I was brought up using Imperial units. When I learnt metric units, lots of things I was interested in were easier to understand and calculations were simplified.
In one book I read (when I was about 9 years old) it said that a cubic inch of the Sun's core gave of xxx (I don't remember the exact number) horsepower! If they had specified it in metric I could relate it to electric heaters.
Try getting a rough idea of the fraction of a woman's weight her baby is: compare mentally getting the ratio of baby of 7 pounds and 8 ounces with the mother in 9 stone and 7 pounds - you're into some difficult calculations! However, compare the a baby of 3.6 Kg to the mother's weight of 60Kg gives you about 6% easily.
How how many British Thermal Units is generated when you drop a hundredweight 4 yards at sea level (g = 32 feet/second^2)? Much easier to calculate the energy in Joules dropping 100 Kg 4 metres (g = 9.8 m/s^2).
Try adding 1 5/8" to 2 2/3", whereas adding 41mm to 68 mm is much easier - for most woodwork projects measuring to the nearest mm is accurate enough!
Please tell us in what ways is Imperial easier?
You might says it is easier to divide a foot in to 3 parts than a metre, true - but dividing a metre in 5 is easier than dividing a foot into 5 parts.
So most calculations in Science and everyday work are easier in metric.
Oh, by the way - please tell your airforce that Kg/cm^2 is not a valid unit of pressure, as pressure is force over a unit area and Kg is a unit of mass! The metric unit of force is the Newton. Force and mass are fundamentally different concepts.
'...That is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'
Someone carefully analyzed the tape electronically, and found Armstrong actually did say "...step for a man..." - the 'a' was practically inaudible by the human ear.
On reading the sentence starting: Other than the choice of the "battle terrain" the tests were conducted in a completely fair manner
The phrase Hit me harder, Baby I'm loving it!
sprang to mind.:-)
On a more serious note, getting someone to give you some really fiendish benchmarks aimed at showing the worst performance of your software, is good value. Give's one greater confidence, than benchmarks from one's own camp.
The winners are the people who need real time - they now have better choice.
Looks like some serious heavy engineering going on in the Linux kernel, almost wish I had a reason to get into real time stuff...
I remember reading somewhere that someone used String Theory to explain why there were 3 families of particles.
Apparently the number of particle families puts topological constraints on String Theory. So finding another particle family would help make String Theory a bit more precise.
Actually the water level _WILL_ fall - because some water will have evaporated - assuming the humidity level is less than 100%, atmopheric pressure and mean background temperatures remain constant.
Water is most dense at about 4.1 C, so if the liquid water was above 4.1 C and cooled because of the ice, this would also cause the level of the liquid surface to drop.
There are many other assumptions that need to be made; including, but not limited too assumptions about: gravitational force and chemicals disolved in the water.
Some of the wierder implied assumptions are: the nature of the dimensionality of the location not changing (one theory about the big bang is that the dimensionality of the universe changed - one dimension got much bigger), and excluding interference by one or more gods...
I believe it is impossible to list absolutely all the assumptions required. Fortunately, for practical purposes, there are a limited number of assumptions we need to be concerned about. Consider the huge explosion if New Zealand did truely become nuclear free!!! (Hint: every atom has a nucleous.)
A lot of people don't realize that Asimov added a 4th law ahead of the first 3.
He called it the Zeroth Law of Robotics - it allowed a Robot to harm a human provided that it would provide a compensating greater benifit to the Human race as a whole (though I'm not sure of the exact wording).
Something like that would be required by an air Traffic Control Robot - to allow the Robot to deliberately crash a plane (running out of fuel, failing engines,...) into a mountain in 5 minutes rather than a city in 6 minutes, assuming there were no other options...
In the Second world War the Royal Navy sent swordfish torpedo bombers - old, slow biplanes nicknamed "stringbags" to attack the great German Battleship Bismarck.
The Bismarck was fitted with radar controlled anti-aircraft guns which were designed to shoot down modern aircraft. The system was implemented on the assumption that aircraft always flew faster than 100 Km/Hr (about 63 miles an hour for the Americans).
The "stringbags" flew into a howling gale, they travelled too slow for the Bismarck's anti-aircraft guns.
Two torpedoes hit the Bismarck. It suffered damage to one rudder and had an oil leak.
The jammed rudder affected its speed and ability to steer.
The oil leak was so significant that the the Royal Navy was able to track from searching for the leak.
Finally the the Royal Navy caught up with the Bismarck and it was destroyed.
Don't tell the Bismarck's captain that modern technology always wins...
