Re:Excessive Complexity for a Simple Solution
on
Brave New Ballot
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Why the hell do you want to take a recipt out the door with you? That's a terrible idea.
A much better idea is to have it print out a short slip with your choices clearly printed on there. You then drop that slip in a box on the way out and if there is any question as to the accuracy of the machines the pollworkers just have to crack open the box and go through all of the recipts. After the voting is complete and the elections are done, a few random counties should have their boxes double checked as well, just to verify that nothing is screwey with any of the electronic tabluation equipment.
It happens. The NSA has this 200 page book on how to lock systems down. Needless to say once you're done with all of the lockdown proceedures almost nothing works anymore on the box.
Global temperatures have been monitored by satellite since 1979 with the Microwave Sounding Units (MSU) flying on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) TIROS-N series of polar-orbiting weather satellites. Beforehand it was less accurate and relied on regularly recording the weather at various points around the globe. For times before we did that (1800s and earlier) they have to use indirect methods including tree ring counting, ice core sampling, and other such techniques.
Which is great except that most systems I run into that have this problem are classified/protected systems so there's no way I'm installing any third party applications on them. You gotta use what the OS comes with.
Basic? How in the world is someone supposed to figure out what ACLs they need to set when the application just spits out a "permission error" and quits? Oh, maybe it'll be in the system log? (checks) Nope, by law no useful information is allowed to be put in the system log. If a program wants to write something to the log, it must be of the form "error: Everything is OK" or "error: giving up" and must be repeated 100 times a second.
My experiance is that if a Windows application dies due to permission trouble, unless you have some sort of diagnostic that no regular user has ever heard of hooked to the application, your chances of figuring out exactly what permission it's having trouble with is nill.
500W is enormous for a console. How in the world do you expect them to keep it cool? The whole thing isn't all that big. If it pulls more than 120 I'll be surprised, and even that's pretty high. Once you get above 100W just cooling the box becomes a major problem--not that Sony hasn't had cooling problems with their v.1 Playstations in the past or anything, but that would be excessive.
Hopefully the F@H client won't use the Blu-ray drive, and will have an option to disable the graphics (the TV will be off or not tuned to the PS3 anyway, no point in running the secondary graphics chip). The Cell will be sucking down plenty of juice, but it's actually doing work and helping to stop cancer. You're basically just donating money (in the form of your power bill) to cancer researchers. Weather or not you want to do this is up to you.
Wait, you're saying that you "spent a fortune" on a new graphics card because XP wasn't supporting your Voodoo 2 and you're saying you didn't get much of a performance boost? If you were only doing 2D Raster stuff, why did you buy such an expensive card? You could have picked up a well supported older model low end Geforce for almost nothing instead, and it still would have been quite a bit faster than your old Voodoo for 3D work.
Honestly, most of these pishing operations that I've seen are real lowbrow affairs. Proper engineering isn't exactly a common feature. Most of the time they don't care if 50% of the passwords (or more) don't work, all they need are a few hits to get what they need.
I consider the "instant on" to be valid when it comes on just as fast as the incandesant. Since incandesant bulbs need a fraction of a second to heat up, one could argue that they're not "instant on" either.:)
Another good measure is if the bulb is on before your finger leaves the switch.
I take it you're not in the US? In the US Heat Pumps are all over the place. The downside of them is that they can't be used in environment that are exceptionally cold (Canada for instance).
Many other countries don't have them because their cities are old and retrofitting central air into an old house is expensive and difficult (especially if your house is listed as historic).
Are you sure you're using modern CFLs? To your points:
1. Flicker is a non-issue on my bulbs. I can't percieve it at all, neither can anyone else. Some of them are surprised to learn that I have CFLs in my lamps and fixtures.
2. Buzz is a non-issue too.
3. Light quality is tougher to measure. While it looks fine to me, I wouldn't be surprised to see that it's missing certain portions of the spectrum. However, this is one of the things where brand matters a lot. The bad CFLs have absolutely terrible color quality (I remember getting a two pack from Wal*Mart once and putting them side by side and seeing a massive color difference.
