Of course, ITER should be located near JET to leverage all the existing nuclear fusion expertise... That way, fusion experts don't have to waste time travelling around the world and the money can be better spent on actually building a fully functional and profitable fusion power plant. It would also be best as they can still quickly use JET as a prototyping tool when fine-tuning the design of ITER.
Once the first one has been built, then they can argue about where to build the 2nd... 3rd... 4th etc.
footnote: AFAIK, JET (Joint European Torus) is the only reactor to achieve fusion. However, it was deliberately built too small to be useful as a power source. It is a 'technology trial'.
Of course IBM has a few nice cards in their hand...
During the 1990s, IBM and MSFT made a deal where MSFT let IBM use their patents on HPFS and in exchange, IBM would let MSFT use their patents on OLE...
Yes, OLE/COM/DCOM/.NET is based upon IP owned by IBM!
And because of MSFT's effective killing of OS/2, does IBM really need to relicense HPFS?
So, if MSFT were to annoy IBM too much, IBM can deliver many levels of pain to MSFT - think product recall/withdrawal of the entire Windows franchise or perhaps even a $699/seat royalty?
In a snakepit, it is oh so difficult to make friends...
You're forgetting the biggest drawback of the Bussard Ramjet... That is the gas collection.
The gas collection mechanism will create such resistance at high velocities that it would jam up and slow the device down a lot.
I believe that there has been some research done which suggest that it would never be able to obtain velocities exceeding 0.1c let alone 'relativistic velocities'.
I think we are more or less stuck on this island Earth, until we can think of something better than Newtonian physics to traverse the gap between the stars... Some revolution akin to Gene Roddenberry's Warp drive or Iain Banks's Exotic Matter drive - something which doesn't require a reaction mass.
OT: Early STTOS was fun - somehow the warp drive sound effects always sound like the London Underground trains...
Working in an office is great fun, especially when you go round to all the PCs in the evening when everyone had left and remove all the postit notes from under the keyboard, on the monitor or in the top desk drawer...
Biometrics are best used as an alternative to the username - but passwords are best remembered by the user.
Many reasonably good security systems go by the principle of "Something you have and something you know". In the case of ATMs, the bank card is the "something you have" with the PIN as the "something you know".
The bank card can just as easily be replaced with biometrics - but the PIN would still be necessary.
My memory is a bit faded on this - didn't Arnie in "Total Recall" press his thumb on a device and hit a keypad to donate money to a street beggar?
Years ago, there was a 486DX100 laptop manufactured by CLEVO. Ideal for working on the move and I distinctly remember testing the battery life by plaing a CD, doing a disk check on infinite loop and playing a video clip all simultainously with the backlight full on... and it lasted about 7 hours. It had a nice trackball integrated in its case which IMO is better than these touchpads we have today - ok, it would be lousy for anyone left-handed but it was good because it was above the keyboard, not below, so there was no accidential touching of it and with the buttons on the side of the case, it was quite comfortable to use.
Nearly a third of the base size was occupied by the huge NiCad battery pack.
I wouldn't mind having that machine again - you can get serious amounts of work done on a trans-Atlantic 11-hour crossing.
With a 140" screen, all those PHBs who set their screen res at 640x480 may be able to upgrade to 800x600.. or maybe even 1024x768 without straining their eyes too much...
While satellites may exist in a highly ionizing environment, I think it is inappropiate to call it radioactive.
It would also be useful for interplanetry probes - I would wager that a lot of mass can be removed if the hardware was more resilient. (Although, the support callout would be prohibitly expensive)
Didn't the old Pioneer/Voyager probes have processors built with transistors in such a way that they can degrade gracefully? I seem to recall reading that the engineers did some wonderful reprogramming hacks from afar to keep them operational.
I still have an Aureal sound card. They were ahead of Creative with official support for Linux...
But there again, since when does the best technology survive? In the PC industry, it's whomever can leverage their product and supply line best to get it out there... The quality or elegance is more or less completely irrelevant.
Annoying lack of verbal skills...
on
Are You Annoying?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I personally think that the most annoying thing about some people in IT is their total absence of verbal skills.
For instance, in a previous company where I worked, some of the IT employees could only communicate to other people in the same office via HotMail Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger or some other instant messaging tool. *EVEN* when the person they are talking to is sitting less than a yard away.
And when you try to talk to such people using normal vocal means, they would give you a blank stare, a long pause where they attempt to remember how to talk and eventually they may find it within themselves to say "Umm... can you IM email instead?"
If a camera manufacturer were to do this in a *secure* manner, it would be quite expensive. The 'signing' silicon would have to be on the same silicon as the CCD element otherwise it would be vulnerable to a simple attack where someone feeds the already doctored image in by (for example) creating a FPGA which looks like the CCD element and interfaces to some data source.
