Sorry if this is in any way pedantic - just FYI since I used to work in a capital markets trading environment...
The abbreviation in most currency markets is not UKP, it's GBP, for Great Britain Pounds.
To quote from a handy refernce page: ISO 4217 (Codes for the Representation of Currencies and Funds) defines three-letter abbreviations for world currencies. The general principle used to construct these abbreviations is to take the two-letter abbreviations defined in ISO 3166 (Codes for the Representation of Names of Countries) and append the first letter of the currency name (e.g., USD for the United States Dollar).
Note if you want to be doing something in a windows script and initiate this process in cygwin, your options could include having cygwin always running, starting an 'at' or cron job there that looks for the presence of a trigger file and kicks off your process when started, then deletes the trigger file when done.
Note this is cumbersome and suckky but I've been forced through similar hoops before and it's just one ugly hack in the bag of tricks.
I'm a white, upper middle class suburban 37 year old male and never would have listened to rap or dance mixes had it not been for P2P. Likewise Mel Torme, who has some incredible vocal talent that I was previously unaware of.
Since the cost of the music was near zero for the friend of mine that grabbed it online, I could see if I liked it. Testing it out and seeing if I like something is a valuable thing - used to be (I hear) that record stores would let you do that. They don't do that now, I believe (though I've not been into a record store in 10 years).
So, I did make aesthetic decisions about groups based on P2P experiences, some positive and some negative.
I should mention that I'm a lot more likely to vomit down a record exec's shirt than ever purchase a CD again. But, I only really listen to the radio anyway (and at that, NPR), so they haven't lost any money on me.
One thing I'm wondering about is something my friend mentioned - that he download the stuff directly from napster and that was over 6 years ago. The statute of limitations on theft in Illinois is less than that. So, he legitimately now owns all the songs he got then. I'm not sure if he's right, but it was a funny perspective.
Mini-flourescent bulbs are nice, I grant you, but:
* My wife is very, very sensitive to light flickering (she makes a great bunt cake, though, so it balances out). She can see the flicker and hates it.
* I therefore cannot use the bulbs in the upstairs, but I do use it in utility areas where I never turn the light off (basement shop area). Due to bad lightswitch placement, I have to walk across a crowded, debris-strewn minefield of a basement to turn on the light there. So, I leave it on all the time.
I will add that there's a neat timed-lightswitch that Home Depot sells for $10 or so. It's got buttons for 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes and an always-on button in the center. Very nice. Saves lots of energy. I put one in the aforementioned shop area right under the always-on light and it controls the floodlamps, landing-lights, KC-daylighters, magnesium-flare dispensers, and 10-million candlepower searchlights I have to 'reduce' shadows in my shop area.
1. Please cite your data source. 2. Adaptec cards claim to do their raid computations in hardware, meaning the system CPU isn't required to do the computations. This is much better than software raid solutions for obvious performance reasons. 3. As I said, the differentiating factor is the ability to grow a setup by adding a disk, without the need to back up the data to another location. Can 3Ware do this? Last I checked (about 2 months ago) they could not.
Adaptec has a good reputation for quality parts; I've not heard bad things about them (I'm sure there's plenty of people that have had horror stories happen to them) but can anyone else (enterprise sysadmins out there?) comment on reliability and configurability of the Adaptec solutions vs. the 3Ware ones? -- Kevin
The 3ware is quite popular, but the adaptec wins in my book because it will do several things the 3ware one will not:
a. On-line expansion: the ability to expand your array without backing up the data to another location, reconfiguring the array, and reloading the data. b. Differently sized disks: if I have 2 disks of different sizes, the 3ware one will only do RAID1 with a total size of the smaller of them; likewise with raid-5.
I've been a consultant at 3 big financial firms (in the Chicago area) that (are using || have used) Wingz, which is a spreadsheet package that runs/ran under OpenStep. This wouldn't be a problem except the makers of Wings left the marketplace long ago and the file format cannot be read by anyone!
I've tried calling, researching, everything. No one has a file converter that will read files in Wingz and write out anything useable, like CSV, Excel, tab-delimited, or whatever. We had copies of Wingz, and it would save to.WKZ format, but there's no way to automate that from a (non-openstep-equipped) Windows or Unix box.
If anyone knows of a way to convert these files to an established file format, even if we loose the formulae and only keep the cell values, that's fine.
I've peeked into the binary with a hex editor, and it's not obvious what the format is, but maybe I just needed some more experimenting time. Does anyone know a converter for Wingz?
Thanks-- -- Kevin
Experience Curves Explain This
on
Hondas in Space
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It seems no one is talking about experience curves here, and they are vital to the discussion.
An "experience curve" is a way of explaining that the price per unit for any device decreases with the sum of the production repititions.
This means that it's the area under the curve that matters, the total number of produced items. A Wikipedia article explains it here.
The multiplier for how much it decreases obviously varies with the device. Any number of examples abound. For one, Photovoltaic cells are decreasing in per-unit price in good accordance with the sum of the cells ever produced. The idea of the government purchasing or subsidizing the purchase of items (examples: ethanol, PV-cells) fits in nicely to this function.
Rockets have not followed the curve because artificial limits (trade secrets, military secrecy, launch licenses, technology transfer) and purchasing uncertainties (NASA defending their turf) has clamped down on information transfer. If info flows freely, everyone benefits from cheaper devices.
