That is not exactly true. The power output of an internal combustion depends not only on the energy content of the fuel but on on other factors as well, such as, *VERY IMPORTANT* compression ratio. The higher the better and ethanol allows the use of considerably higher compression ratios without detonation. It doesn't compensate the lower calorific power of the ethanol (25% less mileage) but for the same engine, ethanol usually has a little higher rated power (it can operate on higher RPMs).
You might be right but just imagine what would happen if people stopped buying their crap: they would say that their revenue drop is due to higher piracy and would get us new crappy evil laws anyway.
It is not hard to imagine these people trying to force, through legislation, everyone to buy music through them. Or that *any* music download should be charged.
No, it means that because the new measurement methodology is so new they can't get any accurate trend and they will use continue to use the older method to estimate the trend. Once enough measurements using the new method are available they will certainly switch to it. You have to realize that any measurement has an uncertainty which can be quite high depending on what and how you are measuring. Once you get better measurement method you don't just throw away older measurements. Some conclusions drawn from it are still valid. In this case the method estimates the amount of ice. It might not get accurate results but it might show pretty well how fast the ice is shrinking.
Those guys did the right thing. They acknowledged an error and made an assessment of the quality of previous data and found that it is good enough to estimate trends. Before publication the study was reviewed by peers and found satisfactory. If in the future further evidence based on the new measurement method (or other methods) might confirm or not their assessment. That's how science works and evolves.
I work in a laboratory - a wind tunnel and I don't think the problem is too much specialization. I don't know what the guy's setup is but from my point of view the problem is hardware support. Most hardware manufacturers simply do not acknowledge that there is an OS different from windows and for these guys open source / free software is a completely alien concept.
So basically, if you want to use free software you are going to have to do it all on your own. From low level hardware drivers (with no support or help whatsoever) up to libraries and high level environments.
But do you know what is interesting? At our lab we have some old equipment (30-40 years old) and they all have service manuals that usually includes electronic circuits diagrams. Basically you had all the information to fix anything. But now the only option available is to send the instrument to the manufacturer and hope they are in the mood of fixing it.
Software? It is a disgrace usually. You by a $200.000 equipment and you get a software that handles the instrument pretty well but does nothing else (how do you interface with anothe equipment???) and the damn software includes a hardware key!!! I ask myself who would "pirate" this software? It is useful only with the equipment the company sold for tons of money and nothing else. I mean you already payed a small fortune for it!!! Often they do not provide an API so that you can try to interface the software with another environment. This drives me insane!
Why do we still by equipment from this company? The first reason is that I will usually have the same problem with other options. Another reason is that most of these equipments are expensive so you have to make sure it will work and the best way to ensure this is to get the same stuff some other lab you know uses.
All this could change is there was an awesome open source environment. But here is the catch: most experimenters I know are very poor programmers. But there is light in the end of the tunnel there are projects like http://www.comedi.org/ that provides drivers for DAQ cards. National Instruments has binary only linux drivers for some of their boards.
Just yesterday my boss agreed to release as open source some code I'm developing. It is basically interfaces to the R (http://www.r-project.org/) environment. Much of it is very similar to matlab's daq toolbox. For now I will mostly be using the code on windows (since many instruments we have do not offer any other option) but I will try to slowly migrate to Linux or some other free environment.
It needs the fortran compiler since it uses a lot of code from fortran libraries (I believe there are several things from netlib). You could try f2c and its wrapper program fort77.
I don't do much statitistics and I use R much of the time. I find the language much nicer to work, graphics part much better and linking to C/Fortran much easier.
One annoying thing is that sometimes you look for something trivially done in matlab/octave only to find that statitians use a different name for it.
One other problem is that since most people using R are usually doing statistics, other areas don't have as many packages and extensions. But this is changing fast because of the rapid growth in use. One year ago I was the only one using it at the mechanical engineering department but I hava managed to convert several people already.
Caesar was given the Imperium for 10 years or life (I don't recall...) and therefore he was the "emperor" when he died. Of course the title of "emperor" did not mean the same thing thing it means today.
I work in a lab where we carry calibrations of flow meters. Even though information storage is *extremely* important to us, most of my co-workers and bosses don't really care about this. There are several standards with dubious origins and some suck but it is perceived to be more important to have a standard, even though bad, than the opposite. And, by the way, ISO A4 is different from OOXML in one important aspect: it doesn't really matter what is the exact size of the paper to people, it must be consistent with printers, manufacturers, etc and other paper sizes (A4 -> A3 -> A2 -> A1 -> A0).
