I'm not really sure an incandescent lightbulb could be considered easy to make. Sure, it can be done with simple tools, but the whole process is fairly complicated. You have to be able to draw fine wire for the filament and blow the glass for the bulb itself. The base has to be assembled from copper and porcelain, you have to evacuate the bulb, install the filament and seal it.
Now, to manufacture LEDs in bulk requires chipmaking equipment, but you're making thousands of LEDs per wafer, so there's an economy of scale there. And the yields tend to improve significantly as the process matures. Also, I'm reasonably sure that making LEDs is considerably more straight forward than microprocessors, if for no other reason than the mask is simpler and you're only making a single component (a huge diode array) on the wafer.
I'll second this, except I use a Handspring Visor Edge instead of an old Palm. Works great and with a little ingenuity it's not too hard to convert the Baen eBooks from the Mobipocket.prc format to ztxt (you just lose some of the formatting and the cover graphic, you gain a lot of space).
Actually, some of learned Fortran on HP/3000s in high school. Using dec writers and acoustic couplers. When we weren't playing adventure on another dialup system. Of course, the guy who could stand in the corner of the room and whistle loudly enough to cause all the acoustic couplers to drop carrier, he was dead meat..
How would something like this be collected? Monitoring port 25? All something like this would do is drive traffic off of public protocols and onto proprietary ones. Instead of paying an email tax, business will set up proprietary links (exchange server, anybody?) Sure, it kinda sounds like a good idea, but you've got to watch out for those unintended consequences.
Actually, it's likely that most of what hit civilian areas in Baghdad was Iraqi anti-aircraft. They were spewing an incredible amout of stuff into the air, and it all had to come down somewhere. That's not to say that a few US munitions didn't go off target, they probably did. It's just that there was plenty of other stuff coming down as well..
Another lightweight window manager is called lwm. It can be found at http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/project/windowmgr/sr c/lwm/lwm.html It has most of the advantages of ratpoison, but allows real windows. I believe there is a debian package for it and I know there's a gentoo ebuild. It's great on an older laptop if you're going to run X.
The manual says it preserves it. I've not tried archiving something from a DVD to VHS though, as I've found something more interesting. There's a project on sourceforge called DVarchive that lets you create a virtual replayTV on your PC, you can then transfer programs from the replay to your PC (and back) to watch either on the pc or just to save. I've found it useful for recording something like junkyard wars, then watching it on the bus on the way into work the next day.
We just got a replayTV 4500 and I love it. The commercial advance is pretty amazing, I've not seen it skip over programming yet, but it skips at least 75% of the commercials automatically and on some shows, it gets 'em all. It'll also allow you to record from DVD or VHS sources as well as saving recorded shows to a VCR. We bought it initially because they were out of TiVos at the store, but now I'm glad we did.
If I'm not mistaken, there's already a monorailish system between Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay and New York, New York, which is directly across the street from the MGM Grand. Why duplicate what already exists?
It renders in Galeon (and the music plays.. sad). But it sure is ugly and I doubt it renders the way it's supposed to.
ferrofluids, magnetic clutches
on
Magnetic Fluids
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Ferrofluids have been used in magnetic clutches. You have two plates facing each other with vanes on them. Put them in a ferrofluid tank. When the magnetic field is absent, either shaft will spin freely without effecting the other. Add a magnetic field and WHAM, the shafts are locked together. I seem to remember there being a problem getting a decent amount of shear strength though. There was an article on this in Scientific American a few years back in the Amateur Scientist column.
Actually, you do have to use a passphrase once if you set things up right. By using ssh-agent and ssh-add you can store all your ssh identities with the agent and only enter the passphrase when the identities are added to the agent. If you're using Debian and OpenSSH this is already set up for you automatically under x-windows. Just add the identities with ssh-add and you're ready to go. Another useful thing is that if you've multiple identities with the same passphrase, you can add them all at once without typing the passphrase multiple times. This is particularly useful if your passphrase is an actual PHRASE (like mine) and tends to be a pain to type repeatedly (it often takes me two or three tries to get mine right.. ).
Actually, the printer for the pocket computer was an honest to goodness dot matrix impact printer that used a ribbon. Each line was 16 characters long. I've still got one somewhere. I nearly flunked calculus in high school because I spent too much time playing a multiplayer battleship I wrote for my pocket computer. You'd make your move, it would print out a map. Rip the map off and pass the computer to the next player.
I've still got my pocket computer, but the display is broken. If anybody has one with an intact display but is otherwise non-working, let me know. I added a little bitty toggle switch to mine to turn off the piezo element and a jack that allows me to plug in an ac adapter (useful when using the printer or cassette adapter as they ate power..).
Hmmm.. you seem to have a few facts confused. The cancer risk posited was if the craft reentered the atmosphere on it's flyby. Chances of which were extremely low. Those cancers will never appear because the circumstance under which they could have never materialized. Additionally, an increase of 3500 some odd cancers spread over the entire population of earth would be statistically insignificant (unless of course you were one of the 3500), there would be no real way to measure it, it would be lost in the noise..