-Nivag
It had a 2MHz 6502 processor, plus 32K RAM, the OS and BASIC were in ROM. The micro ran BASIC 5 times faster than an Apple II or Commodore 64. It also had PROCcedures with arguments and WHILE loops, as well as long variable names - never needed to use GOTO's or GOSUB's. At the time 1982, I was A COBOL programmer on ICL mainframes (roughly IBM 360 compatibles.
The first computer I ever programmed was an HP mini the size of a filing cabinet with about 5K of core memory, this was 1968. I was graphing the results of passing complex numbers into trig functions for fun, my university Maths was up to that level until 2 years later.
My favourite computer was the Acorn Archimedes with a 32 bit ARM2 chip running at 8MHz, it could out perform an Intel 386 running at 25MHz. It had the best GUI I had ever seen, even now some of its features are better than what I can access now. ARM2 assembler was the nicest low level language I have ever used.
How do we get rid of the gray bars that are interspersed with the main news items? Either that, or an ability to consolidate them in one place at the bottom.
I must admit I find the gray bars most annoying, and a quite unnecessary distraction.
The gray bars look so bad, I suggest that you make them an optional extra, that is turned off by default.
The only positive thing I can say about them is that they may encourage me to look at Slashdot once a day instead of multiple times during the day.
No, No, NO! It is 10 thousand years at most. I have it on the best authority. According a guy that presented seminars discrediting Evolution, the Universe was made 10,000 years ago. It must be true as Christians never lie, and it was in a Baptist church run by an American Pastor in Dublin in Ireland, and we all know that Americans always tell the truth...
Are males not allowed to? Here is an obvious case were gender neutral language is more appropriate - using they instead of she would be a lot better, and less disracting to the main point.
(1) ensure firewall set up strictly, install the best anti-virus software (2) apply a pre-emptive scorched earth policy
Actually (1) costs me nothing, and (2) is implemented by not having a Mac...
>>> On a more serious note
I use Linux, but I: (1) install all the latest security patches (2) run with a very strict firewall (3) disable all non-essential "potential" internet accessible services (4) browse any really dodgy sites via a special user account set up for that one site & discarded afterwards (I've only done this once) (5) am not complacent
Personally, I find the lack of variety in computers boring. I remember the days when you had the likes of: (A) the Acorn Archimedes (truly the most user friendly GUI I've ever come across) (B) Atari (C) Commodore (D) Sinclare (E) and others
The most crucial flaw in the notion of Intelligent Design (ID) - is that the justification "life is so complicated and perfect that it must be designed" is that it raises the question "who designed this designer!".
Essentially ID is pure superstition, and has no scientific validity!
Probably he had reached his Least Upper Limit, he might need to learn how to effectively Interpolate more, or at least be more Discrete about his attempts, but he might feel better if he was careful with his Latus Rwctum, lest he go Hyperbolic!
-Nivag
It was that the skin of the Zepplin that was highly flamable...
People just focussed on the fact that Hydrogen burns, but Hydrogen would mostly have gone up - you can see plainly in the film of the event that the skin itself was burning.
Asimov added the Zeroth Law:Do no action that hurts trhe bulk of Humanity
Not sure of the exact words of the Zeroth Law, but it does permit a robot to kill an individual human who was about to bomb a wdding party and kill and injure many people. The law also permits a planet wide planning robot to allow minor failures so that people feel irritated enough to become motivated to take an interest in life - if life is "perfect" why bother attempting to improvev things?
Well, I check the BBC news site http://news.bbc.co.uk/ several times a day, but the MSNBC site several time a year (and most often by "accident") - big diffrence.
I wonder how many people avoid MSNBC because of the connection to Microsoft? I know that makes me wary of it.
One of the advantages of the BBC news site is the complete absence of adverts!
Java has excellent API's for handling databases, and you can write sophisticated GUI applications using Swing.
With the default Hotspot compiler you get frequently executed code converted to native machine code; and in server mode, it will even consider inlining methods betwen classes.
If you are doing a web application, you should consider a combination of Tomcat, Servlets and JSP's. However, there are many other combinations, including many Java Apache projects that might be more suitable for you.
For heavy duty enterprise use you might like to consider JBoss.
Java 1.5 introduced many features to ease coding, as well as improving performance and reliability. The next release of J2EE looks to do provide even better ease of development, as it incorporates key concepts from Hibernate and builds on the neat features of Java 1.5.
I recomend Java for non trivial applications that you want to maintain easily and need to scale to large volumes of transactions.
