A virus that transforms a running Windows machine into a Linux machine without even rebooting (which would certainly noticeably interrupt the services on the machine)?
Oh? I don't know that a reboot on a Windows machine would be considered outside of the normal course of events. Yeah, technically an interruption, but the user wouldn't remark on it...;-)
Re:I wonder what they'll tell Chinese people
on
China Goes Nuclear
·
· Score: 1
The size and shape of cooling towers is dictated by (a) the amount of heat to dispose of and (b) thermodynamics and aerodynamics. Any industrial plant that needs to shed a certain amount of heat, and can't use a nearby river or lake, will have cooling towers.
On the other hand, most (all?) nuclear plants in Ontario (at least the ones I'm familiar with -- Douglas Point, Pickering and Darlington) don't have any cooling towers at all. All their cooling is done by lake water (Lake Huron and Lake Ontario). They're recognizable by the domed reactor containment buildings. (Although come to thing of it, Darlington's may be a different shape).
When the news media show pictures of a cooling tower when discussing nuclear power (this was really big during the Three Mile Island incident), I about laugh myself silly.
TMI had a minor release of very slightly radioactive steam. It never "blew".
And because of the reactor shutdown, coal-fired plants had to step up their output, requiring more coal. More people died when a coal train collided with a car at a RR crossing during the TMI incident than ever have because of that steam release.
What happens if a nuclear bomb is detonated in Nevada?
Howard Hughes calls up and complains about the shaking.
(You do realize, of course, that (part of) Nevada is probably the most heavily nuclear-bombed place on Earth? Although mostly underground since the early 1960s.)
Nobody's talking about burying plutonium -- at least not much of it (only as a trace contaminant). It's too damn useful for other purposes.
Not that plutonium is as bad as you make it out to be. Swallowed, there are a plenty of chemicals that are far more poisonous. The real danger is if a speck is inhaled or gets into the bloodstream.
If you ingest a few grains of plutonium there is a pretty good chance you are eventually going to die from it.
LIke I said, pretty mild. Your local Poison Control office probably has whole books listing stuff that if you ingest less than a grain of will definitely kill you, and a lot sooner than "eventually". Ricin, botulin toxin, nicotine sulphate, the nasty compound in Destroying Angel mushrooms that only makes you a little sick at first, then a day or two after you feel better you keel over because it's destroyed your liver, etc. Of course those are all natural compounds so of course much more benign than anything synthetic. Not.
Most of the high level toxic waste that was supposed to go to Yucca Mountain will be lethal for up to a quarter million years.
Is that all? Lead, arsenic, and other elemental toxins are lethal (by ingestion) forever. (Toxic compounds are lethal for a long time, too, but can be presumed to eventually break down -- although that may be in the millions or billions of year range, depending.)
Not that I have a problem with strict disposal regulations on waste from power production -- but we'd have to shut down all the coal-fired plants in the country if they had to meet a tenth of the requirements placed nukes. Coal ash is nasty stuff -- poisonous and radioactive.
Firstly: It appears we have some of the stuff wrapped in aluminium foil and aren't entirely sure where it is.
A Geiger counter might help there. If you can't detect it, you probably don't need to worry about it.
Secondly: Some of this stuff will be dangerously radioactive for longer than any form of government has been in existence for. Realisticly this means there is no gurantee we can successfully pass the information on about where we have buried the stuff for the required length of tim
So? Human-built structures have been around for longer than any form of government has been in existence for. The Egyptian pyramids, or Stonehenge, among others. Just build a pyramid on top of the stuff, with appropriate warnings about it being cursed.;-)
Besides, there's an inverse relationship between the intensity of emitted radiation and how long that radiation lasts. Potassium (K40) is radioactive with a half-life in the billion year range, but the intensity is generally negligible. (I once read that you'll pick up more radiation from sleeping with somebody (from their K40) than you would living next to a nuclear plant, but I haven't done the math.)
I don't recall the mission off the top of my head, but there was a launch where the spacecraft was powered by an RTG (radioisotope thermal generator) and the booster blew up shortly after launch, dumping the spacecraft in the ocean.
The Navy recovered the RTG, the isotopes still in their tough container, and the RTG was installed on the backup spacecraft.
