Considering the kind of sick places here on Earth that life is perfectly willing to put up with, it seems very likely that even barely habitable worlds would develop some form of life.
This is not necessarily the case. The life you find in those god-awful places like 3 km below the packice or in some deep sea volcanic vent didn't start there. Some lifeforms adapted to those harsh conditions, but on a planet with 3 km of packice all over it may not get started at all.
Just because there's life all over Earth doesn't mean that life could have started in any of the almost non-inhabitable places. From what I've heard, the current theories include something like tidal pools.
I agree that there is data loss in a DV cam, but it is all before the compression stage.
What kind of compression is this? If it's lossy (most video compression schemes are) then it most certainly will not work with computer files. Imagine encoding the Emacs binary with MPEG-4 and then decode it - would most assuredly NOT run.
Most modern DV-cams have a FireWire connector for input/output. These would fit nicely with a FireWire adapter on your PC (or Mac - the newer ones have FireWire already, don't they?). Anyway, a FireWire adapter and cable can't be all that expensive...
That would be SOOO cool, but does a digital camera guarantee the storage of each and every bit? I mean, for a home video of my infant daughter burping milk all over her mother or something it hardly matters if a few bits (pixels) get dumped, but for most files this would be a total disaster. A comprehensive error-checking and correcting facility would have to be employed for this to have any use, IMHO. The idea was employed a while back with VHS tapes, but failed because of the high error rates...
Seeing how it's been argued that TCP/IP isn't very good for high-speed wireless, and that AX.25 (never heard of that before) doesn't cut it either, left me with one question - what protocol would work? I'm pretty much a newbie in terms of wireless, but for embedded systems an industrial network called CAN (Controller Area Network) is widely used because of resistance to noise. While having numerous features that link it to twisted pair wire, parts of it are about protocol design, and the ideas in that area might work very well with wireless. Any ideas? Am I completely off track here?
I agree that XML does what you describe, but if you re-read the part you quoted, he actually does NOT say exactly that XML handles 'content and visual formatting', merely that it promises to clean up that boundary. This sounds like "let XML define the data, and let <technology X> define the visual formatting" to me, but it is a blatant misunderstanding that XML is an alternative to HTML as stated in the last sentence.
I've been doing numerous web projects where we use XML for data, and use some form of transformation to HTML for browser presentation. Look into XSLT for what I think is the coolest way to make these transformations. When done correctly, XSLT is orders of magnitudes faster than some ASP/PHP page combined with client-side scripting will ever be, IMNSHO.
Well, since you're a guy who *obviously* knows everything about market driven economy, does 20+ telecom operators competing furiously over a piss-ant little country with 5 million people sound like communism? Does competition so fierce that mobile phones are frequently GIVEN AWAY to get more subscribers to talk at 10-15 cents per minute in premium quality sound like communism? And no, they get NO subsidies whatsoever.
No government has forced anything down anyones throats here. Just like you guys have FCC to regulate the airwaves, we've got a similar organization in Denmark. Instead of giving the frequencies to whomever lobbies the most, the guys who are willing to pony up the bigger amount, simply gets a frequency. Capitalism at work...
Here in Denmark everybody and his uncle has a GSM900 or GSM1800 based cell-phone (or mobile phone, which is a better word for it, IMHO). We're getting ready to abandon it in favor of UTMS, the next generation in cross-european mobile standards. The frequencies are being auctioned away to whomever makes the best offer, and the market is going to be HUGE. Think real data transfer, not the crappy 9600 bps you get with GSM. Mobile internet, here we come - and I DON'T mean WAP!
So just bypass GSM and go directly to UTMS - anything else would be totally backwards.
Is there a city that was designed? There's a few that claim to be, but if the design changes every 20 years or so I for one don't think they can defend the claim.
That depends - I would say that the classic US style of city "planning", where streets are exclusively north-south and east-west with regular intervals, certainly seems to be a design. Bad, perhaps, but design nevertheless. And this design really favors automobiles, IMHO.
This would not be a very good idea - vacuum does not move heat very efficiently (as in: not at all), so your OC'ed processor would be unable to lose its heat by any means but infrared radiation, which is not very effective at the low temperatures that would allow a processor to operate.
I've heard of seas of liquid nitrogen on Titan - now THAT has potential:-)
An X5 processor could be an AMD (see here). There is also a PowerPC chip called 604e-X5 running 166 MHz, but these are not as common. You can find specs for the AMD X5 here.
As has been said before by many people (Asimov may have been the first), we have build our world for bipedal creatures.
As much as I like Asimov, I'll have to disagree. We have built our world for vehicles. Granted that our buildings are for bipeds, but all the rest is designed for cars, trains, and what-not. Look at any large city (especially in the US), and wonder what it was designed for. People? Yeah right. The only thing that it was ever designed for is the CAR. Same thing with the open country - most of that is farmland, and can only be handled by (mostly huge) vehicles.
