In terms of thermodynamic efficiency, the best engines in general use were the massive 'corncob' engines used in piston engined airliners. Not jet (turbofan engines) - well, with one notable exception of course.
The reason why airliners went to jets rather than staying with the more fuel efficient piston engines is that turbine engines (not just jets, but turboprop engines) are much smaller and lighter for a given amount of horsepower. Piston engines large enough to power an airliner the size of a B777 would be impractially large, even if they were actually fuel efficient. Additionally, propeller driven aircraft can't fly at high percentages of the speed of sound very well.
Until fairly recently, turbine engines were really horrible when it came to fuel efficency. Small turbines still are pretty awful - compare the fuel burn of a Piper Malibu with the piston engine with the Piper Malibu with the Jetprop DLX conversion. The Jetprop DLX conversion is worse in every respect *except* for the weight of the engine and the reliability and the vibration levels (turbines tend to be a lot more reliable). It burns a hell of a lot more fuel and costs a hell of a lot more to maintain. It's only with the giant turbofans that power the B777 have jet engines got anywhere close to piston engines for thermodynamic efficiency. And the huge engines the B777 are fitted with are pretty damn efficient.
The one notable exception is Concorde. At supersonic speeds, its straight turbojet engines were the most thermodynamically efficient turbine engines ever made, and to my knowlege they still hold that title. This is one of the reasons why Concorde was an (engineering, not commercial!) success, but the Russian Tu-144 was not; the Tu-144 couldn't even maintain supersonic speed without running afterburners. Concorde could supercruise at Mach 2. (Also, contrary to popular belief, the Tu-144 was not a copy of Concorde, it was only superficially similar to Concorde but was different in almost every other important respect).
No - not really. The mere existence of Itanic caused MIPS, PA-Risc and Alpha to simply roll over and fold before the competition even got underway. Intel has just essentially destroyed three competing architectures.
So now that MIPS, PA-RISC and Alpha are dead, those vendors were all supposed to move to Xeon.
That's how pretty much all international politics is - at best, international politics resembles 8 year olds in the school yard. Unfortunately for those of us who just want to get on with our lives, these particular 8 year olds have nuclear weapons.
If your Linux boxes are crashing for no apparent reason with no warning, it's typically bad hardware (usually bad memory. I've had a Linux box suffer corruption in the swap partition due to a failing disk but stay running - and I moved the swap somewhere else without needing a reboot)
I just picked a Linux box at random on the LAN, and it sure looks like an uptime of hundreds of days to me:
That seems like a really ropy strategy - Sparc on the high end and Opteron at the low end means the high and low end will NOT be binary compatible.
And people whine enough about the minor binary incompatibilities between different Linux distros due to library differences. This means the high end stuff can only run programs for the low end stuff under emulation, and vice versa.
If all the important software for Sun's corporate clients was open source, this may be less of a problem - but it isn't. It'll increase the costs to vendors having to now support two architectures for Sun, and so they'll probably drop one of the architectures.
A friend of mine worked for RedHat for a while. From what he told me, the management seemed especially Dilbertesque, which is sort of surprising considering the sort of company it's supposed to be.
He's 23. He's not a kid. He's an adult who's old enough to drink alcohol, to serve for his country as an officer, to drive a heavy truck, to fly an airliner full of paying passengers. He's an adult fully responsible for his own actions. Although I don't think this action merits his career/financial life being ruined essentially in perpetuity, he deserves to be LARTed.
I already pay enough to my ISP, so I never bother with those pay-for-access WiFi hotspots that cafes and airports have. (Our local airport on the other hand has free WiFi). If the WiFi hotspot is not free, I use the GPRS service on my mobile phone because it's already paid for. It may be slow, but it does for email and web surfing.
The trouble with the pay for access WiFi hotspots (at least here) are most of them are extortionate. The minimum charge at, say, Gatwick Airport is GBP/5. You can't buy less than a one hour block. Those 'payphone style' Internet kiosks are cheaper, and you can buy just 15 minutes worth which is enough to check email (and you don't have to use up your laptop's battery).
