You obviously have no experience in the realm of charlatans.
In every single case of too-good-to-be-true power sources, there is a gimmick to make the results seem legitimate to the untrained.
It's little more than an magician's trick of misdirection, and ignorance of the audience. There's no real magic in a magician's act; misdirection and suspension of disbelief are their breadwinners.
There's a reason charlatans won't allow people who know what they're doing to examine their apparatus. It has nothing to do with "trade secrets", and everything to do with the fact that experienced chemists, engineers, and physicists generally find the gimmick and expose their fraud in minutes.
There are a lot of ways to heat up the reactor chemically. If you honestly believe that "it can't be done conventionally," then you've utterly failed chemistry.
Simply heating a lithium-ion battery pack over 185 C starts an unstoppable chain-reaction that quickly reaches a couple thousand degrees. Surround a LiPo battery with a chunk of steel, short circuit it, and it it will reach a temp over 185 C. Now you just wait for the steel to slowly heat up. Create an array of a few of these, add copper to equalize the heat in your bank of LiPo batteries, and voila, you've got a heat source of well over 500 watts that can last for hours - days even, if you set it up right.
As much as the/. crowd hates to admit it, there are reasons for most intellectual property law, NDA's, patents, and so forth: one of them is to protect a in inventor - so he can have outside experts verify his apparatus, and can publish how it works for expert scrutiny, yet still retain the rights to profit from his work.
I'd like to believe that Rossi has somehow found out how to generate abundant, clean, and cheap energy. His actions, however, are identical to a garden-variety charlatan. Activities such as grandstanding before customers or the press, "demonstrations", and refusal to let experienced and external experts examine his device.
Rossi does none of this. The smell of charlatan coming from the guy is overpowering. His behavior is identical to a classic con/charlatan. As the saying goes, you don't have to eat the whole turd to know it isn't chocolate.
After having actually read the patent, it looks like Google Authenticator, for example is in the clear.
The patent states that the following must occur:
1.) User inputs a password 2.) Authenticating device receives the password from #1, generates a password, and sends this new password out-of-band to an external device. (Pager, phone, etc) 3.) Person then reads the password from the device 4.) Person inputs the new password into their computer 5.) Computer sends second password over to authenticating device. 6.) Authenticating device finally grants access.
Google authenticator works differently. 1.) User input password 2.) User inputs password read from device 3.) BOTH are sent over the network to the authenticating computer, at the same time. 4.) Authenticating computer grants access.
Note that Google Authenticator does not generate the 'multi-factor' password after receiving the first password from the user.
The multi-factor password is streamed passed to the (pager, phone, etc.) every X seconds.
It's an entirely different mechanism.
Which means that my already low opinion of this guy is now lower, as he's descended into obvious patent troll territory.
The situation has actually only gotten worse, as process sizes shrink. You can take it however you want; my sources are from the Engineering & QA departments of ultra-high performance SSD manufacturers (guys that make any of the disks you mentioned seem slower than carving the data into stone).
You can take that however you want; I have no interest in endangering my friend's jobs, and I don't really care if you believe it or not.
Anybody who takes a manufacturer's warranty as a life expectancy has a few screws loose. It's as much a marketing tactic as flashy ads. Sales & Marketing droids don't give a rat's ass if their campaign costs the company a load of cash in 2-3 years; they'll just shift the blame to engineering & QA and then go out for a drink. They're almost pathologically averse to accepting responsibility for any destruction or debt they cause.
Sales & Marketing drones care about making the sale now. There are few I've met that care if the company succeeds or goes under. The droid will just move on to the next company, as long as the commission is high enough. The sad truth is a good salesdroid doesn't need a good product, and can easily move around between companies, and between industries.
SSD's suffer from one fairly critical problem: Longevity.
As densities become higher (and process sizes smaller), reliability with SSD's will only decrease from its already horribly poor state.
