The microwave beams from military radar on ships regularly cause sea gulls to explode. A megawatt beam will do in a bird pretty quickly. Power generation plants put out 100's of megawatts.
Microwave ovens work by heating water molecules. Broadcasting anything that heats water has a very high loss rate when it is humid. This is the reason satellite TV can die when it rains.
One possible use is in the desert to an isolated community. Perhaps it would also be possible to beam electricity to people on a mountain top. Very limited use technology.
Then there was Tesla's problem when he proposed to beam power to people 100 years ago: how do you get people to pay for the power they use?
Farnsworth's fusor patent (US patent number 3,258,402) describes a much more elaborate tube which works much better than the Hirsch variant.
Evidently the problem with the better design is that once the fusion threshold was reached the temperature of the fusion plasma rose high enough to keep the ion injectors from being able to add new fuel to the plasma.
Farnsworth's better tube creates an almost ideal plasma:
Low electron temperature
High Ion temperature
High plasma density
Stable plasma (no magnetics involved).
As far as I know nobody has rebuilt the more complex fusor tube to try improving on the Farnsworth design. That design was brilliant. It is not obvious how the tube works until you realize that the virtual electrode produced by the electron cloud at the center of the tube is partially canceled by the ions injected into the center - which allows more electrons to concentrate in the virtual electrode - which allows more ions - etc. This allows a very dense plasma to be generated.
The truth is Farnsworth created more fusion in his desktop experiments than any of the giant, big money, fusion experiments since.
Actually modularity is a sign of very clear thinking and planning. The fact that modularity encourages clear thinking is part of the reason that subroutines are supposed to address only one topic.
Thanks for demonstrating the Sgt. Shultz response: "You zee nothzing".
It is indeed fortunate that a black hole protects us from the release of unbounded amounts of energy in a stellar collapse to a singularity. Since otherwise the first one to occur would destroy the rest of the universe.
One of the finite values that the collapsing mass produces is a value for energy which is greater than the E = mc^2 of the mass of the rest of the universe combined. It is a bit difficult to believe that the initial large gas cloud that the star was formed from had that much positive potential energy in it isn't it?
Just continue seeing nothzing, and everything will be O.K. Don't bother to think about anything - never check to see if maybe there are problems with physics. Just believe in the status quo. Everybody knows that our scientific theories are complete and perfekt in every way.
Oh, by the way, please remember this little conversational post in the future. Life might just have a surprise waiting in your personal box of cracker jacks.
See the November 2002 edition of Scientific American page 40 where anyone doing over unity research is dismissed without examination of claims as a fraud.
This is exactly an example of the problem I mentioned in my first post. Because of pressure from physicists you can not be granted a patent on a perpetual motion machine.
What proof of perpetual motion would physicists accept?
The answer to that question is this: none.
If someone were to build a working perpetual motion machine the response of physicists would be "That is impossible so he must be running a fraud of some type. We don't know what the fraud is but we know it is impossible."
Physics is the study of the real and the possible. It is not the study of the unreal and the impossible. Because of this when ever a physicist says "That is impossible." He is talking about a subject he has never studied, and about which he quit literally knows nothing.
I know that mocking people is considered great sport in today's society, and that physicists have been mocking inventors on this subject for at least 150 years; but there is great risk in doing so. If anyone should ever succeed - all of that 150 years of mockery would be paid back with interest.
Taken to its essence the law of conservation of energy says "To an infinite number of decimal places the sum total of the mass and energy in the universe is a constant value." I don't know of any other law of physics that everyone accepts to an infinite number of decimal places without question. In other words: the law of conservation of mass - energy is a statement of physical perfection. We all know that we live in a perfect - flawless universe.
Instead of mocking inventors - physicists would do well to spend their time trying to find out if there are any bugs in the algorithms nature uses to calculate energy.
One place that bugs appear in algorithms is at singularities. For example: The laws of physics predict that when a star collapses to a singularity during the formation of a black hole that an infinite amount of energy is released. Is this a problem?
Here is the physicist's response to that question: "Everybody move along, nothing to see at this train wreck.", "La La La I can't hear you.", and off in the background I think I hear Sgt Schultz: "I zee nothzing!"
