For someone who has touch-typed for years, it would take years to get up to speed with Dvorak
As someone who moved to Dvorak after 5 years of touch-typing Qwerty, I can tell you that this is not the case. A lot of the effort of learning to touch-type is in the motor/coordination skills in the fingers, not in memorizing which letter goes where. I think it took me about a month to get up to speed in Dvorak; it didn't help that I was recovering from a rather painful RSI at the time. I ended up being faster on Dvorak than I ever was on Qwerty.
Chances are the work computer uses Windows, which comes with support for Dvorak, so you don't need to install any software either. It's just a configuration change (which doesn't require administrator privileges
However, Windows does not have a simple way to put the Control key on where normally the CapsLock is located. It requires editing the registry and if I recall correctly, it is a system-wide setting, which will also change the physical keys needed to log in (Ctrl-Alt-Del). Fortunately, my employer's IT support were willing to do this on my work computer.
(I really don't understand how the CapsLock ended up on the home row, even though Ctrl is used much more often by the vast majority of people.)
Not all planes are equal. In some I get gps reception, but more often than not there isn't a single satellite in view, even with the receiver held against the window.
I think windows in newer planes have an infrared-reflecting coating for thermal insulation, which happens to reflect gps waves as well. I've the same issues in trains, by the way.
It takes the first four bytes of the president's name, converts them to int; then applies four modulo operations (%4796 %275 %4). How the author figured out that those four operations would do the job, who knows? Maybe brute-forced the parameter space.
Quoting: "This one-line C program accepts as a first command-line argument the last name of any of the last 31 US Presidents (from Franklin Pierce onwards), in lower case, and prints out their political affiliation. Use "republican" as the 2nd command-line argument, and "democrat" as the 3rd (or equivalent strings of your choice)."
De-obfuscated, it is a boolean expression acting on a string s,
(*(int*)s)%4796%275%4
I wonder whether you can make a regexp that is shorter than this and accomplishes the same thing.
"why someone needs a separate app to do their banking? "
My bank (in Netherlands) requires a chip card and card reader for logging in and transactions (challenge/response system). That would be a pain to use with mobile banking; instead, they store the credentials in the phone, locked with a separate PIN and tied to the phone.
There are various security measures to reduce the chance of fraud, such as autologout upon switching to a different app (royal PITA if you need to copy/paste the account number, by the way); credentials are stored in a private storage for the app (only root would have access).
Those measures would be harder to do safely on a browser, especially from a desktop where malware could have access to the credentials.
All the other commonly used languages -- C, C++, the various.NET languages, Java, etc. -- most certainly do not mutate like that!
Usually if I dig up a C++ program (usually number-crunching using only standard libraries), that I wrote a few years ago (anywhere between 1996 and now), written for g++, it won't compile. Maybe the C++ syntax didn't change, but the handling of complex numbers did (more than once, I think) and various stuff has been moved out of the global namespace.
...used to be able to buy a pack of 10 light bulbs for $2.50
Just rememember that every time you replace one 60 W bulb (1000 hours), it costs you 60 kWh in electricity. That's $6 if you pay $0.10/kWh: more than an equivalent CFL would have cost you including 1000 hours of electricity.
"incandescent bulbs are 10% efficient? Try 2% efficient at creating light we can read by"
You need to specify what you divide by what. For radiation in the range 400-700 nm (visible light), a black body at 2800 K is about 6% efficient, watt per watt. Luminous efficiency is corrected for the sensitivity of the eye, such that only monochromatic green light would be able to reach 100%. An ideal white source would be about 40% in this definition and a light bulb 2%.
like Iceland and the US Pacific Northwest, that use hydropower. Water flowing through a turbine really isn't causing much environmental damage
Except that the hydropower that is used this way cannot be transported to other regions and displace coal power. Now for an isolated island like Iceland, transporting is not an option, but I guess for the US Pacific Northwest it may be.
I can quickly test an idea in the time it takes someone to open their laptop and wait for it to come out of suspend.
