SPEC doesn't do testing themselves. Testing is performed by a lab that licenses the SPEC benchmarks. They just decide what code lives in the benchmarks and coalesce the results.
Correction-- 16 billion gigabytes, 8 billion gigabytes for user space, 8 billion gigabytes for phys/kernel. Just a correction for the pedants out there.;P
A 64 bit address space gives you access to 2^64 bytes of ram-- or 4 billion gigabytes. I don't think anyone will be sticking that in a computer anytime soon. Still, it's useful to have a larger address space than physical RAM, so that virtual addresing for processes and mmap'd files can behave nicely.
32 bit Intel CPUs access up to a 36 bit address space (64GB) using bank switching. No process can have more than 4GB of memory directly accessible at once, and even the kernel has to flip segment registers around (somewhat like the segmented memory architecture on 8088/8086) in order to access the whole 64GB. This can make things very difficult to work with and add overhead and additional copying.
The user mode of an XP application is close to 4GB, but not quite there. The total address space for an app is 4GB, and the kernel needs certain data structures to have available mappings from the processor's memory space when a trap occurs (whether it's an interrupt or a system call). 3.6-3.7GB seems typical based on my experience, but it could, at times, be far worse. Not having a fixed kernel/user memory split makes things more complicated.
64 bit processing makes all this better. You can have 2 billion gigabytes for user space and 2 billion gigabytes for a physical/kernel mapping, and every process can have everything mapped in. Copying should never be necessary to make data available to a process in a properly designed VM. And it is unlikely we're going to need anything more than 64 bits of addressing in the next century.
Both the OS and the hardware have limitations. It uses memory to have space for page tables-- and it doesn't make sense to set up your data structures to be able to hold information on a terabyte of memory when the most you can buy in a machine is 64GB (it also can strain the MMU depending on the complexity of your mappings). Likewise, the number of DIMM slots will vary based on the market segment the machine is aimed at and current technology. Making the OS be able to map more physical memory as hardware evolves will not be hard (probably mostly changing a few constants)
gain speed? cause i know i'm not (lets not mention the fact you make the statement that the xeons are outclassed by 41 percent but you say the system is 71% slower.. missing 10 percent.. and that is only in reference to ONE benchmark.. but i digress)
Maybe you'll want to learn to do some math. Let's say that we have a 41% sales tax rate. I buy something retailing for $1 and pay $1.41. The store gets $1/1.41 = 70.9% of the purchase price.
If one computer is 41% faster than the other, the other runs at 70.9% of the speed. Have a nice day in remedial pre-algebra.
Hello, you could have 4 16-bit segment registers (SS, CS, ES, DS) that you could reference within. The 4 segment registers, shifted left 4 bits + the offset register or constant you were using == a 20 bit address.
If you want to get really picky, on the 286 and later it was 1024k + 64k - 16 bytes, as you could carry into the 21st bit. This "extra" 64k segment was used to implement extended memory.
Being able to look at 4 64k regions of memory at once out of a 1MB address space == bank switching. If you've not had to try and fit stuff into 64k regions, you've not written 8088 assembly. Get a clue.
Actually, the P4 can address more than 4GB of memory thanks to bank switching and using 36 bit addressing in the MMU. It makes things more difficult on the OS kernel and can require more MMU cache flushes and copies, but it does allow IA32 to scale up to 64GB-- in much the same way as 16 bit 8088/8086s were able to address up to 1 megabyte.
Yours only has 1 flat panel instead of two-- add another $2205. Also, you'll be unable to hook both DVI monitors up via the Radeon 9800-- you'll need to get a slower PCI video card to hook the other up.
Yours doesn't have a 3 year support contract, does it?
Also, the Apple you could get much more cheaply if you were to use third party RAM. Vendor RAM is always expensive.
Finally, as to "2 much faster machines"-- the dual 2GHz PPC G5 is 41% faster in SPECfp_rate_base2000 than a dual 3.06GHz Xeon, which IMO is the most important SPEC benchmark. It's faster in all the others, too, except single processor integer performance.
