Even though coins are struck with "One dollar" right on the face, some people insist that they are quarters.
That's because they're shaped almost exactly like quarters. Which is because vending machine industry lobbied the gov't to make them "compatible" with existing vending hardware. Partly because of this, nobody used the damned things and the vending machine industry ended up having to put elaborate and expensive bill readers on many machines.
When I heard they were going to create a new dollar coin a couple of years ago, I thought: Great, now that they've learned their lesson, they won't put out a coin that is so easily mistaken for another denomination. I was wrong; now the vending machine industry wanted them to make the new coin exactly the same size and weight as the Susan B. to maintain "compatibility"! How stupid can they get? Now nobody uses the new one either.
IMO, if they would just come out with a nice thick and chunky coin like the British 1 pound coin, one that has a nice feel when you plop it down on a bar and *looks* like it's worth more than other coins, then there would be no problem getting the public to use it. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to actually happen, though.
My original post said that rechargeable batteries don't make sense for infrequently used devices (I forgot to also include low-drain devices like smoke detectors).
Of course if you're using 312 batteries per year in one device, then rechargeable batteries are the way to go.
I only use a couple of dozen AA batteries per year, most of them in low-drain applications. If you set them down next to a 5-gallon jug of gasoline (or more realisticly, an 80-pound pile of coal), it's not obvious to me that the batteries are worse. (I can't recall ever making a trip to the store just to get batteries. You can always borrow them from some other device in a pinch until your next general shopping trip.)
On top of that, using rechargeables in low-drain devices would involve swapping and recharging them several times per year. This will tend to wear them out; I've never seen rechargeables that live up to their claimed lifetimes. So you would have to factor in consuming some number of rechargeable batteries per year as well.
If your trickle charger is using 5W it is broke as fuck.
Most wall-warts waste a couple of watts at all times; that's why they're warm. Some more power is wasted in the actual trickle charge current, that's why batteries in a charger are usually warm. 5W is not an outlandish value.
the sooner americans realize there are ways to save energy/toxic-waste by doing stuff like that , the better
Let's say your trickle-charger uses 5W of AC power at all times. That's 43 KWH/year, which would take the equivalent of around 5 gallons of oil to produce. Who knows? That might be worse for the environment than tossing a couple of sets of AA batteries.
The only real downside being fuzzier letters. Letters already can be a pain because of the anti-aliasing attempt to split a 1 pixel vertical line between two columns of pixels, especially if you're like me and run at high res and small fonts.
Maybe your analog LCD input isn't synched properly. Mine has an auto-synch button, but it only synchs perfectly when I'm displaying a large bitmap of alternating white and black 1-pixel vertical stripes that I made just for that purpose.
Without the bitmap, after auto-synching the fonts look "good", but there's still room for improvement. Using the bitmap makes a big difference on the sharpness of the fonts when using sub-pixel sampling. The display tends to drift over time, and I have to resynch it every day or two.
(If you pull up a large stripe or herringbone bitmap, you'll also see aliasing and "dancing" patterns unless the LCD clock is perfectly locked.)
Mandatory flex-time (people won't be wasting time idling in traffic jams)
I'm not sure that that would actually help in the long run. A while back I saw an article reporting on a study of commuting habits. It seems that across all cultures and income levels around the world, they found that people on average spend roughly the same time commuting each day, whether it's walking, public transportation, bicycling or in cars.
Presumably, if flextime helps to clear up traffic jams, over time people will just tend to move even farther away from their workplaces. They'll trade in their newly freed time for a chance to live somewhere closer to their ideal accommodations, which will often be farther than they are willing to commute today.
I bolded what he said. It is rather telling that, when confronted with the facts of what gore said, you resort to name calling instead of facing the facts.
You said, and I quote, "telling that, when". What does that mean?
"Telling that, when". It doesn't make any sense. What are we supposed to make of that? That sounds like random babbling. Come back when you can make every individual part of your discussion mean the same as the whole.
China and the former Soviet Union: Both of them had a terrible history of innovation in the modern era (yeah China and the USSR constituents both had extraordinary periods far back, but I'm talking in the communist era), and contributed virtually nothing to the global knowledgebase.
Communist countries did have strong IP laws: All the IP belonged to the state.
The lack of innovation would be expected because people and companies weren't allowed to keep any of the results of their labors, whether IP related or not. Most workers had little motivation to do much of anything other than for fear of being shot. Your example does not illustrate what is being debated here: weak IP in a captialist economy.
BTW, the USSR did display impressive innovations in certain narrow areas, which were usually the ones that the state was most interested in pushing, such as military aerospace technology. They couldn't copy absolutely everything because they didn't always have access to the materials and methods used in the West. They often came up with impressive and innovative workarounds to get the job done with the resources they had.
Let's say I download the evaluation version and install it and as soon as it tells me that the 30 trial is over I say: Gimme the source, so I can fix this?
Your a bunch of idiots, a new and better probe is coming, Voyager isn't needed anymore.
