Please at least attempt to keep to the same units when posting a story. I can do the mental arithmetic fine in converting between them, but it interrupts my train of thought when I come across some mish-mash of units and have to go, "Well, yes, 0.9 m/s *is* slower than 9km/h and 30mph is faster than them both, but by how much exactly? Lessee, 10mph is 16km/hr, times 3, gives 48km/h, which means 9km/h is about 5 times slower and 0.9 m/s is about 3.5km/h which is about 15 times slower than 48km/h. Huh."
So, it would same a lot of time - and really help in your readers ability to quickly comprehend your story - if you could just stick to one set of units next time, be it km/h, m/s, mph or furlongs per fortnight.
As I recall, these companies had an agreement with the CSIRO to implement their technology into the wifi standard in return for royalties. Everyone was happy with this, it was duly noted, etc.
Which mysteriously turned into a big collective "Fuck You" when the CSIRO asked for their royalties a few years later on.
So, as an Australian, I send a cheery "Fuck You" to those companies now, and I hope the CSIRO gets what they're owed, plus punitive damages.
I'm no beekeeper, but I thought that hives were pretty much immobile objects. You plonk a hive down, and that's where it stays. It's not like yooths are out late at night stealing hives for fun and profit.
So why the GPS tracking devices? Beekeepers can't be bothered remembering where there hives are? Do all the bees get on the outside and "1-2-3-LIFT!" their hive to another location when they're tired of the view? Is continental drift particularly troublesome in Europe? Curious minds want to know.
Okay so McDonalds will pay to have a unique symbol in the language and in return they get data on when and how people use it.
Wait. A few questions:
- So if there is no symbol for a certain brand already licensed in the system, how do you, as a user, discuss it?
- What if I am a company that iConji disagrees with for some tedious moral/administrative reason and refuses to licence me? Could be double-plus ungood.
- What if the 'nominal fee' for my suddenly wildly-popular product is too much for me to bear or becomes irritating? Can I remove the symbol from usage? Does iConji come after me with hired goons for the cash?
- What if some other company licenses *my* symbol and uses it to track their efforts to dethrone me? Can I petition to get the symbol transferred to me?
- What if some other company licenses some sort of disparaging symbol to describe my fine product. Can I petition to get the symbol removed? Can I hire uber-lawyers and grind iConji into dust if they disagree?
All these questions will be running through the minds of company lawyers everywhere as soon as they hear of this.
The successes they have had over the past decade are astounding.
Nevermind the fact that Opportunity has only won the longevity race because a software update to Viking I by (cough) JPL essentially bricked it, by accidentally overwriting its antenna pointing code with updated battery conditioning routines.
I notice in all of JPL's press releases about Viking I that they don't mention this little factoid, just that they lost contact and made it a 'memorial base'.
how are you gonna mine, refine and transform metal without oil? With coal? Good luck with that, *no one* is gonna want that in their backyard, except poor countries...
Electric drive trucks are a reality - there have been trucks using overhead wires when hauling out of pits as a boost for their drive motors for 20+ years. The 100 metres of flat ground they traverse in the pit sans overhead cabling could be sorted. Every other large item in a typical mine can and usually does run on 1000 volts or above - excavators, draglines, crushers, conveyors.
Blast furnaces - which reduce the raw iron ore to iron - use large, large quantities of coal. Aluminium uses an electrochemical process, no oil required to directly power that.
As long as they fix the bug where you could stop the desktop from loading and halt the system if you set a desktop background, then deleted the file.
Discovered this one day (1994?) when I put a young lady in the shower as the desktop background on a work computer as a laff for the cross shift and a colleague of mine deleted the file instead of changing the settings.
Much cheek-clenching followed as the critical gui app we were running (and the whole desktop) failed to load with just "file not found" error message and no apparent way to get "back in" to replace it. In the end I think I just reinstalled the OS with many floppies that I brought in from home - seeing as google didn't exist at the time, I was screwed when I went looking for answers on the much-smaller internet.
No they made a big change, not an incredibly small one.
Modded informative?