Let me think-- I could pay $12k and get two of the nicest LCD panels available and the fastest dual processor workstation available in the world made by a vendor with great fabrication quality and customer support. Or I could spend $9k to get two good (but not as nice as the Apple) LCD panels and machines that are only 71% of the speed from a no-name vendor. I think I'd pick Apple.
Lots of things. You can have employees ready to bring services back up after any damage occurs, for one. Also, some satellites could be configured into safe modes that prevent damage-- a significant consideration when even small satellite launches usually cost in excess of $50M. Also, the solar wind is potentially hazardous to humans (especially outside the Van Allen belts. Forecasting the solar wind could improve the safety of future Mars and moon missions.
Also, forecasting the Sun's weather will enable researchers to stage experiments on how the solar wind affects Earth's atmosphere to a greater extent.
The point is to put things that are needed for startup on the root filesystem. SysV generally has/bin as a link to/usr/bin, and/sbin full of stuff that's used at startup time and in single user mode (to get the system running and if/usr failed to mount). Everything in/sbin shouldn't depend on shared libraries, either, for the sake of resiliency.
One point that's interesting, and that I don't think anyone has brought up, is the fact SCO's stock price has been bid up extensively-- in no small part thanks to the public statements made by SCO officials about legal action against IBM.
If IBM should demolish SCO, and those statements prove to be false, I think there might be grounds for a class-action shareholder lawsuit for people who will have lost money on SCO stock-- and such a lawsuit might possibly extend to directors and officers of SCOX. Of course, they certainly have D&O coverage, but such a catastrophic event could test the limits of such coverage.
It would be really nice to see some unethical people held personally accountable for their abuse of the legal system.
You gain traction by synchronizing the motion of the wheels to the surface underneath them.
The dynamic coefficient of friction on tires is much much lower than the static coefficient of friction. Deliberately creating a speed difference between the two ensures that things stay well on the dynamic constant side of the equations.
If I'm humming along at 50MPH and hydroplaning, the right solution to get traction back is not to hold down the throttle such that the rear wheels spin at a rate that would give you a 100MPH speed. That will inhibit them from regaining traction.
Hydroplaning occurs when a film of water causes tires to lose contact with the road surface and is not dependent on high speeds and large amounts of water. The correct reaction for loss of traction because of hydroplaning is different from the response to other types of traction loss. If you experience hydroplaning, slowly decrease pressure on the accelerator, steer the vehicle in the direction of travel, and let the vehicle regain traction from deceleration. Firmly grip the steering wheel because the vehicle may swerve when it regains traction. Once traction is regained, steer the vehicle in the desired direction.
From the California DMV Commerical Driver Handbook:
You can regain control by releasing the accelerator and pushing in the clutch. This will slow your vehicle and let the wheels turn freely. If the vehicle is hydroplaning, do not use the brakes to slow down. If the drive wheels start to skid, push in the clutch to let them turn freely.
To sell hybrid vehicles to the American public at a competitive price, Ford would have to cut some of that nice profit and make less per vehicle.
Ford's profit margin for the past twelve months is 1%; two of the last 4 quarters they've lost money. I think it's simply unrealistic, given that, to ask them to sell a more difficult to produce product for the same price out of altruism.
If the product is more expensive to produce for the same capabilities, it's going to have to cost consumers more for those capabilities. Either that, or there's got to be a compelling argument made that hybrid cars are going to be cheaper in TCO, which I don't think has been demonstrated yet. Overall, there are more complex systems in hybrid cars and the designs are newer, so I would assume they would be less robust. Time will tell.
Let's face it-- the current hybrids on the market are not moneymakers, but they are a good way to hedge the auto industry's bets and build new technology that may be viable in the future.
