After the whole mooon landing hoax;), NASA still hasn't learned to keep the janitors from having keys into their top-secret sound-stages. One of the cleaners saw the poor little dirty machine, and decided to give it a thorough scrubbing.
I hope they take better care of the dolphins with lasers on their heads.
It's too complicated to set up nested parsing of dates, so instead we should change all calendars around the planet.
Uh-huh.
I don't think this is brilliant.
The fact that consecutive years would vary in length by a full week... seems that would cause problems with the measurement of time. Consider calculating interest, a single extra day every four years isn't too bad. Adding a week every few years would make things pretty hairy.
The point of all this is to... make sure that saturday this year is a saturday of the same date next year?
This seems like a great way to make the planet more uniform and boring, we could know what hours are shifts are for every year for the rest of our lives.;)
Plus, the vacation week ends up being only every few years?
Deeper question: do we even care if people switch to linux?
If my parents want to pay a few hundred $ for windows, I won't stop them.
I don't particularly like windows, or microsoft, because I think it's poorly crafted software. Does that mean I try to stop people from using it? No. I do, however, try to let them know what alternatives are out there.
Is open-source supposed to be an anti-microsoft movement?
Why don't we spend more time trying to get hardware manufacturers to support open-standards?
Why shouldn't we get a useful application interface/window manager like KDE (poor terminology, sorry, I'm not in software) ported over so that KDE apps will run more easily in windows? I mean, let's make the tools more useful. It's not about suppressing another business, it's about promoting useful software.
Besides, how else can FUD truly be cut to shreds? Seeing is believing, right? Let people see.
The main obstacle to many people adopting Linux is both the lack of familiarity with the OS, but also (and more importantly) a lack of familiarity with the programs they will be using.
Until people adopt and know that they can functionally use Open-Source programs, they will likely never even consider moving to an open-source OS.
Yes, we end up giving microsoft help in the short term. But in the longer term, we let people know that they are no longer dependant on microsoft. More importantly, we get the feedback of designing for a much larger audience, the one we would (I assume) like to cater to in the longer term.
While the primary purpose of open-source is to liberate tools, a definite secondary purpose in my mind is to allow people to actually use them. I'm mostly for open-source because I think it's a real waste of resources to have software being reinvented from scratch over and over again.
I'm doing my ph.d and I use matlab every day. Without it, I couldn't do a large part of what I do, nearly as quickly as is possible. Kudos to the mathworks people on doing a phenomenal job.
That said: Matlab educational version (at least what I saw a year ago) sucks bigtime.
Few students need to do approximate math. The 150$ they shell out is for a maximally stripped down version of an otherwise great software. It has a ridiculously small limit on the maximal matrix size.
But this is totally offtopic: The toplevel post is about OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE.
Besides, most math students would be better off with maple or other symbolic math programs.
All I could think is that I'm allergic to bee stings.
It's essentially a wireless networking scheme that layers on top of an independant physical platform, yet costs significant dough to get certified for. Very clever scheme. Too bad they haven't included really interesting things in their design. All it lays out is the full node/slave node/coordinator node network. It really should have things like dynamic reconfiguration of the network structure. I think it's around 7500$ to become a 'zigbee partner' and then another indeterminate amount to become zigbee compliant/certified. That doesn't even include the royalties for using the stack commercially. The underlying hardware interface however... is very interesting.
I'm also not sure I want my home devices on an unauthenticated wireless network.
A spread-frequency digital communications system is really useful (802.15.4 standard). It also doesn't have the associated royaly issues.
No matter how much testing they do, once they begin mass production, the product will differ significantly from anything painstakingly produced as demo/beta units. You can guarantee that things that wouldn't be acceptable in the tests will slip by, as the devices in mass production can't be tested as thoroughly as demo/beta units. Q/A can't be done for tens of thousands of devices.
That's why there is usually a limited rollout at the beginning of a products life: returns are expected. Charge double for the bleeding edge device, because it will be returned and replaced before long.
Aren't most 1st gen portable products similar?
on
Sony PSP Defects Reported
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Isn't buying a 1st gen. protable electronics device just begging for this kind of trouble?
Why poeple buy bleeding edge products is beyond me.
A pity, they have taken the original images down (around 9:45 am). I hadn't noticed the blackboard images... you guys have sharp eyes.
