Not quite... a reflecting surface has to absorb all the energy and then re-emit it when it is reflected.
How's that again?
A mirror doesn't "absorb all the energy and then re-emit it", at least not in any meaningful sense. What it does do is reflect 90% or 97% or 99% of the incident light, and convert the rest to heat. 10% of 15KW is 1.5KW, which (when deposited in a thin optical coating) will heat things up pretty quickly. And god help you if your mirror has gotten dusty, or smeared, or fingerprinted. (Think about the dire warnings about fingerprints on a mere 300-watt halogen bulb.)
Just a sidenote, what is the rationale for making the IPv6 address spaces for LANs so freaking large? It's unlikely even the largest of organizations will need an address space as big as the entire IPv4 address space, much less individuals....
Unless you're willing to ban fire, water, air, and dirt, you're not going to be able to stop eeevildoers. All you'll do is make the hobby more inconvenient, dangerous, and dirty.
It's all just so tragically silly and pointless. We've cut off an entire branch of childhood curiosity and achievement, just to pretend we're doing something about "drugs" and "terrorists". Meanwhile, alcohol and tobacco are freely available OTC, and an extremely volatile, toxic and energetic material perfectly suited for large-scale fuel-air explosions is dropping back toward $2/gallon here in the US.
By an odd coincidence, 994 is the number of matches I get for my own name (as it's always appeared in my.sig). The earliest match is from 1999. If I search on an email address I used earlier, I get matches going back to 1991 -- with my name appearing just as it does in the other posts. Trying various other addresses, I can get back as far as 1990, but I'm pretty sure I was posting back in the mid-'80's.
Without the requirement for search warrants (obtained from an impartial judge), the police, FBI, or other government officials/politicians can go from house-to-house-to-house taking PCs simply because they feel like it. Do YOU want to be a victim of these random, harassing, and very inconvenient confiscations. I certainly Do Not! The Constitution was written because that's precisely what was happened in the 1760 and 1770s, and the American people were stick and tired of the bullshit.
Who cared if the Brits were confiscating PCs, with no electricity to run them anyhow?
This could be the "ultimate miniaturization of computer memory", if not for the fact that each nucleus is wrapped in 15 electrons and about a trillion times its own volume of empty space. Unless, of course, they've found a way to contain degenerate matter and selectively polarize individual nuclei therein -- and I'm thinking compressing matter to degeneracy would tend to shorten those T1 times pretty substantially.
Apple spends 9/10 of their time marketing. Always hasl. Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work arguably won't get the laptop marketed for its Word processing and gaming use.
On the other hand, based on my own observations, Mr. and Ms. Professional Visual Neuroscientist seem to choose Mac over PC at a rate approaching 50%, at least in the few meetings I've attended.
I'm also Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work. No serious colorimetric work is yet being done with LCDs for the very same reason: a green dot needs to be exactly the same green whether it's presented in the middle of the screen or at the edge. With CRTs that's the case. With LCDs, assuming the viewing position is the same, the viewing angle changes slightly between those two screen locations, and the color is altered.
Under what circumstances would you actually try to do colorimetry off a screen, instead of analyzing the source data? I can't imagine why you would measure an analog rendering of digital data, confounded by ambient light, dirt on the screen and so forth, instead of just going to the digital data.
Our lab works with MRI neuro datasets, and most of the quantitative stuff happens in Matlab or ImageJ.
I haven't minded the glossy screen on my MacBook as much as I expected, but I was counting on buying a matte MBP, hopefully with better than 1440x900 resolution. I have a sinking feeling that they canned the matte displays because they like the glossy cosmetics better, especially when the screen is blank.
...a car with anti-lock brakes still rear-ends someone?
"Cars that drive themselves" won't arrive as a new option in model year 20XX. They'll encroach bit by bit, following in the footsteps of automatic spark advance, electric starters, power steering, power brakes, automatic transmission, cruise control, electronic fuel injection, anti-lock brakes, traction control, collision avoidance, self-parking...
When you finally do get a car that can "drive itself", you'll probably be too busy talking on your cell phone and using your extended navigation/information center to notice.
Maybe, but that video smacks of well-rehearsed demoware to me. (Especially the "Mississippi" part.) I'd like to give the demonstrator a paragraph of plain text, or better yet a block of Perl, and see how well an expert user of his input scheme fares with it.
To be honest, the TouchStream keyboard is much better than anything Apple currently offers. But it's still not as efficient for typing as a conventional keyboard -- you take a large and unavoidable hit when you give up the tactile feedback (key texture, key travel) of a physical keyboard. The TouchStream was a win in spite of this, because it knocked out my RSI from constantly reaching for the mouse or modifier keys; for others, the zero-force typing was what made the difference.
