Yes, Yes, I know replying to my own comment, bad form. At any rate while this might or might not fix Zango I did find this which looks like an excellent tool/starting point for nuking Zango: http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html
I would but there appears to be no way to send and detonate suitcase nukes though their form. Needless to say, I hate them and there software more than death. Zango pops up ads and, has a large memory footprint and can bring single core, midrange, Athlon 64 based computers to their knees. In the limited methods I used, using Add/Remove Programs, using their own removal app, running Spybot, running Spybot at Startup, ending the Zango process, deleting the in use Zango app, there seems to be no way to delete the Zango reliably aside from a total reformat and reinstall of Windows. Not only is the Zango software spyware of the absolute worst form, I think that they might kill puppies at Zango because of they are that evil. It is so insidious that I wonder if Zango writes itself into the Windows kernel.
However, I have a solution I think that someone, maybe even me, would be to make a Linux Live CD designed specifically to remove spyware. If I were really evil I would make the Live CD to remove Zango specifically and only Zango. Mounting a Windows partition would be the easy part I would use the FUSE NTFS-3G filesystem driver. I'm not sure but there must be some way to edit the Windows registry in Linux and some way to remove ActiveX Controls from IE in Linux. Maybe I am just the person to figure this out.
As humorous as this is. IIRC, TSR, put out a collectible dice game that used special dice with nearly unintelligible die faces. To make things even more fun some had multiple die faces with the same symbol.
Yes, yes I know it isn't all fun and collapsing bridges in Minnesota. Sometimes whe have the above. Seriously though, last October, Buffalo, a large town in Minnesota, had its gas service shut off because of a gas line leak. They shut the gas main off and then went to door to door in the town shutting each of the gas meters off. The necessary gas line work was done. Then, the gas main was turned on again and the house meters were turned on again. This took IIRC three days and 200 gas company employees. See, people can learn from their mistakes. More on it here:
I have a friend who actually had to try and read and then understand code like that. Only the comments were all in German and he only knows English. The code had something to do with power distribution over power lines, so this was rather important code. After a little over two years he quit rather than move when the company was bought out. Now he works as a manager at a gas station. I think I remember him describing the coding he had to do as being soul crushing.
Yes it does make sense. Li, Be, and B are all unstable at the temperatures at the core of a sun. Lithium with an amu of 6 literally falls apart extremely quickly inside a sun. At any rate, 3He, 7Li, 6Li Be and B are actually formed by spallation of other elements due to cosmic ray collisions. As another reply states go here: http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/energy/tri plealph.html
After Carbon is formed alpha particles fuse with the Carbon, Oxygen, Neon and so on, until Iron is formed, note that all along this path no odd number elements are formed. Iron is at the dead bottom of the nuclear energy potential graph. This means that it actually takes energy to fuse Helium with Iron to make Nickel. Where do Nickel and all the other odd numbered elements aside from Li and B come from? Well since it takes energy to make Nickel, when a super giant star undergoes a supernova at the end of its life there is plenty of energy to go around. When a supernova occurs the implosion and subsequent explosion leaves lots of energy to form Nickel, Uranium and Tungsten for example. Add a few odd protons fusions and you get the odd numbered elements too. The event of a supernova is really the only way you can form the oddball elements by fusion. Nuclear decay can also produce oddball elements, those elements with masses above Iron or that are odd numbered, but the vast majority of the oddball elements are produced by fusion during a supernova. This is probably the reason why odd numbered elements are 10 times less abundant than the adjacent even numbered elements.
As an aside, (and oh boy is this offtopic) all elements have chemical properties that make them concentrate under certain conditions that from what I have seen really only exist or at least used to exist on only Earth. This is why I find the concept of mining asteroids pretty absurd. While there are three types of asteroids (carbonaceous, stony and iron-nickel), they are all pretty undifferentiated and there is little or no concentration of economically useful elements, like for instance Aluminum. We have all the iron we will ever need in Precambrian iron reefs that dot every continent and there is very little call for more carbon, or for that matter chunks of undifferentiated basalt. Mining Mars *may* make sense, but all it appears to be made of is basalt or mechanically weathered basalt, but little to no *chemically* weathered basalt.
The problem is one of sorting and concentration. Chemical sorting can occur from running water, cooling magma, or other ways. Running water at different acidities and oxidation states is how some elements are sorted. This is important and neither of these has occurred on an asteroid and very little has probably occurred on Mars. The concentration of an element is what is important. Without a rare element, like Aluminum, being concentrated by several times from its percentage of natural occurance, the cost of refining Aluminum from an asteroid would be several times more than it would be to just mine it from terrestrial Aluminum ore. Suppose someone told you that there was five tons of Gold distributed evenly in a big block of Iron, it would be worthwhile to obtain the Gold if the block was only ten tons, but if the block was 10,000,000,000 tons one would just walk away, it would never be worthwhile to refine the Gold. The point is that unless someone finds an asteroid that is made purely of gold, be sure to ask how they intend on removing all of the impurities from the asteroid and how their method is going to be cost effective versus preexisting terrestrial methods. Most discussions on asteroid mining don't seem to acknowledge this point at all.
