Posts by Tom 7 8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
Mach 1 drops fro 760mph at sea level to around 660mph at 35000 feet and seems to stay there up to 60000 ft but I cant find figures for above that. It may be meaningless above there as the mean free path may be so long that any wave front disappears in noise. Perhaps Branson could do some useful science at this level by checking out for his own sonic boom on the way down.
TBF it currently is the thing that is most likely to allow me to get 'above' the atmosphere and back alive. There is one chance in a few million I might get up there in this - which, at 6'5 is a lot better than having to earn enough to make my own spacecraft rather than just book two seats on this!
5 years ago was the time to start planning the open interfaces these vehicles will need to communicate with traffic control centres, each other and indeed other road users.
Can you imagine the problems that will arise when twenty different vehicle manufacturers arrive with their own systems and a cyclist is forced to pay for an iCar avoidance system before using a bit of road Apple has bribed some town council for test purposes. Or BMW demand a right to overtake and cut in when they feel like it. Or Uber thinking its OK to switch off most of the lidar because they are too keen to get rid of drivers asap.
The potential benefits of driverless vehicles is massive if they can be forced to co-operate with each other and other road users from day one for the benefit of all and not just whoever turns up first with a half cocked system and enough backing to buy a monopoly of something.
The government (and many others) will be on the back foot and end up providing well sub optimal interface protocols because they will be bullied into it and have no f'ing idea of the shit they will be dumping on us.
But it would be cheaper for BT to rip out the 6 miles of copper and put in fibre for me (or it should be) I've been here 10 years and am on my 4th pair and second pole. I get half a dozen call outs to fix one thing or another.
And the really annoying part is it seems they've laid the fibre - they've just been waiting for the government to pay for it.
I've got an I7 8 core laptop. Tensor flow runs one the 'standard' handwritten number recognition rests in around 20 minutes on all 8 cores. This is a bit faster than on my ancient gx720. Caffe runs the same test in about 25 minutes on one core out of the box and a noticeably faster when compiled for the chipset and runs 5c cooler too. I didnt try recompiling Tensor because it didnt tell me it might be a good idea.
Now the GPU on the RaspberryPis is rated at 24Glops and my I7 is rated at 42 or so I'm looking forward to seeing that working ( or rather a box of Pi zeros working - in theory the PiZeros work out about twice as expensive as the cheapest Titan so they are value for money for up to a box load).
I must play with Snap and see if it is that much faster.
I cant think of any reason why Google would release slow software on the world tho...
I wonder why the Lidar did not pick up the poor woman. Perhaps they do it on the cheap - the ones used for mapping the ground can do 30,000 samples a second over a reasonable viewport. Should have picked up her shoes at least. Or perhaps they dont want the car to break on every moth or bird in front and have set a 'only if bigger than' to larger than shoe size. I guess wider ranges of laser frequencies might be necessary to ensure that people and cars dont cloak themselves.
The think they seem to have missed is hops dont just provide flavour. They are normally boiled with the wort for 90 minutes or so and that produces a shit load of chemical reactions where the hop chemicals react with the malt sugars to produce molecules that not only affect the flavour but the mouth feel of beer. Leaving out the hops and the boil will make it feel like watery piss and not beer.
Most english speakers cant program even if the programming language is in english.
But seriously the really hard bit about computing is computing. People invent different languages all the time and none of them make it any easier - they merely move the hurdles up and down the track but they still have to be jumped. Give people a version of a language in their language and they will have to jump the hurdle of learning the english equivalents when they start using libraries.
From my own experience learning programming in non-machine code I had to learn the words I was using were not used in computing in the way they were used in common english.
Treat computing like chemistry where you tend to learn German if you want to get past A'Level in it, and accept the lingua-franca is 'English'.
When Uber has destroyed the competition it raises its prices and then turns into the 'whining black cab' company complaining about neo-uber that pops up to undercut it. Unless it bribes lots of politicians to prevent any competition. It really is an evil corrupt business model.
The above mentioned line printer once produced a seriously high security document about (amongst other things) document security from one of those shitty little Hitler types that pick up on the slightest mistake you make and then write a policy to stop you breathing. This was late on a Friday evening and the document was safely stored for a few days before being placed in his in tray when he was out of his office searching all the printers in the very large building where we worked and dripping sweat from every pore on his terrified body.
One place I worked had a seriously fast line printer - my memory says 5000lpm which sounds ridiculous now but I remember trying to feed it some card like fan fold and accidentally sent it a 'box' of form feeds and the 'paper' shot across the print room faster than the eye could see some 30 feet or so. Took me hours to repack so I could print the occasionally creased party invites.
I think one thing you need for intelligent life to form is somewhere like earth and 4 billion years. To make somewhere like earth you need a couple of generations of stars. and also for it to not have too many active stars in the region blowing up and wiping out any life before it has 4 billion years to get to the point where it thinks a digital watch is a good thing. Any region of space that is likely to provide these conditions will have to take around 10 billion years to provide the planet with all the elements necessary and not too much radiation around the place. Which get us to about now from the big bang.
I'd put good money on their being other intelligent life out there and its a couple of billion light years away and thinking the same as us and in a couple of billion years we may just have detectors sufficiently sensitive to catch their first TV shows.
I think you will find money trails are a lot harder to follow than working out how to diagnose the most obtuse security problems. Which is strange when, of modern business skills, accountancy is the one that should be most easy to make completely transparent and traceable.
Strange that.
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