If you go to see the Babbage Difference Engine, make sure to go when they demo it. They only crank it a few cycles each day to keep from constantly having to oil it. There's just something beautify about that nice "chunk-clunk" sound that it makes as each column resets and the carry arms spiral around.
If you are confused by the psoting, read the *fine* article! It will clarify This!;)
I hope I'm not the only one who had a time figuring out This article.
I agree. The company I work for is not small, but its hardware design group is about 10 people out of the about 200 that work at our site (we are mostly a software house:( ). This is my first job out of college and I has a BSEE, but I was hired as a systems engineer - since our company doesn't hire hardware engineers. My boss jokes that I am the first hardware hire in ten years! Yet somehow, I am now the lead and practially sole designer of a major FPGA design and have been envolved in hardware, systems, software, database, and some network engineering. So I've had to juggle many hats in the two years I've been working.
Xilinx Virtex II Pros and the soon-to-be-available Virtex 4's have up to two IBM Power PC hard cores embedded inside them. This cores max out at 300MHz. It's doubtful that a soft processor core would match or beat that speed, especially since the clock rates are limited to 400MHz (except for the SerDes sections).
"Not only is XML verbose, but it's extremely wasteful in how much space it needs to use for the amount of true data that it is sending,"
I've been saying this since the begining: Why send ten times the bytes for the same amount of data? Sure, its human readable and writeable, but how many times do humans actually read or write XML (I'm talking about web users here, not us/.ers;)). It seems to me that if something is primarily machine read and written, a binary format makes much more sense: its more compact and can be interpreted by the machine much faster.
Advances in networking and processing power go a long way in addressing performance concerns, though perhaps not on battery-constrained mobile phones, he said.
And that quote exemplies the reason why we have a whole lot faster machines, but still feel bogged down doing the same things. The speed advantage is largely negated by ineffecient coding and data storage formats such as XML. You cannot always assume the next round of hardware will make things fast enough. I'll be glad when we reach the limits of silicon and Moore's Law is put to rest, because it will force people to stop thinking of fast hardware as an excuse for sloppy coding and bloat.
If you have an area set aside in your home that you call your electronics lab, and know how to use breadboards, multimeters, and soldering irons, you may not get as much out of this book.
I turned around and looked at my oscilloscope, power supply, logic analyzer, multimeters, and signal generator sitting on my electronics bench. Oh well, guess I'll have to make due with my electrical engineering background, but it sounds like a book I'd have enjoyed as a kid.
I haven't come across any areas that have no speed limit or 75 and I've lived here all my 24 years, but that doesn't mean people don't drive like there is no speed limit! Around Dallas here, most of it is 60-70mph posted, but most people drive about 10 mph over whatever is posted. Those stretches of road out in west Texas and the panhandle, where its flat, might as well have no speed limit!
He may not have been born here, but he's a Texan now. Texans stick to their guns (except for all those hippies in Austin - hey I'm an Aggie, so I can't cut them any slack;) ), especially when the going gets tough. I'm pround to be a Texan and have a President who is too. If you don't think he's Texan, then just read this - he handled it like a Texan would.
To get back on topic, I'm not so sure we need this mega highway, although it would help crossing Texas a bit. I'm generally a supporter of Gov. Perry (after all he is a fellow Aggie:)), but I think he has bitten off too much with this plan. Anyhow, that's my $0.02.
Think about what is required to generate and distribute electric power on a commercial scale, about what is needed to make electric power safe for use in the home, in business, in industry.
And yet it was not Edison who did this, but rather another forgotten inventor - Nikola Tesla. Edison was for a DC power distribution system which would have cost a lot more by requiring a generation plant every block or so. Tesla developed the polyphase AC distribution system from the ground up: generators, motors, transformers, etc. Tesla is the real father of the modern electrical power system.
Yes, there is an increase in cost and footprint, but it comes anytime you use an XOR since it is a much larger "gate". There really is no such thing as an "XOR gate" - all XOR's are made up of several gates in pretty much all the different IC technologies (NMOS, PMOS, CMOS, DTL, RTL, TTL, etc). The concept of an "XOR gate" just simplifies the schematics and function descriptions.
Actually, he did mention that the battery he was using was 9V with a rated capacity of 5400 mAh ( walmart.com has it listed). He also says the display and unit were drawing an average of 1.9A, so batterylife comes out to about 2 hours and 51 mins. YMMV:) As for heat, the total power consumption is at most 17W (1.9A @9V) so it souldn't be too bad.
Although some quick googling lists the PS2 power consumption as 45W(5.3A @8.5V), so I wonder about the 1.9 A for both the screen and PS2 - that would only give you about an hour of batterylife.
Actually, this is a pretty good history of buring "oxygen candles" on submarines and even spacecraft. These are chemical blocks which give off oxygen when ignited. Of course, the Go'auld should probably be more advanced than that, but maybe they just like the style - they are rather heavy on theatrics at times.
