The state will pay once for the laptop computers. A pay raise goes on forever so buying the laptops is trivial.
I'd also point out that in most American school systems pay is set by the district and not the state government. But the economics of schools is a zero-sum game - you can pay teachers more - but something will have to go because there is a limited amount of money in the system. Want to give up that music program in the elementary schools? How about larger class size? Less art? Fewer field trips?
It's not a trivial problem and just saying "pay the teachers more" isn't sufficient.
You could run RT-11 on the PC 350 as I remember and it was pretty spiffy.
DEC decided that what they REALLY needed to run on the 350 was a dumbed-down version of RSX-11/M-Plus with an awful menu system.
RT-11 was a wonderful little OS (little in that it's memory footprint was about 8K) whose motto was "Who says you can't love something that's small and finishes fast?"
DEC suffered a severe failure of vision -- they had the pieces but Olson wouldn't listen about how to put them together.
Small high-power electric motors for ship propulsion are prime candidates for "high-temperature" superconductors.
The US Navy has funded demonstration projects for ship propulsion.
Indeed electric propulsion for surface ships and submarines, that use common components is a very big research item right now for all the obvious reasons.
And just what part of the United States have you been "enjoying" these parks? Or are you parked in front of a computer screen all day in, say, San Francisco?
Have you toured? Lived in different parts of the country? Or are you stuck in a metro area and think you have seen the entire country?
At the Naval Submarine League symposium this past June Lockeed Martin displayed a fascinating bit of techology that took a video stream from a UAV along with an embedded GPS position stream and information regarding the orientation of the camera lens. This video was processed and the footprint of the image (corrected for slant angle etc etc) onto a map. Add a bit of target recognition software to help watch the image for interesting targets of opportunity.
If a target is located on a frame of the downloaded video imagery it can be precisely located, a human can agree it's a target worthy of shooting at, and the coordinates downloaded to a Tomahawk and launced - in minutes.
If the new Tactical Tomahawk's are used, which may be loitering in the area, the submarine can uplink via satellite to the weapon and send it on its way very quickly.
This technology was partially demonstrated in Operation Giant Shadow which proved in prinicipal how the upgraded Trident SSGN submarines will operate.
In the demo package there was an XServe, although I don't know if it were doing anything other than serving as a QuickTime video stream to simulate the UAV collecting the data.
Geee - let's think about this a moment okay? US Navy submarines are nuclear powered - which means there's a big steam propulsion plant occupying the back half the submarine. It gets HOT. Air conditioning is required to keep the engineering spaces habitable. They also carry lots of electronic equipment, computers etc etc. These require cooling.
Also submarines operate these days in shallow, warm-water ocean conditions. Back in the bad-ol' days the boats operated in cold deep oceans but no longer. Look at the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea and the coastal conditions of the Indian Ocean where water temperatures are over 80 degrees.
Why do people post things when they have no immediate knowledge beyond maybe playing a video game??
Keep in mind that the VIRGINIA class is designed without traditional periscopes. Instead high-definition cameras will take the place of the traditional optical periscope. So you can imagine why you'd want to be able to do some serious image manipulation.
Of course sonar systems would benefit from compute servers as well.
A few weeks ago I attended a luncheon where the state of computer systems on the ABRAHAM LINCOLN was discussed. While controlling the battle force during the Iraq war computer systems were rebooted on 45 minute intervals because they weren't stable: running Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Hopefully this will be fixed when the LINCOLN goes through her overhaul.
This is a machine that gets hauled around, moved, etc. It's basically more fragile than desktop systems. Everything is a bit closer to the edge.
I have a first-generation TiBook ordered the day they were announced. I've had 3 keyboards, a new disk drive, and new memory. Hasn't cost me a dime and Apple has gotten the machine turned around very rapidly.
For me the AppleCare warrenty running out is the mark of when it's time to consider buying a new laptop. By that time there should be 1.5GHz machines at least anda much bigger disk drive etc etc.
It's a nice gimmic and for sports it's pretty nice. But Nikon can't play with Canon and the D1S and it's full frame 11 MPixel CMOS chip. Until Nikon can make a camera that's even close to the D1S life will be difficult and there's no indication that Nikon will be able to compete any time soon.
Think SPORTS. Think sitting in a photographer's well at a ball game. You shoot. Between innings you've uploaded to your editor. You can move around to various locations in the venue. Most athletic events are sufficiently small to allow this sort of camera to work and many sports are episodic enough to allow the download to happen.
Of course this camera doesn't compare well to a Canon D1S. It's not a full frame sensor and it's simply not as good an imaging device as the Canon is. Nikon appears to be unable to play at the same quality as Canon does in digital cameras.
