actually you can get non-polarised electrolytics too, they are often used in loudspeaker crossover circuits, i think they are basically two ordinary electrolytics in inverse series.
but anyway in most cases (especially in digital equipment like computers) capacitors are used in a way that keeps them biased the same way all the time so it doesn't really matter if they are polarised or not.
i agree with the gp that the important characteristics of electrolytics are big and slow (high ESR) while the important ones of ceramic are small and fast (low ESR).
tantalums are fairly big and fairly fast, they also have much better lifetime characteristics than electrolytics. The downside is that they are expensive and when they do go bang (tantalums are polarised) they tend to fragment into a shower of tiny hot high velocity shrapnel.
Its unclear from TFA if the "solid capacitors" gigabyte are reffering to are tantalums or some new technology.
If it is security as its advocates claim, then it's good for everyone, including Microsoft (since they no longer have to worry about browser security you REALLY don't understand do you, MS killed netscape because they threatened to make windows irrelevent as applications moved to the internet (unfortunately for MS while on thier deathbed just before being bought out by AOL for use against MS netscape opensourced their browser) .
you can't legally (at least not if eulas are valid in your country and even if they aren't your on shaky ground if you start copying it to install on multiple systems) install the windows version of IE under wine without owning a windows license. The unix and mac versions of IE are so hopelessly out of date as to be nearly useless to those looking for compatibility.
that means that as long as some sites require IE, buisness users who need to visit those sites will need to run windows or at least have a windows license allocated to them.
handing firefox victory in the browser market would be a very stupid move for MS because it would force sites to support firefox and once sites were supporting firefox that would be another barrier to linux migration taken down.
yes MS wants to improve thier reputation for security but i can't imagine them doing it at the cost of reducing windows lockin.
the last really radical change to the windows gui was windows 95, sure there have been fairly large tweaks since (the biggest being "windows desktop update" from IE4 and the changes windows XP). but by and large i'd expect a user who learnt on windows 95 to have little trouble dealing with the user interface of XP.
we still have drive letters for different drives/partitions, we still can edit the start menu by right clicking and selecting open on the start button, we still have windows selection through the taskbar (though now by default they are put in those horrible group), we still have 3 icons in the top right hand corner of windows in the same order and with the same symbols as on 95.
what intelligence is is a difficult question to answer.
personally i'd say its the ability to solve problems WITHOUT having been designed to solve those problems and the ability to see opertunities of improvement for the current way of doing things.
cats live in our homes, foxes roam in our cities neither of those animals were designed for those environments nor have they had time for significant biological evoloution yet they find ways to manage in those environments.
and we have in a couple of centuries gone from farmers who lived off the land in relatively primitive houses to living in suburbs with no fields for miles arround and commuting into mega-cities with huge towser blocks without being reprogrammed along the way.
current "AI" research is still a LONG LONG way from acheiving that kind of adaptability.
I think even OpenSSH has used the "you should urgently upgrade to the latest version, but we won't tell you why" to the same effect and seriously pissed off linux distros that have a policy of backporting security fixes by doing so
Why is a secret security patch a problem? firstly many have a policy of not upgrading without a good reason, if they consider a security fix to be a good reason but not any of the other items in the changelog then people may unknowingly remain unpatched.
secondly it smacks of trying to cover up problems and if you get a reputation for trying to cover up problems that will make people in the know very wary of your software (look at IE for example).
Having the peace of mind that there will be regular backports for 5 years on my free OS of choice was a deal breaker. don't you think its a little premature to assume that? ubuntus first release was just over two years and has made one LTS release which they have been supporting for less than a year.
When dapper+8 (4 years after dapper) is released and both dapper and dapper+4 support have been provided for all that time then assuming ubuntu looks healthy it will be time to rely on ubuntus long term support policy.
finally remember the LTS policy and even the 18 month policy for normal releases only apply to stuff in main so if you use stuff from universe you either have to upgrade every 6 months or track security issues on the universe stuff yourself.
there are occasions when popping up a window is the best choice, the big one i've come accross is when you have an window that contains say an irc client (usually a java applet but ajax or streaming to frames are also possible), unless you pop it up in a seperate window then it is very easy for the user to accidently close it.
i do however wish firefox would have a "change new window request into new tab request" setting.
debian do a "point release" every so often which includes security updates among other things and when they do so they build both new full CD/DVD images and a set of update CDs (they don't seem to yet do update DVDs but i've just suggested it;) ).