I'm sure you're probably thinking "but improvements in technology will bring greater reliability!" Unfortunately, we're at the point where quantum tunneling starts screwing with us, and there's little we can do about it. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is a brick wall, and we've run smack into it. Quantum tunneling is relatively rare at the current process sizes, but it won't be long before it's an insurmountable problem.
I've seen few SSD's last more than two years even under relatively low workloads.
Many of the faster drives are lucky to last six months.
SSD's even lose data to bit rot at a rate much higher than is advertised.
It's difficult to really read all of the meaning here. One less hole can be worse than nothing with our congressional circus.
Give the scientists some benefit of the doubt: They are not only aware of the scientific issues involved, but of the political minefield any change must charge through. Trying to focus all efforts on one issue (banning an insecticide) is relatively simple.
Even if you got an insecticide ban through, these scientists apparently don't feel it's enough. Banning the insecticide first, and finding out what else to do later, will be a total disaster with legislators. The insecticide ban alone won't make a different "large enough", and we'll then see a group of familiar congressmen & senators block any further action (of any kind) because the insecticide ban didn't fix the problem by itself.
I suppose it depends on the area; the contract lengths for home Internet service are actually zero in my area - from both Comcast, and CenturyLink. The introductory rates are still good for 6 months to a year.
For CenturyLink, it was probably a good deal: They get to be a Tier-1 peer, instead of having to pay extortion fees like TIER-2 and 3.
It was a very good deal for Qwest's customers. They went from being limited to 1.5 Mbit to being able to buy "up to" 40 Mbit...
I dumped CenturyLink/Qwest long before then, but my brother supposedly got close to 30 Mbit measured.
Like most telecom idiots, CenturyLink has a 12-month "introductory rate", and they won't negotiate. Since all of their competitors do the same, the practice has become switching networks every year, after the introductory rate expires. The same applies if you have Cable or Satellite TV; customers just switch every year for a lower rate.
I really don't see how being so boneheaded helps either company, but that's telecom in the USA.
Have you, by any chance, imported the CAcert.org root certificate(s)?
I don't recall if CAcert.org is included in by default... I'm thinking not.
If you had trouble figuring out the certificate was signed by CAcert.org, nor do you know who CAcert.org is or the X.509 CA racket in general, I'd suggest you just wait for your ISP to do everything for you.
Comcast is currently deploying IPv6. A few news items down, they state: IPv6 has been launched on all Arris DOCSIS 3.0 C4 CMTSes, covering over 50% our network. We are targeting completion of the rest of the network by mid-2013.
Voice prints are a real thing, of course; my point isn't that it's not possible to identify people from a voice sample.
My point is that Apple doesn't make its money by selling you, me, and everyone else to the highest bidder, nor does its business have any real advantage in profiling us. Apple's business isn't advertising, it's selling hardware. (The flop that is iAd notwithstanding)
Google, on the other hand, is entirely different: Their entire revenue stream is from collecting our personal information, categorizing and analyzing it, and then selling or otherwise making that data useful to its actual customers, ie. its advertisers.
Hell, I create my own image and speach recognition software from scratch, and I don't need all those fucking samples. I just need to run the samples through my algorithms at most twice -- Once, then again to test if the changes were beneficial or not
If you honestly believe that, then you've never spent even a minute actually learning the basics of speech recognition, let alone the level of complexity involved in modern algorithms. Signal processing isn't like database programming, where you get a nice result that fits into a box, and can easily reduce unwanted side effects.
Also keep in mind, there's a difference between "automatic speech recognition" - where whole sentences are parsed and understood (such as used with Siri or Google , versus "discrete speech recognition" where very limited actions are understood (like older cell phones when you spoke "dial ").
The problem is that while you might have improved the recognition for one specific sample, you've now made it considerably worse for another... so you have to build up a massive library of samples to do regression testing. One of the biggest challenges in speech recognition over the years is the utter lack of sample data for a wide populace, coupled with computers that are unable to hold enough samples in memory to do any meaningful comparisons.
