Almost any kind of troubles. The Olympic did crash into a British warship, the collision holing her both below and above the waterline, but no one was hurt in that one and neither the Olympic nor the warship sank.
According to Wikipedia, one of the passengers on the Olympic when it crashed later was later on the Titanic when she sank (and survived that ordeal), and later was on the Britannic when it sank (surviving that one too).
Actually, there's a bit more to being "cloudy" than just virtual servers over the internet (indeed, they not even need be over the internet - you can have your own local cloud and many companies have internal clouds). Virtual servers over the internet is merely client/server. For a service to be "cloudy", generally it'll have attributes like HTTP (in other words, RESTful interfaces and each request being treated no different to the first request, in other words, the service doesn't hold state from request to request, just like with HTTP) and distributable. The main benefit of "cloudiness" is because of this you can easy scale up services when demand is high, and scale them back when demand is low. It makes it easier to make a resilient service than the traditional client/server type service where the server side has to keep state. Infrastructures like Amazon's EC2 allow you to scale things up and down easily and economically because you can turn on the "virtual server over the internet" part of it on and off very rapidly, and you only pay for the instances you've instatiated. But just using Amazon's EC2 doesn't automatically make your service "cloudy" if it does not have all the other necessary attributes.
You might be able to justify the "collateral damage" by saying it's the target's fault for being around other people and not distinctly marking themselves as a target.
However, the ten or so other people who got killed at the same time have families. Many of the members of these families probably couldn't give a damn about the terrorist's cause. However, now they've just had a family member wiped out by a drone strike. Put yourself in their shoes. Do you think they are just going to say "Oh well, my brother shouldn't have been there"? Of course not - by taking out one terrorist, you've probably turned a dozen young men from being young men who yesterday couldn't give a damn into a dozen angry young men who now want revenge against your country and feel completely justified in that desire.
These drone strikes are not only cowardly, they are morally questionable when they are going to have such "collateral damage" and at best they are a recruiting sargeant for the terrorist's cause. With every terrorist you kill like this, you probably make another dozen who take their place.
If you didn't do your due diligence (time zones, support hours etc) when buying a $30M piece of machinery, well, you're the victim of your *own* incompetence.
Their Z80 implementation may not necessarily use the "classic Z80" timings. Indeed, Zilog's own current Z80 based microcontroller offerings are pipelined, and will get a throughput of up to 1 instruction per CPU cycle. The basic Verilog TV80 implementation of the Z80 also executes instructions in fewer clock cycles than the classic Z80 timings. I'd be surprised if the TI implementation has the same timings as the classic Z80.
There's also various screen memory layouts that reduce the amount of work the CPU has to do, such as monochrome bit map with colour attribute overlay (so for drawing a graph, typically you're dealing only with 1 bit per pixel) and some of the graphics operations are likely not done by the CPU. You can also have memory mapped displays and avoid I/O instructions altogether (except for switching in and out different bits of the frame buffer). I don't have a TI calculator so I don't know what scheme it uses for writing to the display but I'd not be surprised if it has something analagous to a GPU to put stuff on the screen, and if it doesn't, then I wouldn't be surprised if the screen is memory mapped. I'd also be very surprised if their CPU uses classic Z80 timings.
Apropos of nothing, but I'm sure the Z88DK supports the TI calculators, along with a lot of retrocomputing hardware. The Z88DK has cross platform libraries for things like graphics and I/O etc. (although I think the sprite library only supports ZX Spectrum and Amstrad targets)
I have a good emulation of an HP48GX on my phone, however, although the emulation is extremely faithful (it's actually a proper emulation and uses the ROM from the calculator, rather than just an app that looks like the calculator) I'd much rather use a real calculator because the problem is on a small touch screen with no tactile feedback, it's very easy to miskey and I spend half my time correcting miskeys. Also, with the application up and the screen turned on with the phone, and if I'm spending significant time doing maths problems, the phone's battery gets significantly used (my phone isn't brand new and the battery has lost a fair bit of capacity due to age). By comparison an actual calculator will go an awful long time before running its batteries down.
Now I could use the computer to do it, but I'd rather have a separate device that's not using up screen space while using the computer.
It's not prior art, it's obviousness. In terms of file storage, I consider myself "ordinarily skilled in the art", yet 5 years ago I put in such a system to expire files at work on a distributed filesystem. The problem is that the USPTO is allowing obvious stuff to be patented. They even admit as such - unfortunately I can't find the article - but I remember reading the USPTO saying "only 5% of patents they grant are what they call pioneer patents" (in other words, something really new and worthy of patent protection). The reform needs to be that only these "pioneer patent" applications actually get granted and the rest thrown out.
Keyboard shortcuts are "how 2013". Or do you laboriously go to Edit - Copy/Edit - Paste instead of just using Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V and not having to take your hands off the keyboard?
