I am a scientist. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Technical language tends to be extremely consise, why bother with extra words when the meaning can be extracted from the context, etc. In math, why bother labelling the matrix with indices when it can be inferred from the context that it is obviously a matrix, and not just an ordinary number. And so on. What is wrong with that? Other units are context sensitive. Assuming you are from the USA, how often do you use the correct unit for mass? The average american probably hasn't even heard of it!
LOL, your troll-fu is weak. Quibbling over k vs K is silly. Kelvins is a base unit, not a prefix. I don't recall ever seeing the 'kilo' prefix in a unit that also had a Kelvin in it, and conversely I've never seen a k or K written where it wasn't immediately obvious from the context whether kilo or Kelvin was intended. Try again!
No, the word 'Kilobyte' had established a consistent meaning of 1024 bytes long before Flash existed. All you are saying is that the Flash manufactures have succumbed to the same deceptive marketing tricks of the hard disk manufacturers. It is an abuse of language for marketing purposes, nothing else. So is using 'bits' in network speeds, it is purely so they can market a number that is 8 times bigger. If you are going to download files, then you want to know what the transfer speed is in units of the file size, which is bytes. But 2Mb/s looks way faster than 244KB/s, [*] so lets print that number on the box!
ISO tried to sort out the mess by defining new terms for the power of 2 prefixes, and it would have worked if they had chosen names that don't suck.
[*] I was debating exactly what number to put in there. I was tempted to put in 200KB/s, since that is probably a realistic peak transfer speed on a 2Mbit connection. But that is a silly suggestion - who would come up with the idea of actually putting a number on the box that is immediately useful to a consumer? Better to put in some technical nonsense that depends on using some weird definition of the units to get a bigger looking number!
While I can see the technical merit in using the Ki/Mi/Gi prefix instead of K/M/G, I object to it for the simple reason that kibibyte, mibibyte and gibibyte are stupid sounding words and I refuse to use them for that reason alone.
It might be, for a newcomer, initially confusing that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes instead of 1000 bytes, but the original scheme is a consistent exception. The powers of 2 apply to bytes and only bytes, nothing else. 1Km = 1000 meters. 1KW = 1000 Watts. 1KB = 1024 bytes. 1 KN = 1000 Newtons. Not completely uniform, but there is no ambiguity.
On the other hand, if someone came up with a set of power of 2 prefixes that didn't suck, I'd happily switch.
The number of people on slashdot that cannot do basic arithmetic is depressing. Even more depressing is that moderators don't even notice and mod it up anyway!
The standards orgs are political machines. Never trust a politician - even politicians who are techies.
That is only partially correct; some standards are political - the vast majority are extremely mundane. This is true even of the ISO SC34 committee that voted on OOXML. Except for the exceptional event, the vast majority of the work of this committee is technicalities that have little political interest. Virtually all of the members of the committee are on it because they are experts in the field and are interested in it. There simply isn't enough political excitement in these committees to sustain a political shill in the long term. This is exactly the problem that TFA describes - none of the new members to the committee are at all interested in the day to day work because they have no technical interest in the subject matter. This isn't normal - and indeed the refusal to vote is grounds for being summarily removed from the committee, which is likely to happen real soon now. (Note that this won't affect the ballot resolution meeting at OOXML, the participation at that meeting is exactly those members that participated in the original ballot, irrespective of their future status on SC34.)
They didn't. That isn't a supposition, it is a fact. Towards the end, they did try to recruit some additional members to counter the influx of Microsoft-sponsored shills, and they certainly did a lot of lobbying, but a pre-built `standing army' of shills? No.
it will spend, on average, exactly 50% of the time in sunlight (ie. when it is sunny at the point on the Earth directly below it), and 50% of the time in darkness
Argh, I realized my mistake just after posting this. Ignore this part, it is completely wrong. The satellite would only be eclipsed by the Earth for a very small amount of time, the GP's numbers are reasonable (and probably conservative).