If you really wan't the latest updates you can always take a copy of the relavent directories on security.debian.org and burn it to a CD/DVD.
my mum has a very strong pair of scisors with the pivot a long was from the handle, i dunno where she got them (though i seem to remember she bought them originally from cutting lino) but they look virtually idential to the trauma shears shown at http://www.usemc.com/Trauma-Shears-s/186.htm&Click =4880
All floating point operations are approximations, writing good floating point code is all about understanding the approximations and tradeoffs you are making.
and floading point operations can be one of the slowest parts of code
i have to agree on the lack of comments in the source for games, it can make them very hard to penatrate (particularlly when combined with heavy use of macros)
lets instead think of adding a wireless keyboard accessory trouble with accessories is that few people buy them (or in the case of keyboard/mouse for the PS2 realise they can use ones they aready have) which means few games support them.
by putting the wiimote in the box nintendo has practically gauranteed it will become a major part of the Wii platform.
This means that, for every console they sell to someone that doesn't buy at least $200 worth of additional product, they are taking damage.
i suspect most people who buy one will wan't it at least partly for gaming as if you don't then its not worth buying (ok so a few devs who wan't to play arround on a PPC box might too but i doubt that number will be signficiant to sony).
its a pity linux wasn't installed out of the box but if sony and the distros can make the installation newbie friendly (should be pretty easy given that its known hardware) then it will be a nice value add to have basic desktop apps availible on your gaming box, some may even decide it makes a PC at home unessacery.
also through emulators it allows running of illegal copies of old games (imo this is significant since running old games is a killer feature of the wii that sony would find it hard to compete with legally)
i think his point was that stable isotopes of strontium don't do much to you and neither does something of the same radioactive strength as strontium-90 evenly distributed through the body.
but combine the two and as you say you have a deadly combination.
the quality is good though lego (provided its not decades old or badly chewed etc) ALWAYS fits lego easilly and yet grips well by friction, getting that kind of repeatable long life friction grip with plastic parts can't be easy.
Its not such an issue with building say model houses but the adivce i always got was if you are building a technic model and wan't to use ordinary bricks in them make sure they are genuine lego ones.
P.S. always use a brick seperator even if it seems a pain, biting lego bricks leads to them not fitting so closely which screws up many technic designs.
there's a train running down a track on the collision course with another train. It's about to run into the last switch before collision becomes inevitable. There's a single person sleeping on the other track served by the switch. Do you (a) do nothing or (b) throw the switch, killing the sleeping guy/playing child/family in car but saving the passengers on the trains. Assuming a fatal collision can't be stopped any other way you should throw the points and kill the person/people on the track.
presumablly the more difficult judgement calls come when you don't know if the trains can stop in time or not or when the trains involved are frieght trains with only a few people on board.
but yes theese cramped "can't get out of the way of everything and can't stop in time either" situations generally require human judgement to identify what is what (a computer can easilly tell something is in the way, its much harder to tell how many people would die in a collision with it) and make a descision that aims to kill/maim as few people as possible.
Believe it or not, most commercial flights are already 95% done on autopilot
hardly surprising, big sky,small planes, large clearances between planes giving plenty of ability to move out of the way and noone trying to shoot you down. All you have to do is keep the plane stable, follow waypoints and move out of the way if anything else comes too close.
takeoff and landing is somewhat trickier (its done a lot because it can land safely in thick fog, thus reducing diverts) and i belive requires special ground equipment. I doubt the emergency divert airports in the mid atlantic have the equipment for automatic landings.
a staged system would probablly work better, something more like (where T is the introduction time)
T+1 year =banks must only give out new currency T+2 years=shops must only give out new currency T+4 years=old currency may only be changed at banks
A system like that would allow the bulk of money to leave circulation normally through banks replacing old notes while still fixing the issue fairly rapidly.
i suspect that the ammount of money stored as cash in jars for long periods is only a very small fraction of the total money in circulation.
As for cards i dunno what its like in the US but here in the UK small shops do not like cards (afaict small shops pay much higher fees than the big chains) and often either don't take them at all or only take them for purchases over a certain value.
There are a few situations I can see where everyday workstation users might have a bit of trouble without any training. One would be, as you touched upon, mounting devices, CDs, floppies, USB sticks, etc., to get files that aren't on the primary hard drive or to save something. OK, maybe a French depute doesn't need to understand all of the mechanics and optional arguments of dd or mkisofs, but eventually someone will want to take work home with them on a disk/CD, load something off a pen drive, or burn a graphical presentation to a DVD. Having to tell them as part of the IT department, "Oh, that's too complicated for you. Yeah, I know even someone as stupid as you could figure it out in Windows, but it's a bit trickier now--there's more to remember. I'll come by and do it for you later" is simply not going to be tolerated very long. a properly configured modern desktop linux system should make all this stuff pretty easy and ceraintly not require you to manually mount stuff or use mkisofs/cdrecord directly, may i ask whatr linux distro are you using.
