If you never meant a low frequency square wave, then you're not going to keep the speaker in one position for any length of time (which was your original hypothesis).
As the frequency gets higher and higher, it will look less and less like a square wave. The amplifier design will likely include a low pass filter somewhere in its design which will limit the fastest rise and fall time of the wave form. As the frequency gets close to the upper end of the audible range (say above ~12 to 15KHz or so) you'll probably find the amplitude of the signal reaching the speaker starts to roll off even if you send a maximum amplitude square wave to the input of the audio amplifier. Your square wave will at best look like a triangle or sawtooth wave and will be decreasing in amplitude more and more until it has virtually disappeared.
Some time ago I measured a square wave through a simple audio circuit (a typical amplifier in a modern laptop will perform rather better, but it still shows what will happen to a square wave as the frequency increases as it passes through a typical audio amplifier), and I still have the screen grabs from the oscilloscope. Let me demonstrate:
The square wave input was of identical amplitude for each of these, the only thing changed was the frequency. As I said the low pass filter in a typical amplifier found in a laptop's audio circuit won't start seriously attenuating the circuit anywhere near as low as this particular circuit, but it certainly will do the same in any case.
An audio designer who doesn't expect square waves at full design amplitude to go through his system is described by one word: "negligent". Typical 1980s analogue synthesizers often generated square waves, so you have to expect that some sound might contain a lot of square wave content. If a square wave not exceeding rated power can kill the Dell's speaker or audio circuit, then the product is defective and they should fix it under warranty, as warranties are supposed to fix defects caused by bad workmanship.
That's not going to happen. Every audio system will essentially have filters in its design - a capacitor that will block signals near DC (so you can't move the speaker to one position and keep it there) and a low pass filter that will remove unwanted high frequency components of the signal. You can't send a signal to a speaker in any sanely designed audio system and keep the speaker in one position for any appreciable length of time.
That's wrong. Connect a 200W speaker to a 100W amp, and the most you'll produce is still 100W (and a correctly designed amp rated to 100W continuous will not expire under these conditions).
None of those nukes were detonated on live cities.
That's what makes the difference. That's why the Tsar Bomba nor the atmospheric tests produced these effects - they were detonated over wildernesses, not cities full of highly flammable hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon products. That's why an actual nuclear war would produce a nuclear winter, although the atmospheric tests done in the 1950s won't.
I don't hate Gnome3, in fact I fail to see what all the hate is about. Admittedly I missed the first couple of horrific iterations of Gnome 3 since I'm a Debian user, so we didn't get it until quite late on where many of the usability problems were fixed. It took me all of half an hour to get used to Gnome 3 after upgrading from Debian 6 to 7.
Your argument here seems similar to this logical fallacy:
1. My dog has four legs. 2. My cat has four legs. 3. Therefore my dog is a cat.
Just because site $X from year $Y might look dated in Google Chrome doesn't justify the design of the beta. I think most of us can accept that you may want to change a user interface (especially to potentially take advantage of newer browsers). However, the point is the current beta is getting it *wrong*. It's not change to improve the site, it's change for the sake of change and you're even admitting to this above.
I want a user interface, not a user experience. If your site is not melting into the background so I hardly notice that I'm using the user interface, you're doing it wrong. Forcing an "experience" on users has been the worst thing for UI design since they started peddling that stuff.
In previous updates to Slashdot, you've asked the community to come up with designs and the community voted on which one they liked the most. Why the change? Slashdot _IS_ the community.
Here's my suggestions: 1. Don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy. Scrap the beta now and chalk it up to experience. 2. Work on providing a straightforward Slashdot RESTful API that separates the backend from the user interface instead. 3. Run a competition in the community to design a new user interface that uses this back end. Allow the community to discuss the various new designs people come up with. Choose the one the community likes the most as the default.
The comment system should be the top priority. Slashdot *is* a comment system. And:
> improving the experience
User experience. This is where it all started going wrong, back when Microsoft started rabbiting on about "user experience". I don't want an operating system to give me an "experience", I want it to melt into the background so I don't notice it. Similarly, I don't want Slashdot's comment system to give me a "user experience", the user interface should just melt into the background so I barely even notice I'm using it. The current beta is trying to give me an experience, even things like the boxes around the comments are too "in your face" and distracting. I hardly need to mention the absurd amount of white space. When reading the beta comment system, my 2560x1440 monitor feels like it's 800x600. The beta comment user interface *is* giving me an experience, and I do not want an experience.