Yeah, we've come up with a slightly better space probe. Let's dump the one that's out there working now, and our shiny new probe will be on the scene to take over the job in just 25 short years. It'll be worth the wait, I promise!
so in other words instead of writing your task in a few lines of straight C, you'd write it in a bunch of straight C in an extension library and then use python to glue it together.
Exactly. Only a freshman CS student would think that the few lines in that mandelbrot algorithm are significant code. The vast bulk of the code in any real application would be for viewing, selecting rendering parameters, zooming, etc. There is no reason at all to write the UI, I/O or other management code in C.
tis strange how virtually none of the widely used python applications do this though.
What are you talking about? Most every Python app makes extensive use of the native library calls.
My point was that we can understand more about the method from reading the Java declaration than from the Python declaration.
At the expense of having to write twice as much code, adding endless typecasts to your code, wading through endless documentation covering redundant overloads that handle different types, requiring a separate compile step, installing a VM that uses 10X the disk space and memory, and having only one available programming technique, OO, without other useful ideas from methodologies like functional programming.
Nobody would write mandelbrot inner loops in Python for anything other than prototyping. That 5 lines of code belongs in an extension library.
The vast majority of programming in this world is *not* bit-banging like mandelbrots. This is especially true for the types of programs that you actually get paid to write.
It's almost never necessary to operate at that level in Python because it provides native code libraries to handle low-level operations. Skilled Python programmers know how to use the libraries to do the heavy lifting for them.
Neither declaration tells you enough to actually use that function. Since you're going to have to read the documentation and/or source code anyway, you might as well use the nicer language.
Do police or government have any role in a society based on rule of law?
Yes, they do. But the role they have does not include automatically tracking and logging the movements of ordinary citizens going about their daily lives.
It's highly debatable whether you could call it "pure 64-bit". A description of the implementation from here:
Also, the Windows NT implementation on the Alpha was not really true 64 bit, but used a less ambitious system called VLM to allow access to more memory than 32 bit system. Here's a quote from Microsoft about it:
"As you can see, the VLM APIs don't constitute true 64-bit computing. Sure, you can allocate and use this memory if it's physically present, meaning that virtual memory doesn't work with these addresses. But 99.44 percent of the Win32 API can't work with addresses above 4GB, so it's just you and your 64-bit pointers. Think of it as frontier territory with no newspapers, running water, or phone lines."
...building on the biggest strengths of two diverse platforms. They're combining the user-friendliness and intuitiveness of the UNIX command-line UI with the rock-solid elegant architectural foundations of Microsoft Windows.
We were given a six digit number to sign in, with a ten digit, alpha-numeric, randomly assigned password. The letter with the password did not come with the sign in. Further, the letter stated that the University doesn't even know the password, so it should be kept safe. Advisors were asked to keep the password in strict confidence, and not to disclose them to anyone, under any circumstances. To top it off, the University set it so that there was a narrow time period for the endorsements to be done.
But presumably nobody on campus is going to hack the honor code because that would be a breach of the honor code. So why bother with the high-tech security?
Do you have any 25 year old spreadsheets or doc files?
The oldest Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet file I found in my computer is almost 25 years old. Both Gnumeric and OOo were able to open it with no problems.
Even characters ascii characters are being phased out by unicode.
One of them most popular Unicode encodings, UTF-8, is a strict superset of 7-bit ASCII, so it's fully backwards compatible.
The various extended charset encodings for different languages are another story, but I don't see how the simple translation tables that convert these to Unicode are going to somehow get lost in the foreseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because they're shaped almost exactly like quarters. Which is because vending machine industry lobbied the gov't to make them "compatible" with existing vending hardware. Partly because of this, nobody used the damned things and the vending machine industry ended up having to put elaborate and expensive bill readers on many machines.
When I heard they were going to create a new dollar coin a couple of years ago, I thought: Great, now that they've learned their lesson, they won't put out a coin that is so easily mistaken for another denomination. I was wrong; now the vending machine industry wanted them to make the new coin exactly the same size and weight as the Susan B. to maintain "compatibility"! How stupid can they get? Now nobody uses the new one either.
IMO, if they would just come out with a nice thick and chunky coin like the British 1 pound coin, one that has a nice feel when you plop it down on a bar and *looks* like it's worth more than other coins, then there would be no problem getting the public to use it. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to actually happen, though.
Of course if you're using 312 batteries per year in one device, then rechargeable batteries are the way to go.
I only use a couple of dozen AA batteries per year, most of them in low-drain applications. If you set them down next to a 5-gallon jug of gasoline (or more realisticly, an 80-pound pile of coal), it's not obvious to me that the batteries are worse. (I can't recall ever making a trip to the store just to get batteries. You can always borrow them from some other device in a pinch until your next general shopping trip.)
On top of that, using rechargeables in low-drain devices would involve swapping and recharging them several times per year. This will tend to wear them out; I've never seen rechargeables that live up to their claimed lifetimes. So you would have to factor in consuming some number of rechargeable batteries per year as well.
