Very nice. I've been waiting for the crowds to decline a bit so I can see the new museum without being run over by mobs of kids. It's good that people are actually going. Few went to the old California Academy of Sciences Museum, with dusty dioramas from the 1930s.
What you really want is a Berg breadboarding kit. This is the pro version of a Mecchano set. Expect to pay something in low four figures for a full kit, although you can buy parts separately.
The usual suppliers are Stock Drive Products, Small Parts, Inc., Berg, Boston Gear, and McMaster. The first two mostly stock miniature parts; the last two offer larger sized components. Incidentally, if you haven't worked with gears that carry significant loads, go to the Boston Gear site and work through their "Gearology" online course.
If you're going to do kinetic sculpture, go to MOMA in New York and see what from the 1960s is still running.
All that work by several people over three years to make $500K? There were apparently more people involved than the two indicted, and they had some operating costs. So they might have made $50K/year per participant, if they were lucky. And they had all the hassles of running a business. Even without the "going to jail" part, this was a lose.
They probably would have done better running a legit trucking brokerage, which they clearly knew how to do. They had to do all the selling and paperwork a real broker would do. Worse,
their scam model didn't allow for much repeat business, so they had to keep hustling to find new customers.
The big squeeze is already underway, and it's in marginal ad-supported businesses.
Nobody has made real money with banners in years.
It's becoming clear that while ads associated with search results have value, all those vaguely relevant ads that Google puts on the web sites of others don't really generate many sales.
Likely outcomes for the next few years:
Any social networking site that doesn't have positive cash flow right now is toast.
Wikipedia will do fine, because it's cheap to run. Wikia, though, might not make it.
If you're dependent on "cloud computing" on someone else's cloud, be very afraid.
Be prepared to migrate your web sites to another hosting service on short notice, in case your provider tanks.
(If you haven't done so already, make absolutely certain that you have full control of your domains, and that they're not in any way controlled by your hosting company.)
Corporate migration to Vista will just about stop. The people who need it have already converted, and nobody else needs to spend the money, especially if a hardware upgrade is required. Microsoft will cave on XP life extension until Windows 7 works.
PCs and laptops will get cheaper, holding steady at about current levels of capability.
We're not going to see huge numbers of cores on very many desktops.
Linux will continue to grow in the server space. Probably not on the desktop, though.
More MySQL, less Oracle.
Expect supply chain problems. Look up your key suppliers in Dun and Bradstreet. When D&B says they're in trouble, get ready.
Companies that do something Really Useful will do OK. We're already seeing growth in previously boring areas, like railroading. "Bling" is so over.
The 2008 holiday season is going to really suck in retail. "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without" - U.S. Government National Recovery Administration, 1933.
On-line sales of routine items may grow, as more brick-and-mortar retail chains tank.
When the dust settles, the financial-services sector will be about half the size it was in the mid-2008.
Correction: they're not using one of the exotic 3M fluids; what they're using is more like a specialty synthetic transformer oil.
Somebody over at Extreme Overclocking not only used HFE-7500, they cooled it down to -100F. This fluid remains a flowing liquid from -148F to +262F, so it's possible to use it in an unpressurized cooling system and without the coolant boiling off when the system isn't running.
Now that was a cooling project. They built a case from scratch, using a plasma cutter and TIG welding. The system has two compressors, 1.5HP and 2.5HP, which means the cooling system alone takes about 5 kilowatts to drive. There's plumbing, gauges, and expansion tanks. But unlike the liquid nitrogen and dry ice projects, which are more like demos, this can run continuously without adding fluids. Although, at 5KW in, MIPS/watt are rather low.
Meanwhile, on the real piracy front, the MV Faina is still being held by Somali pirates. It was surrounded by US warships weeks ago. Now some additional NATO warships are surrounding it. The pirates want $20 million to release the mostly-Ukrainian crew, and Ukrainians have collected the money. This sort of piracy happens frequently, but this ship is unusual because it's loaded with old Soviet tanks and other weapons.
This has been dragging on for weeks. Neither the US nor NATO wants to take the casualties and risk the hostages to take the ship back.
But the situation will soon change. The Russian Navy is sending one warship, the Neustrashimiy, to the scene; it just passed through the Suez Canal and should reach the target by the end of the week. The Russians aren't saying what they intend to do, but the general consensus is that when they get done, the pirates will be dead. The hostages may be dead too, but that won't bother Putin, or, indeed, many Russians.
OK, you want social interaction, we'll give you social interaction.
