To make a wild guess, I'd speculate perhaps it would be measured in micrometers or nanometers.
I'd suggest you rethink your scales. The total mass involved in a LHC shot is less than you're average grain of sand. You're not dealing with anything on the nanometer scale - your down into sub-angstrom range.
Ah, yeah that probably does change things somewhat. I'll amend my thought experiment to account for this.
As an additional note, your understanding of gravimetric motion leaves a lot to be desired. An object falling into the center of the earth won't sit there, it will act like a ball on a rubber band - bouncing back & forth through the center point as kinetic energy is transfered back & forth to potential energy.
Well, true; I was omitting this for simplicity. But I also figured that the very slight mass of the singularity would result in it bouncing around a lot less, as it would not carry with it a great deal of inertia, and its much greater density than the surrounding medium would tend to dampen its upward rebound.
Except that the interaction cross-section of something like this is so low that the density of the core of the earth might as well be zero. Even were it to fall into the center of the Earth and were it to have an infinite lifetime, it would fall there without colliding with anything and remain there for billions of years, still without interacting.
Something that dense and that tiny will fall to the center of the earth at near-freefall speeds, and nothing would be able to stop it.
If the hole were to fall down to the center of Earth's mass the way I describe, it would have picked up some mass as it descended, due to the "snowball effect", but it would not be a terribly large amount relative to Earth's overall mass. So its event horizon would still be considerably tinier than 9mm.
If we can estimate how much mass the hole would pick up via the snowball effect, we can get a decent estimate of its Schwartzchild radius. To make a wild guess, I'd speculate perhaps it would be measured in micrometers or nanometers.
The Schwartzchild radius and gravitational mass of the hole is irrelevant if the hole sits at the bottom of a larger mass's gravity well, and all of that mass is pressing down into it.
It's true, but irrelevant that the Earth's core's density might as well be zero compared to the density of the microsingularity. The singularity's density is infinite; anything non-infinite might as well be zero in comparison. This does nothing to protect the earth, however.
However tiny the singularity is, any mass that crosses its event horizon adds to the mass of the hole, and increases its lifespan, and increases its gravitational strength, and increases its event horizon.
As the very center of the core falls into the hole, the material above will fall in to replace the void left by the compression of the material that just fell into the hole. It's not that the singularity's gravity well will be causing the earth to be eaten; it's that the earth's own mass will continue to press inward, where it will be eaten by the microsingularity, adding to it, and increasing its lifespan. The mass more falls into it, the more the surrounding outer mass will tend to collapse inward.
Interaction will accelerate, just as a falling body accelerates in Earth's gravity well, which is indeed what would be happening. The entire Earth would be falling into its own gravity well, disappearing behind the event horizon of the singularity at the center.
But, see here's the thing: the black hole may have very little mass, and therefore attract very little nearby matter.
However, it is also affected by the Earth's gravity.
The black hole will fall downward, like all objects that have mass, drawntoward the center of the earth.
Every bit of matter between the black hole and the center of the earth will fall into the black hole, adding to its mass like a snowball rolling down a hill.
When the black hole hits the bottom of Earth's gravity well, the pressure of all the material above it will press downard into it, putting more and more Earth material past the black hole's event horizon. With nothing to stop the inward falling mass of the planet's mass into the hole, the hole will swallow the entire planet...those calculations are apparently not as precisely calibrated as previously thought.
But, see here's the thing: the black hole may have very little mass, and therefore attract very little nearby matter.
However, it is also affected by the Earth's gravity.
The black hole will fall downward, like all objects that have mass, drawntoward the center of the earth.
Every bit of matter between the black hole and the center of the earth will fall into the black hole, adding to its mass like a snowball rolling down a hill.
When the black hole hits the bottom of Earth's gravity well, the pressure of all the material above it will press downard into it, putting more and more Earth material past the black hole's event horizon. With nothing to stop the inward falling mass of the planet's mass into the hole, the hole will swallow the entire planet.
The only way this won't happen is if the hole "evaporates" due to Hawking radiation more quickly than it can accrete mass, and loses sufficient mass such that it stops having an event horizon, eg ceases to be a black hole.
Fortunately, calculations predict that very light holes would lose mass due to Hawking radiation very quickly. However, those calculations are apparently not as precisely calibrated as previously thought.
I don't care if Firefox uses a lot of memory. It's an application. I want my applications to use memory, as much as they need. I'm not complaining about memory usage with regard to apps; just pointing out that that is how much it uses, and therefore that's at least how much I'd like to have left over when the OS is done allocating memory for its processes.
