These clouds do have a name - they are called mammatus clouds. They are typically associated with convective activity. They are not unknown, and there are thousands of photos of mammatus clouds on the internet. We get them occasionally where I live. I understand they are most frequent in places like the mid West in the United States, but that doesn't mean you don't occasionally see them in other places - such as where I live, or in Scotland.
In my experience, a "crashy machine" is almost always down to the PSU. Out of the dozens of "crashy machines" I've had to fix, only one was due to bad memory. The rest were *all* down to faulty power supplies, and all of those were due to capacitors that had failed.
I have an oscilloscope so I can easily test for ripple without needing to open up the power supply and look for the obvious signs (bulging capacitors, maybe ones that have leaked). We've had dozens of machines at work with supplies that have gone bad this way. Bad capacitors have been a real problem in recent years. Four years ago, it wasn't just in power supplies either - we had to return 70 machines to Hewlett-Packard under warranty after the capacitors on the motherboard began failing after 3 months of use. We've not seen anything on that scale on motherboards since, but we still have frequent problems with power supplies failing from "capacitor plague".
A machine of mine was actually killed by a sudden power supply failure - the PSU let the magic smoke out with a loud "bang", and there was the sound of stuff richocheting around the computer's case. That sound turned out to be bits of exploding chips on the motherboard. The only thing that survived that incident was the CD-ROM drive - all other components were destroyed.
They have to reject a lot of perfectly good people anyway (what's the application rate? 10 applicants for each place?) If you have to reject 90% of the candidates anyway, you need to find a valid way of choosing the 10% you have room to accept. When undoubtedly most of the applicants will be sound on engineering type things, it seems perfectly acceptable to accept the technically sound AND able to communicate applicants in preference to the others.
If you have to go to Texas, it's best to fly via Houston. The immigration people are actually friendly, they have enough immigration desks, and typically even if you're getting off the plane near to last you'll still be through immigration and customs in half an hour.
I went through Dallas once. Never again. This was also before 11/9. Surly immigration official who demanded to see *all* my paperwork (for my L1 visa) - the Houston immigration officials never asked for it, then accused me of carrying a "copy" instead of the originals despite the paperwork bearing the original stamp from the US Embassy in London. If I'm in the US and travelling internally, I also avoid DFW. It's the world's most chaotic airport.
Not only that, but telnet and rlogin over 10base2 thin-net or 10baseT with a hub rather than a switch, so anyone on your LAN segment could see your passwords going by...
I think we *do* know how dangerous a tanker full of fuel is, and that's why we just don't hear about fuel tankers blowing up in city streets - they are made so they are unlikely to get breached. The fuel in a full tanker that hasn't been breached simply won't blow up - the fuel/air mixture is wrong. I can't even recall hearing about any incident where a fuel tanker has blown up in a city street in my country. I can't even recall a tanker blowing up in a motorway accident, for that matter. The only incident of a fuel tanker I can think of which blew up was the one that was *bombed* by NATO a few weeks ago in Afghanistan.
Actually, a pulverized coal station is about twice as efficient as an internal combustion engine. That counts as significantly more efficient. Transmission losses from the power station to the outlet are likely much less than transmission losses of a typical automatic car transmission.
A modern power station is more efficient still. Take, for example, my local power station. It is one of the most efficient in Europe, with a thermodynamic efficiency of around 80%. It's a gas turbine power station. Waste heat from the gas turbine is then used to produce steam, to run a secondary steam turbine. Any waste heat left over from that heats the adjacent swimming pool and sports complex. Not much energy is wasted up the flue. It's also throttleable and can change power output very rapidly, so for example, if we build a number of wind turbines, the gas power station can throttle up and down as wind strength varies.
The other thing is electricity acts as an abstraction layer. If the coal station is shut down and a nuclear power station is put in its place, suddenly everyone is driving nuclear powered cars without having to do anything at all. That abstraction layer hugely reduces our dependence on any particular kind of fuel.
Immigrants in general are *not* the lazy assholes. In general, immigrants work bloody hard. The usual old saw I hear is that they are coming and "stealing our jobs", not coming and sponging off the dole.
