Actually, I'm pretty sure those arrogant designers at NASA are quite confident that the International Space Station resists earthquakes.
For the more terrestrially minded, the problem is to resist earthquakes in a cost effective manner, or alternatively stop people from doing stupid things. After all, why do people knowingly locate in known flood areas behind dikes, in arid deserts, underneath volcanoes, or in known high-intensity earthquake areas? and not expect disasters to happen?
Live in the big flat mid-west plains, it might be boring, but it is safe.
I heard a similar story about an auto-tracking algorithm used for aiming cameras. It would happily follow the red car, but then it saw the red garbage dumpster. It never moved after seeing the red garbage dumpster.
The truth is that the AI algorithms are absolutely notorious for keying in on unanticipated patterns. For the AI algorithms to work, you need to verify they are doing what you expect. Depending on your choice of algo, this can be really tough.
The GC algorithm doesn't really matter. As soon as you need dedicated real-time style control over how the memory allocations are done, then a managed language sucks. Real-time people ban the use of malloc in certain segments of code for a reason. The programmer must take control over memory allocations for really high-performance code. It is just the way it is.
If 1000 SlashDotters download one song every 2 minutes, then they will download 262,800 songs over the course of one year. If the RIAA collects $80,000 per song, they will collect $21 Trillion Dollars. At 10% income tax, this will raise an extra $2 trillion for the U.S. budget, and wipe out the nations deficit.
As such, every/. reader should download as many songs as possible. Save the nation from deficit! Fix the housing crisis! Save the stock market! Be a national hero!
This verdict will be the cause of derision internationally, and will provide endless fodder for those who are fond of laughing in their beer at the USA. Unfortunately, they will have a pretty irrefutable point.
This verdict will be sited by the Pirate Party and every other opposition group to the **AA and IFPI. It will be very tough for the politicians to effectively argue against it too. The Pirate Party has an elected member in the European Parliament now too.
The RIAA may have one this court case, but internationally, this success creates a major problem for the RIAA's efforts to get draconian IP laws passed by foreign governments.
There are always other options. If the verdict sticks and the situation you describe comes to pass, she can always leave the country and settle somewhere temperate and out of the target-sights.
Yes, she is going to pack up her 4 kids and move to a third-world country on what little money she has in the bank.
Move to Canada and claim refugee status. I'm sure it will get appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but there is no way this judgment will survive in Canadian court. You just can't wreck someone's life for no solid reason. At the very least, you could claim refugee status, declare bankruptcy, be told you don't qualify as a refugee, and still have all your debts discharged. Although, IANAL.
The U.S. population uses metric. They just don't know it.
You would be surprised how many wheel nuts have an imperial outer dimension (3/4" comes to mind), and metric threads. Catepillar uses bolts with metric threads, and imperial heads for the U.S. market. That way, the same engine design can be used around the world. Just use the imperial headed bolts for the U.S. market, and the normal metric bolts everywhere else.
I think if you looked at the parts in the average automobile, you would be surprised at how many dimensions are in metric. Recently, I have noticed that the official "accurate" dimensions of construction materials are in metric. That 1/2" piece of plywood is actually 12 mm.
However, people who had ancient newsreaders that only supported ASCII would see the signature as a long line of =d7=81=43=99=e3=11 sequences.
YOU WERE THE ONE. The evil bastard that used to give my text editor spasms with the =d7=81=43=99=e3=11 sequences. I so hate you. Gosh I really hate you. Those stupid sequences used to give me nightmares.
Warning to the humor impaired: The above was sarcasm. Although, those =d7 sequences did give me nightmares.;-)
At my university, they explicitly exempt Macs and Linux from having to use Cisco Clean Access. They port scan the Linux / Mac box, and use network level checks to make sure your computer is secure (or at least appears secure.)
The big problems are with Windows. With a campus as big as ours, all Windows boxes must run an up to date virus scanner. This policy must be enforced. To do otherwise is just stupid. Every computer, even Linux machines, are continuously being probed looking for vulnerable ports. People have targeted our university with custom spam, and custom port scanning attacks. Machines from senior staff have gotten virus infected, even when running current anti-virus software, and have been used to distribute spam. Users are also stupid. One inadvertently used a restricted access mailing list to spam the entire university, ironically with a complaint saying "Stop Spamming Me!"