We've only recently started to see speech recognition of that calibre, and even then, it's accomplished by sending a recording off to a datacenter so fraking huge that it'd easily sit at the top of the TOP500 supercomputer list if their owners bothered to run linpack on it. It's no coincidence that it's also only been in the past couple of years speech recognition has become anything more than a lame joke.
Everyone I've ever spoken to or read about in the field of voice recognition tells me that having samples of people's voices is critical to improving it... and getting those samples (mainly the raw quantity of samples) is the biggest problem they face.
So it doesn’t surprise me at all that anyone keeps a massive archive of samples... the sample data can be critical in improving voice recognition.
As an aside: Google Voice's voice mail feature does more or less the same thing... and the reasoning is the same also: More sample data means better voice recognition.
I can't help but shake my head at the comparison:
Google samples user voices, reads (and transcribes) voice mail, reads your email, your stock information and then feeds it into their advertising engine, and does this for four years and counting; reaction: Meh...
Apple samples voices, anonymizes it, uses it it improve voice recognition over a period of two years; reaction: EVIL! APPLE MUST DIE!
It's not that we're "misspelling" it; it's that we had a spelling reformer by the name of Noah Webster whose dictionary has been the standard of American English for nearly 200 years.
Given that England has dramatically different ways to pronounce words, and throwing in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales mixes things up even more, I'd expect there to be a more enlightened understanding that distance and time results in different, but by no means incorrect, dialects.
America is over a thousand miles from the British Isles, and has a culture sundered from the British for centuries. We're not British, and we don't speak British English. We have our own set of dialects, and our own linguistic history. It's no more incorrect for an American to spell "color" than a Britain to spell "colour".
IOW Google is forking before the already announced move from WebKit to WebKit2 will come into effect.
WebKit2 is already in use... has been for a couple of years now...
WebKit2 isn't really a "newer" version of WebKit. A better way to describe it is that WebKit2 is a different API from your app to WebKit; the different API is what gives you built-in Multithreaded & Sandboxed WebKit, as well as the Nitro JavaScript engine.
The split seems to be almost entirely because Google wants to remove the parts of WebKit (accessed via the WebKit2 API) that are "redundant" for their uses: * Multithreaded & Sandboxed: Chrome provides an alternate implementation. * Nitro: Chrome uses their own competing V8 JavaScript engine
By doing this, both WebKit and Blink can benefit: WebKit is able to move to a single multithread & sandbox model (ie. that of WebKit2), and Blink is able to do the same.
I imagine there will still be substantial code sharing.
I've read some commenters that have mentioned that it may be a similar story to developers moving from gcc to clang/LLVM - that WebKit has grown enough, and supports a diverse enough set of platforms, that "making the hippo dance isn't much fun."
Smaller browsers are sorta screwed... but I think WebKit2 is likely to be the better option with what we currently know...
- WebKit2 is essentially WebKit with multithreaded sandboxing baked-in; the whole point was so anybody who uses WebKit2 will get the multithreaded sandboxy-goodness free. At least on Windows and OS X. On Linux, WebKit2 is still in development, as most apps use a widget toolkit like Qt or GTK+; Linux developers have to wait for the toolkits to add in support. Qt is targeting version 5, and GTK+ has it somewhere in the pipeline as well.
- Chrome has its own sandboxing model, separate from WebKit. With Blink forking, it's all but certain the "baked in" sandboxing Apple and the WebKit community put into WebKit2 will be pulled out entirely - Google doesn't need it, doesn't want it, and it complicates development & maintenance.
Is there some part of the world so stupid they don't realize that it'll still be April 1st in American Samoa for another 5.5 hours (At time of posting)?
I've done enough testing of "new" power saving for mobile parts from Nvidia.. I had enough fun the three times the GeForce 8600M killed my laptop's motherboard. (With corresponding warranty replacement.).
Funny... it seems more or less the same as it has been since 1999. Was there a golden age of Slashdot in 1998?
