I was at BP today (with two other nerds) and the tour gide mentioned several of these.
I was particularly interesting that one isolated post was sending the same short message every day and this was assumed to be "Nothing to report".
The surounding allied forces were instructed to not go near the isolated German so that they could get more examples of the machine sending the same message.
Re:The Mysterious Reoccurrence of Mr. Freckles
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Twitter means meaningless chatter and a type of bird song.
Tweet is a (single) noise a bird makes.
By inferance, tweet is related to twitter as short unimportant remark is to meaningless chatter.
Besides batteries, there will be a huge demand for Lithium if fusion ever becomes practical. It is used to capture the neutrons and also generate more He.
Anything over 60V can kill you. Lower voltages require wires penetrating the skin to kill you.
The biggest danger is if you are wet and the current path passes through your heart. The current (as low as 30 mA) does not damage the heart, but it causes it to go into an abnormal rhythm that is fatal.
I've been shocked many times by between 120 and 800V. Only one time however was I close to dieing when I was holding a lamp with a leakage to the metal handle and grabed a grounded cable with the other. My hand locked on to the cable and I was just barely able to pull myself free.
To summarize, 120V will definately kill you if there is a good conduction path. This usually requires wet hands or feet.
Curiously higher voltages can sometimes be less dangerous. They can cause a temprorary clamping of the heart muscle, but they do not cause the abnormal rhythm.
As a professional writer for decades, I have used most of the tools.
Word is a good place to start, but you will want to move off of it quickly for big projects. A key point that has not been covered enough is the distinction between writing and printing. Word is a reasonable writing tool, but a bad printing tool for large documents.
Most big organizations with an in-house technical publications department use some sort of SGML or XML tool. FrameMaker and AuthorIt are popular. Flare is gaining ground, but I have not used it so I can't say anything about it.
FrameMaker is very good for giving complete control of documentation layout (docbook) and is able to export to PDF or web. In general you don't want to be too tied down to how text is presented while you are writing it.
If you must use Word, try to get the template sorted out early on and disable formatting changes. Word can quickly get out of control and you have dozens of almost identical formats in a document.
To boil years of experience down to a few tips: - write as simply as you can and don't show off - try to be consistent - write what your audience needs and can handle - use the active voice - use graphics and tables instead of wordy paragraphs - find as many examples of bad writing as you can and study them intently to really understand why they are bad.
It's sad how this site has become so extreme in denying global warming.
It will be obvious to everyone soon, even to deluded nerds, but possibly too late to change.
When the constant speed of light (within measurement ability) it was a great suprise because the scientists assumed the measurement they were doing would prove existence of either.
Nuclear phenomena was investigated by the Curies, it took a long time because the engineering ability to refine yellow cake was limited. 21st centurn engineering would have identified radium and uranium isotopes in a matter of days.
Crystals were being investigated, it was just a matter of time until diodes and transistors were discovered. (and from there ICs)
All of these depend on genius to shorten the time to a result, but sufficiently advanced engineering would get to the same place eventually.
Of course, engineering depends on science. The faster science goes, the faster engineering goes.
None of that contradicts my basic point that one way of measuring genius is how much ahead the scientist was compared to the craftmanship of the era they worked in.
The reason research is so much slower now is because all of the easy stuff has been found. My physic's lab class had a lot of assignments to rediscover basic laws and constants such as acceleration of gravity, defraction and lens law, wavelength, conservation of momentum. Most of these only took two hours. A lot easier in the 20th century than it was for the original workers with limited tools.
My personal measure of Great Genius, is how far they were ahead of their contempories.
Most of the breakthroughs in the 19th and 20th centuries were either pure engineering where engineering alone would have eventually caught up even if performed by average scientists.
Determining the speed of light is constant in a vacume (engineering), determining the chromosome structure (would have been done eventually by better scanners and computers), atomic bomb (engineering), integrated circuit (engineering).
Rembrant (genius), Newton (mostly genius, far ahead of his time, but others were working on calculus for example)
The need for genius is to breakup group think and complacency. A secondary value is to provide inspiration to others that follow after to dream of their own accomplishments.
I've also had problems with Writer and Word not opening each others saved docs.
In particular I have been fighting both to get Christmas card lables printed.
I have no objection to people using FOS if it provides the features they need, but if Word does what I want and I am willing to pay the cost, that's my choice too. About once a month I try to do something in an FOS alternative just to see if it has gotten better. So far paying for what I want is worth the features.
There are too main problems to the wider adoption of OS alternatives:
- Features missing
- Poor usability (made worse by zealots saying to users that they don't understand the software)
Both of these are due (perhaps understandably) to the applications having what the developer wanted to create rather than what typical users might want.
