Do you have a link to any of these "what if" reports? Google isn't finding anything particularly interesting.
Re:16 bit colour?
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LHC Success!
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Because screens with colour used informatively, rather than making eye candy screens with flashy gradients and transparency, make the actual information easier to discern. This isn't some commercial app that has to sell to Mac enthusiasts, nor is it Photoshop.
Well, no, it's just that Microsoft shouted long and hard about how reliable the LSE would be now it was running on Windows Server System 2003. So it's deliciously ironic that after all this trumpet tooting, it still fell flat on its face, regardless of the reason...since Microsoft's ads were obviously to get everyone to believe that the system would be highly reliable.
Maybe so, but the sweet, sweet irony is that Microsoft used the London Stock Exchange in their highly irritating "Highly Reliable Times" advertisments on various websites (including Slashdot). Nothing like tooting your own trumpet, and then the subject of the trumpet tooting falling flat on its face!
You miss the fact that your gigabit copper network in the house is the last ten feet, not the last mile, and is made up of Cat6 cable.
The last mile from the phone exchange is often an elderly, cat-nothing twisted pair. Cross talk problems, the capacitance and the inductance of the line, mean you won't be getting 50 megaBYTES per second down it, ever.
Most people, though, simply do not grok how much data a short video or a few dozen lightly compressed photos use up, though. It's not like voice, where everyone understands what a minute is. A few minutes on a data call can transfer just a few kilobytes, or possibly tens of megabytes - and most people who aren't IT people or telecommunications experts simply don't understand this.
It would be more customer-friendly to by default have the international roaming plan bar calls once the charges reach, say, $100 - instead of let people who aren't IT experts unexpectedly run up gigantic data bills.
That's before we get to the rip-off profiteering that is international roaming.
2008 is still warmer than the 1971-2000 average. In any case, one cooler year does not a trend make. If the annual temperatures trend down for the next 10 years you have a point, but they haven't (and they aren't likely to) - one cooler year, which is still warmer than the most recent set of averages, does not disprove global warming.
The models have been tested. For example, the Met.Office's Hadley Climate Centre tests their models by setting conditions to what they were 50 years ago, and seeing if the model reasonably predicts where we end up today, and by and large, it does. So yes, they have been empirically tested.
Once they have done this testing and can validate that the model can at least start 50 years back and give sufficiently accurate results of what's happening today, they can then use it as the basis for various experiments - such as changing solar input into the system, changing CO2 levels etc.
While it may not predict accurately what's likely in 500 years time, it can provide a pretty good idea at what's likely to happen in 50-100 years time.
This year *has* been warmer than average, as a whole. Perhaps not in your specific location, but as a whole, this year has been warmer than the 1971 to 2000 average, as has every year since 2000.
You're also confusing climatology with meteorology. They aren't the same thing.
What about Spain? Spanish is a good language to learn, what with >400M+ native speakers of the language worldwide, many reasonably close to back home in the USA. Something like 50% of the planet can either speak Spanish or English (not necessarily as their native language of course) so Spanish is a great language to learn.
Actually, the EU wasn't anything about competing with the USA, it is (a rather successful) attempt at *keeping* Europe peaceful on the basis that it's bad business to try and kill your customers and suppliers.
I've never heard *that*. The most common way of saying a=b*c/4 in English English, is "a equals b times c over 4". The only time 'by' is used to possibly mean multipled is by carpenters and the like (for example "a two by four" to mean a 2in x 4in piece of timber) - but people in the USA call them two by fours as well. (The difference in British English is for the lumber 'two by four', is that it's usually pronounced 'two be four').
In any case, if you think English is confusing by having one word mean many things, look at how many different meanings 'quedar', 'dar' and 'llevar' have in Spanish!
I have 25 year old computers and 25 year old discs. They are all perfectly readable.
An IDE interface is *easy* to homebrew - you can do it with a couple of 74 series ICs and whatever suitable device is available in the future for low speed bi-directional communications - just get something from the embedded world (where low speed 8 bit will probably still be king for many applications). I'm sure there will be 8 bit microcontrollers with whatever hotpluggable interface for PCs exists in 25 years time.
IDE interfaces are so easy to make that there's a proliferation of them for old 8 bit computers - you can connect an IDE drive these days to a Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC Micro etc. very easily. The circuits to do so are very simple.
If push came to shove I could design a USB interface for the floppy drive for my BBC Micro, and read them on a brand new Apple Macbook Pro. I'm sure electronics hobbyists will still exist in 25 years time.
No, IDE is a good choice - it's electronically simple, and well within the means of a hobbyist to make an IDE interface on stripboard or breadboard. Even if there are no commercially available IDE interfaces, it would be quite easy to make one.
