Hey, if you assume "Mr. Fusion" power supplies, flying cars are easy, even without the anti-grav technology implied in the movie.
It's all a question of power/weight ratios, which is why nobody had any success with ordinary heavier than air flight until the internal combustion engine came along; steam engines just won't cut it. Hook up a Mr. Fusion to some high power electric motors (it's the battery weight that kills you for electric powered flight) and away you go.
Noisy, though. (Without antigrav or wings, the only way to lift a flying car is by moving large volumes of air. If you restrict the cross sectional area of that column of air (ie, no helicopter-like large rotor blades), the air has to be moving fast. Fast moving air == noise.)
That wasn't true even in 1991, except maybe for Intel processors which are notoriously wasteful of clock cycles (which is why they have always advertised clock speed rather than instructions per second). A 1 MHz MOS 6502 was just as fast as a 4.7 MHz Intel 8080 (and needed fewer support chips).
If you throw more transistors at the problem, and/or different architectures, you can complete instructions in a single cycle. (Especially e.g. register-to-register instructions where the answer comes out of the inputs at the speed of propagation delay through the gates.) If you do it right, you can even design clockless CPUs where the completion of the previous instruction triggers the start of the next one without waiting on an external clock.
This assumes your CPU is not microprogrammed; the instruction words contain the relevant bitmasks for source and destination registers as well as the control code for the ALU. See for example the PDP-11 instruction set (IIRC).
Of course as others have pointed out, modern processors pipeline multiple instructions at different stages of execution at the same time, for a net throughput of multiple instructions per cycle.
I don't know about "Heroes", but some cable-channel stuff just isn't available over the air, or at least not until years later when it goes into syndication (eg Stargate).
In which case the alternative is to buy the end of season DVD set, which is what I do. (Gave up on cable and satellite years ago, and have little patience for OTA programming with its ads and watermarks.)
For that matter my local library has the sets for some of the shows, which is great for getting a taste for them to see if they're worth buying. I think I'm at about #18 on the hold list for "Eureka" right now.
Check out Michael Crichton's latest, "Next", for such a set up scenario with a (well paid) female setting a guy up for an underage rape charge, complete with DNA evidence. Mind, the guy has to be a bit of sleaze in the first place to be set up that way -- as with most set ups and cons -- but he gets hit for a lot worse than what he thought he did.
Depends. What's the risk factor involved? And how's your cashflow? Can you afford to pay your attorneys plus legal fees for the year or more that the lawsuit drags out? What if the troll gets an injunction against you selling your product that they say violates their patent? How are you going to pay the bills then?
Going to trial is always a crapshoot even if you're 100% sure that you have a solid case. Nasty surprises happen (jury goofs up, judge makes a bad decision -- can your cashflow survive the appeal process? -- etc).
Not that fighting patent trolls isn't a noble cause; I wish more people would do it. But plenty of people see discretion as the better part of valor. (As witness the amount of crap people submit to before boarding a plane these days.)
Probably. But if you're a (smallish) business owner, do you want to go that route and spend time and money tied up in court proceedings or just pay the man a few bucks to go bother somebody else?
And in response to another poster, than only marks you as an easy touch if the details get out. The patent troll sure isn't motivated to let others know what you settled for, and both of you would have an interest in plastering the settlement with NDAs.
Its one reason that patent (etc) trolls usually go after smaller businesses first. That was one of the odd things about the Caldera-SCO case: they went after IBM first, undoubtedly expecting to just be bought out altogether rather than actually have to through with it.
Who the hell would settle something like this with such a well established history of "prior art"?
Someone who, when they appeared ready to fight it, was offered a settlement and patent license for a very nominal sum. Easier and cheaper to pay even a few hundred bucks and walk away than pay for lawyers and months of a lawsuit.
ODF advocates want ODF to be the sole ISO standard
I don't think that's true for most of them any more than you do (unless you're stupider than you look).
I doubt most ODF "advocates" would have any problem with another ISO open document format standard that made technical sense. MSOXML of course doesn't make technical sense: it is self contradictory, contradicts a number of pre-existing ISO standards (1900 as a leap year, anyone?), and is insufficiently specified to implement properly ( SpaceLikeWord95 tags?).
