You miss his point ENTIRELY, despite quoting the part of his post that has all the key words in it.
He wants a replacement for a tape RECORDER, not a player. The iPod is a PLAYER.
I agree with him that a hand-held recording device that would rip audio to high-fidelity digital audio on a ultra-compact hard drive would be most excellent.
Electrical power is provided by four radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG), each providing 40 watts of power at launch. Two three-rod trusses, 120 degrees apart, project from the equipment compartment to deploy the RTG power sources about 10 feet from the center of the spacecraft. A third boom, 120 degrees from the others, projects from the experiments compartment and positions the helium vector magnetometer sensor 20 feet from the spacecraft center.
Question:Why does the RTG power decrease?
Answer: Power for the Pioneer 10 is generated by the Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG's). Heat from the decay of the plutonium 238 isotope is converted by thermoelectric couples into electrical current. The electrical output depends on the hot junction temperature, the thermal path to the radiator fins, and the cold junction temperature. It is the degradation of the thermoelectric junction that has the major effect in decreasing the power output of the RTG. In the 30-year time scale operation of Pioneer 10, the 92 year half-life of the isotope does not appreciably affect the RTG operation. The nuclear decay heat will keep the hot junction temperature hot for many years but unfortunately will not be able to be converted into enough electricity to power the transmitter for much longer.
As an aside, this type of power source is behind the plutonium scare-mongering that surrounded Cassini.
This could result in some really useful information about the edges of the solar system -- except that apparantly Pioneer 10's power system is going to run out of juice in a few years (solar powered I guess - the W/m^2 will probably be too low to power the probe at that point).
The Pioneer 10 & 11 probes are not solar powered. They use RTG (radiothermal generation) power sources, which are hot lumps of radioactive material and the heat is converted into electricity. Solar power would be far too weak even at Jupiter or Saturn, much less at the distances that Pioneer 10 & 11 are at.
The radioactive source is continually decaying, so it will lose power over time.
Whereas in the US, some self-serving nutball like David Koresh might be able to get 100 or 200 people to follow them, in China, a charismatic psycho can get several million.
By "charismatic psycho," I assume you are referring to Mao?
All flamebait aside, the "problem" of people following Falun Gong is peanuts compared to the real problems (mass unemployment, declining peasant incomes, etc.) facing China in its transition to an open economic system.
China is very concerned about *accurate*, independent depictions of economic dislocation being more widely available. They don't want to publicize worker protests when local well-connected "entrepreneurs" close down state-owned enterprises, cutting off social benefits to thousands of workers while enriching themselves. They don't want to publicize the corruption of local tax collectors that impose arbitrary taxes on peasant farmers.
Instead, they want (oddly like George W. Bush) to promote the message that all these problems are a case of a few "bad apples" in what is a sound system, and that the Communist Party (with Jiang Zemin at the core!) is hard at work solving these problems.
The average Chinese peasant knows damn well that the goverment isn't offering any kind of "pay your taxes, the future will be better" promise. Instead, they are getting the "pay your arbitrary, illegal local tax levies, you don't have any recourse to the central government anyway" reality.
The genius/insight of Mendeleev (and his other table-making predecessors like Newlands) was to realize that introducing gaps into the sequence of atoms arranged by MASS allowed a table to exhibit the periodicity. The modern concept of atomic number could only exist after positing that there was something other than mass that determined the properties of atoms. Until then, the atomic number was basically a bookkeeping device, denoting the order in weight. One couldn't be sure that there wasn't some rare or unknown element that might be discovered between two elements.
Today, we know the determining property is the atomic number, i.e., the charge of the nucleus, and the atomic number is discrete, since one can only have an integer number of protons in a nucleus. Until Moseley's X-ray data, there wasn't any experimental proof that atomic number was a physical property.
This development process is really what made chemistry into a hard science in the 19th century.
Look, if a Wal-mart manager could feel comfortable installing Mandrake and keeping a useful demo environment available on the computer, preserving it against "attacks" by pre-teen customers and other clueless passers-by, they wouldn't have to take a job as a Walmart manager. Instead, they'd have some tech job which gave them the job security that let them spend time posting on Slashdot.
A Walmart manager has too many things to worry about already, like managing a workforce of perhaps a hundred or so minimum-wage workers, and keeping a store in stock of thousands of items, while dealing with any number of screw-ups, emergencies, and irate customers.
Apropos Apple in CompUSA, back a few years, I knew a guy who was paid by a marketing agency part-time to go maintain the Apple kiosks at Sears and Circuit City. He was not being paid what he was truly worth in terms of ability---most of his compensation was the feeling that he was participating in the Apple jihad. He was lucky to get any support at all from the commission-driven drones, who would be just as happy selling DVD players or dishwashers. Now the guy works at an Apple store part-time, as Apple has decided to focus on their own retail chain.
Unless some Linux vendor manages to fund some kind of underpaid mujahedeen squad that would go store-to-store to do periodic fixups and staff training, retail Linux kiosks are not going to work. Maybe RedHat needs to go retail?
Not to be harsh, but financial/managerial issues are as important to the success of a product as the engineering issues are, and outsourcing is more and more what the electronics industry is about. Apple can't succeed making this hardware alone, but also can't simply slap an Apple label on a generic MP3 player.
Make vs. buy is a huge issue for people making complicated products, and this article goes through pretty thoroughly the tradeoffs Apple must have made in making these decisions.
Perhaps you just want a series of pixellated JPEGs to ooh and aah at, but face it---most chips look alike.
