"The practice of involuntary servitude, including slavery, is illegal..."
While there may be some security interests involved here, civil servants, including scientists, are not generally expected to give up normal civil rights to keep their jobs, and THERE ARE LOTS OF LAWS that relate to the past abuses of civil servants by their (elected) bosses. I'd expect this misbehavior is covered by statute. If it isn't, it should be.
Heck, doesn't this remind anyone else of the McCarthy era 'loyalty oath'?
If the JPL folk don't sign the waiver, what provision of the civil service code allows them to be fired for refusal?
Actually, it's scary because FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) is an easy trap to fall into.
Look at a hurricane: it uses sunlight on salt water (free and abundant resources) and creates rainfall (fresh water) and lots of mechanical energy. Taming hurricanes is as big a step as taming fire, it's a VERY good way for civilization to proceed to a bright future. Don't let FUD steal your future, or blight your descendants' prospects.
Taming fire worked out well, until greenhouse gas pollution became a problem. Taming hurricanes can work out well, too--if we actually DO it instead of just trying to talk about the FUD.
There are a number of issues you'll need to think about.
Firstly, 'the wave equation' is only for scalar waves (like sound pressure waves) in a propagating medium. If there are loss-of-energy processes, new terms enter that equation. If the waves are electromagnetic, there's a VECTOR field involved, and you get all the polarized-light effects of light waves. Light also can be absorbed or attenuated. And either light or sonar can be frequency-shifted by contact with a moving medium (doppler effect), interact with thermal fluctuations (which add noise), or worse. By worse, consider the familiar phenomenon of fluorescence: that day-glo paint gets blue light input, but gives off red light in return. And the red light doesn't necessarily turn off when the illumination source goes away, it might persist a few milliseconds. All of the interaction of light and sound with matter is properly involved here, and NOT just that little wave-equation approximation.
Secondly, most folk on this group are concerned with computation; the numerical solution and display part of the problem is their perspective. That is good if there's a need for a SPECIFIC solution, like calculating a rainbow or modeling a lens system or finding a diffraction pattern. But, you're looking at the problem for mathematical insights, it seems. It might be better to look into Huygens' principle and Hamiltonian optics, from your point of view. Those don't lead quickly to a solution, of course, but there's a LOT of insight to be gained there. Or, so I hear.
Thirdly, the usual course work in physics includes wave propogation in free space followed by free space with boundaries and considers in depth the various kinds of standing wave solutions. I recommend highly the two volume "Methods of Theoretical Physics" by Morse and Feshbach. Most problems are then dealt with in terms of superposition of 'free-propogation here/standing-wave there' and you get your insights from those simple cases to build up a composite solution for more difficult systems.
In the real world, using sonar or radar, the noise floor is the KEY element that isn't in that wave equation. You have to tune out (Fourier analyze) the unwanted signals, and various kinds of filtering/coincidence analysis are often going to dominate the work. It's not that you can't find a good treatment out in the literature, but that you are looking for a treatment that looks like a simple wave-equation solution. A lot of the good work on this subject is WAY beyond wave equation level.
>>You must work in a really boring field. If someone makes a deceitful argument, I would hope they >>would be exposed as a liar, not simply contradicted. And I don't mind reading colourful prose, >>rather than the dead academic passive voice.
>The 'colorful prose' is a great litmus test for bullshit. If a scientist reveals data on a subject >on global warming and then details what (s)he thinks to be the effects which are outside the >scope of their expertise, my bullshit detector goes ape sh*t.
That 'great litmus test' is called the ad hominem fallacy. Serious thinkers ditched it a few centuries B. C.
A scientist whose work gets co-opted by spinmeisters has good reason to speak colorful language, and that does NOT make the spinmeister into a cute, cuddly guy that you want to align with.
>I think this illustrates why Steve Jobs one man war on buttons won't catch on
Hey, it's early days yet! Figure out what buttons you want, how to arrange 'em, get the feedback perfect and then... attach a Bluetooth antenna. Your iPhone now has the controller of your dreams.
Ain't standards wonderful?
Obligatory rant: I've used nine-button mice (labeled with red/green/blue, circle/square/triangle, left/center/right). I've used five-button mice. I've used three button and trackwheel mice. I've used two-button mice, one-button mice, and at least one trackwheel system (Tektronix 4010) with no buttons at all. When I have a choice, though, I use a one-button mouse.