I agree that Word does not scale well to big projects. If forced to abandon FrameMaker, I would go to Latex rather than Word. If Writer can eventually operate completely seamlessly with Word, I'll move to Writer in a second. Until then...
The risk of nukes is the least convincing argument. A lot of people seem to think that if the good guys don't have nuclear technology, the bad guys wont bother (different people might have different interpretations on the good guys and the bad guys).
The secret of building nuclear weapons, according to a quote I can't source at the moment, is knowing that nuclear weapons are possible.
Everything after that is just technology.
If there is to be a world program, with enforcement, is the new plan, OK with me. Getting everyone to agree on the world enforcer will be a problem.
Actually they can't watch TV, except for nature programs that don't have a plot.
Impossible to follow a drama if you can't remember who the characters are or what they did five minutes ago.
Good point. May of the posters above and below are confused about the difference between cache and on-chip RAM.
Cache is great if you have huge programs. Smaller applications (such as a might be used in a parallel element) work better with on-chip SRAM.
The main difference is the way the memory is addressed. SRAM has it's own address space, cache is a fast copy of conventional memory.
There are some corner cases where you can lock down cache to make it function as SRAM, but generally on-chip SRAM is easier to optimize for than cache. Cache optimizes everything so needs (relatively) less care in programming.
Of course the technology for the individual memory cells is the same. What is different is the addressing logic and (for cache) keeping track of whether the cache matches the external memory.
I not sure what you meed by 2,000,000 ly in 28 years.
Obviously you cannot accelerate that much because of the hard limit of light speed (and the effect of increasing mass as you approach light speed).
Of course if you mean some radically new and unimaginable technology, why not assume you can get there in five seconds.
This both true and not true.
The "Euro" plug that is now standard in the EU (except for UK) is polarized and will only mate in one orientation.
It will still be some time however before these are used everywhere.
There are still a lot of legacy three-pin or two pin sockets around and most of these are not polarized.
Of course if a plug or socket is miswired, there is no way to get around that. Most Euro cables for appliances are molded and do not require the customer to wire it. Socket wiring is down to the professionalism of the installer.
Which wire is hot is well defined for three-pin plugs (assuming of course that the plug and socket are wired correctly).
Many plugs for low power however have just two wires in the free-socket end of the power cord (usually an "8" connector) and these of course cannot be relied upon.
You do know (or would know if you had any ability to use a keyboard beyond typing idle speculation) that Obama graduated Magna cum Laude from Harvard Law so he was in the top 10% of his class. That is enough for me to go on. Does it matter what his Columbia grades were?
Companies are stopping providing credit to each other now. Already. This is not a theory. Banks (and other institutions, but mainly banks) have driven up the cost of commercial paper by a phenonomenal amount or just stopped writing. This is something that does not require speculation. It only requires observing what is going on now.
I think the rescue plan needed passing, but it is a great pity that it became necessary. Prudent regulation (and less greed, but that's hard to legislate against) would have resulted in a downturn, but no need for a rescue plan.
If people are mad now about the bailout,just wait until the real $hit comes down. This is just the beginning. It's going to get a lot worse. Naomi Klien's new book is a timely description of what is coming.
There are a lot of desktop applications that are crying out for HPC.
It's true that many of these applications also have a *nix variant, but some do not.
Massive CAD programs, RTL synthesys and validation, many types of simulation.
When applications get huge (or have huge data sets), the OS becomes an insignificant part of the workload.
Many of these applications are starting to migrate to "cloud" or cluster HW with Linux, but there are still many places where the app people want to use is a Windows app.
I have heard this said often - and even somethimes said even by people that seem to be intelligent.
There are a lot of religious "fundamentalists" that don't usually get a lot of TV coverage. Some light has recently been focused on Palin's old church and illuminated a lot of very strange beliefs.
I went there recently and I really loved it. My wife however was very bored. She found it more interesting however when there were speakers talking about the history.
I preferred the really techy stuff - particularly seeing electronic commponents that I worked with when I first started making electronic projects. Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for the exibits) you could not touch them. Probably a good thing otherwise I might have been taking the Bombe apart to get a better idea how it worked.
Perhaps they need different color coded streams: Children, young geeks, wives (or non-geek husbands), old farts.
I hope they get funding sorted. This place is real history. More than almost any castle or birthplace tourist "adventure".
Slashdot Mirror
I was at BP today (with two other nerds) and the tour gide mentioned several of these.
I was particularly interesting that one isolated post was sending the same short message every day and this was assumed to be "Nothing to report".