I thought this was a refreshing change from the usual Slashdot fare of "look at some piece of hardware get torn apart" or "look at the goofy enclosure someone has put a Beowulf cluster in."
I think you are missing my point. I've just now taken a look at the ConTeXt information, and I am quite impressed at the results. But it seems to me that ConTeXt is more analogous to LaTeX+pdfTeX than raw TeX.
My concerns are more with the internals of TeX; namely, how can it be made easier for people to develop things like LaTeX or pdfTeX in a way that can be easily customized.
Like many people, my experience in TeX was writing my thesis in LaTeX. But when I wanted to adjust the format that I borrowed from a friend, either to cope with changed thesis format requirements, or to typeset a certain kind of program documentation, I found the process of understanding and modifying LaTeX macros to require true wizardry, without the rewards that wizardry brings in modern, powerful programming languages.
OK, so TeX has been recoded by a few people in a few languages. But from what I've seen, these people haven't really attacked the complexity and inflexibility of things like LaTeX's implementation macros. I.e., they maintain the same distinction between TeX internals and the TeX language.
Why is it that some people have to write packages like LaTeX, other people have to write enhanced versions of the TeX processor, and yet other people have to write DVI drivers, each using different languages? I find that the modularity of TeX is too coarse---format files, TeX processor, DVI processor, none of which really communicate with each other, or can be programmed together.
I think the possibility of doing typesetting in a programmatic way (like TeX) is very powerful, especially when coupled with aesthetically good algorithms (like TeX). But I want to have an implementation where the *programmability* is given higher priority, and the programmer is given access to the entire typesetting flow in a modern way.
My point about the DVI file formats is that it is really a machine language for a generic typesetter. It has lost much of the sense of the document. Sure, by liberal use of specials, you can include intelligence in your documents, but that requires you to have a new implementation of the TeX processor, and a new DVI processor, possibly integrated into the TeX processor. What if you could produce the same effect simply by changing or defining a new format file?
Yeah, this seems to have attacked the modularity issue for TeX's internal structure.
Still, it looks like the TeX language and the implementation language (Java) are separate.
I would like a system where there are two syntaxes for the same language. One is the mark-up syntax, which would be the default syntax for writing your documents. Hopefully, compatible with or easily translated from existing TeX documents. This syntax is optimized for writing documents.
The other syntax would be oriented toward re-programming TeX. This would be optimized for describing custom layout algorithms or other processing of user input. Personally, I would want it to look like Lisp.
For simple substitution-type macros, you could use either syntax, like in TeX today with simple
\def\TeX{T\kern-.2em\lower.5ex\hbox{E}\kern-.06e m X}
when things are simple, or a more program-like form
as well. But with the Lisp-like syntax, I know that I can use all the powerful Lisp macro and programming capabilities to do typesetting. (E.g. trig functions for typesetting at angles, TeX control sequences that take Lisp data structures as arguments) Wow!
When you look at TeX's definition for \settabs with all its \sett@b and \s@tt@b special names, or LaTeX definitions, I think being able to do things in Lisp would be a real win. And, if it really is Lisp, it won't be hard to write translators that slurp up currently existing formats (like LaTeX) and spew out the new Lispified version automatically, so I don't lose any of today's formatting abilities.
1) you are absolutely right. But TeX's font support has only lately become convenient enough for most users, and relatively few fonts with TeX-compatible font metrics have become widespread.
2) TeX is hardly Lisp-like. It's more like a macro assembler language. Its internal variables are a fixed number of registers, arranged in several banks, each of one "type," some of which have special behavior; its named variables are really only replacement strings (control sequences) or aliases to built-in registers; and its control structures are heinous.
For a truly Lisp-like language, I would want variables to be unlimited, support modern data structures, true parameter passing to user subroutines, for the state of the TeX process to support full introspection, be completely customizable (e.g. be able to write new paragraph and spacing routines as part of TeX modules), and for new control and data structures to be defineable.
3) What I mean is that there is no easily accessible representation for "parsed" TeX input. The processing into the internal representation is driven by a few different "modes" of the TeX engine (e.g. vertical mode, horizontal mode, math mode) which consume tokens and produce internal data structures. I would like for users to be able to redefine or add additional modes in add-on modules, rather than having to recode TeX's internals directly.
How do you change TeX's pagination or paragraph-building? Right now it is a total hack job. You have to generate the right tokens to create the right amount of glue and space to have the built-in routines do what you want, tweaking several internal variables along the way.
Here's an example of what I had a desire to do: I was trying to typeset a table where some of the table cells would have multiple text lines. I.e. if the text was long, instead of insisting on a super-wide column, I wanted TeX to break the text into several lines, making the table cell span a larger number of text lines. Then, the other columns with short text will float to the center of this "expanded row."
I don't think you can do that easily. I ended up doing the breaks by hand. Why is that necessary? Why can't I code a table where the vertical direction is as flexible as the horizontal direction, and call the line-breaking algorithm on individual cells? Ideally, I'd like to be able to *easily* code any kind of table-generating macros I want.
4) what I mean is that there is no built-in data structure representing a DVI file. The reason is that TeX was made to run without using much core memory, so only a page or so of output is held in internal form before being squeezed out of the toothpaste tube into the DVI bucket. Once it is out of the tube, the DVI toothpaste can't be sucked up again. I would like more flexibility in processing the final DVI results, without having to write a different dvi2blah driver that has to support everything that dvi2pdf or dvips already supports.
