I mean, these things can be used as bearings and springs. Everything mechanical is made up of a number of relatively simple objects (much like a good programming language), and these are two of the important ones.
If they can find ways to make more of the mechanical structures, and arrange them into complex structures, I may well own those SF writers an apology.
Well, it isn't so much that things are made of springs as that everything can act as a spring. The traditional coil-of-wire spring is just one very compact way to produce high spring-rates from common materials.
One very common way of doing stress analysis is to use spring constant formulas to determine the deflection the structure undergoes after you know the force applied.
A spring is anything which deflects under force, ie, everything. The armed services studied the approximate spring constant of a human neck when a pilot is ejected from his airplane. (A professor participated in that one.) So, efforts will have to be made to find out how each nano-structure (tube, sphere, concentric tubes, etc) reacts to forces in all directions, not just linear.
When the spring-rate characteristics are more precisely known, more engineering will be possible. Sign me up!
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the nature of Gnutella, but I don't see anyone to prosecute. When I use Gnutella, I connect to individual computers, not a corporate server. There is no company selling Gnutella (or advertising on the download page) of which I am aware.
The law is like a gun: powerful, but requiring a very specific target. In the case of Gnutella, I don't know what that target would be.
You said: Orbital momentum is worth about $1/(kgm/s).
That is linear momentum. In a straight line. Orbits are circular, so we are concerned with angular momentum. Angular momentum is a function of the radius of the circular motion, the orbit. That would make the units kg*m*m/s, with the equation being: H=m*r*v.
4. stabilization. Even quite a short (100m) tether will be stabilized by Earth's tidal forces and can be used to keep a satellite pointed in a certain way
Yep, tethers are cool. The stabilization aspect was pointed out to me by a buddy when we were talking about control systems (I think he was in Controls at the time).
Most satellites must be kept in a certain attitude to perform correctly, and lots of effort is put into maintaining this attitude. The real expenses start to build as you try to create an ever-more precise system. But if you hang a mass from a line, gravity gradients will pull the line straight down, orienting the satellite.
Gravity gradient: gravity depends on distance [F=G*m1*m2/(r^2) with 'm1' & 'm2' being the Earth and the orbiting stuff in this case, and 'r' being the distance between the centers of mass of the two objects], so the closer you are to the Earth, the more gravity you feel. Not a whole lot more, but there aren't a whole lot of other forces acting on your satellite. So a few kilograms on the end of a line (100m -> 1000m) should straighten your satellite out. This is great for communications satellites: they must face the center of the Earth for best performance, and that is exactly what a tether does for you.
The author of the NASA tether article alludes to that in this section, saying, in part,
Once the rocket's stage and the tether's end mass are far enough apart, the difference in the gravitational force at the two locations will in effect pull the objects apart. Eventually, the tether will be vertical with respect to Earth.
I agree with Cliff, you need some local volunteer help, but you should also try to learn the system. If someone with skill is available, ask her to help you set up the computer to do what you want (whatever that is), and teach you a few basics. Then start learning on your own; hubie was right when he said that this is a great opportunity. Learn from this, but have an expert around to help you avoid the big mistakes.
As for what to do with the server, that depends on what the students are like. If you have high school students, and this magnet school is tech-tilted, you can use the computer to teach graphics (3D even?), programing (something other than BASIC), or networking. It really depends on what skills the available teachers have.
And available teachers can be volunteers. Try a LUG or IrixUG (if such a beast exists) in the eight counties the school serves, you may be able to find a few people willing to come teach computing to a few dozen skulls full of mush. (Push the benefits of teaching: re-learn the subject, watch fire being ignited in a few eyes, looks great on resume when you volunteer.)
If it is a high school, try the local Community College for teachers. Some of the teachers/tech staff there might want to help, and a few students might be skilled enough in what you want to teach. Heck, try universities nearby. Many campus clubs do outreach, including teaching/tutoring youngsters. I know of two or three like that at my university, so you might get lucky.
They have Linux running the Seti clients, so their client is the same code that was vetted for general Linux use. Well, I'm assuming that the Linux code wansn't changed, there doesn't seem to be a need to change the code.
they keep extending, even retroactively, the copyright term
That sounds like an ex post facto law.
