I think it's safe to assume that any sufficiently advanced race of people in the universe (even if they've reached a point where RF communication is useless and archaic) will still emit RF as a part of the daily routine. Any large-energy things they might be doing should probably release RF. The question is, is SETI looking only for communications patterns, or also industrial RF bleed patterns? Is there any way to distinguish that from RF background noise?
For that matter, energy is energy, and spectrum space is spectrum space... this advanced society that knows better things than RF modulation as we know it will probably need all the wireless bandwidth it can find (_we_ always need more, no matter how much _we_ have). If they communicate by some "new" means in the RF energy spectrum range, most likely it will produce some effect on those bandwidths which our radio receivers can detect and determine to be "unnatural in origin".
Let me know if i am correct: Why is it that black holes cannot be detected? Is it because any light that would otherwise escape indicating its presence is consumed?
Black holes can be detected (in theory of course) by looking for the emissions they give off. The theory goes (extremely roughly) that as individual particles reach the "edge" (event horizon?) of the black hole (crossing this line means you never come back), some of them are torn apart, half of the particle going in, half going out, and some energy is released during this fission. It is these fissions at the edge that make a black hole appear to give off energy, and make it detectable.
Also: What are some good books on black holes that one of a mind uneducated as far as black holes are concerned might be able to read wiht little trouble?
Read "A breif history of time" by Stephen Hawking. It's a short paperback intended for the intelligent yet un-astrophysics-educated public which explains black holes and lots of other things very well, and it's written by an incredibly knowledgeable person on the subjects.
No it isn't. If it was flamebait, where are the flame responses? I just expressed my support for anyone going to court against (as the slashdot story said) a company who's business plan involves getting a patent and sueing people.
[ This is so late nobody will read it but the poster, but that's what it's here for ]
I recently bought some VA FullOn 2x2 servers to testbed some Beowulf stuff. The Intel motherboard in these things is capable of a certain level of serial management.
You still have to configure the BIOS via VGA... but once you've got the config done, you can check status (is machine up), power on/off/reset, etc... via a serial port. Of course, if you run linux you also get serial console from the boot loader onwards.
I think it's called IPMI (Intel Platform Management Interface???)... check VA's website for their VACM server management product,which lists supported boards for serial management, etc...
FYI I believe SystemsHoust (which became a part of MCI and became known as "MCI Systemshouse" was probably sold away during the MCI/Worldcom merger or shortly thereafter, and probably ended up in the hands of EDS.. in case that helps tracking people down. I'm not entirely sure it ended up there, but I think so.
I'd like to semi-anonymously state that I work for one of the companies that has experienced this problem on E10K's. Sun has been working with our company on this for quite some time. I have to say that it seems to me that the problem is largely environmental.
While Sun could have manufactured the part to be more environment-tolerant, the users can also virtually eliminate the problem by operating their datacenters well within spec.
Therefore, I don't completely blame Sun for this. Even if there was no environmental influence, and it was just pure manufacturing flaw... the rates that this flaw happens at are fairly low.
This has nothing to do with any sort of general purpose counteraction of gravity using magnets, as the slashdot post would have you think.
The fluids he's floating are filled with metallic particles that react to the magnets. Unless you can easily saturate your body with some special compounds that have magnetic properties, forget flying with this
They owe "us" bigtime for being the horses' asses they've always been, trying to monopolize and over-commercialize the net. They are the Microsoft of ISPs. They deserve to have to fight a legal battle for us and win our side some points to make up for their transgressions.
I think MB is generally thought to mean MegaBytes, and Mb to mean Megabits. The USB 2.0 speed is 480 Mbits, not MBytes... a speedup factor of 40x, not the 320x it sounded like to me on first reading. Just trying to clarify, not bitch.
It is true that there's heavy info available already, but I still see the need for computer historians. They should be the ones trying to set the record straight. Many oft-quoted peices of our computer history are reported 50 different ways in 50 different places. Computer historians could sort these out, do real research, and present us with a more probably true picture of where we came from.
