Actually, I'd hire a Linux administrator first. His first job: call around and find companies that are scrapping out their 100MHz machines because they are outmoded -- but will really zip under Linux. Then you need a tiny budget for an install CD. The one thing I don't know about is finding applications -- how many educational programs are there for Linux (or other *nix), and will the mainstream Windows programs run under Wine?
The problem with Windoze systems in schools is that it is not obviously necessary to start with a good administrator -- so the schools never hire one, and so they rarely get much out of the systems except for a few kids that tinker with them. Not that those kids are getting a proper training as administrators either...
madfgurtbn: No, what you really need is some law enforcement. I assume this is a high-school, right? The vandals are old enough to be tried as adults then -- give a few of them a night in jail, plus six months of their weekends cleaning up the city park or something, and it might become possible to actually _teach_ at the school. But as it is, in most places (1) the school won't call the cops in the first place, except for making a drawing of a gun, and (2) if they do get busted, they get yelled at a bit and turned loose.
I think a lot of people still believe in the old saying You get what you pay for. In the age of overhyped dot-com stocks (not to mention Enron!), $150 tennis shoes, and EULA's that say you don't own the software you bought and the vendor has no responsibility at all for whether it works, that saying seems hopelessly naive and optimistic. If you research thoroughly before you buy, maybe you'll get what you pay for.
But it still is pretty hard for people to really believe that sometimes you get more than you paid for... That is a hurdle for "selling" OSS. The fundamental thing that's not understood here is that the incremental cost of selling one more copy of any software package is less than a dollar, so it's not worth collecting. If you offer decent support on it, that's likely to cost over $100 -- and that's what Linux vendors actually sell, and what M$ pretends to sell.
In Linux, new wiz-bang devices are generally not supported in the main distributions because it takes time and public review of code to get it there. What is a company to do. Why in hell should supplying device drivers be the responsibility of the OS? Ten years ago, any add-on device you bought would come with it's own driver disk from the manufacturer -- and usually there'd be a manufacturer's BBS or FTP site where you could check for newer versions. And usually those were pretty good drivers, because they were written by someone that really understood that piece of hardware.
As far as I can tell, this notion that the drivers should come with the OS came about merely because Windows (through 98 & NT 4.0) didn't actually fill up the CD-ROM, so MS tossed in whatever other free stuff it could find. Never mind that some of those drivers are bound to be obsolete before the CD gets stamped.
That manufacturers don't feel any pressure to write Linux versions of their drivers _is_ a serious problem...
Then why don't they put an index to the Knowledge Base that actually works (that is, will find the answer when you don't already know the answer)? Put in the exact words of an error message -- nothing found. Had MIS call the paid tech support. Two days later, they sent us the URL to a page in the KB about that error message. Turned out the error was the exact opposite of what the error message said...
For embedded systems, you don't worry about a plethora of drivers. You just need one driver -- for the circuit you're going to put into the product -- and you're probably designing that circuit yourself. If a generic driver will work, that's nice. More likely, someone's going to have to tweak the driver a bit. Would you rather do that in the secretive world of MS-approved code, or starting with open source?
Admittedly, the GPL can sometimes be a stumbling block here -- companies might think that publishing the source code to their particular driver hack will give away some of the secrets of their design... 10% of the time, they might be right.
Re:Peizo fans are at least 15 years old
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Swaying CPU Fans
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· Score: 2
Yes, peizo fans have been around a long time. They use a crystal which shrinks or expands when in an electric field. So you attach levers to the crystal so a small dimensional change flaps the wings, and put in a little inverter circuit to apply AC to electrodes on the crystal.
I don't know if there is any real advantage to this as compared to regular motor-driven fans. It takes a certain amount of power to move a certain amount of air, and AFAIK electric motors are pretty efficient. I don't know the efficiency of piezo devices, but I don't see how it can get much more than electric motors -- if a piezo fan takes 0.01 times the power, it's probably moving 0.01 times as much air, and that's not going to keep your 2GHz CPU cool. But if you actually want that tiny of a fan, I expect piezo will scale down easier than motors.
Also, most small fan failures are due to the bearing going out. Piezo devices don't have to have bearings -- you can just bend the wings to flap them instead. If you can find material that will bend back and forth forever without failing, peizo might be more reliable. But that's a big "if".
The problem is that putting a thermoelectric generator (or any other sort of heat-driven generator) in the heat path from the CPU increases the thermal resistance, so the CPU core gets hotter...
Of course, heat makes air move directly. Design your heat-sink and case to take advantage of that, and you shouldn't need a fan unless the cooling requirements are outrageous. Problems are:
--The user can't lay the case on it's side or otherwise change the orientation from what the designer intended.
--The case, mobo, and heat-sink have to be designed together, and the user can't add anything inside the case, as it might change the airflow.
--Most CPU's cooling requirements _are_ outrageous if run at full rated speed.
So I wouldn't want a box designed for natural convection only. But for the user that finds adding a USB peripheral challenging, doesn't need 1GHz, and doesn't want that fan humming, maybe it would work.
I've never really caught on to the desktop-concept. First, if you want to read a Word document, do you launch Word and go looking for the.doc file, or do you go find the file (in W-Explorer, e.g.) and doubleclick it? Only a programmer would think the first way is normal. The second way corresponds with what people do with physical objects, and of course with the "object oriented" progamming metaphor. (If you still don't doubleclick on data files, you're probably one hell of a coder, but stay away from the UI.)
So how does this relate to desktops? Basically, they are just special folders. My normal mode of starting to work on a file (in Windows with it's single desktop) is to launch W-Explorer from the desktop icon (if needed, usually it's on all day), navigate through the file system to a folder I set up for the particular project, then doubleclick the file to "open" it (launch the default application for the file type). So the project folder includes everything I use for that project; if it isn't appropriate to actually store a file in the project folder, I put in a shortcut.
I normally view folders as a list with "details", because quite often the file date or size is important, and going through the menu to toggle the display style takes too many mouse clicks. This isn't the easiest possible way when I just want to launch a file -- then it would be better to have big icons that are easy to hit with the mouse, and to be able to arrange them according to the logic of the project. Uh, that's a desktop!
