I thought the list was too heavy on the "air/sea battles transplanted into space" genre (nee space opera), and light on movies with deep emotional content. It looked like one generation's list.
To go back a little bit, I'd nominate Silent Running as one of the better movies (especially for the sense of isolation in space, the challenges of living in such an environment, etc.)
Besides, with a gorgeous soundtrack by Peter Schickeley (of PDQ Bach fame, amusingly enough), could it be all bad?
Apple recommends fully draining the battery and recharging it at least once a month to keep it from going into some sort of deep discharges state.
Not quite. Lithium batteries don't have that problem. The real reason for the full discharge-recharge cycle is to give the system a chance to recalculate the battery's capacity. One manufacturer puts it this way:
Generally a SBS (coulomb-metric) fuel gauge is accurate to within 2%-5% and provides continuous measurement and display of the battery condition. However, with SBS you must cycle the pack to full discharge and full charge periodically in order to re-calibrate the fuel gauge.
I regularly run through airports leeching power briefly between flights
I can see it now -- microwave antennas on the back of your laptop, phone, etc. to geta free boost from the omnipresent TSA. "It's OK officer, I don't mind you taking a nice long look at the X-Ray..."
120,000 page views?! That's nothing compared to the Slashdot death ray!
The myth is dead! Long live the myth!
on
The Solar Death Ray
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· Score: 5, Informative
It's really only a "death ray" if you're really really tiny. Mythbustersdid a great job of blowing the myth apart, with a much larger mirror array arranged in a proper fresnel configuration. It douldn't set fire to much of anything, even when they put gasoline on the target.
Quite a few studies have looked for the "magic bullet" that helps students learn, and only one thing has emerged reliably -- time on task. Yup, the more time you spend working with the material (read: doing homework, working in class, etc.), the better you do academically. The correlation is extremely clear
If you have that emphasis, using computers in the classroom has a positive impact. If you just use computers for the sake of using them (or they distract students away, as in the article), they have a negative impact.
The other place where computers fall down in the classroom is that quite a bit of learning is a social activity, and some of the best teaching moments come from students teaching each other. But, if you put one student at each computer, you've just lost that opportunity. If you put multiple students at a computer, they're all focusing on the computer (and one is probably hogging the keyboard), so you lose that interaction that is so valuable.
The best use so far has been in science curricula where a simulation can replace access to expensive equipment or let students do what would otherwise be a dangerous experiment. But, for basic skills such as reading and math, computers are simply a distraction.
At first I was taken aback by the cheezy dialog ("she lied to me! She used me!"), adequate acting, and overall look.
Then I remembered Jar-Jar.
This band of rebel filmmakers may be the galaxy's best last hope.
Using Gilligan's Island as an example is a "hook" to draw the reader in, just as the mods conflate opinions into their descriptions of a story.
The real story is about how people react to new monies being introduced, especially when one regime is replaced by another. The article cites, for example, the practice of US soldiers distributing $20 bills into Iraq in place of the existing Dinars, but people not only kept using the familiar currency but the Dinar doubled in value as compared to the dollar in spite of it no longer being an official currency.
Except in the case of truly "breathrough" innovations, the tried and true usually wins out over the new (and presumably intersting) until there's a critical mass using it. Research shows that the point at which a new innovation takes over is around 25% of the available market (which is why the iPod has begun to pop up so widely; people who aren't early-adopter techie types are seeing enough of their friends using them to get over the inertia of not being the first to use something.)
So, this is an article about people using familiar currency over new currency; it juat happens they chose a TV show for their hypothetical example rather than making one up out of whole cloth.
There's an even clearer and simpler way to explain it (from the press release, as reporters have to explain it to a lay audience):
We describe the world by measuring quantities and forces that vary over time and space. The rules of nature are often expressed by formulas involving their rates of change, so-called differential equations. Such formulas may have an "index", the number of solutions of the formulas minus the number of restrictions which they impose on the values of the quantities being computed. The index theorem calculates this number in terms of the geometry of the surrounding space.
