Perhaps they are behind where you were in terms of rote numeracy, but perhaps they have a deeper understanding of numerical objects than you did at that age?
I've spent pretty much my entire engineering career (25 years and counting) doing digital signal processing for realtime systems (voice coders, radio modulation and demodulation, GPS, inertial navigation, and graphics tomfoolery) and over time I've developed a pretty good grasp on numerical objects, algebra, and calculus, in fixed point, floating point, and modular field arithmetic. Certainly I know that stuff a lot better now than when I graduated, and I can think back through my schooling and see what was and what wasn't effective, from the basics through to a decently high level of applied math.
What I see my kids being taught, is basically a shotgun approach; but they spend so much time blasting them with alternate methods for doing things, that there is no time to teach the kids the underlying fundamentals which might help them tie things together; and the kids get confused between the different parts of the different methods so that instead of learning one or two methods fully and practicing it until they have it cold, they learn five methods superficially and forget the solution processes two days after the math unit ends.
My kids went through the same thing with the multiple methods of doing multiplication... holy sh!t did it frustrate the hell out of the younger one because once he had figured out a method that was intuitive to him, all the other methods were just, in his opinion, superfluous wastes of time. Now I hear that the "new thought" is that, for some things such as basic single digit multiplication, rote memorization is in fact the most effective method and it leaves time free to work on higher level problems.
FWIW, I did my grade school curriculum in the Netherlands in the 70's and it was like this (from a math perspective): Grade1: Addition/subtraction; Grade2: Multiplication tables. Lots of recitation to drive the numbers into your head. Grade 3: Long division. Grade 4: Fractions. Grade 5: Decimals and bigger numbers. Grade 6: Common factor elimination in fractional expressions.
My kids are three to four years behind that timeline because of the unnecessary fluffery that seems to pervade North American education.
Rote memorization is enough for math, hey? As others have already remarked, that will not work so well with division. Or algebra, or any other form of applied math. Or pure math. But I guess Ohio doesn't need to produce any math prodigies from here on.
If you say "well, we can teach math methods so our kids don't have to be dumber than birds" then you have to teach logic (induction/deduction etc) so the kids can do proofs. Logical methods applied to everyday events (why do things fall?) begat the scientific method.
Having recently been involved in somewhat of an edit war (well, more of a "spirited discussion"... I'm in it for the long haul on behalf of my fellow Sunbeam Tiger owners), the "reliable citation" requirement is pretty much a nuclear handgrenade. Information is considered "reliable" if it's in a printed and published book by a "reliable source" which can be taken to mean "someone that writes a lot" - regardless of whether or not their writings are well researched in general or in particular. In our particular case, even appeals to demonstrable fact were treated with disdain because it was "original research" which is not permitted.
But they're not. SMS messages are sent over the control channel on the cellular network (which is why they use much less of the system infrastructure than a voice call, which requires assignment of a voice/data channel, etc.) and they can stay fully within the cellular phone system infrastructure. No email relays involved.
I used Suntools to create windowed apps on their workstations in about 1988... the first bunch were done by handcoding the panels, then someone came out with 'Tooltool' - and that basically did what most of the current form-creator GUIs do.
Ummm... orbital velocity is inversely proportional to its altitude above the earth. For LEO stuff, it's about 17,000 MPH (sorry about the units). If you want a faster velocity, you have to orbit lower, and then atmospheric drag would take it out within a few orbits. The moon's tangential velocity, relative to the earth, is only about 2700 km/h (or 1700 MPH).
OP clearly said, "... that CAN lock the wheel...", not, that *will* lock the wheel. The brakes should under all circumstances be able to provide enough torque on the wheels in order to stop the car, including being able to lock the wheels. How much of the ultimate stopping ability gets used, should be up to the driver or the ABS system. The failsafe on the ABS, by the way, should be (and as far as I know, this IS the case) that it cuts itself out of the loop and allows the driver to apply full hydraulic pressure to the brakes.
A problem with current driver ed is that people are still being taught to pump the brakes to prevent a skid. With ABS, this is counterproductive. Without ABS, it can help, but it's not as effective as threshold braking. The thing with pumping the brakes is that everytime you pump, you use some of the stored vacuum in the brake booster system. If you have the throttle wide open (as in a 'stuck accelerator' case) then the vacuum is not being replenished, and you probably have only one or two assisted stops worth of vacuum in the booster circuit, and the right thing to do is to get on the brakes HARD and then switch off the ignition, taking care not to click the key all the way through to where it locks the steering column. This is a technique that can easily be practiced in a wide open parking lot or driver's ed facility and it would save lives, or at the least some cars.
