Re:(Standardized) Tests
on
Watch Camera
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· Score: 2
I don't know about anywhere else, but when I took the SAT (at the Northern Arizona University testing center), it was a no-calculator test, and I had to leave my calculator watch at the front desk. I'm pretty sure that cameras are banned from most testing centers, so I don't see any reason why camera watches shouldn't be.
Re:Are we (they?0 missing something?
on
Watch Camera
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· Score: 1
If you download and watch their annoying realplayer video, you'd see that it does tell time, and has 5 alarms, a picture-linked phone book, and a lot of other features not mentioned on the page.
But, if the material the chip is encased in was a good enough heat conductor, you could make due with much less heatsink
Oh come on, you have the same amount of heat! You'd need the same sized heat sink - it's still AIR this is being radiated into! Actually, I'm not sure how well these things would radiate heat at the ends anyway.
Hmmm, maybe I'm misunderstanding something here. As I understand it, the material the heatsink is made of has no effect on the rate that heat dissipates through the air once it's left the chip/heatsink. That's why I said you would need a really powerful fan. But, the rate at which heat moves from the chip/heatsink into the air at the point of contact is effected by the conductivity of the material from which the heat is radiating, right? In other words, with equal, sufficient, arbitrarily large airflow, a heatsink made out of a better thermal conductor will require less surface area than one made out an inferior conductor to achieve the same transfer, right? I doubt these nanotubes will be that material, but if taken to the extreme that relationship should hold even when you reduce the surface area to just what's on the chip, right?
Let me know if I've missed anything, I'm relatively new to this stuff and I find it fascinating:)
I was thinking about that, too... Instead of dissipating the heat directly with a heatsink made out of nanotubes, just use them to conduct the heat elsewhere. I don't know about big case heat sink, I was thinking more along the lines of conducting the heat either: a) outside or b) into a heatsink submerged in water, or some cooler substance. Either way could (depending on what climate you live in/what substance you used) potentially provide much better heat dissipation than any room-temperature arrangement...
I almost posted a reply just like yours, but then I realized that this guy could be right, although not for the reasons he was thinking of. A heat sink, for all intents and purposes, is just an extension of the surface area of the chip due to the fact that air is a really bad heat conductor and requires lots of surface area to transfer lots of heat. But, if the material the chip is encased in was a good enough heat conductor, you could make due with much less heatsink to achieve the same effect, provided you had sufficient airflow. While I don't think this material will make it, we could theoretically find something that would dissipate heat so well that a heat sink would be unnecessary, since the airflow over just the surface of the chip could be sufficient to cool it. Of course, you're also talking a really strong fan, but it still might be done. Eventually.
But what would all the overclocking sites do if the ultimate heatsink was shapeless and grey?!
Luckily, we don't have to worry about that anytime soon. The nanotubes might move heat away from the CPU faster, but they still have to move that heat to somewhere, which is where all the fins and pins and fans come into play. Those have nothing to do with moving the heat from the CPU to the heat sink, and everything to do with moving the heat from the heat sink to the surrounding air, thus allowing more heat to move from the CPU to the heat sink, etc.
On the other hand, if they could build a heat sink with single carbon nanotube-thick pins spaced right, and a good fan...
OK, either I've missed something important, or most of the other posters have. Here's the deal, IMHO:
They've identified a gene that, when removed from a coffee plant, will cause that coffee plant to not produce caffeine. The gene itself does not produce caffeine, in fact it's likely it has *nothing to do* with the production of caffeine (but doesn't 'Caffeine Gene' make a great headline for the mass media?), but if you remove it from this plant it stops the plant from making caffeine. The jump from identifying a gene that can *stop* caffeine production in a specific plant to identifying a (single!) gene that can cause caffeine production (in any organism!) is something akin to deciding that you can make anything (i.e. a bicycle) move at 60mph down the freeway just by adding spark plugs, based on the evdence that removing the spark plugs from a car makes it *stop* being able to go at 60mph down the freeway. [Required/. post linux reference, as an analogy: It's like deciding you can run linux programs on any computer that has a processor, since taking out the processor makes your computer not run linux programs.]
Then, the submitter makes the further jumps first to caffeine production regulated by existing natural rythms, and then to generic synthesis on demand, and then to artifical 'pharmaceutical organs'. Along the way he provides exactly zero thoughts on the biological feasability of any of these. It's to be expected that a topic as non-computer-related as genetics wouldn't have the same level of conversation you normally see (or dread?) on/., but it'd be really nice if anybody read the article.
Anyways, I know I'm taking this way too seriously, as I would want to be at the top of the list if there were ever a real possibility of a mod to produce caffeine internally, but if you stop and think about it there's really not much chance of seeing it in our lifetimes (unless someone manages to actually 'cure' human aging). And even if there was, it probably wouldn't have anything to do with the research described in this particular article:)
-Jade E.
