Basically, in order to demonstrate anything useful, this thing needs to be hooked up to a dynamometer and have a load applied. A laboratory dynamometer (and surely MIT has one of these available) can apply variable load and measure the torque and power output. At the moment it doesn't seem to have any external load applied, it is just a free wheeling device with self coupling via the various magnets etc. In free wheeling mode there may well be ways to remove hysteresis and braking effects by the coupling. But this is irrelevent in the context of all the speculation on this device as a "perpetual motion machine" or even a more efficient motor.
Until the performance under load is verifed, any claims as to enhanced efficiency are about as meaningless as the claims in spam email about *enhancement*.
He was convinced the puzzle was insoluble and put up a million pounds, which was won a few months later.
Clearly someone with more money than sense. If his analysis of the eternity puzzle is anything to go by I don't think anyone need take any notice of his gibbered ravings about climate change.
Were we the only ones to have this initial picture of an arm wrestling robot being some hulking great mechanical monstrosity, with hydraulic cylinders and actuators, heavy drive shafts and such, sort of thing that would be built on "Scrap Heap Challenge".
I don't complain, I just run emacs/auctex and type
C-c C-e enu to insert the enumerate environment
to insert a new item in that environment
and C-c C-f C-t to insert the typewriter font.
All this without having to take my hands off the keyboard. If I want to use the mouse I can get the same things off of menus, which happen to indicate the keyboard shortcuts as well, so you eventually learn them.
Useful first exercise - cubic equation solver
on
Short Coding Projects?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I do numerical modelling for process engineering and my first programming exercise with a new language is to write a cubic equation solver based on that in the Numerical Recipies books. This exercises all of the basics, particularly math funtions (square roots, powers and trigenometry) as well as basic conditionals. The resulting code is actually useful in my work - I now have versions in Fortran (the original NR Fortran book didnt actually supply code), C, C++, Java, Tcl, and Python!
On a related note the very first significant program I ever wrote was as an exercise in Fortran programming on punched cards - a quadratic equation solver. Most of the same elements were there - mathematical functions and conditionals, with the additional complication of requiring formatted output - you had to decide if the roots were real or imaginary and print them in a suitably formatted way, so the exercise also taught you how to do output of strings. I seem to remember it took about three days to complete the exercise, but in those days of submitting batches of punched cards the compile - run - debug cycle was 24 hours!
Emacs has exactly this sort of feature in its buffer selection menu. If you have a large number of buffers open, it will group them by mode in a menu for buffer selection (so for example, all c-code buffers are grouped for one submenu, all text buffers in a separate submenu, all python buffers, all TeX buffers etc)
On the other hand if only a few buffers are open, then you are presented with a single list.
You can even customize the behaviour to determine the point at which this splitting will take place.
This has been done using expect,a language mainly used for talking to interactive programs. It has a feature that it can pretend to be a human (and thus have an irregular and slow typing speed). This is used for the beer program, which comes as a demo with expect. (If you have Tcl installed you probably have it)
The final verse in one run
11 botqle off baer oc tbe wakl, 1 botplo of beer, take onne da, pass itt arounm, 0 yotglees oof beeeer on tte walll.
beer.exp:
# 99 bottles of beer on the wall, Expect-style # Author: Don Libes
Unlike programs (http://www.ionet.net/~timtroyr/funhouse/beer.html ) which merely print out the 99 verses, this one SIMULATES a human typing the beer song. Like a real human, typing mistakes and timing becomes more erratic with each beer - the final verse is barely recognizable and it is really like watching a typist hunt and peck while drunk.
Finally, no humans actually sing all 99 verses - particularly when drunk. In reality, they occasionally lose their place (or just get bored) and skip verses, so this program does likewise.
Because the output is timed, just looking at the output isn't enough - you really have to see the program running to appreciate it. Nonetheless, for convenience, output from one run (it's different every time of course) can be found in the file beer.exp.out But it won't show the erratic timing; you have to run it for that.
# For an even fancier version, see http://expect.nist.gov/scripts/superbeer.exp
I live in Sweden and have a mobile phone service that provides internet access as well. I just did a two month trip to New Zealand/Australia, and visited Thailand and a few other places along the way.
The phone is an Ericsson 888, which has a built-in IR port, and its the only use I've ever found for the IR port on the computer (Toshiba Satellite). It took a bit of fiddling to get the computer to talk to the phone, and you occasionally had to reboot windows cos the IR port just dies, but otherwise it works well enough - 9600 is OK for downloading email.
Never any problems actually accessing the internet and downloading web pages or email via POP. Halfway through the trip they changed the configuration on the SMTP server (to prevent forwarding presumably), so I couldn't send SMTP email any more, and noone could figure out what was going on. I ended up using a HTML emailer in the meantime, which was just fine for keeping in touch with the family.
GSM works well pretty much anywhere on the planet, except of course the USA and Japan. It was pretty convenient to be able to stick the phone down by the laptop and connect up while sitting by a swimming pool at a hotel in Bangkok!
Silicon Graphics employs hundreds of engineers, makes a wide range of workstations and high powered number cruncher, and has in general a staggering breadth and depth of knowledge in hardware and software
Their present market cap is 1.427 billion. (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=sgi&d=t)
Red Hat have... some linux stuff. No profits, a lot of competitors. The market values them at 3.659 billion (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=rhat&d=t)
Even VA systems, in spite of their drop, are still worth over a billion dollars.
