One, EULAs have never shown to be legally binding.
Neither has the GPL, as far as I know.
There's nothing stopping you from buying CDs, you know. Or getting your music elsewhere. If you don't like the iTunes EULA, vote with your wallet. And let Apple know that you used to buy music at the iTMS, but you've decided their EULA is too restrictive; you'd like to be able to buy unencrypted files.
Have you looked hard enough? Here in Canada I think everything by EMI has DRM now. It's stopped me from buying a few CDs, since I didn't know whether or not they'd be able to be put on my iPod and I don't feel like running a $15 experiment.
Interestingly, EMI's "quality control" department has reading comprehension problems. I sent them a "will this work on my computer" question and they responded with "we're sorry you're having problems with our CD; send us your address and we'll send you a replacement."
What part of "I haven't bought your CD yet, because I don't know if it will work" don't they understand?
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about your.sig now? It'd be nice if this post got modded into the basement, since it's a ploy to pad a troll account (see the AC follow-up for details) but according to your.sig...
Everything is grey. Don't paint yourself into a corner by viewing the world in binary.
That's not quite accurate. In engineering, you are dealing whith quantifiable measures, in the sense that you know exactly what kind of conditions and stresses the materials are going to be exposed to.
That's incorrect. You never know exactly what conditions and stresses the materials are going to be exposed to. You're dealing with "the innate perversity of inanimate objects" as Kipling so eloquently put it.
Factors of safety are no different than things like array bounds checking, error handling routines, etc., in software. You're covering your ass and doing your best to fail gracefully if it comes to that.
An Engineer (which is what a lot of software people want to call themselves) must take measures to ensure the safety of the public. That does not mean you have to be superhuman, and that everything you make has to work perfectly. It means that what you turn out has to meet the current state-of-the-art in terms of rigor. You are not responsible if the factors which lead to your design's demise were beyond your control (person drove car into a brick wall at 200kph) or beyond the scientific knowledge at the time. You are responsible when you screw up and spec four bolts instead of five, and you are responsible when you screw up and forget to bounds-check your array.
Try taking a 1969 car and driving it 120,000 miles without doing anything more than changing the oil.
Any chance that might be due to manufacturing improvements? Tighter tolerances? Better materials? Better understanding of the actual dynamics (fluid, thermo, mech, etc.)? The computer isn't the be-all and end-all in this exercise, you know. And really, it's the weak link.
Don't get me wrong... I like computers, and the cool control-systems stuff I can do with them... but they're not the only thing which has advanced over the last decade.
Also, I find that in most cases it's EASIER to work on my car with a computer. Without a computer you only know if there's something wrong if it's bad enough to cause serious performance degradation. With a computer, you can catch problems way before they become serious. I had a light a few months ago, went to the auto parts store, borrowed their scanner, saw that I had a stuck EGR valve, wrenched it off, cleaned it, and replaced it.
And this is a perfect opportunity to show you the flip side, because I had exactly the same symptoms back when my car finished its first winter.
In March, when the car was under a year old, the "check engine" light came on. Sometimes it means you didn't tighten your gas cap enough, or you got crappy fuel. As it turns out, it was a stuck EGR valve, fried solenoid. The valve was cleaned, the solenoid was replaced, and the "check engine" light came on again that very night.
The next "check this" item on the list is the fuel delivery system. Valve cleaned, solenoid replaced, fuel system torn down and reassembled. The light was back on in a day.
As it turns out, the ECU was defective. The engine computer was frying the solenoid, and then reporting the (correct!) "my solenoid isn't working" error code! You couldn't tell that from the symptoms, because all the signs of mechanical failure were there.
Most of the power increases over the years has come from improved cylinder head designs. High swirl ports, the reintroduction of muli-valve & OHC designs. Camshaft designs even for pushrod engines had two big leaps in technology. One in the early '80s and one in the mid '90s.