The surounding allied forces were instructed to not go near the isolated German so that they could get more examples of the machine sending the same message.
Twitter means meaningless chatter and a type of bird song.
Tweet is a (single) noise a bird makes.
By inferance, tweet is related to twitter as short unimportant remark is to meaningless chatter.
Very Nice. Would have been even better if you signed H.N.
The numbers for desktop I have heard imply that it is the other ninety-eight percent of the market.
Besides batteries, there will be a huge demand for Lithium if fusion ever becomes practical. It is used to capture the neutrons and also generate more He.
Anything over 60V can kill you. Lower voltages require wires penetrating the skin to kill you.
The biggest danger is if you are wet and the current path passes through your heart. The current (as low as 30 mA) does not damage the heart, but it causes it to go into an abnormal rhythm that is fatal.
I've been shocked many times by between 120 and 800V. Only one time however was I close to dieing when I was holding a lamp with a leakage to the metal handle and grabed a grounded cable with the other. My hand locked on to the cable and I was just barely able to pull myself free.
To summarize, 120V will definately kill you if there is a good conduction path. This usually requires wet hands or feet.
Curiously higher voltages can sometimes be less dangerous. They can cause a temprorary clamping of the heart muscle, but they do not cause the abnormal rhythm.
As a professional writer for decades, I have used most of the tools.
Word is a good place to start, but you will want to move off of it quickly for big projects. A key point that has not been covered enough is the distinction between writing and printing. Word is a reasonable writing tool, but a bad printing tool for large documents.
Most big organizations with an in-house technical publications department use some sort of SGML or XML tool. FrameMaker and AuthorIt are popular. Flare is gaining ground, but I have not used it so I can't say anything about it.
FrameMaker is very good for giving complete control of documentation layout (docbook) and is able to export to PDF or web. In general you don't want to be too tied down to how text is presented while you are writing it.
If you must use Word, try to get the template sorted out early on and disable formatting changes. Word can quickly get out of control and you have dozens of almost identical formats in a document.
To boil years of experience down to a few tips:
- write as simply as you can and don't show off
- try to be consistent
- write what your audience needs and can handle
- use the active voice
- use graphics and tables instead of wordy paragraphs
- find as many examples of bad writing as you can and study them intently to really understand why they are bad.
It's sad how this site has become so extreme in denying global warming.
It will be obvious to everyone soon, even to deluded nerds, but possibly too late to change.
When the constant speed of light (within measurement ability) it was a great suprise because the scientists assumed the measurement they were doing would prove existence of either.
Nuclear phenomena was investigated by the Curies, it took a long time because the engineering ability to refine yellow cake was limited. 21st centurn engineering would have identified radium and uranium isotopes in a matter of days.
Crystals were being investigated, it was just a matter of time until diodes and transistors were discovered. (and from there ICs)
All of these depend on genius to shorten the time to a result, but sufficiently advanced engineering would get to the same place eventually.
Of course, engineering depends on science. The faster science goes, the faster engineering goes.
None of that contradicts my basic point that one way of measuring genius is how much ahead the scientist was compared to the craftmanship of the era they worked in.
The reason research is so much slower now is because all of the easy stuff has been found. My physic's lab class had a lot of assignments to rediscover basic laws and constants such as acceleration of gravity, defraction and lens law, wavelength, conservation of momentum. Most of these only took two hours. A lot easier in the 20th century than it was for the original workers with limited tools.
My personal measure of Great Genius, is how far they were ahead of their contempories.
Most of the breakthroughs in the 19th and 20th centuries were either pure engineering where engineering alone would have eventually caught up even if performed by average scientists.
Determining the speed of light is constant in a vacume (engineering), determining the chromosome structure (would have been done eventually by better scanners and computers), atomic bomb (engineering), integrated circuit (engineering).
Rembrant (genius), Newton (mostly genius, far ahead of his time, but others were working on calculus for example)
The need for genius is to breakup group think and complacency. A secondary value is to provide inspiration to others that follow after to dream of their own accomplishments.
I've also had problems with Writer and Word not opening each others saved docs.
...
In particular I have been fighting both to get Christmas card lables printed.
I have no objection to people using FOS if it provides the features they need, but if Word does what I want and I am willing to pay the cost, that's my choice too. About once a month I try to do something in an FOS alternative just to see if it has gotten better. So far paying for what I want is worth the features.
There are too main problems to the wider adoption of OS alternatives:
- Features missing
- Poor usability (made worse by zealots saying to users that they don't understand the software)
Both of these are due (perhaps understandably) to the applications having what the developer wanted to create rather than what typical users might want.
