But what country that has the technology, education, and economic prosperity to develop modern ICBM technology would even think of nuking the US? What would would they stand to gain from doing that? And isn't the US arsenal of 10000 nukes more than enough of a detterent?
The only way the US will get nuked is from terrorists, and the missile defnse is useless against them.
The only people who have ballistic missiles are soverign contries, and they are not going to use them against the US, simply because the US could bury them with 10000 of them. Mutually assured destruction has kept the world safe.
A missile defense shield will only start a new arms rage- China only has 20 missiles that can reach the US, and they are all liquid fueled, all of which can be easily stoped by a defense shield. This will force them to develop solid fueled missiles, and hundreds of them, to maintain the current strategic position. This will also force Russia, India, Pakastan, and any other aspiring world power to follow suit. Most physicists are sure that solid fueled missiles are impossible to defend against, so the net result will be a massive proliferation of nuclear technology with no added protection for the US.
And of course, as 9/11 showed, its not soverign nations with ICBM's that threaten the US, its underground terrorists organizations that do. If the hundreds of billions of dollars required for the system was spent on intellegence, homeland security, or NOT pissing off everyone else in the world, you'd be much safer than with a missile shield.
Of course, the missile defense shield never had anything to do with protecting citizens- its always been about extending the american hedgemony, giving it's leaders uncontested nuclear superiority.
Well, if the purpose of a tax cut is to boost the economy, then aiming the tax cuts to the lower 50% of the population will have a much larger economic impact than the upper 50%.
Simply because the poorer people will need to spend all of that extra money, creating extra jobs.
Give that same amount of money to a multi-millionare, and its just going to pad his bank account. Sure a small portion of it will be reinvested into the economy, but it will not create as many jobs as if all of that money was spent directly.
Back in the late 90's, when Nortel and JDS uniphase where booming, almost half of our engineering physics program were immediately hired by those two companies upon graduation. (i'm from a Canadian school, so those two companies are basically the entire networking industry here... in the US you'll have many more choices) Electrical engineering, communications option would also be a good bet.
It all depends on what you want to do with your career- if you mean networking as in setting up networks for businesses, then a cert is all you need. But if you actually want to design future networks and develop new technologies, then a Bachelor's in engineering or graduate work in physics/math is the only way to get there.
Would this be the same school (Queen's) that offers Computer science, Biomedical computng, Computer Engineering, Applied Math-Computing option, and Engineering Physics Computer option:)
Attenuated viruses sensitize your immune system against that specific virus, so that it can effectively defend against future infection FROM THAT SAME VIRUS (or the full strength, unattenuated version).
Both virsues cause damage to your body, and the only reason for innocuation is its better to get sick from the weaker one rather than the stronger one. In no case does it ever help your body.
No known virus performs a postive biological role like the parent poster was implying, IE they are not capable of synthesizing essential compounds or directly preventing colonization of dangerous microbes- bacteria like S.aureus, E.coli, etc are directly required for survival.
I agree, most of what you hear in the mass media about nanotechnology is greatly exagerated. Almost every post here is confusing nano-structured materials, which is just starting to arrive commercially today, and what most on slashdot consider true nanotechnology. (the only thing in common is small size- nanoscale materials is simply dumb materials made to smaller scales (technically 90nm chip production falls into this catagory) while nanotechnology involves computation, mechanics, and electronics at those small scales)
True nanotechnology, ie miniture robots, is not even close to being feasible with today's technology, and i doubt anything close to an autonomous device will be created in 25 years. Grey goo is a potential problem with this true nanotechnology, but it is so far off that any discussion is simply science fiction until nanobots become remotely possible.
On the otherhand, the behaviour of "nanoscale/nanostructured materials" (basically the extension of materials science to smaller scales) is something that needs to be addressed immediately- carbon nanotube production is increasing rapidly, and many commercial products already use nanoscale materials. These chemicals are too small to be decomposed by bacteria (nature's way of cleaning up most contaminents) or attacked by our immune system, so they could really build up and cause long-term damage in the same way as DDT or heavy metals in the food chain. Combined with the novel properties of these materials, there really is a serious concern that must be addressed by new regulations and new testing procedures.
Comming from a country that actually uses metric, there simply isn't the same confusion between force and mass as occurs in a system that uses US/imperial units.
In the US, yes, pounds are used for both mass and weight, but that has never been true with SI units.
I've never heard anyone say "weighing kilograms".
The "unwashed masses" don't confuse it either- when they buy a box that says "1 kilogram", they are thinking about the quantity of matter inside the box, not the force of gravity acting on it.
So mass is the natural way we all understand things 'in everyday use', and the imperial system of using units of FORCE (pounds) to describe mass is the source of confusion. This does not occur in SI, no one thinks of a force when we talk about kilograms. (just like no one would think of a force if you were talking about 'Slugs')
And anyways, the only people who could possibly put a set of scales on mars would be people who understand the most basic physics. IF you ever got into a discussion about gravity on other planets, then that would be a good time to explain to the "unwashed masses" the difference between force and mass.
