My PS still hasn't died. It just sits, ruler of the coffee table (which is too far away from everything to allow it to be plugged into anything). I fully expect it to outlast my PS2 (which my girlfriend stole and currently has at her apartment; not that that has anything to do with my prediction of an early demise. Really.)
In related news, I hear that the military has decided to try out this new technology they heard about called the "transistor". If tests go as planned, they plan to phase out all vacuum tubes by the end of this century.
Really, where did the idea come from that our military has these super-advanced systems? Sure, they've got a lot of money, but they also have decade-plus testing regimens before they actually use anything.
Even if this chip's architecture turns out to be a dud, they'll have plants ready to produce 65 nanometer processors. Eventually they'll have some chips running at 65 nanometers, and they'll have a fab ready to produce it.
Thats what they think. In reality, everyone will skip right by the 65 nanometer process to the 63 nanometer process. Its much better. If Sony and Toshiba were really forward-thinking, they would be working on building 42 nanometer fabs. As everyone knows, that will be the answer to everything.
(Due to the uselessnes of this post, I have been sacked.)
Where in the article does any reference to wireless phones occur? And where in reality does a teraflop processor have its place in a phone?
Want a cellular phone, but don't have anyone to talk to? NO PROBLEM! Our new TeraFlop SCS micro-cellular phone has the processing power to allow you to carry on a conversation with just your phone, with no need to make friends or actually connect to anyone! Amaze your friends by carrying on a conversation on your TFlop SCS while 600 feet underground! Best of all, you never need worry about roaming charges again with our patented Network-Free Communications System, as your entire calling area follows your phone wherever it goes!
(What, you don't think that was funny? Something must be wrong with you.)
It looks way too fragile to withstand the immense forces needed to achieve escape velocity.
The big, fragile-looking thing is only the aircraft that carries the spacecraft to high altitude, where it is released and (hopefully) goes into orbit on its own. The actual spacecraft is the little pod hanging beneath it that looks like a 40's concept of a spacecraft except without the fins.
Okay, its an ugly spacecraft! Actually, the spacecraft part isn't too bad, it just looks like a 40's idea of a rocketship. The carrier part is just plain (or is that plane?) ugly, though.
I'd post the picture at least, but it seems the site got/.ed entirely just before it finished downloading, so no copy of it in my cache.
Okay, throwing in 9/11 had absolutely nothing at all to do with the discussion - we are talking about accidental crashes, not purposeful running of aircraft into things. That was just ridiculous.
Now, about needing all 2/3/4 engines to fail for an aircraft to crash on take-off: patently untrue. If an engine failure occurs during takeoff on a 2-engine aircraft, chances are the plane will crash. They simply do not have the power needed to take off with only half their engines. A four engine aircraft might be able to safely take off with one engine out, but even that is chancy. Takeoff is probably the most dangerous part of any flight, as it requires all engines to be working at or near full power for an extended period of time - whether an aircraft has one, two or four engines, they all need to be working during takeoff. During landings, the other most dangerous part of flight, an engine failure can usually be overcome by increasing thrust in remaining engine(s); such is not the case during takeoff, where an engine failure at the wrong time means the plane is landing now no matter what is on the ground. A civil aircraft with a dead engine can limp along home if the engine failure occurs well into a flight (or even just a couple thousand feet off the ground), but no existing civil air transport has the power necessary to takeoff safely with even one dead engine - look it up. Take the new Boeing 777 as an example of a twin jet. WIth both engines, taking off from sea level (best takeoff performance) and a payload 100,000 pounds under max takeoff (probably well under what any 777 would actually be operating at), it requires a ground roll of nearly 7,000 feet. You lose an engine during takeoff, and suddenly you have a ground roll required of at least 12,000 feet, probably more like 14-15,000. All of a sudden you have run out of runway at nearly every airport in the world, and this is under "ideal" conditions (aside from engine failure). By the way, that was at standard temp, which is something like 60 degrees, with no air conditioning, etc. Increase temp, turn on air conditioning and other electronics, and suddenly the situation gets much worse. Do you get the idea yet? Engine failure during VSTOL takeoff is automatically flight-ending. Engine failure during a normal takeoff has a very good likelihood of ending in a crash, or at least a crash landing.