That's right, they prefer to deal only with enterprise-class partners with names like Yahoo! and Google.
Most wall-warts waste a couple of watts at all times; that's why they're warm. Some more power is wasted in the actual trickle charge current, that's why batteries in a charger are usually warm. 5W is not an outlandish value.
Let's say your trickle-charger uses 5W of AC power at all times. That's 43 KWH/year, which would take the equivalent of around 5 gallons of oil to produce. Who knows? That might be worse for the environment than tossing a couple of sets of AA batteries.
Maybe your analog LCD input isn't synched properly. Mine has an auto-synch button, but it only synchs perfectly when I'm displaying a large bitmap of alternating white and black 1-pixel vertical stripes that I made just for that purpose.
Without the bitmap, after auto-synching the fonts look "good", but there's still room for improvement. Using the bitmap makes a big difference on the sharpness of the fonts when using sub-pixel sampling. The display tends to drift over time, and I have to resynch it every day or two.
(If you pull up a large stripe or herringbone bitmap, you'll also see aliasing and "dancing" patterns unless the LCD clock is perfectly locked.)
No self-discharge.
For most devices that you use infrequently, rechargeable batteries are useless because they drain dead in a couple of months even when not in use.
I'm not sure that that would actually help in the long run. A while back I saw an article reporting on a study of commuting habits. It seems that across all cultures and income levels around the world, they found that people on average spend roughly the same time commuting each day, whether it's walking, public transportation, bicycling or in cars.
Presumably, if flextime helps to clear up traffic jams, over time people will just tend to move even farther away from their workplaces. They'll trade in their newly freed time for a chance to live somewhere closer to their ideal accommodations, which will often be farther than they are willing to commute today.
You said, and I quote, "telling that, when". What does that mean?
"Telling that, when". It doesn't make any sense. What are we supposed to make of that? That sounds like random babbling. Come back when you can make every individual part of your discussion mean the same as the whole.
Communist countries did have strong IP laws: All the IP belonged to the state.
The lack of innovation would be expected because people and companies weren't allowed to keep any of the results of their labors, whether IP related or not. Most workers had little motivation to do much of anything other than for fear of being shot. Your example does not illustrate what is being debated here: weak IP in a captialist economy.
BTW, the USSR did display impressive innovations in certain narrow areas, which were usually the ones that the state was most interested in pushing, such as military aerospace technology. They couldn't copy absolutely everything because they didn't always have access to the materials and methods used in the West. They often came up with impressive and innovative workarounds to get the job done with the resources they had.
Here you go.
Yeah, we've come up with a slightly better space probe. Let's dump the one that's out there working now, and our shiny new probe will be on the scene to take over the job in just 25 short years. It'll be worth the wait, I promise!
Nobody is asking Microsoft to reveal their source code, so both you and your buddy are barking up the wrong tree.
Exactly. Only a freshman CS student would think that the few lines in that mandelbrot algorithm are significant code. The vast bulk of the code in any real application would be for viewing, selecting rendering parameters, zooming, etc. There is no reason at all to write the UI, I/O or other management code in C.
tis strange how virtually none of the widely used python applications do this though.
What are you talking about? Most every Python app makes extensive use of the native library calls.
At the expense of having to write twice as much code, adding endless typecasts to your code, wading through endless documentation covering redundant overloads that handle different types, requiring a separate compile step, installing a VM that uses 10X the disk space and memory, and having only one available programming technique, OO, without other useful ideas from methodologies like functional programming.
The vast majority of programming in this world is *not* bit-banging like mandelbrots. This is especially true for the types of programs that you actually get paid to write.
It's almost never necessary to operate at that level in Python because it provides native code libraries to handle low-level operations. Skilled Python programmers know how to use the libraries to do the heavy lifting for them.
Neither declaration tells you enough to actually use that function. Since you're going to have to read the documentation and/or source code anyway, you might as well use the nicer language.
Oh, I didn't know that we Americans had solved the problem of human stupidity. That's great news.
And your SSN was originally designed as a convenience to help make sure that you get your share of some government handouts.
Since things never expand beyond their original purported purpose, surely you'd have no qualms about posting your SSN here.
However, that custom feature was seen on certain 1960s era Aston Martins.
Yes, they do. But the role they have does not include automatically tracking and logging the movements of ordinary citizens going about their daily lives.
It's highly debatable whether you could call it "pure 64-bit". A description of the implementation from here:
I think it's a sure winner.
But presumably nobody on campus is going to hack the honor code because that would be a breach of the honor code. So why bother with the high-tech security?
The oldest Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet file I found in my computer is almost 25 years old. Both Gnumeric and OOo were able to open it with no problems.
Even characters ascii characters are being phased out by unicode.
One of them most popular Unicode encodings, UTF-8, is a strict superset of 7-bit ASCII, so it's fully backwards compatible.
The various extended charset encodings for different languages are another story, but I don't see how the simple translation tables that convert these to Unicode are going to somehow get lost in the foreseeable future.