Another problem that could arise is if the XServer crashes and the user, who maybe hasn't used DOS in 10+ years, is suddenly met with this command prompt and a lot of text about XFontErrors and core dumps. Their first thought probably won't be, "Woops, I guess I'd better restart the XServer and e-mail this core dump and a list of things I was doing at the time to the appropriate people. How mildly inconvenient," but rather, "Oh, shit, oh shit oh shit, I just destroyed the computer. I'm going to be fired!" I'm sure many people thought oh shit the first time they saw "illegal operation" or the BSOD in windows too, after the first time (and possiblly asking someone whats going on) it generally stops being a big deal.
and that's when, thinking back to their days in Windows when they needed to fix a crashed program, hit the power button to reboot the computer...without unmounting any of the filesystems or properly shutting down. and how is that worse than them hitting the power button in a similar situation on a windows box?
Getting someone to use OOo doesn't make it one bit easier to switch from Win32 to Linux on the desktop. That's like saying "I got my mother to use Winamp instead of WMP, so now I can install Ubuntu on her PC and she can use Linux". what have mothers got to do with it, we are talking corporate/government peons here who use heavilly locked down machines (btw if you learnt windows on an open box get ready for loads of frustration when you hit a windows box setup by an IT department who belives that crippling=security).
Said peons don't need to worry about stuff like installing applications or setting up the OS because that is done for them by the IT department (generally the OS is setup by imaging and new apps added either by reimaging or by using a deployment system)
once you have them using a set of apps that can all run well (note: wine may be acceptable in some circumstances but any apps to be used on it must be well tested on it) on both windows and linux (opensource or otherwise) then switching them should be a simple matter of showing them round thier new desktop environment (which will have nice icons put there by you to start the apps they need) and how to get at thier network filestore from the dialogs in their apps.
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not all caps are vital, most of them are just there to improve the smoothing on the power rails.
also just because the cap is damaged to some degree doesn't mean it has completely failed.
so no this does not entirely surprise me.
actually you can get non-polarised electrolytics too, they are often used in loudspeaker crossover circuits, i think they are basically two ordinary electrolytics in inverse series.
but anyway in most cases (especially in digital equipment like computers) capacitors are used in a way that keeps them biased the same way all the time so it doesn't really matter if they are polarised or not.
i agree with the gp that the important characteristics of electrolytics are big and slow (high ESR) while the important ones of ceramic are small and fast (low ESR).
tantalums are fairly big and fairly fast, they also have much better lifetime characteristics than electrolytics. The downside is that they are expensive and when they do go bang (tantalums are polarised) they tend to fragment into a shower of tiny hot high velocity shrapnel.
Its unclear from TFA if the "solid capacitors" gigabyte are reffering to are tantalums or some new technology.
If it is security as its advocates claim, then it's good for everyone, including Microsoft (since they no longer have to worry about browser security
you REALLY don't understand do you, MS killed netscape because they threatened to make windows irrelevent as applications moved to the internet (unfortunately for MS while on thier deathbed just before being bought out by AOL for use against MS netscape opensourced their browser) .
you can't legally (at least not if eulas are valid in your country and even if they aren't your on shaky ground if you start copying it to install on multiple systems) install the windows version of IE under wine without owning a windows license. The unix and mac versions of IE are so hopelessly out of date as to be nearly useless to those looking for compatibility.
that means that as long as some sites require IE, buisness users who need to visit those sites will need to run windows or at least have a windows license allocated to them.
handing firefox victory in the browser market would be a very stupid move for MS because it would force sites to support firefox and once sites were supporting firefox that would be another barrier to linux migration taken down.
yes MS wants to improve thier reputation for security but i can't imagine them doing it at the cost of reducing windows lockin.
the last really radical change to the windows gui was windows 95, sure there have been fairly large tweaks since (the biggest being "windows desktop update" from IE4 and the changes windows XP). but by and large i'd expect a user who learnt on windows 95 to have little trouble dealing with the user interface of XP.
we still have drive letters for different drives/partitions, we still can edit the start menu by right clicking and selecting open on the start button, we still have windows selection through the taskbar (though now by default they are put in those horrible group), we still have 3 icons in the top right hand corner of windows in the same order and with the same symbols as on 95.
right which means that without sorting out the local government first no ammount of charitable aid will make much difference.
sad but true
what intelligence is is a difficult question to answer.
personally i'd say its the ability to solve problems WITHOUT having been designed to solve those problems and the ability to see opertunities of improvement for the current way of doing things.
cats live in our homes, foxes roam in our cities neither of those animals were designed for those environments nor have they had time for significant biological evoloution yet they find ways to manage in those environments.
and we have in a couple of centuries gone from farmers who lived off the land in relatively primitive houses to living in suburbs with no fields for miles arround and commuting into mega-cities with huge towser blocks without being reprogrammed along the way.
current "AI" research is still a LONG LONG way from acheiving that kind of adaptability.
its not as though MS didn't give you plenty of oppertunity to deal with the issues before IE 7 was made an automatic update.
