Gates had little to do with it - he was merely in the right place at the right time: Microsoft got where it is today largely due to luck, gaining a monopoly on the coat tails of the IBM PC.
What made the PC popular was really Compaq clean-rooming the PC BIOS and making the IBM Compatible. If Digital Research had got the contract for the PC OS instead of Microsoft, we'd all be whining about DR's monopoly now instead of Microsoft's.
Ice core samples show that CO2 content in the atmosphere strongly correlates with global temperature. The ice core records go back hundreds of thousands of years. The green house properties of carbon dioxide are well known and aren't disputed by any serious scientist.
It was an explosion-like event. Comparing an explosion-like event to a quantity of TNT makes sense (comparing a like event with a like event). You could express it in joules, but it would be meaningless to most people.
A modern thermonuclear weapon is a multistage device. Briefly, here's how one works.
There are essentially two nuclear bombs within a thermonuclear weapon. There is a fission bomb and a fusion bomb. The fission bomb is needed to detonate the fusion part. The fission part, at one end of the bomb casing, consists of an initiator (neutron generator), a sphere of fissile material (plutonium), and a neutron reflector (IIRC, natural uranium tamper) all wrapped in a spherical set of explosive lenses. The entire fission device is a sphere. The fusion part is behind a radiation shield, and is cylindrical. Coming through this shield is an enriched uranium "spark plug" that goes from the fission bomb and up the centre of the cylinder of fusion fuel. The fusion fuel is a solid fuel - lithium deuteride.
Around this cylinder of fusion fuel is a natural uranium tamper. Then there is a layer of polystrene, and the bomb casing. So essentially you have a cylinder that consists of bomb casing, polystyrene, natural uranium tamper, lithium deuteride and the highly enriched uranium 'spark plug'.
The sequence of events in detonation is that the explosive lenses are detonated around the fission first stage. This causes the contents of the spherical fission stage to implode - increasing the density of the fission bomb. When it is assembled into a critical mass, the initiator is fired, which fires neutrons into this highly compressed mass of plutonium. It starts to fission. The goal of the design is to keep this mass assembled for as long as possible - the longer you can keep the critical mass assemble before the nuclear reaction blows it apart, the better the efficiency.
The fission bomb is now emitting a significant amount of prompt radiation. Most of this won't reach the fusion part just yet because of the radiation shield. However, X-rays are now vaporizing the polystyrene wrapping the cylinder of fusion fuel. This enormously compresses the tamper, the lithium deuteride and the spark plug into a tiny fraction of its original volume. At the same time, the spark plug starts fissioning. Basically, a bomb the size of the Nagasaki bomb is being used to crush this cylinder of fusion fuel. The fusion reaction starts taking place. Again, the bomb is designed to keep all this stuff assembled for long enough that a significant fusion reaction can occur - and this time is measured in tens of nanoseconds. Finally, the fusion reaction's energy starts the natural uranium tamper fissioning - the third stage - adding yet more power to the explosion.
All this has to be exquisitely timed or you just spread some radioactive material around rather than start a nuclear reaction. If one of the explosive lenses in the fission device explodes a couple of nanoseconds late, the bomb won't go off.
Eventually (eventually, as I said, is measured in nanoseconds) the energy liberated starts to disassemble the bomb, and the reaction completes. By the time the bomb casing has started to break apart, the nuclear reaction has finished.
As you can see, there are several stages to this reaction. Any fault in the bomb will mean it either won't detonate at all or will "fizzle" (in this instance, a "fizzle" means only enough energy to blow up, say, Long Island). Various components in the bomb degrade - the electronics, the explosives and the plastics. If any degrade sufficiently it's likely the bomb simply won't go off at all.
In which case, clean room the OpenBSD driver - the hard work (reverse engineering) has been done - use the OpenBSD sourcecode and docs to write a spec, then have someone else implement the spec. The OpenBSD source can speed up the clean room process.
Actually, you'll probably find yourself under suspicion at a smaller airfield. Small airfields are like small towns, except more so: everyone knows everyone else.
After Sept.11th, a news organization phoned the operator of our local airfield, and asked some questions (probably hoping to do a Shock! Horror! No security at GA airfield! Oh noes! Someone could fly a plane lighter than a Geo Metro into the side of a downtown building and...erm, bounce off!)
