How could anyone have any question about this being a good thing?... The local school board is building it and MS is contributing technology and services to the school to see what happens to education when the school is afforded every technological luxury possible.
Does Microsoft promise to supply hardware and software upgrades for free to the school in perpetuity? No? What happens when upgrade time rolls around in a handful of years?
In Oakville, Ontario, River Oaks school was built about ten years ago. Conceived and presented at the time as a 'bold experiment', there were massive investments in information technology. The school's administrators solicited partnerships with numerous tech firms, and landed tremendous amounts of hardware from companies like Apple. The school was a showpiece for the 'future of education', boasting one standalone computer for every three students (a ratio unheard of at the time, especially in public education) and laptops for all of the staff.
I went to another school in the same school board at the time. Students from my school were bused to River Oaks once a week for shop and home ec classes--those facilities were too expensive to install in eveyr school. In grade eight at the time, I goggled at the number and power of the computers. I enjoyed using proper CAD software for designs in shop class. Everything was shiny and new. The Macs had colour monitors!
Fast forward ten or twelve years. I'm doing my graduate studies, and River Oaks is no longer the model of glossy perfection. With a tech budget that's less than a fifth what's needed to maintain the state of the art, obsolete computers languish in corners. Hardware isn't repaired.
So, how could the grant be a bad thing? Microsoft will be supplying personnel to support and maintain the hardware--will those personnel be funded in perpetuity? Future administrators might feel compelled to draw funding from other--dare I say more important?--areas to continue to maintain and upgrade an expensive technological legacy. Fifteen years from now, at best the school will be full of obsolete computers running out of date software--at worst, it will be full of current hardware and software, and unable to afford textbooks, pencils, or teachers.
What's really amusing is governments that can't be troubled to find real voters to shill for them in ads. A couple of months ago, the provincial government of Ontario, Canada ran some ads presenting families and concerned voters that wanted--among other things--tax breaks on their mortgage payments and a ban on teachers' strikes.
Unfortunately, the smiling families were stock art, and the real life individuals lived in places such as Oregon. To my knowledge, none of the people in the ad spots were even Canadian. Oops.
I got the Faraday constant--number of coulombs per mole of electrons--from Google. A search on the term Faraday constant returns both the Google calculator value (96 485.3415 s.A/mol) and numerous web sites with the same number. (Aside: the Google calculator is yet another incredibly clever and useful tool from Google. I am impressed as hell by it.)
550 tons of electrons;
divided by 9.1E-34 tons per electron;
divided by 6.02E23 electrons per mole;
divided by 96485 moles of electrons per amp.second;
divided by 3600 seconds per hour;
multiplied by 110 volts distribution;
Gives 318 kWh in 550 tons of electrons, delivered to your door in North America, or twice as much energy in Europe.
If you're drawing 400 watts for computer and modem;
and you wasted fifteen minutes on this story;
That's only 3200 readers to use up 550 tons of electrons. Of course, since we're using alternating current, those readers had to return the electrons for reuse by other/.ers.:D
The sky is composed of nitrogen and oxygen in large proportions. Both are transparent materials in gaseous form. They do, however, refract light like a prism.
They do indeed--but that has precious little to do with why the sky is (usually) blue. Refraction occurs when light passes from a medium with one refractive index into another, and bends in so doing. There are lots of websites on the topic. The amount of bending that occurs depends on the material and on the wavelength of the light. Typically, materials have a higher index of refraction for shorter wavelengths--this dependence of refractive index enables prisms to separate light into component colours.
The apparent colour of the sky depends not on refraction (air has an index of 1.003, only a shade more than vacuum's 1.000) so light bends very little passing through the atmosphere. The important effect is Rayleigh scattering. Light with shorter wavelengths is scattered much more strongly--red and yellow light from the sun follows a fairly direct path to the viewer, so the sun appears as a yellow disc. Blue light is scattered repeatedly by the atmosphere, resulting in a diffusely blue sky. Interestingly, if you take a long exposure photograph on a moonlit night, the sky will still show up as blue from scattered moonlight.
Incidentally, I would call the 'sky' blue, even though the gases of the atmosphere are (except around cities) colourless. That's the colour you see when you look up, in the direction of what a layperson would call the sky. Oh, and I am a physicist.
