They are required to have these tracking devices by NOAA in the USA. The boats have to pay huge fines if they stray outside their allowed zones and are not allowed to fish without out. If you've ever watched "Deadliest Catch", those boats all have one.
These devices regularly report the vessel's position via satellite and have internal batteries and no "off" switch. If you do remove power, the device immediately reports it as a power loss event and you have some explaining to do. If you block the GPS antenna it reports that too and again you have some explaining to do. All events are queued internally in flash so they will eventually be sent. If a vessel is not heard from for awhile NOAA all hell breaks loose since the assumption is that it has sunk, so it's in the vessel operator's interest to leave the damn thing alone.
These devices are quite small, use very little power, and the data throughput is tiny. It boggles my mind that airplanes don't have something equivalent.
The frustrating thing is when a simple oversight renders something completely unusable. If a developer had, just for one minute, put himself in someone else's shoes it would have been completely obvious.
I can just imagine. Could you share some examples?
I used to be involved with web dev software. We'd make the effort to have it warn the editor
if they use colour contrast combinations that are effectively invisible to colour blind folks.
With the ridiculous way web pages are these days, I doubt anybody bothers with even that anymore
Damn that's hilarious. And I agree completely. Web site accessibility has utterly nosedived in the last few years.
The amount of layers of arbitrary and unnecessary popups and menus and
crap has made the web worse and worse. It's become a challenge to put
the mouse cursor anywhere and not have some unwanted menu or other
idiocy pop into my face, obscuring what I really wanted to read. I used to
use text browsers like lynx just to cut down on the noise, but these
days hardly any sites work decently with lynx.
So what's a blind user dependent on text-to-speech to do? A few years back,
that was workable. With today's craptacular web pages that use several
megabytes of javascript, I guess they're out of luck.
In music lingo, "tritone" just means an interval of six semitones, or an augmented fourth. It's the strange sound you get when playing a C and F# at the same time.
Agreed - In similar vein, I have seen one-star reviews of restaurants stating that 'the line/wait was too long", meaning they never even *tried* the place;
I am reminded of the Yogi Berra quote: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
I once saw a review where the buyer gave it one star because the item he ordered wasn't really what he wanted.
Yes, he ordered an item, they delivered it promptly, but he decided he really should have ordered something else and so he gave it one star.
You just can't win with some people.
If you read the book, the movie makes perfect sense.
Now, I absolutely love 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I will freely admit that its one major failing as a movie goes is that it cannot stand alone.
It gives absolutely no context or explanation at all for the "beyond the infinite" section.
Kubrick must have known that, and to this day I don't know why he chose to make such a lavish film that won't make sense without the book.
I suspect a big part of it is that since Bowman is entirely alone at the end, it would take either internal dialogue, narration, or some back-and-forth with
his hosts, all of which would have come across as utterly goofy or corny, so he decided to go weapons-grade primadonna artsy-fartsy instead.
So you have to read a book to appreciate this movie. There are worse things in life...
I'm dating myself, but I still have my copy of Sedra & Smith's "Micro Electronic Circuits" from my days at the University of Toronto. It's 30 years later, but I still use it.
It turns out that electrons don't change their behaviour after a few decades, and people who are good at explaining are still good at explaining in writing after a few decades. I also found a Quantum Mechanics book written by some guy around 1950 in German (which I can barely read but I managed) whose name I sadly can't remember but made my mind clear and pass QM with flying colours.
I really don't know what my kids are going to do with their pdf's. I really don't. I guess they'll manage, but I can grab the dead tree thing and it still works, despite some mold on the edges.
Well, how about this: my wife is Korean, and when I suggested to her that Korea is 68 years old she burst into mad laughter.
I suggest you go to Koreatown and suggest with a straight face to people there that Korea is 68 years old. The Japanese thing is a tiny blip in their millenial history and almost forgotten.
If you want to have some counter with a reset button based on some random criterion, fine, go ahead. Just don't expect anybody else to take it seriously.
x = [2, 8, 7, 9, -5, 0, 2]
print [xn for xn in x if 2 < xn < 10]
y = [1, -3, 10, 0, 8, 9, 1]
print [yn for yn in y if -2 < yn < 9]
print [xn for xn in x if xn in y]
Funny thing is, I find that easier to read and understand than the original. It's like "make a list of the elements in this range and print it", twice over, and finally "make a list of the stuff in x that's also in y and print it".