It's my understanding that the Escape will be entering the fleet dealer network within the next quarter. And a lot of the technologies that make hybridization easy and cost effective today simply weren't practical for mass market adoption 5 years ago, so I think overall things are moving at a reasonable pace.
The thing is, hybridization gets you maybe a 25% real-world efficiency gain, and it's the lowest hanging (and cheapest) fruit to improve fuel economy. If we really want to do more than that, either vehicles are going to have to greatly improve in price, there'll have to be a great technological breakthrough, or people wil have to settle for less features.
Hint: You hit them head on. The ending position of the two cars, and the relative masses of the two cars, tells you the relative speed of each at accident time....
The accelerometer also provides information as to relative velocity. Kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity and mass. If I am travelling in a 2000kg car travelling 100km/h, I have 1.5MJ of energy. The 1000kg light car travelling in the other direction at 200km/h will have 3MJ of energy. Therefore, after collision, both cars will have a total of 1.5MJ of energy going the direction of the second car-- making it quite clear that the second car was going faster. Any moron understands how this works after seeing a billiard table for the first time.
Also, your wheels would only continue accelerating if you held down the gas pedal-- and I think the data would make it pretty clear it was due to hydroplaning-- if you start hydroplaning are you gonna hold down the accelerator and keep your car at redline with the wheels spinning like crazy, or are you going to take your foot off the gas? Keep in mind 5 seconds of data is logged.
Finally, if YOU LOSE CONTROL OF YOUR VEHICLE BECAUSE OF NEGLIGENCE, and KILL SOMEONE ELSE, you have committed vehicular manslaughter. The other person's speed doesn't matter. There's a very good chance that everyone's gonna die in a 55MPH head on crash.
Gah, in my frustration I flubbed both pieces of math slightly.
I forgot to multiply by 10, so the actual energy is 45MJ; however, I also recalled the actual energy of a ton of TNT incorrectly; it's on the order of 4GJ. So this idea of little moon rocks having potential energy of nuclear weapons is ridiculous. (And in fact, if it was true, it would have required the Apollo CM to use nuclear weapons to slow down to return to earth).
Okay, top-posting is silly, but because of the amount of misinformation here about kinetic energy from a 10 kilo object falling from the moon, I feel the need to respond.
The mean orbital velocity of the moon is 1 km/sec. Assuming you were able to completely launch a rock such that it had the orbital velocity of the moon, but was heading towards the earth, it would start at 1km/sec, and fall 380,000 km (this is a ridiculous concept, and will greatly over-estimate the amount of energy present). It can pick up approximately 2km/sec of energy by falling, for a total velocity of 3km/sec. This yields a kinetic energy of 4.5MJ. One ton of TNT has an approximate energy of of 4MJ.
Hello? If you drop a 10kg rock from the moon, even with ridiculous assumptions and no atmospheric braking, it produces less energy than a conventional 2000lb bomb!
Why choose to economically reward bad behavior and excessive litigation? This will just make the case it's worthwhile to terrorize people with IP claims.
Besides, if you tried to buy the company, the price would go up; you can't acquire the company for the market cap because not all shares are liquid on the exchange-- unless you were to make a proposal that the shareholders as a whole voted on and accepted.
Scorched earth is the way for everyone to play here. Sure, it might end up cheaper for IBM to buy SCO than to litigate this. But they shouldn't-- this sends an unequivocal "don't fuck with us" message to the next party that feels like litigating to make a quick buck.
Who said anything about dialup? Getting an onboard modem to call an 800 number is easy enough. But I think the primary use for this is to locate corporate PCs that have been plugged into an ethernet.
This might not just be used for stolen PCs, but for overall inventory control. When companies are growing quickly often PCs get lost. If they can't be found at audit-time, companies have to write off a proportionate share of their capital equipment.
Not to mention there's a huge grey market in laptops, servers, and PCs-- figuring out where the stolen equipment ultimately ends up is valuable.
How do you think things like the preboot execution environment (PXE) for netbooting work?