That said, I think trying to shoot radwastes into the Sun is a dumb idea. It would take an incredible amount of delta-V (easier to land them on the Moon -- shades of Space: 1999!), and we might find a use for them someday. Just bury them somewhere -- how about in an abandoned uranium mine?
No offense meant. Never lived in Sudbury but visited it or passed through it a few times. Sudbury definitely has a coolness factor -- where else in the world do they mine an asteroid?
(Okay, I know the prevailing theory is that the metal deposits were from upwelling after the strike punched a big dent in the crust, rather than the remains of the meteorite itself. And I used to get into arguments with my high school geology teacher because the still (barely) prevailing theory then was that the whole basin was a geosyncline rather than an impact formation. But still...)
I live in Northern Ontario... about a 4 hour drive north of Toronto.
That's what, Sudbury? North Bay? Come on. That's not Northern Ontario. Moosonee is Northern Ontario;-) Or Pickle Lake. I might even give you Cochrane (starting point of the Polar Bear Express). Four hours north of Toronto is still further south than the US border with Manitoba and provinces west.
It certainly can't change it's mind halfway through.
Unless you know that it halts, how do you know when "halfway through" is? My example doesn't know itself when (if ever) it will halt until it does, so it can hardly "change its mind".
Of course, figuring out [i.e, deciding] which of these programs decides it may be hard, but that is a different question which has nothing to do with decidability.
No, it's the same question, you're just trying to push it back a step.
Yes you do. Otherwise you might just as well say "it is decided by the flip of this coin", without specifying whether heads or tails means it will halt.
Indeed, in the example I gave, the program will certainly halt on some target sequences ("14159" for example) but may or may not halt on others (a sequence of 67 "1"s? Unlikely but not provable.)
Program B is provably wrong in some but not all cases. Program A is not provably correct except in trivial cases (eg a single-digit sequence). Therefore the problem is not "decided" at all.
Firstly, the halting problem is trivially decidable for any particular program, the program either halts or it doesn't.
Okay, suppose you're given a program that computes successive digits of, say, pi. Trivially we can say that it won't halt (not counting physical or architectural limitations of the computer), by definition.
Suppose we now add a test wherein the program halts if it detects a particular sequence of digits. Will it halt or not?
Show the trivial method by which you decide your answer.
The point is that FOSS will never be legally allowed to play these *standard* media discs, ever.
Uh, patents expire after about 20 years. That's even before the Unix clock rolls over in 2038.
Now that this standard is out that mandates Microsoft codecs, it can *never* be undone,
Never is a long time. Patents expire, formats fall out of favor (cylindrical records, 8-track, 30-line video recording, Betamax, reel-to-reel audio, 45 RPM and LP vinyl records, CED videodisc, DIVX, etc. All once media for publishing prerecorded entertainment, now rare.) It isn't so much that the standard is undone as it, and its media, is superceded.
If for instance Sony decides to only release Spiderman 4 on Blu-Ray, whatcha gonna do?
Well, personally I didn't even see Spiderman 1 until it arrived at the 99-cent rental rack at the grocery store, so I won't care.
I imagine many others will find someone to rip a DVD or VCD, or download the equivalent. Worst case, absent some software method, such a rip can be done by aiming a camera at a screen. Sure it suffers in quality, but many people are willing to put up with that.
Hell, I've bought GAME SYSTEMS because I liked one game.
Well, there are always people with more money than sense.;-) Remember CED videodiscs? Or DIVX (the marketing scheme, not the codec)? (Or even, grin, 8-track tape cartridges?) No doubt some folks bought those because of one title. Oh well.
HP has been more than hedging its bets on 64-bit processors for a while. They're one of the few to currently offer an AMD-64 based laptop, for example, and have been offering AMD processors in (Windows/Linux) servers for a while. (Their Itanium-based Integrity servers are mainly HP-UX, although you can put Linux on them.)
Binary storage for [...] data makes a lot more sense since it is more compact and easier to parse, and there are also standards such as the IEEE float and double standard.
Of course. That's why widely used and well-established for the past 20 years data transfer standards like PostScript use binary.
How many CPU architectures does nVidia release binary drivers for? This may be less of an issue for AGP cards (hmm, AMD64?), but you'll find PCI cards in x86, PPC, MIPS and Sparc boxes.
An open source Linux (or BSD) driver can be recompiled to support any of those (modulo some CPU-specific tweaking). I somehow doubt an x86 binary driver is as versatile.