Hmm, US Constitution, Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3:
No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
An "ex post facto" law is one which affects events before the law went into effect.
Example - I cross the street, in the crosswalk, with the signal, but I am wearing a t-shirt which says "I want my DeCSS!" This is legal, I'm crossing the street in accordance with local ordinances, and my t-shirt is legally protected free speech.
But someone *cough* MPAA *cough* doesn't like that, so they get a law passed which says that crossing the street in protest-wear is illegal, and that it always has been illegal. But I'm a nice boy, so I don't cross the street in my DeCSS shirt anymore.
However, the MPAA really wants me, so they use the video tape of my original crossing to haul me into court. I crossed the street before the law was passed, but that doesn't matter, because the law affects acts commited before it was passed. In this way, politicians and companies can make today's lawful act into tomorrow's crime, but still arrest those who committed the act when it was legal.
I can be arrested for acts which weren't crimes when I acted!
The fragment of the Constitution listed above prevents this sort of thing from happening, when it is enforced. It isn't being enforced very well, in my estimation. Copyright being extended on works written before the law which affects them? Sounds ex-post-facto to me. The 1993 tax changes affected income from January 1993 onward, but the law wasn't enacted until several months later. Sounds ex-post-facto to me.
Anything which is retroactive is ex post facto. And un-Constitutional.
The interface might be designed to be difficult, as a way to prevent competitors (other auto companies and third-party diagnostic providers) from reverse-engineering the protocols, and offering competing products. Yeah monopoly/oligarchy.
Anyway, it may not be a trivial hack. I suggest that you think about asking your car mechanic (You are friendly with him, aren't you? If not, ask another shop.) if there are any specs in the repair manuals, or if he can share anything with you. He may get nervous (NDAs for diagnostic operators), or mislead you (he'll make less money if you succeed), so be careful about who you ask and how you ask.
And if you have any success, please share it. I can imagine a convergence of car guys and computer guys working on their cars, crossing social boundaries, living in harmony with each other and nature, learning from each other,... uh, whoops. How did I have a flash-back to the 60's when I was born in the 70's?
Maybe others will take this as a cue to make user privacy a higher priority. And maybe pigs will fly.
I'm not expecting the worst (I do occasionally plan for it), but I don't expect businesses to forgoe guaranteed profits for "user comfort" which isn't guaranteed and for which there is no proven business model.
The people I have known at college who were in the business majors weren't the most trusting, generous, 'What do the people want?' types. Not evil, just more concentrated on making money from a service than in making that service the best it could be.
If there were a demonstrated, proven way to make money without ad-tracking, to make more money than with ad-tracking, there would be fewer ad-trackers.
Assuming that they have been working on issues like that for 5 years, which I don't know about. I'm a little cynical, so I'm guessing that they haven't looked in-depth at the problems with different companies trying to register the same name, or what happens when a US and non-US company go for the same name (does the US company get special treatment?). But they might be the best thing since sliced bread.
Caucho may have been referring to the 'definition' of Open Source by the distributors, as seen at OpenSource.org. GPL & BSD were first, but some think that they are now sub-sets of the larger class of 'opensource' licenses.
Not in my experience. I tried to get to our faculty directory from a machine that only had IE, and it refused me, saying something about an unsupported protocol. I was stunned for a moment, then I realized that MS probably didn't care about Gopher, so why support it? Sad.
And, yes, I checked the URL in the Preview and it works for me. If it doesn't work for you, it's not my mistake. TTFN.
Maybe I'm giving Mr. Nielsen too much credit (I don't know him from Adam), but this decentralization of computing may happen without MicroSoft. Gene Roddenberry thought of this several decades ago, and it has been a staple of SciFi for a long time. (I seem to remember stories that pre-dated Star Trek doing this, but I don't remember specifics, and Niven didn't reach as many average-joe types as Star Trek has in the last 30 years.)
Whether MS does this, or AOL, or VALinux, it still might happen. The flavor will be different, but it will most likely happen, regardless of who the major players are.
