Interestingly, Facebook doesn't seem to make unfriends too easy to find - they consider the greasmonkey script to be "abusive or spammy" and won't allow me to forward it to somebody within the fb message service.
still-image compression is not a field where large gains can be had so easily.
JPEG has two significant practical deficiencies which are not inherent in its lossy nature
firstly it's 8-bit channel depth is not enough to allow any editing without noticeable degradation,
and secondly, its compression characteristics tend to enhance photo grain and silicon array noise.
I guess that the reason that something better hasn't emerged is the combination of the patent thicket around wavelets, and all the shenanegans the digital camera manufacturers have been playing with raw formats.
The Rover gas-turbine car was almost ready for launch (in the mid-'60s). It was cleaner, quieter and potentially cheaper than cars with conventional reciprocating engine designs. It did have two major disadvantages - unreliability due to brittleness of the heat exchanger, and - the tendency to singe the paint off cars that approached too close to the exhaust.
I was told about 10 years ago that "70% of the world's digital data is stored under MVS" which surprised me a bit, even then. After some thought when you consider that almost all commercial transactions (banks, telcos etc) whould have been running MVS then it may have been true. SETI and CERN and other large scientific endeavours are small fry in comparison.
using 64-bit integers instead of floats is a common trick in embedded C for control and signal processing on low power processors. I have experience of four different embedded systems used in commercial products from three different companies I've worked with - three of the four used 64-bit integers for roundoff-sensitive calculations. I was a bit surprised that Matlab can't handle this, but then I've seen the poor quality of the ostensibly production-ready code that comes out of their M2C converter - it was about ten times the code footprint and a fifth the speed of a minimally-optimised C version of the same algorithm.
Honestly, I don't know how anyone can justify paying for this, when R (and even Octave in this instance) is more capable. Where the target platform requires C or asm code, then doing development in Matlab is usually more trouble than it saves. The graphs are prettier, though.
These days paper, as is used in laser printers etc. is not made mostly from wood. It is mostly made from bulking agents like calcium carbonate, which have to be ground to typically 2 micron or finer, and then dried at huge energy cost. The wood fibers are just there to keep all the bulk together, and are a small portion (sometimes as little as 10%) of the weight of a sheet of paper.
You may have noticed that this sort of paper leaves a lot of ash when burnt.
I used to work on powder processing instrumentation and regularly had to take laptop computers onsite to calibrate instruments. We used to use Dells with external IP-54 keyboards and masking tape over all the unused ports. On a few occasions I had to take a normal keyboard they didn't last more than a few keystrokes (I'd guess 20 per key before they failed).
This was lactose, coal, silica, calcium carbonate, etc. When we started work with metal powder we invested in proper IP54 laptops - no fan, membrane keyboard and rubber plugs on all the ports. Heavy, underpowered (800MHz PIII) but they worked. We looked at some "ruggedised" efforts but without the IP rating they were really just slightly less prone to drop damage.
The good bits of "Mozart's Requiem" were written by one of his students after he died in order to help pay his debts.
The only other half-decent stuff attributed to him are the 40th Symphony and the Magic Flute overture, also written in the three months whilst he was kicking the bucket. Makes me suspect that somebody else wrote them for him as well.
Having lived in the US, UK, Malaysia and France, I would concurr that the British plug system is far better. It was properly thought, and universally implemented across the country 50 years ago using an act of parliment on the premise that using anything else was dangerous and therefore potentially negligent. More features have been added since then (including household earth-leakage trip sensing).
I've had problems with a French pin snapping in a socket leaving an exposed live pin for my 3-year-old son to play with (luckily I spotted it in time and managed to cover it). In the US I almost got used to the risk of shocks off electrical appliances. I also had a lab fire destroy some of my work because somebody had knocked out the cable of the pump supplying the coolant.
In Malaysia where the national standard specifies the british plug type, the biggest issue was that cheap Chinese imports sometimes didn't use it.
When basic safety is involved, I don't think that it's over-engineering. Your comment about extra points of failure doesn't make any sense.
Body temperature control is very effective in reducing the number of different enzymes that need to be coded for. Frogs, for example have ~8x more genes than humans - partly because they have lots of different enzymes that do the same thing but at different temperature.