To think, I missed my chance to pay all my money...:(
I can't wait to see their press release about it: "DOS attacks cost SCO $400,000,000 in lost licensing fees". I mean come one, what if we had all just woken up and realized that those poor guys really do deserve all out money?
But a machine that can mill 5 or 6 micron wide details does for me today what tomorrow I won't be able to do with a 'molecular fabricator'.
Did I mention I'm a chemist?
If you want molecular precision, is can happen. If you want to build larger structures, it can happen.
Bridging between different size domains isn't as simple as drawing a large CAD model of something and saying make-it-so. The complexity of design of a significant item would be huge. It wouldn't lead to easily reproduced common items or circuits.
Nice idea, too bad it's not new. Nice to keep it fresh in our minds though.
No clue how to reach Pat, so I'll assume he will be thoroughly reading the responses to the post. I understand his email would otherwise become unuseable.
I noticed last week that in British Columbia (Canadian west coast), a tropical fungal infection has been on the rise. It's often misdiagnosed, and it's been a bit of a problem in B.C. recently.
Cryptococcus neoformans infection seems to cause serious lung and CNS problems. It's also contracted from spores in the air, so it could explain how it could have come from nowhere.
Whatever the problem turns out to be, good luck in getting better. Have you tried going to the media in your area? *Mystery Illness Baffles Doctors* I'm sure some local health professionals will help then! Perhaps it would also help to *ONLY* answer questions the doctors ask, instead of giving a huge number of details (some of which may be completely irrelevant to the core problem) that overwhelm them.
I'm an analytical chemist. I do stuff that is among the top of what science can do for detection and analysis of chemicals. A lot of what goes on in CSI is possible, but not given a real caseload. It would take months or years to complete the studies that they demonstrate being completed in hours.
It must be nice to be able to plant the evidence, and choose the technique for analyzing it, so that the plot can be flushed out. Too bad real life doesn't permit that (ok, in some cases of corruption, investigators also do this... but I'm speaking generally;).
My brother watches CSI, and tells me about how the police can now catch people so easily. He thinks that forensics labs everywhere are equipped for doing any test conceivable.
While it's nice that CSI promotes usefulness of science and technology, it's definitely giving people a very misleading idea of the state of our techniques. In reality very little of what is shown could be done so quickly.
I can only imagine how angry people must be when a crime is committed against them, and they find out that the only analysis most police will do is take a statement. I'd love to see much higher technology involved, but chances are strong that forensics as CSI portrays will never touch most of our lives.
I'd say that I see at least 3 financial institution phishing scams each week. I have never had a single scam in the name of my bank. Over all, I think I have seen phishing for information for about 10-15 banks. Seems likely to me that the blogger simply got unlucky with having his own bank targeted (or maybe the phisher just got lucky).
This looks a whole lot like what Steve Mann has been doing for several decades. He was doing research on wearable displays at MIT for a long time, now he's at the University of Toronto.
Not to say that his way of doing things isn't freakishly strange, but he's definitely a leader in the area:
I met him at a lecture he gave at McGill last year. I think he's a little out in left field, but he's also very bright, and deserves credit. He's been wearing this kind of laser device for some time now, and doesn't seem to have any retinal burn-in.
I think that you'd have to consider the intensity levels involved, it's a matter of wavelength, intensity and duration of exposure. It's quite possible that the 3 combined make this extremely safe. My approximation is that you probably risk more eye-damage from looking directly at a halogen desk lamp bulb.
His system is more interesting, because he includes a camera, and does image processing to include relevant information about the outside world onto the retinal image that is being displayed: ie. names of people (yes, little laser overlayed name tags), recalling facts and so on. I'm not sure how successful his systems are, but the way he speaks about them, they work fairly sucessfully.
I think you aren't taking the whole terrorism thing seriously enough.
For example:
What you call car 'wrecks' I call accidents. Nobody really wanted to get hurt. No one really wanted to hurt anyone else. It's just the way things go.
Children getting killed around their homes. It's probably just because natural selection is supposed to take care of them. It makes the US stronger as a nation by eliminating the weakest.
Murder. Hah. It's probably all deserved in the first place. After all, how often do people get unjustly killed? Probably just brought it on themselves.
No healthcare and food? Oh come on, why don't they just eat at McD's? It's not so expensive! With the amount of added chemicals in the food, you don't need any supplementary medication!