I think even OpenSSH has used the "you should urgently upgrade to the latest version, but we won't tell you why" to the same effect
and seriously pissed off linux distros that have a policy of backporting security fixes by doing so
Why is a secret security patch a problem?
firstly many have a policy of not upgrading without a good reason, if they consider a security fix to be a good reason but not any of the other items in the changelog then people may unknowingly remain unpatched.
secondly it smacks of trying to cover up problems and if you get a reputation for trying to cover up problems that will make people in the know very wary of your software (look at IE for example).
Having the peace of mind that there will be regular backports for 5 years on my free OS of choice was a deal breaker.
don't you think its a little premature to assume that? ubuntus first release was just over two years and has made one LTS release which they have been supporting for less than a year.
When dapper+8 (4 years after dapper) is released and both dapper and dapper+4 support have been provided for all that time then assuming ubuntu looks healthy it will be time to rely on ubuntus long term support policy.
finally remember the LTS policy and even the 18 month policy for normal releases only apply to stuff in main so if you use stuff from universe you either have to upgrade every 6 months or track security issues on the universe stuff yourself.
so you want noobies flooding your irc channel with joins/parts as they use the back/forward buttons with your ajax or java applet based irc client?
other than forcing a new window what soloution to this do you propose?
there are occasions when popping up a window is the best choice, the big one i've come accross is when you have an window that contains say an irc client (usually a java applet but ajax or streaming to frames are also possible), unless you pop it up in a seperate window then it is very easy for the user to accidently close it.
i do however wish firefox would have a "change new window request into new tab request" setting.
just how up to date do you feel you need to be?
;) ).
debian do a "point release" every so often which includes security updates among other things and when they do so they build both new full CD/DVD images and a set of update CDs (they don't seem to yet do update DVDs but i've just suggested it
If you really wan't the latest updates you can always take a copy of the relavent directories on security.debian.org and burn it to a CD/DVD.
my mum has a very strong pair of scisors with the pivot a long was from the handle, i dunno where she got them (though i seem to remember she bought them originally from cutting lino) but they look virtually idential to the trauma shears shown at http://www.usemc.com/Trauma-Shears-s/186.htm&Click =4880
All floating point operations are approximations, writing good floating point code is all about understanding the approximations and tradeoffs you are making.
and floading point operations can be one of the slowest parts of code
i have to agree on the lack of comments in the source for games, it can make them very hard to penatrate (particularlly when combined with heavy use of macros)
lets instead think of adding a wireless keyboard accessory
trouble with accessories is that few people buy them (or in the case of keyboard/mouse for the PS2 realise they can use ones they aready have) which means few games support them.
by putting the wiimote in the box nintendo has practically gauranteed it will become a major part of the Wii platform.
This means that, for every console they sell to someone that doesn't buy at least $200 worth of additional product, they are taking damage.
i suspect most people who buy one will wan't it at least partly for gaming as if you don't then its not worth buying (ok so a few devs who wan't to play arround on a PPC box might too but i doubt that number will be signficiant to sony).
its a pity linux wasn't installed out of the box but if sony and the distros can make the installation newbie friendly (should be pretty easy given that its known hardware) then it will be a nice value add to have basic desktop apps availible on your gaming box, some may even decide it makes a PC at home unessacery.
also through emulators it allows running of illegal copies of old games (imo this is significant since running old games is a killer feature of the wii that sony would find it hard to compete with legally)
i think his point was that stable isotopes of strontium don't do much to you and neither does something of the same radioactive strength as strontium-90 evenly distributed through the body.
but combine the two and as you say you have a deadly combination.
yeah its not the cheapest contstruction toy,
the quality is good though lego (provided its not decades old or badly chewed etc) ALWAYS fits lego easilly and yet grips well by friction, getting that kind of repeatable long life friction grip with plastic parts can't be easy.
Its not such an issue with building say model houses but the adivce i always got was if you are building a technic model and wan't to use ordinary bricks in them make sure they are genuine lego ones.