The 30 km/s mentioned by the parent poster is a VELOCITY, while you're referring to a rate of change of velocity, ie ACCELERATION. The poster was referring to the velocity of the gas leaving the thruster, which is totally different from either the velocity or acceleration of the craft.
From that information alone, you can not figure out the acceleration of the ship, as you also need to know the mass/mass flow rate of the particles leaving the thruster. Actually, ion thrusters have extremely low acceleration because of the incredibly small quantities of mass involved. The key advantage is that they don't need to carry much fuel, and over long periods of time, the acceleration adds up. However, there's no way you could use it for a manned mission to mars, or ANY "fast trip" period.
Unfortunately, i doubt there will ever be a digital output for high-res audio.
Look at any of the commercial DVD-audio or SACD players available- none of them support digital output at 192khz/24bit. If one was available, anyone could bypass the huge amounts of DRM/watermarking on those new discs, and make bit-perfect copies by simply plugging it into your soundcard/dat recorder.
Anyways, the S/PDIF standard doesn't support bit rates high enough for 192/24 audio, so an entirely new format would have to be made, and somehow i doubt the RIAA will allow one to be made.
Of course, digital output at 44.1/16, (well AC'97 resamples it to 48khz) will still be available, and that's more than good enough for 99.999% of the market.
So basically, this high-res stuff is nothing more than a marketing ploy, there is no way you can achieve 24-bit performance on a noisy switching powesupply while blasted by EMI, reproduced by a 99 cent DAC/opamp chip. (well there's no way to achive 24 bit performance period at room temperature, since the johnston resistor noise of any system is greater than the resolution of a 24bit system, but that's another matter altogether)
DSD is just sony's proprietary high resolution format (ie they wanted to start yet another format war, dividing up the 100 or so people intersted in high-res audio between DVD-A and SACD).
The difference between DSD and PCM (used in CD's and DVD-A) really isn't as great as the marketing people try to tell you. In fact, virtually all CD/dvd/DVD-A players made in the last 10 years (excluding some extremely expensive audiophile stuff) convert the PCM to a DSD-like format in the digital to analog conversion process. Any player that says "1-bit dac", "delta sigma" do this.
Basically, PCM stores the data at relatively low rates (44.1, 96, or 192 khz) but takes each mesurement to a high resolution (16 bits or 24 bits). In contrast, DSD samples the signal at several megahertz, but the value stored can only be 1 or 0 (ie 1 bit resolution). Mathematically, the two are basically equivilent once the appropriate filters are applied.
The main reason for DSD is that it is much cheaper to manufacturer high speed digital chips than it is to manufacture precise analog chips. So you can get a much better price/performance ratio by using the DSD format, since the 1-bit DAC is an all digital circuit. (on or off)
So basically everyting you use converts the sound to DSD at the DAC stage, the only area where it makes a difference. All of the mathematical conversions between PCM and DSD are essentially lossess, so it doesn't matter what format the data is stored in on the disc.
However, what does matter is the total amount of information stored on the disc. DVD-A holds 4.7 gigs of audio, while Sony's SACD only holds about 1.5 gig. There is basically no way that SACD can beat DVD-A when it stores that much less information.
Anyways, all of this is very academic, only the most expensive audiophile speakers could possibly show a difference between CD, DVD-A, and SACD, and 99% of the poplulation doesn't own/doesn't want to own such equipment. Playing back these formats on a computer is worthless as they will have to pass through the noisy computer environment ( digital outputs not allowed on high-res formats to prevent piracy).
For any EE's out there, calculate the Johnston resistor noise in a typical system, and compare it to the resolution obtained by 24 bit sampling. You'll find that 24 bits is overkill even in an ideal noise-free environment, and inside a computer, the huge amounts of powersupply, EMI and acoustic noise, means that high-res audio in a computer is simply a marketing ploy.
My compaq evo (corporate model) didn't have any 3rd party software on it in the default install. Just windows XP pro, the online user manual/compaq config program, and the drivers for all the hardware.
Everything else (win DVD, CD burning software, office, antivirus, etc) came on seperate CD's, and the user can choose whether to install it. Those come preinstalled on the notebook (but not if you restore the computer from the backup discs) but there's still not a single piece of bloatware/3rd party software. Memory usage was less than 100 megs on XP on the brand new computer!
Maybe the crap they sell at best buy is different, but you're making the same blanket statements as the original poster
Unfortunately, the trend for laptops is that they simply stop selling old models, rather than drop the price. With today's Just In Time business model, most manufacturers simply mantain the prices and bump up the specs slightly, rather than making a big price cut.
Laptops rarely drop in price by more than $200-300 over their lives, unless you're lucky enough to find one on clearance or pick up a used one. For example, a P3 ~1 ghz laptop would probably be enough for most people, but good luck finding anything less than 2ghz these days.
