In practice, you need some form of voltage converter anyway. Because a single Li-Ion cell has a voltage of 3.6V while computer components have voltages anywhere between 1V (ultra low voltage CPUs) to 5 V (USB power supply for external devices, according to Wikipedia). There is no way you can satisfy all these needs from the same battery without some adjusting of the voltages.
In fact, a quick look at my preferred computer mail order shop tells me that most laptop batteries have voltages over 10 V, which needs to be converted down for any current PC component. TFA is right by the way: those are pretty expensive per watt-hour.
Which leaves only one valid argument against standardized batteries: Custom shapes make it easier for the vendors to build small laptops, because they can adjust the battery to fit into whatever space is left by the other components.
A typical op-amp can provide an output current of some 10 mA. Which is fine for driving a 32 Ohm headphone at low voltages. If you switch to lower impedances (4 or 8 ohm?), the music player will need a more beefy opamp.
The internet is great for comparing prices and finding the cheapest offers. I have used that myself on occasion to get CDs below 10 euros or some electronic spare parts for a fraction of the price the official channels demand. And that is only about getting the same stuff cheaper. Finding alternatives from another brand is also easier when you can get all the information you need on the net.
Of course, the above covers only low priced stuff where most dealers won't bother with haggling because it would be too much work. For expensive stuff with a lot of visibility, the celebrities still have that advantage.
A settlement requires both parties to agree. In this case, I don't see how the CRIA can "prove" to be in the right. Unless they offer a really substantial settlement (several hundred million?) plaintiffs might prefer to go ahead with the lawsuit.
99% seems a bit pessimistic, but I agree that understanding that stuff might put you among the more knowledgeable developers in many organizations.
Considering constant factors versus "big O": In my experience most tasks with a count of input data low enough that "big O" does NOT dominate the execution time are fast enough anyway. Modern CPUs are your friend here and allow you to slack off a bit. Exceptions may include scripting languages and realtime applications.
There are huge differences between different algorithms, and picking the right one will usually sufficient without further optimization. For a very rough overview look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation.
So choose an algorithm with favorable "Big O", implement it cleanly and try if that is fast enough. Only if that is not sufficient, try clever tricks.
Microsoft seems to have a pretty good grasp of how much bugs and security holes the majority of their customers will tolerate, and the releases reflect that by being just good enough that said customers don't run away screaming.
Of course, if you walk the edge like that you might fail on occasion. See Windows ME and Vista. The former was soon forgotten because XP came soon after (and IT geeks grabbed Win2K anyway). The latter actually hurt their reputation for a while.
I used (soft) contact lenses for a while, and those had a tendency to drift around a bit. Which was no problem for a lens that has the same refraction at every place. But when the same happens with the display lens, you might have one more offset to measure and consider.
That works for those of us who know the companies in question. But for a lot of non-technical people who don't follow the IT news, it may come as a surprise that Apple won't repair their MacBook. Or that Microsoft tends to release operating systems which need a lot of babysitting. For these people it is completely reasonable to get upset and maybe start a class action lawsuit.
Personally, I do follow news such as this and prefer to 1) Avoid Apple completely. I think their management is a bunch of assholes with a greater control fetish than Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer ever had. 2) Minimize the use of Microsoft products. The fact that most of computer games require Windows has kept me from switching completely to Linux so far. But IE and MS Office are a no-no for me.
Of course, these are only the most well-known offenders. I could go on about Symantec(Symandreck) software, HP printers, Google desktop toolbars and a few more...
Of course, if they keep releasing the source it may not stay limited. I wonder if this is going to stay a genuine Open Source OS or if Google will pull an Apple and gradually go back on the openness.
When the deadlines get near enough, you may be faced with a choice of using the somehow-not-broken code or miss the deadline. Been there, done that.
But at the same time, I recognize the dangers and I'd rather not work that way. In short, unless I got a manager breathing down my neck who jacks up the pressure, I take the time to do it the right way. And in the long term, it usually pays off. Because intransparent and poorly understood code will pile up to the point that no one understands it anymore.
No, I just have my doubts if the higher standards would stick when the patent examiners are under pressure to process patents fast and management really wants to see more approved patents because those bring revenue. A decision by Congress to grant no more patents, period, would be far more clear cut and not so easy to water down.
Individual patent claims may be stupid and a waste of time, but it is the huge numbers of patents that really makes the system fail.
A way to fix that would be to drastically increase the required inventive step, so only extraordinary inventions would get patent protection at all. Those extraordinary inventions would be much less numerous and it would be possible again to do an exhaustive search if your code was already patented by someone else. But I don't think that will happen anytime soon. It would be easier to remove the patent system completely.
