The compactFlash article suggested that the electron beam supplies 55kGy... (ie 55kJ per kg of material) In order to quantify how strong is the radiation, I run a quick search:
According to FAS, it is massive. LD50 (ie 50% killing rate) for 55kGy is about 80%. The big ass electron gun is really equipped for the atomic age. Maybe, eBay and Amazon will office us a choice of "radiation hardening" as gift wrap for our electronic gadget.
PS: I know how will be the survivers of WWIII. The postal worker who hides within the within that mail disinfecting machine.:-)
Let's be realistic. Culture takes time to transform. It takes France about 50 years after revolution to establish the modern day balance between mornach, church and people. It takes US at least a century from the liberation of slaves (the Civil Wars) to the removal of all the racial discrimination policy against African American (around JFK).
It is just 20 years since Deng's reform (revolution)... There was no religion freedom at all in Mao's era. Anyone claimed to be a follower of any religion was sent to labour camp. Situation in fact improves quite rapidly in the last decade. At this stage, it is more important to persuade Chinese govt to accept the free practice all the more mainstream religion. After then, people will fight for their own "right of being idiots in public". Not only the Chinese Govt need to learn, the general public also need some time to figure out how a "normal" reglion should behave (and that's why devious cult in developed countries cannot attract much followers)... Completely out-of-hand approach is liable for radical religious problem that everyone worries in recent time.
We are getting a bit offtopic... But, that is still a good discussion, why not carry on...
I agree with most what Red Eyes said. The ironic thing is the image of China becomes more and more negative in the last decade, but, if you ask an oridinary Chinese, most of them (>80%) will prefer to live in the modern China, rather than the one 20yrs ago... Nevertheless, the Chinese govt has hell of things needed to improve, but, they are not devils.
The most difficult thing for worldwide audience is, they can only hear two voices for news related to China: 1) propaganda from the Communist party 2) one-sided argument from people against that party --for good or bad reasons... That's sort of expected. These 2 kinds of people are more inclined to translate what they think to English in order to lend support from the world. You know that's a big hassel. Their audience is not ordinary Chinese...
Religion freedom is a throny issue. We keep on hearing something like gross oppression of religion freedom in China. It is quite true, but, not as violent/brute as illustrated.
Well, those Christians allowed to practice in China are allowed because their religion was "registered". Not too sure what this means, but I'm supposing you have to have government approval to be recognized. Yes, the
According to a mainstream Christian website that regularly send pastors to China for exchange, both legally and secretely, China allows non party members to choose what they believe. (The website is in Chinese. BabelFish may help). The number of registered Christian is about 10M in 1997. The registered church can teach what the Bible said, but they are not allowed to stick posters or preach in public and cannot organise private gathering outside the church etc. There are also underground mainstream church groups. The number of following may be 7-8 times of registered.
But, the ones that make the most headlines are those more non-mainstream church. Many of them are formed locally and claim the leader as modern day Jesus etc. While non-mainstream (or cult) does not necessary means bad, but.... I personally think China's heavy-handed religious policy backfires. With no good competition from good religion organisations, cult booms... Learning takes time. (Remember the European history in 18-19 century? )
Same applies to Falun Gong. Most of its followers are nice. But, "Master Li"'s (Falun Gong leader) teaching is very dubious. His early tape circulating in China contains something like "Upon the request of Li Peng (the infamous premier), Master Li stopped the Earth from imploding for a further 10 yrs"....
For funny reasons, people tend to relate IP more strongly with software but not hardware, which does not seem to make too much sense to me. China does a lot of OEM these day for foreign electronics companies. In general, the workers have good work ethics.
If they really did not respect IP, you would probably see lots of circuit diagrams etc being stolen by Chinese workers in these OEM plants and sell to the rivals (eg sell Sony's design to Philips etc). I have never heard anything like that. Mind you, from a company's point of view, this kind of industry espionage more serious than supplying the latest.net intranet design to another company. I agree language is main reason why India has a stronger software industry than China. IP is not too much an issue here.
