My HP 32 sits next to me on the desk, ready at an instant to answer questions like what is 1.83mm in inches, or what is the square root of 50. Much faster than pulling up an app on the tablet or smartphone, and much less wasteful of battery power.
What I haven't used in years is the programming functionality of the calculator. That's where Octave and other PC applications now shine.
As a lifelong rural inhabitant, I've always been amazed, whenever I've visited NYC, at just how energy-inefficient many of the buildings are. Single-pane windows, little insulation, baseboard heaters, drafty weatherstripping, the works. I've been there when it's been blazingly hot, and again when it's been bitterly cold, and in both cases the standard solution seems to be to just crank the environmental controls to max. When you split wood in the summer for heat in the winter you quickly develop a respect for how quickly those little inefficiencies add up, and you do something about them. Apparently New Yorkers don't have a similar feedback loop between their effort and their energy usage. Either that, or they're making so much money packaging derivatives their power bills are below the monthly bill noise floor.
Maybe those cetaceans are already in contact with aliens, and we're unaware of it, until the aliens lose contact with said cetaceans and send a large scary probe to Earth...hey...haven't I seen this before?
An example of the reality that even the best design is nothing but paper (or bits) until it comes out the other end of the shop floor. That's why MIL-TFP40 is the most-requested but least-followed standard in industry.
(BTW, stands for 'Make It Like The F*ng Print For Once')
Not sure why you're being moderated down...in any case, you're absolutely right. In California prisoners make the license plates, and they're also used by the DMV to 'screen' the vanity plates. Apparently they're far more skilled at the task then any other solution the DMV has tried. The CA DMV even checks the applications mirrored now, since some like 3M TA3 got through once upon a time.
I've been hacking computer hardware and software as recreation and occupation since the VIC-20 days. I bought VMWare when it first came out over a decade ago, because I realized what a useful backup tool it was. As I had (back then) all of my old original hard drives, disks, and the like, I was able to archive and boot OS's and programs that are now long gone. My final DOS install from around 1990 with all my 1980's work on it under DOSBox. Win 3.11. (Borland C++). Windows 95 (Generic CADD). Windows 98. Windows 2000. My original floppy disk Slackware install from the mid '90s. All running as VMWare VMs on my Gentoo box. (Should move them to Virtualbox some day...) Backups from old ZIP drives (remember those?) Even the college papers I did using Speedscript on a C-64 (yes I'm that old) are still available to me because the old Commodore disks got archived and still run fine using VICE. When working with industrial controllers and the like, you'd be surprised how often it is necessary to fire up some ancient tool or peruse some old documentation. And sometimes it's fun just to run old applications like Johnny Castaway for s**ts and giggles.
This is also why I refuse to buy any version of Windows beyond 2000, any program that requires a dongle, or any program that requires online 'activation'. If it can't run in a VM or expires, I want nothing to do with it.
The only thing I never archived was my old copy of MS Bob, and the disk got tossed a decade ago too. Shame, really. Some days I miss Clippy and Comic Sans.
Have the Propeller folks come out with a Linux-based development solution yet? That's the only thing that has stopped me from exploring that chip in the past. Love the concept though.
OK, I admit it, I read TFA. Except for one or two games, I'm not seeing any performance improvement from those graphs. In fact, as the proud owner of a HD6570, the new DRM seems to be a regression. Since I don't game I don't really care anyway, but WTF is this story about again? Slow news Sunday?
3D printers are not Mr. Fusion. You can't just toss in any old banana-colored plastic and get good results. You've got to know the difference between thermoset and thermoplastic families, and then the properties of the individual resins in each (PET, ABS, PVA, HDPE, etc. etc.) Then you've got to consider the numerous additives that most plastic parts will have in them, UV inhibitors, metal particles for EMI shielding, etc. Some plastics and additives are benign, others are quite toxic when heated.
If you want decent, consistent results, leave the recycling to Waste Management and start with known raw materials.
"He was right,
dead right,
as he sped along;
but he's just as dead
as if he was wrong."
Spot on, CanadianRealist. The above dittie is the one I live by on my bicycle, or while walking. I simply keep in mind that 50% of the folks I see behind the wheel are of below-average IQ, and don't bother arguing with the idiots. I just get out of their way. You live longer that way.
I mountain bike often on the out-of-the way rural roads around these parts. Loose gravel, pot holes, washboard ruts, steep hills, just nasty to drive on. For many years I'd only meet the occasional Billy Bob in his pickup driving on them. Around 10 years ago I first started seeing the BMWs on them. Invariably they would stop as I rode by and ask me 'Is [some more major road] up ahead?' Then they'd continue gingerly down the road, bumping and high-centering their nice car in the muddy ruts. It confused me for years until I figured out that these smart-looking folks in their fancy cars were blindly following those new-fangled GPS things like they were all-knowing Oracles of cartography.
