A $10 disposable digital camera has a dirt cheap computer inside. They have a 1.2 megapixel LCD sensor, 8MB of flash memory, an 8-bit Intel 8051 processor clone, a SDRAM chip and USB interface.
Each of these computer parts is less than a $1.
We see the same "free" "non-polluting" mania for any promising technology. For example, hydrogen is better thought to be a "battery" rather than a fuel because it doesn't exist on Earth in a high-energy state. It has to be freed from emthane or water by an energy intensive process.
Second, because is among the smallest molecules in nature, it leaks like almost nothing else, up to 20% in some estimates. It is thought to be a significant greenhouse gas then, though tranistory because UV light evently combines with atmospheric oxygen.
In the colleges, UNIX pretty much took over by 1980. PC CPUs were too weak for UNIX until x386 in the early 1990s. Thats when Linus' emulation could work. UNIX already had a useful graphical desktop in XWindows seven years (1986) before Windows (1993 3.1).
The US has college spaces for almost half of its college-age population (slowing down with recent recession). China, India and even Japan have a much smaller college system, less than 5% for the first two. So you see immense competition for the tiny number of spaces. Its like the 19th century in the USA when there were only MIT and the Ivies. So Asian colleges are going to look comparatively good with mostly elite students.
Hubble cost seven times too much using shuttle
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 4, Insightful
An interesting observation by Prof Weinberg is that we could have built and launched seven Hubble telescopes via unmanned rockets compared to the cost of the original, much delayed, shuttle launch and subsequent servicing missions. Instead of four upgrades over 20 years, we would have had seven upgrades over 25 years.
Did you ever see the polar ice caps?
The orbitors detected hydrogen in the soil a long time ago.
The orbitors photographic sedimentary structures in the rocks a long time ago. It was not clear whether these were due to water, wind or volcanics.
What the rovers have established is there was standing water at some time in the past.
Big hullabalo a few weeks ago that scientists had shrunk an amino acid detector and analyser to the size of a computer chip. They'll try to get these on the 2009 landers.
Sun rolled its own GUI called SunView between 1984 when it started until 1988 or so when XWindows got decent. SGI licensed it for several years. XWindows won out because it ran a little more efficiently and it ran on most UNIX computers. Some of Sun's utilities are still in SunView.
My self of 25 years ago would have been surprised by:
*The end of the Soviet Union as the US's significant enemy.
*A movie about Jesus would have been a runaway hit.
*People would have driving mini-tanks (SUVs) and one hours worth of the mediam US wage could buy five gallons of gasoline. 1979 was the worst of energy crises of a decade of them. Everyone was predicting $100 / bbl oil, subcompacts. An hours worth of median wage could only buy two gallons of gasoline.
*Gay marriage would be the big social topic. Gays at that time were just a part of the larger sexual liberation movement. The hippee communes were just winding down. There was a controversial social consitutional admendment however: The liberals were pushing the Equal Rights Admendment for women. It only got about 34 of the 38 necessary state ratifications, then stalled. A marriage admendment would probably get just as far.
*People could copy music and movies electronically practically free.
*The emergence of political conservatism and the republican party. The country was coming off of two lame presidents of each party: Nixon and Carter. Reagan was elected because of his militarism after we wimped out in Iran.
What were not surprises:
*The dominance of MicroSoft. The 60s and 70s had AT&T and IBM as the evil empire. MicroSoft was merely a passing of hats.
*The InterNet. My univerisites Standrd and MIT were fairly wired up already. Email and file exchanges were common.
*F/X movies. Star Wars I had rewritten that book a few years earlier.
*Open source. AT&T UNIX had been around for a decade. The source code was floating around universities for nearly free. Also, lots of people were hacking LISP freeware in the A.I. labs.
I bet you the average patent claim or property deed would bamboozle many of the smart-asses in this thread. English, the richest language in the world, has a half-dozen ways of saying anything by reverting to a jargon dialect. A college educated person may need to know the multi-syllable French words plus a fair amount of Latin and Greek. An urban hipster may need to know a fair amount of Spanish. They used to say that if you can explain it to your spouse or children in plain English (heavy on the small syllale Germanic words) hen you may not really understand it yourself.
Reminded me of those stories of old people buying hundreds of magazines in order win a million dollars from Ed McMahn. Lonely people do look forward to any sort of contact.
