I think that it has been fixed in 10.2, but in the initial release of MAC-OSX (not real OSX which is a different company), the display was supposedly vector driven similar to postscript or PDF. As a result it could take an exceedingly long time for a very long text (or html or pdf or postscript) file to display since the whole document was considered by the computer instead of just what was on screen. I think that this was one of the sources of the initial complaints about the MAC OSX experience.
From my own experience, having used Linux, Unix (Digital mostly), Windows 98, Windows NT, Mac OS 7.2, and Windows XP, the over all experience is similar to running Gnome on Mandrake 7. But my sister's 2000$ powerbook with OS10.2 is noticably slower than my 1000$ ThizLinux 6.0 Desknote. And to me price/performance is the only spec that matters (not Mhz).
From General relativity when you cross the event-horizon, the role of the time coordinate and the radial distance coordinate switch. This results in being able to move back and forth in time, but not being able to move away from the center of the black hole. Slightly more relevant to this discussion is the conversion between the mass of a black hole and the radius of the event horizon (assuming spherical symmetry) is:
For a black hole the mass of our sun the radius is:
Radius = 2 * (6.67 * 10^-11m/kg/s^2) * (2 * 10^30 kg) / (3 * 10^8 m/s)^2 = 2.964 km
When you check my math make sure you get your units right. A black hole three times the size of our solar system would be quite massive, and you should be impressed.
Also, I saw a program on Discovery Channel a while ago (6 months+) which had an interview with an observational astronomer in which he claimed to have observed movement in the center of our Galaxy which was consistant only with a supermassive black hole. I guess he finally published.
I'm pretty sure that all of the ISP's out there own only the metaphorical last mile of the connection. The primary structure of the internet is primarially payed for (and maintained) by _large_ institutions such as universities, government departments, and very large corporations. I don't think that my DSL ISP ran fiber to the next town over. I think that none of the ISPs actually run the fiber that your data goes on from city to city.
Ummm... Inflation accounts for most of that price increase. The real reason why cars are better is that the technology has improved. To say that the price of cars has gone up you ought to compare a 2003 model car to a 1976 model car with identical features. Very few (err... none) cars in 1976 had air bags, anti-lock brakes, 100,000 mile warranties, continuously variable transmittion etc.
586 horsepower actually 1 horsepower is 750 watts.
It doesn't suprise me that an electric car can hit high speeds, or have very short acceleration times. Electric motors have very good low speed torque. Basically they translate about 90% of the energy you dump into them to kinetic energy (try getting that out of a mechanical transmittion), so acceleration is pretty much dependant on what you can draw from the power source. Also, top speed is very dependant on areodynamics. I remember a vehicle from the 1930's in the Deutches (spelling) Museum in Munich that could do 70 miles an hour on a very low power engine (I seem to remeber about 50 hoursepower). It acompished this by having a very low drag coefficient (it was tear-drop shapped, and supposedly has the lowest drag coefficient of any car ever made). The electric vehicle in question here looks like it is pretty areodynamical, so I don't doubt the top speed claim. You should also take note that the high speed and acceleration probably have a very dramatic effect on the range (since drawing high current causes the battery to dump more of its energy into heat). For the same reason stop and go traffic probably kills the range since lots of current will be drawn starting and stopping the vehicle.
For use in the states I'ld be concerned that the time to charge wasn't listed, making it impractical for long distance travel (or stop and go traffic). Let's see some fuel cell cars that can be re-filled instead of re-charged (like a internal combustion car).
Tritium (hydrogen-3) not deuterium (hydrogen-2) is what makes hydrogen bombs go mega-boom, but you need an atomic bomb to get hot enough. They can actually mine their own Uranium, but enriching the U-235 to weapons grade is very difficult. Finally, even if you have the materials and knowledge of explosives to overcome the pre-detenation problem, do you know what critical mass is for the particular isotope and enrichment. If you don't it probably either won't work or you'll blow yourself up (or irradiate yourself) before you get it assembled. Ok, that rant's over.