Well the new US fighter jet, the F/A 22 is the first plane ever with engines that can go supersonic using turbofans.
Not quite true. It is the first produciton aircreaft to be capable of supersonic flight at a level attitude without using afterburners. Many military jets use turbofans and are capable of supersonic speeds - F-14, F-16, F-15, F/A-18, you get the idea.
Name another form of transport that hasn't got faster since the sixties?*
Well, here in the good ol' USA, our trains are running about the same speed as they were 100+ years ago. Since the 60's our population has gained some weight, so we also don't seem to walk as fast as we used to. About the only thing moving faster today is cars, and thats only on the rare occasion when you aren't stuck in traffic. While I don't know how fast the space shuttle moves compared to Apollo rockets, I don't think it is that big a step. So, umm, can you name a form of transport that has sped up since the 60s?
While I don't think a VSTOL passenger aircraft is economically feasable (especially after the billions we have spent on nice long runways), I don't think there is really that much of a safety concern anymore. We have these cool things called computers that can be used to ensure that the aircraft transitions from vertical to horizontal flight correctly, no matter what the pilot tries to do. The only safety issue would be if the engine(s) were to lose power before transition to horizontal flight. This is a legitimate concern, but it is a problem shared with ordinary passenger aircraft - the only time they run their engines at anywhere near full power is during the takeoff roll and initial climbout, during which time an engine failure is disastrous anyway.
Still, at least the plane should find itself with a major entry in the history of aviation as the first supersonic passenger plane
As I am sure others have pointed out by now, the Tu-144 was the first supersonic passenger jet, beating the concorde by several months at least. It was also the shortest lived, as it was removed from service after only a few years due to a crash and the extreme cost of operating it. The Soviet aircraft was also slightly faster than Concorde.
At least from one perspective. At the universities I have been to, programming is usually offered as a Computer Science degree, whereas Computer Engineering refers to hardware design. In my opinion, it would generally be more accurate to label the COmputer Science degree program as Software Engineering, as the vast majority of people in the program are essentially learning how to take existing algorithms and methods and apply them to specific problems - this, in my view, is engineering. A scientist would be researching new algorithms, creating new languages, and generally increasing knowledge about the field. I think most people would agree that this is not what most programming degrees are about.
Now, the article is more about a professional title as opposed to what the job involves. From this point of view, I don't think that most programmers should be considered professional engineers. Just because you perform engineering work doesn't make you a professional engineer - that invlolves more professional responsibility than most programmers take. It isn't even an issue so much of education - I could go get a Ph.D. in civil engineering and this wouldn't allow me to call myself a professional engineer. The title of professional engineer connotes not only the engineering education required, but also that the person has experience in the field and has shown that they posess the professional responsibility to be an engineer. If software engineers want to be professional engineers, they need to form a national or international organization with standardized tests and a way of evaluating prospective engineers on their professionalism. Also, if they want to be professional engineers, they need to be willing to take full, personal responsibility for their work - something that most "software engineers" I have dealt with are unwilling to do.
So, in my opinion, while "software engineers" really are engineers as far as the kind of work they do, they are not professional engineers in terms of credibility and personal responsibility. This is not to say that software engineers are not deserving of the title (at least some of them), just that if they want to be regarded as professional engineers they need to find a way to ensure that anyone with the professional title of "software engineer" meets a certain level of capability and can be relied upon by people outside the field to have the necessary knowledge and responsibility to get the job they are hired for done.
I've downloaded the trial twice in the last couple years (this has been around for quite a while now), and as far as I can tell the only 3D things in the software are the giant sphere that makes the earth and the video card required to run it. In the trial version, at least, there is no eleveation mapping or anything else. It is just flat photos pasted on a spherical Earth. It is pretty cool though, being able to pan and scan from one city to another smoothly. Really cool, but a little lacking in the 3D department.
Interesting side note, President Clinton and Jobs were pretty tight, while Michael Dell was a big supporter of Dubya. I think that says a lot...
Yeah, it says that Jobs is (or was) a Californian, and Dell is a Texan. In Texas, apparently, you support Texans no matter how idiotic they are.