With 20,000+ PCs on the network, bad things happen.
I think a key difference between a software and a non-software patent should be a test to the effect: Can this be implemented with any computer purchased at the local Buy More? If the patent application can be implemented with commodity, off-the-shelf components, then the unique element in the patent must be software. If the unique element is software, then the patent is a software patent. The nice thing about the commodity, off-the-shelf component test, is that it extends nicely into business method patents. If the patent optimizes the method of exchanging sheets of paper in an office, then it quickly becomes obvious when someone is trying to patent something very abstract.
Now someone could claim that the combination of hardware mentioned in the patent is somehow special. I don't care about this. As long as the patent doesn't disallow large sections of software running on essentially any old hardware, then the author may have a valid hardware patent.
Unfortunately, I'm not a lawyer, and as such my opinion is worthless. Still I can hope the Supreme Court agrees with me.
Getting deported for not volunteering your finger prints would be an interesting way to get a free trip out of the country.
In practice, I doubt they would let you back in, and you might need a lawyer to talk your way out of trouble. Somehow, I think the U.S. will find a way of making it a costly "free" trip.
The CEO gets paid on the short term savings. If other people adopt a longer term viewpoint, they can gain a long-term competitive advantage. Have you noticed the Chinese are selling equipment into the United States directly, bypassing the American companies acting as middle men? Westinghouse is not an American brand anymore. IBM computers are now Lenovo.
It is a really simple machine with an uptime of only 1.5 hours per day. It is really tough to get Windows to do real-time control tasks for long periods of time. Even for activities where reaction times are in the few second range, Windows updates and Anti-virus updates are killers. With Linux, you can make the hard drive read-only, lock everything down, install a real-time kernel, and you can get much more consistent quick reaction times.
Some days, I feel like organizing a contest: who can keep your Windows machine alive the longest? It just there isn't much point. Windows can barely keep up with a long-term 24/7 data logging activity.
Does Vista and/or Windows 7 have the bug where if you write files to a directory constantly (say once every few seconds for a month), and then do a directory operation, "dir", the machine locks up for a few minutes?
The police won't file charge an assault easily. One of my friends went into diabetic shock, and crashed his car with his daughter in it. One of the locals thought he was drunk and punched him in the nose, and did quite a bit of damage. The local wanted to send a message about drunk driving with kids. The police wouldn't charge him for assault, because "one hit" could be self-defence.
Also, if no witnesses are present, it can be really tough to prosecute an assault case.
Lesson: if you want to cops to charge someone, show up with a textbook case in advance. The victim should be ready for that random surprise crime. Don't expect the cops to be able to prove it, after the fact.
In fairness to the cops, with no witnesses, many crimes can be almost impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Most criminals are stupid, and repeat the same crime endlessly until the get caught. It wasn't the 10,000 examples of vandalism that got a local spray painter thrown in jail. It was the last attempt where the cops caught the vandal red handed.
I'm wondering if the RIAA is giving away freebies to judges. Something along the lines of how some of the drug companies give free cruises to Doctors. Something along the lines of:
$DOCTOR_WHO_PRESCRIBED_DRUGS$, please come on this free ocean going cruise. We are a great drug company. We like Doctors. We support Doctors. You just have to listen to one free speech on $DRUG_OF_THE_DAY$. Aren't we a great company? Isn't this cruise great? Oh and it's free!
Except now it is:
Judge $CIVIL_TRIAL_JUDGE$, please come to our golf and country club. We won't even comment on the multitude of active litigation cases you have, because odds are, they have nothing to do with us. By the way, music piracy is bad. Invite your other friends that are also judges out to the golf and country club too. By the way, music piracy is bad.
The judiciary may have been bought and paid for, before the trials even started. This tactic might not work in the U.S., but in a smaller country, like Sweden, it might be possible to encourage judges to join an organization. Support the organization generously, and opinion can be slowly swayed.
