Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought we were still working on the whole "Do neutrinos have mass?" question. If something has no mass
can it be said to be lighter than something else?
Experiments indicate how light neutrinos are. When each experiment fails to find any mass in neutrinos, the conclusion is "neutrinos are lighter than X". X has been getting smaller, and it's less than the mass of other particles.
My mother got a degree in Electrical Engineering, then after not being employed for about 15 years (raising kids instead) she applied to do admin on VMS machines (high end at the time) for a large organization. The organization gradually switched to SunOS and HP/UX, so she gradually switched from VMS to UNIX.
In university she did a very little bit of programming in Fortran on punch cards. Programming is not a very large part of administration, though it can make dealing with peculiar situations (which nobody else has dealt with) easier.
There is nothing in this bill that would prevent a terrorist attack of this nature. Worrying about "cyberterrorists and hackers" has nothing to do with September 11, 2001.
How much communication do you need to organize this? Lets see:
"Hey Bob, let's hijack planes on tuesday and crash them into some big buildings." "OK Jim."
The greatest amount of electric power you can get to a heat source is calculable. Consider this: at rest, a human puts out about 80W as heat, and this is at 37 degrees C. The greatest possible efficiency for a heat engine is Carnot efficiency,
e = 1 - L/H
In this case the value is
e = 1 - (273+20)/(273+37) = 0.055 = 5.5%
(Room temperature assumed to be 20C)
Multiplying this efficiency by the power wasted at rest, we get only 4.4W. Considering that this assumes you process every watt put off by your body, a small fraction of that is all you can expect.
So don't expect too much power from these sorts of things. You'll never run a Pentium off this.
The web was accessible by the blind, it's becoming less so. Think about it. Take a nice simple site, something that Lynx can easily make sense of. All you need to understand it blind is a bit of text-to-speech software. This exists. But now we get hideous sites using tables, frames, and non-critical graphics, and the result becomes a mess. Being able to feel a tiny portion of the screen is helpful, but far from ideal. I'd much rather have sites that seperate the content from the formatting, making it possible to have text-to-speech give blind people the information that matters. Graphics are nice, but most information is text. (Incidentally, for those who don't realise it, CSS can be used to give sites that look nice but are still readable.)
Re:Clothes that transform thermal energy
on
Solar Clothes
·
· Score: 1
Sounds good, but it turns out from thermodynamics that the highest possible efficiency of turning heat into useful energy depends on the temperature of the hot and cold body. Specifically, the efficiency is
1 - Tl/Th
where Tl is the low temperature and Th is the high temperature, both in Kelvin (or Rankine, for you Americans). So if his body temperature is 37C or 310K, and the outside temperature is room temperature at 20C or 293K, the maximum efficiency is 0.05484 or about 5%. That's pretty bad. Even in a cold Canadian winter at -30C or 243K, the best is less than 22%. And we can't actually build anything that good, it's the theoretical maximum (Carnot efficiency).
So unless your friend likes working outside on really cold days, he won't get much energy output. Also keep in mind that at rest a human puts out about 80W, so even on this winter day he'll only get about 17.3 watts, which isn't enough to run a modern Intel chip.
Incidentally to convert Celsius to Kelvin add 273, and Farenheit to Rankine add 460.
Please get your units right. A Watt is a Joule
per second. A Joule is a unit of energy
(J = N*m). The kilowatt-hour is (kJ/s)*h, where h is 3600 seconds (one hour). Dimensionally it is the same as kJ.
If the device is generating 100 watts, ie 100 Joules per second, then it will generate 100 watt-hours in an hour, or 0.1 kWh. In 10 hours it will generate 1 kWh, not kW/h.
kW/h is truly a bizarre unit; it's dimensionally identical to J/s^2, which looks like an acceleration of power consumption. So maybe one could say "the average power consumption in California over the past 5 years is increasing at a rate of 20 kW/h" (numbers made up). An annual rate seems more likely to be reported.
Besides, I don't think they're suggesting this for saving on your electricity, but rather for providing convenient electricity without batteries.
