Gravitons are a force-mediating particle - if they exist. Completely different from pions. They are also near-impossible to observe directly - they make neutrinos look solid. There's no experimental confirmation they even exist, but certain theories far beyond my understanding predict them.
It only needs the impossible strength if you're spinning it for gravity. Though it'd still be a ridiculous thing to build, when s swarm of smaller (though still huge by current standards) objects is more practical and less prone to catastrophic failure.
A dyson sphere is a structure for energy collection above all. If you want nicely habitable space, you build a ringworld so you can have at least a little bit of gravity (Though not very much, or it tears apart). Dyson spheres are for those who have energy-intensive megaprojects, like running a simulated civilisation or trying to broadcast a beacon the entire galaxy can detect.
Not just the new ones - even some of the older games are being ported to linux now, though probably only en route to the promised Steambox.
I just finished Postal 2 on linux. Aside from steam achievements not being done yet, it worked flawlessly at max-everything. There is something satisfying in playing a character who responds to everyday irritations with outrageously over-the-top violence.
A lot of these useful tricks were more useful before modern electronics. Syncronised motors are easy with AC, true - and just as easy with a twenty-cent microcontroler chip and a few cheap sensors, or stepper motors. Stepper motors can also vary their speed as required.
There's another useful one: The number of cycles in a day is fixed. If the power goes up above the spec frequency a bit, the operators will lower it slightly after to exactly balance it. That's because some electromechanical devices use the grid frequency for timing - a syncronous motor connecte to a 50/60:1 reduction gear gives a shaft rotating once per second. Another 60:1 and you've got a minute hand for a clock. The ability to cheaply implement a perfectly accurate clock that way are a very useful thing before the introduction of really cheap quartz crystals and drivers.
I don't see any reason to switch everything to DC, though. AC works very well, and is already established. I can see applications for DC power distribution in certain circumstances. High-density computing, for one - why have a full mains PSU in every server? It's expensive, more points of failure, and you end up going from mains incoming to DC for the UPSs inverted to AC to send back to the servers converted back to DC for use inside - and those inverters are not that reliable too. It makes more sense to feed all the servers off of DC (Usually 48V - any lower and current gets silly), and have the power supply stuff all centralized. All the servers need is a DC-DC converter for each rail.
And pre-life it'll be mostly carbon dioxide. We could work with that. Carbon dioxide plus energy can be processed into oxygen. Just means the colony might be stuck indoors or wearing respirators for a few thousand years. Annoying, but manageable.
Often, yes. It's common at wifi hotspots to be presented with a captive portal. You have to enter your mobile phone number, they text you a code, you enter the code to unlock the portal. That way they have tied your identity to a phone number.
Here in the UK, actually breaking the encryption isn't illegal - but distributing any tools or software designed to break the encryption is, and so is distributing any content which has had the rights management stripped. As the UK law is just our implimentation of the EUCD, I imagine much the same applies in the rest of Europe.
It'll get more common, though. The IPv4 pool is dry, which leaves NAT (Technically PAT, but everyone uses the term wrong anyway) as the only option. The only real solution to this is IPv6, but there's no commercial case for any ISP to deploy it until after everyone else has done so - and as it'll be both expensive to set up and initially unreliable due to the high number of misconfigured systems and unreachable destinations, no ISP wants to go first.
Tha'ts now how the tarrif works. It doesn't make copying legal - it's simply a payment in compensation for the many many many acts of illegal copying which the government admits it is powerless to stop.
It's relative. The republicans are on the right of US politics, the democrats are on the left of US politics - but US politics as a whole only spans from 'right' to 'extreme far right' by European standards.
What Europe calls left would be regarded as traiterously communist in the US, and what the US calls right would be reduced to the man standing on a European street corner screaming that the end of the world is upon us.
