Hydrogen bombs can have yields in the 10MT range, but generally it's pointless making them that big. The Russian 50MT bomb wasn't actually a practical weapon - it was far too large, and could only be carried by a specially modified (and slow flying) bomber. That is still the case today. That bomber would easily be shot down.
Generally, practical weapons will be less than 500kT, there's really no point making them any bigger.
Ignoring the rather bad calculations on percentage, the two nukes would have to be fairly large to do that - at least thermonuclear. Countries like NK at worst will probably only be able to develop a device equivalent to the original Trinity (20-odd kt, pure fission). They don't even have ICBMs.
Firewire is a MUST for video editing - all the digital video cameras I've seen may have USB ports, but the only thing that comes out the USB port are still photos. Video only comes out of the camera's Fireware port (called iLink by Sony).
You can't just write off the entirity of the idea of 'software engineering' because your professor is a dork.
I've worked on some *very* large projects, where we employed software engineering processes (specifically, the SEI's CMM). When I started on the project, we were doing it exactly how you did it for your 'kick ass project' - which works great for a small project btw, but resulted in all nighters, missed deadlines, LOTS of bugs and lots of heartache on our big project. Of course everyone complained when we started moving to proper software engineering processes (including automated testing and proving that the automated testing was indeed working, and writing COMPLETE specs BEFORE writing a single line of code). It wasn't an enjoyable transition. Then came the independent audits. I had the dubious pleasure of being development's rep (read: the guy they interrogated mercilessly) for the audits since I was the senior developer on the project.
But it was a revelation - the road to Damascus if you like. Employing proper processes and sticking to them meant some really interesting things happened: - Within a year, we became extremely accurate at sizing new tasks - Within a year, there were no more all nighters or vast gobs of unpaid overtime to be done - indeed, we were all working 40 hour weeks. - The code quality improved DRAMATICALLY. The difference was like night and day. - Customer satisfaction turned right around from us nearly losing the contract to having an extremely good relationship with our customer.
At the start, I was as skeptical as you and saw the whole 'software engineering' thing sucking all the fun out of my job.
A year later, I realised it had prevented us from being burned out (and fired by the customer) and had actually kept the job being fun.
Properly done software engineering processes really do work in the real world. I still didn't (and still don't) enjoy going to requirements reviews and writing detailed niggly specifications, but I'm happy to do them because I realise that way I get to spend weekends and evenings doing my own thing at home instead of pulling all-nighters.
Probably because you didn't do any CS-like learning is why you think learning C# in a very short period of time is 'simply false'. (Another poster mentioned libraries so I won't belabour that point. It took me about 45 minutes over lunch one day to get up to speed with the syntax and features of Objective-C having never written a line of ObjC in my life; it will take a lot longer to know Cocoa (the class library) inside and out. But you can just look up library details on the fly, especially if you have an existing project to look at. I wager it would take me no longer than 45 minutes to grok the syntax of C# too - all it is is a variation on a theme, and again, I can just trawl the library documentation).
You will probably learn this with time. Of course you don't say what languages you do use - but if you're monolingual, perhaps that's why you think that. A CS student is likely to have been exposed to many languages, and in the course of this has recognised that really what is important is not the language but the principles of computer science and will already realise that picking up the basics of a new language of a given type is really a 45 minute job. Your dismissal of CS graduates (who generally will have this skill) just shows you still have an awful lot to learn yourself which you may have done if you had done CS:-)
On enumerating goodness, in a corporate environment, that's exactly what you want: you don't want everyone to use their computer as a general do everything tool - you want them to use their computer to do the job they are supposed to do. They don't need Comet Cursor or Kazaa to do that.
Of course, then there's the developers who (should) know what they are up to, and will need to be able to install things without having to go through the IT department for every scripting tool they need to get their job done. So you put those guys on a separate network segment, firewalled off from the rest of the office workers - so if a developer manages to clobber the network, they don't clobber the entire company.