This may not be what we want. Rocket tech = missle tech = N. Korea lobbing a nuke at us = maybe we'd better not publish the cheap rocket designs in Popular Science today, eh? (fearmongering).
Check out the wikipedia article link above, you'll see it directly applies to this situation.
NASA really has something to learn about broadcasting. There are frequently long sections of: * dead air; * video with no sound, typically of big rooms with people milling about; * sound with no picture, people talking over a picture of NASA's logo; * video with "cocktail party" sound, where someone abandons the mike on a filing cabinet and you get to hear people walking by saying "Great weather today, Dave!" * unscheduled time with a NASA logo and no clue when the next broadcast is.
Kind of frustrating. Of course, there's the crowd that says, "don't complain, at least we have pictures!", but I'd really like a little higher production values.
It has surprised me that WMD were not faked by CIA / DIA / etc. (insert random agency name here). Getting a hold of some generic sarin, anthrax, botulinin, chlorine gas, etc. would be easy for any U.S. agency determined to do so. Placing it in a couple of buried shipping containers in the desert that we 'accidentally' discovered the location to would have been very easy.
The fact that this was not done says to me: * maybe some was found but they can't talk about it (doubtful); * most of the people in the U.S. armed forces are basically ethical (encouraging); * no one thought of faking it (highly doubtful); * there are too many checks and balances within the agency structures to allow a fake to succeed (highly likely).
The checks-balances scenario is this: CIA decides to fake it. 1. They create the agent/material, bury it, fake up docs, release info about it, "find" it, make news. 2. FBI decides, Hey, let's test it and figure out where it really came from and how it was made. 3. UN / Brits request samples to test, start interviewing all their people about the subject and get nothing or actual denials. 4. FBI figures out this isn't genuine and points fingers, or: 5. ATF decides to test it independently, or: 6. Secret service / Treasury tests it independently, or: 7. GAO / Congressional subcommittee asks lots of questions, or: 8. UN figures it out, points fingers, or: 9. Iraq former-regime muckety-mucks say, "hey, wait, we didn't do that... it's cool, but we didn't do it."
Just some thoughts. I like having multiple levels of power structures all competing for the truth. The whole CIA reorg bill concentrates power too much in my opinion. It'll allow for this kind of potential fakery to succeed.
There are huge numbers of data points missing from this article:
What is the production cost of the ethanol in CDN$/litre (or gallon, whatever);
What is the capacity in millions-of-liters/year of a plant of x cost (fixed vs. variable costs);
Is there new technology at work here?
(advanced)What is the experience curve coefficient for cellulose ethanol?
What is total number of gallons (or litres) of gasoline used by Canada per year
what is the total number of liters per year of Ethanol?
what is the difference between cellulose-based-ethanol and other ethanols in (production cost, production capability, capacity, etc.).
I know no one here will know this stuff necessarily, but it would be great if science articles like this could give the geeks in the room a nod and give __SOME__ of this info...
My girlfriend would kill me if I got her this as a gift. Of course, it would be redundant, as I'd kill myself if I even thought of giving something like this to her as a token of love.
My wife says in response, "You're just Jealous!"
Seriously, my wife's the Star Wars nut in the family. We're Unitarian and her religious convictions (and to some degree mine) were shaped by this mythology.
Unfortunately, the "JarJar Factor" and the "concentration of midi-chlorians" B.S. changed the nature of the storyline and mythology to a large degree and we both don't like the direction it took.
Regardless, there are many women who appreciate the opportunity to be taken out to live theater like a unique one-man show, especially when it means being able to have a night on the town sans our 3 kids (all under age 3.5). Need I say more about this being an excellent birthday gift?
My wife, standing behind me, says, "Yah! And I loved it!".
My wife and I saw the "One Man Star Wars Trilogy" as my b-day gift to her on Dec. 19th at the Apollo Theater in Chicago (on Lincoln Ave.). The tickets were $19 each plus tax. Seating was for 175 and maybe 125 people were there on a bitterly cold 5-degree-fahrenheit Sunday afternoon.
The show was fantastic! We are relatively big star wars buffs, so the trivia contest at the start of the show was welcome. We got most of them, but several were so hard that an 11-year-old had to get it (the exact wording of Han Solo as being 'the main course' for the Ewoks).
The person doing the show (sorry, don't remember his name) was very talented. Several people sneezed, had to step out to the lobby, or otherwise 'interrupted' the show, and he acknowledged each humorously, in character and out, then picked up where he left off. This to me was the mark of someone who has paid their dues in improv theater being a very, very fast think-on-your-feet performer.
His intonations and body language were exquisite. He managed to make fun of the characters and still be true to the spirit of the show quite effectively. We had a wonderful night of it, a very funny and very worthwhile show!
At the end of the evening, he gave us a preview by doing Golum ("precious") and we knew it would also be a great show.
This is high praise from me. I've seen quite a bit of improv and small-performance theater due to a friend being in the scene and being invited to a variety of performances.
Just my 5 cents. We'll see him again almost assuredly. I hope he makes a good DVD deal recording his performance.
Half the cost (55%+) of a solar cell installation is dc->ac conversion & associated electronics. this development does not help that cost, unfortunately...