Well, they were speaking to the line guy. The conversation went more or less like this.
Journalist: "Well, you have no security!!!111oneone" Line man: "Actually, we have the best security there is - familiarity. If we see strangers poking around, we'll go up to them and see what they want. We actually had this happen last week" Jounalist (sensing some sort of a scoop): "Well, what aroused your suspicion?" Line man: "They were poking around and obviously didn't know what they were doing. So I went over to speak to them" Journalist: "Did you call the FBI? Who were they?" Line man: "Actually, it was the FBI"
Our airport (Houston Gulf - KSPX) got a lot of attention from the press because it was owned by the Bin Laden familly (not Osama obviously). It was owned by one of Osama's brothers, who had died in an ultralight crash in the 1980s, and held in a trust. The unwelcome attention caused the trust to sell the airport to a housing developer, so now it's yet another set of identikit McMansions.
Titanium isn't very stiff at all - it gives extremely readily, much more so than steel. If you know anyone with titanium framed spectacles, they can demonstrate for you.
As for safety, just like Li-Ion batteries have safety devices, I would imagine a "batacitor" would probably have a current limiting device inside a casing of adequate strength (and waterproofness), so the current draw from exposed terminals couldn't reach dangerous levels.
A long time. Texas goes on and on and on and on and [...] on and on and on. And on a bit more. It's further from El Paso to Texarkana than it is from El Paso to Los Angeles. The population density is very low in Texas - a population of 20 million, and half of that is in Houston and the Dallas/Fort Worth areas (5 million in the greater Houston area, and the DFW area also having 5 million) leaving most of the rest of the state (which is the size of France) pretty much empty.
The growth seems to be happening in the big metropolitan areas - but Houston has so much space to expand into, the expansion is basically going on unchecked because there's little to stop it. This is not necessarily a good thing. I used to live in Houston (and didn't mind it too much) - but I don't think I'd want to live there now with all the characterless sprawl of McMansions and strip malls that's going on now.
Surely this should be the Acer Perspire 9800 instead of Aspire. After all, perspire is what you'll do after lugging this around for a while on a warm day.
If you're essentially going to make a desktop replacement like this, at least equip it with a desktop type full stroke keyboard with cursor keys so it's not a machine with all the drawbacks of a laptop and all the drawbacks of a desktop. In the late 1980s, even the cheapo PC maker Amstrad made a portable with a 102-key full stroke keyboard rather than a compromised laptop keyboard. The Amstrad was probably about the same width as this thing. The photo shows lots of wasted space on the edges of the keyboard which could have been better used to provide a full sized keyboard.
Three to five down events per year totaling 10 to 19 hours of downtime per year? I'm not SuperAdmin, but NONE of my servers are ever down for that long or that often. Who are they letting run these boxes? What are they doing? Taking the machine into single user mode and recompiling the kernel before rebooting them or something?
Exactly - the record companies want all the benefits of globalization (cheap labour) but want to disallow all the benefits of globalization (low prices) to their customers. They are having their cake and eating it too.
Using a recent version of VMware Server, I can say that Xen still blows it away performance wise - the difference is like night and day for what I'm doing. That's not to say VMware server is bad - it is not, I like it, and I find it useful - but Xen and VMware Server are different approaches to solve different problems.
But the US bus driver's cost of living (housing, fuel, food etc.) probably eats most of that, particularly if he lives somewhere like San Fransisco (in which case, he probably can't support himself on that wage and needs to be a DINKY).
The Indian's $800/month on the other hand is enough to live like a king - because the basic cost of living is a tiny fraction of what it is in the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
Gates had little to do with it - he was merely in the right place at the right time: Microsoft got where it is today largely due to luck, gaining a monopoly on the coat tails of the IBM PC.
What made the PC popular was really Compaq clean-rooming the PC BIOS and making the IBM Compatible. If Digital Research had got the contract for the PC OS instead of Microsoft, we'd all be whining about DR's monopoly now instead of Microsoft's.
Duh. This is Slashdot not Cee Colon Backslash. What did you expect?
Don't let the door slap you on the ass on the way out, then.