>(i.e. Cisco, Nortel, etc.). China, OTH, has a
>very bad reputation. You can go anywhere and buy >expensive pieces of software for only $1. Or for >that matter, you can get a DVD of the latest >movie within days after it's released into >theaters long before the official releases come
Oh yes... Everyone agrees Napster is where you can get Day 1 music from (for *FREE*). But, where do/did most Napster users come from? People are mostly from the developed part of the world with cable/xDSL modem, I supposed. All these piracy matter come down to economics.
People from undeveloped developing countries (mostly) do not have a need for these high value IP. Computer and CD players are too expensive. Developed countries find both the software and hardware price sort of okay... "Really developing" developing country is the worst in that aspect. I can tell you India is heading to that path. (How do (most) programmers from developing world learn programming? Don't tell me that they all use Linux/*BSD. )
Taiwan is a prime example for a transition: in the mid 80's, one of my family friend's ideal gift after visiting Taiwan was pirated software. (You cannot find a single pirated floppy in China at that time). Taiwanese sold them very openly in some speciallised shopping mall. All the softwares were cracked and already copied to floppies. Pirated western tech books were sold at fraction of the original price... All have been changed in recent years (at least it has been scaled down a lot).
We share the same fate as you. I am talking about the one which offers broadband via "satellite" disks (in fact, it is kind of asynchronise WLAN, fast download-2Mbps, slow upload 28kbps).
It initially gave us unlimited data downland in exchange for capped transfer speed (2Mbps capped to 256kbps). Then, they blamed Napster and capped the data to 2GB per month.
Then, they redefine this product design (what a nice term). They meter each single MB of data. The new customers basically will need to pay 3 times more than what I paid if they want to d/l 2GB per month... Existing customers are not affected so far... But god knows when will they change their mind. The price for the new customers is now comparable (within 100% price difference) to a delicated 256kbps line...
When all potential players are gone, I am quite sure they will squeeze us further. Welcome to monopoly world!
I am afraid your stat is a bit incomprehensive. In terms of biggest metropolitan area, you are right. Many agree that should be the greater Tokyo region, somewhere under 30M.
While China does not have a single metropolitan area as big as 30M, it does not invalidate the fact that it has well more than 100M living in cities.
http://www.citypopulation.de/Country.html?E,Chin a
If you just count 24 province centres, the total is already 75M. Many provinces have more than 1 cities. Officially, non-rural dweller is about 300M in China.
The most misleading thing is many cities are misclassified as rural towns. No one really cares about changing the designation. A friend of mine's grandfather is living in "town" in GuangDong, which has got a population of close to 1 million. It was largely a farming area 20yrs ago. But, it is now a major manufacturing base in the region....
In Taiwan and HongKong, many people use an input method known as Cangjie (esp for those who touch PC since early 90's). Basically, you map the shape of a character into a 5 letter alphabatical string. It is a real pain in the rear.
For professional typists and those who do not know pin-yin, tough luck, they will have to live with Cangjie. Only adv is Cangjie can usu achieve better input speed for trained typists...
I have not actually done a survey with the undergrads, but from my perception, we should be able to find a correlation between the competence of a student (in term something "real", eg performance in a project, not just merely marks) and their attitude towards unfamilar OS/language etc.
The main problem is probably not "brainwashed" by MS , but rather, lack of passion to learn anything new. Many are attracted to do CS or IT for the wrong reasons (eg image, salary, job availabilty etc).
Trust me, most of these "MS fans" are the same bunch of today's marginal IT workers: someone who does not know how to lookup his/her own IP, does not understand the need to apply service pack, compulsive rebooter etc...
AKAIK, spraying seawater mist is a way to reduce the IR sig...
If a ship wants to hide its hull from the eye of a submarine, it may be a good idea to borrow that from the subs. In order to reduce the acoustic sig, the propellers can be replaced by water jets. It is surely quiter, as a side effect, it may also reduce the wake...
Microwave oven seems to do quite a lot of tricks on
anything conductive. Here I found a plasuible explanation. Not sure if it makes scientific sense....