And as for the "Mercury capsule conflagration", that was Apollo 1, the astronauts were running a routine practice session. There were a number of mistakes that contributed to their deaths, not least of which was an inward opening hatch and a pure oxygen environment at 1 atmosphere.
The stuff they propose making solar sails out of is quite thin, the space debris is just going to punch a small hole in the sail. Your efficiency will drop a hair, but nothing catastrophic is likely to happen.
I wouldn't worry about the sail so much as I would the struts and lines connecting the sail to the rest of the craft. Sure, the odds are really low that one will be severed, but if they weren't designed properly it could cause real problems.
Actually, this won't work in atmosphere, so it's not a way into space, as it's just a special case of a solar sail. However, it looks like a pretty nifty way to go to the outer planets once you are in space. Maybe this could be used for a new Pluto Express mission. Coming back could be a problem... I wonder if you can tack against the solar wind?
Whilst I've not used this latest version of QNX, a couple of years ago I designed the control system for a wafer polishing tool that used QNX for the control system. We ran it on 3 single board computers, one with a hard drive, the others booting off flash and sharing the hard drive of the first. It was nice because the hardware and resources were transparently available on all three SBCs, computer 1 could easily get to serial ports on computer 2, etc. By dividing the control tasks up into a number of modules and using the QNX send/receive/reply IPC stuff, we were able to move tasks around on the fly and the system didn't know or care where stuff was running. I just wished they had supported gcc at the time. Watcom was ok, but it was a really old implementation of c++....
Actually, every super heterodyne radio receiver (which almost all are these days) generates a radio signal of its own. This is mixed with the incoming signal to generate a signal at 455 khz IIRC. The generated signal can be detected and used to determine which frequency your radio is tuned to.....
I've been a professional software developer for nearly 20 years now and everything he writes rings very true. It's actually worse than that in many cases. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've actually been given a specification for a project, or even a reasonable list of requirements. And the established deadlines are typically even worse, you end up doubling or even tripling your estimates for project length simply because you know that whatever time you ask for will be cut in half (or more). Code reviews are something you read about in software engineering texts, if you actually know someone who is able to do them, you feel privileged. It's no wonder that almost all software projects are over budget and late, the budget and timeframe were unrealistic to begin with and the requirements and specifications never existed!
Just as a minor aside, the two side containers are not for O2, they are actually solid rocket boosters. The LOX is in the large external tank with the liquid hydrogen (the external tank is divided into multiple subtanks). If the side boosters had been merely O2 containers, Challenger wouldn't have gone boom...
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I'm not really sure an incandescent lightbulb could be considered easy to make. Sure, it can be done with simple tools, but the whole process is fairly complicated. You have to be able to draw fine wire for the filament and blow the glass for the bulb itself. The base has to be assembled from copper and porcelain, you have to evacuate the bulb, install the filament and seal it.
Now, to manufacture LEDs in bulk requires chipmaking equipment, but you're making thousands of LEDs per wafer, so there's an economy of scale there. And the yields tend to improve significantly as the process matures. Also, I'm reasonably sure that making LEDs is considerably more straight forward than microprocessors, if for no other reason than the mask is simpler and you're only making a single component (a huge diode array) on the wafer.
Building codes in Scottsdale, AZ require sprinklers in all new construction, residential or commercial. There may be other cities with the same codes.
jim
I'll second this, except I use a Handspring Visor Edge instead of an old Palm. Works great and with a little ingenuity it's not too hard to convert the Baen eBooks from the Mobipocket .prc format to ztxt (you just lose some of the formatting and the cover graphic, you gain a lot of space).
Actually, some of learned Fortran on HP/3000s in high school. Using dec writers and acoustic couplers. When we weren't playing adventure on another dialup system. Of course, the guy who could stand in the corner of the room and whistle loudly enough to cause all the acoustic couplers to drop carrier, he was dead meat..
So no, some of us didn't start out with QBasic.
How would something like this be collected? Monitoring port 25? All something like this would do is drive traffic off of public protocols and onto proprietary ones. Instead of paying an email tax, business will set up proprietary links (exchange server, anybody?) Sure, it kinda sounds like a good idea, but you've got to watch out for those unintended consequences.
Actually, it's likely that most of what hit civilian areas in Baghdad was Iraqi anti-aircraft. They were spewing an incredible amout of stuff into the air, and it all had to come down somewhere. That's not to say that a few US munitions didn't go off target, they probably did. It's just that there was plenty of other stuff coming down as well..
Naw, that was John Perry Parlow. And he was on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York.
jim
The manual says it preserves it. I've not tried archiving something from a DVD to VHS though, as I've found something more interesting. There's a project on sourceforge called DVarchive that lets you create a virtual replayTV on your PC, you can then transfer programs from the replay to your PC (and back) to watch either on the pc or just to save. I've found it useful for recording something like junkyard wars, then watching it on the bus on the way into work the next day.
jim
We just got a replayTV 4500 and I love it. The commercial advance is pretty amazing, I've not seen it skip over programming yet, but it skips at least 75% of the commercials automatically and on some shows, it gets 'em all. It'll also allow you to record from DVD or VHS sources as well as saving recorded shows to a VCR. We bought it initially because they were out of TiVos at the store, but now I'm glad we did.
jim
If I'm not mistaken, there's already a monorailish system between Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay and New York, New York, which is directly across the street from the MGM Grand. Why duplicate what already exists?
