The carbon-Silicon which are the only atoms allowing complex molecules is one aspect. Another is the fact that life seems to require a small liquid solvent molecule (Water on earth). Ammonia has been mooted as an alternative. That tends to limit the ranges quite a bit since there are just not that many of those.
There is another issue here. Life on earth seems to be foudn everywhere we look, but it is becoming clearer and clearer from genetic studies that all the forms have a common ancestor. Life on Earth can be divided into Eukaryotic and Prokaryotic cells. Aukarotes are all comlex multicellular life forms, prokaryotic cells do not form any serious complexity on earth.
All eukaryotic cells have mitchondria in them, and this is what allows life to be so diverse: The cells can generate essentially as much energy as they need because they have their own internal powerplants in them, which prokaryotes (bacteria) do not. That makes one hell of a difference. Plants also have Chloroplasts which photosynthesize which solve essentially the same problem of small cells that cannot gorw because they cannot generate enough energy to sustain themselves. Eukaryotes are typically 1000-100000 biggen than bacteria.
It is not commonly ccepted that Mitochondria and Choloplasts in cells used to be independent bacteria and that the first eukaryote developed as some kind of symbiotic relationship between two bacteria. Either a parasite that invaded a cell or a cell that ate another cell, we are not sure.
But the curious part is this: In the 4 billion year history of life on earth this happened only twice. Once with mitochondira and once with chloroplasts. Only those two symbiotic mergers survived to bring us the variety of life we know. Considering how often bacteria and other microorganisms engulf each other it means that a working combo must have been an extremely rare and unique event in evolution.
So while other planets may certainly harbour simple bacterial life it appears that complex life is very very difficult to achieve.
I once saved a RAID config on a Maxtor card like that. We had a broken controller and ordered a new one second hand from EBay (with hand-delivered courier delivery, pronto! pronto! I need it now! No I do not care that delivery will be 4 times the price of the bloody card, I will throw in 20% more for you too!) and since the stupid Maxtor RAID controllers did not save the RAID configon the HDD's as it should I, in a desperate move, transferred the NVRAM chip from the bad card to the newish good one. Never was I so happy to see Windows NT 4.0 boot.
99.9999% of all/.ers live in their mothers' basement and, as such, do not pay for power. Besides, everyone here CLAIMS to have their machines on all the time which in reality is bullshit.
One day in the far future they will all realize that their dicks did not grow because they had a multi-aeon uptime on the Trusy Ol' White Box.
I visit a customer on a consulting job about a website. He works inside an institute which is a member of an external industry group. The website is an industry group thing and is not hosted in their network, it is on an external site. He is tasked with some problem. So he asks the IT dudes for permission to post things to the external site. This is denied.
So in order to his work done he simply purchases a cheap 56K modem, attaches it to his workstation and dials out to his own ISP to upload the stuff we need to work on.
The IT people, for being the bunch of fascist arrogant powerhungy shits that they usually are, now dramatically decreased their security by having a un-firewalled connection of a windows 95 machine straight onto the Internet. On an ISP's known address block.
France does not have Maglev trains. Germany developed a protoype of one and sold it to China (which uses it on the cummuter line between Shangai airport and the city center). The German parliament is perenially discussing building a Hamburg-Berlin link but it is pretty expensive and there is now a new high-speed rail link which makes it less viable. Maglev is not THAT fast.
The French TGVs are high-speed trains but they use normal rail technology. The French Train system is powered from the normal grid which is largely nuclear. The Germans also have a high-speed train, the ICE (InterCity Express). The trains are 20 km/h slower than TGV at the fastest points but the trains are waaaay more comfortable. They still do 280km/h though. Travelling by ICE rocks.
Both systems can travel on normal tracks but both system also have special ultra-high-speed sections dedicated to them. In the case of ICE the main one lies between Frankfurt Airport and the Ruhr, which bypasses the Rhine Valley and cuts the journey time Franfkurt Airport -> Bonn from 2 hours to 45 minutes. Sadly you skip the nice scenic Rhine Gorge at the Lorelei, so its not ALL better:)
Bingo. You just nailed the thermal management system of the Powermac right on the head. The thing has 10 (ten) fans but is quiet as heck because the machine is split up in thermal zones and each fan only runs when necessary.