I would look into the picoBTX form factor systems. The board selection is rather limited, however. All of the picoBTX motherboards are Intel branded and consequently use Intel processors. Three chipsets are available in the picoBTX form factor G965, Q965, and 945G. There is one board for each chipset and they each use desktop processors. The 945G board does not support the Core 2 Duo processors, however the two other boards support the Core 2 Duo. The G965 has faster onboard graphics than the Q965. All three have board have a x16 PCIe slot and the G965 board has a PCIe Minicard slot. The PCIe Minicard card slot may be compatable with mini-PCIe wireless cards, but I dont know. However there is no antenna adaptor cable or antenna included with the G965 board, but there are stores that sell the parts that could make a wireless card work.
The picoBTX motherboards are 11"x8". The only case available I have seen specifically for picoBTX boards is the AOpen B200 which is 13"x13"x4" and has a 275W power supply. BTX power supplies are rated slightly different than ATX power supplies so I would not be too concerned with using this power supply with most Intel processors. However, I would feel a bit queasy about putting a Pentium D or a Core 2 Duo Extreme in this case, but for an NAS, you probably would not put one of those processors in a picoBTX case. Since this case is a low profile case, a riser card would be needed to add a graphics card. However, the B200 does use desktop sized hard drives and optical drives
I think that this may be what you are looking for. The cost of a picoBTX system is only slightly more than a MicroATX system, and is significantly less expensive than a mini-ITX system. Also, such a picoBTX system would be significantly faster than any other mini-ITX system out there if you used a Core 2 Duo processor.
While not the same as being accused of murder or becoming severely injured, when Cassondra Foesch, one of the primary developers of PearPC, went to work for Microsoft, work on PearPC slowed down considerably. Microsoft no longer allowed her to continue to work on PearPC. Before she changed genders, Cassondra Foesch was known as Daniel Foesch. I am (and so is the English language) really bad at explaining this situation without being offensive. I may have "outed" her current status on Slashdot, but she did "out" herself last week on the PearPC devel list. Hopefully, I managed to write this post this without offending her.
If you are concerned about not having an FM radio with your iPod, there is the iPod FM radio remote. While it is not exactly cheap at, $50, there are battery radios that are less expensive than the Zune or the iPod. Of course as long as you are speaking about emergency radios, then everyone should have a shortwave radio in case of nuclear war or meteor impact. Not there is much to do in the case of global devestation, aside from dying of radiation sickness or dying of starvation.
The Sony Reader looks really neat and I am excited, and I noticed a few things about storage on the Reader. For instance, I think it is good that Sony made SD card support available, in addition to Memory Stick compatibility. This is nice and all, but PDF files can get large and being able to add even more storage would be good. From what I understand MS cards on the PSP top out at 4GB at least with the older firmware, which leads me to believe the MS "standard" only supports cards 4GB (2^32 bytes) in size. SD 1.1 cards are limited to the same size, 4GB. However there is a new standard for SD cards called, SD 2.0, which is also known as SDHC. I like to know if Sony has plans to or already supports SDHC cards on the Reader. I would also like to know if the Reader supports USB host mode like certain hard drive cases and the Apple iPod do. One model of hard drive case by AMS that supports USB host mode has an internal Li-ion battery. While I do not know the battery life of this case with the drive running, it should be at least one to two hours. This would be long enough to copy a couple of files from an external hard drive to the internal memory of the Reader. If the Reader does not support USB host mode, Apple could add a file browser to the iPod and with the Camera Connector which enables USB host mode on the iPod, files could be loaded on to the Reader. Then again maybe Sony could maye a larger version of the Reader with a hard drive and a larger battery.
A similar 4GB Hard Drive that sticks on the underside of a Sony PSP is available. It has a CF connector inside of it too. I'm not sure what the maximum limit for the size of a Memory Stick is. However, I'm sure many people would like to know. At any rate, there are 60GB 1.8" hard drives which when coupled with the adaptor would make for a somewhat portable PSP or Nintendo DS.
I suppose one could, with a IDE to SATA bridge board and a few other parts, add an eSATA port to a PSP or a Nintendo DS. I suppose then, with a four drive eSATA rack, one could add up to 2TB of storage. Why 2TB? because 2TB is the largest size that FAT32 can be formatted. I'm not sure at all what one would do with a 2TB Nintendo DS, but that shouldn't stop anybody. Perhaps one could run a large database off of a Nintendo DS. Speed and stability would be a problem though.
I wonder though, does either the Sony PSP or the Nintendo DS have a Memory Management Unit (MMU) with their processor? If they do not, it would be impossible to use a swap file. Then again, Motorola made a separate MMU, the 68851, for processors about 15 years ago. I suppose one could try to add an MMU to a PSP or NDS too, but that would be really demented.