It's not unusual to make bridge components redundant for safety; the first bridge over the Mississippi was the Eads bridge at St. Louis, and it was designed so any component could be removed for maintenance. Construction started in 1867, and the bridge is still standing. It is still in use.
It was also the first use of steel in a major way; Carnegie lost lots of money meeting the strict elasticity specifications on the bridge members, but made up for it in the boost to his reputation.
>It is some journalist mambo-jumbo. The motherboard uses some non-electrolytic capacitors >( the brown boxes near CPU socket ) I believe that those are multilayer ceramic capacitors. >The rest just look like regular SMD aluminium electrolytic capacitors
They ARE aluminum, and they are electrolytic, but the electrolyte isn't a liquid, it's a solid. The solid-electrolyte capacitors are more expensive, more reliable and also more durable, so will take higher temperatures. They are said to completely eliminate leakage-of-goo failures.
For reference, Nichicon solid-electrolyte 6.3V 470 uF LF series capacitors sell for $0.75 and an equivalent with liquid-goo electrolyte ( PW series) is $0.18. Those are prices in hundred quantity, from DigiKey. The price premium was much worse a few years ago, so we're going to see this feature on lots of logic boards.
According to ATT's study, network neutrality is positive. The establishment of network neutrality doubles the demand for... ATT's product: gigabytes of transferred data.
If ATT believes this study, they will be lobbying for net neutrality. If they don't lobby for net neutrality, we can draw at least one conclusion.
>The question is how are they capturing the IP addresses? If they're capturing >the packets, that's the same as a wiretap.
It's a subtle point; when you phone your co-conspirator in the plot to lob banana cream pies at cement trucks, you
(1) take the phone off-hook (2) wait for the 'it's off hook' message to be received and for the
telco to respond with a dial tone (3) type out a number to connect to (4) yak with Bob about the "Soupy Sales project"
The first three steps were communication with THE PHONE CARRIER and that's not protected by the full force of the law. Because there are bombs that can be set off by calling a rigged phone number, it's unclear that those steps SHOULD be protected against snoops. In any case, Congress, should they believe there is a problem, could change the applicable law.
The fourth amendment provisions against 'unreasonable search' had to be interpreted after the advent of telephony, and that was left to Congress. The court in this case just decided that step (4) is protected by statutes, but not steps (1), (2), (3). Same goes for e-mail; the content is private, the address is not.
> During my career here, I have had to take (as an Electrical Engineering major):
> Physics I - despite the fact that no circuit I build will use newtonian physics >Statics - the science of non-moving structures (mostly a class on bridges) >Dynamics OR Thermodynamics - (had Statics as a prereq... do I need to point out that with my > masters is Digital Signal Processing I will never use eigther of these?) >Programming/misc - C, C++, ASM (motorola), ASM (intel), Java, Matlab, AutoCAD, MathCAD
Ah, the innocence of youth! No circuit will use Newtonian physics? No moving motors, no generators or linear motion (loudspeakers)? What kind of DSP monastery do you imagine you'll be living in, that doesn't deal with these in GREAT DETAIL?
And the dynamics and statics of lots of real-world systems gets channeled through transducers into... DSP applications that make sense of the stresses, strains, and the like. Major machines are controlled by (your?) DSP designs, and you wouldn't want to exceed the mechanical limits. Hiring a DSP guru is the cheap way to work around these issues. Hiring a DSP guru who knows about stresses/strains is preferred.
The reasoning of your college, which considers these things to be essential, is valid, IMO.
>>The 80-column limit comes from the size of an IBM punched card.
>Urban myth perhaps? There's no relation between screen widths and punch cards.
No myth. FORTRAN before 1977 was firmly attached to 80-character records with the last eight used only for sequence numbers. If you wanted your terminal to read/write a FORTRAN program (common 'way back then), it needed 72 characters across. Some terminals (Tektronix 4010 for instance- my first bitmap screen) had exactly 72 characters.
It bit me once or twice; if a filename was over 72 characters it crashed a shared-resource analysis program. When we pressed the author, he refused to increase the filename buffer size, citing the terminal width. Never liked that guy. Buffersize chauvinism....
Also the ASR33 teletype used 8.5" paper and 10 characters per inch. Technically, it wasn't limited to 80 characters, BUT if you went over, you weren't gonna autowrap! The 14" paper in a fullsize lineprinter allowed 132 characters, which is another 'standard' we hear about.