Whether it was low pass filtering or just the card being at its limits I don't know, but the output was really quite weak. That's why I needed an audio amp. A 40W amp, no less. Since the audio amp wasn't designed for 60kHz either, the output still wasn't all that strong, but it was good enough for the watch to pick it up sitting next to the coil.
This one could, and I don't claim to know why. But I saw it clearly on my oscilloscope: 60kHz.
Actually it wasn't exactly 60kHz, it was 59 point something because of quantization according to a frequency counter, but apparently it was close
enough to keep the watch happy.
Yeah, but if were to walk into Stockholm in 1250 and say hi to Birger Jarl and ask him what country you were in, what do you think he would have said?
Not "Danmark" or "Kalmarunionen" or something like that, I can guarantee you.
A lot of the "independence" dates for European countries are really arbitrary, because they just gradually grew into place.
Equally idiotic is calling the Koreas "68 years old". So what the hell was there before 1945? Or how about year 1000?
Some 15 years ago, when they were at their original low power, my area was so fringe that my fancy new WWVB wristwatch just wouldn't pick it up.
The protocol is really quite straightforward and well documented at their site. The 60kHz signal sends binary by sending either full power or a bit less (I forget how many dB). I used a computer synced with NTP and a plain old soundcard generating 60kHz from a sound card into an audio amp, and I just did either full on or full off. The output ran into a big coil that I had wound to be roughly resonant around 60kHz.
Much to my amazement, it worked. So I just kept the watch near that coil overnight and it synced perfectly, until WWVB cranked up their power at which point I retired the mess.
Slide rules give approximate answers. VERY approximate answers; their only advantage back in the day was that they were fast. These mechanical marvels give exact answers. Considering that when you divide it gives you a remainder that you can use to extend the answer to any arbitrary number of decimal places, they are in fact more accurate than a modern electronic calculator (apart from fancy ones like hp50g)
Anyway, why the negativity? Do you not appreciate well built complex machinery? My example was a Facit calculator, made in Sweden and extremely popular around the world. A similar marvel was the M209 cipher machine. Even includes a printer, yet it fits in your pocket. I'd love to have one.
Very little force is needed, and I've never gotten caught on those tabs. Actually, the force depends on how many numbers have to change:
rolling over something like 999999 to 1000000 makes a noticeable difference in resistance. Really I should open it up and lube it.
I'm told you can still find these in remote villages in India and Africa and the like. They don't need electricity and are very reliable.
They can multiply and divide as well as adding/subtracting. The above link shows the result of doing 355/113: 3.1415929 with a remainder of 23.
The top left is an accumulator, the top right is a counter, and the lower register is the number you want to add/subtract (entry register). So to do 355/113, the procedure is
Pull all three 3 metal tabs on the sides to clear all registers
Enter 355, press the rightmost red arrow button to shoot the entry register number all the way to the left
Crank forward once. You now have 3550000000000 in the accumulator and "1" in the counter's leftmost position.
Squeeze the two rightmost chrome handles together to clear both the counter and entry register back to 0
Enter 113, press the rightmost red arrow button to shoot the number all the way to the left. You're done entering numbers at this point.
Crank backwards to subtract from the accumulator until it is less than the entry register (takes three times). Don't worry if you overshoot; a bell will ring to indicate underflow and you just add it back. The counter now shows three in the leftmost position. The red dot indicates that it notes you started off subtracting, so it's counting backward cranks as +1 instead of -1.
Press the right arrow to shift the entry register one position to the right
Repeat the subtracting process, shifting right until you can't go any more right. You're done.
It sounds more complicated than it is, but really it's just long division. It takes about 20-30 seconds to do that division. That sucker works as well as the day it was built. I've looked inside; it's a mechanical marvel.
Oh yeah, those white slider tabs are for placing the decimal points where you want them
but this time move the routers to the other room. As it stands, they still don't know if it was the routers causing the
problem or something else in that particular room (temperature, draft, amount of sunlight, etc).
C'mon, that's unfair. COBOL was in all seriousness meant to let "Managers do Programming", and so it had syntax like "ADD 1 TO X".
Java really was like an easy C/C++. The the object system wasn't bolted on like with C++ and memory management was GC done for free. I program in C for a living but I don't see the hate for Java. It seems like some trendy bullshit to me.
j2ee on the other hand, holy crap what a stinking turd..
and I feed bad for possibly slashdotting the guy, especially since it's been a bit of an insisider thing. He's been animating since quite early, and it's a long strange trip. Give him money.
http://xkcd.aubronwood.com/
Slashdot Mirror
Vessel Monitoring System.
