4. Earth is not a sphere, so the Haversine formula will be inaccurate.
If you're interested in "real" data like driving distances or times, then Haversine is even less useful.
If all you care about is an as the crow flies approximation within a percent or two (not counting the crow's climb to and descent from altitude), Haversine is pretty good:
Are you sure? If you're making $60k a year, the overhead in terms of benefits, insurance, employer half of ssi, etc bring you to about a total cost of $120k. That's $20k per month.
Yeah, my 3.5 year old 42" LCD backlit TV is an ancient artifact, should really scrap it for that 63W power draw difference, except, wait, at $0.11/kwh, it's only costing $63 per year extra to run it 24/7/365, and it will take 10 years for the electricity costs to have any hope of covering the cost of a new screen. Maybe I should hang onto it until the next generation of tech comes out and makes LED backlighting look like striking sparks from flint.
BTW, I've got a Chumby, sorry to say, it sucks. I still use it, but that doesn't change the fact that the software is clunky, the WiFi is weak, and the processor is dog-slow. Still, it's a better alarm clock than anything I ever had before - plays Pandora for the alarm (when the WiFi works), and shows me a live feed from an IP cam.
Re:Why are you even still using petrol?
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Is E85 Dead Now?
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Visit the Houston-Texas City area to see why... there are also offshore refining platforms that sound like the stuff of science fiction to hear them described, or at least were before Katrina and Rita - I'd guess they've rebuilt them by now.
Re:It was never "available" - it was mandated
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Is E85 Dead Now?
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I find this highly unlikely. You're probably talking about E10 or E15, which are mandated in many localities for what they claim are environmental purposes, but are largely sops to the corn lobby (or sold to well-meaning useful idiots as envirogoodness).
They're assembling these in Chinese factories. Which are cheap, but not $0. They're shipped from there to the consumers in EU and US (and others), which also costs more than $0 each.
If hobbyists could assemble them ourselves, they could be even cheaper than $25. And it's primarily hobbyists who are their market. How about it?
I think they've addressed this on the Pi website... BGA soldering is not much of a hobbyist endeavour. Also, you'd be surprised how import duties applied per component add up when buying a parts kit compared to a single board - contact your local lawmaker about the idiocy of that particular law and what it's doing for local manufacturing (of course, some bright politician probably thinks it's better for the country to offshore all that filthy manufacturing and let the peasants go back to mining coal or whatever it was they did before factories...)
What does an ordinary Alarm Clock cost? Economics says no, you're spot-on.
On a practical side, I'd want some kind of audio-out in parallel with the TV, or at least a way for the Pi to turn the TV on so you're not burning 70W all night long for the backlight to heat up a black screen.
Google Earth is hard to beat for functionality and ease of programming (see: KML).
Google Earth is not Open Source, but for basic GIS it's a hell of a lot cheaper then an ESRI setup.
Yep - and while there are a number of Open Source GIS solutions out there, it's still hard to beat Google Earth for functionality and ease of programming.
If you are designing your own tools just to save money, then you're under-valuing your time as a developer.
This statement has to be qualified by comparison to the cost of the tools.
If the (additional) tools required take less than one man-month to develop as compared to the purchased package, well, I'd like to be worth $20K/month, but I'm not. Also, the initial purchase price is often the camel's nose under the tent flap, any organization I have ever been in would spend at least $10K of management handwringing, accounting, comparison shopping, independent consultant referencing and other time to decide if and when to pull the trigger on a $20K purchase. (Not true, one place I worked had a $25K/quarter discretionary budget at the department level, keep it under that and you just had to convince your Director - does your shop have $25K/quarter quick access discretionary money left in the current budget?) Back to the stinking camel - now that you've paid $20K for it, what are the "hidden costs" of maintenance and upgrades for the package?
Most times, it's less effort on my part to code the algorithm in question than it is to pull the levers required to shake loose more than $1000 from the money tree - so, am I serving my organization better by using my time and skills as a programmer, or as a lobbyist convincing them to spend money?
The U.S. does own foreign debt. Mostly third world debt.
Yeah, junk bonds worked out so well in the 1980s, what could go wrong taking the concept global?
The United States will decline, all empires do.
