One of the most time consuming parts of a short journey is getting the passenger doors aligned with the port-side gangways. Unlike airports, it's not the gangways that move to the plane, it's the vessel that must align with the portside. Sometimes the portside gangway can move up or down, but many times, the crew have to tie down these mini gangways with ropes when the tides and ballast tanks aren't enough. It takes several minutes of maneuvering to get the ship aligned with the dockside, sometimes even having to reverse and try again, especially in heavy swells. If they could get GPS down to several inches, combined with the sideways movement that many catamarans have, docking could be done automatically.
I've stayed in hotels where i don't know the local street layout. Keeping track of the position of the Sun or Moon when you go out to a restaurant or cafe is one simple way of telling which direction to go back home. Though this only works for short trips. Streets are usually numbered away from downtown. so if the street numbers are going downwards, you are heading into town. Streets that branch in an angle less than 90 degrees also point towards downtown. Satellite dishes point towards South. Moss usually grows on the North side of trees.
The original railways lines in the UK were formed by making lots of small connections at first and then connecting them up later. London's underground started off as a tunnel going underneath the Thames and avoiding the smell and muck on the bridge. Then others started building more tunnels, eventually they kept extending all the tunnels until they started going over land as well.
Dynamic Link Library or Shared Object. In the early days of UNIX, it was found that the huge amount of space was being used by GUI applications and command line programs statically linked to common libraries like standard IO, sockets, X-windows, GUI's, maths and crypto libraries. Huge amounts of disk space were being used to stored duplicate copies of compiled code. So they figured that it would be more cost effective to dynamically link at run-time instead of a compile-time with the bonus that they could be compiled into relocatable code only loaded into system when needed.
If you run "ldd" on a program, you will see all the libraries needed for that program.
By separating the library files from the applications, any bugs or problems could be fixed through a simple upgrade. The downside is that someone can rootkit a system by replacing a DLL used by applications that need system access.
I've noticed that - my old laptop (2.8Ghz dual-core with nvidia Ti5600) used to be able to run Google Streetview quite comfortably. Now, it just got slower and slower as new version of Firefox came out. My assumption was that the software was using a larger cache size or something.
Intel still has all those "extensions" like AVX, multi-core, Thread-Building-Blocks and hyper-threading", but there just isn't that many applications that require an overclocked 4GHZ twelve core vector accelerated floating-point unless it's some kind of supercomputing application. That's where they make most of their money. The markups on the latest high-end processors are usually three times that of the medium range ones.
Astronomers have found ways to get around atmospheric interference. Amateur or pro-amateur astronomers used lucky imaging. They use a high-speed CCD to catch multiple images of a particular target and keep the ones that are in focus (or even just the bits of image that have a high level of sharpness). Then they can combine these together to make a perfect picture.
With the larger telescopes, they have adaptive optics to compensate for the refraction caused by air turbulence. They fire off a laser into the scape to determine the light distortion. They then adjust the direction of all those dozens of smaller mirrors to keep the image in focus.That allows ground based telescopes to rival the Hubble telescope.
Back in the 1980's during the "Information Technology revolution", my high school used to have typing classes using big clunky mechanical typewriters. In a small advanced teaching subject room, they had a single LCD line word processor. Along side with an Apple ][ with dot matrix printer and color TV/monitor.
Everyone was really scared about what it meant. Some national companies had a 3:1 worker/manager ratio. Director : 3 x managers, 3 x engineers. With every department moving away from their own separate databases to a single national database, the workload was reduced by vast amount (no more paperwork being shuffled across in, out and pending trays to different departments). All those management jobs just disappeared.
When the first computers arrived with keyboards, email, word-processors and spreadsheets, some managers felt they were "just becoming glorified typists".
"It's humid today" isn't exactly a scientific measurement. I'd expect some kind of electronic measurement with barometer, thermometer and hygrometer. You can get an all in one wireless system with automatic logging for less than £40. If you want to splurge out on a bit more (£130), you can get a wireless weather station that connects via the internet to a smartphone. There are probably others with more features and functionality, but it was the first I found.
Parents just want to make sure their children "get into computers" because that is where the money is (working in IT compared to working at McDonalds). Computers are programmed, so therefore their children must learn "computer programming".