Even with FingerWorks magic, though, you can't touch-type on something the size of an iPhone. The Swype method looks promising; there are lots of other gestural text-entry schemes as well. Coupled with sophisticated predictive mechanisms, they can get quite efficient.
Apple really had nothing to do with the new touch screen technologies. The just happened to be in the right place at the right time as third party companies came about perfecting them. The only reason multi touch has become so prevalent now is because patents on them have expired so they are effectively free game. Apple can't hold onto it, and everyone else is free to exploit it.
Anybody can build a touch screen that lets you poke at big static buttons, or lets you try to fatfinger a virtual keyboard. Only Apple has the FingerWorks patents to do high-quality, high-usability multitouch gestures.
Disclaimer: I've been using a FingerWorks TouchStream keyboard for more than five years, so I'm a big fan of the technology. I've also been a Mac user since 1985 or so. But when Apple bought FingerWorks, they completely shut down all sales and support, leaving the existing user base swinging in the breeze, so I'm a bit... conflicted.
Making liquid oxygen is very easy due to the fact that the boiling point of oxygen is a couple of degrees higher than the boiling point of nitrogen: get pressurized oxygen in a closed system and cool it down with liquid nitrogen until it liquefies. Congratulations, you're done.
Yes, congratulations. Now, for the record, where did you get the pressurized oxygen? You probably bought it from Air Products, BOC, or the like. How did they get it? By fractionating liquid air.
You can make liquid oxygen by cooling air with liquid nitrogen. In fact, if you just let LN2 sit out in an open-mouth dewar, O2 will preferentially condense into it, and it will gradually "turn into" LOX. But first it has to condense out the water vapor from the air, which generates a lot of heat, which evaporates a lot of LN2. Then it has to condense out the CO2, not that that's terribly significant. To collect a little bit of LOX, you end up boiling off an awful lot of LN2.
It works out a lot better to filter air, then cool it enough to condense out the water, then maybe cool it enough to condense out the CO2, then filter it again, then cool it enough to condense it, then run it through a big, well-insulated fractionating column to separate the nitrogen (near the top), oxygen (near the bottom) and argon (nearer the bottom). When you start with thoroughly clean and dry air, the process can get pretty efficient. But to get good efficiency, you need a BIG installation, and that costs big bucks. It works out a lot cheaper to let BOC or AP build the facility, and then buy their products.
More or less. Ours has a pair of really big (but not 125K gallon) LOX storage tanks (along with tanks for liquid nitrogen and, believe it or not, liquid nitrous oxide). Oxygen cylinders are large, bulky, heavy, and of limited capacity. Instead, the hospital sets up a big tank outside, along with a big set of heat exchangers, and pipes the gas throughout the complex.
There's also an emergency oxygen hookup station where they can connect directly to a LOX tanker if something happens to both their storage installations.
You haven't been paying close attention on the highway. It gets shipped all over the place in semi tankers, a few thousand gallons at a time.
It may not be "hard" to make, but it costs a lot of energy, and a fair amount of capital investment. The hospital here goes through quite a lot of it, but it's still cheaper to buy it than to make it.
What are they going to use to FILL that thing? A huge convoy of tanker trucks? Does it sit by a rail spur? Or are they going to colocate a liquefaction plant?
I suspect whatever power is needed for playing MP3's and keeping a browser up is typical for most non-business users.
Is this "keeping a browser up displaying some text", which consumes almost no processor cycles, or "keeping a browser up displaying a page lousy with Flash ads", which can easily busy out a 2GHz core?
Recall that bacteria have had around 4 billion years to turn Earth into a nanopocalyptic wasteland.
You mean like the Oxygen Catastrophe, where uncontrollably replicating microbiomachines saturated the atmosphere with a waste product so caustic that it rotted the very rocks out from under them?
1. Actual speeds based on DSL synch rate, may vary, and are not guaranteed. Many factors affect speed. Service and speed not available in all areas.
Wow, too bad for you. Verizon offered us an explicit QOS guarantee of 16Kbps bidirectional. That's right, their DSL is guaranteed to be at least half the speed of a 33.6K modem!
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite... a reflecting surface has to absorb all the energy and then re-emit it when it is reflected.
How's that again?
A mirror doesn't "absorb all the energy and then re-emit it", at least not in any meaningful sense. What it does do is reflect 90% or 97% or 99% of the incident light, and convert the rest to heat. 10% of 15KW is 1.5KW, which (when deposited in a thin optical coating) will heat things up pretty quickly. And god help you if your mirror has gotten dusty, or smeared, or fingerprinted. (Think about the dire warnings about fingerprints on a mere 300-watt halogen bulb.)