I first stumbled on Slashdot ten years ago when Alan Cox mentioned in his online diary (a novelty in those days) that it was nice that even Slashdot were carrying it as a story.
I knew Alan from my uni days when I heard the outrageous rumour that SUCS (the comp.soc.) were trying to put real Unix onto a PC.
Raw Diode Lasers produce a highly elliptical output which makes it inefficient to couple to a round fiber. It is possible to reduce the astigmatism with fancy lens designs, but this needs to be very close to the die. Even then, the output won't be anywhere near as clean as a gas laser.
This development sounds like a neat and robust way of doing what had previously be done with carefully assembled, and glued lens - pinhole -lens arrangements.
Solar and wind, as they are now anyways, will never be stable energy sources
They don't have to be stable to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
We have adequate weather forecasting to allow wind and sunshine to be predicted.
We have the technology, but seemingly not the political will, to integrate a lot more clean generation capacity than we do, into an advanced national grid.
Whilst we're burning coal when its sunny in Arizona or windy in Maine, then these baseline arguments are irrelevant.
This development would be great for Intrinsically Safe (EEx etc) instrumentation applications. Current ATEX regs make it awkward to supply anything above about 1Watt at 6V. Most people resort to pneumatics and/or keeping the computational logic outside the zoned areas.
Disappointingly for IEEE, he article is sparse in terms of technical details, such as the power/size ratio.
not all the ice that could melt is supported by water buoyancy.
temperature changes of liquid water will cause change in density.
polar bears will drown
The first is what could inhibit the Atlantic Conveyor by weakening its motive force : the downward flow of cooled salty water would be disrupted by large quantities of freshwater runoff from Greenland. Consequence - European weather becomes more like that on Newfoundland.
The second mechanism is what will cause sea levels to rise - the average temperature of the ocean is more than 4C so an uniform increase in water temperature will cause expansion. As the ocean is quite deep in places, a small expansion could lead to a significant rise in water level.
Admittedly not everybody cares about polar bears drowning or European climate becoming too cold to make Champagne or low-lying island states in the Indian Ocean being obliterated. Selfish gits.
Also, a surface with near zero emissivity and high conductivity would likely cause burns very quickly if left in the sun on a summer day.
No, a highly absorbing surface will also have a high emissivity, because of a consequence of the wonderfully named Helmholtz Reciprocity Relationship
The 99.99whatever% absorbtion property (for solar panels etc.) is not significantly better than blackboard paint. The really useful bit is the corresponding 0.00whatever1% scatter and transmissivity which means that this stuff can be used for very effective stray light control for improving the SNR in optical instruments such as telescopes, spectrometers and laser diffraction sizers.
The consensus is about as strong as that of evolutionary biologists' view of evolution i.e. they agree on the general premise but disagree on the details. They haven't developme models that can fully account for observed phenomena, and they take different sets of sweeping assumptions to be able to come up with a manageable model.
If you think about it the whole premise of any prediction is gouing to be wrong: "If we carry on as we're going now..." is not possible.
China is industrialising. The price of oil will react to its scarcity. The percieved importance of rainforest is increasing as it becomes scarcer.
Regional climatic shifts like what started the 1997 Indonesian smog will become more (or maybe less) common as ocean currents shift.
We can (and probably will) argue ad nauseum about the relative importance of the historical CO2 and temperature records, sunspots, methane from the tundra, oceanic absorption etc. but the basic fact is that we're releasing huge amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere whilst destroying the ecosphere's long-established buffers.
Whether the system is stable unstable, metastable or whatever is probably impossible to predict with certainty. I would rather err on the side of caution. Those with a vested interest with us carrying on as we are would rather we ignore the doomsayers until it's too late^W^Wscientifically proven.
The computerworld article contains a rather insipid description of the site from which my over-active imagination must imagine what the contents of the site must be like. It contains no link to any off-site source of information. This reeks of the pre-google days of the wwweb when traditional media monopolies were desperately trying to hang on to their feebe prescriptive worldview. Why is Slashdot linking to this site and not to a genuine uncensored source?
