Applets are so uncommon that the average user will only come across them once per reboot. So that's what, 4-5 times a day for the average (Windows) user?
Seriously, though, aren't most browsers multi-threaded anymore? There's no reason why the Java plug-in can't just spawn off a thread and return control to the browser. The page can continue to render while the applet loads. And I've certainly run into plenty of Flash/Shockwave/TFMJS pages that take more than a couple of seconds to load, I think people aren't so quick to turn away as is commonly claimed. If they're just curious, maybe, but if their friend sends them a link with "OMG! U gotta l@@k!", they'll sit there for a good 10 seconds at least.
Clearly "Social Computing" doesn't have much to do with, well... computing. And since the majority of people using "Web 2.0" sites are either kids sitting in their rooms or middle-aged poseurs sipping lattes in coffee shops, it's really not terribly "social" either...
According to one of my neighbors, this scenario happens about once a week at the school she works at:
* Child decides to do homework outside. * Child runs in to use bathroom / get a snack * Child is told to wash up, it's time for supper * Supper, evening activities, bath, bed. * Rain or sprinklers soak backpack and contents
It's a little tough to dry out an e-book with a hair dryer (if my experience this spring with an errant Blackberry is anything to go by...) I also notice kids tend to sling their backpacks like hay bales when they're getting into the car, anything that can't take a 5G impact from any angle is going to need insurance.:)
In these days where we're being told to consume less energy, an always-on machine in the house isn't going to look attractive. No reason why it couldn't. If you're mostly using it as a storage server and mail gateway, you don't need anything terribly powerful (you can easily saturate four 100Mb ports with a 1Ghz P-III). And if it's a home server, you'll mostly need it when people are home and using it, so it can go to sleep overnight and probably half the day, too.
OTOH, people are probably going to want something with 2-5 TB of storage, so you'll have several large drives, which will probably take a fair amount of power. This could be ameliorated by giving the server 2+G of memory (yeah, I know, more power drain) and using most of it as a write-through disk cache.
Hmmm, now seems like a good time to brush up on distributed file systems...
I'm not sure if he is attempting to show when the furnace is on or how much fuel each unit is using and when. I got the impression all he was looking for was some way to measure the natural gas and oxygen flows to the furnace, to get an idea (or maybe a better one) of furnace efficiency and to provide some operation cost figures to the bean-counters. He seemed pretty aware that process control was something he didn't want to get in to.
There are ultrasonic meters that don't require fitting pipes and such. That would probably be ideal, as a later response indicated that these furnaces were intended to run continuously until they were EOL'd. That would make fitting an in-line sensor problematic at best. I wasn't aware that any of these existed for gases, though; every one I've seen has been for liquid flow measurements. I'm not in the industrial control and measurement field, though, so I'm sure they have lots of toys I don't know about...
Right, that's what I understood the parent to be suggesting. However, the description only included one LED, which means you can't tell which way the encoder is turning, just that it's moving. If you had access to a decent print shop, you might be able to make an encoder wheel that "faded" from one state to another: e.g., instead of just an opaque block on the track, you'd have a gradient. Then, depending on whether you had an abrupt (clear to opaque) or ramped (clear to translucent to opaque) transition, you could determine the direction of rotation. Easier said than done, I suppose, or maybe this is a well-known technique to people in the encoder field. Or maybe I should have kept my mouth shut and just applied for the patent — d'oh!
Regardless, the parent post just recommended punching some evenly-spaced holes in a disk, which obviously can't give you a direction indication.
IBM is already profitable, but this is all about boosting share prices short term. I worked for a company that was profitable, but my division wasn't growing as fast as they thought it should be (we were doing 8-12%, they wanted 20%+). So they laid off a bunch of us, waited a quarter for these amazing profits to come in, then sold the division. Any bets IBM Global Services will become the new American arm of TCS, InfoSys or Wipro?
*snort* There are about 10,000 different microbrews made in Oregon, and 9,982 of them are IPAs. Good luck if you're looking for a decent porter or pils...
That's funny, because I think California is the only state the does register control systems engineers. At least, everyone whose resume I've seen it mentioned on always states "Registered control systems engineer in the state of California".
Interesting idea, but it won't monitor the actual position of the valve, just changes in its position. So you won't know if it's closed or not, only if it's more open or more closed than it was the last time it was at rest. Actually, with just a single LED, I'm not sure you could even tell which direction it was moving.
It's hard to know what to suggest without knowing what form the valve takes. Does it have a round handle, like an outdoor faucet, or a lever, like many natural gas connections have? How many degrees does it move through from fully closed to fully open?