The big time-sink games, like Everquest and WoW, where it's necessary to get everybody on line at the same time for a raid, could be made even more intrusive with a mobile aspect. If someone raids your fortress, frantic messages go out to all the defenders phones, demanding that they get on line immediately and help with the defense.
When you really want to annoy another guild, raid them at 4 AM.
Jaron Lanier is complaining that Wikipedia listed him as a "film director". He did make a film once. Apparently it sucked, and he's embarrassed about it. He's whining because Wikipedia mentions that part of his life, and he'd like to delete that from his resume.
Damnit! That system is a word-for-word description of my old idea for detecting stealth/stealthy aircraft- I came up with it in low-observables/composites class a few years back.
GEODSS is unsuitable for detecting low-flying aircraft. The field of view with big telescopes is too small. Sites have to be installed in high-altitude locations with good seeing.
It's for looking at targets much further out. There are smaller electro-optical trackers for anti-aircraft use.
The most useful approach for detecting stealthed aircraft is
bistatic radar, a subject which tends not to be discussed much in the open literature. Ordinary "monostatic" radar has the transmitter and the receiver in the same location. Stealthed aircraft are designed to have a very small radar reflection of the incoming beam back in the direction from which it came. That's why the weird aircraft geometries. But only to a limited extent do they absorb radar beam energy. Much of it is reflected off in other directions. Bistatic radars, where the transmitter(s) and receivers(s) are in different locations, can pick up those reflections. There are some clever ideas in this space. But I digress.
The problem with soft-landing heavy objects on Mars is that there's not enough atmosphere for aerobraking and parachutes to do the job, so the approaches used for Earth re-entry won't work. There's too much gravity for landing on rockets. as with lunar landers, without most of the payload being landing fuel. The problem gets harder as the mass goes up. This was realized only about five years ago, to the embarrassment of some within NASA. So there are now various complicated hybrid schemes, like this.
One bad feature of this design is that the actual landing forces have to be taken by the rover's suspension. Previous designs had the rover inside the landing module, not underneath it. That approach uses crushable components (air bags, crushable blocks, collapsible legs, etc.) to cushion the landing. With this "flying crane" approach, the autopilot has to do a really, really smooth landing or the rover will be broken.
It's probably possible to fix everything except hard drives and speakers, but it may not be worth the trouble. There are companies that do this, but they usually are called in by flooded industrial plants, not consumers.
You need at least modest repair facilities. A small tank with a stirrer or agitator is a big help. Things like PC boards can be rinsed off with deionized or distilled water. If that's not enough, put them in the tank with deionized water and dishwashing detergent, and agitate for a while. An ultrasonic cleaner is useful but not essential. Allow to drain, then dry with a hair dryer.
It's helpful to have a test bench with a very low current fast-acting circuit breaker for initial power up. (An old trick: wire an outlet in series with a switch and a lamp socket, and put in a big incandescent bulb, like 150 watts. For first power up, plug into this rig.
If there's a short, all that happens is that the bulb lights up. If the load isn't drawing much current, there's very little voltage drop, because incandescents have a low resistance when cold.) Have a CO2 fire extinguisher handy.
Non-ball-bearing fans may have rusted and probably will have lost their lubrication. If they'll spin freely by hand, give them a try; if not, or they're too noisy, replace as needed.
Devices with potentiometer knobs may need the pots cleaned with spray-on control cleaner. There's also spray-on connector cleaner; you'll need a can of that, too.
Dry out the hard drives with a hair dryer, and try to power them up. They might still work long enough to get the data off. Hard drive internal cleaning is possible, but it has to be done by specialists in a clean room at far more expense than the cost of a new drive.
It's only done to recover the data; the damaged drive is read once and discarded.
CD/DVD drives may or may not have survived. The odds are poor, but the drives are cheap.
When you reassemble a computer, you'll need to run all the diagnostics. You'll need to buy one of the better PC hardware diagnostic programs (not a Windows diagnostic program) that will boot up cold.
And then you'll need to reinstall all the software, starting with the operating system.
Audio amplifiers and such should be completely recoverable.
I don't know what to do about large flat-panel displays. Ask the manufacturer.
Zinc, copper, and mild steel, all of which are likely to be found on a circuit board, will all corrode slowly in deionized water. You don't get mineral deposits from deionized water, and it's nonconductive, but it's not noncorrosive.