And by the way, there is an "ISO police". Most countries acknowledge ISO's standards and many standards are actually laws in several countries. For instance, flow meters have to express their measurements in correct units and under correct conditions (standard pressure/temperature). Even when due to local issues (historye/whatever) the national standard is different from ISO's the national standard usually refers to ISO , justifies the differences and provides means to "correct" differences. Byers (large ones at least) usually require some sort of standard conformance and often this amounts to ISO conformance.
Since MS holds a near monopoly on office software, people just don't think of this. When ODF was approved as an ISO standard I actually spoke to my boss about the need to store our information using ODF. This was the first time someone actually heard me on this sort of issue. But now, with OOXML, they are actually happy - they believe that they don't have to do anything to be compliant with ISO. I know that this is not true but MS says so...
ISO is not about computer related stuff only. On the contrary that's only a tiny part and not the most significant part of it anyway. Think about screws, pipes and stuff like that: what would happen if that was not standardized? What about all kinds of measurements? How can you compare measurement or other aspects of measurement such as uncertainty if there are no adequate standards? There are all sorts of things where standards are extremely important. Think about building a large pipeline going through several countries. In different countries there might be different standards and on some small countries there might not even be a relevant standard - standard pipe diameters might be different, measurement units might be different, safety regulations are different - it is a real nightmare to handle all these little things. In these situations international standards come in very handy. An international standards organization is an essential aspect of a global economy.
Standards are not about bleeding edge technology. It deals exclusively (almost) with industry accepted practices. There are problems. some organizations have too much power sometimes (usually a large manufacturer) and their concerns might overwhelm other important aspects to other interested people.
You might not like Hugo Chavez or his policies. Hell, you might even hate him. But I've never heard about anyone standing in a wall for anything. There even was a military coup against him and do you know what? Only one guy is being prosecuted (the guy who was made president) and he fled but he is certainly not facing facing death/torture or anything resembling a "wall". Several ex-top allies have "deserted" him over the years and do you know what? They are living in Venezuela being part of what is called the OPPOSITION. Yes, there is such a thing in Venezuela and, by the way, they are actually heard outside (duh!) and, amazingly, in Venezuela (most of all) - most of the media is totally against him.
He is a populist and often acts like a buffoon but he was elected, he faced the public opinion in a referendum to remove him from office and when he tried to make changes to the constitution last year, he submitted them to the public and lost (by a very small margin). He acknowledged the defeat and said that he would try to hear the people (obviously that is not necessarily the truth). Where else do you see such an open process? Certainly not in the US or most countries in Europe.
I don't know about your specific examples but there are several industries were wages make up a very little part of the costs. On the other hand there are other aspects such as design, quality and marketing that add value to a product . 40-50 years ago Japanes products were "shitty" and cheap and then they started to improve and make a name for themselves. The same could be said for Taiwan 30 years ago or Korea 20-10 years ago. You can get very cheap pans made in China but unless you are lucky they will wear out very soon. But Chinese junk has been getting better over the years.
I did not know about this correlation of ozone hole and particle emissions from the sun. Very interesting indeed. Did you notice how fast the ozone hole "problem" was solved? It reached mainstream media and a couple of years later CFCs were banned. How fast can such broad decisions be made? I remember one paper that was widely cited that basically mixed CFCs and an atmosphere and bombarded this environment with UV and the result was the destruction of O3. But conditions (pressure, temperature concentrations, etc) were very different from those observed in the ionosphere. In fact, there was very little research on the causes of the hole. Research basically informed that there was a hole (but with no previous history) and this paper (I don't remember the authors).
OTOH, patents on most common CFCs expired few years before and several manufacturers worldwide were beginning to manufacture CFCs and lowering prices. Suddenly the ozone layer hole hits the news and CFCs are banned in very little time. Including refrigerants such as R22 that has an excellent performance and should destroy very little ozone. And new, complicated, expensive and *patented* refrigerants show up to save the world.
But I think it would be unfair to compare this situation with global warming because in this case there is a lot of research from groups all over the world and there is a history of measurements to compare actual conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
Who needs a mid 50's oscilloscope on their car !?!
That is not exactly true. The power output of an internal combustion depends not only on the energy content of the fuel but on on other factors as well, such as, *VERY IMPORTANT* compression ratio. The higher the better and ethanol allows the use of considerably higher compression ratios without detonation. It doesn't compensate the lower calorific power of the ethanol (25% less mileage) but for the same engine, ethanol usually has a little higher rated power (it can operate on higher RPMs).