Republican means a small government in order to preserve the liberties of individuals. Except for where drugs are involved, of course. And pornography. And abortion. And immigration. And the feds still need to butt in and overrule the state authority to ban gay marriage and preemptively block non-discrimination laws. Oh, and it's important the government still be able to erect giant crucifix monuments and put up displays of the ten commandments just to make sure everyone knows that non-Christians aren't true Americans and aren't welcome in the country. But asside from all that, they stand for small government. And massive subsidies for well-connected companies, but the democrats do that too.
DC-DC converters of comparable efficiency are now quite practical. They weren't at the time, as they need semiconductor components. 80% is common, 95% is achievable. For high power applications like grid distribution, transformers are a lot cheaper - you can simply scale them up easily, while trying to make a DC-DC converter run at half a million volts would need some very exotic semiconductor components.
You can get 2D glasses. Just like 3D glasses, except the lenses are identical so you only get one image. You still get screwed on the price premium though.
Why would hollywood want that? They use a staggered release system so that every potential customer pays as much as possible. Those with money to burn go to the cinema, those on slightly lower budgets have to wait for the DVD, and those who don't spend money on films at all eventually provide their pittance by watching the advertisments when it's shown on TV.
No surprise, though. Look how much it costs to make a blockbuster now. Audiences expect high production values - painted backdrops and cardboard sets just don't cut it any more, you need on-location shooting with a superstar lead earning a ten-figure paycheck. Far too much money to risk on something untested. So hollywood, being heavily dependant on high-budget movies, needs to stick to the things that are well-tested. Established cliches, feel-good stories with messages familiar to the audience. Predictable genre pieces, franchises and sequals.
Britain did have a parody show - a three-part mockery of the many reality-TV talent-contest shows that were popular at the time. The title was formed by just smashing all the shows it was mocking together: "Britain's got the pop factor and possibly a new celebrity jesus christ soapstar superstar strictly on ice."
70s? Older than that. How many Westerns use that cliche? There are always some evil bandits, and always a hero (Or in the spagetti westerns, usually an anti-hero) to kill them.
The production cost for a blockbuster has grown to the extent that there is no other model that would work. It's the same reason for the lack of innovative storytelling - when the budget for a film is in the hundreds of millions, you can't risk gambling it all on something new that consumers might reject. You have to stick to the tried-and-tested cliches.
More likely outcome: The web-dev has a thirty-core monster workstation and produces a page without any thought for performance, because it works quickly for him. Then you try on your portable device, and it takes two minutes to load all the embedded video advertising.
If massive-neural nets do reach common use (Which isn't that likely, they are somewhat overhyped) then I'd expect to see specific accelerators designed to run them. Probably something like FPGAs: Software writes the net, hardware executes it. A general-purpose processor (Probably x64 or ARM) does the coordinating, but augmented by specialised or semi-specialised hardware for certain tasks. Very much as we have today with hardware acceleration of 3D graphics or video decoding.
You can see the trend already. 3D acceleration was introduced for graphics, but then repurposed for other things, and followed up with revised graphics architectures designed for non-graphics applications. They are still useless for general-purpose computing, their architecture too limited, but used in conjunction with a general processor they can greatly outperform the processor alone on things like image processing, cryptographic tasks, physics simulation and such. It's now quite common to see even consumer applications, with games using physics simulation to provide much more detailed rigid-body simulation than was previously possible - ie, more bits of shrapnel and chunks of corpse bouncing around when you lob that grenade.
As for neural nets, you probably won't see much need to simulate huge ones. Small ones work surprisingly well, and their applications are really quite limited - they aren't some magic AI bullet that turns into a functional mind if you make them big enough. They excel at classification tasks, so they ar very handy in OCR, handwriting recognition, speech recognition and such. Google made one that can recognise cats, and if you can recognise cats then you can recognise other things, so straight away I'm seeing applications in web filter software.
Slashdot Mirror
Gravitons are a force-mediating particle - if they exist. Completely different from pions. They are also near-impossible to observe directly - they make neutrinos look solid. There's no experimental confirmation they even exist, but certain theories far beyond my understanding predict them.