P.S. On the other hand, I could have lost our little game, and be totally wrong. That tends to happen when I post at 1:30 AM after having slept for about 6 hours in a week.
AFAIK [sic] is an acronym for 'spelled in context', and is used to indicate that something that looks like a typo is being presented as it was in the original material. (See also NMF)
If wishes were horses, then we'd already have Bluetooth.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how would a few hundred thousand horses have sped the development of Bluetooth?
Or is this some new permutation of the 'million monkey with typewriters and infinite time' theory? If every time we wished something would be released, another horse got added to a chaotic development process, I still think it would take a while to get anything useful done, though. Maybe if they were smart horses... like those mice a few weeks back...
If we were to do such a thing, we'd need to design something that would allow normal DNS lookups (i.e., those done by browsers) to work with both new and old addresses. Maybe run the new services on the same port, but change the format of the query... That, or write a DNS server that would recognize which TLD's were which, and used the appropriate root servers. (I don't see it being overly difficult to get a server using a hints file that differentiates 'old' and 'new' root servers...)
When I upgraded from a PII 266 to a Celeron 433, I had to get a new case because the slocket I was using wouldn't fit in the old one (power supply in the way). I know that's not a normal situation, and I wasn't changing manufacturers, but it shows there are a few instances when you would need to replace your case to get a new CPU.
9. The computing future is based on "cyberbodies" -- self-contained, neatly-ordered, beautifully-laid-out collections of information, like immaculate giant gardens. 10. You will walk up to any "tuner" (a computer at home, work or the supermarket, or a TV, a telephone, any kind of electronic device) and slip in a "calling card," which identifes a cyberbody. The tuner tunes it in. The cyberbody arrives and settles in like a bluebird perching on a branch. 11. Your whole electronic life will be stored in a cyberbody. You can summon it to any tuner at any time.
Does this sound like Microsoft's press release on.NET to anybody else? Specifically, this paragraph:
MSN.NET... By combining the leading content and services of MSN with the new.NET platform, MSN.NET will allow consumers to create a single digital personality and use smart services to ensure consistent, seamless and safe access to the information, entertainment and people they care about any time, any place and on any device.
Actually, a bit of further research reveals the the Moscow Times is owned by something called Independent Media. From their site:
Independent Media, a privately owned limited liability Dutch company, is one of the strongest publishing houses on the Russian mass media scene today.... and is the leader in the English-language newspaper market with its flagship, The Moscow Times.
Is it just me, or does anybody else find it somewhat disturbing that 'The Moscow Times' website, including both themoscowtimes.com and themoscwtimes.ru, is entirely in English?
Recently shopping for a KVM, I saw several proudly bearing the linux-tested.com logo. In fact, *all* of the KVM's at this particular store had the logo. No big surprise, they're KVM's, right? I bought a Belkin 4-port OmniCube (Model F1D094) and thought nothing more of it.
That is, until I saw this story. I decided to go see what linux-tested.com had to say about this KVM (which works perfectly, btw.) The following are excerpts from their review:
The OmniCube has keyboard control of switching via a short sequence of keys followed by an onscreen display which has no effect upon the display as generated by the host CPU.
...
The OmniCube isn't packaged with software but does have internal key commands and on-screen display capabilities allowing for rapid switching of CPUs from the keyboard.
These, and several other references to the same feature, seem perfectly normal. Except for one thing: This model has no on-screen display! I've sat here and switched through my boxes every single way the switch supports (button on the switch and 3 different keyboard shortcuts), and there's absolutely no on-screen indication of any kind. Just in case mine is broken, I got out the box, but there's no mention of an OSD. (The models that do have OSD's have '-OSD' at the end of their model number, and aren't called OmniCubes.)
The model number on the KVM, and it's box, are the same one they gave in the review. The product name, OmniCube, is the same. So, question is, how could you possibly review a feature that didn't exist? Do they even look at the hardware they certify? I don't think I'd trust the 'linux-tested' logo for anything more complicated than a printer cable, cinsidering this obvious discrepancy.
The point (I knew I had one) is, we need to come down on certification places that don't use valid (and repeatable) testing procedures just as hard as we do manufacturers that claim linux support but don't follow through. I, personally, am going to be complaining to linux-tested.com and belkin both, and I think next time I go to buy hardware, given the choice between two similar pieces, I'll take one without a fake linux-tested logo over one from a company who thinks, 'Hey, let's make some money off this linux thingy by [selling|buying] tested logos for hardware!'
-Jade E. I don't usually rant this much, just haven't had enough caffeine lately.
Tripwire 2.2.1 for Linux... In support of the open source community, Tripwire plans to release an open source version of this product this fall.