They are required to have these tracking devices by NOAA in the USA. The boats have to pay huge fines if they stray outside their allowed zones and are not allowed to fish without out. If you've ever watched "Deadliest Catch", those boats all have one.
These devices regularly report the vessel's position via satellite and have internal batteries and no "off" switch. If you do remove power, the device immediately reports it as a power loss event and you have some explaining to do. If you block the GPS antenna it reports that too and again you have some explaining to do. All events are queued internally in flash so they will eventually be sent. If a vessel is not heard from for awhile NOAA all hell breaks loose since the assumption is that it has sunk, so it's in the vessel operator's interest to leave the damn thing alone.
These devices are quite small, use very little power, and the data throughput is tiny. It boggles my mind that airplanes don't have something equivalent.
Animal medicine should be approved only after it has undergone extensive human testing. It seems only fair...
The frustrating thing is when a simple oversight renders something completely unusable. If a developer had, just for one minute, put himself in someone else's shoes it would have been completely obvious.
I can just imagine. Could you share some examples?
I used to be involved with web dev software. We'd make the effort to have it warn the editor if they use colour contrast combinations that are effectively invisible to colour blind folks. With the ridiculous way web pages are these days, I doubt anybody bothers with even that anymore
Damn that's hilarious. And I agree completely. Web site accessibility has utterly nosedived in the last few years.
The amount of layers of arbitrary and unnecessary popups and menus and crap has made the web worse and worse. It's become a challenge to put the mouse cursor anywhere and not have some unwanted menu or other idiocy pop into my face, obscuring what I really wanted to read. I used to use text browsers like lynx just to cut down on the noise, but these days hardly any sites work decently with lynx.
So what's a blind user dependent on text-to-speech to do? A few years back, that was workable. With today's craptacular web pages that use several megabytes of javascript, I guess they're out of luck.
I don't know why people keep bringing up the HP48 when the HP50g has been HP's flagship calculator for many years now. It's ARM based and plenty fast.
In music lingo, "tritone" just means an interval of six semitones, or an augmented fourth. It's the strange sound you get when playing a C and F# at the same time.
Agreed - In similar vein, I have seen one-star reviews of restaurants stating that 'the line/wait was too long", meaning they never even *tried* the place;
I am reminded of the Yogi Berra quote: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
I once saw a review where the buyer gave it one star because the item he ordered wasn't really what he wanted.
Yes, he ordered an item, they delivered it promptly, but he decided he really should have ordered something else and so he gave it one star. You just can't win with some people.
Does the BOFH have a security clearance?
I think we can safely assume that he has already provided himself with Top Secret clearance long ago...
If you read the book, the movie makes perfect sense.
Now, I absolutely love 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I will freely admit that its one major failing as a movie goes is that it cannot stand alone. It gives absolutely no context or explanation at all for the "beyond the infinite" section.
Kubrick must have known that, and to this day I don't know why he chose to make such a lavish film that won't make sense without the book. I suspect a big part of it is that since Bowman is entirely alone at the end, it would take either internal dialogue, narration, or some back-and-forth with his hosts, all of which would have come across as utterly goofy or corny, so he decided to go weapons-grade primadonna artsy-fartsy instead.
So you have to read a book to appreciate this movie. There are worse things in life...
I'm dating myself, but I still have my copy of Sedra & Smith's "Micro Electronic Circuits" from my days at the University of Toronto. It's 30 years later, but I still use it.
It turns out that electrons don't change their behaviour after a few decades, and people who are good at explaining are still good at explaining in writing after a few decades. I also found a Quantum Mechanics book written by some guy around 1950 in German (which I can barely read but I managed) whose name I sadly can't remember but made my mind clear and pass QM with flying colours.
I really don't know what my kids are going to do with their pdf's. I really don't. I guess they'll manage, but I can grab the dead tree thing and it still works, despite some mold on the edges.
Well, how about this: my wife is Korean, and when I suggested to her that Korea is 68 years old she burst into mad laughter.
I suggest you go to Koreatown and suggest with a straight face to people there that Korea is 68 years old. The Japanese thing is a tiny blip in their millenial history and almost forgotten.