Instead of trying to measure the valve position (which isn't a value you really want), you might want to think about trying to tap into the lines the valves control and read the actual flow. If the valve has a threaded connection, it might actually be easier to attach a flowmeter than to instrument the valve.
Wow. That government dope must be some gooood shit, Maynard.
they havn't been fighting like this for the last 35-40 years Yeah, and slavery's been abolished in the US for over a century, no hard feelings about that today, is there?
we aren't stopping any idealist ideas from happening over there. Well, I'm sure the Kurds who are agitating to carve their own country out of the North will be glad to hear that they can start issuing passports any day now...
We are attempting to let the Iraqi people instill whatever they want. Sure, as long as it's democracy with equal representation. If they want to go back to being a a monarchy, or establish a Communist state, how far do you think they'll get? I'm all for democracy, but if you think there's any way they'd be allowed to form any other kind of government, you really should put the bong down and go out and get some fresh air.
the competing factions which seem to be two similar but separate religious groups and fight off the terrorist who are doing everything possible to stop this from happening Um, the terrorists are the "two similar but separate religious groups". It's Sunnis vs. Shiites, just like it has been since Aisha fought Ali. And now we're stuck in the middle trying to referee.
And No, It won't be Iraq V Iran. YHBT. HAND.
Contractors have always had to abide by the rules set in place by the command they support. This isn't exactly restricted to military or government contractors, either. Every place I've ever contracted has had rules regarding all kinds of things you could and couldn't do with company resources or on company property or while on company business. Dress codes, document content and format guides, when you can go to lunch and for how long, no dating anyone in your group/division/business unit, no "controversial" pictures/posters/slogans/knick-knacks in your work area — some places obviously just wanted semi-autonomous puppets, and would gladly have issued Tasers to the management staff if they could figure out how to get them through Purchasing...
And while it may feel more ominous to have the threat of being carted off to Leavenworth if you offend the wrong people, I can assure you it's at least as bad in the corporate world. They won't send you off to prison if you accidentally spill coffee on a colonel's shoes, but I know someone who was fired and blacklisted from one of the highest-paying markets in the area because he whacked an administrative assistant's car door with his briefcase.
Of course, it seems that the biggest companies have the most onerous rules, and the US military is nothing if not a really big company...
Thoughtcrime has no statute of limitations, Citizen! Thanks to your unsolicited confession, the State has no choice but to detain you pending your conviction and eventual trial. Please accompany the uninformed officer to the Blessed Mother of Immaculate Cattle Prods re-education camp for re-grooving and eventual reclamation.
This is the only parallel they see with Vietnam as of now Um, so the fact that they're fighting a guerrilla war against a people with more than a few hundred years of internicene infighting didn't register? Or are we supposed to feel better because we're not going up against "Godless Communists", and instead we're facing peoples who have made a hobby of putting the smack down on Christians since about the sixth century?
I'm just waiting for Iraq to become "pacified". Then we can have them play North Vietnam, and Iran can play South Vietnam, and it'll really be like the old days!
Actually I was referring to the 68K emulation built into the PowerPC Macs, but the Rosetta technology does pretty much the same thing on the Intel Macs. I don't know if Rosetta will let you emulate a PowerPC emulating a 68K, but I suspect so.
One of the really sad things is that the x86 architecture is crappy because it was based on a lot of prior art brought over from the 8080 and 8085. That's why the instruction set's so non-orthagonal, and why it's so register-poor. No excuse, really, but it wasn't intended to be a whiz-bang CPU; that was going to be the iAPX-432's job. The 8086 was cobbled together quickly when Intel realized they had to get something to market quickly before Moto (68K) or Nat Semi (32k) started shipping in volume. It's just unfortunate that IBM picked it for the CPU in the original PC, and we've been stuck with it ever since.
there's always someone who thinks we are somehow "hindered" by the fact that we can still run 30-year old software unmodified on new hardware. We are, because it's just a new implementation of a crappy architecture. Apple showed that it's quite feasible to run old software on new hardware, even new hardware that had almost nothing in common with the old hardware. Intel provides x86 compatibility on Itanium, there's no reason why we can't all move to a new processor and take our old software with us. It's just that nobody's coming out with any new processors for PC-class machines.
I'd say the ability to run 30-year-old software unmodified on a modern processor shows just how little progress we've actually made...
Face it, Wired's milked their fifteen quarters of fame far beyond any further relevance. They're like a post-Modern Scientific American, except they never really had any serious geek cred to begin with.
I would argue that in the end, if you don't understand the universe that it will ultimatley [sic] kill you. There's no guarantee that understanding will alter that. Just because you know about physiology doesn't mean you'll survive a gunshot wound.
