C- Whilst *vigorously* checking prostate, he reached forward with one hand to pick up my file and had to use his other hand to steady himself on my shoulder. He knew that shoulder hurt from an old sports injury yet still he leaned on it - very unprofessional.
Exam took a while too, but he said he had to be sure everything was ok, so I suppose that's one good thing in his favour.
An MP3 file is data. And when algorithms are used (an MP3 codec), they generate sound from the data.
This is a specific point that intrigues me. I can dump a second's worth of CD audio and print out 200 pages of raw, 16 bit 44.1kHz audio data. I can do the same with a MP3 and generate a seperate 200 pages of similar data. "Similar" being the key point.
One could show the court both data sets and it is easily seen that the MP3 data is entirely different from the CD data.
So, what is the MP3 data file then? It's not a copy, more like if I did a sketch of a photograph. Well, probably more of a very accurate oil painting, but still.... it's certainly not a copy of the original data. Feed my copy into your audio CD player and what do you get? White noise if you're lucky.
"Oh", you say," but we're talking about *audio* recordings here, not digital data!"
Well, are we? They're both just numbers on a storage medium when the police come to visit.
You should have seen what happened when VM development was just starting out.
A BASIC program consisting of a single comment "VM code goes here" on an old Tandy Model I was well on its way to sentience before someone managed to code up the first few stub routines and get things under control. It was a close call. I was there, and I was shitting myself, it was that close. Couldn't sleep for months afterwards.
Always remember kids - left to it's own devices, a VM will kill you and everyone you know without batting a (virtual) eyelid. It's no joke. VM programming is Serious Business. I've seen what can happen and it ain't pretty. It fucks you up inside. I just pray to God that VMware knows what they're doing, because if they fuck things up, this VM malarky will get out of hand. It will get out of hand and we'll be lucky to live through it.
But I would suspect that somewhere in a subsidiary licensing/purchase agreement between Apple and the battery cell maker there is tiny fine print that says, "ensure end users are not able to easily remove the internal battery, due to safety reasons."
Meaning "All the control/protection electronics are in the laptop motherboard and any clown who tinkers with the unprotected battery module by itself is likely to lose their eyebrows."
If so that seems like a deliberate attempt to make things more awkward for those who want to swap it themselves.
"It was pretty easy to get into with just philips head screws and I was just trying to prise the connector out with a pair of scissors, and they kinda got stuck across the wires and started glowing and it looked really cool so I got my camera and tried to take a picture but the flash was too bright so I turned it off and turned the macro on and got reeeeeal close to it and it went BANG and my eyebrows caught fire and now Apple owes me eleventy billion dollars for pain and suffering!!!1!!!1"
Not that you or I would ever do that, but *sigh* companies have to take into account the lowest common denominator when building a laptop.
even to the extent of having the individual cells pressed into rectangular shapes in order to maximize the amount of the space actually dedicated to batteries.
Sadly for Apple's 'innovation department', prismatic batteries are nothing new.
Lastly, it's thermal controls are designed for the warm conditions of LEO not the arctic icebox of lunar orbit.
I'm curious. Apart from the altitude, what's the difference between a 90 minute polar orbit around the moon as opposed to a 90 minute polar orbit around the earth?
Never mind the fact that getting to an equatorial orbit from where the ISS is now is not easy.
You can't easily turn your orbit 'left' or 'right'. Taking the extreme example, say you wanted to do a 90 degree left turn from the ISS's current orbit. You have to do two things simultaneously :
- Lower your current forward velocity from it's current value of approx 7 kilometres/sec to zero. - Increase the velocity in the direction you want to travel from zero to 7 kilometres/sec.
Let's just say that you're not going to be doing that with an ion thruster any time soon.
It can be all three if you make your program small enough, hence all the tiny little programs you get in your common unix, that all do just one thing and one thing well.
In fact it will have a net negative effect on your gas mileage. If you put an electric (re)generator on a shock absorber, and hook it up to an electrical load (to capture the energy) then the generator will fight back when the shock absorber tries to react to the pothole. In effect, it will directly reduce the "shock absorbing" capability of the shock absorber, giving you both a rougher ride and slowing your car down more....... It's called Back EMF, basic high school physics.
You're argument is based on one large assumption, that electric regeneration is *in addition* to the current hydraulic setup.
