If you were suppose to be held liable, do you think anything would change? Were any Professional Engineers held liable for the big blackout last year?
There is a difference between being -incorrect- (engineers are human) and being -negligent-. All the engineering codes do is insure that the engineer acted compentently - just because things break, doesn't mean the designer is instantly liable. Unfortunately it usually is interpreted to mean that by the general public.
I knew when I hit a key on my 48.. didn't need to double check. I actually finally wore out the 0 button on the keyboard; the contacts are getting funny sounding after 10 years of abuse, including likely millions of keypresses in University and much abuse from Phoenix and simple games like that.
The calculator who's weak IR communication inspired me to build a IR repeater. My first really neat EE project.
I desperately want a replacement, but it has to have those clicky keys. I had a 100LX and I wore it out too.. please please please please make this, and make sure to include the CLASSIC tactile keys!
Move to a state that allows concealed carry. Learn to use your weapon appropriately.. I live in Canada where it's not a concern, but if I moved to the USA, this would be high on my list of priorities.
until my little book ended up in a mudpuddle. Palms are dirt cheap on ebay, and they have that ever-handy "sync" feature...they still all suck for drawing with though:(
Driving is dangerous. You're only safer in a SUV if you hit a little car. Hit something stationary or another SUV and the energies involved are much higher. Nevermind stopping distance and handling. We'd all be safer if drivers were a little more aware of their mortality.
Virtually no cargo room
A large percentage of the time, I have virtually no cargo. Like everyone else.
Can't bring the kids along, since they won't be allowed to even sit in your PM until they get a drivers license
Everywhere I am aware of in North America, kids get free bus rides to school if it's too far to walk. Life's tough. Be glad your kids haven't been drafted to go fight over oil.
I'm not about to let some other jerk drive for me. What if he cuts someone off and doesn't leave enough room for me?
I'd love to pay someone to drive for me, like a taxi service or an automatic driving lane. Do you know how much productivity you could gain?
It's top heavy (although it can recline, alleviating this problem somewhat)
Maybe this might open the door to more third parties in the mini-ITX field. None of my machines with the mini-ITX have fans on them, and they work very well for dedicated units.
I'm going to be replacing the last of my oldschool computers - a p100 dating from 1995 - with a VIA miniITX soon because of the power consumption and reliability gains, to say nothing of the space savings.
Great for little video and MAME computers as well.
Re:www.dieoff.org - depressing news for you
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Here's the thing, no one knows how much oil we have left
No, but the experts who are paid a huge pile of money note the rate of discovery of new oil is far below the consumption rate of existing reserves.
What will happen is that we will use up all the oil that can be easily extracted at a net energy gain. If you have to burn 25e6 million barrels of oil to get 20e6 million barrels - there is the problem.
www.dieoff.org - depressing news for you
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Has all you need to know, and it's not crackpottery - just thousands and thousands of pages of studies and data from the Horses's mouth - Congress and the US Petrochemical industry. The people in power know what the deal is and it's not pretty. We will fight wars over oil in the future.
Ignorant people think gasoline is unlimited. I'll see the end of it, and the inevitable disaster is not going to be pretty. People think the government should lower prices - that's called communism, and it means shortages. Next time you gripe about the price of gasoline, wonder what you'll do when there is none.
I really hope those stories of the oil companies keeping free energy devices suppressed are true - because the oil companies aren't going to be oil companies for much longer.
Oil is far too valuable to be burning at the TREMENDOUS rate of consumption worldwide currently. There will be NO industrial revolution for most third world countries because of the lack of oil available to build infrastructure.
Green energy sources are a bad joke compared to the amounts of energy we consume from oil. The only long term solution is a 0 growth economy combined with population decrease. The alternatives long-term are not pretty.
Unless, of course, cold fusion works or a feasible technology for extracting energy from the ZPE is found. I sure hope something happens.
If the oil supply is as low as some sources claim (C 30 years) get used to the idea of catalysed diesel engines and vegetable oil fuel. Safe and Green!