Ice core samples show that CO2 content in the atmosphere strongly correlates with global temperature. The ice core records go back hundreds of thousands of years. The green house properties of carbon dioxide are well known and aren't disputed by any serious scientist.
Well, at least the employee knows what the internet is for:1 227974645
The internet is for porn! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=543034384
It was an explosion-like event. Comparing an explosion-like event to a quantity of TNT makes sense (comparing a like event with a like event). You could express it in joules, but it would be meaningless to most people.
A modern thermonuclear weapon is a multistage device. Briefly, here's how one works.
There are essentially two nuclear bombs within a thermonuclear weapon. There is a fission bomb and a fusion bomb. The fission bomb is needed to detonate the fusion part.
The fission part, at one end of the bomb casing, consists of an initiator (neutron generator), a sphere of fissile material (plutonium), and a neutron reflector (IIRC, natural uranium tamper) all wrapped in a spherical set of explosive lenses. The entire fission device is a sphere. The fusion part is behind a radiation shield, and is cylindrical. Coming through this shield is an enriched uranium "spark plug" that goes from the fission bomb and up the centre of the cylinder of fusion fuel. The fusion fuel is a solid fuel - lithium deuteride.
Around this cylinder of fusion fuel is a natural uranium tamper. Then there is a layer of polystrene, and the bomb casing. So essentially you have a cylinder that consists of bomb casing, polystyrene, natural uranium tamper, lithium deuteride and the highly enriched uranium 'spark plug'.
The sequence of events in detonation is that the explosive lenses are detonated around the fission first stage. This causes the contents of the spherical fission stage to implode - increasing the density of the fission bomb. When it is assembled into a critical mass, the initiator is fired, which fires neutrons into this highly compressed mass of plutonium. It starts to fission. The goal of the design is to keep this mass assembled for as long as possible - the longer you can keep the critical mass assemble before the nuclear reaction blows it apart, the better the efficiency.
The fission bomb is now emitting a significant amount of prompt radiation. Most of this won't reach the fusion part just yet because of the radiation shield. However, X-rays are now vaporizing the polystyrene wrapping the cylinder of fusion fuel. This enormously compresses the tamper, the lithium deuteride and the spark plug into a tiny fraction of its original volume. At the same time, the spark plug starts fissioning. Basically, a bomb the size of the Nagasaki bomb is being used to crush this cylinder of fusion fuel. The fusion reaction starts taking place. Again, the bomb is designed to keep all this stuff assembled for long enough that a significant fusion reaction can occur - and this time is measured in tens of nanoseconds. Finally, the fusion reaction's energy starts the natural uranium tamper fissioning - the third stage - adding yet more power to the explosion.
All this has to be exquisitely timed or you just spread some radioactive material around rather than start a nuclear reaction. If one of the explosive lenses in the fission device explodes a couple of nanoseconds late, the bomb won't go off.
Eventually (eventually, as I said, is measured in nanoseconds) the energy liberated starts to disassemble the bomb, and the reaction completes. By the time the bomb casing has started to break apart, the nuclear reaction has finished.
As you can see, there are several stages to this reaction. Any fault in the bomb will mean it either won't detonate at all or will "fizzle" (in this instance, a "fizzle" means only enough energy to blow up, say, Long Island). Various components in the bomb degrade - the electronics, the explosives and the plastics. If any degrade sufficiently it's likely the bomb simply won't go off at all.
They don't use tritium (I think they used cryogenic tritium once in a test, but that's the only time). The fusion fuel is lithium deuteride, IIRC.
Muscle memory is great until you go on a trip to France, and at the internet cafe are greeted by an AZERTY keyboard!
I found it works OK if I resize the window a bit after it loads.
In which case, clean room the OpenBSD driver - the hard work (reverse engineering) has been done - use the OpenBSD sourcecode and docs to write a spec, then have someone else implement the spec. The OpenBSD source can speed up the clean room process.
Actually, you'll probably find yourself under suspicion at a smaller airfield. Small airfields are like small towns, except more so: everyone knows everyone else.
After Sept.11th, a news organization phoned the operator of our local airfield, and asked some questions (probably hoping to do a Shock! Horror! No security at GA airfield! Oh noes! Someone could fly a plane lighter than a Geo Metro into the side of a downtown building and...erm, bounce off!)