FORTRAN and ASR33 both predate VT100 screens (and VT54 screens, too).
>Actually, PWM is digital....It is not necessarily discrete time.
How can that be? The signal is encoded in a pulse-length, which is an analog to the sound pressure. That makes it analog.
Maybe you're thinking PWM is BINARY (which it is; either the pulse is ON or OFF at any given time); but this is unrelated to its analog nature. To be digital is to have representation equivalent to a finite string of symbols from an alphabet... and pulses of continuously variable width aren't elements of any enumerable alphabet.
Yes, the original article omitted READ operation. The old NeXT magnetooptic drives used the polarization-rotation trick, and never got very fast. And there's nothing in the article to indicate the READ operation is up to speed.
Not a problem, though; just scream the disk at 30kRPM for write, and slow down to 3 RPM for read. You'll have the comfort of hearing your hard disk bray and whine like a jackass...
Our public institutions, like the Hurricane Control Center, act in the public interest, and the claim of the reprimand "taking valuable time away from your public role" indicates, in my view, that Mary Glackin, who presumably wrote or approved the document, is corrupted and can no longer function as a useful civil servant. We, the people, need to find a better person to take over that position. Clearly, warning of failure to maintain the information gathering apparatus that supports hurricane warning is VERY MUCH the correct public role for Bill Proenza. Kudos, Bill! Shame, Mary!
Alas, our current administration does not support the Hurricane Control Center as well as it supports the likes of Mary Glackin.
> I heard countless predictions on the media that global warming was going to cause the 2006 hurricane season >to be catastrophically intense and large. Obviously it wasn't.
Obvious? The intensity of hurricanes or their number is nearly irrelevant to popular perception. We pay LOTS of attention to those storm days that impact a vulnerable populated area and none at all to those storm days that wash over the oceans.
Serious students of weather aren't given to pointing a year or two in advance to a particular trouble spot and getting that kind of 'prediction' right. Heck, the flooding in New Orleans was known to be a possibility going back about 30 years (the Corps of Engineers was on record as asking for funds to update the flood controls for that long, and Congress always said no).
In short, there's nothing obvious to us newspaper-reading citizens that would really impress a weather scientist. The REAL weather data is what scientists feed on.
Not just soap, any residue can harm a contact surface (hard water => water spots).
I've washed keyboard keycaps with sprayer/drip dry while holding the keyboard keys-down so no water would penetrate to the circuit board. And I've dipped keyboards (deionized water/wetting agent/alcohol mix) and air-dryed, with some success.
But the grungiest keyboard I've ever seen was an old Sun server keyboard, with crusted lumpy fingerprint-crud. It took about 20 minutes of wiping with a succession of alcohol-dampened wipes to get it clean. I used denatured ethanol, but isopropyl would have been OK.
Some modern keyboards have a couple of layers of plastic film with conductive paint; the paint might not like water, and the between-layers region does NOT dry quickly, so those aren't good candidates for immersion.
It's probable that you'd use Cat5 computer wiring; put a couple of sockets in each room, more in the large shared rooms. And phone sockets everywhere.
Don't wire it like a home phone system (daisychain), but rather like a commercial building (all runs to a central wiring closet location). Try to put your wiring closet somewhere distant from the fuse box and water heater (which are locations riddled with other pipes). You'll want the wiring closet to have easy access (not behind things stored in the basement), and light and AC sockets.
If there's a long run inside the walls (crawlspace to attic) consider using conduit, otherwise just add a nylon string to the pulled wires; it can drag another wire if you find the box is lacking in any way.
In the wiring closet this week will probably be 100baseT switches (they're cheap), but gigabit someday. Cat5e is more than adequate for gigabit, remember a house has relatively short wire runs anyhow.
The networking of the early Macintosh (1986-ish) was DEFINITELY superior in cost to 10base5 Ethernet (does anyone else remember thickwire?), and sold LOTS of Laserwriter II printers as networked office print centers. I'm still using Laserwriters on an Ethernet/Localtalk bridge.
LocalTalk serial adapters ran at 239 kbaud and had circa 500 meter cable-length limits. It worked on a straight Mac serial port, or addon cards for ISA PC slots.
For nearly a decade, the 'killer app' for Macintosh computers was the laser printer driver. Apple made good money on it.