I have yet to see a good energy analysis of biodiesel done that accounts for all the inputs used, e.g. fertilizer, fuel used by harvesting equipment, and energy for processing and transport. It would suprise me if there was a net energy gain, actually it would probably shock me.
Thermodynamics is dismal stuff. Oil works because there are billions of watts just sitting there needing to be scooped up, more or less. Other green technolgies require a lot more processing and it becomes harder to get an energy benefit.
Biodiesel can be used to make other processes more efficient by burning waste, but it in itself does not provide a net energy gain.
Finally, we'll learn once and for all if high-speed CD-ROM players can really shatter a compact disc.
I had this actually happen to me with a CDR. I'm not sure if the disc was damaged, but it sounded like a large firecracker when it catastrophically failed. I'm sure it has happened to others here.
Haven't seen the show to see what they concluded, though.
I took the plunge awhile ago - I needed test equipment for a small company, and I just didn't have the funds to get proper SMT rework gear new, refurbised, or otherwise. I bought several thousand dollars of items from ebay - most of them under $500, and haven't had a single problem with equipment or buyers. You can spot many of the suspicious ads if you look, and if something bothers you, pass it up.
One scam I hate is the shipping.. $5 items that fit in a courier pak costing $15 to ship? Please. Ebay needs to do something about that.
I've used Ebay exensively for car parts as well, and most people have been very plesant to deal with. I don't bid if something seems amiss, though. Even if I took a few hits, I'd still come out way ahead - I saved over $10,000 on the test gear I got, even after recalibration.
I remember reading some time ago about the possibility of using pulsed high intensity lasers to ionize a path through the air that could then be used as a guide for charged particles to follow. Particle beam weapons don't have the inverse square law working against them, although I imagine there are a number of other problems.
Haven't heard anything about this in a long time..
When the costs of commuting outway the benefits, it will change.
Perhaps a 4x price hike isn't enough - how about being unable to get gasoline, except for a rationed amount? Going to be so keen on commuting then? This is not just likely, but probable in the very near future.
The reason a video feed is needed is so the guy with the money can watch you, in case that's not apparent. There are few things that will ever change, and that's one of them, here in North America. I'm Canadian and pay much more for gasoline than Americans - about $1/l, if I paid $4-5/l, it would be insane to commute. For what it's worth, I think it's insane now.
Teleworking will happen when there's enough communications infrastructure in place to have a high definition, or at least good quality, video feed to the employee at home. Until this can happen it will be too difficult to get things done outside of a personal working environment.
Really though, the kick for all of this will be gasoline prices 2-4x what they are now. It's insane to spend the amount of time most people do commuting, it's a huge loss of productivity overall. There is a culture of mistrust that won't change until it absolutely has to.
A close friend (cough) has been in the tunnels at my old university, it's actually pretty interesting and they used to be open. It is very dangerous as poorly shielded high voltage lines run through them, though, amoung other hazards.
Why? Why not. Tunnels were one of / the main motivators behind the now imfamous MIT Guide to Lockpicking, and it's not that far of a stretch to see why someone would be interested in getting a map. Maybe the kid just wanted to read them, but come on, if you REALLY wanted to know, those tunnels are ventilated above ground and it would take all of 15 seconds to gain entry and map it out that way, with string if need be.
Maybe this isn't that big a deal, but it's on the top of a damp moss covered slope. You better be careful, because there are worse things than being eaten by a grue.
... but powebooks in my experience are not silent at all. My 1GHz Titanium has a rather noisy fan. It emits about as much noise as my Dell inspiron 8200 notebook (that is, quite a lot in my opinion).
I had a Tibook, it was very loud. It wasn't so loud after I physically disconnected the fan, heh heh. Didn't seem to hurt anything.
I have a new Albook - it is absolutely dead silent. I think I've heard the fan click on once when running a simulation, and even then it was barely perceptible. Suffice it to say Apple has done their homework. If you put in a gb of ram, you won't ever even see a hard drive access.