1998, you are our only hope!
Eh, screw it. I like/. the way I've always known it: An RSS precursor that picks out a single, vaguely interesting story from news sources I otherwise find useless and never visit.
This is the funniest thing I've read for the whole of April Fool's. The contempt level is the same: You aren't a "member" - you're a product that is sold to the site's advertisers. In both cases, you've got the same status as a sheet of toilet paper: Your fate is to be covered in some ad executive's excrement and disposed of.
Meeting a launch window that small is a real achievement; that's awesome.
However, the Launch Window is highly dependent on the abilities of the launch vehicle; and the Soyuz is ancient and rather limited compared to its younger siblings.
I'm wondering if it's a limitation of orbital mechanics, a limitation of a surviving crew, or a limitation of the Soyuz launch vehicle that makes the launch window so small.
For example, many modern EELV's are capable of putting a similar mass into orbit in less time (widening the launch window), though at possibly non-survivable levels of acceleration...
Oh relax... the Slashdot admins are probably too busy finding the next bitcoin story to publish. They haven't met their bitcoin story quota for the day, and the clock is ticking...
So is this a case of a new rendezvous record strictly for Soyuz?
I know launch trajectories are typically very closely tied to the capabilities of the launch vehicle; so is this just a new record for Soyuz, or were all launch vehicles (with the slightly different launch trajectories they are capable of) limited to the previous two days to rendezvous?
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously have no experience in the realm of charlatans.
In every single case of too-good-to-be-true power sources, there is a gimmick to make the results seem legitimate to the untrained.
It's little more than an magician's trick of misdirection, and ignorance of the audience. There's no real magic in a magician's act; misdirection and suspension of disbelief are their breadwinners.
There's a reason charlatans won't allow people who know what they're doing to examine their apparatus. It has nothing to do with "trade secrets", and everything to do with the fact that experienced chemists, engineers, and physicists generally find the gimmick and expose their fraud in minutes.
There are a lot of ways to heat up the reactor chemically. If you honestly believe that "it can't be done conventionally," then you've utterly failed chemistry.
Simply heating a lithium-ion battery pack over 185 C starts an unstoppable chain-reaction that quickly reaches a couple thousand degrees. Surround a LiPo battery with a chunk of steel, short circuit it, and it it will reach a temp over 185 C. Now you just wait for the steel to slowly heat up. Create an array of a few of these, add copper to equalize the heat in your bank of LiPo batteries, and voila, you've got a heat source of well over 500 watts that can last for hours - days even, if you set it up right.
As much as the /. crowd hates to admit it, there are reasons for most intellectual property law, NDA's, patents, and so forth: one of them is to protect a in inventor - so he can have outside experts verify his apparatus, and can publish how it works for expert scrutiny, yet still retain the rights to profit from his work.
I'd like to believe that Rossi has somehow found out how to generate abundant, clean, and cheap energy. His actions, however, are identical to a garden-variety charlatan. Activities such as grandstanding before customers or the press, "demonstrations", and refusal to let experienced and external experts examine his device.
Rossi does none of this. The smell of charlatan coming from the guy is overpowering. His behavior is identical to a classic con/charlatan. As the saying goes, you don't have to eat the whole turd to know it isn't chocolate.
Have you seen the price of an E-Meter these days?
After having actually read the patent, it looks like Google Authenticator, for example is in the clear.
The patent states that the following must occur:
1.) User inputs a password
2.) Authenticating device receives the password from #1, generates a password, and sends this new password out-of-band to an external device. (Pager, phone, etc)
3.) Person then reads the password from the device
4.) Person inputs the new password into their computer
5.) Computer sends second password over to authenticating device.
6.) Authenticating device finally grants access.
Google authenticator works differently.
1.) User input password
2.) User inputs password read from device
3.) BOTH are sent over the network to the authenticating computer, at the same time.
4.) Authenticating computer grants access.
