Several years back I built a MIDI interface for my trusty Amiga 1000, using a circuit design from a magazine.
I carefully etched the board by hand and manually drilled all the holes, only to discover to my horror that I'd printed the board upside down. So, rather than waste time doing the board over, I bent the pins of all the chips 180 degrees and mounted them upside down! Worked like a charm!
Just wondering, even though the atmosphere is only 0.000524% Helium, would it still be possible to extract enough from the surrounding air to keep the airship pumped up? Could probably stay aloft for months at a time then...
OK I'll bite. For a start, you've got to control the vehicle in some way. The rules state it can't go over a certain speed and they need a remote shutdown capability for safety. It needs to work out when to speed up, slow down and give way to traffic. Real tricky over uneven terrain.
Also, the laser range finder might work if you were driving through a tunnel, but in this case it's very hard to work out where the edge of the road is because there are no walls. What's the range finder going to bounce off? I've ridden a trail bike through bush north of Sydney and found myself turning onto a fire break on more than one occasion. Dried creek beds, cleared paths under powerlines etc make the pathfinding stuff really hard unless you've mapped the terrain in advance. The team that did that spent serious coin on aerial surveillance, storage and mapping. They need this because the SatNav will only be providing waypoints, not a full path.
Obstacles are also a nightmare. It's pretty hard to recognise a barbed wire fence at speed. So you're going to need some very good visual recognition software and some pretty serious processing power to do it in real time. It may not even be possible yet, though I'd love to be proved wrong!
There are some good suggestions here, but ultimately there's only so much you can do because sociability and empathy for others is a form of intelligence in itself. The "intelligence" people talk about is academic, but there are plenty of other forms - sporting ability, languages, musical ability, spatial awareness and - definately - social ability.
In my experience, many "geeks" have a huge amount of academic intelligence but poor social intelligence. So when it comes to improving their social skills, it's like teaching your grandmother how to configure a router. Possible, but likely painful.
The thing with all the different intelligence/ability types is that people usually learn to avoid the areas where they're weak because it's a recipe for humiliation. How many jocks study advanced maths for example? I don't buy the argument that nerds are poor at social skills because they're not interested. I think they're very interested - they just haven't got a clue!
I guess the best approach is to get your charge into an environment that's outside his usual peer group but still in an environment where he won't be put down or discouraged.
If black is truly black and distinct from reflective that would be very cool. Not sure how they'd do it though - I suspect black would be reflective making Film Noir almost impossible to view on sunny days!
I've used a few net cafes around the world and I'm pretty paranoid about key loggers recording my passwords, so I use a similar trick:
When typing in a password, I add a few extra characters in the middle and then highlight the extra characters with the mouse. When you type the last few (valid) characters of the password the highlighted characters are automatically deleted and you can login - but a key logger won't know which characters are valid or not.
One of the problems with physical prints is that the studios often save money by sending second hand prints to foreign markets after the opening weekends in the US. It's simple economics really, if each print costs the distributor $1200 to make, and the number of cinemas each movie plays at drops fairly quickly after it's initial release, they can save by shipping the excess prints a few weeks or even months later to foreign markets. This is particularly common with small budget and independent films.
The flow on effect is that DVD releases of the movies also end up staggered between markets - which I've always figured was one of the main reasons for studios wanting regional encoding on DVDs.
My big hope for digital projection is that it will eliminate the need for staggered release schedules and regional encoding - as movies will be able to be released world wide if needed for negligable additional cost. Obviously the studios will save a packet along the way too. So they should pay for it.
Re:Alternative medicine kooks
on
Cyberchondria
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· Score: 1
It's really amazing how fraud is illegal, but alternative medicine gets a special pass -- and medicine is an area where one would think that we *should* have some form of tough regulation.
Agreed. The unrestricted sale of herbal "remedies" is a classic example.
I think the solution is to ramp up clinical trials for alternative therapies. Not only to find out what works and what doesn't, but also to test harmful interreactions with conventional medicines.
Worse - Misdiagnosis from alternative therapists
on
Cyberchondria
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In Australia last week, a naturopath was convicted for manslaughter after telling a couple who's baby had a heart defect that he was cured. They cancelled an operation that could have saved the kid and he died. More here
IMO, misinformation is much worse than information overload. I know a few people who go to alternative therapists pretty much exclusively and get told an amazing load of bullshit. Sure, doctors don't have all the answers and their judgement is often skewed by the pharmaceutical industry peddling new expensive drugs. But I'll take their advice over the alternative snake oil salesmen any day.
