No, he absolutely right. The safest one lane bridge will be one made with 10 bazillion cubic feet of cement and steel...with a few holes to let the water through of course. But, this is the real world, you can't do that. It would be ugly, environmentally harmful, and cost too much money; it wouldn't get built on real earth.
There's ALWAYS compromise for functionality. This is why things such as "margin of safety" exists. You don't build something that will not fail, you build something that a failure is, statistically, pretty slim.
If you read your quote, he says it's always tempered by the real world. This is true. So, I challenge you: name *one* device that functions as it should, 100% of the time, without compromise. If I were given this impossible challenge, the first thing that would come to my mind is medical devices. Look up how fruitful medical device production is these days. It's not, because for anything beyond something simple like a screw, you nearly *can't* make them reliable enough and still turn a profit over their lifetimes (lawsuits for failing devices are expensive for some odd reason).
Nah, it's very low conductivity even with regular contamination. Try testing your tap water...pretty pathetic. Not even remotely close enough to directly kill something. The death would be from a secondary effect, like a power converter going unstable from a huge change in circuit wide capacitance or, if you were real unlucky, something like a high impedance transistor gate being physically close enough to a voltage source to actually turn the thing on (or off), even with the high resistance.
Now, if you drop it in the ocean, I'm sure your chances of a bricked phone are MUCH higher.
First phone, went swimming three times: pool, lake, then creek. Survived fine. This wasn't "splash, oh no!". This was swimming around for a good 10 minutes and then "meh...it's a trooper.".
Second phone: swimming in lake, dropped into "freshly flushed" toilet. Works fine. Still can't hold this one close to my face...
For all the cases, took the battery out and let it dry in a sunny window for two weeks without trying to turn it on. Always powered right up. The water indicators always worked...and always fell off the second time around. There's not really that much in a modern phone that can be damaged by low conductivity water directly. I suppose if you caused the power converter to go unstable or something, then you have a chance of killing it. Unfortunately, my GPS died in the second lake incident...the old school LCD that used rubber contact strips had debris trapped in it...couldn't get it to align properly or stay put after cleaning it..
Re:Still not quite sure why twitter is necessary
on
Two Scoops of Buzz
·
· Score: 1
I only want a few words updating me on my friends' status, location, and plans.
And you have the reason people bash twitter...they see it as something more than it is. I think everyone should understand the following sentence:
Twitter is not meant to communicate thoughts or ideas.
With the major news organizations popularizing it as a source of information or as a way to communicate, this confusion makes sense. It's just normal marketing, "You can use this knife to cut your vegetables, saw your lumber, prop up your wobbly table. Call now, and we'll include a neck strap for your knife. Now you can shade and cool your neck on those hot summer days!"
Rapid reaction time, good slide slip sensors, and some great counterintuitive steering routines are all going to be essential if this is going to be "at race speeds".
Unfortunately, *realtime* reaction time has nothing to do with staying on the road if physics wont allow it. If you go into a corner too fast, then you're quick reaction could put you into a beautiful sideways controlled drift, right past the point where the surface of the road stops existing. This means the car must also have some very impressive "look ahead". If it doesn't have a map of the road, it'll have to predict a safe speed for any blind turns (I imagine nearly all of them are) while considering the road surface conditions. I assume they use a pretty precise map (something like rally), and leaves road conditions to the traction sensors...does or doesn't have a map...still extremely impressive.
It would be interesting to through something at it like a blind hairpin turn with a nice tarmac to pea gravel covered tarmac transition around the bend. There's a popular youtube (blocked at work, can't get link) video of that type of condition with a blind type of rally race (no map) with human drivers...I remember about 5 cars rolling!
You've been watching too much CSI. I believe what they mean is that they can see if a large heat source exists behind a cement wall. Walls are very good insulators and *stop* heat. With an infrared camera, you can barely even see through a sheet of glass! It's a passive sensor, detecting the heat that the object gives off, and giving that temperature a color in the image. To get an idea of heat blocking capabilities, turn on your reflector space heater, which is a incredibly powerful IR source, shine it at a window, and go outside. Chances are, you wont be able to feel *anything*.
