So you're using centrifugal force to create a potential well to hold the particles in. Two questions:
(1) The particles are very hot indeed. Their mass is low. The centrifugal potential well has to be very deep indeed to keep them from escaping. How well does this work? How hard is it to spin them fast enough? The electrons will escape the well more easily than protons/nucleii. How quickly will the plasma become positively charged? (Depends on the ratio of temperature to well depth.) What effect will it have on the operation of the machine that you have a huge current due to the very quickly spinning positively charged plasma?
(2) The particles are whizzing around, and are 'attached' to the magnetic field lines. This suggests that the magnetic field lines will get twisted very quickly, bringing the spin to a halt. This was my first thought, but if you make the field lines into loops (coathanger shapes) then you can whizz your coathangers around without twisting things up. Two problems with this: To make a magnetic field loop, you need a current. To make a very powerful one, you need a very large current. How is this done? Secondly, any 'stray' field lines that don't fully loop will get spun up very quickly, so even a very small non-looped field will magnify by being spun up until it causes you problems. (IIRC, galactic magnetic fields are thought to have been formed from very weak projenitors by this process.)
I've got a sliderule in my calculator collection. The cover has the "Intel Inside" sticker on it, from my first computer (486/66, Linux 0.99p15.) There were problems at highschool I could figure out several times faster on a sliderule than a calculator.
I've got an HP-35 too. Curiously, just today I browsed e-bay for the very first time and saw a bid of about $350 for an HP-35 - this is really silly, there are lots of them still around. My HP-46 is a *much* rarer beast. (I've got 11C, 15C, 16C, 18BII, 19C, 21, 25, 32E, 34C, 35, 41C, 45, 46, 48SX, 55, 65, 67, 80, 97 - from memory, it's a while since I've revisited the collection.)
"Beginning in late June, the MSDN Subscriber Download Web site will prompt you to sign up for your personal Passport and associate your current subscriber record to this Passport. After signing up, access to MSDN Subscriber Downloads will be easier, faster, and more secure."
It looks to me like you can keep using the old method if you wish to forgo the supposed benefits of the 'passport'. At least it is ambiguous enough to check out before getting upset.
The cost formula includes a term (ksloc**1.05): i.e. thousands of source lines to the power of 1.05. This reflects the fact that the bigger a program becomes, the harder it is to add new lines, because the system you are adding too is more complex. He plugs the size of the entire code base of RH7.2 into this formula. This seems unreasonable to me - these are many almost independent packages. The fact that Mozilla has added however many million lines of code to the distribution doesn't make it any harder to add new lines to GCC.
Having said all that, I just went and calculated the effect of this. By this formula, one 30M line program is 60% harder to write than 30 million 1 line programs. The difference between one 30M line program and 60 500K line programs is only 22% - so the overestimation is not large.
It seems to me that every point on the page doesn't reflect some fraction of the light falling on it (whatever colours that pixel won't reflect.) Even if you turn every pixel on, something like 2/3 of the light won't be reflected, and you will get a mid-gray at best.
While I agree with the complaints about fair use, the zoning system has a lot going for it, if used properly. If airlines had to sell all their seats at the same price, it would hurt the poor and help the rich - but instead, they can charge vacationers less and business people more due to the fact that vacationers book long in advance, while business often books a few days before they fly. In the same way, if DVDs have to be the same price the world over, they will simply be priced out of the range of anyone who doesn't have a first world income.
If they can afford to sell them for $5 (price made up off the top of my head) in India, is it fair that the same thing be sold for $30 in USA? I think such a price differential is fine - the product has a very high setup cost (making the movie) but a very low marginal cost (pressing another disk.) It is just like cheap educational deals for software packages - you recover your costs from the people who can afford to pay full price, and sell cheap to those who can't, because anything you get from them is still a bit of profit.
The alternative to ($30 in US, $5 in India) isn't ($5 in US, $5 in India), it is ($30 in US, $30 in India.)
Come to think of it, there is another alternative - it is $30 the first year after release, $5 5 years after release. If the zoning system fails (as it seems to be) we may well see this model.
I kind of like the low budgets myself - it is part of the charm. I used to have a hobby of playing 'spot the heat exchanger plates' in the sets. (This works on Blake's 7 too.) (You can see a (very large) example of a heat exchanger plate
here.) My father worked for a company which dealt with them, so I learned to recognize them, and then saw that they are all over the place in cheap (is there any other kind?) British SF TV show sets.
Just to add to the argument, Tom Baker, Lalla Ward and Douglas Adams were the best Dr Who team IMAO.
Re:Consider the limitations
on
PS2 As PC
·
· Score: 2
I ran X on an 8MB 486 in 1993. It beautifully filled my RAM and started swapping vigerously as soon as I wanted to run an application.
(486/66Mhz, Slackware 1.03, kernel 0.99p15)
This is only peripherally related to the question, but I have some thoughts on how I would like package management systems in Unix to work.
I want large tracts of the directory structure to be modified only by packages installing their standard files. To completely restore these areas, all you need know is what packages (and which versions) were installed.