If you want to have some counter with a reset button based on some random criterion, fine, go ahead. Just don't expect anybody else to take it seriously.
x = [2, 8, 7, 9, -5, 0, 2] print [xn for xn in x if 2 < xn < 10]
y = [1, -3, 10, 0, 8, 9, 1] print [yn for yn in y if -2 < yn < 9]
print [xn for xn in x if xn in y]
Funny thing is, I find that easier to read and understand than the original. It's like "make a list of the elements in this range and print it", twice over, and finally "make a list of the stuff in x that's also in y and print it".
Like everyone else, you missed my part "how about year 1000" (a year I picked at random).
Japanese being assholes there for a few decades half a century ago doesn't suddenly erase the previous thousands of years of Korea being Korea.
I'm not even Korean and it's obvious to me.
Whether it was low pass filtering or just the card being at its limits I don't know, but the output was really quite weak. That's why I needed an audio amp. A 40W amp, no less. Since the audio amp wasn't designed for 60kHz either, the output still wasn't all that strong, but it was good enough for the watch to pick it up sitting next to the coil.
This one could, and I don't claim to know why. But I saw it clearly on my oscilloscope: 60kHz.
Actually it wasn't exactly 60kHz, it was 59 point something because of quantization according to a frequency counter, but apparently it was close enough to keep the watch happy.
Yeah, but if were to walk into Stockholm in 1250 and say hi to Birger Jarl and ask him what country you were in, what do you think he would have said? Not "Danmark" or "Kalmarunionen" or something like that, I can guarantee you.
A lot of the "independence" dates for European countries are really arbitrary, because they just gradually grew into place.
Equally idiotic is calling the Koreas "68 years old". So what the hell was there before 1945? Or how about year 1000?
Some 15 years ago, when they were at their original low power, my area was so fringe that my fancy new WWVB wristwatch just wouldn't pick it up.
The protocol is really quite straightforward and well documented at their site. The 60kHz signal sends binary by sending either full power or a bit less (I forget how many dB). I used a computer synced with NTP and a plain old soundcard generating 60kHz from a sound card into an audio amp, and I just did either full on or full off. The output ran into a big coil that I had wound to be roughly resonant around 60kHz.
Much to my amazement, it worked. So I just kept the watch near that coil overnight and it synced perfectly, until WWVB cranked up their power at which point I retired the mess.
Slide rules give approximate answers. VERY approximate answers; their only advantage back in the day was that they were fast. These mechanical marvels give exact answers. Considering that when you divide it gives you a remainder that you can use to extend the answer to any arbitrary number of decimal places, they are in fact more accurate than a modern electronic calculator (apart from fancy ones like hp50g)
Anyway, why the negativity? Do you not appreciate well built complex machinery? My example was a Facit calculator, made in Sweden and extremely popular around the world. A similar marvel was the M209 cipher machine. Even includes a printer, yet it fits in your pocket. I'd love to have one.
Very little force is needed, and I've never gotten caught on those tabs. Actually, the force depends on how many numbers have to change: rolling over something like 999999 to 1000000 makes a noticeable difference in resistance. Really I should open it up and lube it.
I'm told you can still find these in remote villages in India and Africa and the like. They don't need electricity and are very reliable.
They can multiply and divide as well as adding/subtracting. The above link shows the result of doing 355/113: 3.1415929 with a remainder of 23.
The top left is an accumulator, the top right is a counter, and the lower register is the number you want to add/subtract (entry register). So to do 355/113, the procedure is
It sounds more complicated than it is, but really it's just long division. It takes about 20-30 seconds to do that division. That sucker works as well as the day it was built. I've looked inside; it's a mechanical marvel.
Oh yeah, those white slider tabs are for placing the decimal points where you want them
but this time move the routers to the other room. As it stands, they still don't know if it was the routers causing the problem or something else in that particular room (temperature, draft, amount of sunlight, etc).
C'mon, that's unfair. COBOL was in all seriousness meant to let "Managers do Programming", and so it had syntax like "ADD 1 TO X".
Java really was like an easy C/C++. The the object system wasn't bolted on like with C++ and memory management was GC done for free. I program in C for a living but I don't see the hate for Java. It seems like some trendy bullshit to me.
j2ee on the other hand, holy crap what a stinking turd..
and I feed bad for possibly slashdotting the guy, especially since it's been a bit of an insisider thing. He's been animating since quite early, and it's a long strange trip. Give him money. http://xkcd.aubronwood.com/
Seriously, your dad is doing Python? That's awesome for him. I'm 50 and incredibly frustrated at how stupid kids seem to be these days.