The specs for the RSX were never going to be equivalent to a 7800GTX, the RSX could run at 900MHz and it still wouldn't be as fast the 7800GTX. The problem is that current GPUs are memory bandwidth limited and the RSX only will have a memory datapath width of only 128-bit, half of the 256-bit memory datapath of the 7800GTX. For a console system, a 256-bit datapath is not feasible because of the increased cost of the printed circuit board. As a consequence, even though it is based off of the NV47 design of the 7900 series, the RSX will probably be cut down from the 24 pixel pipes and 16 ROPs of the 7900GTX to 16 pixel to 8 ROPs, at least. Ironically, if this news item is true the 500 core and 650 memory of the RSX will actually make it slightly slower than the 500 core and 700 MHz memory of the Xenos GPU of the Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 also has a 10MB eDRAM on the Xenos die which the RSX will not have, which helps out the Xenos significantly. While both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 both have a total of 512MB of memory, on the Xbox 360 the memory is unified and is used both for the GPU and CPU, on the PS3 the memory is divided into two parts, 256MB of main memory for the CPU and 256 MB for the RSX. This is not going to help performance on the PS3. If the RSX is also cut down on pipelines and ROPs to save costs the performance of the PS3 will be not be impressive by GPU performance. Not that the CPU performance of the Cell processor is shaping to be very impressive either.
The Lithium in these batteries will be recycled; mainly it is easier to recover Lithium from batteries than it is to recover Lithium from its ore. Lithium is rare in the Universe, the conditions for its ore to form are rare, and Lithium is hard to recover from its ore. At any rate, Lithium is mined from the crystals that form at the top of pegamitic granite plutons. (Hah, eat that astronomers!) Pegamatitic granite is essentially granite that is made up of large crystals.
I have a bachelor's degree in Geology and this never crossed my mind before, I'm sort of embarrased that this never never happened. Now that someone has mentioned that "pluton" refers to both an intrusive igneous body and a type of planet, I think that the IAU was pretty stupid. Then again IIRC, in Geology "pluton" may be deprecated because I don't recall too many of my professors using it. The perferred word, in Geology, may be "intrusion", but what do I know?
Yes, I've always kind of wondered about the wisdom of trying to obtain any rare element from space. To make a certain element economical or even possible to mine on the Earth the element has to be concentrated somehow. On the Moon there are fewer ways that elements can be concentrated. There was never liquid water on the moon to erode and transport an element. For that matter there is little to no variation in the types of rocks, there is no granite on the Moon. The lack of granite is due to how granite is formed and the composition of granite. Also the gravity on the Moon is much lower so certain kinds of separtation would not work as well.
Just for the heck of it I thought that I would list all of the things I could think of that would not allow one to use a quad core processor on a Mac Pro.
First off the new Clovertown processors must use the same socket and bus protocols as the Woodcrest processors. Even if the Clovertown processors use the same socket, the new processor must have the same pinout and must be electrically compatible with the Woodcrest processors. Another potential problem is that Clovertown could require new VRM specifications.
Finally that is all Intel can do to make the Mac Pro incompatable with the Clovertown processors. Additionally the proper microcode to support the Clovertown processor has to be in the firmware. (This may not be totally necessary as there are some x86 systems that will boot without the proper microcode for their processor. Additional software must be run to have the processor to work properly though.)
Finally, Apple could release a firmware "upgrade" that could make it so that on boot up on detection of a Clovertown processor the computer would not boot. Apple did this with the Blue and White G3 systems before releasing the G4 towers. Even though there is a G4 tower that uses the same chipset as the B&W G3, in their default state, after the firmware upgrade the B&W G3 systems will not boot with a G4 processor in a B&W G3. However, some enterprising individual made a firmware patch of their own to bypass this G4 ROM Block. Someone else could add the proper microcode and remove any firmware block on the Clovertown, but the problem would be how to flash the new firmware. (I would imagine that Apple/Intel might make flashing a third party firmware hard to do though.)
Sure you can do Quad-SLI, but why? Most games are CPU limited rather than GPU limited. What is becoming more and more important for many gamers is the image quality and nVidia loses in convincingly in all cases. The ATI X1k series can do angle independent anisotropic filtering which improves image quality. However, the nVidia 7900 series is stuck with angle dependent anisotropic filtering, which produces quantitatively worse image quality. Both ATI cards in Crossfire mode and nVidia SLI cards have high quality Anti-aliasing modes, however Crossfire AA modes actually are playable unlike the nVidia 16x and 32x AA modes which are in practice unsuable because of low frame rates. I could go on about the reasons why nVidia cards are just not as good as ATI cards and why Quad-SLI is kind of useless so I will just list a few more problems that nVidia cards have. No HDR+AA, inferior texture filtering, driver settings tricks just to get the output to look equivalent to ATI cards, texture shimmering with AA, and lower performance in general.
What is the manufacturer of Firewire controllers in the computers you are using? VIA controllers are usually not the best Firewire controllers. Texas Instruments controllers are usually better. For that matter, depending on the situation try compressing the files. Also, do not depend on time remaining in Windows I have found it wildly inaccurate at times. Windows seems to estimate the time remaining to be way too high, so YMMV, literally.