Bathtubs. Look, if you're wasting all that water taking baths, you are doing the world as a whole a favor by saving water in the future.
'Media fear-gospel'? Come on, look, CNN is just trying to keep us all aware of the truly important, fundamentally preventable issues.
I also don't see the problem with ignorance. I mean, if people get too smart, it means they can do illegal things. They might not want to follow the laws that keep us all safe. The system could get broken! I also don't see what you have against DWARFS in this country. I say we leave them out of it.
Ok, so everything I've said so far is satirical. Truth is, I completely agree with you. Big surprise.
What I found funniest in the article was the closing line: Can't the Department of Home Security find any 'real' terrorists? How many CNN reports have there been about catching domestic terrorists? Preventing terrorist attacks? Complex plots from foreigners to destroy the american way of life? I think the Dept' probably does more to anger and outrage foreigners than to improve the safety of the USA.
Honestly, the people I saw causing trouble seemed to just be bored.
Literally people who were walking down the street and decided to take advantage of the chaos to break things.
They really didn't seem to need any motivation for causing trouble other than opportunity.
I know that this is highly stereotypical, but most of the people who caused trouble were young punks. Literally kids dressed in punk outfits. People who live off the street. I have known lots of peaceful, respectable punks, but the majority of the people that I have seen causing trouble at protests have also been punks.
The police provoke in a much less subtle way. They throw tear-gas into peacefully assembled crowds. They bring in riot police and advance on the crowd, beating them back. They have no need for 'agents provocateurs', because they don't get in trouble for openly provoking unrest.
I might have been there (Quebec City), and have a similar tape. I especially love how riot police beat up mainstream journalists *first*, and then go after other people.
I asked one of the cameramen that had been hit in the head with a baton how often this happened, and why this was done... He told me that it was very frequent. The cameraman being hit wasn't newsworthy. But once hit, the cameraman would have to retreat, leaving the police unattended by mainstream media to do as they wished.
It's funny how things get misreported, even when the reporters themselves are getting injured before protestors cause trouble/damage.
Then again, I have seen the odd protestor break windows for kicks in Montreal. In particular, people who don't seem to be interested in the protest at all, but who enjoy the havoc created.
More importantly, it doesn't have to break the 64 bit operations into many successive 32 bit operations. 64 bit operation are not simply 2x32 bit operations, but can be several dozen operations.
An 8-bit microcontroller can perform 64 bit floating point operations correctly. It just takes a long time.
I think most people are missing the advantage of having the Peltier junction in the CPU.
If you sit a Peltier junction on top of a chip, you can't cool the chip much unless you insulate the board, and processor from the air (not trivial). If the processor gets too cool, humidity in the air starts to condense, and you short out the board.
On the other hand, if the cooler is integrated into the processor, then you can maintain the interior of the package at a very low temperature (increasing the efficiency of the core), while keeping the exterior temperature constant (not cooling the whole package).
This means that you avoid the condensation problem.
This is the same reason that scientific CCD's often have a built-in Peltier junction. Higher operating temperature leads to higher noise (unwanted in already dim images). So you cool the CCD. Only if the cooler is external to the CCD, you cause condensation. So you take the cooler, and wedge it up to the CCD, inside of a vacuum case, with the hot side of the cooler against the case. This way, the CCD stays nice and frigid, while the cooler can do it's job.
If you don't believe me about the prominance of such devices, google 'cooled CCD'.
I'm not completely sure about the reliability of Peltiers, but considering the they are simply a bunch of metal junctions (as long as they are in contact, they function), they should not deteriorate very quickly. Perhaps by overheating them, you can make them oxidize, but I doubt this would happen inside a CPU package. (Your CPU probably has more significant chance of being eaten by a wild leopard)
Does anyone else find it amusing that the device is commonly called a Peltier cooler, even though it operates via the Seebeck effect? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier_effect
That's interesting. I have had a Matrox G450 dualhead card with the video editing card (800$ worth).
I bought them when they were new.
The drivers didn't work with vanilla win98.
I returned them. Matrox took 4 months to reimburse me (and that only after VISA decided to credit me anyways, and let Matrox deal with them). I never got any kind of apology for the delay.
Their web site clearly sold the video editing card as an accessory *for* the G450. I had purchased the card as a bunde through the matrox 'buy online' option.