Note that Google Authenticator does not generate the 'multi-factor' password after receiving the first password from the user.
The multi-factor password is streamed passed to the (pager, phone, etc.) every X seconds.
It's an entirely different mechanism.
Which means that my already low opinion of this guy is now lower, as he's descended into obvious patent troll territory.
The situation has actually only gotten worse, as process sizes shrink. You can take it however you want; my sources are from the Engineering & QA departments of ultra-high performance SSD manufacturers (guys that make any of the disks you mentioned seem slower than carving the data into stone).
You can take that however you want; I have no interest in endangering my friend's jobs, and I don't really care if you believe it or not.
Anybody who takes a manufacturer's warranty as a life expectancy has a few screws loose. It's as much a marketing tactic as flashy ads. Sales & Marketing droids don't give a rat's ass if their campaign costs the company a load of cash in 2-3 years; they'll just shift the blame to engineering & QA and then go out for a drink. They're almost pathologically averse to accepting responsibility for any destruction or debt they cause.
Sales & Marketing drones care about making the sale now. There are few I've met that care if the company succeeds or goes under. The droid will just move on to the next company, as long as the commission is high enough. The sad truth is a good salesdroid doesn't need a good product, and can easily move around between companies, and between industries.
SSD's suffer from one fairly critical problem: Longevity.
As densities become higher (and process sizes smaller), reliability with SSD's will only decrease from its already horribly poor state.
I'm sure you're probably thinking "but improvements in technology will bring greater reliability!" Unfortunately, we're at the point where quantum tunneling starts screwing with us, and there's little we can do about it. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is a brick wall, and we've run smack into it. Quantum tunneling is relatively rare at the current process sizes, but it won't be long before it's an insurmountable problem.
I've seen few SSD's last more than two years even under relatively low workloads.
Many of the faster drives are lucky to last six months.
SSD's even lose data to bit rot at a rate much higher than is advertised.
I think it was Jeff Atwood (dev of stack overflow, discourse.org) who described SSD's as being the "crazy/hot" scale of data storage.: SSD's crazy-bad reliability is only tolerated with because their performance is so hot.
That's not to say SSD's don't have their place, but it's not likely I'll ever trust SSD's with data that I want to actually keep long-term.
It's difficult to really read all of the meaning here. One less hole can be worse than nothing with our congressional circus.
Give the scientists some benefit of the doubt: They are not only aware of the scientific issues involved, but of the political minefield any change must charge through. Trying to focus all efforts on one issue (banning an insecticide) is relatively simple.
Even if you got an insecticide ban through, these scientists apparently don't feel it's enough. Banning the insecticide first, and finding out what else to do later, will be a total disaster with legislators. The insecticide ban alone won't make a different "large enough", and we'll then see a group of familiar congressmen & senators block any further action (of any kind) because the insecticide ban didn't fix the problem by itself.
Just a thought:
The prominent voices in defining the requirements of a "CA Audit" are the CA's, and they have something to sell...
It's in their interest to eliminate competition.
It has nothing to do with trust, and everything to do with money.
I suppose it depends on the area; the contract lengths for home Internet service are actually zero in my area - from both Comcast, and CenturyLink. The introductory rates are still good for 6 months to a year.
State & local regulations, maybe?
It's Qwest's famouse Spirit of Service
For CenturyLink, it was probably a good deal: They get to be a Tier-1 peer, instead of having to pay extortion fees like TIER-2 and 3.
It was a very good deal for Qwest's customers. They went from being limited to 1.5 Mbit to being able to buy "up to" 40 Mbit...
I dumped CenturyLink/Qwest long before then, but my brother supposedly got close to 30 Mbit measured.
Like most telecom idiots, CenturyLink has a 12-month "introductory rate", and they won't negotiate. Since all of their competitors do the same, the practice has become switching networks every year, after the introductory rate expires. The same applies if you have Cable or Satellite TV; customers just switch every year for a lower rate.
