Thanks be to google. Took longer than expected because Google suggests variant spellings, but in fact I had the right one and it suggested the wrong one!
So ist's mit aller Bildung auch beschaffen:
Vergebens werden ungebundne Geister
Nach der Vollendung reiner Hoehe streben.
Wer Grosses will, muss sich zusammenraffen;
In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.
The whole point of this kind of photography is that the equipment forces you to work and think in a different way. At that point, working with and against the equipment and conditions is what produces art. No amount of post processing or Photoshop is ever more than an artisanal job, which is why there is no Photoshop fine art.
You'll find it in Goethe. I can't remember the original word for word, but in effect he says that without working within restrictions we never reach the highest levels of achievement; whoever wants to make something great must submit to the limitations of some medium. This guy has found a restricted medium that can be used to produce something like art. Arguments about megapixels are as irrelevant as arguments about how fine Renaissance artists could grind up their paint.
In fact eco-toilets rely on the "friendly" bacteria and fungi eating the "unfriendly" ones (I'm oversimplifying, but it's generally true.) I have one and it is very clear in the instructions that you do not put anything down it which might kill the bugs. It also produces very little smell from the air outlet, and employs positive ventilation to ensure that the bugs get a good oxygen supply.
So your point is a good one. Any bugs on your keyboard are aerobic and can survive in relatively dry environments. They are likely to be relatively benign.
Years ago we had a major crisis on an engineering project. The phbs decided there would be an engineering group meeting of the entire engineering department (!) every day at 4 for 2 hours to review the work being done to resolve the issue and to plan the next stages.
At this meeting was a very old and experienced PhD who knew everything about the project. He regarded the meeting as an opportunity to display his knowledge at length, but had nothing of substance to put forward; after all, it was his design decisions that had caused the mess in the first place. Did I mention he was now a contractor and paid by the hour?
I know nothing about the branch of engineering concerned but I did go and ask the technicians what they thought. They knew the answer perfectly well - the material of a major tubular component was completely underspecified and was leaking gas when the plant got hot. But the PhD refused to accept it.
We didn't exactly draw straws for who would bring it up - but suffice it to say that I ended up with the short one. The result was an hour or so of listening to the worst metallurgical bullshit I have ever endured. But in the end we got our way, the components were replaced, the system started to work, the PhD was let go, (and a year later I was the engineering manager - it seems the MD had been reading the minutes).
Proof if proof were needed that the real reason for meetings is to drive the engineers to the point at which they will risk their jobs and their credibility to find a solution that means they don't have to go to any more meetings.
"Pentium" - Greek root, Latin inflexion, nothing good could have come of it. But then, when you think about it, Advanced Micro Devices is its own mission statement, while "Intel" suggests they acquire their knowledge through espionage. Proper chip companies have three letter names - IBM, AMD, VIA. Time for Intel to play catch up in this area as well.
This is surely all part of the celebrity culture thing. "Celebrities" are created by lazy media sources (because, for instance, doorstepping drug addicted models is easier and cheaper than doing serious investigative journalism into drug addiction.) Then the celebrities decide that they no longer want the invasion of privacy...but, if it stops, so will their earnings soon after. In the same way, with artificially hyped games, the team owners want publicity because this creates a television and newspaper audience and so generates revenue, but then they decide that everybody must pay to have access to their "content" - which risks removing the popular activities which generate a demand for the content.
Let them do it and let them succeed. The faster that games return to a stadium only activity, the faster that television goes into terminal decline, the faster so-called celebrities disappear up their own anuses, the quicker we might get back to a society in which people actually do things instead of just consuming images and sounds. There is something deeply wrong in a society in which a basketball player is paid more than an entire team of Aids researchers, and advertising copywriters are paid more than government ministers.
Look how successful all the companies manufacturing along the Texas/Mexico border were. The sad fact is that China is only going ahead because of its willingness to let US debt fund its manufacturing capacity, and its huge pool of people who will work for peanuts because the alternatives are even worse. If regulation and taxation are so bad, why are states like Massachusetts and New York, with European levels of taxation and regulation, so successful while there are so many poor Red states? I think you need to get a clue about economic replacement (the way that the West stays on top by replacing low added value industries like assembly operations with high added value like bioscience and advanced engineering).