Lets keep things in perspective. It'd be my guess that SGI could marshall a lot more talent than the rest of the linux upstarts put together. I'll believe that santity has returned when the Red Hats and VA's drop to maybe 10% of SGI. (Or SGI rises appropriately).
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Basically, in order to demonstrate anything useful, this thing needs to be hooked up to a dynamometer and have a load applied. A laboratory dynamometer (and surely MIT has one of these available) can apply variable load and measure the torque and power output. At the moment it doesn't seem to have any external load applied, it is just a free wheeling device with self coupling via the various magnets etc. In free wheeling mode there may well be ways to remove hysteresis and braking effects by the coupling. But this is irrelevent in the context of all the speculation on this device as a "perpetual motion machine" or even a more efficient motor.
Until the performance under load is verifed, any claims as to enhanced efficiency are about as meaningless as the claims in spam email about *enhancement*.
Monckton is the guy who came up with the Eternity Puzzle.
http://www.mathpuzzle.com/eternity.html/
He was convinced the puzzle was insoluble and put up a million pounds, which was won a few months later.
Clearly someone with more money than sense. If his analysis of the eternity puzzle is anything to go by I don't think anyone need take any notice of his gibbered ravings about climate change.
Douglas Adams had a bit to say on this:
http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html
He makes the point that 12V is a very convenient voltage, in that we can get it from car batteries.
Well Rowan Atkinson as Blackadder certainly does, when discussing wealthy relatives:
"...they have one great redeeming feature -- their wallets.
More capacious than an elephant's scrotum, and just as difficult
to get your hands on"
Were we the only ones to have this initial picture of an arm wrestling robot being some hulking great mechanical monstrosity, with hydraulic cylinders and actuators, heavy drive shafts and such, sort of thing that would be built on "Scrap Heap Challenge".
I don't complain, I just run emacs/auctex and type
C-c C-e enu to insert the enumerate environment
to insert a new item in that environment
and C-c C-f C-t to insert the typewriter font.
All this without having to take my hands off the keyboard. If I want to use the mouse I can get the same things off of menus, which happen to indicate the keyboard shortcuts as well, so you eventually learn them.
I do numerical modelling for process engineering and my first programming exercise with a new language is to write a cubic equation solver based on that in the Numerical Recipies books. This exercises all of the basics, particularly math funtions (square roots, powers and trigenometry) as well as basic conditionals. The resulting code is actually useful in my work - I now have versions in Fortran (the original NR Fortran book didnt actually supply code), C, C++, Java, Tcl, and Python!
On a related note the very first significant program I ever wrote was as an exercise in Fortran programming on punched cards - a quadratic equation solver. Most of the same elements were there - mathematical functions and conditionals, with the additional complication of requiring formatted output - you had to decide if the roots were real or imaginary and print them in a suitably formatted way, so the exercise also taught you how to do output of strings. I seem to remember it took about three days to complete the exercise, but in those days of submitting batches of punched cards the compile - run - debug cycle was 24 hours!
Emacs has exactly this sort of feature in its buffer selection menu. If you have a large number of buffers open, it will group them by mode in a menu for buffer selection (so for example, all c-code buffers are grouped for one submenu, all text buffers in a separate submenu, all python buffers, all TeX buffers etc)
On the other hand if only a few buffers are open, then you are presented with a single list.
You can even customize the behaviour to determine the point at which this splitting will take place.
The final verse in one run
11 botqle off baer oc tbe wakl,
1 botplo of beer,
take onne da, pass itt arounm,
0 yotglees oof beeeer on tte walll.
1. These really don't hold that much - 8 MB can't even store very large word-processing/spreadsheet documents
Um, which word processor do you use? The entire TeX source for Knuths "TeX Book" occupies about 1.3Mb.
8Mb would be enough to store all the writing and programming I do in a year, in source form anyway.
I live in Sweden and have a mobile phone service that provides internet access as well. I just did a two month trip to New Zealand/Australia, and visited Thailand and a few other places along the way.
The phone is an Ericsson 888, which has a built-in IR port, and its the only use I've ever found for the IR port on the computer (Toshiba Satellite). It took a bit of fiddling to get the computer to talk to the phone, and you occasionally had to reboot windows cos the IR port just dies, but otherwise it works well enough - 9600 is OK for downloading email.
Never any problems actually accessing the internet and downloading web pages or email via POP. Halfway through the trip they changed the configuration on the SMTP server (to prevent forwarding presumably), so I couldn't send SMTP email any more, and noone could figure out what was going on. I ended up using a HTML emailer in the meantime, which was just fine for keeping in touch with the family.
GSM works well pretty much anywhere on the planet, except of course the USA and Japan. It was pretty convenient to be able to stick the phone down by the laptop and connect up while sitting by a swimming pool at a hotel in Bangkok!
Lets take an example a little closer to home...
Silicon Graphics employs hundreds of engineers, makes a wide range of workstations and high powered number cruncher, and has in general a staggering breadth and depth of knowledge in hardware and software
Their present market cap is 1.427 billion.
(http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=sgi&d=t)
Red Hat have... some linux stuff. No profits, a lot of competitors.
The market values them at 3.659 billion
(http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=rhat&d=t)
Even VA systems, in spite of their drop, are still worth over a billion dollars.
Lets keep things in perspective. It'd be my guess that SGI could marshall a lot more talent than the rest of the linux upstarts put together. I'll believe that santity has returned when the Red Hats and VA's drop to maybe 10% of SGI. (Or SGI rises appropriately).
Theres a long way to go yet.