Their excuse why it didn't work: 'you put the G450 with the video editing card. Try connecting the G450 without the editing card. We haven't developed the driver for it yet, even though we are selling the hardware bundled.'
Years before, I had the same experience with a friend who bought the older matrox g-series cards.
Eventually, I bought another G450 (without video editing daughterboard), and it now has functional drivers. It's not very stable. It doesn't support many old games. The drivers that are certified never supported industry standards that were around when the board was designed, or features that I had expected from their advertising.
I honestly don't see where the 'really, really stable' part comes in. My experience with Matrox cards is that they have consistently had terrible drivers that make them less than stellar in terms of reliability.
I'm a chemist. Not really the kind that is into materials though.
My guess, if you could make regular sheets, and cross link them with other polymer substrates, then coat the sheets externally with other fabric, you could make an air-tight, water-tight strong, light, flexible fabric.
This stuff would also burn really easily, and get punctured easily. While flexible, the material wouldn't have any place to dissipate the energy of an object penetrating it.
The reason we consider spider silk to be so 'strong' is because it is a fiber that self-folds and unfolds. This means that it can dissipate tension along its axis. It can hold a higher tension for a while because of that.
Stuff like kevlar, can stretch really well, and this carbon fabric wouldn't. As soon as you poked it, it would begin to rupture. It would also probably be HIGHLY susceptible to chemical reaction from the 2 directions normal to its surface.
The posts talking about the semiconductor uses are more on track.
Great work by Smeds.
on
Saving Huygens
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Boris Smeds did a great job in replacing lots of expensive tests with a series of trivial, yet critical tests.
Why weren't simple tests like these used while the spacecraft was on the ground?
These are obvious problems. When you take a transmitter and throw it into a planetary descent, this is what should be expected.
It is shocking to me that a transceiver pair isn't tested by the team assembling the spacecraft before launch!
If it can be tested in 2 days when it's in space, 48 light-speed minutes away, why can't it be tested on the ground, fully assembled?
Engineering isn't a science, but I expect that engineers desigining projects like this should be using thorough unbiased scientific testing, not only thorough design.
If they slip up like this in non-destructive tests, one has to wonder about how tests on the resistance to physical damage are carried out?
Do they simply make assumptions that all nuts & bolts are manufactured to spec? Do they assume that all parts will withstand the forces that they are requesting in spec sheets?
How can a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars be justified in creating such craft, when basic, inexpensive testing isn't being carried out? If the test would cost 30,000$ (a few days of well-paid outside experts time, plus expenses and travel), as a critical portion of a 300,000,000$ mission, how is it not done?
The only agreement that should be accepted by an agency purchasing a part is that they won't use the specifications of that part to replicate exactly the same device. I'm sure that they paid a high premium for the transceiver. Why wouldn't they have access to the documentation and spec sheets? This use of NDA's is dangerous.
From the samsung definition, it didn't seem to me that they were individually controlling the values of the sub-pixel colors. by this I mean: the four green pixels are probably still being excited from the same single driving line. What I think is different, is that the four green pixels are affected by their neighbouring pixels, and the hardware automatically does the anti-aliasing...
The article doesn't mention anywhere that they have increased the quality of the digital to analog signal converter precision of the LED drivers. It's using a standard RGB signal feed, so it can't be using a 0-2047 color range for the green.
One thing I find really interesting is that the eye is actually sensitive to the near-UV. We can see light below 400nm, as I have frequently experienced while teaching a spectroscopy lab. Students build their own Czerny-Turner spectrometer, and observe the emission bands from a mercury pen lamp. Some of the UV peaks are visible (not to all students), although very dimly due to our poor UV-response.
The bit about there being less blue emitters still applies: there will be less blue emitted due to a lower pixel area. If the eye is less sensitive (I don't doubt this), then the opposite should apply. We should need less red emitters than blue to observe a similar intensity.
Slashdot Mirror
After the whole mooon landing hoax ;), NASA still hasn't learned to keep the janitors from having keys into their top-secret sound-stages. One of the cleaners saw the poor little dirty machine, and decided to give it a thorough scrubbing.
I hope they take better care of the dolphins with lasers on their heads.
It's too complicated to set up nested parsing of dates, so instead we should change all calendars around the planet.
Uh-huh.
I don't think this is brilliant.
