* Parallel printer connector - 1. Choosing to save money by not putting a shift register in the printer was one of the most unfortunate decisions in the history of personal computing. How many kilotons of copper have been needlessly wasted on all those wires? Cable is thick, heavy and expensive. This is a classic example of how the marketplace can converge on a suboptimal solution and then get locked in.
It was a good decision at the time though. Don't forget you're talking about a standard developed when 2400 baud was a fast modem and 9600 baud (or about 900 characters per second) was pretty much the max data rate you could get for a terminal/printer run over the serial port. The bottle neck was the cable, so sending the data in parallel made a great deal of sense at the time--adding a bit of copper meant you could print 8 times as fast.
That said, I HATE fortran with a passion, mostly because it's ugly. 6 character variable names are impossible to deal with. Couple this with capitalization and indentation rules left over from the punch card era and you have code which is literally painful to read.
Aww, c'mon. Six-character variable names are ancient, any compiler less than 15 years old supports longer names, the 6-character limit is just if you're paranoid about backwards compatibility. The language doesn't HAVE any capitalization rules, so you can use whatever has the most visual appeal. As to the indentation, free-form source code became standard with F90.
they have a 1.5 watt, 20ms pulsed CO2 (infrared, same wavelength range the military wants to use) laser that will cause third-degree burns if you put your hand in the beam for *two pulses*.
I've played with similar lasers (in my case, a magawatt gain-switched CO2, 100-150 ns pulses).
CO2 lases at 10.6 microns which is very strongly absorbed by water but has neglegible absorption by metal. Bad if you're the pilot, not such a problem if you're the plane.
Why don't we just make sure the competent folks get/keep their jobs instead of worrying about someone's country of origin? Heaven knows there are enough incompentent American programmers who are still employed....
It's not what you know, it's who you know. Always has been, always will be.
CWRU implemented an ATM network in 1995/1996 that failed miserably. I know because I was one of the first people on it. At the time, ATM was an unproven technology. Vendor support just wasn't there.
Not to mention that INS (IT Dept to everyone else) stuck a firewall with 10MB/s network cards between
the ATM network and the outside world. ATM to every machine on campus, and we were lucky to get 20kB/s to any computer off-campus. And then couldn't upgrade it for almost a year because there wasn't any money budgeted...
This is, after all, the school that upgraded their entire campus to ATM (back when ATM was first available), arranged for an nice fast connection to the outside world (100MB, which was a big pipe at the time), and the stuck a firewall with two 10MB ethernet cards between the two. This went on for a good year...
Maybe my understanding of the DMCA is a bit off, but couldn't MS insinuate that, since an OSS media player that decodes Media Player could be used to circumvent someone's copyright protection (regardless of who), the reverse engineering was in violation of the DMCA?
IANAL, but assuming RealMedia did a proper clean-room implementation, what they've done is an independant creative work. Microsoft's copyright has not been violeted because nothing of the new implementation belongs to Microsoft.
There are also passages of the DMCA that deal with reverse-engineering for the purpose of inter-operability, but it will probably take a real lawyer to say anything intelligent about how applicable they may be to this situation.
How about a large dish coated with a think layer of soft material which you put into an orbit you want to clean and after its been there for a while fire the retros and burn the lot up in the atmosphere.
I've occasionally wondered why someone hasn't tried clearing minefields using some tacky Rockford Phosgate subwoofers mounted on a nice big tank.
Actually, there's some work being done at UMISS on doing just that for detecting landmines. A buried mine changes the compressibility of the soil, by looking at how the surface vibrates, you get a pretty good map of anything buried below it (although you're naturally most sensitive to shallow objects). Based on the shape of the object, you can start making decisions as to whether its worth digging up or not.
I did some work in the field of demining for a few years (sensor development stuff). This isn't such a big deal because removing mines is easy. The hard part is finding the sucker in the first place.
Just to give you an idea what the problem is currently like with modern mines, a typical anti-personnel mine (the US Army's M-14) is 2 inches [5.6cm] in diameter and about 1.5 inches [4.6cm] high. The only metal in the mine is the firing pin, maybe 10 g of (non-ferrous) metal. This is buried about an inch below the surface of the ground and holds enough plastic explosive to blow your leg off.
A simple answer, but a wrong one. Ignorance is not a defence in a patent infringement suit.