Problem is is that Disney has been acting even more scummy that usual in this case. From what I understand Clare Milne isn't exactly mentally competent. She probably doesn't understand what the agreement with Disney means or what effect is has. For all we know a Disney lawyer could have offered her a cookie for agreeing to have someone sign or stamp the agreement for her. (Clare Milne probably doesn't have the motor functions to sign or even stamp anything.) The lawyers from Disney have taken advantage of this poor, disabled woman. The agreement that Clare Milne "signed" almost totally transfered the rights to Pooh over to Disney forever, and probably even left only a pittance for her. Also, since Clare Milne has no children or other family I believe that all of the rights to Pooh would end up in Disney's hands after her death according to this agreement. Doesn't this make you feel all warm a fuzzy for Disney now?
I own an Acer laptop too, and I rarely restart it too. At any rate, according to the "Acer ePowerManagement" program my laptop currently with a full charge has a battery life of 156 hours in Standby or 65 days in Hibernation. The difference on a laptop is that in Standby, the RAM is kept on and in Hibernation the RAM is turned off. On a desktop computer with an ATX power supply there is a +5V rail on the power supply that is always on regardless of whether the computer is in Standby, Hibernation or in Shutdown. The only way to completely stop a desktop from drawing power is by turning the switch on the back of the power supply if present or unplugging the computer. I would not worry about this though as a computer turned off would use at the most 30W and probably much less. (Yes, I know the +5V rail is rated at 10W on an ATX power supply, but some power is lost as heat from the power conversion. In any case the difference between Standby and Hibernate is that Standby allows the computer to recover much faster than Hibernate after being powered up again.
At any rate in regards to the GP there are several potential pitfalls for the "Standby" state in for the average Windows user on a PC.
The biggest potential pitfall is that the PC may not have ACPI enabled in the BIOS on the computer. This problem is impossible to fix without a complete reinstall of Windows XP on a computer with ACPI disabled. Fortunately it is impossible to turn off ACPI support in the BIOS of most computers from within the last two to three years.
Another pitfall is the sleep state that the computer is set to in the BIOS. In the BIOS, the Standby state should be set to S3 or Auto and not S1. By default in the BIOS many of the motherboards I have used for home-built computers have had their Standby state set to S1. Standby in S1 mode keeps the PSU, the CPU and the fans running which is pretty pointless. Standby in S3 mode is better at it actually turns the computer off.
Another potential pitfall with respect to Standby is generally hardware problems. The most common problem is an older computer with a broken BIOS. Also some hardware drivers that are usually older do not support Standby. Another problem is that there are some older Seagate SATA drives with broken firmware that do not to turn back from Standby after being turned off in S3 mode. A less common problem that occurs more often with workstations and poorly designed laptops is that there may be too many RAM chips and too much power draw for the PSU or the battery to power them.
Another problem usually with a fresh install of Windows is that the standard video driver in Windows totally lacks support for any Standby or Hibernation mode. In any case install all of your hardware drivers and see if Standby works then.
The article states that this technology could have many uses; with more work potentially liquid crystals that can change their thickness could improve current LCD technology.
One optical property of minerals in rocks in the field mineralogy used in identifying minerals is something called interference colors. To characterize the history of a rock and its constituent minerals, sometimes, a rock is cut into pieces and a thin slice is cut from one of the newly cut surfaces. After more cutting and some polishing, the resulting slice is supposed to be 30m (micrometers) for standard identification and is mounted on a microscope slide. At this thickness silicate minerals which are a large constituent of many different kinds of rocks, and while silicates may appear opaque in a rock, silicates are actually translucent and this feature is brought out in thin section. In addition to being translucent most silicates are crystals and the liquid crystals in LCD panels are both optically anisotropic.
Assuming one had two polarizing films on top of each other at ninety degrees no light would pass between them like most people discovered in grade school science. However, if you put a crystal that is optically anisotropic between these two films and either rotate the crystal or change anisotropy of the crystal though electricity, in the case of the liquid crystal in the case of an LCD screen, the light gets bent in such a way that the light that passed though the first filter actually would actually pass though the second polarizing film. This is basically how LCD screens work and this property is also useful in identifying minerals. Another property of anisotropic minerals is how much each wavelength of light is slowed down which results in the color of the crystal to change; this color is known as the interference color. The interference color also depends on the thickness of the mineral if the slide has been poorly made. The range of interference colors range the entire spectrum and in some cases interference colors can look fluorescent or even pearlescent.
This article seems to mention that with this technology the thickness of a cell of a liquid crystal could be changed. With the right type of liquid crystal, one could make a liquid crystal screen that would use interference colors to produce a full range of colors. Such a display would have a larger gamut of colors that current LCD screens and even CRT monitors and could be capable of unusual color effects.
Yes, but this whole scenario wasn't too hard to avoid in the original version of Escape Velocity. The way around IIRC was to just to delete the preferences file and I'm not sure, but some invisible files may also have had to be deleted. However, dealing with invisible files are hard to deal with in the Classic MacOS unless you had ResEdit or Norton Disk Utilities.
Later versions of Escape Velocity had several other methods that would not allow you get very far without registering. One way this was done was to not allow the player to buy the higher grade ships or equipment, or to get very far on the in the story.