(The same can also be said for USB and FireWire devices, although that's a bit out of nVidia's domain.)
Sure there are discs. See other posts about where to buy them.
As for drive availablity, Best Buy, CompUSA, etc have at least four different models of dual-layer, multi format (DVD+/- R/RW in single layer, CD-R/RW, and DVD+R DL) burners on their shelves.
I burned a DVD+R DL that I bought at MicroCenter with an out-of-the-box (no firmware upgrade) NEC drive that I bought at CompUSA. I'd say that was mainstream.
(I did have to upgrade my old version of growisofs to burn DL under Linux, never bothered loading the supplied Windows software.)
there aren't really a lot of examples of applications that lose features because they aren't used.
Come now. Can you imagine Marketing's reaction when Development says "we want to drop features X, Y and Z; nobody uses them anyway"?
Or Management's reaction when the developers tell them "we want to spend N person-weeks removing features X and Y and doing the necessary code refactoring for what we take out". Oh yeah, and "and of course that will have to be tested".
No, proprietary code is like the Roach Motel -- features check in, they never check out.
Cost of VHS vs Betamax aside, in the early days a VHS tape held a full 2 hours, the Betamax tapes didn't. The technical advantage as far as the consumer was concerned was to VHS because of this.
There's no such discrepancy in +R vs -R formats -- except that right now I can put 8.5 GB on a +R format (dual layer) disc, but only 4.7 GB on a -R disc (because the -R dual layer standard isn't finalized, and no media or equipment is available for it at consumer prices). Advantage, +R.
In reality I expect that most PC drives will read and write anything (except perhaps for some low-end stuff), and DVD players will play anything -- as most current production already does. The price difference in media will probably be negligible, unless the head-start that +R DL has is maintained.
Slashdot Mirror
A virus that transforms a running Windows machine into a Linux machine without even rebooting (which would certainly noticeably interrupt the services on the machine)?
;-)
Oh? I don't know that a reboot on a Windows machine would be considered outside of the normal course of events. Yeah, technically an interruption, but the user wouldn't remark on it...
Rather insulting to the "astrochimp" Ham, too.
Or possibly very complimentary.
The size and shape of cooling towers is dictated by (a) the amount of heat to dispose of and (b) thermodynamics and aerodynamics. Any industrial plant that needs to shed a certain amount of heat, and can't use a nearby river or lake, will have cooling towers.
On the other hand, most (all?) nuclear plants in Ontario (at least the ones I'm familiar with -- Douglas Point, Pickering and Darlington) don't have any cooling towers at all. All their cooling is done by lake water (Lake Huron and Lake Ontario). They're recognizable by the domed reactor containment buildings. (Although come to thing of it, Darlington's may be a different shape).
When the news media show pictures of a cooling tower when discussing nuclear power (this was really big during the Three Mile Island incident), I about laugh myself silly.
When TMI blew? When TMI blew!?
When did that happen?
TMI had a minor release of very slightly radioactive steam. It never "blew".
And because of the reactor shutdown, coal-fired plants had to step up their output, requiring more coal. More people died when a coal train collided with a car at a RR crossing during the TMI incident than ever have because of that steam release.
What happens if a nuclear bomb is detonated in Nevada?
Howard Hughes calls up and complains about the shaking.
(You do realize, of course, that (part of) Nevada is probably the most heavily nuclear-bombed place on Earth? Although mostly underground since the early 1960s.)
Nobody's talking about burying plutonium -- at least not much of it (only as a trace contaminant). It's too damn useful for other purposes.
Not that plutonium is as bad as you make it out to be. Swallowed, there are a plenty of chemicals that are far more poisonous. The real danger is if a speck is inhaled or gets into the bloodstream.
If you ingest a few grains of plutonium there is a pretty good chance you are eventually going to die from it.
LIke I said, pretty mild. Your local Poison Control office probably has whole books listing stuff that if you ingest less than a grain of will definitely kill you, and a lot sooner than "eventually". Ricin, botulin toxin, nicotine sulphate, the nasty compound in Destroying Angel mushrooms that only makes you a little sick at first, then a day or two after you feel better you keel over because it's destroyed your liver, etc. Of course those are all natural compounds so of course much more benign than anything synthetic. Not.