I used to get told by old guys in the industry how they used to build early machines a 19 inch rack cabinet at a time, stacking cabinets side by side as the design grew. Problems came when the signal path got such that signal degradation started, whereupon intermediate cabinets had to be built containing latches and signal regenerators. This was in the days when Philips had a vacuum tube catalog...for computers. I've now lost my copy, sadly. And that's the problem with this kind of design. Signal paths need to be as short as possible and with as few intermediate connections as possible. The design with the smallest possible CPU, short memory and GPU paths, and everything else on point connections using the highest possible serial clock speeds to minimise the actual number of signal lines and so reduce cross channel noise - that's the most efficient design, and with the rise of Firewire, Sata, USB-2, Gigabit Ethernet and optical connections, that's exactly where the industry is going. Interestingly, this was forecast by Ivor Catt in the 1970s - though he failed to spot that the CPU itself needed to be as integrated as possible, and it is the peripherals that need the high speed serial links. Not surprisingly, given the state of the industry at the time.
Conclusion: looks nice but design actually sucks technically. Too many connectors, enforces a form factor that will often be inconvenient, and the issue is going away for other reasons (USB-2, Firewire, hardware miniaturisation)
I think you are making very valid points here. Chipset support is the weak point of Power, which is why it is good for embedded applications where general purpose chipsets are not an issue. Assuming that Apple gets VMWare to produce virtual PC support, wouldn't it be running on Darwin rather than OS/X itself? Assuming that Apple sticks with its superior open boot technology, the task of producing a reliable VMWare version could be relatively simple. If VMWare can produce reliable workstation versions that run on numerous Linux flavors, surely they can do the same for Darwin.
Strangely, until recently I couldn't actually see a use for X86 OS/X. But if Apple can produce some good, reliable, fast hardware with a decent VMWare implementation, I can see a way to getting solid off-the-shelf developer machines without having to build them from components all the time.
In fact, the simple security model, sensible and clear install options and user-friendly design tools make it more likely that a MySQL install will be done properly than, say, an application connecting to MS SQL Server or SQL Server Express. The steepness of the MS SQL learning curve and the counter-intuitivity of many of the Transact-SQL statements and default install options cause a lot of trouble for small scale users. I guess the result is a lot of small database applications stick with "Access" because the users cannot get budget for migration. Whereas with MySQL, there is a chance they will get something that works properly going quite quickly, and be able to deploy the results to Java clients, Crystal, OOo, Excel, FileMaker etc. without major pain.
Ever since the MySQL installer required a root password and disabled root connections outside localhost by default, while telling you that in clear language during the install process, it has been more credible as a simple installable RDBMS than some of the competition. FileMaker is another example of a database (of a sort, though) which makes sensible install defaults and then allows progressive expansion of capability without overwhelming the user with poorly documented options, but it is not as install-friendly.
I know it is fashionable for "real" computer scientists and DBAs to sneer at MySQL. But that's actually a sign of insecurity. Real mechanics don't sneer at zinc plated steel bolts because 316 is available: they just don't use zinc plate under salt spray conditions.
Every idiot who carves me up, every clown who overtakes on a blind bend at 80, every moron in an SUV who tries to push past on narrow roads, every cretin who squeals tires just getting round a city intersection considers himself (and increasingly herself) to be an excellent driver. You may be the exception. I consider myself to be a mediocre driver, which means I try to avoid the ABS and traction lights coming on. I would feel much happier in a world in which we all knew we were, at best, mediocre drivers.
I got phoned up at work once by an acquaintance who was a commercial lawyer in a large corporation.
"I've been told we're going to sue NEC. Who are NEC?" Me: "A large Japanese computer manufacturer. Why?" "Apparently our new system doesn't work." Me: "That sounds like software. NEC make hardware. Doesn't the hardware work?" "Apparently the software supplier went bust, so we're suing NEC" Me: "That doesn't make sense." "The thing is, have they got a lot of money?" Me: "I imagine they have huge amounts of money." "Oh good, that'll keep us busy for a while then."
I am currently still using a two year old Acer AMD64. So far it has lost one rubber foot (my fault)and has worn half the lettering off the "N" key because I don't type too well, and that's it. It travels in the back of the car, on trains and occasionally goes on the boat. It gets used typically around 60 hours a week. It is still faster and more reliable than the company's standard HP notebooks (Turions) and I see no reason to replace it. The screen illumination is still steady, the battery retains plenty of charge, and now IBM has sold its PC division I know what my next home notebook is going to be. (The AMD option, though.) And I don't even get paid for saying this.
The conclusion: every company has more and less durable models.
Who is this "we"? Perhaps it won't have the slightest effect on 90% of us. Why does this post sound like a Microsoft marketing bulletin with a small addition to try and make it look less obvious?