Meanwhile, while British people moan about people coming to the country and "hardly speaking a word of English", and "putting strain on the NHS", the very same people are making plans to retire to Spain without being able to speak a single word of Spanish, and are planning to live in English retirement ghettos in that country, while putting strain on the Spanish health service.
Why is immigration into Britain such a terrible thing, but emigration to sunny countries is perfectly acceptable?
But the grandparent wasn't arguing this - the grandparent was saying "if you're not from the EU you shouldn't be allowed in, no exceptions" (paraphrased) and it was this to which I was replying. The usual followup is "they are coming here and stealing our jobs". But in terms of "stealing our jobs", I don't really see the difference between a Yorkshireman moving to Hampshire to find work and a Canadian moving to Hampshire to find work, or indeed a Nigerian who speaks good English moving to Hampshire to find work. None of the above are "stealing jobs".
Guess what - we're still using silicon based semiconductors today. Just because we use various species of Li-Ion (for example lithium polymer) batteries, it doesn't mean that things aren't moving forward.
The Li-Ion battery that was in the lab barely resembles the modern Li-Poly. The original lithium ion based batteries couldn't be charged very fast, and neither could they support a very high discharge rate - not enough for even a basic phone (that's why phones all had NiCd or NiMH batteries until the late 90s). The difference between the early Li-Ions and a modern Li-Poly is like night and day.
Consider this - I have an electric RC heli powered by Li-Poly batteries. It's not small, either - it weighs 2kg and you wouldn't want to have it hit you. The Li-Poly batteries can continuously supply just over 90 amps, and can support a peak discharge rate of double that - you're looking at near lead-acid discharge performance from a battery technology that only a few years ago would have caught fire if you tried to draw more than a dozen amps off it. And for a given power capacity weighs a fraction of the equivalent lead-acid battery.
I also have a smaller RC heli which weighs 350 grams. Before that, I had another heli that size. The difference between the batteries I got for the earlier heli just 18 months ago is stark compared to the new battery. The new battery I have is only 2/3rds of the size of the 18 month old batteries, and can support a continuous discharge rate that's double what the older batteries could do. A new battery that could support the discharge rate of the older ones could be half the size.
There are also Li-Poly batteries that can support much higher charge rate - recently 5C charge rate batteries appeared (until the last couple of years, the best you could get was 1C charge rate). It's only in the last few years that electric radio control models of any significant size have been even possible, and the continuous improvement in discharge rate, reliability and capacity is evident.
My next door neighbour is Albanian. She has a degree in electrical engineering, and speaks four languages fluently (her native Albanian, of course, as well as English, Italian and German). She is precisely the sort of person we should be biting our own arms off to get into the country.
But she describes the whole experience of the immigration process as "Kafkaesque". She would have gone to Canada where people with her qualifications are welcomed - except she was engaged to marry my neighbour. The UK Embassy treated her as sub-human, with little manners, and tried to make the entire process humiliating.
What I have to ask is this: what is fundamentally different between, say, someone from Yorkshire moving to Hampshire, and someone from Albania - who speaks English fluently - doing the same thing? Why don't we have immigration controls in every county to keep people in the same place and stop them from moving around? Also, why do so many UK citizens want to emigrate to sunny places without bothering to learn the local language, but get bent all out of shape when people from other countries arrive in the UK?
While I agree Sharepoint is an abombination, when I've had the misfortune to interact with it (usually, I've needed to do so with various scripts), I found you can actually NET USE Sharepoint as if it were just a normal CIFS drive, and access everything as files.
I don't see what's difficult about getting your documents out again in bulk.
Wait... are the parties being thrown by Microsoft employees, or is Microsoft expecting people in the general public to do the marketing for one of the world's richest companies for virtually nothing?
But the type of crash they showed is precisely the sort of crash a typical "head on" crash is. Head on crashes are rarely full front to full front, but usually less than 40% of the offside of each car colliding with each other, as one of the drivers drifted over the centreline. This is why the insurance industry uses this kind of crash - they have no axe to grind, they want to simulate the most common type of "head on" crash so they can accurately make their actuary tables. If they didn't, they would end up making the wrong risk assessments, and they wouldn't maximise their profits.
