If localities were really interested in saftey they would increase the "on-time" for the yellow light from 3 seconds, back to 5. But no....revenue generated from red light runners is more important than saftey....
I've lived in states where the lights have long yellows, and I've lived in states where they have short yellows. Drivers quickly adjust for the length of the lights.
With a longer light, you simply discount the first couple of seconds and ignore it before you start your internal timeout. The same selfish people are going to be running the red light in either situation.
I've seen no fewer red light runners where the yellows are longer than where they are short.
Songwriters can actually quantify their P2P piracy losses. By statute, a songwriter is both entitled and limited to collecting 8 cents for every digital phonorecord delivery of sound recordings containing her songs. Each illegal P2P download of a song robs the songwriter of that 8 cents.
However, in the real world, P2P downloads (even if they were legal) have an intrinsic value somewhere less than a track on a CD and somewhere more than a song heard over the radio*. IIRC, artists royalties per radio listener per song are measured in millicents. That leaves a lot of room for downward adjustment for what they're really losing.
*Why can I make this claim, notwithstanding what record companies want to charge? Because MP3s are more disposable. (Radio songs are totally disposable, for example.) I've still got LPs that I bought 30 years ago; I've bought some used LPs that are now 40 years old, and my mom has some records that are 80 years old. How many people are going to still have any of their MP3s around a few decades from now? Or even after they upgrade to their next computer? An MP3 is a piece of throwaway trash, like the cheap Radio Shack C60 casettes that "pirates" used to use in the 1970s. Nobody's going to pay very much for either.
(Disclaimer: no, I've never used any P2P network. I did have a box full of casettes at one time though...)
So pour the fuel cell alchohol out into the guard's little plastic bowl, and he'll let you pass. When you get on the plane, buy one of those tiny bottles of vodka, refill your laptop, and fire it up.
I agree, Lisp and Scheme support every language feature you can think of. But I think Larry Wall said it best: "Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in."
That's why after almost 50 years, it still hasn't taken over the world. Moreover, while code that operates on code is extremely powerful, it can be one of the most mind-boggling features in all of CS. In a world where many developers can't understand simple recursion, it's probably just too advanced for general consumption.
I think languages like Python and Ruby (especially use is made of their functional programming features) find the happy medium between powerful features and approachability.
The flag-planting on the moon on 20 July 1969 did in fact claim the moon for the United States - by international convention, the moon belonged to the United States at that moment.
The Soviet Union was the first (1959) to splatter their flag onto the moon's surface as described here:
Luna 2 was the second of a series of spacecraft launched in the direction of the Moon. The first spacecraft to land on the Moon, it impacted the lunar surface east of Mare Serenitatis near the Aristides, Archimedes, and Autolycus craters. Luna 2 was similar in design to Luna 1, a spherical spacecraft with protruding antennae and instrument parts. The instrumentation was also similar, including scintillation- and geiger- counters, a magnetometer, and micrometeorite detectors. The spacecraft also carried Soviet pennants. There were no propulsion systems on Luna 2 itself.
They were also the first to soft land a probe (Luna 9 in 1966). Maybe they're the ones with the valid claim.
They are safer. IIRC, they haven't lost any cosmonauts since 1971 when three died from lack of oxygen because of a stuck air valve on reentry. They learned their lesson and started using space suits on reentry after that.
They've been safer because they use the right tool for the job of getting people into space: a simple, debugged and reliable launch vehicle.
In 1983, a Soyuz booster blew up on the launch pad. But guess what: the crew was saved by the escape tower. What a concept; the shuttle could use one of those. Nothing beats having a backup plan in case of failure.
For reentry, if I had to choose betting my life on thousands of fragile glued-on tiles vs a simple small ablative shield, I'd pick the latter. The KISS principle works.
On the other hand, I think that more than a few hackers will feel a twinge of sadness when they see footage of some people being blown up.
Look at the bigger picture. Systems like these are developed in part to try to accurately blow up the minimal number of enemy leaders and soldiers to get the job done while sparing civilians.
It's got to be better than going back to the WWII through Vietnam strategy of randomly dropping unguided firebombs on hundreds of thousands of civilians.
It is possible to alias different escape sequences to commands like lm and ll to make the terminal full screen, send it to the background, make it tall, etc.
The bad news: Evil black hat hackers can use remote exploits to move the OSX terminal around the screen.
The good news: With the velvet smooth animated motion, harmonizing colors, translucent effects and drop shadows, being 0wned has never looked better!
Look at the bright side: There was a thriving aftermarket for pricey NT event log tools. It provided a lot of programmers with high paying jobs. The byzantine API ensured job security. (That market may still be thriving; I haven't been paying attention lately.)