You can get a trivial ethernet driver + DHCP + TCP/IP stack + simple TCP client into 32K fairly easily. Let's not forget that Suns made since before 1991 have supported DHCP (well, bootp) + UDP/IP + TFTP to netboot.
Putting this in the BIOS now is insurmountable why?
Assuming the ex-employee has the resources to pay damages, and that you can collect them.
Insurance companies in most contracts are allowed to subrogate; that is, when they pay damages to you, they inherit all of your rights regarding that claim-- and can choose to go and sue the employee themselves if they think it's worthwhile.
Yah, and the descent rate is very high because the "wings" don't provide a very good Cl/Cd at the speeds and angles of attack that the shuttle flies.
Still, bailout at 10,000 feet is conceivable with the systems as they exist. The main reason for a bailout as opposed to a controlled landing is it's likely that the landing gear would fail to deploy; and at the landing speeds and loads the shuttle experiences, lacking a gear on landing would definitely be LOCV (loss of crew and vehicle).
It's too bad that there are a few things that lack computer control in the shuttle, like the landing gear (ostensibly for safety reasons). Sure, the computer flying all the way to the ground is probably a little less reliable than a human pilot; but t makes the bailout call a lot easier to make, if you know that the vehicle will try and land itself with a high probability of success.
Several US ICBM systems are ready for "combat orbital" missions of various kinds. With several tries, they could be used to bring up consumables of various kinds (CO2 scrubbing canisters, food, water, blankets)...
When the fuel cells on the Shuttle run out, large amounts of the shuttle's equipment would be destroyed by the cold. The inside of the shuttle would likely settle down to -20 or -30 degrees.. but it would be possible to stretch things a couple more weeks while a rescue plan was developed.
There is also the possibility that the shuttle could have survived if additional measures were taken. "cold soaking" the bottom of the shuttle (changing orientation so that the bottom and leading edges dissipate their heat, instead of being pre-warmed by the sun) could delay peak heating by a couple of minutes.. and getting rid of weight of all forms lowers the amount of kinetic and potential energy to dissipate. It's possible such measures could have gotten Columbia down to a safe bailout altitude.
The conclusion? NASA has major cultural issues that prevented risks from being properly assessed-- similar to the cultural issues that prevented the concerns of Thiokol engineers from preventing the Challenger disaster. If imagery had been acquired and had shown that Columbia was mortally wounded, I think there's a 70-80% chance that the Columbia astronauts could have been rescued.
The whole attitude of "well, that wasn't how it was designed to work, but we got away with it once so it's safe" has gotta stop. Safety in a complex system like a manned space vehicle comes from a high level of vigilance and not tolerating any deviations from spec without a TON of analysis and understanding.
Re:This Mb/s math doesn't make sense
on
802.11g Slows Down
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There's multiple factors that degrade things, a lot of them having to do with channel control and being able to share the connection for multiple users.
However, the beacon has to be sent at a fairly low data rate (so distant nodes can receive it), which means it uses a lot of the access point's time on the channel. The AP's can't receive and transmit at the same time, so this takes up a fixed percentage of the channel bandwidth.
CD's are a completely digital encoding of the audio, with error correction codes (Reed-Solomon). Unless the original is scratched so badly that playback is affected, copies that you make will be perfect. (If it is badly damaged, you'll probably get error messages when you try and rip)
CD audio is just 16 bit PCM, like most WAV files. When you copy WAV files around, quality isn't lost. Why would it be on a CD? I can rip a CD to AIFF or WAV, burn it to CD, and compare and get the same audio data back, bit for bit.
Now, if the CD is stored in a lossy format (MP3), before reburning it, you might have a point. But CD copying software tends not to do that (except jukebox apps like ITunes).
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See SPEC's disclaimer.
SPEC doesn't do testing themselves. Testing is performed by a lab that licenses the SPEC benchmarks. They just decide what code lives in the benchmarks and coalesce the results.