If I were a physicist I would be very careful who I was mocking; pay back is a real bitch.
Somebody ought to ask Dvorak if he is running a Chang modification on his PC.
For those who don't know the story, back in the days of the 286, a Taiwanese company claimed to be able to run 286's much faster than anyone else, it was called a "Chang modification". Dvorak touted it as a breakthrough technology. Of course anyone who understood technology realized the claim was ridiculous. It turned out all Chang was doing was reprogramming the timer chip so that it didn't keep time correctly - thus making benchmarks look more impressive.
In other words Dvorak's technical knowledge level is absurdly low. The man has great contempt for anyone who does have technical knowledge; he thinks we are inferior 'droids' to be ruled by assholes like him. He truly is the prototype of Dilbert's abysmally ignorant Pointy Haired Boss.
Dvorak really is dumb enough to think that Apple would change to Intel; the change from the 68000 to the Power PC almost destroyed Apple. Switching processor architecture destroys your software base - you have to run in place for years just to get back to where you were. That is the reason that Apple was in so much trouble after the processor change. Another change would be suicide.
And yes, I know that things are written in C these days, and we all know C is 'portable' so the change over 'running in place' period might only be 6 months to a year today. But 6 months to a year of additional progress lost by Apple would pretty much be the last nail in the coffin. Such a change would expose them to the ruthless pricing levels of the PC industry which Apple could never survive.
A patent is a license to sue with the burden of proof on the defendant.
Justice costs money, I'll bet the open source developers can't afford as much as Microsoft can.
Software patents are the absurd invention of one person who pushed for them as a legislator then ruled on their validity later as a judge. A clearer case of conflict of interest has never existed in a court room, but he got away with it to our great detriment.
The most important thing we as programmers can do is fund a lobbying effort in Washington to restore the law back to the traditional pre software patent status.
Sorry, you are dead wrong. Muscle mass comes when the insertion and attachment of the tendons at the ends of muscles are put under stress. It has NOTHING to do with working the muscle against stress by lifting weights. It is possible to grow muscle mass just by massaging the tendons at the ends of muscles, this is sometimes done with bed - ridden patients.
People like Mr. Benson have a very easy job; kicking someone when they are down. Cheap shots are called cheap shots for a reason. They don't take much of an expenditure of energy or require very much courage to deliver.
Why do people behave that way? Because they have learned that it gets them attention; like farting in a class room while the teacher is trying to explain something.
Mr. Benson can't design a space shuttle, but he feels competent to criticize those who do. If you do anything productive, a critic can always point to another way of doing it. Any technology - no matter how poor it is - has some good points to it, and any technology - no matter how good it is has some poor qualities. Critics can always point to the good qualities of a crappy design while focusing on the poor qualities of your good design. It is a cheap trick, pay no attention.
Is the shuttle dangerous, you bet it is. Flying in space is a dangerous activity. Given the limitations of chemical rockets, if you build something strong enough to be safe it is too heavy to fly. The shuttle is to an airplane what a double A fuel dragster is to a bus.
By the way, NASA is the only government agency to ever pay for itself: the taxes raised from the manufacture and sale of items invented in the space program and transferred to the commercial world have more than paid for the entire program.
I have run into problems trying to compress a tar archive of my home directory which has been around since 1995 when I switched to Linux. The two gig limit runs into trouble here.
In a fight you pick strong and ugly over elegant and beautiful. If you put a super model in a boxing ring against Mike Tyson she is not going to do very well.
Another example of strong and ugly vs elegant and beautiful in a marketing fight: Windows 95 vs OS/2 Warp. OS/2 was a far superior operating system to Windows 95 but it lost the marketing fight.
The proof of Beta's technical superiority is that most of the professional broadcast which is done with 1/2 inch tape is done with Beta format cartridges. There was a real attempt to use VHS in professional equipment but it was just too crappy a basic design to be successful.
Amateur video doesn't generally require the quality which is possible with the basic Beta design. In the amateur world the length of recording is more important than the quality.
Because of the Yin and Yang nature of reality the one place that the above is not true is the one place that you would least expect: elegant and beautiful fighting systems win over strong and ugly systems. High tech fighting equipment wins out over larger quantities of low tech. The elegance of a gps guided bomb makes it more effective against a given target than the ugly technique of throwing a bunch of unguided gravity bombs toward that same target.