One of Shneiderman's 8 Golden Rules of user interface design is to provide frequent users with shortcuts. In programs that are keyboard input based, it's best that they be keyboard shortcuts so your hands can remain on the keyboard as much as possible.
The tram in Zaragoza is electric, but there are no overhead wires in the centre of the city (the outskirts are all wired). The trams have supercapacitors, and pick up enough charge to get to the next station with each stop they make. Basically, the city doesn't want the overhead wires spoiling the look of the historic centre of the city.
No they don't. That would be illegal in Europe and I expect the USA too. Brakes MUST be mechanical by regulation. They may be servo assisted, but even if the servo fails they still MUST work if you mash down on them. There are no cars with "brake by wire" that are road-legal.
If you dispute that, cite an example of a production car that's legal for road use and has "brake by wire".
Modern Renault cars do not have a hand brake, they have a button and the brake is digital, it's either fully on or fully off. The engine management system will probably stop the button from doing anything if the car is going above walking pace.
Yes, I think it's stupid too to replace the handbrake with a button. Incidentally if you pass your driving test in a car with a button for the parking brake in this country, you are limited to driving only cars with this type of parking brake (similarly, if you pass in an automatic you're not licenced to drive a manual, for this reason automatics are unpopular here because everyone learns to drive in a manual, not wanting to have a restricted licence, and once you've learned to drive a manual why spend extra on an automatic transmission car that also gets worse fuel economy).
He's a disabled driver, and the car was adapted. Perhaps he had no way of changing the transmission mode while steering, he might only be able to do that with the vehicle stopped.
Modern cars have rev limiters (in fact rev limiters have been standard on cars since they had electronic engine management). In my 18 year old car, if I leave it in neutral and floor the accelerator, it won't over-rev, it'll hit the rev limiter and stop at those revs.
They will continue using SSR (no one is talking about getting rid of secondary surveillance radar, which is where you send a signal and a device on the aircraft actively replies with a packet of data), and continue using the signals from the transmitters that are outside of the power failure/disaster area. In fact this will likely be more resilient, because of instead of a very small number of special purpose transmitters providing the primary radar transmission (which are likely to be taken out by the same disaster in your scenario), you have a much greater and diverse set of transmitters providing the signal.
Well, firstly, since there are lots of transmitters, the loss of one in Guildford isn't going to shut the entire passive radar system down.
Secondly, no one is talking about removing SSR (secondary surveillance radar) which is based off actively interrogating transponders fitted to the aircraft. Indeed, the CAA is forcing everyone to move to (very expensive) Mode-S SSR transponders, a technology that's really already obsolete.
Am I the only one who thinks a touch screen is a *terrible* idea in a car, especially if the touch screen device is supposed to be used while driving? With conventional knobs and switches, you can often find what you want to do just by moving your hand to the approximate position and feeling for the appropriate control. I can operate my car radio without looking at it. But you're forced to look at a touch screen - in other words, stop looking where you're directing nearly two tons of metal to fiddle with some device.
Hopefully there will be some statistics taken on crashes as to the accident rate of touch screen equipped vehicles vs non touch screen equipped vehicles. Intuitively, it would seem that touch screens would have a negative safety consequence.
To everyone thinking that safety will depend on the TV transmitters being always on, this is likely to replace only *one* of the types of radar, primary radar (where you send out a signal and look for reflections). SSR (secondary surveillance radar) won't be going away. This type of radar sends out a signal and the aircraft actively replies.
Primary radar is used to paint targets that don't have transponders. What the CAA has been angling to do for a while now is make Mode-S transponders mandatory in controlled airspace (they did want everything, including hang gliders(!) to carry a Mode-S transponder at one point). Therefore the cost will just be transferred to the hand-to-mouth sector of aviation if they want to still have access to controlled airspace.
While (in the example) chemistry can be entirely taught on a white board, IT can be extremely helpful to the student's learning. I'm currently working on intermediate algebra, and we're using a tool called ALEKS (I forget right now what the acronym expands to, you can look it up!) and it is *tremendously* helpful. I'm learning far far faster than I ever learned from mathematics taught on a whiteboard due to the way ALEKS works. It will figure out what you do and don't know and automatically tailor the material accordingly. Not only am I learning how to do the stuff, I'm retaining it too with a lot more ease than I ever could from material taught in a big class with a white board.
We're still by and large teaching students like we did in the 1860s. We can do it better with *appropriate* technology. And course notes on some website isn't really using IT in teaching.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost any kind of troubles. The Olympic did crash into a British warship, the collision holing her both below and above the waterline, but no one was hurt in that one and neither the Olympic nor the warship sank.
According to Wikipedia, one of the passengers on the Olympic when it crashed later was later on the Titanic when she sank (and survived that ordeal), and later was on the Britannic when it sank (surviving that one too).