That said, the last year has seen all laptop prices drop drastically from the levels they were at for the last 10 years or so, most likely due to the drop in the prices of the LCD's, so many good laptops are in the $1500 range now. ( 2 years ago, you could only get the crappiest entry level celeron/duron laptops for that price)
You'd need one massive astroid to make the entire world less hospitible than mars or the moon. In fact, the lack of oxygen on those places means the bottom of the ocean, the middle of the sahara desert, or antarctica are all better places to go than mars.
Fido sucks- they have no transmission towers outside of the major cities, and even within the cities, they have significantly poorer reception/signal strength than ANY of its competitors.
My fido phone could not be used outside of toronto (unless i paid 75 cents a minute for analog), forcing me to change carriers to telus. I've never looked back, as their coverage is way better anyways.
Fido does give the cheapest prices for new phones, but over a 2 year plan the price difference is negligible, and you have to live with terrible service.
And for any of the new phone deals, you do have to agree to a 2-3 year plan (ie identical to a contract) to get the $200-300 discount off the phone. If you want to change plans/carriers, you'll have to pay back the difference.
Just to nitpick, the coriolis effect has absolutely nothing to do with gravity or rising gases. Its a "fictious force" that occurs as a result of observations taken in a rotating (ie not an inertial system) reference frame, such as the rotating earth.
In everyday life, you do not experience any coriolis effect; if you did you would be aware that the earth is rotating under you- Instead, you're probably confusing the coriolis effect on global mases of air, which results in circulation cells that span vast distances...
What you're describing, the fact that hot air rises, is simply due to the difference in density of the heated gas, ie basic fluid mechanics.
Depends on what work you do (i'm an engineering physics student)
Running maple for symbolic stuff and matlab for numeric calculations is significantly faster than a graphing calculator for any moderately complex problem- you don't need to mess around with menus or second function keys, and typing on a full size qwerty keyboard is much faster than messing around with tiny calculator keys. And not to mention the huge increase in processing power.
Any problem that is faster on a graphing calculator, is probably simple enough to solve even faster using pencil, paper, and a normal scientific calculator, assimung you know what you're doing. Cheap $20 scientific calculators are much faster to use (no menus at all) and decent ones can solve matricies, systems of equations, numeric integration, etc...
Many of the best engineers and math students i know use a similar combination, it seems that graphing calcs are more popluar among the CS and Comp eng students who don't do much serious math...
But i do agree that a PDA would be useless for math, it has none of the advantages of a laptop, and all the disadvantages of a graphing calculator
The difference in quality between compression formats is negilible compared to other factors in the players-
First of all, portables are typically used in noisy environments or outdoors, which makes any losses by the compression impossible to hear. A few "golden ears" can tell the difference between ATRAC, MP3 and.WAV at their highest quality settings, but only in a perfectly quiet environoment, and likely only using $$$$ speakers/headphones. Remove the bulky equipment and add some ambient noise, and no one can tell the difference.
More importantly, the quality of analog section of the playback chain- ie the DAC, the headphone amplifier, and most importantly of all, the headphones themselves, affect the sound way more than the digital section. I'm amazed at the number of people who spend $400 on an Ipod, only to use those crap earbuds, when you could get better sound with a 25 year old walkman (or a cheap MP3 player and very low bitrates) and a $50 set of headphones like the sennheiser PX-250 or Koss Portapro.
The main reason people say minidisc sounds better than MP3 is not because its a superiour compression method (do a test with a high quality MP3 setup (LAME, optical/coax output, external DAC, seperate headphone amplifier), and MP3 will win at every bitrate), but because minidisc players have far superior amplifiers and DACs than the cheap MP3 players/soundcards people used to test MP3's.
Some minidisc players sound better than portable CD players, simply because they have better electronics, and this more than make up for the use of lossy compression. And they sound better than virtually all MP3 players- even most of the high priced HD based players typically have poor analog sections (IE done by the DSP/microcontroler/digital engineer on a tight budget (both in terms of money and power consumption) instead of an analog specialist).
Why not spend the advertising budget on upgrading the 25cent opamp or the $2 earbuds bundled with those players?
In addition, some studies (admittedly supported/publicised by Ti, the maker of DLP chips) have shown that that the LCD crystals themselves wear down after long exposure to the intense heat from the projector bulb. This is of more importance to business/university LCD projectors that use very intense bulbs and are used 8 hours a day, but would likely affect rear projection TV's as well.
So in addition to replacing the bulb every 3-5 years, the entire TV may be unwatchable after 10 years of regular use.
I'd rather wait a few years for LCD or OLED flat panels to reach large sizes, as they should offer better image quality and be much more reliable, though i don't think too many slashdotters watch enough TV to worry about burning it out:)
The wrights build upon the developments of others in the science of aerodynamics, and made many significant engineering achivements (prop design, wing warping, etc) but they did not invent the whole or were the first to gather experimental evidence-
http://www.nasm.si.edu/wrightbrothers/fly/1900/des igning.cfm
The main achievement of the wright brothers was designing the plane as an entire system, systematically solving all of the problems of flight together instead of addressing only small parts of the problem. In other words, they brought proper "engineering" to the development of the airplane, instead of simply experimenting on a hobbiest level. Many people were working on powered flight at the same time, the wrights were the most succesful of the group; and you can make up definitions like "first flight", "first heavier than air flight", "first heavier than air powered flight", first heavier than air powered controled flight", etc, to give any of the inventors the title of "first flight".