Engineers pick the elegant and beautiful ways of doing things because we want things to work better; managers pick the strong and ugly ways of doing things because they are clueless twits who only understand strong and ugly.
Management understands that the general buying public are also mostly clueless twits who see the world like they do. Once things turn from the beauty contest of spec sheets into the ugly world of a marketing fight the management view is the marketable view; most people have no clue what it takes to make something work properly and pick the ugly tech as the way they would do things.
Microsoft is the master of the strong and ugly product. Access is a prime example of that. Access is the shotgun of the database world. Access gives you enough general purpose features that often one of them will hit the target you are aiming at. The 'sniper rifle' approach would be to aim a custom program directly at your application target; that requires more time and expense and skill than blasting away in the general direction with Access.
By the way, coming up with reasons why you did something - after the fact - is rationalizing. That is what this article is: a rationalization.
No, it does have to do with the chipset, nobody had any trouble with mode switching on the slower chip sets..
Yes, I am aware that the Nvidia written driver for Linux was the cause of the ridiculously long switch time.
Early in the history of accelerated video cards it was pointed out that the faster they got for graphics - the slower they were in text mode. The very fast processors we have today mask that particular problem.
While all of the modern 3D chipsets have impressive frame rates for running 3D games they tend to suck badly for much of anything else.
The chips are very slow to switch from text to graphics and vice versa.
I had a board with a slightly older Nvidia chip set. I wasn't very satisfied with the stability of the Xfree drivers for it so I tried the Nvidia Linux drivers. Their driver took five minutes to switch between text and graphics modes.
Older chipsets were much more practical for day to day use; the super speed models remind me of trying to drive a AA fuel dragster to the office every day.
Normally I wouldn't bother to respond to a comment like this - but in this case I will make an exception.
There are many people who believe - as Professor Coward does - that a single star architect such as I described is not necessary for a project like a Mars shot.
People of that mode of thought believe that having a project manager who - while not at the level I described - has a general idea of what is going on and who referees a team design - deciding along with a steering committee - what is to be done and when; is the proper way to do such a project..
We at NASA are very familiar with that project design philosophy. In fact there is even NASA terminology for such a team directed project; it is called a Cluster Fuck
Building a new Rocket requires that you have one man who understands the whole project in order to lead it. Historically there have only been a few people in the history of the world who have had that level of expertise. In order to be the chief architect of a new rocket here is a quick summation of the fields in which that person has to have the equivalent of a Ph.D. in for the project to succeed:
Mechanical engineering. A rocket is just about the toughest mechanical engineering job there is. Example: there is a problem in rocket design known as 'pogo' instability; the thrust is not instantly delivered to all parts of the rocket at the same time - the distributed masses of the rocket interact with the spring constants of the structural material to cause resonance problems along the length of the craft which cause it to behave like a pogo stick. A rocket's mass is continually changing - so all of those resonance problems change as the fuel is burned off - and it can't have pogo instabilities during any of that process. That is just ONE of the mechanical engineering problems.
Electrical engineering. The electrical engineering problems in a rocket are also profound: a rocket requires all sorts of electrical control systems. You not only need to have a Ph.D. in power engineering you need one in control theory, and one in analog design, and one in digital design.
Chemical engineering - Rockets use exotic chemicals and you had better understand them completely.
Materials science: what materials are appropriate for use where? Better understand that at a deep level.
Combustion engineering. Rockets represent the epitome of combustion engineering; the burning has to be smooth without instabilities (that all ties back to the mechanical engineering problem).
Computer science. Uh, computers are pretty important in rocketry - everyone on this site understands what happens with computers if you don't know what you are doing.
Management skills - a new rocket is a huge management problem.
Political and social skills - If you can't shmooze the politicians at a world class level you won't have any funding to accomplish your goals.
It is more than politics - you need sales skills - you have to be able to sell yourself and your project to everyone involved.
Mass marketing: the country has to buy into what you are doing.
Hydraulics - how do you pump the fuels - do you understand standing wave problems in the hydraulic systems? What happens when all of that is subjected to varying accelerations? Better understand that deeply.
