Most Celsuis thermostats I've seen do things in 0.5C increments, because 1C increments is just a bit too big. So you've got that third 7 segment display, except that it only ever shows a 0 or a 5. And since negative numbers are common, you've got to have that extra segment out front too if the thermostat has to display outside temperatures or something like that.
With Fahrenheit you still need that third digit, except that digit can also do double-duty for negative values, since you can assume that you're not going to need to display negative 3 digit values.
Though I must say, thermostats with 7 segment LED displays are pretty rare, almost all I've seen are LCD except for some wall/window mounted A/C units.
1999 also gave us Office Space, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, October Sky, and Galaxy Quest. I consider 1999 one of the last decent years out of Hollywood.
On the other hand, it did give The Phantom Menace, and there's really no excuse for that.
The cruise ships that are in Europe and the Mediterranean in the summer often go to the Caribbean in the winter. Since they have to send the ships across the ocean anyway, they figure they might turn it into a cruise and make some money. So that's why they tend to be one-way, because the ships usually only cross the ocean twice a year.
It's either that, or the massive amount of CPU and memory Windows Update consumes on Windows 7, something that's been an issue for something like 2 years now that Microsoft doesn't seem to care enough to actually fix.
I really have to wonder what Microsoft is thinking. Sure, it's not like the first or second time they tried to break into mobile really went anywhere, but if they wanted to get into that market they should have just kept with it, continued to support the products they had released, maintained compatibility, and eventually their platform might have taken off or at least carved out a respectable niche. It's not like they don't have the money to sink into something like that.
At this point, whatever they release is not going to be taken seriously by anyone, as the assumption is Microsoft will abandon it within a year or two.
People don't get it. It's a "halo" CPU. It's the silicon equivalent to the Shelby Mustang. I'm sure Intel expects they'll only sell a handful. A $2000 CPU is only going to be bought by the few who must have the best, no matter the cost. Intel knows this.
The real purpose is to generate buzz, bring attention to their other CPUs launched at the same time, and get articles like this posted on sites like slashdot. As you can tell, it's working.
The problem with chemicals like that is they are really unstable. It's obvious that they don't actually think your Diet Coke is a liquid explosive, because if it was they would kill themselves and likely several others nearby when they toss it into the trash bin. It's total security theater.
I'm pretty sure they just use the same area code and prefix as the number they are calling, and then just randomly generate the last 4 digits and use that for their caller ID. If it's a number they use a lot then when you do a search on that number you'll find people complaining about junk calls from that number, but when I do a search on the unknown local numbers I get calls from I usually get nothing. I could try calling the number back myself to see where it goes, but I really don't want to bother someone who is most likely innocent and just got joe-jobbed by some scammer.
I'm sure one of the reasons why everyone has a phone number is because of inertia - it's pretty much expected in modern society. If that ever changes, I predict a mass-exodus of people from the phone system. Almost all the calls I get are either people I don't want to talk to, or simply spam, and if I felt I could drop having a phone number I'd do it in a heartbeat.
If I was the phone company, I'd be a bit more scared. Surely they must realize one of the reasons why people dumped their landline is because you get less junk calls on a cell phone (or at least you used to). If they were smarter, they'd oppose laws like this, and would work at getting all the spammy robocallers kicked off the phone network. Otherwise, if the idea gets out there that you don't need a phone number, they won't be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube so to speak, and they'll hemorrhage subscribers at rates that will make them wish they were selling cable TV.
Oh come on, you're not going to win a (fair) election with just the 1% voting for you. Hence the Republicans need to convince about half of the 99% to vote against their best interests* and vote for the guys with the big R next to their name.
*Not that voting for the Democrats would make much of a difference either, but if enough voted for the right third party they might have a problem.
Given that it's Mad Magazine, it's possible they intentionally mixed up the Cathedral and the Kremlin, though it's also likely they just made the same mistake everyone else does.
Actually the closest thing to the Netscape would be clone Seamonkey over, as the interface is basically the old Netscape interface from the 90's and is more or less unchanged. It would look right at home on OS/2.