I see more and more shooters with Canon and fewer and fewer with Nikon. This might not suffice to keep them in the game.
1) this is minor league baseball (AAA, the step just below the majors)
2) they probably do have contract for some form of television broadcasting but it's probably only a few games a year
3) most stadiums allow cameras but not broadcast of play by play although if you ASK you'd probably be able to work a deal - this is all about selling tickets and getting people interested in coming to the ballpark.
Hotdogs are probably $3.50.
And DO enjoy the game. Minor league baseball is a hoot - and at the AAA level it's darn good baseball.
The CARTER (SSN 23) is currently in new construction at Electric Boat in Groton, CT. The last of the SEAWOLF (SSN 21) class, she will be the largest fast attack submarine ever built by the United States.
Due to be commissioned in January 2005 in Kings Bay, GA.
Very few details about the additional 100 foot hull segment added to the CARTER are available beyond some generic posters made by EB and a very few web sites.
The SEAWOLF class represents the most sophisticated submarine design ever made by the US, representing a no-compromise approach not found in the much less expensive VIRGINIA class.
For the record it's quite possible to take non-classified sources and make a document whose classification should be at least SECRET and probably TOP SECRET. You can do this.
I wish the guy didn't sound so adolescent though. If he makes something dangerous he should own the fact and recognize that his research SHOULD be classified. There are responsibilities that each of us has for the actions we take. He did something very interesting - but also potentially quite dangerous to the national security.
So take the knowledge, classify the resource, and go make a zillion dollars in the private sector.
Chernobyl was a disaster but TMI actually did very well - especially when you consider that it took simulaneous HUMAN failures to push the plant over the edge. If the operators has followed Rickover's dictum to "Believe your indication" things would have gone much much better.
Chenobyl is what happens when you don't plan for reactor safety - they violated so many operation rules it's hardly believable. The design of the plant included a positive "alpha-T" that is the temperature coefficient of reactivity could be POSITIVE which means the plant had an operating regieme with postive feedback. Is this stable? NOPE and definately NOT what you would design for a system which changes power exponentially.
Red eye reduction isn't done in the camera by changing the image. It's done by manipulating the flash so the iris of the eye closes down eliminating reflection from the back of the eye.
However a pro would use a flash sufficiently off-axis to eliminate red-eye in the first place - or simply live with it. Probably the photo-editor would take a different image.
Benford's views are fascinating
on
AI in Sci-Fi
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· Score: 1
I've always enjoyed Gregory Benford's view of machine intelligence as presented in his "Galactic Center" novels. He seems to have pondered the differences and how they affect outlook between us wet-ware folks and the machines who inhabit a digital domain.
"Sailing Bright Eternity" is the last of the series. "Great Sky River" the first. I forget the middle novel. There are earlier novels as well "In the Ocean of Night" is particularly good.
In the United States the networks are hopeless and, alas, even PBS has dropped the football. NOVA is now dumbed down, loaded with re-enactments and the softest of the sciences while NPR's "Science Friday" is mostly about technology and medicine.
It's hard to do good science reporting because the reports have to understand what science IS. The fast majority of journalists seem to have taken the bare minimum of courses related to science and still mistake science for engineering. They see science as memorizing facts instead of a process of discovery. Until that changes we won't have science reporting worth diddly squat.
For the expensive memory environment for which it was designed the VAX was fabulous. And it was designed to be scalable as well.
You can snicker at the CISC VAX architecture, but it ran multi-user in less RAM than many processors today have CACHE. Remember 2 MB of RAM was a lot when the 11/780 was introduced. 600 MB drives were considered HUGE and were the size of washing machines.
Its scalable architecture let a copy of VMS from the lowliest processor be physically mounted on the most capable and boot just fine.
It had BCD instructions too, not just string.
But Gorden Bell got a lot more right than he got wrong. And the compact and orthogonal instruction set of the VAX looks pretty good today.
It's not what "NASA or Boeing wants us to believe" that is important. It's what an investigation can determine. It'll take time for enough detail to emerge before we know.
This kind of "us vs them" story indicates all that is wrong with the coverage. It will be methodical analysis, and maybe some luck, that will eventually tell the story. And we might as well get used to the fact that we may NEVER know exactly what happened - only what is probable. That's the real world.
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The state will pay once for the laptop computers. A pay raise goes on forever so buying the laptops is trivial.
I'd also point out that in most American school systems pay is set by the district and not the state government. But the economics of schools is a zero-sum game - you can pay teachers more - but something will have to go because there is a limited amount of money in the system. Want to give up that music program in the elementary schools? How about larger class size? Less art? Fewer field trips?