I am essentially powerless to change this, I do my part, but as one 300 millionth of the population, and personally controlling much less than that fraction of the privately held resources (even though I fall fairly high on the income and property spectrum compared to the median, my percentage holding of wealth is a laughably smaller fraction than 1/300millionth) I do feel at best like a fish pressing on the hull of the Titanic.
Why do I even care? Because, I still believe that, as an "average" person, the U.S. is one of the top 10 places to live in the world, choosing a favorite from that list becomes a matter of taste at some level, but it would be a damn shame for the U.S. to devolve into some third world backwater where less than 0.1% of the population controls more than 99.9% of the wealth/land/resources.
China has a massive property problem because they have had a boom nearly identical to the U.S. Political unrest is a massive threat to their current regime.
India is struggling with similar growth problems, it's damping their exponential economic expansion curve pretty heavily.
The United States will have to welcome a new super power as we decline. My best guess is that the next super power will probably not be the China we know now.
Let's hope the "welcoming" is more gracious than it tended to be 100 years ago or more.
I didn't see anything in a quick skim of your requirements (tl/dr) that looks like it requires a $20K package to meet. There are a number of open source mapping solutions out there, Google Earth is hard to beat for functionality and ease of programming (see: KML).
The key is that "getting along just fine as is" bit. Those days are numbered. China is taking over as world superpower. That's going to have interesting effects on the USA.
Can we PLEASE stop with the China thing? They own less than 9% of U.S. debt. They do not have any meaningful middle class. They offer nothing in the way influence on the world stage beyond that which they have with a few questionable regimes. China will be a power. Maybe a super power, but they're a long, very long way away from parity with Europe much less United States.
How much foreign debt does the U.S. currently own? Compare that to 1970, what's the trend?
What's the U.S. middle class looking like today, as compared to 1970?
The U.S. certainly has influence on the world stage, lately more resembling your average 8th grade bully, usually not a good sign for future prospects.
These are trends of the last 42 years... If things keep going this way for another 100 years, I could see the U.S. and the U.K. sharing a nice cuppa tea together and watching the world go by the way that England already has for the last 50 years, and France for the last 100.
I know this is conspiracy-theory territory, but I'm fairly convinced the car companies/oil companies created E85 and meant for it to fail miserably so that they could say "Hey look, we TRIED to make Alternative Energy cars but nobody wanted them!"
Re:Only one thing worse than actual subsidies...
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
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Just let that sink in for a second.
Ever meet a national level politician (while in office)? I'm sure there are exceptions, but the few I have come into contact with are too busy being "on" 24/7/365 that they don't have time to let anything "sink in for a second." It's all about turning the next advantage to get to the next level, psyching up for the next big pitch, traveling to meet the next group to garner their support.
It's our system, and while I don't have a better alternative handy, it's easy to see some of its fundamental flaws, especially now that we have nations of hundreds of millions of people being represented by less than 1000. The power concentration is too high, the corruption is like watching something in a compressed gas atmosphere hundreds of feet under the sea, it's amazing how fast shiny steel turns to scaly rust.
Re:Why are you even still using petrol?
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
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· Score: 1
Prior to the last "fuel crisis," diesel was cheaper in the U.S. than gasoline. Since then, it is usually more than 93 octane premium gas. Supply and demand? Actualization of the higher energy content of diesel in the price? I've heard some junior chemical engineers state that a barrel of crude can be refined into any ratio of gasoline and diesel through cracking and reforming, for reference:
However, if the whole U.S. market started consuming only diesel engines from here on out, I think we'd start having a surplus of the lighter fuels that would drive gasoline prices down further relative to diesel.
Not only is E85 not as efficient but it is rough on engines.
Sounds to me like the auto manufacturing and maintenance sectors were benefactors too, then.
It was never "available" - it was mandated
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
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· Score: 1
I don't feel like I had a choice about E85 - all 3 pump grades (5 at some stations) were E85, all stations in my county were E85, if I wanted to get away from E85, I think I might have been able to pay $6/gallon for 100 octane Sunoco Race Fuel or possibly bootleg some Aviation gas, but otherwise, there was no choice involved.
For me, it's cutting down the "box count" and overall volume and energy consumption of the boxes that drive the TV. I've got a WDTV, PS3 and eeePC driving the TV now.