Communications - and radio engineering - don't understand antenna theory - whoops sorry no communications with the space craft. Better understand microphones and cameras, and the problems with audio and visual production and distribution.
Cryogenics - Low temperature physics comes into play in a rocket.
Aeronautics - part of the flight is at very high speed in the atmosphere.
Biomedical issues. How do you keep the crew alive and functioning?
Psychology - how do you keep the crew from going crazy?
Going to Mars? Better understand nuclear physics and plasma physics completely. How to you shield a nuclear reactor from the crew - or better sill - how do you build a fusion rocket? How do you build a magnetic nozzle - what are the plasma containment problems. What is Bremmstralung - why is it important?
The list goes on and on. The architect doesn't do all of the work in each field - but he has to understand all of it deeply because he has to be able to pick the people in each specialty who will solve the detailed problems. One Bozo in the bunch and the project is doomed. Most people outside of computers would pick Bill Gates and Microsoft for the software end of things -not deeply understanding the real issues involved leads to poor choices being made. The architect has to be able to give guidance when the people in each field get stuck. He has to fit all of this together; if he doesn't understand it all who will? If somebody somewhere doesn't understand the whole problem - the project is doomed.
When the Soviet architect - Korolev - was killed in a launch accident that was the end of the Russian moon project - nobody could complete his unfinished designs. We had Wherner Von Braun as our architect. We also had Charlie Feltz - who worked on the P-51 Mustang - designed the X-15 and spear headed the shuttle. Sadly Mr. Feltz passed away earlier this month. I don't know the name of the chinese architect. Do any of you?
Such people are very rare If we decide to go to Mars a person like that is necessary.
Bill Gates is a top flight programmer. In the early days Microsoft had some very talented people coding for them. Those talented people have drowned in a sea of clueless morons.
That explains why Microsoft keeps turning out Grandiose Bloatware. Grandiose Bloatware is a clueless person's idea of great software.
I'll bet Bill Gates can't even look at present day Microsoft source code without gagging.
That is the price of selling one's programming soul for great wealth; my guess is Bill's solution to that problem is to never look at current source code.
One of the thrills of colecting classic computers was demonstrated to me the other day when I tried to turn on a 23 year old multiprocessor machine in my garage; a power supply board exploded and caught fire.
The main things to fail in old machines are electrolytic capacitors.
Microsoft's managers by the standards by which people in that field judge success are superb.
What do I mean by that? If you judge Microsoft's management by the universal business scorecard - money - then no one can argue that they are doing a bad job.
From a technical viewpoint Microsoft's managers are clueless idiots, from an ethical standpoint they are amoral cretins who barely qualify as human; but from a business standpoint - the company has made a lot of money on their watch.
In reality Microsoft's management is a lot like a defensive lineman who gets a pass stuck in his face guard - then stumbles blindly into the end zone to score a game winning touchdown; they were in the right place at the right time - every thing else was pure dumb luck.
Of course, Microsoft's management believes that their brilliant business decisions are responsible for Microsoft's success; but then I have already written about their technical judgment.
Back in the early days of the 8086 there was a processor from Zilog called the Z800 (not the z8000 - which was a different chip). It was a super chip; it ran far more software than the 8086 - it was faster and easier to program - being directly compatible with the existing core of CP/M software. There was every reason to believe that the Z800 would wipe the 8086 from the computer market.
The problem was that Zilog never actually got around to building the Z800; it was a classic example of vaporware.
The real question for AMD is: can they build the Opteron? Sadly, the longer the Opteron is delayed the more likely it is to turn from silicon to vapor phase.
I suspect that the real reason that the Intel X86-64 processor got canceled is that Intel decided that the Opteron was likely going into vapor phase. The fact that AMD has little to say on the subject sadly confirms this. The z800 was never officially dropped, it just faded away quietly - which is how vapor phase works.
And yes, I have a manual from Zilog featuring the Z800 - so the documentation AMD has recently produced really doesn't matter much.
Slashdot Mirror
The microwave beams from military radar on ships regularly cause sea gulls to explode. A megawatt beam will do in a bird pretty quickly. Power generation plants put out 100's of megawatts.