However, I have a dozen projects going at once. I can't put them all on one desktop. So I live with the slightly less than optimum interface through W-Exp list/detail view, and mainly use the desktop to capture new shortcuts created by "Send... shortcut to desktop" until I can drag them to the proper place.
So I think I would be quite happy to have a multiple desktop, IF it was properly implemented. (Don't expect that from M$.) That is:
1. Obvious and simple hot-key toggle between the desktops, like ctrl-1, ctrl-2, etc.
2. You can also easily access a list of desktops by name, which both selects a desktop and lets you know that it's hot-key is ctrl-7.
3. Quick toggle between the desktop view (icons arranged your way) and a file manager view (directory tree, file list includes name, size, date, etc., file list can be sorted by name, size, date, or type.)
4. You get to arrange the icons your way, AND YOU CAN COPY AND BACK-UP THAT ARRANGEMENT. Windows is a real pain in the rear if you do put a lot of icons on your desktop -- every so often it decides to sort them out alphabetically, or something. Without asking, without warning, without any reasonable way to go back.
5. Anyplace you can create a shortcut, you can send it to your current or any other desktop, with no more than 4 clicks.
under windows if you hit the WIN-D keybaord combination it hides all your apps, showing you the desktop. Hit it again, and they're back.
Hey, it works! And I'll bet that 99% of the/. geeks who use Windows didn't know that. "Lusers" certainly won't learn it. This is the most fundamental flaw in GUI's as presented by Microsoft: They promise that you can get things done without reading manuals, and make it possible to work inefficiently without knowing much about the system, but to actually use the features efficiently you still have to learn the system, memorize keyboard shortcuts, and all those other things the users allegedly hated about the C:> interface. Only there is no manual to read now. Where in heck do you find out about things like this?
Yeah, I know it's somewhere in the Help files. However, if you don't know a function exists, you aren't going to find out about it from Help. Even if you know it _should_ exist, if you don't know what MS called it, you probably aren't going to find it. When MS writes a tutorial or "tips", it's worse than useless for anyone who already has some notion how to use the system -- their selection of which features and techniques to highlight is darned peculiar, and leads me to think that the authors aren't experienced enough in MS's own software to know what's actually useful... And there's no way to just start on page 1 and skim it all looking for the useful bits, even if I wanted to do that on screen.
For example I cannot take any OTC painkiller because it worsens the symptomes. I have to receive triple anaesthesia (sp?) for minor surgeries. Barbiturates or benzodiazepines (like Valium) will actually get me going up the walls and not down.
Interesting. I definitely had ADHD when I was a kid, and I rather suspect I still have it -- I just learned to take control and keep my concentration going when I can control the environment... (Then again, is it possible to have ADHD & Aspergers both?) Anyhow, I have rather the opposite reaction -- sedatives of any sort knock me out. I get drunk on half a can of beer. It's hereditary -- my mother also has no tolerance for alcohol or sedatives, and has had problems in surgery due to over-reaction to the anesthetics.
Mignon, good joke. But if you'd raised a few babies, you'd know that they don't have to be raised with a chimp -- or be upset -- to fling poo. You've got to brainwash them into NOT thinking it's fun, preferably before they figure oout how to unfasten the diapers.
That pamphlet is indeed pretty subjective, with no definition of what the normal range of behavior is. Training of the evaluators could reduce the variation between different ones... But there is an OBJECTIVE test for autism (at least for the severe full-blown variety). I can't find it on-line right now, but I saw it last year. IIRC, it uses several lights that can be blinked. Blink one, everyone looks at it. Leave it blinking and start another one blinking, NT's will look at the new one. An autistic will keep on looking at the first one to blink. I don't know how Asperger syndrome and other autism-related disorders do.
I wouldn't worry too much about "if your are not considered 'perfect' based on some arbitrary set of standards, then you must be autistic." Considering the sensitivity and awareness often demonstrated by psychologists on the public payroll, "fails to respond" may mean he wouldn't notice firecrackers going off under his chair. You might be lucky to get a speech therapist that hasn't been trained to the point of numbness -- just get her to slow down bit on guessing about stuff out of her specialty...
Ritalin _is_ a variety of amphetamine, and it is a stimulant. Dexedrine is also sometimes used for ADHD, if there's a bad reaction to Ritalin. Maybe they do have a paradoxical "calming" effect on true ADHD, but stimulants can help normal people with concentration, too. In college, every time semester exams approached, there'd be a big underground market in amphetamine capsules. (Bennies??? It's been a long time for me.) It evidently _did_ work to some extent, not well enough for some lazy bastard compete for B's with anyone of normal intelligence who had paid attention & did the homework throughout the semester, but enough to keep too many lazy bastards from flunking out...
I really was hyperactive, and Ritalin really worked. Once the dosages were worked out, I only put about 10% of my effort into torturing the teacher, and got a whole lot more of the school work done. (We still drove the sixth grade teacher into a nervous breakdown, but there were two other boys that were also smarter than her, and they weren't on drugs...)
The trouble is, (1) ADHD is a rather nebulous syndrome, and (2) after seeing the effect of Ritalin on kids like me, teachers want to give it to the rest of the troublemakers too, and for a low-competence teacher that's going to include every normal boy in the class. So the school either persuades the parents or gets a court order to send the kid to a psychologist favored by the school -- that is, one who will recommend Ritalin for damn near anyone. (Psychologists aren't MD's, so they can only "recommend" drugs.) And based on that recommendation, the school can get a court to order the parents to take the kid to a pediatrician and get a prescription for Ritalin. And then -- see how much better the kid is doing at school, the prescription must be right! The problem here is, normal kids would quite likely also show a _temporary_ improvement in school work from amphetamines, but there are plenty of long term dangers...
"Diagnosis by prescription" is pretty common in psychological treatment, mainly because they have many conditions which are thought to be due to chemical imbalances and potentially correctable by medication, but hardly any tests to actually detect those imbalances. So the shrinks are pretty much in the position of a 19th century MD with a chest full of more or less effective herbs and chemicals, and no blood tests or x-rays to help determine what the disease really is. So you try something, and if it makes the patient feel better, you give them more. This was pretty effective at determining the right use of castor oil, but it got to be dangerous when opium and cocaine became available; those things make _anyone_ feel good for a while...