I got the confirmation email May 31, and the postman came last week. I agree with gilroy, if you have waited over a month, start checking at ICANN's members page. Hope that they didn't 'forget' you.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
(URL correction) was Re:Clearing Things Up
on
Tripwire Going GPL
·
· Score: 1
I believe that it's tripWire.org, I get a "No DNS Entry" error for tripFire.
Am I correct in deducing that you advocate illegal acts to make the boss happier?
The management does have a responsibility to the owners & stockholders, but part of that responsibility is to act legally (& ethically if the owners are decent people), so that the future viability of the company is not jeapordized by the current actions of management. That is, stealing today may save several thousand dollars, but it will cost tens of thousands in a few years when you are discovered and sued.
It seems that if there isn't enough money to cover all of the software used, there is a serious management problem. Maybe Gorbie works for a startup that has very little capital (think free-beer software), maybe the management has heard too much about piracy & thinks that it is 'good', maybe some tough choices need to made about which software doesn't justify its cost. I don't envy you your problem Gorbie.
But they did limit the rights of Americans publishing DeCSS, under DMCA &/or UCITA (I get the exact details confused sometimes). So "yet" is "now".
The rights of the people as outlined in the US Constitution are very limited. The Bill of Rights was a compromise between those who wanted guarantees of rights written into the document, and those who didn't want to imply that the rights not explicitly granted were denied. As such, they wrote two Amendments which explicitely state the (hopefully) obvious: government only has the right to do what it is explicitely ordered to do, and the people have rights to do anything not explicitely disallowed. Those Amendments (listed below) seem to have been ignored this century, except for rare cases when it seemed to serve some other purpose.
Amendment 9:
The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment 10: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Cliff, when you said I wish more colleges would look to do practical things like this with their students, I started to write in indignant response. Then Yoda told me: "Breathe in, breathe out. Calm. The force flows through you."
There are some schools which have students do practical, hands-on work. Mine: Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. I'm a graduating Mechanical Engineering student, and in the ME department, our capstone design class is doing a project for a company (Disney, Raytheon, Applied Materials, and a host of small companies). We have eight weeks from receipt of project to presentation, and our four person teams typically do more or better than similar industry teams with more time. Disney asked 5 students to make a life-size robot hand for their rides, because they couldn't. The students did pretty well (I think they had problems with life cycles), and they only had 8 weeks to think, design, calculate, build, test, and present. While taking a full load of senior level classes. (Hmm, I dropped into bragging mode.)
Yes, there are practical schools. I know that practical is important, but I don't want us to forget that there is also a very necessary theoretical aspect to school, which is hard to get outside of school.
B. Huge telescopes aren't yet even possible in space; no way to get them up there.
Yes, Hubble is space based, but it isn't "huge". The Hubble has a main reflecting mirror 2.4m in diameter; the largest single telescopes on Earth are the 10m telescopes on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. (The Keck telescopes are individually bigger than other individual telescopes, but telescopes can be linked to provide an effectively larger telescope. That is what Chris is doing. Keck is doing something simila r for NASA's Origin's program.)
What would that be, played in G, but only after you transcribe each note up a half-step? Yup, way too complex, it sounds like M$.
Hey, that should be their next Windows-only 'development platform/language/mistake'! The language would be called 'M$', and pronounced Micro-Cash. Even though "M" (big m) means 'mega' in the realm of scientific prefixes, and "$" means 'dollar(s)', they'll redefine them, just like Kerberos.
Dirty computers, [[shudder]]; memories of the computers my roommate and I cleaned. We nick-named the first computer "Musty" because when we opened it, it smelled musty, just like a used bookstore. There was mold between the CPU and the ZIFF socket. Cleaning those pins was slow, mostly Q-Tip(TM) and water. Turns out the guy who had given us the computer had kept it in a garage for a year. Anyway, enough recovery of repressed memories, you want to know about cleaning and performance.
Yes, remove the dirt. It's a great insulator; the insulation in my parent's attic is chopped up newspapers, one step away from dust bunnies. Also, dust caked on your CPU fan or power supply fan reduces the effectiveness of the fan noticably.
0) Let the computer sit unplugged overnight. You don't want to be shocked by a capacitor when you are wiping the monitor's insides, or cleaning the power supply.