Microwave ovens work by heating water molecules. Broadcasting anything that heats water has a very high loss rate when it is humid. This is the reason satellite TV can die when it rains.
One possible use is in the desert to an isolated community. Perhaps it would also be possible to beam electricity to people on a mountain top. Very limited use technology.
Then there was Tesla's problem when he proposed to beam power to people 100 years ago: how do you get people to pay for the power they use?
Evidently the problem with the better design is that once the fusion threshold was reached the temperature of the fusion plasma rose high enough to keep the ion injectors from being able to add new fuel to the plasma.
Farnsworth's better tube creates an almost ideal plasma:
As far as I know nobody has rebuilt the more complex fusor tube to try improving on the Farnsworth design. That design was brilliant. It is not obvious how the tube works until you realize that the virtual electrode produced by the electron cloud at the center of the tube is partially canceled by the ions injected into the center - which allows more electrons to concentrate in the virtual electrode - which allows more ions - etc. This allows a very dense plasma to be generated.
The truth is Farnsworth created more fusion in his desktop experiments than any of the giant, big money, fusion experiments since.
Actually modularity is a sign of very clear thinking and planning. The fact that modularity encourages clear thinking is part of the reason that subroutines are supposed to address only one topic.
Thanks for demonstrating the Sgt. Shultz response: "You zee nothzing".
It is indeed fortunate that a black hole protects us from the release of unbounded amounts of energy in a stellar collapse to a singularity. Since otherwise the first one to occur would destroy the rest of the universe.
One of the finite values that the collapsing mass produces is a value for energy which is greater than the E = mc^2 of the mass of the rest of the universe combined. It is a bit difficult to believe that the initial large gas cloud that the star was formed from had that much positive potential energy in it isn't it?
Just continue seeing nothzing, and everything will be O.K. Don't bother to think about anything - never check to see if maybe there are problems with physics. Just believe in the status quo. Everybody knows that our scientific theories are complete and perfekt in every way.
Oh, by the way, please remember this little conversational post in the future. Life might just have a surprise waiting in your personal box of cracker jacks.
See the November 2002 edition of Scientific American page 40 where anyone doing over unity research is dismissed without examination of claims as a fraud.
This is exactly an example of the problem I mentioned in my first post. Because of pressure from physicists you can not be granted a patent on a perpetual motion machine.
The kinetic energy produced by a collapsing cloud of gas is given by
KE = (3/5) ((GM^2)/R)
Where R is the radius of the gas cloud. When R is zero the KE is infinite.
See 'this site' for the derivation of this formula.
Thank you for proving exactly my point that physicists will run their mouths on subjects they know nothing about.
What proof of perpetual motion would physicists accept?
The answer to that question is this: none.
If someone were to build a working perpetual motion machine the response of physicists would be "That is impossible so he must be running a fraud of some type. We don't know what the fraud is but we know it is impossible."
Physics is the study of the real and the possible. It is not the study of the unreal and the impossible. Because of this when ever a physicist says "That is impossible." He is talking about a subject he has never studied, and about which he quit literally knows nothing.
I know that mocking people is considered great sport in today's society, and that physicists have been mocking inventors on this subject for at least 150 years; but there is great risk in doing so. If anyone should ever succeed - all of that 150 years of mockery would be paid back with interest.
Taken to its essence the law of conservation of energy says "To an infinite number of decimal places the sum total of the mass and energy in the universe is a constant value." I don't know of any other law of physics that everyone accepts to an infinite number of decimal places without question. In other words: the law of conservation of mass - energy is a statement of physical perfection. We all know that we live in a perfect - flawless universe.
Instead of mocking inventors - physicists would do well to spend their time trying to find out if there are any bugs in the algorithms nature uses to calculate energy.
One place that bugs appear in algorithms is at singularities. For example: The laws of physics predict that when a star collapses to a singularity during the formation of a black hole that an infinite amount of energy is released. Is this a problem?
Here is the physicist's response to that question: "Everybody move along, nothing to see at this train wreck.", "La La La I can't hear you.", and off in the background I think I hear Sgt Schultz: "I zee nothzing!"
If I were a physicist I would be very careful who I was mocking; pay back is a real bitch.