Correction-- 16 billion gigabytes, 8 billion gigabytes for user space, 8 billion gigabytes for phys/kernel. Just a correction for the pedants out there. ;P
A 64 bit address space gives you access to 2^64 bytes of ram-- or 4 billion gigabytes. I don't think anyone will be sticking that in a computer anytime soon. Still, it's useful to have a larger address space than physical RAM, so that virtual addresing for processes and mmap'd files can behave nicely.
32 bit Intel CPUs access up to a 36 bit address space (64GB) using bank switching. No process can have more than 4GB of memory directly accessible at once, and even the kernel has to flip segment registers around (somewhat like the segmented memory architecture on 8088/8086) in order to access the whole 64GB. This can make things very difficult to work with and add overhead and additional copying.
The user mode of an XP application is close to 4GB, but not quite there. The total address space for an app is 4GB, and the kernel needs certain data structures to have available mappings from the processor's memory space when a trap occurs (whether it's an interrupt or a system call). 3.6-3.7GB seems typical based on my experience, but it could, at times, be far worse. Not having a fixed kernel/user memory split makes things more complicated.
64 bit processing makes all this better. You can have 2 billion gigabytes for user space and 2 billion gigabytes for a physical/kernel mapping, and every process can have everything mapped in. Copying should never be necessary to make data available to a process in a properly designed VM. And it is unlikely we're going to need anything more than 64 bits of addressing in the next century.
Both the OS and the hardware have limitations. It uses memory to have space for page tables-- and it doesn't make sense to set up your data structures to be able to hold information on a terabyte of memory when the most you can buy in a machine is 64GB (it also can strain the MMU depending on the complexity of your mappings). Likewise, the number of DIMM slots will vary based on the market segment the machine is aimed at and current technology. Making the OS be able to map more physical memory as hardware evolves will not be hard (probably mostly changing a few constants)
gain speed? cause i know i'm not (lets not mention the fact you make the statement that the xeons are outclassed by 41 percent but you say the system is 71% slower.. missing 10 percent.. and that is only in reference to ONE benchmark.. but i digress)
Maybe you'll want to learn to do some math. Let's say that we have a 41% sales tax rate. I buy something retailing for $1 and pay $1.41. The store gets $1/1.41 = 70.9% of the purchase price.
If one computer is 41% faster than the other, the other runs at 70.9% of the speed. Have a nice day in remedial pre-algebra.
My luck wih Apple support has always been good.
Hello, you could have 4 16-bit segment registers (SS, CS, ES, DS) that you could reference within. The 4 segment registers, shifted left 4 bits + the offset register or constant you were using == a 20 bit address.
If you want to get really picky, on the 286 and later it was 1024k + 64k - 16 bytes, as you could carry into the 21st bit. This "extra" 64k segment was used to implement extended memory.
Being able to look at 4 64k regions of memory at once out of a 1MB address space == bank switching. If you've not had to try and fit stuff into 64k regions, you've not written 8088 assembly. Get a clue.
Actually, the P4 can address more than 4GB of memory thanks to bank switching and using 36 bit addressing in the MMU. It makes things more difficult on the OS kernel and can require more MMU cache flushes and copies, but it does allow IA32 to scale up to 64GB-- in much the same way as 16 bit 8088/8086s were able to address up to 1 megabyte.
A couple things:
Yours only has 1 flat panel instead of two-- add another $2205. Also, you'll be unable to hook both DVI monitors up via the Radeon 9800-- you'll need to get a slower PCI video card to hook the other up.
Yours doesn't have a 3 year support contract, does it?
Also, the Apple you could get much more cheaply if you were to use third party RAM. Vendor RAM is always expensive.
Finally, as to "2 much faster machines"-- the dual 2GHz PPC G5 is 41% faster in SPECfp_rate_base2000 than a dual 3.06GHz Xeon, which IMO is the most important SPEC benchmark. It's faster in all the others, too, except single processor integer performance.
