Anyone who has ever worked with VMS (and RSX for that matter) know what programming freedom you had, and what the real programming is.
Yes. The freedom to spend all afternoon trying to count single and double quotes in DCL, making sure that they're properly mismatched in order to accomplish what you're trying to do.
And let's not forget QIO. "Hey, let's wrap an entire OS worth of functionality in one entry point, and just use a ginormous variable parameter list to sort it out!"
Not really, the relative velocities are sizeable, when you consider our rotation about our galactic centre. Imagine this fraction of a degree of rotation of the simultaneous space within spacetime, but taken out to the distance of 64 MLy - it's now a difference that is large in magnitude. (We should really do an exact calculation I suppose..)
Um, what? It sounds like you're saying that there's some significance to our angular velocity around our galactic center. I think that's not true.
If it were, imagine the relativistic effects from our angular velocity relative to the center of our planet, around which we revolve in a mere 24 hours. Projecting that out to a radius of 64 MLy, we trace out a circle with a circumference of 402 MLy in the span of a day, a rate of almost 150 billion times the speed of light.
I was waxing nostalgic over computer storage myselkf the other day. My first home computer c.1978 used a 300 baud (10 bits/char => 30 char/sec) audio cassette for storage...
250bps for Level I BASIC, 500bps for Level II.
Man, that upgrade to a 100kbps floppy was like a dream come true...
Re:Great news for someone in scientific computing
on
Microsoft Open Sources F#
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· Score: 2, Informative
I was intrigued with Sun's Fortress, but this has gone nowhere, and it is fundamentally flawed from the start in that it is tied to the JVM, which is no-no when it comes to high performance computing.
How's that again? I haven't seen any indication that CLR is better suited for HPC than the JVM. Not that I've looked extensively, mind you, but it seems like the two runtimes are not that far apart.
I remember experimenting with pulsed currents to generate phosphenes after reading a related SciAm article sometime in the 1980's. Set up a simple 555 pulse generator, use cotton pads with saline as contacts on your temples, and you can get some pretty cool light shows before it starts to tickle too much.
If this really is cutaneous stimulation, I'm perfectly comfortable building small current-limited supplies, and coming up with something that'll make good contact. I'm a little nervous about applying prolonged DC, though -- I'd expect to be generating chlorine (or nasty electrode chlorides) at one side and sodium hydroxide at the other, neither of which are good for the complexion.
I'm not game for sinking electrodes through my skull. Yet.
Keeping a permanent copy of every bad web site made by every bored teen is not actually useful, any more than keeping every grocery list, or to do list, or every piece of homework you ever did as a child. Some things simply don't have future value. The fact that we can keep things forever at near zero cost doesn't mean that we should keep things of near zero value. Let it go.
Problem one: "future value" can't be determined in the present. You can't know today what bits of ephemera will assume great importance next month, or next year, or next century, even if only for a single person.
The vast majority, of course, will remain unimportant. But those terabytes of trivia tossed every day might include the last words and thoughts of your parent or child killed in an accident, or footage of the teens casing your house for next week's burglary, or messages concerning the "arrangement" between a crooked developer and the state politician who'll be leading the Presidential race ten years down the road.
You're embarrassed about something you said 20 years ago? Welcome to adulthood. You can't unsay it, and you can't make other people forget it. You can demonstrate that you've learned something in the two subsequent decades. And when you encounter something stupid someone else said 20 years ago, you can give them the same benefit of the doubt -- if they're still saying the same thing, or still promoting that 20-year-old comment, you can (and should) form a bad impression of them; if they're saying the opposite, or specifically repudiating or apologizing for the earlier comment, your impression of them should improve.
Triage can be tuned, adjusted, improved as we learn more about what is and isn't important. Forgetting is absolute and irreversible. The potential cost of forgetting the wrong thing should often justify the known cost of keeping "everything".
"We're trying to achieve the same power densities, the same energy densities as traditional lithium ion batteries, but we need to make the footprint much smaller," says Chang.
If these batteries are using a chemical process, they're limited to chemical energy densities, which can't get a whole lot higher than what we see today.
A white-hot iron rod will make your clothing burst into flames at a touch. A white-hot spark from your Dremel tool grinding that same rod will bounce right off your clothes, or your skin, without any effect or sensation. So, yeah, it would probably be sort of like that.