In my area, the average cost of energy for 2007 was around $65/megawatt
That doesn't make any sense. The metawatt is a unit of power, not energy. Perhaps you meant megawatt-hours, which makes at least some of your numbers plausible. But the "15 hours of sunlight" per day, is definitely not. A geosynchronous orbit stays above the equator, hovering over a particular spot on the Earth's surface. As such, it will spend, on average, exactly 50% of the time in sunlight (ie. when it is sunny at the point on the Earth directly below it), and 50% of the time in darkness (ie. when the Earth is between the satellite and the sun). So, 12 hours a day. Possibly much less, if they do not continually move the solar collector - I can think of a few reasons why you would NOT want to continually move the collector to get best efficiency: 1) it is a moving part, and if it breaks there is no chance to fix it, 2) beaming the power back to earth requires extremely precise guidance, and moving the collector around is going to play havoc on it. For comparison, imagine shining a laser on a target 26,000 miles away, and turning at the same time. A one-degree shift in the angle corresponds to over 400 miles at the target! So, it might only be an effective couple of hours of light per day. Also, there is the question of how much the efficiency degrades if there is cloud in the way of the microwave beam. This depends on the precise frequency they use, but there will always be some loss.
Now, there are more interesting things you could do to increase the amount of sunlight hitting the collector, eg instead of beaming the power back to earth, beam it (or just have a cable) to another nearby satellite that does the transmission to Earth. Then you can move the entire collector satellite, no separately moving parts. But this increases the cost and complexity.
By the way, the article isn't very clear, but when they way "larger than the ISS", they almost certainly mean larger in WEIGHT, not SIZE. If a single 4000 pound satellite could produce 10MW power, they would have done it years ago!
Recoup the initial expense? Launch something bigger than the ISS into geosynchronous orbit (26,000 miles, compared with the ISS orbit of about 210 miles), for a measly 10 megawatts? You were kidding, right?
Sorry, that is completely clueless. Aside from the fact that China is a silly example to use, lead paint is entirely ineffective for shielding nuclear material. Paint is classed as 'lead paint' if it contains 0.5% lead by weight (and in the US, paint containing any more than 0.06% lead by weight is banned for residential use, and probably this is the limit that was exceeded by the Chinese toys). The total weight of paint in a typical toy is not going to be more than a few grams, which gives a really tiny amount of lead. Far more radiation would be absorbed by the rest of the toy, making the lead entirely irrelevant (lead is a better absorber of radiation than most materials, but not THAT much better!) Just forget it!
Get real - the amount of lead needed to shield a workable bomb is vastly more than you would get by surrounding it with a bunch of toys coated in lead paint.
Actually, on second thoughts that probably isn't true. I suspect most criminals in the USA are relatively harmless dope smokers, less likely to own a gun than average.
now the only people who have the guns are criminals and the government for the most part
Where did you pull that factoid from? It may be that most criminals own a gun, but unless you are going to call 30% of Americans criminals, then you are way off base.
Believe it or not, the second amendment was intended precisely for that purpose. It's not a question of *if* a government will get out of control, it's *WHEN* a government will get out of control. Owning firearms is one of the last points of defense for a democratic government.
Right, so I repeat my statement: When are you going to start? Again and again I see USA'ians trot out the 2nd amendment as an excuse. "The government is out of control, but it is OK because we have the 2nd amendment!" Every time, it is just an excuse for doing nothing, the Republicans are corrupt and morally bankrupt, the Democrats are no real alternative, and the political system is fixed to disallow any other alternative. But no need to do anything about it, we have the 2nd amendment to keep the government in control! It is the ultimate in procrastination.
I hear the second amendment brought up in every single thread of this kind. Nuts! What are you going to do, start shooting at US government officials? When ae you going to start?
I've bookmarked that link to read later but, firstly ODF already includes a mechanism to provide application-specific attributes, which any application (including MS Office) is free to make use of, and secondly Sun doesn't control the ODF standard anyway. If Microsoft proposed an extension to ODF there is nothing Sun can do to prevent them from submitting it to ISO.
No, I'm not missing the point. Microsoft can do whatever tricks they want to keep their vendor lock-in. That is the way the captialist system works, and under those rules it is allowed. Their rights to do that end at the point where they submit an international standard. At that point, it must be open and completely independently reproducible. If they can't accept those terms, then don't submit it as an ISO standard.
