Daresbury in addition to being the birthplace of Lewis Carrol (Charles Luttwidge Dodgson -- there's a neat stained glass window in the church where his father was vicar) was also the site of the first dedicated storage ring for generating synchrotron radiation (i.e. polarized light from IR to hard X-ray).
Originally the site was created to extend particle physics in the North of England (to include a collaboration of the "northern universities": Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Hull. A particle physics 5GeV electron synchrotron called NINA was built there in the early to mid 1970s and did some useful work.
It also attracted a new group of condensed matter physicists (surface scientists too) who used the synchrotron radiation emitted to do spectroscopy and diffraction of various sorts (photelectron spectrosocopy in the extreme UV and soft X-ray where the SR sources are particularly bright compared to other sources). They set up the SRF to try out these ideas.
The NSF (Nuclear Structure Facility -- for doing energetic heavy ion collisions -- nothing to do with nuclear weapons!) was built there in the late 1970s. That's the tower you can see in the site pictures. Unfortunatly SERC killed nuclear structure work in the UK in 1990. They pulled funding for the NSF and told people to look for beamtime at other sites outside the country. In fact the Recoil Seperator ended up at Oak Ridge, TN (so they didn't keep that expertise in the country).
http://www.srs.ac.uk/srs/
NINA was decomissioned in the late 1970s and it was decided to build the Synchrotron Radition Source (SRS) using part of the old NINA site (and the NINA linac, I think) to provide a dedicated SR source in the UK for chemists, biologists, martials scientists and physicists.
All though this time a theory group was based there and a large regional computing facility (that used to have a Cray 1 in the good old days from 1979 to 1983) that was a major node on JANET (the academic network in the UK).
The SRS was comissioned in 1982. This is where the 20 years mentioned in the article comes in -- opened in 1982 and closed in 2003(ish). I not sure if they'll keep the SRS open although the parameters for the SRS and DIAMOND are rather different. DIAMOND is good for high brightness X-ray studies but not so good for soft X-ray or XUV uses.
I worked there as a (suface science) grad student (from Liverpool University) and got my PhD working on the TGM and GIM and SEXAFS stations on beamline 6 and later did some work on Beanline 1 when I worked at the Surface Science Center at Liverpool University.
The site had a lot of experitise for machine physics (the epople who understand how to keep the electrons going around the ring), beamline and monochromator design. I suspect some of these will move down south and another nothern resource will be lost.
I'm sure the RAL people are happy (the decision as made almost 2 years ago) but they don't have a site who boundary is formed by the Bridgewater Canal. Perhaps it's heading the same way as that old tech.
Kevin Purcell Beamline 6 (and 1) University of Liverpool.
One issue the author of the article gets wrong is that all Microsoft Shared Source licenses are identical. For example he says "Licensees may read and reference the source code but may not modify it". This is not true of all Microsoft Shared Source licenses.
There are Shared Source licenses that permit redistribution.
For example the Rotor (Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure) distribution ships with the following license(which was fought for by the authors of Rotor -- David Stutz):
MICROSOFT SHARED SOURCE CLI, C#, AND JSCRIPT LICENSE
This License governs use of the accompanying Software, and your use of the Software constitutes acceptance of this license.
You may use this Software for any non-commercial purpose, subject to the restrictions in this license. Some purposes which can be non-commercial are teaching, academic research, and personal experimentation. You may also distribute this Software with books or other teaching materials, or publish the Software on websites, that are intended to teach the use of the Software.
You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling the Software, or distributing the Software for use with commercial products.
You may modify this Software and distribute the modified Software for non-commercial purposes, however, you may not grant rights to the Software or derivative works that are broader than those provided by this License. For example, you may not distribute modifications of the Software under terms that would permit commercial use, or under terms that purport to require the Software or derivative works to be sublicensed to others.
You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a license to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you might create using such information.
In return, we simply require that you agree:
1. Not to remove any copyright or other notices from the Software.
2. That if you distribute the Software in source or object form,
you will include a verbatim copy of this license.
3. That if you distribute derivative works of the Software in
source code form you do so only under a license that
includes all of the provisions of this License, and if you
distribute derivative works of the Software solely in object
form you do so only under a license that complies with this
License.
4. That if you have modified the Software or created derivative
works, and distribute such modifications or derivative
works, you will cause the modified files to carry prominent
notices so that recipients know that they are not receiving
the original Software. Such notices must state: (i) that
you have changed the Software; and (ii) the date of any
changes.