Essentially Java is still very viable for serious application development, and is often to be preferred.
If you have a very small development team, only dealing with small to medium transaction loads, and don't expect to maintain the application for years - then other systems may be better for you.
For large scale developments that need to be maintained and enhanced for several years, Java is the only starter. For medium systems: Java is a starter, but there are alternatives - although Java still has the edge. For small systems: the choice is not so clear cut, but personally I'd still chose Javs - though I'd carefully evaluate things before making a final decision.
If I joined a company using PHP, then for small systems I'd stick with PHP, for a new project that was to be large scale I'd switch to Java.
Please don't make decisions on software development like you would when chosing fashionable clothes.
Hopefully that won't be necessary, at most I'll be reading not editing (just visited the URL, it would be good for reading, but you can't use punch cards to mark your place on a screen! - I still have several hundred surplus 80 column punch cards)! I'll see if I can use a Linux workstation...
Many of the younger generation don't appreciate just how much is COBOL is still being maintained and enhanced. I made the mistake at one point saying I'd never be a COBOL programmer - taught me not to be so dogmatic!
I may be starting a new job in the next few weeks. Where I expect to be coding at least 10% of the time, and at least 40% will involve looking at code and mentoring Junior Java developers. Unfortunately they know I can read COBOL, having been COBOL programmer for several years in my dark and sordid past, so I have a suspician I might be asked to do so... They are moving 32 systems, some quite old, into a common arhitecture based on Enterprise Java.
I learnt FORTRAN at university in the early 70's (in Auckland, New Zealand).
Anyhow, I would be coding at home, even if I didn't at work!
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm...
/second^2)? Much easier to calculate the energy in Joules dropping 100 Kg 4 metres (g = 9.8 m/s^2).
I was brought up using Imperial units. When I learnt metric units, lots of things I was interested in were easier to understand and calculations were simplified.
In one book I read (when I was about 9 years old) it said that a cubic inch of the Sun's core gave of xxx (I don't remember the exact number) horsepower! If they had specified it in metric I could relate it to electric heaters.
Try getting a rough idea of the fraction of a woman's weight her baby is: compare mentally getting the ratio of baby of 7 pounds and 8 ounces with the mother in 9 stone and 7 pounds - you're into some difficult calculations! However, compare the a baby of 3.6 Kg to the mother's weight of 60Kg gives you about 6% easily.
How how many British Thermal Units is generated when you drop a hundredweight 4 yards at sea level (g = 32 feet
Try adding 1 5/8" to 2 2/3", whereas adding 41mm to 68 mm is much easier - for most woodwork projects measuring to the nearest mm is accurate enough!
Please tell us in what ways is Imperial easier?
You might says it is easier to divide a foot in to 3 parts than a metre, true - but dividing a metre in 5 is easier than dividing a foot into 5 parts.
So most calculations in Science and everyday work are easier in metric.
Oh, by the way - please tell your airforce that Kg/cm^2 is not a valid unit of pressure, as pressure is force over a unit area and Kg is a unit of mass! The metric unit of force is the Newton. Force and mass are fundamentally different concepts.
'...That is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'
Someone carefully analyzed the tape electronically, and found Armstrong actually did say "...step for a man..." - the 'a' was practically inaudible by the human ear.
-Nivag
On reading the sentence starting:
:-)
Other than the choice of the "battle terrain" the tests were conducted in a completely fair manner
The phrase
Hit me harder, Baby I'm loving it!
sprang to mind.
On a more serious note, getting someone to give you some really fiendish benchmarks aimed at showing the worst performance of your software, is good value. Give's one greater confidence, than benchmarks from one's own camp.
The winners are the people who need real time - they now have better choice.
Looks like some serious heavy engineering going on in the Linux kernel, almost wish I had a reason to get into real time stuff...
-Nivag
very compact at 2-3m diameter
"metres" or "miles???
-Nivag
Hmm...
I remember reading somewhere that someone used String Theory to explain why there were 3 families of particles.
Apparently the number of particle families puts topological constraints on String Theory. So finding another particle family would help make String Theory a bit more precise.
-Nivag
Hmm...
Actually the water level _WILL_ fall - because some water will have evaporated - assuming the humidity level is less than 100%, atmopheric pressure and mean background temperatures remain constant.
Water is most dense at about 4.1 C, so if the liquid water was above 4.1 C and cooled because of the ice, this would also cause the level of the liquid surface to drop.
There are many other assumptions that need to be made; including, but not limited too assumptions about: gravitational force and chemicals disolved in the water.