- if you're into hardcore gaming, nothing is going to beat the nvidia blob at this time for raw 3D frame rate. Power consumption and stability may suffer, and Linus will still be ranting.
- if you're doing 3D primarily for desktop compositing and OpenGL CAD-type stuff, I have found the radeon FOSS driver to be very stable and fast enough on non-bleeding-edge chipsets. It is much improved from years past. The only reason to use the fglrx binary blob is for faster gaming 3D, and for that the Nvidia blob blows it out of the water.
- if you're into 2D applications and video, or if power consumption is important, the Intel FOSS drivers are your best bet. The Intel 3D hardware is getting better with each new chipset, but it still hasn't caught up to Nvidia and ATI, and the software is still too buggy IMO. Power management is typically best with the Intel software though.
Some day Intel will eventually pull ahead when it gets tired of putting more cores on every die-shrink and starts adding GPUPUs instead.
Small correction. Three groups of morons butting heads. Don't forget about the Slashdot morons arguing which group of TFA morons is right.
If this was actually News for Nerds, it would be an article about how R/C Combat aircraft and game cameras can be integrated into a total UAV defense system.
Another tired re-hash of the Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't prove anything.
Even if you accept AGW as a fact, TFA itself says a key part of the problem for the game players is the uncertainty in determining at what CO2 level problems start. In real life even the extent to which global warming is harmful is highly debatable--New York might go under the waves, but parts of Canada could actually become livable.
The solution is obvious to anyone except mathematicians: add some dice. Then the game becomes interesting. Roll a three and you lose a major city unless you have at least 30 Euros in the pot. Roll seven and collect 5 Euros from everyone else because you now have the most productive granaries in the world. Roll snake-eyes, and a comet impact sends everyone back five turns.
Not only is the game more interesting, now it's more like real life. Analyze that, mathematicians.
Any American who's been to Australia or the U.K. knows the Grand Canyon-esque gap in context and meaning between their slang and idiom-ridden English and our slang and idiom-ridden English.
Slashdot Mirror
This. Exactly. Dedicated keys.
My HP 32 sits next to me on the desk, ready at an instant to answer questions like what is 1.83mm in inches, or what is the square root of 50. Much faster than pulling up an app on the tablet or smartphone, and much less wasteful of battery power.
What I haven't used in years is the programming functionality of the calculator. That's where Octave and other PC applications now shine.
As a lifelong rural inhabitant, I've always been amazed, whenever I've visited NYC, at just how energy-inefficient many of the buildings are. Single-pane windows, little insulation, baseboard heaters, drafty weatherstripping, the works. I've been there when it's been blazingly hot, and again when it's been bitterly cold, and in both cases the standard solution seems to be to just crank the environmental controls to max. When you split wood in the summer for heat in the winter you quickly develop a respect for how quickly those little inefficiencies add up, and you do something about them. Apparently New Yorkers don't have a similar feedback loop between their effort and their energy usage. Either that, or they're making so much money packaging derivatives their power bills are below the monthly bill noise floor.
Maybe those cetaceans are already in contact with aliens, and we're unaware of it, until the aliens lose contact with said cetaceans and send a large scary probe to Earth...hey...haven't I seen this before?
An example of the reality that even the best design is nothing but paper (or bits) until it comes out the other end of the shop floor. That's why MIL-TFP40 is the most-requested but least-followed standard in industry.
(BTW, stands for 'Make It Like The F*ng Print For Once')
What? I thought the singularity was going to consume the Earth first.
Not sure why you're being moderated down...in any case, you're absolutely right. In California prisoners make the license plates, and they're also used by the DMV to 'screen' the vanity plates. Apparently they're far more skilled at the task then any other solution the DMV has tried. The CA DMV even checks the applications mirrored now, since some like 3M TA3 got through once upon a time.
Did someone just discover Virtualization?
I've been hacking computer hardware and software as recreation and occupation since the VIC-20 days. I bought VMWare when it first came out over a decade ago, because I realized what a useful backup tool it was. As I had (back then) all of my old original hard drives, disks, and the like, I was able to archive and boot OS's and programs that are now long gone. My final DOS install from around 1990 with all my 1980's work on it under DOSBox. Win 3.11. (Borland C++). Windows 95 (Generic CADD). Windows 98. Windows 2000. My original floppy disk Slackware install from the mid '90s. All running as VMWare VMs on my Gentoo box. (Should move them to Virtualbox some day...) Backups from old ZIP drives (remember those?) Even the college papers I did using Speedscript on a C-64 (yes I'm that old) are still available to me because the old Commodore disks got archived and still run fine using VICE. When working with industrial controllers and the like, you'd be surprised how often it is necessary to fire up some ancient tool or peruse some old documentation. And sometimes it's fun just to run old applications like Johnny Castaway for s**ts and giggles.
