Actually, Base 3 looks to be the most efficient. What might be interesting to look into is a logic family built around +/0/- signaling. That is, use positive, negative and ground as your three voltages.
The biggest trick would be to map boolean operators onto the ternary paradigm. I don't think ternary computing lends itself to as many neat bit-fiddly things as binary.
Although their service is crappy, their advertisements are misleading, and half the stuff on the shelves has been returned, Fry's is a reasonable alternative to Radio Shack.
They stock a lot more components than Rat Shack, and have a variety of tools there too.
Shoot, I was contemplating polyphase filters in the shower this morning. It happened to be on my mind. Just because you keep your mind busy during mundane tasks doesn't mean you're a mental case.
In case you're wondering, some of the initial fascicles released for Vol 4. cover combinations and permutations. So, I can imagine Knuth being amused that he could apply that to something as simple as brushing his teeth, and sharing that amusement as an anecdote in an interview. I doubt he's up there deriving the calculus of the toothbrush every time he takes it to his pearly whites.
More than anything, he struck me as someone who's not afraid of "being a geek," and is ready to point out patterns that cross disciplines as they happen to cross his mind. That is, he doesn't have the usual stigma against being knowledgeable and insightful, and pointing out random technical observations in polite company. If that's a social disorder, oh well.
I find it makes rush hour much more palatable. The boost meter on my car (supercharged) seems to stay at 0 boost and my gas mileage improves, too. When I switch the music back on (industrial, usually), I get too many speeding tickets...
Precisely. There's a big difference between Burt Rutan and his various pilots... (Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager from Voyager, Mark Melvill and Brian Binnie for SpaceShip One).
Did Mark Melvill make private spaceflight possible? Did Jeanna Yeager or Dick Rutan make around-the-world-on-a-tank-of-gas flight possible? (Or even Steve Fossett w/ GlobalFlyer, which Burt contributed to?) More likely, Burt Rutan made those possible, with the help of all the people who fund, support and participate in his ventures.
In contrast, though, we remember Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin more than we remember all the folks at Mission Control or all the engineers at NASA, Grumman, Bell, Lockheed, Delco, etc. that made Apollo 11 possible.
It's what they call "violent agreement..." As in, they're both arguing, but they're actually agreeing with each other without realizing it, since they're saying the same thing slightly different ways.
Yup. Looks to me like they're using the technique internally to file things orderly, since they're generating content that directly populates the database. The nice, handy newline between the keywords and the actual title in the HTML source also makes it trivial for scripts to strip it out later. If they were trying to hide something, they'd teach their cacher to delete the "secret" keywords.
In contrast, for ad hoc "discovered" content, such as what a web spider crawling the rest of the web might find, such practices are hardly benign. Google can trust its own vision of how it wants its database to look, but not the intentions Mr. XXX HardCore Anal Sluts, or the guy that has Ad0be Ph0t0sh0p for 75% off, or worse yet, the guy who wants to "verify your account-holder information"...
Hmmm... if you don't allow unfavorable reviews, why even have a rating number at all? I guess to distinguish among "very good," "excellent" and "orgasmic"?
I actually used a Franklin once. ProDOS refused to boot on it--it had an explicit test for the Franklin ROM (or, at least, "non Apple ROM") and would go into a "here: JMP here" loop. I know, because I hacked a ProDOS disk so it could boot.
(No, I'm not the one that figured it out. I had heard about the problem earlier in Nybble magazine or similar, and remembered where to look when I ran into the problem later. Copy ][+ and its sector editor are handy.)
I guess IF you decide to GOTO the library to borrow it and actually like it, THEN you might not RETURN it right away. If you READ it and get any useful DATA on it, LET me know if it's better LEFT$ on the shelf.
Just remember, as volume decreases, temperature increases. If you decrease the volume too quickly (ie. non-adiabatically), the temperature will increase dramatically due to the increased entropy.
Incidentally, that's how Sun used to do it with their dick^H^H^H^Hdiskless workstations. Everything would run via NFS, and if the working sets were too large, you might attach a small disk to hold swap,/tmp, and maybe a read-only copy of the OS.
What's sad is I have actually NFS mounted a directory over a 14.4Kbps modem link, because I was running on a 386 with 4MB of RAM and no HD.