I agree that Word does not scale well to big projects. If forced to abandon FrameMaker, I would go to Latex rather than Word. If Writer can eventually operate completely seamlessly with Word, I'll move to Writer in a second. Until then
The risk of nukes is the least convincing argument. A lot of people seem to think that if the good guys don't have nuclear technology, the bad guys wont bother (different people might have different interpretations on the good guys and the bad guys).
The secret of building nuclear weapons, according to a quote I can't source at the moment, is knowing that nuclear weapons are possible.
Everything after that is just technology.
If there is to be a world program, with enforcement, is the new plan, OK with me. Getting everyone to agree on the world enforcer will be a problem.
Klaatu barada nikto!
Actually they can't watch TV, except for nature programs that don't have a plot.
Impossible to follow a drama if you can't remember who the characters are or what they did five minutes ago.
Good point. May of the posters above and below are confused about the difference between cache and on-chip RAM.
Cache is great if you have huge programs. Smaller applications (such as a might be used in a parallel element) work better with on-chip SRAM.
The main difference is the way the memory is addressed. SRAM has it's own address space, cache is a fast copy of conventional memory.
There are some corner cases where you can lock down cache to make it function as SRAM, but generally on-chip SRAM is easier to optimize for than cache. Cache optimizes everything so needs (relatively) less care in programming.
Of course the technology for the individual memory cells is the same. What is different is the addressing logic and (for cache) keeping track of whether the cache matches the external memory.
Great, I'm going to give my wife a tractor for Christmas.
Like "dialing" a phone number. A significant percentage of the Slashdot crowd has probably only seen dial phones in movies.
I not sure what you meed by 2,000,000 ly in 28 years. Obviously you cannot accelerate that much because of the hard limit of light speed (and the effect of increasing mass as you approach light speed).
Of course if you mean some radically new and unimaginable technology, why not assume you can get there in five seconds.
This both true and not true.
The "Euro" plug that is now standard in the EU (except for UK) is polarized and will only mate in one orientation.
It will still be some time however before these are used everywhere. There are still a lot of legacy three-pin or two pin sockets around and most of these are not polarized.
Of course if a plug or socket is miswired, there is no way to get around that. Most Euro cables for appliances are molded and do not require the customer to wire it. Socket wiring is down to the professionalism of the installer.
Which wire is hot is well defined for three-pin plugs (assuming of course that the plug and socket are wired correctly).
Many plugs for low power however have just two wires in the free-socket end of the power cord (usually an "8" connector) and these of course cannot be relied upon.
Why do so many Americans love their guns but complain that the free press is, well, free to do what it wants.
Perhaps we could make a deal, give up free press AND the right to expression and give up guns.
Not so attractive a proposition is it?
You do know (or would know if you had any ability to use a keyboard beyond typing idle speculation) that Obama graduated Magna cum Laude from Harvard Law so he was in the top 10% of his class. That is enough for me to go on. Does it matter what his Columbia grades were?
Companies are stopping providing credit to each other now. Already. This is not a theory. Banks (and other institutions, but mainly banks) have driven up the cost of commercial paper by a phenonomenal amount or just stopped writing. This is something that does not require speculation. It only requires observing what is going on now.
I think the rescue plan needed passing, but it is a great pity that it became necessary. Prudent regulation (and less greed, but that's hard to legislate against) would have resulted in a downturn, but no need for a rescue plan.
If people are mad now about the bailout,just wait until the real $hit comes down. This is just the beginning. It's going to get a lot worse. Naomi Klien's new book is a timely description of what is coming.
There are a lot of desktop applications that are crying out for HPC.
It's true that many of these applications also have a *nix variant, but some do not.
Massive CAD programs, RTL synthesys and validation, many types of simulation.
When applications get huge (or have huge data sets), the OS becomes an insignificant part of the workload.
Many of these applications are starting to migrate to "cloud" or cluster HW with Linux, but there are still many places where the app people want to use is a Windows app.
I have heard this said often - and even somethimes said even by people that seem to be intelligent.
There are a lot of religious "fundamentalists" that don't usually get a lot of TV coverage. Some light has recently been focused on Palin's old church and illuminated a lot of very strange beliefs.
I went there recently and I really loved it. My wife however was very bored. She found it more interesting however when there were speakers talking about the history.
I preferred the really techy stuff - particularly seeing electronic commponents that I worked with when I first started making electronic projects. Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for the exibits) you could not touch them. Probably a good thing otherwise I might have been taking the Bombe apart to get a better idea how it worked.
Perhaps they need different color coded streams:
Children, young geeks, wives (or non-geek husbands), old farts.
I hope they get funding sorted. This place is real history. More than almost any castle or birthplace tourist "adventure".