The original statement was that "24 hour service" can cost up to $200K. The anchor for this thread misinterpreted that to mean $200K for a 24 hour period. Most of the responders correctly interpreted the article.
Um, you do realize that a ex con isn't legally allowed to carry or own a firearm, even in the USA?
That's if you're a convicted felon. If you're convicted for petty crimes (check kiting, credit card fraud, recreational drug possession (depending on jurisdiction), etc.) that are generally misdemeanors, then you can still tote a gun.
According to the article, that thing can get up to 20MPH, too, so it can put up a pretty good chase. As long as it stays with an intruder, it can act as a giant homing beacon, radioing back exact position information in real time. (Not that a large rolling black ball wouldn't stand out...) I wonder what the battery life is.
As a point of calibration: A 4 minute mile is 15MPH. Just how many runners can do that?
The FLOPs/Watt or MIPS/Watt only matters if you're using them the entire time. If the CPU's burning a lot of standby power while you sit there slackjawed staring at banner ads in your web-browser, all those MIPS bought you nothing.
If you're not a compute-heavy user, what really matters is standby power, and the ability of the laptop to scale its energy consumption to match the actual compute power you request. It's the efficiency of the idle state that matters the most, I'd say, for portable devices.
Fair enough, I suppose, but it completely misses my point. My point was that with intelligent eyeballing, one could estimate many computations without doing any real work whatsoever. If you know a value's between cos(PI/4) and cos(PI/3), you know it's between 0.707 and 0.5. That's a pretty tight bound without doing any computation whatsoever. That's my point.
I knew that this particular cosine would have a greater magnitude than -0.5 (since it was closer to -1pi than -1.5pi), but I didn't feel the need to go further than that to demonstrate practical first-order estimation techniques.
It's more practical to know that 1/sqrt(2) is about 0.707 than it is to recite more than 5 digits of PI. It's more useful in many cases to eyeball and say "I'ts somewhere between 0.5 and 0.6, closer to 0.5" than it is to work out that it's 0.52517.
P.S. Nintendo does not lose money on GBA's sold. Nintendo actually doesn't lose money on any consoles sold. They've structured their licensing and manufacturing agreements intelligently to that effect. Nintendo probably makes about 5 bucks a game sold, and if an average user buys just 10 games in a console's lifespan, if they've subsidised the cost of the console to a noticable degree they've just eaten up all they would make on it.
A typical retail price to electronics cost ratio for consumer electronics is around 10 to 1. That is, if it has $10 electronics cost, it sells for $100. That pretty much holds for answering machines, cordless phones, and I'm pretty sure it does for TI calculators.
GBAs, however, have a parts cost much closer to its selling price. That closer ratio reflects the subsidy that game licensing provides. So, while Nintendo is smart enough not to ship dollars with every unit, it's wrong to say the GameBoy Advance's pricing doesn't reflect game licensing subsidy. If the GBA didn't have games to subsidize its price, it'd cost more like $400 - $500.
TI doesn't make fancier calculators because they don't need to. Only students use the calculators anyway. (Or, at least, it's the only market that seems to matter.) With all the textbook tie-ins, making calculators is roughly akin to printing money, but that's more a function of all the educational entrenchment. I haven't really used my calculator seriously since I graduated from college 8 years ago. Of course, then again, I wasn't a devoted button-pusher even while I was still working on my EE degree. I prefer to do math in my head. (Ok, I did program in all the compound interest and depreciation formulas for my Engineering Economics class, since boundary cases are a bitch.)
I'd imagine now that teacher lesson plans have stabilized pretty well around a handful of TI calculator models, we'll see more window dressing changes and fewer functional changes to the TI calcs as time goes on.
GameBoys are subsidized by game licensing revenue. Calculators are not.
Calculators are a pure profit play for TI anyway. I asked them why we don't use one of our DSPs or an ARM instead of licensing someone else's 68K, and the answer was that it'd add like a $1 to the cost of the electronics, which is too much.
About -0.5, since 34423.324pi is about 240 degrees once you rip out all the integer multiples of 2pi. That is, cos(34423.324pi) = cos(1.324pi), and that's about 240 degrees.
Of course, I think you'll find many calculators give a different result for cos(34423.324pi) than they do for cos(1.324pi), depending on how they implement cosine. Even if they take the argument MOD 2pi, that can introduce rounding error that changes the result.
And yeah, I did that in my head. Everyone who needs to deal w/ trig functions should know cos(pi/2)=0, cos(pi/3)=0.5 and cos(pi/4)=1/sqrt(2) =0.707 (approx) off the top of their heads. (And, of course, you should know the corresponding sines.)
Oh, and for those of you too lazy to type in the numerical value of pi, there's always 4*atan(1).
AMD was a second-source for Intel CPUs up through the 286 era. I believe this arose out of IBM's requirement to have a second source for whatever CPU it picked for its PC. It appears Wikipedia corroborates my story.
