From their records page, the "Current Eliminator" (336 volts) took the current top prize, pulling 141 mph in 8.861 seconds. Wow. I'd give good money to see how they pulled performance like that out of an electric motor assembly. After all, acceleration power has traditionally been the major weakness of these cars (besides range, which is a power storage issue).
Although for that matter, I'm pretty impressed with a power supply that can deliver that kind of current, too. (Quick calculation on xcalc...) Conservatively, that comes out to around 100 KW from a battery!
Well, the problem is that most people are already conditioned to accept the planned obsolecence of their music collections. People bought all their music again when they went from 45s to LPs, then later to CDs. (I don't think too many people ran out and replaced their LPs with cassete tape, but that's because the quality clearly sucked.) When the change comes, it'll be hyped as the way to get all your old music, with new bells and whistles, sounding better than ever. Plus, the recording industry will then begin slowly phasing out the releases on CD, or releasing them later, or something.
That part is inevitable, though. CDs aren't the end-all ultimate form of music distribution, after all. The danger is that, by the time music is being distributed under the new formats en masse, the RIAA will have already won over all the manufacturers of playback equipment, by threat of lawsuits if necessary. Maybe you'll be able to play all the mp3s you want on your computer, but they'll be cheap recaptures of an analog stream. Your walkman, your car stereo, maybe even your computer (via a next-gen soundcard that talks to firewire/USB2/whatever) will only play the encrypted files you bought, and probably each file will only work on that one device. Sure, Sony beat the MPAA over VCRs, and somebody (forget who) beat the RIAA over cassette recorders, but given how the courts have been behaving over IP these days, who knows who'll win the next round.
"Finally, defendants claim that they are engaged in a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. They are mistaken." -- Judge Kaplan, in issuing the DeCSS injunction against 2600.
Why do companies bother investing money in complex copy protection schemes that can be so easily subverted?
Just connect the analog output from the sound card to an ADC and compress it with the algorithm of your choice.
Unfortunately, a copy made from an analog stream isn't the same as a digital original... after all, chances are you don't have a sound card capable of doing 200+Kbps sampling. And even if you do, a good deal of information from the original is lost in the playback process.
However, the more serious danger is that the recording industry will turn out to have serious enough clout that the manufacturers who turn out playback devices will standardize on some SDMI-ish technology out of fear of RIAA lawsuits. Sure, you'll be able to play all the mp3s you want on your computer, but they'll all be low-to-medium grade, analog recaptures, that won't work on any consumer player (think walkmans, car stereos, etc... digital music's going to be everywhere in 10 years) because they all comply with SDMI. Remember, the SDMI specifies that the recording industry can, at some point of their choosing, disable mp3 playback when they feel that it's time to "phase out the format."
Finally, consider the possibility that the next generation of sound systems will use USB/USB2/1394 digital output straight to the speaker. Technology has already been demonstrated that would let them leave the audio stream encrypted until it arrives at a custom processor in the speaker hardware itself. Heck, Intel's showing off a flatscreen monitor that'll do this with video playback.
The article brings up the fact that, with Socket A (as opposed to Slot A) chips coming sometime in the not-too-distant future, the whole goldfinger card issue will be more or less moot. Instead, you'll need a device that sits between the chip and mobo, or a "slotket" type device that plugs into an older, Slot A, board. There are, however, pins on the chip die designated for these sorts of things, so it shouldn't be too hard.
I agree that the on-die cache is going to be the most important advance, performance-wise. The L2 cache was running at 1/2 clock, then got bumped down to 2/5 clock at around 700 MHz (due to problems with high-speed L2 cache chip suppliers, I believe). When this goes on-die, the cache will finally be able to run at the full clock frequency, which will make the difference between 800 MHz and 1 GHz look paltry by comparison.
On the whole, though, we may be getting to the sorts of CPU speeds where overclocking no longer serves any useful purpose. A 1 GHz chip (or even a 800 MHz one) can, for most tasks, outpace any other componant of the system. So is overclocking my chip to 1.3 GHz going to make a major difference in my Q3 frame rates? Probably not. The graphics card (yes, even a modern 3D card) became the major bottleneck about 400 MHz ago. Sure, that might let me compile software faster, but in this case, I'm going to go with the rated speed to avoid single-bit errors and the like. Heck, with a chip that fast, I might even underclock a bit, just for the added stability.
I think that the very first thing that a Linux desktop needs to be able to do and able to do absolutely flawlessly is, download a RPM or similar package, install it with a few simple clicks, create a "shortcut" to run it on the desktop or in some program menu somewhere, and then run the program. This is what 90% of computer users do 90% of the time (with the running of software happening much more often than the installing, of course), and right now the graphical shells just plain SUCK at this.
