Comment Re:This is a good thing (Score 1) 712
Vista was an anomaly. I remember the chaos. I would guess that it was so resource hungry that Windows 7 didn't have much problem being slimmer...
Vista was an anomaly. I remember the chaos. I would guess that it was so resource hungry that Windows 7 didn't have much problem being slimmer...
At school, I told my German teacher that the computer had crashed. She looked at me strangely, and then said she hoped I'd picked up all the pieces.
... if they can steal tarmac off the road to make a floor for the house, I'm sure they'll grab a solar panel and rig a car headlamp to it...
Could burn a few Australopithecines...
I'm guessing there's pressure on land and infrastructure - most of the electricity use is in the cities and there's not much of a power grid so big solar arrays may not be feasible. And too easy to pinch a panel or two...
It's the Kenyans I'm more worried about. Too many people after bribes!
My friend gets by with one light bulb in the lounge. He's usually using 1-2kWh per month. I think he's about average for Nairobi suburbia. Some households might have a TV and fridge. And a few more light bulbs on at once.
I somehow never got this point. In the standard model, you're starting from a Lagrangian formulation of a quantum field theory, so the existence of a scalar product in the Hilbert space spanned by the theory automatically guarantees normalization of probabilities, no matter which physical values you attach to the parameters of your model. So if you're getting something larger than one, you must have made an error somewhere on the way, but that doesn't imply your entire model is wrong.
... I somehow never got this point...
The infra red space telescopes are positioned out of the sun ('behind' the earth) in order to keep cool. However, there's still the heat from the electronics, and there's no way to get rid of that apart from by radiating the heat away. Black radiates well, hence colouring it black will keep the spacecraft cool.
In sunlight, more heat is coming in than going out, hence black cars get hot, and normal spacecraft are coloured silver (or similar) to make them highly reflective and bounce the heat off. (Even those spacecraft will often have dark surfaces on the other side in order to keep cool.)
I'm guessing that the Blackbird SR-71 got so hot with the engines, that painting it black would result in far more heat radiated than the sun would put back in. It's all a matter of balancing heat in and heat out.
The summary is a little wrong: "Because the light absorption level is so high, the super-black material will also keep temperatures down for the instruments it is used on." I think that should be "Because the heat radiation level is so high, the super-black material will also keep temperatures down for the instruments it is used on."
I did an experiment years ago on a 5 inch floppy disk and a fridge magnet. I had to put the magnet in direct contact with the disk surface itself before I got any corruption. If it took that much on a 1980s floppy, it must surely take much more on a shielded and enclosed hard drive.
Cathode ray tubes certainly. Used to have lots of fun making the screen change colour, until my parents got upset. But it would still take a very strong field even for that.
Luxury! When I were a lad, we had to hand code the packages in byte by byte, and t'Gaffer would delete the lot if we got a byte wrong!
Need whooshed...
Very interesting. We had a problem in telephone exchanges about 25 years ago. All data was held in memory - no disk drives (except for billing records I recall). Some little old granny would mysteriously acquire a premium service. It only affected the lines that were hardly ever used. It was tracked down to "alpha particle corruption", which gradually eroded the charge, which effectively flipped the bit to a 1 and gave the subscriber a random service.
Don't know any more than that, but the old hand that described it to me, did so with unusual glee...
ChromePlus
Absolutely swear by it! Comes with added Selenium and Zinc. Just ask your pharmacist.
Easy! Just infiltrate the crowd with thousands of trained trumpeters who play them 2.128ms after the person standing next to them!
Pity, that only cuts out one harmonic. However, I've occasionally had problems playing trombone next to a bass guitar. The amplified tone somehow cancels out my note and all I get is a muffled rasp.
Maybe we could have speakers concealed under the seats carefully tuned to play the exact opposite of whatever they pick up around them?
I know - how about installing colonies of African wasps trained to attack anything that sounds like them?
Good grief.
I'm just saying that with ad blockers becoming more common, and a technology that is potentially harder to block, advertisers would potentially pay extra for inline content.
Whether they will is another matter. I'm not bothered.
The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.