As in any "somesubject historian" profession, certain historians will over time gain respect for being very accurate and knowledgeable, which will lend credence to their judgements on the reality of computer history.
I'm all for it. I'd love to know for sure the details of a lot of those hazy-ish computer legends I hear about all the time.
Now is a really good time to start as well, since there's still a lot of founding fathers alive to be interviewed.
1. Transmeta's Badass Technology makes them worthwhile for a company like AMD even without market share.
2. Transmeta's Badass Talented People Who Will Probably Make Even Cooler Technology Down The Road are an even bigger draw. (And I'm not just referring to Linus, there are a lot of badasses at Transmeta).
3. AMD's constant struggle with Intel. Both companies are in the business of trying to take a chunk from the market dominator. That factor has been known to unite companies in almost any industry.
So the trick with the car is to carry enough liquid nitrogen to make the trip worthwhile, and to heat it efficiently as it expands into a gas so that the expansion chamber doesn't turn into a giant frosty popsicle and stop working
And how do we heat the bottle? Use the cold bottle as a heatsink for the car's air-conditioning system. You could have an electric compressor (like a fridge) as well as some radiator-like apparatus around the LN2 tank. As the tank cools, a controller slowly turns down (then off) the electric compressor as it gets more cooling capacity from the LN2 tank, which it is using to cool the A/C system.
What Beavis at that bank allowed this to happen, much less thought of it? It pains me greatly because technology always ends up getting a bad rap for stuff like this, as it surely will the first time the thing makes a mistake, or gets hacked. No sane computer scientist would actually arm his own creation and wire to the 'net, this had to be someone else's idea....
Just a note on his comment ( ~ "Java is perhaps a better language but performance sucks due to JVM")
I distinctly remember that GCC has a front end now for compiling Java source and object files into native machine code. I don't know the status of this at this time (how well it works, how much perf gain, how stable, etc...), but for people who like Java as a language, and want fast native code, this might make Java a viable language for building traditional executables that perform well.
... And I suppose they have some ok software concepts what with VACM and all... but they're missing the software boat by not having Mosix or DIPC or something in their VA Linux kernels for the Cluster City / FullOn machines.
I work for a HUGE company that should have mattered to them as a potential future customer, and I ordered a measly quantity of four (4) fully loaded FullOn's (came to somewhere around $100K I think). The sales team SUCKED. The Support Guys SUCKED. We sent hardware back and forth with them for MONTHS until we finally got what we ordered (which was clearly laid out on the original PO, and which they did claim to sell as standard equipment).
I'm not using them again. It would have been less hassle to build the machines myself, drop RedHat in, and start working from there on the cluster s/ware.
And unlike the multihead mentioned in the article, the old Doom multi-head have you true surround vision (so that you could "look" to the left or right of you by looking at the side monitors), instead of just a wider angle.
The fact that ECMA's involved just adds another scary point for point. ECMA also controls other useful standards (for instance, javascript). Microsoft would only have picked them if they can either manipulate or coerce them. That means that not only is (duh) C# going to be another hamful Microsoft "standard", but once they've infiltrated ECMA they'll have some other standards to dork with too.
One of problems he mentions is that of small screen size, because many apps simply don't work well in a 160x100 pixel environment.
Wouldn't it make sense to solve this problem with hardware? Why can't we put high-density LCD's (1-inch square at 800x600 pixels or higher) in an eyepeice to create a nice resolution display that appears to be a 21" monitor to the eye? Is it that the LCD's haven't reached that density?
Please don't responds with a thousand headgear links, I know they're out there. I'm just wondering why major vendors aren't perfecting this into a super-small lightwieght single-eye peice and shipping it with handhelds as the main display (which would make the handheld smaller, too.)
