France still has a pretty large military budget, what with their insistence on developing all military hardware including aircraft, major ships (carriers), missiles (including a nuclear force that's completely independent, unlike other European countries) etc. in house.
AIU, data mining is about finding 'interesting' stuff inside a data set. For instance, data mining would be the DoE going through their DB to see if the same name/SSN would crop up at multiple schools. Or an attempt to correlate school results (grades) with the amount of money spent on a student. Not the FBI submitting some names and asking 'do you have a record for mr. X'.
That's a best-case scenario. It's often at much lower levels, especially when you consider privately-digitized files. I've had video files with the audio at -40 dB.
If it's like the other 'system sounds' in Windows, they'll be recorded at full volume, unlike your music which is at -20 dB average. So you've got your computer connected to a nice sound system, you set your volume so the music (movie, etc.) is audible, and the system sounds will be loud enough to wake the dead. At least the systems sounds can be shut off.
Please Microsoft, copy Apple's Sounds control panel which has a separate volume setting for system sounds.
That's why there are converters. I'm using an Apple Extended Keyboard with an ADB-to-USB converter on my Mac, and I use a Microsoft Natural keyboard [1] with a PS2-to-USB converter on my PC. The PS2-converter cost me about $8.
1: Ergonomic USB keyboards are impossible to get over here
Honestly I am not sure why all the keyboards and mice are USB now
Thank goodness we're getting rid of the abomination that is PS2. Finally, we've got a single bus design that accepts just about all peripherals your're likely to need. Just plug 'em in anywhere. It's also become easy to build a hub into the keyboard, so you can hang mice, memory sticks etc. off the keyboard instead of having to root around the back of the computer.
My Mac Mini at home only has 2 USB ports, and because... I have no free USB ports by default. Instead, I have an extra device sitting with my mini (USB hub) complete with associated wires.
And? That's one of the compromises you make when buying the smallest computer on the market. The current Mini has 4 USB ports, btw. If Apple had used the PS2 port for keyboard and mouse instead of USB, there would have been no room for USB or FireWire at all.
And can we get a Mac with a USB port on the front of the box?
Why, when you can have all the USB ports you want in an even more accessible location (the keyboard) or using a hub, in the location of your choice?
Precisely. There's also a story that one day, a guy walks into Cray HQ and says he wants to buy a supercomputer. They almost threw him out before realizing he was serious. That guy was Steve Jobs, of course, the only walk-in customer Cray ever had.
In this case, there probably won't be any practical applications. It's a publicity stunt, and a showcase for JCB's diesel engines: the engines in the Dieselmax are basically stock engine blocks with huge turbochargers bolted on. The only reason to care is because it's cool.
For practical applications of high-performance diesel technology, take a look at Audi. They just won the Le Mans 24h race using a diesel engine. The lessons learned there (fuel consumption/efficiency, weight vs. performance and reliability) should be useful for roadgoing diesels as well.
Actually, JCB have built several diggers with huge supercharged V8s for use at shows. They can achieve about 100 mph, and do wheelies. They carry a 'JCB GT' tag (no doubt in reference to the joke you mentioned, and others).
The Dieselmax is a showcase for their new engine, which has been developed in-house, quite an achievement for such a relatively small company.
Building an engine for the sort of power output, power/weight ratio and power/frontal area ratio you need to achieve 500 km/h is nontrivial. The Dieselmax uses two engines with a swept volume of 4.4 litres each, and 5+ bar of compression from the turbochargers, to get 750 bhp/engine. The petrol-powered record cars used WW2 vintage aero engines (IIRC Merlins), at 27 litres each and running at maybe 2 bar to get 1500 bhp each. The Merlins were readily available at the time, building a record-breaking car just meant slotting in some second-hand Merlins.
For a diesel recordbreaker, no such option has been available. Sure, you can get 1500 bhp diesels, but they are meant for use in ships and weigh several tons. Lorry engines develop 500 bhp nowadays (a recent development, in 1980 that was no more than 300 bhp) out of 12 litres. Cranking up the turbo pressure seems easy enough, but pretty soon you'll need to cast a new engine block to withstand the enormous forces. The only sport that extensively uses diesels is tractorpulling. Those guys can pull some 1500 bhp from 6 litres, using 2-stage turbochargers and some 10 bar of pressure. Those engines are built to last for 100 meters. Their cooling channels are filled with metal to strengthen the block, and even then violent malfunctions (crankshafts breaking etc) are common.