5. THAT THE SOFTWARE COMES "AS IS", WITH NO WARRANTIES. THIS
MEANS NO EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY, INCLUDING
WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR ANY WARRANTY OF TITLE OR
NON-INFRINGEMENT. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS DISCLAIMER ON
WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE WORKS.
6. THAT MICROSOFT WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES RELATED TO
THE SOFTWARE OR THIS LICENSE, INCLUDING DIRECT, INDIRECT,
SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, TO THE MAXIMUM
EXTENT THE LAW PERMITS, NO MATTER WHAT LEGAL THEORY IT IS
BASED ON. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
ON WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE
WORKS.
7. That if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply
to the Software or anyone's use of the Software, your
license to the Software ends automatically.
8. That your rights under the License end automatically if you
breach it in any way.
9. Microsoft reserves all rights not expressly granted to you in
this license.
As you can see you can modify and redistribute your modification.
And no you aren't contaminated by reading the source (that's specifically called out in the last right granted).
You can redistribute under another license that's compatible with this license (OK, so that's not GPL or BSD but most licenses lock you into the same license not merley a compatible one).
One of the ideas behind releasing this source code was to encourage research based on the Rotor(technically the CLI is very interesting) and to help implementers of other CLI implementations and to help people who code for.NET on Windows to understand what is going on under the covers without getting the.NET source.
David Stutz wrote a good article on this at ORA.com.
If you are interested in finding out more about the SSCLI O'Reilly has a book in the works that should appear in March 2003. The first chapter is available online. Don't worry Microsoft won't own your soul if you read about it. If you are interested in modern language design or compiler implementation then you'll find something here.
I do happen to work at Microsoft as a contractor but these are my own words. And yes, I used to think all Shared Source licenses were the same too.
The N2O4 falls apart in the air to NO2 which is a toxic brown gas with effects on the lings similar to chlorine.
The UMDH is toxic too but it has a less drastic effect.
Unless a tank made it to the ground the chances (reports on NPR that there is a tank on the ground at Nacadoches, TX airport but which tank is not specified).
I suspect NASA would like Joe SixPack to refrain from taking bits home so they can determine the order of break-up of the shuttle by accumulating all of the debris. Saying its toxic is as good a way as any.
Of course there could be other toxic materials on board: Be, perhaps.
Science Daily has a better article (as always) here
The mention of the "tilt" is a mangled reference to the tilt or angle of the orbital plane with respect to our view point. The planet eclipses the star (changing it the apparent magnitude ("brightness") of the star -- that's what they observed) so you know the orbit is edge on to us. Combine that info with the previously measured radial velocity and you can get the actual mass of the planet not just the minimum mass of the planet.
Article follows:
Hubble Makes Precise Measure Of Extrasolar World's True Mass
NASA Hubble Space Telescope's crisp view has allowed an international team of astronomers to apply a previously unproven technique (astrometry) for making a precise measurement of the mass of a planet outside our solar system. The Hubble results place the planet at 1.89 to 2.4 times the mass of Jupiter, our solar system's largest world. Previous estimates, about which there are some uncertainties, place the planet's mass between 1.9 and 100 times that of Jupiter's.
A Hubble set of instruments called Fine Guidance Sensors (FGSs), which are also used to point and stabilize the free-flying observatory, measured a small "side-to-side" wobble of the red dwarf star Gliese 876. This is due to the tug of an unseen companion object, designated Gliese 876b (Gl 876b) and first discovered in 1998 with ground-based telescopes.
Gl 876b is only the second extrasolar planet (after HD 209458) for which a precise mass has been determined, and it is the first whose mass has been confirmed by using the astrometry technique.
Now that this technique has been proven viable for space-based observatory planet confirmations, it will be used in the future to nail down uncertainties in the masses of dozens of extrasolar planets discovered so far.
The observations were made by George F. Benedict and Barbara McArthur (University of Texas at Austin), members of the international observing team led by Thierry Forveille (Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corporation, Hawaii and Grenoble Observatory, France). The results are being published in the December 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Benedict had to observe the star's yo-yo motion for over two years, using a total of 27 orbits worth of Hubble Space Telescope observations. "Making these kinds of measurements of a star's movement on the sky is quite difficult," Benedict emphasizes. "We're measuring angles (.5 milliarcsecond) equivalent to the size of a quarter seen from 3,000 miles away.
The target planet, Gl 876b, is the more distant of two planets orbiting Gliese 876. It was originally discovered by two groups, led by Xavier Delfosse (Geneva/Grenoble Observatory) and Geoffrey Marcy (U.C. Berkeley and San Francisco State University). Marcy's group discovered a smaller planet closer to Gliese 876 a year later, in 1999. These initial discoveries were made by measuring the star's subtle "to-and-fro" speed. This is called the radial velocity technique.