Here's the main claim from the patent:
7,414,845
Attlesey, et al. August 19, 2008
Circuit board assembly for a liquid submersion cooled electronic device
1. A liquid submersion cooled computer, comprising:
a case having a liquid-tight interior space;
a lid removably connected to the case for closing a top of the interior space,
the lid including at least one pass-through connector;
a motherboard disposed in the interior space and attached to the lid,
the motherboard having a top end with electrical contacts engaged with the pass-through connector that permits inputs/outputs and/or power to be passed to the motherboard;
a plurality of components mounted on the motherboard, including one or more of a plurality of processors,
a plurality of memory cards,
a plurality of graphics cards, and a plurality of power supplies;
a dielectric cooling liquid within the interior space and submerging at least one of the components on the motherboard so as to be in direct contact therewith;
and an impingement cooling system that includes a plurality of tubes for directing a flow of the dielectric cooling liquid directly onto two or more of the plurality of components.
The only novelty here seems to be in putting the connectors in the removable lid.
Incidentally, the cooling liquid isn't an "oil" at all. It's one of 3M's Novec engineered fluids, probably HFE-7500, which is 3-ethoxy-1,1,1,2,3,4,4,5,5,6,6,6-dodecafluoro-2-trifluoromethyl-hexane. It's usable for cooling up to 150C, nonflammable, does not irritate skin, does not contribute to global warming, ozone depletion, or smog, and the MSDS even says "Ingestion: no health effects are expected". 3M developed it as a replacement for PCBs and perfluorocarbons like Fluorinert. So it can be used safely by the idiots who overclock.
Interestingly, the US has had, for several decades, a system which can detect UFOs - GEODSS, the Ground Based-Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System. Each GEODSS site (there are three currently active, plus a mobile unit) has a pair of 40-inch telescopes. These were the first fully computerized telescopes, working since the 1980s. The telescopes scan the sky every night. They can detect moving bright objects as streaks, but there's more capability than that. They have a star atlas, and know what should be in each image, so anything that shouldn't be there is detected. If a known star is missing, that's interesting too; it may indicate a dark object. There are two telescopes, so for low-orbit objects, they can get parallax. Multiple sites can be coupled together to get parallax on more distant objects. They can even use one telescope with a laser to illuminate satellites while taking a picture with the other. This is how the USAF finds new satellites, near-earth asteroids, and nonmetallic space junk. The system was recnelty upgraded to use CCD imagers (it used to be tube camera based) and to use better alignment algorithms, so it's now both more sensitive and more accurate.
This is all tied to NORAD in Colorado Springs. GEODSS knows what an incoming ICBM trajectory looks like, and if it ever sees one, NORAD gets notified, without any action from the GEODSS site operators.
GEODSS is a real, live, functional UFO detection system that's been running for decades. If anything big enough to be interesting was anywhere near the planet for more than a few hours, it would be noticed. Even the target didn't reflect radar or light, it could be detected because it would occasionally occult a star.
Ever have dreams with jaggies? Delamination? Compression artifacts? Bad physics simulation? I used to get that when I was doing 3D animation. It's an intensity thing; if you do animation, you spend too much time looking at the same thing, very closely, in detail, at slow speed. So it goes into the material used to make up dreams.
The classic site was Voice of Jihad, but that's been more or less dead for a while. Back in August, it was apparently taken over by some McCain supporter. Now it's a misconfigured shared-IP site on Dreamhost.
bin Laden's annual video didn't get much press this year. He's released his 2008 video, and it's 87 minutes long, but it's hard to find. Reuters has a summary..
I suspect that the main reason there's pressure to suppress his videos is that he always has something tellingly negative to say about Bush. This year, bin Laden's sound bite is "And in fact, the subject of the Mujahideen has become an inseparable part of the speech of your leader and the effects and signs are not hidden."
It's worth remembering that the bin Laden family supported Bush's first presidential campaign. In 1978, Bush and Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, founded Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas.
Sometimes one wonders if the plan was to get an incompetent into the US presidency, then apply enough pressure to make him overreact. A pre 9-11 bio of bin Laden, "The Man who Declared War on America", has quotes from him indicating that he felt America needed to be corrupted before it could be taken down, and outlined what needed to be done to make that happen. All the family had to do was to get someone in office who thought tax cuts would fix anything, get him to overspend on the wrong war, and wait for the US economy to collapse.
We may yet see a "Mission Accomplished" from bin Laden.
scientology is not a religion, it's a business. if you want to drive them out of business, compete with them.