No, no! You've got it all wrong! Changing this chip in my engine will give me 100hp. Well, that and my yellow Type-R stickers. Yellow is key. Red will do, if you're in a pinch.:)
Mine had the problems, and it was purchased outside of the timeframe they quote. The logic board was replaced under the extended warranty (money well spent!) but the extended warranty expires this August. I guess I'll have to keep my fingers crossed.
No. Columbia was the oldest orbiter, and even though it had been refit and upgraded in many ways, it still had it's original airframe. Columbia was the heaviest of the orbiters, and unable to achieve the high orbit of the ISS. It was the only shuttle unable to make flights to the space station.
Columbia could achieved the correct altitude, but not the correct inclination. The climb to the ISS is hard because of the inclination of the orbit; you can't use the Earth's rotation to as much advantage.
All of this is moot, because once on-orbit there's not enough fuel to perform these maneuvers, but it could have been at the right altitude. It could never have been at the proper inclination.
When someone says RTFM they are saying, I'm not going to type the answer to you because it is already written down. Go read it.
Some people are saying that, but other people simply use it as a cop-out. Recent case in point: I'm having iceauth problems, so I've been digging through old newsgroup postings. Somebody replied to an iceauth problem post (you can probably find it on Google Groups; that's where I stumbled across it) by saying "RTFM." Look up the FM for iceauth, and tell me why this is a valid response.
The people who are saying "the answer is already written down; go read it" should give a link to the answer, and quote some of the relevant text. In other words, point the person in the right direction. Don't send them to a multi-page document without any direction.
There's a way to share specialized knowledge properly. If we're having a (verbal) conversation and you asked me what a word meant, I shouldn't reply "it's in the dictionary." Duh. Maybe you don't know how to spell the word. Maybe it's a specialized word that shows up in my medical dictionary, but not in my regular English dictionary. Maybe it's a slang term (hacker parlance, for example). Maybe you don't have easy access to the dictionary right now (you're not near one), maybe the issue is time-sensitive, and you don't have the option of getting yourself to a dictionary, etc., etc.
Assess the situation properly. Give the person enough info that they can make do in the short term, but know where to go to round things out properly. Using my "unknown word" example, tell the person what sort of word they're looking for ("it's a medical term") what the word means generally ("it has to do with XYZ") and tell them where they can get the additional info they need ("most anatomy books talk about it in detail" or "it might only be in medical dictionaries; it's spelled X-Y-Z"). Don't tell them the Latin origins of the word, what date it appeared in common usage, etc. They get that information when they go look it up.
1 kilowatt is 1000 joules per second, or 238 gram calories per second. Conveniently, a gram calorie is the energy needed to raise a gram of water one degree celcius. For water, one gram is also one milliliter. So, a single gram of water will be raised 238 degrees C in one second. We don't want it to be raised more than 20C, so we need to exchange water at a rate of 238/20 = 11.9 mL/sec.
You're ignoring the convective heat transfer coefficient for water.
The heat transfer rate is a product of the temparature difference between the wall and the free-stream fluid, the surface area, and the convective heat transfer coefficient.
Second, NASA's Ion engine (on Deep Space 1) failed in lab tests, and then failed in space. NASA had to "shake" the probe using the gas-based manoevering jets, using up valuable fuel. The probe was a success in the end, but more by luck than design.
They didn't shake it, they rotated it to point the ass end at the Sun to burn crud off the ionizing screen. After that it started just fine.
When will Linux take over? When it interoperates with everything, so that people can get used to using it. Then, you can slowly migrate systems as needed, instead of going all out with one system, then having to re-train all your workers, and iron out all the bugs at once.
And technically this is the GNU way of doing things, isn't it? Use the proprietary tool until your free-not-as-in-beer one works. I don't really see any other way to play the game. The truth of the matter is that Windows has a monstrous lead, and is well-practiced at stomping challengers.
