I read an interesting article where these automotive engineers worked for months to eliminate every source of noise they could from the inside of their prototype car. The engine was inaudible, the fans, silent. Wind noise was reduced as far as possible.
When they had someone test the car, his first question was, "Why are the tires so loud?"
When we first bought our Saturn, we were out driving around, and I started to get annoyed by this damnable clicking noise. Click. Click. Click. WTF? It didn't seem to relate to anything, like turning the wheel, or accelerating, and it was sporatic.
Turned out to be the analog odometer turning over every tenth mile.
[It's 8 years old, now, and not _nearly_ so quiet any more:-).]
So yes, a decrease in size is a decrease in ke, but the major component of kinetic energy is the velocity, which would not change (or else the stuff would fall out of orbit!)
Eh? The bits will collide at all angles, with momentum preserved. So, sometimes two bits will collide, generate 100 bits, all moving very slowly. Or they'll generate a bunch of slow bits and a few very fast bits. And everything in between. Some of the bits will achieve a higher orbit. Some a lower. Some will deorbit.
Smaller bits will also have more atmospheric drag, which will clean them out over time. Even big bits, like spacelab, experience enough atmospheric drag to eventually deorbit.
Beyond that, put/var/spool/ or/var/spool/mail on the card, _not_/var. If you want to retain the logfiles, rsync them to the card using a periodic cronjob (you could copy over the logfiles once an hour almost forever).
Also, just buy a bigger card and you'll reduce the number of cycles. With a 64M card half full, you'll cycle through the other half of the card twice as fast as if you kept it mostly empty. Same 32M of data on a 128M card will cycle 1/3 as fast relative to the 64M card, a 256M card will cycle 1/7 as fast relative to the 64M card.
The "slashdot effect" is when a site which normally gets dozens of hits a day suddenly gets thousands of hits and hour. For a service with a million hits a day, you literally cannot tell if you've been slashdotted (been there, done that - President's Day has more impact than/.).
IOW, you don't need a contingency plan, you just need to design your site to be able to deliver 100x your "normal" front page volume. Make your front page static without a bunch of flash or huge full-color graphics or database queries, and everything reasonably cacheable, and you're pretty much set. But none of this is slashdot-effect specific.
Except that the shuttle cargo bay isn't just to haul cargo but also functions as a drydock.
Ships go to drydocks, not vice versa - because you need to get them out of water. In this case, it's just silly. Why not just cart along some scaffolding and line it with something light and flexible - tyvek, maybe. Tie stuff down to the scaffolding (actually, tie the scaffolding to whatever you're working on:-), while the tyvek prevents wrenches and stuff from shooting off into new orbits.
Personally, I found NeXTSTEP both easier to use and generally more powerful than MacOS X, and that was on a 25Mhz 68040. It really came into its own on a Pentium Pro or Pentium II with a (then) good 2D card like a Matrox Millenium.
"Efficiency" and "speed" are the result of "thinking" about the "system". You can build fast-and-pretty systems just as you can build slow-and-ugly systems.
I more than half wish the OSS revolution had centered around VMS rather than UNIX. There's not the slightest reason we couldn't be doing all the things we do under VMS... except the "price architecture". Put a free+open version on x86 and Linux might have some hot competition.
Back in the 80's I had access to our campus VMS machine, and to the Unix box. I think the big difference was that the VMS machine very much restricted what I could do, the Unix machine didn't. So, I spent more time on the Unix machine. This probably has two root causes: VMS gave the admin more ability to control users, and VMS was more expensive to run than Unix in terms of hardware and whatnot (so the Unix admin didn't care as much).
As mentioned elsewhere, this is certainly a "culture" issue. But VMS seemed to enable a culture of control, while Unix enabled more anarchy. OSS software falls out of anarchy.
Personally, I wish they'd spend a little bit of the money on public education. Start giving basic "Home Internet Security: 101" type courses in high schools so that the new crop of wIdiots have atleast a little backing in knowledge to take home with them.
Or maybe they could spend it on a couple civics courses, so that people started thinking of us as a society that might like to be cohesive, rather than all against all.
I find that a very effective way to discover and fix design flaws is to try to implement them.
Agreed. Design and implementation should be iterative - design everything which you really need, implement, then design the replacement which fixes the old problems plus the new ones. The implementation will need refactoring, but the majority of the actual code will still be usable.
A two-year PowerPoint exercise doesn't always do this.
If you're doing design work in PowerPoint, I can understand why you downplay it. I can't even imagine how one would go about designing software using PowerPoint. I suppose at some level you could just treat it as a text editor... and, of course, it might be useful when your management presents the advantages of your design to the executive staff.