Similar situations existed for the registry, DCOM, performance counters, security model, etc., etc.
There's a reason those cartridges cost so much. Quality ink is always made from the finest rare Cognac. Since Cognac can cost almost $1000 for a 1 liter bottle, and an inkjet cartridge contains about an ounce of ink, you're actually getting about $30 of cognac, and there's very little markup involved.
(Or maybe I'm getting this backwards. Fine cognac might be expensive because it's made from inkjet ink... I don't remember; I'll have to look it up.)
I found these issues as well, however, I found it did a better job of importing.doc files than different versions of Word did.
Yeah, but when Word has formatting errors on its own files, those are the official formatting errors. With Open Office, the formatting errors come from some third party.
I'm sure most people want to experience errors the way they were meant to be, not some lame wannabe errors.
what would happen if Microsoft figured out how to implement Google's page rank system and implemented it on MSN? Google would have no recourse and Microsoft has approximately 80 bajillion times the resources of Google and could easily out market them.
They couldn't successfully compete with Google in this market even if they cloned the search technology. There is no way that Microsoft would ever resist the temptation to load up their main search page with 200K of pictures, news, spam and Javascript widgets. Few people would use the resulting bloated slow ugly service.
It slowed down for the same reason that a ball slows down after you throw it upwards: the pull of gravity.
The probe only reached 82,000 mph because it was falling towards Jupiter. It gave back that energy as it moved away.
It's like a roller coaster with Jupiter creating a big dip in the track. The probe goes fastest at the bottom of the dip, but returns to its original speed after it climbs out.
My interpretation of the article is that the probe briefly reached 82,000 mph during its closest approach to Jupiter. It slowed down considerably as it pulled away from Jupiter's gravity well. IIRC, it's currently moving at something more like 20,000 mph.
The only thing this eats up is cache; because the system has a correspondingly wider data bus, there isn't a hit in memory bandwidth (unless the designers are trying to be cheap bastards and give a 64-bit CPU the same data bus width you'd use for a 32-bit CPU)
Ever since the 8086/8088 duo, the bus width of a CPU has been decoupled from its word size. For a long time, the external bus width of (non Rambus) 32-bit CPUs has been wider than 32 bits. This works because the memory unit fetches entire cache lines. The CPU designers could be less cheap bastards today and bring out 32-bit CPUs with 256-bit wide busses if they wanted to.
And most 64-bit CPUs have a lot of cache.
You could put a lot of cache in a 32-bit CPU. You could put a small cache in a 64-bit CPU. In fact, the biggest difference between high-end and low-end CPUs is just the size of their caches.
To be fair, the current Itanium has an enormous cache that uses the vast majority of the die size and dicates its price and power consumption. It's logic core really isn't that big. If you embedded an X86 core in all of that cache, you'd get a very fast chip. If you teamed up an Itanium core in a Celeron cache, you'd get Celeron-level performance. 64 bits has little to do with it; you're mostly paying for cache and bandwidth when you buy high end CPUs.
Not to mention the fact that most home users won't see a 2X performance boost from 64 bits.
Most home users are going to see a performance drop from 64 bits. 64-bit code needs 8 bytes to hold every pointer. This will serve to eat up more cache and memory bandwidth, which are already major bottlenecks for any CPU.
Unless you have a program that actually needs to work on more than 2G of data at one time, 64 bits buys you nothing but extra time waiting to move around millions extra of zeroed out upper bytes.
Some people need that much data in memory at once, but the average home user today doesn't. People typically mention video, but if there's one thing that's easy to stream in and out of a smaller memory space, it's multimedia data.
Optimizations done at compile time are far better than optimizations done at runtime. At compile time, more is known about the structure of the program, where the flow of the program will be going, and more time intensive optimizations can be done than ones done in realtime in the cpu.
As time goes by, computer languages are trending towards more dynamic behavior. This tends to favor things like JIT compiling and linking into already running programs. Fewer people are going to be able to afford the luxury of spending hours to preprocess their code to fit into an extremely static ("explicitly parallel") hardware model. This will be especially true when chip makers treat their rocket science static compilers as a separate profit center.
Not to mention, the CPU is the one that is actually in the position to know what optimization is needed right now based on the currently running data set. Given that there is usually a several year lag between the latest CPU developments and widespread compiler support, I'd go for a CPU that knows how to do its own tricks. (Hasn't the Itanium architecture been nailed down for almost a decade now? And we're still waiting on better compilers for it?)
Re:Best outcome? It's expedited demise
on
More on Columbia
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· Score: 1
For that matter, even lunar missions would be a better use of money than testing the effects of near zero gravity on ants.
Now wait a minute... how are we ever going to establish ant colonies on the moon or Mars without first having some kind of prior ant space experience closer to home?