Instead of the PC horror of one fan that has to suck out a large volume the whole time and runs at full blast no matter what.
What exactly do you think The Windows Graphics Card API and X windows are? A software layer with a standard interface to the hardware accelerator perhaps?
Aircraft land on Autopilot while a real pilot is stitting in the cockpit look at everything. If anything goes even vaguely wrong he can take over. It is not a totally autonomous system.
Sigh. You are right about the general trend is geekdom. The problem lies in the whole Style vs Substance thing. It is generally true that substance is better than style. But for some reason, geeks think that this implies that any style whatsoever detracts from substance.
This is the same mentality that makes my colleagues force my co-workers to type their stuff in HTML instead of using a simple Rich Text Editor, use a green screen instead of a GUI, tell them that typing a command is easier than pressing a button. "Don't worry, its not hard". The mentality that a HTML app is better than a Swing app. "Look, you can do this from anywhere in the world now!". Ok, so the UI and usability is crap, but you can do it from orbit?? WHO CARES? 99% of the time the work is done from the same bloody machine in the office!
My favourite bugbear, produce all their documents in Arial (on a printer) instead of using, I don't know, readable fonts. "You BOUGHT a font??!!!" Yes, hell, I did. I value my personal corrspondence. "How can you PAY for something like that". I don't know, the typographer has to eat and creating a good readable font is a long hard project? Maybe?
Style is a good thing, and makes the substance better. SUBSITUTING style for substance is not a good idea. That is not the same thing though. And no, typing a command is not easier than pressing a button. More powerful, maybe, but not easier.
To summarize, Easy != Dumb
Making things really Easy and Powerful at the same time, is the real challenge here.
Re:Oh Please
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Whatever you think of Condi Rices' politics, she is smarter than you are. The woman deserved her PhD, she was the provost of Stanford University until she started serving in the Bush adminstration and she was and probably still is the United States' greatest expert on the Soviet Union.
NiMH Battries are not toys. They contain electronic safeguards to ensure they run within parameters otherwise they explode (end they blow up if they run too empty too). This has happened to Nokia in the past and people were hurt because their cellphones started burning. This was caused by fake batteries. The energy density in an NiMH cell is very high.
Quite frankly, the Muslims and the Hindus were wasting each other en-masse before the partition too. The country was a simmering pot waiting to explode. The violence during the partition was pretty bad though. The issue of whether partition reduced or increased the violence in the long term is a difficult question.
Shooting 3D stereo slides is very easy. The thing is, you do not have to worry about the details, the eye takes care of it. Simply load a roll of slide film into any cheap old camera and shoot two shot offset. Make sure you do not flash (since the light changes then) and that you have the same point in the middle of the shot.
Then you take two handheld slide viewers, the sort that you can hold up to the light with a framed slide in it and use one on each eye. This is important, it allows you to move the slides separately until the picture snaps into 3D. Since you can control the slides easily at viewing time the alignment for the shot itself is not critical. The only issue that that you cannot shoot moving things. But it works very well and I have quite a few nice 3D slides.
Nehru (the head of the Congress party) once complained to Lord Mountbatten that Gandhi's insistence on humbly mixing with the peasants was costing Congress a fortune in arranging his plainclothes security detail.
Also, despite his humility Gnahdi has some unrealistic ideas. When the Italians invaded Ethiopia he advised the Ehtopians to let the Italians run over them instead of insisting. He also advised Lord Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy, to simply leave India and leave it to the Indians, without the partition in Muslin and Hindu areas. Considering the amount of simmering religious violence in the country that was a very utopian idea.
Can you recommend a simple starter board? I would like to play a bit with hardware and such and I programmed ASM a lot on the 6502 (Apple II, yeaaaaars ago) and a bit od x86. So what would be a goof beginners board?
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention your corner Blockbuster
The carbon-Silicon which are the only atoms allowing complex molecules is one aspect. Another is the fact that life seems to require a small liquid solvent molecule (Water on earth). Ammonia has been mooted as an alternative. That tends to limit the ranges quite a bit since there are just not that many of those.
