40 percent of women surveyed responded that they were treated better when accompanied by a man./em?
I have a classic household. I earn the dough, she runs the house. We work together with the kids (now 18 and 16). We are both happy with this arrangement. I am a geek - Linux, Windows, C, Java, that is my territory. She runs the house - including plumbing, electricity, and all that it takes to make the house work. We have had extensions to the house - we agree it, she gets the contractors to do it, I pay. All fine.
Except, will the contractors, or any workman we call in, listen to her? Will pigs fly? Over and over again I have to relay *her* orders to the contractors - because they won't obey a female voice. It makes my blood boil, over and over again, when I have to phone some stupid contractor to tell him, in a bass voice, what my wife has told him contralto, and been ignored.
OK, our household is eccenrtic (for a lot more than is in this post). But WTF cannot contractors respect the pover of the the chequebook (checkbook) and DO WHAT THEY ARE PAID FOR!
I though of this years ago. Except I was going to take it at a lower level. And it was the bad old days of dial up with a 14.4K modem. Stop pedalling and your screen goes dark. Pedal gently to keep the screen alive. Pedal faster for net access - the faster you pedal, the greater your baud rate. Trouble is, I was frightened of a heart attack as you try to load pages from a slow site, not realising that it is their fault, not yours, that the download is slow. And the danger of downloading prOn is frighting ("just a bit fastaer and I'll see....").
Not entirely so. If each process can get its core program into cache separately, and each occupies less than half the cache for that core functionality (i.e. not for the large-scale data being processed), then they will not fight for use of the cache. It also depends upon the associativity of the cache. Each program will have a small number of cache "hotspots", at which nit is intensively using the data. The more threads there are running, the more chance there is in an N-way associative cache that several will overlap and cause thrashing.
Sorry about Beagle 2, of course. Well done, lads; it was worth a try, better luck next time.
But give respect to the Jodrell Bank telescope. Nearly half a century old (1957) and still doing leading edge scientific work. What other instrument can boast that? Built for nearly nothing (the main bearings were salvaged out of scrapped battleships) by Prof Bernard Lovell, it has been one of the leading astronomical instruments for its whole life.
True in England, too. If your train has to travel slowly (because, for example, of the large number of repairs in progress) it can be quite uncomfortable going round a bend cambered for higher speeds. Obviously, the camber cannot be enough to endanger a train crawling round, whereas a maglev train could optimise its camber.
Depends yow deep you can stack them. I thing the active depth of current chips is only about 10 microns. Allow nine times as much for an insulating layer and call it 100 microns thick. Then a 1 mm layer of silicon can contain 100 layers of transistors - or about 7 Moores-law doublings, or another 14 years. How you get the heat out of thet lot, I cannot imagine - but that is the technology to invent. Vias made of room-temperature superconductor? Or just N2 superconductor and invent some tiny N2 refrigeration. Whatever, we have about 15 years to invent it.
However, At the end it says that growth could contoinue by using larger chips or 3D stacking.
Moore's law does not specify the technology. It doesn't say that growth will occur by feature shrinkage, only that growth will occur. Growth in transistor numbers by 3D stacking is perfecly within the law. Multi-chip packaging with clever heat sinking is allowable. It only talks about deliverable transistors (and their cost).
I don't think the article means that Moore's law will die - I think it means that transistor shrinkage will die. The king is dead, long live the king.
Mind you, I think that we in the software community have been spoilt by Morre's law (and related effects in disk space and communications bandwidth). We have a lot of room to be cleverer than we are in the use of resources.
As you say "I mostly control..." - i.e. you don't entirely control. The residual accidents - people jumping the central reservation, somebody trying to enter the exit of a major road (saw that on Friday), idiots throwing bricks off bridges, total drunks - probably still represent a higher risk than train travel. There are, for example, a lot more controls to stop train drivers being drunk (they have to check in, sign the log etc.) than there are to stop car drivers being drunk (they have to find the keyhole with their key). Signals etc are probably checked a lot more than many cars on the roads, particularly the 5% or so driving without insurance or test certificate.
GNER are spending money on a WiFi system. I still say it is disgusting.