Somebody ought to ask Dvorak if he is running a Chang modification on his PC.
For those who don't know the story, back in the days of the 286, a Taiwanese company claimed to be able to run 286's much faster than anyone else, it was called a "Chang modification". Dvorak touted it as a breakthrough technology. Of course anyone who understood technology realized the claim was ridiculous. It turned out all Chang was doing was reprogramming the timer chip so that it didn't keep time correctly - thus making benchmarks look more impressive.
In other words Dvorak's technical knowledge level is absurdly low. The man has great contempt for anyone who does have technical knowledge; he thinks we are inferior 'droids' to be ruled by assholes like him. He truly is the prototype of Dilbert's abysmally ignorant Pointy Haired Boss.
Dvorak really is dumb enough to think that Apple would change to Intel; the change from the 68000 to the Power PC almost destroyed Apple. Switching processor architecture destroys your software base - you have to run in place for years just to get back to where you were. That is the reason that Apple was in so much trouble after the processor change. Another change would be suicide.
And yes, I know that things are written in C these days, and we all know C is 'portable' so the change over 'running in place' period might only be 6 months to a year today. But 6 months to a year of additional progress lost by Apple would pretty much be the last nail in the coffin. Such a change would expose them to the ruthless pricing levels of the PC industry which Apple could never survive.
I do know how to do it, send me $20,000 in small bills and I'll tell you the secret.
If genes were not far more important that environment you could teach a frog differential equations.
A patent is a license to sue with the burden of proof on the defendant.
Justice costs money, I'll bet the open source developers can't afford as much as Microsoft can.
Software patents are the absurd invention of one person who pushed for them as a legislator then ruled on their validity later as a judge. A clearer case of conflict of interest has never existed in a court room, but he got away with it to our great detriment.
The most important thing we as programmers can do is fund a lobbying effort in Washington to restore the law back to the traditional pre software patent status.
Sorry, you are dead wrong. Muscle mass comes when the insertion and attachment of the tendons at the ends of muscles are put under stress. It has NOTHING to do with working the muscle against stress by lifting weights. It is possible to grow muscle mass just by massaging the tendons at the ends of muscles, this is sometimes done with bed - ridden patients.
People like Mr. Benson have a very easy job; kicking someone when they are down. Cheap shots are called cheap shots for a reason. They don't take much of an expenditure of energy or require very much courage to deliver.
Why do people behave that way? Because they have learned that it gets them attention; like farting in a class room while the teacher is trying to explain something.
Mr. Benson can't design a space shuttle, but he feels competent to criticize those who do. If you do anything productive, a critic can always point to another way of doing it. Any technology - no matter how poor it is - has some good points to it, and any technology - no matter how good it is has some poor qualities. Critics can always point to the good qualities of a crappy design while focusing on the poor qualities of your good design. It is a cheap trick, pay no attention.
Is the shuttle dangerous, you bet it is. Flying in space is a dangerous activity. Given the limitations of chemical rockets, if you build something strong enough to be safe it is too heavy to fly. The shuttle is to an airplane what a double A fuel dragster is to a bus.
By the way, NASA is the only government agency to ever pay for itself: the taxes raised from the manufacture and sale of items invented in the space program and transferred to the commercial world have more than paid for the entire program.
One of the ways to keep errors from creeping into programs is to put limits on things so high that you can never reach them in the practical world.
The 31 bit limit on time_t overflows in this century - 63 bits outlasts the probable life of the Universe so it is unlikely to run into trouble.
That is the best argument I know for a 64 bit file size; in the long run it is one less thing to worry about.
I have run into problems trying to compress a tar archive of my home directory which has been around since 1995 when I switched to Linux. The two gig limit runs into trouble here.
In a fight you pick strong and ugly over elegant and beautiful. If you put a super model in a boxing ring against Mike Tyson she is not going to do very well.
Another example of strong and ugly vs elegant and beautiful in a marketing fight: Windows 95 vs OS/2 Warp. OS/2 was a far superior operating system to Windows 95 but it lost the marketing fight.
The proof of Beta's technical superiority is that most of the professional broadcast which is done with 1/2 inch tape is done with Beta format cartridges. There was a real attempt to use VHS in professional equipment but it was just too crappy a basic design to be successful.