Just a sidenote, what is the rationale for making the IPv6 address spaces for LANs so freaking large? It's unlikely even the largest of organizations will need an address space as big as the entire IPv4 address space, much less individuals....
In fact, they should never need more than 640K.
Unless you're willing to ban fire, water, air, and dirt, you're not going to be able to stop eeevildoers. All you'll do is make the hobby more inconvenient, dangerous, and dirty.
It's all just so tragically silly and pointless. We've cut off an entire branch of childhood curiosity and achievement, just to pretend we're doing something about "drugs" and "terrorists". Meanwhile, alcohol and tobacco are freely available OTC, and an extremely volatile, toxic and energetic material perfectly suited for large-scale fuel-air explosions is dropping back toward $2/gallon here in the US.
By an odd coincidence, 994 is the number of matches I get for my own name (as it's always appeared in my .sig). The earliest match is from 1999. If I search on an email address I used earlier, I get matches going back to 1991 -- with my name appearing just as it does in the other posts. Trying various other addresses, I can get back as far as 1990, but I'm pretty sure I was posting back in the mid-'80's.
Yeah, broken.
Without the requirement for search warrants (obtained from an impartial judge), the police, FBI, or other government officials/politicians can go from house-to-house-to-house taking PCs simply because they feel like it. Do YOU want to be a victim of these random, harassing, and very inconvenient confiscations. I certainly Do Not! The Constitution was written because that's precisely what was happened in the 1760 and 1770s, and the American people were stick and tired of the bullshit.
Who cared if the Brits were confiscating PCs, with no electricity to run them anyhow?
This could be the "ultimate miniaturization of computer memory", if not for the fact that each nucleus is wrapped in 15 electrons and about a trillion times its own volume of empty space. Unless, of course, they've found a way to contain degenerate matter and selectively polarize individual nuclei therein -- and I'm thinking compressing matter to degeneracy would tend to shorten those T1 times pretty substantially.
Does the IPv6 standard compel redundancy, or merely permit it?
I bought the last one three weeks ago, at full price, and am now stuck with it since the two-week period for returning just finished.
The new machines have been expected for months, and the Tuesday Oct 14 release date has been widely forecast for over a month.
No only are Macs 500$ more expensive than comparable PCs, but you're also at the mercy of the manufacturer when it comes to resale value.
How long should Apple hold off releasing new systems after you buy your computer?
Apple spends 9/10 of their time marketing. Always hasl. Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work arguably won't get the laptop marketed for its Word processing and gaming use.
On the other hand, based on my own observations, Mr. and Ms. Professional Visual Neuroscientist seem to choose Mac over PC at a rate approaching 50%, at least in the few meetings I've attended.
I'm also Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work. No serious colorimetric work is yet being done with LCDs for the very same reason: a green dot needs to be exactly the same green whether it's presented in the middle of the screen or at the edge. With CRTs that's the case. With LCDs, assuming the viewing position is the same, the viewing angle changes slightly between those two screen locations, and the color is altered.
Under what circumstances would you actually try to do colorimetry off a screen, instead of analyzing the source data? I can't imagine why you would measure an analog rendering of digital data, confounded by ambient light, dirt on the screen and so forth, instead of just going to the digital data.
Our lab works with MRI neuro datasets, and most of the quantitative stuff happens in Matlab or ImageJ.
I haven't minded the glossy screen on my MacBook as much as I expected, but I was counting on buying a matte MBP, hopefully with better than 1440x900 resolution. I have a sinking feeling that they canned the matte displays because they like the glossy cosmetics better, especially when the screen is blank.
If it's inherited from the mother, how exactly did your grandfather pass it down to your mother?
...a car with anti-lock brakes still rear-ends someone?
"Cars that drive themselves" won't arrive as a new option in model year 20XX. They'll encroach bit by bit, following in the footsteps of automatic spark advance, electric starters, power steering, power brakes, automatic transmission, cruise control, electronic fuel injection, anti-lock brakes, traction control, collision avoidance, self-parking...
When you finally do get a car that can "drive itself", you'll probably be too busy talking on your cell phone and using your extended navigation/information center to notice.
Maybe, but that video smacks of well-rehearsed demoware to me. (Especially the "Mississippi" part.) I'd like to give the demonstrator a paragraph of plain text, or better yet a block of Perl, and see how well an expert user of his input scheme fares with it.
To be honest, the TouchStream keyboard is much better than anything Apple currently offers. But it's still not as efficient for typing as a conventional keyboard -- you take a large and unavoidable hit when you give up the tactile feedback (key texture, key travel) of a physical keyboard. The TouchStream was a win in spite of this, because it knocked out my RSI from constantly reaching for the mouse or modifier keys; for others, the zero-force typing was what made the difference.
