Thanks for taking the time to respond seriously. I find myself in complete agreement. In the small environments I work with, Samba usually isn't an issue, but it's clear that unless Apple can address Windows interoperability they will never crack the corporate market. Mind you, that's been true for years and years.
Also, the point about excess bells and whistles available on OSX is well made. We're getting out of the idea that hardware always lags software. Bloatware needs to be fixed before Release 2 nowadays.
I've assumed for years that Macs were slower than PCs. But for one business I'm involved with, everyone continues to use Macs. (and still on 9.2.2, sorry.) Why? Because they are completely non-technical. They find the Chooser so much easier to use than Windows networking, or having to navigate to the Windows printers via various alternative routes. They find the screen less cluttered and therefore easier to read. And all the boxes (iMacs) work exactly the same way. Admittedly all they run is Excel, Filemaker and MYOB, but that's what they need. (The fileserver, by the way, is Linux running netatalk, perfectly adequate and much cheaper than a Mac box dedicated to the same job.) The amount of support I have to give these people is minimal and is all application-related.
The other area I encounter non-technical people is the PC world and, of course, the level of support required is much higher. Each successive edition of Windows is more cluttered as standard, and the learning curve is often a major irritation for busy professionals. Things often don't just work out of the box. Only last week I spent a frustrating hour just trying to get two W2k notebooks to communicate properly over ethernet, whereas I don't even have to think about adding Appletalk boxes. OK so I'm stupid, but how many other people are out there who are just as stupid as I am, and also need to work with computers?
In short, I see no real change in the long term situation, which is:
Sure, Macs are slower than PCs.
The average small business or home user without lots of tech support finds Macs easier to use.
On the whole it's easier to network Macs than PCs
The technically competent user who does lots of things with computers gets more performance more cheaply out of PCs
The PC world dominates games
Powerbooks are in general better all round notebooks than Wintel notebooks, and don't actually cost any more
Macs integrate much better into a normal home environment - they are understated whereas PCs are either just plain ugly or overstated and inappropriate
For most people most of the time, anything over a 600MHz PIII is adequate
Even so, Apple badly needs either to sort out its desktop models or to concentrate heavily on notebooks and home appliances. As the mass of users gets used to more demanding applications, there is going to become a point where the lack of raw performance becomes a major issue for too many people.
There is actually a reason why the control computers have the profiles that they do (as some people are pointing out in general terms.)
It isn't just about brakes. It's the maximum torque loading allowed by your gearbox, maximum heat buildup that can be allowed in the slushbox, strength of the universal or CV joints, side loading the suspension can take, aerodynamics, you name it. It takes several hundred people to design a car, and tens of expensive highly qualified engineers to do a proper job of uprating. If even companies like Mercedes occasionally get it wrong (A-Class)it should be obvious that it isn't easy.
I realise that this won't have the least effect on the idiots who think they are God's gift to automotive engineering because they can actually undo the bolts, replace the silencer with a noisenhancer, and do the bolts up...but why is it that the people who do these mods drive so incredibly badly? If the ones around here tried it on a real racetrack, the marshals would have them off before the end of the first lap, assuming they got that far without hitting something. Which is presumably why they do it on public roads, since there are fewer police on the roads than marshals on a racetrack.
The great thing about drag racing is that the thing only needs to stay together for a quarter mile.
No, this is not experimental evidence. It is an observation and a hypothesis to explain it. In order to support or falsify the hypothesis, you then need to think of an experiment the outcome of which is NOT already known, that has different outcomes depending on whether the hypothesis is valid or not and which is not simply a repetition of the original observation. A good experiment supports one hypothesis while falsifying at least one alternative hypothesis that explains the same original observation. I might formulate an hypothesis that the perturbation of the orbit of Mercury is caused by little green men with a big laser cannon, and in the absence of any other supporting information, this would be just as good as Einstein's explanation.
Sorry, but the Earth didn't have much oxygen until life started producing it. That's the history of life: it changes the planet to suit itself.