It's not a trivial problem and just saying "pay the teachers more" isn't sufficient.
You could run RT-11 on the PC 350 as I remember and it was pretty spiffy.
DEC decided that what they REALLY needed to run on the 350 was a dumbed-down version of RSX-11/M-Plus with an awful menu system.
RT-11 was a wonderful little OS (little in that it's memory footprint was about 8K) whose motto was "Who says you can't love something that's small and finishes fast?"
DEC suffered a severe failure of vision -- they had the pieces but Olson wouldn't listen about how to put them together.
I mean wow guys, you just run the C compiler backwards and it will disassemble the object code into C.
And it tells you "Paul is Dead" at the same time.
These kids now adays...
Small high-power electric motors for ship propulsion are prime candidates for "high-temperature" superconductors.
The US Navy has funded demonstration projects for ship propulsion.
Indeed electric propulsion for surface ships and submarines, that use common components is a very big research item right now for all the obvious reasons.
And just what part of the United States have you been "enjoying" these parks? Or are you parked in front of a computer screen all day in, say, San Francisco?
Have you toured? Lived in different parts of the country? Or are you stuck in a metro area and think you have seen the entire country?
At the Naval Submarine League symposium this past June Lockeed Martin displayed a fascinating bit of techology that took a video stream from a UAV along with an embedded GPS position stream and information regarding the orientation of the camera lens. This video was processed and the footprint of the image (corrected for slant angle etc etc) onto a map. Add a bit of target recognition software to help watch the image for interesting targets of opportunity.
If a target is located on a frame of the downloaded video imagery it can be precisely located, a human can agree it's a target worthy of shooting at, and the coordinates downloaded to a Tomahawk and launced - in minutes.
If the new Tactical Tomahawk's are used, which may be loitering in the area, the submarine can uplink via satellite to the weapon and send it on its way very quickly.
This technology was partially demonstrated in Operation Giant Shadow which proved in prinicipal how the upgraded Trident SSGN submarines will operate.
In the demo package there was an XServe, although I don't know if it were doing anything other than serving as a QuickTime video stream to simulate the UAV collecting the data.
Geee - let's think about this a moment okay? US Navy submarines are nuclear powered - which means there's a big steam propulsion plant occupying the back half the submarine. It gets HOT. Air conditioning is required to keep the engineering spaces habitable. They also carry lots of electronic equipment, computers etc etc. These require cooling.
Also submarines operate these days in shallow, warm-water ocean conditions. Back in the bad-ol' days the boats operated in cold deep oceans but no longer. Look at the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea and the coastal conditions of the Indian Ocean where water temperatures are over 80 degrees.
Why do people post things when they have no immediate knowledge beyond maybe playing a video game??
Keep in mind that the VIRGINIA class is designed without traditional periscopes. Instead high-definition cameras will take the place of the traditional optical periscope. So you can imagine why you'd want to be able to do some serious image manipulation.
Of course sonar systems would benefit from compute servers as well.
A few weeks ago I attended a luncheon where the state of computer systems on the ABRAHAM LINCOLN was discussed. While controlling the battle force during the Iraq war computer systems were rebooted on 45 minute intervals because they weren't stable: running Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Hopefully this will be fixed when the LINCOLN goes through her overhaul.
This is a machine that gets hauled around, moved, etc. It's basically more fragile than desktop systems. Everything is a bit closer to the edge.
I have a first-generation TiBook ordered the day they were announced. I've had 3 keyboards, a new disk drive, and new memory. Hasn't cost me a dime and Apple has gotten the machine turned around very rapidly.
For me the AppleCare warrenty running out is the mark of when it's time to consider buying a new laptop. By that time there should be 1.5GHz machines at least anda much bigger disk drive etc etc.
It's a nice gimmic and for sports it's pretty nice. But Nikon can't play with Canon and the D1S and it's full frame 11 MPixel CMOS chip. Until Nikon can make a camera that's even close to the D1S life will be difficult and there's no indication that Nikon will be able to compete any time soon.
Think SPORTS. Think sitting in a photographer's well at a ball game. You shoot. Between innings you've uploaded to your editor. You can move around to various locations in the venue. Most athletic events are sufficiently small to allow this sort of camera to work and many sports are episodic enough to allow the download to happen.
Of course this camera doesn't compare well to a Canon D1S. It's not a full frame sensor and it's simply not as good an imaging device as the Canon is. Nikon appears to be unable to play at the same quality as Canon does in digital cameras.