What I want in general is a system where the entire input-tokens to output-DVI is accessible to user programs written in a high-level language, using real high-level data structures, and where the TeX control sequences can be defined in the *same* language (so that I could code a LaTeX-type package in a programmer-friendly language like Lisp, if I wanted.) I basically want the whole Common Lisp language available to do my typesetting, while maintaining the excellent aspects of TeX, including the usually-convenient mark-up syntax.
Sorry if this is not quite clear, but it is, after all, just a vague dream-like urge. Programming in Common Lisp, for me, is pretty much painless. Programming TeX/LaTeX macros is like doing my own dental work. I get the same feeling that I get when I use a 1980's-era line editor (ED) vs. using Emacs. I want TeX to be a 21st century environment, instead of a 1980's environment.
Yes, TeX was quite an achievement. Stable, wonderfully un-buggy, most definitely. Unfortunately, it was good enough to catch on and establish itself before its flaws could be fixed.
My particular take:
1) The Computer Modern fonts are not very pretty unless you have a very high resolution typesetter; even then, the letters look too thin and spidery for my taste. Sure, you can use other fonts. But most users never do, or use even uglier ones, usually sticking with Computer Modern for the formulas. Do any other really complete and compatible math fonts even exist?
2) The programming features were hacked on as an afterthought. The syntax is fine, perhaps even near optimal, for straight mark-up, but for developing actual algorithms, it makes Perl code look self-explanatory. Right up there with Intercal. This means that packages like LaTeX or formats are very hard to modify or extend in any kind of robust way. So everyone uses the default format, borrows one that works from somebody else, or works very hard to roll their own. Making even slight adjustments or fixes is a real nightmare.
3) The whole TeX program is terribly monolithic. Sure, the text description and commentary talks about various stages of TeX, but the code says otherwise. Knuth's optimization of the "inner loop" means there is no intermediate description of the TeX syntax.
The program itself was written in very low-level Pascal. The data structures are defined in terms of byte layouts, with explicit memory management. All sorts of tricky details insinuate through the code. Sure, it runs great even on 1980-era machines, but God help you if you want to re-implement it in a modern high-level language. As far as I know, this has only been done using web2c, which is a hack specially made to translate TeX. What's going to happen when C compilers are as rare as Pascal compilers are today?
4) Likewise for the file formats. Laid out with great care, byte-for-byte. Easy to read, but tough to translate into something higher-level.
My part-time project/dream is a modern re-implementation, where the TeX typesetting algorithms are embedded in a modern (Common Lisp) environment--so you can code TeX formats and macros in a heavy-duty honest-to-god programming language, and have an high-level, truly modular implementation using real data structures that could actually be tweaked and modified to do even funkier typesetting tasks.
Part of me says this will be easy, because something like 60% of TeX: The Program is doing stuff like memory management that Lisp will do for free, and accounting for funky character encodings (EBCDIC and 6-bit Pascal character sets) that probably can be ignored now that almost everyone is now in ASCII, or headed toward Unicode. The other part of me says this will be difficult for exactly the same reason.
The replies below accurately represent the errors in what you state for gasoline consumption. (I sympathize entirely--data from the web is always in different, incomparable units, and you can easily miss the necessary factors. I've actually made the same mistake in a Slashdot discussion on solar energy)
One (relatively weak) point is that the total "arable" land is somewhat larger than you state; however, the actual amount of land being used for cropland is something less than 400 million acres.
Presumably, we could convert forest and pasture land to rapeseed cultivation, but it is unlikely to improve the situation much, as those are about the same amount as the total cropland, so you could only get a potential doubling of the resource, at the price of a huge change in land use patterns.
You have misinterpreted Knuth's comment on the French language. He does not warn nit-pickers that French has changed since he wrote his text, but rather that the French language used in his quotations has changed since the quotations were originally put in print, and therefore are not necessarily examples of modern French usage or orthography.
As an English example, at the end of Chapter 7 of The TeXbook, he quotes
Some bookes are to bee tasted, others to bee swallowed, and some few to bee chewed and disgested. --FRANCIS BACON, Essayes (1597).
He will presumably not accept "corrections" to the spelling of "bee," "bookes," "disgested," or "Essayes," because they are spelled as Bacon did originally.
Most English speakers freely acknowlege that spelling and usage have changed in the last 400 years. Probably most French nit-pickers are less realistic, but that is a whole other topic.
No, you missed my point, which is that SleepyGuy was using a dual-G4 desktop measurement to predict the performance of an Xserve, which has a different memory architecture.
Sure, it might not make much of a difference, but I'm not going to take his "feeling" as proof. I'd rather see hard data.
You are describing a very narrow view of what a "server" is.
This benchmark is meant to simulate a file server which is holding files used by a workgroup of graphic artists using Photoshop, and submitting print jobs.
A workgroup of graphic artists does not need to run Apache or route e-mail. They need to open and save large files, shared among multiple users, and submit large print jobs.
I will agree that this view is equally narrow, but different people have different computing needs.
actually, the U.S. is less forgiving of bribing foreign officials than most other Western governments. In Europe, companies can classify bribes as "business expenses" for tax purposes. The U.S. does not permit this.
I think Microsoft's view is probably more forward-looking than this.
I suspect that MS believes that by investing in China, they can build up China's domestic software industry. That domestic industry will find that their business will be much more profitable if their intellectual property rights could be protected.