One other note, there are two sorts of head doctor; psychologists are PHD's, while psychiatrists are MD's with additional psychological training. (I know of one that actually takes a shift in the emergency room now and then, to keep his medical skills from getting rusty.) So if the psychiatrist thinks you need Ritalin, or an anti-psychotic, he can write the prescription himself. But in my experience, the psychiatrists are less likely to call for drugs -- maybe it's that they are taking responsibility themselves instead of splitting it with whatever family practitioner gets dragged in to write the prescriptions for the psychologist...
I can't exactly see the Morlocks as descendants of Silicon Valley coders, though. If they split off as a separate species, obviously it will be a weak sluglike creature, with two long skinny arms ending in powerful typing fingers. Think of Jabba the Hut nestled in a cubical, ordering pizzas and slave girls by internet. 8-)
The Morlocks were very _physical_. Wells obviously extrapolated them from the engine-tenders, miners, and other industrial laborers of his period. I always did wonder where the necessary engineers and factory foremen were, but English "gentlemen" of Wells's generation rarely got close enough to real work to discover that keeping the machinery going required brains also.
The Simpsons quite often has a "moral" as blatant as Aesop, but sneaks it in using a cynical tone. Homer and Bart's misdeeds are punished in some hilariously twisted way. Good deeds don't often go unpunished either, but that's pretty well acknowledged in the Judeo-Christian tradition, e.g. Job. It does get lots of laughs from organized churches and from Ned Flanders' excessive zeal, but Flanders is prosperous and far happier than anyone living next door to the Simpsons ought to be. And balancing the mockery are some _really_ religious messages, for instance when Bart sells his soul...
On the other hand, considering that the Rev. Lovejoy and Flanders seem to be Protestants, maybe this Catholic college just thinks the mockery is appropriate...
Since nobody else is going to say this, I guess I have to: Bujold's stories are the ultimate fantasy for us pencil-necked geeks. How do you identify with Conan the Barbarian when you weigh less than his sword arm? But Miles is in much worse shape than us...
The Earth's equator is tilted 22 degrees relative to the sun, so much of the year a geosynchronous satellite would be "above" the north pole or "below" the south pole when swinging around the night side of the Earth. IIRC, the radius of a geosynch orbit is 40,000 km. At the solstices (maximum solar tilt, approximately June 22 & Dec 22), the height of the satellite above or below Earth (as viewed from the sun) would be 15,000 km; Earth is 12,000km diameter. At the equinoxes (approx March 22 & Sept 22), the tilt is "sideways" so the sun is directly above the equator, and the satellite would be shaded for a little while. The orbital circumference is 40,000 * 2 * pi = 251,000km. Earth's shadow is approximately 12,000 km wide. So the satellite is in the shade (12/251)*24 = 1.15 hours that day. That's the longest time of shading, and there should be a few months a year with no shading at all. Yes, you will need something to take over during the off periods -- but because power plants sometimes need maintenance, you've always got to have a backup plan anyhow, either splitting off power from other satellites or having something ground-based: gas turbines, hydro-electrics, flywheels, or a hell of a lot of batteries. (If I was designing the power grid, there'd be a flywheel backup unit every half-mile anyhow, so broken wires would never black out more than a half-mile area.)
By the way, it's possible to have a geosynchronous orbit more tilted than the equator, which gives more shade-free days in a year. Viewed from earth, the satellite moves back and forth above the equator on a north-south line, while always staying at the same longitude. This would require rocking the transmitting antenna back and forth on a 24 hour cycle. (The receivers wouldn't be strongly directional, so wouldn't have to move.)
If you stuck a solar array up from the moon's pole on a tall enough pole, it would be in sunlight all the time, but... The array has to be vertical, and it has to rotate with the moon to stay pointed at the sun. If you are going to send a significant amount of power to earth, you need square miles of solar arrays, and there at most two places on the moon that receive the sun all the time. I don't think a ten-mile-across rotating array is practical even at 1/6g, although it certainly would be spectacular to visiting aliens. ("Turn around and get out of here, there's no intelligent life AND they do things the hard way.") Also, there's the problem of getting the power to a part of the moon where it's practical to point a really big antenna at the Earth...
In geosynch orbit, you could build many smaller arrays, and the arrays and antennas wouldn't need much mechanical support. There is one issue if you are pointing the beam by physically pointing the antenna dish -- it's got to rotate relative to the solar array, so either it's out on a very long arm to the side or you've got some interference problems. OTOH, I think the best way to transmit this much power would be a phased array -- you have lots of output driver circuits each running one little basic antenna element, and you steer the beam by changing the phase relationships between the elements. You can also program in a split beam -- send part of the power to LA and part to Phoenix, for example. And of course, you have the emitters 360 degrees around the solar array, but only the half towards the Earth can operate at one time, except when you're also beaming power towards the Mars liner...
I was under the impression that you were supposed to detect these things outside of the earth-moon system, hopefully at least two weeks outside it. If it's big enough to see that far out, a laser isn't going to do much to it.
Two dumb ideas
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Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 5, Informative
If you are going to do this beamed microwave thing, build it in Earth orbit, closer to the target. (distance)*(wavelength)= k*(diameter of transmitter aperture)*(diameter of beam at target), where k is a constant somewhere between 1/3 and 3. I think the moon is about 250,000 miles or 400,000 km away. So to focus a 30GHz (1 centimeter wavelength) microwave beam down to a 10 km spot on Earth takes an antenna about 400m across. Or in units the average American understands, a football-field sized antenna would put most, but not all, of the transmitted energy into a 10 mile wide spot. This whole area would have to be blanketed with receiving antennas (expensive!). And people living 20 miles away would be measuring the leaking energy and suing every time they got a cough. (Birds would be safely building nests on the antennas, but American trial lawyers never let science get in the way of a deep-pockets lawsuit.)
The best place for a solar power satellite is probably geosynchronous orbit (40,000 km). This needs a football-field sized transmitter and a mile-wide receiver; still pretty big, but maybe manageable. And the transmitter and receiver don't move relatively. A lunar array would have to keep switching between different receivers as the Earth turns. An SPS in a lower orbit would also have to keep switching receivers, but at least it would have smaller antennas.