It's like complaining about a dog turd on the sidewalk and being accused of not liking dogs. No. Like "OO"XML, the complaint is because it's shit, not because of where it came from. (Except perhaps for a few folks.)
There's plenty of arsenic in coal ash. Probably orders of magnitude more than goes into making solar cells, but I'll admit to not having done the math.
Grown-ups are sneakier than we give them credit for sometimes:)
Surprisingly, most grown ups were kids themselves once. Often as not it's remembering some of the things they did themselves as kids that scares the willies out of parents. And as a parent myself, I have to wonder how much of what I thought I got away with as a kid was just my parents choosing to turn a blind eye to it.
It's a 32-bit API, why do you need 64-bit support?
on
Wine 0.9.44 Released
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· Score: 1
64-bit support for Win32? What an odd concept.
Wine runs fine on my 64-bit Linux system as a 32-bit binary (AMD64). I haven't tried it, but now that you've got my curiosity up, I may try it on an IA-64 (Itanium) too, which also happily handles x86 32 bit apps in emulation.
Sure, these days Windows allegedly supports 64-bit platforms. Any idea how much of that is really running in 64 bit native mode vs 32 bit mode? (I have no idea, but I do recall the Win95 days when an allegedly 32-bit OS turned out to do an awful lot of thunking to 16 bits.)
Re:Wine 1.0 would be a great mistake!
on
Wine 0.9.44 Released
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· Score: 2, Funny
I think it would be pointless to push such a product because it is simply not ready yet. Users would also have higher expectations of the product than what should be realistic
You missed it. Think about it, this is a Windows (non-)emulator. Releasing a not quite ready for primetime version as 1.0 (or even 2.0) fits perfectly with providing the whole Windows experience.
The VPN client I use to get into work will immediately break the connection if you try that.
It also drops it if you try to PPTP tunnel through it. (Heck, sometimes it annoyingly drops for no particular reason at all, especially if I'm doing wireless with a less than 100% signal).
To get to the VLAN which lets me connect to the RILOs (through which I can remotely power off servers, among other things), I VPN to the corporate network, ssh to a dedicated security server, ssh from there to another server which guards the subnets for the servers I manage (on private IPs), and from there to one of the servers in that subnet which can actually talk to the VLAN the RILOs are connected to.
So, yeah, I can power them off and on remotely from the internet, but it's not exactly easy. And if I don't have my SecureKey (and its password) I don't even get past the first step.
If I remember right, the one that said "no" was later re-run in an Antarctic dry valley. It said "no" there, too. Basically it's lower limit of detection was too high.
Mind, my favorite way of describing the whole Viking experiment situation is:
The Viking Lander experiments were designed to answer the question, "is there life on Mars?". They landed, performed their experiments, and beamed back: "could you repeat the question?"
Satellite radio has about 50Mhz of the S band for 150 channels of content. FM radio has about a 5th of the channels in about 5 times the spectrum
Funny, my FM radio only goes from about 88 MHz to 108 MHz, a total of 20 MHz of spectrum. Did I get gypped out of 230 MHz somewhere in there, or are you blowing smoke?
The "HD" Digital Radio folks keep running ads telling me that there other stations hidden in there somewhere too, but I'm happy enough with the three or four stations I listen to already, so why should I care? But it sounds like they're already doing what you seem to be saying they ought to, and have been for a while.
I think the "new discovery" part is the "without supernova remnant". Aren't most pulsars embedded in their supernova remnants?
May be an age thing. If the object is young enough that the remnant is still nearby and visible, it's young enough that it hasn't yet shed a lot of energy through its pulsar (etc) emissions, and vice versa. An old neutron star whose remnant nebula is long gone is likely to be a slow, feeble pulsar at best.
The scene in "2001" was adapted from an earlier Arthur C. Clarke short story, "Take A Deep Breath".
By the time of the movie, Clarke was aware of Air Force research in high altitude chambers that people could indeed survive brief periods of vacuum exposure (although unconciousness results after 15-30 seconds from oxygen starvation, so you'd better have help or get pressurization underway by that time). However, as a SCUBA diver, Clarke would also have known that holding your breath during a sudden decompression (as Dave did in the movie) is a virtual guarantee to get a lung embolism or worse. Dave should have been exhaling when he blew the hatch, it's not like you can hold your breath against a pressure differential of even 3 PSI (if the pod was pressurized with pure O2) let alone 14.7 psi (air).