It's correct that cars (and most of the tools we're surrounded by) are designed for bipeds to use and handle, but that doesn't mean that it's an efficient interface for a droid.
I think it is just old thinking that tells us that a robot servant must be humanoid. Why move piles of expensive biped mech around, when small networked tools can do most of the jobs, and at a fraction of the price?
The described way sounds neat, but other ways exists. In a research project in my native country (Denmark - we're almost entirely coastline and no inland) some smart guys tried to use the wave action to move a rod up and down by having a float on top of it. The point was that the rod was magnetic and moved up and down in an inductor coil, thereby producing electricity.
Not sure if it ever amounted to much in terms of actual produced energy, but it did prove that it was possible. The cool point was that this didn't necessarily have to be located near the coastline, but could be moved a dozen kilometers out to sea, making it invisible from the shore due to the curvature of the Earth.
Re:Nuclear fission is the only sustainable power t
on
Wave Driven Generators
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It is, and was at the time, well known that there were and are a number of safe options for the disposal of nuclear waste. New and better ones are constantly being developed.
What options could you possibly refer to that would reliably last the 10000+ years it takes for most of the radiation to die out? Whoever led you to believe this was either stupid or trying to deceive you, IMHO. Or both.
If you think that doing term-papers in whatever odd subject all night is tough, or coding all night for a week or two on some project, just wait for your children to be born. That's when real sleep deprivation sets in...
And yes, I'm very much speaking from experience. But you know what? I think you CAN make your body adapt to fewer hours of sleep, but it's really hard. If you're used to 8 hours of sleep every night, start getting only 7,5 hours for a month. At first you'll be tired, but after the month your body will have gotten used to it. Now reduce to 7 hours for a month and so on. Sooner or later you'll hit your personal barrier where the sleepiness affects you too much - need I say that you should stop then?
Doing this successfully requires you to continue to do so every day for a month, also in the week-end, which is exactly why it works so good when you have little children - they have no notion of weekends, anyway.
If you really want ACLs (I know I do, but maybe that's just because I *like* ACLs due to tons of experience with it on NT), why not support the poor guys doing the NTFS-for- Linux driver?
The arguments about ACLs being too difficult is IMHO crap. They aren't. I've done a lot of stuff directly manipulating ACLs, and the only difficult part was finding out where the docs for the pertinent parts of the Win32 API were. Doing ACL stuff at API level requires that you know what you're doing, but show me a serious API that doesn't. I mean, come on - everything looks difficult until you've tried. Speaking from experience, ACLs were no harder to learn than sockets programming.
Excuse me, but I couldn't help but bring up the following point: Programs having to do more do not necessarily have to run slower.. They need to be redesigned to avoid this. A whole lot of the problems we see with slower code as features creep in has to do with lack of code management and programmer inertia. Code management means that those with the bigger picture in mind redesigns to keep the feature creep from resulting in bloat and bugginess. Programmer inertia means the inability to ruthlessly discard what no longer serves a purpose, or at least longevity in doing so.
Combine these and you get a program that grows featurewise by patching beyond reason, not by redesigning when needed.
I'll not comment on Mozilla particularly since I haven't been doing any of the code, but I've been coding for almost 20 years now. Invariably, when a program goes through many generations successfully, it is because it gets all but rewritten from time to time. Case in point: Up until IE3, Microsoft reversed-engineered Netscape to make their browser. From IE4 and on, they scrapped everything and made their own. Essentially, they decided that they couldn't possibly keep adding features to their current codebase without serious problems, and decided to act on that knowledge. MS should do that more often - but so should just about every programming project in existance...
I know that more complex standards seems like they are probably harder to program for. But more complex standard does not necessarily demand slower code (or even more complex code) - it is my experience that you can usually find a good solution by being able and willing to realize that what you've written so far is no longer good enough.
The bottom line: When very substantial features are to be added to a program, very substantial changes should be made to the program to cleanly incorporate those changes into the original design. Failure to do so WILL lead to bloated buggy code much more easily than otherwise.
burnproof - interesting idea. Any info on how much more money such a burner costs? Any results on how reliable such a disk would be?
That technology could probably be applied to DVD-writers, but my guess is that it's considerably harder with DVD since the data density (and thereby the needed accuracy) is much higher.
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Considering the kind of sick places here on Earth that life is perfectly willing to put up with, it seems very likely that even barely habitable worlds would develop some form of life.
This is not necessarily the case. The life you find in those god-awful places like 3 km below the packice or in some deep sea volcanic vent didn't start there. Some lifeforms adapted to those harsh conditions, but on a planet with 3 km of packice all over it may not get started at all.