Again, my point is that Windows XP -- JUST THE OS -- has gone from using 256MB (which if I want to tweak I could strip down to around 160MB if I really wanted) to using around 512MB.
That, objectively, is bloat. Irrespective of anything to do with any apps.
BUT if I want to use an app that happens to like to use about 300MB of RAM when I use it the way I want to use it, I end up needing to recommend 1024MB of memory so as to avoid swapping. Systems I built in 2002, at which time I only saw a need to load with 512MB of RAM, are no longer adequate.
They *do* run pretty much OK if I upgrade them to 1GB of RAM, though. Not as fast as a present-day dual core build, of course, but reasonably well even on an Athlon XP 1800+ system, once I bump the memory up to 1GB or more.
As long as it's using that additional RAM efficiently and effectively, I'm all for the added functionality. If it could be delivered in a smaller RAM footprint, that'd be a win. We're simply very fortunate that as it turns out RAM prices keep getting cheaper.
My main point was that XP's memory usage has bloated over the years. 256 in 2001; 512+ in 2009.
Along with that, apps use more RAM.
I'm not even complaining about it. Hardware has kept up. Bloat is always best understood relative to hardware. Running XP on a system that was brand new in 2001, I wouldn't be too happy. On a Core 2 Duo or Quad box with 4GB of RAM, it's just fine. I'll take the added features, stability, and security too. I wish it didn't require as much bloat as it does, and I wonder why it does, but I'm not too worried about it given I can build a box today for under $500 that can run it acceptably well.
Windows 2000 is bloated for hardware that was 8 years old when Windows 2000 was released, too. In 1992, you could consider what, a 386 or 486 system to be current. You can't even get 2000 to run on something like that, I'd bet, without extensive hacking.
Back in the SP1 days, you could run XP acceptably on 256MB of RAM, and pretty decently on 512. Today, 512 feels cramped, and is the bare minimum I'd recommend for running SP3 and all the security patches.
1GB is a more reasonable minimum if you actually want to use apps. Firefox 3 is hungry enough that it'll use up 100-300MB if you have a lot of tabs open, so you really do need at *least* 1GB to run the OS plus just a web browser, which is really pretty minimal in terms of applications.
Of course, I can search for answers to questions using a search engine. It's not particularly effective though. It might be in this case, from what the other responder to my original post said, but that's not the point.
Probably better than 90% of the time when I try to search for "how do i..." or "I get [this] undesirable behavior..." I end up getting a lot of useless hits in the search results. Discussion boards where no one knows anything, everyone guesses, someone mentions that they fixed the problem, but doesn't bother putting up any details of what the fix is. "Professional" answer sites where you have to pay to see what the answer is. Some tantalizing hint that the problem I'm researching is actually the way people were doing it 8 years ago, and there's a better way to do things, and if you're lucky there's a name of a technology or new class of object, but little else.
All I know is that if that was the standard that I performed to when providing technical expertise to someone looking for help, my supervisor would lambast my lack of effort.
...and, admittedly, a pretty sucky one. I figured out html on my own and it's not the main thing I do at work, so I never learned how to do things "the right way", and neither did any of my co-workers, for the most part.
I do want to do things the right way, so I read articles like the one linked to in this story with interest. However, I get NOTHING out of them when they're written like this:
The whitehouse.gov site uses ASP.NET 2.0. The HTTP header that identifies the software says "X-Aspnet-Version: 2.0.50727". There is a way for this header to be removed, which saves about 30 bytes of bandwidth on every response. [Search for 'X-Aspnet-Version']
It's annoying to read someone going off about inefficient practices without telling you how to do it better.
"There is a way?" Nice. Thanks for sharing.
(Yes, the "[Search for 'X-Aspnet-Version']" is dead text, not a link to anything...)
It's like this with virtually every other tech problem I've ever tried to research... Zillions of pages of people complaining about a problem, suggesting fixes, or claiming that something they did fixed the problem, and very little in the way of actual, detailed information about the fix, how and why it worked, and what exactly the problem was that it solved.
A good way to transition without whining is to put the upgrade budget that would have gone to Microsoft for every employee's upgrade license into a special bonus check for each employee who uses the software. Do this the year you roll out OO.o, along with a cover letter explaining why.
The problem is that software doesn't even ship as "good enough" anymore. It's more like "it compiles, ship it".
I don't know, if you ask me, software is about a million times better than it used to be. I've never been a user of a mainframe system, and I understand they were coded to be a lot more reliable than desktop class microcomputers. But having started using computers in the early 80's as a small child, and seeing where we are now, there's just no comparison.