On Slashdot being a comment system: calling us an "audience" is the very root of the problem, we're not an audience. Even you must be acutely aware that the stories at Slashdot are often late, the summaries are often bad, the editing is often highly dubious. We don't come here to just read the summaries, the reason we come here is because of the quality of the comments. On many stories you get in-depth and good comments from people close to the subject at hand, far better quality than you might find in a "Have your say" on the BBC or some other proper news website. We only come here for the comment system. Get this wrong and Slashdot is nothing.
The problem is that no one (or at least very few people) knew about Technocrat.net. This is the first time I've heard of a site (that's been shut down twice!)
Perhaps take an advertisment out on Slashdot if you launch it:-)
I have to wonder how many nginx installations are actual web servers. If Netcraft were to crawl our block of network addresses, they would list several sites being served by nginx. However, nginx is merely a reverse proxy and load balancer, all the actual webservers behind it run Apache. This kind of use forms a major use of nginx.
Well, not really. I've found in hotels that are a few floors tall, if the elevator isn't already at my floor and open I can beat it by using the stairs.
Everyone has something to hide. For example, let's say I'm gay, and my route to work involves walking through an area where a traditionally homophobic ethnic group lives. Currently, a problem can be avoided by simply not advertising this fact while walking through said area. However, if you can do a search on anyone you see walking past, vigilantes from this group may decide they will beat up every gay man they find, and having a device that will facially recognise any person and dig out all their background information will make this terribly easy to do. See how this would affect freedom? I can probably come up with hundreds of examples of things that are perfectly innocent and that are (at least amongst your friends and own national group nothing that you feel you need to hide) that you wouldn't want to go into the street broadcasting because it may attract the attention of possibly violent people who don't agree with you and decide to hurt you there and then.
I wouldn't be so sure. Recent modelling to update the 'nuclear winter' theory has not only shown that the theory is most likely valid, but actually far worse than the model that the Soviets and US came up with in the 1980s. Our current best modelling shows that even a hypothetical regional exchange with as few as 50 Nagasaki-sized weapons on each side between India and Pakistan would cause a "nuclear autumn" bad enough to cause famine in many countries, and a growing season shortened by 60 days the first year after this hypothetical war.
An exchange using the remaining weapons of the former Soviet Union and the United States - well, nuclear winter is a misnomer. Nuclear six month long night is a better description. Daytime lighting conditions in the aftermath of such an exchange would reach no more than that of a moonlit night. Continental temperatures would fall very low, and if this hypothetical war were to happen in the growing season, that's all of your food gone. Water would be hard to get as it would be frozen over. Coastal areas would be milder, but be lashed by constant violent storms due to the temperature difference to the extremely cold inland temperatures. Since the soot would be lofted to the stratosphere, there is no mechanism that will rapidly bring it down and the climatic effects would last long enough that the decade after the war would be a truly miserable experience, and most likely fatal. Those who managed to survive this would then have to deal with a world with no ozone layer and no manufacturing industry to make sunblock. Growing crops would be extremely difficult in those conditions.
It'll be a pretty nasty survival if they did. A nuclear exchange of that scale would bring on a nuclear winter long enough to ensure things like agriculture wouldn't be possible for many years.
I was living in North Carolina when an unusually bad snow then ice storm passed through. Raleigh is quite undulating, and one of the funniest sights I saw was in one of the dips in the road, all the big ass RWD cars getting about halfway up the other side then sliding gracefully back down to the bottom of the dip (including a big ol police Crown Victoria). Luckily I had a front wheel drive Ford Contour which made it up the hills just fine (although I did have to dodge a few cars sliding backwards).
The next day was after the ice storm. The few vehicles that had gone through before the freezing rain fell had made tracks in the snow, which were then encased in a couple of inches of ice. You could let go of the steering wheel and let the ruts guide you like rails (and whatever you did, you couldn't get out the ruts so you could only go on roads on which someone had gone before the freezing rain fell). Our car park at work was empty when all this happened, so it got a nice smooth layer of snow capped with 2 inches of ice. It turned into an ice rink. With it being empty we had tremendous fun with it. Incidentally, someone at work who lived in the same apartment complex block stayed home though all of this. It was only 1 mile from work. I walked. (We had to, we had a bit of a deathmarch project on so we were the only group still in work. Half of the group came from Houston and were even less used to seeing snow and ice, but still made it in).
