Yes apart from the enormous expense and difficulty of fitting more lines under the city.
The Jubille line extension cost around £4bn ~$6bn and thats just 10 miles! details here.
One of the main reasons for "mind the gap" is that the legacy (Victorian) tunnels and platforms had to avoid compromising the foundations of buildings above, hence they bend all over the place.
Links are being built and extended, a more recent example currently in the news is the high speed rail link tunnel (~20Km) sections of which collapsed swallowing peoples gardens.
make it run more often, I'm sure if the signalling and rolling stock was more reliable it would be possible to increase the number of trains running. Even a 5% increase would do the trick (for now). Otherwise, staggered working days would also help (how many people HAVE to be at work for 8:30 on the dot).
In the UK and in the context of TV it is used to describe the time after which you can broadcast "mature material" (read violent films, and other stuff that would normally require a 15 certificate or higher).
force the processor flat against the case with heat sink gel
A nice idea in principle, but cases are there to protect the components inside. If you go physically attaching the components to the case, all you have to do is knock the case and end up stressing the CPU die.
That said however, I agree some sort of more "holistic" approach could be wise.
I think that's a little unkind. Politics and ideology get in the way of many things. Someone that's a brilliant coder is of little use to a team if they are not prepared to listen to other people.
If I were a hardned cynic of course I would refer the reader to my signature...;-)
If the rendering engine is generally being asked for a set of icon sizes (e.g. 16x16 32x32 etc.) it can cache ones that exceed some form of rendering time criterion as as (insert bitmap format of choice).
That way complex icons with "2 million vectors" need only take the same length of time displaying a bitmap. Simplistic and potentially a hard disk / virtual memory filler I know, but I expect it would work well for icons, which are generally a set of sizes.
...and have an extremely thin (several atoms) layer of lubrication on the platters.
Wow! I have always regarded hard drives as something of an engineering miracle. They always strike me as far more rugged than I would expect they could ever be! I guess this helps!
..global warming doesn't matter because when a piece of ice melts in a glass of water, the level doesn't go up
There is another issue at work with the rise of sea levels, plain old thermal expansion.
Although the capacity of the oceans for absorbing energy is pretty immense, keep pumping energy in and they will eventually warm up. As they warm up they will expand, causing the sea level to rise. The releative importance of this effect compared to, say glacial melting is debatable and currently under study (10s of cm per degree as a "cricket pitch" figure).
If you want to know a bit more try
a random link from Google
To see the effect for yourself, get a deep pan of cold water place it on the stove and fill it to a miniscus. Then heat gently and note how long it takes to spill over (don't heat too gently or it will just evaporate).
Re:Cell Phones = Cancer is BULLSHIT
on
Reflections
·
· Score: 1
I occasionally use the term. Electrical Engineering friends of mine do.
I too have sinned. I have been known to say "voltage" instead of "electrical potential difference" as well.........
I was just having a bit of (slightly sozzled) fun......
On a more serious note however. If people use these terms loosely, it just leads to confusion. Some people might wonder "what's the difference between Wattage and Power?" thinking that one term refers only to electrical energy and the other to (say) kinetic energy.
What the hell could it possible mean except power???
tsk tsk....
Are you punning as well?;-)
Re:Cell Phones = Cancer is BULLSHIT
on
Reflections
·
· Score: 1
If I were publishing this in a damned journal, I *would* have said "power," jackass
Then why not say "power" here? Why use "power" for a journal and "Wattage" for/. ? Do you think that people here don't know what power is? (yes that was intended as a pun)
Re:Cell Phones = Cancer is BULLSHIT
on
Reflections
·
· Score: 1
OK, I'm a physical chemist
Then please refrain from using "Wattage" when you mean "Power".
Listen, if you are going to be a nitpicker,........surely you mean "pedant";-) ? (Please engage ironic humour)
The fact is that though Semitic refers to an ethnic group of people that includes both Arabs and Jews, the word anti-semitism has come to generally carry the connotation of dislike, hatred of or prejudice against Jews specifically.
Of course I realise that. It has come to that because people keep using the phrase incorrectly. Hence my pompous one man stand to turn back the tide and influence the linguistic landscape of the English language. (please note my tongue is firmly in my cheek here).