Let me think-- I could pay $12k and get two of the nicest LCD panels available and the fastest dual processor workstation available in the world made by a vendor with great fabrication quality and customer support. Or I could spend $9k to get two good (but not as nice as the Apple) LCD panels and machines that are only 71% of the speed from a no-name vendor. I think I'd pick Apple.
Lots of things. You can have employees ready to bring services back up after any damage occurs, for one. Also, some satellites could be configured into safe modes that prevent damage-- a significant consideration when even small satellite launches usually cost in excess of $50M. Also, the solar wind is potentially hazardous to humans (especially outside the Van Allen belts. Forecasting the solar wind could improve the safety of future Mars and moon missions.
Also, forecasting the Sun's weather will enable researchers to stage experiments on how the solar wind affects Earth's atmosphere to a greater extent.
The point is to put things that are needed for startup on the root filesystem. SysV generally has /bin as a link to /usr/bin, and /sbin full of stuff that's used at startup time and in single user mode (to get the system running and if /usr failed to mount). Everything in /sbin shouldn't depend on shared libraries, either, for the sake of resiliency.
One point that's interesting, and that I don't think anyone has brought up, is the fact SCO's stock price has been bid up extensively-- in no small part thanks to the public statements made by SCO officials about legal action against IBM.
If IBM should demolish SCO, and those statements prove to be false, I think there might be grounds for a class-action shareholder lawsuit for people who will have lost money on SCO stock-- and such a lawsuit might possibly extend to directors and officers of SCOX. Of course, they certainly have D&O coverage, but such a catastrophic event could test the limits of such coverage.
It would be really nice to see some unethical people held personally accountable for their abuse of the legal system.
You gain traction by synchronizing the motion of the wheels to the surface underneath them.
The dynamic coefficient of friction on tires is much much lower than the static coefficient of friction. Deliberately creating a speed difference between the two ensures that things stay well on the dynamic constant side of the equations.
If I'm humming along at 50MPH and hydroplaning, the right solution to get traction back is not to hold down the throttle such that the rear wheels spin at a rate that would give you a 100MPH speed. That will inhibit them from regaining traction.
From The DOE's Defensive Driving Tips:
Hydroplaning occurs when a film of water causes tires to lose contact with the road surface and is not dependent on high speeds and large amounts of water. The correct reaction for loss of traction because of hydroplaning is different from the response to other types of traction loss. If you experience hydroplaning, slowly decrease pressure on the accelerator, steer the vehicle in the direction of travel, and let the vehicle regain traction from deceleration. Firmly grip the steering wheel because the vehicle may swerve when it regains traction. Once traction is regained, steer the vehicle in the desired direction.
From the California DMV Commerical Driver Handbook:
You can regain control by releasing the accelerator and pushing in the clutch. This will slow your vehicle and let the wheels turn freely. If the vehicle is hydroplaning, do not use the brakes to slow down. If the drive wheels start to skid, push in the clutch to let them turn freely.
To sell hybrid vehicles to the American public at a competitive price, Ford would have to cut some of that nice profit and make less per vehicle.
Ford's profit margin for the past twelve months is 1%; two of the last 4 quarters they've lost money. I think it's simply unrealistic, given that, to ask them to sell a more difficult to produce product for the same price out of altruism.
If the product is more expensive to produce for the same capabilities, it's going to have to cost consumers more for those capabilities. Either that, or there's got to be a compelling argument made that hybrid cars are going to be cheaper in TCO, which I don't think has been demonstrated yet. Overall, there are more complex systems in hybrid cars and the designs are newer, so I would assume they would be less robust. Time will tell.
Let's face it-- the current hybrids on the market are not moneymakers, but they are a good way to hedge the auto industry's bets and build new technology that may be viable in the future.
It's my understanding that the Escape will be entering the fleet dealer network within the next quarter. And a lot of the technologies that make hybridization easy and cost effective today simply weren't practical for mass market adoption 5 years ago, so I think overall things are moving at a reasonable pace.