But all this nationalistic flag-waving crap is stupid, why does it matter if an American, or a Brazilian or even a French person invented flight 100 years ago. Its obvious that many people all over the world were involved in the development of flight over the entire history of mankind-each development builds on the developments of those who came before them.
we should all be proud of the achivements of the wrights, the "brazillian eccentric", and everyone else involved, as they are a testiment to the ingenuity and perserverence of all people. I remeber hearing a quote from an early boeing airplane designer, where said something along the lines of "the greatest achievement of the airplane is that it brings the world together- if people now have a chance to fly around the world, and see firsthand the cultures and lifestyles of people on the opposite side world, this understanding would stop wars from developing- If you know and understand people in a place, you will not want to drop bombs on them"
Today, this looks like nothing more than wishful thinking, as few people use that opportunity to travel and choose to remain closed off in their own little worlds, while airplanes being used mostly for commercial reasons or millitary purposes(for both the terrorsts and the industrialized nations)
There's a huge difference between installing a heatsink once and doing it millions of times on an industrial scale. As an owner of an athlon with no heatspeader, i'm sure you understand how delicate the die on the chip is, and designing a robotic system to gently install heatsinks, clip them down, run the test, and remove the heatsink thousands of times a second will probably cost more than a fancy cooling system.
What range of temperatures can you obtain with a peltier junction crudely connected to a heatsink? Most chips are rated for operation from 0c to 100c, and certainly need to be tested far beyond this range to predict reliability or to speed bin/grade the parts.
And even if the temperature range could be achieved, waiting for the temperature change at the peltier end of the heat sink to conduct through the heatsink and affect the core temperature means waiting for an extremely long period of time. IF this slows down the testing process, that loss in productivity would cost far more than the cost of an advanced cooling system.
The parent's post makes a lot of sense, and i don't see any reason for your attack....
The shanghai system is definately not going to be just a test system- you can tell by its route- connecting the airport to the downtown of China's commercial centre, and trains scheduled to run every 10 minutes.
Its already given 50 000 "demonstration rides", and is scheduled to open in the next month or so (Jan 2004)
Of course, the practicality still needs to be proven, and this system will go a long way into showing the viability of the system.
"First, I didn't sign up for that job... they did and it was their choice. I thought about it, but decided against it so I could get a CE and EE degree."
Gee, i wonder how many of those soldiers, given the choice of studing electronics or getting shot at, would choose the latter.
Most people who sign up for millitary service (ie department of DEFENSE) do so under the belief that they will risk their lives to protect the country's security. Others simply have no other way to make ends meet. Yes, they signed up for this "job", but trust that if they lose their lives, it will go to a worthwhile cause.
the governemnt, and by extension its citizens, has the responsibility to make sure that these armed forces are used in a responsible way, and that the loss of lives resulting from a war is less than the cost of inaction.
So just because they agreed to a job with some risk does not mean the governement doesn't responsibility to protect their lives and only put them at risk when it is absolutely necessary.
"make up your mind"
Or maybe you should develop some reading comprehension skills. For a supposed enginineer, your logic and reasoning skills are pretty poor. My whole point was that starting wars to remove "governements that aren't doing its job" has never been, and never will be a part of US foreign policy. Actually, its illegal under international law, what gives you the right to decide which governments in the world are "doing its job"? This war was never about liberating the poor iraqi people, or WMD, or terrorism, or any of the other explanations the government has tried to use in the past. My point about conservatives was that that this justification of saving the poor iraqi people is entirely contrary to their beliefs, so when the conservative government uses it as a justification for war, a rational persion would question that justification. (look up the quote from bush, from before he got elected, that said roughly "one reason we're often viewed around the world as the big bad american, a bully, is because we say to countries, 'we do things this way, so should you'") Your not doing your country any favors by blindly accepting everything the governemnt feeds you.
"When you have a government that gasses and kills its own people, then the government isn't doing its job and must be removed."
I find it really strange that conservatives are using this line of reasoning. I always thought spending huge amounts of money humanitarian purposes/foreign aid was a liberal policy. I wonder if the US, if they are acting on principle as they now claim, are going to be consistant and plan on "liberating" Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, DR congo, North Korea, and probably dozens of other countries which the media completely ignores
And funny how you write off soldiers lives as "part of their jobs they signed up for" while you sit at home typing safely away at your computer. These are people who put their lives on the line because they a) love their country so much or b)it is their only hope for an education/better future. It makes me sick that you belive it is their duty to sacrifice their lives to protect "your life and your well being" while you do nothing in return.
Funny how armchair war supporters like you call yourselves patriotic while anyone who questions the governemnt and tries to bring up debate on whether their sacrifice is going to a worthwhile cause is automatically labled a traitor.