Your comments suggest that you have never actually tried any of those things. I have. If you need to maintain electronic components in a controlled temperature environment, the options I suggest will actually work. It's not hard to seal a tank of isopropanol using a standard pass through gland for the cables and a bush for the stirrer.
You should also know that the reason I specify pure paraffin oils is that things like motor oil are really unpleasant and contain lots of unwanted substances.
I'm surprised from your http that you omitted one option I didn't mention: transformer oil.
Fluorinert is utter overkill for this application. It's designed to take high temperatures and react with almost nothing (and I once boiled away a litre owing to a bug in our PID controller loop, sorry folks, blame assembler coding.)
You probably don't want something too flammable, but if you can seal well enough to keep water out isopropanol is relatively nonvolatile and nontoxic, it's just that alcohols tend to absorb water. (Another option is propylene glycol, the stuff used in nontoxic marine antifreeze.) A more off the wall option is a suitable molecular weight paraffin. High quality lamp oil is almost odorless and not particularly flammable in bulk. The question really would be how fast convection currents can move in the different options.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but exactly how is a terrorist going to hijack a spacecraft and crash it into even the approximate neighbourhood of Pennsylvania Avenue? It's not quite like 'oh there's the White House, change course', is it? You have to know where in the orbital path to fire the engines in order to land rather a lot further round the world, and once you are committed, major course changes are not exactly an option as burning up on re-entry doesn't achieve the objective. Given where a spacecraft is likely to be allowed to land, i.e. lots of water or desert, minor course changes won't achieve much. Well, they might hit the next lot of space tourists if they impact the departure lounge, but something tells me a commercial spaceport won't look much like O'Hare or Heathrow.
Looks like some people in Government think that Futurama is a documentary. That, or they have to be seen to be "doing something" to protect us, since the things that might actually achieve that - fixing the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, peace in Iraq and Chechnya, and solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - don't seem to be happening.
To think that I have any useful contribution to make to Wikipedia. That doesn't stop me trying to explain to someone who is not an engineer why he did not understand the wikipedia article. My rantings on slashdot are just trivial observations of day to day things with no lasting value. I certainly do not have the technical expertise or authority to contribute to an encyclopaedia.
Gimbals have been around since...well, if you believe Needham, at least the 10th Century AD in China. A gimbal is just a way of mounting something so it can rotate relative to something else while still being attached to it and moving linearly with it, and the main application has been on boats where equipment like lamps and compasses is suspended in mounts so it can swing. http://www.sailgb.com/p/captains_cabin_lamp/ is a picture of a small gimballed lamp. So long as the centre of gravity of the equipment is below the plane of the mount, the boat can rock underneath and the lamp, compass, cooker or whatever will stay more or less upright. By using an outer pair of pivots to hold a ring which then has another pair of pivots at 90 degress to which the equipment is attached, you get two axis gimbals which allow for rocking and for pitch, which is important on small boats. It isn't practical to suspend (say) a marine stove from a chain because it would swing all over the place, whereas suspending it from pivots near the top means that the base can swing a bit while the pans stay more or less in the same place. So all the stuff in Wikipedia about Euler angles is all very well, but a gimbal is just a way of allowing one thing to be attached to another while being able to rotate in one, two or three dimensions relative to it. There are various designs and obviously the Canfield one is a clever one, but there is nothing mysterious about gimbals themselves.
Many life-forms (grasses, radiolarians,molluscs for example) include large amounts of both silican and calcium carbonate in their skeletal and exoskeletal structures. I suggest you find out what chalk is actually made from - you might be surprised.
Lord Kelvin has a son who inherits the title. He goes to Cambridge and takes his first degree in Natural Sciences and gets a First, while still managing to play Rugby. Then he goes to Oxford to do his BSc, and then goes back to Cambridge where he does a brilliant PhD while turning out part time for the England cricket team. At which point he has a nervous breakdown from all the work. As part of his recovery program he is found a nice quiet job working as a bus conductor (NB only older UK residents will understand this.)
One day two Girton girls are on his bus and one remarks his age and physique, turns to the other and murmurs "Super conductor". To which the other replies "Three degrees Kelvin."
As a result of the parent post, this joke is now officially demolished.
Time to invest in a company that sells those little USB lights, illuminated keyboards, and all those other things we won't be able to do without if we have to work outdoors on the Moon. Because this is going to be a huge problem....
In other news, Navy divers announced that it is quite cold and wet under the sea, coal miners reported that it is quite dark in coal mines, and doctors revealed that there are too many unhealthy people in hospitals.
Slashdot Mirror
So ist's mit aller Bildung auch beschaffen:
Vergebens werden ungebundne Geister
Nach der Vollendung reiner Hoehe streben.
