I've got a fiber line that terminates in my basement, giving me 15 Mbits/s symmetric. I pay $39.95/mo for 50 GB of data transfer, and the fine print in the contract stated that if I went over I'd be charged at "current market rate" for the excess bandwidth. The funny thing is, I know I've gone over a couple of times and they don't seem to care (it didn't show up on my bill).
For the curious, I'm on the iProvo network in Provo, Utah. The city owns and maintains the fiber infrastructure and leases bandwidth to the ISP. I've got my choice of 2 different service providers who compete for price and customer service. The same fiber line can also provide phone and TV as well (also offered from the ISPs).
The iProvo project got started because Qwest and Comcast refused to lay wire to the entire community, so the city decided to do it without the pigopolists' help. Since then another project called Utopia started up at the state level to do the same thing. It's a matter of time before fiber to the home (and business!) is available throught the state (even rural communities). The hope is that having cheap, fast, reliable bandwidth available everywhere in the state will attract new high-tech businesses.
IMHO, this is the way it ought to be done. The line maintenance should be a city utility, just like power and water. ISPs compete on an equal footing, without the luxury of a monopoly on the service due to owning the lines. I'm going to have a hard time leaving this town because I'm addicted to bandwidth and I can't imagine it getting better than this anywhere else I go.
Ah, yes, those dastardly Adobe people have hidden details about Apollo security under this seemingly innocuous link:
And this innocuous link was... where again? Listed in the article summary? Mentioned in the press release? Prominently featured in the main project page? Nope, I found it using their search feature on the developer's site (pretty easy with the page already in front of me). I could navigate there without the search engine in three clicks if I had ESP...
My point is that from their press release I don't see them putting a corporate priority on end user privacy or security. A reference page written for developers and buried in their documentation isn't the same as saying "as safe or safer than a web browser", how hard would that have been?
What patent?
I did include a link to it in my post, perhaps you should look...
If your friend has a patent on a boolean variable, he must be a @#!$&%* genius!
I guess it's time for that rant on software patents...
I'm split on this one. I generally object to software patents, so I'd be tickled if Novell decided to donate this patent to the community (my understanding is that they're pretty much just sitting on it). On the other hand, apparently it hasn't always been obvious that network-dependent applications should be aware of the network's status; furthermore, the presence of the network doesn't imply the availability of all resources on that network. The method described in the patent made the clients work when the server became unavailable, was used to solve a real problem, and was deemed novel by the USPTO.
Back to the topic at hand, the existence of a patent covering something close to what Adobe is doing might cause them legal problems, regardless of my feelings about the validity of software patents in general or your feelings about the utility of this patent in specific.
You realize that the application you used to post that message (a browser) operates in exactly the same way, right?
The difference I see is that a web browser is sandboxed so that things I may not be able to trust (applications written in Flash, for example) shouldn't be able to snoop out personal details from my harddrive without my explicit permission. Even so, I still consider running a web browser to be somewhat risky and browse with a wary eye.
In contrast, Apollo is a standalone platform designed to run "Rich Internet Applications"; it sounds like they intend to give it wide capabilities. The press release makes no mention of the security model; glancing at the Adobe Labs link in the article I found this:
Apollo enables developers to create applications that combine the benefits of web applications - network and user connectivity, rich media content, ease of development, and broad reach - with the strengths of desktop applications - application interactions, local resource access, personal settings, powerful functionality, and rich interactive experiences.
I get paranoid about running apps with "local resource access". I never said it was a rational fear, just that I had it;^) I'm going to be very careful about running anything under this platform, and probably won't install it until there's a compelling application for it written by someone I trust.
You've got a good point. (josath says pretty much the same thing, but I'm only going to reply once =) I see the value of that kind of thing, and it will have lots of great uses.
My problem is that it still sounds like they've built a perfect spyware API, and they're not mentioning anything about the security model. As an end user I'm left to trust the application developer to not be evil, and I don't like that. Placing too much value on ease-of-use for developers is what led Microsoft to all of its problems with spyware and viruses in places like email apps and the office suite.