Western companies complaining about piracy probably doesn't mean squat to the Chinese government. They figure that piracy of western software helps keep China's foreign reserves higher, while still allowing the domestic economy to benefit from the software. When Chinese software starts getting pirated, the Chinese businessmen are going to start working their connections to get the government to crack down. Plus, the pirate shops will start getting legitimate contracts to produce domestic software.
I'll bet that the Chinese government will sit up and take notice when it's not just foreigners asking for copyright enforcement. And that, eventually, will redound to Microsoft's benefit.
Or, maybe Bill Gates figures he's got 40 billion dollars to piss away just because he feels like it. NOT.
The "broken window fallacy" is a fallacious argument, which goes something like this:
"Hurricane Andrew blew through here and created millions of dollars of business fixing broken windows. Why don't we break windows all the time to stimulate the economy, instead of waiting for a random act of Nature?"
The resolution of the fallacy is that we have used economic resources (the materials and labor of window-makers and window-replacers) to restore the status quo, when those same resources could have been used to make new windows, leaving us with more than we had before.
In the case of World War II, what "cured" the Depression was the increase in government spending, employing formerly idle labor to build tanks and ammunition, etc. That is a real increase in economic activity vs. people standing in bread lines, wasting their potentially productive labor. However, we could have alternatively used that labor to build automobiles, office buildings, modern sewer systems, power plants, or anything else, instead of blowing things up in Europe and Asia.
The stimulus to the U.S. economy would have been similar, but Germany and Japan would have been better off as well. Net gain to the world. [This is neglecting the economic losses caused by the system of wartime rationing, which were substantial.]
Of course, Germany and Japan had to be stopped, and the destruction of their homelands and conquered territories was the only practical way of doing so. That's a tragedy, though, not a happy ending.
Not to make too big a deal about this, but the -O flag is making an explicit trade-off between compilation speed, run-time safety, and run-time performance. Disk caching trades a fixed amount of RAM capacity against latency of disk operations.
But using RAM to cache RAM is more tricky---you gain a bit of RAM capacity at the expense of CPU cycles to compress/expand the cached pages. Well, when are you going to be needing and using this RAM cache? When you are near the limits of your RAM capacity, and possibly about to start swapping. It seems to me that this is the worst time to involve more complexity in the workings of the kernel: How did you get to be near the limits of your RAM capacity? You are probably spawning additional processes, or adding to the computational load of the processes you have. If you have a server, this is probably happening because of an increase in external load. Plus, you are having the CPU touch all these pages which are being compressed because they aren't needed, blowing away all the stuff that was in the cache because it was actually needed for computation. Sure, the CPU in modern computers usually has lots of cycles to spare, but that's because the CPU--memory pathway is a bottleneck. Why try to cram more pages back and forth through the bottleneck to try to make use of the extra cycles? It seems just to make things worse!
It just feels to my gut like this feature is most "useful" when all hell is about to break loose, and this feature would make hell break loose just a little bit sooner. That's what gives me the willies.
But hey, if someone wants to explain in technical terms why I'm wrong, please enlighten me.
I'm not a kernel aficionado, but the one that gives me the willies is the Compressed RAM caching. That sounds like a gimmicky fix for "too cheap to buy real RAM."
That and the quoted emphasis on MP3/audio performance seem like this package is not aimed at real production situations, but personal workstation.
I realize that these features can be managed individually, but then what is the advantage over managing these by oneself?
No, the reason there are no practical fusion power plants is that creating fusion conditions in a plasma using current technology uses more power than can be extracted.
Research fusion reactors exist, but they don't produce net power, rather they consume it. That is why they are still research.
This is pretty much unrelated to the problem of simulating fusion bombs, which uses a different fuel (for the final fusion stage, typically lithium-6 deuteride), the ignition of which involves a whole series of reactions between a large number of different materials, initiated by the detonation of a fission bomb boosted with deuterium or tritium.
Fusion power plants typically use plasmas, not solids, for their fuel, and are ignited by confinement and heating. The amount of energy released is pretty much self-regulating, since the plasma will tend to lose confinement and burn less if it gets too hot.
Power generation and weapons have very different design goals: power plants tend to be big, stay still, and produce large amounts of power for a long time, connected to a power transmission system, with human operators nearby. Weapons need to be moved quickly to a target (i.e. be light, compact, and robust), and generate a huge amount of power in a very brief time, with care taken to preserve the safety of the weapon's handlers, and not much done to preserve the safety of any people at the target.
(Of course, the two fields are not totally separate; however, my main point is that they typically involve very different computer simulations).
Re:How is the Brooks article unintentionally funny
on
The Almighty Buck
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· Score: 2
when the Fed raises interest rates their mortgage payments are going to be so high that half of them are going to be in negative equity.
Changes in interest rates alone do not change the equity of the homeowner.
Equity = value of house - principal owed.
When interest rates change, your payments can change, but your equity doesn't magically disappear. The problem of negative equity comes when house prices drop. There is only a mild, indirect connection between mortgage rates and house prices.
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You miss his point ENTIRELY, despite quoting the part of his post that has all the key words in it.
He wants a replacement for a tape RECORDER, not a player. The iPod is a PLAYER.
I agree with him that a hand-held recording device that would rip audio to high-fidelity digital audio on a ultra-compact hard drive would be most excellent.
My post needs to be slightly corrected: the cause of the power loss is mostly due to aging of the thermal couple, not the decay of the radioactivity.