"Robotics" falls in between the stools of academic subjects and industrial applicability. In academia it is seen as the woolly all-encompasing term for research grants awarded to trendy fields like telesurgery, bomb disposal and image processing.
The mathematics you need to be able to do trajectory planning, joint kinematics, machine vision and all the other types of transformations are described in J.J.Craig's book (ISBN 0201095289). This is the application of stuff that has been known for fifty years. The interesting work is all in the application itself.
If you want something similar, but much more in demand, and scope to do something useful, you should look at plant automation - developing control systems for running industrial processes using PLCs. For example, the manufacture of cement consumes one percent of the world's energy, and yet it is controlled by incredibly backward technology. Process engineers that operate these systems are oblivious of all the developments in computing of the past thirty years. Their world is ripe for the injection of some of the expertise that has been developed in academia, and yet, the carry on with their PIDs, their SCADAs and their Ladder Logic.
Teach yourself a bit about grinders, mills, kilns and classifiers and do them a favour - bring them into the 21st century.
A billion is bi-million which is a million squared (10^12)
A trillion is a trillion which is a million cubed (10^18) etc.
Sometime in the 1920s American journalists started using billion for a "thousand million" and it caught on. Prior to that the term wasn't commonly used.
Sometime in the 1980s the BBC gave in and started to mis-use the term as well.
It causes a lot of confusion in the rest of the world (except India, which has its own plethora of names) where they do use the term milliard.
(completely offtopic) The prize money in the TV quiz show "Who wants to be a millionaire?" in Indonesia is 10 Milliard Rupiah.
Yes indeed. From the petition: Microsoft has been sued for allegedly infringing dozens of questionable patents in the software field. The lack of access to software prior art, the inability to find the prior art that does exist, and the limited resources of the Patent Office, make searching by the Patent Office particularly ineffective.
Given the difficulty inherent in finding software prior art, proving a software patent invalid by clear and convincing evidence, especially if a motivation to combine element is also required, is exceedingly difficult.
What goes around, comes around. Maybe this means that they won't be using patents to challenge free software. If they were intending to do that they might be expected to have done it by now.
What's new here is that they are not remeshing the part after a design change. There isn't enough meat in the aricle to be able to tell whether their approach can be applied to all engineering problems where discretized analysis software techniques are now used.
I think that a better approach to reducing the turnaround time for designs is to break down the distinction (that tends to exist in large engineering companies) between engineers, designers and draughtsmen. To a large extent the CAE software companies are doing this. There is still some way to go, however, before the existing generation of FE and CFD software can redo an analysis after a design change without further intervention from the analyst.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, Facebook doesn't seem to make unfriends too easy to find - they consider the greasmonkey script to be "abusive or spammy" and won't allow me to forward it to somebody within the fb message service.
still-image compression is not a field where large gains can be had so easily.
JPEG has two significant practical deficiencies which are not inherent in its lossy nature
I guess that the reason that something better hasn't emerged is the combination of the patent thicket around wavelets, and all the shenanegans the digital camera manufacturers have been playing with raw formats.
The Rover gas-turbine car was almost ready for launch (in the mid-'60s). It was cleaner, quieter and potentially cheaper than cars with conventional reciprocating engine designs.
It did have two major disadvantages - unreliability due to brittleness of the heat exchanger, and
- the tendency to singe the paint off cars that approached too close to the exhaust.
I was told about 10 years ago that "70% of the world's digital data is stored under MVS" which surprised me a bit, even then.
After some thought when you consider that almost all commercial transactions (banks, telcos etc) whould have been running MVS then it may have been true.
SETI and CERN and other large scientific endeavours are small fry in comparison.
using 64-bit integers instead of floats is a common trick in embedded C for control and signal processing on low power processors. I have experience of four different embedded systems used in commercial products from three different companies I've worked with - three of the four used 64-bit integers for roundoff-sensitive calculations.
I was a bit surprised that Matlab can't handle this, but then I've seen the poor quality of the ostensibly production-ready code that comes out of their M2C converter - it was about ten times the code footprint and a fifth the speed of a minimally-optimised C version of the same algorithm.