We do it, but even bacteria do it too. As plants have reduced the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, different dominant plant families have arisen able to survive in the low-CO2 environment. Insects were big at one time because there was more oxygen in the atmosphere, now the species are smaller because there is less. The idea that life requires 0-35C, 20% oxygen, is based on a static view of the world which, as our genetics lecturer once remarked "Unfortunately for some religious groups does not accord with any of the evidence."
For me, the big issue in all this is how we handle the irresponsible minority.
There are psychopaths out there who will get ideas from violent games, but they are more likely to get violent ideas by coming into contact with street gangs, caught up in drug trafficking, or by being abused by their lousy parents.
At the moment we have a legal system which, perhaps rightly, insists that people cannot be locked up until they commit crimes, or parents and institutions cannot have children removed from their care until the child has actually been abused. Because of this, we are constantly being asked to regulate access to things that could do harm. Society is being designed on the basis that it contains a hard core of psychopaths and so no-one must be issued with sharp objects.
Past attempts to remove dangerous people from circulation have usually been carried out by governments in which the psychopaths are in control - liberal governments do not like to infringe civil liberties. Meanwhile, the percentage of dangerous people seems to be going up, if the prison population is any guide.
I don't have any solutions, liberal or otherwise. Our choice seems to be somewhere between the Roman Empire solution (which might well be to kill every teenager and adult male in violent inner city areas, and spread the women and small children around into culturally alien areas)and the Japanese Imperial solution (completely disarm the entire non-military population and control tightly their access to unwanted ideas.) The debate is, where on that spectrum should we be?
If you are so good with high pressure process plant, building catalyst beds, pumping hot nitrogen and so forth, that ammonia isn't hard to make, you hardly need a Chemistry 101 kit.
Of course, if you just mean "extract from something that already contains it", that's a piece of cat's piss. Literally.
I left those considerations out for simplicity, but of course you are right, although variation in droplet size would vary the terminal velocity (Stokes' Law) and would probably not work since both phase and interval modulation would fail. (large drops following small drops would be liable to overtake and absorb them). You could increase the bit rate dramatically by not relying on gravity but expelling drops at some initial velocity. If you knew the terminal velocity and could expel drops at or close to it, then drops would travel at essentially constant velocity and the bit rate might even approach a kbit/s. But this still requires a back channel to report errors and tune the transmitter for best response. Perhaps this could be done by having a back pipe going from low to high level and dripping into a receiver at the high level. Then, of course, you could have continuous circulation.
If you want to know why I am wasting time typing this stuff, I've just finished replacing the attic ball valve, and moving between the ballvalve and the stopcock 35ft below was a real nuisance. Plumbing is on my mind at the moment.
And I have the impression that it isn't taught any more in the US and the UK. Rote learning, multiple choice exams have destroyed a lot of the challenge of teaching as well as being taught. And teaching doesn't pay enough to be a worthwhile career for most people.
Expecting underqualified teachers to teach challenging subjects while requiring them to use unfamiliar hardware, someone else's idea of appropriate software, and an unstable environment (email, messaging) when no-one has really thought out the necessary changes to classroom behavior and trained teachers appropriately...well, I think it's a recipe for disaster and I'm extremely relieved that all my children are past school age. With luck the system will have changed by the time any grandchildren are old enough.
A true story. A few years back I briefly considered going back into teaching. To be exact, I considered doing a course that would have qualified me to teach teachers to use IT in the classroom. There were two problems. First, the college turned out not really to know what the course content should be. The person in charge was a pre-IT trained educator, not a computer scientist or an educational psychologist. Oh, and second, he admitted that there was no guarantee that the Government would actually fund these training posts.
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is looking for the way out.
No, because droplets can follow one another with more than one in the channel at the time. They only need to be far enough apart to be sure they are distinguishable.
If we assume that drops need to start off at least 10mm apart, using the high school classical equation t = sqrt(2s/g), we get about.045s or around 20 drops per second. (They will be physically much further apart at the bottom, of course, but the same distance apart in time.)