4. Small CFLs are available for candelabra style lamps. I have them in my house. They were really helpful in one fixture where it trapped too much heat and burnt up regular bulbs in only a couple of months. Home Depot sells them, although they're not good about keeping them in stock.
5. Most CFLs sold these days are instant on. Older instant-ons used to start putting out 40% of their light immediately and warm up to 100% over the course of a minute or two, but modern ones come on at 90-100% right away.
6. I've only been using them for 5 years now, but in that time between 20 or so bulbs I've only had to replace one, and in that case the ballast had some sort of catastrophic failure. Incandesents don't last nearly as long.
Quality of manufacture matters a lot with CFLs. I've been rather happy with the Commercial Electric ones sold by Home Depot. GE ones last a while, but they took _forever_ to get instant on. Phillips ones I only use on the outside, and they seem to take longer than usual to warm up, but I have no complaints about their life yet. Lights of America sold by Wal*Mart is pure shit. A buddy of mine got several of those and none of them lasted more than 6 months, they also flickered, hummed, and had terrible light quality. The "instant-on" listed on their package was a total lie too.
Depends what you were going to do instead of building it. If you were going to use that time to start your own home business, then yeah, go ahead and buy the prebuilt one. If you were just going to watch TV or play WoW or something, then building it saves you money.
To be fair, things like computers and light bulbs are less efficent at heating the house than a heat pump, especially a modern heat pump. Anything that is just converting the energy to heat directly (every appliance in your house) does it at a rate of 1 energy unit consumed per 1 unit of heating. A heat pump can move upwards of 3 to 4 units of heat per every 1 unit of energy.
The problem with using base 10 math for stuff like that is that it doesn't divide evenly. How often do you convert units when talking about time? A fair bit if you're a researcher maybe, but for most people it's not very often at all. On the other hand, how often do you have to split segements of time in half, thirds, quarters, fifths, or even sixths? Quite a bit if you're like most people. Using 60s, 12s, and 24s a lot (perfect numbers) makes that problem easy. You almost never get messy decimals unless you're really breaking up your time weirdly.
As far as calibrating a new system of units (should you choose to go this route), remember that only the Day and the Year are really strongly correlated with our solar system. The Month has some correlation with the moon, but it's pretty inaccurate. Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Weeks, and to a lesser extent Months are all arbitrary.
Although to be fair, Jaime actually tested the movie myth they had set out to test, namely that spies in movies frequently climb around with magnets.
The vacuum pump rig that Adam had was definatly a better solution though. I still can't believe they tried to make his scrawny butt climb up the side of that huge building though.
On the other hand, if you find that their science is continually bad, perhaps you should step back for a second and re-examine your own science. I've gotten in a few arguments online where people go "The Mythbusters got it all wrong" and usually it's the case the the Mythbusters were much closer to the truth than the online folks. A good half of the time people just don't pay close enough attention and think they're testing something they're not.
For instance, earlier today I saw a guy online complain about how the busted the myth that shooting people with bullets will knock them back. He said that any police officer knows that when you shoot someone they get knocked down, but what he didn't realize was that the Mythbusters were testing if bullets could actually knock you back like in the movies (though plate glass windows, or even just literally pushing you back), not if someone shot with a bullet would fall down. I think the Mythbusters got it spot on, and they even did the math on the show to point out that the physics aren't with having a handgun bullet actually propel a person on planet Earth.
Normally when I read Slashdot, I read the comments page in nested mode from the top to the bottom. With the new system I have to constantly click to open up the threads which got old real quick. Given that you're loading the whole page anyway, it seems pointless to force me to click expand most of the comment sections.
What I'd really like is an option to have them all expanded by default, but allow me to close the comment blocks on discussions that are obviously going nowhere.
A lot of times it's worse than that. Around election time you always hear about the calls and pamphlets to the inner city folks that say "Don't forget to vote for on Friday!". Of course the election is on Thursday... It happens pretty much every time around here.
