More interoperability, less data typing, more parallelism, tougher hide, stronger arms, bigger molars, better sense of smell, etc.
Leave it to gorillas to invent a super-gorilla, when what nature (the client) wanted was a human.
Emulation of the past in bigger and better methods is not the shining future I had hoped, for, folks. After all, I don't really want a computer, I want machinery that does my work and makes my life more comfortable, preferably without my having to train or tell it. I don't want robot slaves that act like human, I want a thermostat. I want an operating ystem that helps my computers be devices that help me in my life, not the other way around.
But we are still pretty decorative, and some of us dance well.
Don Lancaster worked this up...
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 2
starting about ten years ago and did what seems to be a superior job.
It should be noted that the the main use for publishing on demand appears to be scientific and technical data, where very expensive information is to be distributed in an easily chargable form. You don't need these books very often, and the shelf cost is prohibitively high for a bookstore to keep them. Print on demand is turning out to be the answer.
Taking used vegetable oil, methylating it to crack the bonds, and then burning it for motor fuel is the most energy inefficient thing I have seen in a long time. Consider:
1. How much petroleum (fertiliser and fuel) and land use does it take to make a gallon of used french-fry oil?
2. What does it cost in terms of energy to produce methyl alcohol and lye?
3. By-products of this process (dilute gycerin and water contaminated with metallic stearates) are also considered toxic waste, and form a goodly percentage (roughly one third) of the volume converted.
Simple economics should tell you that this is an emergency measure only, for extreme shortage conditions. Five dollars a gallon for fuel is not extreme enough to make this economic.
A better plan might be to take the used fry oil, mix it with old wheat flour (thrown away at mills) and corn or rice cuttings (also thrown away) and flavorings, some water and salt, apply gentle heat to bake, and crumble up for dogfood. Sell the premium dogfood (don't think so? check how commercial dogfood is made...) for cash, say seventy-five cents a pound in hundred pound lots. Use cash to buy regular fuel, or anything else.
Burning edible hydrocarbons for fuel. Who ever thought this up...
I love caribou, but I've never been able to finish a whole one at one sitting.
Believe me, there is plenty of already less-than-pristine area to but a data center and its attendant folks on, even up on the slope. Too bad the oil company tore down the annex, would have made a good place for the workers building this thing, and the food was better than the BOC.
Shortly after developing transparent-layered photography (positive-negative on translucent/transparent bases) William Henry Fox Talbot made pictures like this and displayed them to the Royal Society. The RGB combination worked, but only by accident, as the current light-sensitive emulsions were not sensitive to blue. Turned out one of the blue models used reflected heavily in the UV, which was recorded. All of this around 1845.
Single plate color didn't show up until 1905 or so. See Autochrome. Also, Technicolor movie film operated this way, as did dye-transfer prints (still the best color print process, IF you can find someone to make them...)
What is really interesting though is that these negatives lack the standard registration marking of most such processes. Without these markings, it is very difficult to produce a reasonable image. Also, emulsion creep makes recovery from older images even more difficult. Using the computer to key off of the image points themselves rather than a series of markings on the substrate allows such old images to be restored with reasonable accuracy. And I bet it beats playing with registration pins and a squegee any old day.
when you have to deal with a femptosecond clock? (or worse..)
A lot of production hassles will have to be worked out before these kind of devices become easily mass produced. EEs go through great pains to avoid building anything that will require setting exact frequencies or tuning servo or PLL-style feedback loops. Doing such things in quantity with current mass-produced component tolerances will be difficult. Not that it cannot be worked out, but it adds to the cost.
Second, this sort of tech works really good when you are the only one on the block. Get everybody and all their electronic fodlops to have one of these, and the noise floor goes up. Which means the reliability goes down dramatically.
Consider that the energy in compressed air is in the form of heat. Unless they insulate this cavern, there is going to be appreciable heat transfer. What are the losses going to be?
When they uncompress through turbines for power recovery, they are going to have to make up the loss, and I suppose this is why they intend to use hybrid (part combustion) turbines.
Granted, hydroelectric storage lakes take up more room, but at least you can boat on them in the summer and skate on them in the winter. I suppose it is better than no storage at all, but I think the real solution is to invest in generation on demand equipment (far more smaller generators) and cooperative load sharing agreements between widely distributed areas.
If there is enough vibration around to kill a properly mounted hard disc, you might want to worry about the mechanical and structural of the building. Most buildings I know don't come with a vibration rating.
Vibration is one of the worst things for hard disc drives, as the moments repeat themselves. Most G specs for drives are for a one-time shock. Disc drive suceptibility also depends greatly upon the orientation of the drive to the shock as well. Drives ae USUALLY (may vary by drive construction...) much less sensitive when the shock in in the same plane as the platters.