More information from Pioneer home page:
Electrical power is provided by four radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG), each providing 40 watts of power at launch. Two three-rod trusses, 120 degrees apart, project from the equipment compartment to deploy the RTG power sources about 10 feet from the center of the spacecraft. A third boom, 120 degrees from the others, projects from the experiments compartment and positions the helium vector magnetometer sensor 20 feet from the spacecraft center.
and from the FAQ
Question:Why does the RTG power decrease?
Answer: Power for the Pioneer 10 is generated by the Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG's). Heat from the decay of the plutonium 238 isotope is converted by thermoelectric couples into electrical current. The electrical output depends on the hot junction temperature, the thermal path to the radiator fins, and the cold junction temperature. It is the degradation of the thermoelectric junction that has the major effect in decreasing the power output of the RTG. In the 30-year time scale operation of Pioneer 10, the 92 year half-life of the isotope does not appreciably affect the RTG operation. The nuclear decay heat will keep the hot junction temperature hot for many years but unfortunately will not be able to be converted into enough electricity to power the transmitter for much longer.
As an aside, this type of power source is behind the plutonium scare-mongering that surrounded Cassini.
This could result in some really useful information about the edges of the solar system -- except that apparantly Pioneer 10's power system is going to run out of juice in a few years (solar powered I guess - the W/m^2 will probably be too low to power the probe at that point).
The Pioneer 10 & 11 probes are not solar powered. They use RTG (radiothermal generation) power sources, which are hot lumps of radioactive material and the heat is converted into electricity. Solar power would be far too weak even at Jupiter or Saturn, much less at the distances that Pioneer 10 & 11 are at.
The radioactive source is continually decaying, so it will lose power over time.
Whereas in the US, some self-serving nutball like David Koresh might be able to get 100 or 200 people to follow them, in China, a charismatic psycho can get several million.
By "charismatic psycho," I assume you are referring to Mao?
All flamebait aside, the "problem" of people following Falun Gong is peanuts compared to the real problems (mass unemployment, declining peasant incomes, etc.) facing China in its transition to an open economic system.
China is very concerned about *accurate*, independent depictions of economic dislocation being more widely available. They don't want to publicize worker protests when local well-connected "entrepreneurs" close down state-owned enterprises, cutting off social benefits to thousands of workers while enriching themselves. They don't want to publicize the corruption of local tax collectors that impose arbitrary taxes on peasant farmers.
Instead, they want (oddly like George W. Bush) to promote the message that all these problems are a case of a few "bad apples" in what is a sound system, and that the Communist Party (with Jiang Zemin at the core!) is hard at work solving these problems.
The average Chinese peasant knows damn well that the goverment isn't offering any kind of "pay your taxes, the future will be better" promise. Instead, they are getting the "pay your arbitrary, illegal local tax levies, you don't have any recourse to the central government anyway" reality.
The genius/insight of Mendeleev (and his other table-making predecessors like Newlands) was to realize that introducing gaps into the sequence of atoms arranged by MASS allowed a table to exhibit the periodicity. The modern concept of atomic number could only exist after positing that there was something other than mass that determined the properties of atoms. Until then, the atomic number was basically a bookkeeping device, denoting the order in weight. One couldn't be sure that there wasn't some rare or unknown element that might be discovered between two elements.
Today, we know the determining property is the atomic number, i.e., the charge of the nucleus, and the atomic number is discrete, since one can only have an integer number of protons in a nucleus. Until Moseley's X-ray data, there wasn't any experimental proof that atomic number was a physical property.
This development process is really what made chemistry into a hard science in the 19th century.
Look, if a Wal-mart manager could feel comfortable installing Mandrake and keeping a useful demo environment available on the computer, preserving it against "attacks" by pre-teen customers and other clueless passers-by, they wouldn't have to take a job as a Walmart manager. Instead, they'd have some tech job which gave them the job security that let them spend time posting on Slashdot.
A Walmart manager has too many things to worry about already, like managing a workforce of perhaps a hundred or so minimum-wage workers, and keeping a store in stock of thousands of items, while dealing with any number of screw-ups, emergencies, and irate customers.
Apropos Apple in CompUSA, back a few years, I knew a guy who was paid by a marketing agency part-time to go maintain the Apple kiosks at Sears and Circuit City. He was not being paid what he was truly worth in terms of ability---most of his compensation was the feeling that he was participating in the Apple jihad. He was lucky to get any support at all from the commission-driven drones, who would be just as happy selling DVD players or dishwashers. Now the guy works at an Apple store part-time, as Apple has decided to focus on their own retail chain.
Unless some Linux vendor manages to fund some kind of underpaid mujahedeen squad that would go store-to-store to do periodic fixups and staff training, retail Linux kiosks are not going to work. Maybe RedHat needs to go retail?
Dude. I think he meant the Anonymous Coward :-)
Not to be harsh, but financial/managerial issues are as important to the success of a product as the engineering issues are, and outsourcing is more and more what the electronics industry is about. Apple can't succeed making this hardware alone, but also can't simply slap an Apple label on a generic MP3 player.
Make vs. buy is a huge issue for people making complicated products, and this article goes through pretty thoroughly the tradeoffs Apple must have made in making these decisions.
Perhaps you just want a series of pixellated JPEGs to ooh and aah at, but face it---most chips look alike.
I thought this was a refreshing change from the usual Slashdot fare of "look at some piece of hardware get torn apart" or "look at the goofy enclosure someone has put a Beowulf cluster in."