So getting a diesel to produce enough power with enough reliability means a lot of development work. Most people interested in breaking speed records weren't interested in the Diesel subcategory, they just wanted the overall record and chose the path of least resistance: petrol.
Ever seen an iPod Nano? An AA battery is about 3 times as thick as the Nano, so Apple had a choice: - Install a user-replaceable battery. The player becomes 3 times as thick, and it now has an ugly/break-prone battery cover on the back. Say goodbye to that shiny metal backside, too. It'll have to be plastic instead. - Keep the Nano as it is, and let the accessory market take care of it for those people who really want longer playtime than the internal battery can provide. External battery packs are available for the Nano.
But the message it sends is 'do whatever you want, we don't care as long as you do it below the speed limit'. A message that's received loud and clear by the general public, if our roads are any indication. So traffic safety ends up being no better than before, which leaves revenue generation as a main reason to continue this tactic.
Everyone knows speeding is the only possible cause of traffic accidents. (/sarcasm)
This sort of thinking bugs me no end. Accident statistics clearly show that speed is a contributing factor in a minority (maybe 20%) of accidents and the sole cause of an even smaller percentage. Driving while distracted causes many more accidents. Yet, where I live, >95% of traffic citations are for speeding. For the last few years, we've had more speeding tickets per year than we have licensed drivers, meaning that on average, everyone who has a license now gets one speeding ticket/year. The majority of these tickets are for minor offences (10 km/h on roads outside built-up areas).
I wonder how CRTs stack up against the newer technologies. Yes, a CRT will continue to work forever (my TV is >20 years old now, still works well). But I've noticed that high-resolution CRTs (like the 21" displays I use at work) degrade rather quickly. The 2 year-old NEC FE2111 (running at 1600x1200) I'm using is noticeably fuzzier now than when it was new. Brightness is becoming uneven, too. Screens that are a few years older tend to start curving their picture (straight lines are no longer straight, especially around the edges of the display). No amount of fiddling with the settings will cure this. A colleague used to have a 19" Dell; that display now lives in the server room because it's no longer fit for office work. It's no more than 5 years old! I've also got an LCD (in the laptop that sits next to the CRT). At the same age, the LCD has degraded far less than the CRT. In fact, I can't see any degradation at all. It's a 14" 1024x768 panel though, so maybe it's less prone to degradation than a large display.
Apple doesn't want it to be perfectly transparent. They want running Windows applications to be possible, but enough of a hassle that most people will prefer to run a real Mac application instead. Also, adding native Windows API support to OS X would require a major effort when it's much simpler just to offer virtualisation.
Remember how much time Microsoft spends updating their OS? Apple would basically have to duplicate this. Worse, they'd have to do a significant amount of reverse engineering as well, to keep up with all the unpublished crap in Windows.
Still the wrong way to solve the problem. Have the computer sort out dumb issues like capitalisation, instead of forcing the humans to adapt to some arcane and unreadable convention. While you're at it, get the computer to do something to prevent people from entering the same information twice.
IDK, but maybe the correct solution to that would be to clue-by-four the stupid idiot who thought it'd be a good idea to require data to be entered in caps only. Computers not being able to handle mixed case is sooo 1950s, you know.
TeX may have been a major technical achievement, but it did little to make word processing accessible to non-programmers. The application that got word processing out of the hands of the (relatively) few and into the hands of the many, was MacWrite, the first WYSIWYG word processor available to the general public. Yes, it was predated by Bravo and Gypsy (from Xerox) but we all know how many of those were sold. Also, TeX was predated by loads of word processors. Most of those may have run on dedicated hardware, but those were what drove typewriters to extinction, not TeX.
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France still has a pretty large military budget, what with their insistence on developing all military hardware including aircraft, major ships (carriers), missiles (including a nuclear force that's completely independent, unlike other European countries) etc. in house.
AIU, data mining is about finding 'interesting' stuff inside a data set. For instance, data mining would be the DoE going through their DB to see if the same name/SSN would crop up at multiple schools. Or an attempt to correlate school results (grades) with the amount of money spent on a student.