--Kevin
--> Shameless Plug: I'm looking for a Sr. Software Engineer Job in Northwest suburbs of Chicago, Perl, C, some Java & C#, 14 yrs. experience; Laid off due to merger. kevin@justanyone.com--
I've taught a discussion section of Physics, "Intro to Astronomy" at University of Kansas. I wasn't paid, I took the teaching as a class, Physics 571 Astronomical Instruction. It was a fantastic class to work on, Dr. Steven Shawl was a kickass 'boss' as well as teacher.
Writing a good test takes about 10 times longer than taking it. You have to:
Come up with plausible misconceptions as alternates;
make the questions cover stuff reasonable students should understand given the exposure to it;
Make the questions somewhat entertaining to read if possible to induce people to not dread the tests;
Create sets of questions that cover basics, medium, and advanced subjects so you make sure the C students can pass but not everyone gets A's
the breadth of the questions has to cover the breadth of the classroom topics reasonably well
Grading tests (even multiple choice, but especially essay questions) involved reading all the tests, deciding what the scope of the answers was so you don't fail or Ace the entire class or bias the grading of the first papers you grade, etc.
Things change in Physics all the time, and a teacher who doesn't adjust the curriculum to their students will disincline their students to ever study the subject again - which I believe is one of the three goals of education:
Give them a theoretical framework of basic concepts they'll use the rest of their lives;
Give them enough knowledge to (a)back up the above framework, (b)Prepare for further academic study, and (c) inspire them to regard the subject as interesting and worth future study for the rest of their lives.
Of course, this is usually impossible, but a good teacher would probably echo these concepts in formal 'Educational Methodology' language.
-- Kevin "Soon to be laid off from BankOne due to JPMChase Merger (don't want to move to NYC); looking for a Perl / C programming in Chicago Northern Suburbs - know of anything? Hints? Email me, kevin@justanyone.com with 'job' in subject line (due to spam filter)"
I could really live without admin rights on my box at work. Really. Almost. Except for the bunch of stuff that I have to do that demands that I have it.
Most employers (and a Uni is the prof's employer, so this is about the same) have a 'standard build' which includes lots of software that most people need. The trouble is they never get the mix right for me, the developer. UBS Warburg had a damn good IT department (to cite the best employer I've ever worked for) but they didn't know about http://ultraedit.com/. They were very responsive with new software, but it was still a delay.
For general mode programming, I don't need new software but for maybe once a month, and I can stand a 2 hour or even 4 hour delay to get it installed. This is fine and thus I don't need admin rights for it.
The employer I most recently worked for (not UBS) is okay but they're typical of the industry (as a former consultant I've worked for about 20 companies in the past 14 years). Their standard build is not my standard build.
The times I need admin rights are:
Correcting the system clock (if they had a timeserver I wouldn't need this);
Adding the appplications they never get right:
UltraEdit
Filezilla
Mozilla/Firefox
Cygwin
Quicktime
Acrobat Reader
PowerDesk
ActiveState Perl
Folding at Home
MySQL & MySQL admin
Evaluating New software;
Running Apache on my own box - starting and stopping the service;
With several of my admittedly small C#.NET programs, adding them as a service, starting, and stopping them;
Of course, my employer could have installed all the programs I've named and that would get me through the tough times, but the problem comes when I'm doing the other stuff.
Admittedly I'm a huge power user. But, there's no reason a departmental secretary needs admin rights. She shouldn't be installing that much stuff her/himself.
An organization that has that many rampant security violations obviously needs consequences for those violations. I can say that if I shared a password to my personal account, or a production account even, I would expect a reprimand from my manager. If it was a business critical system, I could be warned and then fired very easily.
Frankly, moving to Linux would not correct the basic organizational problems of disregard for data security. When a prof finds his tests were stolen and thus has to write an entirely new set of questions (a LOT of work, and strangely, I've done it as a Teach. Asst.), they'll think again about security.
If you schedule a computer switch-up, meaning taking all boxes away and redistributing them, you might force the issue of what software should be installed (get licenses for it if needed), putting data on server shares that are backed up regularly, and changing admin passwords. But I DON'T ENVY YOU THE TASK (grin). Of course, there's easier ways - reset admin passwords, announce a reinstall of the OS and thus they'll need to move all their files to a server share, require passwords be changed once every semester and enforce having a number and mixed case in the password, etc.
-- Kevin Rice "Soon to be laid off from BankOne due to JPMChase Merger (don't want to move to NYC); looking for a Perl / C programming in Chicago Northern Suburbs - know of anything? Hints? Email me, kevin@justanyone.com with 'job' in subject line (due to spam filter)"
Hey! There may yet be medical help for the Republican party... They've been heartless for years. But now, through the miracle of Modern Science(tm), we might see the 'compassionate conservatism' (a.k.a. throw-the-beggars-a-'resume-hotline'-business-card )(and fsck the welfare check for the starving widows and orphans).
Yah, flamebait. But, my bleeding-heart-liberal-wife made me post it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
why not say, Java? Leaving aside the uniqueness of the Perl community, from a purely technical perspective Java is far too restrictive for the kind of work I do. And it's far too demanding on the programmer. Sure, it has a lot of great libraries that make it easy to get particular things done, but I didn't want to do those particular things. And certainly not in the ways Java would require me to do them.