Amateur video doesn't generally require the quality which is possible with the basic Beta design. In the amateur world the length of recording is more important than the quality.
Because of the Yin and Yang nature of reality the one place that the above is not true is the one place that you would least expect: elegant and beautiful fighting systems win over strong and ugly systems. High tech fighting equipment wins out over larger quantities of low tech. The elegance of a gps guided bomb makes it more effective against a given target than the ugly technique of throwing a bunch of unguided gravity bombs toward that same target.
Engineers pick the elegant and beautiful ways of doing things because we want things to work better; managers pick the strong and ugly ways of doing things because they are clueless twits who only understand strong and ugly.
Management understands that the general buying public are also mostly clueless twits who see the world like they do. Once things turn from the beauty contest of spec sheets into the ugly world of a marketing fight the management view is the marketable view; most people have no clue what it takes to make something work properly and pick the ugly tech as the way they would do things.
Microsoft is the master of the strong and ugly product. Access is a prime example of that. Access is the shotgun of the database world. Access gives you enough general purpose features that often one of them will hit the target you are aiming at. The 'sniper rifle' approach would be to aim a custom program directly at your application target; that requires more time and expense and skill than blasting away in the general direction with Access.
By the way, coming up with reasons why you did something - after the fact - is rationalizing. That is what this article is: a rationalization.
No, it does have to do with the chipset, nobody had any trouble with mode switching on the slower chip sets..
Yes, I am aware that the Nvidia written driver for Linux was the cause of the ridiculously long switch time.
Early in the history of accelerated video cards it was pointed out that the faster they got for graphics - the slower they were in text mode. The very fast processors we have today mask that particular problem.
While all of the modern 3D chipsets have impressive frame rates for running 3D games they tend to suck badly for much of anything else.
The chips are very slow to switch from text to graphics and vice versa.
I had a board with a slightly older Nvidia chip set. I wasn't very satisfied with the stability of the Xfree drivers for it so I tried the Nvidia Linux drivers. Their driver took five minutes to switch between text and graphics modes.
Older chipsets were much more practical for day to day use; the super speed models remind me of trying to drive a AA fuel dragster to the office every day.
Normally I wouldn't bother to respond to a comment like this - but in this case I will make an exception.
There are many people who believe - as Professor Coward does - that a single star architect such as I described is not necessary for a project like a Mars shot.
People of that mode of thought believe that having a project manager who - while not at the level I described - has a general idea of what is going on and who referees a team design - deciding along with a steering committee - what is to be done and when; is the proper way to do such a project..
We at NASA are very familiar with that project design philosophy. In fact there is even NASA terminology for such a team directed project; it is called a Cluster Fuck
Mechanical engineering. A rocket is just about the toughest mechanical engineering job there is. Example: there is a problem in rocket design known as 'pogo' instability; the thrust is not instantly delivered to all parts of the rocket at the same time - the distributed masses of the rocket interact with the spring constants of the structural material to cause resonance problems along the length of the craft which cause it to behave like a pogo stick. A rocket's mass is continually changing - so all of those resonance problems change as the fuel is burned off - and it can't have pogo instabilities during any of that process. That is just ONE of the mechanical engineering problems.
Electrical engineering. The electrical engineering problems in a rocket are also profound: a rocket requires all sorts of electrical control systems. You not only need to have a Ph.D. in power engineering you need one in control theory, and one in analog design, and one in digital design.
Chemical engineering - Rockets use exotic chemicals and you had better understand them completely.
Materials science: what materials are appropriate for use where? Better understand that at a deep level.
Combustion engineering. Rockets represent the epitome of combustion engineering; the burning has to be smooth without instabilities (that all ties back to the mechanical engineering problem).
Computer science. Uh, computers are pretty important in rocketry - everyone on this site understands what happens with computers if you don't know what you are doing.
Management skills - a new rocket is a huge management problem.
Political and social skills - If you can't shmooze the politicians at a world class level you won't have any funding to accomplish your goals.
It is more than politics - you need sales skills - you have to be able to sell yourself and your project to everyone involved.
Mass marketing: the country has to buy into what you are doing.