The ratings give information about the content, they don't restict the information. You have the freedom to choose; in this case, someone makes a decision about various parameters of the product, eg violence, and the information is provided about the product. This is additional information, permitting a more informed decision. More information is good --- let's not censor the government as it is trying to make clear the content of some products.
Admittedly there can be large problems with giving the correct rating, but the idea is a good one.
They have a non-software Graffiti area so you can see the entire screen. If it was done in software (I had this on my Newton after I got sick of it screwing up my bad writing) some of the screen would need to be covered.
If you want to expant the LCD to also include that area, you drastically increase the price.
By doubling the screen resolution, presumably the OS will "pixel double" for programs that don't understand high res mode.
I saw an interesting graph of OS usage last year. Installed base of HP/UX and Solaris were ~50 times as big as Linux, and bigger than NT. Linux still has a small market share. The problem was that they were succumbing to the terrible Redmond OSs.
That being said, I see a bright future for UNIX, because of Linux (and other free Unices). Now highschool and university graduates (often) come out knowing UNIX, knowing it is good, and wanting to use it. Employers will listen to their suggestions and choose against Microsoft. But it is false to say that UNIX was anywhere near gone before Linus released Linux. The number of installed machines of HP/UX and Solaris is still quite high.
Geosynchronous orbits are extremely high. The US space shuttle can't get anywhere near geosynchronous. Carl Sagan said that if you view the world as a peach, the shuttle never leaves the fuzz. That's nowhere near geosynchronous.
Not only does Stoll sell klein bottles, he has absurdly good QA. And yes, they make good gifts, provided you know the right person. My girlfriend is studying pure math (ie the totally useless kind:) ), so this was perfect.
It worked in the second world war --- while the British were cracking Enigma codes with Collosus, a ridiculously parallel computer, the Americans were using the Navajo language to pass their secret information.
I haven't tried this yet, I'd thought about it a few months ago when I was messing with it, but never did anything. Someone suggested that one could replace the logo with a penguin.
It's not the display part that could make it crash, so a digital watch is no more crash-prone than an electronic watch with an analog face. And almost all the watches you see are actually electronic inside. Some aren't, but I wouldn't say that the majority of watch wearers have rolexes.
OK, so it's affected by money. So what? The worst they can do with the money is stop giving it to us. We'll still have our Free software, and we'll still make it better. Maybe slower, with less people working 9-5 on it (or 8am-midnight), but it'll progress.
Actually, RMS encourages people to charge as much as possible for free software. The money acquired in this way, he reasons, can be used to develop more software. You can charge for a GPL'd program, you just cannot stop whoever buys it from distributing it, and must make the code available.
Still not true. All Sun mice were optical (with an aluminum pad) until fairly recently. I had a Sun 3/60 with an optical mouse, now I have a Sparc II with the same (I don't like to spend money on computers).
Anyway, Apple's entire product line is five computers. (Cube, Tower, iMac, iBook, Powerbook) Not much to brag about.
Re:I'd love to see such a system
on
Pirate DNS?
·
· Score: 1
Maybe, but that's OK; so have it hosted in a different country, outside the reach of your oppressive government.
This opinion appears to be correct and logical, but it is not always so.
I will take as my example WalMart, a large US corporation making its way into Canada recently.
Smaller companies, such as the local individual corner store, or Zellers, Giant Tiger, etc, are not able to compete because they cannot buy goods in the same quantities as WalMart. WalMart, as an enormous company, can buy in huge quantities. This leads, eventually, to monopolization, as the largest company has the greatest advantage which retaining good margins.
This is part of why Capitalism doesn't work. There are other examples of why it does.
News reports that a computer hacker endangered the lives of Space +Shuttle astronauts during a 1997 mission are wrong. A report from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) said a hacker compromised NASA computers, endangering the lives of American astronauts.
NASA's Inspector General's office found that during the STS-86 mission +in September of 1997, the transmission of routine medical information was slightly delayed due to a computer hacker. However, the transmission was successfully completed.
At no time was communication between NASA and the astronauts +compromised. The communication interruption occurred between internal ground-based computer systems.
There has never been an interruption of communication service with the Shuttle due to computer hacker attacks. The command and control communications links between Mission Control and a Space Shuttle in orbit are extremely well insulated.