It only needs the impossible strength if you're spinning it for gravity. Though it'd still be a ridiculous thing to build, when s swarm of smaller (though still huge by current standards) objects is more practical and less prone to catastrophic failure.
A dyson sphere is a structure for energy collection above all. If you want nicely habitable space, you build a ringworld so you can have at least a little bit of gravity (Though not very much, or it tears apart). Dyson spheres are for those who have energy-intensive megaprojects, like running a simulated civilisation or trying to broadcast a beacon the entire galaxy can detect.
Not just the new ones - even some of the older games are being ported to linux now, though probably only en route to the promised Steambox.
I just finished Postal 2 on linux. Aside from steam achievements not being done yet, it worked flawlessly at max-everything. There is something satisfying in playing a character who responds to everyday irritations with outrageously over-the-top violence.
A lot of these useful tricks were more useful before modern electronics. Syncronised motors are easy with AC, true - and just as easy with a twenty-cent microcontroler chip and a few cheap sensors, or stepper motors. Stepper motors can also vary their speed as required.
There's another useful one: The number of cycles in a day is fixed. If the power goes up above the spec frequency a bit, the operators will lower it slightly after to exactly balance it. That's because some electromechanical devices use the grid frequency for timing - a syncronous motor connecte to a 50/60:1 reduction gear gives a shaft rotating once per second. Another 60:1 and you've got a minute hand for a clock. The ability to cheaply implement a perfectly accurate clock that way are a very useful thing before the introduction of really cheap quartz crystals and drivers.
I don't see any reason to switch everything to DC, though. AC works very well, and is already established. I can see applications for DC power distribution in certain circumstances. High-density computing, for one - why have a full mains PSU in every server? It's expensive, more points of failure, and you end up going from mains incoming to DC for the UPSs inverted to AC to send back to the servers converted back to DC for use inside - and those inverters are not that reliable too. It makes more sense to feed all the servers off of DC (Usually 48V - any lower and current gets silly), and have the power supply stuff all centralized. All the servers need is a DC-DC converter for each rail.
A dyson sphere is grav-null inside. You'd need two shells, with atmosphere sandwiched between.
And pre-life it'll be mostly carbon dioxide. We could work with that. Carbon dioxide plus energy can be processed into oxygen. Just means the colony might be stuck indoors or wearing respirators for a few thousand years. Annoying, but manageable.
Often, yes. It's common at wifi hotspots to be presented with a captive portal. You have to enter your mobile phone number, they text you a code, you enter the code to unlock the portal. That way they have tied your identity to a phone number.
Here in the UK, actually breaking the encryption isn't illegal - but distributing any tools or software designed to break the encryption is, and so is distributing any content which has had the rights management stripped. As the UK law is just our implimentation of the EUCD, I imagine much the same applies in the rest of Europe.
It'll get more common, though. The IPv4 pool is dry, which leaves NAT (Technically PAT, but everyone uses the term wrong anyway) as the only option. The only real solution to this is IPv6, but there's no commercial case for any ISP to deploy it until after everyone else has done so - and as it'll be both expensive to set up and initially unreliable due to the high number of misconfigured systems and unreachable destinations, no ISP wants to go first.
Tha'ts now how the tarrif works. It doesn't make copying legal - it's simply a payment in compensation for the many many many acts of illegal copying which the government admits it is powerless to stop.
It's relative. The republicans are on the right of US politics, the democrats are on the left of US politics - but US politics as a whole only spans from 'right' to 'extreme far right' by European standards.
What Europe calls left would be regarded as traiterously communist in the US, and what the US calls right would be reduced to the man standing on a European street corner screaming that the end of the world is upon us.