From my understanding of what they are doing (quantum mechanics based keys) it will be very difficult to transmit keys any real distance through atmosphere, much less a cloud. It would certainly be easier to just use a laser in "binary" mode (on-off) to flash a key from point to point. You'ld still know if it was intercepted since the light would take longer to get there or wouldn't get there at all.
many sources for this information are avalable from the ETS at:
http://www.gre.org/resdevelop.html#ValidationExten sion
wheither or not you are inclined to believe them or not is your choice.
I think that a big part of their problems comes from trying to provide internet acess to 3 billion people who previously didn't have it (is it that few?). Not that this goal isn't admirable, but I think it would be better to concentrate on getting consistant electricity, clean water, and high quality food to the world poor, instead of internet access (lack of computers/electricity to run them could also be a problem).
First, I'ld like to point out that the ETS tests have relative scores, so you don't nessasarially need to get all questions correct to get a "perfect" score, just subtantially more right than 99.5% (a guess) of the people taking the test. So the people who were cheating on these tests really had an effect on the scores of the tallented people who didn't nessasarially have access to the answers.
Second, it takes a fairly large amount of time to figure out how difficult/fair questions are for these tests. That is what the experimental section of the exams are used for. They corrolate your actuall score with how you did on each question in an experimental section and via statistics then determine how difficult that question actually was. Because this process takes time (even after you have written the question), a question needs to have an apprecable lifetime for the tests to continue to be fair and the scores to remain comperable from one exam to the next. In these respects they are different than the questions on a licensing test (which should test your practical ablities anyway) since aptatude tests require relative scores which don't drift from year to year, and licensing exams should determine how quickly you can diagnose/fix a problem or create a solution for a particular challenge.
Decline of Math/Drawing skills
on
Engineer in a Box?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There is no question that both math skills and drawing skills are in rapid decline amoung engeneers (and even scientists). If you go back to the people who were trained even 10 years ago, their ability to make rough estimations in their head far exceeds what todays students can do (since they couldn't always use a calculator/computer on a test or for a project). However, it is also very important that engeneers make useful products and pay attention to design considerations not just math and drawing.
I can think of two excellent examples, one where the engeneer was very good at both drawing and math, but neglected some fundamental requirements for the product (and therefore no one was happy with the result). The other example is of a person with a bachelors of physics, working as an engeneer. This person uses a quite a few computational and drawing tools, but does a wonderful job paying attention to the fundamental requirments of a product/project. Usually this engeneer completes projects quickly with inovative solutions. Point is, you only need so many people making tools (like CAD programs), if creative people can use them easily.
If the media companies are selling the media, then it makes sense that they would throw a fit about making any kind of copy. However, they are selling the content, which means they should actually facilitate copying of the content onto different media for people who have purchased it legally. This means that if you bought a CD/LP/Cassette/8Track/
BetaMax/VHS/DVD/Laserdisk you should be able to either make a copy of it onto whatever media you desire, or for a trivial fee (cost of production) receive a copy of the content on whatever media you want, similar to what the software industry (at least used to) do for lost or damaged disks.
The only language I can think of that meets the requirments of, well defined strings, automatic memory management, and well-designed collection classes is Fortran 77.
I guess we should also switch back to Tektronics 4010 terminals to get rid of problems with video glitches, and regress back to DOS since there is no blue screen of death.
Anyway, the main advantage to writing in C, C++, or any other programing lanuguage with Powerful memory management and well developed libraries is that you don't have to use the basic functions. You can use "safe" functions from well known libraries or make calls to routines written in other languages. I'ld say that crappy programming is 50%, and the other 50% is a lack of Quality Assesment.
Ummm...arn't projects like GTK, QT, all the "visual" projects (not to mention GLibC), and all the other common libraries and scripting languages trying to create common toolkits for programmers?