Currently, the only way to see through walls, which *is* possible, is to use THz (link 1, 2), Xray, and UWB. These are active devices that transmit and receive reflected signals, then construct and image.
And, before someone brings up that infrared is in the THz band, "Low frequency versions of terahertz waves are known as millimeter waves, and they behave much like radio waves. At higher frequencies, the terahertz waves straddle the border between radio and optical emissions." from space.com. From the IEEE paper, "(0.6 to 3 THz) offer a greater degree of penetration through architectural and textile materials", so they're using the looow range.
If you're worried about people seeing through your walls, maybe you should turn off your wifi!:-o
Or, you could do what you should have learned in your first ASM class, use more bytes! 64bit math is perfectly fine on a 8bit microcontroller, just a little slower. Extend the counter so it's in the range of months or years or tens of decades. Just make sure it's a little longer than some other required scheduled maintenance, like 2 election cycles. You should never reboot a MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM because of software, that's just TERRIBLE design. I can't believe you people!
And that's the point of DRM...controlling the hardware it can be transferred to and played on. For all we know, having the DRM could have been in the licensing for Apple to sell the songs at they price they sold them at...possible breaking the license if transferred to a DRM stripping/"incompatible with the terms" type of player.
It's interesting that people seem to think that when a software gets popular enough, the company who made the software somehow loses the ability to make decisions about or have control over that software, that they poured probably millions into, and also becomes a monopoly at the same time.
Proof of this being "We were able to measure our actual usage to greater than 99.9 percent efficiency." when converting the power from the battery to the mobo.
Still, there should be a big efficiency using a mains converter that brings it down to 12 rather than many smaller supplies that bring it from line voltage to 12 and lower.
Oops...forgot to put why they do it that way...because one AC to DC power converter can be made to run much more efficiently than many AC to DC converters handling a fraction of the power.
If you look at the efficiency curve of a converter, it starts out at 0, rise steeply to near peak, rolls up to peak, then start to fall down a bit. Somewhat idle PC's use very little power, giving the least efficiency! So, if you have an overpopulated server farm (to handle spikes) then, most of your pc's will be idle...burning much more power than they should. So, they use one massive power converter that handles much more power, but is always running at/near the peak of the efficiency curve during "average" loads.
And, then you use big fat rails (think thick pipes) as a power bus to negate the increased resistive losses, as mentioned in the last post.
At low DC voltages, you can't really do long cable runs without either suffering substantial resistive losses or using cable so thick you could club a seal to death with it.
Your statement is completely wrong, and I assume you're a troll.
Lower voltages means higher current for the same amount of power (P=I*V).
The power loss for a resistive cable is P=(I^2)*R. So, as current increases, power loss increases dramatically!
And, this power is converted to heat, so, you must increase the thickness of the cable!
This is why we use 300,000V and higher for power transmission lines, to minimize the current flowing through the wire, minimizing the power lost due to the resistance of that wire. And, that's why obscene amounts of power can fly through those relatively thin cables.
Customer: So, since you cut a portion of my service, will I get a discounted rate?
ATTsaurus: RAAWWRRR...Why, I see your point there, of course we can do something for you!
Customer:...what? really? Oh, ok, great!
ATTsaurus: Let me enter that into the computer...*pound pound pound*...ok...so...you used 5 megabytes accessing the Usenet server last month, and 9 gigabytes total...that comes to 0.054% off of your bill, or about 4.3 cents! Congratulations!
No...it's anti-anyonebutnormalcustomer behavior. The people running dns servers are probably 0.000001% of internet users....the rest are probably just infected machines.
The question is *why* do they care about filtering DNS traffic? Do they offer this service as a paid service elsewhere, costing them *money*? Or is it simply to try to get a handle on worms and malware, which uses tons of bandwidth for a network as big as comcast, costing them *tons of money*.
They have a profit based mindset...it shouldn't be hard to figure out why they're doing it. If the cost from malware is more than the loss of a portion of a fairly insignificant customer base that in reality probably costs them what several regular users cost, then they'll choose to block the port!
At one point I called support and asked what kind of account I would need to legally (in terms of usage agreement: no servers allowed) run a website. They said I'd have to go elsewhere to a *hosting company*. That's probably what they'll tell you here.