[rant mode="petty"]I don't trust Adobe to place their customers' interests first. Sending the FBI after Dmitry Sklyarov was a low blow, and was evidence (to me) that they care more about their business partners than their customers. By being one of the first to use the DMCA as a club they dirtied their corporate hands in my eyes, and I won't give them the benefit of the doubt.[/rant]
On a less ranty note (and unrelated to my objections to the security model), depending on the implementation this feature may violate a patent held by Novell on making applications tolerant to loss of network connectivity. (It was filed by a friend of mine, and I described it the way he does). I'll save the rant on software patents for another time.
An Apollo application can connect automatically to online data or services when an Internet connection is detected
my spyware paranoia starts acting up. I really don't want my applications calling home and checking for updates without my explicit permission! I don't think I'd trust an auto-updater from Adobe much more than I'd trust Microsoft's "Windows Update" utility.
I have sisters in law (my wife's sister and my brother's wife) who are both sensitive to UV. My wife's sister has lupus, and will become (literally!) deathly ill if she spends too much time in the sun or under fluorescent lights. My brother's wife probably won't die from it, but becomes ill under fluorescent/sun light as well.
This would be a really bad thing for people like them - it's not just an aesthetic issue, it's their health and life. It's a good thing neither lives in California.
While you are right that new cars have a distinctive smell when they come from the factory, time in the sun at the dealership should destroy the chemicals that cause it over a relatively short period. And it's certainly out of place in a used car. The products exist, and evidence suggests they are in common use in the auto sales industry.
I am not a Real Physicist (TM), but I've got a degree in Mechanical Engineering; let's see if I can take a stab at it.
The short answer is that, yes, a sufficiently motivated particle physicist could tell the difference between living in a universe made entirely of matter and one entirely made of antimatter.
Here's a (partial) long answer: I read an article in Scientific American in about 1991 that explored how Alice (of Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass fame) could tell which universe she was in by use of physics. The logic started with checking whether electrons (positrons? you don't know in this case which they are) followed the right hand rule while passing through a magnetic field, which is a good way to tell if you have simply been turned to antimatter and transported to an all-antimatter universe.
The article then digressed into the truly fanciful, exploring how Alice would tell in everything were also switched left-to-right. The author concluded that it would still be possible with the use of a complicated particle accellerator setup and (if I recall correctly) various circular-polarizing filters. Alice would observe how certain sub-atomic particles decay under rare conditions, and the observed behavior would indicate a right-handed matter universe or a left-handed antimatter universe. I think the real point of the article was to show off the author's discovery of odd particle behavior, together with how clever he is =)
Of course, the point is still valid that if we lived in an antimatter universe, we'd simply accept that the left-hand rule is "how things are".
Note to any real physicists: if you remember reading the same article, or can post the exact details from first principles, go right ahead. I'm sure you're a better source than my memory of an article I read my junior year of high school =)
I just finished a grad-level materials course, and did a project on relative strengths of various materials for use in maille. Long story short, titanium lost badly. Due to its poor rigidity it performed significantly worse on both a per-weight and per-volume basis than cold drawn "mild" steel.
Unless you really just feel like throwing your money away, stick with stainless. On a per-volume basis it's slightly better than inconel, on a per-weight basis it beats inconel by about 20%, and it costs less than 1/2 what inconel does. Titanium costs almost 4x as much as stainless, and in my tests turned in 1/5 of stainless' performance by weight. Mild steel costs 1/2 what stainless does, but turns in 1/3 of the performance (on both a volume and weight basis).
(Note: These results are for butted maille samples stessed in tension until failure; performance is measured in total energy absorbed during the process. The results would be different if the rings were welded, but have fun welding the titanium.)
In my city (Provo, Utah), the city has declared the data delivery infrastructure to be a city utility, and is running fiber to all of the homes in the city. They do not, however, provide an ISP service; licenses for that have been granted to a couple of local (competing) ISPs. VoIP and television service are also available over the same line, each provided by private (licensed) contractors. This seems to be a workable arrangement; the city makes sure that the infrastructure works, and the service providers sell the bandwidth. I'm getting it installed at my house today and ditching the cable modem I've been using for Internet access. =)
My point is, it's possible for government to be involved positively in this business without censorship. My tax dollars aren't going to pay for my neighbor's pr0n downloads, they're going to make sure that the wires stay hung. What my neighbor downloads is between him and his ISP, as far as the city is concerned it's just delivering the bits, just like it delivers the power that's running the computer.