But of course, this maxed-out technology does not contain basic architecture, such as
(1) "don't put your nuclear reactor by the front door where any 7-year-old can blow it up"
(2) "don't forget about chain reactions that can allow a single bomb to blow up your entire station"
(3) "oh, yeah, don't forget (2) again."
and also basic radar and servomechanisms so that weapons can be aimed to hit a moving target.
Still, stardestroyer.net has some pretty funny deflating of Trekkie fantasies!
I think you are missing my point. I've just now taken a look at the ConTeXt information, and I am quite impressed at the results. But it seems to me that ConTeXt is more analogous to LaTeX+pdfTeX than raw TeX.
My concerns are more with the internals of TeX; namely, how can it be made easier for people to develop things like LaTeX or pdfTeX in a way that can be easily customized.
Like many people, my experience in TeX was writing my thesis in LaTeX. But when I wanted to adjust the format that I borrowed from a friend, either to cope with changed thesis format requirements, or to typeset a certain kind of program documentation, I found the process of understanding and modifying LaTeX macros to require true wizardry, without the rewards that wizardry brings in modern, powerful programming languages.
OK, so TeX has been recoded by a few people in a few languages. But from what I've seen, these people haven't really attacked the complexity and inflexibility of things like LaTeX's implementation macros. I.e., they maintain the same distinction between TeX internals and the TeX language.
Why is it that some people have to write packages like LaTeX, other people have to write enhanced versions of the TeX processor, and yet other people have to write DVI drivers, each using different languages? I find that the modularity of TeX is too coarse---format files, TeX processor, DVI processor, none of which really communicate with each other, or can be programmed together.
I think the possibility of doing typesetting in a programmatic way (like TeX) is very powerful, especially when coupled with aesthetically good algorithms (like TeX). But I want to have an implementation where the *programmability* is given higher priority, and the programmer is given access to the entire typesetting flow in a modern way.
My point about the DVI file formats is that it is really a machine language for a generic typesetter. It has lost much of the sense of the document. Sure, by liberal use of specials, you can include intelligence in your documents, but that requires you to have a new implementation of the TeX processor, and a new DVI processor, possibly integrated into the TeX processor. What if you could produce the same effect simply by changing or defining a new format file?
Yeah, this seems to have attacked the modularity issue for TeX's internal structure.
e m X}
Still, it looks like the TeX language and the implementation language (Java) are separate.
I would like a system where there are two syntaxes for the same language. One is the mark-up syntax, which would be the default syntax for writing your documents. Hopefully, compatible with or easily translated from existing TeX documents. This syntax is optimized for writing documents.
The other syntax would be oriented toward re-programming TeX. This would be optimized for describing custom layout algorithms or other processing of user input. Personally, I would want it to look like Lisp.
For simple substitution-type macros, you could use either syntax, like in TeX today with simple
\def\TeX{T\kern-.2em\lower.5ex\hbox{E}\kern-.06
when things are simple, or a more program-like form
(define-control-sequence TeX ()
#\T
(kern (lower #\E (* 0.5 ex)) (* -0.2 em))
(kern #\X (* -0.6 em)))
Then use (TeX) (or \TeX in the markup syntax) to typeset this definition. Sure, this looks more complicated--ideally, you would be able to do
(define-control-sequence TeX ()
"T\kern-.2em\lower.5ex\hbox{E}\kern-.06em X")
as well. But with the Lisp-like syntax, I know that I can use all the powerful Lisp macro and programming capabilities to do typesetting. (E.g. trig functions for typesetting at angles, TeX control sequences that take Lisp data structures as arguments) Wow!
When you look at TeX's definition for \settabs with all its \sett@b and \s@tt@b special names, or LaTeX definitions, I think being able to do things in Lisp would be a real win. And, if it really is Lisp, it won't be hard to write translators that slurp up currently existing formats (like LaTeX) and spew out the new Lispified version automatically, so I don't lose any of today's formatting abilities.
1) you are absolutely right. But TeX's font support has only lately become convenient enough for most users, and relatively few fonts with TeX-compatible font metrics have become widespread.
2) TeX is hardly Lisp-like. It's more like a macro assembler language. Its internal variables are a fixed number of registers, arranged in several banks, each of one "type," some of which have special behavior; its named variables are really only replacement strings (control sequences) or aliases to built-in registers; and its control structures are heinous.
For a truly Lisp-like language, I would want variables to be unlimited, support modern data structures, true parameter passing to user subroutines, for the state of the TeX process to support full introspection, be completely customizable (e.g. be able to write new paragraph and spacing routines as part of TeX modules), and for new control and data structures to be defineable.
3) What I mean is that there is no easily accessible representation for "parsed" TeX input. The processing into the internal representation is driven by a few different "modes" of the TeX engine (e.g. vertical mode, horizontal mode, math mode) which consume tokens and produce internal data structures. I would like for users to be able to redefine or add additional modes in add-on modules, rather than having to recode TeX's internals directly.
How do you change TeX's pagination or paragraph-building? Right now it is a total hack job. You have to generate the right tokens to create the right amount of glue and space to have the built-in routines do what you want, tweaking several internal variables along the way.
Here's an example of what I had a desire to do: I was trying to typeset a table where some of the table cells would have multiple text lines. I.e. if the text was long, instead of insisting on a super-wide column, I wanted TeX to break the text into several lines, making the table cell span a larger number of text lines. Then, the other columns with short text will float to the center of this "expanded row."
I don't think you can do that easily. I ended up doing the breaks by hand. Why is that necessary? Why can't I code a table where the vertical direction is as flexible as the horizontal direction, and call the line-breaking algorithm on individual cells? Ideally, I'd like to be able to *easily* code any kind of table-generating macros I want.