This makes a wonderful point about Perl "There's More Than One Way To Do It" == TMTOWTDI. This is good and bad (like most powerful tools) in that writing hard-to-read code is certainly easy. However, the loose-type is great for projects that don't really need to differentiate between long and integer and float. Hey, it's a number, that's good enough. We read it in, we do stuff with it, we write it out. If it doesn't break when we get a different type coming through than we expected, great.
Yes, Java is demanding. I don't mind demanding. I do mind it being private. And, Java isn't open source. Perl is by nature open source - you CAN'T hide the source if you distribute code to someone. That's the beauty of it.
EDS is one of very few companies that will accept government contracts. US Gov'mt accounting requirements are onerous (hard to comply with) by any standard, so in order to compete for the contract, you have to have a huge team of accountants that know how to produce the kind of records and reports that the Government accounting office(s) expect.
There is a huge hue and cry (outrageous exclamation of disgust and anger) over mismanagment and eggregious spending in government contracts. Having worked in the sector, I'm somewhat familiar. The contractor I worked for made sure there was no waste, fraud, or abuse. However, it spent 10 times as much as the job required, just to do this. The obvious choice for our firm was it would have been far cheaper to run things by GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices)(the private sector accounting standards), and have both a nice large internal audit division and "internal affairs" watchdog enforcement. Alas, most governments are not run this way, and if they are, they devolve into the current format due to political expediency.
I have friends that work for EDS and they comment on the kinds of hoops they have to jump through just to do simple stuff. They've built up a rather large experience pool in doing this hoop-jumping, so they can do contracts cheaper than some other companies.
EDS also tends to run things according to CMM levels whenever they're developing things, so at least if there's a mess-up (as there obviously was here), there will be some kind of follow-through to improve the process of doing this kind of work. EDS's management doesn't want the black eye any more than the government or Microsoft do, but they'll spend the money to make sure it doesn't happen the same way again. There is, after all, no way to prevent all errors, but I give them credit for trying most of the time.
Seems like the Ministry should have tested the rollout in a sandbox that didn't leak.
Of course, MS could have tested their product better.
Of course, this could all be the work of the NSA working with the little green men (Kodos and Frodos) and the Legion of Inappropriately Named White Guys Named Bruce All With The First Name Of Bruce.
"HUNT: Welcome back. And now for the CAPITAL GANG classic. About 10 years ago, the first President Bush went to Japan to try to discuss economic problems. At a state dinner in Tokyo, he vomited on the Japanese prime minister and then fainted."
My grandfather was a wheat farmer in Kansas and practiced this method, saving wheat he considered 'best' to be seed wheat for the next year.
This could not have been illegal; he owned the original wheat and thus the intellectual property contained within it.
I suspect this story is flim-flam (anti-bush propoganda), since if true it would be a PR nightmare for them if true, both domestically in the farm country and internationally.
Of course, it might be true and the bible belt voters who chose their president based on his religious beliefs instead of policies that benefit the rural poor in that selfsame bible belt... well, people vote their pocketbooks unless someone distracts them. I hope this is a distraction that can highlight the unequal nature of the benefits bestowed on the Bush administration's friends.
I heard recently about a new Nuclear Thermal design (in http://www.wired.com/). I'm wondering if this is better (higher ISP per unit cost) than an Ion thruster.
Obviously, if you're headed inbound into the solar system, you're destined for more light therefore more available energy. And, going outbound (Pluto-wise), sunlight gets scarce. So, where is the breakeven? Solar panels cost weight, and Ion engines mass a lot for the miniscule thrust they generate. Nuclear thermal (or Nuclear/Ion) combinations also mass a lot but have the added advantage of much higher available thrusts for short bursts if needed.
What about pairing Nuclear thermal with Ion thrusting? Generate a plasma by heating it with a slow fission or plutonium decay reaction, and also generate electricity from the waste heat. Use the electric power to do microwave heating. Or, directly accelerate the plasma ions using a magneto-hydrodynamic MHD setup?
Is anyone actually actively developing anything like this? It seems to me that the fundamental limitations of our current space delivery systems are NOT who can build a better mousetrap, but that all the mousetraps are using cheese (LH2+LOX) instead of peanut butter (NTR, MHD, Ion engines, etc.).
Also, are there any somewhat-better-than-rumors of USAF designs using these that are flying but that people can't talk about?
It occurs to me that 500 GB is just about enough space to store the 40,000 most popular songs of the last 60 years in 256-bit mp3 format.
I might be willing to pay as much as $200 for such a disk, as long as most of the money went to the copyright owners (performers?) instead of evil record company scumbucketry.
Alas, market forces have yet to work their magic to actualize this rather pleasant "convenience fantasy".
Slashdot Mirror
attempted electronic transfer of UKP13.9m
Sorry if this is in any way pedantic - just FYI since I used to work in a capital markets trading environment...
The abbreviation in most currency markets is not UKP, it's GBP, for Great Britain Pounds.
To quote from a handy refernce page:
ISO 4217 (Codes for the Representation of Currencies and Funds) defines three-letter abbreviations for world currencies. The general principle used to construct these abbreviations is to take the two-letter abbreviations defined in ISO 3166 (Codes for the Representation of Names of Countries) and append the first letter of the currency name (e.g., USD for the United States Dollar).
