I was expecting a hamster wheel being used as a generator and thought "Really? That's something new?"
This technology seems a lot more useful as long as they can get it to scale up nicely. It'd be nice to be able to charge a cell phone from the clothing you wear.
Plus, if you're the kind of person who likes to give your hamsters a better home by making those big tube fortresses, then your hamster will be generating power all the time rather than the relatively lesser amount of time they'd be on the hamster wheel.
One or two enemies per room, "hiding" behind a pillar (IN EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN ROOM) does not frighten me
Speak for yourself. To this day I cannot open a janitorial closet without a shotgun at the ready, and even then my heart races and my brow sweats.
And every time the lights flicker, I have to check every room of the house to make sure no demons spawned or I can't go to sleep.
Once I opened a janitor's closet and there was actually a janitor in it; I was so shocked I almost became a murderer. Fortunately he was really a demon so it was okay.
That's going to be tough to gauge... If reading to my child makes me smile and they claim 10% royalties, does that mean I have to smirk at them? If reading to my child helps him fall asleep, does that mean I owe them a couple of scrapings off of an Ambien? If I read a scary story and he has a nightmare, do I need to jump out of the author's closet and shout, "Boo!"?
Well you know how their theories of damages go. Depending on how many scary stories you've read your kid, then you may have to give the author a heart attack.
That's odd. I always though America's Funniest Home Videos was an insightful commentary on inherent masculine insecurities, and the fear that no matter how strong and capable we may try to appear, someone will find and exploit our vulnerabilities and reduce us to the weeping man-child that we all secretly fear we are deep inside.
And that the someone will be a 1st grader with a whiffle-ball bat.
Next you'll be telling me that soylent green is people.
Soylent Green hasn't been made from real people for years. They've been using a manufactured petro-chemical substitute, but most people didn't notice the change. I personally think it's a lot more bland and kind of ashy tasting. You can still get the good stuff at some import markets, though.
Uh cus she's a woman, something you either don't or don't want to understand.
By the way, I was joking in my first post, the last one, and this one, but it's a joke based on reality. You think marriage is that simple, you just say "it should be this way" and it is? That's why you aren't.;)
Should it matter? In my opinion, if you're married, then it doesn't matter who makes the money, you're in it together. By that reasoning, should a parent who stays home with the children not be able to buy anything at all since they don't earn anything? Granted, I think that any major purchase or decision should be made together, and a $1k purchase is usually considered major, but one person shouldn't be begging the other for anything. That kind of relationship is not sustainable and not healthy for anyone.
To get all serious in a moment for what was supposed to be a joke (gadgets before self-esteem, come on work with me here people), no matter how you think it should work ideally, marriage isn't that simple. The line between "not be able to buy anything" and "major purchase" is going to fluctuate based on who is bringing home more of the bacon. Or one spouse thinks "you're in it together" means "you have to ask for everything" regardless of who is getting paid, especially if one thinks of themselves as the financially responsible one. It may not be healthy, but many things in real relationships aren't healthy, but somehow a lot of them end up sustainable. That's why the married guy begging his wife to buy something, or to go fishing with the guys, and so on are sort of an archetype. Ideal? No. Real? You betcha.
Life without self-respect (and gadgets) is not worth living.
Dude! Way to totally reverse priorities. Did it occur to you that maybe she's the one with the high-paying job, and all that groveling got him better hardware than he could have bought if his was the only income?
Okay that probably wasn't the case, I'm just sayin', if I had to choose between self-respect and gadgets... "Honey, please?! I took out the trash last night and everything!"
And also due to poor economy, otherwise they wouldn't support cheaper DDR2.
I guarantee you they would.
Even when the economy was good, there was a lot of downward pressure on the prices of computers. Mandating a switch to a more expensive memory tech before the market is ready is a sure way to have it backfire in your face *cough* RAMBUS *cough* Ugh that was some nasty phlegm.
Other than starving CIS majors, who barely earn enough money from their university's computer lab to pay for Ramen Noodles, who does that? IT professionals would just buy all the hardware together because their time is worth more than their money, and everybody else just buys entire new computers. This could only appeal to a handful of small-budget kids.
If you don't think in terms of upgrading the processor of the computer sitting on your desk, but instead think of HP updating the processor in their line of AM2-based computers, then you should be able to see that the appeal is basically universal. This way the OEMs can offer refreshed versions of their lines without having to incur the extra expense of DDR3. Obviously they will also make a DDR3 AM3-based line, but the DDR2-based line will be cheaper.