I was writing SVGAlib hacks while at work at the computer hotline in college. We had network-booted machines w/ no HDs. I'd boot from a floppy, running a modified "rescue disk." I was telnet'd in one window (so I could run vi/gcc/etc. directly on the remote computer), and logged in locally in the other so I could run the resulting app...
That would've been in, oh, 1994 or 1995.:-) And yes, it was damn slow, even though the executables I ran were relatively tiny. (I had SVGAlib and libc locally, so I was only bringing my tiny 10K or less a.out over the wire.)
Some "eye candy's" helpful. For instance, drop shadows behind menus and the mouse pointer give better "figure-ground separation," thereby making
them easier to spot.
Menus that fade in/out, roll in/out, etc. aren't particularly helpful. Transparent xterms aren't particularly helpful either, unless you're trying to get your desktop on TV and can combine them with some fancy wallpaper and a photogenic (if unusable) theme.
If we think of an event as a flash bulb popping off at some place and time, this event can be described by four such numbers, x1, y1, z1, and ict1. If there is another flash bulb popping off in another place and time, x2, y2, z2, and ict2; we can define the "interval" between these two events by simple Pythagorean law. The interval is the square root of the sum of the squares of the "distances": x2 - x1, y2 - y1, z2 - z1, and ic (t2 - t1). Note that the "distance" ic (t2 - t1) is "imaginary" but is in units of distance. The product of a unit of velocity, such as the speed of light, c, and a unit of time, is a unit of distance. As an imaginary distance, however, its square will be a negative real number. Therefore, the interval between events in space-time is the square root of the sum of four terms, three of which are always positive, and one of which is always negative.
You what's interesting is that if time's another dimension orthogonal to width, length and height, then it kinda makes sense to measure it in meters also. That makes the "speed of light" unitless--it's really just the conversion factor between the arbitrary units chosen for time vs. space. That is, "1 second = 300,000,000 meters" (approx).
Plug that into E=mc^2, and find that we can measure energy in kilograms.:-)
Now, there is some argument to say that the conversion ratio is missing a sqrt(-1). If you consider distance in regular old 3-space, it's just sqrt(delta-x^2 + delta-y^2 + delta-z^2). But, if you're looking at "causality distance" in 4-space, you actually subtract the time term--the further things are apart in time or the closer they are in space, the more they are able to interact. (That is, two things that are far apart can interact, given enough time.)
That almost implies that the conversion ratio between seconds and meters includes sqrt(-1), such that distance in 4-space is given by sqrt(delta-x^2 + delta-y^2 + delta-z^2 - delta-t^2). This actually makes a certain amount of sense. If you consider oscillating electromagnetic waves, and think of them instead as a fixed magnitude entity that's rotating, the e^(sqrt(-1)*omega*t) that describes it suddenly clicks. After all, where does the wave go when its apparent magnitude goes to 0? (Hint: If you look at the equations, the imaginary component is at its peak right then...)
I think the intent of the "rover" was to help cover gaps. To have true 24hr coverage (covering lunch, bathroom, coffee breaks too), you need to have 6 to 8 guys. But, if you can cut that back to 4 or 5 and have rover fill the gaps--"Hey Frank, get outta the can, someone suspicious is near loading dock 7!"--that's a significant cost savings beyond the cost of the rover. (Especially if the cost of the rover is a nearly fixed cost vs. recurring personnel costs. This assumes the rover lasts a few years.)
A couple episodes were kinda corny filler, but that's because the original concept had only 7 or so key shows. The other 10 were largely filler.
For its time, though, it was quite imaginative and thoroughly paranoid. The whole idea that The Village operated outside any given country's government ("Who's side are you on?") and all the 1984ish elements twisted to reflect Cold War technology development made for something more than just "off the wall." You have direct commentary on the effects of socialism on individuality, the growth of government for government's sake, and ongoing struggle to truly keep some things personal. I guess you could say it's a rather libertarian-angled program. (Or, should I say, programme?) All in a nearly comic-bookish scifi-ish trippy backdrop.:-)
Some things get old in the series by the end, but it was designed from the beginning to run its course over a summer. If they were to try something like this 20 years later, it'd be a week or two long miniseries, with 7 or 8 total episodes.
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And if you believe that, I have some nice swampland in Florida for you...
Actually, Base 3 looks to be the most efficient. What might be interesting to look into is a logic family built around +/0/- signaling. That is, use positive, negative and ground as your three voltages.