This isn't that hard to implement, if you have the right underlying architecture in place. I use Debian, with menu and WindowMaker. If I decide there's some great new program I want, I just zip over to the Debian site. 9 times out of 10 (at least for free software, and fairly often otherwise) there's a.deb for the thing. Now that I know the name of the thing, I zip over to my xterm, su, and then apt-get package_name. If the package has a menufile (many do) it'll install it. Once the install completes, clicking on my desktop brings up a menu with my new program filed pretty much wherever I'd expect it to be. Oh, and the dependencies basically always work.
Of course, sometimes a program isn't available as a.deb for whatever reason, but then again, they're often only available at.tar.gz files. I wouldn't really advise trying to automagically install every.tar the user comes upon. How's the app going to know where to install it, much less how to configure it or what it depends on?
But anyway, my point was that the process of package installation/configuration/registration can be and (in Debian) is very well automated. Dselect is a step in the right direction, as GUIs go, though it's still got a long way to go. I definitely think there should be a better way of browsing over the available packages, for one thing.
Harris compares the experiment's significance to Robert Goddard's firing of the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926.
I might point out that we don't have very many details of this experiment yet. According to the article, the procedure was to put a fragment of their new carbon-filament mesh on a pendulum, and see how high they could hold it with light pressure from a laser. What we don't know yet is - how much force was produced? how powerful was the laser/how efficient was the energy transfer? how readily does this material scale?
We might compare these experiments to the first demonstrations that force could be generated by burning liquid fuels, but comparing this to Goddard's rocket work is very premature.
carbon nanoscience, including fullerenes and carbon nanotubes
molecular-scale electronic devices, including wires and components
molecular self-assembly, with particular emphasis on organized structures and machines,
quantum size effects, including electronic and photonic phenomena
nanotechnologies, including lithographies, microscopies and manipulators
crystal engineering, including detailed architectures for electronic and photonic applications
engineering of nanoscale dots, films, and 3-dimensional structures
molecular-scale biomedical engineering
Quite a breadth of fields represented here, and a list that illustrates an important point about nanotechnology -- by its very nature, you're combining a lot of areas of expertise. Right now, most of the work is arguably in the area of chemistry, but in the next few years you're going to have chemists, physicsts, mechanical/electrical/some new field? engineers, and even computer scientists working in the area. In the end, we're going to need to combine more people than just the physicsts.
Oh, and a note to Technos -- as much money as even the military black budget has to throw around, we're nowhere near developing weapons-grade nanotech. If you want self-replicating weaponry, biological warfare remains your only "good" option.
Well, they have done this in the past, albiet not with panels this large. See this link for an example of an even larger tiling arrangement that uses smaller panels. The major difficulty that really drives up costs is building the underlying interconnects to deliver signal to each pixel, which is a problem that scales with the number of screens involved in the array (as well as the resolution of each one, but I'd assume they're just feeding data into the back of existing panels).
Incidentally, the missing mass problem isn't generally stated in terms of that needed to close the universe. The trouble is that the global curvature still isn't well-enough fixed to say just how much mass is needed. The amount of mass needed to account for the dynamics and gravitational lensing of galaxy clusters, however, is a much better understood notion.
Anyway, the best-guess on cosmic topology varies on whom you talk to. Judging by the redshift/supernova frequency data on distant galaxies, the universe looks open (hyperbolic). But if you look at the mean anisotropy diameter of the cosmic microwave background, it looks marginally open (flat geometry). And if you throw the CC in, you can conceivably have a universe of any mass you like still turn out open.
You're slightly missing the point. By observing the gravitational lensing of galaxy clusters, and the rotational rates of stars in galaxies, astronomers notice that they weigh about ten times what they should, based on their luminosity. Observations of our own galaxy, meanwhile, indicate that unless the Milky Way is extremely free of gas and dust relative to all the others, galaxies don't have enough non-luminous ordinary matter (gas and dust) to make up this difference.
The major candidates for this matter thus far have been MACHOS (massive compact halo objects - i.e. brown dwarfs/neutron stars/black holes), neutral gas (neutral hydrogen, in particular, is rather difficult to detect), and WIMPS. In the last few years, more evidence has been accumulating for all three of these classes. Personally, I expect that the missing mass will turn out to be a mixture of gas and WIMPS - if the halo contained enough compact objects to be significant, you'd think we'd see more stars there too.
As far as making huge/affordable flat panel displays goes, the light-emitting material really isn't the limiting factor. The major trouble fabricating these devices in a cost-effective manner is the interconnects that deliver signal to each pixel individually. While this isn't an especially technically challenging problem, it's very expensive to do. So, sure, a cell of OLED may very well turn out to be cheaper to make than an LCD pixel (which may or may not be the case -- mostly depends on how cheaply the OLED compounds can be made and stably bonded to the substrate), but this won't drastically cut the cost of building displays.
That said, this technology does (as the article correctly emphasizes) enable the construction of much lower-power displays than what is currently used. LEDs have very low heat dissipation, which translates into less wasted current, especially when compared to the heat put out by an LCD backlight. Also, without a backlight, you can make the panel somewhat thinner, so the various comments about using this to make headmount or pda/cellphone displays are probably right on track as to where OLEDs will end up being important.