Thanks for providing my "something new to learn" for the day; I had to look up SCADA to find out what it was. Full-system monitoring and control; pretty cool idea.
The origin of my horror story is my Thermo prof from the University; his experience goes back far enough that he probably left the industry before SCADA was available (SCADA requires quite a bit of computing power). I'm willing to believe that modern implementations have safeguards against the "melt your exchanger to slag" scenario, in which case you're probably right.
The big question is how they would get sufficiently good thermal transfer from the hot surface, given there is a vapour layer involved. Steam developing in your liquid to liquid heat exchanger is bad news (he says having spent the morning fixing a leak in one).
You have perfectly identified the real problem. In addition, you have my condolences on your heat exchanger; however, look on the bright side, it was only a leak. I've heard horror stories about heat exchangers in steam plants melting to slag once the coolant reached film boiling temperature.
Human Hean went on to create, among other games, Rune, Dead Man's Hand and the upcoming Prey.
OK, perhaps this just shows how out of touch I am with gaming news, but I was totally expecting Prey to be one of the examples on the list, not a footnote about games to be released soon.
I thought Prey started development a little after Quake 2 got released, and was supposed to have a "revolutionary" 6 DOF game engine that they were making in house. Unfortunately, someone decided that it was good enough to sell to Real Estate agents to make 3D walkthroughs of their properties for sale (or something like that), so the engine got sold and the game got permanently shelved. If someone knows better, please correct my memory.
Looking online, I've found that IGN has news items on this game going back to 1998 showing developers leaving and 3D Realms desperately trying (unsuccessfully) to stave off rumors that that the project was dead:
March 12, 2002 - Prey, its very name is the definition of vaporware, and is even perhaps responsible for a lot of the Duke Nukem nay saying.
Wow. Actually being released. Using the Doom 3 engine, no less. Who knew? (answer: anyone paying attention to E3, which obviously didn't include me)
Personally, I'll belive it when the game gets released; No US release date + hyped E3 demo = still vaporware.
My grandfather was. He was called in to fix the hydrogen problem at Three Mile Island, and did so by developing a Hydrogen-Oxygen recombiner. His invention is now used in many nuclear plants to mitigate the risk of a hydrogen conflagration. Talking to him, I came to the conclusion that a Hydrogen fire was a real risk to the personnel in the facility (although it probably wouldn't lead to loss of containment). Your post is the first time I'd heard it suggested that there was no Oxygen present; what is your source on that information?
Nowadays, phones (that you buy, not freebies) are robust enough to handle all of the standard US networks (roaming charges may apply, but it works). If there is a lack of coverage, it's because you're in BFE and there's no cell towers nearby.
My Nextel phone doesn't work down in our datacenter, even though there's a Verizon repeater down there. In some cases roaming charges aren't even an option, competing networks on different protocols have no obligation to route each others' calls.
Cooling with liquid Nitrogen: fun to do if you don't care if it fails, but I wouldn't do it with a machine I cared about. Not only do you run the risk of running out of coolant, you also run the risk of getting a catastrophic change in boiling mode on the Nitrogen.
Ever drop water on a really hot pan and watch it skitter around instead of boiling off immediately? Transfer too much heat through that interface and the Nitrogen will start acting like that as well. The result will probably be immedate heat failure of the chip, since it's not cooling off fast enough anymore.
I don't know if the research has been done on Nitrogen to see where that transition point is, but I wouldn't start a project like this without knowing for sure that I wasn't going to cross it.
What exactly is the relevance of you being an engineer? . . . Being an expert in one area does not mean you have the slightest clue in another.
I'll back him up on this. Being an engineer means that he has a very good grasp on procedure for experimentation and requiremensts for declaring validity of a theoretical model. Unlike research scientists who lose some reputation of they are wrong, engineers can cause monetary losses in the $US 10^6-9 range along with loss of human life if they make an inaccurate model. As a result, engineers care in an "I may get fired, destroy my company, and have this tragedy resting on my conscience the rest of my life" way about experimentation that many scientists just don't.