Scientology likes to pretend they are a religion, which holds them back. They're not keeping up with scientific progress. The "E-meter" measures skin resistance, the least useful component of a polygraph. By now, they should have some wireless, Bluetooth-enabled device that reads pulse, respiration, and, for tradition's sake, skin resistance. Someday brainwave monitoring might be added. If you have those measurements, you can read stress relatively well, especially once you have a baseline for the individual. This would allow "auditing" via the Internet. I wonder if Apple would allow a Scientology app for the iPhone.
In other words, Scientology needs a hardware/software upgrade, and they can't do one because they're a "revealed religion".
Another piece of software Scientology should have out is described in Hubbard's "How to Live though an Executive". This is a book on business organization, of all things. There's a whole communication system described, much like a trouble ticket system. It's basically a system to make sure that when something is ordered, it actually gets done. Successful completion is checked off within the system, but by third parties, not the ones doing the work, while trouble reports float upward. It's a bit rigid for use in some organizations, but it might be useful for, say, people running big equipment farms and networks.
But it's 1940s technology, with forms and boards and hooks and rubber stamps and carbon copies. You'd think that Scientology would have this available as an online service. But no, they don't. As far as I know, they don't even use such a system in-house. Again, they've failed to keep up with the technology.
Scientology has a "Religious Technology Center", but it's not an R&D operation. It's more like a cross between the RIAA and the Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the doctrine enforcement unit of the Vatican). They're stuck with Hubbard's technology: "With all Scientology churches bound to minister Dianetics and Scientology technologies in full compliance with their trademark licenses, the entire hierarchy up to the Church of Scientology International is self-correcting and ensures pure and orthodox Scientology.... RTC investigates any departures from that standard administration and ensures that orthodoxy is restored."
They do have competition, in a sense. There's the "est" - Forum - Landmark operation, which has been lightly brainwashing people since the 1970s. It's been called a cult, but it's more like Amway. There were more things like that back in the 1970s, but most of the people vulnerable to that sort of thing seem to have gone off to the Christian right, so the market for such cults is down.
On a scale of 10 for drawing, Tintin is a 10, Girl Genius Online is a 9, Megatokyo is an 8, Penny Arcade is a 6, and these cartoons are around 1.5.
As for humor, if you think those are funny, go see "Sex Drive", in theaters now. It's an R-rated sex comedy aimed at 14 year olds. Sort of like National Lampoon without the funny.
I don't really understand what point you're trying to make.
The point is that the damage is worse that originally reported. Early reports indicated that the connections to a magnet had failed and the magnet had quenched, without damage to the magnet. That by itself wouldn't be too hard to fix, and probably could have been done in place. But, as it turns out, there was considerable damage to other magnets and vacuum lines. All this is in an underground tunnel, so access is tough. Especially since the LHC has less working room in the tunnel
than most other big accelerators.
The magnet assemblies are cylinders about 14m long, with both the superconducting coils and all the supporting vacuum and cryogenic plumbing. Now, several of those units have to be disconnected, moved carefully onto a transport car, moved very slowly to the big lift shaft, hauled up to the surface, repaired, returned to the tunnel, reconnected, and recommissioned.
Each one of those steps is a big, tough job.
Early papers claimed that a magnet quench would cause a few hours of downtime, not a few months.
The Tesla is a great idea, but they tried too hard to make it really fast.
The original idea was to have an air-cooled electric motor and a one-speed transmission.
But they couldn't quite get the top speed they wanted, which was somewhere above 125. So they went to a two-speed
transmission, and the first transmissions wore out rapidly. Then they went back to
a one-speed transmission, and tried water-cooling the motor so they could pour more
current into it. This ran up their costs, delayed shipping of the product, and made
the thing more complex. If they'd settle for a top speed of 110 MPH, the thing
would be much easier. It would still have the acceleration.
More fundamentally, "bling" is dead. It died about two weeks ago. The luxury industry is terrified right now. It's very clear that we're in for a long, worldwide recession.
Expensive status symbols are so over.
I see Tesla cars on the road regularly. But that's because I live near the Silicon Valley dealership. I think they demo the thing by driving past my house and out to Canada Road near Crystal Springs Reservoir, which has a nice scenic route with little traffic where they can speed. I just hope they don't wipe out a bicyclist out there.
They do "woosh" by without engine noise, as advertised.
Their games require you to run "Impulse", and the "Impulse Dock", which is a browser-like client that only talks to Stardock. It has blogs, downloads, and such, and is required for updates to their games. It's like one of those background services required to run many games, only it's in your face.