But then, how would the hicks drive around big trucks and complain about big government and too many taxes?
That's a completely different story. Anyone can pay 3 million euros...
You might be right but just imagine what would happen if people stopped buying their crap: they would say that their revenue drop is due to higher piracy and would get us new crappy evil laws anyway.
It is not hard to imagine these people trying to force, through legislation, everyone to buy music through them. Or that *any* music download should be charged.
George W. Bush is a reasonably balanced leader? That's a first! Obama? Let's wait and see...
No, it means that because the new measurement methodology is so new they can't get any accurate trend and they will use continue to use the older method to estimate the trend. Once enough measurements using the new method are available they will certainly switch to it. You have to realize that any measurement has an uncertainty which can be quite high depending on what and how you are measuring. Once you get better measurement method you don't just throw away older measurements. Some conclusions drawn from it are still valid. In this case the method estimates the amount of ice. It might not get accurate results but it might show pretty well how fast the ice is shrinking.
Those guys did the right thing. They acknowledged an error and made an assessment of the quality of previous data and found that it is good enough to estimate trends. Before publication the study was reviewed by peers and found satisfactory. If in the future further evidence based on the new measurement method (or other methods) might confirm or not their assessment. That's how science works and evolves.
I work in a laboratory - a wind tunnel and I don't think the problem is too much specialization. I don't know what the guy's setup is but from my point of view the problem is hardware support. Most hardware manufacturers simply do not acknowledge that there is an OS different from windows and for these guys open source / free software is a completely alien concept.
So basically, if you want to use free software you are going to have to do it all on your own. From low level hardware drivers (with no support or help whatsoever) up to libraries and high level environments.
But do you know what is interesting? At our lab we have some old equipment (30-40 years old) and they all have service manuals that usually includes electronic circuits diagrams. Basically you had all the information to fix anything. But now the only option available is to send the instrument to the manufacturer and hope they are in the mood of fixing it.
Software? It is a disgrace usually. You by a $200.000 equipment and you get a software that handles the instrument pretty well but does nothing else (how do you interface with anothe equipment???) and the damn software includes a hardware key!!! I ask myself who would "pirate" this software? It is useful only with the equipment the company sold for tons of money and nothing else. I mean you already payed a small fortune for it!!! Often they do not provide an API so that you can try to interface the software with another environment. This drives me insane!
Why do we still by equipment from this company? The first reason is that I will usually have the same problem with other options. Another reason is that most of these equipments are expensive so you have to make sure it will work and the best way to ensure this is to get the same stuff some other lab you know uses.
All this could change is there was an awesome open source environment. But here is the catch: most experimenters I know are very poor programmers. But there is light in the end of the tunnel there are projects like http://www.comedi.org/ that provides drivers for DAQ cards. National Instruments has binary only linux drivers for some of their boards.
Just yesterday my boss agreed to release as open source some code I'm developing. It is basically interfaces to the R (http://www.r-project.org/) environment. Much of it is very similar to matlab's daq toolbox. For now I will mostly be using the code on windows (since many instruments we have do not offer any other option) but I will try to slowly migrate to Linux or some other free environment.
Since we are dealing with national security issues, some sort of cryptography should be applied to the sound of the Constitution being ripped up.
It needs the fortran compiler since it uses a lot of code from fortran libraries (I believe there are several things from netlib). You could try f2c and its wrapper program fort77.
I don't do much statitistics and I use R much of the time. I find the language much nicer to work, graphics part much better and linking to C/Fortran much easier.
One annoying thing is that sometimes you look for something trivially done in matlab/octave only to find that statitians use a different name for it.
One other problem is that since most people using R are usually doing statistics, other areas don't have as many packages and extensions. But this is changing fast because of the rapid growth in use. One year ago I was the only one using it at the mechanical engineering department but I hava managed to convert several people already.
Actually, R hasn't used linked lists to represent its "list" data structure for a long time. So it is very much like python indeed.
Caesar was given the Imperium for 10 years or life (I don't recall...) and therefore he was the "emperor" when he died. Of course the title of "emperor" did not mean the same thing thing it means today.
If you can have web based voting, you are one step away from direct democracy. Who would want that? Certainly not any congressman...
For the same reason the article warrants a post?
I work in a lab where we carry calibrations of flow meters. Even though information storage is *extremely* important to us, most of my co-workers and bosses don't really care about this. There are several standards with dubious origins and some suck but it is perceived to be more important to have a standard, even though bad, than the opposite. And, by the way, ISO A4 is different from OOXML in one important aspect: it doesn't really matter what is the exact size of the paper to people, it must be consistent with printers, manufacturers, etc and other paper sizes (A4 -> A3 -> A2 -> A1 -> A0).