In my mind the no returns on opened software policy by most software retailers has a bigger effect on the crappyness of software. Since on one can return a defective product, there is substantially less motivation to improve it.
Another possible reason that most open source software (OSS?) is less buggy than its comercially developed alternative is that the open source programmers probably USE their software and therefore find the bugs and are motivated to fix them.
First, do any compainies actually require their employees to use PDAs? Second, even though it is important to have a good concept of what you are doing, it is actually nessasary to be able to do the mechanics. If you have no conception of what the right answer should be, you have no idea if the computer/calculator/PDA returned the right answer. Nor can you program the computer/calculator/PDA to do something new and interesting. Why should I compain though, if most people are dependant on their PDA's to do simple math, those of us who can do math will be very rich (cause you won't know if we are screwing you out of your money).
2 plates separated by a very small gap is a capacitor. Capacitors store energy. If you charge one up you deliver energy to it and generate heat. When a capacitor is dis-charged it loses energy and if allowed to equilibrate with the ambient temperature it will end up colder than room temperature.
For those looking for a fairly compact way to cool something to liquid nitrogen (LN) temperatures, Ortec EG&G produced a device to cool large Ge Diodes to LN temps for use in gamma ray spectroscophy. I beleive it used Peltire devices and fans. For the record LN is cheaper and easier to use, but more bulky.
Of course the 2 slit experiment can be done with a diffraction grating and a laser pointer. Laser pointers cost about 10$ (or less), but where would one get a diffraction grating for cheap? That's easy, a Compact Disk (or DVD). Ergo, the laser pointer + compact disk version of the 2 slit experiment is easily accessable for students (cost wise), easy to explain, and demonstrates quantum mechanics.
As a side note, I built a michelson-moorely interferometer as a freshman in college, so I guess "accessable-to-students" depends on the student.
Is Apple really using PDF/PS for desktop graphics. Both of these formats are interpreted and have to be rendered. I can't imagine how slow the html->pdf->display conversion is considering how long it takes to render a large pdf document for printing.
I think that Neon Genisis is both the best and the worst Anime. After watching the last episode my wife disavowed all knowledge of the series. Since then we have been working on collecting the whole thing on DVD. I've got to agree with some of the prior comments saying that it is a very intellectual series, and requires a fair knowledge of religon (just about all of them, lots of references to Budism, Hinduism, Christainity, Jewdism and Islam) and Christian/Jewish mysticism to understand. Over all it is a pretty good mind f**k and you probably shouldn't watch it if you would rather watch DBZ.
Neon Genisis is to Blade Runner what Trigun is to Mad Max and DBZ is to Black Mask.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm... Maybe new ones do. I work with radiation detectors and we commonly break open smoke detectors to get the Americium-241 as a test source.
You mean like lead? or do you have one of those EcoPC's
From my own experience, having used Linux, Unix (Digital mostly), Windows 98, Windows NT, Mac OS 7.2, and Windows XP, the over all experience is similar to running Gnome on Mandrake 7. But my sister's 2000$ powerbook with OS10.2 is noticably slower than my 1000$ ThizLinux 6.0 Desknote. And to me price/performance is the only spec that matters (not Mhz).
Radius = 2 * "Universal Gravitational Constant" * "mass inside event horizon" / pow("speed of light",2)
For a black hole the mass of our sun the radius is:
Radius = 2 * (6.67 * 10^-11m/kg/s^2) * (2 * 10^30 kg) / (3 * 10^8 m/s)^2 = 2.964 km
When you check my math make sure you get your units right. A black hole three times the size of our solar system would be quite massive, and you should be impressed.
Also, I saw a program on Discovery Channel a while ago (6 months+) which had an interview with an observational astronomer in which he claimed to have observed movement in the center of our Galaxy which was consistant only with a supermassive black hole. I guess he finally published.