Slashdot Mirror
Be careful what you wish for. This ATI FireGL card has 2GB of memory:
http://ati.amd.com/products/fireglv8650/index.html
Yes, Yes, I know replying to my own comment, bad form. At any rate while this might or might not fix Zango I did find this which looks like an excellent tool/starting point for nuking Zango:
http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html
I would but there appears to be no way to send and detonate suitcase nukes though their form. Needless to say, I hate them and there software more than death. Zango pops up ads and, has a large memory footprint and can bring single core, midrange, Athlon 64 based computers to their knees. In the limited methods I used, using Add/Remove Programs, using their own removal app, running Spybot, running Spybot at Startup, ending the Zango process, deleting the in use Zango app, there seems to be no way to delete the Zango reliably aside from a total reformat and reinstall of Windows. Not only is the Zango software spyware of the absolute worst form, I think that they might kill puppies at Zango because of they are that evil. It is so insidious that I wonder if Zango writes itself into the Windows kernel.
However, I have a solution I think that someone, maybe even me, would be to make a Linux Live CD designed specifically to remove spyware. If I were really evil I would make the Live CD to remove Zango specifically and only Zango. Mounting a Windows partition would be the easy part I would use the FUSE NTFS-3G filesystem driver. I'm not sure but there must be some way to edit the Windows registry in Linux and some way to remove ActiveX Controls from IE in Linux. Maybe I am just the person to figure this out.
As humorous as this is. IIRC, TSR, put out a collectible dice game that used special dice with nearly unintelligible die faces. To make things even more fun some had multiple die faces with the same symbol.
Sounds like they handled your gas line rupture better than this:
h tml
/ 10/13/centerpointbuffalo/
http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/11/explosion.02/index.
Yes, yes I know it isn't all fun and collapsing bridges in Minnesota. Sometimes whe have the above. Seriously though, last October, Buffalo, a large town in Minnesota, had its gas service shut off because of a gas line leak. They shut the gas main off and then went to door to door in the town shutting each of the gas meters off. The necessary gas line work was done. Then, the gas main was turned on again and the house meters were turned on again. This took IIRC three days and 200 gas company employees. See, people can learn from their mistakes. More on it here:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2006
I have a friend who actually had to try and read and then understand code like that. Only the comments were all in German and he only knows English. The code had something to do with power distribution over power lines, so this was rather important code. After a little over two years he quit rather than move when the company was bought out. Now he works as a manager at a gas station. I think I remember him describing the coding he had to do as being soul crushing.
Yes it does make sense. Li, Be, and B are all unstable at the temperatures at the core of a sun. Lithium with an amu of 6 literally falls apart extremely quickly inside a sun. At any rate, 3He, 7Li, 6Li Be and B are actually formed by spallation of other elements due to cosmic ray collisions. As another reply states go here: http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/energy/tri plealph.html
After Carbon is formed alpha particles fuse with the Carbon, Oxygen, Neon and so on, until Iron is formed, note that all along this path no odd number elements are formed. Iron is at the dead bottom of the nuclear energy potential graph. This means that it actually takes energy to fuse Helium with Iron to make Nickel. Where do Nickel and all the other odd numbered elements aside from Li and B come from? Well since it takes energy to make Nickel, when a super giant star undergoes a supernova at the end of its life there is plenty of energy to go around. When a supernova occurs the implosion and subsequent explosion leaves lots of energy to form Nickel, Uranium and Tungsten for example. Add a few odd protons fusions and you get the odd numbered elements too. The event of a supernova is really the only way you can form the oddball elements by fusion. Nuclear decay can also produce oddball elements, those elements with masses above Iron or that are odd numbered, but the vast majority of the oddball elements are produced by fusion during a supernova. This is probably the reason why odd numbered elements are 10 times less abundant than the adjacent even numbered elements.
As an aside, (and oh boy is this offtopic) all elements have chemical properties that make them concentrate under certain conditions that from what I have seen really only exist or at least used to exist on only Earth. This is why I find the concept of mining asteroids pretty absurd. While there are three types of asteroids (carbonaceous, stony and iron-nickel), they are all pretty undifferentiated and there is little or no concentration of economically useful elements, like for instance Aluminum. We have all the iron we will ever need in Precambrian iron reefs that dot every continent and there is very little call for more carbon, or for that matter chunks of undifferentiated basalt. Mining Mars *may* make sense, but all it appears to be made of is basalt or mechanically weathered basalt, but little to no *chemically* weathered basalt.
The problem is one of sorting and concentration. Chemical sorting can occur from running water, cooling magma, or other ways. Running water at different acidities and oxidation states is how some elements are sorted. This is important and neither of these has occurred on an asteroid and very little has probably occurred on Mars. The concentration of an element is what is important. Without a rare element, like Aluminum, being concentrated by several times from its percentage of natural occurance, the cost of refining Aluminum from an asteroid would be several times more than it would be to just mine it from terrestrial Aluminum ore. Suppose someone told you that there was five tons of Gold distributed evenly in a big block of Iron, it would be worthwhile to obtain the Gold if the block was only ten tons, but if the block was 10,000,000,000 tons one would just walk away, it would never be worthwhile to refine the Gold. The point is that unless someone finds an asteroid that is made purely of gold, be sure to ask how they intend on removing all of the impurities from the asteroid and how their method is going to be cost effective versus preexisting terrestrial methods. Most discussions on asteroid mining don't seem to acknowledge this point at all.