If it comes from the same pot, and if it isn't going to earn money back which will add to either profits or spending on safety, you might be right. But you could say the same about any other facilities for passenger comfort rather than safety. For example, a friend who frequently travels by rail alleges that the air conditioning is very often out of action and you boil or freeze. Are you saying this is right and that they shouldn't fix airconditioning but spend the money on safety instead.
Generally this sort of thing is meant to be self-financing, and even pay some rent back to the running side of the railway. If that is not true, you might have a case. But I would like to see some evidence for that.
Peopke said the same thing about notes when they first came in. "Don't trust them, real money is in coins you can handle, with different real values instead of paper promises".
Paper money (I assume you don't deal entirely in coin) is as virtual as electronic money. The *real* value of a $1 bill is exactly the same as that of a $1000 bill - some reasonable quality paper and a bit of quality printing. Except that if it is a good forgery, it might not have that value. So why are numbers printed on bits of cheap paper more asy to relate to than numbers on a statement (also a bit of cheap paper)?
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
The number of his name - that's your credit card number, above your name, right? The "name of the beast" - some formm of recognised ID with a corporate/government name on it? Sorry, fundies, you're too late - its already happened. Any attempt at a cashless society would appear to trigger this verse.
So fundamentalists should abhor all banking and inist on cash transactions only (which avoids the usury the bible goes on about as well). In fact, notes have serial numbers and the "name of the beast" - the government - on them. So coins only. Cpuld make life difficult in this modern world.
One correction. DU rounds do burn as they hit - chemically burn by combining with oxygen in the atmosphere. One of the benefits of DU as opposed to, say, lead, is that this burning "sharpens" thr round as it penetrates, so that the momentum is still concentrated over a small area, instead of squashing flat and dissipating its energy over a large area. To contradict you, I don't think DU is particularly hard - but this self-sharpening effect means that it doesn't matter. It is increadibly dense: much much denser than hard materials such as titanium This increases the penetrating power of DU. See here
The downside is that this means that the uranium ends up as finely divided uranium oxide which, for purely chemical reasons, is very toxic and has no breakdown mechanism. On particular, the wrecked target vehicl is highly pollited and should only be entered with protective gear. However, they temd to be left in the countryside after the war for gawpers - particularly children - to climb all over.
"Now, what if there is some malfunction, and a sizeable amount of non-spent pebbles are accidentally "discarded": Instant nuclear bomb!"
Not a bomb, I think; at worst a sputter - which woudl be nasty. But actuallu, I think that they fuel will only "burn" when surreonded by the graphite reflectors and graphite core referred to in the design. A really huge heap of pebbles would no doubt "burn" - but it would have to be many times the number in the specially-designed reaction chamber. I think it would be relatively easy to design a storage system which would make it really, realy unlikely that too many pebbles, used or otherwise, would get together. Just using neutron absorbent materials (water?) in the casing would probably help a lot.
It's a bit like diesel or aviation fuel. In the approprate combustion chamber it burns well. Outsid the combustion chamber, you can drop matches in it without problems.
"What, exactly, is the problem with encasing it in a block of concrete and burrying it somewhere? Am I missing something?"
I think you are. While stable on human lifetimes, concrete is not, I believe, stable on the necessary time perios. It is also water permeable on a long enough timescale. In the past, people were researching "glassification" - incorporating the wast into a kind of glass which is much more stable than concrete. Even then, I believe they found that the heat generates by radioactive decay increased the mobility of the waste through the glass so that it might be expected to start leaking out of the block in 250,000 years worst case.
Which makes me wonder why ESS picked that particular direction/orientation. Surely the choice was not politically motivated, since the arrow points to the right (lower-right, yes, but definitely not left as one might expect). Then again, you might say the vertical element sort of leans left, so that would be appropriate.:)
How about because left-to-right and top-to-bottom are the way we normally read, and that is the way the glider is headed? You don't have to see politics in everything.
Google would end up being controlled by Microsoft.