I'm pretty sure that all of the ISP's out there own only the metaphorical last mile of the connection. The primary structure of the internet is primarially payed for (and maintained) by _large_ institutions such as universities, government departments, and very large corporations. I don't think that my DSL ISP ran fiber to the next town over. I think that none of the ISPs actually run the fiber that your data goes on from city to city.
errr... designed at all?
errr... does that mean the operating system isn't designed yet?
Seriously, performance improvements in hardware are continuously swallowed by the continual software bloat. Microsoft is esspecially guilty of this.
Ummm... Inflation accounts for most of that price increase. The real reason why cars are better is that the technology has improved. To say that the price of cars has gone up you ought to compare a 2003 model car to a 1976 model car with identical features. Very few (err... none) cars in 1976 had air bags, anti-lock brakes, 100,000 mile warranties, continuously variable transmittion etc.
It doesn't suprise me that an electric car can hit high speeds, or have very short acceleration times. Electric motors have very good low speed torque. Basically they translate about 90% of the energy you dump into them to kinetic energy (try getting that out of a mechanical transmittion), so acceleration is pretty much dependant on what you can draw from the power source. Also, top speed is very dependant on areodynamics. I remember a vehicle from the 1930's in the Deutches (spelling) Museum in Munich that could do 70 miles an hour on a very low power engine (I seem to remeber about 50 hoursepower). It acompished this by having a very low drag coefficient (it was tear-drop shapped, and supposedly has the lowest drag coefficient of any car ever made). The electric vehicle in question here looks like it is pretty areodynamical, so I don't doubt the top speed claim. You should also take note that the high speed and acceleration probably have a very dramatic effect on the range (since drawing high current causes the battery to dump more of its energy into heat). For the same reason stop and go traffic probably kills the range since lots of current will be drawn starting and stopping the vehicle.
For use in the states I'ld be concerned that the time to charge wasn't listed, making it impractical for long distance travel (or stop and go traffic). Let's see some fuel cell cars that can be re-filled instead of re-charged (like a internal combustion car).
From my understanding of what they are doing (quantum mechanics based keys) it will be very difficult to transmit keys any real distance through atmosphere, much less a cloud. It would certainly be easier to just use a laser in "binary" mode (on-off) to flash a key from point to point. You'ld still know if it was intercepted since the light would take longer to get there or wouldn't get there at all.
Kang, after Marge chooses the backseat of a camaro.
Very few cartoons are broadcast live, it's a horrable strain on the animator's wrists.
many sources for this information are avalable from the ETS at: http://www.gre.org/resdevelop.html#ValidationExten sion
wheither or not you are inclined to believe them or not is your choice.
I think that a big part of their problems comes from trying to provide internet acess to 3 billion people who previously didn't have it (is it that few?). Not that this goal isn't admirable, but I think it would be better to concentrate on getting consistant electricity, clean water, and high quality food to the world poor, instead of internet access (lack of computers/electricity to run them could also be a problem).
I'm guessing this is off-topic.
Second, it takes a fairly large amount of time to figure out how difficult/fair questions are for these tests. That is what the experimental section of the exams are used for. They corrolate your actuall score with how you did on each question in an experimental section and via statistics then determine how difficult that question actually was. Because this process takes time (even after you have written the question), a question needs to have an apprecable lifetime for the tests to continue to be fair and the scores to remain comperable from one exam to the next. In these respects they are different than the questions on a licensing test (which should test your practical ablities anyway) since aptatude tests require relative scores which don't drift from year to year, and licensing exams should determine how quickly you can diagnose/fix a problem or create a solution for a particular challenge.
I can think of two excellent examples, one where the engeneer was very good at both drawing and math, but neglected some fundamental requirements for the product (and therefore no one was happy with the result). The other example is of a person with a bachelors of physics, working as an engeneer. This person uses a quite a few computational and drawing tools, but does a wonderful job paying attention to the fundamental requirments of a product/project. Usually this engeneer completes projects quickly with inovative solutions. Point is, you only need so many people making tools (like CAD programs), if creative people can use them easily.