Considering that his comment largely dealt with experimental procedure and the intractability of proving evolutionary theory, I'd say that he's at least as qualified to discuss it (absent specific details about cases and their results) as any other scientist in this public forum. Before you declare him clueless out of hand, re-read his comments about the procedural methods required for proof of evolution and compare them to the so-called "soft" sciences of human behavior and psychology. "Hard" science researchers frequently question the validity of behavioral studies because of the same issues that LinuxParanoid cited: namely, small sample size, experimental procedure affecting the study results, and intractability of proper longitudinal studies.
Your hostile response makes it sound like he's struck you too close to the mark. Just because you don't like hearing it doesn't mean he's wrong.
That, combined with a history TREE instead of a linear, self-overwriting history (go back 3 pages and click another link -- those 3 pages will drop out of the history). That's what I wish for.
(sorry for not making them hyperlinks, but they don't allow requests with Slashdot as the referrer)
If you are like me and have no idea how to fix the problem, at least go and vote for those two bugs. They've been open since 2003 and 1999, respectively, though, so if you have coding expertise plese help out with this!
I noticed some interesting text on the graphics: "Can render directly to system memory with 100% efficiency"
Isn't this a fix for one of the 3D rendering artists' biggest complaints? I don't do a lot of it now, but back when I was working in a shop that did rendering of CG animation our 3D geeks constantly complained that our graphics cards didn't have as much bandwidth out to the system as they did through their video out port. They even tossed around the idea of doing video capture on the graphics card output becasue it might save time (didn't try it, couldn't get capture card purchase approved).
Is anyone qualified to comment on whether this is just advertizing glitz or if they've really solved the bandwidth-back-to-system problem? I know some people that would really like to find out.
It doesn't look like they're maintaining a current document on Linux. Their comprehensive list of current configuration guides does not list any, in any case. I did find their list of archived guides, which has a guide for Apache 1.3.3 on Red Hat 5.1 - it had the following explanation for why guides get into the archive:
NSA has developed and maintained configuration guidance for a number of products. Over time these products age, are superceded by newer versions, or are no longer used by it customers. As such, NSA may choose to discontinue maintenance and archive some of these guides.
So it looks to me like they're not supporting Linux with this program, regardless of the fact that someone else in the organisation is builing SELinux. Sounds like a classic case of right-hand not knowing what the left hand is doing...
You make it sound like a bad thing that volunteer programmers working on Free Software projects spend their time on things that they are passionate about. I think it's rather a good thing.
What's the difference between the Free Software community volunteers saying "I'm busy, it's free, fix it yourself" and Microsoft saying, "You've paid for it, our EULA indemnifies us, and we know you're not going anywhere, so quiet down while we work on stuff that makes us money"? A bug that a distributor won't fix stays buggy, regardless of the ditributor. Free Software and Microsoft both have their share.
The invitation of "fix it yourself" should actually be te selling point for the PHB! Any company who cares deeply about the security of the web browser it uses can, for the price of a newly hired employee, fix the bug itself, without depending on the goodwill of an apathetic software distributor, be it Free or closed software. If this employee costs less than the yearly licensing fee for the alternative, this is a net gain for both the company and the Free Software community. Everyone wins but the apathetic closed-source software vendor.
You illustrate excellently the difference between implementing Free Software solutions as an individual and doing the same in a large organization. An end user who cares about a bug being fixed can do very little to make the fix happen, unless that user is also a programmer and has time to devote to it. A corporation that cares that a bug gets fixed can spend the money required to get the needed expertise and devote the timre required.
One of my favorite demonstrations from Physics class was when my teacher accelerated a ring of (non-ferrous!) aluminum into the cieling (nearly broke a light fixture) using an electromagnetic field.* This was the same day as he showed various non-ferrous pendulums being slowed to a stop in a fixed magnetic field due to eddy currents created in side the pendulum.
Moral of the story is that, even absent influences such as gravity and friction, a fixed magnetic field can change (slow) the velocity of a non-ferrous metallic object. Granted, though, you have a point about the fast drop in intensity with distance for magnetic fields...