Backward compatibility and in-place upgrades appeals to far more than a handful of poor hobbyists.
Given the additional 1m on the reflector, it'd be safe to assume a far better performance than Hubble.
Yep. Meters matter. A lot. The summary says the mirror is 1.5 times as big (3.5m/2.4m), but really area and thus quantity of incident light is what matters so it's more like 210% as big as Hubble (3.5^2)/(2.4^2). This is a big space telescope. All else being the same, I'd expect this to show a good deal more distant/faint objects.
It says it's infrared, so this may be more comparable to Spitzer than Hubble. Spitzer is only 0.85m. This beast is 17 times the light bucket Spitzer is.
Your appointment is still at 3PM, no adjustment is needed.
Outside of your clock/computer not knowing that it's 3PM, they still think it's 2PM, and thus you're late for your appointment. That's the adjustment I'm talking about.
For dates on disk or in log files, then a standard date such as UTC is perfectly fine, after all, it's not like the government is going to go back and retroactively change the start/end of DST... right?
Retroactively or otherwise, "seconds since the epoch" is the best format for OS time stamps, since it is a monotonically increasing number that can be compared across all reference frames, barring relativistic effects. It is still not without problems, but far better than something that strictly depends upon local/temporary rules of time conversion and where at certain points time appears to go backwards.
But since you're talking strictly about what time to put down for appointments in your calendar application, that's fine. Since we can at least hope that your computer has the latest updates regarding local time rules, and they aren't changing between when your calendar sends you the alarm and the actual appointment, then that should work. As you say, all that matters is that you show up when both you and your dentist agree it is 3pm. For most other things, counting seconds works better.
So we're strictly talking about how your calendar software decides to send you a meeting notice, and not at all about how the OS and other applications measure and denote time.
The user is not specifying a time x seconds in the future. He's specifying a time of day.
My point is that if your computer software is incapable of determining what x is, then it will not be at the correct time when that time of day comes around. It doesn't make a difference if you're storing local time or seconds since the epoch, as time moves forward the computer will calculate the local date/time incorrectly.
No, it very clearly does not. Extensions to the old POSIX standard time do, but not time() itself. The differences are subtle, but they're there and keep tripping up unsuspecting programmers.
Yes there are many subtle problems. It is still superior for doing what OSes need to do with their notions of time.
Your 3PM appointment at the dentist is at 3PM regardless of how many leap seconds get inserted or if its decided that this year, daylight saving time will only shift by 30 minutes, or whatever other crisis may come.
Um, if your 3PM appointment occurs after the daylight savings switch, then it's at 3PM only after taking into account the daylight savings time adjustment. I.e. the opposite of "regardless".
If your software doesn't understand the local convention so as to make the correct adjustment, then it doesn't matter if you store "local" or "global" time, it's still wrong. If it does understand these conventions, then it doesn't matter if you store "local" or "global" time, because either way it can make the correct calculation. Except with global time you have an easy globally comparable time which makes it easier to convert into other local formats.
Either way, you have no method to account for future leap seconds.
I mean if all you want is a clock, where it's not expected to tell you anything more than the current time within some level of accuracy, and when it's wrong due to a change you just go change it yourself, then you can do that. Dates in an operating system are used for a lot more than this. They're used to answer questions like "was this file modified before that one?", and the your-alarm-clock view of time where all that matters is that it's midnight now, but oh it's daylight savings so we set the clock back and now it's 11pm, doesn't serve that purpose.
UNIX time gives a monotonically increasing measure of time in a well-defined unit not subject to politics or calendar adjustments. From this you can make a notion of local time that's as good as your software would know how to in any case, and it is useful for everything else that requires comparing or performing math on time.
Slashdot Mirror
I was expecting a hamster wheel being used as a generator and thought "Really? That's something new?"
This technology seems a lot more useful as long as they can get it to scale up nicely. It'd be nice to be able to charge a cell phone from the clothing you wear.
Plus, if you're the kind of person who likes to give your hamsters a better home by making those big tube fortresses, then your hamster will be generating power all the time rather than the relatively lesser amount of time they'd be on the hamster wheel.
The problem there is that most modern jet craft move faster than your average office building.
Oh sure, on average.
One or two enemies per room, "hiding" behind a pillar (IN EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN ROOM) does not frighten me
Speak for yourself. To this day I cannot open a janitorial closet without a shotgun at the ready, and even then my heart races and my brow sweats.
And every time the lights flicker, I have to check every room of the house to make sure no demons spawned or I can't go to sleep.