Yeah blah blah blah devalue this and that. The point is that most of the tools that are GOOD, stable, production grade are ones that EVERYBODY benefits from having available. Ever notice how it's mainly power user tools, programming languages, etc that are open source and very solid? There's a reason for that. Programmers as a whole would rather spend their time working on things that aren't as mundane - having a solid OS, solid compiler, etc, allows you to have MORE TIME to make programs that put bread on the table - usually custom apps.
Cry me a river that there isn't going to be another bill gates. Computer TOOLS are commodity items now, 20 years ago they were not. But they are just that; tools. Take the tools and make something with them. Maybe you can open source it and we can all make it better - or maybe you can sell it to the highest bidder for food. THAT is the point, my friend.
Computers are a means TO an end; they are not an end in themselves. People completely forgot this during the boom. It comes down to creating wealth, goods, and services that accomplish or offer something someone is willing to pay for. That is what gets missed a lot of the time.
Bozo the Clown doesn't have that fellow's credentials or his experimental apparatus. Attack his theory, technique or experiment, but dismissing him out of hand is ignorant.
Look, everyone seems all full of their intelligence here - so why not approach things with a neutral opinion until proven one way or the other? This guy is not selling you anything. He has an experimental apparatus and theory behind analmous heat production and can reproduce it; Ergo, either something is going on or he made a mistake. This can be determined on the basis of his experiment.
When experiment and existing theory produce different results, you need a new theory. That's how science works. The universe is never wrong. If you want to critique this guy, then go show me how smart you are and pick apart his experiments or apparatus, or maybe propose a theory that could explain the results another way - and devise an experiment to test that theory.
People mocked astronomy, planes, cars, space travel, quantum physics, the atomic bomb, television, computers, you name it - as the work of the devil, impossible, blah blah blah.
Yes, he could be wrong, but that's for replicable experiments to decide. I applaud these guys for trying and more importantly publishing their results. Nothing like the herd mentality, though.:sigh:
Lens distortions can be corrected
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Lenses are very good now. Anything that produces a repeatable distortion can easily be corrected for at the factory - digital cameras have large DSPs in them to handle the image compression work, those same DSPs can very easily apply a distortion correction to the camera to correct for minor lens flaws.
Good lenses are much more important in the analog world, where literally, what you see is what you get.
They only die. And form new connections, and break old ones. You were born with all the neurons you will ever have, and IIRC there's evidence it becomes harder to make new connections as you get older.
The reason those HP calcs kicked so much ass is the keyboard - you could enter things quickly and you didn't need to double or triple check you hit the key right.
I really want a next-gen hp48 with the same form factor.. but it doesn't seem to be likely. I've thought about surgically removing the keyboard from a hp48 and making a frankendevice with a Palm..
Do you mean a BSc. in Computer or Electrical Engineering, or a BSc. in Computer Science.. Starting salaries in Canada have averaged around 50k for engineers in the embedded field, maybe a little less, maybe a little/lot more depending on where you live. It goes up from there depending on options and the like. You can still find work without much effort if you are skilled.
Same rates for VHDL / FPGA hardware work (programming). OS level applications programming I don't go near anymore unless it's one-off custom stuff. Device driver work is well paid still.
Controls system programming (ladder logic, plcs..) makes a little less - 38-40k starting usually, up from there.
If you have a CS degree right now things aren't so rosy in Canada. I know several CS people looking for work; there isn't any, and in my experience, it's easier to get employed with a Mech/EE/CompE degree than a CS ticket right now, although others experience may vary. I put the blame on Universities for devaluing a BSc. CS during the boom. Doesn't matter what you want to do in engineering, you still gotta pass third year calc and intro dynamics. Mmm, spinny f=ma.
Slashdot Mirror
If you were suppose to be held liable, do you think anything would change? Were any Professional Engineers held liable for the big blackout last year?