XBMC on eeePC works pretty well, if you leave it running, essentially by itself, 24-7, otherwise, getting into Windows to launch XBMC is a horridly painful wait, and if you've had something as complex as a browser running in the same session, performance can sometimes be.... lacking. A dedicated, very small and very power efficient, box that boots straight to XBMC and does nothing else would be a welcome addition.
WDTV works pretty well for what it does, there's something to be said for being able to give the kids relatively unsupervised access to the remote control and knowing 100% for sure that they won't be deleting the entire file tree. If the little box with UbuntuTV / XBMC ever makes it to the living room, the WDTV will probably retire to drive another screen in another room.
PS3 is winding down, it has a couple of really neat games, but as a media center it was always too finicky about file formats - and it's too big and too power hungry for what it does.
Oh, and this idea of putting it "in the TV" - maybe I'll get behind that in 5-10 years, but for right now, the processors are just too lame, 5-10 years from now the TV will feel horribly outdated by the clunky slow menu system "inside" and will probably end up being driven by an external box anyway.
A Raspberry Pi can hang off of an HDMI port with little or no additional support, the only thing "unaesthetic" about the solution is the power supply cable.
So, for me, the question is: which free software package is going to port themselves to a sub-$100 HDMI out solution that can hide behind a flat panel first: Ubuntu, or XBMC?
I can already buy a WDTV Live for ~$100, but on Raspberry Pi I'd have the option to "shell out" of the media center if desired.
you'll see someone get a plus 5 for typing "use Linux" like that is some magic answer that has fuck all to do with the topic, a post that says "Google is great" or "they do no evil" will also get modded waay up, even if it has fuck all to do with the topic.
Sounds like the FOX News of "cool to be gnu," tech heads... who says we want to hear another perspective?
Slashdot Mirror
4. Earth is not a sphere, so the Haversine formula will be inaccurate.
If you're interested in "real" data like driving distances or times, then Haversine is even less useful.
If all you care about is an as the crow flies approximation within a percent or two (not counting the crow's climb to and descent from altitude), Haversine is pretty good:
http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=81360
The earth is not as round as a billiard ball, but it's close.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/08/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-the-earth/
I'd like to be worth $20K/month, but I'm not
Are you sure ? If you're making $60k a year, the overhead in terms of benefits, insurance, employer half of ssi, etc bring you to about a total cost of $120k. That's $20k per month.
I work more than 6 months a year.
Yeah, my 3.5 year old 42" LCD backlit TV is an ancient artifact, should really scrap it for that 63W power draw difference, except, wait, at $0.11/kwh, it's only costing $63 per year extra to run it 24/7/365, and it will take 10 years for the electricity costs to have any hope of covering the cost of a new screen. Maybe I should hang onto it until the next generation of tech comes out and makes LED backlighting look like striking sparks from flint.
BTW, I've got a Chumby, sorry to say, it sucks. I still use it, but that doesn't change the fact that the software is clunky, the WiFi is weak, and the processor is dog-slow. Still, it's a better alarm clock than anything I ever had before - plays Pandora for the alarm (when the WiFi works), and shows me a live feed from an IP cam.
Visit the Houston-Texas City area to see why... there are also offshore refining platforms that sound like the stuff of science fiction to hear them described, or at least were before Katrina and Rita - I'd guess they've rebuilt them by now.
I find this highly unlikely. You're probably talking about E10 or E15, which are mandated in many localities for what they claim are environmental purposes, but are largely sops to the corn lobby (or sold to well-meaning useful idiots as envirogoodness).
Yep, thank you, I guess I was referring to G85 ;-)
They're assembling these in Chinese factories. Which are cheap, but not $0. They're shipped from there to the consumers in EU and US (and others), which also costs more than $0 each.
If hobbyists could assemble them ourselves, they could be even cheaper than $25. And it's primarily hobbyists who are their market. How about it?
I think they've addressed this on the Pi website... BGA soldering is not much of a hobbyist endeavour. Also, you'd be surprised how import duties applied per component add up when buying a parts kit compared to a single board - contact your local lawmaker about the idiocy of that particular law and what it's doing for local manufacturing (of course, some bright politician probably thinks it's better for the country to offshore all that filthy manufacturing and let the peasants go back to mining coal or whatever it was they did before factories...)