*I don't remember how the device was constructed, or if the teacher even bothered describing it in detail. All I remember is that it plugged into 110 V AC, had a button he'd press, and it buzzed rather loudly while the button was pressed. The aluminum ring was shot into the acoustic tiles in the 20-foot ceiling hard enough to damage the tile, and the teacher admitted that he had actually broken a light fixture in a previous semester. Since then he aims more carefully.
IANANPE (I am not a nuclear physicist either), but I'm studying Mechanical Engineering so I have a loose grip on the facts. Any real NPs out there feel free to pick me apart.;^)
Yes, it's mostly a containment problem. Fusion reactions are really hard to keep going, unlike fission reactions. We can use control rods to slow down fission because it's using solid fuels. The fuel expands a bit when it gets hot, but typically not so much that the reaction stops. On the contrary, it's a trick to keep fission reactions from running away from you (the proverbial "meltdown"), which is why we use control rods to cool down the reaction and keep it under control. Fusion, on the other hand, requires the fuel to be in a plasma state. Plasmas, like gasses, expand quite a bit when heated, and this causes big problems for sustainability. If the molecules get too far apart the reaction stops.
Keeping fuel molecules close together (needed to keep the fusion reaction going) gets harder in proportion to their temperature, which gets high fast once the reaction starts. Also, if/when containment fails the plasma gets outside its magnetic bottle and cools off rapidly (by touching the container walls, for example), and the reaction stops. And then, once you manage to keep it all together, to sustain the reaction you need to remove the reaction byproducts and introduce new fuel. Both processes are non-trivial, require getting through the containment (twice!), and will tend to cool down the reaction (by removing high-energy exhaust and introducing low-temperature fuel).
All of these issues are related to containment, and any one of them going wrong will cause the reaction to stop. So, to answer your question (finally) about control rods, it's not a matter of slowing the reaction down, it's a matter of keeping it going at all. Control rods won't help in a situation like this.
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I've got a fiber line that terminates in my basement, giving me 15 Mbits/s symmetric. I pay $39.95/mo for 50 GB of data transfer, and the fine print in the contract stated that if I went over I'd be charged at "current market rate" for the excess bandwidth. The funny thing is, I know I've gone over a couple of times and they don't seem to care (it didn't show up on my bill).
For the curious, I'm on the iProvo network in Provo, Utah. The city owns and maintains the fiber infrastructure and leases bandwidth to the ISP. I've got my choice of 2 different service providers who compete for price and customer service. The same fiber line can also provide phone and TV as well (also offered from the ISPs).
The iProvo project got started because Qwest and Comcast refused to lay wire to the entire community, so the city decided to do it without the pigopolists' help. Since then another project called Utopia started up at the state level to do the same thing. It's a matter of time before fiber to the home (and business!) is available throught the state (even rural communities). The hope is that having cheap, fast, reliable bandwidth available everywhere in the state will attract new high-tech businesses.
IMHO, this is the way it ought to be done. The line maintenance should be a city utility, just like power and water. ISPs compete on an equal footing, without the luxury of a monopoly on the service due to owning the lines. I'm going to have a hard time leaving this town because I'm addicted to bandwidth and I can't imagine it getting better than this anywhere else I go.
My point is that from their press release I don't see them putting a corporate priority on end user privacy or security. A reference page written for developers and buried in their documentation isn't the same as saying "as safe or safer than a web browser", how hard would that have been?I did include a link to it in my post, perhaps you should look...I guess it's time for that rant on software patents...
I'm split on this one. I generally object to software patents, so I'd be tickled if Novell decided to donate this patent to the community (my understanding is that they're pretty much just sitting on it). On the other hand, apparently it hasn't always been obvious that network-dependent applications should be aware of the network's status; furthermore, the presence of the network doesn't imply the availability of all resources on that network. The method described in the patent made the clients work when the server became unavailable, was used to solve a real problem, and was deemed novel by the USPTO.
Back to the topic at hand, the existence of a patent covering something close to what Adobe is doing might cause them legal problems, regardless of my feelings about the validity of software patents in general or your feelings about the utility of this patent in specific.
You've got a good point. (josath says pretty much the same thing, but I'm only going to reply once =)
I see the value of that kind of thing, and it will have lots of great uses.