My wife's a court reporter. They wouldn't bother. It's all done phonetically, so it would come out in plain english.
It renders in Galeon (and the music plays.. sad). But it sure is ugly and I doubt it renders the way it's supposed to.
Ferrofluids have been used in magnetic clutches. You have two plates facing each other with vanes on them. Put them in a ferrofluid tank. When the magnetic field is absent, either shaft will spin freely without effecting the other. Add a magnetic field and WHAM, the shafts are locked together. I seem to remember there being a problem getting a decent amount of shear strength though. There was an article on this in Scientific American a few years back in the Amateur Scientist column.
That was pretty much my choice. I don't mind banner ads, they're even occassionally useful, but these are very annoying.
Actually, you do have to use a passphrase once if you set things up right. By using ssh-agent and ssh-add you can store all your ssh identities with the agent and only enter the passphrase when the identities are added to the agent. If you're using Debian and OpenSSH this is already set up for you automatically under x-windows. Just add the identities with ssh-add and you're ready to go. Another useful thing is that if you've multiple identities with the same passphrase, you can add them all at once without typing the passphrase multiple times. This is particularly useful if your passphrase is an actual PHRASE (like mine) and tends to be a pain to type repeatedly (it often takes me two or three tries to get mine right.. ).
Actually, the printer for the pocket computer was an honest to goodness dot matrix impact printer that used a ribbon. Each line was 16 characters long. I've still got one somewhere. I nearly flunked calculus in high school because I spent too much time playing a multiplayer battleship I wrote for my pocket computer. You'd make your move, it would print out a map. Rip the map off and pass the computer to the next player.
I've still got my pocket computer, but the display is broken. If anybody has one with an intact display but is otherwise non-working, let me know. I added a little bitty toggle switch to mine to turn off the piezo element and a jack that allows me to plug in an ac adapter (useful when using the printer or cassette adapter as they ate power..).
Hmmm.. you seem to have a few facts confused. The cancer risk posited was if the craft reentered the atmosphere on it's flyby. Chances of which were extremely low. Those cancers will never appear because the circumstance under which they could have never materialized. Additionally, an increase of 3500 some odd cancers spread over the entire population of earth would be statistically insignificant (unless of course you were one of the 3500), there would be no real way to measure it, it would be lost in the noise..
And as for the "Mercury capsule conflagration", that was Apollo 1, the astronauts were running a routine practice session. There were a number of mistakes that contributed to their deaths, not least of which was an inward opening hatch and a pure oxygen environment at 1 atmosphere.
jim
The stuff they propose making solar sails out of is quite thin, the space debris is just going to punch a small hole in the sail. Your efficiency will drop a hair, but nothing catastrophic is likely to happen.
I wouldn't worry about the sail so much as I would the struts and lines connecting the sail to the rest of the craft. Sure, the odds are really low that one will be severed, but if they weren't designed properly it could cause real problems.
jim
Actually, this won't work in atmosphere, so it's not a way into space, as it's just a special case of a solar sail. However, it looks like a pretty nifty way to go to the outer planets once you are in space. Maybe this could be used for a new Pluto Express mission. Coming back could be a problem... I wonder if you can tack against the solar wind?
jim
Whilst I've not used this latest version of QNX, a couple of years ago I designed the control system for a wafer polishing tool that used QNX for the control system. We ran it on 3 single board computers, one with a hard drive, the others booting off flash and sharing the hard drive of the first. It was nice because the hardware and resources were transparently available on all three SBCs, computer 1 could easily get to serial ports on computer 2, etc. By dividing the control tasks up into a number of modules and using the QNX send/receive/reply IPC stuff, we were able to move tasks around on the fly and the system didn't know or care where stuff was running. I just wished they had supported gcc at the time. Watcom was ok, but it was a really old implementation of c++....
jim
Actually, every super heterodyne radio receiver (which almost all are these days) generates a radio signal of its own. This is mixed with the incoming signal to generate a signal at 455 khz IIRC. The generated signal can be detected and used to determine which frequency your radio is tuned to.....
Billy Crystal, Joan Rivers..
He's the first pregnant male.
No, I've not seen it, I just have a good memory for useless triva...
I've been a professional software developer for nearly 20 years now and everything he writes rings very true. It's actually worse than that in many cases. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've actually been given a specification for a project, or even a reasonable list of requirements. And the established deadlines are typically even worse, you end up doubling or even tripling your estimates for project length simply because you know that whatever time you ask for will be cut in half (or more). Code reviews are something you read about in software engineering texts, if you actually know someone who is able to do them, you feel privileged. It's no wonder that almost all software projects are over budget and late, the budget and timeframe were unrealistic to begin with and the requirements and specifications never existed!
Just as a minor aside, the two side containers are not for O2, they are actually solid rocket boosters. The LOX is in the large external tank with the liquid hydrogen (the external tank is divided into multiple subtanks). If the side boosters had been merely O2 containers, Challenger wouldn't have gone boom...
jim nutt