A burning candle will not produce nanotubes of any great length, yes probability suggests that some will be formed but they will be insignificant to all the other compounds released from the wick.
As for the big-boy method, sure that is what they do but it is usually in an controled and _enclosed_ environment. Yes the product is nasty and can be carcinogenic but generally they are not allowed to "fly about all over the place" if you are doing it differently i'd start asking for danger money:)
Ahh what joys Prof. Kroto has bestowed upon the world!
The designs you mention are based heavily on the mechanical properties of carbon fullerene cages, not their electrical ones. Also the ability of carbon to bond is the basic property on which all this science is based.
There are a number of projects that are looking at the electrical properties of carbon nanotubes, such as doping them with large electron rich atoms in the hope of producing superconductors and being able to produce nano scale wires for microprocessor like devices. After reading this article it seems that the team were trying to lay out a carbon nano tube in the hope of conduncting electricity. They then found that When they bent the tube it stopped conducting, something that was not predicted. This result will cause people to chanage the way they think about carbon nano-tubes. Simply bending then into place will not work so we will need new structures to form bends in the tubes, if they are to conduct.
The bonding you are so worried about is only temporary, the structure of a nano-tube is very stable (which is why it is a surprise that this happens) to move from a nano-tube to diamond (which is the next stage of bonding for carbon) would take insane ammounts of energy. These are strong, robust structures that are still very usefull.
There is great potential here for even more advances in nano-tech, this research has shown that nano-scale mechanical relays are possible!
(yeah ok so smaller more transistor like systems have already been thought of...)
IIRC KParts was started to avoid the overhead of a CORBA architecture (such as the one Bonobo uses). I know the speed issues of CORBA have been hashed out time and time again but does this mean there has been shift in the KDE attitude to this?
Also i seem to recall reading at one point that KParts was going be extensible to enable it to use CORBA objects if the lightwight KPart was not available. How much of a shift is this for KDE? it would seem that such compatability was always on the cards.
IMHO the interesting part for is the compatability that will come from having KParts accessable from Gnome which is something new.
Good work guys! here's to an truly open and portable component model.
Check out the slashdot sections, BSD, YRO, AskSlashdot, Apachie, etc... These get extra stories posted to them which do not get put on the front page. If you activate slashboxes for these sections you get to see what is there. IMO this is a good thing as it allows for a much better S/N ratio when it comes to discussions on specific subject areas.
I generally have the 'Science' and 'Semi-Random' slashboxes active cos i like the science stuff and the random box gives me the opportinity to spot other interesting stories.
After reading the article i got the impression that this machine needs you to fire in a number of nails to break up a surface. I would guess that this means that each nail would work as a wedge to split the surface along a line (assuming you fired the nails reasonably closely along a line). Hmmm... 60 nails to break up 3x3ft square that is about one nail every 4.5 inches.
If each nail just causes a split then there should be less of a problem of fragments being thrown back. Still at 6.5 ft tall and 265 pounds this sounds like a digger attachment which should have the opperator safely caged in the cabin.
As for a weapon, accuracy could be a problem, it has a slow fire cycle (10 seconds per round) and no mention of what sort of wieght it can accelerate to this speed...
Point in case the lin7k project, Linux for Psion 5 and related hardware. I personally have had linux running on my Psion 5, purely in the standard 8MB RAM, no not even a compact flash disk. Admitedly there is only so much you can do with such a device but it boots and will give you a shell, even network using Slip!
The iopener comes with 8MB of Flash and 32MB of RAM, build a tiny kernel which just supports the iopener hardware and a compressed initrd image and you probably have a very functional system. X may also be possible, even ignoring projects such as nanoX, XFree86 v4.0 includes a mini X server for devices such as the itsy.
Linux does not have to be Fat, RedHat were talking about their embeded linux project at the UK Linux Expo las week, kernels as small as 32k were mentioned.
Amiga, (way ahead of its time yet again *grin*) has had something like this for the past 3 years.