SATA uses very high frequencies, and has a much, much higher barrier to entry for someone who is not an EE with just the PCB layout issues alone.
The failure rate for 5.25 in discs isn't nearly that bad. I have thirty odd for my BBC Micro, all about 25 years old. Only two had errors on them (I suspect one because the disc was physically damaged, it won't even reformat).
3.5 inch discs *used* to be good, but the most recently made 3.5 inch discs are terrible.
Take the battery out before storing the computer. Replace failed capacitors on recovery.
Most caps in a laptop will be tantalum and multilayer ceramic (you can get multilayer ceramic caps up to 10uF in surface mount packages now). In any case, most electrolytics will still work well enough after that time (as they do in my 25 year old 8 bit stuff). Most drives will still work too, I have 25 year old floppy disc drives that work quite happily. The biggest problem with old drives is the belts failing but you can improvise those.
You under rate magnetic media! I have a number of 25 year old 5.25 inch discs, all which read perfectly. The failure rate of these has been very low. (This contrasts with the failure rates of 3.5 inch discs before they finally became obsolete, many of which wouldn't last more than a day or two!)
IDE is electronically simple, though. It is not hard to homebrew your own IDE to USB adapter today using a microcontroller, or even just a FT245R and some 74 series logic. So IDE isn't a bad choice because it's within the reach of an electronics hobbyist to make an interface.
Hobbyists have been making IDE interfaces for old 8 bit computers for years, such as the C64 and Sinclair Spectrum.
It would be much harder to home brew your own SATA interface.
1. Remove the CMOS battery before storage. 2. Replace capacitors when digging it out again.
I have 25 year old computers with perfectly good electrolytic capacitors (well, perhaps not perfectly good, but good enough). But I suspect the majority of the caps in a laptop are multilayer ceramic or tantalum.
"A GPU from 2006" sounds a lot like famous last words.
I wonder if anyone at DEC made comments in a similar vein about Intel CPUs, when the Alpha was so far ahead of anything Intel was making? NVidia's architect should not underestimate Intel, if he does, he does it at his company's peril.
No, La Niña is spelled "The little girl" in English. You can't translate the word "niña" to English just by replacing the letter ñ with a letter n. (ñ is not an accented n, it's a letter in its own right, coming after the letter n in the Spanish alphabet, which has 27 letters).
Models *do* get tested. For example, if you read the Met Office's website (for the Hadley Climate Centre) you'll see they do plenty of validation work - for example, giving the model the conditions that prevailed 50 years ago, and seeing how well it predicts today's conditions from a known starting point.
No model is perfect, but there are methods to determine whether the model is plain bullshit, spot on, or somewhere inbetween.
Oil shales and tar sands won't give you cheap oil. What most people miss is it's not all about quantity. RATE at which you can extract is just as important.
To give you an idea of this, Canada has 1700 billion barrels of proven reserves in its tar sands. However, it takes one barrel of oil to make 1.5 barrels of tar sand oil. Contrast this to normal crude, which needs one barrel of oil to extract *30* barrels of oil. The laws of physics mean that you're not going to gain any significant improvement on this.
Despite Canada's 1700 billion barrels of proven reserves, it has taken billions of dollars and many years to get the oil production *RATE* from this enormous field...to the rate that Mexico's Cantarell field was making not long after it was discovered. Cantarell is less than _one thousandth_ of the size of Canada's tar sands. This is the difference between unconventional sources and regular crude like North Sea Brent or the stuff the Saudis pump.
The same is true for shale. These are euphemistically called "unconventional sources" in the industry. While they will provide oil for many years, they will never provide it at a particularly high rate - not enough to satiate current demand, nor will they provide it cheaply. Rate of production is everything. Having quantity without the rate of extraction is not all that helpful.
We need to be working on non-oil based energy solutions right now. We need to be doing them all, and have some diversity in what powers society. Those who think the "unconventional sources" such as tar sands and oil shale are the silver bullet are sadly mistaken.
British don't drink lager warm. But ale is drunk at the temperature it comes up from the cellar, which is warmer than lager typically is. But then again, lager is served ice cold so you can't actually taste it, because let's face it, most mass produced lagers are pretty rank.
The unintended consequence of this will be to deter the reporting of any attempted financial scam (such as reporting boiler rooms) because the victim will fear that if they did something wrong they may get prosecuted. Indeed, boiler room scammers would probably use this as a threat to continue being suckered and NOT report it (even though the scamee in these instances is not attempting anything illegal - but if they can be suckered in by a boiler room, they can also be suckered in by a boiler room claiming they are now part of a fraud themselves).
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have a link to any of these "what if" reports? Google isn't finding anything particularly interesting.