How about the other way round? According to the article, if Google whip up enough hype among private investors, they could raise $100bn. Microsoft is worth a bit over $300bn, so they take that $100bn and make a 25% cash, 75% stock offer for Microsoft. And Microsoft end up being run by people with the understanding of real value and service that Google has.
No, I don't believe it either, but it is a nice thought.
I don't think there is in the generall case a correct answer to whether collectives should be singular or plural - it depends upon the context.
"Congress have failed to agreee..." because you are talking about a lod of swuablling politicians who are definitely plural.
"Congress has past a bill..." because those politicians have managed to achiueve a consensus and act as as a single entity.
In this case the sungular is correct, because Amnazon as an entity is offering a new service. But you could use the term collectively for all employees of Amazon.
This is equivalent of the facility you have in a physical bookstore to open a book and browse a few pages before purchasing. I can see it might be very useful, if they get the majority of books in a field accessible like this.
I wanted a PHP book the other day, and it is very difficult to decidew which one of the plethora available I wanted. So I went to my physoical bookstore. Smaller choice, but I could open each and get an impression of whther ther were slow, detail by detail, dummies books or the sort of high-speed summary I wanted.
When you look at Moore's law for chips and then look at the performance of hard drives you can see that the hard drive is the biggest non inovative mechanism in your computer.
I think that is not in accordance with facts. The doubling period for disk drive capacity is a bit longer than for ram and CPU MHZ, but not much - maybe two years to 18 months. And there is actually a heck of a lot of innovation going on inside those cases. Just because the brick ismthe same shape does not means that there is no innovation inside, just as the fact that all chips are just lumps of silicon in ceramic packages doesn't mean that there are no innovations in manufacturing. Innovations I can think of include GMR heads, Viterbi encoding, Headerless sectoring, "pixie dust", sputtered media. Haven't heard of these? No, they are just hidden inside a "magic box" you buy. But there is a lot of innovation inside that bland box.
why don't these hard drive manufacturers try to innovate by adding more than one read/write head on each platter of the hard drive.
It has been thought of, and found not to be worth the cost. The actuator/arm/head amplifier mechanism are a significant part of the cost of the drive. It puts more heat inside the enclosure as two arms hurtle back and fourth. Then there are turbulence problems: the airflow from one head disturbs the flow over the other in a way that will vary with the position of the other head. Simple ATA controllers do not allow overlapping, so the capabilities of two arms would be rarely used in a workstation context (this is changing). In a server context, capacity as well as performance is needed;
If you are going to have a second set of heads, why not package them withe a second set of platters in a second enclosure and double capacity - i.e. a second drive.
Or, on a laptop (as grandparent was), remove battery. It is usually a pretty easily accessible. Worked on my laptop after Windows Automatic Update screwed it up.
There was a study published in New Scientist some years ago in which they studied the use of disposable plastic coffee cups vs reusable china cups/mugs. They came to teh conclusion that if the mug was washed in a doshwasher after every use, it did more environmental harm (energy in, detergents out) than the plastic cup. Two uses per wash and the china won out.
When, some years ago, I was in the nappy (diaper in the US) purchasing stage, writing on the packat claimed that using disposables was more environmentally friendly than machine washing and tumble drying re-usables. This was from an obviously biased source, so I didn't take it seriously (but went on buying disposable because of the yuck factor) but it does suggests the relative costs must be in the same ballpark for them to get the claim past the advertising standards people.
People make the decision whether to travel or not based on time. If it took you six days from New York to London, you probably wouldn't bother. If it took you two hours from New York to Tokyo, ypu would do it two ot three times a year. Of course the journey between any two places is always the same distance - but the places you choose to go vary with the time taken.
True, in a purely logical world. Which would give a factor of three back to Concorde, still leaving it looking pretty bad.
But in the real world, people seem to measure distances in hours, not miles. It appears to be a constant that the largest city in the world has a radius of about one hour. As technology has increased speeds, so cities have grown. And people will commute up to about two hours, with increasing radius. So people reckon cost of their journeys in hours, and weight risk accordingly. Not logical, but seems to be the way the human mind works.
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40 percent of women surveyed responded that they were treated better when accompanied by a man./em?