Slashdot Mirror
But what country that has the technology, education, and economic prosperity to develop modern ICBM technology would even think of nuking the US? What would would they stand to gain from doing that? And isn't the US arsenal of 10000 nukes more than enough of a detterent?
The only way the US will get nuked is from terrorists, and the missile defnse is useless against them.
The only people who have ballistic missiles are soverign contries, and they are not going to use them against the US, simply because the US could bury them with 10000 of them. Mutually assured destruction has kept the world safe.
A missile defense shield will only start a new arms rage- China only has 20 missiles that can reach the US, and they are all liquid fueled, all of which can be easily stoped by a defense shield. This will force them to develop solid fueled missiles, and hundreds of them, to maintain the current strategic position. This will also force Russia, India, Pakastan, and any other aspiring world power to follow suit. Most physicists are sure that solid fueled missiles are impossible to defend against, so the net result will be a massive proliferation of nuclear technology with no added protection for the US.
And of course, as 9/11 showed, its not soverign nations with ICBM's that threaten the US, its underground terrorists organizations that do. If the hundreds of billions of dollars required for the system was spent on intellegence, homeland security, or NOT pissing off everyone else in the world, you'd be much safer than with a missile shield.
Of course, the missile defense shield never had anything to do with protecting citizens- its always been about extending the american hedgemony, giving it's leaders uncontested nuclear superiority.
Well, if the purpose of a tax cut is to boost the economy, then aiming the tax cuts to the lower 50% of the population will have a much larger economic impact than the upper 50%.
Simply because the poorer people will need to spend all of that extra money, creating extra jobs.
Give that same amount of money to a multi-millionare, and its just going to pad his bank account. Sure a small portion of it will be reinvested into the economy, but it will not create as many jobs as if all of that money was spent directly.
I agree,
Back in the late 90's, when Nortel and JDS uniphase where booming, almost half of our engineering physics program were immediately hired by those two companies upon graduation. (i'm from a Canadian school, so those two companies are basically the entire networking industry here... in the US you'll have many more choices) Electrical engineering, communications option would also be a good bet.
It all depends on what you want to do with your career- if you mean networking as in setting up networks for businesses, then a cert is all you need. But if you actually want to design future networks and develop new technologies, then a Bachelor's in engineering or graduate work in physics/math is the only way to get there.
Would this be the same school (Queen's) that offers Computer science, Biomedical computng, Computer Engineering, Applied Math-Computing option, and Engineering Physics Computer option :)
Attenuated viruses sensitize your immune system against that specific virus, so that it can effectively defend against future infection FROM THAT SAME VIRUS (or the full strength, unattenuated version).
Both virsues cause damage to your body, and the only reason for innocuation is its better to get sick from the weaker one rather than the stronger one. In no case does it ever help your body.
No known virus performs a postive biological role like the parent poster was implying, IE they are not capable of synthesizing essential compounds or directly preventing colonization of dangerous microbes- bacteria like S.aureus, E.coli, etc are directly required for survival.
I agree, most of what you hear in the mass media about nanotechnology is greatly exagerated. Almost every post here is confusing nano-structured materials, which is just starting to arrive commercially today, and what most on slashdot consider true nanotechnology. (the only thing in common is small size- nanoscale materials is simply dumb materials made to smaller scales (technically 90nm chip production falls into this catagory) while nanotechnology involves computation, mechanics, and electronics at those small scales)
True nanotechnology, ie miniture robots, is not even close to being feasible with today's technology, and i doubt anything close to an autonomous device will be created in 25 years. Grey goo is a potential problem with this true nanotechnology, but it is so far off that any discussion is simply science fiction until nanobots become remotely possible.
On the otherhand, the behaviour of "nanoscale/nanostructured materials" (basically the extension of materials science to smaller scales) is something that needs to be addressed immediately- carbon nanotube production is increasing rapidly, and many commercial products already use nanoscale materials. These chemicals are too small to be decomposed by bacteria (nature's way of cleaning up most contaminents) or attacked by our immune system, so they could really build up and cause long-term damage in the same way as DDT or heavy metals in the food chain. Combined with the novel properties of these materials, there really is a serious concern that must be addressed by new regulations and new testing procedures.
Comming from a country that actually uses metric, there simply isn't the same confusion between force and mass as occurs in a system that uses US/imperial units.
In the US, yes, pounds are used for both mass and weight, but that has never been true with SI units.
I've never heard anyone say "weighing kilograms".
The "unwashed masses" don't confuse it either- when they buy a box that says "1 kilogram", they are thinking about the quantity of matter inside the box, not the force of gravity acting on it.
So mass is the natural way we all understand things 'in everyday use', and the imperial system of using units of FORCE (pounds) to describe mass is the source of confusion. This does not occur in SI, no one thinks of a force when we talk about kilograms. (just like no one would think of a force if you were talking about 'Slugs')
And anyways, the only people who could possibly put a set of scales on mars would be people who understand the most basic physics. IF you ever got into a discussion about gravity on other planets, then that would be a good time to explain to the "unwashed masses" the difference between force and mass.