I agree with most of what you said, but thought I'd add that for normal people (joe user at home, not trying to be super-secretive like some slashdotters might), giving out your IP does give away information about yourself.
If the person is using a local ISP, a quick whois will show their locality. In either case, it gives up your ISP as well, and it's no bother to call up the ISP and determine more about the user through creative social engineering.
Given the choice, you're mildly safer (although only by obscurity, rather than security) not having random people know your IP/hostname.
It's a stability thing, although it would probably also be a scalability thing at some point if not. By using the IBM VM layer, the linux boxen can be "virtually" seperate, allowing a user of one virtual linux box to load experimental kernels, crash his kernels, run cpu-bound stuff at high priority, etc.... without affecting the other virtual machines (which might "belong" to a totally different customer/company).
This is just my opinion, I suppose, but AIX is just about the worst commercial unix-clone I've ever used. (and I've been using it extensively for years, I know what I'm talking about). And DB2 just doesn't compete with Oracle in my book for a commercial database for real-world problems. Maybe you should start by re-evaluating your choices.
Here's a super-short 30 second list of AIX annoyances:
All of the text tools (grep, awk, sed, vi) have arbitrary limits on the length of a text line they will process, I believe 2048 characters with most of these tools.
Their "cfgmgr" and related tools for hardware detection/configuration at boot- and run-time are quirky at best.
Most of their man pages are completely un-informative and hard to read.
Most of the low-level tools needed for expert systems administration of AIX are undocumented, with no good "-h/--help" or man page.
They use an "Object" (supposedly) database to store OS config information, rather than the tradition of human textfiles with optional high-level management tools on top of them. I guess it made it easier on them writing management tools to be able to reshape what was being managed into oblivion.
The kernel is horribly about properly scheduling processes of various priorities.
Actually, certain types of energy weapons already exist, and are well-documented and manufactured today. The most prevalent are EMP bombs (massive ElectroMagnetic Pulse, disables anything eletrical over a very wide area, such as a city)and HERF guns (High Enegery Radio Frequency guns, which do the same thing, but precisely targetable at an airplane, a car engine, a large unix box, etc..).
See the book "Information Warfare" by Winn Schwartau (ISBN: 1560251328), which has a really good chapter on this stuff. I can't think of any decent web links at the moment, but searching for EMP and HERF at altavista should turn up interesting stuff
Slashdot Mirror
For that matter, energy is energy, and spectrum space is spectrum space... this advanced society that knows better things than RF modulation as we know it will probably need all the wireless bandwidth it can find (_we_ always need more, no matter how much _we_ have). If they communicate by some "new" means in the RF energy spectrum range, most likely it will produce some effect on those bandwidths which our radio receivers can detect and determine to be "unnatural in origin".
No it isn't. If it was flamebait, where are the flame responses? I just expressed my support for anyone going to court against (as the slashdot story said) a company who's business plan involves getting a patent and sueing people.
You still have to configure the BIOS via VGA... but once you've got the config done, you can check status (is machine up), power on/off/reset, etc... via a serial port. Of course, if you run linux you also get serial console from the boot loader onwards.
I think it's called IPMI (Intel Platform Management Interface???)... check VA's website for their VACM server management product,which lists supported boards for serial management, etc...
At least it's a step in the right direction.
FYI I believe SystemsHoust (which became a part of MCI and became known as "MCI Systemshouse" was probably sold away during the MCI/Worldcom merger or shortly thereafter, and probably ended up in the hands of EDS.. in case that helps tracking people down. I'm not entirely sure it ended up there, but I think so.
Read what he said ^^^^^
While Sun could have manufactured the part to be more environment-tolerant, the users can also virtually eliminate the problem by operating their datacenters well within spec.
Therefore, I don't completely blame Sun for this. Even if there was no environmental influence, and it was just pure manufacturing flaw... the rates that this flaw happens at are fairly low.