If you liked Elite...
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 5, Informative
...you may like Oolite, an Elite tribute. It has the goodness that ArcElite has too - it is not player centric, you can encounter epic battles (I've seen three or four distinct groups of ships battling it out, with the Police mixed in there too). The game is open source (GPL) and expandable with expansion packs (so now you can have Generation Ships and Space Dredgers, as well as scenes from the Dark Wheel like the Tionisla Orbital Graveyard). It's available for OSX, Linux and Windows (it was originally developed for OSX).
I'll add to what the other poster said - just the bit in an Intel x86 chip that figures out how long the instructions needs as much die space as an *entire* ARM core. So yes, there is something about the ISA that makes ARM inherently low power.
Which is also bizarre - the article makes it look like this functionality only works when *wired* via an HDMI adapater. Why would you want to use a handheld device like this *wired*? (I can imagine perhaps someone shooting video in the field from a lipstick camera would do this to check the camera's aligned properly, but for the general user?)
Rubbish. Science produces boatloads of emotion, from those doing it and discovering something, to those seeing some of the astonishing results - like molecules being directly imaged, or an experiment working according to a theory that hadn't been tested, or indeed, an experiment debunking a theory.
If you've ever read the original Bastard Operator from Hell, you'll know it as "DUMMY MODE ON". In the BOFH's world, as soon as you mention something to do with computers, the user turns into a dummy.
When I was at school, we were taught binary arithmetic. Computers, we were told, couldn't do arithmetic in decimal numbers, only in binary, and if we ever wanted to work with computers we would have to be able to do binary arithmetic.
This is true today. When did computers start using decimal? The one on my desk certainly can't do decimal, it can ONLY do binary arithmetic. Sure, it can convert decimal to binary, do the work, and convert it back to show you - but it can still ONLY do binary arithmetic. In the forseeable future, computers will continue only being able to do binary arithmetic.
And if you want to be a software developer of even average calibre, you MUST know how to do binary arithmetic. You MUST grok how bitwise logic works, otherwise some problems will simply confound you because you're thinking in base 10, but the problem the software is having requires you to think the same way the computer "thinks". Especially if you work with embedded systems, but when working on even normal PC software, the time comes where a problem is caused because a programmer was thinking in base 10 and should have been considering what's happening at the bit level.
The problem is monopoly causes far more damage than not letting shareholders sell to absolutely anyone (i.e. the company that could wind up with a new monopoly). That's why there are anti-monopoly laws.
Furthermore, when companies keep growing through acquisition, especially questionable ones - there is a growing risk they end up like Chrysler, like GM, or like Bank of America - "Too Big To Fail" and require a massive injection of taxpayers money so as to not send massive, debilitating shockwaves through the economy when they collapse that have ruinous secondary consequences. I'm not saying 'Orrible is one of these - I'm writing about the general case, but this is why there must be oversight over whether a merger (actually, takeover in most cases) can happen. IMHO, part of monopoly legislation should be preventing companies growing by merger into something that is "Too Big To Fail" and will need to be baled out by the taxpayer - which is bad for the taxpayer *AND* bad for free markets since artificially propping these companies up distorts the market a great deal.
So to protect the free market, you cannot have unmoderated capitalism. You have to at least prevent monopoly abuse.
No, it was due to Sun's management. The last few years, they simply have lacked any kind of strategy and have been flapping around. One moment, they love Linux and are going to bet the company on it. The next moment they hate Linux and the CEO is making idiotic statements about how "IBM is in such a pickle" on his blog, when anyone with the business sense of a dead mouse could clearly see it was Sun who were in the pickle.
The downfall of Sun was obvious 5 years ago - and had everything to do with a chronic and complete absence of strategy, and little to do with technology.
The US patent system rubber stamps thousands of obvious patents. If this system is made global, the US will have the lion's share of patents from the get-go, and it will be far more difficult for a company in Europe, for instance, to challenge a patent issued by a foreign patent office and enforced through international treaty.
Therefore the US gets a monopoly on technology.
Hopefully, the rest of the world will see thorough this plan and not accept it.