I take it that I'm not that much into electronics, but when I'm at work and not in a meeting, I usually have a computer nearby, usually with Gnuplot running in some window, which I use both as a symbolic calculator and as a quick way to plot mathematically expression. (Gnuplot can also handle complex-number arithmetic, which may be relevant for analog electronics). Could you give an example of something that would be easier to do in a calculator?
My huge power draw is the heater and the hot water heater. No problem. We have these things called Batteries...
Huh? From sunlight to electricity to battery storage to hot water sounds like a rather inefficient and expensive roundtrip. Why don't you use a solar water heater and/or store hot water in a well insulated tank?
It's not really an answer to the Ask Slashdot question, but I don't see why one would want to use a non-approved programmed calculator.
The point of a calculator during exams is that you have a single tool with well defined capabilities, so as not to get an unfair advantage above students using a different brand of tool. For actual (professional) engineering calculations you will use a computer with decent programming tools (matlab, python, C/C++, or whatever your favorite is). In my 22 years of university (physics), scientific research, and industrial engineering, I have never felt the need for a fancy calculator. Nowadays I have RealCalc (Android app, clone of the decades-old Casio FX-8x line of non-programmable calculators) if I need a quick calculation during a meeting and a computer (combined with pen and paper) for everything else.
If your exams require that you have a graphing calculator, you'll probably need one. But I've never seen them used around me (R&D department counting a few thousand mechanical engineers).
I'd say this is exactly the amount of detail that you need while driving. Really, what would be the added practical value of "Battery bank 7 temperature exceeded threshold level 1 based on mean power over last 15 minutes, click here to see a plot" for your decision to stop now, drive home, or drive directly to the service station?
I wouldn't be surprised if more details can be found somewhere under "advanced status" or something.
People are not going to suddenly spend half their day on a bus driving back and forth because suddenly it's free
Actually, I think that that is exactly what will happen. See the other comment about loitering (sitting on the bus/train forever to keep warm). Other example: some 20 years ago, Netherlands introduced unlimited "free" public transport (bus and nation-wide trains) for students (age 18-24 years). It created a huge surge in passenger numbers, much more than what could be covered by the reduction in monthly allowances. So much that in the next few years, they restricted the hours of usage *and* increased the fees. I also recall that several courier services popped up, operated by students using their unlimited subscription to deliver packages on the other side of the country.
how about make public transport free and just pay for it through a flat levy?
I'm all for subsidizing this kind of public infrastructure if only because the alternative is using tax money to deal with all the extra traffic. However, I don't believe that making it free is a good idea. Transportation, public or not, still costs money; with free public transport, all financial incentives for people to reduce unnecessary movements disappear, as do financial incentives for the operators to increase efficiency. This is asking for ever increasing costs of the public transport system.
Slashdot added "from the.... dept." to the article. The lameness filter prevents me from pasting the morse code here, but it seems to translate into: "R T L L S - S E N D - I N V E R T E D - T E S S A N E". But now I am none the wiser, what does that mean?
No, only the gut feeling that 1e-7 per year is a very low risk compared to e.g. the risk of getting killed in traffic (1e-4 per year). What I read is that F3 tornadoes can usually be survived by staying in an interior room; for F4 and F5 you need an underground shelter or reinforced room. The question is more whether it makes sense financially to build the entire house tornado-resistant or even spend $10,000 on a storm shelter.
telling them that those lives are only worth as much as the insurance.
It is cold, but the value of life is estimated to be around 7 M$, based on how much people want to be paid to take risks, and on what (government) measures to prevent loss of life cost. Based on that, a measure that increases the survival probability for an F4/F5 tornado would be allowed to cost about $1 per person per year.
Disclosure: Tornadoes don't affect me as I live in Netherlands. I should be more worried about flooding...
People who decided not to live in plywood boxes in tornado country, or in wildfire area or below the sea level between a lake and the sea, or below the river level etc should not be asked to shoulder the burden
For hurricanes and floodings, which could devastate large areas in a single event, I see your point. However, a single tornado usually impacts only a small area. The probability of an individual house in Tornado Alley being struck by an F4 or F5 tornado seems to be 10^(-7) per year. Economically, it makes more sense to insure the risk than to build an F4-tornado-proof house. I couldn't find probabilities for F3 tornadoes, but I could imagine that a similar argument holds there.