Yeah, I got put on one of those "sucker" lists once. I gave to the Fraternal Order of Police or something and suddenly I'm getting calls from the Fraternal Brotherhood of Police, the Policemans Fraternal Brotherhood, and whatnot. Each time they called after that I offered to pledge the minimum amount and then just sat on the mailers once they came. Pretty soon I was moved to the deadbeat list and the volume of calls dropped dramatically. If you read the pamphlet carefully, you'll notice that you aren't actually pledging anything at all over the phone, and you're under no obligation to actually pay them anything for sending you mail. I get a call from them about once every 9 - 12 months or so now, but each time I just pledge the minimum and then never send the envelope in. That seems to keep them off of your back.
IMHO, it's totally worth it to rent the cablemodem for $5 a month. In my experiance they only last about 6 months before going totally flaky (although the "remote diagnostics" the cable company does never find anything out of the ordinary) and having to be replaced. I even have the thing plugged into a Surge Protector/UPS and filter the cable line through it and they still crap out after 6 months.
OTOH, it might just be my lousy local cable company that always buys the absolute cheapest box possible, even if it's a total piece of crap.
I'd take that 660,000 figure with a grain of salt. Lindon Labs (the SL developers) are pretty loose with what they consider a "user". While it's not hard to find people online (there's a giant worldmap that shows where everybody is in the world), it doesn't take long to realize that even the people who are "online" are often AFK and just sitting in camping chairs. I seriously doubt they've ever had 660,000 online at once too, I think that's a count of the registered (and it's free to register!) accounts.
So does this mean Wikipedia simply won't be available in China? Seems to me that not bowing to the censors is a short ride to a permanent ban in the great firewall of China.
That article just wasted 2 whole minutes of my life. If you're brand new to the console/pc flamewar it'll give you the same arguments that everybody else has already heard a million times, but if not, don't bother.
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Why the hell do you want to take a recipt out the door with you? That's a terrible idea.
A much better idea is to have it print out a short slip with your choices clearly printed on there. You then drop that slip in a box on the way out and if there is any question as to the accuracy of the machines the pollworkers just have to crack open the box and go through all of the recipts. After the voting is complete and the elections are done, a few random counties should have their boxes double checked as well, just to verify that nothing is screwey with any of the electronic tabluation equipment.
It happens. The NSA has this 200 page book on how to lock systems down. Needless to say once you're done with all of the lockdown proceedures almost nothing works anymore on the box.
Global temperatures have been monitored by satellite since 1979 with the Microwave Sounding Units (MSU) flying on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) TIROS-N series of polar-orbiting weather satellites. Beforehand it was less accurate and relied on regularly recording the weather at various points around the globe. For times before we did that (1800s and earlier) they have to use indirect methods including tree ring counting, ice core sampling, and other such techniques.
Which is great except that most systems I run into that have this problem are classified/protected systems so there's no way I'm installing any third party applications on them. You gotta use what the OS comes with.
Basic? How in the world is someone supposed to figure out what ACLs they need to set when the application just spits out a "permission error" and quits? Oh, maybe it'll be in the system log? (checks) Nope, by law no useful information is allowed to be put in the system log. If a program wants to write something to the log, it must be of the form "error: Everything is OK" or "error: giving up" and must be repeated 100 times a second.
My experiance is that if a Windows application dies due to permission trouble, unless you have some sort of diagnostic that no regular user has ever heard of hooked to the application, your chances of figuring out exactly what permission it's having trouble with is nill.
500W is enormous for a console. How in the world do you expect them to keep it cool? The whole thing isn't all that big. If it pulls more than 120 I'll be surprised, and even that's pretty high. Once you get above 100W just cooling the box becomes a major problem--not that Sony hasn't had cooling problems with their v.1 Playstations in the past or anything, but that would be excessive.