One thing that helps is to specifically look at damage mechanisms and then come up with a strategy that offers the best workaround. As an example, in the first-generation TDMA digital cellular phone standard, it was recognized that channel noise was typically bursty. You could lose much of one frame of data, but adjacent frames would be OK. So they encoded important data with a 4:1 forward error correction scheme, and then interleaved the encoded data over two frames. If you lost a frame, the de-interleaving process followed by a maximum-likelyhood data detector would still properly decode the data.
On a disk, a similar approach might be to use a 2:1 or 3:1 forward error correction and then interleave data over multiple sectors. If you wipe out a sector, you'd still have the data from the other sectors to recover from.
This would, of course, be implemented best at a low level on the disk drive controller. At high throughput rates, the amount of computation required for this scheme is substantial. But you don't get something for nothing.
Remember that they all have to apply. This isn't exactly sudo.
Not correct. Of the claims you listed, 1, 2, and 9 are independent claims and can stand alone. A competitive product that incorporated just the elements of, say, claim 9, would violate this patent. A prior art product that included the elements of claim 1 would invalidate claim 1 as an independent claim, but not necessarily the combinations of claim 1 and claim 13 or claim 1 and claim 14. Unless the dependent claims 13 and 14 were subsequently judged to be obvious in light of the earlier product that demonstrated claim 1.
To an aggressive patent prosecutor, "exactly" has nothing to do with it. The approach is "We've got this patent, see? Pay us the money or we'll sue until you're out of business".
Armadillo completed the challenge several months ago, but their landing accuracy was slightly worse than Masten's attempt. Masten completed the challenge only one day before the expiration of the contest, and was able to do it only because another competitor failed and the X prize foundation allowed Masten to use their launch window (they'd earlier used up their scheduled time slots without doing a successful flight). Armadillo didn't have time or launch permits to go back and improve their accuracy.
John Carmack was understandably disappointed in losing the $500K but is taking the long view that Masten needs the money more than they do, and they've already moved on to new projects.
Collecting exercise data and keeping it for later analysis or comparison can be a great motivational tool especially when you're in the early stages of an exercise program. On a day to day basis it may not feel like you're getting any more fit or going faster, but you can look at a trend line based on a month's data and clearly see that you're going farther, faster, and at a lower perceived effort level (or with a lower heart rate).
Some fitness metrics are hard to quantify based on a single exercise session, so it's worth it to have data for different days, doing different things.
Disclosure: I design and test fitness monitoring products for one of the companies mentioned by several of the posters. As a group we're some of the fittest nerds around.
The problem with any internal combustion engine is it's hard to control the combustion process so completely that you don't get any intermediate products out the tailpipe.
The GP said "the combustion products of methanol are relatively harmless" and that's the part I'm taking issue with - I think that because methanol can be cheaply synthesized from a number of different feedstocks, it's a good candidate for a gasoline substitute, and I've actually used M-85 blend in my race car. The higher octane number of methanol allows you to bump the compression ratio way up and gain some efficiency that way.
One of the reasons that methanol and ethanol produce fewer emissions than gasoline is that either of those alcohols is a much simpler molecule (just one or two carbons) while gasoline is actually a blend of 6- to 9-chain carbons, with varying amounts of branching. The reference "octane" molecule that has an octane number of 100 is actually a pentane with three methyl branches. So the number of intermediate products that are possible in gasoline combustion just boggles the mind, where methanol combustion really only has a couple of possibilities. I'm guessing that if methanol becomes a more common fuel in the future we'll see methanol specific catalysts in the exhaust and they will take care of the aldehyde problem... but in the meantime, methanol exhaust is not "relatively harmless".
The car will charge whenever the user plugs it into the wall... because otherwise the battery would be ballast for half the time and that's not how anyone will want to use it. Having the charger regulate itself according to some internal clock would simply be defeated by having the user reset the clock as required to get the car into the charging mode.
The only way that "charging at night" could be enforced is if the car-charging wall outlet was switched by the power utiltity...
I have an HP 204D oscillator and a Tek 500 series modular analog storage oscilloscope - the kind where they use a low-power flood gun in the CRT to keep the image. It does four channels plus triggering, and it's entirely adequate for low-speed signals and automotive testing.
True enough. My background is as an RC airplane hobbyist 'way back when, and more recently (10 years ago) involved with GPS and inertial navigation using a ring-laser gyro based IMU. When I posted I hadn't read the link that the poster gave... didn't realize it was an autopilot dev board, which is cool. The AUVSI contests (the company I worked for back then sponsored contestants by way of deals on GPS equipment) mostly featured helicopters, because the precision nav challenges in the contests required hover capability.