My problem is that it still sounds like they've built a perfect spyware API, and they're not mentioning anything about the security model. As an end user I'm left to trust the application developer to not be evil, and I don't like that. Placing too much value on ease-of-use for developers is what led Microsoft to all of its problems with spyware and viruses in places like email apps and the office suite.
[rant mode="petty"]I don't trust Adobe to place their customers' interests first. Sending the FBI after Dmitry Sklyarov was a low blow, and was evidence (to me) that they care more about their business partners than their customers. By being one of the first to use the DMCA as a club they dirtied their corporate hands in my eyes, and I won't give them the benefit of the doubt.[/rant]
On a less ranty note (and unrelated to my objections to the security model), depending on the implementation this feature may violate a patent held by Novell on making applications tolerant to loss of network connectivity. (It was filed by a friend of mine, and I described it the way he does). I'll save the rant on software patents for another time.
I have sisters in law (my wife's sister and my brother's wife) who are both sensitive to UV. My wife's sister has lupus, and will become (literally!) deathly ill if she spends too much time in the sun or under fluorescent lights. My brother's wife probably won't die from it, but becomes ill under fluorescent/sun light as well.
This would be a really bad thing for people like them - it's not just an aesthetic issue, it's their health and life. It's a good thing neither lives in California.
I beg to differ.
While you are right that new cars have a distinctive smell when they come from the factory, time in the sun at the dealership should destroy the chemicals that cause it over a relatively short period. And it's certainly out of place in a used car. The products exist, and evidence suggests they are in common use in the auto sales industry.
I am not a Real Physicist (TM), but I've got a degree in Mechanical Engineering; let's see if I can take a stab at it.
The short answer is that, yes, a sufficiently motivated particle physicist could tell the difference between living in a universe made entirely of matter and one entirely made of antimatter.
Here's a (partial) long answer: I read an article in Scientific American in about 1991 that explored how Alice (of Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass fame) could tell which universe she was in by use of physics. The logic started with checking whether electrons (positrons? you don't know in this case which they are) followed the right hand rule while passing through a magnetic field, which is a good way to tell if you have simply been turned to antimatter and transported to an all-antimatter universe.
The article then digressed into the truly fanciful, exploring how Alice would tell in everything were also switched left-to-right. The author concluded that it would still be possible with the use of a complicated particle accellerator setup and (if I recall correctly) various circular-polarizing filters. Alice would observe how certain sub-atomic particles decay under rare conditions, and the observed behavior would indicate a right-handed matter universe or a left-handed antimatter universe. I think the real point of the article was to show off the author's discovery of odd particle behavior, together with how clever he is =)
Of course, the point is still valid that if we lived in an antimatter universe, we'd simply accept that the left-hand rule is "how things are".
Note to any real physicists: if you remember reading the same article, or can post the exact details from first principles, go right ahead. I'm sure you're a better source than my memory of an article I read my junior year of high school =)
I just finished a grad-level materials course, and did a project on relative strengths of various materials for use in maille. Long story short, titanium lost badly. Due to its poor rigidity it performed significantly worse on both a per-weight and per-volume basis than cold drawn "mild" steel.
Unless you really just feel like throwing your money away, stick with stainless. On a per-volume basis it's slightly better than inconel, on a per-weight basis it beats inconel by about 20%, and it costs less than 1/2 what inconel does. Titanium costs almost 4x as much as stainless, and in my tests turned in 1/5 of stainless' performance by weight. Mild steel costs 1/2 what stainless does, but turns in 1/3 of the performance (on both a volume and weight basis).
(Note: These results are for butted maille samples stessed in tension until failure; performance is measured in total energy absorbed during the process. The results would be different if the rings were welded, but have fun welding the titanium.)
In my city (Provo, Utah), the city has declared the data delivery infrastructure to be a city utility, and is running fiber to all of the homes in the city. They do not, however, provide an ISP service; licenses for that have been granted to a couple of local (competing) ISPs. VoIP and television service are also available over the same line, each provided by private (licensed) contractors. This seems to be a workable arrangement; the city makes sure that the infrastructure works, and the service providers sell the bandwidth. I'm getting it installed at my house today and ditching the cable modem I've been using for Internet access. =)
My point is, it's possible for government to be involved positively in this business without censorship. My tax dollars aren't going to pay for my neighbor's pr0n downloads, they're going to make sure that the wires stay hung. What my neighbor downloads is between him and his ISP, as far as the city is concerned it's just delivering the bits, just like it delivers the power that's running the computer.