This is probably over-simplistic, but why can't Microsoft Word handle big complex documents? It is 2009. Word has been through a zillion revisions. Why does it still have nasty bugs?
I have a little short committee meeting report, that is now impossible to format. It literally has the conclusions on a separate page, because I can't delete the extra page. I'm sure there is a way, but it would be easier to recreate the document. In WordPerfect, I could at least use Reveal Codes. Reveal Codes always showed me the problems in my WordPerfect documents. With Word, no Reveal Codes means no chance of understanding the problem.
I think that all you need to do is create a complex document, use a few formulas, charts, tables, figures, try some custom formatting, mail it around the office for edits with users using different versions of Word, and the document will become uneditable. Word eats documents. In 2009, I don't understand why.
It'd be pretty easy to get a list of publications, extract the initial letters, and search for the longest prefix match.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, the book copyright people have made major efforts to ensure the text of books is not available in digital form. This has several consequences, one being that random sentences stored in obscure texts are hard to find. Another is that there are many texts that will never be read by people wanting to read them, because they are out of print and unavailable.
Also, the Google books database is not a substitute for a raw database of book contents. Google will only pick up the reference if the person literally types the sentence into the search engine. If a person reverses the letters in a word, or just picks the first letter of critical words, then Google is lost. There is no substitute for a large database of book contents for cracking a problem like this.
For me, if you are going to teach students how to do something, you might as well teach them how to do it properly. Otherwise, someone may try to copy the circuit and reuse it in a practical application.
I sometimes work with university students. It is a little too obvious how dangerous following simple textbook advice can be. Emergency Stop circuits implemented in Visual Basic are a personal crusade...
Try making the peizo a current source, with almost no parallel resistance. The piezo sensors I use are modeled as charge sources, with no parallel resistance. They generate signal because the mechanical deflection (X) corresponds to a charge (Q). A time changing mechanical deflection (dX/dt) thus generates a current (i=dQ/dt).
This change might better explain what is happening in the circuit. I think you will find that the transistor acts as almost a Class C amplifier, and has large amounts of distortion.
The criticism may be blunt, but if students do a cookbook project, they should at least be smart enough to know the errors in their ways.
This project has quite a few major problems in the analog front end. Especially, given the fact that with a micro-controller, you could at least try to fix some of them. The report makes no mention of the fact the students even noticed them. Also, the calculations that they did do, are considerably more complex than necessary. Specifically, the students missed the fact the piezo transducer is a charge coupled device, so they are essentially dropping current straight into the base of the amplifying transistor. No voltage gain calculation required.
This one is silly -- why not just read the mic directly and apply the relevant digital filtering/transofrmation? RMS at least.
Many of the cheap micro-controllers have ADC's that won't do the job well, at least not well enough to get any kind of dynamic range out of the circuit.
A bigger problem with the MIT design, is that it uses a Piezo-Buzzer for a microphone. This will give a wickedly non-linear frequency response curve. Piezo-Buzzers are designed to have a narrow range of frequencies in which they operate effectively.
The MIT design also uses a single transistor amplifier circuit. It wouldn't surprise me if the harmonics on the output are poor. Specifically, with this circuit, the average sound level can be determined by simply averaging the output of the transistor amplifier. Essentially, the average voltage on both the collector and emitter of the transistor should change if an AC signal is applied to the base. If this average is read with a DC voltmeter, then it should give an approximation of the sound-level, subject to the microphones frequency response curve.
I am not clear why anyone would build a sound level meter without using either a proper microphone or an effective amplifier circuit. A quad op-amp IC, and a few circuits from the web, should give you the average sound level over an extended frequency and amplitude range. It is even possible to do RMS to DC, peak-level to DC, and log-linear conversions in analog. For a retro-look, an old-fashioned voltmeter or amp-meter can be used for a display. For a more modern look, it is possible to use a cheap micro-controller with a slow ADC (or an LM3914) for the analog to digital conversion. Historically, this was the way it was done in many stereos, and the same circuit is probably still in use in many professional recording labs.