As others have already said, unless you work in your company's law office (and if so, why are you asking./ of all places), IP is being infringed on if and when your company's lawyers say it is being infringed on. If you have any serious questions as to where that boundary is (and it sounds like the original poster genuinely does) its your responsibility as an employee to take it up with legal--that's what they're paid for.
Earth Simulator" is a rather bold name for a supercomputer, especially when you consider it probably can't even simulate the global weather fast enough to predict it (or even tell you what the weather is in real time).
The computer isn't intended to forcats the weather. It's for forcasting the climate. Weather is a local and worries about local day-to-day fluctuation. Climate deals with large-scale (continent-sized) regions and how the averages vary on a scale of decades to centuries.
The other intended use, as others have already pointed out, is to validate climate models against historical data and to optimize non-linear model parameters.
Better than double checking everything is to have an external eye code review everything.
I might add that in addition to the obvious benefits (many eyes, etc.), I know my writing certainly improves when someone else is going to have to read my work. No one wants to be embaressed in front of others, and the threat [promise?] of an external review makes it worth spending the extra few minutes to make it right instead of just "close enough".
I did my doctoral dissertation in liquid crytal physics, so I got to know something about the field.
LCD's are pretty much commodity items. The technology is sufficiently old that the core patents are starting to expire, but because twisted nematic displays are so damn cheap to make, nothing else has been able to displace them. Most of the engineering is just incremental improvements to the manufacturing process to allow for the manufacture of large displays while keeping manufacturing defects (a perenial plague) to a minimum. Finally, 99% of the displays are made by Japanese companies, who do not like to hire non-Japanese citizens.
They were correct in stating that the army doesn't use LASER sights for sniper rifles, however, as an army friend was recently telling me, they now use a form of IASER for sights.
The IASER basically paints an infrared dot as opposed to a visible light dot, thus it can't be seen with human eyes.
LASER == Light Amplified by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Nothing says that light has to be visible to the naked eye. The CO2 laser I used to use had a wavelength of 10.6 microns (far longer than anything you would want to put on a rifle scope), but it was still a laser. IASER is just marketing-speak.
-JS
P.S. ordinary silicon CCD's see a fair bit beyond the visible (850 nm or there abouts, depends how much sensitivity you insist on). Gallium Arsenide detectors will get you out passed 1.0--1.2 microns, so all you really need is a little TV display. I've seen high-quality LCD displays (DisplayTech's ferroelectric stuff) that are the size of an eyepiece and CCD chips are less than an inch square, so this isn't a completely impractical approach.
My first thought was the Schrodinger equation [shodor.org] - it can be solved for Hydrogen.
The Schroedinger equation describes the evolution of a system with time. To find the the energy levels of the Hydrogen atom, you only need to solve the eigenvalue problem which is an even simpler problem (but still formally related to the Schroedinger equation). Solving for the energy levels of the hydrogen atom is standard fare for undergraduate physics majors.
Question 1 : Are hydrinos possible according to the Schrodinger equation?
No. The first energy eigenvalue has the lowest possible energy (and matches the observed ground state of the atom). The energy spectrum can be shown to be bounded from below; it is not possible to find an atomic electron state below the first eigenvalue.
Question 2 : If not, what changes to Schrodinger are needed to explain hydrinos and are these changes consistent with the rest of physics?
I, as a physicst, claim the Schroeidnger equaiton and quantum electrodynamcis work and I have experimental evidence to back my claims up.
Until the Blacklight people can show me an experiment that can be independantly confirmed, the burden of proof rests with them.
Given that quantum electrodynics easily explains effects at the 10^-6 eV level (the Lamb shift, for comparison the energy to ionize Hydrogen atoms is 13.6 eV -- a factor of 10 million greater), I think they have there work cut out.
To get back to your question, though, there are no simple modifications that can be made to the Schroedinger equation that won't be fundamentally inconsistant with the existing 80-100 years of experimental evidence.
But he wants people to licence software under the GPL, which allows what Caldera et al are proposing. As long as they supply the source code...
Supplying the source code is not sufficient to meet the GPL. There must also be no restriction on redistribution of binaries. To wit,
Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy,
distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
...
You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2...
Per-seat licensing is a restriction on the recpient's right (under the GPL) to redistribute the program and is thus fundamentally incompatible with the GPL.