A solar plant in orbit is in sunlight almost all the time (depending on distance from earth and orbital particulars, it might spend a few hours a year in earth-shadow). On the moon, two weeks out of every four is night.
The laser installation would also work better in a medium-height earth orbit, where it's solar panels were powered all the time and it was much closer to the targets. At least, I assume that it isn't meteroids headed for the moon that this is supposed to shoot down?
Hi. Those are two pretty common names, so that's not much of a coincidence. When I was in the Air Force, there were at least two other Mark Moss's that I heard of. As for the e-mail story, something like that seems to be pretty common too. There are no other Moss's in the company on-line phone list, so unless you hired in one month ago, it's just another coincidence...
BTW, Moss is an english name, but my ancestors were German-American farmers named Maass. They changed the spelling in WWI.
Journalists have more protection in libel cases, as long as they are reporting on public issues or public figures. On the other hand, it's pretty rare for anyone to have cause to sue a non-journalist for libel -- if you don't publish the news, your chances for publishing anything derogatory are slim. (For example, I'd think anything on/. would at most count as slander, but IANAL.)
Anyway, since he was a journalist reporting on a public issue, to win a lawsuit against him the company has to prove both that the story was false, and that the falsehood was "malicious". The company claimed to have enough evidence that the story was false as to require a full trial, but the judge decided that they didn't have evidence of malice. The win is basically that the journalist didn't have the expenses of defending himself in a trial...
I define "backup" as including at a minimum daily copying of NEW data, plus whatever other arrangements are needed to esnsure that you can get your needed applications and data up and running in a new system within the required time. "Archiving" is making long-lasting copies of data that isn't going to change often.
Home computers usually don't have much data that changes frequently, nor do you have to spend a lot of money to ensure that you can be back up quickly -- that is, re-installing all your applications is acceptable in the rare case of a hard drive crash. Maybe only your checkbook records need back-ups. (The ancient DOS shareware program I still use for the checkbook fits nicely on one diskette along with 13 years of data, so I'm all set there.) But your photographs and tax records definitely need archived. The only truly long-term solutions for archiving are rather impractical for most people: printing to acid-free paper with permanent inks, which gets mighty bulky in the long run and might not preserve colors, or etched in stone or metal for _really_ permanent records. The best practical solution I know of for your family jpeg photos is to buy good CD-R's (100-year lifetime claimed), and make two copies on two different brands. Keep one set in your safe deposit box or something, so if your house burns down you still have it. Every 3 years, review the archives -- are the disks holding up, does it look like compatible drives will remain on the market, and will the data and disk formats remain comprehensible to new software? Every so often, you are going to have to copy to new formats.
Note that there are other not-so-standard optical media that are technically better. The trouble with relying on one of those is that at some point you will have good disks and be unable to obtain a drive to read them. It's going to be a very long time until that happens to CD's. Write-once DVD's are worth checking into; I don't yet trust their data stability or longevity on the market, but unless the copy protection @#$%^& screws it up, they are going to be a better archival medium than CD-R's.
Businesses need both archives and frequent backups. Tapes are NOT a great solution for backups. Our e-mail server here had a hard-drive failure recently. (Very much against my own opinions, this used microsoft software and tape backup.) It took four days to install all the software on a new hard drive and restore all recoverable data from several tapes. The most recent backup tape was unreadable, so two day's e-mail was lost. This was not a big problem, but 4 days without e-mail was a very big problem. And what I hear is that this is pretty typical: 20% of tapes from very expensive backup systems don't read back, and it takes far too long to restore from them when they do work.
So for a business to recover from a hard drive crash before it becomes a major problem, you need to mirror the hard drive. (Or if you need hundreds of gigs, use RAID 5.) At the cost of hard drives nowadays, there is no excuse not to.
This protects you against HD failures, but not catastrophes like someone stealing the servers, or crashing an airliner into the building. Many of the WTC businesses actually were ready for that, almost -- they were backing up their servers to servers in Minnesota. The service also included some desks, computers, and phone lines so if the offices in NY were destroyed, the workers could get right back to work as soon as they arrived in Minnesota. The only thing not planned for was planes to be grounded at the same time, so the people had to drive to MN. But I can't think of a better plan for a company that is concentrated in just one city.
If a business has offices in multiple cities, then you can backup the servers to other company offices...
Finally, mirror drives give you instant recovery from many catastrophes, but are no good against the most common causes of data loss: corrupted files and viruses. If you are mirroring, the corruption spreads to the backup within seconds. So you need something besides the mirror drives. Periodically taking off an archive copy of the data may be sufficient. Rotating full and incremental tape backups give some protection, since the chances of bad file + bad tape at the same time are rather slim. Or for the really paranoid, have a whole chain of back-up (not mirror) hard drives -- each night you copy the nth drive to the (n+1)th, so if it takes two days to notice that a file was corrupted, you've still got a good copy on drive 3. Add to this a good off-line archiving system for files that aren't used frequently (so corrupt copies could spread through all the backup HD's before anyone notices), and you are pretty well covered.
That's what I first thought, until I read further into the article. This is NOT a stack of IC's. It's a process for growing more layers of transistors on the surface of one IC. Theoretically, it should cost less than stacked IC's, and may eventually cost less than a set of "2D" (that is, single transistor layer) chips to be soldered onto a board side by side. (A significant part of the cost of a typical memory IC is in attaching the leads for the outside world, covering it in epoxy, and placing it on a board.) However, the cost savings depend on the percentage of finished chips that pass test; if you've cut the raw cost by 50% but cut the yield by 75%, then the cost per working chip is higher. The article doesn't say anything about yields, but if they are actually shipping production quantities for digital cameras, they probably doing fairly well at solving the yield issues, and will do better soon...
A digital camera is one application where density may count more than price, and I don't see how the Matrix chips can be beat for density. In conventional IC's, most of the silicon is below the active areas and only provides mechanical support. Stack those IC's, and you have many layers of non-functional silicon. The Matrix chip has just one.
Stacked chips have limited vertical interconnects -- either you connect them only at the edges, or you drill holes through the chips (much bigger than other IC fixtures) and metal-plate those as vertical wires. The Matrix chips can have true 3D interconnects, at the size of other IC features. This may not mean much to a plain memory chip, but it could be very important to other applications...