The core of a good science fiction story lies in the people, not the technology. Theodore Sturgeon defined it wonderfully: "A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content."
He's not alone in this belief -- peruse the Definitions of "Science Fiction" page and you'll see the same sentiment echoed by many successful authors (e.g. Ray Bradbury: Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.)
As for the rest of the show, I think they're being conservative -- it's all pretty much straight-line extrapolations, nothing really radical.
Forget teaming with Ferrari to build notebooks, they should co-brand this one with Hummer.
They're not tracking individual customer purchases
on
BudNet Tracks Your Suds
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· Score: 5, Informative
According to the article "They're drilling down to the level of the individual store," Thompson says. "They can pinpoint if customers are gay, Latino, 30-year-old, college-educated conservatives.
They do that in two ways (again, according to the article): a "nightly sweep of their distributors' databases" and 2) on-site visits by sales reps who notice how the store is set up, whether it's selling room-temp or chilld beer (or both), and probably noting the class of customers.
Despite Michael's concerns, there's nothing in there about tying to individual customer purchases or even getting explicit sales data on competitors' products.
"Keyword density" is a favorite SEO trick for trying to get a page to rank more highly, along with engine-specific tricks (e.g. getting people to link to your page with they keywords you want in the link to drive a Google ranking higher.
I just ran a handful of experiemnts with long-established (8+ years), high-ranking pages and found a few interesting things in Yahoo:
Incoming link popularity appears to play a far smaller role than on Google. Pages that are "top of page 1" material in Google due to their oncoming links don't even show up on top of Yahoo.
Yahoo is using the meta Description tag, at least in the display (but it also looks like they're using it for ranking.)
They're giving extreme weight to items that show up in the Yahoo directory (which has been pay-for-inclusion for the most part the past several years.) In fact, one of my pages which has changed titles shows up in yahoo search under a 6 year old title (the one used to list it in the directory, natch.)
Yahoo is also giving heavy weight to keywords that show up in URLs.
Keyword cramming seems to move sites up on Yahoo (very annoying, especially for those of us who would rather get placed via honest content.)
To be honest, Yahoo's new engine reminds me of circa-1996 engines. Go run the same search on Yahoo and Google and see what comes back with better relevance (Google still looks better to me.)
Why do you need the big x86 processors?... I would probably start with some very cheap circuits.
Given mass manufacturing, the "big x86 processors" and associated components and software turn out to be cheaper than "cheap" (and custom) circuitry.
Easier still: "try again" caps have 3 lines of printing, centered. Winning caps have 4 lines and fill pretty much the whole space. You don't even have to make out the words, just avoid the caps with a fair bit of whitespace at the edges.
I recently bought a couple of Hitachi drives, and despite my quiet misgivings at the "Deskstar" label on them, I fell under the spell of Frys and laid out my cash.
Wondering if they were the infamous 75GXP deathstars under another label, I looked at the master table of part numbers at Hitachi. (Fortunately for me, they aren't -- the Hitachi 60GB and 80GB retail kits have Deskstar 7K250 drives.)
I've had two incidents that show this is already happening in California:
The (federal) IRS disputed the tax deductability of some of my wife's student loans a couple of years ago. About two days after we got that straightened out (by having our tax advisor, who is a former IRS agent, quote chapter and verse), we received a note from the State of California's Franchise Tax Board saying "we learned from the IRS..."; we had to go through the whole song and dance a second time to shut them up.
I opened a small business last year, duly filing all my paperwork and paying the fees, then paid my estimated quarterly taxes to the feds in December. Come January, I received a letter from the city of San Jose saying "we collect data from the IRS and see you have a business..." trying to dun me for a business license (which I had already paid for.) I had to send them the details of my original filing to shut them up.
Given what little I've seen of the Massachusetts beaurocracy, I bet the residents there are going to be subjectd to even more fun than we Californians!