Republican means a small government in order to preserve the liberties of individuals. Except for where drugs are involved, of course. And pornography. And abortion. And immigration. And the feds still need to butt in and overrule the state authority to ban gay marriage and preemptively block non-discrimination laws. Oh, and it's important the government still be able to erect giant crucifix monuments and put up displays of the ten commandments just to make sure everyone knows that non-Christians aren't true Americans and aren't welcome in the country. But asside from all that, they stand for small government. And massive subsidies for well-connected companies, but the democrats do that too.
DC-DC converters of comparable efficiency are now quite practical. They weren't at the time, as they need semiconductor components. 80% is common, 95% is achievable. For high power applications like grid distribution, transformers are a lot cheaper - you can simply scale them up easily, while trying to make a DC-DC converter run at half a million volts would need some very exotic semiconductor components.
I said you can get, not that they will provide. It's not likely to be something the cinema will provide. Just buy them online and take them with you.
You can get 2D glasses. Just like 3D glasses, except the lenses are identical so you only get one image. You still get screwed on the price premium though.
Why would hollywood want that? They use a staggered release system so that every potential customer pays as much as possible. Those with money to burn go to the cinema, those on slightly lower budgets have to wait for the DVD, and those who don't spend money on films at all eventually provide their pittance by watching the advertisments when it's shown on TV.
No surprise, though. Look how much it costs to make a blockbuster now. Audiences expect high production values - painted backdrops and cardboard sets just don't cut it any more, you need on-location shooting with a superstar lead earning a ten-figure paycheck. Far too much money to risk on something untested. So hollywood, being heavily dependant on high-budget movies, needs to stick to the things that are well-tested. Established cliches, feel-good stories with messages familiar to the audience. Predictable genre pieces, franchises and sequals.
Britain did have a parody show - a three-part mockery of the many reality-TV talent-contest shows that were popular at the time. The title was formed by just smashing all the shows it was mocking together: "Britain's got the pop factor and possibly a new celebrity jesus christ soapstar superstar strictly on ice."
70s? Older than that. How many Westerns use that cliche? There are always some evil bandits, and always a hero (Or in the spagetti westerns, usually an anti-hero) to kill them.
The production cost for a blockbuster has grown to the extent that there is no other model that would work. It's the same reason for the lack of innovative storytelling - when the budget for a film is in the hundreds of millions, you can't risk gambling it all on something new that consumers might reject. You have to stick to the tried-and-tested cliches.
More likely outcome: The web-dev has a thirty-core monster workstation and produces a page without any thought for performance, because it works quickly for him. Then you try on your portable device, and it takes two minutes to load all the embedded video advertising.
If massive-neural nets do reach common use (Which isn't that likely, they are somewhat overhyped) then I'd expect to see specific accelerators designed to run them. Probably something like FPGAs: Software writes the net, hardware executes it. A general-purpose processor (Probably x64 or ARM) does the coordinating, but augmented by specialised or semi-specialised hardware for certain tasks. Very much as we have today with hardware acceleration of 3D graphics or video decoding.
You can see the trend already. 3D acceleration was introduced for graphics, but then repurposed for other things, and followed up with revised graphics architectures designed for non-graphics applications. They are still useless for general-purpose computing, their architecture too limited, but used in conjunction with a general processor they can greatly outperform the processor alone on things like image processing, cryptographic tasks, physics simulation and such. It's now quite common to see even consumer applications, with games using physics simulation to provide much more detailed rigid-body simulation than was previously possible - ie, more bits of shrapnel and chunks of corpse bouncing around when you lob that grenade.
As for neural nets, you probably won't see much need to simulate huge ones. Small ones work surprisingly well, and their applications are really quite limited - they aren't some magic AI bullet that turns into a functional mind if you make them big enough. They excel at classification tasks, so they ar very handy in OCR, handwriting recognition, speech recognition and such. Google made one that can recognise cats, and if you can recognise cats then you can recognise other things, so straight away I'm seeing applications in web filter software.
But by the time you've finished reading the first paragraph of the first page, the other nine are loaded even if you can't parallise.
Plan B involves a very large blender.