The building of an autonomous flying craft has been the subject of student competition for quite a while, but the focus has generally been on helicopters, simply because you can get them to stand still... doing a good inertial autopilot on an airplane is significantly more challenging.
The thing is that probably 95% of the Lint reports could have been fixed by the code designers, just by making appropriate declarations or a bit of type casting. The fact that 60% of the source is reported by Lint, indicates that the designers never bothered to do any kind of static code checking or to clean up warnings, and that points to a lack of care during development and testing.
At a previous job we had to buy a third-party driver for an embedded PCMCIA controller. The software vendor delivered code that (the first time around) produced about 1200 lines of warnings when we compiled it. We queried them about it and they responded that "we don't compile with warning output enabled". Our reply to them was that our coding standard was that the compile would fail on warnings, and we wouldn't accept their code unless they fixed all the warnings... they cleaned up their act, and fixed a couple of previously unresolved problems in the process.
I hope NOT. The 400 watt supply in your computer would draw 33 amps at 12 volts - actually more than that because its efficiency (at generating the 5V, 3.3V, and CPU core voltages) wouldn't be more than about 90 percent. 33 amps would cost you some significant power loss in the cable run from your breaker panel to the computer, unless you used some large (10 gauge or better) conductors. And all that copper would cost you a lot of dough.
The way forward is low-loss power conversion, from line voltage (120 or 240V) to X volts DC, at a high efficiency for both near-zero load (when your load is off) and the nominal active load. Power factor correction is going to become more than a nice-to-have, when a significant portion of the residential load is reactive and you start to get strange resonance effects between different appliances.
That kind of thinking may burn us all later. At our house we have cable Internet, a home Wi-Fi hub, and cordless phones. Unfortunately, all that stuff goes down when the power fails. It's not like I don't know how to work around it, but so far I haven't actually done anything about it, other than also having a couple of old-school line-powered phones wired up. However, the time may come when the local ISP's equipment suffers a lightning strike or there is a substantial infrastructure problem in town. Instantly, the internet is no more in our neck of the woods. At that point, having an alternate wireless packet network would be a good thing...
To comment on the article itself: What is really the problem is that the college instructors are convinced this is high technology and on the limits of what a student might achieve. I was a student project judge for our local deVry school a few years back, and they were designing amplifiers for EMG signals using that cutting-edge op-amp, the uA741. They didn't even know that there might be other, better opamps, simply because their instructors have no clue and can't even tell their students where to go look for stuff.
Nevermind that he's apparently ignoring the true cause of a lot of the "lost" power - which is in the various bandlimiting filters that any real cellphone pretty much can't do without. It's tough to get a good multiband filter that doesn't have 1 to 2 dB insertion loss. The apertures are also geometric, so you are automatically sensitive to odd-order harmonics in both directions.
And I wonder how his aperture's impedance matches the amplifier out of band? From what I've seen in bleeding-edge RF architectures over the last 20 years or so, it's far easier to make a poor oscillator than a good amplifier, with any given set of components.
The major point is that even the 4 watts is significant, because it's drawn continuously. If the console used 100 watts when it was on (ignoring for the moment whether or not that is the right number) and you use the console for one hour per day then you're using 100 watt-hours to run the console when it's active. Then, the other 23 hours per day, it's pulling 4 watts, using a further 92 watt-hours. So your total energy used per day is 192 watt-hours, and only about half of that is valuable in any sense at all.
The issue with that, is that the Stirling engine's efficiency is limited by the absolute temperature differential between the hot and cold side. So a perfect Stirling engine using waste heat from the engine's coolant (assuming for a moment it is maintained at 97 degrees C by a thermostat, and the ambient temperature wherever the engine is dumping its heat is 27 degrees C), will have a best case efficiency of 70/370 = 23% (of the approximately 30% of the heat wasted by the IC engine that is available in the coolant - the remainder goes out the exhaust). Then you have to convert that 23% into a useful form of work (let's say electrical energy) which incurs additional efficiency loss.
Not that there's anything wrong with that... using an extra 5 or 6 percent of the chemical energy in the fuel for useful output still counts, but there is a pretty high cost in money and weight associated with getting that extra energy out. If it's done in a vehicle you have to account for the decrease in acceleration efficiency due to the extra mass...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they're just not that smart....?
Sorry.
...
Perhaps they are behind where you were in terms of rote numeracy, but perhaps they have a deeper understanding of numerical objects than you did at that age?
