There are two types of users: casual users and power users. Catering to one group currently often means frustrating the other, but computers are flexible enough that this needn't be the case. Power users may not be the majority of your audience, but if you can cater to them by offering an alternative interface, why not? The power users are potentially powerful advocates for your app, much more so than the casual users.
To take the Ribbon as an example: Make the damn thing default but provide the classic menus and (customizable) toolbars as an option.
What makes you think that SpaceX aren't being careful? The all-up test is only the last testing step; it's preceded by the usual unit tests. In fact SpaceX are being more careful than most; they've designed the Falcon 9 so that they can assemble the first stage, do a test fire and then launch that same first stage. I don't remember NASA doing such full-scale test runs on the Shuttle, for example.
You'd need a significant length of straight track to accomplish the transfer. In corners, the different corner radii mean that you'd need to increase the distance between the train cars on the outside of the bend to make sure the cars stay lined up.
It'd be much simpler to link up the trains front-to-back. The Dutch ICM shows a practical design to do this. The ICM is only linked at standstill, but a few tweaks to the coupling (and possibly the doors) would allow it to be linked while moving. The mechanical link also makes it easy to ensure the trains keep matching speeds (just drive the rear train at a slightly higher power level than the front). The drawback of this design is that there's only one connection point so the transfer is much slower.
If they find a way to produce this in large quantities, they'd shake up the adhesive tape market quite a bit. Tape that's very strong and leaves no residue? Sign me up! Even gaffer tape tends to leave residue if left on too long.
The output graph of the solar panels nicely tracks their power usage stats (assuming that AC is their biggest variable load). So the installation makes a dent in their peak power usage, which saves more money than the average price/kWh they pay would suggest.
Did you take into account the effect the solar panels (on the roof) will have on the temperature in the data center? If the panels are 15% efficient, the amount of energy reaching the roof decreases by 15% which should lead to a temperature drop. If the panels are mounted on frames above the roof, some additional energy will leak away as heat radiating from the panels will heat up the ambient air rather than the roof. This won't make much of a dent in the 16x figure, but dropping that to 13x (assuming a 20% lower power load due to savings on AC) still saves a fair number of panels.
I just choked on my cup of tea reading that. It's voice recognition feed into some search engines, Wolfram Alpha, Yelp and some snippets from Wikipedia and the result plays through text to speech, mashed up with voice commands. If you call such a remix of off-the-shelf tech and existing services state-of-the art AI then you must be joking.
If it's so obvious and easy to do, why haven't you done it? From reports from actual users, it seems to me that for the first time we have a voice recognition system that can do more than respond to a small number of precisely-defined words. If that's not state-of-the-art, I want to know what world you live in, and can I have some of the futuristic tech you must be using?
If I have to choose between giving money to the latest teenybopper sensation or the estate of Johnny Cash, then yes, my choice would be the heirs.
And no, they didn't just copy some old tracks. Production is an integral part of publishing music, and in this case production wasn't finished. So they spent money creating recordings that are worth listening to. Why would Cash object to recordings being released postmortem? Quite the contrary: he knew he wouldn't be able to finish production on all the recordings he'd made, so he prepared songs to be released after his death.
Actually, yes. Several albums have been finished and released since Cash's death a few years ago. Old archive material that had never been released before, and the projects he worked on in the years before his death. This is only feasible if the copyright on the works extends beyond the owner's death.
I'm not arguing that current copyright terms aren't ridiculous, but here is a case where a copyright cutoff at the owner's death would have prevented albums from being published (since there wouldn't have been any money in publishing them).
As I understand it, write leveling is already being done. The number of extra writes necessary could be an issue if the leveling mechanism is too agressive (e.g. not allowing three consecutive writes in the same location). The other extreme would be allowing 5000 writes before you move a block of data to a new location (ie only moving the data once in the lifetime of a drive).
I was wondering how long this SSD will last in typical use. Let's take the 128 GB unit; thats 128Gx10000 write cycles. Some numbers for my system: I've got 4 GB RAM, and at the moment it's using 1.5 GB of swap. Let's say the swap gets overwritten once a day. I hibernate 2x/day. New data: that won't be too much, Time Machine backs up maybe 1 GB in a week. In total 10GB of writing per day. That's 120,000 days, not bad.
Worse case would be rewriting the entire SSD each day, that still 5000-10,000 days. Still good enough.