It's worse than I'd thought. They may have to pull quite a few magnets out of the tunnel for repair, and some sheered off their mountings.
There's a lot of energy stored in those superconducting magnets. A magnet quench, where superconductivity is lost, is a violent event, even when the electrical safeties all work properly, as they did here. The magnet heats up suddenly, and boils the liquid helium. That blasts into the vacuum insulation cavity, setting off further quenches in nearby magnets. The pressures were high enough to blow out relief disks (as planned) and damage the vacuum valves to adjacent sections (not expected.).
None of this is about the physics. It's all plumbing and electrical work.
Considering that Google charges $50/yr/user for business email, they have far too many long outages. At that price point, they should be fully redundant across multiple data centers.
Welcome to "cloud computing". It's not your cloud.
"Hey! You! Get off of my cloud
Don't hang around 'cause two's a crowd
On my cloud." - some '60s band.
Slashdot Mirror
Very nice. I've been waiting for the crowds to decline a bit so I can see the new museum without being run over by mobs of kids. It's good that people are actually going. Few went to the old California Academy of Sciences Museum, with dusty dioramas from the 1930s.
What you really want is a Berg breadboarding kit. This is the pro version of a Mecchano set. Expect to pay something in low four figures for a full kit, although you can buy parts separately.
The usual suppliers are Stock Drive Products, Small Parts, Inc., Berg, Boston Gear, and McMaster. The first two mostly stock miniature parts; the last two offer larger sized components. Incidentally, if you haven't worked with gears that carry significant loads, go to the Boston Gear site and work through their "Gearology" online course.
If you're going to do kinetic sculpture, go to MOMA in New York and see what from the 1960s is still running.
All that work by several people over three years to make $500K? There were apparently more people involved than the two indicted, and they had some operating costs. So they might have made $50K/year per participant, if they were lucky. And they had all the hassles of running a business. Even without the "going to jail" part, this was a lose.
They probably would have done better running a legit trucking brokerage, which they clearly knew how to do. They had to do all the selling and paperwork a real broker would do. Worse, their scam model didn't allow for much repeat business, so they had to keep hustling to find new customers.
The big squeeze is already underway, and it's in marginal ad-supported businesses. Nobody has made real money with banners in years. It's becoming clear that while ads associated with search results have value, all those vaguely relevant ads that Google puts on the web sites of others don't really generate many sales.
Likely outcomes for the next few years:
Correction: they're not using one of the exotic 3M fluids; what they're using is more like a specialty synthetic transformer oil.
Somebody over at Extreme Overclocking not only used HFE-7500, they cooled it down to -100F. This fluid remains a flowing liquid from -148F to +262F, so it's possible to use it in an unpressurized cooling system and without the coolant boiling off when the system isn't running.
Now that was a cooling project. They built a case from scratch, using a plasma cutter and TIG welding. The system has two compressors, 1.5HP and 2.5HP, which means the cooling system alone takes about 5 kilowatts to drive. There's plumbing, gauges, and expansion tanks. But unlike the liquid nitrogen and dry ice projects, which are more like demos, this can run continuously without adding fluids. Although, at 5KW in, MIPS/watt are rather low.
Star Wars? Oh, yeah, my parents used to be into that.
Meanwhile, on the real piracy front, the MV Faina is still being held by Somali pirates. It was surrounded by US warships weeks ago. Now some additional NATO warships are surrounding it. The pirates want $20 million to release the mostly-Ukrainian crew, and Ukrainians have collected the money. This sort of piracy happens frequently, but this ship is unusual because it's loaded with old Soviet tanks and other weapons.
This has been dragging on for weeks. Neither the US nor NATO wants to take the casualties and risk the hostages to take the ship back.
But the situation will soon change. The Russian Navy is sending one warship, the Neustrashimiy, to the scene; it just passed through the Suez Canal and should reach the target by the end of the week. The Russians aren't saying what they intend to do, but the general consensus is that when they get done, the pirates will be dead. The hostages may be dead too, but that won't bother Putin, or, indeed, many Russians.
OK, you want social interaction, we'll give you social interaction.
The big time-sink games, like Everquest and WoW, where it's necessary to get everybody on line at the same time for a raid, could be made even more intrusive with a mobile aspect. If someone raids your fortress, frantic messages go out to all the defenders phones, demanding that they get on line immediately and help with the defense.
When you really want to annoy another guild, raid them at 4 AM.
This would probably sell in Singapore.