Now assume we use classical serial communication, 1 start bit, one stop bit, one parity bit. That's 11 bits to a byte, or very roughly 2 bytes per second. The problem is mainly one of error correction. There is no back channel, so any errors cannot be corrected as there is no retransmit request. This is definitely not related to TCP/IP which was intended to be a robust protocol. It's just the equivalent of Morse code. Even so, at about 100 bytes per minute, and with the opportunity for compression, the transmission rate is about as fast as an ordinary Morse operator.
Why don't I see this as particularly revolutionary? Well, forget the problems of transferring power to rotating car wheels for a moment, consider that significant design changes would almost certainly be needed to make use of such a technology on overhead power lines, bridges, airplane wings etc.
And the life cycle of such things is enormous. There are standards (codes in USenglish) to consider, which will need to be altered. Given the fear of litigation over design failure, the difficulty of proving the cost benefits, and the innate conservatism of people who make things that can be involved in major catastrophes, the development cycle could well be fifty years or more before there was any widespread application.
And perhaps that's why snowboards get mentioned. Like piezo tennis rackets, there will be early adopters who aren't actually very good at winter sports but have lots of cash and who will attribute the improvement that comes with practice to the miracle technology...might just sell.
I write as someone who for the last five years has had a digital hearing aid sitting in my right ear 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. As I understand it, it uses all the tricks used by encodings like MP3 to reduce the necessary bandwidth for processing.
My last hearing test showed that the hearing in my right ear had not deteriorated at an unusual rate and had not deteriorated faster than my left ear.
So, although this is only one case, I suspect that this paper is nto going to lead very far.
Re:220 isn't much more dangerous than 110
on
Hardware Bits
·
· Score: 2
I had to decide whether to reply to this or moderate it down.
In fact, there is NO safe lower limit for electric shock, and I write as someone who at one time designed unusual power supplies (5kV 5000A, for instance) and had to spend a lot of time consulting experts. The effects of shock on the body are actually highly unpredictable, and if you are really unlucky a couple of milliamps can cause cardiac fibrillation and death. Confusingly, voltages from 60 to around 1000V are all called "low voltage" and regarded in roughly the same way from a design safety point of view.
As for the difference between 110V and 230V supplies, it is true that 220V is very considerably more dangerous. The reason there are so few fatalities is that generally when wires are cut, both current conductors contact the body close to one another and the current flows in a local loop. The amount of current that reaches the sensitive areas (heart, brain, spinal cord) is extremely small. The really dangerous situation is when one part of the body is in contact with ground and another comes into contact with a line conductor. In these circumstances the 220V supply will put more current through critical areas, increasing the chance of fibrillation or cessation of breathing.
The observation about relative currents is also incorrect. Since the resistance of power conductors is low, a 230V supply will generally put more current into a short circuit than 110. In the worst case, the UK 230V supply can put about 6000A into a domestic circuit for a short time.
But that is what we have circuit breakers and fuses for. The weakness of the US system is that individual circuits are often not protected to the same extent that they are in Europe, and that is why the risk of cable fires is greater - the use of cables with a rating lower than the upstream protection device.
A big problem is that our entire electrical systems are now obsolete. They were designed when electrical appliances were bar heaters, washing machines and incandescent lamps. Now we need much lower current systems with multiple outlets to power all our tiny toys. We have lots of thin cables being connected to outlets rated at 10, 13 or 16A. But the cost of developing and installing more modern systems is prohibitive. Hence all those annoying little power supply bricks. Now that even CRT monitors are on the way out, we really need something like a safe, simple domestic 12 or 24V small appliance rail that can be locally backed up with batteries, supported with solar panels, even charged via exercise machines. But don't hold your breath waiting.
In the 1970s. Some unfortunate hippy got arrested with a couple of grams of cannabis and the police decided to make an example of this one. So the prosecutor went on and on about the end of civilisation, stoned maniacs raping chickens and biting the heads off sheep, anything that would conceal from the press and the public that some unfortunate middle class kid was being made a scapegoat. Then the judge would hand down some remarks about the need to stop this sort of thing, set an example, and send the hippy to prison for ten years or so, while a few of the police continued to collect the weekly brown envelopes from the dealers.