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Actually, I'd hire a Linux administrator first. His first job: call around and find companies that are scrapping out their 100MHz machines because they are outmoded -- but will really zip under Linux. Then you need a tiny budget for an install CD. The one thing I don't know about is finding applications -- how many educational programs are there for Linux (or other *nix), and will the mainstream Windows programs run under Wine?
The problem with Windoze systems in schools is that it is not obviously necessary to start with a good administrator -- so the schools never hire one, and so they rarely get much out of the systems except for a few kids that tinker with them. Not that those kids are getting a proper training as administrators either...
madfgurtbn: No, what you really need is some law enforcement. I assume this is a high-school, right? The vandals are old enough to be tried as adults then -- give a few of them a night in jail, plus six months of their weekends cleaning up the city park or something, and it might become possible to actually _teach_ at the school. But as it is, in most places (1) the school won't call the cops in the first place, except for making a drawing of a gun, and (2) if they do get busted, they get yelled at a bit and turned loose.
Apple, IBM, MS have spent billions on human Interface research to make computers easier to use.
Insightful? Only to someone that doesn't have to use Windows & Office and daily see the problems in their UI.
I think a lot of people still believe in the old saying You get what you pay for. In the age of overhyped dot-com stocks (not to mention Enron!), $150 tennis shoes, and EULA's that say you don't own the software you bought and the vendor has no responsibility at all for whether it works, that saying seems hopelessly naive and optimistic. If you research thoroughly before you buy, maybe you'll get what you pay for.
But it still is pretty hard for people to really believe that sometimes you get more than you paid for... That is a hurdle for "selling" OSS. The fundamental thing that's not understood here is that the incremental cost of selling one more copy of any software package is less than a dollar, so it's not worth collecting. If you offer decent support on it, that's likely to cost over $100 -- and that's what Linux vendors actually sell, and what M$ pretends to sell.
In Linux, new wiz-bang devices are generally not supported in the main distributions because it takes time and public review of code to get it there. What is a company to do. Why in hell should supplying device drivers be the responsibility of the OS? Ten years ago, any add-on device you bought would come with it's own driver disk from the manufacturer -- and usually there'd be a manufacturer's BBS or FTP site where you could check for newer versions. And usually those were pretty good drivers, because they were written by someone that really understood that piece of hardware.
As far as I can tell, this notion that the drivers should come with the OS came about merely because Windows (through 98 & NT 4.0) didn't actually fill up the CD-ROM, so MS tossed in whatever other free stuff it could find. Never mind that some of those drivers are bound to be obsolete before the CD gets stamped.
That manufacturers don't feel any pressure to write Linux versions of their drivers _is_ a serious problem...
Then why don't they put an index to the Knowledge Base that actually works (that is, will find the answer when you don't already know the answer)? Put in the exact words of an error message -- nothing found. Had MIS call the paid tech support. Two days later, they sent us the URL to a page in the KB about that error message. Turned out the error was the exact opposite of what the error message said...
For embedded systems, you don't worry about a plethora of drivers. You just need one driver -- for the circuit you're going to put into the product -- and you're probably designing that circuit yourself. If a generic driver will work, that's nice. More likely, someone's going to have to tweak the driver a bit. Would you rather do that in the secretive world of MS-approved code, or starting with open source?
Admittedly, the GPL can sometimes be a stumbling block here -- companies might think that publishing the source code to their particular driver hack will give away some of the secrets of their design... 10% of the time, they might be right.
Yes, peizo fans have been around a long time. They use a crystal which shrinks or expands when in an electric field. So you attach levers to the crystal so a small dimensional change flaps the wings, and put in a little inverter circuit to apply AC to electrodes on the crystal.
I don't know if there is any real advantage to this as compared to regular motor-driven fans. It takes a certain amount of power to move a certain amount of air, and AFAIK electric motors are pretty efficient. I don't know the efficiency of piezo devices, but I don't see how it can get much more than electric motors -- if a piezo fan takes 0.01 times the power, it's probably moving 0.01 times as much air, and that's not going to keep your 2GHz CPU cool. But if you actually want that tiny of a fan, I expect piezo will scale down easier than motors.
Also, most small fan failures are due to the bearing going out. Piezo devices don't have to have bearings -- you can just bend the wings to flap them instead. If you can find material that will bend back and forth forever without failing, peizo might be more reliable. But that's a big "if".
The problem is that putting a thermoelectric generator (or any other sort of heat-driven generator) in the heat path from the CPU increases the thermal resistance, so the CPU core gets hotter...
Of course, heat makes air move directly. Design your heat-sink and case to take advantage of that, and you shouldn't need a fan unless the cooling requirements are outrageous. Problems are:
--The user can't lay the case on it's side or otherwise change the orientation from what the designer intended.
--The case, mobo, and heat-sink have to be designed together, and the user can't add anything inside the case, as it might change the airflow.
--Most CPU's cooling requirements _are_ outrageous if run at full rated speed.
So I wouldn't want a box designed for natural convection only. But for the user that finds adding a USB peripheral challenging, doesn't need 1GHz, and doesn't want that fan humming, maybe it would work.
I've never really caught on to the desktop-concept. First, if you want to read a Word document, do you launch Word and go looking for the .doc file, or do you go find the file (in W-Explorer, e.g.) and doubleclick it? Only a programmer would think the first way is normal. The second way corresponds with what people do with physical objects, and of course with the "object oriented" progamming metaphor. (If you still don't doubleclick on data files, you're probably one hell of a coder, but stay away from the UI.)
... shortcut to desktop" until I can drag them to the proper place.
So how does this relate to desktops? Basically, they are just special folders. My normal mode of starting to work on a file (in Windows with it's single desktop) is to launch W-Explorer from the desktop icon (if needed, usually it's on all day), navigate through the file system to a folder I set up for the particular project, then doubleclick the file to "open" it (launch the default application for the file type). So the project folder includes everything I use for that project; if it isn't appropriate to actually store a file in the project folder, I put in a shortcut.
I normally view folders as a list with "details", because quite often the file date or size is important, and going through the menu to toggle the display style takes too many mouse clicks. This isn't the easiest possible way when I just want to launch a file -- then it would be better to have big icons that are easy to hit with the mouse, and to be able to arrange them according to the logic of the project. Uh, that's a desktop!