The biggest trick would be to map boolean operators onto the ternary paradigm. I don't think ternary computing lends itself to as many neat bit-fiddly things as binary.
--JoeAlthough their service is crappy, their advertisements are misleading, and half the stuff on the shelves has been returned, Fry's is a reasonable alternative to Radio Shack.
They stock a lot more components than Rat Shack, and have a variety of tools there too.
--JoeShoot, I was contemplating polyphase filters in the shower this morning. It happened to be on my mind. Just because you keep your mind busy during mundane tasks doesn't mean you're a mental case.
In case you're wondering, some of the initial fascicles released for Vol 4. cover combinations and permutations. So, I can imagine Knuth being amused that he could apply that to something as simple as brushing his teeth, and sharing that amusement as an anecdote in an interview. I doubt he's up there deriving the calculus of the toothbrush every time he takes it to his pearly whites.
More than anything, he struck me as someone who's not afraid of "being a geek," and is ready to point out patterns that cross disciplines as they happen to cross his mind. That is, he doesn't have the usual stigma against being knowledgeable and insightful, and pointing out random technical observations in polite company. If that's a social disorder, oh well.
--JoeI find it makes rush hour much more palatable. The boost meter on my car (supercharged) seems to stay at 0 boost and my gas mileage improves, too. When I switch the music back on (industrial, usually), I get too many speeding tickets...
Precisely. There's a big difference between Burt Rutan and his various pilots... (Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager from Voyager, Mark Melvill and Brian Binnie for SpaceShip One).
Did Mark Melvill make private spaceflight possible? Did Jeanna Yeager or Dick Rutan make around-the-world-on-a-tank-of-gas flight possible? (Or even Steve Fossett w/ GlobalFlyer, which Burt contributed to?) More likely, Burt Rutan made those possible, with the help of all the people who fund, support and participate in his ventures.
In contrast, though, we remember Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin more than we remember all the folks at Mission Control or all the engineers at NASA, Grumman, Bell, Lockheed, Delco, etc. that made Apollo 11 possible.
The hero tag's in the eye of the beholder.
--JoeWith all this integer madness, I find it amusing that it's the rational numbers are expressed as a ratio of two integers...
It's what they call "violent agreement..." As in, they're both arguing, but they're actually agreeing with each other without realizing it, since they're saying the same thing slightly different ways.
Yup. Looks to me like they're using the technique internally to file things orderly, since they're generating content that directly populates the database. The nice, handy newline between the keywords and the actual title in the HTML source also makes it trivial for scripts to strip it out later. If they were trying to hide something, they'd teach their cacher to delete the "secret" keywords.
In contrast, for ad hoc "discovered" content, such as what a web spider crawling the rest of the web might find, such practices are hardly benign. Google can trust its own vision of how it wants its database to look, but not the intentions Mr. XXX HardCore Anal Sluts, or the guy that has Ad0be Ph0t0sh0p for 75% off, or worse yet, the guy who wants to "verify your account-holder information"...
--JoeHmmm... if you don't allow unfavorable reviews, why even have a rating number at all? I guess to distinguish among "very good," "excellent" and "orgasmic"?
--JoeHeh, what do you know. Google really does know all. Or, at least, where to find it.
I actually used a Franklin once. ProDOS refused to boot on it--it had an explicit test for the Franklin ROM (or, at least, "non Apple ROM") and would go into a "here: JMP here" loop. I know, because I hacked a ProDOS disk so it could boot.
(No, I'm not the one that figured it out. I had heard about the problem earlier in Nybble magazine or similar, and remembered where to look when I ran into the problem later. Copy ][+ and its sector editor are handy.)
--JoeI guess IF you decide to GOTO the library to borrow it and actually like it, THEN you might not RETURN it right away. If you READ it and get any useful DATA on it, LET me know if it's better LEFT$ on the shelf.
--JoeJust remember, as volume decreases, temperature increases. If you decrease the volume too quickly (ie. non-adiabatically), the temperature will increase dramatically due to the increased entropy.
--JoeIncidentally, that's how Sun used to do it with their dick^H^H^H^Hdiskless workstations. Everything would run via NFS, and if the working sets were too large, you might attach a small disk to hold swap, /tmp, and maybe a read-only copy of the OS.
What's sad is I have actually NFS mounted a directory over a 14.4Kbps modem link, because I was running on a 386 with 4MB of RAM and no HD.