I really don't see how being so boneheaded helps either company, but that's telecom in the USA.
Have you, by any chance, imported the CAcert.org root certificate(s)?
I don't recall if CAcert.org is included in by default... I'm thinking not.
If you had trouble figuring out the certificate was signed by CAcert.org, nor do you know who CAcert.org is or the X.509 CA racket in general, I'd suggest you just wait for your ISP to do everything for you.
Comcast is currently deploying IPv6. A few news items down, they state: IPv6 has been launched on all Arris DOCSIS 3.0 C4 CMTSes, covering over 50% our network. We are targeting completion of the rest of the network by mid-2013.
Voice prints are a real thing, of course; my point isn't that it's not possible to identify people from a voice sample.
My point is that Apple doesn't make its money by selling you, me, and everyone else to the highest bidder, nor does its business have any real advantage in profiling us. Apple's business isn't advertising, it's selling hardware. (The flop that is iAd notwithstanding)
Google, on the other hand, is entirely different: Their entire revenue stream is from collecting our personal information, categorizing and analyzing it, and then selling or otherwise making that data useful to its actual customers, ie. its advertisers.
Hell, I create my own image and speach recognition software from scratch, and I don't need all those fucking samples. I just need to run the samples through my algorithms at most twice -- Once, then again to test if the changes were beneficial or not
If you honestly believe that, then you've never spent even a minute actually learning the basics of speech recognition, let alone the level of complexity involved in modern algorithms. Signal processing isn't like database programming, where you get a nice result that fits into a box, and can easily reduce unwanted side effects.
Also keep in mind, there's a difference between "automatic speech recognition" - where whole sentences are parsed and understood (such as used with Siri or Google , versus "discrete speech recognition" where very limited actions are understood (like older cell phones when you spoke "dial ").
The problem is that while you might have improved the recognition for one specific sample, you've now made it considerably worse for another... so you have to build up a massive library of samples to do regression testing. One of the biggest challenges in speech recognition over the years is the utter lack of sample data for a wide populace, coupled with computers that are unable to hold enough samples in memory to do any meaningful comparisons.
We've only recently started to see speech recognition of that calibre, and even then, it's accomplished by sending a recording off to a datacenter so fraking huge that it'd easily sit at the top of the TOP500 supercomputer list if their owners bothered to run linpack on it. It's no coincidence that it's also only been in the past couple of years speech recognition has become anything more than a lame joke.
Everyone I've ever spoken to or read about in the field of voice recognition tells me that having samples of people's voices is critical to improving it... and getting those samples (mainly the raw quantity of samples) is the biggest problem they face.
So it doesn’t surprise me at all that anyone keeps a massive archive of samples... the sample data can be critical in improving voice recognition.
As an aside: Google Voice's voice mail feature does more or less the same thing... and the reasoning is the same also: More sample data means better voice recognition.
I can't help but shake my head at the comparison:
Google samples user voices, reads (and transcribes) voice mail, reads your email, your stock information and then feeds it into their advertising engine, and does this for four years and counting; reaction: Meh...
Apple samples voices, anonymizes it, uses it it improve voice recognition over a period of two years; reaction: EVIL! APPLE MUST DIE!
No, I just don't give such obtuse attempts at humor anything but derision.
It's not that we're "misspelling" it; it's that we had a spelling reformer by the name of Noah Webster whose dictionary has been the standard of American English for nearly 200 years.
Given that England has dramatically different ways to pronounce words, and throwing in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales mixes things up even more, I'd expect there to be a more enlightened understanding that distance and time results in different, but by no means incorrect, dialects.
America is over a thousand miles from the British Isles, and has a culture sundered from the British for centuries. We're not British, and we don't speak British English. We have our own set of dialects, and our own linguistic history. It's no more incorrect for an American to spell "color" than a Britain to spell "colour".
IOW Google is forking before the already announced move from WebKit to WebKit2 will come into effect.
WebKit2 is already in use... has been for a couple of years now...