IIRC, Creative made a USB "soundcard" just for this reason. It was a box that plugged into an USB port and had RCA outputs and inputs so your auido wouldn't suffer from EMI. I don't know if they still make it - I saw it at Best Buy probably 5 years ago.
I agree that the take-home receipt is bad, but if the machine printed out a receipt and you deposited it in a box, then you would have trail for recounts and would make it harder for this type of fraud to take place. I think the whole push for e-voting was to reduce the chances of a vote being counted wrong because of a hanging chad or pregnant chad. So if you can make the voting output a standardized format(machine readable and human readable), those errors would be reduced. Of course, you'd still have plenty of other ways to commit voter fraud, and that's something politicians have long been good at.:)
It depends on where you are. I did early voting here in Dallas,TX and we had e-voting. I think I heard that about a quarter of the US would have e-voting this year, but I don't remember the source.
Maybe its just me, but a paper trail would do two important things: a verifiable trail for recounts and tactile feedback. When I finished voting, I pushed the big flashing red "vote" button and felt like something was missing. I stood there a few seconds making sure I had actually voted. After seeing the "screensaver" on the screen I was sure my vote had finished, but if I had a paper printout to fold and put in a box, it would have been a lot more "finalized". Some things just need that physcological effect of tactile feedback. Any how, thats my $0.02.
I think step two is to write a virus which moves a couple fractions of a cent into your account anytime someone makes a transaction, ala Office Space!;)
Back in college, we needed a mixer downfront in the auditorium to mix four singers together, but we only had one hardwired channel. So using my budding electrical engineering skills, I started working on a remote controled four channel audio mixer. It recieved commands over a wireless serial link to mute or adjust the volume on each channel. Unfortunately, we didn't need it for very long and the project got shelved before it could be completed.
By the way, its name, LATMAN, is a really nice acronym, you'll have to figure out for yourself.
Umm, sorry but your link to an "antigravity device" clearly states that the machine has nothing to do with antigravity. In fact it explains that the device works by creating an "ion wind" to create thrust. As to your comment about matter being made of waves, its accepted due to the particle/wave duality of light, just that its harder to work with "matter waves" since they are so small in wavelength, that the "marbles" model is accurate. Anyhow, thats my physics rant for the day.
Well, my linux router is an old 386 I got for free when a chuch was cleaning out its closets. It was a "single board computer" for a while when I had its innards screwed down onto an old corkboard i had laying around. The hard drive was held on by a piece of cardboard and the cards were only held in place by their slots. And the whole thing had a cardboard shoe box as a cover with a fan hanging over the memory and a custom processor heatsink (just for fun). The harddrive led just kinda poked through a hole in the box.
Now he's been upgraded to a stripped out dell chassis I found on the side of the road with card board side panel (featuring a nice keep out sign:)) The cards are still not screwed in place but are somewhat clamped down now. Also added a LCD for monitoring the network.
You can find a lot of useful information about homebuilt wind generators here. I'm also thinking of doing something similar to this someday when I get the time for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one who read the title as Google To End Support for IP6? That would have been quite a shock!
If you go to see the Babbage Difference Engine, make sure to go when they demo it. They only crank it a few cycles each day to keep from constantly having to oil it. There's just something beautify about that nice "chunk-clunk" sound that it makes as each column resets and the carry arms spiral around.
This reminds me of an Arthur C. Clark short story "Transit of Earth" (I saw it in The Wind from the Sun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_from_the_Sun)
If you are confused by the psoting, read the *fine* article! It will clarify This! ;)
I hope I'm not the only one who had a time figuring out This article.
I agree. The company I work for is not small, but its hardware design group is about 10 people out of the about 200 that work at our site (we are mostly a software house:( ). This is my first job out of college and I has a BSEE, but I was hired as a systems engineer - since our company doesn't hire hardware engineers. My boss jokes that I am the first hardware hire in ten years! Yet somehow, I am now the lead and practially sole designer of a major FPGA design and have been envolved in hardware, systems, software, database, and some network engineering. So I've had to juggle many hats in the two years I've been working.
Xilinx Virtex II Pros and the soon-to-be-available Virtex 4's have up to two IBM Power PC hard cores embedded inside them. This cores max out at 300MHz. It's doubtful that a soft processor core would match or beat that speed, especially since the clock rates are limited to 400MHz (except for the SerDes sections).
Or for a more geeky approach (or atleast more dangerous!) try the Jet Powered Beer Cooler.
I've been saying this since the begining: Why send ten times the bytes for the same amount of data? Sure, its human readable and writeable, but how many times do humans actually read or write XML (I'm talking about web users here, not us /.ers ;)). It seems to me that if something is primarily machine read and written, a binary format makes much more sense: its more compact and can be interpreted by the machine much faster.