I was writing SVGAlib hacks while at work at the computer hotline in college. We had network-booted machines w/ no HDs. I'd boot from a floppy, running a modified "rescue disk." I was telnet'd in one window (so I could run vi/gcc/etc. directly on the remote computer), and logged in locally in the other so I could run the resulting app...
That would've been in, oh, 1994 or 1995. :-) And yes, it was damn slow, even though the executables I ran were relatively tiny. (I had SVGAlib and libc locally, so I was only bringing my tiny 10K or less a.out over the wire.)
--JoeSome "eye candy's" helpful. For instance, drop shadows behind menus and the mouse pointer give better "figure-ground separation," thereby making them easier to spot.
Menus that fade in/out, roll in/out, etc. aren't particularly helpful. Transparent xterms aren't particularly helpful either, unless you're trying to get your desktop on TV and can combine them with some fancy wallpaper and a photogenic (if unusable) theme.
--JoeIt all depends on how you interpret the output of the various tools. For instance, if you run 'free', you'll get something that looks like this:
If you look closely, 246MB of my 256MB is "used," but of that, 74MB are disk buffers. Only 172MB are used by applications at the moment.
So, by one measure, all but 8MB are in use, and by another measure, all but 82MB are in use.
--Joesqrt(2)....
Oh, ok, you can if you use an infinite number of powers of 2...
For what it's worth, I wasn't just pulling the above out of my hindside... Look at the formula for "intervals" at the bottom of that previous link:
You what's interesting is that if time's another dimension orthogonal to width, length and height, then it kinda makes sense to measure it in meters also. That makes the "speed of light" unitless--it's really just the conversion factor between the arbitrary units chosen for time vs. space. That is, "1 second = 300,000,000 meters" (approx).
Plug that into E=mc^2, and find that we can measure energy in kilograms. :-)
Now, there is some argument to say that the conversion ratio is missing a sqrt(-1). If you consider distance in regular old 3-space, it's just sqrt(delta-x^2 + delta-y^2 + delta-z^2). But, if you're looking at "causality distance" in 4-space, you actually subtract the time term--the further things are apart in time or the closer they are in space, the more they are able to interact. (That is, two things that are far apart can interact, given enough time.)
That almost implies that the conversion ratio between seconds and meters includes sqrt(-1), such that distance in 4-space is given by sqrt(delta-x^2 + delta-y^2 + delta-z^2 - delta-t^2). This actually makes a certain amount of sense. If you consider oscillating electromagnetic waves, and think of them instead as a fixed magnitude entity that's rotating, the e^(sqrt(-1)*omega*t) that describes it suddenly clicks. After all, where does the wave go when its apparent magnitude goes to 0? (Hint: If you look at the equations, the imaginary component is at its peak right then...)
Okay, enough mad scientist raving for now.
--JoeFirst post!
Well, if your luggage is geeky 'nuff, it's got a keypad like a telephone... ;-)
"Wow! I have the same combination on my luggage!"
I think the intent of the "rover" was to help cover gaps. To have true 24hr coverage (covering lunch, bathroom, coffee breaks too), you need to have 6 to 8 guys. But, if you can cut that back to 4 or 5 and have rover fill the gaps--"Hey Frank, get outta the can, someone suspicious is near loading dock 7!"--that's a significant cost savings beyond the cost of the rover. (Especially if the cost of the rover is a nearly fixed cost vs. recurring personnel costs. This assumes the rover lasts a few years.)
--JoeA couple episodes were kinda corny filler, but that's because the original concept had only 7 or so key shows. The other 10 were largely filler.
For its time, though, it was quite imaginative and thoroughly paranoid. The whole idea that The Village operated outside any given country's government ("Who's side are you on?") and all the 1984ish elements twisted to reflect Cold War technology development made for something more than just "off the wall." You have direct commentary on the effects of socialism on individuality, the growth of government for government's sake, and ongoing struggle to truly keep some things personal. I guess you could say it's a rather libertarian-angled program. (Or, should I say, programme?) All in a nearly comic-bookish scifi-ish trippy backdrop. :-)
Some things get old in the series by the end, but it was designed from the beginning to run its course over a summer. If they were to try something like this 20 years later, it'd be a week or two long miniseries, with 7 or 8 total episodes.
--Joe