That seems to be true for many people who were trained in the "new math" (that started in the 60's and was widespread in the '80s) and happen to not suck at numbers. My problem is for some reason I think that 18 is close to 19 but the 19 to 20 change is larger. Maybe its all those silly hexadecimal numbers I deal with. $19 plus 1 is $1A?
Another odd thing is how people cope with number and compound number. For example we all think of "six" as one number but our concept of 6 is different than 35 which we have been taught is 30+5. There are some interesting psychological effects of that compared to numbers such as a score or a dozen. Most languages have one word for numbers up to 12 and a few numbers above that (20, 40, 50, 100 are common) and will use compound concects on larger number such as 4 x score + 7 or MXIII. In many older languages you will have the word for 40 meaning the same as "a lot". The old english money system is an another example of stirling and pence prices. You wouldn't seen a price in the US as 3 quarters and 4 pennys but that exact sort of thing was common all over the world less than 50 years ago. It seems that precise number usage in the general population seems to be quite recent.
The tobacco companies have been doing it for decades as well. They use the term "lift" and "rise" to describe how smoke rises. They want the smoke to rise very slowly so it has a better chance to remind another addict that they need to light up so they cut their drug with some nasty chemicals to keep the smoke from going up too fast as well as preserve some of the smell/stench for as long as they can.
Commercials are effective. They aren't effective at getting the consumer to part with their cash for the product shown but they are very effective at getting the company to part with its cash for the ads. An advertising agency doesn't need to sell the end product, they only need to sell the ad.
The internet came around and for once in the recent history of ads, there was immediate feedback and that showed the ads didn't work as well as anyone in the ad agencies claimed.
The only fact that science shows about ads is that we are all over saturated with ads and ignore them most of the time. The only way to change that is reduce the ads we see but too many competing ad sources won't ever let that happen so their product has less real value every year.
The new systems cost thousands of dollars compared to the $50 for the old style transmitters and the new ones aren't selling well. The 121.5 systems are still outselling the new ones even though every boat dealer explains it won't work in a few years. The big problem with 121.5 is they never took the easy route which is to interrupt the carrier every few seconds with a fast cut out circuit and put some detectors on the GPS sats. That would give about 1000 meters of accuracy on the 1st signal and a bit of processing could reduce that to 100 meters which is as good as the new system in most cases and the transmitters would still only be about $50.
I was just thinking of a way to get patent law reform considered... a "user pays" system where the users are not the people who have the patents, but the ones that use them to make money. There should be a tax on the fees they make (either by royalties or lawsuits) that covers the patent office's expenses. If it didn't cost thousands of dollars to patent anything, then the patent office would have had millions of e-commerce submissions and have a much better idea what prior art is.
Shock is only one killer... The heat is the other and stuff in a car dash can get very hot and well above the storage temps for hard drives. When you turn on the car and force the A/C way up, it may cool some parts inside the dash or it might not cool anything.
In winter you could have a problem at the other end of the temp scale.
And don't forget electrical shock too. Cars can create huge charges with the newer tire compounds and it only takes one zap to kill the entire computer.
There seems to be a reason why so many cars are now mounting their electrical stuff under the back seat.
I've been talking to the OSx guys about this. It turns out that Garmin's idea of USB and the spec don't jive. For example when you ask for the 1st 4 bytes of the config descriptor, garmin USB devices give back more than 4 bytes that are all zeros.
Its a shame too since the garmin GPS 18 USB is a slick little device. One other thing to consider with Garmin's USB GPSs is they don't look like a serial port. You would expect at least one of the USB channels to look and ack like a 9600 baud NMEA device so it would work with all the existing software but they screwed that up and only talk their own binary protocol.
I've traveled all over the world with my Tadpole and it lives in its padded bag inside a big backpack. It gets packed aginst a stack of paper (flyers, reciepts and misc other papers) and some clothes that cna be packed flat.
If your in parts of the world where theft is very common, get one of the web meshes. The pick pockets in S. Africa are known to cut the bottom out of backpacks and steal stuff in crowds. The mesh stops that if you get a good mesh.
While the US doesn't need the oil from there (most US oil comes from the North Sea), having the oil from Iraq going to places like Europe, Inida and China helps keep the North Sea Crude price down.
The Iraq gravy train was feeding the US as well as anyone else but when your start messing with Big Oil and Big Tobacco, your asking to be taken down. After the 1st war, Uday figured out that he could sell smokes to his neighbors because they would prefer his over American brands. The US taxes tobacco at a rate based on how much the local country taxes the product so the US govt get a huge cut of every sale in places like the UK but almost nothing from Spain. The result is Uday was importing through countries with no tobacco tax and repackaging for the arab market. It worked so well that he was supplying nearly 1/4 of all the tobacco in the world and cutting the Uncle Sam out of the action. That cost him his life. Oh, the UN considers tobacco a food.