1) Remove all media. I know, I know, but the people you got it from may have put 'that old computer' in the garage with a CD in the drive. All you have to do is start the boot, hit eject, remove the CD, push the tray back in, and you can turn it off before it gets out of BIOS. There may be ways to manualy eject the CD tray, without power.
2) Set up your "surgery center". Probably in the garage. You'll need the right tools nearby, and you don't want those dust-bunnies getting under the couch.
3) Take the whole computer apart. COMPLETELY. Well, only after you have let it sit unplugged overnight; think big capacitor discharging when your screwdriver slips. Remove every card, the motherboard, each drive, and the power supply. Then look for ways to remove the plastic attached to the metal frame. (The second computer had this 'cool' front plastic panel which was spring loaded to cover the drives when a button was pressed. The spring-pulley mechanism was dirt-encrusted and didn't work until it was cleaned.) Let the monitor sit unplugged overnight. Take apart the monitor, after the capacitors are allowed to discharged! (Remember, when high voltage is involved, paranoia is your friend.) Remove the power supply, and try to disassembly it. I say try because the second computer had Torx instead of phillips head screws, a six-pointed star needing a driver to match. Pain in the rear. You probably want to take apart the printer too.
4) Ventilate your workspace. Dust bunnies make me sneeze and allergize, and some solvents are BAD to breathe.
5) Blow dust away with lung-power or compressed air. I'm a student, so my lungs do a great job at a great price, but compressed air is very nice. Hmm, one amendment, I used compressed air on a part of a power supply I couldn't take apart any more. And, yes, do take apart the power supply (high voltage danger, let it sit). A power supply which is filled with dust is a hear problem waiting to happen. Use some pressurized air to help you clean the power supply. But be careful about where that air is going, if anything goes ballistic, it could cause damage/pain.
6) Wipe the components with a damp rag, water or alcohol. Water is cheap, alcohol cleans a little better. Alcohol requires ventilation. Clean the fan blades and casings of all of the fans you can get to. Clean the grills where the air flows. Wair for capacitor discharge. Wipe the monitor glass down. (When we cleaned that second computer, we discovered that the owner had spilled coffee on/in the monitor. The glass tube was coffee-dust brown, and the dirt didn't come off without serious elbow grease. That CRT tube should be transparent, if it isn't, you may have a coffee fiend on your hands.) When cleaning the monitor, don't change any adjustments you don't know about; some adjust the electron gun alignment.
7) Let everything dry, and re-assemble. Drying shouldn't take longer than a few hours, even if you washed the motherboard in the kitchen sink. Just don't leave ANY moisture on it when you hit POWER.
8) Let us know what happens. Take pictures, post them, and put a link in your bio. I like to see before/after pictures of computers. If I were a car guy, I might be restoring classic cars.
Well, JPGs might be a bad idea, as a recent article on kuro5hin pointed out. The compression in JPGs reduces the resolution of detail, and smooths out the picture so that loss of data is less apparent. I don't think that a research lab wants to purposefuly destroy data. I don't know enough about the details of each format to know which would be better, but JPGs have a big drawback.
Six engine performance measures were studied, including fuel injection timing, injection pressure, and amount of exhaust recirculation. The simulation was then reproduced experimentally in a real diesel engine housed at the ERC.
That means that they had an existing engine which they could tweak, and they wanted to input variables into the GA which could be altered in a controlled fashion on the engine. I believe that the three parameters listed can be controlled by the onboard computer, making it almost trivial to test different configurations: just change the parameters in the computer. Then turn the engine over, run her through her paces, and look at the data. Your GA predictions have been tested.
The next step will probably put that engine on the road, to be tested in real situations, and maybe they will then use a population closer to 50 or 60 on the next set of predictions. Variables I can think of: number of cylinders; diameter of cylinders; stroke of piston in each cylinder; should the cylinders be identical in dimensions or should some be bigger?; one engine in the front with 8 cylinders, or one engine at each wheel, each engine having 2 cylinders?; material for the block; should the block be one material and the surfaces be coated with another?; which material for the coating?; number of spark plugs per cylinder; configuration of spark plugs in each cylinder; should that configuration be the same for each cylinder?; material(s) the piston is made out of; fuel injection port(s) and configuration...