There is a difference between being -incorrect- (engineers are human) and being -negligent-. All the engineering codes do is insure that the engineer acted compentently - just because things break, doesn't mean the designer is instantly liable. Unfortunately it usually is interpreted to mean that by the general public.
I knew when I hit a key on my 48.. didn't need to double check. I actually finally wore out the 0 button on the keyboard; the contacts are getting funny sounding after 10 years of abuse, including likely millions of keypresses in University and much abuse from Phoenix and simple games like that.
The calculator who's weak IR communication inspired me to build a IR repeater. My first really neat EE project.
I desperately want a replacement, but it has to have those clicky keys. I had a 100LX and I wore it out too.. please please please please make this, and make sure to include the CLASSIC tactile keys!
RPN forever!
Move to a state that allows concealed carry. Learn to use your weapon appropriately.. I live in Canada where it's not a concern, but if I moved to the USA, this would be high on my list of priorities.
YMMV.
until my little book ended up in a mudpuddle. Palms are dirt cheap on ebay, and they have that ever-handy "sync" feature. ..they still all suck for drawing with though :(
The drivers legs are used as the front bumper
...
Driving is dangerous. You're only safer in a SUV if you hit a little car. Hit something stationary or another SUV and the energies involved are much higher. Nevermind stopping distance and handling. We'd all be safer if drivers were a little more aware of their mortality.
Virtually no cargo room
A large percentage of the time, I have virtually no cargo. Like everyone else.
Can't bring the kids along, since they won't be allowed to even sit in your PM until they get a drivers license
Everywhere I am aware of in North America, kids get free bus rides to school if it's too far to walk. Life's tough. Be glad your kids haven't been drafted to go fight over oil.
I'm not about to let some other jerk drive for me. What if he cuts someone off and doesn't leave enough room for me?
I'd love to pay someone to drive for me, like a taxi service or an automatic driving lane. Do you know how much productivity you could gain?
It's top heavy (although it can recline, alleviating this problem somewhat)
Seen a SUV recently?
Maybe this might open the door to more third parties in the mini-ITX field. None of my machines with the mini-ITX have fans on them, and they work very well for dedicated units.
I'm going to be replacing the last of my oldschool computers - a p100 dating from 1995 - with a VIA miniITX soon because of the power consumption and reliability gains, to say nothing of the space savings.
Great for little video and MAME computers as well.
Here's the thing, no one knows how much oil we have left
No, but the experts who are paid a huge pile of money note the rate of discovery of new oil is far below the consumption rate of existing reserves.
What will happen is that we will use up all the oil that can be easily extracted at a net energy gain. If you have to burn 25e6 million barrels of oil to get 20e6 million barrels - there is the problem.
Has all you need to know, and it's not crackpottery - just thousands and thousands of pages of studies and data from the Horses's mouth - Congress and the US Petrochemical industry. The people in power know what the deal is and it's not pretty. We will fight wars over oil in the future.
Ignorant people think gasoline is unlimited. I'll see the end of it, and the inevitable disaster is not going to be pretty. People think the government should lower prices - that's called communism, and it means shortages. Next time you gripe about the price of gasoline, wonder what you'll do when there is none.
I really hope those stories of the oil companies keeping free energy devices suppressed are true - because the oil companies aren't going to be oil companies for much longer.
Oil is far too valuable to be burning at the TREMENDOUS rate of consumption worldwide currently. There will be NO industrial revolution for most third world countries because of the lack of oil available to build infrastructure.
Green energy sources are a bad joke compared to the amounts of energy we consume from oil. The only long term solution is a 0 growth economy combined with population decrease. The alternatives long-term are not pretty.
Unless, of course, cold fusion works or a feasible technology for extracting energy from the ZPE is found. I sure hope something happens.
If the oil supply is as low as some sources claim (C 30 years) get used to the idea of catalysed diesel engines and vegetable oil fuel. Safe and Green!