The advantage of implementing a proper micro-phone is the much flatter frequency response curve. The advantage of the log-linear conversion, is that most sound meters read in dB, which is a logarithmic scale. It takes a very good linear ADC to implement the same conversion digitally. A 5-bit (32 count) ADC reading a log input has more dynamic range than a 24-bit ADC reading a linear input (2^32 >> 2^24). Although in practice, I wouldn't recommend using less than an 8-bit ADC on an analog circuit.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm pretty sure those arrogant designers at NASA are quite confident that the International Space Station resists earthquakes.
For the more terrestrially minded, the problem is to resist earthquakes in a cost effective manner, or alternatively stop people from doing stupid things. After all, why do people knowingly locate in known flood areas behind dikes, in arid deserts, underneath volcanoes, or in known high-intensity earthquake areas? and not expect disasters to happen?
Live in the big flat mid-west plains, it might be boring, but it is safe.
I heard a similar story about an auto-tracking algorithm used for aiming cameras. It would happily follow the red car, but then it saw the red garbage dumpster. It never moved after seeing the red garbage dumpster.
The truth is that the AI algorithms are absolutely notorious for keying in on unanticipated patterns. For the AI algorithms to work, you need to verify they are doing what you expect. Depending on your choice of algo, this can be really tough.
The GC algorithm doesn't really matter. As soon as you need dedicated real-time style control over how the memory allocations are done, then a managed language sucks. Real-time people ban the use of malloc in certain segments of code for a reason. The programmer must take control over memory allocations for really high-performance code. It is just the way it is.
If 1000 SlashDotters download one song every 2 minutes, then they will download 262,800 songs over the course of one year. If the RIAA collects $80,000 per song, they will collect $21 Trillion Dollars. At 10% income tax, this will raise an extra $2 trillion for the U.S. budget, and wipe out the nations deficit.
As such, every /. reader should download as many songs as possible. Save the nation from deficit! Fix the housing crisis! Save the stock market! Be a national hero!
This verdict will be sited by the Pirate Party and every other opposition group to the **AA and IFPI. It will be very tough for the politicians to effectively argue against it too. The Pirate Party has an elected member in the European Parliament now too.
The RIAA may have one this court case, but internationally, this success creates a major problem for the RIAA's efforts to get draconian IP laws passed by foreign governments.
Move to Canada and claim refugee status. I'm sure it will get appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but there is no way this judgment will survive in Canadian court. You just can't wreck someone's life for no solid reason. At the very least, you could claim refugee status, declare bankruptcy, be told you don't qualify as a refugee, and still have all your debts discharged. Although, IANAL.
The U.S. population uses metric. They just don't know it.
You would be surprised how many wheel nuts have an imperial outer dimension (3/4" comes to mind), and metric threads. Catepillar uses bolts with metric threads, and imperial heads for the U.S. market. That way, the same engine design can be used around the world. Just use the imperial headed bolts for the U.S. market, and the normal metric bolts everywhere else.
I think if you looked at the parts in the average automobile, you would be surprised at how many dimensions are in metric. Recently, I have noticed that the official "accurate" dimensions of construction materials are in metric. That 1/2" piece of plywood is actually 12 mm.
YOU WERE THE ONE. The evil bastard that used to give my text editor spasms with the =d7=81=43=99=e3=11 sequences. I so hate you. Gosh I really hate you. Those stupid sequences used to give me nightmares.
Warning to the humor impaired: The above was sarcasm. Although, those =d7 sequences did give me nightmares. ;-)
Does "zzzz" get you sex?
Microsoft Spell Check Easter Eggs.
At my university, they explicitly exempt Macs and Linux from having to use Cisco Clean Access. They port scan the Linux / Mac box, and use network level checks to make sure your computer is secure (or at least appears secure.)
The big problems are with Windows. With a campus as big as ours, all Windows boxes must run an up to date virus scanner. This policy must be enforced. To do otherwise is just stupid. Every computer, even Linux machines, are continuously being probed looking for vulnerable ports. People have targeted our university with custom spam, and custom port scanning attacks. Machines from senior staff have gotten virus infected, even when running current anti-virus software, and have been used to distribute spam. Users are also stupid. One inadvertently used a restricted access mailing list to spam the entire university, ironically with a complaint saying "Stop Spamming Me!"