I think as much as we complain, in the end, if you want a direct and unfiltered, higher risk, and more expensive to maintain connection to the internet, you'll have to...pay more....just like if you want to use 5x the bandwidth of a normal user, you'll have to pay more.
I like the idea of the internet being a standard connection, wide open and the same anywhere...but that's not going to happen without regulatory laws, cause it doesn't make much business sense.
You're right...the electrons don't travel further than that...but the signal will...with some delay.
You don't need electrons to enter one end of the wire and exit the other at the same time...with long transmission lines, it's the change in potential, as a wave, that moves from one end of the wire to the other, not the electrons.
Like the other guy said, interfaces are attached to a pipeline...send the data to the peripheral, have it process the data, get some data back. Think gpu, physx, those kind of modern day coprocessors. You're not directly controlling the gpu hardware, you're sending data to it at high data rates, then telling it to crunch the numbers for you.
And...the other other guy is right, the point is moot since the dies are so small.
Nah, just use it like a man! My old Toshiba laptop, I used it as a cutting board, solder station, glueing surface, and diner plate...survived just fine, and looked rough, like a man!
Last time I said this...the comment was marked as flaimbait...but...why couldn't they have included something to keep the solar panels clean? Something like a felt windshield wiper? Small motor to vibrate the panels? Can of Dust-B'Gone?
I don't know...seems silly that a layer of dust...on a planet consisting almost entirely of rock and dust...wipes out the operation of a whatever million dollar rover.
Slashdot Mirror
There really needs to be some sort of mod point emergency reserve...I would break the hermetic seal for you, kind sir.
Also, your comment, for some reason, reminds me of most Javascript code that I've seen...
No, he absolutely right. The safest one lane bridge will be one made with 10 bazillion cubic feet of cement and steel...with a few holes to let the water through of course. But, this is the real world, you can't do that. It would be ugly, environmentally harmful, and cost too much money; it wouldn't get built on real earth.
There's ALWAYS compromise for functionality. This is why things such as "margin of safety" exists. You don't build something that will not fail, you build something that a failure is, statistically, pretty slim.
If you read your quote, he says it's always tempered by the real world. This is true. So, I challenge you: name *one* device that functions as it should, 100% of the time, without compromise.
If I were given this impossible challenge, the first thing that would come to my mind is medical devices. Look up how fruitful medical device production is these days. It's not, because for anything beyond something simple like a screw, you nearly *can't* make them reliable enough and still turn a profit over their lifetimes (lawsuits for failing devices are expensive for some odd reason).
Nah, it's very low conductivity even with regular contamination. Try testing your tap water...pretty pathetic. Not even remotely close enough to directly kill something. The death would be from a secondary effect, like a power converter going unstable from a huge change in circuit wide capacitance or, if you were real unlucky, something like a high impedance transistor gate being physically close enough to a voltage source to actually turn the thing on (or off), even with the high resistance.
Now, if you drop it in the ocean, I'm sure your chances of a bricked phone are MUCH higher.
My phones like water.
First phone, went swimming three times: pool, lake, then creek. Survived fine. This wasn't "splash, oh no!". This was swimming around for a good 10 minutes and then "meh...it's a trooper.".
Second phone: swimming in lake, dropped into "freshly flushed" toilet. Works fine. Still can't hold this one close to my face...
For all the cases, took the battery out and let it dry in a sunny window for two weeks without trying to turn it on. Always powered right up. The water indicators always worked...and always fell off the second time around. There's not really that much in a modern phone that can be damaged by low conductivity water directly. I suppose if you caused the power converter to go unstable or something, then you have a chance of killing it. Unfortunately, my GPS died in the second lake incident...the old school LCD that used rubber contact strips had debris trapped in it...couldn't get it to align properly or stay put after cleaning it..
I only want a few words updating me on my friends' status, location, and plans.
And you have the reason people bash twitter...they see it as something more than it is. I think everyone should understand the following sentence:
Twitter is not meant to communicate thoughts or ideas.
With the major news organizations popularizing it as a source of information or as a way to communicate, this confusion makes sense. It's just normal marketing, "You can use this knife to cut your vegetables, saw your lumber, prop up your wobbly table. Call now, and we'll include a neck strap for your knife. Now you can shade and cool your neck on those hot summer days!"