Yep, separation of powers DOES make it impossible.
The scary thing is, two people get together and do something illegal: both can be prosecuted or sued.
Or a government agent and a person get together and do something illegal: both can be prosecuted or the person can be sued (but not the government agent, IF he was acting for his agency - you can't sue the government).
If you then change the rule so the person cannot be sued, then the ONLY way misdeeds can be brought to light is through prosecution. And the government agent is a coworker of the prosecutory authorities (and we are seeing some disturbing evidence of prosecutors being encouraged to follow the party line...).
The very suggestion (what's next: a license to steal?) is HORRIFYING.
Surely, it can't happen here? Reassure me? Please?
It isn't something that 'no one seems to care about'; it's something that bugs me every time my (Unix) boots up. All those pesky little/etc and other minor files that get read on startup, are an occasion to wipe the disk head over 80 bytes of information and 4016 bytes of nulls.
The disk throughput for small files thus is 80/4096 of its raw throughput, which means my three-minute boot time would be more like four seconds if the filesystem 'solved' this little performance issue.
But the drive manufacturers have another issue to deal with- sectors are separated by a blank unwritten space, and bigger sectors mean fewer such (and that means more usable bits stored).
So, the 'theoretical' storage goes up because the intersector gaps are reduced by a factor of eight. And the cost in small-file-access throughput isn't part of the marketing 'speed' numbers (nor should it be; there are buffering schemes that can mask it). So, the manufacturers see it as a win.
If it also makes ECC with multibit correction feasible, then the manufacturers win in another way, too: instead of 1 bad bit causing a bad block (invalidating 512 bytes means throwing away 4095 good bits and one bad bit), they can correct single-bit errors and 2-bit errors, and detect multibit errors, so can keep all the blocks with one bad bit, and only throw away if there's (for instance) three bad bits. Correction is slow, will occur in unpredictable patterns, and costs some processor power, BUT modern S.M.A.R.T. reporting and other technology makes it OK for the future. Didn't see anything in the article to indicate if ECC was gonna be part of the drive or was gonna be dumped onto the host OS's device driver. Or is ECC just someone's speculation?
While there aren't any ligatures, my screen is rendered with display PostScript, and has all the same kerning and font capability of most print software. I enjoy the capability of selecting fonts and sizes on-screen, and wouldn't want those decisions made by others. As my vision ages, I'm making the fonts bigger. None of your business HOW big.
Metafont/TeX/LaTeX has kerning and ligatures and makes pretty good print.
Display PostScript is the imaging model for Macintosh OS X unless you choose to fire up Xwindows.
It is clear that XLR connections for balanced audio offer improvements in sound quality...
>No it isn't. XLR connectors are robust which is why they are found on PRO kit. >The advantage to a balanced signal is reduced RF
Not RF mainly, but ground loops (which are a big problem at harmonics of the power line frequency, 60/180 Hz in my neck of the woods). With all of our modern devices using switching power supplies, there's LOTS of sources for pickup at other frequencies. See Ott's book on instrumentation Ott, Henry _Noise Reduction Techniques in Electronic Systems_ to get a more complete picture.
In fact, there are many interference and distortion sources that balanced signals can reduce (like thermocouple effects). As for pro audio systems, there's a secondary consideration, other than ruggedness, that favors these connections; you can supply phantom power to a microphone preamp by suitable trickery.
Diamond reverts to graphite quickly only at high temperatures and low pressures. From examination of graphite nodules, one can clearly discern facets of the sort that hexagonal carbon (graphite) does not possess; the nodules are clearly the result of cubic carbon (diamond) having changed state quickly, probably as a diamond mass was ejected in a lava stream from deep in the Earth to the surface.
From the size of the graphite nodules, it is clear that the Earth's mantle houses diamond crystals in the 1 meter diameter range. Only the most violent eruptions result in cooling rapid enough to retain the cubic crystal structure. The violent eruption does reduce the particle size somewhat...
See Robert Hazen's book _The Diamond Makers_ for more info.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a saying where I come from:
"The practice of involuntary servitude, including slavery, is illegal..."
While there may be some security interests involved here, civil servants, including
scientists, are not generally expected to give up normal civil rights to keep their
jobs, and THERE ARE LOTS OF LAWS that relate to the past abuses of civil
servants by their (elected) bosses. I'd expect this misbehavior is covered
by statute. If it isn't, it should be.