This is certainly too bad, but not especially surprising. Considering how long the probe has been out of contact, the chances that it was still operational had to be roughly nil. That, and the fact that the Global Surveyor didn't pick up any signals when they tried exactly this experiment before... as I said, not too surprising.
However, NASA should be praised for trying, and especially for having the guts to make an announcement like this, despite the low chances of success. What other government agencies do you know of that will come out and say "This probably isn't going to work, but we'll keep you posted anyway" ?
In the end, lets just hope NASA (and the people holding NASA's pursestrings) have learned a few lessons. There's nothing wrong with "faster, better, cheaper" as a design objective, but if you want to minimize the failure rate, you can't cut all the way to the bone. $5 mil more and we'd know what happened to the lander.
There was a discussion here a while back about options regarding embedded linux solutions. Several gripes came up, including the lack of a filesystem or drivers for flash memory, support for varying CPU clock speed, and a few other details. Look at this. From Itsy's page,
Although there are much newer versions of ARM Linux available today, the Itsy port contains several pieces of software not yet available in the newer versions, including the FTL flash file system, power management support, support to dynamically change clock speeds, etc. We expect that these features will eventually be integrated into later versions of Linux, by the Linux community.
Looks like they've gone to the trouble to write a bunch of these for us. Yay! Now anybody want to look into turning these into a 2.3/2.4 kernel mod?
Well, I just looked at the LDP site and I have to say, it looks good. Very navigable, the search engine seems to work. I have to say, though, that I've never been a huge fan of the style that seems to be dominating these days: the page full of news-boxes with a itsy-bitsy nav bar on one side. Nevertheless, it works.
Though I'd hate to make more work for them, I might make one suggestion for the LDP. Since they're hosting just about everything else, what about incorporating a subject indexed RFC archive? It would be nice to be able to get all these things from one place, and the LDP could perhaps do a better job of sorting them than most (ie. preferentially return protocol specs over obscure derivaties of said protocols). I generally use the archive at faqs.org, but their search results are a real pain to wade through.
So let's say SORM just passed, and your ISP is now relaying all communications to the FSB. Okay, you start using SSH/SSL/PGP to encrypt everything that goes to and from your computer. Maybe you even use anonymizing proxies so they can't tell who you're talking to. Great...
...or maybe not so great. Next year, they pass a law outlawing anonymizing proxies as "instruments of terror that aid criminals." Okay, so you use a foreign one. Year after that, they outlaw all encryption over 20 bits, and since they're watching your every transmission, they can tell if you're complying. Not that they'll come for you the next day, there's far too much data for them to scrutinize it that closely. But, if the FSB/Kremlin/Customs agents/Tax agency/whoever ever decides that you're behaving a little funny (or just doesn't like you ever since you published that nasty editorial about them), they can pull up your internet connection, see that you're still using 1024-bit PGP, and haul you away. Too bad.
Moral of the story: if they can get away with making this law (and it looks like they may already have), they can make just about any law they damn well please. But now, they've got the surveilance tech to enforce it.
The major problem I see with this is the amount of current needed to drive that many solenoids. Lets say you want to move said 350 pounds though a range of motion of, say, 20 cm in a second. Okay, you just drew 300 W of power, assuming perfect efficiency. Throw in the heat loss most solenoids incur, and you're up to a 500 W muscle. Your body can do this, easy, because it has the equivalent of a massively parallel power plant (sugar metabolism in each of the 1E7 to 1E9 muscle cells in a muscle). You want to carry around a power supply that feeds 300 W to each of about 10 muscles in a leg. Probably not.
To the fellow who suggested placing the same charge in each electrode and hoping they repel, this in general doesn't work. The expansion you see is caused by a potential difference across the substance, which changes the geometry of the material's molecues relationships to each other, not by electrostatic attraction/repulsion as per se. Especially when you consider that the breakdown voltage for this material is probably a few 100V/mm at most, you'll never get a large enough charge to collect on the material's boundaries to exert a useful force. You don't see capacitors getting crushed by the electrostatic attraction of their plates -- you see dielectric breakdown.
So when I suggested looking for a way to reverse the process, they actually need to find a different, but probably related, substance, that undergoes an expansion, rather than a contraction, along the direction of the potential gradient.
- Experience shows that tools designed for one purpose that are effective for another tend to be used for that other purpose too, no matter what its designers intended.
- Experience shows that if a vulnerability exists in a security system, it is likely that someone will take advantage of it sooner or later.
If only other protocol designers (e.g the DVD-CCA) would keep such things in mind when designing their products, instead of trying to legislate/litigate unintended uses and security breaches away after the fact, we might avoid a great deal of trouble. Weak security will usually be broken sooner or later. And for goodness' sake, don't sue your customers when they use your products in ways you didn't intend.