With high school education with BASIC, the teachers would start from scratch, introduce variables, arrays, strings, input and output, arithmetic, for/while loops, conditional logic, and each of those topics would be covered in a week. At the end of the course, you would be lucky to have got onto drawing graphs in ASCII. At the same time, the business community would make sure that you got to learn about mainframes, batch processing, punched card, magnetic tape and databases.
At home, the programmable toys in the past were BigTrak\and some robots you could build with technical Lego. With computer software, there was Logo and printer/plotters. The first thing anyone did was to run the supplied tutorials or copy some code in from the instruction book. Then they would combine bits from the different tutorials to make their own programs. Eventually, they could write an entire program from scratch once they knew what all the different commands would do. Local newsagents would have racks of computer magazines with guides on sprite programming, MIDI sound programming, generating mazes, player-missile graphics, how to connect sensors, weather stations and just about anything else.
It would make more sense to give students a catalog of home learning kits and let them order a couple for free. Anything taught in schools at a regimented pace is going to bore some students, and others still won't be able to keep up.
I don't think anyone is allowed near those telescopes. They don't have to as everything is accessed through the internet. Each astronomer gets funding for a project. A portion of the funding goes to booking time on a telescope. They specify the target, the time, the telescope, pictures are taken electronically via high-resolution CCD at the eyepiece of the telescope and placed on a server. There are some telescopes which are just continually recording data non-stop to high-capacity RAID array storage packs. When someone wants to investigate a particular object, they can retrieve all those images with that object in view.
In the earlier days, an astronomy student has to spend the entire evening in the observatory, aiming and targeting the telescope while taking photographs to be developed.
Your university principal has probably met the president/prime minister. The head of a university department has met the university principal. Your course lecturer has met the head of department. Your course lecturer you see some parts of the week.
Some systems work on detecting the direction the eyes are looking by measuring the shape of the pupil. Advertising and human-computer interaction people use eye-gaze detection systems that are used to measure how long and where a person is looking
Imagine if both Europe and the USA could build two large telescopes that could be combined together to form a stereoscopic telescope the size of the planet...
Sure you can block one IP address at a time. Then they'll switch to a range of IP addresses, then funnel *everything* through a single IP address with a proxy server. I got fed up of constantly seeing IP traffic sent out, so tried blocking things. I'm using Privacy Badger:
Safe Browsing also stores a mandatory preferences cookie on the computer which the US National Security Agency allegedly uses to identify individual computers for purposes of exploitation.
"Add-ons Blocklist: Firefox contacts Mozilla once per day to check for add-on information to check for malicious add-ons. This includes, for example: browser version, OS and version, locale, total number of requests, time of last request, time of day, IP address, and the list of add-ons you have installed. You can turn off metadata updates at any time, but it may leave you open to security vulnerabilities."
"To help display relevant snippets, Firefox sends Mozilla a monthly request to look up your location at a country level using your IP address. We then send that country level information back to Firefox, where it's stored locally. Firefox will then choose snippets to show you based on the locally stored country information."
Then Windows 10 will just start rotating through server IP address lists, using proxy servers, and doing just about everything else that Google does. They only have to get lucky once.
My parents used to have an aol.com dialup account, but they were forced to spend more and switch over to ADSL when AOL stopped providing dial-up modem pools. Still kept the old email account. With an old PC, their routine used to be; switch on PC, go into the kitchen, put the kettle on, put the toaster on, wait for the kettle to boil, wait for the toast to be ready, make some coffee, make the toast, have breakfast, go back to the PC, wait for the login screen to appear, dial into AOL, wait for a modem to be free, feed the cats, feed the dog, wait for the email to download, read email, send reply, do stuff for the rest of the day.
The Atari 800 used to have 9 pin sockets for the game controllers. These matched RS232 connectors. We replaced the cheap plastic moulded connectors with metal RS232 connectors. Only downside was that touching the metal case against the lower pins of the socket would reset the machine.
That mistake was duplicated with the desktop PC where the EGA connector was also 9 pin. You could end up plugging a monitor into the RS232 port.
Then there's SCART, where the cable was attached to the socket diagonally, constantly putting pressure that would pull the socket out.
That's funny. Give them a C++ library with classes with constructors, algebraic operators, and they'll still want to create their own foundation classes that have the variables but no operators, requiring everyone else to have to work around that logic.