Benedict and McArthur combined the astrometric information with the radial velocity measurements (made in the planet's discovery) to determine the planet's mass by deducing its orbital inclination. If astronomers don't know how the planet's orbit is tilted with respect to Earth, they can only estimate a minimum mass for the planet. But without knowing more, the mass could be significantly larger if the orbit was tilted to a nearly face-on orientation to Earth. The star would still move towards and away from us slightly, even though it had a massive companion. "You can't hide massive companions from the Hubble Space Telescope," says McArthur. "The planet's orbit turns out to be tilted nearly edge-on to Earth. This verifies it is a low-mass object."
"There are a few more stars where we can do this kind of research with Hubble," Benedict says. "Most candidate stars are too distant. Astronomers can look forward to doing these kinds of studies on literally hundreds of stars with the planned NASA Space Interferometry Mission, called SIM, which will be far more precise than Hubble.
"Knowing the mass of extrasolar planets accurately is going to help theorists answer lots of questions about how planets form," Benedict adds. "When we get hundreds of these mass determinations for planets around all types of stars, we're going to see what types of stars form certain types of planets. Do big stars form big planets and small stars form small planets?"
Measuring stellar wobbles on the sky has been used to search for planets for decades. But extremely high precision and telescope optical stability are required. The Hubble FGSs are the first astrometric tool to accomplish this ultra-precise kind of measurement for an extrasolar planet.
The gas giant plant orbiting the sunlike star HD 209458 is the very first planet to have its mass verified by using transit and radial velocity data. This was only possible because the planet was discovered to be passing in front of the star every four days, slightly dimming the star's light. This is proof the orbit is edge-on, yielding a mass that agrees with the lower limit estimate of.7 Jupiter masses.
Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here.
No, he didn't. Just check say Yahoo Finance and you can see this is not true. There was no one block of 2 million shares traded today. And certainly not 10 minutes before COB. Also as Bill is an insider he is very constrained on how he does his stock sales. He has to file his sales in advance (common to prevent accusations of insider trading).
Bill sold quite a few shares in October but none on November 1st:
1,000,000 shares on 10/22
1,000,000 shares on 10/23
2,000,000 shares on 10/24
1,000,000 shares on 10/25
He last sold stock in the middle of August. He regularly sells out his stock. Just like the other officers that you can check out here.
Bill holds about 12% of MSFT and at his selling rate will be out of the company stock in about 11 or 12 years time. Curiously this is also about how long Steve Ballmer has said (recently) that he is thinking about sticking around as CEO. So I give them a decade before they finish mutating into a regular blue-chip like GE or IBM:-)
Like everyone else on the DCD mailing list for the Microsoft case I received this email: From: "USDC Clerk's Office" Date: Fri Nov 1, 2002 14:20:57 US/Pacific To: 98CV1232@nyed.uscourts.gov Subject: Netscape version 6.2 Reply-To: donotreply@DCD.USCOURTS.GOV
To users who use the Netscape version 6.2 browser, fi you see the message at the bottom of the browser stating that the document is done and you do nit see the document, please hit the reload button at the top of your browser to view the document. Thank you for your patience in this matter.
Obviously some sort of conspiracy here to prevent people using rival browsers from reading the judgment.
This is just a radar/areodynamic test prototype and is quite a few years from production. And as the "skip a generation" approach the current administration has the UAV version is probably the future.
The location of the air intake also implies that this is going to be a subsonic aircraft design. Perhaps the future replacement for the F117A rather than a fighter.
Boeing's current development of the X-45A Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle, or UCAV, technology demonstrator draws directly on its Bird of Prey experience. Some aspects of the UCAV's innovative radar-evading design, such as its shape and inlet, were developed from this project.
So it seems unlikley we'll see a manned version of one of these in the future. They may have been thinking that way in the early 1990s when they started to build it but not today.
The video is interesting -- the plane looks so different from different angles and there is one angle where the wings look more like a flying squirrel rather than a bird of prey(tm).
A superconducting magnet operated on a constant current, such as those used in Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the body, suffers no dissipation of electrical energy. That is not true, however, when a superconducting magnet is pulsed. And tests of the new magnet in pulsed operation showed that "initially [the electrical] losses were much higher than predicted," Minervini said.
With repeated operation, however, the magnet appeared to correct itself. "With each cycle the losses lessened until they reached a steady value a lot closer to what we'd predicted," Minervini said.
