Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Does The Paper Account For Regenerative Braking (Score 1) 555

When you use the brakes in an EV the brake pads generally aren't used, instead the motor is used as a generator converting kinetic energy into stored power. I don't see this mentioned in the abstract, are the authors really not including this?

The paper does take account of this: regenerative braking is assumed for EVs and (conservatively) zero brake-wear is assumed.

Comment Re:Does The Paper Account For Regenerative Braking (Score 1) 555

When you use the brakes in an EV the brake pads generally aren't used, instead the motor is used as a generator converting kinetic energy into stored power. I don't see this mentioned in the abstract, are the authors really not including this?

Having RTFP, they do take regenerative braking into account - EV cars are assumed to use regen and have effectively zero brake-wear.

Comment Re: 'simply' following rules (Score 2) 285

One of Feynman's memoirs includes the haha-only-serious observation that mathematical theorems are either unproven or trivial, and this is simply a re-statement of the same principle.

And actually, there's a lot of speculation about whether colonies exhibit intelligence or consciousness (eg Hofstadter's Aunt Hillary, but also Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart's Heaven - they also did the Science of the Discworld series with pterry).

Comment Third level domain precedence (Score 1) 111

The rules are that, for the next five years, any .co.uk owner can register the corresponding .uk domain. If there isn't a .co.uk, the .org.uk owner can register, and if there isn't a .org.uk owner, the .me.uk owner can register it.

All other .uk subdomains don't get a bite at the cherry. Nor is there any protected time where a .org.uk or a .me.uk owner can register the .uk domain if the .co.uk owner doesn't want it.

Comment Re:And google will retain that info exclusively. (Score 4, Insightful) 195

If you want to know if I've read an email:
request a return receipt
If I want to give you that information, I will.

Goodness, there's an existing, non-scummy way of working all this out which preserves user expectations of privacy and provides you with the information you actually want, not a poor proxy of it.

Comment Re:I can think of one that Steve Jobs disagreed wi (Score 2) 598

"Quicksort is already implemented a thousand times, so there's no need to implement it again, just find which library you need."

Yes, that's true, but we're talking about education here, not building websites.

Also, knowing about QS implementations lets you know when it's been done wrong.

Case in point: Microsoft's C runtime library shipped around the time of Windows NT and Visual Studio 6 had a sub-optimal qsort implementation - it took 97 seconds (on a 600MHz Athlon) to sort 260,000 integers with a constrained set of values (0-180), whereas other implementations (eg Numerical Recipes) could do it three orders of magnitude quicker.
Delving in, the qsort() algorithm didn't exchange elements where the value equalled the partitioning element, which leads to increased comparison function calls (effectively proportional to 1/range).

Comment Re:Nature is amazing (Score 1) 213

What if the intelligent designer just wanted to use evolution? I've never understood why the two solutions have to be exclusive.

Well, Intelligent she might be (gives you the afternoon off, after all), but it's a bit more dispassionate than I'd want my Benevolent Omniscient Being to be. Have you read about all those parasites? The ones that eat their host from the inside out, the ones that affect the brain, so the host goes wandering out into wide open places and gets eaten, etc.

It's almost Lovecraftian.

Slashdot Top Deals

As long as we're going to reinvent the wheel again, we might as well try making it round this time. - Mike Dennison

Working...