Honestly, I don't know how anyone can justify paying for this, when R (and even Octave in this instance) is more capable. Where the target platform requires C or asm code, then doing development in Matlab is usually more trouble than it saves. The graphs are prettier, though.
These days paper, as is used in laser printers etc. is not made mostly from wood. It is mostly made from bulking agents like calcium carbonate, which have to be ground to typically 2 micron or finer, and then dried at huge energy cost.
The wood fibers are just there to keep all the bulk together, and are a small portion (sometimes as little as 10%) of the weight of a sheet of paper.
You may have noticed that this sort of paper leaves a lot of ash when burnt.
Fine sand is a killer - it gets everywhere.
I used to work on powder processing instrumentation and regularly had to take laptop computers onsite to calibrate instruments. We used to use Dells with external IP-54 keyboards and masking tape over all the unused ports. On a few occasions I had to take a normal keyboard they didn't last more than a few keystrokes (I'd guess 20 per key before they failed).
This was lactose, coal, silica, calcium carbonate, etc. When we started work with metal powder we invested in proper IP54 laptops - no fan, membrane keyboard and rubber plugs on all the ports. Heavy, underpowered (800MHz PIII) but they worked. We looked at some "ruggedised" efforts but without the IP rating they were really just slightly less prone to drop damage.
but does it run Linux?
The only other half-decent stuff attributed to him are the 40th Symphony and the Magic Flute overture, also written in the three months whilst he was kicking the bucket. Makes me suspect that somebody else wrote them for him as well.
Having lived in the US, UK, Malaysia and France, I would concurr that the British plug system is far better. It was properly thought, and universally implemented across the country 50 years ago using an act of parliment on the premise that using anything else was dangerous and therefore potentially negligent. More features have been added since then (including household earth-leakage trip sensing).
I've had problems with a French pin snapping in a socket leaving an exposed live pin for my 3-year-old son to play with (luckily I spotted it in time and managed to cover it).
In the US I almost got used to the risk of shocks off electrical appliances. I also had a lab fire destroy some of my work because somebody had knocked out the cable of the pump supplying the coolant.
In Malaysia where the national standard specifies the british plug type, the biggest issue was that cheap Chinese imports sometimes didn't use it.
When basic safety is involved, I don't think that it's over-engineering. Your comment about extra points of failure doesn't make any sense.
Body temperature control is very effective in reducing the number of different enzymes that need to be coded for.
Frogs, for example have ~8x more genes than humans - partly because they have lots of different enzymes that do the same thing but at different temperature.
Or, Put simply, "No matter how slow it is, at least it has Adblock"
I first stumbled on Slashdot ten years ago when Alan Cox mentioned in his online diary (a novelty in those days) that it was nice that even Slashdot were carrying it as a story.
I knew Alan from my uni days when I heard the outrageous rumour that SUCS (the comp.soc.) were trying to put real Unix onto a PC.
Raw Diode Lasers produce a highly elliptical output which makes it inefficient to couple to a round fiber. It is possible to reduce the astigmatism with fancy lens designs, but this needs to be very close to the die. Even then, the output won't be anywhere near as clean as a gas laser.
This development sounds like a neat and robust way of doing what had previously be done with carefully assembled, and glued lens - pinhole -lens arrangements.
Whilst we're burning coal when its sunny in Arizona or windy in Maine, then these baseline arguments are irrelevant.
One other unintended consequence (besides the congestion and pollution) may be that of reducing the average family size to 4.
This development would be great for Intrinsically Safe (EEx etc) instrumentation applications.
Current ATEX regs make it awkward to supply anything above about 1Watt at 6V.
Most people resort to pneumatics and/or keeping the computational logic outside the zoned areas.
Disappointingly for IEEE, he article is sparse in terms of technical details, such as the power/size ratio.
- not all the ice that could melt is supported by water buoyancy.
- temperature changes of liquid water will cause change in density.
- polar bears will drown
The first is what could inhibit the Atlantic Conveyor by weakening its motive force : the downward flow of cooled salty water would be disrupted by large quantities of freshwater runoff from Greenland. Consequence - European weather becomes more like that on Newfoundland.The second mechanism is what will cause sea levels to rise - the average temperature of the ocean is more than 4C so an uniform increase in water temperature will cause expansion. As the ocean is quite deep in places, a small expansion could lead to a significant rise in water level.