This is also why I refuse to buy any version of Windows beyond 2000, any program that requires a dongle, or any program that requires online 'activation'. If it can't run in a VM or expires, I want nothing to do with it.
The only thing I never archived was my old copy of MS Bob, and the disk got tossed a decade ago too. Shame, really. Some days I miss Clippy and Comic Sans.
Have the Propeller folks come out with a Linux-based development solution yet? That's the only thing that has stopped me from exploring that chip in the past. Love the concept though.
at the Holodeck.
Hardly extinct:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=144565
And they average horse probably has a nicer life today.
OK, I admit it, I read TFA. Except for one or two games, I'm not seeing any performance improvement from those graphs. In fact, as the proud owner of a HD6570, the new DRM seems to be a regression. Since I don't game I don't really care anyway, but WTF is this story about again? Slow news Sunday?
3D printers are not Mr. Fusion. You can't just toss in any old banana-colored plastic and get good results. You've got to know the difference between thermoset and thermoplastic families, and then the properties of the individual resins in each (PET, ABS, PVA, HDPE, etc. etc.) Then you've got to consider the numerous additives that most plastic parts will have in them, UV inhibitors, metal particles for EMI shielding, etc. Some plastics and additives are benign, others are quite toxic when heated.
If you want decent, consistent results, leave the recycling to Waste Management and start with known raw materials.
Very Monty Python-esque. Well done, Sir Troll.
Because every governmental agency I'm aware of has a budgetary line item called 'contingency fund'?
Wow, wish I could mod you up. Informative, detailed, non-political and accurate. What are you doing on /.?
Like Mexico, for example.
"He was right,
dead right,
as he sped along;
but he's just as dead
as if he was wrong."
Spot on, CanadianRealist. The above dittie is the one I live by on my bicycle, or while walking. I simply keep in mind that 50% of the folks I see behind the wheel are of below-average IQ, and don't bother arguing with the idiots. I just get out of their way. You live longer that way.
...and stop compressing every performance into the top 6dB of dynamic range.
I mountain bike often on the out-of-the way rural roads around these parts. Loose gravel, pot holes, washboard ruts, steep hills, just nasty to drive on. For many years I'd only meet the occasional Billy Bob in his pickup driving on them. Around 10 years ago I first started seeing the BMWs on them. Invariably they would stop as I rode by and ask me 'Is [some more major road] up ahead?' Then they'd continue gingerly down the road, bumping and high-centering their nice car in the muddy ruts. It confused me for years until I figured out that these smart-looking folks in their fancy cars were blindly following those new-fangled GPS things like they were all-knowing Oracles of cartography.
Idiots.
Agreed. Not enough information here.
This has been my experience:
- if you're into hardcore gaming, nothing is going to beat the nvidia blob at this time for raw 3D frame rate. Power consumption and stability may suffer, and Linus will still be ranting.
- if you're doing 3D primarily for desktop compositing and OpenGL CAD-type stuff, I have found the radeon FOSS driver to be very stable and fast enough on non-bleeding-edge chipsets. It is much improved from years past. The only reason to use the fglrx binary blob is for faster gaming 3D, and for that the Nvidia blob blows it out of the water.
- if you're into 2D applications and video, or if power consumption is important, the Intel FOSS drivers are your best bet. The Intel 3D hardware is getting better with each new chipset, but it still hasn't caught up to Nvidia and ATI, and the software is still too buggy IMO. Power management is typically best with the Intel software though.
Some day Intel will eventually pull ahead when it gets tired of putting more cores on every die-shrink and starts adding GPUPUs instead.
Actually, it depends on the degree of severity whether or not color blindness is a disqualifying factor for becoming a pilot.
Win8 is like a quarterback throwing a Hail Mary pass at a baseball game.
Small correction. Three groups of morons butting heads. Don't forget about the Slashdot morons arguing which group of TFA morons is right.
If this was actually News for Nerds, it would be an article about how R/C Combat aircraft and game cameras can be integrated into a total UAV defense system.
Another tired re-hash of the Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't prove anything.
Even if you accept AGW as a fact, TFA itself says a key part of the problem for the game players is the uncertainty in determining at what CO2 level problems start. In real life even the extent to which global warming is harmful is highly debatable--New York might go under the waves, but parts of Canada could actually become livable.
The solution is obvious to anyone except mathematicians: add some dice. Then the game becomes interesting. Roll a three and you lose a major city unless you have at least 30 Euros in the pot. Roll seven and collect 5 Euros from everyone else because you now have the most productive granaries in the world. Roll snake-eyes, and a comet impact sends everyone back five turns.
Not only is the game more interesting, now it's more like real life. Analyze that, mathematicians.
Any American who's been to Australia or the U.K. knows the Grand Canyon-esque gap in context and meaning between their slang and idiom-ridden English and our slang and idiom-ridden English.