On a point of pedantry, if you did try and move the big silver lever in flight, you wouldn't be able to open the door anyway. Airliners generally use plug type doors. To find out the force required to open one in flight, take the surface area of the door, multiply by the pressure differential (say, 8 psi) and work out how many tons of force the puny human trying to open it would require.
Sorry, but it's highly unlikely. In the early days of Linux (early to mid 90s), S3 cards were one of just a few that we all avoided at all costs, because unlike most other cards which had open specs, S3 kept theirs a closely guarded secret. (S3 drivers did show up eventually, but by that time everyone else was using Tseng Labs ET4000 W32 which was open).
The trouble with growing it on the surface of the ocean is you could quite easily cause ecological problems that way. Grown in a sealed environment will keep it all in (obviously) which becomes much more important if the algae is genetically modified and you want to keep it out of the environment.
...and kerosene is a kind of diesel. There are reciprocating aviation diesels that run on Jet-A1. Diesel cars will run on kerosene so long as a lubricant is added (or they'll run, but not for long).
Reducing bandwith is always a good idea (it speeds up site access for a start) but considering most hosting providers now let you have around 1TB per server with no bandwidth charges, cutting bandwidth usage probably won't make any changes to how much it costs to run Slashdot.
Many European diesels have made it to the US. I have friends who are very satisfied with their VW Jetta TDi. Besides, diesel cars aren't the half of it - jet fuel is essentially a type of diesel, and jet engines will happily run on it.
Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple to charge a penny on-line.
Micropayments were available in the mid to late 1980s on Prestel and Micronet (a British pre-world wide web online service). "Information providers" on Prestel/Micronet could have free pages, or pages that cost money to view from 1 penny and up. In 1986, I was buying and downloading games for my Sinclair Spectrum for a reasonable discount over going to the shop and buying the same game on tape. Multi-user games such as Shades were paid for using micropayments (1 penny increments). You could rent Gallery pages (a bit like making your own home page on the web today) by using this system.
Of course with Prestel/Micronet it was easy since Prestel just added the charges to your bill quarterly. However, there's no reason why PayPal couldn't have done the same for PayPal user to PayPal user transactions since they wouldn't have to interact with any banking institutions to do it, so really it's boo on PayPal for taking so long to actually make this happen.
Finally, if fusion electricity is cheap enough, we can simply grow very dense crops under electric lighting and convert the resulting bio-oils to biodiesel.
That's unnecessarily complex. Typical crops (such as rapeseed oil) yield around 150 US gallons of biodiesel per acre per year.
On the other hand, algae species have been found to contain 50% oil that can be used for biodiesel. An algae biodiesel factory has the potential for 10,000 to 20,000 US gallons of biodiesel per acre under normal sunlight. Using 0.3% to 0.6% of the land mass in the US (and since growing algae will be more of an industrial than an agricultural process, this can be done in the desert where the sunlight is best) you can make enough biodiesel to power the United States _entire_ transportation infrastructure. Most of this infrastructure (trains, planes, diesel cars and trucks) can use this fuel without modification - unlike hydrogen which will require a complete replacement of the current infrastructure.
My phone pairs up with my PowerBook very nicely. That has 60GB of storage. A phone like this (so long as the cell companies don't do their usual exhorbitant charging per kilobyte) would be useful as a device to use with your laptop (or perhaps built into your laptop) when you're away from home.
No. Large scale wireless sucks, it always has sucked and probably already will suck. The best wireless technologies that users can actually get their hands on right at this moment have terrible latency and very high charges (for data you get charged per kilobyte - downloading that DVD would cost thousands).
Not so when you pay by the kilobyte. Mobile networks are notorious for charging outrageous rates - such as 1 or 2c per kilobyte. Add up how many kilobytes are in a typical pirated movie encoded as MPEG-4.
It would be cheaper for the pirates to fly pirated DVDs to the end users in a private jet.
Slashdot Mirror
It's missile, suitcase, Chinese, Afghanistan, people...
Hydrogen bombs can have yields in the 10MT range, but generally it's pointless making them that big. The Russian 50MT bomb wasn't actually a practical weapon - it was far too large, and could only be carried by a specially modified (and slow flying) bomber. That is still the case today. That bomber would easily be shot down.
