It really does seem like an odd 'adventure'. The guy is basically sentencing himself to a year in solitary confinement, with the added bonus of possible catastrophe at any moment. No indication from the article that he's doing it to raise awareness of global warming, or to raise money for some cause, or even to gain some scientific knowledge. I can't even imagine a particularly good book deal coming out of this.
I think he could accomplish as much by spending a year in a Schrodinger box.
I love Doctor Who, but I'm pretty sure you can kill a stone with a hammer and chisel, or a jackhammer if you're pressed for time, or with TNT if you're really in a hurry.
A lot of people have mentioned this, and I think the proper reply is: If this is they way the restaurant management is thinking, then they are misusing the web, not understanding what the customer really needs/wants, and are not going to be successful.
As somebody else said up above, restaurant web sites are often terrible because they value form over substance. My favorite sites have a PDF of the menu, or an HTML menu available. The menu on the web site should be accurate, up to date, readable, accessible (to the blind for instance) and searchable. These are the proper priorities. Having it look like handwritten text on a chalkboard? Not so much.
If you -are- using a chalkboard inside the restaurant, is retyping the menu onto a device for upload to your website more work? Of course it is. Too bad.
If you'll read my other comment you'll see that I basically agree with your assessment. However, for a consumer product, this amount of markup is probably reasonable. You'll never get a raspberry pi, wifi adapter, bluetooth adapter, battery and video screen to fit into that form factor. That's where engineering design and packaging, and custom circuit design come into play. And the software has a price too. Even if you or I could cobble up the basics of this product on our own, it still might be useful for the average consumer.
All that said, I do wonder whether the market can bear a $200 price for this device.
Almost everything (maybe everything?) this does could be done with a Raspberry Pi, but the result would obviously be a bit larger to carry around. It does seem like they've added some nice polish to the software in the form of the automatic data gathering (from a USB connected device), and they obviously need a back end system to give each Egg a subdomain under eggcyte.com.
In both Asimov's story and this experiment, the real moral seems to be that somebody failed to specify the proper requirements, or run a reasonable design review. "If you can't save everybody, save who you can" seems like a reasonable addition to the program.
I agree. I am a big fan of Musk and SpaceX but there is no chance in hell that SpaceX would be developing these systems without self-destruct capability. Might as well praise Google for ensuring their self-driving cars have brakes.
I went to his Facebook page and it looks the like comments on this issue are about 30:1 against his position. He's really being hammered there as a sellout. Yeah, I know, he really doesn't give a damn, but I'm glad people are speaking up.
Re:Bah, we already said goodbye to CTRL-S years ag
on
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
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· Score: 1
My personal definition would be "if you can stand on it, it's a world". If you the best you can do is float next to it and even the slightest touch bounces you away, it's not a world. Hardly scientific, but it gets the point across.
I have a memory card from an original IBM PC from 1982, which has stacked memory chips. In fact, each pair of chips has ALL of their pins wired to the same contacts on the PCB. Although I have been unwilling to take apart the board to verify, this leads me to believe that the chip on top and the chip underneath are different. I'm guessing one of them has an inverter on an address line, so it will respond to even addresses, while the other responds to odd addresses.
Really? The moon orbits the earth. Is it eclipsed by the earth 50% of the time? Of course not. You're only thinking about satellites in -low- earth orbit, which are shaded by the earth basically during half of each orbit. Put the satellites in very high orbits (geosynchronous itself is pretty high), and they are exposed to sunlight far more than 50% of the time. Heck, put a satellite in a polar orbit and for much of the year it can be exposed to the sun -throughout- its orbit.
That still means at any given time 1/2 the panels aren't doing anything useful. It also means on every lunar day the panels go through massive temperature transitions from incredibly hot to incredibly cold.
Instead, you could place a ring of panels in high orbit around the earth and have -all- of them working nearly all the time. I guess there might be a tradeoff due to the need for microwave transmitters on every generating satellite (since wiring together sets of panels many kilometers apart in earth orbit is probably not feasible).
while studying someone else's code. All the programmers were muttering and cursing under their breath, about what an idiot the programmer was and how much better they could have written the same thing.
Some of us care about that $10 a month. In fact, I didn't get basic cable bundled with my internet until it actually -dropped- the cost of my internet (net cost of basic cable was actually -negative-).
But what happened next? Comcast decided to switch basic cable from analog to digital to save bandwidth. (Ok, no problem so far - that's actually a good idea). But what did they give basic cable subscribers then? A tiny box which converted the digital signal to 4x3 Standard Definition NTSC television (the old Channel 3 connection). In other words, crap. I could hook up an antenna to my TV and pull broadcast TV in 1080p HD, but the cable company puts me back in the 90's. You bet your ass I cared about that $10 a month. If adding basic cable to my internet connection cost me even one cent I wouldn't have been happy.
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It really does seem like an odd 'adventure'. The guy is basically sentencing himself to a year in solitary confinement, with the added bonus of possible catastrophe at any moment. No indication from the article that he's doing it to raise awareness of global warming, or to raise money for some cause, or even to gain some scientific knowledge. I can't even imagine a particularly good book deal coming out of this.
I think he could accomplish as much by spending a year in a Schrodinger box.
Everybody wants to rule the world.