If I ran a cafe, I'd allow free wifi with a purchase. It'd be something extra to differentiate my shop from the competition.
Actually, UNIX doesn't necessarily need the file extension - the kernel looks at the file's 'magic number' (as well as the executable bit) to decide if it should be executed and how to execute it.
It isn't if you turn off the TV and turn on the radio. There is much humour on BBC Radio 4. I've been in paroxysms of laughter from some of the stuff they have on. Trouble is I was driving at the time...
Well, supposing I survived it, I'd rather miss my fellow humans. On the scale of the entire history of the planet, it might be neither here nor there, but for me (since I was human last time I checked) it would be a pretty bad thing. It'd ruin my whole day. There'd be no more Slashdot.
The trouble is this makes for an incredibly heavy and incredibly inefficient nuke. This severely limits the deployment methods - perhaps the only viable method for a terrorist to use such an enormous bomb is to load it on a ship and detonate it in the harbour. It's also easier for the authorities to detect such a large bomb.
This is the design of the Hiroshima bomb. In its favour, it is so easy to build that the US didn't even bother testing it before they used it.
Nukes that are portable enough to let off in any location are much more complex (and have a limited shelf life - i.e. they need maintenance to remain usable). The simpler forms of plutonium-based bombs (a sphere of Pu surrounded by highly engineered high explosive lenses - this is the implosion bomb design used for all fission nuclear weapons from Trinity and onwards) have a Po-210 initiator in the centre (a very strong alpha emitter). The trouble is Po-210 has a very short half-life, so leave your bomb in storage for 100 days or so and it probably won't work.
The climate is wonderful if you're a duck! There's also great food in the UK too - things like Indian, Chinese, Italian. There's also plenty of beautiful women, and most of the beautiful women have cute foreign accents!
I lived in the US for a number of years. I think you overstate the death of the coal and steel industry (because the power stations still burn just as much coal, and new power capacity has had to be added since as demand went up).
Even in 1990, the average UK citizen used half the energy that the average US citizen did. Having lived in the US, it's not hard to see why; in the US little is built for efficiency (from our homes to our cars), but in the UK, efficiency is a very important metric in every day decisions.
Things like: in the US, my apartment, although relatively newly built, was poorly insulated and had single glazed windows. It kept a large tank full of hot water heated for 24/7 (over which I had no control) even though I needed it perhaps twice a day. An on-demand gas water heater would have done just as good job on a fraction of the energy. It had a refrigerator suitable for a family with four children, despite being a single bedroom apartment. There was no timer on the heat/AC control, meaning it was all to easy to forget to switch it off when I went to work or went away for the weekend. It probably takes less energy to heat the four bedroom house that I have now in a much colder place than it did to heat my apartment in the winter - in Houston - not exactly known for its cold.
Let's take Houston, which is pretty typical for a US city. It sprawls in such a way that public transport is simply not practical. Everything is built on needing the car (the state of Texas says that driving is a privilege - but it's really more of a necessity) and urban planners don't seem to take into account ways of, say, getting your groceries without having to drive. My employer didn't provide a shower at work, but demanded its employees be reasonably clean - making cycling to work impractical (every employer I've had in the British Isles of any consequence has had at least one shower in the building). Even the cars - despite the high price of fuel, it seems the 8mpg Suburban is no longer big enough - I was surprised how Hummers had gone from seeing the occasional one when I moved back (2002) to when I just visited (last week). Half the vehicles on the road appear to be trucks or SUVs of some sort running on gasoline rather than more efficient diesel engines - with just one person on board and nothing in the way of payload. I bet a good proportion of these people could get by with a midsize car that uses less than half the fuel.
Of course, the irony will be that if the predictions on sea level rises are true, then most of George Bush's brother's state will end up underwater, as will all the refineries in the Houston area (which are about 20ft above mean sea level).