Hydraulics - how do you pump the fuels - do you understand standing wave problems in the hydraulic systems? What happens when all of that is subjected to varying accelerations? Better understand that deeply.
Communications - and radio engineering - don't understand antenna theory - whoops sorry no communications with the space craft. Better understand microphones and cameras, and the problems with audio and visual production and distribution.
Cryogenics - Low temperature physics comes into play in a rocket.
Aeronautics - part of the flight is at very high speed in the atmosphere.
Biomedical issues. How do you keep the crew alive and functioning?
Psychology - how do you keep the crew from going crazy?
Going to Mars? Better understand nuclear physics and plasma physics completely. How to you shield a nuclear reactor from the crew - or better sill - how do you build a fusion rocket? How do you build a magnetic nozzle - what are the plasma containment problems. What is Bremmstralung - why is it important?
The list goes on and on. The architect doesn't do all of the work in each field - but he has to understand all of it deeply because he has to be able to pick the people in each specialty who will solve the detailed problems. One Bozo in the bunch and the project is doomed. Most people outside of computers would pick Bill Gates and Microsoft for the software end of things -not deeply understanding the real issues involved leads to poor choices being made. The architect has to be able to give guidance when the people in each field get stuck. He has to fit all of this together; if he doesn't understand it all who will? If somebody somewhere doesn't understand the whole problem - the project is doomed.
When the Soviet architect - Korolev - was killed in a launch accident that was the end of the Russian moon project - nobody could complete his unfinished designs. We had Wherner Von Braun as our architect. We also had Charlie Feltz - who worked on the P-51 Mustang - designed the X-15 and spear headed the shuttle. Sadly Mr. Feltz passed away earlier this month. I don't know the name of the chinese architect. Do any of you?
Such people are very rare If we decide to go to Mars a person like that is necessary.
Bill Gates is a top flight programmer. In the early days Microsoft had some very talented people coding for them. Those talented people have drowned in a sea of clueless morons.
That explains why Microsoft keeps turning out Grandiose Bloatware. Grandiose Bloatware is a clueless person's idea of great software.
I'll bet Bill Gates can't even look at present day Microsoft source code without gagging.
That is the price of selling one's programming soul for great wealth;
my guess is Bill's solution to that problem is to never look at current source code.
One of the thrills of colecting classic computers was demonstrated to me the other day when I tried to turn on a 23 year old multiprocessor machine in my garage; a power supply board exploded and caught fire.
The main things to fail in old machines are electrolytic capacitors.
Microsoft's managers by the standards by which people in that field judge success are superb.
What do I mean by that? If you judge Microsoft's management by the universal business scorecard - money - then no one can argue that they are doing a bad job.
From a technical viewpoint Microsoft's managers are clueless idiots, from an ethical standpoint they are amoral cretins who barely qualify as human; but from a business standpoint - the company has made a lot of money on their watch.
In reality Microsoft's management is a lot like a defensive lineman who gets a pass stuck in his face guard - then stumbles blindly into the end zone to score a game winning touchdown; they were in the right place at the right time - every thing else was pure dumb luck.
Of course, Microsoft's management believes that their brilliant business decisions are responsible for Microsoft's success; but then I have already written about their technical judgment.
I really hope they do pull it off - I would love to be able to run 64 bit Linux on something I could afford to own.
Back in the early days of the 8086 there was a processor from Zilog called the Z800 (not the z8000 - which was a different chip). It was a super chip; it ran far more software than the 8086 - it was faster and easier to program - being directly compatible with the existing core of CP/M software. There was every reason to believe that the Z800 would wipe the 8086 from the computer market.
The problem was that Zilog never actually got around to building the Z800; it was a classic example of vaporware.
The real question for AMD is: can they build the Opteron? Sadly, the longer the Opteron is delayed the more likely it is to turn from silicon to vapor phase.
I suspect that the real reason that the Intel X86-64 processor got canceled is that Intel decided that the Opteron was likely going into vapor phase. The fact that AMD has little to say on the subject sadly confirms this. The z800 was never officially dropped, it just faded away quietly - which is how vapor phase works.
And yes, I have a manual from Zilog featuring the Z800 - so the documentation AMD has recently produced really doesn't matter much.