The Siamise (SP?) system allows for an Amiga to share resources with a PC system in the same box and uses SCSI to connect the two motherboards. I seem to recall that both win9x and Linux were supported. PC apps could be displayed on the Amiga workbench and likewise amiga apps on the PC partner. This does not really allow the systems to share all resources though. For that consider the Acorn RiscPC.
Acorn produced a system in the early-mid 90s (spring 93 i think but it may well have been 94) which provided a dual headded processor bus capable of supporting not only the native ARM chips but a second processor of practicaly any architecture which would have full use of the same resources of the host. Alas only x86 processor cards were ever produced (At the launch there were many wild suggestions of CRAYs on the second processor bus and for a while PPC looked like it would turn up...) but these allowed windows to run, well crawl;)
Other issues with the RiscPC architecture limited the system, 16MHz memmory bus, 2MB video ram, no PCI (although ISA cards could be bridged to from the native podule bus). So Acron is no more but I still use my RiscPC (now with StrongARM) if ever i need to do serious work, the UI simply runs rings arrond anything else out there (belive me i've used my fair share.) and there is no better wordprocessor than TechWriter (think WYSIWYG TeX with full AntiAliased fonts):)
I would guess that there might be a problem if this bypasses macrovision.
Where does the macrovision signal come into play? I would imagine (But don't actually know) that this would happen in the MPEG-2 -> Analoge signal conversion. If this chip bypasses this then i can see there being problems...
That said can you even concieve of these home movie buffs degrading their viewing pleasure by recording the signal onto VHS tape? I think not...
Do you have any more information on how these calibration charts are used?
Simply looking at a calibration chart through normal camera optics is meaningless. The human brain will try and adjust the colour balance to the earth norm because that is what we are wired for.
What is really needed is a measure of the martian light used to illuminate a white standard across the full UV-Vis-NearIR spectrum. Once that is known and the response of the optics used to take the pictures on mars is known to every frequency in that spectrum you can start to make some colour calibrations.
Using CIE human colour response curves for red, green and blue would then give an impression of how a human on Mars would probably see the colours. To be honest, because this is a function of the iluminating light and because the brain does so much processing based on what it expects to see, it will probably 'look' much like the earth norm.
True colour (for anything other than single wavelength laser) is impossible to define without a human observer, colour is purely a function of our biological make-up. We will see what we want to see.
It looks like this stems ftom the original Viking missions. IIRC the first pictures seen as they were sent back to earth showed an almost blue sky much like earth's. This was a surprise to NASA so they checked the gain used on the different colour channels (the camera sent back seperate red, green and blue images) used and found that they had given a higher bias to the blue channel than they should have. Removing this extra gain caused the images to shift back into the red images we know.
This article seems to suggest that NASA should not have removed the excess blue from the images..
*shrug* images is images load these ones into the GIMP and you would probably be able to give Mars a green sky just by changing the colour balance...
It is my understanding that by naming your post Microsoft has sworn, under oath, that your post violates the DMCA. If you can show that your post has not violated the DMCA then i would have thought that Microsoft will be open to being found in violation of purjury laws...
I can't quite recall if it was foolproof but the old macs, this was back in early 1994, at university had something to protect them...
I can still remember the hoops you had to jump through to get Mosaic installed on them. The protection system prevented you from running any programs from any directories out side the applications directory tree which had no write access so you could not install new software.
There was a bug in TurboGopher that could be exploited to get arround this though. Using TurboGopher download the stuffit expander and save it into the TG executable directory (tsk tsk, not checking permissions, naughty TurboGopher *grin*) where it could be run. Then download the Mosaic archive into the same directory, expand it, and you could surf the web at really low speed until the system crashed (very frequently) and rebooted where the mac would check its drive and remove any extra files so you had to repeat the process:)
Sure you can trap just about anything inside a buckyball, current trends are focused on trying to trap large metal atoms inside them in the hope of producing superconductors.
Traped Oxygen wouldn't cause bucky balls to burn all that well... Buckyballs are _very_ stable (Surviving ground zero of a planet killer impact) the amount of energy you would need to pump into one of these to burn would probably be more that you would get out... That said i can't confirm that this is the case as i do not have the data to hand.