Provide that your internet account gives unlimited download, you can "support" the spammer this way:
wget -r -l2 -i spammer.lst -O/dev/null &>/dev/null
Better still, set that up as a cron job. (Remember, you are *not* DOS the site, you just want to get a fresh copy of the "useful" info into the proxy each hour. I would imagine some guys refresh their slashdot title at a similar rate:-)
Say, you can pull 1MB from each sucker per hour. It converts to 720 MB per month. I can imagine most of them operate their dodge site with a cheap account (sth like 2GB upload per month as basic option, paid extra $$$ for extra data). The above command really packs some punch.
In the future, I wonder if people will need to authenticate themselves using.net when passing through custom.:-)
Serious, I do not really think Schimdt's appointment is that bad. Esp in the past, it is not at all difficult to find CEO/senior managers etc with a military background. Many of them can still do a good job without turning the companies to a barrack... For people as higher up, personal character may be more important...
http://beri.tripod.ca/specs.html
http://www.gcunlimited.com/gc/console.shtml
While GCN does not seem to be as PC-ish as XBox, I still think some of us can have a way to deal with it... They use a customise PowerPC as MPU. It should still be easier to handle than Saturn, I think... Any comment?
Why Soccer? Because robots have a good chance to win. It will make the organisers happy just like the IBM developers with Deep Blue.:-)
Here is the motto from www.robotcup.org
By the year 2050,
develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots
that can win against the human world soccer champions.
I don't really think it will take up 49 more years. If I were a professional (human) soccer player, I will run for life once the walking robots appear in the field (esp for the alpha/beta versions). That's not so funny to see big robots on rampage.
-- From the perspective of a survivor who got nearly run down by an out-of-control 100kg research robot.;-)
I just come across a tutorial about near infrared photography. If the gameboy cam are IR sensitive, it will be quite cool. We can even build a "flashnight" with an array of remote control IR LEDs.
Next time I know how to take a close shot of the penguins without waking them up (I live somewhere in south hemisphere, within very long driving distance to a penguin colony..)
The exact location of a submarine is of the ultimate concern for its survival during the war time. The holographic approach seems to solve the communication problem.... But, I doubt if that will in fact expose the secret location of a sub.
Decrypting the msg will be hard, but finding out where the constructive/destructive interference zone s are should be much easier... Hopefully, the system won't become a sub location broadcaster.
Why not get a TuxScreen ? With a Strong Arm processor + 16MB EDO/4MB flash, touch screen, PCMCIA/serial... for just $99. It is a dream for any geek.... (It has also been slashdotted.)
It is not only hackable, in fact, please hack it... It sells at a price probably lower than the parts (est to be around $300)!!! Kudos to Tim Riker from tuxscreen.
Gray area in confidential info....
on
Brian West Update
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This case is quite clear cut that Brian West had done something stupid and wrong. He deserves what he gets.
But, there are cases are not always as clear cut as that. In this case, we can identify his criminal intention from his download of password list then use it to exploit other parts of the system.
What if the confidential / proprietary info is left in a completely unencrypted/protected state. A few months ago, when my friend was looking up info for a robot toy from a very high profile website, the ColdFusion server encountered some internal errors and dumped out its own scripts and even the **administive password**. My earlybird friend cached the page and showed up later on today.... The intention seems to be benign enough, but the material evidence seems to be the same.
That's why, when ridiculous convictions really occur, we still need the community, we still need EFF. In some cases, we are the only people who understand what we are thinking...
I can see the point that clockless design can reduce the power consumption. However, I don't really catch the point why it may solve the other problems inherited from high speed computation.
Suppose we want to increment the register for 1000M times, clocked circuit will generate hell lot of the noises when all the signal pushes thru the circuit,at say 2GHz,for a duration of say, 0.5s.... But, if we want the clockless design to work as good, its asynchronous gates should still be switched for that much times in the same 0.5.
In terms of noise generation, it will be on par of convention design. As all the gates still need to switch at pretty much the same speed, other physical barriers still operates.
Well, most of us think this is just a joke... But, more importantly, it is a bit misleading. 2 billion joules sounds like a lot.... But, if we want to transform that to the equivalent of energy released by TNT, it is just about 5 tons.... And it is distributed right across UK...