True, he was the first human to make the trip around the planet, but it was more accidental, and as you say with a long break in between.
Elcano was crew, and captain for a good part of the voyage -- he was actually doing the navigation part of the circumnavigation. Enriquez was just along for the ride (in terms of navigation or sailing duties, at least).
BTW, even though Columbus "discovered" the Americas, it was Juan Sebastian Elcano who proved the world was round by sailing westward (modulo a few detours) until he returned to Spain. Yeah, everyone says it was Magellan, but Magellan died on the expedition in the Philippines, it was Elcano who assumed command at that point and finished the circumnavigation (along with a dozen or so shipmates).
You forgot to mention Christopher Columbus's theory that the earth is round... [...]when the rest of the so called "Intelligent" people of the world said it was flat.
LOL! You still believe that nursery school myth?
NO intelligent person in Columbus's time thought the world was flat -- as it clearly is not to anyone sufficiently observant. Columbus's problem is that he wanted to go to Asia via a western route, and everyone intelligent knew that with a circumference of about 25,000 miles, Eratosthenes having calculated it about 240 BC (as others had since). Hence they "knew" that with the sailing technology of the day, there was no way Columbus could make the voyage.
They were right, too. Had the Americas not been in his way, his expedition would have perished before he got as far as the longitude of Hawaii.
There is some evidence that Columbus may in fact have known that there was some land mass to the west considerably before Asia (the Vikings certainly did, and it is quite possible that fishermen who went as far as the Grand Banks were also aware). Whether from that he decided that Eratosthenes was wrong and the circumference was smaller (possibly influenced by Ptolemy's maps (from Geographica) which underestimated the circumference at about 18,000 miles), or whether he was just arguing that way to get backing for an expedition (with the secret purpose of discovering and exploiting just whatever land mass was there), we have no way of knowing.
That mistake alone discredits the rest of your post as to make it not even worth reading.
On Lost, the only survivor in the front section of the plane was the pilot, and that was just long enough to be dismembered by whatever-it-was (oh, and to pass along an important plot point about too far off course to be found by searchers). Most of the survivors were from the midsection.
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Hey, if you assume "Mr. Fusion" power supplies, flying cars are easy, even without the anti-grav technology implied in the movie.
It's all a question of power/weight ratios, which is why nobody had any success with ordinary heavier than air flight until the internal combustion engine came along; steam engines just won't cut it. Hook up a Mr. Fusion to some high power electric motors (it's the battery weight that kills you for electric powered flight) and away you go.
Noisy, though. (Without antigrav or wings, the only way to lift a flying car is by moving large volumes of air. If you restrict the cross sectional area of that column of air (ie, no helicopter-like large rotor blades), the air has to be moving fast. Fast moving air == noise.)
That wasn't true even in 1991, except maybe for Intel processors which are notoriously wasteful of clock cycles (which is why they have always advertised clock speed rather than instructions per second). A 1 MHz MOS 6502 was just as fast as a 4.7 MHz Intel 8080 (and needed fewer support chips).
If you throw more transistors at the problem, and/or different architectures, you can complete instructions in a single cycle. (Especially e.g. register-to-register instructions where the answer comes out of the inputs at the speed of propagation delay through the gates.) If you do it right, you can even design clockless CPUs where the completion of the previous instruction triggers the start of the next one without waiting on an external clock.
This assumes your CPU is not microprogrammed; the instruction words contain the relevant bitmasks for source and destination registers as well as the control code for the ALU. See for example the PDP-11 instruction set (IIRC).
Of course as others have pointed out, modern processors pipeline multiple instructions at different stages of execution at the same time, for a net throughput of multiple instructions per cycle.
I don't know about "Heroes", but some cable-channel stuff just isn't available over the air, or at least not until years later when it goes into syndication (eg Stargate).
In which case the alternative is to buy the end of season DVD set, which is what I do. (Gave up on cable and satellite years ago, and have little patience for OTA programming with its ads and watermarks.)
For that matter my local library has the sets for some of the shows, which is great for getting a taste for them to see if they're worth buying. I think I'm at about #18 on the hold list for "Eureka" right now.