The ideal is something like this: I backup/etc,/home and/usr/local only. If my hard drive goes to Silicon Heaven, I buy a new one, restore onto it, and then run a program that looks at the list (saved in/etc) of packages I had installed and helps me reinstall them all.
To make the obligitory Douglas Adams quote for this thread, you need to sit annoyingly still to keep listening to the same station.
If you controlled an airplane like this, you'd soon have the first case of an airliner crash caused by a flea.
If you design your language by committee, you'll end up with something like Ada. (OK, I've never even seen Ada code, but I've never heard anyone say anything good about it.) If you just let everyone glob in features from their favourite languages, you'll end up with a monstrosity that nobody ever uses, like Perl. (Um, hang on...)
The wrist brace is probably cheaper than the DNA test, so they could simply issue them to everyone. However, I take your point. The company could say "Here's a bunch of info on preventing CTS/RSI/OOS (choose your TLA) and we'll pay for a test that only you get to see the results of so you can know if you are particularly susceptible."
Black doesn't just absorb heat better - it also emits it better. (That is why heat sinks are black.) Darker colours come into equilibrium with their environment faster. If your house is warmer than the environment, this could be bad. (On a sunny day, on the sunny side of the house, a fraction of a square degree (angle) of the environment is at a few thousand degrees, so this is likely to be a positive effect, but on the shady side it is likely to be negative.)
Also, if your house is well insulated, it will do just as well at keeping that sun-induced heat from your dark exterior out as it does at keeping your central heating heat in.
I can do better than that. I did my thesis observations with a 10m parabolic polished mirror. (Not that there were many birds there to fry.) One of the observing requirements was "never let the sun fall on the dish."
I also used terminal emulation software on my HP48SX calculator to replace one of the terminals and enter a command to slew the telescope - hence I claim that the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory is the world's largest and most expensive peripheral to a pocket calculator.
(JCMT next door is bigger - 15m - but has a nifty shield to prevent the sunlight problem, so they get to observe during the day. It isn't just frying the focal point that is a problem - uneven heating warps the dish beyond the fraction of a millimeter tolerence required for using the telescope.)
Not really. He had published the idea before it occured to anyone it was patentable, thus invalidating any attempt to patent it. Furthermore, had he patented it when he published the idea (around 1948 I think) the patent would have expired I think 17 years latter (1965) before it was a major business.
Incidentally, in the semi-recent spate of documentary series about the early space program, they made a big deal about how one rogue engineer at NASA pushed the revolutionary lunar orbit rendezvous idea. While not taking away from that engineer's determination and rightness, this was also thought of by Clarke in around 1948. I have a book by him from this time about the science and engineering of spaceflight. (I can't remember if this is where the geostationary satellite idea was published.)
Lots of people say something to the effect:
Linus wants *small* patches, which do specific things, or implement one new feature.
So, if your small patch is "Prevents the Frangle Hyperqueue Monitor from crashing on PPC", how does it get verified in the official kernel if you need 50 other similar small patches before your kernel will even get as far as trying to access the Frangle Hyperqueue on PPC?
However, because of the way the USPTO works, they
were able to apply for the SDRAM patent later, but using the original application date of 1990.
What are the chances of other countries getting so sick of USPTO stuff ups that they no longer honour US patents? This would be a very big step, involving cancelling treaties, so I expect it isn't very likely. What are the chances of other countries threatening to do so, if the USPTO doesn't get its act together?
"Think about:
1) there is a huge financial incentive to preserve the huge price difference between consumer gear and production
gear.
But if you aren't already in the business of producing production gear, there is a huge financial incentive to sell production capable gear at consumer gear price. I think one of the famous communists said that when the time came to hang all the capitalists, you'd be able to find one of them prepared to sell you the rope.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article: Though I really wanted to build something that would fetch the newspaper or drive me to work, my girlfriend was much more realistic.
I wish I'd thought of making a realistic Lego girlfriend. Somebody should tell the guys at Columbia Internet.
We atheists have our own OS now? Cool!
(1) The particles are very hot indeed. Their mass is low. The centrifugal potential well has to be very deep indeed to keep them from escaping. How well does this work? How hard is it to spin them fast enough? The electrons will escape the well more easily than protons/nucleii. How quickly will the plasma become positively charged? (Depends on the ratio of temperature to well depth.) What effect will it have on the operation of the machine that you have a huge current due to the very quickly spinning positively charged plasma?
(2) The particles are whizzing around, and are 'attached' to the magnetic field lines. This suggests that the magnetic field lines will get twisted very quickly, bringing the spin to a halt. This was my first thought, but if you make the field lines into loops (coathanger shapes) then you can whizz your coathangers around without twisting things up. Two problems with this: To make a magnetic field loop, you need a current. To make a very powerful one, you need a very large current. How is this done? Secondly, any 'stray' field lines that don't fully loop will get spun up very quickly, so even a very small non-looped field will magnify by being spun up until it causes you problems. (IIRC, galactic magnetic fields are thought to have been formed from very weak projenitors by this process.)