A "quantum leap" implies a sudden jump from one state to another, as opposed to a gradual improvement.
Just because the word is associated with tiny particles a-la quantum physics does not mean that it is tiny in itself. Why do you think Max Planck decided to use the word quantum in the first place? Because there where no incremental changes in energy states with his theory, just step changes as packets of energy (loosely, quanta in Latin) arrived.
Car analogy:
If you drive a 60's era car then drive a current model, you will experience a large shift in things such as performance, safety and reliability. This can be described as a "quantum leap"
And while we're on the topic, does anyone else have an issue with the use of , "of all time"?
I know it's technically correct to claim something like that, but jeez, at least have the "sport" in question going for 20 years - or a generation, say - before you start making such hyperbolic statements.
For example:
One can argue that Don Bradman was the greatest cricketer "of all time". Cricket, having been played in some form or another since the 16th century, has been around long enough that the use of the phrase, "of all time" is valid.
Starcraft? Been around, what, 12 years, tops? Makes claims like, "one of the best-known and most successful players of all time" a little hard to swallow. Perhaps, "Of his generation" would be more suitable, or you could simply just drop the entire sentence. If they really are "best-known and most-successful", then you don't need to state the obvious.
the update assumes the computer will actually respond to the brake being pressed or any input for that matter.
An unresponsive engine computer is not an issue. Remember that this is the same computer that has to output 360,000 ignition and fuel injection pulses every minute using data read from half a dozen sensors at the same rate.
It's disheartening the way that the internet - coupled with distance and semi-anonymity - somehow compels people to spew such verbal abuse. In real life, would you say that sentence to a person that you've only just met?
Uhm, 10 lines of 80 characters? 20 lines of 40 characters, if you think 80 in one hit might make you cross-eyed. Is it that hard to manually type in? For a backup copy that you will only ever be likely to type in once or twice, ever?
Sailors in the navy are forbidden from being on the foredeck when the Aegis Radar is operating, because it will cook their bodies like a hot dog in a microwave.
Yes, but that's a 250kW radar with a very tightly focused beam, not a 10W Cellphone transmitter with a 30 degree antenna.
Antennas DO have the ability to damage human tissues
Your primary failure mode will be: if the brake pressed switch fails (ie: the tail lights are stuck on), then the car won't run.
Most manufacturers brake/throttle interlocks are set to be overridden if suspicious conditions are noted. Still on for longer than X period of time while the car is in motion, on 5 times in a row before engine start, still on 5 minutes after engine stop, etc.
... and waiting for the software interrupt to get picked up by the CPU, which may be in a hung state.
The same hung CPU that's managing ignition timing and fuel injection 14,000 times a minute? Seems like having a locked engine computer is one of the safest faults you can have.
And anyway, there's watchdog timers that hard-reset the CPU if there's no activity in a rather short timeframe (less than 1 second, usually).
It would be a pretty crappy car if it engaged the seat belt PREtensioners POST-impact.
Pretensioners are fired after the initial contact, whilst the very front of the vehicle is still crumpling away. How the hell do you think the computer knows that it has hit something otherwise? Radar? Not on your $10K cheapo. Magic? No, a little ball + spring combo live underneath your front bumper and the last thing they tell the vehicle before they are crushed in an accident is "something big is heading your way".
I'd also rather it didn't "kill engine power" every time I hit the brakes.
We're not just talking about 'every time', we're talking about the two-feet-on-the-brake-pedal-jesus-christ-I-want-to-stop-NOW kind of braking that will activate ABS. Once ABS (and it's cousin, stability control) are running the show, engine power can (and will) be modulated as they see fit in attempt to keep the vehicle going where you want it to go. If you think you can simultaneously control brake force and engine power separately to each wheel whilst in an emergency to do the same, than you go right ahead. I'll take the bus.
although "traction control" systems might retard timing if severe wheel slip is detected.
Traction control is a lot smarter than you seem to think now, and retarding timing went out of fashion about 15 years ago. Now if the traction control system wants less power it simply requests the engine computer to reduce power output by X percent and the engine computer will choose between:
- Simply closing the throttle body, if it has control of it.