If this is from climate change,... Evolutionary survival will not save you. Dunno, mammals seem to have done pretty well for themselves during the first ice age. Dinosaurs...not so much.
Otherwise the dinosaurs would have a nifty system of repealing their doom that would most resemble a space program. Um, not too many dinosaurs around to have much of anything at this point. And I don't believe extinction can be "repealed". Regardless, why a space program? Why not some kind of advanced genetics, wrap their DNA with something that'll produce an animal that can survive the impending cataclysm, then devolve back into dinosaurs when the danger's over? "Mammals: The Mutation That Wears Off! Ask for it by name!" Or who's to say there isn't some virus locked in permafrost somewhere that'll sweep across the globe as the polar ice caps melt (sure sign that the Cold Times are over) and infect the sharks and crocodiles, causing genes dormant for millions of years to awaken, giving rise to a new generation of thunder lizards...
One day in the far flung future there will be no life (or sentient beings) to actually contemplate the nature of reality and quantum physics. Fling your future out far enough, and we'll all be dead. Nobody escapes entropy. Unless the universe collapses back upon itself before that happens. But nobody's going to survive that, either...
we should not expect to wait until version.03 (.06?) for a decent release. <rant onTopic="no">WTFIIWTG "releasing" a pre-1.0 version? If you want people to use it, label it as 1.0. It's like there's some fear that a point release requires divine intervention or something. Or is everybody afraid that people won't feel cool and edgy if they're running a post-1.0 release?
I guess I can see if you've got a formal goal for your software, like if you're implementing some spec, you might have pre-1.0 releases because you don't meet the spec yet. But I see an awful lot of projects (and Beryl sounds like one) that don't fall into that category.</rant>
Not enough to power a postcard with one of these irritating battery/chip/speaker combinations in it. Although these things may also be powered directly the dark forces that surround them. Um, just who are you sending these cards to, exactly? Does Hallmark have a new Santeria line?
I can't believe that Wired, the most typographically-challenged magazine in print, is printing an article about readability. Is this a case of "Do as I say, not as I do", or just basic couldn't-find-a-clue-with-both-hands-and-Google?
Or maybe they've gotten better. I think I stopped reading them after about their seventh issue, their "fresh and edgy" layout seemed more "fucked-up and annoying" to me...
I'd be surprised if it ran on hardware that old Actually, I ran the Edgy live CD on a P-II 450 w/128M and didn't have a problem, except it wouldn't set the display resolution past 1024x768. The graphics card is a Matrox G200, so that's not the problem (Windows XP ran at 1152x870, and even let me set the resolution to 1600x1200, but the 17" MultiSync couldn't deal with it).
Anyone have any idea how difficult it is to run old Windows games on Ubuntu (I assume through WINE or some such)? My daughter's got a couple of old Win95 (might even be DOS) games she likes, would it be feasible to try to set those up? The most recent version of Windows I have installation media for is WinME, and I'd like to avoid using that...;)
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, though, aren't most browsers multi-threaded anymore? There's no reason why the Java plug-in can't just spawn off a thread and return control to the browser. The page can continue to render while the applet loads. And I've certainly run into plenty of Flash/Shockwave/TFMJS pages that take more than a couple of seconds to load, I think people aren't so quick to turn away as is commonly claimed. If they're just curious, maybe, but if their friend sends them a link with "OMG! U gotta l@@k!", they'll sit there for a good 10 seconds at least.
What's the load time of the average MySpace page?
There's Nexenta, which is basically Debian on the OpenSolaris kernel. But you're right, it would be nice to have a completely unencumbered Solaris.
Slashdot's got an article that says "Timogen writes to tell us Wired is reporting that a research team is reporting that"...
According to one of my neighbors, this scenario happens about once a week at the school she works at:
:)
* Child decides to do homework outside.
* Child runs in to use bathroom / get a snack
* Child is told to wash up, it's time for supper
* Supper, evening activities, bath, bed.
* Rain or sprinklers soak backpack and contents
It's a little tough to dry out an e-book with a hair dryer (if my experience this spring with an errant Blackberry is anything to go by...) I also notice kids tend to sling their backpacks like hay bales when they're getting into the car, anything that can't take a 5G impact from any angle is going to need insurance.
OTOH, people are probably going to want something with 2-5 TB of storage, so you'll have several large drives, which will probably take a fair amount of power. This could be ameliorated by giving the server 2+G of memory (yeah, I know, more power drain) and using most of it as a write-through disk cache.
Hmmm, now seems like a good time to brush up on distributed file systems...