Really? You're complaining about using the term "nano" to refer to structures bigger than molecules but smaller than the wavelength of light?
By the same token, everything that goes on in your body is based on bio-chemistry, and therefore "nanoscale by definition". But it's still useful to distinguish (for example) biochemical changes in bone digestion due to biphosphonates from microscopic changes in bone structure associated with osteoporosis from large-scale changes associated with being run over by a truck.
The nanoscale structure of battery electrodes, larger than individual molecules but smaller than the wavelength of visible light, is absolutely critical to optimizing battery performance. It's distinct from the battery's basic chemistry, it's distinct from gross electrode shape and size, and it's certainly distinct from the macroscopic and chemical changes "studied for ages" in association with corrosion.
People buy books at thrift stores and library sales because they love books.
More specifically, I and my family buy books at these places because we want to read them, or give them to someone who wants to read them.
People donate books to libraries because they want to share their love of books.
We donate books to libraries because we don't want to end up featured on "Hoarders", or on the local news.
If this becomes any popular, it will drive the price up for one thing; it will take the books from people who might pick one up because it's cheap, and love it, and put it in the hands of people who are trying to make a profit from it.
Only the "rarities" and the currently popular. Someone who might pick up a book because it's cheap, and love it, should be able to consummate that love as well with a mass-market printing as with a first edition. If it's being priced up because it's currently popular, it should also be relatively easy to find it in your library's circulating stock, and read it for absolutely free.
Because as with everything, it takes something that people do for love of knowledge, art, or craft, and pollute it with people who don't care for it at all, just for the money it represents.
Just like those scummy publishers who care only for profit, and who make books accessible to the public despite, not because of, their greed?
That is why you feel shame doing it. Not to mention that if this becomes really profitable, how long until publishers, editors and authors see the "lost profits" and crack down on it like they are doing with music and movies?
How are they going to "crack down" on legal resale of dumb, DRM-free physical artifacts? They've tried that already, and failed definitively.
...we can posit imaginary transparent stuff for the wire, hoses, and conduit as well. We can even imagine that we can tailor its refractive index so that it truly appears "invisible", not just "clear".
What if it treats oxygen as a poison and has developed the ability to remove it from the atmosphere and "fix it"
1. Oxygen is a poison. It's poisonous to us humans at high concentrations. It's toxic to many forms of life at normal concentrations -- and they were here on Earth well before us. In fact, it was their own disregard for sustainable growth and waste management that destroyed their ecosystem.
2. Everything fixes oxygen. It's continually being bound up by everything that breathes, everything that rusts, everything that burns, everything that rots.
I'm not a bit worried about things that evolve with no connection to Earth's biosphere. I'm very worried about things that evolve under the guidance of humans with modern genetic-manipulation equipment, an ever-improving grasp of genetic function, and a bad attitude toward some or all of contemporary civilization.
I came here to say this. If I'm strapping on a backpack tank, I'll pass up the H2O2 in favor of, well, just about anything else. Certainly, jet fuel and propane are positively benign by comparison.
...had a kit project to build a "digital" video camera. The "MOS sensor" that it used was, as I recall, essentially a DRAM with a transparent cover -- in fact, people were prying the lids off standard DRAM chips to use them as image sensors. (Decades later, I verified that you could detect bit-flips in an erased EPROM when you hit it with a red laser pointer. Forget high-ISO night photography; this was probably somewhere around ISO 0.5.)
You could then presumably build an interface to load the image into your Altair 8800 box, presented in the previous month's issue. At some point in the next few months, they even ran a project for a bit-mapped graphic display. Those were the glory days of Popular Electronics.
In fact, there are probably a number of business-process patents that could be construed as covering this technique. Surely some of them are licenseable or for sale.
The limit on drive capacity is not switching speed, but focal spot diameter. If this is a 405nm laser, its minimum focus spot will be exactly the same size as the spot of existing Blu-Ray lasers (they're 405nm, too). What am I missing?
Heh. Here in the US, the credit card companies have enough muscle to forbid merchants from collecting a premium. There's been talk of passing laws to change this, but when you're proposing a law that entrenched interests can characterize as "imposing extra fees on consumers", it's pretty hard to get much traction. So, merchants continue to pass the cost along in higher prices, and people who use cash or checks end up subsidizing all those credit card "benefits".