- Killing fuel injection on a few cylinders to drop power.
- Dropping boost if it's a turbo'd vehicle.
- Cutting (or yes, retarding) ignition. Bit of a last resort due to unburnt fuel getting out the other side of the engine.
And what $20,000 compact automatically turns on hazard blinkers, mutes the stereo, and opens windows?
My Peugoet 307 turned on the hazards and muted the music if you hit the brakes hard enough to activate its electronic brake force assist system. I did it a couple of times in the two years I had the car, but never got into a collision to find out about the windows.
We detect that your machine is infected with a rootkit, all of your personal information is in danger of being stolen. Please install a firewall/update your browser/ run your AV"
Typical user response:
OMG WTF IS THIS SHIT I JUST WANT TO PLAY ONLINE POKER WHAT IS MICROSOFT DOING I DONT UNDERSTAND!?!?!
why exactly do we need massive percentages (10-50%) of our resources funneled to maintain the state and state-run defense and services
So that people who are envious of your physical resources don't all band together, drop by your house one day, and proceed to hack you to bits with machetes? So that there's a semi-controlled environment to enable the provision of services - like power, water and maybe even a little internet?
* physical defense and security being the only notable exception.
And a very big fucking exception they will remain, too. Dreams, meet reality. Watch out for reality's sucker punch, it can really catch you unawares.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey Submitter,
km/h, km, mph, m/s.
Please at least attempt to keep to the same units when posting a story. I can do the mental arithmetic fine in converting between them, but it interrupts my train of thought when I come across some mish-mash of units and have to go, "Well, yes, 0.9 m/s *is* slower than 9km/h and 30mph is faster than them both, but by how much exactly? Lessee, 10mph is 16km/hr, times 3, gives 48km/h, which means 9km/h is about 5 times slower and 0.9 m/s is about 3.5km/h which is about 15 times slower than 48km/h. Huh."
So, it would same a lot of time - and really help in your readers ability to quickly comprehend your story - if you could just stick to one set of units next time, be it km/h, m/s, mph or furlongs per fortnight.
Thanks.
It's not really a World Cup, it's a European-South American Cup with a couple countries from other continents invited.
So....
Group from eastern hemisphere + group from western hemisphere + smattering of other groups from northern / southern hemispheres != world?
As I recall, these companies had an agreement with the CSIRO to implement their technology into the wifi standard in return for royalties. Everyone was happy with this, it was duly noted, etc.
Which mysteriously turned into a big collective "Fuck You" when the CSIRO asked for their royalties a few years later on.
So, as an Australian, I send a cheery "Fuck You" to those companies now, and I hope the CSIRO gets what they're owed, plus punitive damages.
I'm no beekeeper, but I thought that hives were pretty much immobile objects. You plonk a hive down, and that's where it stays. It's not like yooths are out late at night stealing hives for fun and profit.
So why the GPS tracking devices? Beekeepers can't be bothered remembering where there hives are? Do all the bees get on the outside and "1-2-3-LIFT!" their hive to another location when they're tired of the view? Is continental drift particularly troublesome in Europe? Curious minds want to know.
Okay so McDonalds will pay to have a unique symbol in the language and in return they get data on when and how people use it.
Wait. A few questions:
- So if there is no symbol for a certain brand already licensed in the system, how do you, as a user, discuss it?
- What if I am a company that iConji disagrees with for some tedious moral/administrative reason and refuses to licence me? Could be double-plus ungood.
- What if the 'nominal fee' for my suddenly wildly-popular product is too much for me to bear or becomes irritating? Can I remove the symbol from usage? Does iConji come after me with hired goons for the cash?
- What if some other company licenses *my* symbol and uses it to track their efforts to dethrone me? Can I petition to get the symbol transferred to me?
- What if some other company licenses some sort of disparaging symbol to describe my fine product. Can I petition to get the symbol removed? Can I hire uber-lawyers and grind iConji into dust if they disagree?
All these questions will be running through the minds of company lawyers everywhere as soon as they hear of this.