Countries like the UK are party to Kyoto, yet the UK isn't whining 'unfair'. The UK's economy has expanded significantly since 1990, and the UK currently has the strongest economy in Europe, with the lowest unemployment, highest growth, and per capita of population is a bigger exporter than the United States ($305bn/yr for a population of 60M in the UK, versus $714bn/yr for a population of 270M in the United States). Yet the UK isn't whining about it. The UK never had a fleet of Trabbies to get rid of, and car ownership in the UK is far higher in 2005 than it was in 1990. Why is the UK not whining about it?
That seems like a non-sequitor. Nations who are trying to reduce energy usage will be affected less severely by 'peak oil' (which despite the doomsayers, is still a long way off). Conservation of oil will actually be a virtue that will lead to a stronger economy where oil is scarce.
If anything, rising oil costs will cause Kyoto reductions to actually be exceeded.
It depends on your goals. I prefer SVN's revisioning system (having used both CVS and CMVC, which use the same revisioning). The nice thing about it is if you extract revision n, you'll know all the files you extract from the repo are as the repo looked when revision was made. This is non-trivial with CVS or CMVC's revisioning system unless you know the version number of all the files in the entire repo and extract those version numbers.
It's still easy to tell when individual files were changed using something like the 'svn log' command.
Not necessarily - the Hiroshima bomb was never tested; it was considered simple enough that they were confident it'd go off. Now any nuke NK would have that's useful would need to be a newer design, but if the design was a stolen one that had adequate testing by someone else, they may feel they don't need to test.
Slashdot Mirror
In terms of thermodynamic efficiency, the best engines in general use were the massive 'corncob' engines used in piston engined airliners. Not jet (turbofan engines) - well, with one notable exception of course.
The reason why airliners went to jets rather than staying with the more fuel efficient piston engines is that turbine engines (not just jets, but turboprop engines) are much smaller and lighter for a given amount of horsepower. Piston engines large enough to power an airliner the size of a B777 would be impractially large, even if they were actually fuel efficient. Additionally, propeller driven aircraft can't fly at high percentages of the speed of sound very well.
Until fairly recently, turbine engines were really horrible when it came to fuel efficency. Small turbines still are pretty awful - compare the fuel burn of a Piper Malibu with the piston engine with the Piper Malibu with the Jetprop DLX conversion. The Jetprop DLX conversion is worse in every respect *except* for the weight of the engine and the reliability and the vibration levels (turbines tend to be a lot more reliable). It burns a hell of a lot more fuel and costs a hell of a lot more to maintain. It's only with the giant turbofans that power the B777 have jet engines got anywhere close to piston engines for thermodynamic efficiency. And the huge engines the B777 are fitted with are pretty damn efficient.
The one notable exception is Concorde. At supersonic speeds, its straight turbojet engines were the most thermodynamically efficient turbine engines ever made, and to my knowlege they still hold that title. This is one of the reasons why Concorde was an (engineering, not commercial!) success, but the Russian Tu-144 was not; the Tu-144 couldn't even maintain supersonic speed without running afterburners. Concorde could supercruise at Mach 2. (Also, contrary to popular belief, the Tu-144 was not a copy of Concorde, it was only superficially similar to Concorde but was different in almost every other important respect).
But was Itanic really a total failure?
No - not really. The mere existence of Itanic caused MIPS, PA-Risc and Alpha to simply roll over and fold before the competition even got underway. Intel has just essentially destroyed three competing architectures.
So now that MIPS, PA-RISC and Alpha are dead, those vendors were all supposed to move to Xeon.
But poor old Intel didn't see Opteron coming.
That's how pretty much all international politics is - at best, international politics resembles 8 year olds in the school yard. Unfortunately for those of us who just want to get on with our lives, these particular 8 year olds have nuclear weapons.
OpenBSD is now SMP (since 3.6, which is the latest release).