Just because there's life all over Earth doesn't mean that life could have started in any of the almost non-inhabitable places. From what I've heard, the current theories include something like tidal pools.
I agree that there is data loss in a DV cam, but it is all before the compression stage.
What kind of compression is this? If it's lossy (most video compression schemes are) then it most certainly will not work with computer files. Imagine encoding the Emacs binary with MPEG-4 and then decode it - would most assuredly NOT run.
Most modern DV-cams have a FireWire connector for input/output. These would fit nicely with a FireWire adapter on your PC (or Mac - the newer ones have FireWire already, don't they?). Anyway, a FireWire adapter and cable can't be all that expensive...
That would be SOOO cool, but does a digital camera guarantee the storage of each and every bit? I mean, for a home video of my infant daughter burping milk all over her mother or something it hardly matters if a few bits (pixels) get dumped, but for most files this would be a total disaster. A comprehensive error-checking and correcting facility would have to be employed for this to have any use, IMHO. The idea was employed a while back with VHS tapes, but failed because of the high error rates...
Seeing how it's been argued that TCP/IP isn't very good for high-speed wireless, and that AX.25 (never heard of that before) doesn't cut it either, left me with one question - what protocol would work? I'm pretty much a newbie in terms of wireless, but for embedded systems an industrial network called CAN (Controller Area Network) is widely used because of resistance to noise. While having numerous features that link it to twisted pair wire, parts of it are about protocol design, and the ideas in that area might work very well with wireless. Any ideas? Am I completely off track here?
I agree that XML does what you describe, but if you re-read the part you quoted, he actually does NOT say exactly that XML handles 'content and visual formatting', merely that it promises to clean up that boundary. This sounds like "let XML define the data, and let <technology X> define the visual formatting" to me, but it is a blatant misunderstanding that XML is an alternative to HTML as stated in the last sentence.
I've been doing numerous web projects where we use XML for data, and use some form of transformation to HTML for browser presentation. Look into XSLT for what I think is the coolest way to make these transformations. When done correctly, XSLT is orders of magnitudes faster than some ASP/PHP page combined with client-side scripting will ever be, IMNSHO.
very strange thing. At least is has force feedback (or would that be force feed-forward?)
Sorry to burst your bubble, pal, but it's "UMTS" not "UTMS". "UMTS" stands for "Unified Mobile Telecommunications System".
OK, bad spelling on my side - as long as we agree that we're referring to this.
UMTS is known as Wideband CDMA in the US and Japan.
Bad spelling aside, does this mean that there is current/future support for UMTS in the US and Japan? Now *that* would be cool...
Well, since you're a guy who *obviously* knows everything about market driven economy, does 20+ telecom operators competing furiously over a piss-ant little country with 5 million people sound like communism? Does competition so fierce that mobile phones are frequently GIVEN AWAY to get more subscribers to talk at 10-15 cents per minute in premium quality sound like communism? And no, they get NO subsidies whatsoever.
No government has forced anything down anyones throats here. Just like you guys have FCC to regulate the airwaves, we've got a similar organization in Denmark. Instead of giving the frequencies to whomever lobbies the most, the guys who are willing to pony up the bigger amount, simply gets a frequency. Capitalism at work...
Here in Denmark everybody and his uncle has a GSM900 or GSM1800 based cell-phone (or mobile phone, which is a better word for it, IMHO). We're getting ready to abandon it in favor of UTMS, the next generation in cross-european mobile standards. The frequencies are being auctioned away to whomever makes the best offer, and the market is going to be HUGE. Think real data transfer, not the crappy 9600 bps you get with GSM. Mobile internet, here we come - and I DON'T mean WAP!
So just bypass GSM and go directly to UTMS - anything else would be totally backwards.
The satellite had failed just two months after its launch in September 1998, and had been tumbling out of control ever since.
That sounds an awful lot like the story of the company itself and in particular, their stock.
My Dream Calendar Program would look like Natalie Portman - nuff said
Is there a city that was designed? There's a few that claim to be, but if the design changes every 20 years or so I for one don't think they can defend the claim.
That depends - I would say that the classic US style of city "planning", where streets are exclusively north-south and east-west with regular intervals, certainly seems to be a design. Bad, perhaps, but design nevertheless. And this design really favors automobiles, IMHO.
For that you don't really need a bot - a spouse will do :-)
This would not be a very good idea - vacuum does not move heat very efficiently (as in: not at all), so your OC'ed processor would be unable to lose its heat by any means but infrared radiation, which is not very effective at the low temperatures that would allow a processor to operate.
I've heard of seas of liquid nitrogen on Titan - now THAT has potential :-)
An X5 processor could be an AMD (see here). There is also a PowerPC chip called 604e-X5 running 166 MHz, but these are not as common. You can find specs for the AMD X5 here.
I've always found that the easiest way to get rid of old computers is to donate them to schools, relatives etc - does that count as legal disposal?