Slashdot Mirror
These clouds do have a name - they are called mammatus clouds. They are typically associated with convective activity. They are not unknown, and there are thousands of photos of mammatus clouds on the internet. We get them occasionally where I live. I understand they are most frequent in places like the mid West in the United States, but that doesn't mean you don't occasionally see them in other places - such as where I live, or in Scotland.
You didn't mention the power supply.
In my experience, a "crashy machine" is almost always down to the PSU. Out of the dozens of "crashy machines" I've had to fix, only one was due to bad memory. The rest were *all* down to faulty power supplies, and all of those were due to capacitors that had failed.
I have an oscilloscope so I can easily test for ripple without needing to open up the power supply and look for the obvious signs (bulging capacitors, maybe ones that have leaked). We've had dozens of machines at work with supplies that have gone bad this way. Bad capacitors have been a real problem in recent years. Four years ago, it wasn't just in power supplies either - we had to return 70 machines to Hewlett-Packard under warranty after the capacitors on the motherboard began failing after 3 months of use. We've not seen anything on that scale on motherboards since, but we still have frequent problems with power supplies failing from "capacitor plague".
A machine of mine was actually killed by a sudden power supply failure - the PSU let the magic smoke out with a loud "bang", and there was the sound of stuff richocheting around the computer's case. That sound turned out to be bits of exploding chips on the motherboard. The only thing that survived that incident was the CD-ROM drive - all other components were destroyed.
Remember, this is not a bombardment, but a "police action"
They have to reject a lot of perfectly good people anyway (what's the application rate? 10 applicants for each place?) If you have to reject 90% of the candidates anyway, you need to find a valid way of choosing the 10% you have room to accept. When undoubtedly most of the applicants will be sound on engineering type things, it seems perfectly acceptable to accept the technically sound AND able to communicate applicants in preference to the others.
If you have to go to Texas, it's best to fly via Houston. The immigration people are actually friendly, they have enough immigration desks, and typically even if you're getting off the plane near to last you'll still be through immigration and customs in half an hour.
I went through Dallas once. Never again. This was also before 11/9. Surly immigration official who demanded to see *all* my paperwork (for my L1 visa) - the Houston immigration officials never asked for it, then accused me of carrying a "copy" instead of the originals despite the paperwork bearing the original stamp from the US Embassy in London. If I'm in the US and travelling internally, I also avoid DFW. It's the world's most chaotic airport.
Not only that, but telnet and rlogin over 10base2 thin-net or 10baseT with a hub rather than a switch, so anyone on your LAN segment could see your passwords going by...
I think we *do* know how dangerous a tanker full of fuel is, and that's why we just don't hear about fuel tankers blowing up in city streets - they are made so they are unlikely to get breached. The fuel in a full tanker that hasn't been breached simply won't blow up - the fuel/air mixture is wrong. I can't even recall hearing about any incident where a fuel tanker has blown up in a city street in my country. I can't even recall a tanker blowing up in a motorway accident, for that matter. The only incident of a fuel tanker I can think of which blew up was the one that was *bombed* by NATO a few weeks ago in Afghanistan.
Actually, a pulverized coal station is about twice as efficient as an internal combustion engine. That counts as significantly more efficient. Transmission losses from the power station to the outlet are likely much less than transmission losses of a typical automatic car transmission.
A modern power station is more efficient still. Take, for example, my local power station. It is one of the most efficient in Europe, with a thermodynamic efficiency of around 80%. It's a gas turbine power station. Waste heat from the gas turbine is then used to produce steam, to run a secondary steam turbine. Any waste heat left over from that heats the adjacent swimming pool and sports complex. Not much energy is wasted up the flue. It's also throttleable and can change power output very rapidly, so for example, if we build a number of wind turbines, the gas power station can throttle up and down as wind strength varies.
The other thing is electricity acts as an abstraction layer. If the coal station is shut down and a nuclear power station is put in its place, suddenly everyone is driving nuclear powered cars without having to do anything at all. That abstraction layer hugely reduces our dependence on any particular kind of fuel.
Immigrants in general are *not* the lazy assholes. In general, immigrants work bloody hard. The usual old saw I hear is that they are coming and "stealing our jobs", not coming and sponging off the dole.