If the airline industry had been allowed to be completely responsible for its own security, you can bet that at least one airline would be letting you carry your loaded sidearm with you.
Hopefully, in the course of their midair firefight, the terrorists and citizen militia will be mindful to avoid hitting any vapor-filled fuel tanks or critical control lines that may be nearby.
Re:Honda's are lame and so are these cars
on
10 Techno-Cool Cars
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· Score: 1
All these cars are hippie BS
gimmie a 2003 50th aniversar Corvette Z06
now *THATS* a car 405 hp AT THE WHEELS STOCK
The 405 HP Corvette also gets 28 MPG highway. As far as penis extensions go, it's pretty environmentally friendly. Even a hippie could approve.
Rotary engines have traditionally produced large amounts of power for their displacement, but the displacement figures are "cheating", because they really are sharing about 3 cylinders worth of thermodynamic cycling per rotor. There are still 6 distinct gas cycle regions in a 2 rotor engine, so to do an apples-to-apples comparison, you should multiply the displacement by 3.
For rotary engines, the tradeoff has traditionally been low efficiency because geometry dictates that the combustion chamber has a large surface area. This saps heat out of the expanding gas. It's the exact opposite of a "hemi" head engine. Maybe the RX8 has somehow solved this problem; I can't seem to find MPG figures after a cursory Googling.
2-cycle chainsaw motors also generate large amounts of power for their size/weight and have few moving parts because of their thermodynamic cycle. However, they are not considered "high tech".
Slashdot Mirror
I've lived in states where the lights have long yellows, and I've lived in states where they have short yellows. Drivers quickly adjust for the length of the lights.
With a longer light, you simply discount the first couple of seconds and ignore it before you start your internal timeout. The same selfish people are going to be running the red light in either situation.
I've seen no fewer red light runners where the yellows are longer than where they are short.
However, in the real world, P2P downloads (even if they were legal) have an intrinsic value somewhere less than a track on a CD and somewhere more than a song heard over the radio*. IIRC, artists royalties per radio listener per song are measured in millicents. That leaves a lot of room for downward adjustment for what they're really losing.
*Why can I make this claim, notwithstanding what record companies want to charge? Because MP3s are more disposable. (Radio songs are totally disposable, for example.) I've still got LPs that I bought 30 years ago; I've bought some used LPs that are now 40 years old, and my mom has some records that are 80 years old. How many people are going to still have any of their MP3s around a few decades from now? Or even after they upgrade to their next computer? An MP3 is a piece of throwaway trash, like the cheap Radio Shack C60 casettes that "pirates" used to use in the 1970s. Nobody's going to pay very much for either.
(Disclaimer: no, I've never used any P2P network. I did have a box full of casettes at one time though...)
In the future there will be no difference. They'll both be illegal.
So pour the fuel cell alchohol out into the guard's little plastic bowl, and he'll let you pass. When you get on the plane, buy one of those tiny bottles of vodka, refill your laptop, and fire it up.
That's why after almost 50 years, it still hasn't taken over the world. Moreover, while code that operates on code is extremely powerful, it can be one of the most mind-boggling features in all of CS. In a world where many developers can't understand simple recursion, it's probably just too advanced for general consumption.
I think languages like Python and Ruby (especially use is made of their functional programming features) find the happy medium between powerful features and approachability.
The Soviet Union was the first (1959) to splatter their flag onto the moon's surface as described here:
They were also the first to soft land a probe (Luna 9 in 1966). Maybe they're the ones with the valid claim.
If you've got KDE, just type info:foo in the location bar. You can browse info pages the way they ought to be: as html.
(You can also type #foo to get the foo man page.)
They are safer. IIRC, they haven't lost any cosmonauts since 1971 when three died from lack of oxygen because of a stuck air valve on reentry. They learned their lesson and started using space suits on reentry after that.
They've been safer because they use the right tool for the job of getting people into space: a simple, debugged and reliable launch vehicle.
In 1983, a Soyuz booster blew up on the launch pad. But guess what: the crew was saved by the escape tower. What a concept; the shuttle could use one of those. Nothing beats having a backup plan in case of failure.
For reentry, if I had to choose betting my life on thousands of fragile glued-on tiles vs a simple small ablative shield, I'd pick the latter. The KISS principle works.
Look at the bigger picture. Systems like these are developed in part to try to accurately blow up the minimal number of enemy leaders and soldiers to get the job done while sparing civilians.
It's got to be better than going back to the WWII through Vietnam strategy of randomly dropping unguided firebombs on hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The bad news: Evil black hat hackers can use remote exploits to move the OSX terminal around the screen.