Huh?
The 30 km/s mentioned by the parent poster is a VELOCITY, while you're referring to a rate of change of velocity, ie ACCELERATION. The poster was referring to the velocity of the gas leaving the thruster, which is totally different from either the velocity or acceleration of the craft.
From that information alone, you can not figure out the acceleration of the ship, as you also need to know the mass/mass flow rate of the particles leaving the thruster. Actually, ion thrusters have extremely low acceleration because of the incredibly small quantities of mass involved. The key advantage is that they don't need to carry much fuel, and over long periods of time, the acceleration adds up. However, there's no way you could use it for a manned mission to mars, or ANY "fast trip" period.
Unfortunately, i doubt there will ever be a digital output for high-res audio.
Look at any of the commercial DVD-audio or SACD players available- none of them support digital output at 192khz/24bit. If one was available, anyone could bypass the huge amounts of DRM/watermarking on those new discs, and make bit-perfect copies by simply plugging it into your soundcard/dat recorder.
Anyways, the S/PDIF standard doesn't support bit rates high enough for 192/24 audio, so an entirely new format would have to be made, and somehow i doubt the RIAA will allow one to be made.
Of course, digital output at 44.1/16, (well AC'97 resamples it to 48khz) will still be available, and that's more than good enough for 99.999% of the market.
So basically, this high-res stuff is nothing more than a marketing ploy, there is no way you can achieve 24-bit performance on a noisy switching powesupply while blasted by EMI, reproduced by a 99 cent DAC/opamp chip. (well there's no way to achive 24 bit performance period at room temperature, since the johnston resistor noise of any system is greater than the resolution of a 24bit system, but that's another matter altogether)
DSD is just sony's proprietary high resolution format (ie they wanted to start yet another format war, dividing up the 100 or so people intersted in high-res audio between DVD-A and SACD).
The difference between DSD and PCM (used in CD's and DVD-A) really isn't as great as the marketing people try to tell you. In fact, virtually all CD/dvd/DVD-A players made in the last 10 years (excluding some extremely expensive audiophile stuff) convert the PCM to a DSD-like format in the digital to analog conversion process. Any player that says "1-bit dac", "delta sigma" do this.
Basically, PCM stores the data at relatively low rates (44.1, 96, or 192 khz) but takes each mesurement to a high resolution (16 bits or 24 bits). In contrast, DSD samples the signal at several megahertz, but the value stored can only be 1 or 0 (ie 1 bit resolution). Mathematically, the two are basically equivilent once the appropriate filters are applied.
The main reason for DSD is that it is much cheaper to manufacturer high speed digital chips than it is to manufacture precise analog chips. So you can get a much better price/performance ratio by using the DSD format, since the 1-bit DAC is an all digital circuit. (on or off)
So basically everyting you use converts the sound to DSD at the DAC stage, the only area where it makes a difference. All of the mathematical conversions between PCM and DSD are essentially lossess, so it doesn't matter what format the data is stored in on the disc.
However, what does matter is the total amount of information stored on the disc. DVD-A holds 4.7 gigs of audio, while Sony's SACD only holds about 1.5 gig. There is basically no way that SACD can beat DVD-A when it stores that much less information.
Anyways, all of this is very academic, only the most expensive audiophile speakers could possibly show a difference between CD, DVD-A, and SACD, and 99% of the poplulation doesn't own/doesn't want to own such equipment. Playing back these formats on a computer is worthless as they will have to pass through the noisy computer environment ( digital outputs not allowed on high-res formats to prevent piracy).
For any EE's out there, calculate the Johnston resistor noise in a typical system, and compare it to the resolution obtained by 24 bit sampling. You'll find that 24 bits is overkill even in an ideal noise-free environment, and inside a computer, the huge amounts of powersupply, EMI and acoustic noise, means that high-res audio in a computer is simply a marketing ploy.
Really?
My compaq evo (corporate model) didn't have any 3rd party software on it in the default install. Just windows XP pro, the online user manual/compaq config program, and the drivers for all the hardware.
Everything else (win DVD, CD burning software, office, antivirus, etc) came on seperate CD's, and the user can choose whether to install it. Those come preinstalled on the notebook (but not if you restore the computer from the backup discs) but there's still not a single piece of bloatware/3rd party software. Memory usage was less than 100 megs on XP on the brand new computer!
Maybe the crap they sell at best buy is different, but you're making the same blanket statements as the original poster
Unfortunately, the trend for laptops is that they simply stop selling old models, rather than drop the price. With today's Just In Time business model, most manufacturers simply mantain the prices and bump up the specs slightly, rather than making a big price cut.
Laptops rarely drop in price by more than $200-300 over their lives, unless you're lucky enough to find one on clearance or pick up a used one. For example, a P3 ~1 ghz laptop would probably be enough for most people, but good luck finding anything less than 2ghz these days.