I left the US over 10 years ago now so I don't know whether most people still drive rear wheel drive cars these days, but certainly a lot of people had RWD pickup trucks which are just about the worst thing to drive in a snow/ice storm.
Cowardice. China could do real harm to the US if China embargoed the US. Cuba is too weak to hurt the US. Therefore Cuba can be punished but China must be left alone.
ARM scales fine (in another way). Sophie Wilson (one of the ARM's original developers) indeed said that ARM wouldn't be any better today than x86 in terms of power per unit of computing done. However, an advantage ARM has for parallelizable workloads is you can get more ARM cores onto a given area of silicon. Just the part of an x86 that figures out how long the next instruction is is the size of an entire ARM core, so if you want lots of cores this will count for something (for example, the Spinnaker research project at Manchester University uses absurd numbers of ARM cores).
The UK actually has the most tornadoes in the world per unit area (0.14 per 1000km^3) - more tornadoes per 1000km^3 than "Tornado Alley" in the United States. Including territorial waters, the UK has more tornadoes per year than any other European country. It's just they are very rarely strong enough to be noteworthy. If no one sees them then no one will know they even existed, since they tend to be too weak to do any damage (or at least damage that's not consistent with other attributes of the storm). The ones out at sea are waterspouts and unless they hit a boat or are observed by a weather reporting station, no one will even know it happened.
Surely if a cartridge is only 0.1mm smaller in diameter than the chamber, the metal of the cartridge can stretch by this small amount without exploding when fired? Are cartridge manufacturing tolerances really so tight that 0.1mm difference in diameter is the difference between safe firing and catastrophic explosion?
Slashdot Mirror
If you never meant a low frequency square wave, then you're not going to keep the speaker in one position for any length of time (which was your original hypothesis).
As the frequency gets higher and higher, it will look less and less like a square wave. The amplifier design will likely include a low pass filter somewhere in its design which will limit the fastest rise and fall time of the wave form. As the frequency gets close to the upper end of the audible range (say above ~12 to 15KHz or so) you'll probably find the amplitude of the signal reaching the speaker starts to roll off even if you send a maximum amplitude square wave to the input of the audio amplifier. Your square wave will at best look like a triangle or sawtooth wave and will be decreasing in amplitude more and more until it has virtually disappeared.
Some time ago I measured a square wave through a simple audio circuit (a typical amplifier in a modern laptop will perform rather better, but it still shows what will happen to a square wave as the frequency increases as it passes through a typical audio amplifier), and I still have the screen grabs from the oscilloscope. Let me demonstrate:
Waveform 1 (lowest frequency): http://photo.alioth.net/tmp2/b...
Waveform 2 (mid frequency): http://photo.alioth.net/tmp2/b...
Waveform 3 (highish frequency): http://photo.alioth.net/tmp2/b...
Waveform 4 (highest): http://photo.alioth.net/tmp2/b...
The square wave input was of identical amplitude for each of these, the only thing changed was the frequency. As I said the low pass filter in a typical amplifier found in a laptop's audio circuit won't start seriously attenuating the circuit anywhere near as low as this particular circuit, but it certainly will do the same in any case.
An audio designer who doesn't expect square waves at full design amplitude to go through his system is described by one word: "negligent". Typical 1980s analogue synthesizers often generated square waves, so you have to expect that some sound might contain a lot of square wave content. If a square wave not exceeding rated power can kill the Dell's speaker or audio circuit, then the product is defective and they should fix it under warranty, as warranties are supposed to fix defects caused by bad workmanship.
That's not going to happen. Every audio system will essentially have filters in its design - a capacitor that will block signals near DC (so you can't move the speaker to one position and keep it there) and a low pass filter that will remove unwanted high frequency components of the signal. You can't send a signal to a speaker in any sanely designed audio system and keep the speaker in one position for any appreciable length of time.
That's wrong. Connect a 200W speaker to a 100W amp, and the most you'll produce is still 100W (and a correctly designed amp rated to 100W continuous will not expire under these conditions).
The Tsar Bomba wasn't exploded over a city. It's the burning cities that create the nuclear winter, not the actual nuclear explosion.
None of those nukes were detonated on live cities.
That's what makes the difference. That's why the Tsar Bomba nor the atmospheric tests produced these effects - they were detonated over wildernesses, not cities full of highly flammable hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon products. That's why an actual nuclear war would produce a nuclear winter, although the atmospheric tests done in the 1950s won't.