Note to the humor-impaired: This was intended to be a joke...
As has been said before by many people (Asimov may have been the first), we have build our world for bipedal creatures.
As much as I like Asimov, I'll have to disagree. We have built our world for vehicles. Granted that our buildings are for bipeds, but all the rest is designed for cars, trains, and what-not. Look at any large city (especially in the US), and wonder what it was designed for. People? Yeah right. The only thing that it was ever designed for is the CAR. Same thing with the open country - most of that is farmland, and can only be handled by (mostly huge) vehicles.
It's correct that cars (and most of the tools we're surrounded by) are designed for bipeds to use and handle, but that doesn't mean that it's an efficient interface for a droid.
I think it is just old thinking that tells us that a robot servant must be humanoid. Why move piles of expensive biped mech around, when small networked tools can do most of the jobs, and at a fraction of the price?
They have those already on Iceland, if memory serves me correct...
The described way sounds neat, but other ways exists. In a research project in my native country (Denmark - we're almost entirely coastline and no inland) some smart guys tried to use the wave action to move a rod up and down by having a float on top of it. The point was that the rod was magnetic and moved up and down in an inductor coil, thereby producing electricity.
Not sure if it ever amounted to much in terms of actual produced energy, but it did prove that it was possible. The cool point was that this didn't necessarily have to be located near the coastline, but could be moved a dozen kilometers out to sea, making it invisible from the shore due to the curvature of the Earth.
It is, and was at the time, well known that there were and are a number of safe options for the disposal of nuclear waste. New and better ones are constantly being developed.
What options could you possibly refer to that would reliably last the 10000+ years it takes for most of the radiation to die out? Whoever led you to believe this was either stupid or trying to deceive you, IMHO. Or both.
If you think that doing term-papers in whatever odd subject all night is tough, or coding all night for a week or two on some project, just wait for your children to be born. That's when real sleep deprivation sets in...
And yes, I'm very much speaking from experience. But you know what? I think you CAN make your body adapt to fewer hours of sleep, but it's really hard. If you're used to 8 hours of sleep every night, start getting only 7,5 hours for a month. At first you'll be tired, but after the month your body will have gotten used to it. Now reduce to 7 hours for a month and so on. Sooner or later you'll hit your personal barrier where the sleepiness affects you too much - need I say that you should stop then?
Doing this successfully requires you to continue to do so every day for a month, also in the week-end, which is exactly why it works so good when you have little children - they have no notion of weekends, anyway.
If you really want ACLs (I know I do, but maybe that's just because I *like* ACLs due to tons of experience with it on NT), why not support the poor guys doing the NTFS-for- Linux driver?
The arguments about ACLs being too difficult is IMHO crap. They aren't. I've done a lot of stuff directly manipulating ACLs, and the only difficult part was finding out where the docs for the pertinent parts of the Win32 API were. Doing ACL stuff at API level requires that you know what you're doing, but show me a serious API that doesn't. I mean, come on - everything looks difficult until you've tried. Speaking from experience, ACLs were no harder to learn than sockets programming.
Excuse me, but I couldn't help but bring up the following point: Programs having to do more do not necessarily have to run slower.. They need to be redesigned to avoid this. A whole lot of the problems we see with slower code as features creep in has to do with lack of code management and programmer inertia. Code management means that those with the bigger picture in mind redesigns to keep the feature creep from resulting in bloat and bugginess. Programmer inertia means the inability to ruthlessly discard what no longer serves a purpose, or at least longevity in doing so.
Combine these and you get a program that grows featurewise by patching beyond reason, not by redesigning when needed.
I'll not comment on Mozilla particularly since I haven't been doing any of the code, but I've been coding for almost 20 years now. Invariably, when a program goes through many generations successfully, it is because it gets all but rewritten from time to time. Case in point: Up until IE3, Microsoft reversed-engineered Netscape to make their browser. From IE4 and on, they scrapped everything and made their own. Essentially, they decided that they couldn't possibly keep adding features to their current codebase without serious problems, and decided to act on that knowledge. MS should do that more often - but so should just about every programming project in existance...
I know that more complex standards seems like they are probably harder to program for. But more complex standard does not necessarily demand slower code (or even more complex code) - it is my experience that you can usually find a good solution by being able and willing to realize that what you've written so far is no longer good enough.
The bottom line: When very substantial features are to be added to a program, very substantial changes should be made to the program to cleanly incorporate those changes into the original design. Failure to do so WILL lead to bloated buggy code much more easily than otherwise.
burnproof - interesting idea. Any info on how much more money such a burner costs? Any results on how reliable such a disk would be?
That technology could probably be applied to DVD-writers, but my guess is that it's considerably harder with DVD since the data density (and thereby the needed accuracy) is much higher.