However, I have a dozen projects going at once. I can't put them all on one desktop. So I live with the slightly less than optimum interface through W-Exp list/detail view, and mainly use the desktop to capture new shortcuts created by "Send
So I think I would be quite happy to have a multiple desktop, IF it was properly implemented. (Don't expect that from M$.) That is:
1. Obvious and simple hot-key toggle between the desktops, like ctrl-1, ctrl-2, etc.
2. You can also easily access a list of desktops by name, which both selects a desktop and lets you know that it's hot-key is ctrl-7.
3. Quick toggle between the desktop view (icons arranged your way) and a file manager view (directory tree, file list includes name, size, date, etc., file list can be sorted by name, size, date, or type.)
4. You get to arrange the icons your way, AND YOU CAN COPY AND BACK-UP THAT ARRANGEMENT. Windows is a real pain in the rear if you do put a lot of icons on your desktop -- every so often it decides to sort them out alphabetically, or something. Without asking, without warning, without any reasonable way to go back.
5. Anyplace you can create a shortcut, you can send it to your current or any other desktop, with no more than 4 clicks.
under windows if you hit the WIN-D keybaord combination it hides all your apps, showing you the desktop. Hit it again, and they're back.
/. geeks who use Windows didn't know that. "Lusers" certainly won't learn it. This is the most fundamental flaw in GUI's as presented by Microsoft: They promise that you can get things done without reading manuals, and make it possible to work inefficiently without knowing much about the system, but to actually use the features efficiently you still have to learn the system, memorize keyboard shortcuts, and all those other things the users allegedly hated about the C:> interface. Only there is no manual to read now. Where in heck do you find out about things like this?
Hey, it works! And I'll bet that 99% of the
Yeah, I know it's somewhere in the Help files. However, if you don't know a function exists, you aren't going to find out about it from Help. Even if you know it _should_ exist, if you don't know what MS called it, you probably aren't going to find it. When MS writes a tutorial or "tips", it's worse than useless for anyone who already has some notion how to use the system -- their selection of which features and techniques to highlight is darned peculiar, and leads me to think that the authors aren't experienced enough in MS's own software to know what's actually useful... And there's no way to just start on page 1 and skim it all looking for the useful bits, even if I wanted to do that on screen.
For example I cannot take any OTC painkiller because it worsens the symptomes. I have to receive triple anaesthesia (sp?) for minor surgeries. Barbiturates or benzodiazepines (like Valium) will actually get me going up the walls and not down.
Interesting. I definitely had ADHD when I was a kid, and I rather suspect I still have it -- I just learned to take control and keep my concentration going when I can control the environment... (Then again, is it possible to have ADHD & Aspergers both?) Anyhow, I have rather the opposite reaction -- sedatives of any sort knock me out. I get drunk on half a can of beer. It's hereditary -- my mother also has no tolerance for alcohol or sedatives, and has had problems in surgery due to over-reaction to the anesthetics.
Mignon, good joke. But if you'd raised a few babies, you'd know that they don't have to be raised with a chimp -- or be upset -- to fling poo. You've got to brainwash them into NOT thinking it's fun, preferably before they figure oout how to unfasten the diapers.
That pamphlet is indeed pretty subjective, with no definition of what the normal range of behavior is. Training of the evaluators could reduce the variation between different ones... But there is an OBJECTIVE test for autism (at least for the severe full-blown variety). I can't find it on-line right now, but I saw it last year. IIRC, it uses several lights that can be blinked. Blink one, everyone looks at it. Leave it blinking and start another one blinking, NT's will look at the new one. An autistic will keep on looking at the first one to blink. I don't know how Asperger syndrome and other autism-related disorders do.
I wouldn't worry too much about "if your are not considered 'perfect' based on some arbitrary set of standards, then you must be autistic." Considering the sensitivity and awareness often demonstrated by psychologists on the public payroll, "fails to respond" may mean he wouldn't notice firecrackers going off under his chair. You might be lucky to get a speech therapist that hasn't been trained to the point of numbness -- just get her to slow down bit on guessing about stuff out of her specialty...
Ritalin _is_ a variety of amphetamine, and it is a stimulant. Dexedrine is also sometimes used for ADHD, if there's a bad reaction to Ritalin. Maybe they do have a paradoxical "calming" effect on true ADHD, but stimulants can help normal people with concentration, too. In college, every time semester exams approached, there'd be a big underground market in amphetamine capsules. (Bennies??? It's been a long time for me.) It evidently _did_ work to some extent, not well enough for some lazy bastard compete for B's with anyone of normal intelligence who had paid attention & did the homework throughout the semester, but enough to keep too many lazy bastards from flunking out...
I really was hyperactive, and Ritalin really worked. Once the dosages were worked out, I only put about 10% of my effort into torturing the teacher, and got a whole lot more of the school work done. (We still drove the sixth grade teacher into a nervous breakdown, but there were two other boys that were also smarter than her, and they weren't on drugs...)
The trouble is, (1) ADHD is a rather nebulous syndrome, and (2) after seeing the effect of Ritalin on kids like me, teachers want to give it to the rest of the troublemakers too, and for a low-competence teacher that's going to include every normal boy in the class. So the school either persuades the parents or gets a court order to send the kid to a psychologist favored by the school -- that is, one who will recommend Ritalin for damn near anyone. (Psychologists aren't MD's, so they can only "recommend" drugs.) And based on that recommendation, the school can get a court to order the parents to take the kid to a pediatrician and get a prescription for Ritalin. And then -- see how much better the kid is doing at school, the prescription must be right! The problem here is, normal kids would quite likely also show a _temporary_ improvement in school work from amphetamines, but there are plenty of long term dangers...
"Diagnosis by prescription" is pretty common in psychological treatment, mainly because they have many conditions which are thought to be due to chemical imbalances and potentially correctable by medication, but hardly any tests to actually detect those imbalances. So the shrinks are pretty much in the position of a 19th century MD with a chest full of more or less effective herbs and chemicals, and no blood tests or x-rays to help determine what the disease really is. So you try something, and if it makes the patient feel better, you give them more. This was pretty effective at determining the right use of castor oil, but it got to be dangerous when opium and cocaine became available; those things make _anyone_ feel good for a while...