The 1997 incident is currently under investigation by NASA Inspector General's office.
My sun4 (old SparcStation 2) isn't terribly quiet; it had two little fans running at a tremendous speed.
It annoyed me, so I replaced one of them with a really big 10V fan, and ran it at 5V. That one is silent. But the other fan is plently loud and not convenient to replace, and the disks are far from silent. Soon it may move into the closet.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought we were still working on the whole "Do neutrinos have mass?" question. If something has no mass
can it be said to be lighter than something else?
Experiments indicate how light neutrinos are. When each experiment fails to find any mass in neutrinos, the conclusion is "neutrinos are lighter than X". X has been getting smaller, and it's less than the mass of other particles.
My mother got a degree in Electrical Engineering, then after not being employed for about 15 years (raising kids instead) she applied to do admin on VMS machines (high end at the time) for a large organization. The organization gradually switched to SunOS and HP/UX, so she gradually switched from VMS to UNIX.
In university she did a very little bit of programming in Fortran on punch cards. Programming is not a very large part of administration, though it can make dealing with peculiar situations (which nobody else has dealt with) easier.
There is nothing in this bill that would prevent a terrorist attack of this nature. Worrying about "cyberterrorists and hackers" has nothing to do with September 11, 2001.
How much communication do you need to organize this? Lets see:
"Hey Bob, let's hijack planes on tuesday and crash them into some big buildings." "OK Jim."
That's all it takes.
The greatest amount of electric power you can get to a heat source is calculable. Consider this: at rest, a human puts out about 80W as heat, and this is at 37 degrees C. The greatest possible efficiency for a heat engine is Carnot efficiency,
e = 1 - L/H
In this case the value is
e = 1 - (273+20)/(273+37) = 0.055 = 5.5%
(Room temperature assumed to be 20C)
Multiplying this efficiency by the power wasted at rest, we get only 4.4W. Considering that this assumes you process every watt put off by your body, a small fraction of that is all you can expect.
So don't expect too much power from these sorts of things. You'll never run a Pentium off this.
The web was accessible by the blind, it's becoming less so. Think about it. Take a nice simple site, something that Lynx can easily make sense of. All you need to understand it blind is a bit of text-to-speech software. This exists. But now we get hideous sites using tables, frames, and non-critical graphics, and the result becomes a mess. Being able to feel a tiny portion of the screen is helpful, but far from ideal. I'd much rather have sites that seperate the content from the formatting, making it possible to have text-to-speech give blind people the information that matters. Graphics are nice, but most information is text. (Incidentally, for those who don't realise it, CSS can be used to give sites that look nice but are still readable.)
Sounds good, but it turns out from thermodynamics that the highest possible efficiency of turning heat into useful energy depends on the temperature of the hot and cold body. Specifically, the efficiency is
1 - Tl/Th
where Tl is the low temperature and Th is the high temperature, both in Kelvin (or Rankine, for you Americans). So if his body temperature is 37C or 310K, and the outside temperature is room temperature at 20C or 293K, the maximum efficiency is 0.05484 or about 5%. That's pretty bad. Even in a cold Canadian winter at -30C or 243K, the best is less than 22%. And we can't actually build anything that good, it's the theoretical maximum (Carnot efficiency).
So unless your friend likes working outside on really cold days, he won't get much energy output. Also keep in mind that at rest a human puts out about 80W, so even on this winter day he'll only get about 17.3 watts, which isn't enough to run a modern Intel chip.
Incidentally to convert Celsius to Kelvin add 273, and Farenheit to Rankine add 460.
Please get your units right. A Watt is a Joule per second. A Joule is a unit of energy (J = N*m). The kilowatt-hour is (kJ/s)*h, where h is 3600 seconds (one hour). Dimensionally it is the same as kJ.
If the device is generating 100 watts, ie 100 Joules per second, then it will generate 100 watt-hours in an hour, or 0.1 kWh. In 10 hours it will generate 1 kWh, not kW/h.
kW/h is truly a bizarre unit; it's dimensionally identical to J/s^2, which looks like an acceleration of power consumption. So maybe one could say "the average power consumption in California over the past 5 years is increasing at a rate of 20 kW/h" (numbers made up). An annual rate seems more likely to be reported.