A non-official site's list is at: http://www.jhall.demon.co.uk/currency/by_country.
The official 4217 list of currency codes is at http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/c
The official ISO 3166 Country codes list is at:
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma
Note if you want to be doing something in a windows script and initiate this process in cygwin, your options could include having cygwin always running, starting an 'at' or cron job there that looks for the presence of a trigger file and kicks off your process when started, then deletes the trigger file when done.
Note this is cumbersome and suckky but I've been forced through similar hoops before and it's just one ugly hack in the bag of tricks.
I'm a white, upper middle class suburban 37 year old male and never would have listened to rap or dance mixes had it not been for P2P. Likewise Mel Torme, who has some incredible vocal talent that I was previously unaware of.
Since the cost of the music was near zero for the friend of mine that grabbed it online, I could see if I liked it. Testing it out and seeing if I like something is a valuable thing - used to be (I hear) that record stores would let you do that. They don't do that now, I believe (though I've not been into a record store in 10 years).
So, I did make aesthetic decisions about groups based on P2P experiences, some positive and some negative.
I should mention that I'm a lot more likely to vomit down a record exec's shirt than ever purchase a CD again. But, I only really listen to the radio anyway (and at that, NPR), so they haven't lost any money on me.
One thing I'm wondering about is something my friend mentioned - that he download the stuff directly from napster and that was over 6 years ago. The statute of limitations on theft in Illinois is less than that. So, he legitimately now owns all the songs he got then. I'm not sure if he's right, but it was a funny perspective.
Mini-flourescent bulbs are nice, I grant you, but:
* My wife is very, very sensitive to light flickering (she makes a great bunt cake, though, so it balances out). She can see the flicker and hates it.
* I therefore cannot use the bulbs in the upstairs, but I do use it in utility areas where I never turn the light off (basement shop area). Due to bad lightswitch placement, I have to walk across a crowded, debris-strewn minefield of a basement to turn on the light there. So, I leave it on all the time.
I will add that there's a neat timed-lightswitch that Home Depot sells for $10 or so. It's got buttons for 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes and an always-on button in the center. Very nice. Saves lots of energy. I put one in the aforementioned shop area right under the always-on light and it controls the floodlamps, landing-lights, KC-daylighters, magnesium-flare dispensers, and 10-million candlepower searchlights I have to 'reduce' shadows in my shop area.
1. Please cite your data source.
2. Adaptec cards claim to do their raid computations in hardware, meaning the system CPU isn't required to do the computations. This is much better than software raid solutions for obvious performance reasons.
3. As I said, the differentiating factor is the ability to grow a setup by adding a disk, without the need to back up the data to another location. Can 3Ware do this? Last I checked (about 2 months ago) they could not.
Adaptec has a good reputation for quality parts; I've not heard bad things about them (I'm sure there's plenty of people that have had horror stories happen to them) but can anyone else (enterprise sysadmins out there?) comment on reliability and configurability of the Adaptec solutions vs. the 3Ware ones?
-- Kevin
There's two popular RAID cards for the PC. I'm most interested in Raid-5 because the obvious cost-per-gig savings vs. mirror (raid-1) solutions.
1. httP;//www.3Ware.com
2. http://adaptec.com/
The 3ware is quite popular, but the adaptec wins in my book because it will do several things the 3ware one will not:
a. On-line expansion: the ability to expand your array without backing up the data to another location, reconfiguring the array, and reloading the data.
b. Differently sized disks: if I have 2 disks of different sizes, the 3ware one will only do RAID1 with a total size of the smaller of them; likewise with raid-5.
Just some ideas for you...
-- Kevin
I've been a consultant at 3 big financial firms (in the Chicago area) that (are using || have used) Wingz, which is a spreadsheet package that runs/ran under OpenStep. This wouldn't be a problem except the makers of Wings left the marketplace long ago and the file format cannot be read by anyone!
.WKZ format, but there's no way to automate that from a (non-openstep-equipped) Windows or Unix box.
I've tried calling, researching, everything. No one has a file converter that will read files in Wingz and write out anything useable, like CSV, Excel, tab-delimited, or whatever. We had copies of Wingz, and it would save to
If anyone knows of a way to convert these files to an established file format, even if we loose the formulae and only keep the cell values, that's fine.
I've peeked into the binary with a hex editor, and it's not obvious what the format is, but maybe I just needed some more experimenting time. Does anyone know a converter for Wingz?
Thanks--
-- Kevin
It seems no one is talking about experience curves here, and they are vital to the discussion.
An "experience curve" is a way of explaining that the price per unit for any device decreases with the sum of the production repititions.
This means that it's the area under the curve that matters, the total number of produced items. A Wikipedia article explains it here.
The multiplier for how much it decreases obviously varies with the device. Any number of examples abound. For one, Photovoltaic cells are decreasing in per-unit price in good accordance with the sum of the cells ever produced. The idea of the government purchasing or subsidizing the purchase of items (examples: ethanol, PV-cells) fits in nicely to this function.
Rockets have not followed the curve because artificial limits (trade secrets, military secrecy, launch licenses, technology transfer) and purchasing uncertainties (NASA defending their turf) has clamped down on information transfer. If info flows freely, everyone benefits from cheaper devices.