Well, I think you see what I mean. This GA was easy to test, because a few parameters were used, and those parameters can be changed easily. Test it easy at first, and make the tests more complex as you do more.
Slashdot Mirror
One very common way of doing stress analysis is to use spring constant formulas to determine the deflection the structure undergoes after you know the force applied.
A spring is anything which deflects under force, ie, everything. The armed services studied the approximate spring constant of a human neck when a pilot is ejected from his airplane. (A professor participated in that one.) So, efforts will have to be made to find out how each nano-structure (tube, sphere, concentric tubes, etc) reacts to forces in all directions, not just linear.
When the spring-rate characteristics are more precisely known, more engineering will be possible. Sign me up!
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
The law is like a gun: powerful, but requiring a very specific target. In the case of Gnutella, I don't know what that target would be.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
That is linear momentum. In a straight line. Orbits are circular, so we are concerned with angular momentum. Angular momentum is a function of the radius of the circular motion, the orbit. That would make the units kg*m*m/s, with the equation being: H=m*r*v.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Most satellites must be kept in a certain attitude to perform correctly, and lots of effort is put into maintaining this attitude. The real expenses start to build as you try to create an ever-more precise system. But if you hang a mass from a line, gravity gradients will pull the line straight down, orienting the satellite.
Gravity gradient: gravity depends on distance [F=G*m1*m2/(r^2) with 'm1' & 'm2' being the Earth and the orbiting stuff in this case, and 'r' being the distance between the centers of mass of the two objects], so the closer you are to the Earth, the more gravity you feel. Not a whole lot more, but there aren't a whole lot of other forces acting on your satellite. So a few kilograms on the end of a line (100m -> 1000m) should straighten your satellite out. This is great for communications satellites: they must face the center of the Earth for best performance, and that is exactly what a tether does for you.
The author of the NASA tether article alludes to that in this section, saying, in part,
Physics is cool.Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
As for what to do with the server, that depends on what the students are like. If you have high school students, and this magnet school is tech-tilted, you can use the computer to teach graphics (3D even?), programing (something other than BASIC), or networking. It really depends on what skills the available teachers have.
And available teachers can be volunteers. Try a LUG or IrixUG (if such a beast exists) in the eight counties the school serves, you may be able to find a few people willing to come teach computing to a few dozen skulls full of mush. (Push the benefits of teaching: re-learn the subject, watch fire being ignited in a few eyes, looks great on resume when you volunteer.)
If it is a high school, try the local Community College for teachers. Some of the teachers/tech staff there might want to help, and a few students might be skilled enough in what you want to teach. Heck, try universities nearby. Many campus clubs do outreach, including teaching/tutoring youngsters. I know of two or three like that at my university, so you might get lucky.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
That sounds like an ex post facto law.
Hmm, US Constitution, Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3:
An "ex post facto" law is one which affects events before the law went into effect.Example - I cross the street, in the crosswalk, with the signal, but I am wearing a t-shirt which says "I want my DeCSS!" This is legal, I'm crossing the street in accordance with local ordinances, and my t-shirt is legally protected free speech.
But someone *cough* MPAA *cough* doesn't like that, so they get a law passed which says that crossing the street in protest-wear is illegal, and that it always has been illegal. But I'm a nice boy, so I don't cross the street in my DeCSS shirt anymore.
However, the MPAA really wants me, so they use the video tape of my original crossing to haul me into court. I crossed the street before the law was passed, but that doesn't matter, because the law affects acts commited before it was passed. In this way, politicians and companies can make today's lawful act into tomorrow's crime, but still arrest those who committed the act when it was legal.
I can be arrested for acts which weren't crimes when I acted!
The fragment of the Constitution listed above prevents this sort of thing from happening, when it is enforced. It isn't being enforced very well, in my estimation. Copyright being extended on works written before the law which affects them? Sounds ex-post-facto to me. The 1993 tax changes affected income from January 1993 onward, but the law wasn't enacted until several months later. Sounds ex-post-facto to me.
Anything which is retroactive is ex post facto. And un-Constitutional.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Anyway, it may not be a trivial hack. I suggest that you think about asking your car mechanic (You are friendly with him, aren't you? If not, ask another shop.) if there are any specs in the repair manuals, or if he can share anything with you. He may get nervous (NDAs for diagnostic operators), or mislead you (he'll make less money if you succeed), so be careful about who you ask and how you ask.