I can get beige box specials in Australia that are under US$300 and cheaper if I want to buy the parts. 64M GeForce FX cards are worth what about AU$35? With the different market in the US, It seems that such a pc should cost even less. In fact this was the cheapest thing at fry's outpost at $179.
1) Most of the framework is in C derived language. unless its full of endianness bugs, it should be trivial to port to a different platform. The kernel is endian clean.
2) Most sound cards follow one of a 3 standards. If there are drivers for that it will work, otherwise it wont.
3) XCode knows how to link to other compilers. A simple change to it and it could be building binaries for other platforms at the same time. Apple figured out multi-cpu application bundles a long time ago.
4) I told my father to buy my mother a Mac. He said no because a PC was 1/6 the cost of a machine at Frys. Any $300 PC will have a better video card than the new iMac. I'm not sure you can still buy PC vidoe cards that suck as bad as what they put in the iMac (and yes apple, thats why there isn't a new iMac sitting on my desk)
Hey I run a sparcstation 1 in the real world. I know about long term costs.
The problem is AT&T can't count on the macs having less admin expenses over the long term because they don't know enough about them. Its an unknown. The Windows costs is known.
Also keep in mind that the stock market has forced large companies to keep cost projections down for the next 90 days. there isn't much long term planning in large companies any more compared to 20 years ago.
Right now every corporate desktop has a working mouse, keyboard and display and all they need is the beige box and apple refuses to play in that market.
You have to dig though vic roads web site. They don't break out the different classes of roads because it looks better if they don't so SE Freeway is in the same general stats as the freeway west of Ballarat.
The 1st sign will say 1km away. Some of them on the SE Freeway are less than 600 meters from the exit. Not all the exits on the SE have two signs.
As far as major roads... if you've driven a great deal in a many different cities, it gets hard to keep them all stright. Melbourne has a problem where they like changing the road names. Some of them will change three times in a few km which is understandable if the roads wheren't stright but these are well planned roads.
In most parts of the world the "slow lane" is the rightmost lane on the highway. Acceleration lanes merge into the slow lane and sometimes in cities the acceleration lane will just continue to the next exit. The process for the old granny driver is to fly down the highway at 20mph (30kmh) and make it into the slow lane. Once there they only have to change lanes once to get to an exit. In Victoria when they want to reduce the traffic from 4 lanes to 3, they end the slow lane right after an exit so the granny driver had to merge right at about the time where everyone who waits for the last second for the exit is merging left. The result is the slow drivers now go all the way to the second middle lane so on a 4 lane road with a 100k limit you have the left two lanes moving quick (90 to 100), the next lane to the right moving very slow (often slower than 80km) and the right lane going 95 being blocked by someone that thinks they are goin 99.9 so they don't get a ticket. That system is messed up and vicroads has stats to prove it.
If your disassembling the code of a program, the data is just junk that gets in the way until you figure out what the code is doing. Of course the ascii comments in data may be useful and from what I can tell, DNA doesn't seem to have any text strings in it so for now its just junk.
I haven't looked into the pattern matching stuff the bio guys are using but its very handy to be able to take a bit of a program and find out where the common libraries functions are hiding but since they have references that get fixed up by the linker, every version will be different. I still haven't found a good simple algorithm that will go though a binary and try to find a match to an existing function. The ideal situation would be able to have a small table of function fingerprints and then have another small bit of code be abel to search a binary for those fingerprints and be able to say "printf is at 0x4564 and vsprintf is at 0x498c" and have it work with any CPU.
Car in europe have a regulatory requirement for an emergency brake. The US rules requires a parking brake which will stop the car form high way speeds but you get better deacceleration just hitting the clutch (if you have one)
747's are drive by plumbing not drive by wire. There is only one Boeing commercial plane thats drive by wire and its got the same hull losses as Airbus fly by wire planes. The hull losses on fly by wire are higher than the old hydraulic systems. I don't think I want a fly by wire car either when the old stuff works so well.
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That seems to be true for many people who were trained in the "new math" (that started in the 60's and was widespread in the '80s) and happen to not suck at numbers. My problem is for some reason I think that 18 is close to 19 but the 19 to 20 change is larger. Maybe its all those silly hexadecimal numbers I deal with. $19 plus 1 is $1A?