It used to be, computers were slow, crashed all the time, on the slightest problem, and encountered problems very frequently. Today, we have many of these same problems, but much less frequently and much less severe. An application crash no longer brings down the entire system. When it does crash, usually there is no data loss, and the application is able to recover most if not all of your recent progress, even if you didn't save. Crashes happen far less frequently, and the systems run faster than they used to, even with a great many more features and all the bloat we typically complain about.
Right, they want it. They want a job so they can make money so they won't starve.
Do they understand the risks and threats associated with that job? Based on how they perform the job, it would seem that they do not have a full understanding of what they have agreed to do.
For someone who does have such an understanding, what exactly would you say are our obligations? Apparently, you would appear to be taking the position that our only obligation is to give them money for doing the job, and that's it. I don't think that's sufficient. If we're paying someone to clean up our messes, we need to make sure that they can do the job properly, and that we provide them with information for how to protect their health and safety, and preserve their environment. Otherwise, we're not solving the problem, we're simply passing the buck.
"They want us to" is a total cop-out. Responsibility for dealing with toxic substances is not all in one court or the other, it is shared. If we do not recognize our obligations and hold ourselves accountable to meet them, then surely we will fail, and needless suffering and damage will be the result.
If they're generating millions from e-waste we throw away then why is it the wests fault that they are polluting themselves?
If they dealt with the waste in a responsible manner and took even basic precautions then they wouldn't be polluting their own villages.
Because, rather than deal with it responsibly ourselves, we've outsourced the problem to people apparently incapable or unwilling to deal with it responsibly. Recycling that involves toxic substances is a job that probably no one wants to do if they understand the personal risks involved, but someone has to do it so it falls to the ignorant and desperate.
Slashdot Mirror
...it looks like an older generation MacBook Pro with a sticker over its logo.
Yes, it is a MacBook. Techcrunch had a Story on this last week.
It's inconceivable to me out they could let something like that slip thru.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
How's that saying go... Fool me once, shame on you... Fool me... fool me twice... Aw fuck we did re-elect George W. Bush.
I'd suggest you rethink your scales. The total mass involved in a LHC shot is less than you're average grain of sand. You're not dealing with anything on the nanometer scale - your down into sub-angstrom range.
Ah, yeah that probably does change things somewhat. I'll amend my thought experiment to account for this.
As an additional note, your understanding of gravimetric motion leaves a lot to be desired. An object falling into the center of the earth won't sit there, it will act like a ball on a rubber band - bouncing back & forth through the center point as kinetic energy is transfered back & forth to potential energy.
Well, true; I was omitting this for simplicity. But I also figured that the very slight mass of the singularity would result in it bouncing around a lot less, as it would not carry with it a great deal of inertia, and its much greater density than the surrounding medium would tend to dampen its upward rebound.
Except that the interaction cross-section of something like this is so low that the density of the core of the earth might as well be zero. Even were it to fall into the center of the Earth and were it to have an infinite lifetime, it would fall there without colliding with anything and remain there for billions of years, still without interacting.
A solar-massed singularity would have a SC radius of 3km. The Schwarzchild radius (event horizon) for a black hole with the mass of the Earth has been calculated to be about 9mm. Therefore, any singularity created out of LHC experiments will be far tinier than 9mm, very likely microscopic in fact.
Something that dense and that tiny will fall to the center of the earth at near-freefall speeds, and nothing would be able to stop it.
If the hole were to fall down to the center of Earth's mass the way I describe, it would have picked up some mass as it descended, due to the "snowball effect", but it would not be a terribly large amount relative to Earth's overall mass. So its event horizon would still be considerably tinier than 9mm.
If we can estimate how much mass the hole would pick up via the snowball effect, we can get a decent estimate of its Schwartzchild radius. To make a wild guess, I'd speculate perhaps it would be measured in micrometers or nanometers.
The Schwartzchild radius and gravitational mass of the hole is irrelevant if the hole sits at the bottom of a larger mass's gravity well, and all of that mass is pressing down into it.
It's true, but irrelevant that the Earth's core's density might as well be zero compared to the density of the microsingularity. The singularity's density is infinite; anything non-infinite might as well be zero in comparison. This does nothing to protect the earth, however.
However tiny the singularity is, any mass that crosses its event horizon adds to the mass of the hole, and increases its lifespan, and increases its gravitational strength, and increases its event horizon.
As the very center of the core falls into the hole, the material above will fall in to replace the void left by the compression of the material that just fell into the hole. It's not that the singularity's gravity well will be causing the earth to be eaten; it's that the earth's own mass will continue to press inward, where it will be eaten by the microsingularity, adding to it, and increasing its lifespan. The mass more falls into it, the more the surrounding outer mass will tend to collapse inward.