I have a classic household. I earn the dough, she runs the house. We work together with the kids (now 18 and 16). We are both happy with this arrangement. I am a geek - Linux, Windows, C, Java, that is my territory. She runs the house - including plumbing, electricity, and all that it takes to make the house work. We have had extensions to the house - we agree it, she gets the contractors to do it, I pay. All fine.
Except, will the contractors, or any workman we call in, listen to her? Will pigs fly? Over and over again I have to relay *her* orders to the contractors - because they won't obey a female voice. It makes my blood boil, over and over again, when I have to phone some stupid contractor to tell him, in a bass voice, what my wife has told him contralto, and been ignored.
OK, our household is eccenrtic (for a lot more than is in this post). But WTF cannot contractors respect the pover of the the chequebook (checkbook) and DO WHAT THEY ARE PAID FOR!
I though of this years ago. Except I was going to take it at a lower level. And it was the bad old days of dial up with a 14.4K modem. Stop pedalling and your screen goes dark. Pedal gently to keep the screen alive. Pedal faster for net access - the faster you pedal, the greater your baud rate. Trouble is, I was frightened of a heart attack as you try to load pages from a slow site, not realising that it is their fault, not yours, that the download is slow. And the danger of downloading prOn is frighting ("just a bit fastaer and I'll see....").
Not entirely so. If each process can get its core program into cache separately, and each occupies less than half the cache for that core functionality (i.e. not for the large-scale data being processed), then they will not fight for use of the cache. It also depends upon the associativity of the cache. Each program will have a small number of cache "hotspots", at which nit is intensively using the data. The more threads there are running, the more chance there is in an N-way associative cache that several will overlap and cause thrashing.
Sorry about Beagle 2, of course. Well done, lads; it was worth a try, better luck next time.
But give respect to the Jodrell Bank telescope. Nearly half a century old (1957) and still doing leading edge scientific work. What other instrument can boast that? Built for nearly nothing (the main bearings were salvaged out of scrapped battleships) by Prof Bernard Lovell, it has been one of the leading astronomical instruments for its whole life.
Respect.
Unless you are a member of the Worshipful Companies of Dyers or Vintners, who own some of the swans on the River Thames, alongside the Queen.
True in England, too. If your train has to travel slowly (because, for example, of the large number of repairs in progress) it can be quite uncomfortable going round a bend cambered for higher speeds. Obviously, the camber cannot be enough to endanger a train crawling round, whereas a maglev train could optimise its camber.
Depends yow deep you can stack them. I thing the active depth of current chips is only about 10 microns. Allow nine times as much for an insulating layer and call it 100 microns thick. Then a 1 mm layer of silicon can contain 100 layers of transistors - or about 7 Moores-law doublings, or another 14 years. How you get the heat out of thet lot, I cannot imagine - but that is the technology to invent. Vias made of room-temperature superconductor? Or just N2 superconductor and invent some tiny N2 refrigeration. Whatever, we have about 15 years to invent it.
However, At the end it says that growth could contoinue by using larger chips or 3D stacking.
Moore's law does not specify the technology. It doesn't say that growth will occur by feature shrinkage, only that growth will occur. Growth in transistor numbers by 3D stacking is perfecly within the law. Multi-chip packaging with clever heat sinking is allowable. It only talks about deliverable transistors (and their cost).
I don't think the article means that Moore's law will die - I think it means that transistor shrinkage will die. The king is dead, long live the king.
Mind you, I think that we in the software community have been spoilt by Morre's law (and related effects in disk space and communications bandwidth). We have a lot of room to be cleverer than we are in the use of resources.
As you say "I mostly control..." - i.e. you don't entirely control. The residual accidents - people jumping the central reservation, somebody trying to enter the exit of a major road (saw that on Friday), idiots throwing bricks off bridges, total drunks - probably still represent a higher risk than train travel. There are, for example, a lot more controls to stop train drivers being drunk (they have to check in, sign the log etc.) than there are to stop car drivers being drunk (they have to find the keyhole with their key). Signals etc are probably checked a lot more than many cars on the roads, particularly the 5% or so driving without insurance or test certificate.