Not the FBI submitting some names and asking 'do you have a record for mr. X'.
That's a best-case scenario. It's often at much lower levels, especially when you consider privately-digitized files. I've had video files with the audio at -40 dB.
If it's like the other 'system sounds' in Windows, they'll be recorded at full volume, unlike your music which is at -20 dB average. So you've got your computer connected to a nice sound system, you set your volume so the music (movie, etc.) is audible, and the system sounds will be loud enough to wake the dead.
At least the systems sounds can be shut off.
Please Microsoft, copy Apple's Sounds control panel which has a separate volume setting for system sounds.
What annoys me about TOS is the way the technology looks outdated even by 1990s standards. It'd take an awful lot of CGI to fix that.
...but not as we know it.
That's why there are converters. I'm using an Apple Extended Keyboard with an ADB-to-USB converter on my Mac, and I use a Microsoft Natural keyboard [1] with a PS2-to-USB converter on my PC. The PS2-converter cost me about $8.
1: Ergonomic USB keyboards are impossible to get over here
Why the hell does the blurb refer to the computer as a 'Stock Keeping Unit' [1]?
1: at least, that's what Google tells me 'SKU' means...
Honestly I am not sure why all the keyboards and mice are USB now
... I have no free USB ports by default. Instead, I have an extra device sitting with my mini (USB hub) complete with associated wires.
Thank goodness we're getting rid of the abomination that is PS2. Finally, we've got a single bus design that accepts just about all peripherals your're likely to need. Just plug 'em in anywhere.
It's also become easy to build a hub into the keyboard, so you can hang mice, memory sticks etc. off the keyboard instead of having to root around the back of the computer.
My Mac Mini at home only has 2 USB ports, and because
And? That's one of the compromises you make when buying the smallest computer on the market.
The current Mini has 4 USB ports, btw.
If Apple had used the PS2 port for keyboard and mouse instead of USB, there would have been no room for USB or FireWire at all.
And can we get a Mac with a USB port on the front of the box?
Why, when you can have all the USB ports you want in an even more accessible location (the keyboard) or using a hub, in the location of your choice?
Precisely. There's also a story that one day, a guy walks into Cray HQ and says he wants to buy a supercomputer. They almost threw him out before realizing he was serious. That guy was Steve Jobs, of course, the only walk-in customer Cray ever had.
(avoiding the obvious)
...was it designed on a Mac?
Aludium Q36 Welly Modulator
The only thing missing is the earth-shattering kaboom.
In this case, there probably won't be any practical applications. It's a publicity stunt, and a showcase for JCB's diesel engines: the engines in the Dieselmax are basically stock engine blocks with huge turbochargers bolted on. The only reason to care is because it's cool.
For practical applications of high-performance diesel technology, take a look at Audi. They just won the Le Mans 24h race using a diesel engine. The lessons learned there (fuel consumption/efficiency, weight vs. performance and reliability) should be useful for roadgoing diesels as well.
Actually, JCB have built several diggers with huge supercharged V8s for use at shows. They can achieve about 100 mph, and do wheelies. They carry a 'JCB GT' tag (no doubt in reference to the joke you mentioned, and others).
The Dieselmax is a showcase for their new engine, which has been developed in-house, quite an achievement for such a relatively small company.
Building an engine for the sort of power output, power/weight ratio and power/frontal area ratio you need to achieve 500 km/h is nontrivial.
The Dieselmax uses two engines with a swept volume of 4.4 litres each, and 5+ bar of compression from the turbochargers, to get 750 bhp/engine.
The petrol-powered record cars used WW2 vintage aero engines (IIRC Merlins), at 27 litres each and running at maybe 2 bar to get 1500 bhp each. The Merlins were readily available at the time, building a record-breaking car just meant slotting in some second-hand Merlins.
For a diesel recordbreaker, no such option has been available. Sure, you can get 1500 bhp diesels, but they are meant for use in ships and weigh several tons. Lorry engines develop 500 bhp nowadays (a recent development, in 1980 that was no more than 300 bhp) out of 12 litres. Cranking up the turbo pressure seems easy enough, but pretty soon you'll need to cast a new engine block to withstand the enormous forces.