I don't hate Gnome3, in fact I fail to see what all the hate is about. Admittedly I missed the first couple of horrific iterations of Gnome 3 since I'm a Debian user, so we didn't get it until quite late on where many of the usability problems were fixed. It took me all of half an hour to get used to Gnome 3 after upgrading from Debian 6 to 7.
Your argument here seems similar to this logical fallacy:
1. My dog has four legs.
2. My cat has four legs.
3. Therefore my dog is a cat.
Just because site $X from year $Y might look dated in Google Chrome doesn't justify the design of the beta. I think most of us can accept that you may want to change a user interface (especially to potentially take advantage of newer browsers). However, the point is the current beta is getting it *wrong*. It's not change to improve the site, it's change for the sake of change and you're even admitting to this above.
> UX research
I want a user interface, not a user experience. If your site is not melting into the background so I hardly notice that I'm using the user interface, you're doing it wrong. Forcing an "experience" on users has been the worst thing for UI design since they started peddling that stuff.
In previous updates to Slashdot, you've asked the community to come up with designs and the community voted on which one they liked the most. Why the change? Slashdot _IS_ the community.
Here's my suggestions:
1. Don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy. Scrap the beta now and chalk it up to experience.
2. Work on providing a straightforward Slashdot RESTful API that separates the backend from the user interface instead.
3. Run a competition in the community to design a new user interface that uses this back end. Allow the community to discuss the various new designs people come up with. Choose the one the community likes the most as the default.
The comment system should be the top priority. Slashdot *is* a comment system.
And:
> improving the experience
User experience. This is where it all started going wrong, back when Microsoft started rabbiting on about "user experience". I don't want an operating system to give me an "experience", I want it to melt into the background so I don't notice it. Similarly, I don't want Slashdot's comment system to give me a "user experience", the user interface should just melt into the background so I barely even notice I'm using it. The current beta is trying to give me an experience, even things like the boxes around the comments are too "in your face" and distracting. I hardly need to mention the absurd amount of white space. When reading the beta comment system, my 2560x1440 monitor feels like it's 800x600. The beta comment user interface *is* giving me an experience, and I do not want an experience.
On Slashdot being a comment system: calling us an "audience" is the very root of the problem, we're not an audience. Even you must be acutely aware that the stories at Slashdot are often late, the summaries are often bad, the editing is often highly dubious. We don't come here to just read the summaries, the reason we come here is because of the quality of the comments. On many stories you get in-depth and good comments from people close to the subject at hand, far better quality than you might find in a "Have your say" on the BBC or some other proper news website. We only come here for the comment system. Get this wrong and Slashdot is nothing.
The problem is that no one (or at least very few people) knew about Technocrat.net. This is the first time I've heard of a site (that's been shut down twice!)
Perhaps take an advertisment out on Slashdot if you launch it :-)
An American football isn't egg shaped, so it won't be handegg. The correct term would be hand prolate spheroid.
HTH, HAND.
I have to wonder how many nginx installations are actual web servers. If Netcraft were to crawl our block of network addresses, they would list several sites being served by nginx. However, nginx is merely a reverse proxy and load balancer, all the actual webservers behind it run Apache. This kind of use forms a major use of nginx.
Well, not really. I've found in hotels that are a few floors tall, if the elevator isn't already at my floor and open I can beat it by using the stairs.
No, it's because virtually everyone in Cambridge rides a bicycle, whereas virtually everyone in Stoke drives or goes by bus.
Maybe so, but gcc was pretty much the only game in town for many years and gcc remains in development and very widely used.
Everyone has something to hide. For example, let's say I'm gay, and my route to work involves walking through an area where a traditionally homophobic ethnic group lives. Currently, a problem can be avoided by simply not advertising this fact while walking through said area. However, if you can do a search on anyone you see walking past, vigilantes from this group may decide they will beat up every gay man they find, and having a device that will facially recognise any person and dig out all their background information will make this terribly easy to do. See how this would affect freedom? I can probably come up with hundreds of examples of things that are perfectly innocent and that are (at least amongst your friends and own national group nothing that you feel you need to hide) that you wouldn't want to go into the street broadcasting because it may attract the attention of possibly violent people who don't agree with you and decide to hurt you there and then.