If you look at a blue ball through the edge of a prism and it looks red, is the ball still blue? I think so.
If you look at a 'blue' ball through the edge of a prism, it will look blue or black--if it reflected large amounts of red light, then it wouldn't appear blue without the prism in the first place.
I would call you a pedant, if you were right.
I would still call you a pedant--and a condescending one, at that--even though you're a little iffy on scattering of light. If you would like some further pedantry, I would be pleased to explain why the sky is red at sunset.
then you think about creating an artificial black hole and stuffing ever more matter into a singularity and you could calculate the universe from something the size of the head of a pin (especially if you adhere to the multiverse theory, which states there are infinite realities).
Wait--I'm confused. You're going to perform computations inside of a singularity (black hole). Okay. How are you going to get your result back out again?
The current price for methanol is on the order of 230USD per ton--about seventy cents per gallon. The article describes the fuel cell as being the size of a Bic lighter or an inkjet cartridge, so it could hold at most about 30 mL (one fluid ounce) of 24% methanol--worth a little over a tenth of a cent, in bulk...
Granted, there is probably some processing, but even analytical grade lab methanol isn't going to cost you that much more. The biggest part of the price will be the container--and I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing refill-your-own fuel cell kits, like those that now exist for inkjets. Bonus: spilled methanol should evaporate cleanly, unlike printer ink....
I upgraded (yes, upgraded) my RedHat distro to Mandrake 9 on my Thinkpad this morning in the car on the way to work. Yes, it really was that easy, and sitting in traffic has never been so enjoyable.
A lot of other replies in this thread assume that the parent poster was installing Mandrake while driving. If so, he probably should be concentrating more on the road. Before anyone else chimes in with condemnation, consider this--maybe the guy carpools. Maybe he commutes in with his wife. Maybe he is a slug. In other words, maybe he was a passenger. Slashdotters seem generally pro-environment--why is it so hard to conceive of a vehicle that actually has more than one occupant?
The one and only point of RLVs is to be cheaper than one-time use vehicles.
Correct.
But they aren't. The technology and the engineering just isn't there to make them so.
Debated hotly.
As an idea, the RLV has been proved to be completely worthless.
That's a bit of a leap--because our existing technology isn't quite there yet, we should abandon all consideration of the idea? Even if an RLV isn't viable from a strict nickel and dime standpoint, perhaps it is worthwhile to consider devoting some resources to it just so we learn more about designing and operating such vehicles. I work in research (phys chem and biophysics) and there are any number of relatively common lab tools that were expensive and/or unwieldy ten years ago--and some that were thought impossible twenty years ago.
It's like someone saying the earth is suspended in space on the back of a big turtle which is suspended on the back of another turtle, ad. infinitum. For a human who doesn't have any means of verification, the turtle theory can explain things as well as gravity.
Wait--I'm confused. How does the Earth being on the back of a giant turtle (or an infinite number of such) cause things to fall down?
Einstein's theories were also empirically unprovable until recent advances in avionics, minaturization, and electronics. It turns out, decades after he began to speak about 'Special Relativity', you can indeed fly an atomic clock around the world and measure that it has undergone relativistic time dialation.
Einstein's General Theory of Relativity provided an explanation for the motion of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit. Further, it correctly predicted the magnitude of this motion--all of about 43 seconds of arc per century. It's a small motion, but it had been observed, measured, and puzzled at by astronomers in the nineteenth century.
Aside: Many people cite the 1919 eclipse observations made by the Royal Astronomical Society (also mentioned in the link above) as a further early proof of relativity. Though this is the most popular early 'proof', it is tainted with uncertainties. More recent work suggests that the precision of the RAS' instruments was insufficient for the task--the good agreement with theory was likely largely coincidence. Indeed, contradictory results from later eclipses and other groups did follow in succeeding decades. (Measurements with modern instruments have, of course, borne out relativity.)
I was riding a Segway up the mountain and it was like 'beep beep beep.' And then, like, I rolled halfway back down, and I was like, 'huh?'
It was kind of a... bummer.