There are plenty of people who would much rather pay double than waste an hour in a queue. These people would be grateful that someone had the sense to price to market.
Or it could be that no one was willing to pay that price, and his station sat empty. Until that is all the other stations ran out of petrol....
Except that no one HAD to pay. They could continue to wait in the queues at the other petrol stations. They were just offered the additional option of paying with money rather than time. Since he "made a mint" it is clear that many people preferred than option.
And people who needed fuel HAD to pay his price, because he was the only station that still had petrol available and they had no other choice but to pay up or do without.
This is called price gouging, and there are laws against it in many jurisdictions. Even if it's not illegal, many still consider in unethical and people resent being taken advantage of. If a station served mostly locals I could see them taking a pretty big hit once things settled back to normal.
About the only thing it gets wrong is just how fragile modern cars are. Sure, they may be safer, but even the most minor collision will cause significant (if only cosmetic) damage. It's gotten even worse the past few years. 15 years ago, you still at least had a flimsy plastic bumper that offered a small amount of protection. That's basically gone now, if you hit anything at all you'll smash that insanely expensive light cluster, or crush that gigantic oversized grill which seems to be in style now.
I remember several years ago, I was in Microcenter for some reason and I saw 8GB of DDR3-1600 for $35. I was like - double my ram for less than $40, why not? Glad I did.
Couple of years later in late 2014 I was building another computer and I popped over to get 16GB of RAM for it too, figured it would cost about $75 or so. To my shock, 8GB was $80! Computer is still running on 8GB and it looks like the prices haven't come down either. Ridiculous.
Back in the 90's, the graphing calculators like the TI-81 and TI-85 (along with non-TI's like the HP48) weren't so unreasonable in terms of capabilities and cost. My TI-85 survived 4 years of high school and all of college, though it got pretty limited used after the first couple of semesters of college when my math courses got advanced enough that it wasn't really very helpful anymore.
Unfortunately, a lot of standardized tests now are trimming their lists of acceptable calculators and are dropping older models, so if you bring in your trusty TI-81 or TI-85 they won't let you use it even though there really isn't reason they shouldn't.
There are literally hundreds of Windows 7 patches, and hundreds more hotfixes. That's billions of possible combinations of pick-and-choose updates. How do you propose that Microsoft test these possible combinations?
I would propose that once they've got a large enough number of patches, they could roll them all into one large patch which could be used to both apply all those patches at once, and to "reset" the state of the OS so that everyone is once again running the same base version. They could call these large patches something like a "Service Pack".
It's about the money. If you make equipment like this, when you start looking at your options for your control system, you quickly realize that a commodity PC is insanely powerful and dirt cheap compared to something more purpose-built. Plus, you can write your control software in Visual Studio, and it's a lot easier to find people who can write software for Windows and they'll be cheaper. In addition almost all of your users will be familiar with Windows, so you'll spend less time training them.
Of course, this is how you end up with capital equipment that should last a couple of decades, powered by a cheap commodity PC that's probably only really good for 5 years, and will be creaking along by 10 years, assuming it even lasts that long. These companies like to view service as a major profit center too, so a replacement will cost thousands, and will be a $500 commodity desktop which is almost certainly running Windows 7 (read: good for less than 3 years). So is it any surprise a bunch of this stuff is still on XP (or Windows 2000, or NT...).
A 386 does about 4.3 MIPS at 33 MHz. So at 10 GHz it would do about 1300 MIPs. A quad core i7 does about 100,000-150,000 or so, so about 100 times faster. To be fair, the i7 is a quad core so a single core would be about 25 times as fast.
The interesting part to me is that a 386 is about 275,000 transistors, and a quad core i7 is about 1,400,000,000. So for the same transistor count, you could have a 5000 core(!!!) 386 processor. Assuming you could build such a thing and clock it at modern speeds (say, 2 GHz), you'd get about 250 MIPs per core so about 1,275,000 MIPs total which would in theory be faster than the i7. That's assuming of course you could actually effectively use all those cores.