The fact that consecutive years would vary in length by a full week... seems that would cause problems with the measurement of time. Consider calculating interest, a single extra day every four years isn't too bad. Adding a week every few years would make things pretty hairy.
The point of all this is to... make sure that saturday this year is a saturday of the same date next year?
This seems like a great way to make the planet more uniform and boring, we could know what hours are shifts are for every year for the rest of our lives. ;)
Plus, the vacation week ends up being only every few years?
Is this whole sceme a joke?
heh.
Nope, we definitely reinvent it, so that it doesn't have to be reinvented over and over...
Adding stability, useability and low cost just seems to be a nice set of side-effects.
Deeper question: do we even care if people switch to linux?
If my parents want to pay a few hundred $ for windows, I won't stop them.
I don't particularly like windows, or microsoft, because I think it's poorly crafted software. Does that mean I try to stop people from using it? No. I do, however, try to let them know what alternatives are out there.
Is open-source supposed to be an anti-microsoft movement?
Why don't we spend more time trying to get hardware manufacturers to support open-standards?
Why shouldn't we get a useful application interface/window manager like KDE (poor terminology, sorry, I'm not in software) ported over so that KDE apps will run more easily in windows? I mean, let's make the tools more useful. It's not about suppressing another business, it's about promoting useful software.
Besides, how else can FUD truly be cut to shreds? Seeing is believing, right? Let people see.
The main obstacle to many people adopting Linux is both the lack of familiarity with the OS, but also (and more importantly) a lack of familiarity with the programs they will be using.
Until people adopt and know that they can functionally use Open-Source programs, they will likely never even consider moving to an open-source OS.
Yes, we end up giving microsoft help in the short term. But in the longer term, we let people know that they are no longer dependant on microsoft. More importantly, we get the feedback of designing for a much larger audience, the one we would (I assume) like to cater to in the longer term.
While the primary purpose of open-source is to liberate tools, a definite secondary purpose in my mind is to allow people to actually use them. I'm mostly for open-source because I think it's a real waste of resources to have software being reinvented from scratch over and over again.
I'm doing my ph.d and I use matlab every day. Without it, I couldn't do a large part of what I do, nearly as quickly as is possible. Kudos to the mathworks people on doing a phenomenal job.
That said: Matlab educational version (at least what I saw a year ago) sucks bigtime.
Few students need to do approximate math. The 150$ they shell out is for a maximally stripped down version of an otherwise great software. It has a ridiculously small limit on the maximal matrix size.
But this is totally offtopic: The toplevel post is about OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE.Besides, most math students would be better off with maple or other symbolic math programs.
All I could think is that I'm allergic to bee stings.
It's essentially a wireless networking scheme that layers on top of an independant physical platform, yet costs significant dough to get certified for. Very clever scheme. Too bad they haven't included really interesting things in their design. All it lays out is the full node/slave node/coordinator node network. It really should have things like dynamic reconfiguration of the network structure. I think it's around 7500$ to become a 'zigbee partner' and then another indeterminate amount to become zigbee compliant/certified. That doesn't even include the royalties for using the stack commercially. The underlying hardware interface however... is very interesting.
I'm also not sure I want my home devices on an unauthenticated wireless network.
A spread-frequency digital communications system is really useful (802.15.4 standard). It also doesn't have the associated royaly issues.
That's why there is usually a limited rollout at the beginning of a products life: returns are expected. Charge double for the bleeding edge device, because it will be returned and replaced before long.
Isn't buying a 1st gen. protable electronics device just begging for this kind of trouble?
Why poeple buy bleeding edge products is beyond me.
It's SCO® VeryOpenServer(TM) 5.0.7 now.
A pity, they have taken the original images down (around 9:45 am). I hadn't noticed the blackboard images... you guys have sharp eyes.
To think, I missed my chance to pay all my money... :(
I can't wait to see their press release about it: "DOS attacks cost SCO $400,000,000 in lost licensing fees". I mean come one, what if we had all just woken up and realized that those poor guys really do deserve all out money?
It isn't a molecular fabricator.
But a machine that can mill 5 or 6 micron wide details does for me today what tomorrow I won't be able to do with a 'molecular fabricator'.
Did I mention I'm a chemist?
If you want molecular precision, is can happen. If you want to build larger structures, it can happen.