If you want to zerg rush, use lings not drones. It ends badly if you use drones.
Actually, there's a bit more to being "cloudy" than just virtual servers over the internet (indeed, they not even need be over the internet - you can have your own local cloud and many companies have internal clouds). Virtual servers over the internet is merely client/server. For a service to be "cloudy", generally it'll have attributes like HTTP (in other words, RESTful interfaces and each request being treated no different to the first request, in other words, the service doesn't hold state from request to request, just like with HTTP) and distributable. The main benefit of "cloudiness" is because of this you can easy scale up services when demand is high, and scale them back when demand is low. It makes it easier to make a resilient service than the traditional client/server type service where the server side has to keep state. Infrastructures like Amazon's EC2 allow you to scale things up and down easily and economically because you can turn on the "virtual server over the internet" part of it on and off very rapidly, and you only pay for the instances you've instatiated. But just using Amazon's EC2 doesn't automatically make your service "cloudy" if it does not have all the other necessary attributes.
You might be able to justify the "collateral damage" by saying it's the target's fault for being around other people and not distinctly marking themselves as a target.
However, the ten or so other people who got killed at the same time have families. Many of the members of these families probably couldn't give a damn about the terrorist's cause. However, now they've just had a family member wiped out by a drone strike. Put yourself in their shoes. Do you think they are just going to say "Oh well, my brother shouldn't have been there"? Of course not - by taking out one terrorist, you've probably turned a dozen young men from being young men who yesterday couldn't give a damn into a dozen angry young men who now want revenge against your country and feel completely justified in that desire.
These drone strikes are not only cowardly, they are morally questionable when they are going to have such "collateral damage" and at best they are a recruiting sargeant for the terrorist's cause. With every terrorist you kill like this, you probably make another dozen who take their place.
Or not. Kent State shows that soldiers are quite happy to fire on unarmed fellow countrymen.
If you didn't do your due diligence (time zones, support hours etc) when buying a $30M piece of machinery, well, you're the victim of your *own* incompetence.
Their Z80 implementation may not necessarily use the "classic Z80" timings. Indeed, Zilog's own current Z80 based microcontroller offerings are pipelined, and will get a throughput of up to 1 instruction per CPU cycle. The basic Verilog TV80 implementation of the Z80 also executes instructions in fewer clock cycles than the classic Z80 timings. I'd be surprised if the TI implementation has the same timings as the classic Z80.
There's also various screen memory layouts that reduce the amount of work the CPU has to do, such as monochrome bit map with colour attribute overlay (so for drawing a graph, typically you're dealing only with 1 bit per pixel) and some of the graphics operations are likely not done by the CPU. You can also have memory mapped displays and avoid I/O instructions altogether (except for switching in and out different bits of the frame buffer). I don't have a TI calculator so I don't know what scheme it uses for writing to the display but I'd not be surprised if it has something analagous to a GPU to put stuff on the screen, and if it doesn't, then I wouldn't be surprised if the screen is memory mapped. I'd also be very surprised if their CPU uses classic Z80 timings.
Apropos of nothing, but I'm sure the Z88DK supports the TI calculators, along with a lot of retrocomputing hardware. The Z88DK has cross platform libraries for things like graphics and I/O etc. (although I think the sprite library only supports ZX Spectrum and Amstrad targets)
I have a good emulation of an HP48GX on my phone, however, although the emulation is extremely faithful (it's actually a proper emulation and uses the ROM from the calculator, rather than just an app that looks like the calculator) I'd much rather use a real calculator because the problem is on a small touch screen with no tactile feedback, it's very easy to miskey and I spend half my time correcting miskeys. Also, with the application up and the screen turned on with the phone, and if I'm spending significant time doing maths problems, the phone's battery gets significantly used (my phone isn't brand new and the battery has lost a fair bit of capacity due to age). By comparison an actual calculator will go an awful long time before running its batteries down.
Now I could use the computer to do it, but I'd rather have a separate device that's not using up screen space while using the computer.
It's not prior art, it's obviousness. In terms of file storage, I consider myself "ordinarily skilled in the art", yet 5 years ago I put in such a system to expire files at work on a distributed filesystem. The problem is that the USPTO is allowing obvious stuff to be patented. They even admit as such - unfortunately I can't find the article - but I remember reading the USPTO saying "only 5% of patents they grant are what they call pioneer patents" (in other words, something really new and worthy of patent protection). The reform needs to be that only these "pioneer patent" applications actually get granted and the rest thrown out.
Keyboard shortcuts are "how 2013". Or do you laboriously go to Edit - Copy/Edit - Paste instead of just using Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V and not having to take your hands off the keyboard?