Materials like this exert force because they try to maintain an approximately uniform density, so an electric potential squeezes it into a different shape. The trouble with using this to do mechanical work -- like the "artificial muscle" this is being hyped as -- is that you can't exert very much force before the material starts to compress, or else you overwhelm the electrostatic forces. This is sort of the converse of the problem that piezo-based transducers have always had: the electrostatic potentials cause the crystalline lattice of a piezo to expand with considerable force... but only for a few hundreds of microns, at best. Which makes them good for speakers, or ultra-fine positioning, but not so good for doing work.
As far as I can tell, the most promising avenue for these materials would be to use them rather like small, agile hydrolic pumps that have large dynamic range but little pushing power and even less pull. The comment in the article about an artificial butterfly could be insightful with respect to what you could do with these. As far as artificial limbs go, unless they can dramatically increase the force they can put out, they might be a major breakthrough for actuating the fingers of a prosthetic hand, but they'll be no good at all for replacing the wrist flexors, never mind a bicep.
I would suggest that researchers look for a way to turn this effect around, allowing the material to pull rather than push. Such plastics almost invariably have greater tensile strength than resistance to compression, and it's much easier to engineer around, too.
You can find the Galileo project's Galileo Millennium Mission on the JPL's pages. Tentatively, there aren't any close flyby opportunities of Callisto scheduled for this extended-extended mission, although there is growing support within NASA to send one of the "faster-better-cheaper" probes to take a closer look. The Europa Orbiter is such a probe that would look closer at the suspected ocean there, so a misson to other Jovian satellites is not out of the question.
In theory, you could have Galileo transmit to Earth at a time when Calisto would be passing between the probe and us; however, such an event isn't likely to occur if a close flyby isn't scheduled, and even if one was, an occultation still isn't a guarantee. And unfortunately, Galileo isn't set up to, for instance, use its antenna as a reflection radar to look for itself. Passive sensors only.
As far as Jovian radiation goes, I would propose that, given current theories regarding life's evolution on Earth, it would increase the probability that life would arise. Besides a fertile chemical environment, it seems that ionizing radiation accelerates the process of dissociating simple molecules which can then recombine into more complex ones. Background radiation in interstellar space is enough to form alcohols in nebulae and amino acids and PAHs in cometary ice; stellar radiation or Jupiter's radiation belts would do this even faster. That said, the ice crust on top of Europa's ocean is probably thick enough to shield any incoming ionizing radiation, so it's likely a non-issue. Life's best bet on Europa is tidally-generated heat and geologic radiation.
Discoloration, meanwhile, suggests eruptions, but smooth, crater-free regions are better evidence of this. Of course, cratering doesn't tell us much more than that volcanism happened within the last half-billion years or so. What appear to be fresh escarpments along fault lines might bring that date a little closer, but discoloration is going to really clinch the issue, once we know what the stuff is. For this, we need the Europa Orbiter to do spectral analysis on the surface. If it turns out to be, for instance, sulpher or iron-rich minerals from the ocean underneath, we don't get much new information about the age of the eruptions. If we're looking at some sort of hydrocarbonish gunk, it would be broken down by radiation rather quickly, so it is more recent. Most exciting of all, it could be some sort of organic residue from subsurface life forms... but who knows.
According to their WINE page, Corel's programmers have been working only on the internal WINE source tree, mostly for buxfixes. They claim to have been focusing on it because of "release deadlines for our Linux applications approaching..." Does this mean that they're using WINE as a backend to their Linux apps? I hope not... I'd much rather run natively complied code. More stable, and a whole lot faster.
Speaking of speed, they also say that they've integrated some KDE-like code to do UI-management and themability. It'll be nice to have more options than "look-like-win31" and "look-like-win95" but what is this going to do for performance? Already, WINE runs anything more complex than Minesweeper pretty slowly -- ever wanted to see Mathematica really crawl?
Still, I'm looking forward to checking out what they've done to the code. Hopefully, WineHQ will start picking through the code right away to merge the good bits with the main tree.
The trouble with Java is that, as soon as you load a UI layer (Swing comes to mind; haven't used JFC but I somehow suspect similar performance) the whole app/applet slows to an absolute crawl. This is, I think, mostly the fault of how Java implements new calls: calling an instantiated function results in calls to the contructors of every class above it.
Other than that, I've seen performance approaching that of compiled C++ out of Java, if the app takes pains to avoid new. UI layers simply don't do this.
China, despite the economic growth over the past 20 or so years, is a really poor country with lots of problems - chief among them the state-owned enterprises that are reportedly going to go down the toilet in the not-too-distant future.
The scientific payoff from sending up a copycat version of the Soyuz is minimal, and the propaganda benefits aren't all that great either (some research into undetectable sporting performance-enhancing drugs would achieve a similar propaganda result at a much lower cost), and the military benefits non-existent. So, what's the point - even from the view of the Chinese leadership?