And we all know how successful it was, don't we. Drugs were stamped out completely. The CIA and the Marines eliminated all drugs from Asia and South America, and the State of Florida obtained its entire GSP from tourism and orange juice.It was just as successful as Prohibition.
Yes, I know this is a rant. I'm pissed off because moronic Norwegian prosecutors are sending, as usual, the wrong message to the kids. Adults are stupid, technically crass, and misuse their power. And they suck up to the people with lots of cash. Just the message to send the next generation.
First, Moore's Law is about transistor density, not clock speed. If it runs out by end of the decade that's still an increase of around 32X - and unless we suddenly have a need to become amateur weather forecasters, it's difficult to see any obvious applications. [cue enormous list from/. readers]. We've now reached the stage where handheld devices have the same sort of processing power and memory of respectable desktops of a few years back, and I find it interesting that the sudden big hype is the tablet PC, which is relatively low speed but has good battery life. That could be the direction things are going, and if so it is hardly surprising Andy Grove is worried about leaking electrons, what with Transmeta, Via and Motorola/IBM having lower power designs.
A case in point about technology demonstrators. Someone mentioned aircraft. OK, how much faster have cars got since, say, 1904 when (I think) RR first appeared? Not an awful lot, actually. They are vastly more reliable, waterproof, use less fuel, handle better, are safer, and enormously cheaper in real terms BUT they go about the same speed from A to B and carry about as many people. And they are still made of steel and aluminum, basically the same stuff available in 1904.
This is far from a perfect analogy because, of course, the function of the computer keeps getting reinvented: it is applied to more and more jobs as it gets cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. But it does point out that the end of Moore's law is not the end of research and development.
I'm going to be all serious and try and put together a sensible post about this thing.
First of all, vortex technology is quite respectable nowadays. As well as the Dyson cleaner, which gets more effective with each generation, there is the work on vortex particulate removers for Diesel engines and powder paint shops. The basic principle seems to be that the air is made to spiral down the vortex chamber in ever narrowing circles. As it does so, its angular velocity increases so that particulates experience an increasing force which carries them to the vortex walls.
Now, in a conventional vortex cleaner, you want non-turbulent flow to keep those particles going in the right direction. But what if the flow becomes turbulent? As it breaks up you would have small localised regions of extremely high turbulence in an environment of increasing angular momentum - so that instead of having a turbulent flow of air scrubbing a single surface, you could have lots of small turbulent flows in three dimensions. That sounds like a pretty effective way of abrading things with a soft medium that would do what is claimed.
So why does the Post talk about scientists being baffled? Well, as a 2c worth, perhaps it's because they have to talk up the story and perhaps it's because the journo didn't know the difference between a vortex chamber and a plate of gefulte fish and wanted to report that everybody else stood around looking stupid too. (In view of the Dow Jones case decision in Australia perhaps I should add this is just my personal opinion, wild speculations, journalists are all genius saviours of mankind etc.)
Perhaps the next Dyson cleaner will not just pick up the dust but act as a dry waste disposal unit as well. Or perhaps not.
...what is going on. Forget Bush, who seems just to be a mental underperformer (many countries have done well when their Royal Families collectively lacked the IQ of a seaslug in a jar of alcohol), I suspect the real problem is that the people in power are many years behind an understanding of where technology has actually been going. While technologists have been following Moore's Law, the politicians and the bureaucracy have been following a linear path of increased understanding, dropping behind the curve more and more each year. (And FBI agents are lawyers, basically the most reactionary profession of the lot.) Now suddenly they are being asked to do something other than obtain campaign donations and talk crap on TV. And they have not the slightest idea what to do. When a politican or a civil servant doesn't know what to do, what is the reaction? Find something that people are doing, and stop it. It is so much easier to ban something than to think of a positive action.