Translation:
We're a bunch of Linux geeks who don't like commercial software, and we know nobody we care about really gives a damn about our other products, so we're going to open source the important one. However, we like to buy toys and people who aren't running linux will still pay for our products, so this is the only thing we're releasing.
This invention relates to an information handling system in which information is derived from a computer at a remote point and transmitted via the public telephone network to terminal apparatus.
The invention also includes the terminal apparatus itself.
OK, so let me get this straight. If this is being applied to the WWW, then the patent covers: TCP/IP, PPP, every web browser out there, and every computer connected to the web through a modem.
Man, I oughta try to patent some little bit of x86 assembly, and include the line "The invention also includes the apparatus used to execute the code." I'd be rich!
Slashdot Mirror
1.5
I don't know about anywhere else, but when I took the SAT (at the Northern Arizona University testing center), it was a no-calculator test, and I had to leave my calculator watch at the front desk. I'm pretty sure that cameras are banned from most testing centers, so I don't see any reason why camera watches shouldn't be.
If you download and watch their annoying realplayer video, you'd see that it does tell time, and has 5 alarms, a picture-linked phone book, and a lot of other features not mentioned on the page.
Hmmm, maybe I'm misunderstanding something here. As I understand it, the material the heatsink is made of has no effect on the rate that heat dissipates through the air once it's left the chip/heatsink. That's why I said you would need a really powerful fan. But, the rate at which heat moves from the chip/heatsink into the air at the point of contact is effected by the conductivity of the material from which the heat is radiating, right? In other words, with equal, sufficient, arbitrarily large airflow, a heatsink made out of a better thermal conductor will require less surface area than one made out an inferior conductor to achieve the same transfer, right? I doubt these nanotubes will be that material, but if taken to the extreme that relationship should hold even when you reduce the surface area to just what's on the chip, right?
Let me know if I've missed anything, I'm relatively new to this stuff and I find it fascinating :)
I was thinking about that, too... Instead of dissipating the heat directly with a heatsink made out of nanotubes, just use them to conduct the heat elsewhere. I don't know about big case heat sink, I was thinking more along the lines of conducting the heat either: a) outside or b) into a heatsink submerged in water, or some cooler substance. Either way could (depending on what climate you live in/what substance you used) potentially provide much better heat dissipation than any room-temperature arrangement...
I almost posted a reply just like yours, but then I realized that this guy could be right, although not for the reasons he was thinking of. A heat sink, for all intents and purposes, is just an extension of the surface area of the chip due to the fact that air is a really bad heat conductor and requires lots of surface area to transfer lots of heat. But, if the material the chip is encased in was a good enough heat conductor, you could make due with much less heatsink to achieve the same effect, provided you had sufficient airflow. While I don't think this material will make it, we could theoretically find something that would dissipate heat so well that a heat sink would be unnecessary, since the airflow over just the surface of the chip could be sufficient to cool it. Of course, you're also talking a really strong fan, but it still might be done. Eventually.
Luckily, we don't have to worry about that anytime soon. The nanotubes might move heat away from the CPU faster, but they still have to move that heat to somewhere, which is where all the fins and pins and fans come into play. Those have nothing to do with moving the heat from the CPU to the heat sink, and everything to do with moving the heat from the heat sink to the surrounding air, thus allowing more heat to move from the CPU to the heat sink, etc.
On the other hand, if they could build a heat sink with single carbon nanotube-thick pins spaced right, and a good fan...
OK, either I've missed something important, or most of the other posters have. Here's the deal, IMHO:
/. post linux reference, as an analogy: It's like deciding you can run linux programs on any computer that has a processor, since taking out the processor makes your computer not run linux programs.]
/., but it'd be really nice if anybody read the article.
:)
They've identified a gene that, when removed from a coffee plant, will cause that coffee plant to not produce caffeine. The gene itself does not produce caffeine, in fact it's likely it has *nothing to do* with the production of caffeine (but doesn't 'Caffeine Gene' make a great headline for the mass media?), but if you remove it from this plant it stops the plant from making caffeine. The jump from identifying a gene that can *stop* caffeine production in a specific plant to identifying a (single!) gene that can cause caffeine production (in any organism!) is something akin to deciding that you can make anything (i.e. a bicycle) move at 60mph down the freeway just by adding spark plugs, based on the evdence that removing the spark plugs from a car makes it *stop* being able to go at 60mph down the freeway. [Required
Then, the submitter makes the further jumps first to caffeine production regulated by existing natural rythms, and then to generic synthesis on demand, and then to artifical 'pharmaceutical organs'. Along the way he provides exactly zero thoughts on the biological feasability of any of these. It's to be expected that a topic as non-computer-related as genetics wouldn't have the same level of conversation you normally see (or dread?) on
Anyways, I know I'm taking this way too seriously, as I would want to be at the top of the list if there were ever a real possibility of a mod to produce caffeine internally, but if you stop and think about it there's really not much chance of seeing it in our lifetimes (unless someone manages to actually 'cure' human aging). And even if there was, it probably wouldn't have anything to do with the research described in this particular article
-Jade E.