"We think we understand what's happening, at least qualitatively," he continued. "It has to do with interactions between the thousands of wires twisted into cables that in turn are coiled to form the magnet. We are essentially changing the electrical characteristics of the cable in a way that decreases losses over time."
No. That's restating the problem. You don't have the understanding bit here. What is going on that will change the (I presume) I squared R losses in the magnet.
The skin finding hack to locate faces has been used a lot.
The trick for those of you are interested is to convert you image from RGB (or whatever format you have your image in) to HLS coordinates (hue, lightness and saturation). Or TLS (tint).
As skin (regardless of race excepting albinos) is colored with melatonin and the "color" varies with the amount of melatonin the hue is roughly a constant for most people. Using that and LS info and connectedness you can improve your hits.
Of course there are better methods and a google reveals some of them.
Hooks up to stereo equipment allowing you to digitally record old LPs, cassettes or 8-tracks.
The one thing missing though is 802.11b connectivity. I don't have cat5 running to my hifi/video gear. Wireless connectivity would go a long way.
Cringley has similar ideas
And even for typical CPU/memory intensive tasks I really don't think the G4 CPU is FSB bandwidth limited.
I've seen a lot of comments on various web sites about the new 1Ghz bemoaning its lack of a DDR front side bus. Though I too am a little disappointed I think everyone has got sucked into the Apple marketing distortion field. I'm also disappointed to see comments on a few sites saying "clearly" the dual CPUs in the "Wind Tunnel" G4s are FSB bandwidth limited.
These claims require proof and the proof just isn't there. These best counter argument I've seen so far was a comment on xlr8yourmac.com
1) A quick check shows it to be 3 (and bit) times the performance of my 667 Mhz G4 system (7450 processor). It scaled linearly (e.g. 2 * (1000/667)) despite the improved memory system. [BTW - the new dual 1GHz has 1MB DDR L3 per CPU, vs 2MB DDR L3 cache per CPU with the dual 1GHz Quicksilver model] The FSB is clearly SDR from the documentation and performance. The memory system is DDR. I need to run more tests.
Hmm that "clearly" word again.
Well the 7455 bus is still SDR but the thing to note in this report is the "performance scaled linearly" with clock speed. As both machines use similar CPUs (7450 in one and 7455 the newer there are no large changes in the CPU design) the conclusion we draw from this is that the CPU is *not* memory I/O bound (i.e. FSB bandwidth bound). If it was the increase in performance would be less than 2 * (1000/667) times. So running both CPUs flat out doesn't saturate the memory bus (and all the usual other traffic is kept off the internal bus by the IO controller if it moved by DMA transfers).
It also implies that for most applications (the tester doesn't describe the tests they used so whatever test they used) the 1Mbyte per CPU cache is sufficient and its loss
I'd like to see more measurements done to confirm this hypothesis but it looks like magically speeding up the bus won't cause the CPU through to improve dramatically. The way to do this (if anyone has a chance is to run some CPU and memory bound applications on the all three models (and try to correct for the different cache sizes and FSB speeds) but if you see close the linear relationship then the CPUs are certainly not held back by the front side bus.
And h0tblack has a point that DMA will get more of a workout with Quartz Extreme though I suspect it will be less than he expects (most of the stuff should be in the GPU VRAM for compositing and anything that gets there will have to be worked on by the CPU to some extent at least once).
If you haven't read Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" book you should. It weaves an interesting story in exactly this area that uses punctuated equilibrium, HERVs, speciation triggered by retroviruses, global disease epidemics, and its set (partially) in Seattle too:-)
An interesting story set on top of some interesting scientific speculation.
There is no memory effect in NiCd batteries** the real problem is lousy charging systems overcharging the batteries. This heat the NiCds and causes to vent electrolyte.
Short form:
Long (and accurate) from ARRL:
http://www2.arrl.org/tis/info/pdf/119470.pdf
** At least not for ones on earth -- there is a real memory effect for slow charging and discharging NiCds in orbit. But unless you phone is in a satellite in orbit this won't be a issue.
Solution: Don't put the phone back in the cradle until it needs a charge.
ALWAY keep a regular (loop powered) phone in your local loop. You can always pick up with it when you battery is dead oer when power is out (and the base is dead).
And Radio Shack carries a lot of cordless phone batteries (I had the same problem with a VTech 900Mhx cordless -- now on its third battery).
Note that if you follow the transition-aid instructions (at least on the DHCP server I'm getting address from) you will still be fsck'ed because the DNS's they provide are in the following order:
24.0.224.33
24.0.224.34
204.127.198.4
Unfortunatly the first two always resolve names to the http://transition-aid.attbi.com web site (http://216.148.227.211) so if you use the DHCP info you won't see any websites.