Advances in networking and processing power go a long way in addressing performance concerns, though perhaps not on battery-constrained mobile phones, he said.
And that quote exemplies the reason why we have a whole lot faster machines, but still feel bogged down doing the same things. The speed advantage is largely negated by ineffecient coding and data storage formats such as XML. You cannot always assume the next round of hardware will make things fast enough. I'll be glad when we reach the limits of silicon and Moore's Law is put to rest, because it will force people to stop thinking of fast hardware as an excuse for sloppy coding and bloat.
Don't forget the telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, TV producers, and salespeople.
I turned around and looked at my oscilloscope, power supply, logic analyzer, multimeters, and signal generator sitting on my electronics bench. Oh well, guess I'll have to make due with my electrical engineering background, but it sounds like a book I'd have enjoyed as a kid.
It's the high-tech version of the Emperor's New Clothes! Only the truely 1337 can see it. Can't you see it? :)
I haven't come across any areas that have no speed limit or 75 and I've lived here all my 24 years, but that doesn't mean people don't drive like there is no speed limit! Around Dallas here, most of it is 60-70mph posted, but most people drive about 10 mph over whatever is posted. Those stretches of road out in west Texas and the panhandle, where its flat, might as well have no speed limit!
To get back on topic, I'm not so sure we need this mega highway, although it would help crossing Texas a bit. I'm generally a supporter of Gov. Perry (after all he is a fellow Aggie:)), but I think he has bitten off too much with this plan. Anyhow, that's my $0.02.
And yet it was not Edison who did this, but rather another forgotten inventor - Nikola Tesla. Edison was for a DC power distribution system which would have cost a lot more by requiring a generation plant every block or so. Tesla developed the polyphase AC distribution system from the ground up: generators, motors, transformers, etc. Tesla is the real father of the modern electrical power system.
Yes, there is an increase in cost and footprint, but it comes anytime you use an XOR since it is a much larger "gate". There really is no such thing as an "XOR gate" - all XOR's are made up of several gates in pretty much all the different IC technologies (NMOS, PMOS, CMOS, DTL, RTL, TTL, etc). The concept of an "XOR gate" just simplifies the schematics and function descriptions.
Although some quick googling lists the PS2 power consumption as 45W(5.3A @8.5V), so I wonder about the 1.9 A for both the screen and PS2 - that would only give you about an hour of batterylife.
Actually, this is a pretty good history of buring "oxygen candles" on submarines and even spacecraft. These are chemical blocks which give off oxygen when ignited. Of course, the Go'auld should probably be more advanced than that, but maybe they just like the style - they are rather heavy on theatrics at times.
IIRC, Creative made a USB "soundcard" just for this reason. It was a box that plugged into an USB port and had RCA outputs and inputs so your auido wouldn't suffer from EMI. I don't know if they still make it - I saw it at Best Buy probably 5 years ago.
I agree that the take-home receipt is bad, but if the machine printed out a receipt and you deposited it in a box, then you would have trail for recounts and would make it harder for this type of fraud to take place. I think the whole push for e-voting was to reduce the chances of a vote being counted wrong because of a hanging chad or pregnant chad. So if you can make the voting output a standardized format(machine readable and human readable), those errors would be reduced. Of course, you'd still have plenty of other ways to commit voter fraud, and that's something politicians have long been good at. :)
Maybe its just me, but a paper trail would do two important things: a verifiable trail for recounts and tactile feedback. When I finished voting, I pushed the big flashing red "vote" button and felt like something was missing. I stood there a few seconds making sure I had actually voted. After seeing the "screensaver" on the screen I was sure my vote had finished, but if I had a paper printout to fold and put in a box, it would have been a lot more "finalized". Some things just need that physcological effect of tactile feedback. Any how, thats my $0.02.
- - Install Windows on ATM machines
- -
....
- - Profit
I think step two is to write a virus which moves a couple fractions of a cent into your account anytime someone makes a transaction, ala Office Space!By the way, its name, LATMAN, is a really nice acronym, you'll have to figure out for yourself.
Umm, sorry but your link to an "antigravity device" clearly states that the machine has nothing to do with antigravity. In fact it explains that the device works by creating an "ion wind" to create thrust. As to your comment about matter being made of waves, its accepted due to the particle/wave duality of light, just that its harder to work with "matter waves" since they are so small in wavelength, that the "marbles" model is accurate. Anyhow, thats my physics rant for the day.
Now he's been upgraded to a stripped out dell chassis I found on the side of the road with card board side panel (featuring a nice keep out sign:)) The cards are still not screwed in place but are somewhat clamped down now. Also added a LCD for monitoring the network.
You can find a lot of useful information about homebuilt wind generators here. I'm also thinking of doing something similar to this someday when I get the time for it.