I would look into the picoBTX form factor systems. The board selection is rather limited, however. All of the picoBTX motherboards are Intel branded and consequently use Intel processors. Three chipsets are available in the picoBTX form factor G965, Q965, and 945G. There is one board for each chipset and they each use desktop processors. The 945G board does not support the Core 2 Duo processors, however the two other boards support the Core 2 Duo. The G965 has faster onboard graphics than the Q965. All three have board have a x16 PCIe slot and the G965 board has a PCIe Minicard slot. The PCIe Minicard card slot may be compatable with mini-PCIe wireless cards, but I dont know. However there is no antenna adaptor cable or antenna included with the G965 board, but there are stores that sell the parts that could make a wireless card work.
The picoBTX motherboards are 11"x8". The only case available I have seen specifically for picoBTX boards is the AOpen B200 which is 13"x13"x4" and has a 275W power supply. BTX power supplies are rated slightly different than ATX power supplies so I would not be too concerned with using this power supply with most Intel processors. However, I would feel a bit queasy about putting a Pentium D or a Core 2 Duo Extreme in this case, but for an NAS, you probably would not put one of those processors in a picoBTX case. Since this case is a low profile case, a riser card would be needed to add a graphics card. However, the B200 does use desktop sized hard drives and optical drives
I think that this may be what you are looking for. The cost of a picoBTX system is only slightly more than a MicroATX system, and is significantly less expensive than a mini-ITX system. Also, such a picoBTX system would be significantly faster than any other mini-ITX system out there if you used a Core 2 Duo processor.
While not the same as being accused of murder or becoming severely injured, when Cassondra Foesch, one of the primary developers of PearPC, went to work for Microsoft, work on PearPC slowed down considerably. Microsoft no longer allowed her to continue to work on PearPC. Before she changed genders, Cassondra Foesch was known as Daniel Foesch. I am (and so is the English language) really bad at explaining this situation without being offensive. I may have "outed" her current status on Slashdot, but she did "out" herself last week on the PearPC devel list. Hopefully, I managed to write this post this without offending her.
If you are concerned about not having an FM radio with your iPod, there is the iPod FM radio remote. While it is not exactly cheap at, $50, there are battery radios that are less expensive than the Zune or the iPod. Of course as long as you are speaking about emergency radios, then everyone should have a shortwave radio in case of nuclear war or meteor impact. Not there is much to do in the case of global devestation, aside from dying of radiation sickness or dying of starvation.
The Sony Reader looks really neat and I am excited, and I noticed a few things about storage on the Reader. For instance, I think it is good that Sony made SD card support available, in addition to Memory Stick compatibility. This is nice and all, but PDF files can get large and being able to add even more storage would be good. From what I understand MS cards on the PSP top out at 4GB at least with the older firmware, which leads me to believe the MS "standard" only supports cards 4GB (2^32 bytes) in size. SD 1.1 cards are limited to the same size, 4GB. However there is a new standard for SD cards called, SD 2.0, which is also known as SDHC. I like to know if Sony has plans to or already supports SDHC cards on the Reader. I would also like to know if the Reader supports USB host mode like certain hard drive cases and the Apple iPod do. One model of hard drive case by AMS that supports USB host mode has an internal Li-ion battery. While I do not know the battery life of this case with the drive running, it should be at least one to two hours. This would be long enough to copy a couple of files from an external hard drive to the internal memory of the Reader. If the Reader does not support USB host mode, Apple could add a file browser to the iPod and with the Camera Connector which enables USB host mode on the iPod, files could be loaded on to the Reader. Then again maybe Sony could maye a larger version of the Reader with a hard drive and a larger battery.
What about the poor people who have more than one prime factor?
factor 11893: 1699 7
A similar 4GB Hard Drive that sticks on the underside of a Sony PSP is available. It has a CF connector inside of it too. I'm not sure what the maximum limit for the size of a Memory Stick is. However, I'm sure many people would like to know. At any rate, there are 60GB 1.8" hard drives which when coupled with the adaptor would make for a somewhat portable PSP or Nintendo DS.
I suppose one could, with a IDE to SATA bridge board and a few other parts, add an eSATA port to a PSP or a Nintendo DS. I suppose then, with a four drive eSATA rack, one could add up to 2TB of storage. Why 2TB? because 2TB is the largest size that FAT32 can be formatted. I'm not sure at all what one would do with a 2TB Nintendo DS, but that shouldn't stop anybody. Perhaps one could run a large database off of a Nintendo DS. Speed and stability would be a problem though.
I wonder though, does either the Sony PSP or the Nintendo DS have a Memory Management Unit (MMU) with their processor? If they do not, it would be impossible to use a swap file. Then again, Motorola made a separate MMU, the 68851, for processors about 15 years ago. I suppose one could try to add an MMU to a PSP or NDS too, but that would be really demented.