Jaron Lanier is complaining that Wikipedia listed him as a "film director". He did make a film once. Apparently it sucked, and he's embarrassed about it. He's whining because Wikipedia mentions that part of his life, and he'd like to delete that from his resume.
That's not a Wikipedia problem.
Damnit! That system is a word-for-word description of my old idea for detecting stealth/stealthy aircraft- I came up with it in low-observables/composites class a few years back.
GEODSS is unsuitable for detecting low-flying aircraft. The field of view with big telescopes is too small. Sites have to be installed in high-altitude locations with good seeing. It's for looking at targets much further out. There are smaller electro-optical trackers for anti-aircraft use.
The most useful approach for detecting stealthed aircraft is bistatic radar, a subject which tends not to be discussed much in the open literature. Ordinary "monostatic" radar has the transmitter and the receiver in the same location. Stealthed aircraft are designed to have a very small radar reflection of the incoming beam back in the direction from which it came. That's why the weird aircraft geometries. But only to a limited extent do they absorb radar beam energy. Much of it is reflected off in other directions. Bistatic radars, where the transmitter(s) and receivers(s) are in different locations, can pick up those reflections. There are some clever ideas in this space. But I digress.
The problem with soft-landing heavy objects on Mars is that there's not enough atmosphere for aerobraking and parachutes to do the job, so the approaches used for Earth re-entry won't work. There's too much gravity for landing on rockets. as with lunar landers, without most of the payload being landing fuel. The problem gets harder as the mass goes up. This was realized only about five years ago, to the embarrassment of some within NASA. So there are now various complicated hybrid schemes, like this.
The scheme with the cables does not look promising. Unlike Luna, Mars has winds and weather. This looks like one of the student lander designs from NASA's high school curriculum.
One bad feature of this design is that the actual landing forces have to be taken by the rover's suspension. Previous designs had the rover inside the landing module, not underneath it. That approach uses crushable components (air bags, crushable blocks, collapsible legs, etc.) to cushion the landing. With this "flying crane" approach, the autopilot has to do a really, really smooth landing or the rover will be broken.
It's probably possible to fix everything except hard drives and speakers, but it may not be worth the trouble. There are companies that do this, but they usually are called in by flooded industrial plants, not consumers.
You need at least modest repair facilities. A small tank with a stirrer or agitator is a big help. Things like PC boards can be rinsed off with deionized or distilled water. If that's not enough, put them in the tank with deionized water and dishwashing detergent, and agitate for a while. An ultrasonic cleaner is useful but not essential. Allow to drain, then dry with a hair dryer.
It's helpful to have a test bench with a very low current fast-acting circuit breaker for initial power up. (An old trick: wire an outlet in series with a switch and a lamp socket, and put in a big incandescent bulb, like 150 watts. For first power up, plug into this rig. If there's a short, all that happens is that the bulb lights up. If the load isn't drawing much current, there's very little voltage drop, because incandescents have a low resistance when cold.) Have a CO2 fire extinguisher handy.
Non-ball-bearing fans may have rusted and probably will have lost their lubrication. If they'll spin freely by hand, give them a try; if not, or they're too noisy, replace as needed.
Devices with potentiometer knobs may need the pots cleaned with spray-on control cleaner. There's also spray-on connector cleaner; you'll need a can of that, too.
Dry out the hard drives with a hair dryer, and try to power them up. They might still work long enough to get the data off. Hard drive internal cleaning is possible, but it has to be done by specialists in a clean room at far more expense than the cost of a new drive. It's only done to recover the data; the damaged drive is read once and discarded.
CD/DVD drives may or may not have survived. The odds are poor, but the drives are cheap.
When you reassemble a computer, you'll need to run all the diagnostics. You'll need to buy one of the better PC hardware diagnostic programs (not a Windows diagnostic program) that will boot up cold.
And then you'll need to reinstall all the software, starting with the operating system.
Audio amplifiers and such should be completely recoverable.
I don't know what to do about large flat-panel displays. Ask the manufacturer.
So could deionized water, for less money.
Zinc, copper, and mild steel, all of which are likely to be found on a circuit board, will all corrode slowly in deionized water. You don't get mineral deposits from deionized water, and it's nonconductive, but it's not noncorrosive.
Here's the main claim from the patent:
7,414,845 Attlesey, et al. August 19, 2008
Circuit board assembly for a liquid submersion cooled electronic device
1. A liquid submersion cooled computer, comprising:
The only novelty here seems to be in putting the connectors in the removable lid.