The fluids he's floating are filled with metallic particles that react to the magnets. Unless you can easily saturate your body with some special compounds that have magnetic properties, forget flying with this
As in any "somesubject historian" profession, certain historians will over time gain respect for being very accurate and knowledgeable, which will lend credence to their judgements on the reality of computer history.
I'm all for it. I'd love to know for sure the details of a lot of those hazy-ish computer legends I hear about all the time.
Now is a really good time to start as well, since there's still a lot of founding fathers alive to be interviewed.
1. Transmeta's Badass Technology makes them worthwhile for a company like AMD even without market share.
2. Transmeta's Badass Talented People Who Will Probably Make Even Cooler Technology Down The Road are an even bigger draw. (And I'm not just referring to Linus, there are a lot of badasses at Transmeta).
3. AMD's constant struggle with Intel. Both companies are in the business of trying to take a chunk from the market dominator. That factor has been known to unite companies in almost any industry.
And how do we heat the bottle? Use the cold bottle as a heatsink for the car's air-conditioning system. You could have an electric compressor (like a fridge) as well as some radiator-like apparatus around the LN2 tank. As the tank cools, a controller slowly turns down (then off) the electric compressor as it gets more cooling capacity from the LN2 tank, which it is using to cool the A/C system.
Maybe they should pay for the mission with banner ads :)
I distinctly remember that GCC has a front end now for compiling Java source and object files into native machine code. I don't know the status of this at this time (how well it works, how much perf gain, how stable, etc...), but for people who like Java as a language, and want fast native code, this might make Java a viable language for building traditional executables that perform well.
I work for a HUGE company that should have mattered to them as a potential future customer, and I ordered a measly quantity of four (4) fully loaded FullOn's (came to somewhere around $100K I think). The sales team SUCKED. The Support Guys SUCKED. We sent hardware back and forth with them for MONTHS until we finally got what we ordered (which was clearly laid out on the original PO, and which they did claim to sell as standard equipment).
I'm not using them again. It would have been less hassle to build the machines myself, drop RedHat in, and start working from there on the cluster s/ware.
And unlike the multihead mentioned in the article, the old Doom multi-head have you true surround vision (so that you could "look" to the left or right of you by looking at the side monitors), instead of just a wider angle.
The fact that ECMA's involved just adds another scary point for point. ECMA also controls other useful standards (for instance, javascript). Microsoft would only have picked them if they can either manipulate or coerce them. That means that not only is (duh) C# going to be another hamful Microsoft "standard", but once they've infiltrated ECMA they'll have some other standards to dork with too.
Wouldn't it make sense to solve this problem with hardware? Why can't we put high-density LCD's (1-inch square at 800x600 pixels or higher) in an eyepeice to create a nice resolution display that appears to be a 21" monitor to the eye? Is it that the LCD's haven't reached that density?
Please don't responds with a thousand headgear links, I know they're out there. I'm just wondering why major vendors aren't perfecting this into a super-small lightwieght single-eye peice and shipping it with handhelds as the main display (which would make the handheld smaller, too.)
If the person is using a local ISP, a quick whois will show their locality. In either case, it gives up your ISP as well, and it's no bother to call up the ISP and determine more about the user through creative social engineering.
Given the choice, you're mildly safer (although only by obscurity, rather than security) not having random people know your IP/hostname.
It's a stability thing, although it would probably also be a scalability thing at some point if not. By using the IBM VM layer, the linux boxen can be "virtually" seperate, allowing a user of one virtual linux box to load experimental kernels, crash his kernels, run cpu-bound stuff at high priority, etc.... without affecting the other virtual machines (which might "belong" to a totally different customer/company).
Here's a super-short 30 second list of AIX annoyances:
Is there a Linux kernel that's functional on G4's, or anyone working on it?
See the book "Information Warfare" by Winn Schwartau (ISBN: 1560251328), which has a really good chapter on this stuff. I can't think of any decent web links at the moment, but searching for EMP and HERF at altavista should turn up interesting stuff