Because screens with colour used informatively, rather than making eye candy screens with flashy gradients and transparency, make the actual information easier to discern. This isn't some commercial app that has to sell to Mac enthusiasts, nor is it Photoshop.
Well, no, it's just that Microsoft shouted long and hard about how reliable the LSE would be now it was running on Windows Server System 2003. So it's deliciously ironic that after all this trumpet tooting, it still fell flat on its face, regardless of the reason...since Microsoft's ads were obviously to get everyone to believe that the system would be highly reliable.
Maybe so, but the sweet, sweet irony is that Microsoft used the London Stock Exchange in their highly irritating "Highly Reliable Times" advertisments on various websites (including Slashdot). Nothing like tooting your own trumpet, and then the subject of the trumpet tooting falling flat on its face!
You miss the fact that your gigabit copper network in the house is the last ten feet, not the last mile, and is made up of Cat6 cable.
The last mile from the phone exchange is often an elderly, cat-nothing twisted pair. Cross talk problems, the capacitance and the inductance of the line, mean you won't be getting 50 megaBYTES per second down it, ever.
Most people, though, simply do not grok how much data a short video or a few dozen lightly compressed photos use up, though. It's not like voice, where everyone understands what a minute is. A few minutes on a data call can transfer just a few kilobytes, or possibly tens of megabytes - and most people who aren't IT people or telecommunications experts simply don't understand this.
It would be more customer-friendly to by default have the international roaming plan bar calls once the charges reach, say, $100 - instead of let people who aren't IT experts unexpectedly run up gigantic data bills.
That's before we get to the rip-off profiteering that is international roaming.
2008 is still warmer than the 1971-2000 average. In any case, one cooler year does not a trend make. If the annual temperatures trend down for the next 10 years you have a point, but they haven't (and they aren't likely to) - one cooler year, which is still warmer than the most recent set of averages, does not disprove global warming.
The models have been tested. For example, the Met.Office's Hadley Climate Centre tests their models by setting conditions to what they were 50 years ago, and seeing if the model reasonably predicts where we end up today, and by and large, it does. So yes, they have been empirically tested.
Once they have done this testing and can validate that the model can at least start 50 years back and give sufficiently accurate results of what's happening today, they can then use it as the basis for various experiments - such as changing solar input into the system, changing CO2 levels etc.
While it may not predict accurately what's likely in 500 years time, it can provide a pretty good idea at what's likely to happen in 50-100 years time.
This year *has* been warmer than average, as a whole. Perhaps not in your specific location, but as a whole, this year has been warmer than the 1971 to 2000 average, as has every year since 2000.
You're also confusing climatology with meteorology. They aren't the same thing.
What about Spain? Spanish is a good language to learn, what with >400M+ native speakers of the language worldwide, many reasonably close to back home in the USA. Something like 50% of the planet can either speak Spanish or English (not necessarily as their native language of course) so Spanish is a great language to learn.
Actually, the EU wasn't anything about competing with the USA, it is (a rather successful) attempt at *keeping* Europe peaceful on the basis that it's bad business to try and kill your customers and suppliers.
No, they should have used a bright red and blue checkerboard pattern, not only on the desktop but title bars, too.
The human eye has some red/blue chromatic aberration, making red/blue patterns pretty annoying to the eye.
I've never heard *that*. The most common way of saying a=b*c/4 in English English, is "a equals b times c over 4". The only time 'by' is used to possibly mean multipled is by carpenters and the like (for example "a two by four" to mean a 2in x 4in piece of timber) - but people in the USA call them two by fours as well. (The difference in British English is for the lumber 'two by four', is that it's usually pronounced 'two be four').
In any case, if you think English is confusing by having one word mean many things, look at how many different meanings 'quedar', 'dar' and 'llevar' have in Spanish!
I have 25 year old computers and 25 year old discs. They are all perfectly readable.
An IDE interface is *easy* to homebrew - you can do it with a couple of 74 series ICs and whatever suitable device is available in the future for low speed bi-directional communications - just get something from the embedded world (where low speed 8 bit will probably still be king for many applications). I'm sure there will be 8 bit microcontrollers with whatever hotpluggable interface for PCs exists in 25 years time.
IDE interfaces are so easy to make that there's a proliferation of them for old 8 bit computers - you can connect an IDE drive these days to a Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC Micro etc. very easily. The circuits to do so are very simple.
If push came to shove I could design a USB interface for the floppy drive for my BBC Micro, and read them on a brand new Apple Macbook Pro. I'm sure electronics hobbyists will still exist in 25 years time.
No, IDE is a good choice - it's electronically simple, and well within the means of a hobbyist to make an IDE interface on stripboard or breadboard. Even if there are no commercially available IDE interfaces, it would be quite easy to make one.