Interaction will accelerate, just as a falling body accelerates in Earth's gravity well, which is indeed what would be happening. The entire Earth would be falling into its own gravity well, disappearing behind the event horizon of the singularity at the center.
But, see here's the thing: the black hole may have very little mass, and therefore attract very little nearby matter.
However, it is also affected by the Earth's gravity.
The black hole will fall downward, like all objects that have mass, drawntoward the center of the earth.
Every bit of matter between the black hole and the center of the earth will fall into the black hole, adding to its mass like a snowball rolling down a hill.
When the black hole hits the bottom of Earth's gravity well, the pressure of all the material above it will press downard into it, putting more and more Earth material past the black hole's event horizon. With nothing to stop the inward falling mass of the planet's mass into the hole, the hole will swallow the entire planet...those calculations are apparently not as precisely calibrated as previously thought.
No.
Lord Vader, is that you?
But, see here's the thing: the black hole may have very little mass, and therefore attract very little nearby matter.
However, it is also affected by the Earth's gravity.
The black hole will fall downward, like all objects that have mass, drawntoward the center of the earth.
Every bit of matter between the black hole and the center of the earth will fall into the black hole, adding to its mass like a snowball rolling down a hill.
When the black hole hits the bottom of Earth's gravity well, the pressure of all the material above it will press downard into it, putting more and more Earth material past the black hole's event horizon. With nothing to stop the inward falling mass of the planet's mass into the hole, the hole will swallow the entire planet.
The only way this won't happen is if the hole "evaporates" due to Hawking radiation more quickly than it can accrete mass, and loses sufficient mass such that it stops having an event horizon, eg ceases to be a black hole.
Fortunately, calculations predict that very light holes would lose mass due to Hawking radiation very quickly. However, those calculations are apparently not as precisely calibrated as previously thought.
Also, none of them is likely to be using the password "popcorn". They use the more secure p0pc0rn, instead.
XP memory footprint:
2001: ~215MB
2009: ~800MB
Verdict: XP has bloated since its initial release.
Side note: Also, apps have gotten bloaty in this same time.
Conclusion: Bloat affects apps as well as operating systems.
I don't care if Firefox uses a lot of memory. It's an application. I want my applications to use memory, as much as they need. I'm not complaining about memory usage with regard to apps; just pointing out that that is how much it uses, and therefore that's at least how much I'd like to have left over when the OS is done allocating memory for its processes.
Again, my point is that Windows XP -- JUST THE OS -- has gone from using 256MB (which if I want to tweak I could strip down to around 160MB if I really wanted) to using around 512MB.
That, objectively, is bloat. Irrespective of anything to do with any apps.
BUT if I want to use an app that happens to like to use about 300MB of RAM when I use it the way I want to use it, I end up needing to recommend 1024MB of memory so as to avoid swapping. Systems I built in 2002, at which time I only saw a need to load with 512MB of RAM, are no longer adequate.
They *do* run pretty much OK if I upgrade them to 1GB of RAM, though. Not as fast as a present-day dual core build, of course, but reasonably well even on an Athlon XP 1800+ system, once I bump the memory up to 1GB or more.
As long as it's using that additional RAM efficiently and effectively, I'm all for the added functionality. If it could be delivered in a smaller RAM footprint, that'd be a win. We're simply very fortunate that as it turns out RAM prices keep getting cheaper.
My main point was that XP's memory usage has bloated over the years. 256 in 2001; 512+ in 2009.
Along with that, apps use more RAM.
I'm not even complaining about it. Hardware has kept up. Bloat is always best understood relative to hardware. Running XP on a system that was brand new in 2001, I wouldn't be too happy. On a Core 2 Duo or Quad box with 4GB of RAM, it's just fine. I'll take the added features, stability, and security too. I wish it didn't require as much bloat as it does, and I wonder why it does, but I'm not too worried about it given I can build a box today for under $500 that can run it acceptably well.
Windows 2000 is bloated for hardware that was 8 years old when Windows 2000 was released, too. In 1992, you could consider what, a 386 or 486 system to be current. You can't even get 2000 to run on something like that, I'd bet, without extensive hacking.
XP *has* gotten pretty bloated.
Back in the SP1 days, you could run XP acceptably on 256MB of RAM, and pretty decently on 512. Today, 512 feels cramped, and is the bare minimum I'd recommend for running SP3 and all the security patches.
1GB is a more reasonable minimum if you actually want to use apps. Firefox 3 is hungry enough that it'll use up 100-300MB if you have a lot of tabs open, so you really do need at *least* 1GB to run the OS plus just a web browser, which is really pretty minimal in terms of applications.