This may not be what we want. Rocket tech = missle tech = N. Korea lobbing a nuke at us = maybe we'd better not publish the cheap rocket designs in Popular Science today, eh? (fearmongering).
Check out the wikipedia article link above, you'll see it directly applies to this situation.
--Kevin
NASA really has something to learn about broadcasting. There are frequently long sections of:
* dead air;
* video with no sound, typically of big rooms with people milling about;
* sound with no picture, people talking over a picture of NASA's logo;
* video with "cocktail party" sound, where someone abandons the mike on a filing cabinet and you get to hear people walking by saying "Great weather today, Dave!"
* unscheduled time with a NASA logo and no clue when the next broadcast is.
Kind of frustrating. Of course, there's the crowd that says, "don't complain, at least we have pictures!", but I'd really like a little higher production values.
It has surprised me that WMD were not faked by CIA / DIA / etc. (insert random agency name here). Getting a hold of some generic sarin, anthrax, botulinin, chlorine gas, etc. would be easy for any U.S. agency determined to do so. Placing it in a couple of buried shipping containers in the desert that we 'accidentally' discovered the location to would have been very easy.
The fact that this was not done says to me:
* maybe some was found but they can't talk about it (doubtful);
* most of the people in the U.S. armed forces are basically ethical (encouraging);
* no one thought of faking it (highly doubtful);
* there are too many checks and balances within the agency structures to allow a fake to succeed (highly likely).
The checks-balances scenario is this: CIA decides to fake it.
1. They create the agent/material, bury it, fake up docs, release info about it, "find" it, make news.
2. FBI decides, Hey, let's test it and figure out where it really came from and how it was made.
3. UN / Brits request samples to test, start interviewing all their people about the subject and get nothing or actual denials.
4. FBI figures out this isn't genuine and points fingers, or:
5. ATF decides to test it independently, or:
6. Secret service / Treasury tests it independently, or:
7. GAO / Congressional subcommittee asks lots of questions, or:
8. UN figures it out, points fingers, or:
9. Iraq former-regime muckety-mucks say, "hey, wait, we didn't do that... it's cool, but we didn't do it."
Just some thoughts.
I like having multiple levels of power structures all competing for the truth. The whole CIA reorg bill concentrates power too much in my opinion. It'll allow for this kind of potential fakery to succeed.
-- Kevin
Hey, Wait a minute! HALO-philes?
These microbes love Halo? Cool! I knew it was a popular game, but the game's crossing the interspecies-player boundary is wicked awesome!
What about Halo II ?
-- Kevin
P.S., Yah, I know halo == halide == saltlike. Run with the joke, dude.
There are huge numbers of data points missing from this article:
I know no one here will know this stuff necessarily, but it would be great if science articles like this could give the geeks in the room a nod and give __SOME__ of this info...
-- Kevin
My girlfriend would kill me if I got her this as a gift. Of course, it would be redundant, as I'd kill myself if I even thought of giving something like this to her as a token of love.
My wife says in response, "You're just Jealous!"
Seriously, my wife's the Star Wars nut in the family. We're Unitarian and her religious convictions (and to some degree mine) were shaped by this mythology.
Unfortunately, the "JarJar Factor" and the "concentration of midi-chlorians" B.S. changed the nature of the storyline and mythology to a large degree and we both don't like the direction it took.
Regardless, there are many women who appreciate the opportunity to be taken out to live theater like a unique one-man show, especially when it means being able to have a night on the town sans our 3 kids (all under age 3.5). Need I say more about this being an excellent birthday gift?
My wife, standing behind me, says, "Yah! And I loved it!".
-- Kevin
My wife and I saw the "One Man Star Wars Trilogy" as my b-day gift to her on Dec. 19th at the Apollo Theater in Chicago (on Lincoln Ave.). The tickets were $19 each plus tax. Seating was for 175 and maybe 125 people were there on a bitterly cold 5-degree-fahrenheit Sunday afternoon.
The show was fantastic! We are relatively big star wars buffs, so the trivia contest at the start of the show was welcome. We got most of them, but several were so hard that an 11-year-old had to get it (the exact wording of Han Solo as being 'the main course' for the Ewoks).
The person doing the show (sorry, don't remember his name) was very talented. Several people sneezed, had to step out to the lobby, or otherwise 'interrupted' the show, and he acknowledged each humorously, in character and out, then picked up where he left off. This to me was the mark of someone who has paid their dues in improv theater being a very, very fast think-on-your-feet performer.
His intonations and body language were exquisite. He managed to make fun of the characters and still be true to the spirit of the show quite effectively. We had a wonderful night of it, a very funny and very worthwhile show!
At the end of the evening, he gave us a preview by doing Golum ("precious") and we knew it would also be a great show.
This is high praise from me. I've seen quite a bit of improv and small-performance theater due to a friend being in the scene and being invited to a variety of performances.
Just my 5 cents. We'll see him again almost assuredly. I hope he makes a good DVD deal recording his performance.
-- Kevin
I hate to correct you on costs per watt: currently is between $3.50 and $5.30 per watt, dependind if you buy 1 module or 100,000 modules.