But I was thinking... What would prevent against a 'old-fashioned' fakery? Imagine getting a good high-resolution image of Bin Laden and Bush Jr, making full-sized cardboard cutouts of them, setting them in a set with furniture etc and then taking a picture of that - if the lighting is done correctly it would look good and it would have no artifacts from any image manipulation.
I set up a firewall at a medium-sized company and the only machine which was allowed to connect to some remote machine on port 25 was the mail server. In a similar vein, the transparent proxy was deliberately set up to break LookOut Express HotMail over HTTP.
Simple things like that, default to deny for both inbound and outbound, virus checking on the mail server: they all greatly reduce the risk of these Windows plagues.
And I thought it was all pretty much standard practice.
I personally think that individuals should take more responsibility for their equipment. It's not really the ISP's business to put in firewalls - perhaps if the users were to pay for the additional service, then the ISP can provide... The individual can always put in a firewall themselves which would only allow port 25 connection to their ISP's mailserver.
Perhaps - a "manditory" additional fee for a firewall for those who do not have an operational firewall?
I had thought that Disney was using compressed air to launch their fireworks for many years already... And IIRC, the fireworks have tiny PICs on them so that they can be programmed just before launch, the launchers are not fixed and may be directed electronically - the combination of a precision launch at a precise speed and direction combined with a firework which detonated at a precise time after launch meant that they are able to repeat their firework displays again and again...
Probably the "news" is about Disney Corp making their patents royalty free...
Maybe he's discovered that a wife or serious girlfriend is quite expensive to maintain and has decided to sell off the heirloom investment in order to pay for wife's shopping habits (clothes, jewellery, etc)
Thankfully, my dear sweet wife doesn't read SlashDot:D
Slashdot Mirror
Of all the people surprised at IBM's strategy and foresight....
Remember -- IBM is very good at playing Chess.
It's been a long time since I have read a posting which has made me laugh out loud!
Kudos to the poster
Of course, ITER should be located near JET to leverage all the existing nuclear fusion expertise... That way, fusion experts don't have to waste time travelling around the world and the money can be better spent on actually building a fully functional and profitable fusion power plant. It would also be best as they can still quickly use JET as a prototyping tool when fine-tuning the design of ITER.
Once the first one has been built, then they can argue about where to build the 2nd... 3rd... 4th etc.
footnote: AFAIK, JET (Joint European Torus) is the only reactor to achieve fusion. However, it was deliberately built too small to be useful as a power source. It is a 'technology trial'.
Why not limit it to only running 1 application at any time... that way users won't get confused at all
Except in England where it is only blue occasionally,
Microsoft wasn't ignoring Linux...
They were simply too busy dancing on OS/2's grave to notice.
Of course IBM has a few nice cards in their hand...
During the 1990s, IBM and MSFT made a deal where MSFT let IBM use their patents on HPFS and in exchange, IBM would let MSFT use their patents on OLE...
Yes, OLE/COM/DCOM/.NET is based upon IP owned by IBM!
And because of MSFT's effective killing of OS/2, does IBM really need to relicense HPFS?
So, if MSFT were to annoy IBM too much, IBM can deliver many levels of pain to MSFT - think product recall/withdrawal of the entire Windows franchise or perhaps even a $699/seat royalty?
In a snakepit, it is oh so difficult to make friends...
You're forgetting the biggest drawback of the Bussard Ramjet... That is the gas collection.
The gas collection mechanism will create such resistance at high velocities that it would jam up and slow the device down a lot.
I believe that there has been some research done which suggest that it would never be able to obtain velocities exceeding 0.1c let alone 'relativistic velocities'.
I think we are more or less stuck on this island Earth, until we can think of something better than Newtonian physics to traverse the gap between the stars... Some revolution akin to Gene Roddenberry's Warp drive or Iain Banks's Exotic Matter drive - something which doesn't require a reaction mass.
OT: Early STTOS was fun - somehow the warp drive sound effects always sound like the London Underground trains...
Working in an office is great fun, especially when you go round to all the PCs in the evening when everyone had left and remove all the postit notes from under the keyboard, on the monitor or in the top desk drawer...
Of course, they were all shredded.
Biometrics are best used as an alternative to the username - but passwords are best remembered by the user.
Many reasonably good security systems go by the principle of "Something you have and something you know". In the case of ATMs, the bank card is the "something you have" with the PIN as the "something you know".
The bank card can just as easily be replaced with biometrics - but the PIN would still be necessary.
My memory is a bit faded on this - didn't Arnie in "Total Recall" press his thumb on a device and hit a keypad to donate money to a street beggar?
How about a fake battery pack which is actually a couple of pounds of high-explosive?
Of course, it carries a risk to the legitimate user who forgets that the fake pack is connected...