It's really a question of what you're willing to pay. My laptops are 1366x768, but I always go for low cost. You can certainly do much better.
I love Doctor Who, but I'm pretty sure you can kill a stone with a hammer and chisel, or a jackhammer if you're pressed for time, or with TNT if you're really in a hurry.
A lot of people have mentioned this, and I think the proper reply is: If this is they way the restaurant management is thinking, then they are misusing the web, not understanding what the customer really needs/wants, and are not going to be successful.
As somebody else said up above, restaurant web sites are often terrible because they value form over substance. My favorite sites have a PDF of the menu, or an HTML menu available. The menu on the web site should be accurate, up to date, readable, accessible (to the blind for instance) and searchable. These are the proper priorities. Having it look like handwritten text on a chalkboard? Not so much.
If you -are- using a chalkboard inside the restaurant, is retyping the menu onto a device for upload to your website more work? Of course it is. Too bad.
If you'll read my other comment you'll see that I basically agree with your assessment. However, for a consumer product, this amount of markup is probably reasonable. You'll never get a raspberry pi, wifi adapter, bluetooth adapter, battery and video screen to fit into that form factor. That's where engineering design and packaging, and custom circuit design come into play. And the software has a price too. Even if you or I could cobble up the basics of this product on our own, it still might be useful for the average consumer.
All that said, I do wonder whether the market can bear a $200 price for this device.
Almost everything (maybe everything?) this does could be done with a Raspberry Pi, but the result would obviously be a bit larger to carry around. It does seem like they've added some nice polish to the software in the form of the automatic data gathering (from a USB connected device), and they obviously need a back end system to give each Egg a subdomain under eggcyte.com.
http://www.collegehumor.com/vi...
In both Asimov's story and this experiment, the real moral seems to be that somebody failed to specify the proper requirements, or run a reasonable design review. "If you can't save everybody, save who you can" seems like a reasonable addition to the program.
Totally depends on who's providing the news coverage. Fox news, yes. CNN, maybe. Space.com, not so much.
BREAKING NEWS: Media outlets are biased.
I agree. I am a big fan of Musk and SpaceX but there is no chance in hell that SpaceX would be developing these systems without self-destruct capability. Might as well praise Google for ensuring their self-driving cars have brakes.
Seriously man, it has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.
THIS IS AN EX-PLATFORM!!
Obviously not the same, but heartwarming nonetheless, Hobbes and Bacon: http://imgur.com/gallery/tUzAL
I went to his Facebook page and it looks the like comments on this issue are about 30:1 against his position. He's really being hammered there as a sellout. Yeah, I know, he really doesn't give a damn, but I'm glad people are speaking up.
As Mr. Miyagi might have said, X On, X Off.
The title is basically buzzfeed for science.
"Which Perverse Hemihelical Chirality are you? Take this quiz to find out!"
My personal definition would be "if you can stand on it, it's a world". If you the best you can do is float next to it and even the slightest touch bounces you away, it's not a world. Hardly scientific, but it gets the point across.
Edit: Thinking about it, an inverter on CS (Chip Select) might be more likely.
I have a memory card from an original IBM PC from 1982, which has stacked memory chips. In fact, each pair of chips has ALL of their pins wired to the same contacts on the PCB. Although I have been unwilling to take apart the board to verify, this leads me to believe that the chip on top and the chip underneath are different. I'm guessing one of them has an inverter on an address line, so it will respond to even addresses, while the other responds to odd addresses.
Really? The moon orbits the earth. Is it eclipsed by the earth 50% of the time? Of course not. You're only thinking about satellites in -low- earth orbit, which are shaded by the earth basically during half of each orbit. Put the satellites in very high orbits (geosynchronous itself is pretty high), and they are exposed to sunlight far more than 50% of the time. Heck, put a satellite in a polar orbit and for much of the year it can be exposed to the sun -throughout- its orbit.
That still means at any given time 1/2 the panels aren't doing anything useful. It also means on every lunar day the panels go through massive temperature transitions from incredibly hot to incredibly cold.
Instead, you could place a ring of panels in high orbit around the earth and have -all- of them working nearly all the time. I guess there might be a tradeoff due to the need for microwave transmitters on every generating satellite (since wiring together sets of panels many kilometers apart in earth orbit is probably not feasible).
while studying someone else's code. All the programmers were muttering and cursing under their breath, about what an idiot the programmer was and how much better they could have written the same thing.
Some of us care about that $10 a month. In fact, I didn't get basic cable bundled with my internet until it actually -dropped- the cost of my internet (net cost of basic cable was actually -negative-).
But what happened next? Comcast decided to switch basic cable from analog to digital to save bandwidth. (Ok, no problem so far - that's actually a good idea). But what did they give basic cable subscribers then? A tiny box which converted the digital signal to 4x3 Standard Definition NTSC television (the old Channel 3 connection). In other words, crap. I could hook up an antenna to my TV and pull broadcast TV in 1080p HD, but the cable company puts me back in the 90's. You bet your ass I cared about that $10 a month. If adding basic cable to my internet connection cost me even one cent I wouldn't have been happy.
I don't think I've burned out a CFL in the past 8 years, and they weren't that expensive to begin with. So, anecdotally, YES they can be cheaper.
Sorry, posting to remove erroneous moderation. Me and my clumsy fingers. Consider yourself getting +1 Funny.