Bridging between different size domains isn't as simple as drawing a large CAD model of something and saying make-it-so. The complexity of design of a significant item would be huge. It wouldn't lead to easily reproduced common items or circuits.
Nice idea, too bad it's not new. Nice to keep it fresh in our minds though.
No clue how to reach Pat, so I'll assume he will be thoroughly reading the responses to the post. I understand his email would otherwise become unuseable.
I noticed last week that in British Columbia (Canadian west coast), a tropical fungal infection has been on the rise. It's often misdiagnosed, and it's been a bit of a problem in B.C. recently.
Take a look: CBC story from 23 Nov 2004, and CBC story from 25 Nov 2004.
Cryptococcus neoformans infection seems to cause serious lung and CNS problems. It's also contracted from spores in the air, so it could explain how it could have come from nowhere.
Whatever the problem turns out to be, good luck in getting better. Have you tried going to the media in your area? *Mystery Illness Baffles Doctors* I'm sure some local health professionals will help then! Perhaps it would also help to *ONLY* answer questions the doctors ask, instead of giving a huge number of details (some of which may be completely irrelevant to the core problem) that overwhelm them.
I'm an analytical chemist. I do stuff that is among the top of what science can do for detection and analysis of chemicals. A lot of what goes on in CSI is possible, but not given a real caseload. It would take months or years to complete the studies that they demonstrate being completed in hours.
It must be nice to be able to plant the evidence, and choose the technique for analyzing it, so that the plot can be flushed out. Too bad real life doesn't permit that (ok, in some cases of corruption, investigators also do this... but I'm speaking generally ;).
My brother watches CSI, and tells me about how the police can now catch people so easily. He thinks that forensics labs everywhere are equipped for doing any test conceivable.
While it's nice that CSI promotes usefulness of science and technology, it's definitely giving people a very misleading idea of the state of our techniques. In reality very little of what is shown could be done so quickly.
I can only imagine how angry people must be when a crime is committed against them, and they find out that the only analysis most police will do is take a statement. I'd love to see much higher technology involved, but chances are strong that forensics as CSI portrays will never touch most of our lives.
I'd say that I see at least 3 financial institution phishing scams each week. I have never had a single scam in the name of my bank. Over all, I think I have seen phishing for information for about 10-15 banks. Seems likely to me that the blogger simply got unlucky with having his own bank targeted (or maybe the phisher just got lucky).
This looks a whole lot like what Steve Mann has been doing for several decades. He was doing research on wearable displays at MIT for a long time, now he's at the University of Toronto.
Not to say that his way of doing things isn't freakishly strange, but he's definitely a leader in the area:
http://wearcam.org/
http://eyetap.org/mann/
http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com/science_
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/14/i
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/cyborg_ma
I met him at a lecture he gave at McGill last year. I think he's a little out in left field, but he's also very bright, and deserves credit. He's been wearing this kind of laser device for some time now, and doesn't seem to have any retinal burn-in.
I think that you'd have to consider the intensity levels involved, it's a matter of wavelength, intensity and duration of exposure. It's quite possible that the 3 combined make this extremely safe. My approximation is that you probably risk more eye-damage from looking directly at a halogen desk lamp bulb.
His system is more interesting, because he includes a camera, and does image processing to include relevant information about the outside world onto the retinal image that is being displayed: ie. names of people (yes, little laser overlayed name tags), recalling facts and so on. I'm not sure how successful his systems are, but the way he speaks about them, they work fairly sucessfully.
I think you aren't taking the whole terrorism thing seriously enough.
For example:
- What you call car 'wrecks' I call accidents. Nobody really wanted to get hurt. No one really wanted to hurt anyone else. It's just the way things go.
- Children getting killed around their homes. It's probably just because natural selection is supposed to take care of them. It makes the US stronger as a nation by eliminating the weakest.
- Murder. Hah. It's probably all deserved in the first place. After all, how often do people get unjustly killed? Probably just brought it on themselves.
- No healthcare and food? Oh come on, why don't they just eat at McD's? It's not so expensive! With the amount of added chemicals in the food, you don't need any supplementary medication!
- Bathtubs. Look, if you're wasting all that water taking baths, you are doing the world as a whole a favor by saving water in the future.
- 'Media fear-gospel'? Come on, look, CNN is just trying to keep us all aware of the truly important, fundamentally preventable issues.