Just because you have a hammer doesn't make everything a nail! One of the points the FSF has always made is that you could make money by becoming a gcc/emacs/whatever expert, and then selling support. The thing that makes this work is that you while it takes a lot of time and effort to build a compiler, it takes an order of magnitude less to understand an existing compiler. You just have to be able to follow what previous developers wrote, you don't have to think it all up yourself.
Same could apply to the Wikipedia. There's no reason (well, excepting licensing) that someone couldn't come along and verify a subset of the Wikipedia and sell a hardcopy version. While a paper citing "Wikipedia" would probably be laughed away, citing the specific _instance_ of Wikipedia published by a specific publisher on a specific date might not be so funny. Even better if the publisher develops a reputation for actually verifying stuff and folding updates back into Wikipedia. Since it's often tons easier to verify something than to figure it out in the first place, you could end up with a decent encyclopedia with maybe 1/10 of the development cost.
[On the other hand, I personally think that doing research only on the Internet is a very bad idea in the first place, except for Internet-related subjects. You tend to get some pretty scary selection bias. A specific point of a research library is to have a broad catalog on various subjects, while the Internet tends to have a scattering of very narrow selections.]
Why-do-I-care panders: The other day, Some Guy took his radical casemod out for a bit of 802.11action at 36,000feet. That's amazing, beats the onboard movie.
Intel has a very strong history of designing chips that ramp up very well (except for their one CPU engineering failure, the Pentium Pro, which was too ambitiously designed).
You're kidding, right? At the time, the company I was with was targetting Pentium 133 as a baseline, but my development hardware was a PPro 150 overclocked to 166Mhz. It kicked the Pentium 133's ass.
I think what you maybe meant to say was the the PPRo was too expensive, and ahead of the needs of the broader market.
And "one" engineering failure? The i860/i960 were hyped as a "supercomputer on a chip", but were horrid to code general purpose stuff for (that's why they pretty much ended up as embedded processors in printers and the like). The iAPX 432 from the early 80's was a fairly impressive CPU designed to support object-oriented work, and it flopped badly.
Heck, even the i286 wasn't so great - it had virtual memory capabilities which the broad market couldn't make use of, yet, but they were only barely acceptable for more sophisticated systems (aka Unix), and that with hacks. The i386 was where things really got interesting...
I'm not sure that explaination explained that light doesn't have mass.
Thought Experiment Time: Posit two equal-mass black holes, one composed of neutronium, the other composed of anti-neutronium. Drop them into each other. Their event horizons merge, creating a 2X "sized" black hole, but when the particle/anti-particles annihilate according to the ever-popular E=mc^2, leaving only "massless" photons, it's still a black hole - what's holding everything together?
[OK, I can already point out the flaw - it would take infinite time for the neutrons to hit any anti-neutrons due to how spacetime is warped. But I'm sure someone with more Physics Phu could come up with a concept along the same general lines.]
OK, maybe I can do that. Posit a measuring device sensitive enough to measure the gravitational pull of a neutron or anti-neutron (using neutral particles here to hopefully simplify things). Throw them at each other at the same speed, and the sensor will see a net gravitational pull towards the point where they will meet. When they meet, it should still see the same net gravitational pull, even though they have now annihilated into a collection of photons. [This applies even if they turn into radiation plus photons, because that would also change the gravitational pull.]
That's easy to explain away for the individual case using quantum mechanics, but not if you do the experiment over and over again.
Does this mean black holes have color?
on
E ~ mc^2
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· Score: 1
They mention a couple times that one possible result would be that light of different frequencies would have slightly different speeds. If that is the case, it would seem that black holes would have a "color", due to the fact that the event horizon would be at a different radius for different frequencies of light.
Err, well, it would be more like a four dimensional rainbow, I suppose. Come to think of it, this would also imply that gravitational lensing should also affect different frequencies differently, which should also be detectable.
Boy, all of that makes me wonder if I'm missing something. Maybe NYT isn't the deep science reference I imagined it to be...
I'll admit he's imaginative, but every book of his I've read started out good throught he first half, then... lost it. Basically, they stopped making sense. All the sentences were made up of correct words, but the plotlines ceased to relate to each other or earlier plotlines. Maybe it's that he's feeding a line that's just too sophisticated for me, but I'm fairly well-read, so I doubt that.
My personal suspicion is that he needs a good editor. A lot of current science fiction needs a good editor. Not only to catch little stupidities (grammatical problems, mixing up a name, etc), but also larger issues, like indicating which plotlines just aren't pulling the book forward, or which characters are too shallow, whatever. But just as CEOs write their own email nowadays, authors seem to handle their editting in-house...