4) what I mean is that there is no built-in data structure representing a DVI file. The reason is that TeX was made to run without using much core memory, so only a page or so of output is held in internal form before being squeezed out of the toothpaste tube into the DVI bucket. Once it is out of the tube, the DVI toothpaste can't be sucked up again. I would like more flexibility in processing the final DVI results, without having to write a different dvi2blah driver that has to support everything that dvi2pdf or dvips already supports.
What I want in general is a system where the entire input-tokens to output-DVI is accessible to user programs written in a high-level language, using real high-level data structures, and where the TeX control sequences can be defined in the *same* language (so that I could code a LaTeX-type package in a programmer-friendly language like Lisp, if I wanted.) I basically want the whole Common Lisp language available to do my typesetting, while maintaining the excellent aspects of TeX, including the usually-convenient mark-up syntax.
Sorry if this is not quite clear, but it is, after all, just a vague dream-like urge. Programming in Common Lisp, for me, is pretty much painless. Programming TeX/LaTeX macros is like doing my own dental work. I get the same feeling that I get when I use a 1980's-era line editor (ED) vs. using Emacs. I want TeX to be a 21st century environment, instead of a 1980's environment.
Yes, TeX was quite an achievement. Stable, wonderfully un-buggy, most definitely. Unfortunately, it was good enough to catch on and establish itself before its flaws could be fixed.
My particular take:
1) The Computer Modern fonts are not very pretty unless you have a very high resolution typesetter; even then, the letters look too thin and spidery for my taste. Sure, you can use other fonts. But most users never do, or use even uglier ones, usually sticking with Computer Modern for the formulas. Do any other really complete and compatible math fonts even exist?
2) The programming features were hacked on as an afterthought. The syntax is fine, perhaps even near optimal, for straight mark-up, but for developing actual algorithms, it makes Perl code look self-explanatory. Right up there with Intercal. This means that packages like LaTeX or formats are very hard to modify or extend in any kind of robust way. So everyone uses the default format, borrows one that works from somebody else, or works very hard to roll their own. Making even slight adjustments or fixes is a real nightmare.
3) The whole TeX program is terribly monolithic. Sure, the text description and commentary talks about various stages of TeX, but the code says otherwise. Knuth's optimization of the "inner loop" means there is no intermediate description of the TeX syntax.
The program itself was written in very low-level Pascal. The data structures are defined in terms of byte layouts, with explicit memory management. All sorts of tricky details insinuate through the code. Sure, it runs great even on 1980-era machines, but God help you if you want to re-implement it in a modern high-level language. As far as I know, this has only been done using web2c, which is a hack specially made to translate TeX. What's going to happen when C compilers are as rare as Pascal compilers are today?
4) Likewise for the file formats. Laid out with great care, byte-for-byte. Easy to read, but tough to translate into something higher-level.
My part-time project/dream is a modern re-implementation, where the TeX typesetting algorithms are embedded in a modern (Common Lisp) environment--so you can code TeX formats and macros in a heavy-duty honest-to-god programming language, and have an high-level, truly modular implementation using real data structures that could actually be tweaked and modified to do even funkier typesetting tasks.
Part of me says this will be easy, because something like 60% of TeX: The Program is doing stuff like memory management that Lisp will do for free, and accounting for funky character encodings (EBCDIC and 6-bit Pascal character sets) that probably can be ignored now that almost everyone is now in ASCII, or headed toward Unicode. The other part of me says this will be difficult for exactly the same reason.
The replies below accurately represent the errors in what you state for gasoline consumption. (I sympathize entirely--data from the web is always in different, incomparable units, and you can easily miss the necessary factors. I've actually made the same mistake in a Slashdot discussion on solar energy)
One (relatively weak) point is that the total "arable" land is somewhat larger than you state; however, the actual amount of land being used for cropland is something less than 400 million acres.
Presumably, we could convert forest and pasture land to rapeseed cultivation, but it is unlikely to improve the situation much, as those are about the same amount as the total cropland, so you could only get a potential doubling of the resource, at the price of a huge change in land use patterns.
You have misinterpreted Knuth's comment on the French language. He does not warn nit-pickers that French has changed since he wrote his text, but rather that the French language used in his quotations has changed since the quotations were originally put in print, and therefore are not necessarily examples of modern French usage or orthography.
As an English example, at the end of Chapter 7 of The TeXbook, he quotes
Some bookes are to bee tasted,
others to bee swallowed,
and some few to bee chewed and disgested.
--FRANCIS BACON, Essayes (1597).
He will presumably not accept "corrections" to the spelling of "bee," "bookes," "disgested," or "Essayes," because they are spelled as Bacon did originally.
Most English speakers freely acknowlege that spelling and usage have changed in the last 400 years. Probably most French nit-pickers are less realistic, but that is a whole other topic.
No, you missed my point, which is that SleepyGuy was using a dual-G4 desktop measurement to predict the performance of an Xserve, which has a different memory architecture.
Sure, it might not make much of a difference, but I'm not going to take his "feeling" as proof. I'd rather see hard data.
The G4 tower does not have DDR main RAM. Unless your data is fitting in 2 MB, the path to memory is operating half as fast as the Xserve.
You are describing a very narrow view of what a "server" is.
This benchmark is meant to simulate a file server which is holding files used by a workgroup of graphic artists using Photoshop, and submitting print jobs.