And by the way, there is an "ISO police". Most countries acknowledge ISO's standards and many standards are actually laws in several countries. For instance, flow meters have to express their measurements in correct units and under correct conditions (standard pressure/temperature). Even when due to local issues (historye/whatever) the national standard is different from ISO's the national standard usually refers to ISO , justifies the differences and provides means to "correct" differences. Byers (large ones at least) usually require some sort of standard conformance and often this amounts to ISO conformance.
Since MS holds a near monopoly on office software, people just don't think of this. When ODF was approved as an ISO standard I actually spoke to my boss about the need to store our information using ODF. This was the first time someone actually heard me on this sort of issue. But now, with OOXML, they are actually happy - they believe that they don't have to do anything to be compliant with ISO. I know that this is not true but MS says so...
ISO is not about computer related stuff only. On the contrary that's only a tiny part and not the most significant part of it anyway. Think about screws, pipes and stuff like that: what would happen if that was not standardized? What about all kinds of measurements? How can you compare measurement or other aspects of measurement such as uncertainty if there are no adequate standards? There are all sorts of things where standards are extremely important. Think about building a large pipeline going through several countries. In different countries there might be different standards and on some small countries there might not even be a relevant standard - standard pipe diameters might be different, measurement units might be different, safety regulations are different - it is a real nightmare to handle all these little things. In these situations international standards come in very handy. An international standards organization is an essential aspect of a global economy.
Standards are not about bleeding edge technology. It deals exclusively (almost) with industry accepted practices. There are problems. some organizations have too much power sometimes (usually a large manufacturer) and their concerns might overwhelm other important aspects to other interested people.
Here in Brazil (São Paulo) we are having one of the warmest winters ever.
When I first read the title I thought it said faSter. That would've been news. But FaTter? That is expected from MS.
You might not like Hugo Chavez or his policies. Hell, you might even hate him. But I've never heard about anyone standing in a wall for anything. There even was a military coup against him and do you know what? Only one guy is being prosecuted (the guy who was made president) and he fled but he is certainly not facing facing death/torture or anything resembling a "wall". Several ex-top allies have "deserted" him over the years and do you know what? They are living in Venezuela being part of what is called the OPPOSITION. Yes, there is such a thing in Venezuela and, by the way, they are actually heard outside (duh!) and, amazingly, in Venezuela (most of all) - most of the media is totally against him.
He is a populist and often acts like a buffoon but he was elected, he faced the public opinion in a referendum to remove him from office and when he tried to make changes to the constitution last year, he submitted them to the public and lost (by a very small margin). He acknowledged the defeat and said that he would try to hear the people (obviously that is not necessarily the truth). Where else do you see such an open process? Certainly not in the US or most countries in Europe.
I don't see anyone complaining about child labor in China. This is the least of their problems.
I don't know about your specific examples but there are several industries were wages make up a very little part of the costs. On the other hand there are other aspects such as design, quality and marketing that add value to a product . 40-50 years ago Japanes products were "shitty" and cheap and then they started to improve and make a name for themselves. The same could be said for Taiwan 30 years ago or Korea 20-10 years ago. You can get very cheap pans made in China but unless you are lucky they will wear out very soon. But Chinese junk has been getting better over the years.
Isn't your spaceship basically a huge torch?
I did not know about this correlation of ozone hole and particle emissions from the sun. Very interesting indeed. Did you notice how fast the ozone hole "problem" was solved? It reached mainstream media and a couple of years later CFCs were banned. How fast can such broad decisions be made? I remember one paper that was widely cited that basically mixed CFCs and an atmosphere and bombarded this environment with UV and the result was the destruction of O3. But conditions (pressure, temperature concentrations, etc) were very different from those observed in the ionosphere. In fact, there was very little research on the causes of the hole. Research basically informed that there was a hole (but with no previous history) and this paper (I don't remember the authors).
OTOH, patents on most common CFCs expired few years before and several manufacturers worldwide were beginning to manufacture CFCs and lowering prices. Suddenly the ozone layer hole hits the news and CFCs are banned in very little time. Including refrigerants such as R22 that has an excellent performance and should destroy very little ozone. And new, complicated, expensive and *patented* refrigerants show up to save the world.
But I think it would be unfair to compare this situation with global warming because in this case there is a lot of research from groups all over the world and there is a history of measurements to compare actual conditions.
I though you have balls.