The instruction and data sides have separate TLBs, so you can distinguish "readable" pages from "executable" pages by loading instruction and data TLBs separately. PaX does this.
This doesn't surprise me at all. As an emulator author myself (jzIntv), I've worked closely with other emulator authors to reverse engineer and understand all the corners of my chosen system of interest.
I've worked with the authors of Bliss, IntvWin/IntvDos, Nostalgia, IntvPC, Kinty and the MESS Intellivision driver to work out emulation bugs and understand the various odd machine details. The authors of those emulators also have worked with each other--it's not like I'm some central focus here. It's a friendly community.
It'd surprise me more if the emu authors couldn't get past their egos to such an extent that they simply didn't talk to each other except to flame.
BTW, I just tested, and it seems that pressing [ESC] works to stop GIF animations in Mozilla under Windows also (at least, with 1.8a5--I don't have other versions installed). I suspect the same is true under Linux.
I think I'll go back to "image.animation_mode normal", now since it's no big deal for me to hit [ESC] on pages with annoying looping GIFs.
The people I feel real sorry for are the ones who don't even know how to reformat and end up buying another computer (yes, I have met people who have done this).
If you're a real bastard, you could offer to help them by taking their "broken" computer off their hands real cheap.;-)
This would work great if the content providers could see if you were blocking ads and not serve content if you are.
And, it would only spawn ad-blocking proxies that download the ads for you, or browser extensions that download the ads and fake cookies or whatever, if that becomes a prerequisite.
What if I can't pay attention to the content because the ads are screaming for my attention? I get easily distracted by stuff moving in my peripheral vision, such that I can't concentrate on an article or whatever. It's not like magazines, where the ads just sit there, waiting patiently for your attention.
I personally like the Firefox/Mozilla extention "Click to Play" for Flash movies (though I'd like it to have a whitelist option). Also, the semi-hidden "image.animation_mode once" configuration tweak's useful. Actually, it appears [ESC] will also stop animations (at least under Firefox on my Mac), which is also very useful. I need to try it under Moz, and on my Linux and Windows boxen.
I personally nearly never click on ads, because I'm just plain not interested in what they offer. I have, however, clicked on Google's text ads several times--they were actually relevant! Anyone who feels their product or service is more important than the reason I visited the site doesn't deserve my attention.
Also, don't forget that you burn fuel faster when you're carrying more of it. Even if you could get off the ground with that much fuel, you'd be burning it at a much higher rate than near the end of the flight.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually a weather balloon. :-)
The original statement was that "24 hour service" can cost up to $200K. The anchor for this thread misinterpreted that to mean $200K for a 24 hour period. Most of the responders correctly interpreted the article.
--JoeThat's if you're a convicted felon. If you're convicted for petty crimes (check kiting, credit card fraud, recreational drug possession (depending on jurisdiction), etc.) that are generally misdemeanors, then you can still tote a gun.
--JoeAccording to the article, that thing can get up to 20MPH, too, so it can put up a pretty good chase. As long as it stays with an intruder, it can act as a giant homing beacon, radioing back exact position information in real time. (Not that a large rolling black ball wouldn't stand out...) I wonder what the battery life is.
As a point of calibration: A 4 minute mile is 15MPH. Just how many runners can do that?
--JoeGawd... Automan. "On a scale of 1 to 10, you can think of me as 11." Amusing, but only because he looked like Tron.
The FLOPs/Watt or MIPS/Watt only matters if you're using them the entire time. If the CPU's burning a lot of standby power while you sit there slackjawed staring at banner ads in your web-browser, all those MIPS bought you nothing.
If you're not a compute-heavy user, what really matters is standby power, and the ability of the laptop to scale its energy consumption to match the actual compute power you request. It's the efficiency of the idle state that matters the most, I'd say, for portable devices.
--JoeYou should be able to find a Tandy 100 on eBay.
Fair enough, I suppose, but it completely misses my point. My point was that with intelligent eyeballing, one could estimate many computations without doing any real work whatsoever. If you know a value's between cos(PI/4) and cos(PI/3), you know it's between 0.707 and 0.5. That's a pretty tight bound without doing any computation whatsoever. That's my point.
I knew that this particular cosine would have a greater magnitude than -0.5 (since it was closer to -1pi than -1.5pi), but I didn't feel the need to go further than that to demonstrate practical first-order estimation techniques.It's more practical to know that 1/sqrt(2) is about 0.707 than it is to recite more than 5 digits of PI. It's more useful in many cases to eyeball and say "I'ts somewhere between 0.5 and 0.6, closer to 0.5" than it is to work out that it's 0.52517.
--JoeYou said:
A typical retail price to electronics cost ratio for consumer electronics is around 10 to 1. That is, if it has $10 electronics cost, it sells for $100. That pretty much holds for answering machines, cordless phones, and I'm pretty sure it does for TI calculators.
GBAs, however, have a parts cost much closer to its selling price. That closer ratio reflects the subsidy that game licensing provides. So, while Nintendo is smart enough not to ship dollars with every unit, it's wrong to say the GameBoy Advance's pricing doesn't reflect game licensing subsidy. If the GBA didn't have games to subsidize its price, it'd cost more like $400 - $500.