What does an ordinary Alarm Clock cost? Economics says no, you're spot-on.
On a practical side, I'd want some kind of audio-out in parallel with the TV, or at least a way for the Pi to turn the TV on so you're not burning 70W all night long for the backlight to heat up a black screen.
Google Earth is hard to beat for functionality and ease of programming (see: KML).
Google Earth is not Open Source, but for basic GIS it's a hell of a lot cheaper then an ESRI setup.
Yep - and while there are a number of Open Source GIS solutions out there, it's still hard to beat Google Earth for functionality and ease of programming.
If you are designing your own tools just to save money, then you're under-valuing your time as a developer.
This statement has to be qualified by comparison to the cost of the tools.
If the (additional) tools required take less than one man-month to develop as compared to the purchased package, well, I'd like to be worth $20K/month, but I'm not. Also, the initial purchase price is often the camel's nose under the tent flap, any organization I have ever been in would spend at least $10K of management handwringing, accounting, comparison shopping, independent consultant referencing and other time to decide if and when to pull the trigger on a $20K purchase. (Not true, one place I worked had a $25K/quarter discretionary budget at the department level, keep it under that and you just had to convince your Director - does your shop have $25K/quarter quick access discretionary money left in the current budget?) Back to the stinking camel - now that you've paid $20K for it, what are the "hidden costs" of maintenance and upgrades for the package?
Most times, it's less effort on my part to code the algorithm in question than it is to pull the levers required to shake loose more than $1000 from the money tree - so, am I serving my organization better by using my time and skills as a programmer, or as a lobbyist convincing them to spend money?
The U.S. does own foreign debt. Mostly third world debt.
Yeah, junk bonds worked out so well in the 1980s, what could go wrong taking the concept global?
The United States will decline, all empires do.
I am essentially powerless to change this, I do my part, but as one 300 millionth of the population, and personally controlling much less than that fraction of the privately held resources (even though I fall fairly high on the income and property spectrum compared to the median, my percentage holding of wealth is a laughably smaller fraction than 1/300millionth) I do feel at best like a fish pressing on the hull of the Titanic.
Why do I even care? Because, I still believe that, as an "average" person, the U.S. is one of the top 10 places to live in the world, choosing a favorite from that list becomes a matter of taste at some level, but it would be a damn shame for the U.S. to devolve into some third world backwater where less than 0.1% of the population controls more than 99.9% of the wealth/land/resources.
China has a massive property problem because they have had a boom nearly identical to the U.S. Political unrest is a massive threat to their current regime.
India is struggling with similar growth problems, it's damping their exponential economic expansion curve pretty heavily.
The United States will have to welcome a new super power as we decline. My best guess is that the next super power will probably not be the China we know now.
Let's hope the "welcoming" is more gracious than it tended to be 100 years ago or more.
If you've got something generating Lat/Lon coordinates to slap into your database, the distance calculations are trivial:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haversine_formula
I didn't see anything in a quick skim of your requirements (tl/dr) that looks like it requires a $20K package to meet. There are a number of open source mapping solutions out there, Google Earth is hard to beat for functionality and ease of programming (see: KML).
Yeah, I was just thinking about getting my Antique tag, coming up in 2016...
The key is that "getting along just fine as is" bit. Those days are numbered. China is taking over as world superpower. That's going to have interesting effects on the USA.
Can we PLEASE stop with the China thing? They own less than 9% of U.S. debt. They do not have any meaningful middle class. They offer nothing in the way influence on the world stage beyond that which they have with a few questionable regimes. China will be a power. Maybe a super power, but they're a long, very long way away from parity with Europe much less United States.
How much foreign debt does the U.S. currently own? Compare that to 1970, what's the trend?
What's the U.S. middle class looking like today, as compared to 1970?
The U.S. certainly has influence on the world stage, lately more resembling your average 8th grade bully, usually not a good sign for future prospects.
These are trends of the last 42 years... If things keep going this way for another 100 years, I could see the U.S. and the U.K. sharing a nice cuppa tea together and watching the world go by the way that England already has for the last 50 years, and France for the last 100.