Slashdot Mirror
According to FAS, it is massive. LD50 (ie 50% killing rate) for 55kGy is
about 80%. The big ass electron gun is really equipped for the atomic age. Maybe, eBay and Amazon will office us a choice of "radiation hardening" as gift wrap for our electronic gadget.
PS: I know how will be the survivers of WWIII. The postal worker who hides within the within that mail disinfecting machine. :-)
Let's be realistic. Culture takes time to transform. It takes France about 50 years after revolution to establish the modern day balance between mornach, church and people. It takes US at least a century from the liberation of slaves (the Civil Wars) to the removal of all the racial discrimination policy against African American (around JFK).
It is just 20 years since Deng's reform (revolution)... There was no religion freedom at all in Mao's era. Anyone claimed to be a follower of any religion was sent to labour camp. Situation in fact improves quite rapidly in the last decade. At this stage, it is more important to persuade Chinese govt to accept the free practice all the more mainstream religion. After then, people will fight for their own "right of being idiots in public". Not only the Chinese Govt need to learn, the general public also need some time to figure out how a "normal" reglion should behave (and that's why devious cult in developed countries cannot attract much followers)... Completely out-of-hand approach is liable for radical religious problem that everyone worries in recent time.
I agree with most what Red Eyes said. The ironic thing is the image of China becomes more and more negative in the last decade, but, if you ask an oridinary Chinese, most of them (>80%) will prefer to live in the modern China, rather than the one 20yrs ago... Nevertheless, the Chinese govt has hell of things needed to improve, but, they are not devils.
The most difficult thing for worldwide audience is, they can only hear two voices for news related to China: 1) propaganda from the Communist party 2) one-sided argument from people against that party --for good or bad reasons... That's sort of expected. These 2 kinds of people are more inclined to translate what they think to English in order to lend support from the world. You know that's a big hassel. Their audience is not ordinary Chinese...
Religion freedom is a throny issue. We keep on hearing something like gross oppression of religion freedom in China. It is quite true, but, not as violent/brute as illustrated.
Well, those Christians allowed to practice in China are allowed because their religion was "registered". Not too sure what this means, but I'm supposing you have to have government approval to be recognized. Yes, the
According to a mainstream Christian website that regularly send pastors to China for exchange, both legally and secretely, China allows non party members to choose what they believe. (The website is in Chinese. BabelFish may help). The number of registered Christian is about 10M in 1997. The registered church can teach what the Bible said, but they are not allowed to stick posters or preach in public and cannot organise private gathering outside the church etc. There are also underground mainstream church groups. The number of following may be 7-8 times of registered.
But, the ones that make the most headlines are those more non-mainstream church. Many of them are formed locally and claim the leader as modern day Jesus etc. While non-mainstream (or cult) does not necessary means bad, but.... I personally think China's heavy-handed religious policy backfires. With no good competition from good religion organisations, cult booms... Learning takes time. (Remember the European history in 18-19 century? )
Same applies to Falun Gong. Most of its followers are nice. But, "Master Li"'s (Falun Gong leader) teaching is very dubious. His early tape circulating in China contains something like "Upon the request of Li Peng (the infamous premier), Master Li stopped the Earth from imploding for a further 10 yrs"....
For funny reasons, people tend to relate IP more strongly with software but not hardware, which does not seem to make too much sense to me. China does a lot of OEM these day for foreign electronics companies. In general, the workers have good work ethics.
.net intranet design to another company. I agree language is main reason why India has a stronger software industry than China. IP is not too much an issue here.
If they really did not respect IP, you would probably see lots of circuit diagrams etc being stolen by Chinese workers in these OEM plants and sell to the rivals (eg sell Sony's design to Philips etc). I have never heard anything like that. Mind you, from a company's point of view, this kind of industry espionage more serious than supplying the latest
>(i.e. Cisco, Nortel, etc.). China, OTH, has a
>very bad reputation. You can go anywhere and buy >expensive pieces of software for only $1. Or for >that matter, you can get a DVD of the latest >movie within days after it's released into >theaters long before the official releases come
Oh yes... Everyone agrees Napster is where you can get Day 1 music from (for *FREE*). But, where do/did most Napster users come from? People are mostly from the developed part of the world with cable/xDSL modem, I supposed. All these piracy matter come down to economics.