If the media companies are selling the media, then it makes sense that they would throw a fit about making any kind of copy. However, they are selling the content, which means they should actually facilitate copying of the content onto different media for people who have purchased it legally. This means that if you bought a CD/LP/Cassette/8Track/ BetaMax/VHS/DVD/Laserdisk you should be able to either make a copy of it onto whatever media you desire, or for a trivial fee (cost of production) receive a copy of the content on whatever media you want, similar to what the software industry (at least used to) do for lost or damaged disks.
The only language I can think of that meets the requirments of, well defined strings, automatic memory management, and well-designed collection classes is Fortran 77.
I guess we should also switch back to Tektronics 4010 terminals to get rid of problems with video glitches, and regress back to DOS since there is no blue screen of death.
Anyway, the main advantage to writing in C, C++, or any other programing lanuguage with Powerful memory management and well developed libraries is that you don't have to use the basic functions. You can use "safe" functions from well known libraries or make calls to routines written in other languages. I'ld say that crappy programming is 50%, and the other 50% is a lack of Quality Assesment.
Ummm...arn't projects like GTK, QT, all the "visual" projects (not to mention GLibC), and all the other common libraries and scripting languages trying to create common toolkits for programmers?
In my mind the no returns on opened software policy by most software retailers has a bigger effect on the crappyness of software. Since on one can return a defective product, there is substantially less motivation to improve it.
Another possible reason that most open source software (OSS?) is less buggy than its comercially developed alternative is that the open source programmers probably USE their software and therefore find the bugs and are motivated to fix them.
First, do any compainies actually require their employees to use PDAs? Second, even though it is important to have a good concept of what you are doing, it is actually nessasary to be able to do the mechanics. If you have no conception of what the right answer should be, you have no idea if the computer/calculator/PDA returned the right answer. Nor can you program the computer/calculator/PDA to do something new and interesting. Why should I compain though, if most people are dependant on their PDA's to do simple math, those of us who can do math will be very rich (cause you won't know if we are screwing you out of your money).
2 plates separated by a very small gap is a capacitor. Capacitors store energy. If you charge one up you deliver energy to it and generate heat. When a capacitor is dis-charged it loses energy and if allowed to equilibrate with the ambient temperature it will end up colder than room temperature. For those looking for a fairly compact way to cool something to liquid nitrogen (LN) temperatures, Ortec EG&G produced a device to cool large Ge Diodes to LN temps for use in gamma ray spectroscophy. I beleive it used Peltire devices and fans. For the record LN is cheaper and easier to use, but more bulky.
Of course the 2 slit experiment can be done with a diffraction grating and a laser pointer. Laser pointers cost about 10$ (or less), but where would one get a diffraction grating for cheap? That's easy, a Compact Disk (or DVD). Ergo, the laser pointer + compact disk version of the 2 slit experiment is easily accessable for students (cost wise), easy to explain, and demonstrates quantum mechanics. As a side note, I built a michelson-moorely interferometer as a freshman in college, so I guess "accessable-to-students" depends on the student.
Is Apple really using PDF/PS for desktop graphics. Both of these formats are interpreted and have to be rendered. I can't imagine how slow the html->pdf->display conversion is considering how long it takes to render a large pdf document for printing.
Please warn about spoilers in the subject line. Not everyone has seen it.
I think that Neon Genisis is both the best and the worst Anime. After watching the last episode my wife disavowed all knowledge of the series. Since then we have been working on collecting the whole thing on DVD. I've got to agree with some of the prior comments saying that it is a very intellectual series, and requires a fair knowledge of religon (just about all of them, lots of references to Budism, Hinduism, Christainity, Jewdism and Islam) and Christian/Jewish mysticism to understand. Over all it is a pretty good mind f**k and you probably shouldn't watch it if you would rather watch DBZ. Neon Genisis is to Blade Runner what Trigun is to Mad Max and DBZ is to Black Mask.