GNER are spending money on a WiFi system. I still say it is disgusting.
If it comes from the same pot, and if it isn't going to earn money back which will add to either profits or spending on safety, you might be right. But you could say the same about any other facilities for passenger comfort rather than safety. For example, a friend who frequently travels by rail alleges that the air conditioning is very often out of action and you boil or freeze. Are you saying this is right and that they shouldn't fix airconditioning but spend the money on safety instead.
Generally this sort of thing is meant to be self-financing, and even pay some rent back to the running side of the railway. If that is not true, you might have a case. But I would like to see some evidence for that.
Peopke said the same thing about notes when they first came in. "Don't trust them, real money is in coins you can handle, with different real values instead of paper promises".
Paper money (I assume you don't deal entirely in coin) is as virtual as electronic money. The *real* value of a $1 bill is exactly the same as that of a $1000 bill - some reasonable quality paper and a bit of quality printing. Except that if it is a good forgery, it might not have that value. So why are numbers printed on bits of cheap paper more asy to relate to than numbers on a statement (also a bit of cheap paper)?
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
The number of his name - that's your credit card number, above your name, right? The "name of the beast" - some formm of recognised ID with a corporate/government name on it? Sorry, fundies, you're too late - its already happened. Any attempt at a cashless society would appear to trigger this verse.
So fundamentalists should abhor all banking and inist on cash transactions only (which avoids the usury the bible goes on about as well). In fact, notes have serial numbers and the "name of the beast" - the government - on them. So coins only. Cpuld make life difficult in this modern world.
One correction. DU rounds do burn as they hit - chemically burn by combining with oxygen in the atmosphere. One of the benefits of DU as opposed to, say, lead, is that this burning "sharpens" thr round as it penetrates, so that the momentum is still concentrated over a small area, instead of squashing flat and dissipating its energy over a large area. To contradict you, I don't think DU is particularly hard - but this self-sharpening effect means that it doesn't matter. It is increadibly dense: much much denser than hard materials such as titanium This increases the penetrating power of DU. See here
The downside is that this means that the uranium ends up as finely divided uranium oxide which, for purely chemical reasons, is very toxic and has no breakdown mechanism. On particular, the wrecked target vehicl is highly pollited and should only be entered with protective gear. However, they temd to be left in the countryside after the war for gawpers - particularly children - to climb all over.
"Now, what if there is some malfunction, and a sizeable amount of non-spent pebbles are accidentally "discarded": Instant nuclear bomb!"
Not a bomb, I think; at worst a sputter - which woudl be nasty. But actuallu, I think that they fuel will only "burn" when surreonded by the graphite reflectors and graphite core referred to in the design. A really huge heap of pebbles would no doubt "burn" - but it would have to be many times the number in the specially-designed reaction chamber. I think it would be relatively easy to design a storage system which would make it really, realy unlikely that too many pebbles, used or otherwise, would get together. Just using neutron absorbent materials (water?) in the casing would probably help a lot.
It's a bit like diesel or aviation fuel. In the approprate combustion chamber it burns well. Outsid the combustion chamber, you can drop matches in it without problems.
"What, exactly, is the problem with encasing it in a block of concrete and burrying it somewhere? Am I missing something?"
I think you are. While stable on human lifetimes, concrete is not, I believe, stable on the necessary time perios. It is also water permeable on a long enough timescale. In the past, people were researching "glassification" - incorporating the wast into a kind of glass which is much more stable than concrete. Even then, I believe they found that the heat generates by radioactive decay increased the mobility of the waste through the glass so that it might be expected to start leaking out of the block in 250,000 years worst case.
Which makes me wonder why ESS picked that particular direction/orientation. Surely the choice was not politically motivated, since the arrow points to the right (lower-right, yes, but definitely not left as one might expect). Then again, you might say the vertical element sort of leans left, so that would be appropriate. :)
How about because left-to-right and top-to-bottom are the way we normally read, and that is the way the glider is headed? You don't have to see politics in everything.
Google would end up being controlled by Microsoft.