Barely a day goes by that I don't do something in Linux that is impossible (or very much more difficult) to do in Windows. Especially automatic things. An example: I want to check every hour to see if a website has changed. No problem, three lines of shell script in a cron job.
Doesn't IE for Windows have "subscriptions"? IE for Mac does... it'll track your sites for you, and you can customize the check interval for each site if you want. Frankly, I'd rather that than a shell script in a cron job, even though I know how to do both.
The electronic vote counting here (Ontario, Canada) sticks with the familiar: you mark a paper ballot as before, and it is fed through a reader which sits on top of a lockbox. You watch your ballot go through, and the machine beeps to tell you "ya, I read it fine" and prints something similar on its display. If there's ever a challenge to the results, the original ballots are there for hand counting.
I believe he's referring to the ridiculous amount of swapping that would have gone on had they used a 6GB data set. The Xeon only has 4GB memory. (I can't believe I said "only.")
The G5 would have the same problem if it was working on a dataset that was 1.5x the size of its physical memory.
Customer: Yeah, I like this shirt, but I'm not sure you guys are selling it at the best price. I'm just gonna take the shirt with me while I shop around, mmm 'k?"
Shops don't let you do this, for fairly obvious reasons. Airlines do.
Huh? Shops sure as hell do. I don't know what stores you shop at, but every store I shop at has a return policy on unused merchandise.
Maybe I haven't been looking hard enough, but I haven't seen (legal) downloads of Microsoft Office X, Adobe Photoshop, Unreal 2, or pretty much anything else that you might want.
I believe IBM will let you download electronic verions of their software, and knock 10% off the price.
MJC
Re:AvWeek is reporting transition to turbulent flo
on
More on Columbia
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· Score: 1
What they got wrong was when the Romulan ship fired its engines to detatch itself form the Enterprise. Since they were mashed together, all they should have achieved was to move the entire mess backwards, unless the enterprise was also reversing or being held in place (or pushed off with a tractor beam, which they didn't do).
This isn't the case. If the Enterprise has a large inertia (which a ship of that size would), the parts holding the two ships together would have to transmit huge forces as the one ship (the one firing its engines) tried to get the Enterprise moving.
Newton's Second Law... F=m*a; a large "F" can be the result of a large inertia (m) or a large acceleration (a) or both.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet, so I'll bring it up.
Perhaps "become" was deliberately misspelled in this particular version of the memo, as a signature of sorts? Easy way to find a leak. (Assuming Microsoft cares one way or the other...)
And I too could have done without the tripe in green. Lets try not to turn into a bunch of crybabies just because our revolution hasn't been as swift and successful as we anticipated.
The external interfaces are even worse, these make the brain totally useless for many tasks that computers can process in seconds. As an example try raytracing a rendering a scene using crayons and doing the maths in your head.
I do it every night, several times a night. Imersive animation, in realtime. It's called dreaming.
It's not my fault I can't output the production... the computer-interface technology is sub-par. Technically if you knew how to decode the EEG properly you could watch my movies.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd forgotten about that; good catch.
MJC
One, EULAs have never shown to be legally binding.
Neither has the GPL, as far as I know.
There's nothing stopping you from buying CDs, you know. Or getting your music elsewhere. If you don't like the iTunes EULA, vote with your wallet. And let Apple know that you used to buy music at the iTMS, but you've decided their EULA is too restrictive; you'd like to be able to buy unencrypted files.
MJC
Have you looked hard enough? Here in Canada I think everything by EMI has DRM now. It's stopped me from buying a few CDs, since I didn't know whether or not they'd be able to be put on my iPod and I don't feel like running a $15 experiment.
Interestingly, EMI's "quality control" department has reading comprehension problems. I sent them a "will this work on my computer" question and they responded with "we're sorry you're having problems with our CD; send us your address and we'll send you a replacement."
What part of "I haven't bought your CD yet, because I don't know if it will work" don't they understand?