Are people just so arrogant as to not be able to admit, or perhaps even afraid to admit, that there are just some things that have not been explained yet? Things that are just beyond our current grasp, but not necessarily beyond our potential grasp?
Of course there are things we don't know. On the other hand, when the first 99 experiments fail to detect ESP (or whatever your preferred pseudo-science is), most people start to see a basic trend developing...
There's a difference between keeping an open mind and checking your brain at the front door.
According to a FAQ at http://www.paper.upm-kymmene.com, "4) How much energy is needed in the paper production? Depending on the grade 2-4 MWh of heat and power is needed to produce one tonne of paper. The power use of an one hour home-PC session is roughly the same as the power used for a copy of a Donald Duck cartoon magazine. 5) How much water is needed in paper production? The fresh water use of a paper mill is about 10-15 cubic meters per tonne of paper depending on the grade and the mill."
You're comparing a ton of paper (something like 50000 pages) to a one-hour PC session. Let's scale these down to be something similar. I can read about 50 pages/hour of moderately technical writing. 50000 pages/50 pph = 1000 hours to read all that paper. So that 2-4 MWh is really 2-4 KWh amortized over the reading time of the paper. Figure a 200 W power supply, and the paper is higher by only a factor of 10. AND that doesn't include the construction costs of the computer (you think paper uses a lot of water, you should try silicon computer chips).
If you have some name of program used before LaTeX and still in use, could you name them for us? Thank you!
"troff" of course. It's what everyone who cared about these things used before there was TeX. "pic" handled the graphics and "eqn" handled the equations.
After some refining, the reactor uranium contains 3% U235.
Isn't the "depleted uranium" used in the rounds what is left over in this refining process? Remember - even if it worked perfectly (which it doesn't), there would be 5 units of (non-radioactive) U-238 for each refined unit of 97% U-238 / 3% U-235.
Yes.
To clear up the confusion, U-235 is the stuff in the reactors (usually at around 3% concentration, although there's some variation) and in bombs (at near 100% concentration). As part of the separation process, you get large quantities of nearly pure U-238. It has become depleted of U-235, hence the name. This is uranium which has never seen the inside of a reactor, not reprocessed waste. Because uranium is both naturally extremely dense and pyrophoric (at elevated temperatures), it's use in weapons is something of a no-brainer.
As a generic heavy metal, that it causes heavy-metal poisoning (e.g. liver and kidney damage) once it gets into your system in large quantities should also be a no-brainer.
t seems that the main reason this happens is that the synchronus movement causes less vibration in the system as a whole, and therefore conserves more energy. A path-of-least-resistance sort of thing.
Perhaps there's a physics major out there who could explain better...
That's basically it. The proper term is mode-locking. It's also the reason why one side of the moon always faces the earth and why there's a 3/2 ratio in the time of the orbits of Uranus to Neptune. You can also make some really cool high-power lasers if you mode-lock the period to the cavity length (Ti:Sapphires are the most common).
I am defining Leech Computing as 'a program running on a client computer without user knowledge that can process data and report back the results, but otherwise does not effect the usability of the client computer and makes no changes to the client'. This leech program runs only in memory, and does not access the client's hard drive at all.
And how is different from a classic [pre-Morris] computer worm? The original idea of a computer worm, after all, was a piece of code that would seek out under-utilized computers and run your code on it without disrupting normal operation. Morris's worm, for that matter, could have acted that way (arguably it was intended to) if it had been better debugged.
You don't use complex numbers for real work very
often do you?
I want to see this as
a.power(b)
because if the program is misbehaving, it's almost
certainly due to the branch cut that you
inevitably have to deal with for complex argument
b. Even non-integer negative real-valued b is multi-valued and saying "just return the value in the upper half plane" is good for at least 3 days of
debugging for the next poor sod that has to use that code.
Operator overloading is useful. Operator overloading without sufficient thought ahead of time is a disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a good decision at the time though. Don't forget you're talking about a standard developed when 2400 baud was a fast modem and 9600 baud (or about 900 characters per second) was pretty much the max data rate you could get for a terminal/printer run over the serial port. The bottle neck was the cable, so sending the data in parallel made a great deal of sense at the time--adding a bit of copper meant you could print 8 times as fast.