I've setup statically and dropped the 24.* DNS server and I'm just relying on the other one.
The other interesting point is they seem to be happily routing both the old IPs from @home (the 65.*) and the new ones from attbi (12.*) to make sure old static IPs still work. If you use DHCP to pick up your new address you will see the new IP and gateway addresses (and a "funny" 11 bit netmask -- 255.255.248.0).
Reverse DNS doesn' work on my new IP. @home resolved everyone's IP to their name.sttl1.wa.home.com, for example. This doesn't seem to be the case with attbi.
But sttl1.wa.attbi.com does exist. Wait a minute its being faked by the DNS servers.
Posted via attbi cable mode from Seattle, WA.
BTW, where are all the conspiracy theory posts? I can now PPTP into my work account at Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Daresbury in addition to being the birthplace of Lewis Carrol (Charles Luttwidge Dodgson -- there's a neat stained glass window in the church where his father was vicar) was also the site of the first dedicated storage ring for generating synchrotron radiation (i.e. polarized light from IR to hard X-ray).
Originally the site was created to extend particle physics in the North of England (to include a collaboration of the "northern universities": Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Hull. A particle physics 5GeV electron synchrotron called NINA was built there in the early to mid 1970s and did some useful work.
It also attracted a new group of condensed matter physicists (surface scientists too) who used the synchrotron radiation emitted to do spectroscopy and diffraction of various sorts (photelectron spectrosocopy in the extreme UV and soft X-ray where the SR sources are particularly bright compared to other sources). They set up the SRF to try out these ideas.
The NSF (Nuclear Structure Facility -- for doing energetic heavy ion collisions -- nothing to do with nuclear weapons!) was built there in the late 1970s. That's the tower you can see in the site pictures. Unfortunatly SERC killed nuclear structure work in the UK in 1990. They pulled funding for the NSF and told people to look for beamtime at other sites outside the country. In fact the Recoil Seperator ended up at Oak Ridge, TN (so they didn't keep that expertise in the country).
http://www.srs.ac.uk/srs/
NINA was decomissioned in the late 1970s and it was decided to build the Synchrotron Radition Source (SRS) using part of the old NINA site (and the NINA linac, I think) to provide a dedicated SR source in the UK for chemists, biologists, martials scientists and physicists.
All though this time a theory group was based there and a large regional computing facility (that used to have a Cray 1 in the good old days from 1979 to 1983) that was a major node on JANET (the academic network in the UK).
The SRS was comissioned in 1982. This is where the 20 years mentioned in the article comes in -- opened in 1982 and closed in 2003(ish). I not sure if they'll keep the SRS open although the parameters for the SRS and DIAMOND are rather different. DIAMOND is good for high brightness X-ray studies but not so good for soft X-ray or XUV uses.
I worked there as a (suface science) grad student (from Liverpool University) and got my PhD working on the TGM and GIM and SEXAFS stations on beamline 6 and later did some work on Beanline 1 when I worked at the Surface Science Center at Liverpool University.
The site had a lot of experitise for machine physics (the epople who understand how to keep the electrons going around the ring), beamline and monochromator design. I suspect some of these will move down south and another nothern resource will be lost.
I'm sure the RAL people are happy (the decision as made almost 2 years ago) but they don't have a site who boundary is formed by the Bridgewater Canal. Perhaps it's heading the same way as that old tech.
Kevin Purcell
Beamline 6 (and 1)
University of Liverpool.
The preprint is at arXiv (e.g. xxx.lanl.gov) for those that don't have a subscription to APL
The phase coherence of light from extragalactic sources - direct evidence against first order Planck scale fluctuations in time and space
You might also find this previous paper interesting by the same authors:
Stringent limits on the existence of Planck time from stellar interferometry
There are Shared Source licenses that permit redistribution.
For example the Rotor (Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure) distribution ships with the following license(which was fought for by the authors of Rotor -- David Stutz):
As you can see you can modify and redistribute your modification.
And no you aren't contaminated by reading the source (that's specifically called out in the last right granted).
You can redistribute under another license that's compatible with this license (OK, so that's not GPL or BSD but most licenses lock you into the same license not merley a compatible one).
One of the ideas behind releasing this source code was to encourage research based on the Rotor(technically the CLI is very interesting) and to help implementers of other CLI implementations and to help people who code for
David Stutz wrote a good article on this at ORA.com.