And if you have any success, please share it. I can imagine a convergence of car guys and computer guys working on their cars, crossing social boundaries, living in harmony with each other and nature, learning from each other, ... uh, whoops. How did I have a flash-back to the 60's when I was born in the 70's?
Good luck with your car.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
I'm not expecting the worst (I do occasionally plan for it), but I don't expect businesses to forgoe guaranteed profits for "user comfort" which isn't guaranteed and for which there is no proven business model.
The people I have known at college who were in the business majors weren't the most trusting, generous, 'What do the people want?' types. Not evil, just more concentrated on making money from a service than in making that service the best it could be.
If there were a demonstrated, proven way to make money without ad-tracking, to make more money than with ad-tracking, there would be fewer ad-trackers.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
Not in my experience. I tried to get to our faculty directory from a machine that only had IE, and it refused me, saying something about an unsupported protocol. I was stunned for a moment, then I realized that MS probably didn't care about Gopher, so why support it? Sad.
And, yes, I checked the URL in the Preview and it works for me. If it doesn't work for you, it's not my mistake. TTFN.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
That looks like I'm whoring for karma and ranting. I wonder if I am.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
Whether MS does this, or AOL, or VALinux, it still might happen. The flavor will be different, but it will most likely happen, regardless of who the major players are.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
TTFN
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
The management does have a responsibility to the owners & stockholders, but part of that responsibility is to act legally (& ethically if the owners are decent people), so that the future viability of the company is not jeapordized by the current actions of management. That is, stealing today may save several thousand dollars, but it will cost tens of thousands in a few years when you are discovered and sued.
It seems that if there isn't enough money to cover all of the software used, there is a serious management problem. Maybe Gorbie works for a startup that has very little capital (think free-beer software), maybe the management has heard too much about piracy & thinks that it is 'good', maybe some tough choices need to made about which software doesn't justify its cost. I don't envy you your problem Gorbie.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
The rights of the people as outlined in the US Constitution are very limited. The Bill of Rights was a compromise between those who wanted guarantees of rights written into the document, and those who didn't want to imply that the rights not explicitly granted were denied. As such, they wrote two Amendments which explicitely state the (hopefully) obvious: government only has the right to do what it is explicitely ordered to do, and the people have rights to do anything not explicitely disallowed. Those Amendments (listed below) seem to have been ignored this century, except for rare cases when it seemed to serve some other purpose.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
There are some schools which have students do practical, hands-on work. Mine: Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. I'm a graduating Mechanical Engineering student, and in the ME department, our capstone design class is doing a project for a company (Disney, Raytheon, Applied Materials, and a host of small companies). We have eight weeks from receipt of project to presentation, and our four person teams typically do more or better than similar industry teams with more time. Disney asked 5 students to make a life-size robot hand for their rides, because they couldn't. The students did pretty well (I think they had problems with life cycles), and they only had 8 weeks to think, design, calculate, build, test, and present. While taking a full load of senior level classes. (Hmm, I dropped into bragging mode.)
Yes, there are practical schools. I know that practical is important, but I don't want us to forget that there is also a very necessary theoretical aspect to school, which is hard to get outside of school.
End Rant. :)
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
B. Huge telescopes aren't yet even possible in space; no way to get them up there.
Yes, Hubble is space based, but it isn't "huge". The Hubble has a main reflecting mirror 2.4m in diameter; the largest single telescopes on Earth are the 10m telescopes on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. (The Keck telescopes are individually bigger than other individual telescopes, but telescopes can be linked to provide an effectively larger telescope. That is what Chris is doing. Keck is doing something simila r for NASA's Origin's program.)
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
Hey, that should be their next Windows-only 'development platform/language/mistake'! The language would be called 'M$', and pronounced Micro-Cash. Even though "M" (big m) means 'mega' in the realm of scientific prefixes, and "$" means 'dollar(s)', they'll redefine them, just like Kerberos.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
Yes, remove the dirt. It's a great insulator; the insulation in my parent's attic is chopped up newspapers, one step away from dust bunnies. Also, dust caked on your CPU fan or power supply fan reduces the effectiveness of the fan noticably.