So, how is Pixar archiving it's film data? How about LucasFilm?
They have this nefarious scheme whereby they cause copies to be released to 'Theatres', which in turn manufactures demand for 'DVD' and 'VHS' copies. Then 'consumers' actually pay them 'money' to store these archive copies in their den. Massive redundancy is thus achieved.
[Oddly enough, that would be a good way to store stuff for future archaeologists to find. If we could only agree on, say, 10Meg of data which is really important, then encode it on consumer DVDs and/or CDs, there are bound to be a couple dozen copies which survive thousands of years due to chance.]
What happens is that all of the forward-looking projects get canned, and the remaining employees are focussed on finishing the half-done projects which were so awesome a year ago. Since you're maximizing return on sunk costs, that great in the short term. After awhile, though, you start to find that you're running out of gas, because nobody has been laying the foundations for future development.
I've seen four layoffs in a year and a half, and I know that my productivity has plummetted each time. I have maybe half as many "good days" cranking out code, for a couple months afterwards. But, what code I do write is generally better targetted at immediate revenue opportunities.
I'm interested in sustainable productivity gains, and those mostly come from growing at the right rate in the first place - hire-hire, rather than hire-hire-hire-hire-fire-fire.
Re: Those aren't LCDs people buy
on
LCD Round-up
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· Score: 3, Informative
My take is that Sauron has already had more screen-time in the movie than he did in the entire book. So Saruman obviously has to be the proxy bad-guy. It also provides a nice progression - first we have to kick Saruman's ass, then we go after Sauron - without being too confusing.
Haven't seen AOTC, yet, but one of the common complaints I've heard was about how it spends half the time in dry political discussion. LOTR could have so easily fallen into that (in fact, that's part of why I like the books!).
Slashdot Mirror
I read an interesting article where these automotive engineers worked for months to eliminate every source of noise they could from the inside of their prototype car. The engine was inaudible, the fans, silent. Wind noise was reduced as far as possible.
:-).]
When they had someone test the car, his first question was, "Why are the tires so loud?"
When we first bought our Saturn, we were out driving around, and I started to get annoyed by this damnable clicking noise. Click. Click. Click. WTF? It didn't seem to relate to anything, like turning the wheel, or accelerating, and it was sporatic.
Turned out to be the analog odometer turning over every tenth mile.
[It's 8 years old, now, and not _nearly_ so quiet any more
So yes, a decrease in size is a decrease in ke, but the major component of kinetic energy is the velocity, which would not change (or else the stuff would fall out of orbit!)
Eh? The bits will collide at all angles, with momentum preserved. So, sometimes two bits will collide, generate 100 bits, all moving very slowly. Or they'll generate a bunch of slow bits and a few very fast bits. And everything in between. Some of the bits will achieve a higher orbit. Some a lower. Some will deorbit.
Smaller bits will also have more atmospheric drag, which will clean them out over time. Even big bits, like spacelab, experience enough atmospheric drag to eventually deorbit.
Beyond that, put /var/spool/ or /var/spool/mail on the card, _not_ /var. If you want to retain the logfiles, rsync them to the card using a periodic cronjob (you could copy over the logfiles once an hour almost forever).
Also, just buy a bigger card and you'll reduce the number of cycles. With a 64M card half full, you'll cycle through the other half of the card twice as fast as if you kept it mostly empty. Same 32M of data on a 128M card will cycle 1/3 as fast relative to the 64M card, a 256M card will cycle 1/7 as fast relative to the 64M card.
The "slashdot effect" is when a site which normally gets dozens of hits a day suddenly gets thousands of hits and hour. For a service with a million hits a day, you literally cannot tell if you've been slashdotted (been there, done that - President's Day has more impact than /.).
IOW, you don't need a contingency plan, you just need to design your site to be able to deliver 100x your "normal" front page volume. Make your front page static without a bunch of flash or huge full-color graphics or database queries, and everything reasonably cacheable, and you're pretty much set. But none of this is slashdot-effect specific.
[_Nobody_ bothers to get caching right.]
Except that the shuttle cargo bay isn't just to haul cargo but also functions as a drydock.
:-), while the tyvek prevents wrenches and stuff from shooting off into new orbits.
Ships go to drydocks, not vice versa - because you need to get them out of water. In this case, it's just silly. Why not just cart along some scaffolding and line it with something light and flexible - tyvek, maybe. Tie stuff down to the scaffolding (actually, tie the scaffolding to whatever you're working on
It's a telling point, but it's amusing that he says the outsourced CEO will cost one-tenth as much. Obviously he forgot a couple zeros on that.