There are a couple of reasons to do this. No, the scientific payoff isn't going to justify the effort, but that wasn't the initial justification for sending humans into orbit the first time around, either. Somebody else said, it was largely fear of cold-war rivals. Now, rightly or wrongly, China does perceive itself in a kind of cold war with the Western powers, and the Chinese military has admitted to their inability to confront the West on a traditional battlefield, if it should come to that.
The Soviets and Americans conducted the initial space launches to prove their ballistic missile capability, but since China has been orbiting payloads for years, they hardly have anything to prove in this realm, other than showing off their ability to launch an exceptionally heavy load. This, in fact, could have a much more benign effect than many Americans are willing to give the Chinese credit for: that they can launch such a large payload, and trust it enough to risk the major publicity problems associated with losing an astronaut, says good things about their ability to do commercial satellite launches. With many state-owned industries drying up, the Chinese gov. could use a cash-cow like that.
Late last year, the Chinese launched an unmanned capsule into orbit and recovered it intact. Pictures of Chinese astronauts (Taikonauts, apparently, is the word they're using) in space suits have surfaced from time to time since the early 1980s, indicating they've been considering this sort of move for a while now. They clearly have the capability to put a human in orbit right now; my guess is that they waited to make this announcment until analyzing the data from last year's launch to make sure the capsule is space-worthy. Now they just have to wait for the rocket to be fabricated.
The real question, of course, is the Chinese government's motives behind this. Presumably, national prestige is a major factor -- if they were doing this for economic reasons, they'd go the route of India, and echew manned operations for potentially profitable satellite launch services. In which case you have to wonder, will this spur the U.S. or other spacefaring governments to increase funding for manned spaceflight, or to just sit back and say, "good for them," unconcerned?
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Although for that matter, I'm pretty impressed with a power supply that can deliver that kind of current, too. (Quick calculation on xcalc...) Conservatively, that comes out to around 100 KW from a battery!
Well, the problem is that most people are already conditioned to accept the planned obsolecence of their music collections. People bought all their music again when they went from 45s to LPs, then later to CDs. (I don't think too many people ran out and replaced their LPs with cassete tape, but that's because the quality clearly sucked.) When the change comes, it'll be hyped as the way to get all your old music, with new bells and whistles, sounding better than ever. Plus, the recording industry will then begin slowly phasing out the releases on CD, or releasing them later, or something.
That part is inevitable, though. CDs aren't the end-all ultimate form of music distribution, after all. The danger is that, by the time music is being distributed under the new formats en masse, the RIAA will have already won over all the manufacturers of playback equipment, by threat of lawsuits if necessary. Maybe you'll be able to play all the mp3s you want on your computer, but they'll be cheap recaptures of an analog stream. Your walkman, your car stereo, maybe even your computer (via a next-gen soundcard that talks to firewire/USB2/whatever) will only play the encrypted files you bought, and probably each file will only work on that one device. Sure, Sony beat the MPAA over VCRs, and somebody (forget who) beat the RIAA over cassette recorders, but given how the courts have been behaving over IP these days, who knows who'll win the next round.
"Finally, defendants claim that they are engaged in a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. They are mistaken." -- Judge Kaplan, in issuing the DeCSS injunction against 2600.
Unfortunately, a copy made from an analog stream isn't the same as a digital original ... after all, chances are you don't have a sound card capable of doing 200+Kbps sampling. And even if you do, a good deal of information from the original is lost in the playback process.
However, the more serious danger is that the recording industry will turn out to have serious enough clout that the manufacturers who turn out playback devices will standardize on some SDMI-ish technology out of fear of RIAA lawsuits. Sure, you'll be able to play all the mp3s you want on your computer, but they'll all be low-to-medium grade, analog recaptures, that won't work on any consumer player (think walkmans, car stereos, etc ... digital music's going to be everywhere in 10 years) because they all comply with SDMI. Remember, the SDMI specifies that the recording industry can, at some point of their choosing, disable mp3 playback when they feel that it's time to "phase out the format."
Finally, consider the possibility that the next generation of sound systems will use USB/USB2/1394 digital output straight to the speaker. Technology has already been demonstrated that would let them leave the audio stream encrypted until it arrives at a custom processor in the speaker hardware itself. Heck, Intel's showing off a flatscreen monitor that'll do this with video playback.
The article brings up the fact that, with Socket A (as opposed to Slot A) chips coming sometime in the not-too-distant future, the whole goldfinger card issue will be more or less moot. Instead, you'll need a device that sits between the chip and mobo, or a "slotket" type device that plugs into an older, Slot A, board. There are, however, pins on the chip die designated for these sorts of things, so it shouldn't be too hard.
I agree that the on-die cache is going to be the most important advance, performance-wise. The L2 cache was running at 1/2 clock, then got bumped down to 2/5 clock at around 700 MHz (due to problems with high-speed L2 cache chip suppliers, I believe). When this goes on-die, the cache will finally be able to run at the full clock frequency, which will make the difference between 800 MHz and 1 GHz look paltry by comparison.