P.S. always use a brick seperator even if it seems a pain, biting lego bricks leads to them not fitting so closely which screws up many technic designs.
do you have any evidence to back up that claim?
there's a train running down a track on the collision course with another train. It's about to run into the last switch before collision becomes inevitable. There's a single person sleeping on the other track served by the switch. Do you (a) do nothing or (b) throw the switch, killing the sleeping guy/playing child/family in car but saving the passengers on the trains.
Assuming a fatal collision can't be stopped any other way you should throw the points and kill the person/people on the track.
presumablly the more difficult judgement calls come when you don't know if the trains can stop in time or not or when the trains involved are frieght trains with only a few people on board.
but yes theese cramped "can't get out of the way of everything and can't stop in time either" situations generally require human judgement to identify what is what (a computer can easilly tell something is in the way, its much harder to tell how many people would die in a collision with it) and make a descision that aims to kill/maim as few people as possible.
Believe it or not, most commercial flights are already 95% done on autopilot
hardly surprising, big sky,small planes, large clearances between planes giving plenty of ability to move out of the way and noone trying to shoot you down. All you have to do is keep the plane stable, follow waypoints and move out of the way if anything else comes too close.
takeoff and landing is somewhat trickier (its done a lot because it can land safely in thick fog, thus reducing diverts) and i belive requires special ground equipment. I doubt the emergency divert airports in the mid atlantic have the equipment for automatic landings.
1 year is probablly cutting it a bit tight.
a staged system would probablly work better, something more like (where T is the introduction time)
T+1 year =banks must only give out new currency
T+2 years=shops must only give out new currency
T+4 years=old currency may only be changed at banks
A system like that would allow the bulk of money to leave circulation normally through banks replacing old notes while still fixing the issue fairly rapidly.
i suspect that the ammount of money stored as cash in jars for long periods is only a very small fraction of the total money in circulation.
As for cards i dunno what its like in the US but here in the UK small shops do not like cards (afaict small shops pay much higher fees than the big chains) and often either don't take them at all or only take them for purchases over a certain value.
There are a few situations I can see where everyday workstation users might have a bit of trouble without any training. One would be, as you touched upon, mounting devices, CDs, floppies, USB sticks, etc., to get files that aren't on the primary hard drive or to save something. OK, maybe a French depute doesn't need to understand all of the mechanics and optional arguments of dd or mkisofs, but eventually someone will want to take work home with them on a disk/CD, load something off a pen drive, or burn a graphical presentation to a DVD. Having to tell them as part of the IT department, "Oh, that's too complicated for you. Yeah, I know even someone as stupid as you could figure it out in Windows, but it's a bit trickier now--there's more to remember. I'll come by and do it for you later" is simply not going to be tolerated very long.
a properly configured modern desktop linux system should make all this stuff pretty easy and ceraintly not require you to manually mount stuff or use mkisofs/cdrecord directly, may i ask whatr linux distro are you using.
Another problem that could arise is if the XServer crashes and the user, who maybe hasn't used DOS in 10+ years, is suddenly met with this command prompt and a lot of text about XFontErrors and core dumps. Their first thought probably won't be, "Woops, I guess I'd better restart the XServer and e-mail this core dump and a list of things I was doing at the time to the appropriate people. How mildly inconvenient," but rather, "Oh, shit, oh shit oh shit, I just destroyed the computer. I'm going to be fired!"
I'm sure many people thought oh shit the first time they saw "illegal operation" or the BSOD in windows too, after the first time (and possiblly asking someone whats going on) it generally stops being a big deal.
and that's when, thinking back to their days in Windows when they needed to fix a crashed program, hit the power button to reboot the computer...without unmounting any of the filesystems or properly shutting down.
and how is that worse than them hitting the power button in a similar situation on a windows box?
Getting someone to use OOo doesn't make it one bit easier to switch from Win32 to Linux on the desktop. That's like saying "I got my mother to use Winamp instead of WMP, so now I can install Ubuntu on her PC and she can use Linux".
what have mothers got to do with it, we are talking corporate/government peons here who use heavilly locked down machines (btw if you learnt windows on an open box get ready for loads of frustration when you hit a windows box setup by an IT department who belives that crippling=security).
Said peons don't need to worry about stuff like installing applications or setting up the OS because that is done for them by the IT department (generally the OS is setup by imaging and new apps added either by reimaging or by using a deployment system)
once you have them using a set of apps that can all run well (note: wine may be acceptable in some circumstances but any apps to be used on it must be well tested on it) on both windows and linux (opensource or otherwise) then switching them should be a simple matter of showing them round thier new desktop environment (which will have nice icons put there by you to start the apps they need) and how to get at thier network filestore from the dialogs in their apps.