I have yet to see a good energy analysis of biodiesel done that accounts for all the inputs used, e.g. fertilizer, fuel used by harvesting equipment, and energy for processing and transport. It would suprise me if there was a net energy gain, actually it would probably shock me.
Thermodynamics is dismal stuff. Oil works because there are billions of watts just sitting there needing to be scooped up, more or less. Other green technolgies require a lot more processing and it becomes harder to get an energy benefit.
Biodiesel can be used to make other processes more efficient by burning waste, but it in itself does not provide a net energy gain.
Finally, we'll learn once and for all if high-speed CD-ROM players can really shatter a compact disc.
I had this actually happen to me with a CDR. I'm not sure if the disc was damaged, but it sounded like a large firecracker when it catastrophically failed. I'm sure it has happened to others here.
Haven't seen the show to see what they concluded, though.
I took the plunge awhile ago - I needed test equipment for a small company, and I just didn't have the funds to get proper SMT rework gear new, refurbised, or otherwise. I bought several thousand dollars of items from ebay - most of them under $500, and haven't had a single problem with equipment or buyers. You can spot many of the suspicious ads if you look, and if something bothers you, pass it up.
One scam I hate is the shipping.. $5 items that fit in a courier pak costing $15 to ship? Please. Ebay needs to do something about that.
I've used Ebay exensively for car parts as well, and most people have been very plesant to deal with. I don't bid if something seems amiss, though. Even if I took a few hits, I'd still come out way ahead - I saved over $10,000 on the test gear I got, even after recalibration.
I remember reading some time ago about the possibility of using pulsed high intensity lasers to ionize a path through the air that could then be used as a guide for charged particles to follow. Particle beam weapons don't have the inverse square law working against them, although I imagine there are a number of other problems.
Haven't heard anything about this in a long time..
When the costs of commuting outway the benefits, it will change.
Perhaps a 4x price hike isn't enough - how about being unable to get gasoline, except for a rationed amount? Going to be so keen on commuting then? This is not just likely, but probable in the very near future.
The reason a video feed is needed is so the guy with the money can watch you, in case that's not apparent. There are few things that will ever change, and that's one of them, here in North America. I'm Canadian and pay much more for gasoline than Americans - about $1/l, if I paid
$4-5/l, it would be insane to commute. For what it's worth, I think it's insane now.
YMMV.
Teleworking will happen when there's enough communications infrastructure in place to have a high definition, or at least good quality, video feed to the employee at home. Until this can happen it will be too difficult to get things done outside of a personal working environment.
Really though, the kick for all of this will be gasoline prices 2-4x what they are now. It's insane to spend the amount of time most people do commuting, it's a huge loss of productivity overall. There is a culture of mistrust that won't change until it absolutely has to.
You can always (try) to work for yourself, too..
A close friend (cough) has been in the tunnels at my old university, it's actually pretty interesting and they used to be open. It is very dangerous as poorly shielded high voltage lines run through them, though, amoung other hazards.
Why? Why not. Tunnels were one of / the main motivators behind the now imfamous MIT Guide to Lockpicking, and it's not that far of a stretch to see why someone would be interested in getting a map. Maybe the kid just wanted to read them, but come on, if you REALLY wanted to know, those tunnels are ventilated above ground and it would take all of 15 seconds to gain entry and map it out that way, with string if need be.
Maybe this isn't that big a deal, but it's on the top of a damp moss covered slope. You better be careful, because there are worse things than being eaten by a grue.
... but powebooks in my experience are not silent at all. My 1GHz Titanium has a rather noisy fan. It emits about as much noise as my Dell inspiron 8200 notebook (that is, quite a lot in my opinion).
I had a Tibook, it was very loud. It wasn't so loud after I physically disconnected the fan, heh heh. Didn't seem to hurt anything.
I have a new Albook - it is absolutely dead silent. I think I've heard the fan click on once when running a simulation, and even then it was barely perceptible. Suffice it to say Apple has done their homework. If you put in a gb of ram, you won't ever even see a hard drive access.