The posters who are making jokes about banning telephones and coats are not actually that far off the mark. In the Soviet Union, that dangerous instrument the typewriter required a licence, and all official typewriters had their fingerprint taken by the KGB so that any typed document could be traced to the original machine. As for photocopiers, each one had its KGB operative to control access. We now seem to be heading for a government policy of achieving basically the same thing electronically. In the long term, it is likely to be about as successful.
The big problem is, who is going to educate the politicians? Or do we need to find a way to replace them with younger, better educated ones who might actually have a clue about the modern world?
I'm waiting for the Thomas analysis of populations in Ankh-Morpork. There should be sufficient information in the Pratchett oeuvre. How many trolls? How many dwarves? And exactly how big is Unseen University?
There must be someone out there prepared to sponsor a Chair of Imaginary Population Studies and give this guy a job.
The videos are terrible quality but the image of the thing walking with the wings rippling is undeniably impressive - much more so than any CGI I've seen. And the things themselves have a genuine imaginative quality. They seem to have been influenced by science fiction comics, but they actually work as real structures. That is seriously clever stuff.
The big annoyance I find with SO under W2k is the creation of vast temporary files. And yes, it is slower to startup and slightly slower to run than Office.
However, I get attachments from various people who are prone to macro viruses. The total absence of Office from my system means that this crap never gets a chance to run.
When I look at huge multicolored spreadsheets that actually do something that could be done far more elegantly in a three-table relational database, Word documents produced by people with the visual intelligence of a seaslug, and PP presentations that make my eyeballs go funny, I do wonder just how much highly paid make-work Office has caused in the last ten years. It would be interesting to know how much more profitable corporate America would have been if no-one had ever come up with competition for Lotus 123 and Word Perfect.
Which makes me sound, I guess, like a Luddite. But in a way the feature proliferation in Office has destroyed choice (I'm sure this is deliberate) by creating an insuperable bar to new entrants in the WP/SS field through the requirement to interoperate with the Office file formats. If SO or OO are only 90% as good as Office, they probably will not sell regardless of their other merits. What would happen to the world car market if every manufacturer, no matter what else they did, was forced to use Ford engines and transmissions? Hint: it wouldn't be bad for Ford.
It's a pity that governments and ISO don't seem to have been able to get together to develop an international standard for word processing and spreadsheet formats for official business. That might create a more level playing field and encourage a bit more real innovation in the user interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you Xerox, from the depths of my bank account.
Also, the point about excess bells and whistles available on OSX is well made. We're getting out of the idea that hardware always lags software. Bloatware needs to be fixed before Release 2 nowadays.
The amount of support I have to give these people is minimal and is all application-related.
The other area I encounter non-technical people is the PC world and, of course, the level of support required is much higher. Each successive edition of Windows is more cluttered as standard, and the learning curve is often a major irritation for busy professionals. Things often don't just work out of the box. Only last week I spent a frustrating hour just trying to get two W2k notebooks to communicate properly over ethernet, whereas I don't even have to think about adding Appletalk boxes. OK so I'm stupid, but how many other people are out there who are just as stupid as I am, and also need to work with computers?
In short, I see no real change in the long term situation, which is:
It isn't just about brakes. It's the maximum torque loading allowed by your gearbox, maximum heat buildup that can be allowed in the slushbox, strength of the universal or CV joints, side loading the suspension can take, aerodynamics, you name it. It takes several hundred people to design a car, and tens of expensive highly qualified engineers to do a proper job of uprating. If even companies like Mercedes occasionally get it wrong (A-Class)it should be obvious that it isn't easy.
I realise that this won't have the least effect on the idiots who think they are God's gift to automotive engineering because they can actually undo the bolts, replace the silencer with a noisenhancer, and do the bolts up...but why is it that the people who do these mods drive so incredibly badly? If the ones around here tried it on a real racetrack, the marshals would have them off before the end of the first lap, assuming they got that far without hitting something. Which is presumably why they do it on public roads, since there are fewer police on the roads than marshals on a racetrack.
The great thing about drag racing is that the thing only needs to stay together for a quarter mile.