That said, the last year has seen all laptop prices drop drastically from the levels they were at for the last 10 years or so, most likely due to the drop in the prices of the LCD's, so many good laptops are in the $1500 range now. ( 2 years ago, you could only get the crappiest entry level celeron/duron laptops for that price)
You'd need one massive astroid to make the entire world less hospitible than mars or the moon. In fact, the lack of oxygen on those places means the bottom of the ocean, the middle of the sahara desert, or antarctica are all better places to go than mars.
Fido sucks- they have no transmission towers outside of the major cities, and even within the cities, they have significantly poorer reception/signal strength than ANY of its competitors. My fido phone could not be used outside of toronto (unless i paid 75 cents a minute for analog), forcing me to change carriers to telus. I've never looked back, as their coverage is way better anyways. Fido does give the cheapest prices for new phones, but over a 2 year plan the price difference is negligible, and you have to live with terrible service. And for any of the new phone deals, you do have to agree to a 2-3 year plan (ie identical to a contract) to get the $200-300 discount off the phone. If you want to change plans/carriers, you'll have to pay back the difference.
Just to nitpick, the coriolis effect has absolutely nothing to do with gravity or rising gases. Its a "fictious force" that occurs as a result of observations taken in a rotating (ie not an inertial system) reference frame, such as the rotating earth. In everyday life, you do not experience any coriolis effect; if you did you would be aware that the earth is rotating under you- Instead, you're probably confusing the coriolis effect on global mases of air, which results in circulation cells that span vast distances... What you're describing, the fact that hot air rises, is simply due to the difference in density of the heated gas, ie basic fluid mechanics.
Depends on what work you do (i'm an engineering physics student)
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Running maple for symbolic stuff and matlab for numeric calculations is significantly faster than a graphing calculator for any moderately complex problem- you don't need to mess around with menus or second function keys, and typing on a full size qwerty keyboard is much faster than messing around with tiny calculator keys. And not to mention the huge increase in processing power.
Any problem that is faster on a graphing calculator, is probably simple enough to solve even faster using pencil, paper, and a normal scientific calculator, assimung you know what you're doing. Cheap $20 scientific calculators are much faster to use (no menus at all) and decent ones can solve matricies, systems of equations, numeric integration, etc...
Many of the best engineers and math students i know use a similar combination, it seems that graphing calcs are more popluar among the CS and Comp eng students who don't do much serious math
But i do agree that a PDA would be useless for math, it has none of the advantages of a laptop, and all the disadvantages of a graphing calculator
The difference in quality between compression formats is negilible compared to other factors in the players-
.WAV at their highest quality settings, but only in a perfectly quiet environoment, and likely only using $$$$ speakers/headphones. Remove the bulky equipment and add some ambient noise, and no one can tell the difference.
First of all, portables are typically used in noisy environments or outdoors, which makes any losses by the compression impossible to hear. A few "golden ears" can tell the difference between ATRAC, MP3 and
More importantly, the quality of analog section of the playback chain- ie the DAC, the headphone amplifier, and most importantly of all, the headphones themselves, affect the sound way more than the digital section. I'm amazed at the number of people who spend $400 on an Ipod, only to use those crap earbuds, when you could get better sound with a 25 year old walkman (or a cheap MP3 player and very low bitrates) and a $50 set of headphones like the sennheiser PX-250 or Koss Portapro.
The main reason people say minidisc sounds better than MP3 is not because its a superiour compression method (do a test with a high quality MP3 setup (LAME, optical/coax output, external DAC, seperate headphone amplifier), and MP3 will win at every bitrate), but because minidisc players have far superior amplifiers and DACs than the cheap MP3 players/soundcards people used to test MP3's.
Some minidisc players sound better than portable CD players, simply because they have better electronics, and this more than make up for the use of lossy compression. And they sound better than virtually all MP3 players- even most of the high priced HD based players typically have poor analog sections (IE done by the DSP/microcontroler/digital engineer on a tight budget (both in terms of money and power consumption) instead of an analog specialist).
Why not spend the advertising budget on upgrading the 25cent opamp or the $2 earbuds bundled with those players?
oops, forgot to post the link: http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3998,a= 41131,00.asp
In addition, some studies (admittedly supported/publicised by Ti, the maker of DLP chips) have shown that that the LCD crystals themselves wear down after long exposure to the intense heat from the projector bulb. This is of more importance to business/university LCD projectors that use very intense bulbs and are used 8 hours a day, but would likely affect rear projection TV's as well.
:)
So in addition to replacing the bulb every 3-5 years, the entire TV may be unwatchable after 10 years of regular use.
I'd rather wait a few years for LCD or OLED flat panels to reach large sizes, as they should offer better image quality and be much more reliable, though i don't think too many slashdotters watch enough TV to worry about burning it out
The wrights build upon the developments of others in the science of aerodynamics, and made many significant engineering achivements (prop design, wing warping, etc) but they did not invent the whole or were the first to gather experimental evidence- http://www.nasm.si.edu/wrightbrothers/fly/1900/des igning.cfm
The main achievement of the wright brothers was designing the plane as an entire system, systematically solving all of the problems of flight together instead of addressing only small parts of the problem. In other words, they brought proper "engineering" to the development of the airplane, instead of simply experimenting on a hobbiest level. Many people were working on powered flight at the same time, the wrights were the most succesful of the group; and you can make up definitions like "first flight", "first heavier than air flight", "first heavier than air powered flight", first heavier than air powered controled flight", etc, to give any of the inventors the title of "first flight".