>Hang on! Oh, the water's cold. Hang on! I'll never let got. She lets go.
I kept wondering why they didn't make a cozy raft by tying a bunch of life-jacketed stiffs together. They seemed to have plenty of time.
Personally, I found NeXTSTEP both easier to use and generally more powerful than MacOS X, and that was on a 25Mhz 68040. It really came into its own on a Pentium Pro or Pentium II with a (then) good 2D card like a Matrox Millenium.
"Efficiency" and "speed" are the result of "thinking" about the "system". You can build fast-and-pretty systems just as you can build slow-and-ugly systems.
Huh. So now all they have to do is to prove that they've had the domain for 9 years. Presumably they have credit card receipts and the like, right?
Oh, wait...
I more than half wish the OSS revolution had centered around VMS rather than UNIX. There's not the slightest reason we couldn't be doing all the things we do under VMS... except the "price architecture". Put a free+open version on x86 and Linux might have some hot competition.
Back in the 80's I had access to our campus VMS machine, and to the Unix box. I think the big difference was that the VMS machine very much restricted what I could do, the Unix machine didn't. So, I spent more time on the Unix machine. This probably has two root causes: VMS gave the admin more ability to control users, and VMS was more expensive to run than Unix in terms of hardware and whatnot (so the Unix admin didn't care as much).
As mentioned elsewhere, this is certainly a "culture" issue. But VMS seemed to enable a culture of control, while Unix enabled more anarchy. OSS software falls out of anarchy.
Personally, I wish they'd spend a little bit of the money on public education. Start giving basic "Home Internet Security: 101" type courses in high schools so that the new crop of wIdiots have atleast a little backing in knowledge to take home with them.
Or maybe they could spend it on a couple civics courses, so that people started thinking of us as a society that might like to be cohesive, rather than all against all.
I find that a very effective way to discover and fix design flaws is to try to implement them.
Agreed. Design and implementation should be iterative - design everything which you really need, implement, then design the replacement which fixes the old problems plus the new ones. The implementation will need refactoring, but the majority of the actual code will still be usable.
A two-year PowerPoint exercise doesn't always do this.
If you're doing design work in PowerPoint, I can understand why you downplay it. I can't even imagine how one would go about designing software using PowerPoint. I suppose at some level you could just treat it as a text editor... and, of course, it might be useful when your management presents the advantages of your design to the executive staff.
Just because you have a hammer doesn't make everything a nail! One of the points the FSF has always made is that you could make money by becoming a gcc/emacs/whatever expert, and then selling support. The thing that makes this work is that you while it takes a lot of time and effort to build a compiler, it takes an order of magnitude less to understand an existing compiler. You just have to be able to follow what previous developers wrote, you don't have to think it all up yourself.
Same could apply to the Wikipedia. There's no reason (well, excepting licensing) that someone couldn't come along and verify a subset of the Wikipedia and sell a hardcopy version. While a paper citing "Wikipedia" would probably be laughed away, citing the specific _instance_ of Wikipedia published by a specific publisher on a specific date might not be so funny. Even better if the publisher develops a reputation for actually verifying stuff and folding updates back into Wikipedia. Since it's often tons easier to verify something than to figure it out in the first place, you could end up with a decent encyclopedia with maybe 1/10 of the development cost.
[On the other hand, I personally think that doing research only on the Internet is a very bad idea in the first place, except for Internet-related subjects. You tend to get some pretty scary selection bias. A specific point of a research library is to have a broad catalog on various subjects, while the Internet tends to have a scattering of very narrow selections.]
Why-do-I-care panders: The other day, Some Guy took his radical casemod out for a bit of 802.11 action at 36,000 feet. That's amazing, beats the onboard movie.
Right now, you can get a SimpleTech 512MB type-I at Dell for $125 after rebates and coupons.
What's really going to drive this is the fact that more manufacturers are starting to announce 1Gig cards.
Intel has a very strong history of designing chips that ramp up very well (except for their one CPU engineering failure, the Pentium Pro, which was too ambitiously designed).
You're kidding, right? At the time, the company I was with was targetting Pentium 133 as a baseline, but my development hardware was a PPro 150 overclocked to 166Mhz. It kicked the Pentium 133's ass.
I think what you maybe meant to say was the the PPRo was too expensive, and ahead of the needs of the broader market.
And "one" engineering failure? The i860/i960 were hyped as a "supercomputer on a chip", but were horrid to code general purpose stuff for (that's why they pretty much ended up as embedded processors in printers and the like). The iAPX 432 from the early 80's was a fairly impressive CPU designed to support object-oriented work, and it flopped badly.