The specs for the RSX were never going to be equivalent to a 7800GTX, the RSX could run at 900MHz and it still wouldn't be as fast the 7800GTX. The problem is that current GPUs are memory bandwidth limited and the RSX only will have a memory datapath width of only 128-bit, half of the 256-bit memory datapath of the 7800GTX. For a console system, a 256-bit datapath is not feasible because of the increased cost of the printed circuit board. As a consequence, even though it is based off of the NV47 design of the 7900 series, the RSX will probably be cut down from the 24 pixel pipes and 16 ROPs of the 7900GTX to 16 pixel to 8 ROPs, at least. Ironically, if this news item is true the 500 core and 650 memory of the RSX will actually make it slightly slower than the 500 core and 700 MHz memory of the Xenos GPU of the Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 also has a 10MB eDRAM on the Xenos die which the RSX will not have, which helps out the Xenos significantly. While both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 both have a total of 512MB of memory, on the Xbox 360 the memory is unified and is used both for the GPU and CPU, on the PS3 the memory is divided into two parts, 256MB of main memory for the CPU and 256 MB for the RSX. This is not going to help performance on the PS3. If the RSX is also cut down on pipelines and ROPs to save costs the performance of the PS3 will be not be impressive by GPU performance. Not that the CPU performance of the Cell processor is shaping to be very impressive either.
The Lithium in these batteries will be recycled; mainly it is easier to recover Lithium from batteries than it is to recover Lithium from its ore. Lithium is rare in the Universe, the conditions for its ore to form are rare, and Lithium is hard to recover from its ore. At any rate, Lithium is mined from the crystals that form at the top of pegamitic granite plutons. (Hah, eat that astronomers!) Pegamatitic granite is essentially granite that is made up of large crystals.
I have a bachelor's degree in Geology and this never crossed my mind before, I'm sort of embarrased that this never never happened. Now that someone has mentioned that "pluton" refers to both an intrusive igneous body and a type of planet, I think that the IAU was pretty stupid. Then again IIRC, in Geology "pluton" may be deprecated because I don't recall too many of my professors using it. The perferred word, in Geology, may be "intrusion", but what do I know?
Yes, I've always kind of wondered about the wisdom of trying to obtain any rare element from space. To make a certain element economical or even possible to mine on the Earth the element has to be concentrated somehow. On the Moon there are fewer ways that elements can be concentrated. There was never liquid water on the moon to erode and transport an element. For that matter there is little to no variation in the types of rocks, there is no granite on the Moon. The lack of granite is due to how granite is formed and the composition of granite. Also the gravity on the Moon is much lower so certain kinds of separtation would not work as well.
Just for the heck of it I thought that I would list all of the things I could think of that would not allow one to use a quad core processor on a Mac Pro.
First off the new Clovertown processors must use the same socket and bus protocols as the Woodcrest processors. Even if the Clovertown processors use the same socket, the new processor must have the same pinout and must be electrically compatible with the Woodcrest processors. Another potential problem is that Clovertown could require new VRM specifications.
Finally that is all Intel can do to make the Mac Pro incompatable with the Clovertown processors. Additionally the proper microcode to support the Clovertown processor has to be in the firmware. (This may not be totally necessary as there are some x86 systems that will boot without the proper microcode for their processor. Additional software must be run to have the processor to work properly though.)
Finally, Apple could release a firmware "upgrade" that could make it so that on boot up on detection of a Clovertown processor the computer would not boot. Apple did this with the Blue and White G3 systems before releasing the G4 towers. Even though there is a G4 tower that uses the same chipset as the B&W G3, in their default state, after the firmware upgrade the B&W G3 systems will not boot with a G4 processor in a B&W G3. However, some enterprising individual made a firmware patch of their own to bypass this G4 ROM Block. Someone else could add the proper microcode and remove any firmware block on the Clovertown, but the problem would be how to flash the new firmware. (I would imagine that Apple/Intel might make flashing a third party firmware hard to do though.)
Sure you can do Quad-SLI, but why? Most games are CPU limited rather than GPU limited. What is becoming more and more important for many gamers is the image quality and nVidia loses in convincingly in all cases. The ATI X1k series can do angle independent anisotropic filtering which improves image quality. However, the nVidia 7900 series is stuck with angle dependent anisotropic filtering, which produces quantitatively worse image quality. Both ATI cards in Crossfire mode and nVidia SLI cards have high quality Anti-aliasing modes, however Crossfire AA modes actually are playable unlike the nVidia 16x and 32x AA modes which are in practice unsuable because of low frame rates. I could go on about the reasons why nVidia cards are just not as good as ATI cards and why Quad-SLI is kind of useless so I will just list a few more problems that nVidia cards have. No HDR+AA, inferior texture filtering, driver settings tricks just to get the output to look equivalent to ATI cards, texture shimmering with AA, and lower performance in general.
What is the manufacturer of Firewire controllers in the computers you are using? VIA controllers are usually not the best Firewire controllers. Texas Instruments controllers are usually better. For that matter, depending on the situation try compressing the files. Also, do not depend on time remaining in Windows I have found it wildly inaccurate at times. Windows seems to estimate the time remaining to be way too high, so YMMV, literally.