WebKit2 isn't really a "newer" version of WebKit. A better way to describe it is that WebKit2 is a different API from your app to WebKit; the different API is what gives you built-in Multithreaded & Sandboxed WebKit, as well as the Nitro JavaScript engine.
The split seems to be almost entirely because Google wants to remove the parts of WebKit (accessed via the WebKit2 API) that are "redundant" for their uses:
* Multithreaded & Sandboxed: Chrome provides an alternate implementation.
* Nitro: Chrome uses their own competing V8 JavaScript engine
By doing this, both WebKit and Blink can benefit: WebKit is able to move to a single multithread & sandbox model (ie. that of WebKit2), and Blink is able to do the same.
I imagine there will still be substantial code sharing.
I've read some commenters that have mentioned that it may be a similar story to developers moving from gcc to clang/LLVM - that WebKit has grown enough, and supports a diverse enough set of platforms, that "making the hippo dance isn't much fun."
Smaller browsers are sorta screwed... but I think WebKit2 is likely to be the better option with what we currently know...
- WebKit2 is essentially WebKit with multithreaded sandboxing baked-in; the whole point was so anybody who uses WebKit2 will get the multithreaded sandboxy-goodness free. At least on Windows and OS X. On Linux, WebKit2 is still in development, as most apps use a widget toolkit like Qt or GTK+; Linux developers have to wait for the toolkits to add in support. Qt is targeting version 5, and GTK+ has it somewhere in the pipeline as well.
- Chrome has its own sandboxing model, separate from WebKit. With Blink forking, it's all but certain the "baked in" sandboxing Apple and the WebKit community put into WebKit2 will be pulled out entirely - Google doesn't need it, doesn't want it, and it complicates development & maintenance.
Is there some part of the world so stupid they don't realize that it'll still be April 1st in American Samoa for another 5.5 hours (At time of posting)?
Just roll with it.
Bacon flavored chocolate. Pfah.
I'll eat your bacon flavored chocolate, and raise you... um... http://baconlube.com/
(And though it's still April 1st where I post, this is no joke...)
Also: It's April Fool's day for another 5.5 hours in American Samoa.
I've done enough testing of "new" power saving for mobile parts from Nvidia.. I had enough fun the three times the GeForce 8600M killed my laptop's motherboard. (With corresponding warranty replacement.).
THANK YOU
This is exactly what I wanted to know.
Wait... Slashdot was great once?
Funny... it seems more or less the same as it has been since 1999. Was there a golden age of Slashdot in 1998?
1998, you are our only hope!
Eh, screw it. I like /. the way I've always known it: An RSS precursor that picks out a single, vaguely interesting story from news sources I otherwise find useless and never visit.
Also, they don't have contempt for their members.
This is the funniest thing I've read for the whole of April Fool's. The contempt level is the same: You aren't a "member" - you're a product that is sold to the site's advertisers. In both cases, you've got the same status as a sheet of toilet paper: Your fate is to be covered in some ad executive's excrement and disposed of.
Meeting a launch window that small is a real achievement; that's awesome.
However, the Launch Window is highly dependent on the abilities of the launch vehicle; and the Soyuz is ancient and rather limited compared to its younger siblings.
I'm wondering if it's a limitation of orbital mechanics, a limitation of a surviving crew, or a limitation of the Soyuz launch vehicle that makes the launch window so small.
For example, many modern EELV's are capable of putting a similar mass into orbit in less time (widening the launch window), though at possibly non-survivable levels of acceleration...
Oh relax... the Slashdot admins are probably too busy finding the next bitcoin story to publish. They haven't met their bitcoin story quota for the day, and the clock is ticking...
So is this a case of a new rendezvous record strictly for Soyuz?
I know launch trajectories are typically very closely tied to the capabilities of the launch vehicle; so is this just a new record for Soyuz, or were all launch vehicles (with the slightly different launch trajectories they are capable of) limited to the previous two days to rendezvous?