According to a TV report I saw today, up to 50 deg C. That means there'll be some ventilation. They also have mandatory driver swaps every couple of hours to minimize the health risk.
No, Ricthie is a guy who invented one specific type of concrete that just happens to be really popular. If Ritchie hadn't invented C, pretty much the same things would have been done in another language.
Steve Jobs' contribution isn't about white plastic, it's bringing the GUI to the masses when the guys who invented it were content to let it moulder in a lab.
Ritchie is important, but he didn't change the world.
How about naming it after one of the pioneers of radio astronomy? - Karl Jansky, first to realize that there were radio waves coming from space - Grote Reber, first to build a radio telescope - Sir Martin Ryle, who came up with radio interferometry (although he's already had a radio telescope named after him)
WYSIWYG is a downside IMHO. The UNIX philosophy says "use text, it is a general interface".
It's a general interface, but it's also one that doesn't use a large chunk of the available bandwidth of your information channel (a bitmapped display). Text that use visual cues to convey formatting information is more readable than text that uses [emphasis]textual[/emphasis] cues to convey the same information. WYSIWYG has a bad name because of the likes of Word, where formatting is just that: formatting. In FrameMaker and AuthorIT, each paragraph is assigned a functional tag. That tag is visualized using text formatting but it is independent of that formatting: with a single command you can assign new formatting. This isn't much different to what LyX does.
The main difference between LaTeX and FM/AIT is context: As far as I understand, LaTeX uses a programming approach where you call subdocuments in the same way you can call a subroutine. That works well for subroutines where you only need to know about the input, function and output of the subroutine to use it. For text I prefer having the subroutine expand in place so I can see it in context (vital for a manual that has to have a consistent text flow). Unlike a subroutine, the exact wording of a subdocument is important and I'd rather not have to find and open the subdocument manually.
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Well, screw them. The UI design team should be working for us users, not the other way round. Score one for capitalism.
There are two types of users: casual users and power users. Catering to one group currently often means frustrating the other, but computers are flexible enough that this needn't be the case. Power users may not be the majority of your audience, but if you can cater to them by offering an alternative interface, why not? The power users are potentially powerful advocates for your app, much more so than the casual users.
To take the Ribbon as an example: Make the damn thing default but provide the classic menus and (customizable) toolbars as an option.
What makes you think that SpaceX aren't being careful? The all-up test is only the last testing step; it's preceded by the usual unit tests.
In fact SpaceX are being more careful than most; they've designed the Falcon 9 so that they can assemble the first stage, do a test fire and then launch that same first stage. I don't remember NASA doing such full-scale test runs on the Shuttle, for example.
Banks lend money to/from each other every day, often huge amounts for very short terms (1 day). This is normal operating procedure.
You'd need a significant length of straight track to accomplish the transfer. In corners, the different corner radii mean that you'd need to increase the distance between the train cars on the outside of the bend to make sure the cars stay lined up.
It'd be much simpler to link up the trains front-to-back. The Dutch ICM shows a practical design to do this. The ICM is only linked at standstill, but a few tweaks to the coupling (and possibly the doors) would allow it to be linked while moving. The mechanical link also makes it easy to ensure the trains keep matching speeds (just drive the rear train at a slightly higher power level than the front).
The drawback of this design is that there's only one connection point so the transfer is much slower.
Do we know for sure that a batch of neutrinos didn't arrive 50 months before 1987a?
So that's the solution to prevent meteorite strikes: just send in the CRS.
is a kit to build a working replica of the mechanism.
I always assumed that the DSN antennas were used for spacecraft communications only, had no idea they were used for radio and radar astronomy as well.
If they find a way to produce this in large quantities, they'd shake up the adhesive tape market quite a bit. Tape that's very strong and leaves no residue? Sign me up! Even gaffer tape tends to leave residue if left on too long.
The output graph of the solar panels nicely tracks their power usage stats (assuming that AC is their biggest variable load). So the installation makes a dent in their peak power usage, which saves more money than the average price/kWh they pay would suggest.
Did you take into account the effect the solar panels (on the roof) will have on the temperature in the data center?
If the panels are 15% efficient, the amount of energy reaching the roof decreases by 15% which should lead to a temperature drop.
If the panels are mounted on frames above the roof, some additional energy will leak away as heat radiating from the panels will heat up the ambient air rather than the roof.
This won't make much of a dent in the 16x figure, but dropping that to 13x (assuming a 20% lower power load due to savings on AC) still saves a fair number of panels.