Admittedly not everybody cares about polar bears drowning or European climate becoming too cold to make Champagne or low-lying island states in the Indian Ocean being obliterated. Selfish gits.
No, a highly absorbing surface will also have a high emissivity, because of a consequence of the wonderfully named Helmholtz Reciprocity Relationship
The 99.99whatever% absorbtion property (for solar panels etc.) is not significantly better than blackboard paint. The really useful bit is the corresponding 0.00whatever1% scatter and transmissivity which means that this stuff can be used for very effective stray light control for improving the SNR in optical instruments such as telescopes, spectrometers and laser diffraction sizers.
If you think about it the whole premise of any prediction is gouing to be wrong: "If we carry on as we're going now..." is not possible. China is industrialising. The price of oil will react to its scarcity. The percieved importance of rainforest is increasing as it becomes scarcer. Regional climatic shifts like what started the 1997 Indonesian smog will become more (or maybe less) common as ocean currents shift.
We can (and probably will) argue ad nauseum about the relative importance of the historical CO2 and temperature records, sunspots, methane from the tundra, oceanic absorption etc. but the basic fact is that we're releasing huge amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere whilst destroying the ecosphere's long-established buffers. Whether the system is stable unstable, metastable or whatever is probably impossible to predict with certainty. I would rather err on the side of caution. Those with a vested interest with us carrying on as we are would rather we ignore the doomsayers until it's too late^W^Wscientifically proven.
The computerworld article contains a rather insipid description of the site from which my over-active imagination must imagine what the contents of the site must be like. It contains no link to any off-site source of information.
This reeks of the pre-google days of the wwweb when traditional media monopolies were desperately trying to hang on to their feebe prescriptive worldview.
Why is Slashdot linking to this site and not to a genuine uncensored source?
The mathematics you need to be able to do trajectory planning, joint kinematics, machine vision and all the other types of transformations are described in J.J.Craig's book (ISBN 0201095289). This is the application of stuff that has been known for fifty years. The interesting work is all in the application itself.
If you want something similar, but much more in demand, and scope to do something useful, you should look at plant automation - developing control systems for running industrial processes using PLCs. For example, the manufacture of cement consumes one percent of the world's energy, and yet it is controlled by incredibly backward technology. Process engineers that operate these systems are oblivious of all the developments in computing of the past thirty years. Their world is ripe for the injection of some of the expertise that has been developed in academia, and yet, the carry on with their PIDs, their SCADAs and their Ladder Logic.
Teach yourself a bit about grinders, mills, kilns and classifiers and do them a favour - bring them into the 21st century.
A billion is bi-million which is a million squared (10^12)
A trillion is a trillion which is a million cubed (10^18)
etc.
Sometime in the 1920s American journalists started using billion for a "thousand million" and it caught on. Prior to that the term wasn't commonly used. Sometime in the 1980s the BBC gave in and started to mis-use the term as well. It causes a lot of confusion in the rest of the world (except India, which has its own plethora of names) where they do use the term milliard.
(completely offtopic) The prize money in the TV quiz show "Who wants to be a millionaire?" in Indonesia is 10 Milliard Rupiah.
Microsoft has been sued for allegedly infringing dozens of questionable patents in the software field. The lack of access to software prior art, the inability to find the prior art that does exist, and the limited resources of the Patent Office, make searching by the Patent Office particularly ineffective. Given the difficulty inherent in finding software prior art, proving a software patent invalid by clear and convincing evidence, especially if a motivation to combine element is also required, is exceedingly difficult.
What goes around, comes around. Maybe this means that they won't be using patents to challenge free software. If they were intending to do that they might be expected to have done it by now.
I think that a better approach to reducing the turnaround time for designs is to break down the distinction (that tends to exist in large engineering companies) between engineers, designers and draughtsmen. To a large extent the CAE software companies are doing this. There is still some way to go, however, before the existing generation of FE and CFD software can redo an analysis after a design change without further intervention from the analyst.