People from undeveloped developing countries (mostly) do not have a need for these high value IP. Computer and CD players are too expensive. Developed countries find both the software and hardware price sort of okay... "Really developing" developing country is the worst in that aspect. I can tell you India is heading to that path. (How do (most) programmers from developing world learn programming? Don't tell me that they all use Linux/*BSD. )
Taiwan is a prime example for a transition: in the mid 80's, one of my family friend's ideal gift after visiting Taiwan was pirated software. (You cannot find a single pirated floppy in China at that time). Taiwanese sold them very openly in some speciallised shopping mall. All the softwares were cracked and already copied to floppies. Pirated western tech books were sold at fraction of the original price... All have been changed in recent years (at least it has been scaled down a lot).
Dear Aussie,
We share the same fate as you. I am talking about the one which offers broadband via "satellite" disks (in fact, it is kind of asynchronise WLAN, fast download-2Mbps, slow upload 28kbps).
It initially gave us unlimited data downland in exchange for capped transfer speed (2Mbps capped to 256kbps). Then, they blamed Napster and capped the data to 2GB per month.
Then, they redefine this product design (what a nice term). They meter each single MB of data. The new customers basically will need to pay 3 times more than what I paid if they want to d/l 2GB per month... Existing customers are not affected so far... But god knows when will they change their mind. The price for the new customers is now comparable (within 100% price difference) to a delicated 256kbps line...
When all potential players are gone, I am quite sure they will squeeze us further. Welcome to monopoly world!
A wired Kiwi....
I am afraid your stat is a bit incomprehensive. In terms of biggest metropolitan area, you are right. Many agree that should be the greater Tokyo region, somewhere under 30M.
n a
While China does not have a single metropolitan area as big as 30M, it does not invalidate the fact that it has well more than 100M living in cities.
http://www.citypopulation.de/Country.html?E,Chi
If you just count 24 province centres, the total is already 75M. Many provinces have more than 1 cities. Officially, non-rural dweller is about 300M in China.
The most misleading thing is many cities are misclassified as rural towns. No one really cares about changing the designation. A friend of mine's grandfather is living in "town" in GuangDong, which has got a population of close to 1 million. It was largely a farming area 20yrs ago. But, it is now a major manufacturing base in the region....
In Taiwan and HongKong, many people use an input method known as Cangjie (esp for those who touch PC since early 90's). Basically, you map the shape of a character into a 5 letter alphabatical string. It is a real pain in the rear.
For professional typists and those who do not know pin-yin, tough luck, they will have to live with Cangjie. Only adv is Cangjie can usu achieve better input speed for trained typists...
I have not actually done a survey with the undergrads, but from my perception, we should be able to find a correlation between the competence of a student (in term something "real", eg performance in a project, not just merely marks) and their attitude towards unfamilar OS/language etc.
The main problem is probably not "brainwashed" by MS , but rather, lack of passion to learn anything new. Many are attracted to do CS or IT for the wrong reasons (eg image, salary, job availabilty etc).
Trust me, most of these "MS fans" are the same bunch of today's marginal IT workers: someone who does not know how to lookup his/her own IP, does not understand the need to apply service pack, compulsive rebooter etc...
AKAIK, spraying seawater mist is a way to reduce the IR sig...
If a ship wants to hide its hull from the eye of a submarine, it may be a good idea to borrow that from the subs. In order to reduce the acoustic sig, the propellers can be replaced by water jets. It is surely quiter, as a side effect, it may also reduce the wake...
Microwave oven seems to do quite a lot of tricks on
a rr os/sam.html
anything conductive. Here I found a plasuible explanation. Not sure if it makes scientific sense....
http://members.tripod.com/~hochwald/microwave/b
Provide that your internet account gives unlimited download, you can "support" the spammer this way: /dev/null &> /dev/null
:-)
wget -r -l2 -i spammer.lst -O
Better still, set that up as a cron job. (Remember, you are *not* DOS the site, you just want to get a fresh copy of the "useful" info into the proxy each hour. I would imagine some guys refresh their slashdot title at a similar rate
Say, you can pull 1MB from each sucker per hour. It converts to 720 MB per month. I can imagine most of them operate their dodge site with a cheap account (sth like 2GB upload per month as basic option, paid extra $$$ for extra data). The above command really packs some punch.