-1, Too much information.
Thanks for tainting my dreams, bud.
Keplers Laws do not apply to stars in galaxies.
Why not?
I just choked on my cup of tea reading that. It's voice recognition feed into some search engines, Wolfram Alpha, Yelp and some snippets from Wikipedia and the result plays through text to speech, mashed up with voice commands. If you call such a remix of off-the-shelf tech and existing services state-of-the art AI then you must be joking.
If it's so obvious and easy to do, why haven't you done it? From reports from actual users, it seems to me that for the first time we have a voice recognition system that can do more than respond to a small number of precisely-defined words. If that's not state-of-the-art, I want to know what world you live in, and can I have some of the futuristic tech you must be using?
If I have to choose between giving money to the latest teenybopper sensation or the estate of Johnny Cash, then yes, my choice would be the heirs.
And no, they didn't just copy some old tracks. Production is an integral part of publishing music, and in this case production wasn't finished. So they spent money creating recordings that are worth listening to. Why would Cash object to recordings being released postmortem? Quite the contrary: he knew he wouldn't be able to finish production on all the recordings he'd made, so he prepared songs to be released after his death.
Have you bought a new Cash album lately?
Actually, yes. Several albums have been finished and released since Cash's death a few years ago. Old archive material that had never been released before, and the projects he worked on in the years before his death. This is only feasible if the copyright on the works extends beyond the owner's death.
I'm not arguing that current copyright terms aren't ridiculous, but here is a case where a copyright cutoff at the owner's death would have prevented albums from being published (since there wouldn't have been any money in publishing them).
As I understand it, write leveling is already being done.
The number of extra writes necessary could be an issue if the leveling mechanism is too agressive (e.g. not allowing three consecutive writes in the same location). The other extreme would be allowing 5000 writes before you move a block of data to a new location (ie only moving the data once in the lifetime of a drive).
I was wondering how long this SSD will last in typical use. Let's take the 128 GB unit; thats 128Gx10000 write cycles.
Some numbers for my system: I've got 4 GB RAM, and at the moment it's using 1.5 GB of swap. Let's say the swap gets overwritten once a day. I hibernate 2x/day. New data: that won't be too much, Time Machine backs up maybe 1 GB in a week.
In total 10GB of writing per day. That's 120,000 days, not bad.
Worse case would be rewriting the entire SSD each day, that still 5000-10,000 days. Still good enough.
I wonder how those early failures happen? (see the Hot/Crazy scale and SSDs)
According to a TV report I saw today, up to 50 deg C. That means there'll be some ventilation. They also have mandatory driver swaps every couple of hours to minimize the health risk.
Don't be ridiculous. Having variable-length addresses != floating-point.
Reber would be an interesting choice given the current name. "Grote" is Dutch for "large".
No, Ricthie is a guy who invented one specific type of concrete that just happens to be really popular. If Ritchie hadn't invented C, pretty much the same things would have been done in another language.
Steve Jobs' contribution isn't about white plastic, it's bringing the GUI to the masses when the guys who invented it were content to let it moulder in a lab.
Ritchie is important, but he didn't change the world.
How about naming it after one of the pioneers of radio astronomy?
- Karl Jansky, first to realize that there were radio waves coming from space
- Grote Reber, first to build a radio telescope
- Sir Martin Ryle, who came up with radio interferometry (although he's already had a radio telescope named after him)
WYSIWYG is a downside IMHO. The UNIX philosophy says "use text, it is a general interface".
It's a general interface, but it's also one that doesn't use a large chunk of the available bandwidth of your information channel (a bitmapped display). Text that use visual cues to convey formatting information is more readable than text that uses [emphasis]textual[/emphasis] cues to convey the same information.
WYSIWYG has a bad name because of the likes of Word, where formatting is just that: formatting. In FrameMaker and AuthorIT, each paragraph is assigned a functional tag. That tag is visualized using text formatting but it is independent of that formatting: with a single command you can assign new formatting. This isn't much different to what LyX does.
The main difference between LaTeX and FM/AIT is context: As far as I understand, LaTeX uses a programming approach where you call subdocuments in the same way you can call a subroutine. That works well for subroutines where you only need to know about the input, function and output of the subroutine to use it.
For text I prefer having the subroutine expand in place so I can see it in context (vital for a manual that has to have a consistent text flow). Unlike a subroutine, the exact wording of a subdocument is important and I'd rather not have to find and open the subdocument manually.