He's probably a ham, donating his time, energy and knowledge to helping others by providing communications when every other system is down
Don't mean to troll, but isn't this argument a contradiction? If every other system is down, then you'd get no interference and HAM radio would work fine. If broadband over powerlines was running (and causing interference), then you could call for help using that connection.
Seems to me the only way this scenario can happen is when people are trapped somewhere without cell-phone or telephone access, broadband over powerlines is running through the area but nobody is connected to it or knows how to use a computer to call for help, including the HAM operator who's signal is jammed. Sounds more like a B movie plot than a real situation.
Broadband powerline interference is a problem granted. I think it could be bad for pilots on HF for example. But this oft-repeated scenario of the heroic HAM operator just doesn't make sense to me.
A related question, has anyone come out with a dv camera that records direct to a mini hard disk yet? Seems the next logical step given the great success of the iPod, but I haven't seen any.
Surely a 40GB+ drive would have big advantages in speed, durability and editing than the tape and dvd cameras. A simple camera/firewire combo that plugged into an iPod for realtime storage would be sweet.
I've negotiated over a dozen of these agreements in contracts around the world. In addition to the overbearing IP clauses, there's a couple of other things I regularly see that you should look out for:
1. Restraint of Trade clauses
This is where they say if you quit this job, you can't go work in the same field or for a competitor for a certain amount of time. In Australia (where I am) these clauses are unenforcable and illegal, but it may be different in the US and elsewhere. Some of the contracts I've been presented with were truly outrageous on this one - eg. You can't work in your field world-wide for a year. What a joke!
2. Anti-siphoning clauses
Mostly these are reasonable. eg. You can't pinch half the company's staff and go and start another company. Occassionally I see some shockers though. eg. I teach part-time for a training company and they wanted a 50% share of any consulting revenues I obtained from student leads, or any work I obtained from the company they worked for. Quite a stretch given that they're not in the consulting business.
And last of all, if you ask for $1 every time you hear the words, "It's just a standard contract" you'll retire a very rich man!
The most useful project I ever did in my CompSci degree was writing a compiler. It was written in C and compiled a cut down form of Pascal into PDP-11 assembly language. Taught me a hell of a lot about how data is stored, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value and the effect of good code on machine efficiency.
But the one thing that annoyed me in Computer Science was whenever we did the really low-level stuff, the lecturers would say, "We can leave the extra detail to the sparkies (Electronic Engineers)"
So in my final year of CompSci I did Electronic Engineering 100! I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to look below the "high level" of assembly language and see what's actually happening at the chip level. And if you want to get even more detail, there's alway quantam physics...
A better option would be to cache the article text or the generated HTML pages to RAM or disk. No reason to hit the database every time someone wants to read the same info.
Honestly, this is Content Management Systems 101. If the article changes, you flush the cache and the next hit goes off to the database to get the article again.
You're right. I should have checked the facts regarding thermal expansion as the culprit rather than drag. As far as carbon fibre goes I was just throwing that out as a wild guess given that the stuff's very strong, much more easily shaped and less prone to expansion than metal. I'll check my facts first next time:)
There's an interesting write-up on the SR-71 here which talks about the thermal expansion problems. Choice quote - "It was discovered during a Lockheed Skunk Works study to see how much money and development it would take to get the SR to go faster than it's designed top speed (mach 3.2-3.5) that the metal divider between the windshield was heating up so much above mach 3.5 that it was affecting the integrity of the windshield, and at that point they had stretched the glass technology to the maximum."
Arguably the bigger issue with getting a scramjet powered vehicle working is coming up with materials that aren't ripped apart by drag at that speed.
At cruise in the Concorde, you could apparently feel heat from the windows due to the air friction.
The SR-71's fuselage stretched over a foot at high speed. So if you're going faster again, you're going to need some pretty impressive materials to keep the fuselage together. I'm guessing metal's probably not up to it. Maybe some sort of woven carbon fibre like on the stealth bomber?
Nice one Pixar. Disney have just lost the goose that rendered the golden egg. I wonder how many more times Disney will be undone by their own greed?
Anyone hear about how Disney dropped out of Peter Pan because they didn't want to donate any money to a London children's hospital? The author of Peter Pan left the copyright to the hospital in his will. When the most recent movie was made, Disney believed it should be exempt from making any payment to the hospital from the sale of spin-off books, board games, soft toys and computer games, which are expected to generate tens of millions of dollars in their own right.