No, but you could easily have said less: 10^100.
Or, to your extreme, 1x1x1x1x1x1x1x1x1x10^100.
I got as far as the wrong "your", and then dismissed the remainder of the post as the ramblings of a crazy person.
Agreed. Reworded sentence but didn't reword word.
Rapid reaction time, good slide slip sensors, and some great counterintuitive steering routines are all going to be essential if this is going to be "at race speeds".
Unfortunately, *realtime* reaction time has nothing to do with staying on the road if physics wont allow it. If you go into a corner too fast, then you're quick reaction could put you into a beautiful sideways controlled drift, right past the point where the surface of the road stops existing. This means the car must also have some very impressive "look ahead". If it doesn't have a map of the road, it'll have to predict a safe speed for any blind turns (I imagine nearly all of them are) while considering the road surface conditions. I assume they use a pretty precise map (something like rally), and leaves road conditions to the traction sensors...does or doesn't have a map...still extremely impressive.
It would be interesting to through something at it like a blind hairpin turn with a nice tarmac to pea gravel covered tarmac transition around the bend. There's a popular youtube (blocked at work, can't get link) video of that type of condition with a blind type of rally race (no map) with human drivers...I remember about 5 cars rolling!
Some of us like the higher fidelity from the unsmoothed pixels that software rendering masters!
Damn kids with your fancy bicubicly stretched pixels and anti-aliased edges. Get off my screen!
You've been watching too much CSI. I believe what they mean is that they can see if a large heat source exists behind a cement wall. Walls are very good insulators and *stop* heat. With an infrared camera, you can barely even see through a sheet of glass! It's a passive sensor, detecting the heat that the object gives off, and giving that temperature a color in the image. To get an idea of heat blocking capabilities, turn on your reflector space heater, which is a incredibly powerful IR source, shine it at a window, and go outside. Chances are, you wont be able to feel *anything*.
Currently, the only way to see through walls, which *is* possible, is to use THz (link 1, 2), Xray, and UWB. These are active devices that transmit and receive reflected signals, then construct and image.
And, before someone brings up that infrared is in the THz band, "Low frequency versions of terahertz waves are known as millimeter waves, and they behave much like radio waves. At higher frequencies, the terahertz waves straddle the border between radio and optical emissions." from space.com. From the IEEE paper, "(0.6 to 3 THz) offer a greater degree of penetration through architectural and textile materials", so they're using the looow range.
If you're worried about people seeing through your walls, maybe you should turn off your wifi! :-o
Or, you could do what you should have learned in your first ASM class, use more bytes! 64bit math is perfectly fine on a 8bit microcontroller, just a little slower. Extend the counter so it's in the range of months or years or tens of decades. Just make sure it's a little longer than some other required scheduled maintenance, like 2 election cycles. You should never reboot a MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM because of software, that's just TERRIBLE design. I can't believe you people!
And that's the point of DRM...controlling the hardware it can be transferred to and played on. For all we know, having the DRM could have been in the licensing for Apple to sell the songs at they price they sold them at...possible breaking the license if transferred to a DRM stripping/"incompatible with the terms" type of player.
Agreed 100%!
It's interesting that people seem to think that when a software gets popular enough, the company who made the software somehow loses the ability to make decisions about or have control over that software, that they poured probably millions into, and also becomes a monopoly at the same time.
Proof of this being
"We were able to measure our actual usage to greater than 99.9 percent efficiency." when converting the power from the battery to the mobo.
Still, there should be a big efficiency using a mains converter that brings it down to 12 rather than many smaller supplies that bring it from line voltage to 12 and lower.
Oops...forgot to put why they do it that way...because one AC to DC power converter can be made to run much more efficiently than many AC to DC converters handling a fraction of the power.
If you look at the efficiency curve of a converter, it starts out at 0, rise steeply to near peak, rolls up to peak, then start to fall down a bit. Somewhat idle PC's use very little power, giving the least efficiency! So, if you have an overpopulated server farm (to handle spikes) then, most of your pc's will be idle...burning much more power than they should. So, they use one massive power converter that handles much more power, but is always running at/near the peak of the efficiency curve during "average" loads.