I was trying hard to word my reply in such a way as to NOT invoke cries of "embrace extend extinguish". Again, the bottom line is standards of documentation and openness befitting an international standard. If Microsoft chose to document their proprietary binary formats in the form of an extension to ODF, and (especially!) if they submitted the resulting document as a well-formed standard to ISO, then I am sure that 99% of the open source community would welcome it. Better still, though, would be a converter from the binary into a non-legacy format. That almost certainly isn't possible without loss of fidelity, but most people could live with that. Note that if you are going to use any non-Microsoft software that uses OOXML, then you are not going to get a lossless conversion anyway, because no one other than Microsoft will ever be able to implement the depreciated and not-defined backwards-compatibility tags!
Heh, I just reviewed the thread and, duh, it was me that first mentioned hemp rope;-) But no one is claiming that hemp rope would be the driver of a hemp revival anyway, there are not that many applications where it would be used. So it is still a strawman I think.
Oh, except for this guy, who seems to have quite legitimate uses for it, unless of course you don't like his art and are nazi enough to want to prevent him from doing it.
Nevertheless, prior to synthetics it was the best option for many applications. But I don't know of anyone wanting to revive hemp for the purpose of making rope from it, where did this argument come from? It smells like a strawman.
By the way, even modern ropes used in rescues and rock climbing suffer from a similar problem. They are made of a relatively thin core, surrounded by a woven sheath. The problem is that dust and grit gets into the sheath, and then acts like sandpaper acting on the core. But you can't see this occurring because it is covered by the near-pristine sheath. If you want to avoid a sudden unexpected failure the only way is to be extremely paranoid and throw away a section of rope that is even the slightest bit manky. It is a major rule of rope handling that you never tread on a rope, especially if it is lying on dirt, for fear of getting grit embedded into the rope.
The problem is that OOXML defines a bunch of tags for 'backwards compatibility', but doesn't define what they do. To say that 'ODF fanboys and FSF-sponsored trolls don't care about that sort of thing' is insulting. Lots of people, including FSF members, have spent thousands and thousands of hours trying to reverse-engineer Microsoft binary formats. A document specifying this behavior would be universally welcomed, by both the FSF and 'ODF fanboys', because it would then be possible to write high-fidelity converters between old MS formats and ODF (or from MS binary formats to a non-legacy subset of OOXML, for that matter).
Having a bunch of tags with no definition as to what they do is not an ingredient of a good standard. If you wanted to define a bunch of custom tags, it could just as easily be done as an extension to ODF, which, if it was well-defined, ISO and the open source community would surely have no problem with. Having a international standard where significant parts of it are 'depreciated', is itself rather bizarre. If the backwards-compatibility binary-format tags are depreciated, why include them in the international standard?
This is certainly true, at least partially. What impact has Mono had on the linux community? From where I sit, none at all. It isn't installed on my machine, I've never seen it in action, I don't know of anyone who has used it, and I don't even know what it offers.
Before you jump up and say "well, that is because you've been living in a cave with a windows 3.1 laptop for the last 6 years", no, I am a programmer, I use linux both at work and at home, I compile my own system with Gentoo Linux or straight from source, and I'm always trying out new stuff. But I've never come across anything that involved Mono.
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I am a scientist. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Technical language tends to be extremely consise, why bother with extra words when the meaning can be extracted from the context, etc. In math, why bother labelling the matrix with indices when it can be inferred from the context that it is obviously a matrix, and not just an ordinary number. And so on. What is wrong with that? Other units are context sensitive. Assuming you are from the USA, how often do you use the correct unit for mass? The average american probably hasn't even heard of it!
LOL, your troll-fu is weak. Quibbling over k vs K is silly. Kelvins is a base unit, not a prefix. I don't recall ever seeing the 'kilo' prefix in a unit that also had a Kelvin in it, and conversely I've never seen a k or K written where it wasn't immediately obvious from the context whether kilo or Kelvin was intended. Try again!
No, the word 'Kilobyte' had established a consistent meaning of 1024 bytes long before Flash existed. All you are saying is that the Flash manufactures have succumbed to the same deceptive marketing tricks of the hard disk manufacturers. It is an abuse of language for marketing purposes, nothing else. So is using 'bits' in network speeds, it is purely so they can market a number that is 8 times bigger. If you are going to download files, then you want to know what the transfer speed is in units of the file size, which is bytes. But 2Mb/s looks way faster than 244KB/s, [*] so lets print that number on the box!