Heck, doesn't this remind anyone else of the McCarthy era 'loyalty oath'?
If the JPL folk don't sign the waiver, what provision of the civil service
code allows them to be fired for refusal?
Actually, it's scary because FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) is an easy
trap to fall into.
Look at a hurricane: it uses sunlight on salt water (free and abundant resources) and
creates rainfall (fresh water) and lots of mechanical energy. Taming hurricanes
is as big a step as taming fire, it's a VERY good way for civilization to proceed
to a bright future. Don't let FUD steal your future, or blight your
descendants' prospects.
Taming fire worked out well, until greenhouse gas pollution became a problem.
Taming hurricanes can work out well, too--if we actually DO it instead of just
trying to talk about the FUD.
> ... it bounces off the street... I wonder how an iPhone would have fared?
The canonical answer, in convenient video form, is here:
There are a number of issues you'll need to think about.
Firstly, 'the wave equation' is only for scalar waves (like sound pressure waves)
in a propagating medium. If there are loss-of-energy processes, new terms enter
that equation. If the waves are electromagnetic, there's a VECTOR field involved,
and you get all the polarized-light effects of light waves. Light also can be absorbed
or attenuated. And either light or sonar can be frequency-shifted by contact with
a moving medium (doppler effect), interact with thermal fluctuations (which add noise),
or worse. By worse, consider the familiar phenomenon of fluorescence: that
day-glo paint gets blue light input, but gives off red light in return. And the red light
doesn't necessarily turn off when the illumination source goes away, it might persist
a few milliseconds. All of the interaction of light and sound with matter is properly
involved here, and NOT just that little wave-equation approximation.
Secondly, most folk on this group are concerned with computation; the numerical
solution and display part of the problem is their perspective. That is good if there's
a need for a SPECIFIC solution, like calculating a rainbow or modeling a lens system
or finding a diffraction pattern. But, you're looking at the problem for mathematical
insights, it seems. It might be better to look into Huygens' principle and Hamiltonian
optics, from your point of view. Those don't lead quickly to a solution, of course,
but there's a LOT of insight to be gained there. Or, so I hear.
Thirdly, the usual course work in physics includes wave propogation in free space
followed by free space with boundaries and considers in depth the various kinds of
standing wave solutions. I recommend highly the two volume
"Methods of Theoretical Physics" by Morse and Feshbach.
Most problems are then dealt with in terms of superposition
of 'free-propogation here/standing-wave there' and you get your insights from
those simple cases to build up a composite solution for more difficult systems.
In the real world, using sonar or radar, the noise floor is the KEY element that isn't
in that wave equation. You have to tune out (Fourier analyze) the unwanted signals,
and various kinds of filtering/coincidence analysis are often going to dominate the
work. It's not that you can't find a good treatment out in the literature, but that
you are looking for a treatment that looks like a simple wave-equation solution.
A lot of the good work on this subject is WAY beyond wave equation level.
>>You must work in a really boring field. If someone makes a deceitful argument, I would hope they
>>would be exposed as a liar, not simply contradicted. And I don't mind reading colourful prose,
>>rather than the dead academic passive voice.
>The 'colorful prose' is a great litmus test for bullshit. If a scientist reveals data on a subject
>on global warming and then details what (s)he thinks to be the effects which are outside the
>scope of their expertise, my bullshit detector goes ape sh*t.
That 'great litmus test' is called the ad hominem fallacy. Serious thinkers ditched it
a few centuries B. C.
A scientist whose work gets co-opted by spinmeisters has good reason to speak colorful
language, and that does NOT make the spinmeister into a cute, cuddly guy that you
want to align with.
>I think this illustrates why Steve Jobs one man war on buttons won't catch on
Hey, it's early days yet! Figure out what buttons you want, how to arrange 'em, get
the feedback perfect and then... attach a Bluetooth antenna. Your iPhone now has
the controller of your dreams.
Ain't standards wonderful?
Obligatory rant: I've used nine-button mice (labeled with red/green/blue, circle/square/triangle,
left/center/right). I've used five-button mice. I've used three button and trackwheel mice.
I've used two-button mice, one-button mice, and at least one trackwheel system (Tektronix 4010)
with no buttons at all. When I have a choice, though, I use a one-button mouse.
If you need many buttons, you need a KEYBOARD.