Once I opened a janitor's closet and there was actually a janitor in it; I was so shocked I almost became a murderer. Fortunately he was really a demon so it was okay.
All they need to do is paint a bunch of owl silhouettes on the side of the air plane and that should keep the birds away.
That's going to be tough to gauge... If reading to my child makes me smile and they claim 10% royalties, does that mean I have to smirk at them? If reading to my child helps him fall asleep, does that mean I owe them a couple of scrapings off of an Ambien? If I read a scary story and he has a nightmare, do I need to jump out of the author's closet and shout, "Boo!"?
Well you know how their theories of damages go. Depending on how many scary stories you've read your kid, then you may have to give the author a heart attack.
That's odd. I always though America's Funniest Home Videos was an insightful commentary on inherent masculine insecurities, and the fear that no matter how strong and capable we may try to appear, someone will find and exploit our vulnerabilities and reduce us to the weeping man-child that we all secretly fear we are deep inside.
And that the someone will be a 1st grader with a whiffle-ball bat.
But maybe I'm reading too much into the show.
Even though I've been doing this daily for years, does it help me at all that he's yet to give me any kind of financial compensation for it?
Naw that just means they'll get you for the sentimental and emotional value.
Next you'll be telling me that soylent green is people.
Soylent Green hasn't been made from real people for years. They've been using a manufactured petro-chemical substitute, but most people didn't notice the change. I personally think it's a lot more bland and kind of ashy tasting. You can still get the good stuff at some import markets, though.
Why not?
Uh cus she's a woman, something you either don't or don't want to understand.
By the way, I was joking in my first post, the last one, and this one, but it's a joke based on reality. You think marriage is that simple, you just say "it should be this way" and it is? That's why you aren't. ;)
Irrelevant. Would she be groveling for permission to spend $20 extra on a nicer pair of shoes, if he had the high-paying job?
Ha! And you think those circumstances are the same?
I would certainly choose self-respect over marriage, though.
Yes that's pretty much the choice. ;)
Ha ha?
Should it matter? In my opinion, if you're married, then it doesn't matter who makes the money, you're in it together. By that reasoning, should a parent who stays home with the children not be able to buy anything at all since they don't earn anything? Granted, I think that any major purchase or decision should be made together, and a $1k purchase is usually considered major, but one person shouldn't be begging the other for anything. That kind of relationship is not sustainable and not healthy for anyone.
To get all serious in a moment for what was supposed to be a joke (gadgets before self-esteem, come on work with me here people), no matter how you think it should work ideally, marriage isn't that simple. The line between "not be able to buy anything" and "major purchase" is going to fluctuate based on who is bringing home more of the bacon. Or one spouse thinks "you're in it together" means "you have to ask for everything" regardless of who is getting paid, especially if one thinks of themselves as the financially responsible one. It may not be healthy, but many things in real relationships aren't healthy, but somehow a lot of them end up sustainable. That's why the married guy begging his wife to buy something, or to go fishing with the guys, and so on are sort of an archetype. Ideal? No. Real? You betcha.
Is it a generational thing? Does it have something to do with Lawnmower Man?
There are a lot of issues that have to do with Lawnmower Man.
Fear of the word "cyber" is just one. :P
Of course that's what I meant. I don't make typos.
The tricky part is... what is the color of not being here?!
Life without self-respect (and gadgets) is not worth living.
Dude! Way to totally reverse priorities. Did it occur to you that maybe she's the one with the high-paying job, and all that groveling got him better hardware than he could have bought if his was the only income?
Okay that probably wasn't the case, I'm just sayin', if I had to choose between self-respect and gadgets... "Honey, please?! I took out the trash last night and everything!"
And also due to poor economy, otherwise they wouldn't support cheaper DDR2.
I guarantee you they would.
Even when the economy was good, there was a lot of downward pressure on the prices of computers. Mandating a switch to a more expensive memory tech before the market is ready is a sure way to have it backfire in your face *cough* RAMBUS *cough* Ugh that was some nasty phlegm.
Other than starving CIS majors, who barely earn enough money from their university's computer lab to pay for Ramen Noodles, who does that? IT professionals would just buy all the hardware together because their time is worth more than their money, and everybody else just buys entire new computers. This could only appeal to a handful of small-budget kids.