No, this is not experimental evidence. It is an observation and a hypothesis to explain it. In order to support or falsify the hypothesis, you then need to think of an experiment the outcome of which is NOT already known, that has different outcomes depending on whether the hypothesis is valid or not and which is not simply a repetition of the original observation. A good experiment supports one hypothesis while falsifying at least one alternative hypothesis that explains the same original observation. I might formulate an hypothesis that the perturbation of the orbit of Mercury is caused by little green men with a big laser cannon, and in the absence of any other supporting information, this would be just as good as Einstein's explanation.
We do it, but even bacteria do it too. As plants have reduced the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, different dominant plant families have arisen able to survive in the low-CO2 environment. Insects were big at one time because there was more oxygen in the atmosphere, now the species are smaller because there is less. The idea that life requires 0-35C, 20% oxygen, is based on a static view of the world which, as our genetics lecturer once remarked "Unfortunately for some religious groups does not accord with any of the evidence."
There are psychopaths out there who will get ideas from violent games, but they are more likely to get violent ideas by coming into contact with street gangs, caught up in drug trafficking, or by being abused by their lousy parents.
At the moment we have a legal system which, perhaps rightly, insists that people cannot be locked up until they commit crimes, or parents and institutions cannot have children removed from their care until the child has actually been abused. Because of this, we are constantly being asked to regulate access to things that could do harm. Society is being designed on the basis that it contains a hard core of psychopaths and so no-one must be issued with sharp objects.
Past attempts to remove dangerous people from circulation have usually been carried out by governments in which the psychopaths are in control - liberal governments do not like to infringe civil liberties. Meanwhile, the percentage of dangerous people seems to be going up, if the prison population is any guide.
I don't have any solutions, liberal or otherwise. Our choice seems to be somewhere between the Roman Empire solution (which might well be to kill every teenager and adult male in violent inner city areas, and spread the women and small children around into culturally alien areas)and the Japanese Imperial solution (completely disarm the entire non-military population and control tightly their access to unwanted ideas.) The debate is, where on that spectrum should we be?
If you are so good with high pressure process plant, building catalyst beds, pumping hot nitrogen and so forth, that ammonia isn't hard to make, you hardly need a Chemistry 101 kit.
Of course, if you just mean "extract from something that already contains it", that's a piece of cat's piss. Literally.
If you want to know why I am wasting time typing this stuff, I've just finished replacing the attic ball valve, and moving between the ballvalve and the stopcock 35ft below was a real nuisance. Plumbing is on my mind at the moment.
Expecting underqualified teachers to teach challenging subjects while requiring them to use unfamiliar hardware, someone else's idea of appropriate software, and an unstable environment (email, messaging) when no-one has really thought out the necessary changes to classroom behavior and trained teachers appropriately...well, I think it's a recipe for disaster and I'm extremely relieved that all my children are past school age. With luck the system will have changed by the time any grandchildren are old enough.
A true story. A few years back I briefly considered going back into teaching. To be exact, I considered doing a course that would have qualified me to teach teachers to use IT in the classroom. There were two problems. First, the college turned out not really to know what the course content should be. The person in charge was a pre-IT trained educator, not a computer scientist or an educational psychologist. Oh, and second, he admitted that there was no guarantee that the Government would actually fund these training posts.
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is looking for the way out.
If we assume that drops need to start off at least 10mm apart, using the high school classical equation t = sqrt(2s/g), we get about .045s or around 20 drops per second. (They will be physically much further apart at the bottom, of course, but the same distance apart in time.)
Now assume we use classical serial communication, 1 start bit, one stop bit, one parity bit. That's 11 bits to a byte, or very roughly 2 bytes per second. The problem is mainly one of error correction. There is no back channel, so any errors cannot be corrected as there is no retransmit request. This is definitely not related to TCP/IP which was intended to be a robust protocol. It's just the equivalent of Morse code. Even so, at about 100 bytes per minute, and with the opportunity for compression, the transmission rate is about as fast as an ordinary Morse operator.