Re:Software Design != Rocket Design OR does it?
on
X Prize and John Carmack
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
John Carmack may be great at software programming, but does that really apply to spacecraft design? Software is known to be buggy, but when you are being hurtled towards space faster then a speeding bullet you really don't have the luxury of being able to use a debugger.
For spaceflight, we need people who think like the old school programmers. The ones that actually planned their programs before they wrote them. When it took twenty-four hours (or more) between when you submitted your card deck and when you got your output (or a core dump) you learned to be damned careful with your code. The modern attitude of "keep tweaking it until it compiles; we'll fix the bugs in 2.0" won't wash in spaceflight.
Darl is no moron... he's making a tidy wad of cash selling stock that's risen dramatically in price on the promise of tons of licensing revenue...
Absolutely. Take a look at the stock price trend over the last two years. Crappy...crappy...hiccup...crappy...crappy...BIG SPIKE DUE TO LAWSUIT. Darl and friends are making out like bandits.
Unless, of course, their stock dates back to the heady pre-dot-bomb bubble days--then it just sucks slightly less to be them.
I eagerly await the SEC jumping on them. Still waiting....
I mean, it worked. I completely forgot about the muscle pain. I had much more interesing pains to worry about for the next few hours.
Actually, this is (sort of) exactly the mechanism by which capsaicin based topical treatments operate.
The neuronal mechanism is as follows: capsaicin depletes substance P, a neuropeptide, from a specific type of sensory neuron (nerve cell). When capsaicin is first applied to the skin, it causes release of substance P, which leads to redness and a burning sensation. However, if capsaicin is applied regularly, the cumulative exposure to capsaicin depletes substance P and desensitizes the sensory neurons. Eventually the neurons become inactive, and pain sensation is reduced.
In other words, you suffer a bit when you apply the compound, but eventually some of the chemicals responsible for the pain sensation are depleted, and the pain goes away.
To be effective, one must apply regular moderate doses of the capsaicin preparation, to continuously deplete the stores of substance P in the treated area. Otherwise, you're back to the burning sensation when you reapply at long intervals.
I can see using a tool like this to get the perfect studio recording -- especially after getting a great take with just a few bum notes.
I don't know how this is done in so-called popular music, but it is a common practice for concert pianists to record several takes of a difficult piece and then splice together the 'good bits' afterward to produce a 'perfect' recording. Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto is one such notoriously challenging piece.)
I would be quite surprised if other recording artists had not been doing something similar for years.
As for 'correcting' pitch during live performances--why not just lip synch, like pop stars have been doing for years? Real performers can continue to perform live and unfiltered--their fans are going to see a live performance precisely because it's not the buffed, polished, engineered radio version. If I wanted canned-sounding music, I would download an mp3, thank you very much.
Most people in North America know what I'm talking about when I refer to the "A Diamond is Forever Music."
If anyone is curious, the composer of the "Diamond Music" (official title, Shadows) is Karl Jenkins. Based on that commissioned work, Jenkins has constructed a three-movement suite called Palladio. More information here. Palladio appears on a Sony Classical recording aptly titled (in the U.S.) Diamond Music.
You cite poor examples. How are we to test for things we didn't know to test for?
If we barely understand cancer, like back in th 50's, how are we to know to test for it?
I understand that the traditional solution usually involves a whole lot of lab rats. (The little white rodents, not graduate students.) Expose them to the compound in question, then wait for consequences. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you have a good handle on the physiological effects of nanoparticles.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Microsoft promise to supply hardware and software upgrades for free to the school in perpetuity? No? What happens when upgrade time rolls around in a handful of years?
In Oakville, Ontario, River Oaks school was built about ten years ago. Conceived and presented at the time as a 'bold experiment', there were massive investments in information technology. The school's administrators solicited partnerships with numerous tech firms, and landed tremendous amounts of hardware from companies like Apple. The school was a showpiece for the 'future of education', boasting one standalone computer for every three students (a ratio unheard of at the time, especially in public education) and laptops for all of the staff.
I went to another school in the same school board at the time. Students from my school were bused to River Oaks once a week for shop and home ec classes--those facilities were too expensive to install in eveyr school. In grade eight at the time, I goggled at the number and power of the computers. I enjoyed using proper CAD software for designs in shop class. Everything was shiny and new. The Macs had colour monitors!