You're still thinking in print terms. 100dpi is certainly coarser than normal visual acuity, but the iPad's gestures make panning and zooming very quick and fluid. When I want to see finer detail (or, more frequently, when I want to click on a small link), I just zoom in.
I'd certainly love to have a 300dpi display (actually, 200dpi would be fine for my older eyes), but the combination of antialiasing and pan/zoom on the iPad works out very nicely for me. I like what I've seen of e-ink, but I'd really miss that capability, and I think it'll be a while before that level of dynamic refreshing and multitouch interaction is widespread in commercial e-ink devices.
...like how to make one that's directional. You're talking about eavesdropping on an omnidirectional transmission, not one targeted at us.
We can pick up Voyager's 20-watt transmission (from a 3.4-meter reflector pointed straight at us) with a 34-meter dish at a range of over 1/1000 of a light year. To get the same signal strength at four light-years, you could bump up the power to 300 megawatts, or you could make the transmitter a lot more directional, or you could make the receiving antenna bigger, or (most sensibly) some combination of the three.
There have always been entities, classes, and attributes that have multiple accepted names, and there have always been name changes in the face of new understanding or new fashions. Humans are perfectly capable of remembering that, for example, "Apatosaurus" is the proper name for what we used to call "Brontosaurus", or that "canola oil" is a less hackle-raising name for "rapeseed oil". It's our indexing systems and search engines that have problems, and ontological/semantic annotation can solve those problems quite handily.
...we could probably build and deploy a set of space telescopes with REALLY big primaries and REALLY big baselines. I'm talking big enough to resolve surface detail on this object, and objects much further away. I see a lot more payoff along that path, including pushing technologies that will make true interstellar probes more practical.
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Anyone who has ever worked with VMS (and RSX for that matter) know what programming freedom you had, and what the real programming is.
Yes. The freedom to spend all afternoon trying to count single and double quotes in DCL, making sure that they're properly mismatched in order to accomplish what you're trying to do.
And let's not forget QIO. "Hey, let's wrap an entire OS worth of functionality in one entry point, and just use a ginormous variable parameter list to sort it out!"
Not really, the relative velocities are sizeable, when you consider our rotation about our galactic centre. Imagine this fraction of a degree of rotation of the simultaneous space within spacetime, but taken out to the distance of 64 MLy - it's now a difference that is large in magnitude. (We should really do an exact calculation I suppose..)
Um, what? It sounds like you're saying that there's some significance to our angular velocity around our galactic center. I think that's not true.
If it were, imagine the relativistic effects from our angular velocity relative to the center of our planet, around which we revolve in a mere 24 hours. Projecting that out to a radius of 64 MLy, we trace out a circle with a circumference of 402 MLy in the span of a day, a rate of almost 150 billion times the speed of light.
Tell me more about the material from which these cables are made.
I was waxing nostalgic over computer storage myselkf the other day. My first home computer c.1978 used a 300 baud (10 bits/char => 30 char/sec) audio cassette for storage...
250bps for Level I BASIC, 500bps for Level II.
Man, that upgrade to a 100kbps floppy was like a dream come true...
I was intrigued with Sun's Fortress, but this has gone nowhere, and it is fundamentally flawed from the start in that it is tied to the JVM, which is no-no when it comes to high performance computing.
How's that again? I haven't seen any indication that CLR is better suited for HPC than the JVM. Not that I've looked extensively, mind you, but it seems like the two runtimes are not that far apart.
I remember experimenting with pulsed currents to generate phosphenes after reading a related SciAm article sometime in the 1980's. Set up a simple 555 pulse generator, use cotton pads with saline as contacts on your temples, and you can get some pretty cool light shows before it starts to tickle too much.
If this really is cutaneous stimulation, I'm perfectly comfortable building small current-limited supplies, and coming up with something that'll make good contact. I'm a little nervous about applying prolonged DC, though -- I'd expect to be generating chlorine (or nasty electrode chlorides) at one side and sodium hydroxide at the other, neither of which are good for the complexion.
I'm not game for sinking electrodes through my skull. Yet.
