Several teachers that I had relied on the class staying pretty constant, and gave each student a number in alphabetical order. To "Call roll", you would listen for the number before yours, and after that was said by the student in question, you would say yours. Any absences were immediately obvious, and it took no more than a minute to finish it.
Rather than having to speed up and slow down the ICE to increase speed (Thus taking it away from it's peak performance area), the ICE stays fixed at it's peak performance level.
ICE "power" bands are typically a very rough parabola, with the peak area (For high-performance motors) being between 4,500-7,500 RPM. Outside of that area, they are more inefficient. An electric motor's peak power band (Using the Tesla as an example) is a flat line of maximum torque from 0-5,500 RPM, beyond which the available torque slopes off linearly until it breaks off completely at 15,000 RPM. That is 100% of available torque from 0-5,500RPM. So an electric motor has a "Power band" of 7,000 RPM, whereas an ICE has a "Power band" of 3,000 RPM. It's this limitation that requires ICE vehicles to have complicated gearboxes and clutching systems to ensure they utilise their power band as speed increases.
I'm not arguing that the Volt is not electric. I'm stating that it was originally sold as being "Pure electric drive", but it has since been found out to be "Mostly electric drive", which is a large difference. While it is an achievement, Toyota could do the exact same thing with a software change and a second battery pack, which shows just how small a step this really is.
Given the EV1's 100+ mile range and highway-capable driving speed (When using the 1st generation NiMh batteries they were fitted with), this is more of a step backwards, and a real disappointment for EV lovers everywhere.
GM stated explicitly that the ICE could never move the wheels, it was claimed that it turned a generator that then charged the batteries, as a series hybrid, as opposed to to how the Prius does it (As a parallel hybrid). It has since been found out that the ICE can (and does) directly turn the wheels.
And, with the ICE completely disconnected from the wheels it can run at it's most efficient speed (As ICEs have a very narrow power band, whereas electric motors have a much much wider power band (From 0 RPM)). This would make for much better performance.
Yet, in garages across the world, people are taking older cars and making perfectly good (in some cases even, better than the ICE counterparts) electric vehicles. Take a look at White Zombie, or Blue Meanie, or Eric Tischer's EV SL1, or Gavin Shoebridge's Kiwi-EV, or any of the other examples on evalbum.com. And that's home-based builders using bespoke parts. Mass production would bring down prices for all of the components, obviously, especially large format Li-Ion (Or Li-Poly) cells.
"Hello, Police? Yes, my mechanic has found what appears to be a pipe bomb attached to the underside of my car. Could you please send some units, and bomb disposal, here immediately, I am concerned for my life."
It's a long black pipe, sealed at both ends, with an antenna wire hanging out of it, and magnets to secure it in place. While it may be a GPS tracker, it could just as likely been a pipe bomb with a remote trigger. Best let the authorities blow that sucker up. And if the FBI come by asking for their tracker back, you can have them arrested for instigating an act of terror on American soil by planting their "pipe-bomb" on your car.
And then the legal system disappears up it's own fundamental orifice.
Okay, great. So where is the (completely legal under US law) software that the Library of Congress can use to back up Blu-Rays that have been released recently? Or, indeed, legal (Under US law) software that they can use to back up DVDs? Nowhere, because such software is in direct conflict with the DMCA, and thus is illegal.
I've seen what's even worse happen here in Canada. A friend of mine was a security guard, and in a union. His union told him that he had to strike in solidarity with the grocery store workers from their union that were also on strike. This, despite the fact the union had no problems with the company he worked for.
And, as an aside, the union in question backed down after two years of striking.
Many unions here, it seems to me, have rather misled people for members. The Casino workers here went on strike after refusing a pay increase. Three months later, the union settled with the casino for the same rate as the initial offer, and increased their dues to swallow whole the wage increase anyway, making the whole strike less than pointless. And that's not the only example, there have been many more instances of this kind of behaviour.
This, and many more, are the reason that I am firmly against American-style (Or, at least, Canadian-style) Unions.