Incidentally, the cooling liquid isn't an "oil" at all. It's one of 3M's Novec engineered fluids, probably HFE-7500, which is 3-ethoxy-1,1,1,2,3,4,4,5,5,6,6,6-dodecafluoro-2-trifluoromethyl-hexane. It's usable for cooling up to 150C, nonflammable, does not irritate skin, does not contribute to global warming, ozone depletion, or smog, and the MSDS even says "Ingestion: no health effects are expected". 3M developed it as a replacement for PCBs and perfluorocarbons like Fluorinert. So it can be used safely by the idiots who overclock.
Interestingly, the US has had, for several decades, a system which can detect UFOs - GEODSS, the Ground Based-Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System. Each GEODSS site (there are three currently active, plus a mobile unit) has a pair of 40-inch telescopes. These were the first fully computerized telescopes, working since the 1980s. The telescopes scan the sky every night. They can detect moving bright objects as streaks, but there's more capability than that. They have a star atlas, and know what should be in each image, so anything that shouldn't be there is detected. If a known star is missing, that's interesting too; it may indicate a dark object. There are two telescopes, so for low-orbit objects, they can get parallax. Multiple sites can be coupled together to get parallax on more distant objects. They can even use one telescope with a laser to illuminate satellites while taking a picture with the other. This is how the USAF finds new satellites, near-earth asteroids, and nonmetallic space junk. The system was recnelty upgraded to use CCD imagers (it used to be tube camera based) and to use better alignment algorithms, so it's now both more sensitive and more accurate.
This is all tied to NORAD in Colorado Springs. GEODSS knows what an incoming ICBM trajectory looks like, and if it ever sees one, NORAD gets notified, without any action from the GEODSS site operators.
GEODSS is a real, live, functional UFO detection system that's been running for decades. If anything big enough to be interesting was anywhere near the planet for more than a few hours, it would be noticed. Even the target didn't reflect radar or light, it could be detected because it would occasionally occult a star.
Ever have dreams with jaggies? Delamination? Compression artifacts? Bad physics simulation? I used to get that when I was doing 3D animation. It's an intensity thing; if you do animation, you spend too much time looking at the same thing, very closely, in detail, at slow speed. So it goes into the material used to make up dreams.
The classic site was Voice of Jihad, but that's been more or less dead for a while. Back in August, it was apparently taken over by some McCain supporter. Now it's a misconfigured shared-IP site on Dreamhost.
bin Laden's annual video didn't get much press this year. He's released his 2008 video, and it's 87 minutes long, but it's hard to find. Reuters has a summary..
I suspect that the main reason there's pressure to suppress his videos is that he always has something tellingly negative to say about Bush. This year, bin Laden's sound bite is "And in fact, the subject of the Mujahideen has become an inseparable part of the speech of your leader and the effects and signs are not hidden."
It's worth remembering that the bin Laden family supported Bush's first presidential campaign. In 1978, Bush and Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, founded Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas. Sometimes one wonders if the plan was to get an incompetent into the US presidency, then apply enough pressure to make him overreact. A pre 9-11 bio of bin Laden, "The Man who Declared War on America", has quotes from him indicating that he felt America needed to be corrupted before it could be taken down, and outlined what needed to be done to make that happen. All the family had to do was to get someone in office who thought tax cuts would fix anything, get him to overspend on the wrong war, and wait for the US economy to collapse.
We may yet see a "Mission Accomplished" from bin Laden.
scientology is not a religion, it's a business. if you want to drive them out of business, compete with them.
Scientology likes to pretend they are a religion, which holds them back. They're not keeping up with scientific progress. The "E-meter" measures skin resistance, the least useful component of a polygraph. By now, they should have some wireless, Bluetooth-enabled device that reads pulse, respiration, and, for tradition's sake, skin resistance. Someday brainwave monitoring might be added. If you have those measurements, you can read stress relatively well, especially once you have a baseline for the individual. This would allow "auditing" via the Internet. I wonder if Apple would allow a Scientology app for the iPhone.
In other words, Scientology needs a hardware/software upgrade, and they can't do one because they're a "revealed religion".
Another piece of software Scientology should have out is described in Hubbard's "How to Live though an Executive". This is a book on business organization, of all things. There's a whole communication system described, much like a trouble ticket system. It's basically a system to make sure that when something is ordered, it actually gets done. Successful completion is checked off within the system, but by third parties, not the ones doing the work, while trouble reports float upward. It's a bit rigid for use in some organizations, but it might be useful for, say, people running big equipment farms and networks. But it's 1940s technology, with forms and boards and hooks and rubber stamps and carbon copies. You'd think that Scientology would have this available as an online service. But no, they don't. As far as I know, they don't even use such a system in-house. Again, they've failed to keep up with the technology.