Besides, I don't think they're suggesting this for saving on your electricity, but rather for providing convenient electricity without batteries.
The ratings give information about the content, they don't restict the information. You have the freedom to choose; in this case, someone makes a decision about various parameters of the product, eg violence, and the information is provided about the product. This is additional information, permitting a more informed decision. More information is good --- let's not censor the government as it is trying to make clear the content of some products.
Admittedly there can be large problems with giving the correct rating, but the idea is a good one.
The university of Waterloo has an SGI origin which they have apparently been given to develop Linux for. Some information can be found here.
They have a non-software Graffiti area so you can see the entire screen. If it was done in software (I had this on my Newton after I got sick of it screwing up my bad writing) some of the screen would need to be covered. If you want to expant the LCD to also include that area, you drastically increase the price. By doubling the screen resolution, presumably the OS will "pixel double" for programs that don't understand high res mode.
That being said, I see a bright future for UNIX, because of Linux (and other free Unices). Now highschool and university graduates (often) come out knowing UNIX, knowing it is good, and wanting to use it. Employers will listen to their suggestions and choose against Microsoft. But it is false to say that UNIX was anywhere near gone before Linus released Linux. The number of installed machines of HP/UX and Solaris is still quite high.
UNIX didn't exist until 1969, according to this page, which matches what I though was true. No seeding of AT&T UNIX in the 1960s, thank you very much.
The orbit altitude for a very recent flight to the ISS was merely 177 nautical miles (328 km). Spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit travel at an altitude of 35,785 km.
Not only does Stoll sell klein bottles, he has absurdly good QA. And yes, they make good gifts, provided you know the right person. My girlfriend is studying pure math (ie the totally useless kind :) ), so this was perfect.
It worked in the second world war --- while the British were cracking Enigma codes with Collosus, a ridiculously parallel computer, the Americans were using the Navajo language to pass their secret information.
I haven't tried this yet, I'd thought about it a few months ago when I was messing with it, but never did anything. Someone suggested that one could replace the logo with a penguin.
It's not the display part that could make it crash, so a digital watch is no more crash-prone than an electronic watch with an analog face. And almost all the watches you see are actually electronic inside. Some aren't, but I wouldn't say that the majority of watch wearers have rolexes.
OK, so it's affected by money. So what? The worst they can do with the money is stop giving it to us. We'll still have our Free software, and we'll still make it better. Maybe slower, with less people working 9-5 on it (or 8am-midnight), but it'll progress.
Actually, RMS encourages people to charge as much as possible for free software. The money acquired in this way, he reasons, can be used to develop more software. You can charge for a GPL'd program, you just cannot stop whoever buys it from distributing it, and must make the code available.
Anyway, Apple's entire product line is five computers. (Cube, Tower, iMac, iBook, Powerbook) Not much to brag about.
Maybe, but that's OK; so have it hosted in a different country, outside the reach of your oppressive government.
I heard there was a version distributed over millions of servers worldwide. :P
I will take as my example WalMart, a large US corporation making its way into Canada recently.
Smaller companies, such as the local individual corner store, or Zellers, Giant Tiger, etc, are not able to compete because they cannot buy goods in the same quantities as WalMart. WalMart, as an enormous company, can buy in huge quantities. This leads, eventually, to monopolization, as the largest company has the greatest advantage which retaining good margins.
This is part of why Capitalism doesn't work. There are other examples of why it does.
NASA's Inspector General's office found that during the STS-86 mission +in September of 1997, the transmission of routine medical information was slightly delayed due to a computer hacker. However, the transmission was successfully completed.
At no time was communication between NASA and the astronauts +compromised. The communication interruption occurred between internal ground-based computer systems.
There has never been an interruption of communication service with the Shuttle due to computer hacker attacks. The command and control communications links between Mission Control and a Space Shuttle in orbit are extremely well insulated.
The 1997 incident is currently under investigation by NASA Inspector General's office.
It annoyed me, so I replaced one of them with a really big 10V fan, and ran it at 5V. That one is silent. But the other fan is plently loud and not convenient to replace, and the disks are far from silent. Soon it may move into the closet.