It's quite an easy job mechanically to reduce the ability of a hydraulic shock and let the electric side take over. An electrically operated modulation valve that links either side of the piston as required would do the trick (basically from one end of the cylinder to the other). Chuck in an algorithm that then adjusts this valve and the electrical load in response to average suspension movement, a mechanical high-flow cutoff that closes the bypass and lets the hydraulic shock catch those really big bumps that the electrical system can't handle in time, and you're good to go.
Wellllll, I'm sure I've been a little bit glib with that description, but that'd probably be the general principle behind it anyway.
Looks like Ronald Reagan played too many Atari "Missile Command" games and all of those trillions spent for SDI program was for nothing. If SDI did exist, it would have detected a Russian satellite coming too near a USA satellite and shot it down.
From memory the original SDI "laser-in-space" was a directed x-ray weapon powered by a small nuclear explosion. Not something you'd want to pop off on a whim, being (a) single-use (b) very expensive (c) liable to cause more trouble internationally than the sat in question was worth (OMG Nukes in spaaaaaaace!).
I visit a town on occasion (here in Australia) that has the usual syndicated FM radio stations. You get to news time, and some female with a soft US accent reads out the news.
Except..... the pronunciation of local town names, inflection and near-perfect cadence is juuuuust enough to make me wonder if it isn't a rather good TTS program just plowing through some text on-air, in order to save the expense of having some person read the news out for the hundred-odd stations that form part of the syndicated network.
Anyone know if there is a commercial system that does this? Just curious.
So all the layers of ferns and trees that I find imprinted throughout a 30 foot thick seam of coking coal aren't evidence enough?
The process of forming coal is well known (Living biosphere -> swamps/peat bogs -> compression from overlying strata -> 5+ million years -> coal, generally)
Regarding oil: If oil *is* being made 'down there', it sure as hell ain't being made in the quantities we currently use daily.
You've got to wonder how much longer they're going to keep that question in.
Going to the extreme here, say you were 12, in the Hitler Youth Movement, in 1945.
You'd be 76 now in 2009 - are you still really of that much interest to the US? All the 'serious' Nazis of that era (that is, those who rose to an appreciable rank) would have to be pushing 90 by now.
But I suppose that's an going to be indicator of the longevity of current measures in the War On Terror.
The driver doesn't have any choice in the matter, because the key, car and phone all belong to his or her parents
Teen, to hardware store drone: "Hi, I need to get another key cut. Oh, that extra blob on the end there? It was for some useless car alarm that the previous owner had. Hasn't worked for ages. Don't worry about it, just a normal key will do."
Well, with Telstra's current HSPDA network, I can get consistent, sustained rates of 2-3Mbps with my phone (and laptop) to random sites on the internet. This is in a variety of places - some inner city, some where I can guarantee that I'm pretty much the only person in that cell using data.
Distance-wise, it doesn't really seem to matter much - I have been some 60km away from the only tower with a 6dBi broomstick antenna attached to my phone and still get the same speeds as if I was in town. At the very edges of reception, in places where I can't hold a call, I can still get bursty data at 100-300kbps.
Say what you want about Telstra's prices, but their network is well beyond anyone else's in Australia at present.
Except for their "liberty" plans, which comprise 2/3rds of their available plans. Those plans that - being shaped without charge once reaching their limits - are the plan that any sane person would choose.
But I guess that wouldn't be *quite* as dramatic to say now, would it?
Having said that, I will wholeheartedly agree the 'entry level' plans are a nasty trap for inexperienced grandparents or something. 200MB download at 256kbps for $29.95 with a 15c/MB excess is not a plan that most internet users would pick however. Especially seeing that the next plan up (and only other plan on that speed) can give you 12GB for $59.95 with no excess usage.
once again macs seem to be innovating, the dual gpu thing where you have a low power one for run of the mill 2d stuff and high power one for the apps that need it are a good example (i believe this is appearing in pc laptops as well).
Wow, that's some serious innovation going on there. Good work, Apple!
Oh, by the way - 1997 called, they want their 3DFX cards back.
*Side note: The fact that you NEED the MythTV gui (running on X) to configure the backend is an awfully lame design decision on MythTV's part. Whatever happened to editing text files or a simple command-line based configurator?