But all this nationalistic flag-waving crap is stupid, why does it matter if an American, or a Brazilian or even a French person invented flight 100 years ago. Its obvious that many people all over the world were involved in the development of flight over the entire history of mankind-each development builds on the developments of those who came before them.
we should all be proud of the achivements of the wrights, the "brazillian eccentric", and everyone else involved, as they are a testiment to the ingenuity and perserverence of all people. I remeber hearing a quote from an early boeing airplane designer, where said something along the lines of "the greatest achievement of the airplane is that it brings the world together- if people now have a chance to fly around the world, and see firsthand the cultures and lifestyles of people on the opposite side world, this understanding would stop wars from developing- If you know and understand people in a place, you will not want to drop bombs on them"
Today, this looks like nothing more than wishful thinking, as few people use that opportunity to travel and choose to remain closed off in their own little worlds, while airplanes being used mostly for commercial reasons or millitary purposes(for both the terrorsts and the industrialized nations)
There's a huge difference between installing a heatsink once and doing it millions of times on an industrial scale. As an owner of an athlon with no heatspeader, i'm sure you understand how delicate the die on the chip is, and designing a robotic system to gently install heatsinks, clip them down, run the test, and remove the heatsink thousands of times a second will probably cost more than a fancy cooling system.
What range of temperatures can you obtain with a peltier junction crudely connected to a heatsink? Most chips are rated for operation from 0c to 100c, and certainly need to be tested far beyond this range to predict reliability or to speed bin/grade the parts.
And even if the temperature range could be achieved, waiting for the temperature change at the peltier end of the heat sink to conduct through the heatsink and affect the core temperature means waiting for an extremely long period of time. IF this slows down the testing process, that loss in productivity would cost far more than the cost of an advanced cooling system.
The parent's post makes a lot of sense, and i don't see any reason for your attack....
The shanghai system is definately not going to be just a test system- you can tell by its route- connecting the airport to the downtown of China's commercial centre, and trains scheduled to run every 10 minutes. Its already given 50 000 "demonstration rides", and is scheduled to open in the next month or so (Jan 2004) Of course, the practicality still needs to be proven, and this system will go a long way into showing the viability of the system.
"First, I didn't sign up for that job... they did and it was their choice. I thought about it, but decided against it so I could get a CE and EE degree."
Gee, i wonder how many of those soldiers, given the choice of studing electronics or getting shot at, would choose the latter.
Most people who sign up for millitary service (ie department of DEFENSE) do so under the belief that they will risk their lives to protect the country's security. Others simply have no other way to make ends meet. Yes, they signed up for this "job", but trust that if they lose their lives, it will go to a worthwhile cause.
the governemnt, and by extension its citizens, has the responsibility to make sure that these armed forces are used in a responsible way, and that the loss of lives resulting from a war is less than the cost of inaction.
So just because they agreed to a job with some risk does not mean the governement doesn't responsibility to protect their lives and only put them at risk when it is absolutely necessary.
"make up your mind"
Or maybe you should develop some reading comprehension skills. For a supposed enginineer, your logic and reasoning skills are pretty poor. My whole point was that starting wars to remove "governements that aren't doing its job" has never been, and never will be a part of US foreign policy. Actually, its illegal under international law, what gives you the right to decide which governments in the world are "doing its job"? This war was never about liberating the poor iraqi people, or WMD, or terrorism, or any of the other explanations the government has tried to use in the past. My point about conservatives was that that this justification of saving the poor iraqi people is entirely contrary to their beliefs, so when the conservative government uses it as a justification for war, a rational persion would question that justification. (look up the quote from bush, from before he got elected, that said roughly "one reason we're often viewed around the world as the big bad american, a bully, is because we say to countries, 'we do things this way, so should you'") Your not doing your country any favors by blindly accepting everything the governemnt feeds you.
"When you have a government that gasses and kills its own people, then the government isn't doing its job and must be removed."
I find it really strange that conservatives are using this line of reasoning. I always thought spending huge amounts of money humanitarian purposes/foreign aid was a liberal policy. I wonder if the US, if they are acting on principle as they now claim, are going to be consistant and plan on "liberating" Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, DR congo, North Korea, and probably dozens of other countries which the media completely ignores
And funny how you write off soldiers lives as "part of their jobs they signed up for" while you sit at home typing safely away at your computer. These are people who put their lives on the line because they a) love their country so much or b)it is their only hope for an education/better future. It makes me sick that you belive it is their duty to sacrifice their lives to protect "your life and your well being" while you do nothing in return.
Funny how armchair war supporters like you call yourselves patriotic while anyone who questions the governemnt and tries to bring up debate on whether their sacrifice is going to a worthwhile cause is automatically labled a traitor.