Instead of trying to wrap he human being around the technology, the imagineers of Star Trek just guessed what the optimal machine-human interface would be: talking computers, palm size commnication and medical devices, etc. Where a device name did not exist, they just turned the verb-action into the name; scanner, transporter, etc. Hopefully the details of our technologies will disappear into the optimal machine-human interfaces also.
The wired article is mixing these two cases up.
Hollywood may have been founded on piracy of media, which may have been wrong during the patent windows.
But it is the piracy of content which is more disturbing in the digital age, i.e. the violation of copyright by copying a particular expression of idea.
No imagery I know of can "see" all things large enough to stop a vehicle, such as meter-size rocks and bushes. The vehicle will still have to execute local intelligence (or brute force).
Furthermore, you assume that all military robots would be programmed with similar maps, so this is not an advantage.
The "edge" is defined by frequency redshifting of infinity, where objects are receding at the apparent speed of light, and the universe is infinitely small. The largest redshifts observed last month are an eleven-fold frequency stretch (z=10). Visible light is stretched into deep infra-red. This implies an apparent doppler recession of 98% the speed of light (without including the cosmological constant or acceleration). It gets harder and harder to observe objects as they are more red-shifted.
This show deals with the stress of being a gifted child. Also with a highly dysfunctional family. Unlike most geeks, Malcolm has a fair amount of social intelligence.
It takes an effort to look at peoples faces when I talk to them. I get no useful feedback and my gaze wants to wander. I know from reading articles and watching TV that face communication is important, but it means nothing to me.
I find the comment "before MicroSoft" amusing. Apple had the first commercially successful GUI in 1984- nine years before MicroSofts wirst usable version of windows. The UNIX world was using XWindows six years earlier too. Everyone was making fun of MicroSoft's lowly MS-DOS interface well into the 1990s.
Slightly off-topic, but some doctors use the term "brain attack" to refer to a cerebral stroke. This term better reflects are quick and serious strokes are.
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A $10 disposable digital camera has a dirt cheap computer inside. They have a 1.2 megapixel LCD sensor, 8MB of flash memory, an 8-bit Intel 8051 processor clone, a SDRAM chip and USB interface. Each of these computer parts is less than a $1.
We see the same "free" "non-polluting" mania for any promising technology. For example, hydrogen is better thought to be a "battery" rather than a fuel because it doesn't exist on Earth in a high-energy state. It has to be freed from emthane or water by an energy intensive process.
Second, because is among the smallest molecules in nature, it leaks like almost nothing else, up to 20% in some estimates. It is thought to be a significant greenhouse gas then, though tranistory because UV light evently combines with atmospheric oxygen.
In the colleges, UNIX pretty much took over by 1980. PC CPUs were too weak for UNIX until x386 in the early 1990s. Thats when Linus' emulation could work. UNIX already had a useful graphical desktop in XWindows seven years (1986) before Windows (1993 3.1).
The US has college spaces for almost half of its college-age population (slowing down with recent recession). China, India and even Japan have a much smaller college system, less than 5% for the first two. So you see immense competition for the tiny number of spaces. Its like the 19th century in the USA when there were only MIT and the Ivies. So Asian colleges are going to look comparatively good with mostly elite students.
An interesting observation by Prof Weinberg is that we could have built and launched seven Hubble telescopes via unmanned rockets compared to the cost of the original, much delayed, shuttle launch and subsequent servicing missions. Instead of four upgrades over 20 years, we would have had seven upgrades over 25 years.
Did you ever see the polar ice caps?
The orbitors detected hydrogen in the soil a long time ago.
The orbitors photographic sedimentary structures in the rocks a long time ago. It was not clear whether these were due to water, wind or volcanics.
What the rovers have established is there was standing water at some time in the past.
Big hullabalo a few weeks ago that scientists had shrunk an amino acid detector and analyser to the size of a computer chip. They'll try to get these on the 2009 landers.
Sun rolled its own GUI called SunView between 1984 when it started until 1988 or so when XWindows got decent. SGI licensed it for several years. XWindows won out because it ran a little more efficiently and it ran on most UNIX computers. Some of Sun's utilities are still in SunView.
We should all go back to the telegraph and one-key keyboards then!
My self of 25 years ago would have been surprised by:
*The end of the Soviet Union as the US's significant enemy.