Years ago, there was a 486DX100 laptop manufactured by CLEVO. Ideal for working on the move and I distinctly remember testing the battery life by plaing a CD, doing a disk check on infinite loop and playing a video clip all simultainously with the backlight full on... and it lasted about 7 hours. It had a nice trackball integrated in its case which IMO is better than these touchpads we have today - ok, it would be lousy for anyone left-handed but it was good because it was above the keyboard, not below, so there was no accidential touching of it and with the buttons on the side of the case, it was quite comfortable to use.
Nearly a third of the base size was occupied by the huge NiCad battery pack.
I wouldn't mind having that machine again - you can get serious amounts of work done on a trans-Atlantic 11-hour crossing.
*sighs*
With a 140" screen, all those PHBs who set their screen res at 640x480 may be able to upgrade to 800x600.. or maybe even 1024x768 without straining their eyes too much...
A hypothetical situation:
Install a transparent proxy on the LAN
Set up automated web usage stats page
Let the 'higher powers' have access to stats page.
Wait 6 months...
Listen for the sound that used shell casings make as they hit the carpet tiles...
Why do people have to think radioactive?
While satellites may exist in a highly ionizing environment, I think it is inappropiate to call it radioactive.
It would also be useful for interplanetry probes - I would wager that a lot of mass can be removed if the hardware was more resilient.
(Although, the support callout would be prohibitly expensive)
Didn't the old Pioneer/Voyager probes have processors built with transistors in such a way that they can degrade gracefully? I seem to recall reading that the engineers did some wonderful reprogramming hacks from afar to keep them operational.
Cool, then we can all install an Acorn BBC B ROM and happily be playing Chuckie Egg or Repton all evening!
If you want a lot of torque at 0 RPM, the only option is the good old fashioned steam locomotive.
Max torque when stationary
I still have an Aureal sound card. They were ahead of Creative with official support for Linux...
But there again, since when does the best technology survive? In the PC industry, it's whomever can leverage their product and supply line best to get it out there... The quality or elegance is more or less completely irrelevant.
I personally think that the most annoying thing about some people in IT is their total absence of verbal skills.
For instance, in a previous company where I worked, some of the IT employees could only communicate to other people in the same office via HotMail Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger or some other instant messaging tool. *EVEN* when the person they are talking to is sitting less than a yard away.
And when you try to talk to such people using normal vocal means, they would give you a blank stare, a long pause where they attempt to remember how to talk and eventually they may find it within themselves to say "Umm... can you IM email instead?"
Very frustrating!
If a camera manufacturer were to do this in a *secure* manner, it would be quite expensive. The 'signing' silicon would have to be on the same silicon as the CCD element otherwise it would be vulnerable to a simple attack where someone feeds the already doctored image in by (for example) creating a FPGA which looks like the CCD element and interfaces to some data source.
But I was thinking... What would prevent against a 'old-fashioned' fakery? Imagine getting a good high-resolution image of Bin Laden and Bush Jr, making full-sized cardboard cutouts of them, setting them in a set with furniture etc and then taking a picture of that - if the lighting is done correctly it would look good and it would have no artifacts from any image manipulation.
I set up a firewall at a medium-sized company and the only machine which was allowed to connect to some remote machine on port 25 was the mail server. In a similar vein, the transparent proxy was deliberately set up to break LookOut Express HotMail over HTTP.
Simple things like that, default to deny for both inbound and outbound, virus checking on the mail server: they all greatly reduce the risk of these Windows plagues.
And I thought it was all pretty much standard practice.
I personally think that individuals should take more responsibility for their equipment. It's not really the ISP's business to put in firewalls - perhaps if the users were to pay for the additional service, then the ISP can provide... The individual can always put in a firewall themselves which would only allow port 25 connection to their ISP's mailserver.
Perhaps - a "manditory" additional fee for a firewall for those who do not have an operational firewall?
Just thinking aloud....
Things like this must make Oscar Deutche spin in his grave.... His business was to entertain the whole nation, not just those with no disabilities.
Lets remember what ODEON stands for...
Oscar
Deutche
Entertains
Our
Nation
(Of course, I may have spelt his name wrong but this is SlashDot, who cares!)
I had thought that Disney was using compressed air to launch their fireworks for many years already... And IIRC, the fireworks have tiny PICs on them so that they can be programmed just before launch, the launchers are not fixed and may be directed electronically - the combination of a precision launch at a precise speed and direction combined with a firework which detonated at a precise time after launch meant that they are able to repeat their firework displays again and again...
Probably the "news" is about Disney Corp making their patents royalty free...
Maybe he's discovered that a wife or serious girlfriend is quite expensive to maintain and has decided to sell off the heirloom investment in order to pay for wife's shopping habits (clothes, jewellery, etc)
:D
Thankfully, my dear sweet wife doesn't read SlashDot
Thats a great idea... IBM can successfully claim that they are sending it to SCO electronically too