Some of the wierder implied assumptions are: the nature of the dimensionality of the location not changing (one theory about the big bang is that the dimensionality of the universe changed - one dimension got much bigger), and excluding interference by one or more gods...
I believe it is impossible to list absolutely all the assumptions required. Fortunately, for practical purposes, there are a limited number of assumptions we need to be concerned about. Consider the huge explosion if New Zealand did truely become nuclear free!!! (Hint: every atom has a nucleous.)
-Nivag
Mir had mold growing on the outside of the space station, despite the vacuum and extremes of temperature!
-Nivag
A lot of people don't realize that Asimov added a 4th law ahead of the first 3.
...) into a mountain in 5 minutes rather than a city in 6 minutes, assuming there were no other options...
He called it the Zeroth Law of Robotics - it allowed a Robot to harm a human provided that it would provide a compensating greater benifit to the Human race as a whole (though I'm not sure of the exact wording).
Something like that would be required by an air Traffic Control Robot - to allow the Robot to deliberately crash a plane (running out of fuel, failing engines,
-Nivag
Remember it is one million Euro , the US dollar figure should be in brackets...
Quoting the US dollar figure looks strange, as it is not a round number.
-Nivag
(P.S. The plural of Euro is Euro, not Euros! - I was in Dublin when we changed from Irish Pound to the Euro.)
In the Second world War the Royal Navy sent swordfish torpedo bombers - old, slow biplanes nicknamed "stringbags" to attack the great German Battleship Bismarck. The Bismarck was fitted with radar controlled anti-aircraft guns which were designed to shoot down modern aircraft. The system was implemented on the assumption that aircraft always flew faster than 100 Km/Hr (about 63 miles an hour for the Americans). The "stringbags" flew into a howling gale, they travelled too slow for the Bismarck's anti-aircraft guns. Two torpedoes hit the Bismarck. It suffered damage to one rudder and had an oil leak. The jammed rudder affected its speed and ability to steer. The oil leak was so significant that the the Royal Navy was able to track from searching for the leak. Finally the the Royal Navy caught up with the Bismarck and it was destroyed. Don't tell the Bismarck's captain that modern technology always wins... -Nivag
It had a 2MHz 6502 processor, plus 32K RAM, the OS and BASIC were in ROM. The micro ran BASIC 5 times faster than an Apple II or Commodore 64. It also had PROCcedures with arguments and WHILE loops, as well as long variable names - never needed to use GOTO's or GOSUB's. At the time 1982, I was A COBOL programmer on ICL mainframes (roughly IBM 360 compatibles.
The first computer I ever programmed was an HP mini the size of a filing cabinet with about 5K of core memory, this was 1968. I was graphing the results of passing complex numbers into trig functions for fun, my university Maths was up to that level until 2 years later.
My favourite computer was the Acorn Archimedes with a 32 bit ARM2 chip running at 8MHz, it could out perform an Intel 386 running at 25MHz. It had the best GUI I had ever seen, even now some of its features are better than what I can access now. ARM2 assembler was the nicest low level language I have ever used.
Now I run a Linux/Intel box at home.
-Nivag
How do we get rid of the gray bars that are interspersed with the main news items? Either that, or an ability to consolidate them in one place at the bottom.
I must admit I find the gray bars most annoying, and a quite unnecessary distraction.
The gray bars look so bad, I suggest that you make them an optional extra, that is turned off by default.
The only positive thing I can say about them is that they may encourage me to look at Slashdot once a day instead of multiple times during the day.
-Nivag
No, No, NO! It is 10 thousand years at most. I have it on the best authority. According a guy that presented seminars discrediting Evolution, the Universe was made 10,000 years ago. It must be true as Christians never lie, and it was in a Baptist church run by an American Pastor in Dublin in Ireland, and we all know that Americans always tell the truth...
-Nivag
"... she can disable it if she wants..."
Are males not allowed to? Here is an obvious case were gender neutral language is more appropriate - using they instead of she would be a lot better, and less disracting to the main point.
-Nivag
I have a 2 pronged policy for Mac security:
(1) ensure firewall set up strictly, install the best anti-virus software
(2) apply a pre-emptive scorched earth policy
Actually (1) costs me nothing, and (2) is implemented by not having a Mac...