You can use a command line, you just need to know SQL. Jeez, kids these days....:-)
I haven't used the newer versions of mythTV - I had run a system with upgrades from.12 to one of the.21RC's. You do that kind of thing and you learn SQL pretty quick. But I guess all media centres are still in a state of flux and get wiped/installed on a semi-regular basis, with a clean slate each time.
For long-term users, there's no real database maintenance done by MythTV. Some manual trimming/compacting of the database at times helps speed. eg your liveTV seek tables - they get rather large and can tend to glue things up..... and never seem to be deleted. Recorded shows - MythTV keeps the database records *forever*, so it can avoid recording them again. Good in theory, bad after a few years.
Personally, I prefer MySQLNavigator for tinkering with MythTV's database directly when I've got X, but I've done the command-line thing before when I've hosed the database via filesystem corruption and I've had to selectively restore chunks of it from a mysql dump.
And there's some things that still don't have a gui interface. Changing the transcoding presets for the DVD-ripper, for instance. You need SQL if you want to change the author's original presets.
But all in all, it works ok, and I've learned a lot of stuff about my linux system over the years because of it.
in the beginning God creates the heavens and earth, then at some point later he says let their be light
That's why I find God to be so amazing. He made all this, IN THE DARK! I would have been, "Oh, sod this, let there be a small star or something, so I can see what I'm doing here."
Actually, that explains why some things are a bit fucked up. Wave/Particle duality? Yeah, look, God couldn't see exactly what He was doing there when that bit came together, so no wonder. Duck-billed mamallian egg-laying Platypuses? Vestigial tails on humans? Same deal. With Him working blind, consider yourself lucky you don't have an anus right next to your nose.
(Well, *some* people do sometimes, but that's a matter of lifestyle preference.)
Slashdot Mirror
Average person: "There were already passengers on the bus when these twelve got on."
(Looks at the theologian, biologist, physicist and mathematician)
"When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right guys?"
C- Whilst *vigorously* checking prostate, he reached forward with one hand to pick up my file and had to use his other hand to steady himself on my shoulder. He knew that shoulder hurt from an old sports injury yet still he leaned on it - very unprofessional.
Exam took a while too, but he said he had to be sure everything was ok, so I suppose that's one good thing in his favour.
An MP3 file is data. And when algorithms are used (an MP3 codec), they generate sound from the data.
This is a specific point that intrigues me. I can dump a second's worth of CD audio and print out 200 pages of raw, 16 bit 44.1kHz audio data. I can do the same with a MP3 and generate a seperate 200 pages of similar data. "Similar" being the key point.
One could show the court both data sets and it is easily seen that the MP3 data is entirely different from the CD data.
So, what is the MP3 data file then? It's not a copy, more like if I did a sketch of a photograph. Well, probably more of a very accurate oil painting, but still.... it's certainly not a copy of the original data. Feed my copy into your audio CD player and what do you get? White noise if you're lucky.
"Oh", you say," but we're talking about *audio* recordings here, not digital data!"
Well, are we? They're both just numbers on a storage medium when the police come to visit.
No, that's what your appendix is for.
Apparently some primal need from way back in prehistory is fulfilled when you say, "I don't remember eating that!"
Think NaN's are bad?
You should have seen what happened when VM development was just starting out.
A BASIC program consisting of a single comment "VM code goes here" on an old Tandy Model I was well on its way to sentience before someone managed to code up the first few stub routines and get things under control. It was a close call. I was there, and I was shitting myself, it was that close. Couldn't sleep for months afterwards.
Always remember kids - left to it's own devices, a VM will kill you and everyone you know without batting a (virtual) eyelid. It's no joke. VM programming is Serious Business. I've seen what can happen and it ain't pretty. It fucks you up inside. I just pray to God that VMware knows what they're doing, because if they fuck things up, this VM malarky will get out of hand. It will get out of hand and we'll be lucky to live through it.
Call BS all you want.
But I would suspect that somewhere in a subsidiary licensing/purchase agreement between Apple and the battery cell maker there is tiny fine print that says, "ensure end users are not able to easily remove the internal battery, due to safety reasons."
Meaning "All the control/protection electronics are in the laptop motherboard and any clown who tinkers with the unprotected battery module by itself is likely to lose their eyebrows."
If so that seems like a deliberate attempt to make things more awkward for those who want to swap it themselves.