I've got an HP-35 too. Curiously, just today I browsed e-bay for the very first time and saw a bid of about $350 for an HP-35 - this is really silly, there are lots of them still around. My HP-46 is a *much* rarer beast. (I've got 11C, 15C, 16C, 18BII, 19C, 21, 25, 32E, 34C, 35, 41C, 45, 46, 48SX, 55, 65, 67, 80, 97 - from memory, it's a while since I've revisited the collection.)
It looks to me like you can keep using the old method if you wish to forgo the supposed benefits of the 'passport'. At least it is ambiguous enough to check out before getting upset.
Having said all that, I just went and calculated the effect of this. By this formula, one 30M line program is 60% harder to write than 30 million 1 line programs. The difference between one 30M line program and 60 500K line programs is only 22% - so the overestimation is not large.
It seems to me that every point on the page doesn't reflect some fraction of the light falling on it (whatever colours that pixel won't reflect.) Even if you turn every pixel on, something like 2/3 of the light won't be reflected, and you will get a mid-gray at best.
If they can afford to sell them for $5 (price made up off the top of my head) in India, is it fair that the same thing be sold for $30 in USA? I think such a price differential is fine - the product has a very high setup cost (making the movie) but a very low marginal cost (pressing another disk.) It is just like cheap educational deals for software packages - you recover your costs from the people who can afford to pay full price, and sell cheap to those who can't, because anything you get from them is still a bit of profit.
The alternative to ($30 in US, $5 in India) isn't ($5 in US, $5 in India), it is ($30 in US, $30 in India.)
Come to think of it, there is another alternative - it is $30 the first year after release, $5 5 years after release. If the zoning system fails (as it seems to be) we may well see this model.
Just to add to the argument, Tom Baker, Lalla Ward and Douglas Adams were the best Dr Who team IMAO.
I ran X on an 8MB 486 in 1993. It beautifully filled my RAM and started swapping vigerously as soon as I wanted to run an application. (486/66Mhz, Slackware 1.03, kernel 0.99p15)
I want large tracts of the directory structure to be modified only by packages installing their standard files. To completely restore these areas, all you need know is what packages (and which versions) were installed.
The ideal is something like this: I backup /etc, /home and /usr/local only. If my hard drive goes to Silicon Heaven, I buy a new one, restore onto it, and then run a program that looks at the list (saved in /etc) of packages I had installed and helps me reinstall them all.
To make the obligitory Douglas Adams quote for this thread, you need to sit annoyingly still to keep listening to the same station. If you controlled an airplane like this, you'd soon have the first case of an airliner crash caused by a flea.
I don't know about the Darwin Award - it takes quite a lot of skill and intelligence to kill yourself like this.
If you design your language by committee, you'll end up with something like Ada. (OK, I've never even seen Ada code, but I've never heard anyone say anything good about it.) If you just let everyone glob in features from their favourite languages, you'll end up with a monstrosity that nobody ever uses, like Perl. (Um, hang on ...)
The wrist brace is probably cheaper than the DNA test, so they could simply issue them to everyone. However, I take your point. The company could say "Here's a bunch of info on preventing CTS/RSI/OOS (choose your TLA) and we'll pay for a test that only you get to see the results of so you can know if you are particularly susceptible."
Also, if your house is well insulated, it will do just as well at keeping that sun-induced heat from your dark exterior out as it does at keeping your central heating heat in.
If installing conduits is too wimpy for you, you can do what was done in the comp sci building at Princeton: attach all the wall panels with velcro.
Sounds like a job for underclocking.
P.S. in response to the .sig: Real calculators don't have an "=" key.
Could we have it be a superset of C++ as well please?
I also used terminal emulation software on my HP48SX calculator to replace one of the terminals and enter a command to slew the telescope - hence I claim that the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory is the world's largest and most expensive peripheral to a pocket calculator.
(JCMT next door is bigger - 15m - but has a nifty shield to prevent the sunlight problem, so they get to observe during the day. It isn't just frying the focal point that is a problem - uneven heating warps the dish beyond the fraction of a millimeter tolerence required for using the telescope.)
Just one datum: my brief experience with lecturing was that it took 8 hours to prepare a one hour lecture from scratch.
Incidentally, in the semi-recent spate of documentary series about the early space program, they made a big deal about how one rogue engineer at NASA pushed the revolutionary lunar orbit rendezvous idea. While not taking away from that engineer's determination and rightness, this was also thought of by Clarke in around 1948. I have a book by him from this time about the science and engineering of spaceflight. (I can't remember if this is where the geostationary satellite idea was published.)
So, if your small patch is "Prevents the Frangle Hyperqueue Monitor from crashing on PPC", how does it get verified in the official kernel if you need 50 other similar small patches before your kernel will even get as far as trying to access the Frangle Hyperqueue on PPC?
What are the chances of other countries getting so sick of USPTO stuff ups that they no longer honour US patents? This would be a very big step, involving cancelling treaties, so I expect it isn't very likely. What are the chances of other countries threatening to do so, if the USPTO doesn't get its act together?
But if you aren't already in the business of producing production gear, there is a huge financial incentive to sell production capable gear at consumer gear price. I think one of the famous communists said that when the time came to hang all the capitalists, you'd be able to find one of them prepared to sell you the rope.