Check out Michael Crichton's latest, "Next", for such a set up scenario with a (well paid) female setting a guy up for an underage rape charge, complete with DNA evidence. Mind, the guy has to be a bit of sleaze in the first place to be set up that way -- as with most set ups and cons -- but he gets hit for a lot worse than what he thought he did.
Very true.
And yet there are always people willing to pay the Dane-geld, otherwise patent trolls (and protection rackets in general) wouldn't exist.
Depends. What's the risk factor involved? And how's your cashflow? Can you afford to pay your attorneys plus legal fees for the year or more that the lawsuit drags out? What if the troll gets an injunction against you selling your product that they say violates their patent? How are you going to pay the bills then?
Going to trial is always a crapshoot even if you're 100% sure that you have a solid case. Nasty surprises happen (jury goofs up, judge makes a bad decision -- can your cashflow survive the appeal process? -- etc).
Not that fighting patent trolls isn't a noble cause; I wish more people would do it. But plenty of people see discretion as the better part of valor. (As witness the amount of crap people submit to before boarding a plane these days.)
Probably. But if you're a (smallish) business owner, do you want to go that route and spend time and money tied up in court proceedings or just pay the man a few bucks to go bother somebody else?
And in response to another poster, than only marks you as an easy touch if the details get out. The patent troll sure isn't motivated to let others know what you settled for, and both of you would have an interest in plastering the settlement with NDAs.
Its one reason that patent (etc) trolls usually go after smaller businesses first. That was one of the odd things about the Caldera-SCO case: they went after IBM first, undoubtedly expecting to just be bought out altogether rather than actually have to through with it.
Who the hell would settle something like this with such a well established history of "prior art"?
Someone who, when they appeared ready to fight it, was offered a settlement and patent license for a very nominal sum. Easier and cheaper to pay even a few hundred bucks and walk away than pay for lawyers and months of a lawsuit.
I don't think that's true for most of them any more than you do (unless you're stupider than you look).
I doubt most ODF "advocates" would have any problem with another ISO open document format standard that made technical sense. MSOXML of course doesn't make technical sense: it is self contradictory, contradicts a number of pre-existing ISO standards (1900 as a leap year, anyone?), and is insufficiently specified to implement properly ( SpaceLikeWord95 tags?).
It's like complaining about a dog turd on the sidewalk and being accused of not liking dogs. No. Like "OO"XML, the complaint is because it's shit, not because of where it came from. (Except perhaps for a few folks.)
There's plenty of arsenic in coal ash. Probably orders of magnitude more than goes into making solar cells, but I'll admit to not having done the math.
Grown-ups are sneakier than we give them credit for sometimes :)
Surprisingly, most grown ups were kids themselves once. Often as not it's remembering some of the things they did themselves as kids that scares the willies out of parents. And as a parent myself, I have to wonder how much of what I thought I got away with as a kid was just my parents choosing to turn a blind eye to it.
64-bit support for Win32? What an odd concept.
Wine runs fine on my 64-bit Linux system as a 32-bit binary (AMD64). I haven't tried it, but now that you've got my curiosity up, I may try it on an IA-64 (Itanium) too, which also happily handles x86 32 bit apps in emulation.
Sure, these days Windows allegedly supports 64-bit platforms. Any idea how much of that is really running in 64 bit native mode vs 32 bit mode? (I have no idea, but I do recall the Win95 days when an allegedly 32-bit OS turned out to do an awful lot of thunking to 16 bits.)
I think it would be pointless to push such a product because it is simply not ready yet. Users would also have higher expectations of the product than what should be realistic
You missed it. Think about it, this is a Windows (non-)emulator. Releasing a not quite ready for primetime version as 1.0 (or even 2.0) fits perfectly with providing the whole Windows experience.
The VPN client I use to get into work will immediately break the connection if you try that.
It also drops it if you try to PPTP tunnel through it. (Heck, sometimes it annoyingly drops for no particular reason at all, especially if I'm doing wireless with a less than 100% signal).
To get to the VLAN which lets me connect to the RILOs (through which I can remotely power off servers, among other things), I VPN to the corporate network, ssh to a dedicated security server, ssh from there to another server which guards the subnets for the servers I manage (on private IPs), and from there to one of the servers in that subnet which can actually talk to the VLAN the RILOs are connected to.