"It was pretty easy to get into with just philips head screws and I was just trying to prise the connector out with a pair of scissors, and they kinda got stuck across the wires and started glowing and it looked really cool so I got my camera and tried to take a picture but the flash was too bright so I turned it off and turned the macro on and got reeeeeal close to it and it went BANG and my eyebrows caught fire and now Apple owes me eleventy billion dollars for pain and suffering!!!1!!!1"
Not that you or I would ever do that, but *sigh* companies have to take into account the lowest common denominator when building a laptop.
even to the extent of having the individual cells pressed into rectangular shapes in order to maximize the amount of the space actually dedicated to batteries.
Sadly for Apple's 'innovation department', prismatic batteries are nothing new.
Lastly, it's thermal controls are designed for the warm conditions of LEO not the arctic icebox of lunar orbit.
I'm curious. Apart from the altitude, what's the difference between a 90 minute polar orbit around the moon as opposed to a 90 minute polar orbit around the earth?
Never mind the fact that getting to an equatorial orbit from where the ISS is now is not easy.
You can't easily turn your orbit 'left' or 'right'. Taking the extreme example, say you wanted to do a 90 degree left turn from the ISS's current orbit. You have to do two things simultaneously :
- Lower your current forward velocity from it's current value of approx 7 kilometres/sec to zero.
- Increase the velocity in the direction you want to travel from zero to 7 kilometres/sec.
Let's just say that you're not going to be doing that with an ion thruster any time soon.
(checks image)
So...... beautiful,glossy front screen.... which will be face-down 90% of the time on all sorts of unforgiving surfaces.
The production version had better have a slightly raised edge all around that screen, otherwise it's going to be scratched in record time.
It can be all three if you make your program small enough, hence all the tiny little programs you get in your common unix, that all do just one thing and one thing well.
Failing that...more money.
Or less money.
MEMO TO ALL STAFF:
We are presently overstaffed in relation to our workload. There will be a meeting with all staff on Thursday at 9am to discuss...... our options.
Please note that none of these options involves me being fired or taking a pay cut in any way, shape or form.
Regards
Boss.
In fact it will have a net negative effect on your gas mileage. If you put an electric (re)generator on a shock absorber, and hook it up to an electrical load (to capture the energy) then the generator will fight back when the shock absorber tries to react to the pothole. In effect, it will directly reduce the "shock absorbing" capability of the shock absorber, giving you both a rougher ride and slowing your car down more. ......
It's called Back EMF, basic high school physics.
You're argument is based on one large assumption, that electric regeneration is *in addition* to the current hydraulic setup.
It's quite an easy job mechanically to reduce the ability of a hydraulic shock and let the electric side take over. An electrically operated modulation valve that links either side of the piston as required would do the trick (basically from one end of the cylinder to the other). Chuck in an algorithm that then adjusts this valve and the electrical load in response to average suspension movement, a mechanical high-flow cutoff that closes the bypass and lets the hydraulic shock catch those really big bumps that the electrical system can't handle in time, and you're good to go.
Wellllll, I'm sure I've been a little bit glib with that description, but that'd probably be the general principle behind it anyway.
Looks like Ronald Reagan played too many Atari "Missile Command" games and all of those trillions spent for SDI program was for nothing. If SDI did exist, it would have detected a Russian satellite coming too near a USA satellite and shot it down.
From memory the original SDI "laser-in-space" was a directed x-ray weapon powered by a small nuclear explosion. Not something you'd want to pop off on a whim, being (a) single-use (b) very expensive (c) liable to cause more trouble internationally than the sat in question was worth (OMG Nukes in spaaaaaaace!).
That's why using the European spelling makes it easier to differentiate.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure the SI unit is spelled metre, not meter.
Micrometre / Micrometer.
I visit a town on occasion (here in Australia) that has the usual syndicated FM radio stations. You get to news time, and some female with a soft US accent reads out the news.
Except..... the pronunciation of local town names, inflection and near-perfect cadence is juuuuust enough to make me wonder if it isn't a rather good TTS program just plowing through some text on-air, in order to save the expense of having some person read the news out for the hundred-odd stations that form part of the syndicated network.
Anyone know if there is a commercial system that does this? Just curious.
Regarding coal:
So all the layers of ferns and trees that I find imprinted throughout a 30 foot thick seam of coking coal aren't evidence enough?