Current prices of photovoltaic cell modules is always tracked at a nice website, http://www.solarbuzz.com/Moduleprices.htm.
Half the cost (55%+) of a solar cell installation is dc->ac conversion & associated electronics. this development does not help that cost, unfortunately...
--Kevin
--> Shameless Plug: I'm looking for a Sr. Software Engineer Job in Northwest suburbs of Chicago, Perl, C, some Java & C#, 14 yrs. experience; Laid off due to merger. kevin@justanyone.com--
I've taught a discussion section of Physics, "Intro to Astronomy" at University of Kansas. I wasn't paid, I took the teaching as a class, Physics 571 Astronomical Instruction. It was a fantastic class to work on, Dr. Steven Shawl was a kickass 'boss' as well as teacher.
Writing a good test takes about 10 times longer than taking it. You have to:
- Come up with plausible misconceptions as alternates;
- make the questions cover stuff reasonable students should understand given the exposure to it;
- Make the questions somewhat entertaining to read if possible to induce people to not dread the tests;
- Create sets of questions that cover basics, medium, and advanced subjects so you make sure the C students can pass but not everyone gets A's
- the breadth of the questions has to cover the breadth of the classroom topics reasonably well
Grading tests (even multiple choice, but especially essay questions) involved reading all the tests, deciding what the scope of the answers was so you don't fail or Ace the entire class or bias the grading of the first papers you grade, etc.Things change in Physics all the time, and a teacher who doesn't adjust the curriculum to their students will disincline their students to ever study the subject again - which I believe is one of the three goals of education:
- Give them a theoretical framework of basic concepts they'll use the rest of their lives;
- Give them enough knowledge to (a)back up the above framework, (b)Prepare for further academic study, and (c) inspire them to regard the subject as interesting and worth future study for the rest of their lives.
Of course, this is usually impossible, but a good teacher would probably echo these concepts in formal 'Educational Methodology' language.-- Kevin
"Soon to be laid off from BankOne due to JPMChase Merger (don't want to move to NYC); looking for a Perl / C programming in Chicago Northern Suburbs - know of anything? Hints? Email me, kevin@justanyone.com with 'job' in subject line (due to spam filter)"
Disclaimer: I'm NOT a SysAdmin, I'm a developer.
I could really live without admin rights on my box at work. Really. Almost. Except for the bunch of stuff that I have to do that demands that I have it.
Most employers (and a Uni is the prof's employer, so this is about the same) have a 'standard build' which includes lots of software that most people need. The trouble is they never get the mix right for me, the developer. UBS Warburg had a damn good IT department (to cite the best employer I've ever worked for) but they didn't know about http://ultraedit.com/. They were very responsive with new software, but it was still a delay.
For general mode programming, I don't need new software but for maybe once a month, and I can stand a 2 hour or even 4 hour delay to get it installed. This is fine and thus I don't need admin rights for it.
The employer I most recently worked for (not UBS) is okay but they're typical of the industry (as a former consultant I've worked for about 20 companies in the past 14 years). Their standard build is not my standard build.
The times I need admin rights are:
- Correcting the system clock (if they had a timeserver I wouldn't need this);
- Adding the appplications they never get right:
- UltraEdit
- Filezilla
- Mozilla/Firefox
- Cygwin
- Quicktime
- Acrobat Reader
- PowerDesk
- ActiveState Perl
- Folding at Home
- MySQL & MySQL admin
- Evaluating New software;
- Running Apache on my own box - starting and stopping the service;
- With several of my admittedly small C#
.NET programs, adding them as a service, starting, and stopping them;
Of course, my employer could have installed all the programs I've named and that would get me through the tough times, but the problem comes when I'm doing the other stuff.Admittedly I'm a huge power user. But, there's no reason a departmental secretary needs admin rights. She shouldn't be installing that much stuff her/himself.
An organization that has that many rampant security violations obviously needs consequences for those violations. I can say that if I shared a password to my personal account, or a production account even, I would expect a reprimand from my manager. If it was a business critical system, I could be warned and then fired very easily.
Frankly, moving to Linux would not correct the basic organizational problems of disregard for data security. When a prof finds his tests were stolen and thus has to write an entirely new set of questions (a LOT of work, and strangely, I've done it as a Teach. Asst.), they'll think again about security.
If you schedule a computer switch-up, meaning taking all boxes away and redistributing them, you might force the issue of what software should be installed (get licenses for it if needed), putting data on server shares that are backed up regularly, and changing admin passwords. But I DON'T ENVY YOU THE TASK (grin). Of course, there's easier ways - reset admin passwords, announce a reinstall of the OS and thus they'll need to move all their files to a server share, require passwords be changed once every semester and enforce having a number and mixed case in the password, etc.
-- Kevin Rice
"Soon to be laid off from BankOne due to JPMChase Merger (don't want to move to NYC); looking for a Perl / C programming in Chicago Northern Suburbs - know of anything? Hints? Email me, kevin@justanyone.com with 'job' in subject line (due to spam filter)"
Hey! There may yet be medical help for the Republican party... They've been heartless for years. But now, through the miracle of Modern Science(tm), we might see the 'compassionate conservatism' (a.k.a. throw-the-beggars-a-'resume-hotline'-business-car
Yah, flamebait. But, my bleeding-heart-liberal-wife made me post it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
From the Article:
why not say, Java?