TI doesn't make fancier calculators because they don't need to. Only students use the calculators anyway. (Or, at least, it's the only market that seems to matter.) With all the textbook tie-ins, making calculators is roughly akin to printing money, but that's more a function of all the educational entrenchment. I haven't really used my calculator seriously since I graduated from college 8 years ago. Of course, then again, I wasn't a devoted button-pusher even while I was still working on my EE degree. I prefer to do math in my head. (Ok, I did program in all the compound interest and depreciation formulas for my Engineering Economics class, since boundary cases are a bitch.)
I'd imagine now that teacher lesson plans have stabilized pretty well around a handful of TI calculator models, we'll see more window dressing changes and fewer functional changes to the TI calcs as time goes on.
--JoeGameBoys are subsidized by game licensing revenue. Calculators are not.
Calculators are a pure profit play for TI anyway. I asked them why we don't use one of our DSPs or an ARM instead of licensing someone else's 68K, and the answer was that it'd add like a $1 to the cost of the electronics, which is too much.
--JoeAbout -0.5, since 34423.324pi is about 240 degrees once you rip out all the integer multiples of 2pi. That is, cos(34423.324pi) = cos(1.324pi), and that's about 240 degrees.
Of course, I think you'll find many calculators give a different result for cos(34423.324pi) than they do for cos(1.324pi), depending on how they implement cosine. Even if they take the argument MOD 2pi, that can introduce rounding error that changes the result.
And yeah, I did that in my head. Everyone who needs to deal w/ trig functions should know cos(pi/2)=0, cos(pi/3)=0.5 and cos(pi/4)=1/sqrt(2) =0.707 (approx) off the top of their heads. (And, of course, you should know the corresponding sines.)
Oh, and for those of you too lazy to type in the numerical value of pi, there's always 4*atan(1).
--JoeOr, the thermal diode will trip and shut you down safely.
...and then you'll need partake of a different sort of crystal to keep up.
AMD was a second-source for Intel CPUs up through the 286 era. I believe this arose out of IBM's requirement to have a second source for whatever CPU it picked for its PC. It appears Wikipedia corroborates my story.
--JoeIt must use an IEEE-754 hidden-one representation...
The instruction and data sides have separate TLBs, so you can distinguish "readable" pages from "executable" pages by loading instruction and data TLBs separately. PaX does this.
--JoeThis doesn't surprise me at all. As an emulator author myself (jzIntv), I've worked closely with other emulator authors to reverse engineer and understand all the corners of my chosen system of interest.
I've worked with the authors of Bliss, IntvWin/IntvDos, Nostalgia, IntvPC, Kinty and the MESS Intellivision driver to work out emulation bugs and understand the various odd machine details. The authors of those emulators also have worked with each other--it's not like I'm some central focus here. It's a friendly community.
It'd surprise me more if the emu authors couldn't get past their egos to such an extent that they simply didn't talk to each other except to flame.
The article claims 5, but the first page of the popup has a graphic that claims 10. I suspect a last minute change to cut from 10 to 5.
Consistent breeze might deposit, whereas gusts might end up removing...
BTW, I just tested, and it seems that pressing [ESC] works to stop GIF animations in Mozilla under Windows also (at least, with 1.8a5--I don't have other versions installed). I suspect the same is true under Linux.
I think I'll go back to "image.animation_mode normal", now since it's no big deal for me to hit [ESC] on pages with annoying looping GIFs.
--JoeIf you're a real bastard, you could offer to help them by taking their "broken" computer off their hands real cheap. ;-)
--JoeIt's kinda like saying "I'm starving, McDonald's is the only thing open, but I won't eat there because clowns disturb me."
--JoeAnd, it would only spawn ad-blocking proxies that download the ads for you, or browser extensions that download the ads and fake cookies or whatever, if that becomes a prerequisite.
--JoeWhat if I can't pay attention to the content because the ads are screaming for my attention? I get easily distracted by stuff moving in my peripheral vision, such that I can't concentrate on an article or whatever. It's not like magazines, where the ads just sit there, waiting patiently for your attention.
I personally like the Firefox/Mozilla extention "Click to Play" for Flash movies (though I'd like it to have a whitelist option). Also, the semi-hidden "image.animation_mode once" configuration tweak's useful. Actually, it appears [ESC] will also stop animations (at least under Firefox on my Mac), which is also very useful. I need to try it under Moz, and on my Linux and Windows boxen.
I personally nearly never click on ads, because I'm just plain not interested in what they offer. I have, however, clicked on Google's text ads several times--they were actually relevant! Anyone who feels their product or service is more important than the reason I visited the site doesn't deserve my attention.
--JoeAlso, don't forget that you burn fuel faster when you're carrying more of it. Even if you could get off the ground with that much fuel, you'd be burning it at a much higher rate than near the end of the flight.
--Joe