ISO tried to sort out the mess by defining new terms for the power of 2 prefixes, and it would have worked if they had chosen names that don't suck.
[*] I was debating exactly what number to put in there. I was tempted to put in 200KB/s, since that is probably a realistic peak transfer speed on a 2Mbit connection. But that is a silly suggestion - who would come up with the idea of actually putting a number on the box that is immediately useful to a consumer? Better to put in some technical nonsense that depends on using some weird definition of the units to get a bigger looking number!
While I can see the technical merit in using the Ki/Mi/Gi prefix instead of K/M/G, I object to it for the simple reason that kibibyte, mibibyte and gibibyte are stupid sounding words and I refuse to use them for that reason alone.
It might be, for a newcomer, initially confusing that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes instead of 1000 bytes, but the original scheme is a consistent exception. The powers of 2 apply to bytes and only bytes, nothing else. 1Km = 1000 meters. 1KW = 1000 Watts. 1KB = 1024 bytes. 1 KN = 1000 Newtons. Not completely uniform, but there is no ambiguity.
On the other hand, if someone came up with a set of power of 2 prefixes that didn't suck, I'd happily switch.
The number of people on slashdot that cannot do basic arithmetic is depressing. Even more depressing is that moderators don't even notice and mod it up anyway!
maybe you should consider the safety records of Soyuz vs the shuttle, before making such statements...
They didn't. That isn't a supposition, it is a fact. Towards the end, they did try to recruit some additional members to counter the influx of Microsoft-sponsored shills, and they certainly did a lot of lobbying, but a pre-built `standing army' of shills? No.
That doesn't make any sense. The metawatt is a unit of power, not energy. Perhaps you meant megawatt-hours, which makes at least some of your numbers plausible. But the "15 hours of sunlight" per day, is definitely not. A geosynchronous orbit stays above the equator, hovering over a particular spot on the Earth's surface. As such, it will spend, on average, exactly 50% of the time in sunlight (ie. when it is sunny at the point on the Earth directly below it), and 50% of the time in darkness (ie. when the Earth is between the satellite and the sun). So, 12 hours a day. Possibly much less, if they do not continually move the solar collector - I can think of a few reasons why you would NOT want to continually move the collector to get best efficiency: 1) it is a moving part, and if it breaks there is no chance to fix it, 2) beaming the power back to earth requires extremely precise guidance, and moving the collector around is going to play havoc on it. For comparison, imagine shining a laser on a target 26,000 miles away, and turning at the same time. A one-degree shift in the angle corresponds to over 400 miles at the target! So, it might only be an effective couple of hours of light per day. Also, there is the question of how much the efficiency degrades if there is cloud in the way of the microwave beam. This depends on the precise frequency they use, but there will always be some loss.
Now, there are more interesting things you could do to increase the amount of sunlight hitting the collector, eg instead of beaming the power back to earth, beam it (or just have a cable) to another nearby satellite that does the transmission to Earth. Then you can move the entire collector satellite, no separately moving parts. But this increases the cost and complexity.
By the way, the article isn't very clear, but when they way "larger than the ISS", they almost certainly mean larger in WEIGHT, not SIZE. If a single 4000 pound satellite could produce 10MW power, they would have done it years ago!
Recoup the initial expense? Launch something bigger than the ISS into geosynchronous orbit (26,000 miles, compared with the ISS orbit of about 210 miles), for a measly 10 megawatts? You were kidding, right?
Sorry, that is completely clueless. Aside from the fact that China is a silly example to use, lead paint is entirely ineffective for shielding nuclear material. Paint is classed as 'lead paint' if it contains 0.5% lead by weight (and in the US, paint containing any more than 0.06% lead by weight is banned for residential use, and probably this is the limit that was exceeded by the Chinese toys). The total weight of paint in a typical toy is not going to be more than a few grams, which gives a really tiny amount of lead. Far more radiation would be absorbed by the rest of the toy, making the lead entirely irrelevant (lead is a better absorber of radiation than most materials, but not THAT much better!) Just forget it!