If you are interested in finding out more about the SSCLI O'Reilly has a book in the works that should appear in March 2003. The first chapter is available online. Don't worry Microsoft won't own your soul if you read about it. If you are interested in modern language design or compiler implementation then you'll find something here.
I do happen to work at Microsoft as a contractor but these are my own words. And yes, I used to think all Shared Source licenses were the same too.
Coorection:
The attitude control system (ACS) and the orbital manuevering system (OMS) both use:
dinitrogen tetroxide (oxidiser)
unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (fuel)
The N2O4 falls apart in the air to NO2 which is a toxic brown gas with effects on the lings similar to chlorine.
The UMDH is toxic too but it has a less drastic effect.
Unless a tank made it to the ground the chances (reports on NPR that there is a tank on the ground at Nacadoches, TX airport but which tank is not specified).
I suspect NASA would like Joe SixPack to refrain from taking bits home so they can determine the order of break-up of the shuttle by accumulating all of the debris. Saying its toxic is as good a way as any.
Of course there could be other toxic materials on board: Be, perhaps.
Science Daily has a better article (as always) here
.7 Jupiter masses.
The mention of the "tilt" is a mangled reference to the tilt or angle of the orbital plane with respect to our view point. The planet eclipses the star (changing it the apparent magnitude ("brightness") of the star -- that's what they observed) so you know the orbit is edge on to us. Combine that info with the previously measured radial velocity and you can get the actual mass of the planet not just the minimum mass of the planet.
Article follows:
Hubble Makes Precise Measure Of Extrasolar World's True Mass
NASA Hubble Space Telescope's crisp view has allowed an international team of astronomers to apply a previously unproven technique (astrometry) for making a precise measurement of the mass of a planet outside our solar system. The Hubble results place the planet at 1.89 to 2.4 times the mass of Jupiter, our solar system's largest world. Previous estimates, about which there are some uncertainties, place the planet's mass between 1.9 and 100 times that of Jupiter's.
A Hubble set of instruments called Fine Guidance Sensors (FGSs), which are also used to point and stabilize the free-flying observatory, measured a small "side-to-side" wobble of the red dwarf star Gliese 876. This is due to the tug of an unseen companion object, designated Gliese 876b (Gl 876b) and first discovered in 1998 with ground-based telescopes.
Gl 876b is only the second extrasolar planet (after HD 209458) for which a precise mass has been determined, and it is the first whose mass has been confirmed by using the astrometry technique.
Now that this technique has been proven viable for space-based observatory planet confirmations, it will be used in the future to nail down uncertainties in the masses of dozens of extrasolar planets discovered so far.
The observations were made by George F. Benedict and Barbara McArthur (University of Texas at Austin), members of the international observing team led by Thierry Forveille (Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corporation, Hawaii and Grenoble Observatory, France). The results are being published in the December 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Benedict had to observe the star's yo-yo motion for over two years, using a total of 27 orbits worth of Hubble Space Telescope observations. "Making these kinds of measurements of a star's movement on the sky is quite difficult," Benedict emphasizes. "We're measuring angles (.5 milliarcsecond) equivalent to the size of a quarter seen from 3,000 miles away.
The target planet, Gl 876b, is the more distant of two planets orbiting Gliese 876. It was originally discovered by two groups, led by Xavier Delfosse (Geneva/Grenoble Observatory) and Geoffrey Marcy (U.C. Berkeley and San Francisco State University). Marcy's group discovered a smaller planet closer to Gliese 876 a year later, in 1999. These initial discoveries were made by measuring the star's subtle "to-and-fro" speed. This is called the radial velocity technique.
Benedict and McArthur combined the astrometric information with the radial velocity measurements (made in the planet's discovery) to determine the planet's mass by deducing its orbital inclination. If astronomers don't know how the planet's orbit is tilted with respect to Earth, they can only estimate a minimum mass for the planet. But without knowing more, the mass could be significantly larger if the orbit was tilted to a nearly face-on orientation to Earth. The star would still move towards and away from us slightly, even though it had a massive companion. "You can't hide massive companions from the Hubble Space Telescope," says McArthur. "The planet's orbit turns out to be tilted nearly edge-on to Earth. This verifies it is a low-mass object."
"There are a few more stars where we can do this kind of research with Hubble," Benedict says. "Most candidate stars are too distant. Astronomers can look forward to doing these kinds of studies on literally hundreds of stars with the planned NASA Space Interferometry Mission, called SIM, which will be far more precise than Hubble.
"Knowing the mass of extrasolar planets accurately is going to help theorists answer lots of questions about how planets form," Benedict adds. "When we get hundreds of these mass determinations for planets around all types of stars, we're going to see what types of stars form certain types of planets. Do big stars form big planets and small stars form small planets?"