The good news: With the velvet smooth animated motion, harmonizing colors, translucent effects and drop shadows, being 0wned has never looked better!
Similar situations existed for the registry, DCOM, performance counters, security model, etc., etc.
(Or maybe I'm getting this backwards. Fine cognac might be expensive because it's made from inkjet ink... I don't remember; I'll have to look it up.)
I'm stoked. I'm going to pull in some serious coin on this deal.
Every socket designer dreams about being chosen to do a major Intel processor. It doesn't get any bigger than this, baby!
Yeah, but when Word has formatting errors on its own files, those are the official formatting errors. With Open Office, the formatting errors come from some third party.
I'm sure most people want to experience errors the way they were meant to be, not some lame wannabe errors.
They couldn't successfully compete with Google in this market even if they cloned the search technology. There is no way that Microsoft would ever resist the temptation to load up their main search page with 200K of pictures, news, spam and Javascript widgets. Few people would use the resulting bloated slow ugly service.
The probe only reached 82,000 mph because it was falling towards Jupiter. It gave back that energy as it moved away.
It's like a roller coaster with Jupiter creating a big dip in the track. The probe goes fastest at the bottom of the dip, but returns to its original speed after it climbs out.
I'm currently offering for sale:
Anyone got comments/stories/advice about this car? Post 'em here, then cease and desist.
My interpretation of the article is that the probe briefly reached 82,000 mph during its closest approach to Jupiter. It slowed down considerably as it pulled away from Jupiter's gravity well. IIRC, it's currently moving at something more like 20,000 mph.
Ever since the 8086/8088 duo, the bus width of a CPU has been decoupled from its word size. For a long time, the external bus width of (non Rambus) 32-bit CPUs has been wider than 32 bits. This works because the memory unit fetches entire cache lines. The CPU designers could be less cheap bastards today and bring out 32-bit CPUs with 256-bit wide busses if they wanted to.
And most 64-bit CPUs have a lot of cache.
You could put a lot of cache in a 32-bit CPU. You could put a small cache in a 64-bit CPU. In fact, the biggest difference between high-end and low-end CPUs is just the size of their caches.
To be fair, the current Itanium has an enormous cache that uses the vast majority of the die size and dicates its price and power consumption. It's logic core really isn't that big. If you embedded an X86 core in all of that cache, you'd get a very fast chip. If you teamed up an Itanium core in a Celeron cache, you'd get Celeron-level performance. 64 bits has little to do with it; you're mostly paying for cache and bandwidth when you buy high end CPUs.
Most home users are going to see a performance drop from 64 bits. 64-bit code needs 8 bytes to hold every pointer. This will serve to eat up more cache and memory bandwidth, which are already major bottlenecks for any CPU.
Unless you have a program that actually needs to work on more than 2G of data at one time, 64 bits buys you nothing but extra time waiting to move around millions extra of zeroed out upper bytes.
Some people need that much data in memory at once, but the average home user today doesn't. People typically mention video, but if there's one thing that's easy to stream in and out of a smaller memory space, it's multimedia data.
As time goes by, computer languages are trending towards more dynamic behavior. This tends to favor things like JIT compiling and linking into already running programs. Fewer people are going to be able to afford the luxury of spending hours to preprocess their code to fit into an extremely static ("explicitly parallel") hardware model. This will be especially true when chip makers treat their rocket science static compilers as a separate profit center.
Not to mention, the CPU is the one that is actually in the position to know what optimization is needed right now based on the currently running data set. Given that there is usually a several year lag between the latest CPU developments and widespread compiler support, I'd go for a CPU that knows how to do its own tricks. (Hasn't the Itanium architecture been nailed down for almost a decade now? And we're still waiting on better compilers for it?)
Now wait a minute... how are we ever going to establish ant colonies on the moon or Mars without first having some kind of prior ant space experience closer to home?
Hopefully, in the course of their midair firefight, the terrorists and citizen militia will be mindful to avoid hitting any vapor-filled fuel tanks or critical control lines that may be nearby.
gimmie a 2003 50th aniversar Corvette Z06
now *THATS* a car 405 hp AT THE WHEELS STOCK
The 405 HP Corvette also gets 28 MPG highway. As far as penis extensions go, it's pretty environmentally friendly. Even a hippie could approve.
For rotary engines, the tradeoff has traditionally been low efficiency because geometry dictates that the combustion chamber has a large surface area. This saps heat out of the expanding gas. It's the exact opposite of a "hemi" head engine. Maybe the RX8 has somehow solved this problem; I can't seem to find MPG figures after a cursory Googling.
2-cycle chainsaw motors also generate large amounts of power for their size/weight and have few moving parts because of their thermodynamic cycle. However, they are not considered "high tech".