*A movie about Jesus would have been a runaway hit.
*People would have driving mini-tanks (SUVs) and one hours worth of the mediam US wage could buy five gallons of gasoline. 1979 was the worst of energy crises of a decade of them. Everyone was predicting $100 / bbl oil, subcompacts. An hours worth of median wage could only buy two gallons of gasoline.
*Gay marriage would be the big social topic. Gays at that time were just a part of the larger sexual liberation movement. The hippee communes were just winding down. There was a controversial social consitutional admendment however: The liberals were pushing the Equal Rights Admendment for women. It only got about 34 of the 38 necessary state ratifications, then stalled. A marriage admendment would probably get just as far.
*People could copy music and movies electronically practically free.
*The emergence of political conservatism and the republican party. The country was coming off of two lame presidents of each party: Nixon and Carter. Reagan was elected because of his militarism after we wimped out in Iran.
What were not surprises:
*The dominance of MicroSoft. The 60s and 70s had AT&T and IBM as the evil empire. MicroSoft was merely a passing of hats.
*The InterNet. My univerisites Standrd and MIT were fairly wired up already. Email and file exchanges were common.
*F/X movies. Star Wars I had rewritten that book a few years earlier.
*Open source. AT&T UNIX had been around for a decade. The source code was floating around universities for nearly free. Also, lots of people were hacking LISP freeware in the A.I. labs.
I bet you the average patent claim or property deed would bamboozle many of the smart-asses in this thread. English, the richest language in the world, has a half-dozen ways of saying anything by reverting to a jargon dialect. A college educated person may need to know the multi-syllable French words plus a fair amount of Latin and Greek. An urban hipster may need to know a fair amount of Spanish. They used to say that if you can explain it to your spouse or children in plain English (heavy on the small syllale Germanic words) hen you may not really understand it yourself.
Reminded me of those stories of old people buying hundreds of magazines in order win a million dollars from Ed McMahn. Lonely people do look forward to any sort of contact.
Instead of trying to wrap he human being around the technology, the imagineers of Star Trek just guessed what the optimal machine-human interface would be: talking computers, palm size commnication and medical devices, etc. Where a device name did not exist, they just turned the verb-action into the name; scanner, transporter, etc. Hopefully the details of our technologies will disappear into the optimal machine-human interfaces also.
The ring cycle is four operas nearly fours long each.
Like something that nukes the disk if not at the authorized IP address?
The wired article is mixing these two cases up. Hollywood may have been founded on piracy of media, which may have been wrong during the patent windows. But it is the piracy of content which is more disturbing in the digital age, i.e. the violation of copyright by copying a particular expression of idea.
You can push that 2000 years before Gutenburg if you consider the naughty pictures on Greek and Roman vases that made them sell better.
No imagery I know of can "see" all things large enough to stop a vehicle, such as meter-size rocks and bushes. The vehicle will still have to execute local intelligence (or brute force).
Furthermore, you assume that all military robots would be programmed with similar maps, so this is not an advantage.
I heard that Kenny might die in the next episode of South Park. Now withour Comedy Central I will never know :-(
The "edge" is defined by frequency redshifting of infinity, where objects are receding at the apparent speed of light, and the universe is infinitely small. The largest redshifts observed last month are an eleven-fold frequency stretch (z=10). Visible light is stretched into deep infra-red. This implies an apparent doppler recession of 98% the speed of light (without including the cosmological constant or acceleration). It gets harder and harder to observe objects as they are more red-shifted.
This show deals with the stress of being a gifted child. Also with a highly dysfunctional family. Unlike most geeks, Malcolm has a fair amount of social intelligence.
It takes an effort to look at peoples faces when I talk to them. I get no useful feedback and my gaze wants to wander. I know from reading articles and watching TV that face communication is important, but it means nothing to me.
At th end of their mission the rovers will only be active every other day or 3rd day, etc. in order allow more battery charging.
I find the comment "before MicroSoft" amusing. Apple had the first commercially successful GUI in 1984- nine years before MicroSofts wirst usable version of windows. The UNIX world was using XWindows six years earlier too. Everyone was making fun of MicroSoft's lowly MS-DOS interface well into the 1990s.
Slightly off-topic, but some doctors use the term "brain attack" to refer to a cerebral stroke. This term better reflects are quick and serious strokes are.