Meanwhile, while British people moan about people coming to the country and "hardly speaking a word of English", and "putting strain on the NHS", the very same people are making plans to retire to Spain without being able to speak a single word of Spanish, and are planning to live in English retirement ghettos in that country, while putting strain on the Spanish health service.
Why is immigration into Britain such a terrible thing, but emigration to sunny countries is perfectly acceptable?
But the grandparent wasn't arguing this - the grandparent was saying "if you're not from the EU you shouldn't be allowed in, no exceptions" (paraphrased) and it was this to which I was replying. The usual followup is "they are coming here and stealing our jobs". But in terms of "stealing our jobs", I don't really see the difference between a Yorkshireman moving to Hampshire to find work and a Canadian moving to Hampshire to find work, or indeed a Nigerian who speaks good English moving to Hampshire to find work. None of the above are "stealing jobs".
Guess what - we're still using silicon based semiconductors today. Just because we use various species of Li-Ion (for example lithium polymer) batteries, it doesn't mean that things aren't moving forward.
The Li-Ion battery that was in the lab barely resembles the modern Li-Poly. The original lithium ion based batteries couldn't be charged very fast, and neither could they support a very high discharge rate - not enough for even a basic phone (that's why phones all had NiCd or NiMH batteries until the late 90s). The difference between the early Li-Ions and a modern Li-Poly is like night and day.
Consider this - I have an electric RC heli powered by Li-Poly batteries. It's not small, either - it weighs 2kg and you wouldn't want to have it hit you. The Li-Poly batteries can continuously supply just over 90 amps, and can support a peak discharge rate of double that - you're looking at near lead-acid discharge performance from a battery technology that only a few years ago would have caught fire if you tried to draw more than a dozen amps off it. And for a given power capacity weighs a fraction of the equivalent lead-acid battery.
I also have a smaller RC heli which weighs 350 grams. Before that, I had another heli that size. The difference between the batteries I got for the earlier heli just 18 months ago is stark compared to the new battery. The new battery I have is only 2/3rds of the size of the 18 month old batteries, and can support a continuous discharge rate that's double what the older batteries could do. A new battery that could support the discharge rate of the older ones could be half the size.
There are also Li-Poly batteries that can support much higher charge rate - recently 5C charge rate batteries appeared (until the last couple of years, the best you could get was 1C charge rate). It's only in the last few years that electric radio control models of any significant size have been even possible, and the continuous improvement in discharge rate, reliability and capacity is evident.
For what reasons do you think this should be so?
My next door neighbour is Albanian. She has a degree in electrical engineering, and speaks four languages fluently (her native Albanian, of course, as well as English, Italian and German). She is precisely the sort of person we should be biting our own arms off to get into the country.
But she describes the whole experience of the immigration process as "Kafkaesque". She would have gone to Canada where people with her qualifications are welcomed - except she was engaged to marry my neighbour. The UK Embassy treated her as sub-human, with little manners, and tried to make the entire process humiliating.
What I have to ask is this: what is fundamentally different between, say, someone from Yorkshire moving to Hampshire, and someone from Albania - who speaks English fluently - doing the same thing? Why don't we have immigration controls in every county to keep people in the same place and stop them from moving around? Also, why do so many UK citizens want to emigrate to sunny places without bothering to learn the local language, but get bent all out of shape when people from other countries arrive in the UK?
While I agree Sharepoint is an abombination, when I've had the misfortune to interact with it (usually, I've needed to do so with various scripts), I found you can actually NET USE Sharepoint as if it were just a normal CIFS drive, and access everything as files.
I don't see what's difficult about getting your documents out again in bulk.
I'm just wondering when he's going to receive his DMCA takedown notice.
Wait... are the parties being thrown by Microsoft employees, or is Microsoft expecting people in the general public to do the marketing for one of the world's richest companies for virtually nothing?
But the type of crash they showed is precisely the sort of crash a typical "head on" crash is. Head on crashes are rarely full front to full front, but usually less than 40% of the offside of each car colliding with each other, as one of the drivers drifted over the centreline. This is why the insurance industry uses this kind of crash - they have no axe to grind, they want to simulate the most common type of "head on" crash so they can accurately make their actuary tables. If they didn't, they would end up making the wrong risk assessments, and they wouldn't maximise their profits.