A workgroup of graphic artists does not need to run Apache or route e-mail. They need to open and save large files, shared among multiple users, and submit large print jobs.
I will agree that this view is equally narrow, but different people have different computing needs.
actually, the U.S. is less forgiving of bribing foreign officials than most other Western governments. In Europe, companies can classify bribes as "business expenses" for tax purposes. The U.S. does not permit this.
I think Microsoft's view is probably more forward-looking than this.
I suspect that MS believes that by investing in China, they can build up China's domestic software industry. That domestic industry will find that their business will be much more profitable if their intellectual property rights could be protected.
Western companies complaining about piracy probably doesn't mean squat to the Chinese government. They figure that piracy of western software helps keep China's foreign reserves higher, while still allowing the domestic economy to benefit from the software. When Chinese software starts getting pirated, the Chinese businessmen are going to start working their connections to get the government to crack down. Plus, the pirate shops will start getting legitimate contracts to produce domestic software.
I'll bet that the Chinese government will sit up and take notice when it's not just foreigners asking for copyright enforcement. And that, eventually, will redound to Microsoft's benefit.
Or, maybe Bill Gates figures he's got 40 billion dollars to piss away just because he feels like it. NOT.
The "broken window fallacy" is a fallacious argument, which goes something like this:
"Hurricane Andrew blew through here and created millions of dollars of business fixing broken windows. Why don't we break windows all the time to stimulate the economy, instead of waiting for a random act of Nature?"
The resolution of the fallacy is that we have used economic resources (the materials and labor of window-makers and window-replacers) to restore the status quo, when those same resources could have been used to make new windows, leaving us with more than we had before.
In the case of World War II, what "cured" the Depression was the increase in government spending, employing formerly idle labor to build tanks and ammunition, etc. That is a real increase in economic activity vs. people standing in bread lines, wasting their potentially productive labor. However, we could have alternatively used that labor to build automobiles, office buildings, modern sewer systems, power plants, or anything else, instead of blowing things up in Europe and Asia.
The stimulus to the U.S. economy would have been similar, but Germany and Japan would have been better off as well. Net gain to the world. [This is neglecting the economic losses caused by the system of wartime rationing, which were substantial.]
Of course, Germany and Japan had to be stopped, and the destruction of their homelands and conquered territories was the only practical way of doing so. That's a tragedy, though, not a happy ending.
Not to make too big a deal about this, but the -O flag is making an explicit trade-off between compilation speed, run-time safety, and run-time performance. Disk caching trades a fixed amount of RAM capacity against latency of disk operations.
But using RAM to cache RAM is more tricky---you gain a bit of RAM capacity at the expense of CPU cycles to compress/expand the cached pages. Well, when are you going to be needing and using this RAM cache? When you are near the limits of your RAM capacity, and possibly about to start swapping. It seems to me that this is the worst time to involve more complexity in the workings of the kernel: How did you get to be near the limits of your RAM capacity? You are probably spawning additional processes, or adding to the computational load of the processes you have. If you have a server, this is probably happening because of an increase in external load. Plus, you are having the CPU touch all these pages which are being compressed because they aren't needed, blowing away all the stuff that was in the cache because it was actually needed for computation. Sure, the CPU in modern computers usually has lots of cycles to spare, but that's because the CPU--memory pathway is a bottleneck. Why try to cram more pages back and forth through the bottleneck to try to make use of the extra cycles? It seems just to make things worse!
It just feels to my gut like this feature is most "useful" when all hell is about to break loose, and this feature would make hell break loose just a little bit sooner. That's what gives me the willies.
But hey, if someone wants to explain in technical terms why I'm wrong, please enlighten me.
I'm not a kernel aficionado, but the one that gives me the willies is the Compressed RAM caching. That sounds like a gimmicky fix for "too cheap to buy real RAM."
That and the quoted emphasis on MP3/audio performance seem like this package is not aimed at real production situations, but personal workstation.
I realize that these features can be managed individually, but then what is the advantage over managing these by oneself?
No, the reason there are no practical fusion power plants is that creating fusion conditions in a plasma using current technology uses more power than can be extracted.
Research fusion reactors exist, but they don't produce net power, rather they consume it. That is why they are still research.
This is pretty much unrelated to the problem of simulating fusion bombs, which uses a different fuel (for the final fusion stage, typically lithium-6 deuteride), the ignition of which involves a whole series of reactions between a large number of different materials, initiated by the detonation of a fission bomb boosted with deuterium or tritium.
Fusion power plants typically use plasmas, not solids, for their fuel, and are ignited by confinement and heating. The amount of energy released is pretty much self-regulating, since the plasma will tend to lose confinement and burn less if it gets too hot.
Power generation and weapons have very different design goals: power plants tend to be big, stay still, and produce large amounts of power for a long time, connected to a power transmission system, with human operators nearby. Weapons need to be moved quickly to a target (i.e. be light, compact, and robust), and generate a huge amount of power in a very brief time, with care taken to preserve the safety of the weapon's handlers, and not much done to preserve the safety of any people at the target.
(Of course, the two fields are not totally separate; however, my main point is that they typically involve very different computer simulations).
when the Fed raises interest rates their mortgage payments are going to be so high that half of them are going to be in negative equity.
Changes in interest rates alone do not change the equity of the homeowner.
Equity = value of house - principal owed.
When interest rates change, your payments can change, but your equity doesn't magically disappear. The problem of negative equity comes when house prices drop. There is only a mild, indirect connection between mortgage rates and house prices.