Re:Internet Literature Database
on
An IMDb for Books
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
One problem with including things like magazines and journals would be that they periodically change format, and they continuously change in the quality of content. A book, on the other hand, is pretty static once it has been published so reviews of it made today will pretty much be accurate for the rest of that books existence. The same cannot be said for magazines; what happens after five or ten years when all different people are writing and editing a magazine? DO you wipe out all the old review, as they are not really relevant any longer? It seems to me that this kind of thing works better for relatively static works like books, movies, albums, etc. I suppose you could rate each issue of a magazine, but that would get really ridiculous really fast.
Funny, I just did I price compare and came out with something quite different. Let's see...
Powerbook G4:
1 Ghz cpu
15.2" Widescreen TFT (1280x854)
512 MB in 2 SODIMMs (SDRAM)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 64mb
CDRW/DVD drive (not superdrive)
60 GB HD
Mac OSX
no productivity software included (Office X avail. $499)
price: $2449
Dell Inspiron 8500
2.0 Ghz cpu
15.4" Widescreen TFT (1920x1280)
512 MB in 2 SODIMMs (DDR)
Nvidia Geforce4 4200 Go 64mb
CDRW/DVD drive
60 GB HD
Windows XP Home
Wordperfect/Quicken pack (Office Pro avail. $329)
price: $2578
So yeah, the powerbook is cheaper, but you get lower resolution, no productivity software, slower ram, slower graphics card - but also less weight. Looks pretty even to me (I'm not even going to try and compare 1 Ghz powerPC processor to 2 Ghz P4).
Because it would massively reduce the cost of putting stuff into orbit. If we can move fuel, equipment, etc. into orbit at a fraction of the cost it takes today, we could then build larger, heavier spacecraft to visit the rest of the solar system. The vast majority of the mass in a launch to get something to Mars is used simply to get off the ground and into orbit. If a space elevator was built, and it worked as advertised ($100/kg, according to the website in the story), the cost of sending probes or even people to other planets would be reduced hugely.
Well, now we know why real engineers don't run television shows.
If engineering is the art of building something for $1 that any idiot can build for $2, Junkyard Wars is the art of building in ten hours what any engineer can build in a week (oh wait, thats just the design phase).
Now what I'd *LOVE* to see is mandatory licensing on boxes, like we do with food ingredients. Imagine putting the Windows EULA on the back of the Windows Box, forced to use no smaller than a 1/8 in characters? That ought to make the licenses a little more terse.
Nah, instead of just having a fold-out flap on the front of the box they would probably attach a fifty page EULA book.
Slashdot Mirror
[no actual comment]
Half Life 2: Gordon: The College Years
Find out what it really takes to get your PhD.
My PS still hasn't died. It just sits, ruler of the coffee table (which is too far away from everything to allow it to be plugged into anything). I fully expect it to outlast my PS2 (which my girlfriend stole and currently has at her apartment; not that that has anything to do with my prediction of an early demise. Really.)
In related news, I hear that the military has decided to try out this new technology they heard about called the "transistor". If tests go as planned, they plan to phase out all vacuum tubes by the end of this century.
Really, where did the idea come from that our military has these super-advanced systems? Sure, they've got a lot of money, but they also have decade-plus testing regimens before they actually use anything.
Thats what they think. In reality, everyone will skip right by the 65 nanometer process to the 63 nanometer process. Its much better. If Sony and Toshiba were really forward-thinking, they would be working on building 42 nanometer fabs. As everyone knows, that will be the answer to everything.
(Due to the uselessnes of this post, I have been sacked.)
Want a cellular phone, but don't have anyone to talk to? NO PROBLEM! Our new TeraFlop SCS micro-cellular phone has the processing power to allow you to carry on a conversation with just your phone, with no need to make friends or actually connect to anyone! Amaze your friends by carrying on a conversation on your TFlop SCS while 600 feet underground! Best of all, you never need worry about roaming charges again with our patented Network-Free Communications System, as your entire calling area follows your phone wherever it goes!
(What, you don't think that was funny? Something must be wrong with you.)
Well, both GTA and GTA2 were multiplayer, so I guess you could just take the easy route and find one of those. Damn designed-for-consoles GTA3 BS.
The big, fragile-looking thing is only the aircraft that carries the spacecraft to high altitude, where it is released and (hopefully) goes into orbit on its own. The actual spacecraft is the little pod hanging beneath it that looks like a 40's concept of a spacecraft except without the fins.