Another odd thing is how people cope with number and compound number. For example we all think of "six" as one number but our concept of 6 is different than 35 which we have been taught is 30+5. There are some interesting psychological effects of that compared to numbers such as a score or a dozen. Most languages have one word for numbers up to 12 and a few numbers above that (20, 40, 50, 100 are common) and will use compound concects on larger number such as 4 x score + 7 or MXIII. In many older languages you will have the word for 40 meaning the same as "a lot". The old english money system is an another example of stirling and pence prices. You wouldn't seen a price in the US as 3 quarters and 4 pennys but that exact sort of thing was common all over the world less than 50 years ago. It seems that precise number usage in the general population seems to be quite recent.
The tobacco companies have been doing it for decades as well. They use the term "lift" and "rise" to describe how smoke rises. They want the smoke to rise very slowly so it has a better chance to remind another addict that they need to light up so they cut their drug with some nasty chemicals to keep the smoke from going up too fast as well as preserve some of the smell/stench for as long as they can.
Commercials are effective. They aren't effective at getting the consumer to part with their cash for the product shown but they are very effective at getting the company to part with its cash for the ads. An advertising agency doesn't need to sell the end product, they only need to sell the ad.
The internet came around and for once in the recent history of ads, there was immediate feedback and that showed the ads didn't work as well as anyone in the ad agencies claimed.
The only fact that science shows about ads is that we are all over saturated with ads and ignore them most of the time. The only way to change that is reduce the ads we see but too many competing ad sources won't ever let that happen so their product has less real value every year.
The new systems cost thousands of dollars compared to the $50 for the old style transmitters and the new ones aren't selling well. The 121.5 systems are still outselling the new ones even though every boat dealer explains it won't work in a few years. The big problem with 121.5 is they never took the easy route which is to interrupt the carrier every few seconds with a fast cut out circuit and put some detectors on the GPS sats. That would give about 1000 meters of accuracy on the 1st signal and a bit of processing could reduce that to 100 meters which is as good as the new system in most cases and the transmitters would still only be about $50.
Valves? I didn't know IBM had been in the plumbing business?
You've never seen an IBM 3081. Dual CPUs and water cooled and the one I used in '93 had an uptime of 13 years.
yes, and it works very well. Many spamers put all kinds of crud in headers that shouldn't even be there.
.cn
I checked my logs and yep, I'm blowing away gmail just like I'm blowing away stuff from
And thats a good thing?
If I send you a message, I don't want you to be able to forward it to anyplace you want and still have it claim to be form me.
And my spam filters would have killed that message dead. Too much non-human-readable text.
I was just thinking of a way to get patent law reform considered... a "user pays" system where the users are not the people who have the patents, but the ones that use them to make money. There should be a tax on the fees they make (either by royalties or lawsuits) that covers the patent office's expenses. If it didn't cost thousands of dollars to patent anything, then the patent office would have had millions of e-commerce submissions and have a much better idea what prior art is.
Lucas and electronics just don't mix. If Lucas had an electric car, you would have to push it into the showroom.
My MG works much better after I put a Bosch alternator into it.
Shock is only one killer...
The heat is the other and stuff in a car dash can get very hot and well above the storage temps for hard drives. When you turn on the car and force the A/C way up, it may cool some parts inside the dash or it might not cool anything.
In winter you could have a problem at the other end of the temp scale.
And don't forget electrical shock too. Cars can create huge charges with the newer tire compounds and it only takes one zap to kill the entire computer.
There seems to be a reason why so many cars are now mounting their electrical stuff under the back seat.
I've been talking to the OSx guys about this. It turns out that Garmin's idea of USB and the spec don't jive. For example when you ask for the 1st 4 bytes of the config descriptor, garmin USB devices give back more than 4 bytes that are all zeros.
Its a shame too since the garmin GPS 18 USB is a slick little device. One other thing to consider with Garmin's USB GPSs is they don't look like a serial port. You would expect at least one of the USB channels to look and ack like a 9600 baud NMEA device so it would work with all the existing software but they screwed that up and only talk their own binary protocol.
I've traveled all over the world with my Tadpole and it lives in its padded bag inside a big backpack. It gets packed aginst a stack of paper (flyers, reciepts and misc other papers) and some clothes that cna be packed flat.
If your in parts of the world where theft is very common, get one of the web meshes. The pick pockets in S. Africa are known to cut the bottom out of backpacks and steal stuff in crowds. The mesh stops that if you get a good mesh.
While the US doesn't need the oil from there (most US oil comes from the North Sea), having the oil from Iraq going to places like Europe, Inida and China helps keep the North Sea Crude price down.