Yeah blah blah blah devalue this and that. The point is that most of the tools that are GOOD, stable, production grade are ones that EVERYBODY benefits from having available. Ever notice how it's mainly power user tools, programming languages, etc that are open source and very solid? There's a reason for that. Programmers as a whole would rather spend their time working on things that aren't as mundane - having a solid OS, solid compiler, etc, allows you to have MORE TIME to make programs that put bread on the table - usually custom apps.
Cry me a river that there isn't going to be another bill gates. Computer TOOLS are commodity items now, 20 years ago they were not. But they are just that; tools. Take the tools and make something with them. Maybe you can open source it and we can all make it better - or maybe you can sell it to the highest bidder for food. THAT is the point, my friend.
Computers are a means TO an end; they are not an end in themselves. People completely forgot this during the boom. It comes down to creating wealth, goods, and services that accomplish or offer something someone is willing to pay for. That is what gets missed a lot of the time.
How about the Casimir Effect? - "nothing", literally, pushes those metal plates together. Not much of something, but definately a something.
Bozo the Clown doesn't have that fellow's credentials or his experimental apparatus. Attack his theory, technique or experiment, but dismissing him out of hand is ignorant.
I believe the jist of my post was exactly that.
Keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out, is another famous quote. What I'm reading here are not the posts of open OR informed minds.
YMMV.
Look, everyone seems all full of their intelligence here - so why not approach things with a neutral opinion until proven one way or the other? This guy is not selling you anything. He has an experimental apparatus and theory behind analmous heat production and can reproduce it; Ergo, either something is going on or he made a mistake. This can be determined on the basis of his experiment.
:sigh:
When experiment and existing theory produce different results, you need a new theory. That's how science works. The universe is never wrong. If you want to critique this guy, then go show me how smart you are and pick apart his experiments or apparatus, or maybe propose a theory that could explain the results another way - and devise an experiment to test that theory.
People mocked astronomy, planes, cars, space travel, quantum physics, the atomic bomb, television, computers, you name it - as the work of the devil, impossible, blah blah blah.
Yes, he could be wrong, but that's for replicable experiments to decide. I applaud these guys for trying and more importantly publishing their results. Nothing like the herd mentality, though.
Lenses are very good now. Anything that produces a repeatable distortion can easily be corrected for at the factory - digital cameras have large DSPs in them to handle the image compression work, those same DSPs can very easily apply a distortion correction to the camera to correct for minor lens flaws.
Good lenses are much more important in the analog world, where literally, what you see is what you get.
They only die. And form new connections, and break old ones. You were born with all the neurons you will ever have, and IIRC there's evidence it becomes harder to make new connections as you get older.
The reason those HP calcs kicked so much ass is the keyboard - you could enter things quickly and you didn't need to double or triple check you hit the key right.
I really want a next-gen hp48 with the same form factor.. but it doesn't seem to be likely. I've thought about surgically removing the keyboard from a hp48 and making a frankendevice with a Palm..
Do you mean a BSc. in Computer or Electrical Engineering, or a BSc. in Computer Science.. Starting salaries in Canada have averaged around 50k for engineers in the embedded field, maybe a little less, maybe a little/lot more depending on where you live. It goes up from there depending on options and the like. You can still find work without much effort if you are skilled.
Same rates for VHDL / FPGA hardware work (programming). OS level applications programming I don't go near anymore unless it's one-off custom stuff. Device driver work is well paid still.
Controls system programming (ladder logic, plcs..) makes a little less - 38-40k starting usually, up from there.
If you have a CS degree right now things aren't so rosy in Canada. I know several CS people looking for work; there isn't any, and in my experience, it's easier to get employed with a Mech/EE/CompE degree than a CS ticket right now, although others experience may vary. I put the blame on Universities for devaluing a BSc. CS during the boom. Doesn't matter what you want to do in engineering, you still gotta pass third year calc and intro dynamics. Mmm, spinny f=ma.