My point is that the use of the phrase "anti-Semetic" to mean "anti-Jewish" is an unnecessary erosion of meaning. It's like using "British" to mean the English, Scots and the Welsh and using "anti-British" to mean anti-English.
Sooner or later the continued dilution of meaning will result in the word Semetic meaning Jewish. When we wish to talk about the group of people currently known as Semites someone will have to invent a new word describing the people of the region and their emigrated descendents.
The evolution of a language is not always perfectly logical
Semitic \Sem*it"ic\, a.
Of or pertaining to Shem or his descendants; belonging to
that division of the Caucasian race which includes the Arabs, Jews, and related races. [Written also Shemitic.]
Semitic language, a name used to designate a group of
Asiatic and African languages, some living and some dead,
namely: Hebrew and Ph[oe]nician, Aramaic, Assyrian, Arabic, Ethiopic (Geez and Ampharic). --Encyc. Brit.
However, in the current political climate you are probably right, there is almost certainly increasing anti-Semitism. Currently this seems to be mostly coming from the USA and directed at the Arabs of the Middle East in a country whos name begins with "IRA" and ends with "Q" (pun intended).
Presumably you are looking at some form of lunar data store as some kind of outsized "cryptonomicon" style data centre.
The ultimate remote backup site. After all if this 'site' gets blown up, at least your "data" collection will be safe!
A couple of things if you are:
You will need to make sure all the stuff is radiation hardned. Not so much for when it gets there (you can bury it), but for the journey out.
If you bury it, then you will have serious heat problems.
Solar power is a reasonable start, but don't forget the cells will degrade due to the solar wind and micrometeors.
Once you have all the equipment set up, how are you going to maintain a connection to earth? You will have pretty limited options, line of site laser to sats, then some sort of sat up link down link, not terribly practical for >10TB data store you suggest.
If you're not thinking of a lunar data store then ignore all of this and wipe it from your memory.
I was very interested indeed to read some of the comments regarding the use of Ogg at the BBC.
This is most certainly the first I have learned of the trials you guys are conducting, and I thought I was well informed!
The BBC is rare in providing streaming formats that can be played on most platforms since RealPlayer is available for practically anything.
Out of curiousity, what licencing issues are relvent to WMA, Real and Ogg and how efficient (in terms of computing ommph) are the various encoders?
From my perspective the BBC is in a very strong position to introduce the world to open formats such as Ogg, particularly if they are able to provide the players for different platforms as downloads from the BBC site, which may be possible with some of the licences attached to Ogg players.
I wish you guys every success and will keep my eyes peeled on your front page.
...did he make absolutely certain that the whole apperatus was electrostatically neutral?
If not, then as pointed out on the web page, the relative strength of the electrostatic force (which is also inverse square) is far larger than the puny force of gravity and it could swamp the measurement.
For your information, a common way to measure G (the gravitational constant) in the lab is by using an oscillating torsion balance and detecting the frequency change due to the introduction of large masses in the vicinity.
What the heck is a dyne anyhow, what's wrong with good old' SI? NIST for those interested there's a converter between all the old interesting things like the pole, perch, hogshead, American mile, British mile, American short ton, British long ton and various other devients of the mind Here
Re:Not as new as you might think
on
Targeted Sound Beams
·
· Score: 2, Informative
What they are doing is significantly different to directing sound with a parabolic lens.
In its broadest sense the problem with any transmitting antenna, be it sound, light or radio frequencies, is diffraction
For a given wavelength the smaller the space you emit the waves from the wider the angle they spread over.
What these people have done is to use the improved diffraction characteristics of high frequency ultrasound, which diffracts far less than ordinary audio frequencies to generate audio sound literally "out of thin air" due to a nonlinear interaction within the air.
Hats off to Mr Pompei, it sounds like a very neat system. (I couln't help the pun, sorry)
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it be much more effective, and much easier to tax central-london parking lots/spaces?
Not really. There's practically nowhere to park in central London. The parking that does exist can be very expensive (anything up to £20 per day).
A lot of the time it's people going from one side of London to the other, or just passing through. Hence the wish to "discorage" them.
Yes apart from the enormous expense and difficulty of fitting more lines under the city.
The Jubille line extension cost around £4bn ~$6bn and thats just 10 miles! details here.