On the whole, though, we may be getting to the sorts of CPU speeds where overclocking no longer serves any useful purpose. A 1 GHz chip (or even a 800 MHz one) can, for most tasks, outpace any other componant of the system. So is overclocking my chip to 1.3 GHz going to make a major difference in my Q3 frame rates? Probably not. The graphics card (yes, even a modern 3D card) became the major bottleneck about 400 MHz ago. Sure, that might let me compile software faster, but in this case, I'm going to go with the rated speed to avoid single-bit errors and the like. Heck, with a chip that fast, I might even underclock a bit, just for the added stability.
This isn't that hard to implement, if you have the right underlying architecture in place. I use Debian, with menu and WindowMaker. If I decide there's some great new program I want, I just zip over to the Debian site. 9 times out of 10 (at least for free software, and fairly often otherwise) there's a .deb for the thing. Now that I know the name of the thing, I zip over to my xterm, su, and then apt-get package_name. If the package has a menufile (many do) it'll install it. Once the install completes, clicking on my desktop brings up a menu with my new program filed pretty much wherever I'd expect it to be. Oh, and the dependencies basically always work.
Of course, sometimes a program isn't available as a .deb for whatever reason, but then again, they're often only available at .tar.gz files. I wouldn't really advise trying to automagically install every .tar the user comes upon. How's the app going to know where to install it, much less how to configure it or what it depends on?
But anyway, my point was that the process of package installation/configuration/registration can be and (in Debian) is very well automated. Dselect is a step in the right direction, as GUIs go, though it's still got a long way to go. I definitely think there should be a better way of browsing over the available packages, for one thing.
I might point out that we don't have very many details of this experiment yet. According to the article, the procedure was to put a fragment of their new carbon-filament mesh on a pendulum, and see how high they could hold it with light pressure from a laser. What we don't know yet is - how much force was produced? how powerful was the laser/how efficient was the energy transfer? how readily does this material scale?
We might compare these experiments to the first demonstrations that force could be generated by burning liquid fuels, but comparing this to Goddard's rocket work is very premature.
From the ACS page:
Quite a breadth of fields represented here, and a list that illustrates an important point about nanotechnology -- by its very nature, you're combining a lot of areas of expertise. Right now, most of the work is arguably in the area of chemistry, but in the next few years you're going to have chemists, physicsts, mechanical/electrical/some new field? engineers, and even computer scientists working in the area. In the end, we're going to need to combine more people than just the physicsts.
Along these lines, I like what some universities are doing: check out Rice's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology and Cornell's National Nanofabrication Facility for examples of institutes that have been set up specifically to bring together the various disciplines needed to tackle this problem.
Oh, and a note to Technos -- as much money as even the military black budget has to throw around, we're nowhere near developing weapons-grade nanotech. If you want self-replicating weaponry, biological warfare remains your only "good" option.
Well, they have done this in the past, albiet not with panels this large. See this link for an example of an even larger tiling arrangement that uses smaller panels. The major difficulty that really drives up costs is building the underlying interconnects to deliver signal to each pixel, which is a problem that scales with the number of screens involved in the array (as well as the resolution of each one, but I'd assume they're just feeding data into the back of existing panels).
Here's the abstract, and here's the full preprint paper. It's an interesting, if quite densely technical, read.
Anyway, the best-guess on cosmic topology varies on whom you talk to. Judging by the redshift/supernova frequency data on distant galaxies, the universe looks open (hyperbolic). But if you look at the mean anisotropy diameter of the cosmic microwave background, it looks marginally open (flat geometry). And if you throw the CC in, you can conceivably have a universe of any mass you like still turn out open.
The major candidates for this matter thus far have been MACHOS (massive compact halo objects - i.e. brown dwarfs/neutron stars/black holes), neutral gas (neutral hydrogen, in particular, is rather difficult to detect), and WIMPS. In the last few years, more evidence has been accumulating for all three of these classes. Personally, I expect that the missing mass will turn out to be a mixture of gas and WIMPS - if the halo contained enough compact objects to be significant, you'd think we'd see more stars there too.
That said, this technology does (as the article correctly emphasizes) enable the construction of much lower-power displays than what is currently used. LEDs have very low heat dissipation, which translates into less wasted current, especially when compared to the heat put out by an LCD backlight. Also, without a backlight, you can make the panel somewhat thinner, so the various comments about using this to make headmount or pda/cellphone displays are probably right on track as to where OLEDs will end up being important.
However, NASA should be praised for trying, and especially for having the guts to make an announcement like this, despite the low chances of success. What other government agencies do you know of that will come out and say "This probably isn't going to work, but we'll keep you posted anyway" ?
In the end, lets just hope NASA (and the people holding NASA's pursestrings) have learned a few lessons. There's nothing wrong with "faster, better, cheaper" as a design objective, but if you want to minimize the failure rate, you can't cut all the way to the bone. $5 mil more and we'd know what happened to the lander.