Get real - the amount of lead needed to shield a workable bomb is vastly more than you would get by surrounding it with a bunch of toys coated in lead paint.
I hear the second amendment brought up in every single thread of this kind. Nuts! What are you going to do, start shooting at US government officials? When ae you going to start?
No, that is a decryption key for the AACS encryption scheme. It is used by both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
Go ahead. I dare you to find and track a surveilance satellite with a telescope. It isn't impossible, but think for a minute what it requires.
I've bookmarked that link to read later but, firstly ODF already includes a mechanism to provide application-specific attributes, which any application (including MS Office) is free to make use of, and secondly Sun doesn't control the ODF standard anyway. If Microsoft proposed an extension to ODF there is nothing Sun can do to prevent them from submitting it to ISO.
No, I'm not missing the point. Microsoft can do whatever tricks they want to keep their vendor lock-in. That is the way the captialist system works, and under those rules it is allowed. Their rights to do that end at the point where they submit an international standard. At that point, it must be open and completely independently reproducible. If they can't accept those terms, then don't submit it as an ISO standard.
I was trying hard to word my reply in such a way as to NOT invoke cries of "embrace extend extinguish". Again, the bottom line is standards of documentation and openness befitting an international standard. If Microsoft chose to document their proprietary binary formats in the form of an extension to ODF, and (especially!) if they submitted the resulting document as a well-formed standard to ISO, then I am sure that 99% of the open source community would welcome it. Better still, though, would be a converter from the binary into a non-legacy format. That almost certainly isn't possible without loss of fidelity, but most people could live with that. Note that if you are going to use any non-Microsoft software that uses OOXML, then you are not going to get a lossless conversion anyway, because no one other than Microsoft will ever be able to implement the depreciated and not-defined backwards-compatibility tags!
Oh, except for this guy, who seems to have quite legitimate uses for it, unless of course you don't like his art and are nazi enough to want to prevent him from doing it.
Nevertheless, prior to synthetics it was the best option for many applications. But I don't know of anyone wanting to revive hemp for the purpose of making rope from it, where did this argument come from? It smells like a strawman.
By the way, even modern ropes used in rescues and rock climbing suffer from a similar problem. They are made of a relatively thin core, surrounded by a woven sheath. The problem is that dust and grit gets into the sheath, and then acts like sandpaper acting on the core. But you can't see this occurring because it is covered by the near-pristine sheath. If you want to avoid a sudden unexpected failure the only way is to be extremely paranoid and throw away a section of rope that is even the slightest bit manky. It is a major rule of rope handling that you never tread on a rope, especially if it is lying on dirt, for fear of getting grit embedded into the rope.
That was a while ago now. What has he done since 2000?
The problem is that OOXML defines a bunch of tags for 'backwards compatibility', but doesn't define what they do. To say that 'ODF fanboys and FSF-sponsored trolls don't care about that sort of thing' is insulting. Lots of people, including FSF members, have spent thousands and thousands of hours trying to reverse-engineer Microsoft binary formats. A document specifying this behavior would be universally welcomed, by both the FSF and 'ODF fanboys', because it would then be possible to write high-fidelity converters between old MS formats and ODF (or from MS binary formats to a non-legacy subset of OOXML, for that matter).
Having a bunch of tags with no definition as to what they do is not an ingredient of a good standard. If you wanted to define a bunch of custom tags, it could just as easily be done as an extension to ODF, which, if it was well-defined, ISO and the open source community would surely have no problem with. Having a international standard where significant parts of it are 'depreciated', is itself rather bizarre. If the backwards-compatibility binary-format tags are depreciated, why include them in the international standard?
This is certainly true, at least partially. What impact has Mono had on the linux community? From where I sit, none at all. It isn't installed on my machine, I've never seen it in action, I don't know of anyone who has used it, and I don't even know what it offers.
Before you jump up and say "well, that is because you've been living in a cave with a windows 3.1 laptop for the last 6 years", no, I am a programmer, I use linux both at work and at home, I compile my own system with Gentoo Linux or straight from source, and I'm always trying out new stuff. But I've never come across anything that involved Mono.