Thanks for providing my "something new to learn" for the day; I had to look up SCADA to find out what it was. Full-system monitoring and control; pretty cool idea.
The origin of my horror story is my Thermo prof from the University; his experience goes back far enough that he probably left the industry before SCADA was available (SCADA requires quite a bit of computing power). I'm willing to believe that modern implementations have safeguards against the "melt your exchanger to slag" scenario, in which case you're probably right.
I thought Prey started development a little after Quake 2 got released, and was supposed to have a "revolutionary" 6 DOF game engine that they were making in house. Unfortunately, someone decided that it was good enough to sell to Real Estate agents to make 3D walkthroughs of their properties for sale (or something like that), so the engine got sold and the game got permanently shelved. If someone knows better, please correct my memory.
Looking online, I've found that IGN has news items on this game going back to 1998 showing developers leaving and 3D Realms desperately trying (unsuccessfully) to stave off rumors that that the project was dead:
Wow. Actually being released. Using the Doom 3 engine, no less. Who knew? (answer: anyone paying attention to E3, which obviously didn't include me)
Personally, I'll belive it when the game gets released; No US release date + hyped E3 demo = still vaporware.
My grandfather was. He was called in to fix the hydrogen problem at Three Mile Island, and did so by developing a Hydrogen-Oxygen recombiner. His invention is now used in many nuclear plants to mitigate the risk of a hydrogen conflagration. Talking to him, I came to the conclusion that a Hydrogen fire was a real risk to the personnel in the facility (although it probably wouldn't lead to loss of containment). Your post is the first time I'd heard it suggested that there was no Oxygen present; what is your source on that information?
Cooling with liquid Nitrogen: fun to do if you don't care if it fails, but I wouldn't do it with a machine I cared about. Not only do you run the risk of running out of coolant, you also run the risk of getting a catastrophic change in boiling mode on the Nitrogen.
Ever drop water on a really hot pan and watch it skitter around instead of boiling off immediately? Transfer too much heat through that interface and the Nitrogen will start acting like that as well. The result will probably be immedate heat failure of the chip, since it's not cooling off fast enough anymore.
I don't know if the research has been done on Nitrogen to see where that transition point is, but I wouldn't start a project like this without knowing for sure that I wasn't going to cross it.
I'll back him up on this. Being an engineer means that he has a very good grasp on procedure for experimentation and requiremensts for declaring validity of a theoretical model. Unlike research scientists who lose some reputation of they are wrong, engineers can cause monetary losses in the $US 10^6-9 range along with loss of human life if they make an inaccurate model. As a result, engineers care in an "I may get fired, destroy my company, and have this tragedy resting on my conscience the rest of my life" way about experimentation that many scientists just don't.
Considering that his comment largely dealt with experimental procedure and the intractability of proving evolutionary theory, I'd say that he's at least as qualified to discuss it (absent specific details about cases and their results) as any other scientist in this public forum. Before you declare him clueless out of hand, re-read his comments about the procedural methods required for proof of evolution and compare them to the so-called "soft" sciences of human behavior and psychology. "Hard" science researchers frequently question the validity of behavioral studies because of the same issues that LinuxParanoid cited: namely, small sample size, experimental procedure affecting the study results, and intractability of proper longitudinal studies.
Your hostile response makes it sound like he's struck you too close to the mark. Just because you don't like hearing it doesn't mean he's wrong.
There are two bug open on this topic:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2
(sorry for not making them hyperlinks, but they don't allow requests with Slashdot as the referrer)
If you are like me and have no idea how to fix the problem, at least go and vote for those two bugs. They've been open since 2003 and 1999, respectively, though, so if you have coding expertise plese help out with this!