If your Linux boxes are crashing for no apparent reason with no warning, it's typically bad hardware (usually bad memory. I've had a Linux box suffer corruption in the swap partition due to a failing disk but stay running - and I moved the swap somewhere else without needing a reboot)
I just picked a Linux box at random on the LAN, and it sure looks like an uptime of hundreds of days to me:
Linux avro 2.4.18-3 #1 Thu Apr 18 07:31:07 EDT 2002 i586 unknown
11:42am up 238 days, 18:14, 1 user, load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01
That seems like a really ropy strategy - Sparc on the high end and Opteron at the low end means the high and low end will NOT be binary compatible.
And people whine enough about the minor binary incompatibilities between different Linux distros due to library differences. This means the high end stuff can only run programs for the low end stuff under emulation, and vice versa.
If all the important software for Sun's corporate clients was open source, this may be less of a problem - but it isn't. It'll increase the costs to vendors having to now support two architectures for Sun, and so they'll probably drop one of the architectures.
A friend of mine worked for RedHat for a while. From what he told me, the management seemed especially Dilbertesque, which is sort of surprising considering the sort of company it's supposed to be.
He ended up leaving and going back home
He's 23. He's not a kid. He's an adult who's old enough to drink alcohol, to serve for his country as an officer, to drive a heavy truck, to fly an airliner full of paying passengers. He's an adult fully responsible for his own actions. Although I don't think this action merits his career/financial life being ruined essentially in perpetuity, he deserves to be LARTed.
Those older HP laserjets, such as the LaserJet 4 are most excellent. They are practically indestructable it seems.
I already pay enough to my ISP, so I never bother with those pay-for-access WiFi hotspots that cafes and airports have. (Our local airport on the other hand has free WiFi). If the WiFi hotspot is not free, I use the GPRS service on my mobile phone because it's already paid for. It may be slow, but it does for email and web surfing.
The trouble with the pay for access WiFi hotspots (at least here) are most of them are extortionate. The minimum charge at, say, Gatwick Airport is GBP/5. You can't buy less than a one hour block. Those 'payphone style' Internet kiosks are cheaper, and you can buy just 15 minutes worth which is enough to check email (and you don't have to use up your laptop's battery).
If I ran a cafe, I'd allow free wifi with a purchase. It'd be something extra to differentiate my shop from the competition.
Actually, UNIX doesn't necessarily need the file extension - the kernel looks at the file's 'magic number' (as well as the executable bit) to decide if it should be executed and how to execute it.
I don't understand why you couldn't. I know someone who upgraded from RH8 to FC2 without needing a reinstall. They did it remotely, too.
It isn't if you turn off the TV and turn on the radio. There is much humour on BBC Radio 4. I've been in paroxysms of laughter from some of the stuff they have on. Trouble is I was driving at the time...
Well, supposing I survived it, I'd rather miss my fellow humans. On the scale of the entire history of the planet, it might be neither here nor there, but for me (since I was human last time I checked) it would be a pretty bad thing. It'd ruin my whole day. There'd be no more Slashdot.
The trouble is this makes for an incredibly heavy and incredibly inefficient nuke. This severely limits the deployment methods - perhaps the only viable method for a terrorist to use such an enormous bomb is to load it on a ship and detonate it in the harbour. It's also easier for the authorities to detect such a large bomb.
This is the design of the Hiroshima bomb. In its favour, it is so easy to build that the US didn't even bother testing it before they used it.
Nukes that are portable enough to let off in any location are much more complex (and have a limited shelf life - i.e. they need maintenance to remain usable). The simpler forms of plutonium-based bombs (a sphere of Pu surrounded by highly engineered high explosive lenses - this is the implosion bomb design used for all fission nuclear weapons from Trinity and onwards) have a Po-210 initiator in the centre (a very strong alpha emitter). The trouble is Po-210 has a very short half-life, so leave your bomb in storage for 100 days or so and it probably won't work.
The climate is wonderful if you're a duck! There's also great food in the UK too - things like Indian, Chinese, Italian. There's also plenty of beautiful women, and most of the beautiful women have cute foreign accents!