Pretty much everyone under the age of 25 only deals with litres, metres and kilograms.
Not quite. I lived in the UK for a couple of years and I was always amused at how people described temperatures in both Celcius and Fahrenheit - without realising that they were mixing the two!
If it was snowing they'd say "It's below 0". If it was "hot", they'd say "It's over 80 degrees".
I've also never understood why the Poms describe the age of a car by the first letter on it's license plate...
I worked in an ice cream shop for a summer back in my student days.
One of those days was the hottest day on record in Perth, Western Australia - 46.7C (116 F)
I had to throw out some rancid milk. This meant spending quality time amongst 3 industrial bins, all in the sun, which we shared with 1. a fruit shop and, you guessed it, 2. A fishmonger.
Mass of the moon = 7.36 x 10^22 kg (Source Hewitt, Paul G. Conceptual Physics. Addison-Wesley, 1987)
If you took 1000 tonnes of He3 off the moon, a serious undertaking to begin with, that would only be 1/73,600,000,000,000,000 of the moon's mass. In other words, it's REALLY not a problem. And if you're still worried about it, there's always the extra mass added each year by asteroids, solar wind etc.
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I carefully etched the board by hand and manually drilled all the holes, only to discover to my horror that I'd printed the board upside down. So, rather than waste time doing the board over, I bent the pins of all the chips 180 degrees and mounted them upside down! Worked like a charm!
I take it nobody walks to work where you live eh ;-)
Just wondering, even though the atmosphere is only 0.000524% Helium, would it still be possible to extract enough from the surrounding air to keep the airship pumped up? Could probably stay aloft for months at a time then...
Also, the laser range finder might work if you were driving through a tunnel, but in this case it's very hard to work out where the edge of the road is because there are no walls. What's the range finder going to bounce off? I've ridden a trail bike through bush north of Sydney and found myself turning onto a fire break on more than one occasion. Dried creek beds, cleared paths under powerlines etc make the pathfinding stuff really hard unless you've mapped the terrain in advance. The team that did that spent serious coin on aerial surveillance, storage and mapping. They need this because the SatNav will only be providing waypoints, not a full path.
Obstacles are also a nightmare. It's pretty hard to recognise a barbed wire fence at speed. So you're going to need some very good visual recognition software and some pretty serious processing power to do it in real time. It may not even be possible yet, though I'd love to be proved wrong!
In my experience, many "geeks" have a huge amount of academic intelligence but poor social intelligence. So when it comes to improving their social skills, it's like teaching your grandmother how to configure a router. Possible, but likely painful.
The thing with all the different intelligence/ability types is that people usually learn to avoid the areas where they're weak because it's a recipe for humiliation. How many jocks study advanced maths for example? I don't buy the argument that nerds are poor at social skills because they're not interested. I think they're very interested - they just haven't got a clue!
I guess the best approach is to get your charge into an environment that's outside his usual peer group but still in an environment where he won't be put down or discouraged.
If black is truly black and distinct from reflective that would be very cool. Not sure how they'd do it though - I suspect black would be reflective making Film Noir almost impossible to view on sunny days!
Actually I think Steve Irwin will be voted "Father of the Year" first.
When typing in a password, I add a few extra characters in the middle and then highlight the extra characters with the mouse. When you type the last few (valid) characters of the password the highlighted characters are automatically deleted and you can login - but a key logger won't know which characters are valid or not.
The flow on effect is that DVD releases of the movies also end up staggered between markets - which I've always figured was one of the main reasons for studios wanting regional encoding on DVDs.
My big hope for digital projection is that it will eliminate the need for staggered release schedules and regional encoding - as movies will be able to be released world wide if needed for negligable additional cost. Obviously the studios will save a packet along the way too. So they should pay for it.
All my holiday snaps keep coming out black
Agreed. The unrestricted sale of herbal "remedies" is a classic example.
I think the solution is to ramp up clinical trials for alternative therapies. Not only to find out what works and what doesn't, but also to test harmful interreactions with conventional medicines.
IMO, misinformation is much worse than information overload. I know a few people who go to alternative therapists pretty much exclusively and get told an amazing load of bullshit. Sure, doctors don't have all the answers and their judgement is often skewed by the pharmaceutical industry peddling new expensive drugs. But I'll take their advice over the alternative snake oil salesmen any day.