Most of the high level toxic waste that was supposed to go to Yucca Mountain will be lethal for up to a quarter million years.
Is that all? Lead, arsenic, and other elemental toxins are lethal (by ingestion) forever. (Toxic compounds are lethal for a long time, too, but can be presumed to eventually break down -- although that may be in the millions or billions of year range, depending.)
Not that I have a problem with strict disposal regulations on waste from power production -- but we'd have to shut down all the coal-fired plants in the country if they had to meet a tenth of the requirements placed nukes. Coal ash is nasty stuff -- poisonous and radioactive.
Firstly: It appears we have some of the stuff wrapped in aluminium foil and aren't entirely sure where it is.
;-)
A Geiger counter might help there. If you can't detect it, you probably don't need to worry about it.
Secondly: Some of this stuff will be dangerously radioactive for longer than any form of government has been in existence for. Realisticly this means there is no gurantee we can successfully pass the information on about where we have buried the stuff for the required length of tim
So? Human-built structures have been around for longer than any form of government has been in existence for. The Egyptian pyramids, or Stonehenge, among others. Just build a pyramid on top of the stuff, with appropriate warnings about it being cursed.
Besides, there's an inverse relationship between the intensity of emitted radiation and how long that radiation lasts. Potassium (K40) is radioactive with a half-life in the billion year range, but the intensity is generally negligible. (I once read that you'll pick up more radiation from sleeping with somebody (from their K40) than you would living next to a nuclear plant, but I haven't done the math.)
Indeed, it has already happened.
I don't recall the mission off the top of my head, but there was a launch where the spacecraft was powered by an RTG (radioisotope thermal generator) and the booster blew up shortly after launch, dumping the spacecraft in the ocean.
The Navy recovered the RTG, the isotopes still in their tough container, and the RTG was installed on the backup spacecraft.
That said, I think trying to shoot radwastes into the Sun is a dumb idea. It would take an incredible amount of delta-V (easier to land them on the Moon -- shades of Space: 1999!), and we might find a use for them someday. Just bury them somewhere -- how about in an abandoned uranium mine?
No offense meant. Never lived in Sudbury but visited it or passed through it a few times. Sudbury definitely has a coolness factor -- where else in the world do they mine an asteroid?
(Okay, I know the prevailing theory is that the metal deposits were from upwelling after the strike punched a big dent in the crust, rather than the remains of the meteorite itself. And I used to get into arguments with my high school geology teacher because the still (barely) prevailing theory then was that the whole basin was a geosyncline rather than an impact formation. But still...)
I live in Northern Ontario ... about a 4 hour drive north of Toronto.
;-) Or Pickle Lake. I might even give you Cochrane (starting point of the Polar Bear Express). Four hours north of Toronto is still further south than the US border with Manitoba and provinces west.
That's what, Sudbury? North Bay? Come on. That's not Northern Ontario. Moosonee is Northern Ontario
It certainly can't change it's mind halfway through.
Unless you know that it halts, how do you know when "halfway through" is? My example doesn't know itself when (if ever) it will halt until it does, so it can hardly "change its mind".
Of course, figuring out [i.e, deciding] which of these programs decides it may be hard, but that is a different question which has nothing to do with decidability.
No, it's the same question, you're just trying to push it back a step.
And I'm beginning to think I have been trolled.
I don't have to tell you which one,
Yes you do. Otherwise you might just as well say "it is decided by the flip of this coin", without specifying whether heads or tails means it will halt.
Indeed, in the example I gave, the program will certainly halt on some target sequences ("14159" for example) but may or may not halt on others (a sequence of 67 "1"s? Unlikely but not provable.)
Program B is provably wrong in some but not all cases. Program A is not provably correct except in trivial cases (eg a single-digit sequence). Therefore the problem is not "decided" at all.
indeed it may be difficult to say which one,
That's hardly "trivial", then, is it?
Firstly, the halting problem is trivially decidable for any particular program, the program either halts or it doesn't.
Okay, suppose you're given a program that computes successive digits of, say, pi. Trivially we can say that it won't halt (not counting physical or architectural limitations of the computer), by definition.
Suppose we now add a test wherein the program halts if it detects a particular sequence of digits. Will it halt or not?
Show the trivial method by which you decide your answer.