Okay, its an ugly spacecraft! Actually, the spacecraft part isn't too bad, it just looks like a 40's idea of a rocketship. The carrier part is just plain (or is that plane?) ugly, though.
/.ed entirely just before it finished downloading, so no copy of it in my cache.
I'd post the picture at least, but it seems the site got
If that thing is pretty, there is no such thing as ugly. Its about as ugly as any aircraft I have seen in the last twenty years.
Okay, throwing in 9/11 had absolutely nothing at all to do with the discussion - we are talking about accidental crashes, not purposeful running of aircraft into things. That was just ridiculous.
Now, about needing all 2/3/4 engines to fail for an aircraft to crash on take-off: patently untrue. If an engine failure occurs during takeoff on a 2-engine aircraft, chances are the plane will crash. They simply do not have the power needed to take off with only half their engines. A four engine aircraft might be able to safely take off with one engine out, but even that is chancy. Takeoff is probably the most dangerous part of any flight, as it requires all engines to be working at or near full power for an extended period of time - whether an aircraft has one, two or four engines, they all need to be working during takeoff. During landings, the other most dangerous part of flight, an engine failure can usually be overcome by increasing thrust in remaining engine(s); such is not the case during takeoff, where an engine failure at the wrong time means the plane is landing now no matter what is on the ground. A civil aircraft with a dead engine can limp along home if the engine failure occurs well into a flight (or even just a couple thousand feet off the ground), but no existing civil air transport has the power necessary to takeoff safely with even one dead engine - look it up. Take the new Boeing 777 as an example of a twin jet. WIth both engines, taking off from sea level (best takeoff performance) and a payload 100,000 pounds under max takeoff (probably well under what any 777 would actually be operating at), it requires a ground roll of nearly 7,000 feet. You lose an engine during takeoff, and suddenly you have a ground roll required of at least 12,000 feet, probably more like 14-15,000. All of a sudden you have run out of runway at nearly every airport in the world, and this is under "ideal" conditions (aside from engine failure). By the way, that was at standard temp, which is something like 60 degrees, with no air conditioning, etc. Increase temp, turn on air conditioning and other electronics, and suddenly the situation gets much worse. Do you get the idea yet? Engine failure during VSTOL takeoff is automatically flight-ending. Engine failure during a normal takeoff has a very good likelihood of ending in a crash, or at least a crash landing.
Not quite true. It is the first produciton aircreaft to be capable of supersonic flight at a level attitude without using afterburners. Many military jets use turbofans and are capable of supersonic speeds - F-14, F-16, F-15, F/A-18, you get the idea.
Well, here in the good ol' USA, our trains are running about the same speed as they were 100+ years ago. Since the 60's our population has gained some weight, so we also don't seem to walk as fast as we used to. About the only thing moving faster today is cars, and thats only on the rare occasion when you aren't stuck in traffic. While I don't know how fast the space shuttle moves compared to Apollo rockets, I don't think it is that big a step. So, umm, can you name a form of transport that has sped up since the 60s?
While I don't think a VSTOL passenger aircraft is economically feasable (especially after the billions we have spent on nice long runways), I don't think there is really that much of a safety concern anymore. We have these cool things called computers that can be used to ensure that the aircraft transitions from vertical to horizontal flight correctly, no matter what the pilot tries to do. The only safety issue would be if the engine(s) were to lose power before transition to horizontal flight. This is a legitimate concern, but it is a problem shared with ordinary passenger aircraft - the only time they run their engines at anywhere near full power is during the takeoff roll and initial climbout, during which time an engine failure is disastrous anyway.
As I am sure others have pointed out by now, the Tu-144 was the first supersonic passenger jet, beating the concorde by several months at least. It was also the shortest lived, as it was removed from service after only a few years due to a crash and the extreme cost of operating it. The Soviet aircraft was also slightly faster than Concorde.
At least from one perspective. At the universities I have been to, programming is usually offered as a Computer Science degree, whereas Computer Engineering refers to hardware design. In my opinion, it would generally be more accurate to label the COmputer Science degree program as Software Engineering, as the vast majority of people in the program are essentially learning how to take existing algorithms and methods and apply them to specific problems - this, in my view, is engineering. A scientist would be researching new algorithms, creating new languages, and generally increasing knowledge about the field. I think most people would agree that this is not what most programming degrees are about.
