess.
Word is full of half-finished features and kludges (like allowing text formatting to happen outside paragraph/character styles) that can't be fixed by adding a Reveal Codes function.
What Word needs is to be replaced with something like FrameMaker, where some actual thought has gone into making features work consistently and predictably. Not with a throwback to the '80s.
Today's astronauts need to be (and generally are) scientists rather than (test) pilots. Space missions consist of very little piloting and lots of science, which is exactly how it should be. Test pilots test stuff in order that later on, their experience can be translated into something useful. Like doing scientific experiments.
WhiteKnightTwo can put 225 kg into orbit according to TFA. It may be able to carry the X-37B, but not the X-37B plus the giant booster it needs to get into orbit.
From my (totally unscientific) observation, most of the page load time is due to every page requesting crap from 10 different ad networks and trackers, which are inevitably overloaded. You can optimize the pages you serve all you want, but this may be a case where developers need to adjust the attitude of the commercial people involved instead.
Dedicated roadways! You know, like the ones trains run on, sans rails. So, not all that different after all (light rail actually wins out on this one, thanks to the ability to actually attach the vehicle to the infrastructure...)
Actually, the bus only needs dedicated roadways for high-speed sections. It can merge into normal traffic (or existing bus lanes) in cities. Part of the concept is that the bus has no fixed route. This is impossible with a rail vehicle.
As for attaching the vehicle to the infrastructure: not really. A train is constrained in only one dimension, by flanges that are a couple of cm high. A roadway with guard rails on either side offers more protection.
The Superbus is a concept that might work in areas where a high-speed train is uneconomical.
It only throws away images, not the layout tree. You only have the wait for JPEGs/PNGs to be unpacked into RAM.
All too often, the image is what I'm after. Webcomics, other image sites where I'll ctrl-click a dozen links that I expect to be loaded in the background and be ready for viewing without further delay. Instead I get the layout tree, including all of the damn ads, and I still have to wait for the part of the page I want. I'll go fiddle with the about:config settings to see if that'll improve things.
As I see it, the biggest complaints about memory usage seem to be coming from a demographic of people who aren't using their system in a resource-friendly manner.
People should not need to do that. Quit trying to force me to adapt to the machine instead of the other way round. This isn't a Sinclair Spectrum, it should be able to handle 40 tabs without crashing or filling up all my RAM.
The recent improvements in FF memory usage have some severe drawbacks. FF will throw away images in background tabs, and reload them when you switch to the tab. But the reason I load new pages in background tabs is that I don't want to wait for the page to load and be rendered.
It gets worse when you quit FF, and then reopen the app and have it reload your last session. It will create the tabs, but it won't load the page until you activate the tab. Now this is something I'd be willing to tolerate for tabs that have been open for a few weeks. But not for tabs that I've created recently and/or activate frequently.
I also notice that FF memory usage steadily increases over a couple of days, while the number of tabs remains roughly constant.
In other words, they have reduced the memory footprint not by tackling whatever process is hoarding memory like Scrat stacking acorns in his giant hollow tree, but by throwing away items that use memory but are otherwise static (images).
Mozilla jumped the shark when they replaced started taking design decisions away from programmers and putting them in the hands of "user experience designers" who are nothing more than glorified fashion designers.
I agree that the Firefox UI has degraded. However, if you think UI design should be in the hands of programmers, you are sorely mistaken. Putting everything into About:config instead of a preferences dialog is just the kind of design decision a programmer would make. Most programmers have a hard time relating to ordinary users.
So yes, you need user interface designers. Proper ones, whose design decisions are based on observation of actual users. People like Bruce Tognazzini. That the term 'user interface designers' has been polluted by graphic designers that are overly susceptible to fashion and other nonsense is a problem, but one that cannot be solved by giving the programmers control over the interface.
There is one web app that I'd like to see replaced with a local application: video. You know, way back when, websites would just put a hyperlink to an.avi, you'd click on it and it'd open in VLC. Today, you get a bloody Flash video that stutters on my 3 year-old computer, won't allow me to seek or fast-forward properly, won't allow me to change the aspect ratio, won't do a million things that were easy in VLC. Video on the Web is back in the stone age thanks to web apps.
After a while, I have lots of applications and windows open. Shutting down destroys all that. The time it takes to reopen them all is bad enough, but the open documents also serve as a reminder of what I was doing. I find it takes me a lot longer to get going in the morning if I have to set up my environment first.