P.S. On the other hand, I could have lost our little game, and be totally wrong. That tends to happen when I post at 1:30 AM after having slept for about 6 hours in a week.
AFAIK [sic] is an acronym for 'spelled in context', and is used to indicate that something that looks like a typo is being presented as it was in the original material. (See also NMF)
Maybe I'm missing something, but how would a few hundred thousand horses have sped the development of Bluetooth?
Or is this some new permutation of the 'million monkey with typewriters and infinite time' theory? If every time we wished something would be released, another horse got added to a chaotic development process, I still think it would take a while to get anything useful done, though. Maybe if they were smart horses... like those mice a few weeks back...
OK, I obviously need more caffeine.
-Jade E.
n-1? What's rule n then? Making sense?
If we were to do such a thing, we'd need to design something that would allow normal DNS lookups (i.e., those done by browsers) to work with both new and old addresses. Maybe run the new services on the same port, but change the format of the query... That, or write a DNS server that would recognize which TLD's were which, and used the appropriate root servers. (I don't see it being overly difficult to get a server using a hints file that differentiates 'old' and 'new' root servers...)
When I upgraded from a PII 266 to a Celeron 433, I had to get a new case because the slocket I was using wouldn't fit in the old one (power supply in the way). I know that's not a normal situation, and I wasn't changing manufacturers, but it shows there are a few instances when you would need to replace your case to get a new CPU.
> (except Netscape, because that kills CSS [why?])
Because Netscape doesn't actually support CSS. It converts CSS to it's own* Javascript Style Sheets internally. Hence, no Javascript, no Style Sheets.
* It's 'own' standard in the sense that it's published, but nobody else uses it.
-Jade E.
Not an expert, but I've run into the problem before.
Actually, a bit of further research reveals the the Moscow Times is owned by something called Independent Media. From their site:
Guess that explains it.
Is it just me, or does anybody else find it somewhat disturbing that 'The Moscow Times' website, including both themoscowtimes.com and themoscwtimes.ru, is entirely in English?
Recently shopping for a KVM, I saw several proudly bearing the linux-tested.com logo. In fact, *all* of the KVM's at this particular store had the logo. No big surprise, they're KVM's, right? I bought a Belkin 4-port OmniCube (Model F1D094) and thought nothing more of it.
That is, until I saw this story. I decided to go see what linux-tested.com had to say about this KVM (which works perfectly, btw.) The following are excerpts from their review:
...These, and several other references to the same feature, seem perfectly normal. Except for one thing: This model has no on-screen display! I've sat here and switched through my boxes every single way the switch supports (button on the switch and 3 different keyboard shortcuts), and there's absolutely no on-screen indication of any kind. Just in case mine is broken, I got out the box, but there's no mention of an OSD. (The models that do have OSD's have '-OSD' at the end of their model number, and aren't called OmniCubes.)
The model number on the KVM, and it's box, are the same one they gave in the review. The product name, OmniCube, is the same. So, question is, how could you possibly review a feature that didn't exist? Do they even look at the hardware they certify? I don't think I'd trust the 'linux-tested' logo for anything more complicated than a printer cable, cinsidering this obvious discrepancy.
The point (I knew I had one) is, we need to come down on certification places that don't use valid (and repeatable) testing procedures just as hard as we do manufacturers that claim linux support but don't follow through. I, personally, am going to be complaining to linux-tested.com and belkin both, and I think next time I go to buy hardware, given the choice between two similar pieces, I'll take one without a fake linux-tested logo over one from a company who thinks, 'Hey, let's make some money off this linux thingy by [selling|buying] tested logos for hardware!'
-Jade E.
I don't usually rant this much, just haven't had enough caffeine lately.
Translation:
This "talented-tenth" still exists, but "normal people" also have the opportunity to explore the web.
:s/tenth/ten-thousandth/
:s/normal people/the idiots/
:wq
-Jade E.
Elitist at heart.
P.S. This is not intended as the precursor to an editor war, the easily inflamed may replace the above lines with appropriate ESC- commands.
OK, so let me get this straight. If this is being applied to the WWW, then the patent covers: TCP/IP, PPP, every web browser out there, and every computer connected to the web through a modem.
Man, I oughta try to patent some little bit of x86 assembly, and include the line "The invention also includes the apparatus used to execute the code." I'd be rich!