The successes they have had over the past decade are astounding.
Nevermind the fact that Opportunity has only won the longevity race because a software update to Viking I by (cough) JPL essentially bricked it, by accidentally overwriting its antenna pointing code with updated battery conditioning routines.
I notice in all of JPL's press releases about Viking I that they don't mention this little factoid, just that they lost contact and made it a 'memorial base'.
how are you gonna mine, refine and transform metal without oil? With coal? Good luck with that, *no one* is gonna want that in their backyard, except poor countries...
Electric drive trucks are a reality - there have been trucks using overhead wires when hauling out of pits as a boost for their drive motors for 20+ years. The 100 metres of flat ground they traverse in the pit sans overhead cabling could be sorted. Every other large item in a typical mine can and usually does run on 1000 volts or above - excavators, draglines, crushers, conveyors.
Blast furnaces - which reduce the raw iron ore to iron - use large, large quantities of coal. Aluminium uses an electrochemical process, no oil required to directly power that.
So this is a midget voting?!?!
No, all you need is voter who is only partly convinced.
As long as they fix the bug where you could stop the desktop from loading and halt the system if you set a desktop background, then deleted the file.
Discovered this one day (1994?) when I put a young lady in the shower as the desktop background on a work computer as a laff for the cross shift and a colleague of mine deleted the file instead of changing the settings.
Much cheek-clenching followed as the critical gui app we were running (and the whole desktop) failed to load with just "file not found" error message and no apparent way to get "back in" to replace it.
In the end I think I just reinstalled the OS with many floppies that I brought in from home - seeing as google didn't exist at the time, I was screwed when I went looking for answers on the much-smaller internet.
No they made a big change, not an incredibly small one.
Modded informative?
A "quantum leap" implies a sudden jump from one state to another, as opposed to a gradual improvement.
Just because the word is associated with tiny particles a-la quantum physics does not mean that it is tiny in itself. Why do you think Max Planck decided to use the word quantum in the first place? Because there where no incremental changes in energy states with his theory, just step changes as packets of energy (loosely, quanta in Latin) arrived.
Car analogy:
If you drive a 60's era car then drive a current model, you will experience a large shift in things such as performance, safety and reliability. This can be described as a "quantum leap"
And while we're on the topic, does anyone else have an issue with the use of , "of all time"?
I know it's technically correct to claim something like that, but jeez, at least have the "sport" in question going for 20 years - or a generation, say - before you start making such hyperbolic statements.
For example:
One can argue that Don Bradman was the greatest cricketer "of all time". Cricket, having been played in some form or another since the 16th century, has been around long enough that the use of the phrase, "of all time" is valid.
Starcraft? Been around, what, 12 years, tops? Makes claims like, "one of the best-known and most successful players of all time" a little hard to swallow. Perhaps, "Of his generation" would be more suitable, or you could simply just drop the entire sentence. If they really are "best-known and most-successful", then you don't need to state the obvious.
I don't know how to make this more clear to you.
He might make better progress if you offered some sort of financial reward for his comprehension of your opinion,
The problem is that if you want to make a Blu-ray player, you need Sony's blessing in the form of licensing agreements.
China, don't fail me now.
(waits impatiently for the first Sorny All-in-one Blu-ray player to hit the market)
the update assumes the computer will actually respond to the brake being pressed or any input for that matter.
An unresponsive engine computer is not an issue. Remember that this is the same computer that has to output 360,000 ignition and fuel injection pulses every minute using data read from half a dozen sensors at the same rate.
Anyway, that's what hardware watchdogs are for.
Obviously some, like you, are retarded fuckheads.
It's disheartening the way that the internet - coupled with distance and semi-anonymity - somehow compels people to spew such verbal abuse.
In real life, would you say that sentence to a person that you've only just met?
*sighs*
The simplest way is to drop SSH and just use telnet. They won't be expecting that!
But how to store an 800-character key offline?
Uhm, 10 lines of 80 characters? 20 lines of 40 characters, if you think 80 in one hit might make you cross-eyed. Is it that hard to manually type in? For a backup copy that you will only ever be likely to type in once or twice, ever?