I know IBM had water cooled mainframes. My first workplace had to call in a plumber to get the cooling system fixed. One homeless tried to build a shelter around the compute room cooling fans in the car-park. Figured he could build a litte hut and capture all the warm air.
I feel the same with trying to find a good font for editing source code. I like the zero's with the dot in the middle (Andale Mono), the dashes/minus signs should stretch all the way across (Courier New) and just about join up, not some 50/50 dashed line (Andale mono). The characters should fill most of the space in glyph box. Some fonts are just too square (Unispace), others are just too thin (TW-Sung), too small (TlwgMono Bold), too narrow (TakaoMincho). What looks good in the font selection window, looks awful in a command line (eg. Monospace 12)
Perhaps the font file options need to be more configurable - allow the user to select vertical/horizontal scaling and distances between characters rather than just like it/lump it with a particular font.
I was watching some videos on parallel processing. One quote that I remember was that "cores are the transistors of today". Four decades ago, a CPU like a 6502 would have 3510 transistors and was the cheapest on the market, pulling down prices on all the other competitors. A high-end GPU board like an Nvidia Titan will have 2880+ cores. Going by transistors sizes alone, an entire GPU core will fit inside the space of a single 6502 logic gate. It's going to be easier to add more cores as chip sizes get smaller than it is to up the clock speed.
Intel could afford to crank up the juice to get better performance, because their CPU's were always tethered to the mains power supply. Floating-point performance was where their mojo came from. First they managed to get a floating-point unit integrated with the CPU (80486), then they added SIMD instructions (SSE, AVX) and invented massive cooling systems (water cooling with double fans and a radiator grill).
turkeyfish is suggesting that the TCP/IP sockets layer attempts to cache all the data being sent. Unfortunately, this isn't going to work because the reason the application stalls is because the TCP/IP layer is attempting to request a DHCP address from the network (which isn't going to happen), look up the address of a particular hostname (which isn't going to happen either), then stalling again when it tries to open a synchronised two-way connection with the desired host (which isn't going to happen as well).
Many roads now have solar powered signs. The solar panels are placed up at the height of a truck container, so there's not likely to be much light lost.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most time consuming parts of a short journey is getting the passenger doors aligned with the port-side gangways. Unlike airports, it's not the gangways that move to the plane, it's the vessel that must align with the portside. Sometimes the portside gangway can move up or down, but many times, the crew have to tie down these mini gangways with ropes when the tides and ballast tanks aren't enough. It takes several minutes of maneuvering to get the ship aligned with the dockside, sometimes even having to reverse and try again, especially in heavy swells. If they could get GPS down to several inches, combined with the sideways movement that many catamarans have, docking could be done automatically.
I've stayed in hotels where i don't know the local street layout. Keeping track of the position of the Sun or Moon when you go out to a restaurant or cafe is one simple way of telling which direction to go back home. Though this only works for short trips. Streets are usually numbered away from downtown. so if the street numbers are going downwards, you are heading into town. Streets that branch in an angle less than 90 degrees also point towards downtown. Satellite dishes point towards South. Moss usually grows on the North side of trees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM...
The original railways lines in the UK were formed by making lots of small connections at first and then connecting them up later. London's underground started off as a tunnel going underneath the Thames and avoiding the smell and muck on the bridge. Then others started building more tunnels, eventually they kept extending all the tunnels until they started going over land as well.
Dynamic Link Library or Shared Object. In the early days of UNIX, it was found that the huge amount of space was being used by GUI applications and command line programs statically linked to common libraries like standard IO, sockets, X-windows, GUI's, maths and crypto libraries. Huge amounts of disk space were being used to stored duplicate copies of compiled code. So they figured that it would be more cost effective to dynamically link at run-time instead of a compile-time with the bonus that they could be compiled into relocatable code only loaded into system when needed.
If you run "ldd" on a program, you will see all the libraries needed for that program.
By separating the library files from the applications, any bugs or problems could be fixed through a simple upgrade. The downside is that someone can rootkit a system by replacing a DLL used by applications that need system access.
I've noticed that - my old laptop (2.8Ghz dual-core with nvidia Ti5600) used to be able to run Google Streetview quite comfortably. Now, it just got slower and slower as new version of Firefox came out. My assumption was that the software was using a larger cache size or something.