There was a discussion here a while back about options regarding embedded linux solutions. Several gripes came up, including the lack of a filesystem or drivers for flash memory, support for varying CPU clock speed, and a few other details. Look at this. From Itsy's page,
Looks like they've gone to the trouble to write a bunch of these for us. Yay! Now anybody want to look into turning these into a 2.3/2.4 kernel mod?
Well, I just looked at the LDP site and I have to say, it looks good. Very navigable, the search engine seems to work. I have to say, though, that I've never been a huge fan of the style that seems to be dominating these days: the page full of news-boxes with a itsy-bitsy nav bar on one side. Nevertheless, it works.
Though I'd hate to make more work for them, I might make one suggestion for the LDP. Since they're hosting just about everything else, what about incorporating a subject indexed RFC archive? It would be nice to be able to get all these things from one place, and the LDP could perhaps do a better job of sorting them than most (ie. preferentially return protocol specs over obscure derivaties of said protocols). I generally use the archive at faqs.org, but their search results are a real pain to wade through.
Just a thought.
So let's say SORM just passed, and your ISP is now relaying all communications to the FSB. Okay, you start using SSH/SSL/PGP to encrypt everything that goes to and from your computer. Maybe you even use anonymizing proxies so they can't tell who you're talking to. Great...
...or maybe not so great. Next year, they pass a law outlawing anonymizing proxies as "instruments of terror that aid criminals." Okay, so you use a foreign one. Year after that, they outlaw all encryption over 20 bits, and since they're watching your every transmission, they can tell if you're complying. Not that they'll come for you the next day, there's far too much data for them to scrutinize it that closely. But, if the FSB/Kremlin/Customs agents/Tax agency/whoever ever decides that you're behaving a little funny (or just doesn't like you ever since you published that nasty editorial about them), they can pull up your internet connection, see that you're still using 1024-bit PGP, and haul you away. Too bad.
Moral of the story: if they can get away with making this law (and it looks like they may already have), they can make just about any law they damn well please. But now, they've got the surveilance tech to enforce it.
The major problem I see with this is the amount of current needed to drive that many solenoids. Lets say you want to move said 350 pounds though a range of motion of, say, 20 cm in a second. Okay, you just drew 300 W of power, assuming perfect efficiency. Throw in the heat loss most solenoids incur, and you're up to a 500 W muscle. Your body can do this, easy, because it has the equivalent of a massively parallel power plant (sugar metabolism in each of the 1E7 to 1E9 muscle cells in a muscle). You want to carry around a power supply that feeds 300 W to each of about 10 muscles in a leg. Probably not.
Wow. My first +5. Yay for me.
To the fellow who suggested placing the same charge in each electrode and hoping they repel, this in general doesn't work. The expansion you see is caused by a potential difference across the substance, which changes the geometry of the material's molecues relationships to each other, not by electrostatic attraction/repulsion as per se. Especially when you consider that the breakdown voltage for this material is probably a few 100V/mm at most, you'll never get a large enough charge to collect on the material's boundaries to exert a useful force. You don't see capacitors getting crushed by the electrostatic attraction of their plates -- you see dielectric breakdown.
So when I suggested looking for a way to reverse the process, they actually need to find a different, but probably related, substance, that undergoes an expansion, rather than a contraction, along the direction of the potential gradient.
The abstract makes these observations:
- Experience shows that tools designed for one purpose that are effective for another tend to be used for that other purpose too, no matter what its designers intended.
- Experience shows that if a vulnerability exists in a security system, it is likely that someone will take advantage of it sooner or later.
If only other protocol designers (e.g the DVD-CCA) would keep such things in mind when designing their products, instead of trying to legislate/litigate unintended uses and security breaches away after the fact, we might avoid a great deal of trouble. Weak security will usually be broken sooner or later. And for goodness' sake, don't sue your customers when they use your products in ways you didn't intend.
Materials like this exert force because they try to maintain an approximately uniform density, so an electric potential squeezes it into a different shape. The trouble with using this to do mechanical work -- like the "artificial muscle" this is being hyped as -- is that you can't exert very much force before the material starts to compress, or else you overwhelm the electrostatic forces. This is sort of the converse of the problem that piezo-based transducers have always had: the electrostatic potentials cause the crystalline lattice of a piezo to expand with considerable force ... but only for a few hundreds of microns, at best. Which makes them good for speakers, or ultra-fine positioning, but not so good for doing work.
As far as I can tell, the most promising avenue for these materials would be to use them rather like small, agile hydrolic pumps that have large dynamic range but little pushing power and even less pull. The comment in the article about an artificial butterfly could be insightful with respect to what you could do with these. As far as artificial limbs go, unless they can dramatically increase the force they can put out, they might be a major breakthrough for actuating the fingers of a prosthetic hand, but they'll be no good at all for replacing the wrist flexors, never mind a bicep.