Slashdot Mirror
A burning candle will not produce nanotubes of any great length, yes probability suggests that some will be formed but they will be insignificant to all the other compounds released from the wick.
:)
As for the big-boy method, sure that is what they do but it is usually in an controled and _enclosed_ environment. Yes the product is nasty and can be carcinogenic but generally they are not allowed to "fly about all over the place" if you are doing it differently i'd start asking for danger money
Ahh what joys Prof. Kroto has bestowed upon the world!
The designs you mention are based heavily on the mechanical properties of carbon fullerene cages, not their electrical ones. Also the ability of carbon to bond is the basic property on which all this science is based.
There are a number of projects that are looking at the electrical properties of carbon nanotubes, such as doping them with large electron rich atoms in the hope of producing superconductors and being able to produce nano scale wires for microprocessor like devices. After reading this article it seems that the team were trying to lay out a carbon nano tube in the hope of conduncting electricity. They then found that When they bent the tube it stopped conducting, something that was not predicted. This result will cause people to chanage the way they think about carbon nano-tubes. Simply bending then into place will not work so we will need new structures to form bends in the tubes, if they are to conduct.
The bonding you are so worried about is only temporary, the structure of a nano-tube is very stable (which is why it is a surprise that this happens) to move from a nano-tube to diamond (which is the next stage of bonding for carbon) would take insane ammounts of energy. These are strong, robust structures that are still very usefull.
There is great potential here for even more advances in nano-tech, this research has shown that nano-scale mechanical relays are possible!
(yeah ok so smaller more transistor like systems have already been thought of...)
IIRC KParts was started to avoid the overhead of a CORBA architecture (such as the one Bonobo uses). I know the speed issues of CORBA have been hashed out time and time again but does this mean there has been shift in the KDE attitude to this?
Also i seem to recall reading at one point that KParts was going be extensible to enable it to use CORBA objects if the lightwight KPart was not available. How much of a shift is this for KDE? it would seem that such compatability was always on the cards.
IMHO the interesting part for is the compatability that will come from having KParts accessable from Gnome which is something new.
Good work guys! here's to an truly open and portable component model.
Check out the slashdot sections, BSD, YRO, AskSlashdot, Apachie, etc... These get extra stories posted to them which do not get put on the front page. If you activate slashboxes for these sections you get to see what is there. IMO this is a good thing as it allows for a much better S/N ratio when it comes to discussions on specific subject areas.
I generally have the 'Science' and 'Semi-Random' slashboxes active cos i like the science stuff and the random box gives me the opportinity to spot other interesting stories.
After reading the article i got the impression that this machine needs you to fire in a number of nails to break up a surface. I would guess that this means that each nail would work as a wedge to split the surface along a line (assuming you fired the nails reasonably closely along a line). Hmmm... 60 nails to break up 3x3ft square that is about one nail every 4.5 inches.
If each nail just causes a split then there should be less of a problem of fragments being thrown back. Still at 6.5 ft tall and 265 pounds this sounds like a digger attachment which should have the opperator safely caged in the cabin.
As for a weapon, accuracy could be a problem, it has a slow fire cycle (10 seconds per round) and no mention of what sort of wieght it can accelerate to this speed...
Linux could easily fit into the memory provided.
Point in case the lin7k project, Linux for Psion 5 and related hardware. I personally have had linux running on my Psion 5, purely in the standard 8MB RAM, no not even a compact flash disk. Admitedly there is only so much you can do with such a device but it boots and will give you a shell, even network using Slip!
The iopener comes with 8MB of Flash and 32MB of RAM, build a tiny kernel which just supports the iopener hardware and a compressed initrd image and you probably have a very functional system. X may also be possible, even ignoring projects such as nanoX, XFree86 v4.0 includes a mini X server for devices such as the itsy.
Linux does not have to be Fat, RedHat were talking about their embeded linux project at the UK Linux Expo las week, kernels as small as 32k were mentioned.
Amiga, (way ahead of its time yet again *grin*) has had something like this for the past 3 years.