One other note, there are two sorts of head doctor; psychologists are PHD's, while psychiatrists are MD's with additional psychological training. (I know of one that actually takes a shift in the emergency room now and then, to keep his medical skills from getting rusty.) So if the psychiatrist thinks you need Ritalin, or an anti-psychotic, he can write the prescription himself. But in my experience, the psychiatrists are less likely to call for drugs -- maybe it's that they are taking responsibility themselves instead of splitting it with whatever family practitioner gets dragged in to write the prescriptions for the psychologist...
I can't exactly see the Morlocks as descendants of Silicon Valley coders, though. If they split off as a separate species, obviously it will be a weak sluglike creature, with two long skinny arms ending in powerful typing fingers. Think of Jabba the Hut nestled in a cubical, ordering pizzas and slave girls by internet. 8-)
The Morlocks were very _physical_. Wells obviously extrapolated them from the engine-tenders, miners, and other industrial laborers of his period. I always did wonder where the necessary engineers and factory foremen were, but English "gentlemen" of Wells's generation rarely got close enough to real work to discover that keeping the machinery going required brains also.
The Simpsons quite often has a "moral" as blatant as Aesop, but sneaks it in using a cynical tone. Homer and Bart's misdeeds are punished in some hilariously twisted way. Good deeds don't often go unpunished either, but that's pretty well acknowledged in the Judeo-Christian tradition, e.g. Job. It does get lots of laughs from organized churches and from Ned Flanders' excessive zeal, but Flanders is prosperous and far happier than anyone living next door to the Simpsons ought to be. And balancing the mockery are some _really_ religious messages, for instance when Bart sells his soul...
On the other hand, considering that the Rev. Lovejoy and Flanders seem to be Protestants, maybe this Catholic college just thinks the mockery is appropriate...
Since nobody else is going to say this, I guess I have to: Bujold's stories are the ultimate fantasy for us pencil-necked geeks. How do you identify with Conan the Barbarian when you weigh less than his sword arm? But Miles is in much worse shape than us...
The Earth's equator is tilted 22 degrees relative to the sun, so much of the year a geosynchronous satellite would be "above" the north pole or "below" the south pole when swinging around the night side of the Earth. IIRC, the radius of a geosynch orbit is 40,000 km. At the solstices (maximum solar tilt, approximately June 22 & Dec 22), the height of the satellite above or below Earth (as viewed from the sun) would be 15,000 km; Earth is 12,000km diameter. At the equinoxes (approx March 22 & Sept 22), the tilt is "sideways" so the sun is directly above the equator, and the satellite would be shaded for a little while. The orbital circumference is 40,000 * 2 * pi = 251,000km. Earth's shadow is approximately 12,000 km wide. So the satellite is in the shade (12/251)*24 = 1.15 hours that day. That's the longest time of shading, and there should be a few months a year with no shading at all. Yes, you will need something to take over during the off periods -- but because power plants sometimes need maintenance, you've always got to have a backup plan anyhow, either splitting off power from other satellites or having something ground-based: gas turbines, hydro-electrics, flywheels, or a hell of a lot of batteries. (If I was designing the power grid, there'd be a flywheel backup unit every half-mile anyhow, so broken wires would never black out more than a half-mile area.)
By the way, it's possible to have a geosynchronous orbit more tilted than the equator, which gives more shade-free days in a year. Viewed from earth, the satellite moves back and forth above the equator on a north-south line, while always staying at the same longitude. This would require rocking the transmitting antenna back and forth on a 24 hour cycle. (The receivers wouldn't be strongly directional, so wouldn't have to move.)
If you stuck a solar array up from the moon's pole on a tall enough pole, it would be in sunlight all the time, but... The array has to be vertical, and it has to rotate with the moon to stay pointed at the sun. If you are going to send a significant amount of power to earth, you need square miles of solar arrays, and there at most two places on the moon that receive the sun all the time. I don't think a ten-mile-across rotating array is practical even at 1/6g, although it certainly would be spectacular to visiting aliens. ("Turn around and get out of here, there's no intelligent life AND they do things the hard way.") Also, there's the problem of getting the power to a part of the moon where it's practical to point a really big antenna at the Earth...
In geosynch orbit, you could build many smaller arrays, and the arrays and antennas wouldn't need much mechanical support. There is one issue if you are pointing the beam by physically pointing the antenna dish -- it's got to rotate relative to the solar array, so either it's out on a very long arm to the side or you've got some interference problems. OTOH, I think the best way to transmit this much power would be a phased array -- you have lots of output driver circuits each running one little basic antenna element, and you steer the beam by changing the phase relationships between the elements. You can also program in a split beam -- send part of the power to LA and part to Phoenix, for example. And of course, you have the emitters 360 degrees around the solar array, but only the half towards the Earth can operate at one time, except when you're also beaming power towards the Mars liner...
I was under the impression that you were supposed to detect these things outside of the earth-moon system, hopefully at least two weeks outside it. If it's big enough to see that far out, a laser isn't going to do much to it.
If you are going to do this beamed microwave thing, build it in Earth orbit, closer to the target. (distance)*(wavelength)= k*(diameter of transmitter aperture)*(diameter of beam at target), where k is a constant somewhere between 1/3 and 3. I think the moon is about 250,000 miles or 400,000 km away. So to focus a 30GHz (1 centimeter wavelength) microwave beam down to a 10 km spot on Earth takes an antenna about 400m across. Or in units the average American understands, a football-field sized antenna would put most, but not all, of the transmitted energy into a 10 mile wide spot. This whole area would have to be blanketed with receiving antennas (expensive!). And people living 20 miles away would be measuring the leaking energy and suing every time they got a cough. (Birds would be safely building nests on the antennas, but American trial lawyers never let science get in the way of a deep-pockets lawsuit.)
The best place for a solar power satellite is probably geosynchronous orbit (40,000 km). This needs a football-field sized transmitter and a mile-wide receiver; still pretty big, but maybe manageable. And the transmitter and receiver don't move relatively. A lunar array would have to keep switching between different receivers as the Earth turns. An SPS in a lower orbit would also have to keep switching receivers, but at least it would have smaller antennas.