I would suggest that researchers look for a way to turn this effect around, allowing the material to pull rather than push. Such plastics almost invariably have greater tensile strength than resistance to compression, and it's much easier to engineer around, too.
You can find the Galileo project's Galileo Millennium Mission on the JPL's pages. Tentatively, there aren't any close flyby opportunities of Callisto scheduled for this extended-extended mission, although there is growing support within NASA to send one of the "faster-better-cheaper" probes to take a closer look. The Europa Orbiter is such a probe that would look closer at the suspected ocean there, so a misson to other Jovian satellites is not out of the question.
In theory, you could have Galileo transmit to Earth at a time when Calisto would be passing between the probe and us; however, such an event isn't likely to occur if a close flyby isn't scheduled, and even if one was, an occultation still isn't a guarantee. And unfortunately, Galileo isn't set up to, for instance, use its antenna as a reflection radar to look for itself. Passive sensors only.
As far as Jovian radiation goes, I would propose that, given current theories regarding life's evolution on Earth, it would increase the probability that life would arise. Besides a fertile chemical environment, it seems that ionizing radiation accelerates the process of dissociating simple molecules which can then recombine into more complex ones. Background radiation in interstellar space is enough to form alcohols in nebulae and amino acids and PAHs in cometary ice; stellar radiation or Jupiter's radiation belts would do this even faster. That said, the ice crust on top of Europa's ocean is probably thick enough to shield any incoming ionizing radiation, so it's likely a non-issue. Life's best bet on Europa is tidally-generated heat and geologic radiation.
Discoloration, meanwhile, suggests eruptions, but smooth, crater-free regions are better evidence of this. Of course, cratering doesn't tell us much more than that volcanism happened within the last half-billion years or so. What appear to be fresh escarpments along fault lines might bring that date a little closer, but discoloration is going to really clinch the issue, once we know what the stuff is. For this, we need the Europa Orbiter to do spectral analysis on the surface. If it turns out to be, for instance, sulpher or iron-rich minerals from the ocean underneath, we don't get much new information about the age of the eruptions. If we're looking at some sort of hydrocarbonish gunk, it would be broken down by radiation rather quickly, so it is more recent. Most exciting of all, it could be some sort of organic residue from subsurface life forms ... but who knows.
According to their WINE page, Corel's programmers have been working only on the internal WINE source tree, mostly for buxfixes. They claim to have been focusing on it because of "release deadlines for our Linux applications approaching..." Does this mean that they're using WINE as a backend to their Linux apps? I hope not ... I'd much rather run natively complied code. More stable, and a whole lot faster.
Speaking of speed, they also say that they've integrated some KDE-like code to do UI-management and themability. It'll be nice to have more options than "look-like-win31" and "look-like-win95" but what is this going to do for performance? Already, WINE runs anything more complex than Minesweeper pretty slowly -- ever wanted to see Mathematica really crawl?
Still, I'm looking forward to checking out what they've done to the code. Hopefully, WineHQ will start picking through the code right away to merge the good bits with the main tree.
Other than that, I've seen performance approaching that of compiled C++ out of Java, if the app takes pains to avoid new. UI layers simply don't do this.
China, despite the economic growth over the past 20 or so years, is a really poor country with lots of problems - chief among them the state-owned enterprises that are reportedly going to go down the toilet in the not-too-distant future.
The scientific payoff from sending up a copycat version of the Soyuz is minimal, and the propaganda benefits aren't all that great either (some research into undetectable sporting performance-enhancing drugs would achieve a similar propaganda result at a much lower cost), and the military benefits non-existent. So, what's the point - even from the view of the Chinese leadership?
There are a couple of reasons to do this. No, the scientific payoff isn't going to justify the effort, but that wasn't the initial justification for sending humans into orbit the first time around, either. Somebody else said, it was largely fear of cold-war rivals. Now, rightly or wrongly, China does perceive itself in a kind of cold war with the Western powers, and the Chinese military has admitted to their inability to confront the West on a traditional battlefield, if it should come to that.
The Soviets and Americans conducted the initial space launches to prove their ballistic missile capability, but since China has been orbiting payloads for years, they hardly have anything to prove in this realm, other than showing off their ability to launch an exceptionally heavy load. This, in fact, could have a much more benign effect than many Americans are willing to give the Chinese credit for: that they can launch such a large payload, and trust it enough to risk the major publicity problems associated with losing an astronaut, says good things about their ability to do commercial satellite launches. With many state-owned industries drying up, the Chinese gov. could use a cash-cow like that.
The real question, of course, is the Chinese government's motives behind this. Presumably, national prestige is a major factor -- if they were doing this for economic reasons, they'd go the route of India, and echew manned operations for potentially profitable satellite launch services. In which case you have to wonder, will this spur the U.S. or other spacefaring governments to increase funding for manned spaceflight, or to just sit back and say, "good for them," unconcerned?