-JS
Aww, c'mon. Six-character variable names are ancient, any compiler less than 15 years old supports longer names, the 6-character limit is just if you're paranoid about backwards compatibility. The language doesn't HAVE any capitalization rules, so you can use whatever has the most visual appeal. As to the indentation, free-form source code became standard with F90.
-JS
Sigh... Boy do I feel old...
-JS (online only since '89)
I've played with similar lasers (in my case, a magawatt gain-switched CO2, 100-150 ns pulses). CO2 lases at 10.6 microns which is very strongly absorbed by water but has neglegible absorption by metal. Bad if you're the pilot, not such a problem if you're the plane.
-JS
It's not what you know, it's who you know. Always has been, always will be.
-JS
Not to mention that INS (IT Dept to everyone else) stuck a firewall with 10MB/s network cards between the ATM network and the outside world. ATM to every machine on campus, and we were lucky to get 20kB/s to any computer off-campus. And then couldn't upgrade it for almost a year because there wasn't any money budgeted...
-JS
My prediction: Marketing 1, Implementation 0.
This is, after all, the school that upgraded their entire campus to ATM (back when ATM was first available), arranged for an nice fast connection to the outside world (100MB, which was a big pipe at the time), and the stuck a firewall with two 10MB ethernet cards between the two. This went on for a good year...
-JS (former CWRU graduate student)
IANAL, but assuming RealMedia did a proper clean-room implementation, what they've done is an independant creative work. Microsoft's copyright has not been violeted because nothing of the new implementation belongs to Microsoft.
There are also passages of the DMCA that deal with reverse-engineering for the purpose of inter-operability, but it will probably take a real lawyer to say anything intelligent about how applicable they may be to this situation.
-JS
Sounds like Project Wildfire.
-JS
Actually, there's some work being done at UMISS on doing just that for detecting landmines. A buried mine changes the compressibility of the soil, by looking at how the surface vibrates, you get a pretty good map of anything buried below it (although you're naturally most sensitive to shallow objects). Based on the shape of the object, you can start making decisions as to whether its worth digging up or not.
-JS
Just to give you an idea what the problem is currently like with modern mines, a typical anti-personnel mine (the US Army's M-14) is 2 inches [5.6cm] in diameter and about 1.5 inches [4.6cm] high. The only metal in the mine is the firing pin, maybe 10 g of (non-ferrous) metal. This is buried about an inch below the surface of the ground and holds enough plastic explosive to blow your leg off.
-JS
A simple answer, but a wrong one. Ignorance is not a defence in a patent infringement suit.
As others have already said, unless you work in your company's law office (and if so, why are you asking ./ of all places), IP is being infringed on if and when your company's lawyers say it is being infringed on. If you have any serious questions as to where that boundary is (and it sounds like the original poster genuinely does) its your responsibility as an employee to take it up with legal--that's what they're paid for.
-JS
The computer isn't intended to forcats the weather. It's for forcasting the climate. Weather is a local and worries about local day-to-day fluctuation. Climate deals with large-scale (continent-sized) regions and how the averages vary on a scale of decades to centuries.
The other intended use, as others have already pointed out, is to validate climate models against historical data and to optimize non-linear model parameters.
-JS
I might add that in addition to the obvious benefits (many eyes, etc.), I know my writing certainly improves when someone else is going to have to read my work. No one wants to be embaressed in front of others, and the threat [promise?] of an external review makes it worth spending the extra few minutes to make it right instead of just "close enough".
-JS
I did my doctoral dissertation in liquid crytal physics, so I got to know something about the field. LCD's are pretty much commodity items. The technology is sufficiently old that the core patents are starting to expire, but because twisted nematic displays are so damn cheap to make, nothing else has been able to displace them. Most of the engineering is just incremental improvements to the manufacturing process to allow for the manufacture of large displays while keeping manufacturing defects (a perenial plague) to a minimum. Finally, 99% of the displays are made by Japanese companies, who do not like to hire non-Japanese citizens.
In sort, don't bother with LCD's.
-JS
LASER == Light Amplified by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Nothing says that light has to be visible to the naked eye. The CO2 laser I used to use had a wavelength of 10.6 microns (far longer than anything you would want to put on a rifle scope), but it was still a laser. IASER is just marketing-speak.