A solar plant in orbit is in sunlight almost all the time (depending on distance from earth and orbital particulars, it might spend a few hours a year in earth-shadow). On the moon, two weeks out of every four is night.
The laser installation would also work better in a medium-height earth orbit, where it's solar panels were powered all the time and it was much closer to the targets. At least, I assume that it isn't meteroids headed for the moon that this is supposed to shoot down?
Hi. Those are two pretty common names, so that's not much of a coincidence. When I was in the Air Force, there were at least two other Mark Moss's that I heard of. As for the e-mail story, something like that seems to be pretty common too. There are no other Moss's in the company on-line phone list, so unless you hired in one month ago, it's just another coincidence...
BTW, Moss is an english name, but my ancestors were German-American farmers named Maass. They changed the spelling in WWI.
Journalists have more protection in libel cases, as long as they are reporting on public issues or public figures. On the other hand, it's pretty rare for anyone to have cause to sue a non-journalist for libel -- if you don't publish the news, your chances for publishing anything derogatory are slim. (For example, I'd think anything on /. would at most count as slander, but IANAL.)
Anyway, since he was a journalist reporting on a public issue, to win a lawsuit against him the company has to prove both that the story was false, and that the falsehood was "malicious". The company claimed to have enough evidence that the story was false as to require a full trial, but the judge decided that they didn't have evidence of malice. The win is basically that the journalist didn't have the expenses of defending himself in a trial...
I define "backup" as including at a minimum daily copying of NEW data, plus whatever other arrangements are needed to esnsure that you can get your needed applications and data up and running in a new system within the required time. "Archiving" is making long-lasting copies of data that isn't going to change often.
Home computers usually don't have much data that changes frequently, nor do you have to spend a lot of money to ensure that you can be back up quickly -- that is, re-installing all your applications is acceptable in the rare case of a hard drive crash. Maybe only your checkbook records need back-ups. (The ancient DOS shareware program I still use for the checkbook fits nicely on one diskette along with 13 years of data, so I'm all set there.) But your photographs and tax records definitely need archived. The only truly long-term solutions for archiving are rather impractical for most people: printing to acid-free paper with permanent inks, which gets mighty bulky in the long run and might not preserve colors, or etched in stone or metal for _really_ permanent records. The best practical solution I know of for your family jpeg photos is to buy good CD-R's (100-year lifetime claimed), and make two copies on two different brands. Keep one set in your safe deposit box or something, so if your house burns down you still have it. Every 3 years, review the archives -- are the disks holding up, does it look like compatible drives will remain on the market, and will the data and disk formats remain comprehensible to new software? Every so often, you are going to have to copy to new formats.
Note that there are other not-so-standard optical media that are technically better. The trouble with relying on one of those is that at some point you will have good disks and be unable to obtain a drive to read them. It's going to be a very long time until that happens to CD's. Write-once DVD's are worth checking into; I don't yet trust their data stability or longevity on the market, but unless the copy protection @#$%^& screws it up, they are going to be a better archival medium than CD-R's.
Businesses need both archives and frequent backups. Tapes are NOT a great solution for backups. Our e-mail server here had a hard-drive failure recently. (Very much against my own opinions, this used microsoft software and tape backup.) It took four days to install all the software on a new hard drive and restore all recoverable data from several tapes. The most recent backup tape was unreadable, so two day's e-mail was lost. This was not a big problem, but 4 days without e-mail was a very big problem. And what I hear is that this is pretty typical: 20% of tapes from very expensive backup systems don't read back, and it takes far too long to restore from them when they do work.
So for a business to recover from a hard drive crash before it becomes a major problem, you need to mirror the hard drive. (Or if you need hundreds of gigs, use RAID 5.) At the cost of hard drives nowadays, there is no excuse not to.
This protects you against HD failures, but not catastrophes like someone stealing the servers, or crashing an airliner into the building. Many of the WTC businesses actually were ready for that, almost -- they were backing up their servers to servers in Minnesota. The service also included some desks, computers, and phone lines so if the offices in NY were destroyed, the workers could get right back to work as soon as they arrived in Minnesota. The only thing not planned for was planes to be grounded at the same time, so the people had to drive to MN. But I can't think of a better plan for a company that is concentrated in just one city.
If a business has offices in multiple cities, then you can backup the servers to other company offices...
Finally, mirror drives give you instant recovery from many catastrophes, but are no good against the most common causes of data loss: corrupted files and viruses. If you are mirroring, the corruption spreads to the backup within seconds. So you need something besides the mirror drives. Periodically taking off an archive copy of the data may be sufficient. Rotating full and incremental tape backups give some protection, since the chances of bad file + bad tape at the same time are rather slim. Or for the really paranoid, have a whole chain of back-up (not mirror) hard drives -- each night you copy the nth drive to the (n+1)th, so if it takes two days to notice that a file was corrupted, you've still got a good copy on drive 3. Add to this a good off-line archiving system for files that aren't used frequently (so corrupt copies could spread through all the backup HD's before anyone notices), and you are pretty well covered.
That's what I first thought, until I read further into the article. This is NOT a stack of IC's. It's a process for growing more layers of transistors on the surface of one IC. Theoretically, it should cost less than stacked IC's, and may eventually cost less than a set of "2D" (that is, single transistor layer) chips to be soldered onto a board side by side. (A significant part of the cost of a typical memory IC is in attaching the leads for the outside world, covering it in epoxy, and placing it on a board.) However, the cost savings depend on the percentage of finished chips that pass test; if you've cut the raw cost by 50% but cut the yield by 75%, then the cost per working chip is higher. The article doesn't say anything about yields, but if they are actually shipping production quantities for digital cameras, they probably doing fairly well at solving the yield issues, and will do better soon...
A digital camera is one application where density may count more than price, and I don't see how the Matrix chips can be beat for density. In conventional IC's, most of the silicon is below the active areas and only provides mechanical support. Stack those IC's, and you have many layers of non-functional silicon. The Matrix chip has just one.
Stacked chips have limited vertical interconnects -- either you connect them only at the edges, or you drill holes through the chips (much bigger than other IC fixtures) and metal-plate those as vertical wires. The Matrix chips can have true 3D interconnects, at the size of other IC features. This may not mean much to a plain memory chip, but it could be very important to other applications...