I noticed some interesting text on the graphics: "Can render directly to system memory with 100% efficiency"
Isn't this a fix for one of the 3D rendering artists' biggest complaints? I don't do a lot of it now, but back when I was working in a shop that did rendering of CG animation our 3D geeks constantly complained that our graphics cards didn't have as much bandwidth out to the system as they did through their video out port. They even tossed around the idea of doing video capture on the graphics card output becasue it might save time (didn't try it, couldn't get capture card purchase approved).
Is anyone qualified to comment on whether this is just advertizing glitz or if they've really solved the bandwidth-back-to-system problem? I know some people that would really like to find out.
s/apathetic software distributor.*\./apathetic Free Software Community./
You can't pull this trick if you don't have the source code and the right to modify it for your own use.
You make it sound like a bad thing that volunteer programmers working on Free Software projects spend their time on things that they are passionate about. I think it's rather a good thing.
What's the difference between the Free Software community volunteers saying "I'm busy, it's free, fix it yourself" and Microsoft saying, "You've paid for it, our EULA indemnifies us, and we know you're not going anywhere, so quiet down while we work on stuff that makes us money"? A bug that a distributor won't fix stays buggy, regardless of the ditributor. Free Software and Microsoft both have their share.
The invitation of "fix it yourself" should actually be te selling point for the PHB! Any company who cares deeply about the security of the web browser it uses can, for the price of a newly hired employee, fix the bug itself, without depending on the goodwill of an apathetic software distributor, be it Free or closed software. If this employee costs less than the yearly licensing fee for the alternative, this is a net gain for both the company and the Free Software community. Everyone wins but the apathetic closed-source software vendor.
You illustrate excellently the difference between implementing Free Software solutions as an individual and doing the same in a large organization. An end user who cares about a bug being fixed can do very little to make the fix happen, unless that user is also a programmer and has time to devote to it. A corporation that cares that a bug gets fixed can spend the money required to get the needed expertise and devote the timre required.
One of my favorite demonstrations from Physics class was when my teacher accelerated a ring of (non-ferrous!) aluminum into the cieling (nearly broke a light fixture) using an electromagnetic field.* This was the same day as he showed various non-ferrous pendulums being slowed to a stop in a fixed magnetic field due to eddy currents created in side the pendulum.
Moral of the story is that, even absent influences such as gravity and friction, a fixed magnetic field can change (slow) the velocity of a non-ferrous metallic object. Granted, though, you have a point about the fast drop in intensity with distance for magnetic fields...
*I don't remember how the device was constructed, or if the teacher even bothered describing it in detail. All I remember is that it plugged into 110 V AC, had a button he'd press, and it buzzed rather loudly while the button was pressed. The aluminum ring was shot into the acoustic tiles in the 20-foot ceiling hard enough to damage the tile, and the teacher admitted that he had actually broken a light fixture in a previous semester. Since then he aims more carefully.
IANANPE (I am not a nuclear physicist either), but I'm studying Mechanical Engineering so I have a loose grip on the facts. Any real NPs out there feel free to pick me apart. ;^)
Yes, it's mostly a containment problem. Fusion reactions are really hard to keep going, unlike fission reactions. We can use control rods to slow down fission because it's using solid fuels. The fuel expands a bit when it gets hot, but typically not so much that the reaction stops. On the contrary, it's a trick to keep fission reactions from running away from you (the proverbial "meltdown"), which is why we use control rods to cool down the reaction and keep it under control. Fusion, on the other hand, requires the fuel to be in a plasma state. Plasmas, like gasses, expand quite a bit when heated, and this causes big problems for sustainability. If the molecules get too far apart the reaction stops.
Keeping fuel molecules close together (needed to keep the fusion reaction going) gets harder in proportion to their temperature, which gets high fast once the reaction starts. Also, if/when containment fails the plasma gets outside its magnetic bottle and cools off rapidly (by touching the container walls, for example), and the reaction stops. And then, once you manage to keep it all together, to sustain the reaction you need to remove the reaction byproducts and introduce new fuel. Both processes are non-trivial, require getting through the containment (twice!), and will tend to cool down the reaction (by removing high-energy exhaust and introducing low-temperature fuel).
All of these issues are related to containment, and any one of them going wrong will cause the reaction to stop. So, to answer your question (finally) about control rods, it's not a matter of slowing the reaction down, it's a matter of keeping it going at all. Control rods won't help in a situation like this.