I lived in the US for a number of years. I think you overstate the death of the coal and steel industry (because the power stations still burn just as much coal, and new power capacity has had to be added since as demand went up).
Even in 1990, the average UK citizen used half the energy that the average US citizen did. Having lived in the US, it's not hard to see why; in the US little is built for efficiency (from our homes to our cars), but in the UK, efficiency is a very important metric in every day decisions.
Things like: in the US, my apartment, although relatively newly built, was poorly insulated and had single glazed windows. It kept a large tank full of hot water heated for 24/7 (over which I had no control) even though I needed it perhaps twice a day. An on-demand gas water heater would have done just as good job on a fraction of the energy. It had a refrigerator suitable for a family with four children, despite being a single bedroom apartment. There was no timer on the heat/AC control, meaning it was all to easy to forget to switch it off when I went to work or went away for the weekend. It probably takes less energy to heat the four bedroom house that I have now in a much colder place than it did to heat my apartment in the winter - in Houston - not exactly known for its cold.
Let's take Houston, which is pretty typical for a US city. It sprawls in such a way that public transport is simply not practical. Everything is built on needing the car (the state of Texas says that driving is a privilege - but it's really more of a necessity) and urban planners don't seem to take into account ways of, say, getting your groceries without having to drive. My employer didn't provide a shower at work, but demanded its employees be reasonably clean - making cycling to work impractical (every employer I've had in the British Isles of any consequence has had at least one shower in the building). Even the cars - despite the high price of fuel, it seems the 8mpg Suburban is no longer big enough - I was surprised how Hummers had gone from seeing the occasional one when I moved back (2002) to when I just visited (last week). Half the vehicles on the road appear to be trucks or SUVs of some sort running on gasoline rather than more efficient diesel engines - with just one person on board and nothing in the way of payload. I bet a good proportion of these people could get by with a midsize car that uses less than half the fuel.
Of course, the irony will be that if the predictions on sea level rises are true, then most of George Bush's brother's state will end up underwater, as will all the refineries in the Houston area (which are about 20ft above mean sea level).
Countries like the UK are party to Kyoto, yet the UK isn't whining 'unfair'. The UK's economy has expanded significantly since 1990, and the UK currently has the strongest economy in Europe, with the lowest unemployment, highest growth, and per capita of population is a bigger exporter than the United States ($305bn/yr for a population of 60M in the UK, versus $714bn/yr for a population of 270M in the United States). Yet the UK isn't whining about it. The UK never had a fleet of Trabbies to get rid of, and car ownership in the UK is far higher in 2005 than it was in 1990. Why is the UK not whining about it?
That seems like a non-sequitor. Nations who are trying to reduce energy usage will be affected less severely by 'peak oil' (which despite the doomsayers, is still a long way off). Conservation of oil will actually be a virtue that will lead to a stronger economy where oil is scarce.
If anything, rising oil costs will cause Kyoto reductions to actually be exceeded.
It's trivial to do using the "analogue hole". An analogue re-recording with any reasonable sound card will be good enough.
It'll also make it impossible for foreigners on vacation to take internal flights. Have they thought it through at all?
It depends on your goals. I prefer SVN's revisioning system (having used both CVS and CMVC, which use the same revisioning). The nice thing about it is if you extract revision n, you'll know all the files you extract from the repo are as the repo looked when revision was made. This is non-trivial with CVS or CMVC's revisioning system unless you know the version number of all the files in the entire repo and extract those version numbers.
It's still easy to tell when individual files were changed using something like the 'svn log' command.
Not necessarily - the Hiroshima bomb was never tested; it was considered simple enough that they were confident it'd go off. Now any nuke NK would have that's useful would need to be a newer design, but if the design was a stolen one that had adequate testing by someone else, they may feel they don't need to test.
China is not communist. It IS a totalitarian dictatorship, but it is NOT communist.
Actually it won't. Chip & PIN has been around for a while now. It's very difficult to clone the card too with Chip & PIN.