It's the same in the UK. And you can have more than one union's members working at the same place. Under Margaret Thatcher in the UK, "Closed" and "Union" shops were made illegal. This seems to me to be an eminently sensible situation, as it allows both employees and employers the freedom to choose whatever union they wish.
Another issue with DAB in the UK is that we already have RDS on FM, which offers most of the benefits that DAB has for the average listener (Station Identification, frequency hopping, optional traffic/weather report switching, one-way data stream for now playing/next up information etc). The US doesn't have RDS at all (Believe it or not), so a digital radio system would be of more benefit to them.
Why not just set up 2 laptops at either end of the room, with Wi-fi NICs using "Virtual" adapters (Or a USB hub with several cheap USB Wi-Fi NICs in), set up ad-hoc networks on every available Wi-Fi channel between them, and ncat/dev/urandom through each interface. That will effectively occupy all Wi-Fi accessible channels, and give no space for any other ad-hoc network to be set up in. Given that they're local machines, they'd affect (at most) the room they're in, so having little effect on the Wi-Fi in the rest of the school. Cell and SMS blocking is left as an exercise for the reader.
They kind of already have since WinXP (At the least):
13. SOFTWARE TRANSFER. Internal. You may move the Software to a different Workstation Computer. After the transfer, you must completely remove the Software from the former Workstation Computer. Transfer to Third Party. The initial user of the Software may make a one-time permanent transfer of this EULA and Software to another end user, provided the initial user retains no copies of the Software. This transfer must include all of the Software (including all component parts, the media and printed materials, any upgrades, this EULA, and, if applicable, the Certificate of Authenticity). The transfer may not be an indirect transfer, such as a consignment. Prior to the transfer, the end user receiving the Software must agree to all the EULA terms.
The important part being the "Transfer to Third Party" section. Basically, it says only one resale is allowed, and the purchaser MUST agree to the entire EULA before the purchase can take place.
Really? I've had the capability to use 3D in many games since the late 1990's with the Elsa Revelator brand of Riva TNT cards, that supported hard-wired LCD Shutter glasses, meant to be used with CRT displays and refresh rates of 100Hz+. NVidia has had 3D support for a long, LONG time now (Check out the "Supported games" list). That they're now posting guidelines for it, and helping developers out if they request it (Their TWIMTBP program) doesn't negate that.
IIRC, Demon were typically one of the "Good guys", giving so many value-adds to their service, like a dedicated static IP, with a real, customisable subdomain pointed to it properly (So it can be reverse lookup'd), hosting ISP-Local download servers (with massive pipes) for most of the large-bandwidth services (Fileplanet, SunSite, AmiNET, Steam, pretty much every Linux distro out there...) to ensure you got the best transfer performance without contending over the "wild" internet. They had a reputation for not oversubscribing their lines. I personally see this as them giving an option to adjust the QoS on some packet types so they jump the queue, and talking with other hosting companies (especially ones that require low-latency connections, typically gaming sites, but potentially also VoIP services) about how best to route packets to them (so tailoring their connections, rather than relying on BGP explicitly, which sometimes gets it wrong as it assumes "up is best", failing to take into account hops and latency).
Obviously these adjustments won't be needed (or wanted) by everyone, so they offer these changes with a nominal fee (3 quid isn't all that much, after all) which will go towards improving their service even further, and will dissuade customers from blindly opting-in to it ("It's free! Why wouldn't I want it?"), so they can get an idea as to demand for these types of improvements.
Of course, the very best way would be to allow IP-provided QoS settings to determine how the traffic is prioritised, but given the huge potential for abuse of this tactic (Set torrents to "Express", watch everyone else's speed slow) and the current difficulty in defining QoS in operating systems (And the high probability that most systems will be badly/incorrectly configured), doing it this way gives a better customer experience, and higher satisfaction. Those that want it, get it. Those that don't, don't, and are no more worse off because of it.
The bubble sort used here is kinda bogus. It iterates over the whole set on every pass, which it doesn't need to. It only needs to go over dataset-(pass-1) items. I have a feeling this will change the "sound" of the bubble sort in this example.
160 KByte/sec = 1280 KBit/sec = 1.25 MBit/sec, so you are getting 83.3% of what you're paying for (And chances are the other 16.6% of your bandwidth is going into TCP packet headers, packet loss/retransmission, and plain and simple "distance from the provider" losses).