Generally, practical weapons will be less than 500kT, there's really no point making them any bigger.
Ignoring the rather bad calculations on percentage, the two nukes would have to be fairly large to do that - at least thermonuclear. Countries like NK at worst will probably only be able to develop a device equivalent to the original Trinity (20-odd kt, pure fission). They don't even have ICBMs.
Firewire is a MUST for video editing - all the digital video cameras I've seen may have USB ports, but the only thing that comes out the USB port are still photos. Video only comes out of the camera's Fireware port (called iLink by Sony).
You can't just write off the entirity of the idea of 'software engineering' because your professor is a dork.
I've worked on some *very* large projects, where we employed software engineering processes (specifically, the SEI's CMM). When I started on the project, we were doing it exactly how you did it for your 'kick ass project' - which works great for a small project btw, but resulted in all nighters, missed deadlines, LOTS of bugs and lots of heartache on our big project. Of course everyone complained when we started moving to proper software engineering processes (including automated testing and proving that the automated testing was indeed working, and writing COMPLETE specs BEFORE writing a single line of code). It wasn't an enjoyable transition. Then came the independent audits. I had the dubious pleasure of being development's rep (read: the guy they interrogated mercilessly) for the audits since I was the senior developer on the project.
But it was a revelation - the road to Damascus if you like. Employing proper processes and sticking to them meant some really interesting things happened:
- Within a year, we became extremely accurate at sizing new tasks
- Within a year, there were no more all nighters or vast gobs of unpaid overtime to be done - indeed, we were all working 40 hour weeks.
- The code quality improved DRAMATICALLY. The difference was like night and day.
- Customer satisfaction turned right around from us nearly losing the contract to having an extremely good relationship with our customer.
At the start, I was as skeptical as you and saw the whole 'software engineering' thing sucking all the fun out of my job.
A year later, I realised it had prevented us from being burned out (and fired by the customer) and had actually kept the job being fun.
Properly done software engineering processes really do work in the real world. I still didn't (and still don't) enjoy going to requirements reviews and writing detailed niggly specifications, but I'm happy to do them because I realise that way I get to spend weekends and evenings doing my own thing at home instead of pulling all-nighters.
Probably because you didn't do any CS-like learning is why you think learning C# in a very short period of time is 'simply false'. (Another poster mentioned libraries so I won't belabour that point. It took me about 45 minutes over lunch one day to get up to speed with the syntax and features of Objective-C having never written a line of ObjC in my life; it will take a lot longer to know Cocoa (the class library) inside and out. But you can just look up library details on the fly, especially if you have an existing project to look at. I wager it would take me no longer than 45 minutes to grok the syntax of C# too - all it is is a variation on a theme, and again, I can just trawl the library documentation).
:-)
You will probably learn this with time. Of course you don't say what languages you do use - but if you're monolingual, perhaps that's why you think that. A CS student is likely to have been exposed to many languages, and in the course of this has recognised that really what is important is not the language but the principles of computer science and will already realise that picking up the basics of a new language of a given type is really a 45 minute job. Your dismissal of CS graduates (who generally will have this skill) just shows you still have an awful lot to learn yourself which you may have done if you had done CS
On enumerating goodness, in a corporate environment, that's exactly what you want: you don't want everyone to use their computer as a general do everything tool - you want them to use their computer to do the job they are supposed to do. They don't need Comet Cursor or Kazaa to do that.
Of course, then there's the developers who (should) know what they are up to, and will need to be able to install things without having to go through the IT department for every scripting tool they need to get their job done. So you put those guys on a separate network segment, firewalled off from the rest of the office workers - so if a developer manages to clobber the network, they don't clobber the entire company.
On a point of pedantry, if you did try and move the big silver lever in flight, you wouldn't be able to open the door anyway. Airliners generally use plug type doors. To find out the force required to open one in flight, take the surface area of the door, multiply by the pressure differential (say, 8 psi) and work out how many tons of force the puny human trying to open it would require.