It's not unusual to make bridge components redundant for safety; the first bridge over the Mississippi
was the Eads bridge at St. Louis, and it was designed so any component could be removed for
maintenance. Construction started in 1867, and the bridge is still standing. It is still in use.
It was also the first use of steel in a major way; Carnegie lost lots of money meeting the
strict elasticity specifications on the bridge members, but made up for it in the
boost to his reputation.
>It is some journalist mambo-jumbo. The motherboard uses some non-electrolytic capacitors
>( the brown boxes near CPU socket ) I believe that those are multilayer ceramic capacitors.
>The rest just look like regular SMD aluminium electrolytic capacitors
They ARE aluminum, and they are electrolytic, but the electrolyte isn't a liquid, it's a solid.
The solid-electrolyte capacitors are more expensive, more reliable and also more durable,
so will take higher temperatures. They are said to completely eliminate leakage-of-goo
failures.
For reference, Nichicon solid-electrolyte 6.3V 470 uF LF series capacitors sell for $0.75 and
an equivalent with liquid-goo electrolyte ( PW series) is $0.18. Those are prices in hundred
quantity, from DigiKey. The price premium was much worse a few years ago, so we're going
to see this feature on lots of logic boards.
According to ATT's study, network neutrality is positive. The establishment ... ATT's product: gigabytes of
of network neutrality doubles the demand for
transferred data.
If ATT believes this study, they will be lobbying for net neutrality.
If they don't lobby for net neutrality, we can draw at least one conclusion.
>The question is how are they capturing the IP addresses? If they're capturing
>the packets, that's the same as a wiretap.
It's a subtle point; when you phone your co-conspirator in the plot
to lob banana cream pies at cement trucks, you
(1) take the phone off-hook
(2) wait for the 'it's off hook' message to be received and for the
telco to respond with a dial tone
(3) type out a number to connect to
(4) yak with Bob about the "Soupy Sales project"
The first three steps were communication with THE PHONE CARRIER and that's not protected
by the full force of the law. Because there are bombs that can be set off by calling a
rigged phone number, it's unclear that those steps SHOULD be protected against snoops.
In any case, Congress, should they believe there is a problem, could change the applicable
law.
The fourth amendment provisions against 'unreasonable search' had to be
interpreted after the advent of telephony, and that was left to Congress. The
court in this case just decided that step (4) is protected by statutes, but not
steps (1), (2), (3). Same goes for e-mail; the content is private, the address
is not.
> During my career here, I have had to take (as an Electrical Engineering major):
... DSP applications that make sense of the stresses, strains, and the like. Major machines are
> Physics I - despite the fact that no circuit I build will use newtonian physics
>Statics - the science of non-moving structures (mostly a class on bridges)
>Dynamics OR Thermodynamics - (had Statics as a prereq... do I need to point out that with my
> masters is Digital Signal Processing I will never use eigther of these?)
>Programming/misc - C, C++, ASM (motorola), ASM (intel), Java, Matlab, AutoCAD, MathCAD
Ah, the innocence of youth! No circuit will use Newtonian physics? No moving motors,
no generators or linear motion (loudspeakers)? What kind of DSP monastery do
you imagine you'll be living in, that doesn't deal with these in GREAT DETAIL?
And the dynamics and statics of lots of real-world systems gets channeled through transducers
into
controlled by (your?) DSP designs, and you wouldn't want to exceed the mechanical limits. Hiring
a DSP guru is the cheap way to work around these issues. Hiring a DSP guru who knows
about stresses/strains is preferred.
The reasoning of your college, which considers these things to be essential, is valid, IMO.
>>The 80-column limit comes from the size of an IBM punched card.
>Urban myth perhaps? There's no relation between screen widths and punch cards.
No myth. FORTRAN before 1977 was firmly attached to 80-character records
with the last eight used only for sequence numbers. If you wanted your terminal
to read/write a FORTRAN program (common 'way back then), it needed 72
characters across. Some terminals (Tektronix 4010 for instance- my first bitmap
screen) had exactly 72 characters.
It bit me once or twice; if a filename was over 72 characters it crashed a shared-resource
analysis program. When we pressed the author, he refused to increase the
filename buffer size, citing the terminal width. Never liked that guy.
Buffersize chauvinism....
Also the ASR33 teletype used 8.5" paper and 10 characters per inch.