The Iraq gravy train was feeding the US as well as anyone else but when your start messing with Big Oil and Big Tobacco, your asking to be taken down. After the 1st war, Uday figured out that he could sell smokes to his neighbors because they would prefer his over American brands. The US taxes tobacco at a rate based on how much the local country taxes the product so the US govt get a huge cut of every sale in places like the UK but almost nothing from Spain. The result is Uday was importing through countries with no tobacco tax and repackaging for the arab market. It worked so well that he was supplying nearly 1/4 of all the tobacco in the world and cutting the Uncle Sam out of the action. That cost him his life. Oh, the UN considers tobacco a food.
I can get beige box specials in Australia that are under US$300 and cheaper if I want to buy the parts. 64M GeForce FX cards are worth what about AU$35? With the different market in the US, It seems that such a pc should cost even less. In fact this was the cheapest thing at fry's outpost at $179.
1) Most of the framework is in C derived language. unless its full of endianness bugs, it should be trivial to port to a different platform. The kernel is endian clean.
2) Most sound cards follow one of a 3 standards. If there are drivers for that it will work, otherwise it wont.
3) XCode knows how to link to other compilers. A simple change to it and it could be building binaries for other platforms at the same time. Apple figured out multi-cpu application bundles a long time ago.
4) I told my father to buy my mother a Mac. He said no because a PC was 1/6 the cost of a machine at Frys. Any $300 PC will have a better video card than the new iMac. I'm not sure you can still buy PC vidoe cards that suck as bad as what they put in the iMac (and yes apple, thats why there isn't a new iMac sitting on my desk)
Laptop batteries seem to have about 400 recharge cycles and then they will be less than 1/2 of new. Buy a new battery.
Hey I run a sparcstation 1 in the real world. I know about long term costs.
The problem is AT&T can't count on the macs having less admin expenses over the long term because they don't know enough about them. Its an unknown. The Windows costs is known.
Also keep in mind that the stock market has forced large companies to keep cost projections down for the next 90 days. there isn't much long term planning in large companies any more compared to 20 years ago.
Right now every corporate desktop has a working mouse, keyboard and display and all they need is the beige box and apple refuses to play in that market.
You have to dig though vic roads web site. They don't break out the different classes of roads because it looks better if they don't so SE Freeway is in the same general stats as the freeway west of Ballarat.
The 1st sign will say 1km away. Some of them on the SE Freeway are less than 600 meters from the exit. Not all the exits on the SE have two signs.
As far as major roads... if you've driven a great deal in a many different cities, it gets hard to keep them all stright. Melbourne has a problem where they like changing the road names. Some of them will change three times in a few km which is understandable if the roads wheren't stright but these are well planned roads.
In most parts of the world the "slow lane" is the rightmost lane on the highway. Acceleration lanes merge into the slow lane and sometimes in cities the acceleration lane will just continue to the next exit. The process for the old granny driver is to fly down the highway at 20mph (30kmh) and make it into the slow lane. Once there they only have to change lanes once to get to an exit. In Victoria when they want to reduce the traffic from 4 lanes to 3, they end the slow lane right after an exit so the granny driver had to merge right at about the time where everyone who waits for the last second for the exit is merging left. The result is the slow drivers now go all the way to the second middle lane so on a 4 lane road with a 100k limit you have the left two lanes moving quick (90 to 100), the next lane to the right moving very slow (often slower than 80km) and the right lane going 95 being blocked by someone that thinks they are goin 99.9 so they don't get a ticket. That system is messed up and vicroads has stats to prove it.
Junk DNA is just part of the data segment.
If your disassembling the code of a program, the data is just junk that gets in the way until you figure out what the code is doing. Of course the ascii comments in data may be useful and from what I can tell, DNA doesn't seem to have any text strings in it so for now its just junk.
I haven't looked into the pattern matching stuff the bio guys are using but its very handy to be able to take a bit of a program and find out where the common libraries functions are hiding but since they have references that get fixed up by the linker, every version will be different. I still haven't found a good simple algorithm that will go though a binary and try to find a match to an existing function. The ideal situation would be able to have a small table of function fingerprints and then have another small bit of code be abel to search a binary for those fingerprints and be able to say "printf is at 0x4564 and vsprintf is at 0x498c" and have it work with any CPU.
Car in europe have a regulatory requirement for an emergency brake. The US rules requires a parking brake which will stop the car form high way speeds but you get better deacceleration just hitting the clutch (if you have one)
747's are drive by plumbing not drive by wire. There is only one Boeing commercial plane thats drive by wire and its got the same hull losses as Airbus fly by wire planes. The hull losses on fly by wire are higher than the old hydraulic systems. I don't think I want a fly by wire car either when the old stuff works so well.