Leaving aside the uniqueness of the Perl community, from a purely technical perspective Java is far too restrictive for the kind of work I do. And it's far too demanding on the programmer. Sure, it has a lot of great libraries that make it easy to get particular things done, but I didn't want to do those particular things. And certainly not in the ways Java would require me to do them.
This makes a wonderful point about Perl "There's More Than One Way To Do It" == TMTOWTDI. This is good and bad (like most powerful tools) in that writing hard-to-read code is certainly easy. However, the loose-type is great for projects that don't really need to differentiate between long and integer and float. Hey, it's a number, that's good enough. We read it in, we do stuff with it, we write it out. If it doesn't break when we get a different type coming through than we expected, great.
Yes, Java is demanding. I don't mind demanding. I do mind it being private. And, Java isn't open source. Perl is by nature open source - you CAN'T hide the source if you distribute code to someone. That's the beauty of it.
EDS is one of very few companies that will accept government contracts. US Gov'mt accounting requirements are onerous (hard to comply with) by any standard, so in order to compete for the contract, you have to have a huge team of accountants that know how to produce the kind of records and reports that the Government accounting office(s) expect.
There is a huge hue and cry (outrageous exclamation of disgust and anger) over mismanagment and eggregious spending in government contracts. Having worked in the sector, I'm somewhat familiar. The contractor I worked for made sure there was no waste, fraud, or abuse. However, it spent 10 times as much as the job required, just to do this. The obvious choice for our firm was it would have been far cheaper to run things by GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices)(the private sector accounting standards), and have both a nice large internal audit division and "internal affairs" watchdog enforcement. Alas, most governments are not run this way, and if they are, they devolve into the current format due to political expediency.
I have friends that work for EDS and they comment on the kinds of hoops they have to jump through just to do simple stuff. They've built up a rather large experience pool in doing this hoop-jumping, so they can do contracts cheaper than some other companies.
EDS also tends to run things according to CMM levels whenever they're developing things, so at least if there's a mess-up (as there obviously was here), there will be some kind of follow-through to improve the process of doing this kind of work. EDS's management doesn't want the black eye any more than the government or Microsoft do, but they'll spend the money to make sure it doesn't happen the same way again. There is, after all, no way to prevent all errors, but I give them credit for trying most of the time.
Seems like the Ministry should have tested the rollout in a sandbox that didn't leak.
Of course, MS could have tested their product better.
Of course, this could all be the work of the NSA working with the little green men (Kodos and Frodos) and the Legion of Inappropriately Named White Guys Named Bruce All With The First Name Of Bruce.
No, not quite. It was the JAPANESE PRIME MINISTER, not "some chinese consulate guy". Can you imagine if situations were reversed what we would think?
h tml
See here for details: http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=11911 or here:
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0202/23/cg.00.
"HUNT: Welcome back. And now for the CAPITAL GANG classic. About 10 years ago, the first President Bush went to Japan to try to discuss economic problems. At a state dinner in Tokyo, he vomited on the Japanese prime minister and then fainted."
My grandfather was a wheat farmer in Kansas and practiced this method, saving wheat he considered 'best' to be seed wheat for the next year.
This could not have been illegal; he owned the original wheat and thus the intellectual property contained within it.
I suspect this story is flim-flam (anti-bush propoganda), since if true it would be a PR nightmare for them if true, both domestically in the farm country and internationally.
Of course, it might be true and the bible belt voters who chose their president based on his religious beliefs instead of policies that benefit the rural poor in that selfsame bible belt... well, people vote their pocketbooks unless someone distracts them. I hope this is a distraction that can highlight the unequal nature of the benefits bestowed on the Bush administration's friends.
I heard recently about a new Nuclear Thermal design (in http://www.wired.com/). I'm wondering if this is better (higher ISP per unit cost) than an Ion thruster.
Obviously, if you're headed inbound into the solar system, you're destined for more light therefore more available energy. And, going outbound (Pluto-wise), sunlight gets scarce. So, where is the breakeven? Solar panels cost weight, and Ion engines mass a lot for the miniscule thrust they generate. Nuclear thermal (or Nuclear/Ion) combinations also mass a lot but have the added advantage of much higher available thrusts for short bursts if needed.
What about pairing Nuclear thermal with Ion thrusting? Generate a plasma by heating it with a slow fission or plutonium decay reaction, and also generate electricity from the waste heat. Use the electric power to do microwave heating. Or, directly accelerate the plasma ions using a magneto-hydrodynamic MHD setup?
Is anyone actually actively developing anything like this? It seems to me that the fundamental limitations of our current space delivery systems are NOT who can build a better mousetrap, but that all the mousetraps are using cheese (LH2+LOX) instead of peanut butter (NTR, MHD, Ion engines, etc.).
Also, are there any somewhat-better-than-rumors of USAF designs using these that are flying but that people can't talk about?
It occurs to me that 500 GB is just about enough space to store the 40,000 most popular songs of the last 60 years in 256-bit mp3 format.
I might be willing to pay as much as $200 for such a disk, as long as most of the money went to the copyright owners (performers?) instead of evil record company scumbucketry.
Alas, market forces have yet to work their magic to actualize this rather pleasant "convenience fantasy".