In the future, I wonder if people will need to authenticate themselves using .net when passing through custom. :-)
Serious, I do not really think Schimdt's appointment is that bad. Esp in the past, it is not at all difficult to find CEO/senior managers etc with a military background. Many of them can still do a good job without turning the companies to a barrack... For people as higher up, personal character may be more important...
we can tap into a very available form of energy: Methane.
I guess I am not that much an asshole to be a solider/astronomer in the future. :-)
As geeks why don't we sit down and hack :-)
http://beri.tripod.ca/specs.html
http://www.gcunlimited.com/gc/console.shtml
While GCN does not seem to be as PC-ish as XBox, I still think some of us can have a way to deal with it... They use a customise PowerPC as MPU. It should still be easier to handle than Saturn, I think... Any comment?
I insist Google to be renamed as Slash/Google from now on. ;-)
It will make the organisers happy just like the IBM developers with Deep Blue.
Here is the motto from www.robotcup.org
By the year 2050,
develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots
that can win against the human world soccer champions.
I don't really think it will take up 49 more years. If I were a professional (human) soccer player, I will run for life once the walking robots appear in the field (esp for the alpha/beta versions). That's not so funny to see big robots on rampage.
-- From the perspective of a survivor who got nearly run down by an out-of-control 100kg research robot. ;-)
For the weekend sysadms, like me, a conversion will not be started before getting a FAQ
I just come across a tutorial about near infrared photography. If the gameboy cam are IR sensitive, it will be quite cool. We can even build a "flashnight" with an array of remote control IR LEDs.
Next time I know how to take a close shot of the penguins without waking them up (I live somewhere in south hemisphere, within very long driving distance to a penguin colony..)
Join Unreal Tournament then :-)
The exact location of a submarine is of the ultimate concern for its survival during the war time. The holographic approach seems to solve the communication problem.... But, I doubt if that will in fact expose the secret location of a sub.
Decrypting the msg will be hard, but finding out where the constructive/destructive interference zone s are should be much easier... Hopefully, the system won't become a sub location broadcaster.
Why not get a TuxScreen ? With a Strong Arm processor + 16MB EDO/4MB flash, touch screen, PCMCIA/serial... for just $99. It is a dream for any geek.... (It has also been slashdotted.)
It is not only hackable, in fact, please hack it... It sells at a price probably lower than the parts (est to be around $300)!!! Kudos to Tim Riker from tuxscreen.
This case is quite clear cut that Brian West had done something stupid and wrong. He deserves what he gets.
But, there are cases are not always as clear cut as that. In this case, we can identify his criminal intention from his download of password list then use it to exploit other parts of the system.
What if the confidential / proprietary info is left in a completely unencrypted/protected state. A few months ago, when my friend was looking up info for a robot toy from a very high profile website, the ColdFusion server encountered some internal errors and dumped out its own scripts and even the **administive password**. My earlybird friend cached the page and showed up later on today.... The intention seems to be benign enough, but the material evidence seems to be the same.
That's why, when ridiculous convictions really occur, we still need the community, we still need EFF. In some cases, we are the only people who understand what we are thinking...
I can see the point that clockless design can reduce the power consumption. However, I don't really catch the point why it may solve the other problems inherited from high speed computation.
.... But, if we want the clockless design to work as good, its asynchronous gates should still be switched for that much times in the same 0.5.
Suppose we want to increment the register for 1000M times, clocked circuit will generate hell lot of the noises when all the signal pushes thru the circuit,at say 2GHz,for a duration of say, 0.5s
In terms of noise generation, it will be on par of convention design. As all the gates still need to switch at pretty much the same speed, other physical barriers still operates.
Anyone has more detailed info on this topic?
This game is very scary. Bart the racer is only 10yo. I had better buy a truck as a family vehicle if I were going to relocate to Springfield.
energy content of a ton of TNT: 4.18x10^9J
energy released during the event: 20x10^9J