Man, that little string just brought back memories...2:252/204
In the honour of Douglas Adams, at least one of these objects should have been called Rupert.
I'd get a better designed backpack then. I've hiked up mountainsides with backpacks carrying 50lbs without hurting my back.
I worked at IBM both when all email was on VM mainframes, and when it was Notes.
I much preferred VM. People didn't keep sending me damned MSWord attachments!
Hey, I used to live not too far from College Station...
Sorry, but it's highly unlikely. In the early days of Linux (early to mid 90s), S3 cards were one of just a few that we all avoided at all costs, because unlike most other cards which had open specs, S3 kept theirs a closely guarded secret. (S3 drivers did show up eventually, but by that time everyone else was using Tseng Labs ET4000 W32 which was open).
Try True Combat Elite, too - a conversion for Enemy Territory. See http://www.truecombat.com/intro.php
The trouble with growing it on the surface of the ocean is you could quite easily cause ecological problems that way. Grown in a sealed environment will keep it all in (obviously) which becomes much more important if the algae is genetically modified and you want to keep it out of the environment.
...and kerosene is a kind of diesel. There are reciprocating aviation diesels that run on Jet-A1. Diesel cars will run on kerosene so long as a lubricant is added (or they'll run, but not for long).
Reducing bandwith is always a good idea (it speeds up site access for a start) but considering most hosting providers now let you have around 1TB per server with no bandwidth charges, cutting bandwidth usage probably won't make any changes to how much it costs to run Slashdot.
Many European diesels have made it to the US. I have friends who are very satisfied with their VW Jetta TDi. Besides, diesel cars aren't the half of it - jet fuel is essentially a type of diesel, and jet engines will happily run on it.
Micropayments were available in the mid to late 1980s on Prestel and Micronet (a British pre-world wide web online service). "Information providers" on Prestel/Micronet could have free pages, or pages that cost money to view from 1 penny and up. In 1986, I was buying and downloading games for my Sinclair Spectrum for a reasonable discount over going to the shop and buying the same game on tape. Multi-user games such as Shades were paid for using micropayments (1 penny increments). You could rent Gallery pages (a bit like making your own home page on the web today) by using this system.
Of course with Prestel/Micronet it was easy since Prestel just added the charges to your bill quarterly. However, there's no reason why PayPal couldn't have done the same for PayPal user to PayPal user transactions since they wouldn't have to interact with any banking institutions to do it, so really it's boo on PayPal for taking so long to actually make this happen.
That's unnecessarily complex. Typical crops (such as rapeseed oil) yield around 150 US gallons of biodiesel per acre per year.
On the other hand, algae species have been found to contain 50% oil that can be used for biodiesel. An algae biodiesel factory has the potential for 10,000 to 20,000 US gallons of biodiesel per acre under normal sunlight. Using 0.3% to 0.6% of the land mass in the US (and since growing algae will be more of an industrial than an agricultural process, this can be done in the desert where the sunlight is best) you can make enough biodiesel to power the United States _entire_ transportation infrastructure. Most of this infrastructure (trains, planes, diesel cars and trucks) can use this fuel without modification - unlike hydrogen which will require a complete replacement of the current infrastructure.
My phone pairs up with my PowerBook very nicely. That has 60GB of storage. A phone like this (so long as the cell companies don't do their usual exhorbitant charging per kilobyte) would be useful as a device to use with your laptop (or perhaps built into your laptop) when you're away from home.
No. Large scale wireless sucks, it always has sucked and probably already will suck. The best wireless technologies that users can actually get their hands on right at this moment have terrible latency and very high charges (for data you get charged per kilobyte - downloading that DVD would cost thousands).
Not so when you pay by the kilobyte. Mobile networks are notorious for charging outrageous rates - such as 1 or 2c per kilobyte. Add up how many kilobytes are in a typical pirated movie encoded as MPEG-4.
It would be cheaper for the pirates to fly pirated DVDs to the end users in a private jet.
Probably because the game was mostly given away free with new CD-ROM drives (and Riven was mostly given away free with new DVD-ROM drives)