The author keeps using Nautilus to show the innovations in Gnome, and those innovations come back to one person -- Andy Hertzfeld. Andy was a member of the original Macintosh team, who wrote much of Quickdraw and several of the initial applications (including MacPaint). Later, he came up with an vastly improved version of the Finder and a version that handled multitasking natively (Switcher).
Andy co-founded Eazel, and wrote much of Nautlius; all the UI touches mentioned feel like his handiwork.
Just how much content can you have being specific about Embedded Systems Programming
A huge amount. Many embedded systems have real-time requirements, tight memory-space limitations, and a much lower tolerance for failure than desktop systems. If you're talking about a comsumer embedded device (e.g. a cellphone), you have to deal with power management as well. There are multiple operating systems to choose from, several types of processor architectures (including the Harvard Archirtecture typified by Intel's old 8051 family that has entirely separate memory spaces for instructions and data), and several buses specific to embedded systems work.
Why should this matter? There are several embedded systems in your car, and I'm sure you'd be mightily ticked if your car just stopped working randomly. On a more mundane level, what about programmable thermostats or the security card readers where you go to work? That's not to mention the mission-critical embedded systems in aircraft and medical devices.
You mean Project Orion? Interestingly, the British Interplanetary Society studied an updated version called Project Dadelus that used much smaller fuel pellets, exploded them in a reaction chamber, and controlled the thrust much better than the Project Orion plans.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the list was too heavy on the "air/sea battles transplanted into space" genre (nee space opera), and light on movies with deep emotional content. It looked like one generation's list. To go back a little bit, I'd nominate Silent Running as one of the better movies (especially for the sense of isolation in space, the challenges of living in such an environment, etc.) Besides, with a gorgeous soundtrack by Peter Schickeley (of PDQ Bach fame, amusingly enough), could it be all bad?
Not quite. Lithium batteries don't have that problem. The real reason for the full discharge-recharge cycle is to give the system a chance to recalculate the battery's capacity. One manufacturer puts it this way:
I can see it now -- microwave antennas on the back of your laptop, phone, etc. to geta free boost from the omnipresent TSA. "It's OK officer, I don't mind you taking a nice long look at the X-Ray..."
120,000 page views?! That's nothing compared to the Slashdot death ray!
It's really only a "death ray" if you're really really tiny. Mythbusters did a great job of blowing the myth apart, with a much larger mirror array arranged in a proper fresnel configuration. It douldn't set fire to much of anything, even when they put gasoline on the target.
If you have that emphasis, using computers in the classroom has a positive impact. If you just use computers for the sake of using them (or they distract students away, as in the article), they have a negative impact.
The other place where computers fall down in the classroom is that quite a bit of learning is a social activity, and some of the best teaching moments come from students teaching each other. But, if you put one student at each computer, you've just lost that opportunity. If you put multiple students at a computer, they're all focusing on the computer (and one is probably hogging the keyboard), so you lose that interaction that is so valuable.
The best use so far has been in science curricula where a simulation can replace access to expensive equipment or let students do what would otherwise be a dangerous experiment. But, for basic skills such as reading and math, computers are simply a distraction.
At first I was taken aback by the cheezy dialog ("she lied to me! She used me!"), adequate acting, and overall look. Then I remembered Jar-Jar. This band of rebel filmmakers may be the galaxy's best last hope.
Turn the logo on its side...ohmighod, the flag suddenly develops horns!
;)-
Headline in the supermarkets next week: "Lost Atlantean shuttle found in the desert. New 'Bermuda Triangle' to blame."
Using Gilligan's Island as an example is a "hook" to draw the reader in, just as the mods conflate opinions into their descriptions of a story. The real story is about how people react to new monies being introduced, especially when one regime is replaced by another. The article cites, for example, the practice of US soldiers distributing $20 bills into Iraq in place of the existing Dinars, but people not only kept using the familiar currency but the Dinar doubled in value as compared to the dollar in spite of it no longer being an official currency. Except in the case of truly "breathrough" innovations, the tried and true usually wins out over the new (and presumably intersting) until there's a critical mass using it. Research shows that the point at which a new innovation takes over is around 25% of the available market (which is why the iPod has begun to pop up so widely; people who aren't early-adopter techie types are seeing enough of their friends using them to get over the inertia of not being the first to use something.) So, this is an article about people using familiar currency over new currency; it juat happens they chose a TV show for their hypothetical example rather than making one up out of whole cloth.