Intel still has all those "extensions" like AVX, multi-core, Thread-Building-Blocks and hyper-threading", but there just isn't that many applications that require an overclocked 4GHZ twelve core vector accelerated floating-point unless it's some kind of supercomputing application. That's where they make most of their money. The markups on the latest high-end processors are usually three times that of the medium range ones.
Astronomers have found ways to get around atmospheric interference. Amateur or pro-amateur astronomers used lucky imaging. They use a high-speed CCD to catch multiple images of a particular target and keep the ones that are in focus (or even just the bits of image that have a high level of sharpness). Then they can combine these together to make a perfect picture.
With the larger telescopes, they have adaptive optics to compensate for the refraction caused by air turbulence. They fire off a laser into the scape to determine the light distortion. They then adjust the direction of all those dozens of smaller mirrors to keep the image in focus.That allows ground based telescopes to rival the Hubble telescope.
http://www.nature.com/news/ast...
Back in the 1980's during the "Information Technology revolution", my high school used to have typing classes using big clunky mechanical typewriters. In a small advanced teaching subject room, they had a single LCD line word processor. Along side with an Apple ][ with dot matrix printer and color TV/monitor.
Everyone was really scared about what it meant. Some national companies had a 3:1 worker/manager ratio. Director : 3 x managers, 3 x engineers. With every department moving away from their own separate databases to a single national database, the workload was reduced by vast amount (no more paperwork being shuffled across in, out and pending trays to different departments). All those management jobs just disappeared.
When the first computers arrived with keyboards, email, word-processors and spreadsheets, some managers felt they were "just becoming glorified typists".
"It's humid today" isn't exactly a scientific measurement. I'd expect some kind of electronic measurement with barometer, thermometer and hygrometer. You can get an all in one wireless system with automatic logging for less than £40. If you want to splurge out on a bit more (£130), you can get a wireless weather station that connects via the internet to a smartphone. There are probably others with more features and functionality, but it was the first I found.
Parents just want to make sure their children "get into computers" because that is where the money is (working in IT compared to working at McDonalds). Computers are programmed, so therefore their children must learn "computer programming".
With high school education with BASIC, the teachers would start from scratch, introduce variables, arrays, strings, input and output, arithmetic, for/while loops, conditional logic, and each of those topics would be covered in a week. At the end of the course, you would be lucky to have got onto drawing graphs in ASCII. At the same time, the business community would make sure that you got to learn about mainframes, batch processing, punched card, magnetic tape and databases.
At home, the programmable toys in the past were BigTrak\and some robots you could build with technical Lego. With computer software, there was Logo and printer/plotters. The first thing anyone did was to run the supplied tutorials or copy some code in from the instruction book. Then they would combine bits from the different tutorials to make their own programs. Eventually, they could write an entire program from scratch once they knew what all the different commands would do. Local newsagents would have racks of computer magazines with guides on sprite programming, MIDI sound programming, generating mazes, player-missile graphics, how to connect sensors, weather stations and just about anything else.
It would make more sense to give students a catalog of home learning kits and let them order a couple for free. Anything taught in schools at a regimented pace is going to bore some students, and others still won't be able to keep up.
I don't think anyone is allowed near those telescopes. They don't have to as everything is accessed through the internet. Each astronomer gets funding for a project. A portion of the funding goes to booking time on a telescope. They specify the target, the time, the telescope, pictures are taken electronically via high-resolution CCD at the eyepiece of the telescope and placed on a server. There are some telescopes which are just continually recording data non-stop to high-capacity RAID array storage packs. When someone wants to investigate a particular object, they can retrieve all those images with that object in view.
In the earlier days, an astronomy student has to spend the entire evening in the observatory, aiming and targeting the telescope while taking photographs to be developed.
Your university principal has probably met the president/prime minister. The head of a university department has met the university principal. Your course lecturer has met the head of department. Your course lecturer you see some parts of the week.
Some systems work on detecting the direction the eyes are looking by measuring the shape of the pupil. Advertising and human-computer interaction people use eye-gaze detection systems that are used to measure how long and where a person is looking
Here's a list of the largest telescopes in space and on the ground:
http://phys.org/news/2015-01-b...
The diagram is probably the most informative part of the document:
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/csz...
Imagine if both Europe and the USA could build two large telescopes that could be combined together to form a stereoscopic telescope the size of the planet...