Keeping a permanent copy of every bad web site made by every bored teen is not actually useful, any more than keeping every grocery list, or to do list, or every piece of homework you ever did as a child. Some things simply don't have future value. The fact that we can keep things forever at near zero cost doesn't mean that we should keep things of near zero value. Let it go.
Problem one: "future value" can't be determined in the present. You can't know today what bits of ephemera will assume great importance next month, or next year, or next century, even if only for a single person.
The vast majority, of course, will remain unimportant. But those terabytes of trivia tossed every day might include the last words and thoughts of your parent or child killed in an accident, or footage of the teens casing your house for next week's burglary, or messages concerning the "arrangement" between a crooked developer and the state politician who'll be leading the Presidential race ten years down the road.
Problem two: we don't need to "forget", we need to ignore. The amount of data we produced in the last 48 hours is greater than the amount of data we (humanity) produced between 2003 and the beginning of time. Even if we persisted nothing for more than 24 hours, we'd still need extensive triage skills just to deal with the new stuff flooding past us. We can, and always will, apply that same triage to the things we retrieve from archives.
You're embarrassed about something you said 20 years ago? Welcome to adulthood. You can't unsay it, and you can't make other people forget it. You can demonstrate that you've learned something in the two subsequent decades. And when you encounter something stupid someone else said 20 years ago, you can give them the same benefit of the doubt -- if they're still saying the same thing, or still promoting that 20-year-old comment, you can (and should) form a bad impression of them; if they're saying the opposite, or specifically repudiating or apologizing for the earlier comment, your impression of them should improve.
Triage can be tuned, adjusted, improved as we learn more about what is and isn't important. Forgetting is absolute and irreversible. The potential cost of forgetting the wrong thing should often justify the known cost of keeping "everything".
...coming right up?
FTFA:
"We're trying to achieve the same power densities, the same energy densities as traditional lithium ion batteries, but we need to make the footprint much smaller," says Chang.
If these batteries are using a chemical process, they're limited to chemical energy densities, which can't get a whole lot higher than what we see today.
A white-hot iron rod will make your clothing burst into flames at a touch. A white-hot spark from your Dremel tool grinding that same rod will bounce right off your clothes, or your skin, without any effect or sensation. So, yeah, it would probably be sort of like that.
...build hardware that runs the MLCad package.
And I'll panic when it can write, build, and deploy MLCad from scratch.
Really? You're complaining about using the term "nano" to refer to structures bigger than molecules but smaller than the wavelength of light?
By the same token, everything that goes on in your body is based on bio-chemistry, and therefore "nanoscale by definition". But it's still useful to distinguish (for example) biochemical changes in bone digestion due to biphosphonates from microscopic changes in bone structure associated with osteoporosis from large-scale changes associated with being run over by a truck.
The nanoscale structure of battery electrodes, larger than individual molecules but smaller than the wavelength of visible light, is absolutely critical to optimizing battery performance. It's distinct from the battery's basic chemistry, it's distinct from gross electrode shape and size, and it's certainly distinct from the macroscopic and chemical changes "studied for ages" in association with corrosion.
People buy books at thrift stores and library sales because they love books.
More specifically, I and my family buy books at these places because we want to read them, or give them to someone who wants to read them.
People donate books to libraries because they want to share their love of books.
We donate books to libraries because we don't want to end up featured on "Hoarders", or on the local news.
If this becomes any popular, it will drive the price up for one thing; it will take the books from people who might pick one up because it's cheap, and love it, and put it in the hands of people who are trying to make a profit from it.
Only the "rarities" and the currently popular. Someone who might pick up a book because it's cheap, and love it, should be able to consummate that love as well with a mass-market printing as with a first edition. If it's being priced up because it's currently popular, it should also be relatively easy to find it in your library's circulating stock, and read it for absolutely free.
Because as with everything, it takes something that people do for love of knowledge, art, or craft, and pollute it with people who don't care for it at all, just for the money it represents.
Just like those scummy publishers who care only for profit, and who make books accessible to the public despite, not because of, their greed?
That is why you feel shame doing it. Not to mention that if this becomes really profitable, how long until publishers, editors and authors see the "lost profits" and crack down on it like they are doing with music and movies?