With 20,000+ PCs on the network, bad things happen.
I think a key difference between a software and a non-software patent should be a test to the effect: Can this be implemented with any computer purchased at the local Buy More? If the patent application can be implemented with commodity, off-the-shelf components, then the unique element in the patent must be software. If the unique element is software, then the patent is a software patent. The nice thing about the commodity, off-the-shelf component test, is that it extends nicely into business method patents. If the patent optimizes the method of exchanging sheets of paper in an office, then it quickly becomes obvious when someone is trying to patent something very abstract.
Now someone could claim that the combination of hardware mentioned in the patent is somehow special. I don't care about this. As long as the patent doesn't disallow large sections of software running on essentially any old hardware, then the author may have a valid hardware patent.
Unfortunately, I'm not a lawyer, and as such my opinion is worthless. Still I can hope the Supreme Court agrees with me.
Getting deported for not volunteering your finger prints would be an interesting way to get a free trip out of the country.
In practice, I doubt they would let you back in, and you might need a lawyer to talk your way out of trouble. Somehow, I think the U.S. will find a way of making it a costly "free" trip.
The CNC industry is still using NC machines built to work with paper tape. 30 years old and still going strong ...
The CEO gets paid on the short term savings. If other people adopt a longer term viewpoint, they can gain a long-term competitive advantage. Have you noticed the Chinese are selling equipment into the United States directly, bypassing the American companies acting as middle men? Westinghouse is not an American brand anymore. IBM computers are now Lenovo.
It is a really simple machine with an uptime of only 1.5 hours per day. It is really tough to get Windows to do real-time control tasks for long periods of time. Even for activities where reaction times are in the few second range, Windows updates and Anti-virus updates are killers. With Linux, you can make the hard drive read-only, lock everything down, install a real-time kernel, and you can get much more consistent quick reaction times.
Some days, I feel like organizing a contest: who can keep your Windows machine alive the longest? It just there isn't much point. Windows can barely keep up with a long-term 24/7 data logging activity.
Does Vista and/or Windows 7 have the bug where if you write files to a directory constantly (say once every few seconds for a month), and then do a directory operation, "dir", the machine locks up for a few minutes?
Well, Kim Jong-Il is the only world leader to successfully shut down all internet protests in his country ...
The police won't file charge an assault easily. One of my friends went into diabetic shock, and crashed his car with his daughter in it. One of the locals thought he was drunk and punched him in the nose, and did quite a bit of damage. The local wanted to send a message about drunk driving with kids. The police wouldn't charge him for assault, because "one hit" could be self-defence.
Also, if no witnesses are present, it can be really tough to prosecute an assault case.
Lesson: if you want to cops to charge someone, show up with a textbook case in advance. The victim should be ready for that random surprise crime. Don't expect the cops to be able to prove it, after the fact.
In fairness to the cops, with no witnesses, many crimes can be almost impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Most criminals are stupid, and repeat the same crime endlessly until the get caught. It wasn't the 10,000 examples of vandalism that got a local spray painter thrown in jail. It was the last attempt where the cops caught the vandal red handed.
I'm wondering if the RIAA is giving away freebies to judges. Something along the lines of how some of the drug companies give free cruises to Doctors. Something along the lines of:
Except now it is:
The judiciary may have been bought and paid for, before the trials even started. This tactic might not work in the U.S., but in a smaller country, like Sweden, it might be possible to encourage judges to join an organization. Support the organization generously, and opinion can be slowly swayed.
This is probably over-simplistic, but why can't Microsoft Word handle big complex documents? It is 2009. Word has been through a zillion revisions. Why does it still have nasty bugs?
I have a little short committee meeting report, that is now impossible to format. It literally has the conclusions on a separate page, because I can't delete the extra page. I'm sure there is a way, but it would be easier to recreate the document. In WordPerfect, I could at least use Reveal Codes. Reveal Codes always showed me the problems in my WordPerfect documents. With Word, no Reveal Codes means no chance of understanding the problem.