Measuring stellar wobbles on the sky has been used to search for planets for decades. But extremely high precision and telescope optical stability are required. The Hubble FGSs are the first astrometric tool to accomplish this ultra-precise kind of measurement for an extrasolar planet.
The gas giant plant orbiting the sunlike star HD 209458 is the very first planet to have its mass verified by using transit and radial velocity data. This was only possible because the planet was discovered to be passing in front of the star every four days, slightly dimming the star's light. This is proof the orbit is edge-on, yielding a mass that agrees with the lower limit estimate of
Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here.
Insider transactions are listed here.
Bill sold quite a few shares in October but none on November 1st:
He last sold stock in the middle of August. He regularly sells out his stock. Just like the other officers that you can check out here.
Bill holds about 12% of MSFT and at his selling rate will be out of the company stock in about 11 or 12 years time. Curiously this is also about how long Steve Ballmer has said (recently) that he is thinking about sticking around as CEO. So I give them a decade before they finish mutating into a regular blue-chip like GE or IBM
Like everyone else on the DCD mailing list for the Microsoft case I received this email:
From: "USDC Clerk's Office"
Date: Fri Nov 1, 2002 14:20:57 US/Pacific
To: 98CV1232@nyed.uscourts.gov
Subject: Netscape version 6.2
Reply-To: donotreply@DCD.USCOURTS.GOV
To users who use the Netscape version 6.2 browser, fi you see the message
at the bottom of the browser stating that the document is done and you do
nit see the document, please hit the reload button at the top of your
browser to view the document. Thank you for your patience in this matter.
Obviously some sort of conspiracy here to prevent people using rival browsers from reading the judgment.
I think we should be told.
The bin packing problem or knapsack problem ...
t ml
http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/knapsackProblem.h
How much stuff do you have? It's will get exponentially worse the more stuff you have. So giving stuff away and throwing stuff out might be a win.
And curiously a search for Bangor reveals nothing ... no nuclear sub base here. Move along now.
Bangor/King Spit
nothing interesting except the large building and parking lot
same large building
a loading dock
Support dock with small patrol boats
one or two docked subs
Two docked subs?
Ordnance loading dock?
I wonder how long these photos will remain publicly available.
This is just a radar/areodynamic test prototype and is quite a few years from production. And as the "skip a generation" approach the current administration has the UAV version is probably the future.
The location of the air intake also implies that this is going to be a subsonic aircraft design. Perhaps the future replacement for the F117A rather than a fighter.
Even the Boeing PR points this out:
So it seems unlikley we'll see a manned version of one of these in the future. They may have been thinking that way in the early 1990s when they started to build it but not today.
The video is interesting -- the plane looks so different from different angles and there is one angle where the wings look more like a flying squirrel rather than a bird of prey(tm).
In the article it says:
A superconducting magnet operated on a constant current, such as those used in Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the body, suffers no dissipation of electrical energy. That is not true, however, when a superconducting magnet is pulsed. And tests of the new magnet in pulsed operation showed that "initially [the electrical] losses were much higher than predicted," Minervini said.
With repeated operation, however, the magnet appeared to correct itself. "With each cycle the losses lessened until they reached a steady value a lot closer to what we'd predicted," Minervini said.
"We think we understand what's happening, at least qualitatively," he continued. "It has to do with interactions between the thousands of wires twisted into cables that in turn are coiled to form the magnet. We are essentially changing the electrical characteristics of the cable in a way that decreases losses over time."
No. That's restating the problem. You don't have the understanding bit here. What is going on that will change the (I presume) I squared R losses in the magnet.
The skin finding hack to locate faces has been used a lot.
The trick for those of you are interested is to convert you image from RGB (or whatever format you have your image in) to HLS coordinates (hue, lightness and saturation). Or TLS (tint).
As skin (regardless of race excepting albinos) is colored with melatonin and the "color" varies with the amount of melatonin the hue is roughly a constant for most people. Using that and LS info and connectedness you can improve your hits.
Of course there are better methods and a google reveals some of them.
Using hue and ratio of red/green ratios seems to work very nicely.
The one thing missing though is 802.11b connectivity. I don't have cat5 running to my hifi/video gear. Wireless connectivity would go a long way. Cringley has similar ideas
And even for typical CPU/memory intensive tasks I really don't think the G4 CPU is FSB bandwidth limited.
m l# S14256
I've seen a lot of comments on various web sites about the new 1Ghz bemoaning its lack of a DDR front side bus. Though I too am a little disappointed I think everyone has got sucked into the Apple marketing distortion field. I'm also disappointed to see comments on a few sites saying "clearly" the dual CPUs in the "Wind Tunnel" G4s are FSB bandwidth limited.