He's not alone in this belief -- peruse the Definitions of "Science Fiction" page and you'll see the same sentiment echoed by many successful authors (e.g. Ray Bradbury: Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.)
As for the rest of the show, I think they're being conservative -- it's all pretty much straight-line extrapolations, nothing really radical.
Forget teaming with Ferrari to build notebooks, they should co-brand this one with Hummer.
They do that in two ways (again, according to the article): a "nightly sweep of their distributors' databases" and 2) on-site visits by sales reps who notice how the store is set up, whether it's selling room-temp or chilld beer (or both), and probably noting the class of customers.
Despite Michael's concerns, there's nothing in there about tying to individual customer purchases or even getting explicit sales data on competitors' products.
- Incoming link popularity appears to play a far smaller role than on Google. Pages that are "top of page 1" material in Google due to their oncoming links don't even show up on top of Yahoo.
- Yahoo is using the meta Description tag, at least in the display (but it also looks like they're using it for ranking.)
- They're giving extreme weight to items that show up in the Yahoo directory (which has been pay-for-inclusion for the most part the past several years.) In fact, one of my pages which has changed titles shows up in yahoo search under a 6 year old title (the one used to list it in the directory, natch.)
- Yahoo is also giving heavy weight to keywords that show up in URLs.
- Keyword cramming seems to move sites up on Yahoo (very annoying, especially for those of us who would rather get placed via honest content.)
To be honest, Yahoo's new engine reminds me of circa-1996 engines. Go run the same search on Yahoo and Google and see what comes back with better relevance (Google still looks better to me.)Why do you need the big x86 processors? ... I would probably start with some very cheap circuits.
Given mass manufacturing, the "big x86 processors" and associated components and software turn out to be cheaper than "cheap" (and custom) circuitry.
Easier still: "try again" caps have 3 lines of printing, centered. Winning caps have 4 lines and fill pretty much the whole space. You don't even have to make out the words, just avoid the caps with a fair bit of whitespace at the edges.
...but unfortunately this bottle cap is too small to hold it. - Fermat
Wondering if they were the infamous 75GXP deathstars under another label, I looked at the master table of part numbers at Hitachi. (Fortunately for me, they aren't -- the Hitachi 60GB and 80GB retail kits have Deskstar 7K250 drives.)
I've had two incidents that show this is already happening in California:
Given what little I've seen of the Massachusetts beaurocracy, I bet the residents there are going to be subjectd to even more fun than we Californians!
Whoa! Shrub has been looking in the wrong place for Weapons of Mass Destruction -- he never tried eBay.
Andy co-founded Eazel, and wrote much of Nautlius; all the UI touches mentioned feel like his handiwork.
A huge amount. Many embedded systems have real-time requirements, tight memory-space limitations, and a much lower tolerance for failure than desktop systems. If you're talking about a comsumer embedded device (e.g. a cellphone), you have to deal with power management as well. There are multiple operating systems to choose from, several types of processor architectures (including the Harvard Archirtecture typified by Intel's old 8051 family that has entirely separate memory spaces for instructions and data), and several buses specific to embedded systems work.
Why should this matter? There are several embedded systems in your car, and I'm sure you'd be mightily ticked if your car just stopped working randomly. On a more mundane level, what about programmable thermostats or the security card readers where you go to work? That's not to mention the mission-critical embedded systems in aircraft and medical devices.
You mean Project Orion? Interestingly, the British Interplanetary Society studied an updated version called Project Dadelus that used much smaller fuel pellets, exploded them in a reaction chamber, and controlled the thrust much better than the Project Orion plans.