No, typically the "Up to" is the maximum possible raw bandwidth, before any kind of packetization is performed. So if the line is capable of carrying 10,000,000 raw bits of data per second, they'll advertise it as "Up to 10Mb/s". Despite the fact that, even in a perfect situation the most you would get is 7.15Mb/s (That's 10,000,000/1,048,576 (or 1024*1024)*0.75 (To allow for packet framing overhead)), or a transfer speed of 915.5KByte/sec from the ISP's servers. That's without any packet losses, signal attenuation issues, or noisy transfer media. And probably even less than that, even in a perfect situation, as their outgoing bandwidth is likely to be highly contested.
You're probably thinking of the OhMiBod. Really. OhMiBod. I swear you can't make this stuff up. (And thanks to Engadget for informing me of this particular device's existence, before you ask how I know about it).
That leaves though another major hole: silent auto-updates. Year ago there was no option to be prompted on updates. Neither Chrome has yet a semi-decent release notes: even if it's going to suggest an update to me, it is nearly impossible to know what the update might bring as there are no release notes whatsoever. Here I'd love to be proven wrong again.
I found some here, though I'm sure Google would recommend that you use the Stable release branch if you don't want things breaking.
Another minor nag: Chrome opens page in a new tab, next to the current tab. Is it possible to make the new tab to be open as last one? I have in office three standard tabs open and for convenience I keep them as first three. From this first three tabs I open other pages/tabs. Now in Chrome the order gets messed up very quickly and one has to rearrange tabs constantly to keep the first three important tabs in the place where I expect to find them. Is there any option to disable that and make tabs behave as in pre-Fx3.5? (Fx has an about:config option for that.)
Chrome opens tabs the way it does to try and keep a rudimentary history going, grouping related tabs together. You will be pleased to know, however, that there is an extension made just for people who don't like this, to enable "Firefox-like" tab ordering.
Slashdot Mirror
Several teachers that I had relied on the class staying pretty constant, and gave each student a number in alphabetical order. To "Call roll", you would listen for the number before yours, and after that was said by the student in question, you would say yours. Any absences were immediately obvious, and it took no more than a minute to finish it.
I was under the impression that "FaceTime" was just an implementation of Video over SIP, which has been around for a long time now.
Rather than having to speed up and slow down the ICE to increase speed (Thus taking it away from it's peak performance area), the ICE stays fixed at it's peak performance level.
ICE "power" bands are typically a very rough parabola, with the peak area (For high-performance motors) being between 4,500-7,500 RPM. Outside of that area, they are more inefficient. An electric motor's peak power band (Using the Tesla as an example) is a flat line of maximum torque from 0-5,500 RPM, beyond which the available torque slopes off linearly until it breaks off completely at 15,000 RPM. That is 100% of available torque from 0-5,500RPM. So an electric motor has a "Power band" of 7,000 RPM, whereas an ICE has a "Power band" of 3,000 RPM. It's this limitation that requires ICE vehicles to have complicated gearboxes and clutching systems to ensure they utilise their power band as speed increases.
I'm not arguing that the Volt is not electric. I'm stating that it was originally sold as being "Pure electric drive", but it has since been found out to be "Mostly electric drive", which is a large difference. While it is an achievement, Toyota could do the exact same thing with a software change and a second battery pack, which shows just how small a step this really is.
Given the EV1's 100+ mile range and highway-capable driving speed (When using the 1st generation NiMh batteries they were fitted with), this is more of a step backwards, and a real disappointment for EV lovers everywhere.
GM stated explicitly that the ICE could never move the wheels, it was claimed that it turned a generator that then charged the batteries, as a series hybrid, as opposed to to how the Prius does it (As a parallel hybrid). It has since been found out that the ICE can (and does) directly turn the wheels.
And, with the ICE completely disconnected from the wheels it can run at it's most efficient speed (As ICEs have a very narrow power band, whereas electric motors have a much much wider power band (From 0 RPM)). This would make for much better performance.