The electrician has no control on how many devices you hook up to the circuit. A circuit probably has 5 - 12 outlets/lights on it. The circuit breaker is protecting the entire circuit against current exceeding the safe range for the wiring.
Yes, that is the idea. And at least in Germany where I live, the outlets are usually designed to handle all of that current. In most cases, that means "schuko" outlets that can handle 16A, and a 16 A breaker. Appliances with thinner wiring usually have their own fuses. A radio or TV set might have something like a 2A fuse, for instance. Built into the appliance itself, so you can be sure the fuse matches the appliance.
Then the electrician fucked up. He is supposed to know that breaker should not allow higher currents than the line and outlet can handle.
BTW, a fuse in the outlet will only protect against currents that are too high for the outlet. Unless said electrician also makes sure the mains line is strong enough. Also, you don't know in advance what is a normal current for the item you plug into the outlet. It may be much lower than what the outlet can handle. That is why many devices have built-in fuses in case of internal shortcuts, and don't rely on the circuit breakers alone.
Also keep in mind that the development on that kind of systems takes years. And once they are in service, they tend to stay in service for decades. When I served my 15 months of military service in Germany in 1987, I encountered equipment, including some electronics, that was older than me.
The architectural decisions on the Patriot missile system were probably made before 32 bit computers in a size/prize range appropriate for mobile systems were available. Hence, the 24 bit register with the poor accuracy. A few years later, the designers would have deserved a beating for not using something like the Motorola 68000 and storing the time in a 32 bit integer. In 1980, it might still have been a good idea to do that in software but I'm not entirely sure if the performance would have been sufficient.
On the other hand, you can go buy an Android phone any time you want.
True, and lets not forget Nokia/Maemo.
In the PC world, I like how Apple's success weakens the Microsoft almost-monopoly. In the mobile phone market, Apple are part of the problem (and their managers are maybe worse control freaks than Ballmer & Co).
My experience with Windows 9x matches GP's claim. If you had a broken installation and tried to fix it by re-installing without deleting the old installation, it would copy the broken settings and usually work even less than before.
Maybe GP still remembers that time and based his statement on that;-)
I'm not so sure about newer versions, as I made a habit of doing always clean installs back then. Never tried to "repair-install" W2k or later.
I guess Rapid7 wants to do closed source versions in the future. That makes it necessary to buy the copyrights, or at least most of them and re-developing the stuff they could not buy.
Of course that puts them in competition with whatever open source version other people maintain. A previous example of that would be Interbase by Borland. Borland released the version 6.0 under an open source license, but reconsidered soon after and the next version was closed source again. That one open source release was picked up by a group of developers and became the Firebird database (http://www.firebirdsql.org/). Interbase is still available commercially from Embarcadero, but I guess they lose some sales to its open source version.
You're right about the OS for gaming (but the less honest guys can probably find a pirated XP Corporate Edition). The hardware, however, is NOT controlled by Microsoft. My own PC is still mostly running Windows, but I fully expect that Microsoft will some day piss me off enough that Windows gets kicked from the HD. At that point I'll have to give up some games that don't (yet) run under WINE but otherwise I'll be fine. You don't have that sort of freedom with a console.
For my own spare time, I found that there is enough legally freely available content on the web that I don't need to buy much stuff anymore. This includes stories, computer games and even some older Hollywood films that are now being put on YouTube by the rights holders. Also, many independent labels still release CDs without DRM. These cost money but come with the traditional lifetime rights for the consumer.
In short, there is absolutely no need to buy anything from a vendor who wants to rip you off with DRM encumbered products. And in some industry sectors managements seems to get it, CDs with DRM for instance are getting less common. But it may take a few more failures before all of them get it.
While I'm not a stem cell researcher, I dare to make a guess anyway: Embryonic stem cells will keep their place in research, but medicine will gradually move towards adult stem cells from the patient. Partly because of alloimmunity concerns, partly because cells from the patient are more readily available. Especially fat cells, most people in the west can afford to give up a few pounds of fat for harvesting stem cells from;-)
My own experience with Windows 2000 indicates that the OS does not reliably provide latencies in the lower ms ranges. The project in question was a software-controlled device where the software was supposed to do various tasks with frequencies from some 10 Hz to 1000 Hz. In practice, the software (written in Borland Delphi) frequently missed its time windows.
Since the desktop and server versions of Windows are not that different, it seems plausible that Windows was the culprit rather than.net "as such".
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In practice, you need some form of voltage converter anyway.