MJC
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about your .sig now? It'd be nice if this post got modded into the basement, since it's a ploy to pad a troll account (see the AC follow-up for details) but according to your .sig...
Everything is grey. Don't paint yourself into a corner by viewing the world in binary.
MJC
That's not quite accurate. In engineering, you are dealing whith quantifiable measures, in the sense that you know exactly what kind of conditions and stresses the materials are going to be exposed to.
That's incorrect. You never know exactly what conditions and stresses the materials are going to be exposed to. You're dealing with "the innate perversity of inanimate objects" as Kipling so eloquently put it.
Factors of safety are no different than things like array bounds checking, error handling routines, etc., in software. You're covering your ass and doing your best to fail gracefully if it comes to that.
An Engineer (which is what a lot of software people want to call themselves) must take measures to ensure the safety of the public. That does not mean you have to be superhuman, and that everything you make has to work perfectly. It means that what you turn out has to meet the current state-of-the-art in terms of rigor. You are not responsible if the factors which lead to your design's demise were beyond your control (person drove car into a brick wall at 200kph) or beyond the scientific knowledge at the time. You are responsible when you screw up and spec four bolts instead of five, and you are responsible when you screw up and forget to bounds-check your array.
MJC
Try taking a 1969 car and driving it 120,000 miles without doing anything more than changing the oil.
Any chance that might be due to manufacturing improvements? Tighter tolerances? Better materials? Better understanding of the actual dynamics (fluid, thermo, mech, etc.)? The computer isn't the be-all and end-all in this exercise, you know. And really, it's the weak link.
Don't get me wrong... I like computers, and the cool control-systems stuff I can do with them... but they're not the only thing which has advanced over the last decade.
Also, I find that in most cases it's EASIER to work on my car with a computer. Without a computer you only know if there's something wrong if it's bad enough to cause serious performance degradation. With a computer, you can catch problems way before they become serious. I had a light a few months ago, went to the auto parts store, borrowed their scanner, saw that I had a stuck EGR valve, wrenched it off, cleaned it, and replaced it.
And this is a perfect opportunity to show you the flip side, because I had exactly the same symptoms back when my car finished its first winter.
In March, when the car was under a year old, the "check engine" light came on. Sometimes it means you didn't tighten your gas cap enough, or you got crappy fuel. As it turns out, it was a stuck EGR valve, fried solenoid. The valve was cleaned, the solenoid was replaced, and the "check engine" light came on again that very night.
The next "check this" item on the list is the fuel delivery system. Valve cleaned, solenoid replaced, fuel system torn down and reassembled. The light was back on in a day.
As it turns out, the ECU was defective. The engine computer was frying the solenoid, and then reporting the (correct!) "my solenoid isn't working" error code! You couldn't tell that from the symptoms, because all the signs of mechanical failure were there.
MJC
Most of the power increases over the years has come from improved cylinder head designs. High swirl ports, the reintroduction of muli-valve & OHC designs. Camshaft designs even for pushrod engines had two big leaps in technology. One in the early '80s and one in the mid '90s.
No, no! You've got it all wrong! Changing this chip in my engine will give me 100hp. Well, that and my yellow Type-R stickers. Yellow is key. Red will do, if you're in a pinch. :)
MJC
MJC
No. Columbia was the oldest orbiter, and even though it had been refit and upgraded in many ways, it still had it's original airframe. Columbia was the heaviest of the orbiters, and unable to achieve the high orbit of the ISS. It was the only shuttle unable to make flights to the space station.
Columbia could achieved the correct altitude, but not the correct inclination. The climb to the ISS is hard because of the inclination of the orbit; you can't use the Earth's rotation to as much advantage.
All of this is moot, because once on-orbit there's not enough fuel to perform these maneuvers, but it could have been at the right altitude. It could never have been at the proper inclination.
MJC
When someone says RTFM they are saying, I'm not going to type the answer to you because it is already written down. Go read it.