The only sport that extensively uses diesels is tractorpulling. Those guys can pull some 1500 bhp from 6 litres, using 2-stage turbochargers and some 10 bar of pressure. Those engines are built to last for 100 meters. Their cooling channels are filled with metal to strengthen the block, and even then violent malfunctions (crankshafts breaking etc) are common.
So getting a diesel to produce enough power with enough reliability means a lot of development work. Most people interested in breaking speed records weren't interested in the Diesel subcategory, they just wanted the overall record and chose the path of least resistance: petrol.
Ever seen an iPod Nano? An AA battery is about 3 times as thick as the Nano, so Apple had a choice:
- Install a user-replaceable battery. The player becomes 3 times as thick, and it now has an ugly/break-prone battery cover on the back. Say goodbye to that shiny metal backside, too. It'll have to be plastic instead.
- Keep the Nano as it is, and let the accessory market take care of it for those people who really want longer playtime than the internal battery can provide. External battery packs are available for the Nano.
But the message it sends is 'do whatever you want, we don't care as long as you do it below the speed limit'. A message that's received loud and clear by the general public, if our roads are any indication. So traffic safety ends up being no better than before, which leaves revenue generation as a main reason to continue this tactic.
Everyone knows speeding is the only possible cause of traffic accidents. (/sarcasm)
This sort of thinking bugs me no end. Accident statistics clearly show that speed is a contributing factor in a minority (maybe 20%) of accidents and the sole cause of an even smaller percentage. Driving while distracted causes many more accidents.
Yet, where I live, >95% of traffic citations are for speeding. For the last few years, we've had more speeding tickets per year than we have licensed drivers, meaning that on average, everyone who has a license now gets one speeding ticket/year. The majority of these tickets are for minor offences (10 km/h on roads outside built-up areas).
In all of my experiments with magnets I have not been able to detect smoke of any kind!
You must have not been applying enough power.
I wonder how CRTs stack up against the newer technologies. Yes, a CRT will continue to work forever (my TV is >20 years old now, still works well). But I've noticed that high-resolution CRTs (like the 21" displays I use at work) degrade rather quickly.
The 2 year-old NEC FE2111 (running at 1600x1200) I'm using is noticeably fuzzier now than when it was new. Brightness is becoming uneven, too. Screens that are a few years older tend to start curving their picture (straight lines are no longer straight, especially around the edges of the display). No amount of fiddling with the settings will cure this.
A colleague used to have a 19" Dell; that display now lives in the server room because it's no longer fit for office work. It's no more than 5 years old!
I've also got an LCD (in the laptop that sits next to the CRT). At the same age, the LCD has degraded far less than the CRT. In fact, I can't see any degradation at all. It's a 14" 1024x768 panel though, so maybe it's less prone to degradation than a large display.
Apple doesn't want it to be perfectly transparent. They want running Windows applications to be possible, but enough of a hassle that most people will prefer to run a real Mac application instead. Also, adding native Windows API support to OS X would require a major effort when it's much simpler just to offer virtualisation.
Remember how much time Microsoft spends updating their OS? Apple would basically have to duplicate this. Worse, they'd have to do a significant amount of reverse engineering as well, to keep up with all the unpublished crap in Windows.
Duh. Computers are supposed to make our lives easier, not harder.
Still the wrong way to solve the problem. Have the computer sort out dumb issues like capitalisation, instead of forcing the humans to adapt to some arcane and unreadable convention. While you're at it, get the computer to do something to prevent people from entering the same information twice.
IDK, but maybe the correct solution to that would be to clue-by-four the stupid idiot who thought it'd be a good idea to require data to be entered in caps only. Computers not being able to handle mixed case is sooo 1950s, you know.
TeX may have been a major technical achievement, but it did little to make word processing accessible to non-programmers. The application that got word processing out of the hands of the (relatively) few and into the hands of the many, was MacWrite, the first WYSIWYG word processor available to the general public. Yes, it was predated by Bravo and Gypsy (from Xerox) but we all know how many of those were sold.
Also, TeX was predated by loads of word processors. Most of those may have run on dedicated hardware, but those were what drove typewriters to extinction, not TeX.