One of the main reasons for "mind the gap" is that the legacy (Victorian) tunnels and platforms had to avoid compromising the foundations of buildings above, hence they bend all over the place.
Links are being built and extended, a more recent example currently in the news is the high speed rail link tunnel (~20Km) sections of which collapsed swallowing peoples gardens.
make it run more often,
I'm sure if the signalling and rolling stock was more reliable it would be possible to increase the number of trains running. Even a 5% increase would do the trick (for now). Otherwise, staggered working days would also help (how many people HAVE to be at work for 8:30 on the dot).
In the UK and in the context of TV it is used to describe the time after which you can broadcast "mature material" (read violent films, and other stuff that would normally require a 15 certificate or higher).
Hmmm.. I like the idea behind the "supervision tree". Why is that not possible to implement in other languages?
Well, besides the obvious concurrency advantage (need 200000 processes? no problem!)
Is that similar to the implementation of concurrency in Ada?
I discover a bug in the irc parsing routines, I simply fix it in the code, recompile, and reload the offending module -- while the bot is running.
Now that is very interesting! Hmmm.. I can see where this would be very useful in a server environment.
Thanks for your explanation...Cynically I look at this and think "great, another programming language that allows me to print "hello world" in a more obtuse manner".
I'm quite happy to be put straight on this, from any hardend Erlang users.
(*) Ok, ignoring the point of buffer overflows, etc.
A nice idea in principle, but cases are there to protect the components inside. If you go physically attaching the components to the case, all you have to do is knock the case and end up stressing the CPU die.
That said however, I agree some sort of more "holistic" approach could be wise.
If it is a joke. It's not very funny. :-/
a bunch of bitchy whining children
;-)
I think that's a little unkind. Politics and ideology get in the way of many things. Someone that's a brilliant coder is of little use to a team if they are not prepared to listen to other people.
If I were a hardned cynic of course I would refer the reader to my signature...
Heh heh he... Chortle chortle...... Evil cackle.
I expect this is a big "if"....
That way complex icons with "2 million vectors" need only take the same length of time displaying a bitmap. Simplistic and potentially a hard disk / virtual memory filler I know, but I expect it would work well for icons, which are generally a set of sizes.
Could you give a simple example of what you mean? (lameness filter permitting of course)
I have only just got my head around object orientation!
Thanks,-ed
Wow! I have always regarded hard drives as something of an engineering miracle. They always strike me as far more rugged than I would expect they could ever be! I guess this helps!
There is another issue at work with the rise of sea levels, plain old thermal expansion.
Although the capacity of the oceans for absorbing energy is pretty immense, keep pumping energy in and they will eventually warm up. As they warm up they will expand, causing the sea level to rise. The releative importance of this effect compared to, say glacial melting is debatable and currently under study (10s of cm per degree as a "cricket pitch" figure). If you want to know a bit more try a random link from Google To see the effect for yourself, get a deep pan of cold water place it on the stove and fill it to a miniscus. Then heat gently and note how long it takes to spill over (don't heat too gently or it will just evaporate).
I occasionally use the term. Electrical Engineering friends of mine do.
;-)
I too have sinned. I have been known to say "voltage" instead of "electrical potential difference" as well.........
I was just having a bit of (slightly sozzled) fun......
On a more serious note however. If people use these terms loosely, it just leads to confusion. Some people might wonder "what's the difference between Wattage and Power?" thinking that one term refers only to electrical energy and the other to (say) kinetic energy.
What the hell could it possible mean except power???
tsk tsk....
Are you punning as well?
If I were publishing this in a damned journal, I *would* have said "power," jackass
/. ? Do you think that people here don't know what power is? (yes that was intended as a pun)
Then why not say "power" here? Why use "power" for a journal and "Wattage" for
OK, I'm a physical chemist
Then please refrain from using "Wattage" when you mean "Power".
Listen, if you are going to be a nitpicker, ........surely you mean "pedant" ;-) ? (Please engage ironic humour)
The fact is that though Semitic refers to an ethnic group of people that includes both Arabs and Jews, the word anti-semitism has come to generally carry the connotation of dislike, hatred of or prejudice against Jews specifically.
Of course I realise that. It has come to that because people keep using the phrase incorrectly. Hence my pompous one man stand to turn back the tide and influence the linguistic landscape of the English language. (please note my tongue is firmly in my cheek here).