I wouldn't be so sure. Recent modelling to update the 'nuclear winter' theory has not only shown that the theory is most likely valid, but actually far worse than the model that the Soviets and US came up with in the 1980s. Our current best modelling shows that even a hypothetical regional exchange with as few as 50 Nagasaki-sized weapons on each side between India and Pakistan would cause a "nuclear autumn" bad enough to cause famine in many countries, and a growing season shortened by 60 days the first year after this hypothetical war.
An exchange using the remaining weapons of the former Soviet Union and the United States - well, nuclear winter is a misnomer. Nuclear six month long night is a better description. Daytime lighting conditions in the aftermath of such an exchange would reach no more than that of a moonlit night. Continental temperatures would fall very low, and if this hypothetical war were to happen in the growing season, that's all of your food gone. Water would be hard to get as it would be frozen over. Coastal areas would be milder, but be lashed by constant violent storms due to the temperature difference to the extremely cold inland temperatures. Since the soot would be lofted to the stratosphere, there is no mechanism that will rapidly bring it down and the climatic effects would last long enough that the decade after the war would be a truly miserable experience, and most likely fatal. Those who managed to survive this would then have to deal with a world with no ozone layer and no manufacturing industry to make sunblock. Growing crops would be extremely difficult in those conditions.
It'll be a pretty nasty survival if they did. A nuclear exchange of that scale would bring on a nuclear winter long enough to ensure things like agriculture wouldn't be possible for many years.
I was living in North Carolina when an unusually bad snow then ice storm passed through. Raleigh is quite undulating, and one of the funniest sights I saw was in one of the dips in the road, all the big ass RWD cars getting about halfway up the other side then sliding gracefully back down to the bottom of the dip (including a big ol police Crown Victoria). Luckily I had a front wheel drive Ford Contour which made it up the hills just fine (although I did have to dodge a few cars sliding backwards).
The next day was after the ice storm. The few vehicles that had gone through before the freezing rain fell had made tracks in the snow, which were then encased in a couple of inches of ice. You could let go of the steering wheel and let the ruts guide you like rails (and whatever you did, you couldn't get out the ruts so you could only go on roads on which someone had gone before the freezing rain fell). Our car park at work was empty when all this happened, so it got a nice smooth layer of snow capped with 2 inches of ice. It turned into an ice rink. With it being empty we had tremendous fun with it. Incidentally, someone at work who lived in the same apartment complex block stayed home though all of this. It was only 1 mile from work. I walked. (We had to, we had a bit of a deathmarch project on so we were the only group still in work. Half of the group came from Houston and were even less used to seeing snow and ice, but still made it in).
I left the US over 10 years ago now so I don't know whether most people still drive rear wheel drive cars these days, but certainly a lot of people had RWD pickup trucks which are just about the worst thing to drive in a snow/ice storm.
We don't get much snow at all here. But when we do, if you see a crashed vehicle in a ditch, chances it will be a 4x4 vehicle.
PDF isn't proprietary, it's an open published format.
Cowardice. China could do real harm to the US if China embargoed the US. Cuba is too weak to hurt the US. Therefore Cuba can be punished but China must be left alone.
ARM scales fine (in another way). Sophie Wilson (one of the ARM's original developers) indeed said that ARM wouldn't be any better today than x86 in terms of power per unit of computing done. However, an advantage ARM has for parallelizable workloads is you can get more ARM cores onto a given area of silicon. Just the part of an x86 that figures out how long the next instruction is is the size of an entire ARM core, so if you want lots of cores this will count for something (for example, the Spinnaker research project at Manchester University uses absurd numbers of ARM cores).
The UK actually has the most tornadoes in the world per unit area (0.14 per 1000km^3) - more tornadoes per 1000km^3 than "Tornado Alley" in the United States. Including territorial waters, the UK has more tornadoes per year than any other European country. It's just they are very rarely strong enough to be noteworthy. If no one sees them then no one will know they even existed, since they tend to be too weak to do any damage (or at least damage that's not consistent with other attributes of the storm). The ones out at sea are waterspouts and unless they hit a boat or are observed by a weather reporting station, no one will even know it happened.
Surely if a cartridge is only 0.1mm smaller in diameter than the chamber, the metal of the cartridge can stretch by this small amount without exploding when fired? Are cartridge manufacturing tolerances really so tight that 0.1mm difference in diameter is the difference between safe firing and catastrophic explosion?