Sure you can block one IP address at a time. Then they'll switch to a range of IP addresses, then funnel *everything* through a single IP address with a proxy server. I got fed up of constantly seeing IP traffic sent out, so tried blocking things. I'm using Privacy Badger:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Safe Browsing also stores a mandatory preferences cookie on the computer which the US National Security Agency allegedly uses to identify individual computers for purposes of exploitation.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/...
"Add-ons Blocklist: Firefox contacts Mozilla once per day to check for add-on information to check for malicious add-ons. This includes, for example: browser version, OS and version, locale, total number of requests, time of last request, time of day, IP address, and the list of add-ons you have installed. You can turn off metadata updates at any time, but it may leave you open to security vulnerabilities."
"To help display relevant snippets, Firefox sends Mozilla a monthly request to look up your location at a country level using your IP address. We then send that country level information back to Firefox, where it's stored locally. Firefox will then choose snippets to show you based on the locally stored country information."
Then Windows 10 will just start rotating through server IP address lists, using proxy servers, and doing just about everything else that Google does. They only have to get lucky once.
My parents used to have an aol.com dialup account, but they were forced to spend more and switch over to ADSL when AOL stopped providing dial-up modem pools. Still kept the old email account. With an old PC, their routine used to be; switch on PC, go into the kitchen, put the kettle on, put the toaster on, wait for the kettle to boil, wait for the toast to be ready, make some coffee, make the toast, have breakfast, go back to the PC, wait for the login screen to appear, dial into AOL, wait for a modem to be free, feed the cats, feed the dog, wait for the email to download, read email, send reply, do stuff for the rest of the day.
The Atari 800 used to have 9 pin sockets for the game controllers. These matched RS232 connectors. We replaced the cheap plastic moulded connectors with metal RS232 connectors. Only downside was that touching the metal case against the lower pins of the socket would reset the machine.
That mistake was duplicated with the desktop PC where the EGA connector was also 9 pin. You could end up plugging a monitor into the RS232 port.
Then there's SCART, where the cable was attached to the socket diagonally, constantly putting pressure that would pull the socket out.
That's funny. Give them a C++ library with classes with constructors, algebraic operators, and they'll still want to create their own foundation classes that have the variables but no operators, requiring everyone else to have to work around that logic.
I know IBM had water cooled mainframes. My first workplace had to call in a plumber to get the cooling system fixed. One homeless tried to build a shelter around the compute room cooling fans in the car-park. Figured he could build a litte hut and capture all the warm air.
There is the "lynx" web browser. That doesn't allow images to be viewed, so it's very basic.
I feel the same with trying to find a good font for editing source code. I like the zero's with the dot in the middle (Andale Mono), the dashes/minus signs should stretch all the way across (Courier New) and just about join up, not some 50/50 dashed line (Andale mono). The characters should fill most of the space in glyph box. Some fonts are just too square (Unispace), others are just too thin (TW-Sung), too small (TlwgMono Bold), too narrow (TakaoMincho). What looks good in the font selection window, looks awful in a command line (eg. Monospace 12)
Perhaps the font file options need to be more configurable - allow the user to select vertical/horizontal scaling and distances between characters rather than just like it/lump it with a particular font.
I was watching some videos on parallel processing. One quote that I remember was that "cores are the transistors of today". Four decades ago, a CPU like a 6502 would have 3510 transistors and was the cheapest on the market, pulling down prices on all the other competitors. A high-end GPU board like an Nvidia Titan will have 2880+ cores. Going by transistors sizes alone, an entire GPU core will fit inside the space of a single 6502 logic gate. It's going to be easier to add more cores as chip sizes get smaller than it is to up the clock speed.
Intel could afford to crank up the juice to get better performance, because their CPU's were always tethered to the mains power supply. Floating-point performance was where their mojo came from. First they managed to get a floating-point unit integrated with the CPU (80486), then they added SIMD instructions (SSE, AVX) and invented massive cooling systems (water cooling with double fans and a radiator grill).
turkeyfish is suggesting that the TCP/IP sockets layer attempts to cache all the data being sent. Unfortunately, this isn't going to work because the reason the application stalls is because the TCP/IP layer is attempting to request a DHCP address from the network (which isn't going to happen), look up the address of a particular hostname (which isn't going to happen either), then stalling again when it tries to open a synchronised two-way connection with the desired host (which isn't going to happen as well).
Many roads now have solar powered signs. The solar panels are placed up at the height of a truck container, so there's not likely to be much light lost.