And, then you use big fat rails (think thick pipes) as a power bus to negate the increased resistive losses, as mentioned in the last post.
At low DC voltages, you can't really do long cable runs without either suffering substantial resistive losses or using cable so thick you could club a seal to death with it.
Your statement is completely wrong, and I assume you're a troll.
Lower voltages means higher current for the same amount of power (P=I*V).
The power loss for a resistive cable is P=(I^2)*R. So, as current increases, power loss increases dramatically!
And, this power is converted to heat, so, you must increase the thickness of the cable!
This is why we use 300,000V and higher for power transmission lines, to minimize the current flowing through the wire, minimizing the power lost due to the resistance of that wire. And, that's why obscene amounts of power can fly through those relatively thin cables.
Customer: So, since you cut a portion of my service, will I get a discounted rate?
ATTsaurus: RAAWWRRR...Why, I see your point there, of course we can do something for you!
Customer: ...what? really? Oh, ok, great!
ATTsaurus: Let me enter that into the computer...*pound pound pound*...ok...so...you used 5 megabytes accessing the Usenet server last month, and 9 gigabytes total...that comes to 0.054% off of your bill, or about 4.3 cents! Congratulations!
Customer: ...I hate you guys...
ATTsaurus: RAAWR!!!! *eats you*
No...it's anti-anyonebutnormalcustomer behavior. The people running dns servers are probably 0.000001% of internet users....the rest are probably just infected machines.
The question is *why* do they care about filtering DNS traffic? Do they offer this service as a paid service elsewhere, costing them *money*? Or is it simply to try to get a handle on worms and malware, which uses tons of bandwidth for a network as big as comcast, costing them *tons of money*.
They have a profit based mindset...it shouldn't be hard to figure out why they're doing it. If the cost from malware is more than the loss of a portion of a fairly insignificant customer base that in reality probably costs them what several regular users cost, then they'll choose to block the port!
At one point I called support and asked what kind of account I would need to legally (in terms of usage agreement: no servers allowed) run a website. They said I'd have to go elsewhere to a *hosting company*. That's probably what they'll tell you here.
I think as much as we complain, in the end, if you want a direct and unfiltered, higher risk, and more expensive to maintain connection to the internet, you'll have to...pay more....just like if you want to use 5x the bandwidth of a normal user, you'll have to pay more.
I like the idea of the internet being a standard connection, wide open and the same anywhere...but that's not going to happen without regulatory laws, cause it doesn't make much business sense.
Woot! I grabbed JohnDoe_SRJC@yahoo.com!
1. Check slashdot
2. Grab example email address from news article
3. ???
4. Profit!
I'm sitting here watching the yahoo inbox, just waiting for the bucket loads of money to start pouring in...hahaha...SUCKERS!
You're right...the electrons don't travel further than that...but the signal will...with some delay.
You don't need electrons to enter one end of the wire and exit the other at the same time...with long transmission lines, it's the change in potential, as a wave, that moves from one end of the wire to the other, not the electrons.
Like the other guy said, interfaces are attached to a pipeline...send the data to the peripheral, have it process the data, get some data back. Think gpu, physx, those kind of modern day coprocessors. You're not directly controlling the gpu hardware, you're sending data to it at high data rates, then telling it to crunch the numbers for you.
And...the other other guy is right, the point is moot since the dies are so small.
Wait...was this a troll?
Nah, just use it like a man!
My old Toshiba laptop, I used it as a cutting board, solder station, glueing surface, and diner plate...survived just fine, and looked rough, like a man!
...I just rearranged all of mine. All it takes is a screwdriver for the desktop keyboard, and a needle for the laptop.
That's the reason I switched...for the pain...and also for the challenge.
Pain went away. For that reason alone, Dvorak > Qwerty.
Last time I said this...the comment was marked as flaimbait...but...why couldn't they have included something to keep the solar panels clean? Something like a felt windshield wiper? Small motor to vibrate the panels? Can of Dust-B'Gone?
I don't know...seems silly that a layer of dust...on a planet consisting almost entirely of rock and dust...wipes out the operation of a whatever million dollar rover.