Problem is is that Disney has been acting even more scummy that usual in this case. From what I understand Clare Milne isn't exactly mentally competent. She probably doesn't understand what the agreement with Disney means or what effect is has. For all we know a Disney lawyer could have offered her a cookie for agreeing to have someone sign or stamp the agreement for her. (Clare Milne probably doesn't have the motor functions to sign or even stamp anything.) The lawyers from Disney have taken advantage of this poor, disabled woman. The agreement that Clare Milne "signed" almost totally transfered the rights to Pooh over to Disney forever, and probably even left only a pittance for her. Also, since Clare Milne has no children or other family I believe that all of the rights to Pooh would end up in Disney's hands after her death according to this agreement. Doesn't this make you feel all warm a fuzzy for Disney now?
What about for small values of 30 or for large values of 6?
I own an Acer laptop too, and I rarely restart it too. At any rate, according to the "Acer ePowerManagement" program my laptop currently with a full charge has a battery life of 156 hours in Standby or 65 days in Hibernation. The difference on a laptop is that in Standby, the RAM is kept on and in Hibernation the RAM is turned off. On a desktop computer with an ATX power supply there is a +5V rail on the power supply that is always on regardless of whether the computer is in Standby, Hibernation or in Shutdown. The only way to completely stop a desktop from drawing power is by turning the switch on the back of the power supply if present or unplugging the computer. I would not worry about this though as a computer turned off would use at the most 30W and probably much less. (Yes, I know the +5V rail is rated at 10W on an ATX power supply, but some power is lost as heat from the power conversion. In any case the difference between Standby and Hibernate is that Standby allows the computer to recover much faster than Hibernate after being powered up again.
At any rate in regards to the GP there are several potential pitfalls for the "Standby" state in for the average Windows user on a PC.
The biggest potential pitfall is that the PC may not have ACPI enabled in the BIOS on the computer. This problem is impossible to fix without a complete reinstall of Windows XP on a computer with ACPI disabled. Fortunately it is impossible to turn off ACPI support in the BIOS of most computers from within the last two to three years.
Another pitfall is the sleep state that the computer is set to in the BIOS. In the BIOS, the Standby state should be set to S3 or Auto and not S1. By default in the BIOS many of the motherboards I have used for home-built computers have had their Standby state set to S1. Standby in S1 mode keeps the PSU, the CPU and the fans running which is pretty pointless. Standby in S3 mode is better at it actually turns the computer off.
Another potential pitfall with respect to Standby is generally hardware problems. The most common problem is an older computer with a broken BIOS. Also some hardware drivers that are usually older do not support Standby. Another problem is that there are some older Seagate SATA drives with broken firmware that do not to turn back from Standby after being turned off in S3 mode. A less common problem that occurs more often with workstations and poorly designed laptops is that there may be too many RAM chips and too much power draw for the PSU or the battery to power them.
Another problem usually with a fresh install of Windows is that the standard video driver in Windows totally lacks support for any Standby or Hibernation mode. In any case install all of your hardware drivers and see if Standby works then.
The article states that this technology could have many uses; with more work potentially liquid crystals that can change their thickness could improve current LCD technology.
One optical property of minerals in rocks in the field mineralogy used in identifying
minerals is something called interference colors. To characterize the history of a rock and its constituent minerals, sometimes, a rock is cut into pieces and a thin slice is cut from one of the newly cut surfaces. After more cutting and some polishing, the resulting slice is supposed to be 30m (micrometers) for standard identification and is mounted on a microscope slide. At this thickness silicate minerals which are a large constituent of many different kinds of rocks, and while silicates may appear opaque in a rock, silicates are actually translucent and this feature is brought out in thin section. In addition to being translucent most silicates are crystals and the liquid crystals in LCD panels are both optically anisotropic.
Assuming one had two polarizing films on top of each other at ninety degrees no light would pass between them like most people discovered in grade school science. However, if you put a crystal that is optically anisotropic between these two films and either rotate the crystal or change anisotropy of the crystal though electricity, in the case of the liquid crystal in the case of an LCD screen, the light gets bent in such a way that the light that passed though the first filter actually would actually pass though the second polarizing film. This is basically how LCD screens work and this property is also useful in identifying minerals. Another property of anisotropic minerals is how much each wavelength of light is slowed down which results in the color of the crystal to change; this color is known as the interference color. The interference color also depends on the thickness of the mineral if the slide has been poorly made. The range of interference colors range the entire spectrum and in some cases interference colors can look fluorescent or even pearlescent.
This article seems to mention that with this technology the thickness of a cell of a liquid crystal could be changed. With the right type of liquid crystal, one could make a liquid crystal screen that would use interference colors to produce a full range of colors. Such a display would have a larger gamut of colors that current LCD screens and even CRT monitors and could be capable of unusual color effects.
Yes, but this whole scenario wasn't too hard to avoid in the original version of Escape Velocity. The way around IIRC was to just to delete the preferences file and I'm not sure, but some invisible files may also have had to be deleted. However, dealing with invisible files are hard to deal with in the Classic MacOS unless you had ResEdit or Norton Disk Utilities.
Later versions of Escape Velocity had several other methods that would not allow you get very far without registering. One way this was done was to not allow the player to buy the higher grade ships or equipment, or to get very far on the in the story.