So, yeah, I can power them off and on remotely from the internet, but it's not exactly easy. And if I don't have my SecureKey (and its password) I don't even get past the first step.
Mind, my favorite way of describing the whole Viking experiment situation is:
"Wail, wail, wail. Evanescent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", set disk wicket woof.
Satellite radio has about 50Mhz of the S band for 150 channels of content. FM radio has about a 5th of the channels in about 5 times the spectrum
Funny, my FM radio only goes from about 88 MHz to 108 MHz, a total of 20 MHz of spectrum. Did I get gypped out of 230 MHz somewhere in there, or are you blowing smoke?
The "HD" Digital Radio folks keep running ads telling me that there other stations hidden in there somewhere too, but I'm happy enough with the three or four stations I listen to already, so why should I care? But it sounds like they're already doing what you seem to be saying they ought to, and have been for a while.
I think the "new discovery" part is the "without supernova remnant". Aren't most pulsars embedded in their supernova remnants?
May be an age thing. If the object is young enough that the remnant is still nearby and visible, it's young enough that it hasn't yet shed a lot of energy through its pulsar (etc) emissions, and vice versa. An old neutron star whose remnant nebula is long gone is likely to be a slow, feeble pulsar at best.
The scene in "2001" was adapted from an earlier Arthur C. Clarke short story, "Take A Deep Breath".
By the time of the movie, Clarke was aware of Air Force research in high altitude chambers that people could indeed survive brief periods of vacuum exposure (although unconciousness results after 15-30 seconds from oxygen starvation, so you'd better have help or get pressurization underway by that time). However, as a SCUBA diver, Clarke would also have known that holding your breath during a sudden decompression (as Dave did in the movie) is a virtual guarantee to get a lung embolism or worse. Dave should have been exhaling when he blew the hatch, it's not like you can hold your breath against a pressure differential of even 3 PSI (if the pod was pressurized with pure O2) let alone 14.7 psi (air).
True, he was the first human to make the trip around the planet, but it was more accidental, and as you say with a long break in between.
Elcano was crew, and captain for a good part of the voyage -- he was actually doing the navigation part of the circumnavigation. Enriquez was just along for the ride (in terms of navigation or sailing duties, at least).
BTW, even though Columbus "discovered" the Americas, it was Juan Sebastian Elcano who proved the world was round by sailing westward (modulo a few detours) until he returned to Spain. Yeah, everyone says it was Magellan, but Magellan died on the expedition in the Philippines, it was Elcano who assumed command at that point and finished the circumnavigation (along with a dozen or so shipmates).
You forgot to mention Christopher Columbus's theory that the earth is round... [...]when the rest of the so called "Intelligent" people of the world said it was flat.
LOL! You still believe that nursery school myth?
NO intelligent person in Columbus's time thought the world was flat -- as it clearly is not to anyone sufficiently observant. Columbus's problem is that he wanted to go to Asia via a western route, and everyone intelligent knew that with a circumference of about 25,000 miles, Eratosthenes having calculated it about 240 BC (as others had since). Hence they "knew" that with the sailing technology of the day, there was no way Columbus could make the voyage.
They were right, too. Had the Americas not been in his way, his expedition would have perished before he got as far as the longitude of Hawaii.
There is some evidence that Columbus may in fact have known that there was some land mass to the west considerably before Asia (the Vikings certainly did, and it is quite possible that fishermen who went as far as the Grand Banks were also aware). Whether from that he decided that Eratosthenes was wrong and the circumference was smaller (possibly influenced by Ptolemy's maps (from Geographica) which underestimated the circumference at about 18,000 miles), or whether he was just arguing that way to get backing for an expedition (with the secret purpose of discovering and exploiting just whatever land mass was there), we have no way of knowing.
That mistake alone discredits the rest of your post as to make it not even worth reading.
No it's not, it's for "Try", as in "Nice Try".
Ah, you blew it right at the end. It's SCUBA apparatus. The other gear is stuff like mask, fins, etc.
Be thankful I couldn't locate you with my RADAR ranging device, you might have been zapped with LASER radiation.
Otherwise, well done.
Only the front seats for me!
On Lost, the only survivor in the front section of the plane was the pilot, and that was just long enough to be dismembered by whatever-it-was (oh, and to pass along an important plot point about too far off course to be found by searchers). Most of the survivors were from the midsection.