I've spent pretty much my entire engineering career (25 years and counting) doing digital signal processing for realtime systems (voice coders, radio modulation and demodulation, GPS, inertial navigation, and graphics tomfoolery) and over time I've developed a pretty good grasp on numerical objects, algebra, and calculus, in fixed point, floating point, and modular field arithmetic. Certainly I know that stuff a lot better now than when I graduated, and I can think back through my schooling and see what was and what wasn't effective, from the basics through to a decently high level of applied math.
What I see my kids being taught, is basically a shotgun approach; but they spend so much time blasting them with alternate methods for doing things, that there is no time to teach the kids the underlying fundamentals which might help them tie things together; and the kids get confused between the different parts of the different methods so that instead of learning one or two methods fully and practicing it until they have it cold, they learn five methods superficially and forget the solution processes two days after the math unit ends.
FWIW, I did my grade school curriculum in the Netherlands in the 70's and it was like this (from a math perspective): Grade1: Addition/subtraction; Grade2: Multiplication tables. Lots of recitation to drive the numbers into your head. Grade 3: Long division. Grade 4: Fractions. Grade 5: Decimals and bigger numbers. Grade 6: Common factor elimination in fractional expressions.
My kids are three to four years behind that timeline because of the unnecessary fluffery that seems to pervade North American education.
Rote memorization is enough for math, hey? As others have already remarked, that will not work so well with division. Or algebra, or any other form of applied math. Or pure math. But I guess Ohio doesn't need to produce any math prodigies from here on. If you say "well, we can teach math methods so our kids don't have to be dumber than birds" then you have to teach logic (induction/deduction etc) so the kids can do proofs. Logical methods applied to everyday events (why do things fall?) begat the scientific method.
Having recently been involved in somewhat of an edit war (well, more of a "spirited discussion"... I'm in it for the long haul on behalf of my fellow Sunbeam Tiger owners), the "reliable citation" requirement is pretty much a nuclear handgrenade. Information is considered "reliable" if it's in a printed and published book by a "reliable source" which can be taken to mean "someone that writes a lot" - regardless of whether or not their writings are well researched in general or in particular. In our particular case, even appeals to demonstrable fact were treated with disdain because it was "original research" which is not permitted.
But they're not. SMS messages are sent over the control channel on the cellular network (which is why they use much less of the system infrastructure than a voice call, which requires assignment of a voice/data channel, etc.) and they can stay fully within the cellular phone system infrastructure. No email relays involved.
I used Suntools to create windowed apps on their workstations in about 1988... the first bunch were done by handcoding the panels, then someone came out with 'Tooltool' - and that basically did what most of the current form-creator GUIs do.
Ummm... orbital velocity is inversely proportional to its altitude above the earth. For LEO stuff, it's about 17,000 MPH (sorry about the units). If you want a faster velocity, you have to orbit lower, and then atmospheric drag would take it out within a few orbits. The moon's tangential velocity, relative to the earth, is only about 2700 km/h (or 1700 MPH).
A problem with current driver ed is that people are still being taught to pump the brakes to prevent a skid. With ABS, this is counterproductive. Without ABS, it can help, but it's not as effective as threshold braking. The thing with pumping the brakes is that everytime you pump, you use some of the stored vacuum in the brake booster system. If you have the throttle wide open (as in a 'stuck accelerator' case) then the vacuum is not being replenished, and you probably have only one or two assisted stops worth of vacuum in the booster circuit, and the right thing to do is to get on the brakes HARD and then switch off the ignition, taking care not to click the key all the way through to where it locks the steering column. This is a technique that can easily be practiced in a wide open parking lot or driver's ed facility and it would save lives, or at the least some cars.
On a disk, a similar approach might be to use a 2:1 or 3:1 forward error correction and then interleave data over multiple sectors. If you wipe out a sector, you'd still have the data from the other sectors to recover from.
This would, of course, be implemented best at a low level on the disk drive controller. At high throughput rates, the amount of computation required for this scheme is substantial. But you don't get something for nothing.
Not correct. Of the claims you listed, 1, 2, and 9 are independent claims and can stand alone. A competitive product that incorporated just the elements of, say, claim 9, would violate this patent. A prior art product that included the elements of claim 1 would invalidate claim 1 as an independent claim, but not necessarily the combinations of claim 1 and claim 13 or claim 1 and claim 14. Unless the dependent claims 13 and 14 were subsequently judged to be obvious in light of the earlier product that demonstrated claim 1.
To an aggressive patent prosecutor, "exactly" has nothing to do with it. The approach is "We've got this patent, see? Pay us the money or we'll sue until you're out of business".
John Carmack was understandably disappointed in losing the $500K but is taking the long view that Masten needs the money more than they do, and they've already moved on to new projects.