ObTFA: I recently got the 'restart to complete this update' on my Windows 7 computer. Being in the middle of something, I selected 'remind me in 4 hours', then hibernated after 3.5h. Imagine my surprise when the next morning immediately after powering up, the computer proceeded to shut down with no indication of what was happening and why. 25+ years of Windows, and they still can't get simple things like this right.
I send and receive small packages to/from the UK occasionally, and the failure rate has been atrocious. Something like 50% never arrives.
I use registered mail by default now, even though the price of the mail service exceeds the value of the package. At least that way I can file a complaint (and receive some compensation) when the mail doesn't arrive.
No, no, NO! This is stupid. We do this for exactly 0 other professions. French doctors are called Docteur only by the French, Russian ship captains are called Kapitan only by the Russians, Chinese spacefarers should bloody well be called taÃkonaute by the Chinese only.
I was hoping Apple finally found a way towards resolution independence, but it seems they just doubled the resolution in both dimensions to avoid that issue.
Slashdot Mirror
This week the BBC had a one-hour special on Curiosity. Despite entirely too much focus on "ZOMG the landing sequence is soo complicated" (*) it's worth watching (**) as it gives an overview of the whole project.
*: Deplorably, even Horizon has fallen prey to the same decline we've seen on the Discover and NatGeo channels, where documentaries are poisoned with faux suspense at the expense of information. In this case, Horizon forgets to mention WHY the landing sequence is so complicated.
**: finding the torrent is left as an exercise for the reader.
CW won't fuck up the aspect ratio, unlike the Youtube video linked in TFA.
A random Google result for Concorde has the following:
Fuel Consumption (at Idle Power) 1100 kgs/hr (302 Gallons/hr)
Fuel Consumption (at Full Power) 10500 kgs/hr (2885 Gallons/hr)
Fuel Consumption (at Full Re-heated power) 22500 kgs/hr (6180 Gallons/hr)
I can buy the '2 tons' figure if it includes takeoff (which is done with reheat). Otherwise, you'd have to taxi around for at least an hour to burn 2 tons of fuel.
Apple changed the iPod dock connector somewhere around the fifth generation iPod, so my old dock accessories won't work with new iPods. I haven't seen adapters to solve this.
case in point: the first thing I thought of when reading TFA, was the bloodthirsty license agreement which was written around 1985.
In my experience, magnetic tape will start to stick together if you don't use it for a long time. I once tried playing back an open-reel tape that had been lying around for 10 years. Even a Studer PR99 (with 3 drive motors at several hundred W each) had trouble peeling the tape from the reel, and afterwards I had to clean the machine as the tape had dumped half of its magnetic layer as dust.
Same thing with audio cassettes, my deck has trouble fast-forwarding those and can't keep the tape at nominal speed when playing back.
The Reveal Codes function seemed great, because in WP you really needed it. Every now and then WP would mess up the formatting codes and you'd need to delve in and fix them manually. Of course you could also use Reveal Codes to make an even bigger mess.
Word is full of half-finished features and kludges (like allowing text formatting to happen outside paragraph/character styles) that can't be fixed by adding a Reveal Codes function.
What Word needs is to be replaced with something like FrameMaker, where some actual thought has gone into making features work consistently and predictably. Not with a throwback to the '80s.
Today's astronauts need to be (and generally are) scientists rather than (test) pilots. Space missions consist of very little piloting and lots of science, which is exactly how it should be. Test pilots test stuff in order that later on, their experience can be translated into something useful. Like doing scientific experiments.
WhiteKnightTwo can put 225 kg into orbit according to TFA. It may be able to carry the X-37B, but not the X-37B plus the giant booster it needs to get into orbit.
From my (totally unscientific) observation, most of the page load time is due to every page requesting crap from 10 different ad networks and trackers, which are inevitably overloaded. You can optimize the pages you serve all you want, but this may be a case where developers need to adjust the attitude of the commercial people involved instead.
Dedicated roadways! You know, like the ones trains run on, sans rails. So, not all that different after all (light rail actually wins out on this one, thanks to the ability to actually attach the vehicle to the infrastructure...)
Actually, the bus only needs dedicated roadways for high-speed sections. It can merge into normal traffic (or existing bus lanes) in cities.
Part of the concept is that the bus has no fixed route. This is impossible with a rail vehicle.
As for attaching the vehicle to the infrastructure: not really. A train is constrained in only one dimension, by flanges that are a couple of cm high. A roadway with guard rails on either side offers more protection.