Wer Grosses will, muss sich zusammenraffen;
In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.
You'll find it in Goethe. I can't remember the original word for word, but in effect he says that without working within restrictions we never reach the highest levels of achievement; whoever wants to make something great must submit to the limitations of some medium. This guy has found a restricted medium that can be used to produce something like art. Arguments about megapixels are as irrelevant as arguments about how fine Renaissance artists could grind up their paint.
So your point is a good one. Any bugs on your keyboard are aerobic and can survive in relatively dry environments. They are likely to be relatively benign.
At this meeting was a very old and experienced PhD who knew everything about the project. He regarded the meeting as an opportunity to display his knowledge at length, but had nothing of substance to put forward; after all, it was his design decisions that had caused the mess in the first place. Did I mention he was now a contractor and paid by the hour?
I know nothing about the branch of engineering concerned but I did go and ask the technicians what they thought. They knew the answer perfectly well - the material of a major tubular component was completely underspecified and was leaking gas when the plant got hot. But the PhD refused to accept it.
We didn't exactly draw straws for who would bring it up - but suffice it to say that I ended up with the short one. The result was an hour or so of listening to the worst metallurgical bullshit I have ever endured. But in the end we got our way, the components were replaced, the system started to work, the PhD was let go, (and a year later I was the engineering manager - it seems the MD had been reading the minutes).
Proof if proof were needed that the real reason for meetings is to drive the engineers to the point at which they will risk their jobs and their credibility to find a solution that means they don't have to go to any more meetings.
"Pentium" - Greek root, Latin inflexion, nothing good could have come of it. But then, when you think about it, Advanced Micro Devices is its own mission statement, while "Intel" suggests they acquire their knowledge through espionage. Proper chip companies have three letter names - IBM, AMD, VIA. Time for Intel to play catch up in this area as well.
Let them do it and let them succeed. The faster that games return to a stadium only activity, the faster that television goes into terminal decline, the faster so-called celebrities disappear up their own anuses, the quicker we might get back to a society in which people actually do things instead of just consuming images and sounds. There is something deeply wrong in a society in which a basketball player is paid more than an entire team of Aids researchers, and advertising copywriters are paid more than government ministers.
Look how successful all the companies manufacturing along the Texas/Mexico border were. The sad fact is that China is only going ahead because of its willingness to let US debt fund its manufacturing capacity, and its huge pool of people who will work for peanuts because the alternatives are even worse. If regulation and taxation are so bad, why are states like Massachusetts and New York, with European levels of taxation and regulation, so successful while there are so many poor Red states? I think you need to get a clue about economic replacement (the way that the West stays on top by replacing low added value industries like assembly operations with high added value like bioscience and advanced engineering).
And that's the problem with this kind of design. Signal paths need to be as short as possible and with as few intermediate connections as possible. The design with the smallest possible CPU, short memory and GPU paths, and everything else on point connections using the highest possible serial clock speeds to minimise the actual number of signal lines and so reduce cross channel noise - that's the most efficient design, and with the rise of Firewire, Sata, USB-2, Gigabit Ethernet and optical connections, that's exactly where the industry is going.
Interestingly, this was forecast by Ivor Catt in the 1970s - though he failed to spot that the CPU itself needed to be as integrated as possible, and it is the peripherals that need the high speed serial links. Not surprisingly, given the state of the industry at the time.
Conclusion: looks nice but design actually sucks technically. Too many connectors, enforces a form factor that will often be inconvenient, and the issue is going away for other reasons (USB-2, Firewire, hardware miniaturisation)
Assuming that Apple gets VMWare to produce virtual PC support, wouldn't it be running on Darwin rather than OS/X itself? Assuming that Apple sticks with its superior open boot technology, the task of producing a reliable VMWare version could be relatively simple. If VMWare can produce reliable workstation versions that run on numerous Linux flavors, surely they can do the same for Darwin.
Strangely, until recently I couldn't actually see a use for X86 OS/X. But if Apple can produce some good, reliable, fast hardware with a decent VMWare implementation, I can see a way to getting solid off-the-shelf developer machines without having to build them from components all the time.
Ever since the MySQL installer required a root password and disabled root connections outside localhost by default, while telling you that in clear language during the install process, it has been more credible as a simple installable RDBMS than some of the competition. FileMaker is another example of a database (of a sort, though) which makes sensible install defaults and then allows progressive expansion of capability without overwhelming the user with poorly documented options, but it is not as install-friendly.