SATA uses very high frequencies, and has a much, much higher barrier to entry for someone who is not an EE with just the PCB layout issues alone.
The failure rate for 5.25 in discs isn't nearly that bad. I have thirty odd for my BBC Micro, all about 25 years old. Only two had errors on them (I suspect one because the disc was physically damaged, it won't even reformat).
3.5 inch discs *used* to be good, but the most recently made 3.5 inch discs are terrible.
Take the battery out before storing the computer.
Replace failed capacitors on recovery.
Most caps in a laptop will be tantalum and multilayer ceramic (you can get multilayer ceramic caps up to 10uF in surface mount packages now). In any case, most electrolytics will still work well enough after that time (as they do in my 25 year old 8 bit stuff). Most drives will still work too, I have 25 year old floppy disc drives that work quite happily. The biggest problem with old drives is the belts failing but you can improvise those.
You under rate magnetic media! I have a number of 25 year old 5.25 inch discs, all which read perfectly. The failure rate of these has been very low. (This contrasts with the failure rates of 3.5 inch discs before they finally became obsolete, many of which wouldn't last more than a day or two!)
IDE is electronically simple, though. It is not hard to homebrew your own IDE to USB adapter today using a microcontroller, or even just a FT245R and some 74 series logic. So IDE isn't a bad choice because it's within the reach of an electronics hobbyist to make an interface.
Hobbyists have been making IDE interfaces for old 8 bit computers for years, such as the C64 and Sinclair Spectrum.
It would be much harder to home brew your own SATA interface.
The solutions to those are easy.
1. Remove the CMOS battery before storage.
2. Replace capacitors when digging it out again.
I have 25 year old computers with perfectly good electrolytic capacitors (well, perhaps not perfectly good, but good enough). But I suspect the majority of the caps in a laptop are multilayer ceramic or tantalum.
"A GPU from 2006" sounds a lot like famous last words.
I wonder if anyone at DEC made comments in a similar vein about Intel CPUs, when the Alpha was so far ahead of anything Intel was making? NVidia's architect should not underestimate Intel, if he does, he does it at his company's peril.
No, La Niña is spelled "The little girl" in English. You can't translate the word "niña" to English just by replacing the letter ñ with a letter n. (ñ is not an accented n, it's a letter in its own right, coming after the letter n in the Spanish alphabet, which has 27 letters).
Models *do* get tested. For example, if you read the Met Office's website (for the Hadley Climate Centre) you'll see they do plenty of validation work - for example, giving the model the conditions that prevailed 50 years ago, and seeing how well it predicts today's conditions from a known starting point.
No model is perfect, but there are methods to determine whether the model is plain bullshit, spot on, or somewhere inbetween.
Oil shales and tar sands won't give you cheap oil. What most people miss is it's not all about quantity. RATE at which you can extract is just as important.
To give you an idea of this, Canada has 1700 billion barrels of proven reserves in its tar sands. However, it takes one barrel of oil to make 1.5 barrels of tar sand oil. Contrast this to normal crude, which needs one barrel of oil to extract *30* barrels of oil. The laws of physics mean that you're not going to gain any significant improvement on this.
Despite Canada's 1700 billion barrels of proven reserves, it has taken billions of dollars and many years to get the oil production *RATE* from this enormous field...to the rate that Mexico's Cantarell field was making not long after it was discovered. Cantarell is less than _one thousandth_ of the size of Canada's tar sands. This is the difference between unconventional sources and regular crude like North Sea Brent or the stuff the Saudis pump.
The same is true for shale. These are euphemistically called "unconventional sources" in the industry. While they will provide oil for many years, they will never provide it at a particularly high rate - not enough to satiate current demand, nor will they provide it cheaply. Rate of production is everything. Having quantity without the rate of extraction is not all that helpful.
We need to be working on non-oil based energy solutions right now. We need to be doing them all, and have some diversity in what powers society. Those who think the "unconventional sources" such as tar sands and oil shale are the silver bullet are sadly mistaken.
British don't drink lager warm. But ale is drunk at the temperature it comes up from the cellar, which is warmer than lager typically is. But then again, lager is served ice cold so you can't actually taste it, because let's face it, most mass produced lagers are pretty rank.
The unintended consequence of this will be to deter the reporting of any attempted financial scam (such as reporting boiler rooms) because the victim will fear that if they did something wrong they may get prosecuted. Indeed, boiler room scammers would probably use this as a threat to continue being suckered and NOT report it (even though the scamee in these instances is not attempting anything illegal - but if they can be suckered in by a boiler room, they can also be suckered in by a boiler room claiming they are now part of a fraud themselves).