I think that all you need to do is create a complex document, use a few formulas, charts, tables, figures, try some custom formatting, mail it around the office for edits with users using different versions of Word, and the document will become uneditable. Word eats documents. In 2009, I don't understand why.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, the book copyright people have made major efforts to ensure the text of books is not available in digital form. This has several consequences, one being that random sentences stored in obscure texts are hard to find. Another is that there are many texts that will never be read by people wanting to read them, because they are out of print and unavailable.
Also, the Google books database is not a substitute for a raw database of book contents. Google will only pick up the reference if the person literally types the sentence into the search engine. If a person reverses the letters in a word, or just picks the first letter of critical words, then Google is lost. There is no substitute for a large database of book contents for cracking a problem like this.
For me, if you are going to teach students how to do something, you might as well teach them how to do it properly. Otherwise, someone may try to copy the circuit and reuse it in a practical application.
I sometimes work with university students. It is a little too obvious how dangerous following simple textbook advice can be. Emergency Stop circuits implemented in Visual Basic are a personal crusade ...
Try making the peizo a current source, with almost no parallel resistance. The piezo sensors I use are modeled as charge sources, with no parallel resistance. They generate signal because the mechanical deflection (X) corresponds to a charge (Q). A time changing mechanical deflection (dX/dt) thus generates a current (i=dQ/dt).
This change might better explain what is happening in the circuit. I think you will find that the transistor acts as almost a Class C amplifier, and has large amounts of distortion.
The criticism may be blunt, but if students do a cookbook project, they should at least be smart enough to know the errors in their ways.
This project has quite a few major problems in the analog front end. Especially, given the fact that with a micro-controller, you could at least try to fix some of them. The report makes no mention of the fact the students even noticed them. Also, the calculations that they did do, are considerably more complex than necessary. Specifically, the students missed the fact the piezo transducer is a charge coupled device, so they are essentially dropping current straight into the base of the amplifying transistor. No voltage gain calculation required.
Many of the cheap micro-controllers have ADC's that won't do the job well, at least not well enough to get any kind of dynamic range out of the circuit.
A bigger problem with the MIT design, is that it uses a Piezo-Buzzer for a microphone. This will give a wickedly non-linear frequency response curve. Piezo-Buzzers are designed to have a narrow range of frequencies in which they operate effectively.
The MIT design also uses a single transistor amplifier circuit. It wouldn't surprise me if the harmonics on the output are poor. Specifically, with this circuit, the average sound level can be determined by simply averaging the output of the transistor amplifier. Essentially, the average voltage on both the collector and emitter of the transistor should change if an AC signal is applied to the base. If this average is read with a DC voltmeter, then it should give an approximation of the sound-level, subject to the microphones frequency response curve.
I am not clear why anyone would build a sound level meter without using either a proper microphone or an effective amplifier circuit. A quad op-amp IC, and a few circuits from the web, should give you the average sound level over an extended frequency and amplitude range. It is even possible to do RMS to DC, peak-level to DC, and log-linear conversions in analog. For a retro-look, an old-fashioned voltmeter or amp-meter can be used for a display. For a more modern look, it is possible to use a cheap micro-controller with a slow ADC (or an LM3914) for the analog to digital conversion. Historically, this was the way it was done in many stereos, and the same circuit is probably still in use in many professional recording labs.
The advantage of implementing a proper micro-phone is the much flatter frequency response curve. The advantage of the log-linear conversion, is that most sound meters read in dB, which is a logarithmic scale. It takes a very good linear ADC to implement the same conversion digitally. A 5-bit (32 count) ADC reading a log input has more dynamic range than a 24-bit ADC reading a linear input (2^32 >> 2^24). Although in practice, I wouldn't recommend using less than an 8-bit ADC on an analog circuit.
When converted to 2's complement notation, all of the primes start with the digit 0.
But that's nothing. When converted to IEEE-Standard Floating Point, the leading 1 disappears!