Yet, in garages across the world, people are taking older cars and making perfectly good (in some cases even, better than the ICE counterparts) electric vehicles. Take a look at White Zombie, or Blue Meanie, or Eric Tischer's EV SL1, or Gavin Shoebridge's Kiwi-EV, or any of the other examples on evalbum.com. And that's home-based builders using bespoke parts. Mass production would bring down prices for all of the components, obviously, especially large format Li-Ion (Or Li-Poly) cells.
The US tried that once before, with the Japanese. In retaliation, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
"Hello, Police? Yes, my mechanic has found what appears to be a pipe bomb attached to the underside of my car. Could you please send some units, and bomb disposal, here immediately, I am concerned for my life."
It's a long black pipe, sealed at both ends, with an antenna wire hanging out of it, and magnets to secure it in place. While it may be a GPS tracker, it could just as likely been a pipe bomb with a remote trigger. Best let the authorities blow that sucker up. And if the FBI come by asking for their tracker back, you can have them arrested for instigating an act of terror on American soil by planting their "pipe-bomb" on your car.
And then the legal system disappears up it's own fundamental orifice.
They're working on it for CSS 3, and Mozilla (That is, FireFox et al) have a working implementation in place already: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS3_Columns
Okay, great. So where is the (completely legal under US law) software that the Library of Congress can use to back up Blu-Rays that have been released recently? Or, indeed, legal (Under US law) software that they can use to back up DVDs? Nowhere, because such software is in direct conflict with the DMCA, and thus is illegal.
I've seen what's even worse happen here in Canada. A friend of mine was a security guard, and in a union. His union told him that he had to strike in solidarity with the grocery store workers from their union that were also on strike. This, despite the fact the union had no problems with the company he worked for.
And, as an aside, the union in question backed down after two years of striking.
Many unions here, it seems to me, have rather misled people for members. The Casino workers here went on strike after refusing a pay increase. Three months later, the union settled with the casino for the same rate as the initial offer, and increased their dues to swallow whole the wage increase anyway, making the whole strike less than pointless. And that's not the only example, there have been many more instances of this kind of behaviour.
This, and many more, are the reason that I am firmly against American-style (Or, at least, Canadian-style) Unions.
It's the same in the UK. And you can have more than one union's members working at the same place. Under Margaret Thatcher in the UK, "Closed" and "Union" shops were made illegal. This seems to me to be an eminently sensible situation, as it allows both employees and employers the freedom to choose whatever union they wish.
Another issue with DAB in the UK is that we already have RDS on FM, which offers most of the benefits that DAB has for the average listener (Station Identification, frequency hopping, optional traffic/weather report switching, one-way data stream for now playing/next up information etc). The US doesn't have RDS at all (Believe it or not), so a digital radio system would be of more benefit to them.
Why not just set up 2 laptops at either end of the room, with Wi-fi NICs using "Virtual" adapters (Or a USB hub with several cheap USB Wi-Fi NICs in), set up ad-hoc networks on every available Wi-Fi channel between them, and ncat /dev/urandom through each interface. That will effectively occupy all Wi-Fi accessible channels, and give no space for any other ad-hoc network to be set up in. Given that they're local machines, they'd affect (at most) the room they're in, so having little effect on the Wi-Fi in the rest of the school. Cell and SMS blocking is left as an exercise for the reader.
They kind of already have since WinXP (At the least):
The important part being the "Transfer to Third Party" section. Basically, it says only one resale is allowed, and the purchaser MUST agree to the entire EULA before the purchase can take place.
Really? I've had the capability to use 3D in many games since the late 1990's with the Elsa Revelator brand of Riva TNT cards, that supported hard-wired LCD Shutter glasses, meant to be used with CRT displays and refresh rates of 100Hz+. NVidia has had 3D support for a long, LONG time now (Check out the "Supported games" list). That they're now posting guidelines for it, and helping developers out if they request it (Their TWIMTBP program) doesn't negate that.
And Daft Punk's fans did this for the "Alive" tour.
Who needs 'em! Give me my Compugraphic Intellifont fonts back!