And the life cycle of such things is enormous. There are standards (codes in USenglish) to consider, which will need to be altered. Given the fear of litigation over design failure, the difficulty of proving the cost benefits, and the innate conservatism of people who make things that can be involved in major catastrophes, the development cycle could well be fifty years or more before there was any widespread application.
And perhaps that's why snowboards get mentioned. Like piezo tennis rackets, there will be early adopters who aren't actually very good at winter sports but have lots of cash and who will attribute the improvement that comes with practice to the miracle technology...might just sell.
Poor decisions: Deciding to go with internal strategic ideas.
Bad luck: strategic ideas were totally unrealistic.
My last hearing test showed that the hearing in my right ear had not deteriorated at an unusual rate and had not deteriorated faster than my left ear.
So, although this is only one case, I suspect that this paper is nto going to lead very far.
In fact, there is NO safe lower limit for electric shock, and I write as someone who at one time designed unusual power supplies (5kV 5000A, for instance) and had to spend a lot of time consulting experts. The effects of shock on the body are actually highly unpredictable, and if you are really unlucky a couple of milliamps can cause cardiac fibrillation and death. Confusingly, voltages from 60 to around 1000V are all called "low voltage" and regarded in roughly the same way from a design safety point of view.
As for the difference between 110V and 230V supplies, it is true that 220V is very considerably more dangerous. The reason there are so few fatalities is that generally when wires are cut, both current conductors contact the body close to one another and the current flows in a local loop. The amount of current that reaches the sensitive areas (heart, brain, spinal cord) is extremely small. The really dangerous situation is when one part of the body is in contact with ground and another comes into contact with a line conductor. In these circumstances the 220V supply will put more current through critical areas, increasing the chance of fibrillation or cessation of breathing.
The observation about relative currents is also incorrect. Since the resistance of power conductors is low, a 230V supply will generally put more current into a short circuit than 110. In the worst case, the UK 230V supply can put about 6000A into a domestic circuit for a short time.
But that is what we have circuit breakers and fuses for. The weakness of the US system is that individual circuits are often not protected to the same extent that they are in Europe, and that is why the risk of cable fires is greater - the use of cables with a rating lower than the upstream protection device.
A big problem is that our entire electrical systems are now obsolete. They were designed when electrical appliances were bar heaters, washing machines and incandescent lamps. Now we need much lower current systems with multiple outlets to power all our tiny toys. We have lots of thin cables being connected to outlets rated at 10, 13 or 16A. But the cost of developing and installing more modern systems is prohibitive. Hence all those annoying little power supply bricks. Now that even CRT monitors are on the way out, we really need something like a safe, simple domestic 12 or 24V small appliance rail that can be locally backed up with batteries, supported with solar panels, even charged via exercise machines. But don't hold your breath waiting.
And we all know how successful it was, don't we. Drugs were stamped out completely. The CIA and the Marines eliminated all drugs from Asia and South America, and the State of Florida obtained its entire GSP from tourism and orange juice.It was just as successful as Prohibition.
Yes, I know this is a rant. I'm pissed off because moronic Norwegian prosecutors are sending, as usual, the wrong message to the kids. Adults are stupid, technically crass, and misuse their power. And they suck up to the people with lots of cash.
Just the message to send the next generation.
We've now reached the stage where handheld devices have the same sort of processing power and memory of respectable desktops of a few years back, and I find it interesting that the sudden big hype is the tablet PC, which is relatively low speed but has good battery life. That could be the direction things are going, and if so it is hardly surprising Andy Grove is worried about leaking electrons, what with Transmeta, Via and Motorola/IBM having lower power designs.
A case in point about technology demonstrators. Someone mentioned aircraft. OK, how much faster have cars got since, say, 1904 when (I think) RR first appeared? Not an awful lot, actually. They are vastly more reliable, waterproof, use less fuel, handle better, are safer, and enormously cheaper in real terms BUT they go about the same speed from A to B and carry about as many people. And they are still made of steel and aluminum, basically the same stuff available in 1904.