I also don't see the problem with ignorance. I mean, if people get too smart, it means they can do illegal things. They might not want to follow the laws that keep us all safe. The system could get broken! I also don't see what you have against DWARFS in this country. I say we leave them out of it.Ok, so everything I've said so far is satirical. Truth is, I completely agree with you. Big surprise.
What I found funniest in the article was the closing line: Can't the Department of Home Security find any 'real' terrorists? How many CNN reports have there been about catching domestic terrorists? Preventing terrorist attacks? Complex plots from foreigners to destroy the american way of life? I think the Dept' probably does more to anger and outrage foreigners than to improve the safety of the USA.
Honestly, the people I saw causing trouble seemed to just be bored.
Literally people who were walking down the street and decided to take advantage of the chaos to break things.
They really didn't seem to need any motivation for causing trouble other than opportunity.
I know that this is highly stereotypical, but most of the people who caused trouble were young punks. Literally kids dressed in punk outfits. People who live off the street. I have known lots of peaceful, respectable punks, but the majority of the people that I have seen causing trouble at protests have also been punks.
The police provoke in a much less subtle way. They throw tear-gas into peacefully assembled crowds. They bring in riot police and advance on the crowd, beating them back. They have no need for 'agents provocateurs', because they don't get in trouble for openly provoking unrest.
I might have been there (Quebec City), and have a similar tape. I especially love how riot police beat up mainstream journalists *first*, and then go after other people.
I asked one of the cameramen that had been hit in the head with a baton how often this happened, and why this was done... He told me that it was very frequent. The cameraman being hit wasn't newsworthy. But once hit, the cameraman would have to retreat, leaving the police unattended by mainstream media to do as they wished.
It's funny how things get misreported, even when the reporters themselves are getting injured before protestors cause trouble/damage.
Then again, I have seen the odd protestor break windows for kicks in Montreal. In particular, people who don't seem to be interested in the protest at all, but who enjoy the havoc created.
More importantly, it doesn't have to break the 64 bit operations into many successive 32 bit operations. 64 bit operation are not simply 2x32 bit operations, but can be several dozen operations.
An 8-bit microcontroller can perform 64 bit floating point operations correctly. It just takes a long time.
I think most people are missing the advantage of having the Peltier junction in the CPU.
If you sit a Peltier junction on top of a chip, you can't cool the chip much unless you insulate the board, and processor from the air (not trivial). If the processor gets too cool, humidity in the air starts to condense, and you short out the board.
On the other hand, if the cooler is integrated into the processor, then you can maintain the interior of the package at a very low temperature (increasing the efficiency of the core), while keeping the exterior temperature constant (not cooling the whole package).
This means that you avoid the condensation problem.
This is the same reason that scientific CCD's often have a built-in Peltier junction. Higher operating temperature leads to higher noise (unwanted in already dim images). So you cool the CCD. Only if the cooler is external to the CCD, you cause condensation. So you take the cooler, and wedge it up to the CCD, inside of a vacuum case, with the hot side of the cooler against the case. This way, the CCD stays nice and frigid, while the cooler can do it's job.
If you don't believe me about the prominance of such devices, google 'cooled CCD'.
I'm not completely sure about the reliability of Peltiers, but considering the they are simply a bunch of metal junctions (as long as they are in contact, they function), they should not deteriorate very quickly. Perhaps by overheating them, you can make them oxidize, but I doubt this would happen inside a CPU package. (Your CPU probably has more significant chance of being eaten by a wild leopard)
Does anyone else find it amusing that the device is commonly called a Peltier cooler, even though it operates via the Seebeck effect? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier_effect
That's interesting. I have had a Matrox G450 dualhead card with the video editing card (800$ worth).
I bought them when they were new.
The drivers didn't work with vanilla win98.
I returned them. Matrox took 4 months to reimburse me (and that only after VISA decided to credit me anyways, and let Matrox deal with them). I never got any kind of apology for the delay.
Their web site clearly sold the video editing card as an accessory *for* the G450. I had purchased the card as a bunde through the matrox 'buy online' option.
Their excuse why it didn't work: 'you put the G450 with the video editing card. Try connecting the G450 without the editing card. We haven't developed the driver for it yet, even though we are selling the hardware bundled.'
Years before, I had the same experience with a friend who bought the older matrox g-series cards.