;)
:)
The Siamise (SP?) system allows for an Amiga to share resources with a PC system in the same box and uses SCSI to connect the two motherboards. I seem to recall that both win9x and Linux were supported. PC apps could be displayed on the Amiga workbench and likewise amiga apps on the PC partner. This does not really allow the systems to share all resources though. For that consider the Acorn RiscPC.
Acorn produced a system in the early-mid 90s (spring 93 i think but it may well have been 94) which provided a dual headded processor bus capable of supporting not only the native ARM chips but a second processor of practicaly any architecture which would have full use of the same resources of the host. Alas only x86 processor cards were ever produced (At the launch there were many wild suggestions of CRAYs on the second processor bus and for a while PPC looked like it would turn up...) but these allowed windows to run, well crawl
Other issues with the RiscPC architecture limited the system, 16MHz memmory bus, 2MB video ram, no PCI (although ISA cards could be bridged to from the native podule bus). So Acron is no more but I still use my RiscPC (now with StrongARM) if ever i need to do serious work, the UI simply runs rings arrond anything else out there (belive me i've used my fair share.) and there is no better wordprocessor than TechWriter (think WYSIWYG TeX with full AntiAliased fonts)
I would guess that there might be a problem if this bypasses macrovision.
Where does the macrovision signal come into play? I would imagine (But don't actually know) that this would happen in the MPEG-2 -> Analoge signal conversion. If this chip bypasses this then i can see there being problems...
That said can you even concieve of these home movie buffs degrading their viewing pleasure by recording the signal onto VHS tape? I think not...
Do you have any more information on how these calibration charts are used?
Simply looking at a calibration chart through normal camera optics is meaningless. The human brain will try and adjust the colour balance to the earth norm because that is what we are wired for.
What is really needed is a measure of the martian light used to illuminate a white standard across the full UV-Vis-NearIR spectrum. Once that is known and the response of the optics used to take the pictures on mars is known to every frequency in that spectrum you can start to make some colour calibrations.
Using CIE human colour response curves for red, green and blue would then give an impression of how a human on Mars would probably see the colours. To be honest, because this is a function of the iluminating light and because the brain does so much processing based on what it expects to see, it will probably 'look' much like the earth norm.
True colour (for anything other than single wavelength laser) is impossible to define without a human observer, colour is purely a function of our biological make-up. We will see what we want to see.
Depends on what you mean by faked...
It looks like this stems ftom the original Viking missions. IIRC the first pictures seen as they were sent back to earth showed an almost blue sky much like earth's. This was a surprise to NASA so they checked the gain used on the different colour channels (the camera sent back seperate red, green and blue images) used and found that they had given a higher bias to the blue channel than they should have. Removing this extra gain caused the images to shift back into the red images we know.
This article seems to suggest that NASA should not have removed the excess blue from the images..
*shrug* images is images load these ones into the GIMP and you would probably be able to give Mars a green sky just by changing the colour balance...
IANAL (of course)
It is my understanding that by naming your post Microsoft has sworn, under oath, that your post violates the DMCA. If you can show that your post has not violated the DMCA then i would have thought that Microsoft will be open to being found in violation of purjury laws...
Can this be used against them?
I can't quite recall if it was foolproof but the old macs, this was back in early 1994, at university had something to protect them...
:)
I can still remember the hoops you had to jump through to get Mosaic installed on them. The protection system prevented you from running any programs from any directories out side the applications directory tree which had no write access so you could not install new software.
There was a bug in TurboGopher that could be exploited to get arround this though. Using TurboGopher download the stuffit expander and save it into the TG executable directory (tsk tsk, not checking permissions, naughty TurboGopher *grin*) where it could be run. Then download the Mosaic archive into the same directory, expand it, and you could surf the web at really low speed until the system crashed (very frequently) and rebooted where the mac would check its drive and remove any extra files so you had to repeat the process
Sure you can trap just about anything inside a buckyball, current trends are focused on trying to trap large metal atoms inside them in the hope of producing superconductors.
Traped Oxygen wouldn't cause bucky balls to burn all that well... Buckyballs are _very_ stable (Surviving ground zero of a planet killer impact) the amount of energy you would need to pump into one of these to burn would probably be more that you would get out... That said i can't confirm that this is the case as i do not have the data to hand.