My point is that the use of the phrase "anti-Semetic" to mean "anti-Jewish" is an unnecessary erosion of meaning. It's like using "British" to mean the English, Scots and the Welsh and using "anti-British" to mean anti-English.
Sooner or later the continued dilution of meaning will result in the word Semetic meaning Jewish. When we wish to talk about the group of people currently known as Semites someone will have to invent a new word describing the people of the region and their emigrated descendents.
The evolution of a language is not always perfectly logical
Amen to that.
If there's one thing sure to annoy me it's the use of throw-away terms like "anti-Semitic" used by people incorrectly.
I'd be inclined to believe that there is a bit more anti-Semitism in play than we are led to believe.
Are you sure you mean anti-semitism? Semitic refers to the Jews, Arabs and many less well known groups.
Surely in this context you wanted to say anti-Jewish.
Reference below for your edification (emphasis mine)
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]
Semitic \Sem*it"ic\, a.
Of or pertaining to Shem or his descendants; belonging to
that division of the Caucasian race which includes the Arabs,
Jews, and related races. [Written also Shemitic.]
Semitic language, a name used to designate a group of
Asiatic and African languages, some living and some dead,
namely: Hebrew and Ph[oe]nician, Aramaic, Assyrian,
Arabic, Ethiopic (Geez and Ampharic). --Encyc. Brit.
However, in the current political climate you are probably right, there is almost certainly increasing anti-Semitism. Currently this seems to be mostly coming from the USA and directed at the Arabs of the Middle East in a country whos name begins with "IRA" and ends with "Q" (pun intended).
-ed
The ultimate remote backup site. After all if this 'site' gets blown up, at least your "data" collection will be safe!
A couple of things if you are:
You will need to make sure all the stuff is radiation hardned. Not so much for when it gets there (you can bury it), but for the journey out.
If you bury it, then you will have serious heat problems.
Solar power is a reasonable start, but don't forget the cells will degrade due to the solar wind and micrometeors.
Once you have all the equipment set up, how are you going to maintain a connection to earth? You will have pretty limited options, line of site laser to sats, then some sort of sat up link down link, not terribly practical for >10TB data store you suggest.
If you're not thinking of a lunar data store then ignore all of this and wipe it from your memory.
You did simplify things a little though.
After all, don't forget the "people's republic of Yorkshire"
How would have it turned out differently?
Does carrying a gun stop you getting shot?
I was very interested indeed to read some of the comments regarding the use of Ogg at the BBC.
This is most certainly the first I have learned of the trials you guys are conducting, and I thought I was well informed!
The BBC is rare in providing streaming formats that can be played on most platforms since RealPlayer is available for practically anything.
Out of curiousity, what licencing issues are relvent to WMA, Real and Ogg and how efficient (in terms of computing ommph) are the various encoders?
From my perspective the BBC is in a very strong position to introduce the world to open formats such as Ogg, particularly if they are able to provide the players for different platforms as downloads from the BBC site, which may be possible with some of the licences attached to Ogg players.
I wish you guys every success and will keep my eyes peeled on your front page.
-ed
I liked that one. I tried that out with everyone I know and:
It works pretty well
It's funny
You've got my vote...
If not, then as pointed out on the web page, the relative strength of the electrostatic force (which is also inverse square) is far larger than the puny force of gravity and it could swamp the measurement.
For your information, a common way to measure G (the gravitational constant) in the lab is by using an oscillating torsion balance and detecting the frequency change due to the introduction of large masses in the vicinity.
What the heck is a dyne anyhow, what's wrong with good old' SI? NIST for those interested there's a converter between all the old interesting things like the pole, perch, hogshead, American mile, British mile, American short ton, British long ton and various other devients of the mind Here
to directing sound with a parabolic lens.
In its broadest sense the problem with any transmitting antenna, be it sound, light or radio frequencies, is diffraction
For a given wavelength the smaller the space you emit the waves from the wider the angle they spread over.
What these people have done is to use the improved diffraction characteristics of high frequency ultrasound, which diffracts far less than ordinary audio frequencies to generate audio sound literally "out of thin air" due to a nonlinear interaction within the air.
Hats off to Mr Pompei, it sounds like a very neat system. (I couln't help the pun, sorry)