The thing is, hybridization gets you maybe a 25% real-world efficiency gain, and it's the lowest hanging (and cheapest) fruit to improve fuel economy. If we really want to do more than that, either vehicles are going to have to greatly improve in price, there'll have to be a great technological breakthrough, or people wil have to settle for less features.
Hint: You hit them head on. The ending position of the two cars, and the relative masses of the two cars, tells you the relative speed of each at accident time....
The accelerometer also provides information as to relative velocity. Kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity and mass. If I am travelling in a 2000kg car travelling 100km/h, I have 1.5MJ of energy. The 1000kg light car travelling in the other direction at 200km/h will have 3MJ of energy. Therefore, after collision, both cars will have a total of 1.5MJ of energy going the direction of the second car-- making it quite clear that the second car was going faster. Any moron understands how this works after seeing a billiard table for the first time.
Also, your wheels would only continue accelerating if you held down the gas pedal-- and I think the data would make it pretty clear it was due to hydroplaning-- if you start hydroplaning are you gonna hold down the accelerator and keep your car at redline with the wheels spinning like crazy, or are you going to take your foot off the gas? Keep in mind 5 seconds of data is logged.
Finally, if YOU LOSE CONTROL OF YOUR VEHICLE BECAUSE OF NEGLIGENCE, and KILL SOMEONE ELSE, you have committed vehicular manslaughter. The other person's speed doesn't matter. There's a very good chance that everyone's gonna die in a 55MPH head on crash.
Gah, in my frustration I flubbed both pieces of math slightly.
I forgot to multiply by 10, so the actual energy is 45MJ; however, I also recalled the actual energy of a ton of TNT incorrectly; it's on the order of 4GJ. So this idea of little moon rocks having potential energy of nuclear weapons is ridiculous. (And in fact, if it was true, it would have required the Apollo CM to use nuclear weapons to slow down to return to earth).
Okay, top-posting is silly, but because of the amount of misinformation here about kinetic energy from a 10 kilo object falling from the moon, I feel the need to respond.
The mean orbital velocity of the moon is 1 km/sec. Assuming you were able to completely launch a rock such that it had the orbital velocity of the moon, but was heading towards the earth, it would start at 1km/sec, and fall 380,000 km (this is a ridiculous concept, and will greatly over-estimate the amount of energy present). It can pick up approximately 2km/sec of energy by falling, for a total velocity of 3km/sec. This yields a kinetic energy of 4.5MJ. One ton of TNT has an approximate energy of of 4MJ.
Hello? If you drop a 10kg rock from the moon, even with ridiculous assumptions and no atmospheric braking, it produces less energy than a conventional 2000lb bomb!
Bad move, in my opinion.
Why choose to economically reward bad behavior and excessive litigation? This will just make the case it's worthwhile to terrorize people with IP claims.
Besides, if you tried to buy the company, the price would go up; you can't acquire the company for the market cap because not all shares are liquid on the exchange-- unless you were to make a proposal that the shareholders as a whole voted on and accepted.
Scorched earth is the way for everyone to play here. Sure, it might end up cheaper for IBM to buy SCO than to litigate this. But they shouldn't-- this sends an unequivocal "don't fuck with us" message to the next party that feels like litigating to make a quick buck.
No, I think he means until we master nuclear fusion.
Fusion provides plenty of energy to justify the energy expended is dissociating the H2 from H2O.
One quibble-
Asia doesn't get numbering from the American Registry for Internet Numbers; they come from APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Center).
Otherwise, a good point.
Who said anything about dialup? Getting an onboard modem to call an 800 number is easy enough. But I think the primary use for this is to locate corporate PCs that have been plugged into an ethernet.
This might not just be used for stolen PCs, but for overall inventory control. When companies are growing quickly often PCs get lost. If they can't be found at audit-time, companies have to write off a proportionate share of their capital equipment.