Some fitness metrics are hard to quantify based on a single exercise session, so it's worth it to have data for different days, doing different things.
Disclosure: I design and test fitness monitoring products for one of the companies mentioned by several of the posters. As a group we're some of the fittest nerds around.
The GP said "the combustion products of methanol are relatively harmless" and that's the part I'm taking issue with - I think that because methanol can be cheaply synthesized from a number of different feedstocks, it's a good candidate for a gasoline substitute, and I've actually used M-85 blend in my race car. The higher octane number of methanol allows you to bump the compression ratio way up and gain some efficiency that way.
One of the reasons that methanol and ethanol produce fewer emissions than gasoline is that either of those alcohols is a much simpler molecule (just one or two carbons) while gasoline is actually a blend of 6- to 9-chain carbons, with varying amounts of branching. The reference "octane" molecule that has an octane number of 100 is actually a pentane with three methyl branches. So the number of intermediate products that are possible in gasoline combustion just boggles the mind, where methanol combustion really only has a couple of possibilities. I'm guessing that if methanol becomes a more common fuel in the future we'll see methanol specific catalysts in the exhaust and they will take care of the aldehyde problem... but in the meantime, methanol exhaust is not "relatively harmless".
Linky to Wikipedia
The only way that "charging at night" could be enforced is if the car-charging wall outlet was switched by the power utiltity...
I have an HP 204D oscillator and a Tek 500 series modular analog storage oscilloscope - the kind where they use a low-power flood gun in the CRT to keep the image. It does four channels plus triggering, and it's entirely adequate for low-speed signals and automotive testing.
True enough. My background is as an RC airplane hobbyist 'way back when, and more recently (10 years ago) involved with GPS and inertial navigation using a ring-laser gyro based IMU. When I posted I hadn't read the link that the poster gave... didn't realize it was an autopilot dev board, which is cool. The AUVSI contests (the company I worked for back then sponsored contestants by way of deals on GPS equipment) mostly featured helicopters, because the precision nav challenges in the contests required hover capability.
Link to old contest stuff
At a previous job we had to buy a third-party driver for an embedded PCMCIA controller. The software vendor delivered code that (the first time around) produced about 1200 lines of warnings when we compiled it. We queried them about it and they responded that "we don't compile with warning output enabled". Our reply to them was that our coding standard was that the compile would fail on warnings, and we wouldn't accept their code unless they fixed all the warnings... they cleaned up their act, and fixed a couple of previously unresolved problems in the process.
The way forward is low-loss power conversion, from line voltage (120 or 240V) to X volts DC, at a high efficiency for both near-zero load (when your load is off) and the nominal active load. Power factor correction is going to become more than a nice-to-have, when a significant portion of the residential load is reactive and you start to get strange resonance effects between different appliances.
He needs to talk to the Blue Jeans cable guy who previously was a lawyer: the Monster Cable incident
To comment on the article itself: What is really the problem is that the college instructors are convinced this is high technology and on the limits of what a student might achieve. I was a student project judge for our local deVry school a few years back, and they were designing amplifiers for EMG signals using that cutting-edge op-amp, the uA741. They didn't even know that there might be other, better opamps, simply because their instructors have no clue and can't even tell their students where to go look for stuff.
Nevermind that he's apparently ignoring the true cause of a lot of the "lost" power - which is in the various bandlimiting filters that any real cellphone pretty much can't do without. It's tough to get a good multiband filter that doesn't have 1 to 2 dB insertion loss. The apertures are also geometric, so you are automatically sensitive to odd-order harmonics in both directions.
And I wonder how his aperture's impedance matches the amplifier out of band? From what I've seen in bleeding-edge RF architectures over the last 20 years or so, it's far easier to make a poor oscillator than a good amplifier, with any given set of components.
The major point is that even the 4 watts is significant, because it's drawn continuously. If the console used 100 watts when it was on (ignoring for the moment whether or not that is the right number) and you use the console for one hour per day then you're using 100 watt-hours to run the console when it's active. Then, the other 23 hours per day, it's pulling 4 watts, using a further 92 watt-hours. So your total energy used per day is 192 watt-hours, and only about half of that is valuable in any sense at all.
Then you have to convert that 23% into a useful form of work (let's say electrical energy) which incurs additional efficiency loss.
Not that there's anything wrong with that... using an extra 5 or 6 percent of the chemical energy in the fuel for useful output still counts, but there is a pretty high cost in money and weight associated with getting that extra energy out. If it's done in a vehicle you have to account for the decrease in acceleration efficiency due to the extra mass...