Eventually, I bought another G450 (without video editing daughterboard), and it now has functional drivers. It's not very stable. It doesn't support many old games. The drivers that are certified never supported industry standards that were around when the board was designed, or features that I had expected from their advertising.
I honestly don't see where the 'really, really stable' part comes in. My experience with Matrox cards is that they have consistently had terrible drivers that make them less than stellar in terms of reliability.
I'm a chemist. Not really the kind that is into materials though.
My guess, if you could make regular sheets, and cross link them with other polymer substrates, then coat the sheets externally with other fabric, you could make an air-tight, water-tight strong, light, flexible fabric.
This stuff would also burn really easily, and get punctured easily. While flexible, the material wouldn't have any place to dissipate the energy of an object penetrating it.
The reason we consider spider silk to be so 'strong' is because it is a fiber that self-folds and unfolds. This means that it can dissipate tension along its axis. It can hold a higher tension for a while because of that.
Stuff like kevlar, can stretch really well, and this carbon fabric wouldn't. As soon as you poked it, it would begin to rupture. It would also probably be HIGHLY susceptible to chemical reaction from the 2 directions normal to its surface.
The posts talking about the semiconductor uses are more on track.
Boris Smeds did a great job in replacing lots of expensive tests with a series of trivial, yet critical tests.
Why weren't simple tests like these used while the spacecraft was on the ground?
These are obvious problems. When you take a transmitter and throw it into a planetary descent, this is what should be expected.
It is shocking to me that a transceiver pair isn't tested by the team assembling the spacecraft before launch!
If it can be tested in 2 days when it's in space, 48 light-speed minutes away, why can't it be tested on the ground, fully assembled?
Engineering isn't a science, but I expect that engineers desigining projects like this should be using thorough unbiased scientific testing, not only thorough design.
If they slip up like this in non-destructive tests, one has to wonder about how tests on the resistance to physical damage are carried out?
Do they simply make assumptions that all nuts & bolts are manufactured to spec? Do they assume that all parts will withstand the forces that they are requesting in spec sheets?
How can a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars be justified in creating such craft, when basic, inexpensive testing isn't being carried out? If the test would cost 30,000$ (a few days of well-paid outside experts time, plus expenses and travel), as a critical portion of a 300,000,000$ mission, how is it not done?
The only agreement that should be accepted by an agency purchasing a part is that they won't use the specifications of that part to replicate exactly the same device. I'm sure that they paid a high premium for the transceiver. Why wouldn't they have access to the documentation and spec sheets? This use of NDA's is dangerous.
From the samsung definition, it didn't seem to me that they were individually controlling the values of the sub-pixel colors. by this I mean: the four green pixels are probably still being excited from the same single driving line. What I think is different, is that the four green pixels are affected by their neighbouring pixels, and the hardware automatically does the anti-aliasing...
The article doesn't mention anywhere that they have increased the quality of the digital to analog signal converter precision of the LED drivers. It's using a standard RGB signal feed, so it can't be using a 0-2047 color range for the green.
Sorry, I know that wasn't clear.
http://www.photo.net/photo/edscott/vis00010.htm is a clear description of the eye. http://acept.la.asu.edu/PiN/rdg/color/color.shtml is another page that describes things as I have previously been taught them. I'm not sure which is right. Most literature seems to use a log scale, showing the eye to be less sensitive to blue than red or green. Such as: http://www.4colorvision.com/files/photopiceffic.ht m.
I believe that we may be referring to different things. Blue cones are more efficient, and more sensitive to radiation than red or green cones, but red and green cones FAR outnumber blue cones. For this reason, we see blue as being less intense. http://www.cis.rit.edu/people/faculty/montag/vandp lite/pages/chap_9/ch9p1.html
One thing I find really interesting is that the eye is actually sensitive to the near-UV. We can see light below 400nm, as I have frequently experienced while teaching a spectroscopy lab. Students build their own Czerny-Turner spectrometer, and observe the emission bands from a mercury pen lamp. Some of the UV peaks are visible (not to all students), although very dimly due to our poor UV-response.
Very true. It's the end of a long and tiring day.
I was mistakenly thinking of LED's.
The bit about there being less blue emitters still applies: there will be less blue emitted due to a lower pixel area. If the eye is less sensitive (I don't doubt this), then the opposite should apply. We should need less red emitters than blue to observe a similar intensity.