Slashdot Mirror
Most Celsuis thermostats I've seen do things in 0.5C increments, because 1C increments is just a bit too big. So you've got that third 7 segment display, except that it only ever shows a 0 or a 5. And since negative numbers are common, you've got to have that extra segment out front too if the thermostat has to display outside temperatures or something like that.
With Fahrenheit you still need that third digit, except that digit can also do double-duty for negative values, since you can assume that you're not going to need to display negative 3 digit values.
Though I must say, thermostats with 7 segment LED displays are pretty rare, almost all I've seen are LCD except for some wall/window mounted A/C units.
1999 also gave us Office Space, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, October Sky, and Galaxy Quest. I consider 1999 one of the last decent years out of Hollywood.
On the other hand, it did give The Phantom Menace, and there's really no excuse for that.
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but Blackberry is just another Android phone now.
Uhh, he said something that looked good.
The cruise ships that are in Europe and the Mediterranean in the summer often go to the Caribbean in the winter. Since they have to send the ships across the ocean anyway, they figure they might turn it into a cruise and make some money. So that's why they tend to be one-way, because the ships usually only cross the ocean twice a year.
Keep in mind that espousing libertarian viewpoints nowadays will often get you called a leftie.
It's either that, or the massive amount of CPU and memory Windows Update consumes on Windows 7, something that's been an issue for something like 2 years now that Microsoft doesn't seem to care enough to actually fix.
I really have to wonder what Microsoft is thinking. Sure, it's not like the first or second time they tried to break into mobile really went anywhere, but if they wanted to get into that market they should have just kept with it, continued to support the products they had released, maintained compatibility, and eventually their platform might have taken off or at least carved out a respectable niche. It's not like they don't have the money to sink into something like that.
At this point, whatever they release is not going to be taken seriously by anyone, as the assumption is Microsoft will abandon it within a year or two.
People don't get it. It's a "halo" CPU. It's the silicon equivalent to the Shelby Mustang. I'm sure Intel expects they'll only sell a handful. A $2000 CPU is only going to be bought by the few who must have the best, no matter the cost. Intel knows this.
The real purpose is to generate buzz, bring attention to their other CPUs launched at the same time, and get articles like this posted on sites like slashdot. As you can tell, it's working.
The problem with chemicals like that is they are really unstable. It's obvious that they don't actually think your Diet Coke is a liquid explosive, because if it was they would kill themselves and likely several others nearby when they toss it into the trash bin. It's total security theater.
I'm pretty sure they just use the same area code and prefix as the number they are calling, and then just randomly generate the last 4 digits and use that for their caller ID. If it's a number they use a lot then when you do a search on that number you'll find people complaining about junk calls from that number, but when I do a search on the unknown local numbers I get calls from I usually get nothing. I could try calling the number back myself to see where it goes, but I really don't want to bother someone who is most likely innocent and just got joe-jobbed by some scammer.
I'm sure one of the reasons why everyone has a phone number is because of inertia - it's pretty much expected in modern society. If that ever changes, I predict a mass-exodus of people from the phone system. Almost all the calls I get are either people I don't want to talk to, or simply spam, and if I felt I could drop having a phone number I'd do it in a heartbeat.
If I was the phone company, I'd be a bit more scared. Surely they must realize one of the reasons why people dumped their landline is because you get less junk calls on a cell phone (or at least you used to). If they were smarter, they'd oppose laws like this, and would work at getting all the spammy robocallers kicked off the phone network. Otherwise, if the idea gets out there that you don't need a phone number, they won't be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube so to speak, and they'll hemorrhage subscribers at rates that will make them wish they were selling cable TV.
Oh come on, you're not going to win a (fair) election with just the 1% voting for you. Hence the Republicans need to convince about half of the 99% to vote against their best interests* and vote for the guys with the big R next to their name.
*Not that voting for the Democrats would make much of a difference either, but if enough voted for the right third party they might have a problem.
Actually, that cover is a rip-off of a Mad Magazine cover from a few months ago:
http://www.sfgate.com/national/article/Mad-magazine-says-Time-ripped-off-cover-idea-11159783.php
Given that it's Mad Magazine, it's possible they intentionally mixed up the Cathedral and the Kremlin, though it's also likely they just made the same mistake everyone else does.