Not to mention there's a huge grey market in laptops, servers, and PCs-- figuring out where the stolen equipment ultimately ends up is valuable.
How do you think things like the preboot execution environment (PXE) for netbooting work?
You can get a trivial ethernet driver + DHCP + TCP/IP stack + simple TCP client into 32K fairly easily. Let's not forget that Suns made since before 1991 have supported DHCP (well, bootp) + UDP/IP + TFTP to netboot.
Putting this in the BIOS now is insurmountable why?
Assuming the ex-employee has the resources to pay damages, and that you can collect them.
Insurance companies in most contracts are allowed to subrogate; that is, when they pay damages to you, they inherit all of your rights regarding that claim-- and can choose to go and sue the employee themselves if they think it's worthwhile.
This is what insurance is for, really.
Yah, and the descent rate is very high because the "wings" don't provide a very good Cl/Cd at the speeds and angles of attack that the shuttle flies.
Still, bailout at 10,000 feet is conceivable with the systems as they exist. The main reason for a bailout as opposed to a controlled landing is it's likely that the landing gear would fail to deploy; and at the landing speeds and loads the shuttle experiences, lacking a gear on landing would definitely be LOCV (loss of crew and vehicle).
It's too bad that there are a few things that lack computer control in the shuttle, like the landing gear (ostensibly for safety reasons). Sure, the computer flying all the way to the ground is probably a little less reliable than a human pilot; but t makes the bailout call a lot easier to make, if you know that the vehicle will try and land itself with a high probability of success.
Several US ICBM systems are ready for "combat orbital" missions of various kinds. With several tries, they could be used to bring up consumables of various kinds (CO2 scrubbing canisters, food, water, blankets)...
When the fuel cells on the Shuttle run out, large amounts of the shuttle's equipment would be destroyed by the cold. The inside of the shuttle would likely settle down to -20 or -30 degrees.. but it would be possible to stretch things a couple more weeks while a rescue plan was developed.
There is also the possibility that the shuttle could have survived if additional measures were taken. "cold soaking" the bottom of the shuttle (changing orientation so that the bottom and leading edges dissipate their heat, instead of being pre-warmed by the sun) could delay peak heating by a couple of minutes.. and getting rid of weight of all forms lowers the amount of kinetic and potential energy to dissipate. It's possible such measures could have gotten Columbia down to a safe bailout altitude.
The conclusion? NASA has major cultural issues that prevented risks from being properly assessed-- similar to the cultural issues that prevented the concerns of Thiokol engineers from preventing the Challenger disaster. If imagery had been acquired and had shown that Columbia was mortally wounded, I think there's a 70-80% chance that the Columbia astronauts could have been rescued.
The whole attitude of "well, that wasn't how it was designed to work, but we got away with it once so it's safe" has gotta stop. Safety in a complex system like a manned space vehicle comes from a high level of vigilance and not tolerating any deviations from spec without a TON of analysis and understanding.
There's multiple factors that degrade things, a lot of them having to do with channel control and being able to share the connection for multiple users.
However, the beacon has to be sent at a fairly low data rate (so distant nodes can receive it), which means it uses a lot of the access point's time on the channel. The AP's can't receive and transmit at the same time, so this takes up a fixed percentage of the channel bandwidth.
CD's are a completely digital encoding of the audio, with error correction codes (Reed-Solomon). Unless the original is scratched so badly that playback is affected, copies that you make will be perfect. (If it is badly damaged, you'll probably get error messages when you try and rip)
CD audio is just 16 bit PCM, like most WAV files. When you copy WAV files around, quality isn't lost. Why would it be on a CD? I can rip a CD to AIFF or WAV, burn it to CD, and compare and get the same audio data back, bit for bit.
Now, if the CD is stored in a lossy format (MP3), before reburning it, you might have a point. But CD copying software tends not to do that (except jukebox apps like ITunes).