One of Shneiderman's 8 Golden Rules of user interface design is to provide frequent users with shortcuts. In programs that are keyboard input based, it's best that they be keyboard shortcuts so your hands can remain on the keyboard as much as possible.
The tram in Zaragoza is electric, but there are no overhead wires in the centre of the city (the outskirts are all wired). The trams have supercapacitors, and pick up enough charge to get to the next station with each stop they make. Basically, the city doesn't want the overhead wires spoiling the look of the historic centre of the city.
No they don't. That would be illegal in Europe and I expect the USA too. Brakes MUST be mechanical by regulation. They may be servo assisted, but even if the servo fails they still MUST work if you mash down on them. There are no cars with "brake by wire" that are road-legal.
If you dispute that, cite an example of a production car that's legal for road use and has "brake by wire".
He was a disabled driver in an adapted car. There's a good chance the adaptations were not correctly fitted.
Modern Renault cars do not have a hand brake, they have a button and the brake is digital, it's either fully on or fully off. The engine management system will probably stop the button from doing anything if the car is going above walking pace.
Yes, I think it's stupid too to replace the handbrake with a button. Incidentally if you pass your driving test in a car with a button for the parking brake in this country, you are limited to driving only cars with this type of parking brake (similarly, if you pass in an automatic you're not licenced to drive a manual, for this reason automatics are unpopular here because everyone learns to drive in a manual, not wanting to have a restricted licence, and once you've learned to drive a manual why spend extra on an automatic transmission car that also gets worse fuel economy).
He's a disabled driver, and the car was adapted. Perhaps he had no way of changing the transmission mode while steering, he might only be able to do that with the vehicle stopped.
Even so, the safety record of Airbus and Boeing is comparable, so the evidence is that both approaches are just as valid.
Modern cars have rev limiters (in fact rev limiters have been standard on cars since they had electronic engine management). In my 18 year old car, if I leave it in neutral and floor the accelerator, it won't over-rev, it'll hit the rev limiter and stop at those revs.
Slashdot is a open source/unix fans site. If you want a site that's pro or balanced towards Microsoft, go and start Cee Colon Backslash Dot.
They will continue using SSR (no one is talking about getting rid of secondary surveillance radar, which is where you send a signal and a device on the aircraft actively replies with a packet of data), and continue using the signals from the transmitters that are outside of the power failure/disaster area. In fact this will likely be more resilient, because of instead of a very small number of special purpose transmitters providing the primary radar transmission (which are likely to be taken out by the same disaster in your scenario), you have a much greater and diverse set of transmitters providing the signal.
Well, firstly, since there are lots of transmitters, the loss of one in Guildford isn't going to shut the entire passive radar system down.
Secondly, no one is talking about removing SSR (secondary surveillance radar) which is based off actively interrogating transponders fitted to the aircraft. Indeed, the CAA is forcing everyone to move to (very expensive) Mode-S SSR transponders, a technology that's really already obsolete.
Am I the only one who thinks a touch screen is a *terrible* idea in a car, especially if the touch screen device is supposed to be used while driving? With conventional knobs and switches, you can often find what you want to do just by moving your hand to the approximate position and feeling for the appropriate control. I can operate my car radio without looking at it. But you're forced to look at a touch screen - in other words, stop looking where you're directing nearly two tons of metal to fiddle with some device.
Hopefully there will be some statistics taken on crashes as to the accident rate of touch screen equipped vehicles vs non touch screen equipped vehicles. Intuitively, it would seem that touch screens would have a negative safety consequence.
To everyone thinking that safety will depend on the TV transmitters being always on, this is likely to replace only *one* of the types of radar, primary radar (where you send out a signal and look for reflections). SSR (secondary surveillance radar) won't be going away. This type of radar sends out a signal and the aircraft actively replies.
Primary radar is used to paint targets that don't have transponders. What the CAA has been angling to do for a while now is make Mode-S transponders mandatory in controlled airspace (they did want everything, including hang gliders(!) to carry a Mode-S transponder at one point). Therefore the cost will just be transferred to the hand-to-mouth sector of aviation if they want to still have access to controlled airspace.
Yes, it'll be approximately a 1/12th bigger deal than reunifying East Germany...
While (in the example) chemistry can be entirely taught on a white board, IT can be extremely helpful to the student's learning. I'm currently working on intermediate algebra, and we're using a tool called ALEKS (I forget right now what the acronym expands to, you can look it up!) and it is *tremendously* helpful. I'm learning far far faster than I ever learned from mathematics taught on a whiteboard due to the way ALEKS works. It will figure out what you do and don't know and automatically tailor the material accordingly. Not only am I learning how to do the stuff, I'm retaining it too with a lot more ease than I ever could from material taught in a big class with a white board.
We're still by and large teaching students like we did in the 1860s. We can do it better with *appropriate* technology. And course notes on some website isn't really using IT in teaching.