Some people are saying that, but other people simply use it as a cop-out. Recent case in point: I'm having iceauth problems, so I've been digging through old newsgroup postings. Somebody replied to an iceauth problem post (you can probably find it on Google Groups; that's where I stumbled across it) by saying "RTFM." Look up the FM for iceauth, and tell me why this is a valid response.
The people who are saying "the answer is already written down; go read it" should give a link to the answer, and quote some of the relevant text. In other words, point the person in the right direction. Don't send them to a multi-page document without any direction.
There's a way to share specialized knowledge properly. If we're having a (verbal) conversation and you asked me what a word meant, I shouldn't reply "it's in the dictionary." Duh. Maybe you don't know how to spell the word. Maybe it's a specialized word that shows up in my medical dictionary, but not in my regular English dictionary. Maybe it's a slang term (hacker parlance, for example). Maybe you don't have easy access to the dictionary right now (you're not near one), maybe the issue is time-sensitive, and you don't have the option of getting yourself to a dictionary, etc., etc.
Assess the situation properly. Give the person enough info that they can make do in the short term, but know where to go to round things out properly. Using my "unknown word" example, tell the person what sort of word they're looking for ("it's a medical term") what the word means generally ("it has to do with XYZ") and tell them where they can get the additional info they need ("most anatomy books talk about it in detail" or "it might only be in medical dictionaries; it's spelled X-Y-Z"). Don't tell them the Latin origins of the word, what date it appeared in common usage, etc. They get that information when they go look it up.
MJC
You're ignoring the convective heat transfer coefficient for water.
The heat transfer rate is a product of the temparature difference between the wall and the free-stream fluid, the surface area, and the convective heat transfer coefficient.
MJC
They didn't shake it, they rotated it to point the ass end at the Sun to burn crud off the ionizing screen. After that it started just fine.
MJC
And technically this is the GNU way of doing things, isn't it? Use the proprietary tool until your free-not-as-in-beer one works. I don't really see any other way to play the game. The truth of the matter is that Windows has a monstrous lead, and is well-practiced at stomping challengers.
MJC
Doesn't IE for Windows have "subscriptions"? IE for Mac does... it'll track your sites for you, and you can customize the check interval for each site if you want. Frankly, I'd rather that than a shell script in a cron job, even though I know how to do both.
MJC
MJC
The G5 would have the same problem if it was working on a dataset that was 1.5x the size of its physical memory.
MJC
Shops don't let you do this, for fairly obvious reasons. Airlines do.
Huh? Shops sure as hell do. I don't know what stores you shop at, but every store I shop at has a return policy on unused merchandise.
MJC
MJC
I haven't done surgery on my jacket, but the shape feels right.
MJC
Maybe I haven't been looking hard enough, but I haven't seen (legal) downloads of Microsoft Office X, Adobe Photoshop, Unreal 2, or pretty much anything else that you might want.
I believe IBM will let you download electronic verions of their software, and knock 10% off the price.
MJC
MJC
This isn't the case. If the Enterprise has a large inertia (which a ship of that size would), the parts holding the two ships together would have to transmit huge forces as the one ship (the one firing its engines) tried to get the Enterprise moving.
Newton's Second Law... F=m*a; a large "F" can be the result of a large inertia (m) or a large acceleration (a) or both.
MJC
Perhaps "become" was deliberately misspelled in this particular version of the memo, as a signature of sorts? Easy way to find a leak. (Assuming Microsoft cares one way or the other...)
And I too could have done without the tripe in green. Lets try not to turn into a bunch of crybabies just because our revolution hasn't been as swift and successful as we anticipated.
MJC
I like IBM.
MJC
I do it every night, several times a night. Imersive animation, in realtime. It's called dreaming.
It's not my fault I can't output the production... the computer-interface technology is sub-par. Technically if you knew how to decode the EEG properly you could watch my movies.
MJC