If the application was filed by June 7, 1995 and issued before June 8, 1978, ...then the patent may have been issued for a time machine ;-)
I think you meant 1998.
The point is that FOSS will never be legally allowed to play these *standard* media discs, ever.
Uh, patents expire after about 20 years. That's even before the Unix clock rolls over in 2038.
Now that this standard is out that mandates Microsoft codecs, it can *never* be undone,
Never is a long time. Patents expire, formats fall out of favor (cylindrical records, 8-track, 30-line video recording, Betamax, reel-to-reel audio, 45 RPM and LP vinyl records, CED videodisc, DIVX, etc. All once media for publishing prerecorded entertainment, now rare.) It isn't so much that the standard is undone as it, and its media, is superceded.
If for instance Sony decides to only release Spiderman 4 on Blu-Ray, whatcha gonna do?
;-) Remember CED videodiscs? Or DIVX (the marketing scheme, not the codec)? (Or even, grin, 8-track tape cartridges?) No doubt some folks bought those because of one title. Oh well.
Well, personally I didn't even see Spiderman 1 until it arrived at the 99-cent rental rack at the grocery store, so I won't care.
I imagine many others will find someone to rip a DVD or VCD, or download the equivalent. Worst case, absent some software method, such a rip can be done by aiming a camera at a screen. Sure it suffers in quality, but many people are willing to put up with that.
Hell, I've bought GAME SYSTEMS because I liked one game.
Well, there are always people with more money than sense.
Thanks for the info.
However they have firmly commited to ditching pa-risc, mips, and alpha for their other 5 server platforms.
When has HP ever done anything with MIPS? That's originally an SGI chip -- although the MIPS core shows up in a lot of embedded applications too.
Agree on your other points.
HP has been more than hedging its bets on 64-bit processors for a while. They're one of the few to currently offer an AMD-64 based laptop, for example, and have been offering AMD processors in (Windows/Linux) servers for a while. (Their Itanium-based Integrity servers are mainly HP-UX, although you can put Linux on them.)
Binary storage for [...] data makes a lot more sense since it is more compact and easier to parse, and there are also standards such as the IEEE float and double standard.
Of course. That's why widely used and well-established for the past 20 years data transfer standards like PostScript use binary.
Oh, wait...
How many CPU architectures does nVidia release binary drivers for? This may be less of an issue for AGP cards (hmm, AMD64?), but you'll find PCI cards in x86, PPC, MIPS and Sparc boxes.
An open source Linux (or BSD) driver can be recompiled to support any of those (modulo some CPU-specific tweaking). I somehow doubt an x86 binary driver is as versatile.
(The same can also be said for USB and FireWire devices, although that's a bit out of nVidia's domain.)
Sure there are discs. See other posts about where to buy them.
As for drive availablity, Best Buy, CompUSA, etc have at least four different models of dual-layer, multi format (DVD+/- R/RW in single layer, CD-R/RW, and DVD+R DL) burners on their shelves.
I burned a DVD+R DL that I bought at MicroCenter with an out-of-the-box (no firmware upgrade) NEC drive that I bought at CompUSA. I'd say that was mainstream.
(I did have to upgrade my old version of growisofs to burn DL under Linux, never bothered loading the supplied Windows software.)
there aren't really a lot of examples of applications that lose features because they aren't used.
Come now. Can you imagine Marketing's reaction when Development says "we want to drop features X, Y and Z; nobody uses them anyway"?
Or Management's reaction when the developers tell them "we want to spend N person-weeks removing features X and Y and doing the necessary code refactoring for what we take out". Oh yeah, and "and of course that will have to be tested".
No, proprietary code is like the Roach Motel -- features check in, they never check out.
Cost of VHS vs Betamax aside, in the early days a VHS tape held a full 2 hours, the Betamax tapes didn't. The technical advantage as far as the consumer was concerned was to VHS because of this.
There's no such discrepancy in +R vs -R formats -- except that right now I can put 8.5 GB on a +R format (dual layer) disc, but only 4.7 GB on a -R disc (because the -R dual layer standard isn't finalized, and no media or equipment is available for it at consumer prices). Advantage, +R.
In reality I expect that most PC drives will read and write anything (except perhaps for some low-end stuff), and DVD players will play anything -- as most current production already does. The price difference in media will probably be negligible, unless the head-start that +R DL has is maintained.