>>> On a more serious note
I use Linux, but I:
(1) install all the latest security patches
(2) run with a very strict firewall
(3) disable all non-essential "potential" internet accessible services
(4) browse any really dodgy sites via a special user account set up for that one site & discarded afterwards (I've only done this once)
(5) am not complacent
Personally, I find the lack of variety in computers boring. I remember the days when you had the likes of:
(A) the Acorn Archimedes (truly the most user friendly GUI I've ever come across)
(B) Atari
(C) Commodore
(D) Sinclare
(E) and others
The most crucial flaw in the notion of Intelligent Design (ID) - is that the justification "life is so complicated and perfect that it must be designed" is that it raises the question "who designed this designer!".
Essentially ID is pure superstition, and has no scientific validity!
Probably he had reached his Least Upper Limit, he might need to learn how to effectively Interpolate more, or at least be more Discrete about his attempts, but he might feel better if he was careful with his Latus Rwctum, lest he go Hyperbolic! -Nivag
Hydrogen was not the problem!
It was that the skin of the Zepplin that was highly flamable...
People just focussed on the fact that Hydrogen burns, but Hydrogen would mostly have gone up - you can see plainly in the film of the event that the skin itself was burning.
-Nivag
Well I'm in New Zealand, and the standard names for Monopoly are from London, the capital of Great Britain.
The Orange streets are Vine Street, Marlborough Street and Bow Street.
However, you can buy an Irish version which uses streets from Dublin.
-Nivag
Asimov added the Zeroth Law:Do no action that hurts trhe bulk of Humanity
Not sure of the exact words of the Zeroth Law, but it does permit a robot to kill an individual human who was about to bomb a wdding party and kill and injure many people. The law also permits a planet wide planning robot to allow minor failures so that people feel irritated enough to become motivated to take an interest in life - if life is "perfect" why bother attempting to improvev things?
-Nivag
Well, I check the BBC news site http://news.bbc.co.uk/ several times a day, but the MSNBC site several time a year (and most often by "accident") - big diffrence.
I wonder how many people avoid MSNBC because of the connection to Microsoft? I know that makes me wary of it.
One of the advantages of the BBC news site is the complete absence of adverts!
-Nivag
On the Mir space station, they found mold growing on the outside of the space station.
This is despite the vacuum and the exposure to extremes of temperature!
-Nivag
Hmm...
Java has excellent API's for handling databases, and you can write sophisticated GUI applications using Swing.
With the default Hotspot compiler you get frequently executed code converted to native machine code; and in server mode, it will even consider inlining methods betwen classes.
If you are doing a web application, you should consider a combination of Tomcat, Servlets and JSP's. However, there are many other combinations, including many Java Apache projects that might be more suitable for you.
For heavy duty enterprise use you might like to consider JBoss.
Java 1.5 introduced many features to ease coding, as well as improving performance and reliability. The next release of J2EE looks to do provide even better ease of development, as it incorporates key concepts from Hibernate and builds on the neat features of Java 1.5.
I recomend Java for non trivial applications that you want to maintain easily and need to scale to large volumes of transactions.
Essentially Java is still very viable for serious application development, and is often to be preferred.
If you have a very small development team, only dealing with small to medium transaction loads, and don't expect to maintain the application for years - then other systems may be better for you.
For large scale developments that need to be maintained and enhanced for several years, Java is the only starter. For medium systems: Java is a starter, but there are alternatives - although Java still has the edge. For small systems: the choice is not so clear cut, but personally I'd still chose Javs - though I'd carefully evaluate things before making a final decision.
If I joined a company using PHP, then for small systems I'd stick with PHP, for a new project that was to be large scale I'd switch to Java.
Please don't make decisions on software development like you would when chosing fashionable clothes.
-Nivag
chuckle
Thanks! I've book marked it - just in case
Hopefully that won't be necessary, at most I'll be reading not editing (just visited the URL, it would be good for reading, but you can't use punch cards to mark your place on a screen! - I still have several hundred surplus 80 column punch cards)! I'll see if I can use a Linux workstation...
Many of the younger generation don't appreciate just how much is COBOL is still being maintained and enhanced. I made the mistake at one point saying I'd never be a COBOL programmer - taught me not to be so dogmatic!
-Nivag
Hmm...
I am over 40, specifically I am 55.
I still actively write code.
I may be starting a new job in the next few weeks. Where I expect to be coding at least 10% of the time, and at least 40% will involve looking at code and mentoring Junior Java developers. Unfortunately they know I can read COBOL, having been COBOL programmer for several years in my dark and sordid past, so I have a suspician I might be asked to do so... They are moving 32 systems, some quite old, into a common arhitecture based on Enterprise Java.
I learnt FORTRAN at university in the early 70's (in Auckland, New Zealand).
Anyhow, I would be coding at home, even if I didn't at work!
-Nivag