Fast forward ten or twelve years. I'm doing my graduate studies, and River Oaks is no longer the model of glossy perfection. With a tech budget that's less than a fifth what's needed to maintain the state of the art, obsolete computers languish in corners. Hardware isn't repaired.
So, how could the grant be a bad thing? Microsoft will be supplying personnel to support and maintain the hardware--will those personnel be funded in perpetuity? Future administrators might feel compelled to draw funding from other--dare I say more important?--areas to continue to maintain and upgrade an expensive technological legacy. Fifteen years from now, at best the school will be full of obsolete computers running out of date software--at worst, it will be full of current hardware and software, and unable to afford textbooks, pencils, or teachers.
Unfortunately, the smiling families were stock art, and the real life individuals lived in places such as Oregon. To my knowledge, none of the people in the ad spots were even Canadian. Oops.
I got the Faraday constant--number of coulombs per mole of electrons--from Google. A search on the term Faraday constant returns both the Google calculator value (96 485.3415 s.A/mol) and numerous web sites with the same number. (Aside: the Google calculator is yet another incredibly clever and useful tool from Google. I am impressed as hell by it.)
divided by 9.1E-34 tons per electron;
divided by 6.02E23 electrons per mole;
divided by 96485 moles of electrons per amp.second;
divided by 3600 seconds per hour;
multiplied by 110 volts distribution;
Gives 318 kWh in 550 tons of electrons, delivered to your door in North America, or twice as much energy in Europe.
If you're drawing 400 watts for computer and modem;
and you wasted fifteen minutes on this story;
That's only 3200 readers to use up 550 tons of electrons. Of course, since we're using alternating current, those readers had to return the electrons for reuse by other /.ers. :D
They do indeed--but that has precious little to do with why the sky is (usually) blue. Refraction occurs when light passes from a medium with one refractive index into another, and bends in so doing. There are lots of websites on the topic. The amount of bending that occurs depends on the material and on the wavelength of the light. Typically, materials have a higher index of refraction for shorter wavelengths--this dependence of refractive index enables prisms to separate light into component colours.
The apparent colour of the sky depends not on refraction (air has an index of 1.003, only a shade more than vacuum's 1.000) so light bends very little passing through the atmosphere. The important effect is Rayleigh scattering. Light with shorter wavelengths is scattered much more strongly--red and yellow light from the sun follows a fairly direct path to the viewer, so the sun appears as a yellow disc. Blue light is scattered repeatedly by the atmosphere, resulting in a diffusely blue sky. Interestingly, if you take a long exposure photograph on a moonlit night, the sky will still show up as blue from scattered moonlight.
Incidentally, I would call the 'sky' blue, even though the gases of the atmosphere are (except around cities) colourless. That's the colour you see when you look up, in the direction of what a layperson would call the sky. Oh, and I am a physicist.
If you look at a blue ball through the edge of a prism and it looks red, is the ball still blue? I think so.
If you look at a 'blue' ball through the edge of a prism, it will look blue or black--if it reflected large amounts of red light, then it wouldn't appear blue without the prism in the first place.
I would call you a pedant, if you were right.
I would still call you a pedant--and a condescending one, at that--even though you're a little iffy on scattering of light. If you would like some further pedantry, I would be pleased to explain why the sky is red at sunset.
Wait--I'm confused. You're going to perform computations inside of a singularity (black hole). Okay. How are you going to get your result back out again?
That should be:
Though the actual process is:Absolutely! If you open up my computer, you'll see a bright yellow sticky note on my hard drive proudly declaring, "My Files".
Granted, there is probably some processing, but even analytical grade lab methanol isn't going to cost you that much more. The biggest part of the price will be the container--and I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing refill-your-own fuel cell kits, like those that now exist for inkjets. Bonus: spilled methanol should evaporate cleanly, unlike printer ink....
A lot of other replies in this thread assume that the parent poster was installing Mandrake while driving. If so, he probably should be concentrating more on the road. Before anyone else chimes in with condemnation, consider this--maybe the guy carpools. Maybe he commutes in with his wife. Maybe he is a slug. In other words, maybe he was a passenger. Slashdotters seem generally pro-environment--why is it so hard to conceive of a vehicle that actually has more than one occupant?