Because a single Li-Ion cell has a voltage of 3.6V while computer components have voltages anywhere between 1V (ultra low voltage CPUs) to 5 V (USB power supply for external devices, according to Wikipedia). There is no way you can satisfy all these needs from the same battery without some adjusting of the voltages.
In fact, a quick look at my preferred computer mail order shop tells me that most laptop batteries have voltages over 10 V, which needs to be converted down for any current PC component. TFA is right by the way: those are pretty expensive per watt-hour.
Which leaves only one valid argument against standardized batteries:
Custom shapes make it easier for the vendors to build small laptops, because they can adjust the battery to fit into whatever space is left by the other components.
A typical op-amp can provide an output current of some 10 mA. Which is fine for driving a 32 Ohm headphone at low voltages. If you switch to lower impedances (4 or 8 ohm?), the music player will need a more beefy opamp.
The internet is great for comparing prices and finding the cheapest offers. I have used that myself on occasion to get CDs below 10 euros or some electronic spare parts for a fraction of the price the official channels demand. And that is only about getting the same stuff cheaper. Finding alternatives from another brand is also easier when you can get all the information you need on the net.
Of course, the above covers only low priced stuff where most dealers won't bother with haggling because it would be too much work. For expensive stuff with a lot of visibility, the celebrities still have that advantage.
A settlement requires both parties to agree.
In this case, I don't see how the CRIA can "prove" to be in the right. Unless they offer a really substantial settlement (several hundred million?) plaintiffs might prefer to go ahead with the lawsuit.
99% seems a bit pessimistic, but I agree that understanding that stuff might put you among the more knowledgeable developers in many organizations.
Considering constant factors versus "big O":
In my experience most tasks with a count of input data low enough that "big O" does NOT dominate the execution time are fast enough anyway. Modern CPUs are your friend here and allow you to slack off a bit.
Exceptions may include scripting languages and realtime applications.
There are huge differences between different algorithms, and picking the right one will usually sufficient without further optimization. For a very rough overview look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation.
So choose an algorithm with favorable "Big O", implement it cleanly and try if that is fast enough. Only if that is not sufficient, try clever tricks.
That matches my impression:
Microsoft seems to have a pretty good grasp of how much bugs and security holes the majority of their customers will tolerate, and the releases reflect that by being just good enough that said customers don't run away screaming.
Of course, if you walk the edge like that you might fail on occasion. See Windows ME and Vista. The former was soon forgotten because XP came soon after (and IT geeks grabbed Win2K anyway). The latter actually hurt their reputation for a while.
I used (soft) contact lenses for a while, and those had a tendency to drift around a bit. Which was no problem for a lens that has the same refraction at every place. But when the same happens with the display lens, you might have one more offset to measure and consider.
That works for those of us who know the companies in question. But for a lot of non-technical people who don't follow the IT news, it may come as a surprise that Apple won't repair their MacBook. Or that Microsoft tends to release operating systems which need a lot of babysitting. For these people it is completely reasonable to get upset and maybe start a class action lawsuit.
Personally, I do follow news such as this and prefer to
1) Avoid Apple completely. I think their management is a bunch of assholes with a greater control fetish than Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer ever had.
2) Minimize the use of Microsoft products. The fact that most of computer games require Windows has kept me from switching completely to Linux so far. But IE and MS Office are a no-no for me.
Of course, these are only the most well-known offenders. I could go on about Symantec(Symandreck) software, HP printers, Google desktop toolbars and a few more...
Of course, if they keep releasing the source it may not stay limited.
I wonder if this is going to stay a genuine Open Source OS or if Google will pull an Apple and gradually go back on the openness.
Those people are not up to date. The .50 Action Express (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.50_AE) is a much better gun-penis ;-)
When the deadlines get near enough, you may be faced with a choice of using the somehow-not-broken code or miss the deadline. Been there, done that.
But at the same time, I recognize the dangers and I'd rather not work that way. In short, unless I got a manager breathing down my neck who jacks up the pressure, I take the time to do it the right way. And in the long term, it usually pays off. Because intransparent and poorly understood code will pile up to the point that no one understands it anymore.
No, I just have my doubts if the higher standards would stick when the patent examiners are under pressure to process patents fast and management really wants to see more approved patents because those bring revenue.
A decision by Congress to grant no more patents, period, would be far more clear cut and not so easy to water down.
Individual patent claims may be stupid and a waste of time, but it is the huge numbers of patents that really makes the system fail.
A way to fix that would be to drastically increase the required inventive step, so only extraordinary inventions would get patent protection at all. Those extraordinary inventions would be much less numerous and it would be possible again to do an exhaustive search if your code was already patented by someone else.
But I don't think that will happen anytime soon. It would be easier to remove the patent system completely.