Slashdot Mirror
How many data points do you have that support such a broad statement?
As someone who moved to Dvorak after 5 years of touch-typing Qwerty, I can tell you that this is not the case. A lot of the effort of learning to touch-type is in the motor/coordination skills in the fingers, not in memorizing which letter goes where. I think it took me about a month to get up to speed in Dvorak; it didn't help that I was recovering from a rather painful RSI at the time. I ended up being faster on Dvorak than I ever was on Qwerty.
However, Windows does not have a simple way to put the Control key on where normally the CapsLock is located. It requires editing the registry and if I recall correctly, it is a system-wide setting, which will also change the physical keys needed to log in (Ctrl-Alt-Del). Fortunately, my employer's IT support were willing to do this on my work computer.
(I really don't understand how the CapsLock ended up on the home row, even though Ctrl is used much more often by the vast majority of people.)
Not all planes are equal. In some I get gps reception, but more often than not there isn't a single satellite in view, even with the receiver held against the window.
I think windows in newer planes have an infrared-reflecting coating for thermal insulation, which happens to reflect gps waves as well. I've the same issues in trains, by the way.
It takes the first four bytes of the president's name, converts them to int; then applies four modulo operations (%4796 %275 %4). How the author figured out that those four operations would do the job, who knows? Maybe brute-forced the parameter space.
The International Obfuscated C Code contest had a winning entry that could flag the names of US presidents as republican or democrat.
Quoting: "This one-line C program accepts as a first command-line argument the last name of any of the last 31 US Presidents (from Franklin Pierce onwards), in lower case, and prints out their political affiliation. Use "republican" as the 2nd command-line argument, and "democrat" as the 3rd (or equivalent strings of your choice)."
De-obfuscated, it is a boolean expression acting on a string s,
I wonder whether you can make a regexp that is shorter than this and accomplishes the same thing.
"why someone needs a separate app to do their banking? "
My bank (in Netherlands) requires a chip card and card reader for logging in and transactions (challenge/response system). That would be a pain to use with mobile banking; instead, they store the credentials in the phone, locked with a separate PIN and tied to the phone.
There are various security measures to reduce the chance of fraud, such as autologout upon switching to a different app (royal PITA if you need to copy/paste the account number, by the way); credentials are stored in a private storage for the app (only root would have access).
Those measures would be harder to do safely on a browser, especially from a desktop where malware could have access to the credentials.
Usually if I dig up a C++ program (usually number-crunching using only standard libraries), that I wrote a few years ago (anywhere between 1996 and now), written for g++, it won't compile. Maybe the C++ syntax didn't change, but the handling of complex numbers did (more than once, I think) and various stuff has been moved out of the global namespace.
Just rememember that every time you replace one 60 W bulb (1000 hours), it costs you 60 kWh in electricity. That's $6 if you pay $0.10/kWh: more than an equivalent CFL would have cost you including 1000 hours of electricity.
"incandescent bulbs are 10% efficient? Try 2% efficient at creating light we can read by"
You need to specify what you divide by what. For radiation in the range 400-700 nm (visible light), a black body at 2800 K is about 6% efficient, watt per watt. Luminous efficiency is corrected for the sensitivity of the eye, such that only monochromatic green light would be able to reach 100%. An ideal white source would be about 40% in this definition and a light bulb 2%.
Except that the hydropower that is used this way cannot be transported to other regions and displace coal power. Now for an isolated island like Iceland, transporting is not an option, but I guess for the US Pacific Northwest it may be.
I take it that I'm not that much into electronics, but when I'm at work and not in a meeting, I usually have a computer nearby, usually with Gnuplot running in some window, which I use both as a symbolic calculator and as a quick way to plot mathematically expression. (Gnuplot can also handle complex-number arithmetic, which may be relevant for analog electronics). Could you give an example of something that would be easier to do in a calculator?
Huh? From sunlight to electricity to battery storage to hot water sounds like a rather inefficient and expensive roundtrip. Why don't you use a solar water heater and/or store hot water in a well insulated tank?
It's not really an answer to the Ask Slashdot question, but I don't see why one would want to use a non-approved programmed calculator.