This is far from a perfect analogy because, of course, the function of the computer keeps getting reinvented: it is applied to more and more jobs as it gets cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. But it does point out that the end of Moore's law is not the end of research and development.
First of all, vortex technology is quite respectable nowadays. As well as the Dyson cleaner, which gets more effective with each generation, there is the work on vortex particulate removers for Diesel engines and powder paint shops. The basic principle seems to be that the air is made to spiral down the vortex chamber in ever narrowing circles. As it does so, its angular velocity increases so that particulates experience an increasing force which carries them to the vortex walls.
Now, in a conventional vortex cleaner, you want non-turbulent flow to keep those particles going in the right direction. But what if the flow becomes turbulent? As it breaks up you would have small localised regions of extremely high turbulence in an environment of increasing angular momentum - so that instead of having a turbulent flow of air scrubbing a single surface, you could have lots of small turbulent flows in three dimensions. That sounds like a pretty effective way of abrading things with a soft medium that would do what is claimed.
So why does the Post talk about scientists being baffled? Well, as a 2c worth, perhaps it's because they have to talk up the story and perhaps it's because the journo didn't know the difference between a vortex chamber and a plate of gefulte fish and wanted to report that everybody else stood around looking stupid too. (In view of the Dow Jones case decision in Australia perhaps I should add this is just my personal opinion, wild speculations, journalists are all genius saviours of mankind etc.)
Perhaps the next Dyson cleaner will not just pick up the dust but act as a dry waste disposal unit as well. Or perhaps not.
Ask any inhabitant of New York City.
Now suddenly they are being asked to do something other than obtain campaign donations and talk crap on TV. And they have not the slightest idea what to do. When a politican or a civil servant doesn't know what to do, what is the reaction? Find something that people are doing, and stop it. It is so much easier to ban something than to think of a positive action.
The posters who are making jokes about banning telephones and coats are not actually that far off the mark. In the Soviet Union, that dangerous instrument the typewriter required a licence, and all official typewriters had their fingerprint taken by the KGB so that any typed document could be traced to the original machine. As for photocopiers, each one had its KGB operative to control access. We now seem to be heading for a government policy of achieving basically the same thing electronically. In the long term, it is likely to be about as successful.
The big problem is, who is going to educate the politicians? Or do we need to find a way to replace them with younger, better educated ones who might actually have a clue about the modern world?
There must be someone out there prepared to sponsor a Chair of Imaginary Population Studies and give this guy a job.
The videos are terrible quality but the image of the thing walking with the wings rippling is undeniably impressive - much more so than any CGI I've seen. And the things themselves have a genuine imaginative quality. They seem to have been influenced by science fiction comics, but they actually work as real structures. That is seriously clever stuff.
It's a local government initiative and limited in scope.
However, I get attachments from various people who are prone to macro viruses. The total absence of Office from my system means that this crap never gets a chance to run.
When I look at huge multicolored spreadsheets that actually do something that could be done far more elegantly in a three-table relational database, Word documents produced by people with the visual intelligence of a seaslug, and PP presentations that make my eyeballs go funny, I do wonder just how much highly paid make-work Office has caused in the last ten years. It would be interesting to know how much more profitable corporate America would have been if no-one had ever come up with competition for Lotus 123 and Word Perfect.
Which makes me sound, I guess, like a Luddite. But in a way the feature proliferation in Office has destroyed choice (I'm sure this is deliberate) by creating an insuperable bar to new entrants in the WP/SS field through the requirement to interoperate with the Office file formats. If SO or OO are only 90% as good as Office, they probably will not sell regardless of their other merits. What would happen to the world car market if every manufacturer, no matter what else they did, was forced to use Ford engines and transmissions? Hint: it wouldn't be bad for Ford.
It's a pity that governments and ISO don't seem to have been able to get together to develop an international standard for word processing and spreadsheet formats for official business. That might create a more level playing field and encourage a bit more real innovation in the user interface.
Ever heard of a deliberately stupid post? What the hell, I'm only a physical scientist.