How about the other way round? According to the article, if Google whip up enough hype among private investors, they could raise $100bn. Microsoft is worth a bit over $300bn, so they take that $100bn and make a 25% cash, 75% stock offer for Microsoft. And Microsoft end up being run by people with the understanding of real value and service that Google has.
No, I don't believe it either, but it is a nice thought.
See my sig. If my compiler can have a syntac checker, whey can't /.?
I don't think there is in the generall case a correct answer to whether collectives should be singular or plural - it depends upon the context.
"Congress have failed to agreee..." because you are talking about a lod of swuablling politicians who are definitely plural.
"Congress has past a bill..." because those politicians have managed to achiueve a consensus and act as as a single entity.
In this case the sungular is correct, because Amnazon as an entity is offering a new service. But you could use the term collectively for all employees of Amazon.
You can read the page it is on and +/- two pages.
This is equivalent of the facility you have in a physical bookstore to open a book and browse a few pages before purchasing. I can see it might be very useful, if they get the majority of books in a field accessible like this.
I wanted a PHP book the other day, and it is very difficult to decidew which one of the plethora available I wanted. So I went to my physoical bookstore. Smaller choice, but I could open each and get an impression of whther ther were slow, detail by detail, dummies books or the sort of high-speed summary I wanted.
When you look at Moore's law for chips and then look at the performance of hard drives you can see that the hard drive is the biggest non inovative mechanism in your computer.
I think that is not in accordance with facts. The doubling period for disk drive capacity is a bit longer than for ram and CPU MHZ, but not much - maybe two years to 18 months. And there is actually a heck of a lot of innovation going on inside those cases. Just because the brick ismthe same shape does not means that there is no innovation inside, just as the fact that all chips are just lumps of silicon in ceramic packages doesn't mean that there are no innovations in manufacturing. Innovations I can think of include GMR heads, Viterbi encoding, Headerless sectoring, "pixie dust", sputtered media. Haven't heard of these? No, they are just hidden inside a "magic box" you buy. But there is a lot of innovation inside that bland box.
why don't these hard drive manufacturers try to innovate by adding more than one read/write head on each platter of the hard drive.
It has been thought of, and found not to be worth the cost. The actuator/arm/head amplifier mechanism are a significant part of the cost of the drive. It puts more heat inside the enclosure as two arms hurtle back and fourth. Then there are turbulence problems: the airflow from one head disturbs the flow over the other in a way that will vary with the position of the other head. Simple ATA controllers do not allow overlapping, so the capabilities of two arms would be rarely used in a workstation context (this is changing). In a server context, capacity as well as performance is needed;
If you are going to have a second set of heads, why not package them withe a second set of platters in a second enclosure and double capacity - i.e. a second drive.
Or, on a laptop (as grandparent was), remove battery. It is usually a pretty easily accessible. Worked on my laptop after Windows Automatic Update screwed it up.
There was a study published in New Scientist some years ago in which they studied the use of disposable plastic coffee cups vs reusable china cups/mugs. They came to teh conclusion that if the mug was washed in a doshwasher after every use, it did more environmental harm (energy in, detergents out) than the plastic cup. Two uses per wash and the china won out.
When, some years ago, I was in the nappy (diaper in the US) purchasing stage, writing on the packat claimed that using disposables was more environmentally friendly than machine washing and tumble drying re-usables. This was from an obviously biased source, so I didn't take it seriously (but went on buying disposable because of the yuck factor) but it does suggests the relative costs must be in the same ballpark for them to get the claim past the advertising standards people.
People make the decision whether to travel or not based on time. If it took you six days from New York to London, you probably wouldn't bother. If it took you two hours from New York to Tokyo, ypu would do it two ot three times a year. Of course the journey between any two places is always the same distance - but the places you choose to go vary with the time taken.
True, in a purely logical world. Which would give a factor of three back to Concorde, still leaving it looking pretty bad.
But in the real world, people seem to measure distances in hours, not miles. It appears to be a constant that the largest city in the world has a radius of about one hour. As technology has increased speeds, so cities have grown. And people will commute up to about two hours, with increasing radius. So people reckon cost of their journeys in hours, and weight risk accordingly. Not logical, but seems to be the way the human mind works.