The Superbus is a concept that might work in areas where a high-speed train is uneconomical.
It only throws away images, not the layout tree. You only have the wait for JPEGs/PNGs to be unpacked into RAM.
All too often, the image is what I'm after. Webcomics, other image sites where I'll ctrl-click a dozen links that I expect to be loaded in the background and be ready for viewing without further delay. Instead I get the layout tree, including all of the damn ads, and I still have to wait for the part of the page I want.
I'll go fiddle with the about:config settings to see if that'll improve things.
As I see it, the biggest complaints about memory usage seem to be coming from a demographic of people who aren't using their system in a resource-friendly manner.
People should not need to do that. Quit trying to force me to adapt to the machine instead of the other way round. This isn't a Sinclair Spectrum, it should be able to handle 40 tabs without crashing or filling up all my RAM.
The recent improvements in FF memory usage have some severe drawbacks. FF will throw away images in background tabs, and reload them when you switch to the tab. But the reason I load new pages in background tabs is that I don't want to wait for the page to load and be rendered.
It gets worse when you quit FF, and then reopen the app and have it reload your last session. It will create the tabs, but it won't load the page until you activate the tab. Now this is something I'd be willing to tolerate for tabs that have been open for a few weeks. But not for tabs that I've created recently and/or activate frequently.
I also notice that FF memory usage steadily increases over a couple of days, while the number of tabs remains roughly constant.
In other words, they have reduced the memory footprint not by tackling whatever process is hoarding memory like Scrat stacking acorns in his giant hollow tree, but by throwing away items that use memory but are otherwise static (images).
Mozilla jumped the shark when they replaced started taking design decisions away from programmers and putting them in the hands of "user experience designers" who are nothing more than glorified fashion designers.
I agree that the Firefox UI has degraded. However, if you think UI design should be in the hands of programmers, you are sorely mistaken. Putting everything into About:config instead of a preferences dialog is just the kind of design decision a programmer would make. Most programmers have a hard time relating to ordinary users.
So yes, you need user interface designers. Proper ones, whose design decisions are based on observation of actual users. People like Bruce Tognazzini. That the term 'user interface designers' has been polluted by graphic designers that are overly susceptible to fashion and other nonsense is a problem, but one that cannot be solved by giving the programmers control over the interface.
There is one web app that I'd like to see replaced with a local application: video. You know, way back when, websites would just put a hyperlink to an .avi, you'd click on it and it'd open in VLC.
Today, you get a bloody Flash video that stutters on my 3 year-old computer, won't allow me to seek or fast-forward properly, won't allow me to change the aspect ratio, won't do a million things that were easy in VLC. Video on the Web is back in the stone age thanks to web apps.
How about the next step up from HTML/CSS?
Notepad++ with the XMLtools plugin is a decent IDE for XML/XSLT work, and can be run from a thumbdrive without installation.
For FO, you need an output processor (FOP), I haven't found a portable output processor yet.
a use for 216-pin Harting connectors in my living room.
After a while, I have lots of applications and windows open. Shutting down destroys all that.
The time it takes to reopen them all is bad enough, but the open documents also serve as a reminder of what I was doing. I find it takes me a lot longer to get going in the morning if I have to set up my environment first.
ObTFA: I recently got the 'restart to complete this update' on my Windows 7 computer. Being in the middle of something, I selected 'remind me in 4 hours', then hibernated after 3.5h. Imagine my surprise when the next morning immediately after powering up, the computer proceeded to shut down with no indication of what was happening and why. 25+ years of Windows, and they still can't get simple things like this right.
I send and receive small packages to/from the UK occasionally, and the failure rate has been atrocious. Something like 50% never arrives.
I use registered mail by default now, even though the price of the mail service exceeds the value of the package. At least that way I can file a complaint (and receive some compensation) when the mail doesn't arrive.
No, no, NO! This is stupid. We do this for exactly 0 other professions. French doctors are called Docteur only by the French, Russian ship captains are called Kapitan only by the Russians, Chinese spacefarers should bloody well be called taÃkonaute by the Chinese only.
My first introduction to the concept of mercury delay lines was Cryptonomicon. Fun to see an actual computer that used these.
I was hoping Apple finally found a way towards resolution independence, but it seems they just doubled the resolution in both dimensions to avoid that issue.
As I said, "for one". No contradiction.
If you only use Office, then yes. In my case, Office is just one of 20 apps I need on a regular basis. None of them are available for Android.