I know this is conspiracy-theory territory, but I'm fairly convinced the car companies/oil companies created E85 and meant for it to fail miserably so that they could say "Hey look, we TRIED to make Alternative Energy cars but nobody wanted them!"
My "proof" of this is two-fold.
You forgot Allinol
Just let that sink in for a second.
Ever meet a national level politician (while in office)? I'm sure there are exceptions, but the few I have come into contact with are too busy being "on" 24/7/365 that they don't have time to let anything "sink in for a second." It's all about turning the next advantage to get to the next level, psyching up for the next big pitch, traveling to meet the next group to garner their support.
It's our system, and while I don't have a better alternative handy, it's easy to see some of its fundamental flaws, especially now that we have nations of hundreds of millions of people being represented by less than 1000. The power concentration is too high, the corruption is like watching something in a compressed gas atmosphere hundreds of feet under the sea, it's amazing how fast shiny steel turns to scaly rust.
Prior to the last "fuel crisis," diesel was cheaper in the U.S. than gasoline. Since then, it is usually more than 93 octane premium gas. Supply and demand? Actualization of the higher energy content of diesel in the price? I've heard some junior chemical engineers state that a barrel of crude can be refined into any ratio of gasoline and diesel through cracking and reforming, for reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_spread
However, if the whole U.S. market started consuming only diesel engines from here on out, I think we'd start having a surplus of the lighter fuels that would drive gasoline prices down further relative to diesel.
2000 is older? I am still driving my 1991...
Not only is E85 not as efficient but it is rough on engines.
Sounds to me like the auto manufacturing and maintenance sectors were benefactors too, then.
I don't feel like I had a choice about E85 - all 3 pump grades (5 at some stations) were E85, all stations in my county were E85, if I wanted to get away from E85, I think I might have been able to pay $6/gallon for 100 octane Sunoco Race Fuel or possibly bootleg some Aviation gas, but otherwise, there was no choice involved.
Most TVs now have a USB port (used for firmware update on "non-smart" TVs) - just use a micro-USB cable to power the RPi from the TV itself.
Cool - if the port will source 700mA (will need ethernet to get access to the NAS).
For me, it's cutting down the "box count" and overall volume and energy consumption of the boxes that drive the TV. I've got a WDTV, PS3 and eeePC driving the TV now.
XBMC on eeePC works pretty well, if you leave it running, essentially by itself, 24-7, otherwise, getting into Windows to launch XBMC is a horridly painful wait, and if you've had something as complex as a browser running in the same session, performance can sometimes be.... lacking. A dedicated, very small and very power efficient, box that boots straight to XBMC and does nothing else would be a welcome addition.
WDTV works pretty well for what it does, there's something to be said for being able to give the kids relatively unsupervised access to the remote control and knowing 100% for sure that they won't be deleting the entire file tree. If the little box with UbuntuTV / XBMC ever makes it to the living room, the WDTV will probably retire to drive another screen in another room.
PS3 is winding down, it has a couple of really neat games, but as a media center it was always too finicky about file formats - and it's too big and too power hungry for what it does.
Oh, and this idea of putting it "in the TV" - maybe I'll get behind that in 5-10 years, but for right now, the processors are just too lame, 5-10 years from now the TV will feel horribly outdated by the clunky slow menu system "inside" and will probably end up being driven by an external box anyway.
A Raspberry Pi can hang off of an HDMI port with little or no additional support, the only thing "unaesthetic" about the solution is the power supply cable.
So, for me, the question is: which free software package is going to port themselves to a sub-$100 HDMI out solution that can hide behind a flat panel first: Ubuntu, or XBMC?
I can already buy a WDTV Live for ~$100, but on Raspberry Pi I'd have the option to "shell out" of the media center if desired.
Epileptics are "out there on the edge," not all edges are bright or something normal people would admire or aspire to, hers was. It is a shame.
you'll see someone get a plus 5 for typing "use Linux" like that is some magic answer that has fuck all to do with the topic, a post that says "Google is great" or "they do no evil" will also get modded waay up, even if it has fuck all to do with the topic.
Sounds like the FOX News of "cool to be gnu," tech heads... who says we want to hear another perspective?
Last place I worked that handed out Blackberries only gave them to exempt employees.