Technically, it wasn't limited to 80 characters, BUT if you went over, you
weren't gonna autowrap! The 14" paper in a fullsize lineprinter allowed 132
characters, which is another 'standard' we hear about.
FORTRAN and ASR33 both predate VT100 screens (and VT54 screens, too).
>Actually, PWM is digital. ...It is not necessarily discrete time.
How can that be? The signal is encoded in a pulse-length, which
is an analog to the sound pressure. That makes it analog.
Maybe you're thinking PWM is BINARY (which it is; either
the pulse is ON or OFF at any given time); but this is unrelated
to its analog nature. To be digital is to have representation
equivalent to a finite string of symbols from an alphabet... and pulses of
continuously variable width aren't elements of any enumerable alphabet.
Yes, the original article omitted READ operation. The old NeXT magnetooptic drives
used the polarization-rotation trick, and never got very fast. And there's nothing
in the article to indicate the READ operation is up to speed.
Not a problem, though; just scream the disk at 30kRPM for write, and slow down
to 3 RPM for read. You'll have the comfort of hearing your hard disk bray and
whine like a jackass...
and the alternative view
Our public institutions, like the Hurricane Control Center, act in the public interest, and
the claim of the reprimand "taking valuable time away from your public role" indicates,
in my view, that Mary Glackin, who presumably wrote or approved the document, is
corrupted and can no longer function as a useful civil servant. We, the people, need to
find a better person to take over that position. Clearly, warning of failure to maintain the
information gathering apparatus that supports hurricane warning is VERY MUCH the
correct public role for Bill Proenza. Kudos, Bill! Shame, Mary!
Alas, our current administration does not support the Hurricane Control Center as
well as it supports the likes of Mary Glackin.
> I heard countless predictions on the media that global warming was going to cause the 2006 hurricane season >to be catastrophically intense and large. Obviously it wasn't.
Obvious? The intensity of hurricanes or their number is nearly irrelevant to popular perception.
We pay LOTS of attention to those storm days that impact a vulnerable populated area
and none at all to those storm days that wash over the oceans.
Serious students of weather aren't given to pointing a year or two in advance to a particular
trouble spot and getting that kind of 'prediction' right. Heck, the flooding in New Orleans
was known to be a possibility going back about 30 years (the Corps of Engineers was
on record as asking for funds to update the flood controls for that long, and Congress
always said no).
In short, there's nothing obvious to us newspaper-reading citizens that would really
impress a weather scientist. The REAL weather data is what scientists feed on.
Not just soap, any residue can harm a contact surface (hard water => water spots).
I've washed keyboard keycaps with sprayer/drip dry while holding the keyboard keys-down so no water would
penetrate to the circuit board. And I've dipped keyboards (deionized water/wetting agent/alcohol mix)
and air-dryed, with some success.
But the grungiest keyboard I've ever seen was an old Sun server keyboard, with crusted lumpy
fingerprint-crud. It took about 20 minutes of wiping with a succession of alcohol-dampened
wipes to get it clean. I used denatured ethanol, but isopropyl would have been OK.
Some modern keyboards have a couple of layers of plastic film with conductive paint; the paint might
not like water, and the between-layers region does NOT dry quickly, so those aren't good
candidates for immersion.
It's probable that you'd use Cat5 computer wiring; put a couple of sockets in each room, more in the large shared
rooms. And phone sockets everywhere.
Don't wire it like a home phone system (daisychain), but rather like a commercial
building (all runs to a central wiring closet location). Try to put your wiring closet
somewhere distant from the fuse box and water heater (which are locations riddled with
other pipes). You'll want the wiring closet to have easy access (not behind
things stored in the basement), and light and AC sockets.
If there's a long run inside the walls (crawlspace to attic) consider using conduit, otherwise
just add a nylon string to the pulled wires; it can drag another wire if you find the box
is lacking in any way.
In the wiring closet this week will probably be 100baseT switches (they're cheap), but
gigabit someday. Cat5e is more than adequate for gigabit, remember a house has relatively
short wire runs anyhow.
The networking of the early Macintosh (1986-ish) was DEFINITELY superior in cost to 10base5
Ethernet (does anyone else remember thickwire?), and sold LOTS of Laserwriter II printers
as networked office print centers. I'm still using Laserwriters on an Ethernet/Localtalk bridge.