IIRC, Demon were typically one of the "Good guys", giving so many value-adds to their service, like a dedicated static IP, with a real, customisable subdomain pointed to it properly (So it can be reverse lookup'd), hosting ISP-Local download servers (with massive pipes) for most of the large-bandwidth services (Fileplanet, SunSite, AmiNET, Steam, pretty much every Linux distro out there...) to ensure you got the best transfer performance without contending over the "wild" internet. They had a reputation for not oversubscribing their lines. I personally see this as them giving an option to adjust the QoS on some packet types so they jump the queue, and talking with other hosting companies (especially ones that require low-latency connections, typically gaming sites, but potentially also VoIP services) about how best to route packets to them (so tailoring their connections, rather than relying on BGP explicitly, which sometimes gets it wrong as it assumes "up is best", failing to take into account hops and latency).
Obviously these adjustments won't be needed (or wanted) by everyone, so they offer these changes with a nominal fee (3 quid isn't all that much, after all) which will go towards improving their service even further, and will dissuade customers from blindly opting-in to it ("It's free! Why wouldn't I want it?"), so they can get an idea as to demand for these types of improvements.
Of course, the very best way would be to allow IP-provided QoS settings to determine how the traffic is prioritised, but given the huge potential for abuse of this tactic (Set torrents to "Express", watch everyone else's speed slow) and the current difficulty in defining QoS in operating systems (And the high probability that most systems will be badly/incorrectly configured), doing it this way gives a better customer experience, and higher satisfaction. Those that want it, get it. Those that don't, don't, and are no more worse off because of it.
The bubble sort used here is kinda bogus. It iterates over the whole set on every pass, which it doesn't need to. It only needs to go over dataset-(pass-1) items. I have a feeling this will change the "sound" of the bubble sort in this example.
160 KByte/sec = 1280 KBit/sec = 1.25 MBit/sec, so you are getting 83.3% of what you're paying for (And chances are the other 16.6% of your bandwidth is going into TCP packet headers, packet loss/retransmission, and plain and simple "distance from the provider" losses).
Perhaps my sarcasm detector is malfunctioning here, but WTF?
The way I was always taught it, the Mean is the Average, the Median is the middle-most number of the sorted set. So if you had:
Then the Median would be 2, and the Mean would be 3.4
Strapping a rocket to the back might be a bit much. This is more like:
No, typically the "Up to" is the maximum possible raw bandwidth, before any kind of packetization is performed. So if the line is capable of carrying 10,000,000 raw bits of data per second, they'll advertise it as "Up to 10Mb/s". Despite the fact that, even in a perfect situation the most you would get is 7.15Mb/s (That's 10,000,000/1,048,576 (or 1024*1024)*0.75 (To allow for packet framing overhead)), or a transfer speed of 915.5KByte/sec from the ISP's servers. That's without any packet losses, signal attenuation issues, or noisy transfer media. And probably even less than that, even in a perfect situation, as their outgoing bandwidth is likely to be highly contested.
You're probably thinking of the OhMiBod. Really. OhMiBod. I swear you can't make this stuff up. (And thanks to Engadget for informing me of this particular device's existence, before you ask how I know about it).
That leaves though another major hole: silent auto-updates. Year ago there was no option to be prompted on updates. Neither Chrome has yet a semi-decent release notes: even if it's going to suggest an update to me, it is nearly impossible to know what the update might bring as there are no release notes whatsoever. Here I'd love to be proven wrong again.
I found some here, though I'm sure Google would recommend that you use the Stable release branch if you don't want things breaking.
Another minor nag: Chrome opens page in a new tab, next to the current tab. Is it possible to make the new tab to be open as last one? I have in office three standard tabs open and for convenience I keep them as first three. From this first three tabs I open other pages/tabs. Now in Chrome the order gets messed up very quickly and one has to rearrange tabs constantly to keep the first three important tabs in the place where I expect to find them. Is there any option to disable that and make tabs behave as in pre-Fx3.5? (Fx has an about:config option for that.)
Chrome opens tabs the way it does to try and keep a rudimentary history going, grouping related tabs together. You will be pleased to know, however, that there is an extension made just for people who don't like this, to enable "Firefox-like" tab ordering.