How are they going to "crack down" on legal resale of dumb, DRM-free physical artifacts? They've tried that already, and failed definitively.
...we can posit imaginary transparent stuff for the wire, hoses, and conduit as well. We can even imagine that we can tailor its refractive index so that it truly appears "invisible", not just "clear".
What if it treats oxygen as a poison and has developed the ability to remove it from the atmosphere and "fix it"
1. Oxygen is a poison. It's poisonous to us humans at high concentrations. It's toxic to many forms of life at normal concentrations -- and they were here on Earth well before us. In fact, it was their own disregard for sustainable growth and waste management that destroyed their ecosystem.
2. Everything fixes oxygen. It's continually being bound up by everything that breathes, everything that rusts, everything that burns, everything that rots.
I'm not a bit worried about things that evolve with no connection to Earth's biosphere. I'm very worried about things that evolve under the guidance of humans with modern genetic-manipulation equipment, an ever-improving grasp of genetic function, and a bad attitude toward some or all of contemporary civilization.
I came here to say this. If I'm strapping on a backpack tank, I'll pass up the H2O2 in favor of, well, just about anything else. Certainly, jet fuel and propane are positively benign by comparison.
...had a kit project to build a "digital" video camera. The "MOS sensor" that it used was, as I recall, essentially a DRAM with a transparent cover -- in fact, people were prying the lids off standard DRAM chips to use them as image sensors. (Decades later, I verified that you could detect bit-flips in an erased EPROM when you hit it with a red laser pointer. Forget high-ISO night photography; this was probably somewhere around ISO 0.5.)
You could then presumably build an interface to load the image into your Altair 8800 box, presented in the previous month's issue. At some point in the next few months, they even ran a project for a bit-mapped graphic display. Those were the glory days of Popular Electronics.
In fact, there are probably a number of business-process patents that could be construed as covering this technique. Surely some of them are licenseable or for sale.
The limit on drive capacity is not switching speed, but focal spot diameter. If this is a 405nm laser, its minimum focus spot will be exactly the same size as the spot of existing Blu-Ray lasers (they're 405nm, too). What am I missing?
Heh. Here in the US, the credit card companies have enough muscle to forbid merchants from collecting a premium. There's been talk of passing laws to change this, but when you're proposing a law that entrenched interests can characterize as "imposing extra fees on consumers", it's pretty hard to get much traction. So, merchants continue to pass the cost along in higher prices, and people who use cash or checks end up subsidizing all those credit card "benefits".
You're still thinking in print terms. 100dpi is certainly coarser than normal visual acuity, but the iPad's gestures make panning and zooming very quick and fluid. When I want to see finer detail (or, more frequently, when I want to click on a small link), I just zoom in.
I'd certainly love to have a 300dpi display (actually, 200dpi would be fine for my older eyes), but the combination of antialiasing and pan/zoom on the iPad works out very nicely for me. I like what I've seen of e-ink, but I'd really miss that capability, and I think it'll be a while before that level of dynamic refreshing and multitouch interaction is widespread in commercial e-ink devices.
...like how to make one that's directional. You're talking about eavesdropping on an omnidirectional transmission, not one targeted at us.
We can pick up Voyager's 20-watt transmission (from a 3.4-meter reflector pointed straight at us) with a 34-meter dish at a range of over 1/1000 of a light year. To get the same signal strength at four light-years, you could bump up the power to 300 megawatts, or you could make the transmitter a lot more directional, or you could make the receiving antenna bigger, or (most sensibly) some combination of the three.
There have always been entities, classes, and attributes that have multiple accepted names, and there have always been name changes in the face of new understanding or new fashions. Humans are perfectly capable of remembering that, for example, "Apatosaurus" is the proper name for what we used to call "Brontosaurus", or that "canola oil" is a less hackle-raising name for "rapeseed oil". It's our indexing systems and search engines that have problems, and ontological/semantic annotation can solve those problems quite handily.
...we could probably build and deploy a set of space telescopes with REALLY big primaries and REALLY big baselines. I'm talking big enough to resolve surface detail on this object, and objects much further away. I see a lot more payoff along that path, including pushing technologies that will make true interstellar probes more practical.
...all the researchers who do everything in the open and with proper anonymization.
While "common sense" is terribly rare in government, "exceptions" are never in short supply.