The process of forming coal is well known (Living biosphere -> swamps/peat bogs -> compression from overlying strata -> 5+ million years -> coal, generally)
Regarding oil: If oil *is* being made 'down there', it sure as hell ain't being made in the quantities we currently use daily.
You've got to wonder how much longer they're going to keep that question in.
Going to the extreme here, say you were 12, in the Hitler Youth Movement, in 1945.
You'd be 76 now in 2009 - are you still really of that much interest to the US? All the 'serious' Nazis of that era (that is, those who rose to an appreciable rank) would have to be pushing 90 by now.
But I suppose that's an going to be indicator of the longevity of current measures in the War On Terror.
The driver doesn't have any choice in the matter, because the key, car and phone all belong to his or her parents
Teen, to hardware store drone: "Hi, I need to get another key cut. Oh, that extra blob on the end there? It was for some useless car alarm that the previous owner had. Hasn't worked for ages. Don't worry about it, just a normal key will do."
Well, with Telstra's current HSPDA network, I can get consistent, sustained rates of 2-3Mbps with my phone (and laptop) to random sites on the internet. This is in a variety of places - some inner city, some where I can guarantee that I'm pretty much the only person in that cell using data.
Distance-wise, it doesn't really seem to matter much - I have been some 60km away from the only tower with a 6dBi broomstick antenna attached to my phone and still get the same speeds as if I was in town. At the very edges of reception, in places where I can't hold a call, I can still get bursty data at 100-300kbps.
Say what you want about Telstra's prices, but their network is well beyond anyone else's in Australia at present.
Except for their "liberty" plans, which comprise 2/3rds of their available plans. Those plans that - being shaped without charge once reaching their limits - are the plan that any sane person would choose.
But I guess that wouldn't be *quite* as dramatic to say now, would it?
Having said that, I will wholeheartedly agree the 'entry level' plans are a nasty trap for inexperienced grandparents or something. 200MB download at 256kbps for $29.95 with a 15c/MB excess is not a plan that most internet users would pick however. Especially seeing that the next plan up (and only other plan on that speed) can give you 12GB for $59.95 with no excess usage.
once again macs seem to be innovating, the dual gpu thing where you have a low power one for run of the mill 2d stuff and high power one for the apps that need it are a good example (i believe this is appearing in pc laptops as well).
Wow, that's some serious innovation going on there. Good work, Apple!
Oh, by the way - 1997 called, they want their 3DFX cards back.
*Side note: The fact that you NEED the MythTV gui (running on X) to configure the backend is an awfully lame design decision on MythTV's part. Whatever happened to editing text files or a simple command-line based configurator?
You can use a command line, you just need to know SQL. Jeez, kids these days.... :-)
I haven't used the newer versions of mythTV - I had run a system with upgrades from .12 to one of the .21RC's. You do that kind of thing and you learn SQL pretty quick. But I guess all media centres are still in a state of flux and get wiped/installed on a semi-regular basis, with a clean slate each time.
For long-term users, there's no real database maintenance done by MythTV. Some manual trimming/compacting of the database at times helps speed. eg your liveTV seek tables - they get rather large and can tend to glue things up..... and never seem to be deleted. Recorded shows - MythTV keeps the database records *forever*, so it can avoid recording them again. Good in theory, bad after a few years.
Personally, I prefer MySQLNavigator for tinkering with MythTV's database directly when I've got X, but I've done the command-line thing before when I've hosed the database via filesystem corruption and I've had to selectively restore chunks of it from a mysql dump.
And there's some things that still don't have a gui interface. Changing the transcoding presets for the DVD-ripper, for instance. You need SQL if you want to change the author's original presets.
But all in all, it works ok, and I've learned a lot of stuff about my linux system over the years because of it.
in the beginning God creates the heavens and earth, then at some point later he says let their be light
That's why I find God to be so amazing. He made all this, IN THE DARK! I would have been, "Oh, sod this, let there be a small star or something, so I can see what I'm doing here."
Actually, that explains why some things are a bit fucked up. Wave/Particle duality? Yeah, look, God couldn't see exactly what He was doing there when that bit came together, so no wonder. Duck-billed mamallian egg-laying Platypuses? Vestigial tails on humans? Same deal. With Him working blind, consider yourself lucky you don't have an anus right next to your nose.
(Well, *some* people do sometimes, but that's a matter of lifestyle preference.)