Scientology has a "Religious Technology Center", but it's not an R&D operation. It's more like a cross between the RIAA and the Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the doctrine enforcement unit of the Vatican). They're stuck with Hubbard's technology: "With all Scientology churches bound to minister Dianetics and Scientology technologies in full compliance with their trademark licenses, the entire hierarchy up to the Church of Scientology International is self-correcting and ensures pure and orthodox Scientology. ... RTC investigates any departures from that standard administration and ensures that orthodoxy is restored."
They do have competition, in a sense. There's the "est" - Forum - Landmark operation, which has been lightly brainwashing people since the 1970s. It's been called a cult, but it's more like Amway. There were more things like that back in the 1970s, but most of the people vulnerable to that sort of thing seem to have gone off to the Christian right, so the market for such cults is down.
What crap.
On a scale of 10 for drawing, Tintin is a 10, Girl Genius Online is a 9, Megatokyo is an 8, Penny Arcade is a 6, and these cartoons are around 1.5.
As for humor, if you think those are funny, go see "Sex Drive", in theaters now. It's an R-rated sex comedy aimed at 14 year olds. Sort of like National Lampoon without the funny.
This is a dup. It's not a very interesting result, either. A list of the most common HTML tags? Big whoop.
I don't really understand what point you're trying to make.
The point is that the damage is worse that originally reported. Early reports indicated that the connections to a magnet had failed and the magnet had quenched, without damage to the magnet. That by itself wouldn't be too hard to fix, and probably could have been done in place. But, as it turns out, there was considerable damage to other magnets and vacuum lines. All this is in an underground tunnel, so access is tough. Especially since the LHC has less working room in the tunnel than most other big accelerators.
The magnet assemblies are cylinders about 14m long, with both the superconducting coils and all the supporting vacuum and cryogenic plumbing. Now, several of those units have to be disconnected, moved carefully onto a transport car, moved very slowly to the big lift shaft, hauled up to the surface, repaired, returned to the tunnel, reconnected, and recommissioned. Each one of those steps is a big, tough job.
Early papers claimed that a magnet quench would cause a few hours of downtime, not a few months.
The Tesla is a great idea, but they tried too hard to make it really fast. The original idea was to have an air-cooled electric motor and a one-speed transmission. But they couldn't quite get the top speed they wanted, which was somewhere above 125. So they went to a two-speed transmission, and the first transmissions wore out rapidly. Then they went back to a one-speed transmission, and tried water-cooling the motor so they could pour more current into it. This ran up their costs, delayed shipping of the product, and made the thing more complex. If they'd settle for a top speed of 110 MPH, the thing would be much easier. It would still have the acceleration.
More fundamentally, "bling" is dead. It died about two weeks ago. The luxury industry is terrified right now. It's very clear that we're in for a long, worldwide recession. Expensive status symbols are so over.
I see Tesla cars on the road regularly. But that's because I live near the Silicon Valley dealership. I think they demo the thing by driving past my house and out to Canada Road near Crystal Springs Reservoir, which has a nice scenic route with little traffic where they can speed. I just hope they don't wipe out a bicyclist out there.
They do "woosh" by without engine noise, as advertised.
Their games require you to run "Impulse", and the "Impulse Dock", which is a browser-like client that only talks to Stardock. It has blogs, downloads, and such, and is required for updates to their games. It's like one of those background services required to run many games, only it's in your face.
This is progress?
It's worse than I'd thought. They may have to pull quite a few magnets out of the tunnel for repair, and some sheered off their mountings.
There's a lot of energy stored in those superconducting magnets. A magnet quench, where superconductivity is lost, is a violent event, even when the electrical safeties all work properly, as they did here. The magnet heats up suddenly, and boils the liquid helium. That blasts into the vacuum insulation cavity, setting off further quenches in nearby magnets. The pressures were high enough to blow out relief disks (as planned) and damage the vacuum valves to adjacent sections (not expected.).
None of this is about the physics. It's all plumbing and electrical work.
Considering that Google charges $50/yr/user for business email, they have far too many long outages. At that price point, they should be fully redundant across multiple data centers.
Welcome to "cloud computing". It's not your cloud.
"Hey! You! Get off of my cloud Don't hang around 'cause two's a crowd On my cloud." - some '60s band.