The electrician has no control on how many devices you hook up to the circuit. A circuit probably has 5 - 12 outlets/lights on it. The circuit breaker is protecting the entire circuit against current exceeding the safe range for the wiring.
Yes, that is the idea. And at least in Germany where I live, the outlets are usually designed to handle all of that current. In most cases, that means "schuko" outlets that can handle 16A, and a 16 A breaker.
Appliances with thinner wiring usually have their own fuses. A radio or TV set might have something like a 2A fuse, for instance. Built into the appliance itself, so you can be sure the fuse matches the appliance.
Then the electrician fucked up. He is supposed to know that breaker should not allow higher currents than the line and outlet can handle.
BTW, a fuse in the outlet will only protect against currents that are too high for the outlet. Unless said electrician also makes sure the mains line is strong enough. Also, you don't know in advance what is a normal current for the item you plug into the outlet. It may be much lower than what the outlet can handle. That is why many devices have built-in fuses in case of internal shortcuts, and don't rely on the circuit breakers alone.
Also keep in mind that the development on that kind of systems takes years. And once they are in service, they tend to stay in service for decades. When I served my 15 months of military service in Germany in 1987, I encountered equipment, including some electronics, that was older than me.
The architectural decisions on the Patriot missile system were probably made before 32 bit computers in a size/prize range appropriate for mobile systems were available. Hence, the 24 bit register with the poor accuracy.
A few years later, the designers would have deserved a beating for not using something like the Motorola 68000 and storing the time in a 32 bit integer. In 1980, it might still have been a good idea to do that in software but I'm not entirely sure if the performance would have been sufficient.
On the other hand, you can go buy an Android phone any time you want.
True, and lets not forget Nokia/Maemo.
In the PC world, I like how Apple's success weakens the Microsoft almost-monopoly. In the mobile phone market, Apple are part of the problem (and their managers are maybe worse control freaks than Ballmer & Co).
My experience with Windows 9x matches GP's claim. If you had a broken installation and tried to fix it by re-installing without deleting the old installation, it would copy the broken settings and usually work even less than before.
Maybe GP still remembers that time and based his statement on that ;-)
I'm not so sure about newer versions, as I made a habit of doing always clean installs back then. Never tried to "repair-install" W2k or later.
I guess Rapid7 wants to do closed source versions in the future. That makes it necessary to buy the copyrights, or at least most of them and re-developing the stuff they could not buy.
Of course that puts them in competition with whatever open source version other people maintain. A previous example of that would be Interbase by Borland. Borland released the version 6.0 under an open source license, but reconsidered soon after and the next version was closed source again.
That one open source release was picked up by a group of developers and became the Firebird database (http://www.firebirdsql.org/). Interbase is still available commercially from Embarcadero, but I guess they lose some sales to its open source version.
You're right about the OS for gaming (but the less honest guys can probably find a pirated XP Corporate Edition).
The hardware, however, is NOT controlled by Microsoft.
My own PC is still mostly running Windows, but I fully expect that Microsoft will some day piss me off enough that Windows gets kicked from the HD. At that point I'll have to give up some games that don't (yet) run under WINE but otherwise I'll be fine. You don't have that sort of freedom with a console.
For my own spare time, I found that there is enough legally freely available content on the web that I don't need to buy much stuff anymore. This includes stories, computer games and even some older Hollywood films that are now being put on YouTube by the rights holders.
Also, many independent labels still release CDs without DRM. These cost money but come with the traditional lifetime rights for the consumer.
In short, there is absolutely no need to buy anything from a vendor who wants to rip you off with DRM encumbered products. And in some industry sectors managements seems to get it, CDs with DRM for instance are getting less common. But it may take a few more failures before all of them get it.
Good point.
While I'm not a stem cell researcher, I dare to make a guess anyway: ;-)
Embryonic stem cells will keep their place in research, but medicine will gradually move towards adult stem cells from the patient. Partly because of alloimmunity concerns, partly because cells from the patient are more readily available. Especially fat cells, most people in the west can afford to give up a few pounds of fat for harvesting stem cells from
My own experience with Windows 2000 indicates that the OS does not reliably provide latencies in the lower ms ranges. The project in question was a software-controlled device where the software was supposed to do various tasks with frequencies from some 10 Hz to 1000 Hz. In practice, the software (written in Borland Delphi) frequently missed its time windows.
Since the desktop and server versions of Windows are not that different, it seems plausible that Windows was the culprit rather than .net "as such".
Seconded - my private PC runs very reliably with a quality PSU and ECC RAM. It does not have a UPS but the power grid is quite stable here in Germany.