Well, they were speaking to the line guy. The conversation went more or less like this.
Journalist: "Well, you have no security!!!111oneone"
Line man: "Actually, we have the best security there is - familiarity. If we see strangers poking around, we'll go up to them and see what they want. We actually had this happen last week"
Jounalist (sensing some sort of a scoop): "Well, what aroused your suspicion?"
Line man: "They were poking around and obviously didn't know what they were doing. So I went over to speak to them"
Journalist: "Did you call the FBI? Who were they?"
Line man: "Actually, it was the FBI"
Our airport (Houston Gulf - KSPX) got a lot of attention from the press because it was owned by the Bin Laden familly (not Osama obviously). It was owned by one of Osama's brothers, who had died in an ultralight crash in the 1980s, and held in a trust. The unwelcome attention caused the trust to sell the airport to a housing developer, so now it's yet another set of identikit McMansions.
Titanium isn't very stiff at all - it gives extremely readily, much more so than steel. If you know anyone with titanium framed spectacles, they can demonstrate for you.
Nanotubes are extremely strong.
As for safety, just like Li-Ion batteries have safety devices, I would imagine a "batacitor" would probably have a current limiting device inside a casing of adequate strength (and waterproofness), so the current draw from exposed terminals couldn't reach dangerous levels.
You can still quote part of an article without violating copyright. It was properly attributed to CNN, and the summary is a good example of fair use.
A long time. Texas goes on and on and on and on and [...] on and on and on. And on a bit more. It's further from El Paso to Texarkana than it is from El Paso to Los Angeles. The population density is very low in Texas - a population of 20 million, and half of that is in Houston and the Dallas/Fort Worth areas (5 million in the greater Houston area, and the DFW area also having 5 million) leaving most of the rest of the state (which is the size of France) pretty much empty.
The growth seems to be happening in the big metropolitan areas - but Houston has so much space to expand into, the expansion is basically going on unchecked because there's little to stop it. This is not necessarily a good thing. I used to live in Houston (and didn't mind it too much) - but I don't think I'd want to live there now with all the characterless sprawl of McMansions and strip malls that's going on now.
They have those locks so they can impress the clueless who will then pay their exhorbitant rates.
Surely this should be the Acer Perspire 9800 instead of Aspire. After all, perspire is what you'll do after lugging this around for a while on a warm day.
If you're essentially going to make a desktop replacement like this, at least equip it with a desktop type full stroke keyboard with cursor keys so it's not a machine with all the drawbacks of a laptop and all the drawbacks of a desktop. In the late 1980s, even the cheapo PC maker Amstrad made a portable with a 102-key full stroke keyboard rather than a compromised laptop keyboard. The Amstrad was probably about the same width as this thing. The photo shows lots of wasted space on the edges of the keyboard which could have been better used to provide a full sized keyboard.
Three to five down events per year totaling 10 to 19 hours of downtime per year? I'm not SuperAdmin, but NONE of my servers are ever down for that long or that often. Who are they letting run these boxes? What are they doing? Taking the machine into single user mode and recompiling the kernel before rebooting them or something?
RHEL 4 (well, actually CentOS 4.3) seems to work perfectly fine on our NForce 1U rackmount kit. Supported out of the box.
Exactly - the record companies want all the benefits of globalization (cheap labour) but want to disallow all the benefits of globalization (low prices) to their customers. They are having their cake and eating it too.
You can get DRM-free music from eMusic for 25 cents per track.
Ironically, the Daily WTF's forum system seems like it should be a Daily WTF in itself. I've never seen such an abysmal forum.
Using a recent version of VMware Server, I can say that Xen still blows it away performance wise - the difference is like night and day for what I'm doing. That's not to say VMware server is bad - it is not, I like it, and I find it useful - but Xen and VMware Server are different approaches to solve different problems.
But the US bus driver's cost of living (housing, fuel, food etc.) probably eats most of that, particularly if he lives somewhere like San Fransisco (in which case, he probably can't support himself on that wage and needs to be a DINKY).
The Indian's $800/month on the other hand is enough to live like a king - because the basic cost of living is a tiny fraction of what it is in the United States.