The point of a calculator during exams is that you have a single tool with well defined capabilities, so as not to get an unfair advantage above students using a different brand of tool. For actual (professional) engineering calculations you will use a computer with decent programming tools (matlab, python, C/C++, or whatever your favorite is). In my 22 years of university (physics), scientific research, and industrial engineering, I have never felt the need for a fancy calculator. Nowadays I have RealCalc (Android app, clone of the decades-old Casio FX-8x line of non-programmable calculators) if I need a quick calculation during a meeting and a computer (combined with pen and paper) for everything else.
If your exams require that you have a graphing calculator, you'll probably need one. But I've never seen them used around me (R&D department counting a few thousand mechanical engineers).
"'Car needs service. Car may not restart.' WTF? "
I'd say this is exactly the amount of detail that you need while driving. Really, what would be the added practical value of "Battery bank 7 temperature exceeded threshold level 1 based on mean power over last 15 minutes, click here to see a plot" for your decision to stop now, drive home, or drive directly to the service station?
I wouldn't be surprised if more details can be found somewhere under "advanced status" or something.
Actually, I think that that is exactly what will happen. See the other comment about loitering (sitting on the bus/train forever to keep warm). Other example: some 20 years ago, Netherlands introduced unlimited "free" public transport (bus and nation-wide trains) for students (age 18-24 years). It created a huge surge in passenger numbers, much more than what could be covered by the reduction in monthly allowances. So much that in the next few years, they restricted the hours of usage *and* increased the fees. I also recall that several courier services popped up, operated by students using their unlimited subscription to deliver packages on the other side of the country.
I'm all for subsidizing this kind of public infrastructure if only because the alternative is using tax money to deal with all the extra traffic. However, I don't believe that making it free is a good idea. Transportation, public or not, still costs money; with free public transport, all financial incentives for people to reduce unnecessary movements disappear, as do financial incentives for the operators to increase efficiency. This is asking for ever increasing costs of the public transport system.
"cargo capacity of around 2100lbs which is within a couple hundred pounds of 10,000 kg."
Off by a factor 10. It's 22,000 lbs. you'll need 10 of those cars.
"If stuff is bought with a stolen credit card then the credit card company or the bank bears the risk."
I highly doubt that; the thief could have a friend set up an online merchant, make $2000 purchases of virtual goods and split the profit.
The reason merchants are so careful is that the merchants will have to eat the loss in case of a fraudulent transaction.
But those combusted all of the wood and did not leave carbon behind as charcoal.
Slashdot added "from the .... dept." to the article. The lameness filter prevents me from pasting the morse code here, but it seems to translate into: "R T L L S - S E N D - I N V E R T E D - T E S S A N E". But now I am none the wiser, what does that mean?
No, only the gut feeling that 1e-7 per year is a very low risk compared to e.g. the risk of getting killed in traffic (1e-4 per year). What I read is that F3 tornadoes can usually be survived by staying in an interior room; for F4 and F5 you need an underground shelter or reinforced room. The question is more whether it makes sense financially to build the entire house tornado-resistant or even spend $10,000 on a storm shelter.
It is cold, but the value of life is estimated to be around 7 M$, based on how much people want to be paid to take risks, and on what (government) measures to prevent loss of life cost. Based on that, a measure that increases the survival probability for an F4/F5 tornado would be allowed to cost about $1 per person per year.
Disclosure: Tornadoes don't affect me as I live in Netherlands. I should be more worried about flooding...
For hurricanes and floodings, which could devastate large areas in a single event, I see your point. However, a single tornado usually impacts only a small area. The probability of an individual house in Tornado Alley being struck by an F4 or F5 tornado seems to be 10^(-7) per year. Economically, it makes more sense to insure the risk than to build an F4-tornado-proof house. I couldn't find probabilities for F3 tornadoes, but I could imagine that a similar argument holds there.
"one of the more popular ways to generate ANFO is to pump a hole full of chicken shit and then pour in fuel oil"
What are you smoking? ANFO is ammonium nitrate with 6% fuel oil added. Bird droppings don't contain any significant amount of AN.