Now, the article is more about a professional title as opposed to what the job involves. From this point of view, I don't think that most programmers should be considered professional engineers. Just because you perform engineering work doesn't make you a professional engineer - that invlolves more professional responsibility than most programmers take. It isn't even an issue so much of education - I could go get a Ph.D. in civil engineering and this wouldn't allow me to call myself a professional engineer. The title of professional engineer connotes not only the engineering education required, but also that the person has experience in the field and has shown that they posess the professional responsibility to be an engineer. If software engineers want to be professional engineers, they need to form a national or international organization with standardized tests and a way of evaluating prospective engineers on their professionalism. Also, if they want to be professional engineers, they need to be willing to take full, personal responsibility for their work - something that most "software engineers" I have dealt with are unwilling to do.
So, in my opinion, while "software engineers" really are engineers as far as the kind of work they do, they are not professional engineers in terms of credibility and personal responsibility. This is not to say that software engineers are not deserving of the title (at least some of them), just that if they want to be regarded as professional engineers they need to find a way to ensure that anyone with the professional title of "software engineer" meets a certain level of capability and can be relied upon by people outside the field to have the necessary knowledge and responsibility to get the job they are hired for done.
Please don't take me seriously, even if I do learn how to spell grammer (oops, I did it again).
http://www.adobe.com/misc/webform.html [adobe.com]
There's the link to they're feedback page.
Where is the link to your feedback page? Maybe we can get you to correct your grammer and use their instead of they're.
I've downloaded the trial twice in the last couple years (this has been around for quite a while now), and as far as I can tell the only 3D things in the software are the giant sphere that makes the earth and the video card required to run it. In the trial version, at least, there is no eleveation mapping or anything else. It is just flat photos pasted on a spherical Earth. It is pretty cool though, being able to pan and scan from one city to another smoothly. Really cool, but a little lacking in the 3D department.
Yeah, it says that Jobs is (or was) a Californian, and Dell is a Texan. In Texas, apparently, you support Texans no matter how idiotic they are.
One problem with including things like magazines and journals would be that they periodically change format, and they continuously change in the quality of content. A book, on the other hand, is pretty static once it has been published so reviews of it made today will pretty much be accurate for the rest of that books existence. The same cannot be said for magazines; what happens after five or ten years when all different people are writing and editing a magazine? DO you wipe out all the old review, as they are not really relevant any longer? It seems to me that this kind of thing works better for relatively static works like books, movies, albums, etc. I suppose you could rate each issue of a magazine, but that would get really ridiculous really fast.
Funny, I just did I price compare and came out with something quite different. Let's see...
Powerbook G4:
1 Ghz cpu
15.2" Widescreen TFT (1280x854)
512 MB in 2 SODIMMs (SDRAM)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 64mb
CDRW/DVD drive (not superdrive)
60 GB HD
Mac OSX
no productivity software included (Office X avail. $499)
price: $2449
Dell Inspiron 8500
2.0 Ghz cpu
15.4" Widescreen TFT (1920x1280)
512 MB in 2 SODIMMs (DDR)
Nvidia Geforce4 4200 Go 64mb
CDRW/DVD drive
60 GB HD
Windows XP Home
Wordperfect/Quicken pack (Office Pro avail. $329)
price: $2578
So yeah, the powerbook is cheaper, but you get lower resolution, no productivity software, slower ram, slower graphics card - but also less weight. Looks pretty even to me (I'm not even going to try and compare 1 Ghz powerPC processor to 2 Ghz P4).
Because it would massively reduce the cost of putting stuff into orbit. If we can move fuel, equipment, etc. into orbit at a fraction of the cost it takes today, we could then build larger, heavier spacecraft to visit the rest of the solar system. The vast majority of the mass in a launch to get something to Mars is used simply to get off the ground and into orbit. If a space elevator was built, and it worked as advertised ($100/kg, according to the website in the story), the cost of sending probes or even people to other planets would be reduced hugely.
Well, now we know why real engineers don't run television shows.
If engineering is the art of building something for $1 that any idiot can build for $2, Junkyard Wars is the art of building in ten hours what any engineer can build in a week (oh wait, thats just the design phase).
Nah, instead of just having a fold-out flap on the front of the box they would probably attach a fifty page EULA book.