If you don't think in terms of upgrading the processor of the computer sitting on your desk, but instead think of HP updating the processor in their line of AM2-based computers, then you should be able to see that the appeal is basically universal. This way the OEMs can offer refreshed versions of their lines without having to incur the extra expense of DDR3. Obviously they will also make a DDR3 AM3-based line, but the DDR2-based line will be cheaper.
Backward compatibility and in-place upgrades appeals to far more than a handful of poor hobbyists.
Looks similar in design to the huge-primary-made-of-adjustable-smaller-mirror-hexes Hobby-Everly ground-based scope which is 9.5m.
Color me exited. =D
I thought focal length was the biggest factor in resolution? But then again all I know about telescopes comes from hobbyist visible light scopes.
Herschle has half the focal length of Hubble. Kinda surprising, but then again maybe Hubble is designed to have a wider field of view.
Given the additional 1m on the reflector, it'd be safe to assume a far better performance than Hubble.
Yep. Meters matter. A lot. The summary says the mirror is 1.5 times as big (3.5m/2.4m), but really area and thus quantity of incident light is what matters so it's more like 210% as big as Hubble (3.5^2)/(2.4^2). This is a big space telescope. All else being the same, I'd expect this to show a good deal more distant/faint objects.
It says it's infrared, so this may be more comparable to Spitzer than Hubble. Spitzer is only 0.85m. This beast is 17 times the light bucket Spitzer is.
Your appointment is still at 3PM, no adjustment is needed.
Outside of your clock/computer not knowing that it's 3PM, they still think it's 2PM, and thus you're late for your appointment. That's the adjustment I'm talking about.
For dates on disk or in log files, then a standard date such as UTC is perfectly fine, after all, it's not like the government is going to go back and retroactively change the start/end of DST... right?
Retroactively or otherwise, "seconds since the epoch" is the best format for OS time stamps, since it is a monotonically increasing number that can be compared across all reference frames, barring relativistic effects. It is still not without problems, but far better than something that strictly depends upon local/temporary rules of time conversion and where at certain points time appears to go backwards.
But since you're talking strictly about what time to put down for appointments in your calendar application, that's fine. Since we can at least hope that your computer has the latest updates regarding local time rules, and they aren't changing between when your calendar sends you the alarm and the actual appointment, then that should work. As you say, all that matters is that you show up when both you and your dentist agree it is 3pm. For most other things, counting seconds works better.
So we're strictly talking about how your calendar software decides to send you a meeting notice, and not at all about how the OS and other applications measure and denote time.
I can get behind that.
The user is not specifying a time x seconds in the future. He's specifying a time of day.
My point is that if your computer software is incapable of determining what x is, then it will not be at the correct time when that time of day comes around. It doesn't make a difference if you're storing local time or seconds since the epoch, as time moves forward the computer will calculate the local date/time incorrectly.
No, it very clearly does not. Extensions to the old POSIX standard time do, but not time() itself. The differences are subtle, but they're there and keep tripping up unsuspecting programmers.
Yes there are many subtle problems. It is still superior for doing what OSes need to do with their notions of time.
Why do we have gaydar but not virgindar?
For the same reason we have radar to detect planes and ships, sonar to detect submarines, but don't have earthdar to detect the planet earth.
Some things are too easy to find to warrant looking for.
Your 3PM appointment at the dentist is at 3PM regardless of how many leap seconds get inserted or if its decided that this year, daylight saving time will only shift by 30 minutes, or whatever other crisis may come.
Um, if your 3PM appointment occurs after the daylight savings switch, then it's at 3PM only after taking into account the daylight savings time adjustment. I.e. the opposite of "regardless".
If your software doesn't understand the local convention so as to make the correct adjustment, then it doesn't matter if you store "local" or "global" time, it's still wrong.
If it does understand these conventions, then it doesn't matter if you store "local" or "global" time, because either way it can make the correct calculation. Except with global time you have an easy globally comparable time which makes it easier to convert into other local formats.
Either way, you have no method to account for future leap seconds.
I mean if all you want is a clock, where it's not expected to tell you anything more than the current time within some level of accuracy, and when it's wrong due to a change you just go change it yourself, then you can do that. Dates in an operating system are used for a lot more than this. They're used to answer questions like "was this file modified before that one?", and the your-alarm-clock view of time where all that matters is that it's midnight now, but oh it's daylight savings so we set the clock back and now it's 11pm, doesn't serve that purpose.
UNIX time gives a monotonically increasing measure of time in a well-defined unit not subject to politics or calendar adjustments. From this you can make a notion of local time that's as good as your software would know how to in any case, and it is useful for everything else that requires comparing or performing math on time.