Don't mean to troll, but isn't this argument a contradiction? If every other system is down, then you'd get no interference and HAM radio would work fine. If broadband over powerlines was running (and causing interference), then you could call for help using that connection.
Seems to me the only way this scenario can happen is when people are trapped somewhere without cell-phone or telephone access, broadband over powerlines is running through the area but nobody is connected to it or knows how to use a computer to call for help, including the HAM operator who's signal is jammed. Sounds more like a B movie plot than a real situation.
Broadband powerline interference is a problem granted. I think it could be bad for pilots on HF for example. But this oft-repeated scenario of the heroic HAM operator just doesn't make sense to me.
Surely a 40GB+ drive would have big advantages in speed, durability and editing than the tape and dvd cameras. A simple camera/firewire combo that plugged into an iPod for realtime storage would be sweet.
1. Restraint of Trade clauses
This is where they say if you quit this job, you can't go work in the same field or for a competitor for a certain amount of time. In Australia (where I am) these clauses are unenforcable and illegal, but it may be different in the US and elsewhere. Some of the contracts I've been presented with were truly outrageous on this one - eg. You can't work in your field world-wide for a year. What a joke!
2. Anti-siphoning clauses
Mostly these are reasonable. eg. You can't pinch half the company's staff and go and start another company. Occassionally I see some shockers though. eg. I teach part-time for a training company and they wanted a 50% share of any consulting revenues I obtained from student leads, or any work I obtained from the company they worked for. Quite a stretch given that they're not in the consulting business.
And last of all, if you ask for $1 every time you hear the words, "It's just a standard contract" you'll retire a very rich man!
But the one thing that annoyed me in Computer Science was whenever we did the really low-level stuff, the lecturers would say, "We can leave the extra detail to the sparkies (Electronic Engineers)"
So in my final year of CompSci I did Electronic Engineering 100! I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to look below the "high level" of assembly language and see what's actually happening at the chip level. And if you want to get even more detail, there's alway quantam physics...
They tried this once, but all the geeks in the clean room started putting little orcs on the chips and played Dungeons and Dragons
Honestly, this is Content Management Systems 101. If the article changes, you flush the cache and the next hit goes off to the database to get the article again.
There's an interesting write-up on the SR-71 here which talks about the thermal expansion problems. Choice quote - "It was discovered during a Lockheed Skunk Works study to see how much money and development it would take to get the SR to go faster than it's designed top speed (mach 3.2-3.5) that the metal divider between the windshield was heating up so much above mach 3.5 that it was affecting the integrity of the windshield, and at that point they had stretched the glass technology to the maximum."
At cruise in the Concorde, you could apparently feel heat from the windows due to the air friction. The SR-71's fuselage stretched over a foot at high speed. So if you're going faster again, you're going to need some pretty impressive materials to keep the fuselage together. I'm guessing metal's probably not up to it. Maybe some sort of woven carbon fibre like on the stealth bomber?
Anyone hear about how Disney dropped out of Peter Pan because they didn't want to donate any money to a London children's hospital? The author of Peter Pan left the copyright to the hospital in his will. When the most recent movie was made, Disney believed it should be exempt from making any payment to the hospital from the sale of spin-off books, board games, soft toys and computer games, which are expected to generate tens of millions of dollars in their own right.
Read the full story here
So FUCK YOU Disney! Guess how much 50% of 0 is you bozos!
Good to see that justice can still be blind!
Not quite. I lived in the UK for a couple of years and I was always amused at how people described temperatures in both Celcius and Fahrenheit - without realising that they were mixing the two!
If it was snowing they'd say "It's below 0". If it was "hot", they'd say "It's over 80 degrees".
I've also never understood why the Poms describe the age of a car by the first letter on it's license plate...
One of those days was the hottest day on record in Perth, Western Australia - 46.7C (116 F)
I had to throw out some rancid milk. This meant spending quality time amongst 3 industrial bins, all in the sun, which we shared with 1. a fruit shop and, you guessed it, 2. A fishmonger.
I will take that smell to the grave!
Mass of the moon = 7.36 x 10^22 kg (Source Hewitt, Paul G. Conceptual Physics. Addison-Wesley, 1987)
If you took 1000 tonnes of He3 off the moon, a serious undertaking to begin with, that would only be 1/73,600,000,000,000,000 of the moon's mass. In other words, it's REALLY not a problem. And if you're still worried about it, there's always the extra mass added each year by asteroids, solar wind etc.