These claims require proof and the proof just isn't there. These best counter argument I've seen so far was a comment on xlr8yourmac.com
http://xlr8yourmac.com/archives/aug02/081402.ht
where a user reported:
1) A quick check shows it to be 3 (and bit) times the performance of my 667 Mhz G4 system (7450 processor). It scaled linearly (e.g. 2 * (1000/667)) despite the improved memory system. [BTW - the new dual 1GHz has 1MB DDR L3 per CPU, vs 2MB DDR L3 cache per CPU with the dual 1GHz Quicksilver model] The FSB is clearly SDR from the documentation and performance. The memory system is DDR. I need to run more tests.
Hmm that "clearly" word again.
Well the 7455 bus is still SDR but the thing to note in this report is the "performance scaled linearly" with clock speed. As both machines use similar CPUs (7450 in one and 7455 the newer there are no large changes in the CPU design) the conclusion we draw from this is that the CPU is *not* memory I/O bound (i.e. FSB bandwidth bound). If it was the increase in performance would be less than 2 * (1000/667) times. So running both CPUs flat out doesn't saturate the memory bus (and all the usual other traffic is kept off the internal bus by the IO controller if it moved by DMA transfers).
It also implies that for most applications (the tester doesn't describe the tests they used so whatever test they used) the 1Mbyte per CPU cache is sufficient and its loss
I'd like to see more measurements done to confirm this hypothesis but it looks like magically speeding up the bus won't cause the CPU through to improve dramatically. The way to do this (if anyone has a chance is to run some CPU and memory bound applications on the all three models (and try to correct for the different cache sizes and FSB speeds) but if you see close the linear relationship then the CPUs are certainly not held back by the front side bus.
And h0tblack has a point that DMA will get more of a workout with Quartz Extreme though I suspect it will be less than he expects (most of the stuff should be in the GPU VRAM for compositing and anything that gets there will have to be worked on by the CPU to some extent at least once).
If you haven't read Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" book you should. It weaves an interesting story in exactly this area that uses punctuated equilibrium, HERVs, speciation triggered by retroviruses, global disease epidemics, and its set (partially) in Seattle too :-)
An interesting story set on top of some interesting scientific speculation.
There is no memory effect in NiCd batteries** the real problem is lousy charging systems overcharging the batteries. This heat the NiCds and causes to vent electrolyte.
.
Short form:
Long (and accurate) from ARRL:
http://www2.arrl.org/tis/info/pdf/119470.pdf
** At least not for ones on earth -- there is a real memory effect for slow charging and discharging NiCds in orbit. But unless you phone is in a satellite in orbit this won't be a issue
Solution: Don't put the phone back in the cradle until it needs a charge.
ALWAY keep a regular (loop powered) phone in your local loop. You can always pick up with it when you battery is dead oer when power is out (and the base is dead).
And Radio Shack carries a lot of cordless phone batteries (I had the same problem with a VTech 900Mhx cordless -- now on its third battery).
Shocking as it may seem XSLT is Turing complete and you can code in it (not that that is a good idea of course)
http://www.unidex.com/turing/utm.htm
and
http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2001-03-19-b.html
Note that if you follow the transition-aid instructions (at least on the DHCP server I'm getting address from) you will still be fsck'ed because the DNS's they provide are in the following order:
.sttl1.wa.home.com, for example. This doesn't seem to be the case with attbi.
24.0.224.33
24.0.224.34
204.127.198.4
Unfortunatly the first two always resolve names to the http://transition-aid.attbi.com web site (http://216.148.227.211) so if you use the DHCP info you won't see any websites.
I've setup statically and dropped the 24.* DNS server and I'm just relying on the other one.
The other interesting point is they seem to be happily routing both the old IPs from @home (the 65.*) and the new ones from attbi (12.*) to make sure old static IPs still work. If you use DHCP to pick up your new address you will see the new IP and gateway addresses (and a "funny" 11 bit netmask -- 255.255.248.0).
Reverse DNS doesn' work on my new IP. @home resolved everyone's IP to their name
But sttl1.wa.attbi.com does exist. Wait a minute its being faked by the DNS servers.
Posted via attbi cable mode from Seattle, WA.
BTW, where are all the conspiracy theory posts? I can now PPTP into my work account at Microsoft.
:-)
You can find the preprint at
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0106057