I know it is fashionable for "real" computer scientists and DBAs to sneer at MySQL. But that's actually a sign of insecurity. Real mechanics don't sneer at zinc plated steel bolts because 316 is available: they just don't use zinc plate under salt spray conditions.
Every idiot who carves me up, every clown who overtakes on a blind bend at 80, every moron in an SUV who tries to push past on narrow roads, every cretin who squeals tires just getting round a city intersection considers himself (and increasingly herself) to be an excellent driver. You may be the exception. I consider myself to be a mediocre driver, which means I try to avoid the ABS and traction lights coming on. I would feel much happier in a world in which we all knew we were, at best, mediocre drivers.
Unfortunately, although all my Diesel engines can run on bio, my aftermarket Eberspächer won't. You've been warned...
"I've been told we're going to sue NEC. Who are NEC?"
Me: "A large Japanese computer manufacturer. Why?"
"Apparently our new system doesn't work."
Me: "That sounds like software. NEC make hardware. Doesn't the hardware work?"
"Apparently the software supplier went bust, so we're suing NEC"
Me: "That doesn't make sense."
"The thing is, have they got a lot of money?"
Me: "I imagine they have huge amounts of money."
"Oh good, that'll keep us busy for a while then."
The reaction of lawyers everywhere.
The conclusion: every company has more and less durable models.
Who is this "we"? Perhaps it won't have the slightest effect on 90% of us. Why does this post sound like a Microsoft marketing bulletin with a small addition to try and make it look less obvious?
You should also know that the reason I specify pure paraffin oils is that things like motor oil are really unpleasant and contain lots of unwanted substances.
I'm surprised from your http that you omitted one option I didn't mention: transformer oil.
You probably don't want something too flammable, but if you can seal well enough to keep water out isopropanol is relatively nonvolatile and nontoxic, it's just that alcohols tend to absorb water. (Another option is propylene glycol, the stuff used in nontoxic marine antifreeze.) A more off the wall option is a suitable molecular weight paraffin. High quality lamp oil is almost odorless and not particularly flammable in bulk. The question really would be how fast convection currents can move in the different options.
Looks like some people in Government think that Futurama is a documentary. That, or they have to be seen to be "doing something" to protect us, since the things that might actually achieve that - fixing the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, peace in Iraq and Chechnya, and solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - don't seem to be happening.
To think that I have any useful contribution to make to Wikipedia. That doesn't stop me trying to explain to someone who is not an engineer why he did not understand the wikipedia article. My rantings on slashdot are just trivial observations of day to day things with no lasting value. I certainly do not have the technical expertise or authority to contribute to an encyclopaedia.
Gimbals have been around since...well, if you believe Needham, at least the 10th Century AD in China. A gimbal is just a way of mounting something so it can rotate relative to something else while still being attached to it and moving linearly with it, and the main application has been on boats where equipment like lamps and compasses is suspended in mounts so it can swing. http://www.sailgb.com/p/captains_cabin_lamp/ is a picture of a small gimballed lamp. So long as the centre of gravity of the equipment is below the plane of the mount, the boat can rock underneath and the lamp, compass, cooker or whatever will stay more or less upright.
By using an outer pair of pivots to hold a ring which then has another pair of pivots at 90 degress to which the equipment is attached, you get two axis gimbals which allow for rocking and for pitch, which is important on small boats. It isn't practical to suspend (say) a marine stove from a chain because it would swing all over the place, whereas suspending it from pivots near the top means that the base can swing a bit while the pans stay more or less in the same place.
So all the stuff in Wikipedia about Euler angles is all very well, but a gimbal is just a way of allowing one thing to be attached to another while being able to rotate in one, two or three dimensions relative to it. There are various designs and obviously the Canfield one is a clever one, but there is nothing mysterious about gimbals themselves.
It just averaged 230kByte/s and downloaded in a minute. Not bad.
Suggestion: If you want to print it, it looks like it should work well at A5.
Many life-forms (grasses, radiolarians,molluscs for example) include large amounts of both silican and calcium carbonate in their skeletal and exoskeletal structures. I suggest you find out what chalk is actually made from - you might be surprised.
You know, the one that says that when an elderly, distinguished scientist says that something is impossible, he is almost always wrong?
One day two Girton girls are on his bus and one remarks his age and physique, turns to the other and murmurs "Super conductor". To which the other replies "Three degrees Kelvin."
As a result of the parent post, this joke is now officially demolished.
In other news, Navy divers announced that it is quite cold and wet under the sea, coal miners reported that it is quite dark in coal mines, and doctors revealed that there are too many unhealthy people in hospitals.