Right, that's what I understood the parent to be suggesting. However, the description only included one LED, which means you can't tell which way the encoder is turning, just that it's moving. If you had access to a decent print shop, you might be able to make an encoder wheel that "faded" from one state to another: e.g., instead of just an opaque block on the track, you'd have a gradient. Then, depending on whether you had an abrupt (clear to opaque) or ramped (clear to translucent to opaque) transition, you could determine the direction of rotation. Easier said than done, I suppose, or maybe this is a well-known technique to people in the encoder field. Or maybe I should have kept my mouth shut and just applied for the patent — d'oh!
Regardless, the parent post just recommended punching some evenly-spaced holes in a disk, which obviously can't give you a direction indication.
*snort* There are about 10,000 different microbrews made in Oregon, and 9,982 of them are IPAs. Good luck if you're looking for a decent porter or pils...
That's funny, because I think California is the only state the does register control systems engineers. At least, everyone whose resume I've seen it mentioned on always states "Registered control systems engineer in the state of California".
Interesting idea, but it won't monitor the actual position of the valve, just changes in its position. So you won't know if it's closed or not, only if it's more open or more closed than it was the last time it was at rest. Actually, with just a single LED, I'm not sure you could even tell which direction it was moving.
It's hard to know what to suggest without knowing what form the valve takes. Does it have a round handle, like an outdoor faucet, or a lever, like many natural gas connections have? How many degrees does it move through from fully closed to fully open?
Instead of trying to measure the valve position (which isn't a value you really want), you might want to think about trying to tap into the lines the valves control and read the actual flow. If the valve has a threaded connection, it might actually be easier to attach a flowmeter than to instrument the valve.
What if you go to buy some pot, but they sell you a baggie of oregano instead — has a crime been committed?
And while it may feel more ominous to have the threat of being carted off to Leavenworth if you offend the wrong people, I can assure you it's at least as bad in the corporate world. They won't send you off to prison if you accidentally spill coffee on a colonel's shoes, but I know someone who was fired and blacklisted from one of the highest-paying markets in the area because he whacked an administrative assistant's car door with his briefcase.
Of course, it seems that the biggest companies have the most onerous rules, and the US military is nothing if not a really big company...
Thoughtcrime has no statute of limitations, Citizen! Thanks to your unsolicited confession, the State has no choice but to detain you pending your conviction and eventual trial. Please accompany the uninformed officer to the Blessed Mother of Immaculate Cattle Prods re-education camp for re-grooving and eventual reclamation.
Praise the Hoov!
I'm just waiting for Iraq to become "pacified". Then we can have them play North Vietnam, and Iran can play South Vietnam, and it'll really be like the old days!
Actually I was referring to the 68K emulation built into the PowerPC Macs, but the Rosetta technology does pretty much the same thing on the Intel Macs. I don't know if Rosetta will let you emulate a PowerPC emulating a 68K, but I suspect so.
One of the really sad things is that the x86 architecture is crappy because it was based on a lot of prior art brought over from the 8080 and 8085. That's why the instruction set's so non-orthagonal, and why it's so register-poor. No excuse, really, but it wasn't intended to be a whiz-bang CPU; that was going to be the iAPX-432's job. The 8086 was cobbled together quickly when Intel realized they had to get something to market quickly before Moto (68K) or Nat Semi (32k) started shipping in volume. It's just unfortunate that IBM picked it for the CPU in the original PC, and we've been stuck with it ever since.
I'd say the ability to run 30-year-old software unmodified on a modern processor shows just how little progress we've actually made...
"If it's Wired...it's tired"
Or maybe
"An article in Wired! No IQ required!"
Face it, Wired's milked their fifteen quarters of fame far beyond any further relevance. They're like a post-Modern Scientific American, except they never really had any serious geek cred to begin with.
Bring back Omni, and let Wired die...
I guess I can see if you've got a formal goal for your software, like if you're implementing some spec, you might have pre-1.0 releases because you don't meet the spec yet. But I see an awful lot of projects (and Beryl sounds like one) that don't fall into that category.</rant>
I can't believe that Wired, the most typographically-challenged magazine in print, is printing an article about readability. Is this a case of "Do as I say, not as I do", or just basic couldn't-find-a-clue-with-both-hands-and-Google?
Or maybe they've gotten better. I think I stopped reading them after about their seventh issue, their "fresh and edgy" layout seemed more "fucked-up and annoying" to me...
Anyone have any idea how difficult it is to run old Windows games on Ubuntu (I assume through WINE or some such)? My daughter's got a couple of old Win95 (might even be DOS) games she likes, would it be feasible to try to set those up? The most recent version of Windows I have installation media for is WinME, and I'd like to avoid using that...