There is another issue here. Life on earth seems to be foudn everywhere we look, but it is becoming clearer and clearer from genetic studies that all the forms have a common ancestor. Life on Earth can be divided into Eukaryotic and Prokaryotic cells. Aukarotes are all comlex multicellular life forms, prokaryotic cells do not form any serious complexity on earth.
All eukaryotic cells have mitchondria in them, and this is what allows life to be so diverse: The cells can generate essentially as much energy as they need because they have their own internal powerplants in them, which prokaryotes (bacteria) do not. That makes one hell of a difference. Plants also have Chloroplasts which photosynthesize which solve essentially the same problem of small cells that cannot gorw because they cannot generate enough energy to sustain themselves. Eukaryotes are typically 1000-100000 biggen than bacteria.
It is not commonly ccepted that Mitochondria and Choloplasts in cells used to be independent bacteria and that the first eukaryote developed as some kind of symbiotic relationship between two bacteria. Either a parasite that invaded a cell or a cell that ate another cell, we are not sure.
But the curious part is this: In the 4 billion year history of life on earth this happened only twice. Once with mitochondira and once with chloroplasts. Only those two symbiotic mergers survived to bring us the variety of life we know. Considering how often bacteria and other microorganisms engulf each other it means that a working combo must have been an extremely rare and unique event in evolution.
So while other planets may certainly harbour simple bacterial life it appears that complex life is very very difficult to achieve.
Actually I had backups. Of *almost* everything.
That goes way beyond pushing the envelope in dementia. Grab the reins, pal.
I once saved a RAID config on a Maxtor card like that. We had a broken controller and ordered a new one second hand from EBay (with hand-delivered courier delivery, pronto! pronto! I need it now! No I do not care that delivery will be 4 times the price of the bloody card, I will throw in 20% more for you too!) and since the stupid Maxtor RAID controllers did not save the RAID configon the HDD's as it should I, in a desperate move, transferred the NVRAM chip from the bad card to the newish good one. Never was I so happy to see Windows NT 4.0 boot.
99.9999% of all /.ers live in their mothers' basement and, as such, do not pay for power. Besides, everyone here CLAIMS to have their machines on all the time which in reality is bullshit.
One day in the far future they will all realize that their dicks did not grow because they had a multi-aeon uptime on the Trusy Ol' White Box.
I'll throw another one into the mix:
I visit a customer on a consulting job about a website. He works inside an institute which is a member of an external industry group. The website is an industry group thing and is not hosted in their network, it is on an external site. He is tasked with some problem. So he asks the IT dudes for permission to post things to the external site. This is denied.
So in order to his work done he simply purchases a cheap 56K modem, attaches it to his workstation and dials out to his own ISP to upload the stuff we need to work on.
The IT people, for being the bunch of fascist arrogant powerhungy shits that they usually are, now dramatically decreased their security by having a un-firewalled connection of a windows 95 machine straight onto the Internet. On an ISP's known address block.
At least he got his work done.
France does not have Maglev trains. Germany developed a protoype of one and sold it to China (which uses it on the cummuter line between Shangai airport and the city center). The German parliament is perenially discussing building a Hamburg-Berlin link but it is pretty expensive and there is now a new high-speed rail link which makes it less viable. Maglev is not THAT fast.
:)
The French TGVs are high-speed trains but they use normal rail technology. The French Train system is powered from the normal grid which is largely nuclear. The Germans also have a high-speed train, the ICE (InterCity Express). The trains are 20 km/h slower than TGV at the fastest points but the trains are waaaay more comfortable. They still do 280km/h though. Travelling by ICE rocks.
Both systems can travel on normal tracks but both system also have special ultra-high-speed sections dedicated to them. In the case of ICE the main one lies between Frankfurt Airport and the Ruhr, which bypasses the Rhine Valley and cuts the journey time Franfkurt Airport -> Bonn from 2 hours to 45 minutes. Sadly you skip the nice scenic Rhine Gorge at the Lorelei, so its not ALL better
Bingo. You just nailed the thermal management system of the Powermac right on the head. The thing has 10 (ten) fans but is quiet as heck because the machine is split up in thermal zones and each fan only runs when necessary.
Instead of the PC horror of one fan that has to suck out a large volume the whole time and runs at full blast no matter what.
What exactly do you think The Windows Graphics Card API and X windows are? A software layer with a standard interface to the hardware accelerator perhaps?