Correct.
But they aren't. The technology and the engineering just isn't there to make them so.
Debated hotly.
As an idea, the RLV has been proved to be completely worthless.
That's a bit of a leap--because our existing technology isn't quite there yet, we should abandon all consideration of the idea? Even if an RLV isn't viable from a strict nickel and dime standpoint, perhaps it is worthwhile to consider devoting some resources to it just so we learn more about designing and operating such vehicles. I work in research (phys chem and biophysics) and there are any number of relatively common lab tools that were expensive and/or unwieldy ten years ago--and some that were thought impossible twenty years ago.
Wait--I'm confused. How does the Earth being on the back of a giant turtle (or an infinite number of such) cause things to fall down?
Einstein's General Theory of Relativity provided an explanation for the motion of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit. Further, it correctly predicted the magnitude of this motion--all of about 43 seconds of arc per century. It's a small motion, but it had been observed, measured, and puzzled at by astronomers in the nineteenth century.
Aside: Many people cite the 1919 eclipse observations made by the Royal Astronomical Society (also mentioned in the link above) as a further early proof of relativity. Though this is the most popular early 'proof', it is tainted with uncertainties. More recent work suggests that the precision of the RAS' instruments was insufficient for the task--the good agreement with theory was likely largely coincidence. Indeed, contradictory results from later eclipses and other groups did follow in succeeding decades. (Measurements with modern instruments have, of course, borne out relativity.)
Why would you be worried about that one? In 2101, I'll be 122 years old--getting hit by an asteroid would be a nice quick way to go. ;)
Sometimes it's difficult to make an envelope that is sufficiently strong, has four times the volume, and doesn't weigh any more...
Some of the superfluous commas even leap exuberantly into the air.
It was kind of a ... bummer.
For spaceflight, we need people who think like the old school programmers. The ones that actually planned their programs before they wrote them. When it took twenty-four hours (or more) between when you submitted your card deck and when you got your output (or a core dump) you learned to be damned careful with your code. The modern attitude of "keep tweaking it until it compiles; we'll fix the bugs in 2.0" won't wash in spaceflight.
No; the give-away-the-razor-sell-the-blades marketing technique makes me hate Gillette.
Absolutely. Take a look at the stock price trend over the last two years. Crappy...crappy...hiccup...crappy...crappy...BIG SPIKE DUE TO LAWSUIT. Darl and friends are making out like bandits.
Unless, of course, their stock dates back to the heady pre-dot-bomb bubble days--then it just sucks slightly less to be them.
I eagerly await the SEC jumping on them. Still waiting....
That's a real bummer--not only is chocolate delicious, it can also lower blood pressure.
Actually, this is (sort of) exactly the mechanism by which capsaicin based topical treatments operate.
In other words, you suffer a bit when you apply the compound, but eventually some of the chemicals responsible for the pain sensation are depleted, and the pain goes away.
To be effective, one must apply regular moderate doses of the capsaicin preparation, to continuously deplete the stores of substance P in the treated area. Otherwise, you're back to the burning sensation when you reapply at long intervals.
I don't know how this is done in so-called popular music, but it is a common practice for concert pianists to record several takes of a difficult piece and then splice together the 'good bits' afterward to produce a 'perfect' recording. Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto is one such notoriously challenging piece.)
I would be quite surprised if other recording artists had not been doing something similar for years.
As for 'correcting' pitch during live performances--why not just lip synch, like pop stars have been doing for years? Real performers can continue to perform live and unfiltered--their fans are going to see a live performance precisely because it's not the buffed, polished, engineered radio version. If I wanted canned-sounding music, I would download an mp3, thank you very much.
If anyone is curious, the composer of the "Diamond Music" (official title, Shadows) is Karl Jenkins. Based on that commissioned work, Jenkins has constructed a three-movement suite called Palladio. More information here. Palladio appears on a Sony Classical recording aptly titled (in the U.S.) Diamond Music.
If we barely understand cancer, like back in th 50's, how are we to know to test for it?
I understand that the traditional solution usually involves a whole lot of lab rats. (The little white rodents, not graduate students.) Expose them to the compound in question, then wait for consequences. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you have a good handle on the physiological effects of nanoparticles.