-JS
P.S. ordinary silicon CCD's see a fair bit beyond the visible (850 nm or there abouts, depends how much sensitivity you insist on). Gallium Arsenide detectors will get you out passed 1.0--1.2 microns, so all you really need is a little TV display. I've seen high-quality LCD displays (DisplayTech's ferroelectric stuff) that are the size of an eyepiece and CCD chips are less than an inch square, so this isn't a completely impractical approach.
The Schroedinger equation describes the evolution of a system with time. To find the the energy levels of the Hydrogen atom, you only need to solve the eigenvalue problem which is an even simpler problem (but still formally related to the Schroedinger equation). Solving for the energy levels of the hydrogen atom is standard fare for undergraduate physics majors.
No. The first energy eigenvalue has the lowest possible energy (and matches the observed ground state of the atom). The energy spectrum can be shown to be bounded from below; it is not possible to find an atomic electron state below the first eigenvalue.I, as a physicst, claim the Schroeidnger equaiton and quantum electrodynamcis work and I have experimental evidence to back my claims up. Until the Blacklight people can show me an experiment that can be independantly confirmed, the burden of proof rests with them. Given that quantum electrodynics easily explains effects at the 10^-6 eV level (the Lamb shift, for comparison the energy to ionize Hydrogen atoms is 13.6 eV -- a factor of 10 million greater), I think they have there work cut out.
To get back to your question, though, there are no simple modifications that can be made to the Schroedinger equation that won't be fundamentally inconsistant with the existing 80-100 years of experimental evidence.
You said it, not me...
-JS
Supplying the source code is not sufficient to meet the GPL. There must also be no restriction on redistribution of binaries. To wit,
Per-seat licensing is a restriction on the recpient's right (under the GPL) to redistribute the program and is thus fundamentally incompatible with the GPL.
-JS
Of course there are things we don't know. On the other hand, when the first 99 experiments fail to detect ESP (or whatever your preferred pseudo-science is), most people start to see a basic trend developing...
There's a difference between keeping an open mind and checking your brain at the front door.
-JS
You're comparing a ton of paper (something like 50000 pages) to a one-hour PC session. Let's scale these down to be something similar. I can read about 50 pages/hour of moderately technical writing. 50000 pages/50 pph = 1000 hours to read all that paper. So that 2-4 MWh is really 2-4 KWh amortized over the reading time of the paper. Figure a 200 W power supply, and the paper is higher by only a factor of 10. AND that doesn't include the construction costs of the computer (you think paper uses a lot of water, you should try silicon computer chips).
-JS
"troff" of course. It's what everyone who cared about these things used before there was TeX. "pic" handled the graphics and "eqn" handled the equations.
-JS
Yes.
To clear up the confusion, U-235 is the stuff in the reactors (usually at around 3% concentration, although there's some variation) and in bombs (at near 100% concentration). As part of the separation process, you get large quantities of nearly pure U-238. It has become depleted of U-235, hence the name. This is uranium which has never seen the inside of a reactor, not reprocessed waste. Because uranium is both naturally extremely dense and pyrophoric (at elevated temperatures), it's use in weapons is something of a no-brainer.
As a generic heavy metal, that it causes heavy-metal poisoning (e.g. liver and kidney damage) once it gets into your system in large quantities should also be a no-brainer.
-JS
That's basically it. The proper term is mode-locking. It's also the reason why one side of the moon always faces the earth and why there's a 3/2 ratio in the time of the orbits of Uranus to Neptune. You can also make some really cool high-power lasers if you mode-lock the period to the cavity length (Ti:Sapphires are the most common).
-JS
And how is different from a classic [pre-Morris] computer worm? The original idea of a computer worm, after all, was a piece of code that would seek out under-utilized computers and run your code on it without disrupting normal operation. Morris's worm, for that matter, could have acted that way (arguably it was intended to) if it had been better debugged.
-JS
You don't use complex numbers for real work very often do you?
I want to see this as a.power(b) because if the program is misbehaving, it's almost certainly due to the branch cut that you inevitably have to deal with for complex argument b. Even non-integer negative real-valued b is multi-valued and saying "just return the value in the upper half plane" is good for at least 3 days of debugging for the next poor sod that has to use that code.
Operator overloading is useful. Operator overloading without sufficient thought ahead of time is a disaster.
-JS