Aircraft land on Autopilot while a real pilot is stitting in the cockpit look at everything. If anything goes even vaguely wrong he can take over. It is not a totally autonomous system.
Sigh. You are right about the general trend is geekdom. The problem lies in the whole Style vs Substance thing. It is generally true that substance is better than style. But for some reason, geeks think that this implies that any style whatsoever detracts from substance.
This is the same mentality that makes my colleagues force my co-workers to type their stuff in HTML instead of using a simple Rich Text Editor, use a green screen instead of a GUI, tell them that typing a command is easier than pressing a button. "Don't worry, its not hard". The mentality that a HTML app is better than a Swing app. "Look, you can do this from anywhere in the world now!". Ok, so the UI and usability is crap, but you can do it from orbit?? WHO CARES? 99% of the time the work is done from the same bloody machine in the office!
My favourite bugbear, produce all their documents in Arial (on a printer) instead of using, I don't know, readable fonts. "You BOUGHT a font??!!!" Yes, hell, I did. I value my personal corrspondence. "How can you PAY for something like that". I don't know, the typographer has to eat and creating a good readable font is a long hard project? Maybe?
Style is a good thing, and makes the substance better. SUBSITUTING style for substance is not a good idea. That is not the same thing though. And no, typing a command is not easier than pressing a button. More powerful, maybe, but not easier.
To summarize, Easy != Dumb
Making things really Easy and Powerful at the same time, is the real challenge here.
Whatever you think of Condi Rices' politics, she is smarter than you are. The woman deserved her PhD, she was the provost of Stanford University until she started serving in the Bush adminstration and she was and probably still is the United States' greatest expert on the Soviet Union.
Ok. My wrong. I was referring to Li-Ion not NiMH. Stupid old me!
Not that it is so important, the point in the parent was that fake cellphone batteries can explode if they are made with bogus components.
NiMH Battries are not toys. They contain electronic safeguards to ensure they run within parameters otherwise they explode (end they blow up if they run too empty too). This has happened to Nokia in the past and people were hurt because their cellphones started burning. This was caused by fake batteries. The energy density in an NiMH cell is very high.
I have to admit, I am curious about this 37" monitor of yours??
And for once there will be a woman you can literally read like a book!
Quite frankly, the Muslims and the Hindus were wasting each other en-masse before the partition too. The country was a simmering pot waiting to explode. The violence during the partition was pretty bad though. The issue of whether partition reduced or increased the violence in the long term is a difficult question.
Then rather call it D. Or DD. That should definitely pull in the young'uns
Shooting 3D stereo slides is very easy. The thing is, you do not have to worry about the details, the eye takes care of it. Simply load a roll of slide film into any cheap old camera and shoot two shot offset. Make sure you do not flash (since the light changes then) and that you have the same point in the middle of the shot.
Then you take two handheld slide viewers, the sort that you can hold up to the light with a framed slide in it and use one on each eye. This is important, it allows you to move the slides separately until the picture snaps into 3D. Since you can control the slides easily at viewing time the alignment for the shot itself is not critical. The only issue that that you cannot shoot moving things. But it works very well and I have quite a few nice 3D slides.
Nehru (the head of the Congress party) once complained to Lord Mountbatten that Gandhi's insistence on humbly mixing with the peasants was costing Congress a fortune in arranging his plainclothes security detail.
Also, despite his humility Gnahdi has some unrealistic ideas. When the Italians invaded Ethiopia he advised the Ehtopians to let the Italians run over them instead of insisting. He also advised Lord Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy, to simply leave India and leave it to the Indians, without the partition in Muslin and Hindu areas. Considering the amount of simmering religious violence in the country that was a very utopian idea.
Can you recommend a simple starter board? I would like to play a bit with hardware and such and I programmed ASM a lot on the 6502 (Apple II, yeaaaaars ago) and a bit od x86. So what would be a goof beginners board?
And vi is free as in syphilis
Yeah and Konfabulator was a blatant ripoff of the widgets in NextStep.
The BT-Skype thing works very well on my Mac at least. I use it every day and I am beginning to despise a stupid handset.
The only problem with BT is the range, when I walk out of the room the connection breaks.