Hopefully the F@H client won't use the Blu-ray drive, and will have an option to disable the graphics (the TV will be off or not tuned to the PS3 anyway, no point in running the secondary graphics chip). The Cell will be sucking down plenty of juice, but it's actually doing work and helping to stop cancer. You're basically just donating money (in the form of your power bill) to cancer researchers. Weather or not you want to do this is up to you.
Wait, you're saying that you "spent a fortune" on a new graphics card because XP wasn't supporting your Voodoo 2 and you're saying you didn't get much of a performance boost? If you were only doing 2D Raster stuff, why did you buy such an expensive card? You could have picked up a well supported older model low end Geforce for almost nothing instead, and it still would have been quite a bit faster than your old Voodoo for 3D work.
Honestly, most of these pishing operations that I've seen are real lowbrow affairs. Proper engineering isn't exactly a common feature. Most of the time they don't care if 50% of the passwords (or more) don't work, all they need are a few hits to get what they need.
Fortunatly most laptop manufacturers gave up that "feature" around the time Mhz ratings started hitting triple digits.
I consider the "instant on" to be valid when it comes on just as fast as the incandesant. Since incandesant bulbs need a fraction of a second to heat up, one could argue that they're not "instant on" either. :)
Another good measure is if the bulb is on before your finger leaves the switch.
I take it you're not in the US? In the US Heat Pumps are all over the place. The downside of them is that they can't be used in environment that are exceptionally cold (Canada for instance).
Many other countries don't have them because their cities are old and retrofitting central air into an old house is expensive and difficult (especially if your house is listed as historic).
Are you sure you're using modern CFLs? To your points:
1. Flicker is a non-issue on my bulbs. I can't percieve it at all, neither can anyone else. Some of them are surprised to learn that I have CFLs in my lamps and fixtures.
2. Buzz is a non-issue too.
3. Light quality is tougher to measure. While it looks fine to me, I wouldn't be surprised to see that it's missing certain portions of the spectrum. However, this is one of the things where brand matters a lot. The bad CFLs have absolutely terrible color quality (I remember getting a two pack from Wal*Mart once and putting them side by side and seeing a massive color difference.
4. Small CFLs are available for candelabra style lamps. I have them in my house. They were really helpful in one fixture where it trapped too much heat and burnt up regular bulbs in only a couple of months. Home Depot sells them, although they're not good about keeping them in stock.
5. Most CFLs sold these days are instant on. Older instant-ons used to start putting out 40% of their light immediately and warm up to 100% over the course of a minute or two, but modern ones come on at 90-100% right away.
6. I've only been using them for 5 years now, but in that time between 20 or so bulbs I've only had to replace one, and in that case the ballast had some sort of catastrophic failure. Incandesents don't last nearly as long.
Quality of manufacture matters a lot with CFLs. I've been rather happy with the Commercial Electric ones sold by Home Depot. GE ones last a while, but they took _forever_ to get instant on. Phillips ones I only use on the outside, and they seem to take longer than usual to warm up, but I have no complaints about their life yet. Lights of America sold by Wal*Mart is pure shit. A buddy of mine got several of those and none of them lasted more than 6 months, they also flickered, hummed, and had terrible light quality. The "instant-on" listed on their package was a total lie too.
Depends what you were going to do instead of building it. If you were going to use that time to start your own home business, then yeah, go ahead and buy the prebuilt one. If you were just going to watch TV or play WoW or something, then building it saves you money.
To be fair, things like computers and light bulbs are less efficent at heating the house than a heat pump, especially a modern heat pump. Anything that is just converting the energy to heat directly (every appliance in your house) does it at a rate of 1 energy unit consumed per 1 unit of heating. A heat pump can move upwards of 3 to 4 units of heat per every 1 unit of energy.
The problem with using base 10 math for stuff like that is that it doesn't divide evenly. How often do you convert units when talking about time? A fair bit if you're a researcher maybe, but for most people it's not very often at all. On the other hand, how often do you have to split segements of time in half, thirds, quarters, fifths, or even sixths? Quite a bit if you're like most people. Using 60s, 12s, and 24s a lot (perfect numbers) makes that problem easy. You almost never get messy decimals unless you're really breaking up your time weirdly.