Of course, I can search for answers to questions using a search engine. It's not particularly effective though. It might be in this case, from what the other responder to my original post said, but that's not the point.
Probably better than 90% of the time when I try to search for "how do i..." or "I get [this] undesirable behavior..." I end up getting a lot of useless hits in the search results. Discussion boards where no one knows anything, everyone guesses, someone mentions that they fixed the problem, but doesn't bother putting up any details of what the fix is. "Professional" answer sites where you have to pay to see what the answer is. Some tantalizing hint that the problem I'm researching is actually the way people were doing it 8 years ago, and there's a better way to do things, and if you're lucky there's a name of a technology or new class of object, but little else.
All I know is that if that was the standard that I performed to when providing technical expertise to someone looking for help, my supervisor would lambast my lack of effort.
...and, admittedly, a pretty sucky one. I figured out html on my own and it's not the main thing I do at work, so I never learned how to do things "the right way", and neither did any of my co-workers, for the most part.
I do want to do things the right way, so I read articles like the one linked to in this story with interest. However, I get NOTHING out of them when they're written like this:
It's annoying to read someone going off about inefficient practices without telling you how to do it better.
"There is a way?" Nice. Thanks for sharing.
(Yes, the "[Search for 'X-Aspnet-Version']" is dead text, not a link to anything...)
It's like this with virtually every other tech problem I've ever tried to research... Zillions of pages of people complaining about a problem, suggesting fixes, or claiming that something they did fixed the problem, and very little in the way of actual, detailed information about the fix, how and why it worked, and what exactly the problem was that it solved.
A good way to transition without whining is to put the upgrade budget that would have gone to Microsoft for every employee's upgrade license into a special bonus check for each employee who uses the software. Do this the year you roll out OO.o, along with a cover letter explaining why.
There are many good reasons to criticise Virgin, but they don't fuck around
Well, to be perfectly honest, that's always been my number one criticism of Virgin.
Steve's younger brother, Raul, has taken over day to day operations.
Seriously, can anyone tell me ANYTHING whatsoever that the 4th amendment does now?
I can; It's still very handy as a doily.
What's a "tortoise"?
Er... this may seem like a stupid question, but what did they actually improve -- if not the things people were complaining about?
Windows 7 Beta: Now with more hookers.*
*Hookers available for tech journalists and reviewers only.
Wait six years, and when Windows 7 is actually released, the specs of netbook-class PCs will be high enough to run it:0
"Joining the military may be hazardous to your health."
"Progress is the opposite of Congress."
"Paying your taxes subsidizes stupidity."
"Voting is an endorsement of the status quo."
The problem is that software doesn't even ship as "good enough" anymore. It's more like "it compiles, ship it".
I don't know, if you ask me, software is about a million times better than it used to be. I've never been a user of a mainframe system, and I understand they were coded to be a lot more reliable than desktop class microcomputers. But having started using computers in the early 80's as a small child, and seeing where we are now, there's just no comparison.
It used to be, computers were slow, crashed all the time, on the slightest problem, and encountered problems very frequently. Today, we have many of these same problems, but much less frequently and much less severe. An application crash no longer brings down the entire system. When it does crash, usually there is no data loss, and the application is able to recover most if not all of your recent progress, even if you didn't save. Crashes happen far less frequently, and the systems run faster than they used to, even with a great many more features and all the bloat we typically complain about.
Right, they want it. They want a job so they can make money so they won't starve.
Do they understand the risks and threats associated with that job? Based on how they perform the job, it would seem that they do not have a full understanding of what they have agreed to do.
For someone who does have such an understanding, what exactly would you say are our obligations? Apparently, you would appear to be taking the position that our only obligation is to give them money for doing the job, and that's it. I don't think that's sufficient. If we're paying someone to clean up our messes, we need to make sure that they can do the job properly, and that we provide them with information for how to protect their health and safety, and preserve their environment. Otherwise, we're not solving the problem, we're simply passing the buck.
"They want us to" is a total cop-out. Responsibility for dealing with toxic substances is not all in one court or the other, it is shared. If we do not recognize our obligations and hold ourselves accountable to meet them, then surely we will fail, and needless suffering and damage will be the result.
If they're generating millions from e-waste we throw away then why is it the wests fault that they are polluting themselves?
If they dealt with the waste in a responsible manner and took even basic precautions then they wouldn't be polluting their own villages.
Because, rather than deal with it responsibly ourselves, we've outsourced the problem to people apparently incapable or unwilling to deal with it responsibly. Recycling that involves toxic substances is a job that probably no one wants to do if they understand the personal risks involved, but someone has to do it so it falls to the ignorant and desperate.