Or is this just another Slashvertisement(tm)?
Sailors in the navy are forbidden from being on the foredeck when the Aegis Radar is operating, because it will cook their bodies like a hot dog in a microwave.
Yes, but that's a 250kW radar with a very tightly focused beam, not a 10W Cellphone transmitter with a 30 degree antenna.
Antennas DO have the ability to damage human tissues
Only if you are physically struck with one.
Your primary failure mode will be: if the brake pressed switch fails (ie: the tail lights are stuck on), then the car won't run.
Most manufacturers brake/throttle interlocks are set to be overridden if suspicious conditions are noted. Still on for longer than X period of time while the car is in motion, on 5 times in a row before engine start, still on 5 minutes after engine stop, etc.
... and waiting for the software interrupt to get picked up by the CPU, which may be in a hung state.
The same hung CPU that's managing ignition timing and fuel injection 14,000 times a minute? Seems like having a locked engine computer is one of the safest faults you can have.
And anyway, there's watchdog timers that hard-reset the CPU if there's no activity in a rather short timeframe (less than 1 second, usually).
It would be a pretty crappy car if it engaged the seat belt PREtensioners POST-impact.
Pretensioners are fired after the initial contact, whilst the very front of the vehicle is still crumpling away. How the hell do you think the computer knows that it has hit something otherwise? Radar? Not on your $10K cheapo. Magic? No, a little ball + spring combo live underneath your front bumper and the last thing they tell the vehicle before they are crushed in an accident is "something big is heading your way".
I'd also rather it didn't "kill engine power" every time I hit the brakes.
We're not just talking about 'every time', we're talking about the two-feet-on-the-brake-pedal-jesus-christ-I-want-to-stop-NOW kind of braking that will activate ABS. Once ABS (and it's cousin, stability control) are running the show, engine power can (and will) be modulated as they see fit in attempt to keep the vehicle going where you want it to go. If you think you can simultaneously control brake force and engine power separately to each wheel whilst in an emergency to do the same, than you go right ahead. I'll take the bus.
although "traction control" systems might retard timing if severe wheel slip is detected.
Traction control is a lot smarter than you seem to think now, and retarding timing went out of fashion about 15 years ago. Now if the traction control system wants less power it simply requests the engine computer to reduce power output by X percent and the engine computer will choose between:
- Simply closing the throttle body, if it has control of it.
- Killing fuel injection on a few cylinders to drop power.
- Dropping boost if it's a turbo'd vehicle.
- Cutting (or yes, retarding) ignition. Bit of a last resort due to unburnt fuel getting out the other side of the engine.
And what $20,000 compact automatically turns on hazard blinkers, mutes the stereo, and opens windows?
My Peugoet 307 turned on the hazards and muted the music if you hit the brakes hard enough to activate its electronic brake force assist system. I did it a couple of times in the two years I had the car, but never got into a collision to find out about the windows.
vehicle in article = 0.085 liters/100 km
Just to highlight this little fact, that's just under three shot glasses of fuel. To travel 100km. Not too shabby, even at 30mph.
We detect that your machine is infected with a rootkit, all of your personal information is in danger of being stolen. Please install a firewall/update your browser/ run your AV"
Typical user response:
OMG WTF IS THIS SHIT I JUST WANT TO PLAY ONLINE POKER WHAT IS MICROSOFT DOING I DONT UNDERSTAND!?!?!
I can't remember when I changed my .sig - it was quite a few years ago now. Certainly before computers were measured in GHz.
why exactly do we need massive percentages (10-50%) of our resources funneled
to maintain the state and state-run defense and services
So that people who are envious of your physical resources don't all band together, drop by your house one day, and proceed to hack you to bits with machetes? So that there's a semi-controlled environment to enable the provision of services - like power, water and maybe even a little internet?
* physical defense and security being the only notable exception.
And a very big fucking exception they will remain, too.
Dreams, meet reality. Watch out for reality's sucker punch, it can really catch you unawares.