I see more and more shooters with Canon and fewer and fewer with Nikon. This might not suffice to keep them in the game.
You are misinformed on several levels:
1) this is minor league baseball (AAA, the step just below the majors)
2) they probably do have contract for some form of television broadcasting but it's probably only a few games a year
3) most stadiums allow cameras but not broadcast of play by play although if you ASK you'd probably be able to work a deal - this is all about selling tickets and getting people interested in coming to the ballpark.
Hotdogs are probably $3.50.
And DO enjoy the game. Minor league baseball is a hoot - and at the AAA level it's darn good baseball.
The CARTER (SSN 23) is currently in new construction at Electric Boat in Groton, CT. The last of the SEAWOLF (SSN 21) class, she will be the largest fast attack submarine ever built by the United States.
Due to be commissioned in January 2005 in Kings Bay, GA.
Very few details about the additional 100 foot hull segment added to the CARTER are available beyond some generic posters made by EB and a very few web sites.
The SEAWOLF class represents the most sophisticated submarine design ever made by the US, representing a no-compromise approach not found in the much less expensive VIRGINIA class.
Just don't make a hobbit of posts like this...
Yes, it's probably a security threat.
For the record it's quite possible to take non-classified sources and make a document whose classification should be at least SECRET and probably TOP SECRET. You can do this.
I wish the guy didn't sound so adolescent though. If he makes something dangerous he should own the fact and recognize that his research SHOULD be classified. There are responsibilities that each of us has for the actions we take. He did something very interesting - but also potentially quite dangerous to the national security.
So take the knowledge, classify the resource, and go make a zillion dollars in the private sector.
Chernobyl was a disaster but TMI actually did very well - especially when you consider that it took simulaneous HUMAN failures to push the plant over the edge. If the operators has followed Rickover's dictum to "Believe your indication" things would have gone much much better.
Chenobyl is what happens when you don't plan for reactor safety - they violated so many operation rules it's hardly believable. The design of the plant included a positive "alpha-T" that is the temperature coefficient of reactivity could be POSITIVE which means the plant had an operating regieme with postive feedback. Is this stable? NOPE and definately NOT what you would design for a system which changes power exponentially.
So don't cast such a broad net.
Red eye reduction isn't done in the camera by changing the image. It's done by manipulating the flash so the iris of the eye closes down eliminating reflection from the back of the eye.
However a pro would use a flash sufficiently off-axis to eliminate red-eye in the first place - or simply live with it. Probably the photo-editor would take a different image.
I've always enjoyed Gregory Benford's view of machine intelligence as presented in his "Galactic Center" novels. He seems to have pondered the differences and how they affect outlook between us wet-ware folks and the machines who inhabit a digital domain.
"Sailing Bright Eternity" is the last of the series. "Great Sky River" the first. I forget the middle novel. There are earlier novels as well "In the Ocean of Night" is particularly good.
Why build something that will last 200 years when you have no idea about what the world will be like.
Why not, instead, design a home that is easy to rebuild and recycle so you or your descendents can have a different vision and easily remake it.
In the United States the networks are hopeless and, alas, even PBS has dropped the football. NOVA is now dumbed down, loaded with re-enactments and the softest of the sciences while NPR's "Science Friday" is mostly about technology and medicine.
It's hard to do good science reporting because the reports have to understand what science IS. The fast majority of journalists seem to have taken the bare minimum of courses related to science and still mistake science for engineering. They see science as memorizing facts instead of a process of discovery. Until that changes we won't have science reporting worth diddly squat.
Yet another addition to "The Lurking Horror."
For the expensive memory environment for which it was designed the VAX was fabulous. And it was designed to be scalable as well.
You can snicker at the CISC VAX architecture, but it ran multi-user in less RAM than many processors today have CACHE. Remember 2 MB of RAM was a lot when the 11/780 was introduced. 600 MB drives were considered HUGE and were the size of washing machines.
Its scalable architecture let a copy of VMS from the lowliest processor be physically mounted on the most capable and boot just fine.
It had BCD instructions too, not just string.
But Gorden Bell got a lot more right than he got wrong. And the compact and orthogonal instruction set of the VAX looks pretty good today.
It's not what "NASA or Boeing wants us to believe" that is important. It's what an investigation can determine. It'll take time for enough detail to emerge before we know.
This kind of "us vs them" story indicates all that is wrong with the coverage. It will be methodical analysis, and maybe some luck, that will eventually tell the story. And we might as well get used to the fact that we may NEVER know exactly what happened - only what is probable. That's the real world.
Gee - this isn't hard - run Darwin and X Windows software.
Sigs? We don't need no stinkin' sigs.