As far as calibrating a new system of units (should you choose to go this route), remember that only the Day and the Year are really strongly correlated with our solar system. The Month has some correlation with the moon, but it's pretty inaccurate. Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Weeks, and to a lesser extent Months are all arbitrary.
It almost killed my wife to hear him repeatedly say pay-tent in one of the recent shows.
Sometimes I think they overdo the narration however. There are times when I wish he would just shut up and let Jaime or Adam get a word in edgewise.
Although to be fair, Jaime actually tested the movie myth they had set out to test, namely that spies in movies frequently climb around with magnets.
The vacuum pump rig that Adam had was definatly a better solution though. I still can't believe they tried to make his scrawny butt climb up the side of that huge building though.
On the other hand, if you find that their science is continually bad, perhaps you should step back for a second and re-examine your own science. I've gotten in a few arguments online where people go "The Mythbusters got it all wrong" and usually it's the case the the Mythbusters were much closer to the truth than the online folks. A good half of the time people just don't pay close enough attention and think they're testing something they're not.
For instance, earlier today I saw a guy online complain about how the busted the myth that shooting people with bullets will knock them back. He said that any police officer knows that when you shoot someone they get knocked down, but what he didn't realize was that the Mythbusters were testing if bullets could actually knock you back like in the movies (though plate glass windows, or even just literally pushing you back), not if someone shot with a bullet would fall down. I think the Mythbusters got it spot on, and they even did the math on the show to point out that the physics aren't with having a handgun bullet actually propel a person on planet Earth.
Normally when I read Slashdot, I read the comments page in nested mode from the top to the bottom. With the new system I have to constantly click to open up the threads which got old real quick. Given that you're loading the whole page anyway, it seems pointless to force me to click expand most of the comment sections.
What I'd really like is an option to have them all expanded by default, but allow me to close the comment blocks on discussions that are obviously going nowhere.
A lot of times it's worse than that. Around election time you always hear about the calls and pamphlets to the inner city folks that say "Don't forget to vote for on Friday!". Of course the election is on Thursday... It happens pretty much every time around here.
Yeah, I got put on one of those "sucker" lists once. I gave to the Fraternal Order of Police or something and suddenly I'm getting calls from the Fraternal Brotherhood of Police, the Policemans Fraternal Brotherhood, and whatnot. Each time they called after that I offered to pledge the minimum amount and then just sat on the mailers once they came. Pretty soon I was moved to the deadbeat list and the volume of calls dropped dramatically. If you read the pamphlet carefully, you'll notice that you aren't actually pledging anything at all over the phone, and you're under no obligation to actually pay them anything for sending you mail. I get a call from them about once every 9 - 12 months or so now, but each time I just pledge the minimum and then never send the envelope in. That seems to keep them off of your back.
IMHO, it's totally worth it to rent the cablemodem for $5 a month. In my experiance they only last about 6 months before going totally flaky (although the "remote diagnostics" the cable company does never find anything out of the ordinary) and having to be replaced. I even have the thing plugged into a Surge Protector/UPS and filter the cable line through it and they still crap out after 6 months.
OTOH, it might just be my lousy local cable company that always buys the absolute cheapest box possible, even if it's a total piece of crap.
I'd take that 660,000 figure with a grain of salt. Lindon Labs (the SL developers) are pretty loose with what they consider a "user". While it's not hard to find people online (there's a giant worldmap that shows where everybody is in the world), it doesn't take long to realize that even the people who are "online" are often AFK and just sitting in camping chairs. I seriously doubt they've ever had 660,000 online at once too, I think that's a count of the registered (and it's free to register!) accounts.
So does this mean Wikipedia simply won't be available in China? Seems to me that not bowing to the censors is a short ride to a permanent ban in the great firewall of China.
That article just wasted 2 whole minutes of my life. If you're brand new to the console/pc flamewar it'll give you the same arguments that everybody else has already heard a million times, but if not, don't bother.