Heck, even the i286 wasn't so great - it had virtual memory capabilities which the broad market couldn't make use of, yet, but they were only barely acceptable for more sophisticated systems (aka Unix), and that with hacks. The i386 was where things really got interesting...
I'm not sure that explaination explained that light doesn't have mass.
Thought Experiment Time: Posit two equal-mass black holes, one composed of neutronium, the other composed of anti-neutronium. Drop them into each other. Their event horizons merge, creating a 2X "sized" black hole, but when the particle/anti-particles annihilate according to the ever-popular E=mc^2, leaving only "massless" photons, it's still a black hole - what's holding everything together?
[OK, I can already point out the flaw - it would take infinite time for the neutrons to hit any anti-neutrons due to how spacetime is warped. But I'm sure someone with more Physics Phu could come up with a concept along the same general lines.]
OK, maybe I can do that. Posit a measuring device sensitive enough to measure the gravitational pull of a neutron or anti-neutron (using neutral particles here to hopefully simplify things). Throw them at each other at the same speed, and the sensor will see a net gravitational pull towards the point where they will meet. When they meet, it should still see the same net gravitational pull, even though they have now annihilated into a collection of photons. [This applies even if they turn into radiation plus photons, because that would also change the gravitational pull.]
That's easy to explain away for the individual case using quantum mechanics, but not if you do the experiment over and over again.
They mention a couple times that one possible result would be that light of different frequencies would have slightly different speeds. If that is the case, it would seem that black holes would have a "color", due to the fact that the event horizon would be at a different radius for different frequencies of light.
Err, well, it would be more like a four dimensional rainbow, I suppose. Come to think of it, this would also imply that gravitational lensing should also affect different frequencies differently, which should also be detectable.
Boy, all of that makes me wonder if I'm missing something. Maybe NYT isn't the deep science reference I imagined it to be...
This thread almost makes me want to go out and get a Yamaha T@2 drive, and make some non-bootable CD business cards...
"Permutation City", right?
... lost it. Basically, they stopped making sense. All the sentences were made up of correct words, but the plotlines ceased to relate to each other or earlier plotlines. Maybe it's that he's feeding a line that's just too sophisticated for me, but I'm fairly well-read, so I doubt that.
I'll admit he's imaginative, but every book of his I've read started out good throught he first half, then
My personal suspicion is that he needs a good editor. A lot of current science fiction needs a good editor. Not only to catch little stupidities (grammatical problems, mixing up a name, etc), but also larger issues, like indicating which plotlines just aren't pulling the book forward, or which characters are too shallow, whatever. But just as CEOs write their own email nowadays, authors seem to handle their editting in-house...
Later,
scott
So, how is Pixar archiving it's film data? How about LucasFilm?
They have this nefarious scheme whereby they cause copies to be released to 'Theatres', which in turn manufactures demand for 'DVD' and 'VHS' copies. Then 'consumers' actually pay them 'money' to store these archive copies in their den. Massive redundancy is thus achieved.
[Oddly enough, that would be a good way to store stuff for future archaeologists to find. If we could only agree on, say, 10Meg of data which is really important, then encode it on consumer DVDs and/or CDs, there are bound to be a couple dozen copies which survive thousands of years due to chance.]
But it does explain in part why OR/WA have been hit harder by the recession, with plain old unrealistic optimism.
Huh? So hundreds of millions of dollars were spent, but they weren't justified, so they stopped spending them, and that's bad?
What happens is that all of the forward-looking projects get canned, and the remaining employees are focussed on finishing the half-done projects which were so awesome a year ago. Since you're maximizing return on sunk costs, that great in the short term. After awhile, though, you start to find that you're running out of gas, because nobody has been laying the foundations for future development.
I've seen four layoffs in a year and a half, and I know that my productivity has plummetted each time. I have maybe half as many "good days" cranking out code, for a couple months afterwards. But, what code I do write is generally better targetted at immediate revenue opportunities.
I'm interested in sustainable productivity gains, and those mostly come from growing at the right rate in the first place - hire-hire, rather than hire-hire-hire-hire-fire-fire.
1702FP user's guide
The Dell 1702FP is manufactured by Samsung. So is the 1900fp which I've been lusting for. Go figure.
[2000fp is by Acer.]
My take is that Sauron has already had more screen-time in the movie than he did in the entire book. So Saruman obviously has to be the proxy bad-guy. It also provides a nice progression - first we have to kick Saruman's ass, then we go after Sauron - without being too confusing.
Haven't seen AOTC, yet, but one of the common complaints I've heard was about how it spends half the time in dry political discussion. LOTR could have so easily fallen into that (in fact, that's part of why I like the books!).