0) Let the computer sit unplugged overnight. You don't want to be shocked by a capacitor when you are wiping the monitor's insides, or cleaning the power supply.
1) Remove all media. I know, I know, but the people you got it from may have put 'that old computer' in the garage with a CD in the drive. All you have to do is start the boot, hit eject, remove the CD, push the tray back in, and you can turn it off before it gets out of BIOS. There may be ways to manualy eject the CD tray, without power.
2) Set up your "surgery center". Probably in the garage. You'll need the right tools nearby, and you don't want those dust-bunnies getting under the couch.
3) Take the whole computer apart. COMPLETELY. Well, only after you have let it sit unplugged overnight; think big capacitor discharging when your screwdriver slips. Remove every card, the motherboard, each drive, and the power supply. Then look for ways to remove the plastic attached to the metal frame. (The second computer had this 'cool' front plastic panel which was spring loaded to cover the drives when a button was pressed. The spring-pulley mechanism was dirt-encrusted and didn't work until it was cleaned.) Let the monitor sit unplugged overnight. Take apart the monitor, after the capacitors are allowed to discharged! (Remember, when high voltage is involved, paranoia is your friend.) Remove the power supply, and try to disassembly it. I say try because the second computer had Torx instead of phillips head screws, a six-pointed star needing a driver to match. Pain in the rear. You probably want to take apart the printer too.
4) Ventilate your workspace. Dust bunnies make me sneeze and allergize, and some solvents are BAD to breathe.
5) Blow dust away with lung-power or compressed air. I'm a student, so my lungs do a great job at a great price, but compressed air is very nice. Hmm, one amendment, I used compressed air on a part of a power supply I couldn't take apart any more. And, yes, do take apart the power supply (high voltage danger, let it sit). A power supply which is filled with dust is a hear problem waiting to happen. Use some pressurized air to help you clean the power supply. But be careful about where that air is going, if anything goes ballistic, it could cause damage/pain.
6) Wipe the components with a damp rag, water or alcohol. Water is cheap, alcohol cleans a little better. Alcohol requires ventilation. Clean the fan blades and casings of all of the fans you can get to. Clean the grills where the air flows. Wair for capacitor discharge. Wipe the monitor glass down. (When we cleaned that second computer, we discovered that the owner had spilled coffee on/in the monitor. The glass tube was coffee-dust brown, and the dirt didn't come off without serious elbow grease. That CRT tube should be transparent, if it isn't, you may have a coffee fiend on your hands.) When cleaning the monitor, don't change any adjustments you don't know about; some adjust the electron gun alignment.
7) Let everything dry, and re-assemble. Drying shouldn't take longer than a few hours, even if you washed the motherboard in the kitchen sink. Just don't leave ANY moisture on it when you hit POWER.
8) Let us know what happens. Take pictures, post them, and put a link in your bio. I like to see before/after pictures of computers. If I were a car guy, I might be restoring classic cars.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
That means that they had an existing engine which they could tweak, and they wanted to input variables into the GA which could be altered in a controlled fashion on the engine. I believe that the three parameters listed can be controlled by the onboard computer, making it almost trivial to test different configurations: just change the parameters in the computer. Then turn the engine over, run her through her paces, and look at the data. Your GA predictions have been tested.
The next step will probably put that engine on the road, to be tested in real situations, and maybe they will then use a population closer to 50 or 60 on the next set of predictions. Variables I can think of: number of cylinders; diameter of cylinders; stroke of piston in each cylinder; should the cylinders be identical in dimensions or should some be bigger?; one engine in the front with 8 cylinders, or one engine at each wheel, each engine having 2 cylinders?; material for the block; should the block be one material and the surfaces be coated with another?; which material for the coating?; number of spark plugs per cylinder; configuration of spark plugs in each cylinder; should that configuration be the same for each cylinder?; material(s) the piston is made out of; fuel injection port(s) and configuration ...
Well, I think you see what I mean. This GA was easy to test, because a few parameters were used, and those parameters can be changed easily. Test it easy at first, and make the tests more complex as you do more.
Louis Wu
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.