Actually the closest thing to the Netscape would be clone Seamonkey over, as the interface is basically the old Netscape interface from the 90's and is more or less unchanged. It would look right at home on OS/2.
My clever plan would involve pumping out the water before it freezes.
Or it could be that no one was willing to pay that price, and his station sat empty. Until that is all the other stations ran out of petrol....
And people who needed fuel HAD to pay his price, because he was the only station that still had petrol available and they had no other choice but to pay up or do without.
This is called price gouging, and there are laws against it in many jurisdictions. Even if it's not illegal, many still consider in unethical and people resent being taken advantage of. If a station served mostly locals I could see them taking a pretty big hit once things settled back to normal.
About the only thing it gets wrong is just how fragile modern cars are. Sure, they may be safer, but even the most minor collision will cause significant (if only cosmetic) damage. It's gotten even worse the past few years. 15 years ago, you still at least had a flimsy plastic bumper that offered a small amount of protection. That's basically gone now, if you hit anything at all you'll smash that insanely expensive light cluster, or crush that gigantic oversized grill which seems to be in style now.
I remember several years ago, I was in Microcenter for some reason and I saw 8GB of DDR3-1600 for $35. I was like - double my ram for less than $40, why not? Glad I did.
Couple of years later in late 2014 I was building another computer and I popped over to get 16GB of RAM for it too, figured it would cost about $75 or so. To my shock, 8GB was $80! Computer is still running on 8GB and it looks like the prices haven't come down either. Ridiculous.
Yet you can a non-Apple laptop with the same chips and install more than 16GB of RAM.....?
It's 100% absolutely an Apple problem.
Back in the 90's, the graphing calculators like the TI-81 and TI-85 (along with non-TI's like the HP48) weren't so unreasonable in terms of capabilities and cost. My TI-85 survived 4 years of high school and all of college, though it got pretty limited used after the first couple of semesters of college when my math courses got advanced enough that it wasn't really very helpful anymore.
Unfortunately, a lot of standardized tests now are trimming their lists of acceptable calculators and are dropping older models, so if you bring in your trusty TI-81 or TI-85 they won't let you use it even though there really isn't reason they shouldn't.
I would propose that once they've got a large enough number of patches, they could roll them all into one large patch which could be used to both apply all those patches at once, and to "reset" the state of the OS so that everyone is once again running the same base version. They could call these large patches something like a "Service Pack".
It's about the money. If you make equipment like this, when you start looking at your options for your control system, you quickly realize that a commodity PC is insanely powerful and dirt cheap compared to something more purpose-built. Plus, you can write your control software in Visual Studio, and it's a lot easier to find people who can write software for Windows and they'll be cheaper. In addition almost all of your users will be familiar with Windows, so you'll spend less time training them.
Of course, this is how you end up with capital equipment that should last a couple of decades, powered by a cheap commodity PC that's probably only really good for 5 years, and will be creaking along by 10 years, assuming it even lasts that long. These companies like to view service as a major profit center too, so a replacement will cost thousands, and will be a $500 commodity desktop which is almost certainly running Windows 7 (read: good for less than 3 years). So is it any surprise a bunch of this stuff is still on XP (or Windows 2000, or NT...).
Microsoft does forbid using Windows for things like that. That doesn't stop companies from doing it anyway.
A 386 does about 4.3 MIPS at 33 MHz. So at 10 GHz it would do about 1300 MIPs. A quad core i7 does about 100,000-150,000 or so, so about 100 times faster. To be fair, the i7 is a quad core so a single core would be about 25 times as fast.
The interesting part to me is that a 386 is about 275,000 transistors, and a quad core i7 is about 1,400,000,000. So for the same transistor count, you could have a 5000 core(!!!) 386 processor. Assuming you could build such a thing and clock it at modern speeds (say, 2 GHz), you'd get about 250 MIPs per core so about 1,275,000 MIPs total which would in theory be faster than the i7. That's assuming of course you could actually effectively use all those cores.