...you may like Oolite, an Elite tribute. It has the goodness that ArcElite has too - it is not player centric, you can encounter epic battles (I've seen three or four distinct groups of ships battling it out, with the Police mixed in there too). The game is open source (GPL) and expandable with expansion packs (so now you can have Generation Ships and Space Dredgers, as well as scenes from the Dark Wheel like the Tionisla Orbital Graveyard). It's available for OSX, Linux and Windows (it was originally developed for OSX).
http://oolite.aegidian.org/
Latest version is 1.73, and there is a wiki for the game at http://wiki.alioth.net/
I'll add to what the other poster said - just the bit in an Intel x86 chip that figures out how long the instructions needs as much die space as an *entire* ARM core. So yes, there is something about the ISA that makes ARM inherently low power.
Which is also bizarre - the article makes it look like this functionality only works when *wired* via an HDMI adapater. Why would you want to use a handheld device like this *wired*? (I can imagine perhaps someone shooting video in the field from a lipstick camera would do this to check the camera's aligned properly, but for the general user?)
Rubbish. Science produces boatloads of emotion, from those doing it and discovering something, to those seeing some of the astonishing results - like molecules being directly imaged, or an experiment working according to a theory that hadn't been tested, or indeed, an experiment debunking a theory.
Science results in plenty of emotion.
If you've ever read the original Bastard Operator from Hell, you'll know it as "DUMMY MODE ON". In the BOFH's world, as soon as you mention something to do with computers, the user turns into a dummy.
This is true today. When did computers start using decimal? The one on my desk certainly can't do decimal, it can ONLY do binary arithmetic. Sure, it can convert decimal to binary, do the work, and convert it back to show you - but it can still ONLY do binary arithmetic. In the forseeable future, computers will continue only being able to do binary arithmetic.
And if you want to be a software developer of even average calibre, you MUST know how to do binary arithmetic. You MUST grok how bitwise logic works, otherwise some problems will simply confound you because you're thinking in base 10, but the problem the software is having requires you to think the same way the computer "thinks". Especially if you work with embedded systems, but when working on even normal PC software, the time comes where a problem is caused because a programmer was thinking in base 10 and should have been considering what's happening at the bit level.
The problem is monopoly causes far more damage than not letting shareholders sell to absolutely anyone (i.e. the company that could wind up with a new monopoly). That's why there are anti-monopoly laws.
Furthermore, when companies keep growing through acquisition, especially questionable ones - there is a growing risk they end up like Chrysler, like GM, or like Bank of America - "Too Big To Fail" and require a massive injection of taxpayers money so as to not send massive, debilitating shockwaves through the economy when they collapse that have ruinous secondary consequences. I'm not saying 'Orrible is one of these - I'm writing about the general case, but this is why there must be oversight over whether a merger (actually, takeover in most cases) can happen. IMHO, part of monopoly legislation should be preventing companies growing by merger into something that is "Too Big To Fail" and will need to be baled out by the taxpayer - which is bad for the taxpayer *AND* bad for free markets since artificially propping these companies up distorts the market a great deal.
So to protect the free market, you cannot have unmoderated capitalism. You have to at least prevent monopoly abuse.
No, it was due to Sun's management. The last few years, they simply have lacked any kind of strategy and have been flapping around. One moment, they love Linux and are going to bet the company on it. The next moment they hate Linux and the CEO is making idiotic statements about how "IBM is in such a pickle" on his blog, when anyone with the business sense of a dead mouse could clearly see it was Sun who were in the pickle.
The downfall of Sun was obvious 5 years ago - and had everything to do with a chronic and complete absence of strategy, and little to do with technology.
It's quite simple.
The US patent system rubber stamps thousands of obvious patents. If this system is made global, the US will have the lion's share of patents from the get-go, and it will be far more difficult for a company in Europe, for instance, to challenge a patent issued by a foreign patent office and enforced through international treaty.
Therefore the US gets a monopoly on technology.
Hopefully, the rest of the world will see thorough this plan and not accept it.