LocalTalk serial adapters ran at 239 kbaud and had circa 500 meter cable-length limits.
It worked on a straight Mac serial port, or addon cards for ISA PC slots.
For nearly a decade, the 'killer app' for Macintosh computers was the laser printer driver.
Apple made good money on it.
Yep, separation of powers DOES make it impossible.
The scary thing is, two people get together and do something illegal: both
can be prosecuted or sued.
Or a government agent and a person get together and do something illegal:
both can be prosecuted or the person can be sued (but not the
government agent, IF he was acting for his agency - you can't sue the government).
If you then change the rule so the person cannot be sued, then the ONLY way
misdeeds can be brought to light is through prosecution. And the government
agent is a coworker of the prosecutory authorities (and we are seeing some
disturbing evidence of prosecutors being encouraged to follow the party line...).
The very suggestion (what's next: a license to steal?) is HORRIFYING.
Surely, it can't happen here? Reassure me? Please?
It isn't something that 'no one seems to care about'; it's something that /etc and
bugs me every time my (Unix) boots up. All those pesky little
other minor files that get read on startup, are an occasion to wipe the disk
head over 80 bytes of information and 4016 bytes of nulls.
The disk throughput for small files thus is 80/4096 of its raw throughput,
which means my three-minute boot time would be more like
four seconds if the filesystem 'solved' this little performance issue.
But the drive manufacturers have another issue to deal with- sectors
are separated by a blank unwritten space, and bigger sectors
mean fewer such (and that means more usable bits stored).
So, the 'theoretical' storage goes up because the intersector gaps are
reduced by a factor of eight. And the cost in small-file-access throughput
isn't part of the marketing 'speed' numbers (nor should it be; there are
buffering schemes that can mask it). So, the manufacturers see it as a win.
If it also makes ECC with multibit correction feasible, then the manufacturers
win in another way, too: instead of 1 bad bit causing a bad block (invalidating 512
bytes means throwing away 4095 good bits and one bad bit), they can correct
single-bit errors and 2-bit errors, and detect multibit errors, so can keep all the blocks
with one bad bit, and only throw away if there's (for instance) three bad bits.
Correction is slow, will occur in unpredictable patterns, and costs some processor
power, BUT modern S.M.A.R.T. reporting and other technology makes it OK for
the future. Didn't see anything in the article to indicate if ECC was gonna
be part of the drive or was gonna be dumped onto the host OS's device
driver. Or is ECC just someone's speculation?
While there aren't any ligatures, my screen is rendered with display
PostScript, and has all the same kerning and font capability of most print
software. I enjoy the capability of selecting fonts and sizes on-screen,
and wouldn't want those decisions made by others. As my vision
ages, I'm making the fonts bigger. None of your business HOW big.
Metafont/TeX/LaTeX has kerning and ligatures and makes pretty good print.
Display PostScript is the imaging model for Macintosh OS X unless you
choose to fire up Xwindows.
It is clear that XLR connections for balanced audio offer improvements in sound quality...
>No it isn't. XLR connectors are robust which is why they are found on PRO kit.
>The advantage to a balanced signal is reduced RF
Not RF mainly, but ground loops (which are a big problem at harmonics of the power
line frequency, 60/180 Hz in my neck of the woods). With all of our modern devices
using switching power supplies, there's LOTS of sources for pickup at other frequencies.
See Ott's book on instrumentation
Ott, Henry _Noise Reduction Techniques in Electronic Systems_
to get a more complete picture.
In fact, there are many interference and distortion sources that balanced signals can
reduce (like thermocouple effects). As for pro audio systems, there's a secondary
consideration, other than ruggedness, that favors these connections; you can
supply phantom power to a microphone preamp by suitable trickery.
Diamond reverts to graphite quickly only at high temperatures and low pressures.
From examination of graphite nodules, one can clearly discern facets of the
sort that hexagonal carbon (graphite) does not possess; the nodules are clearly
the result of cubic carbon (diamond) having changed state quickly, probably as
a diamond mass was ejected in a lava stream from deep in the Earth to
the surface.
From the size of the graphite nodules, it is clear that the Earth's mantle houses
diamond crystals in the 1 meter diameter range. Only the most violent eruptions
result in cooling rapid enough to retain the cubic crystal structure. The violent
eruption does reduce the particle size somewhat...
See Robert Hazen's book _The Diamond Makers_ for more info.