Even with FingerWorks magic, though, you can't touch-type on something the size of an iPhone. The Swype method looks promising; there are lots of other gestural text-entry schemes as well. Coupled with sophisticated predictive mechanisms, they can get quite efficient.
Apple really had nothing to do with the new touch screen technologies. The just happened to be in the right place at the right time as third party companies came about perfecting them. The only reason multi touch has become so prevalent now is because patents on them have expired so they are effectively free game. Apple can't hold onto it, and everyone else is free to exploit it.
I beg to differ.
More Apple FingerWorks Patents Surface
...as of August 2008, [Elias and Westerman] still file patents for Apple, Inc.
Apple wants you to control a touch panel or computer with almost anything
Multi-Touch Technology And Where It's Going Next...Oh And Apple Didn't Invent It Either!
Anybody can build a touch screen that lets you poke at big static buttons, or lets you try to fatfinger a virtual keyboard. Only Apple has the FingerWorks patents to do high-quality, high-usability multitouch gestures.
Disclaimer: I've been using a FingerWorks TouchStream keyboard for more than five years, so I'm a big fan of the technology. I've also been a Mac user since 1985 or so. But when Apple bought FingerWorks, they completely shut down all sales and support, leaving the existing user base swinging in the breeze, so I'm a bit... conflicted.
Making liquid oxygen is very easy due to the fact that the boiling point of oxygen is a couple of degrees higher than the boiling point of nitrogen: get pressurized oxygen in a closed system and cool it down with liquid nitrogen until it liquefies. Congratulations, you're done.
Yes, congratulations. Now, for the record, where did you get the pressurized oxygen? You probably bought it from Air Products, BOC, or the like. How did they get it? By fractionating liquid air.
You can make liquid oxygen by cooling air with liquid nitrogen. In fact, if you just let LN2 sit out in an open-mouth dewar, O2 will preferentially condense into it, and it will gradually "turn into" LOX. But first it has to condense out the water vapor from the air, which generates a lot of heat, which evaporates a lot of LN2. Then it has to condense out the CO2, not that that's terribly significant. To collect a little bit of LOX, you end up boiling off an awful lot of LN2.
It works out a lot better to filter air, then cool it enough to condense out the water, then maybe cool it enough to condense out the CO2, then filter it again, then cool it enough to condense it, then run it through a big, well-insulated fractionating column to separate the nitrogen (near the top), oxygen (near the bottom) and argon (nearer the bottom). When you start with thoroughly clean and dry air, the process can get pretty efficient. But to get good efficiency, you need a BIG installation, and that costs big bucks. It works out a lot cheaper to let BOC or AP build the facility, and then buy their products.
More or less. Ours has a pair of really big (but not 125K gallon) LOX storage tanks (along with tanks for liquid nitrogen and, believe it or not, liquid nitrous oxide). Oxygen cylinders are large, bulky, heavy, and of limited capacity. Instead, the hospital sets up a big tank outside, along with a big set of heat exchangers, and pipes the gas throughout the complex.
There's also an emergency oxygen hookup station where they can connect directly to a LOX tanker if something happens to both their storage installations.
You haven't been paying close attention on the highway. It gets shipped all over the place in semi tankers, a few thousand gallons at a time.
It may not be "hard" to make, but it costs a lot of energy, and a fair amount of capital investment. The hospital here goes through quite a lot of it, but it's still cheaper to buy it than to make it.
What are they going to use to FILL that thing? A huge convoy of tanker trucks? Does it sit by a rail spur? Or are they going to colocate a liquefaction plant?
Exactly. Foreign meme is foreign, apparently.
...I've ever seen. They didn't even bother to antialias the selection around the legs.
I suspect whatever power is needed for playing MP3's and keeping a browser up is typical for most non-business users.
Is this "keeping a browser up displaying some text", which consumes almost no processor cycles, or "keeping a browser up displaying a page lousy with Flash ads", which can easily busy out a 2GHz core?
Recall that bacteria have had around 4 billion years to turn Earth into a nanopocalyptic wasteland.
You mean like the Oxygen Catastrophe, where uncontrollably replicating microbiomachines saturated the atmosphere with a waste product so caustic that it rotted the very rocks out from under them?
That, and for my family to stop saying "megabytes" when they mean "gigabytes".
1. Actual speeds based on DSL synch rate, may vary, and are not guaranteed. Many factors affect speed. Service and speed not available in all areas.
Wow, too bad for you. Verizon offered us an explicit QOS guarantee of 16Kbps bidirectional. That's right, their DSL is guaranteed to be at least half the speed of a 33.6K modem!