If this is a rack-mounted installation, try industrial equipment isolator pads. Little round things that go between the bottom of the rack and the floor. For desktop or similar, see if you can find an old wavepad from underneath a typerwriter (don't worry, son, look in a museum...) or a half-inch pad of Sorbothane (Costly, ouch....)
and get it over with. What rock have you been under?
1. Pack up the Gerber file and send it on its way to a prototype shop, and they send you back the boards. If you can't afford the three hundred (seen it as low as eighty) bucks then laser print onto mylar, press onto FRP (or whatever) with hot iron, and etch.
2. Assuming that the proto house won't put the chips on for an extra fifty bucks, glue the suckers down, solder wash, and drop in the convection oven.
3. Take coffee break, or go back to Spice.
4. Remove cold board from oven and do other side if required. Clean off connectors and test.
As one who still has to put up with wire wrap on an almost weekly basis, I can tell you that I never want to see one of those cheezy little OK wirewrap guns again in my life. Or big bulky cards, little wire tails shorting pins when you least expect it, connections sliding off due to worn bits, oxidised connections, and once somebody's made about three layers worth of changes, trying to figure out where the other end of the damn wire goes, because they didn't write it down.
Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly. You are absolutely correct. The "heavy entry cost" I was referring to is the licensing and construction bonding BS that goes on with the FCC. I agree that if the FCC were to drop this nonsense, starting a radio station would be a snap, and big media would have less of a lever in money.
Plus, if you are existing on advertising dollars, it takes heavy upkeep to run those salesman out to get those dollars. The day of the "on commission" salesdroid is just about over in our neck of the woods. DOL regs about such are getting stiffer, and in our area nobody is dumb enough to take anybody up on a commission position.
I think the FCC's involvement in radio shold be limited to interference and frequncy assignment, and let the station owners fight it out in the market.
We all know that 13 year-olds are 18 as far as the
on
The Value Of Privacy
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· Score: 2
web is concerned. Just check out what any of them put on the porn site signup forms...
Maybe there ought to be a law protecting web site owners from children.
The first uses a radioactive isotope spread on one side of a set of Peltier juntctions. The other side is left at ambient. Radioactivity is absorbed by the junction mass, turns into heat, which in turn creates voltage across device. Descendants of the SNAP generators. This might not be so practical for a PDA, but might fit in a laptop.
Second, silicon-based photoelectric cells react to particle radiation in much the same way as light. Small printed patterns of ink containing radioactive material are laid down on silicon cells, which are then stacked to give needed voltage and power. There was also some talk of using amorphous solar cell material, which is flexible, putting the radioactives on a strip near one end, and then rolling the thing up in order to get it into a smaller box with less labor. I believe E.F. Johnson holds patent on some of this.
It has been years since I looked into this, I don't know if anybody is mass-producing these critters or not. Round up the usual mil-spec hardware vendors.
Skip solar, it has too many constraints about how much light and when, not to mention that making the cell might produce more pollution than it saves during its lifetime.
Fuel cells are nice, but they have to have air, you can't use them in a rated space, and the fuel runs out. True, you can get more, but then you just have a longer running version of the AAA cell.
I want PDAs to come with a thin-layer isotopic battery built in, that never needs to be changed during the lifetime (oh, say thirty years) of the computer. Save wear, tear, grief all the way around, no more annoying battery doors to pop off at unsuspecting moments, decent reliability, and it gives us a reason to dig out some of the nuke waste that we've been hording and get it usefully distributed around the world.
who remember what the second thing the German occupation forces did after invading the country, then you should go out and tell your children and grandchildren.
Next time, whoever it is will not have to stand you in the streets until they find out all about you and write it down. You and your municipal government will have done it all for them, in advance.
Radio got that way due to the heavy entry and upkeep costs on a radio station. Big media wants this, it allows them to use their money as that extra lever.
That said, you ought to see the penetration statistics on LLL style radio broadcasts. Yep, folks keep the office radio tuned to sat-fed pop-rock (musak with commercials) because they're trying not to offend, or simply because they can't / don't want to think about it, but if you are out trying to get the local opinion leaders in a market nailed, then you can do worse than real local radio.
I suspect the real change will come when computers become capable of inexpensive content filtering. At that point, the advertisement becomes much less a revenue factor, and content provision becomes king. Yes, it will probably mean a shift in funding sources and role for media providers, but hey, what ever happened to horse-carriage makers?
It's a deplorable situation, but one that can be corrected. Curiously enough, the internet is one of the largest correcting factors, primarily because it is inherently two-way, and because the entry price is low.
Media companies know this. I suspect it is one of the driving factors behind big media's push to make the internet "simpler", as they put it. More like, say, television.
It's really hard to run an internet media company. After all, just about anybody can stand up and call bullshit on your stuff. They even seem to get a perverse satisfaction out of it.
I suspect that in the future, though the media world will realign itself. Large media will probably become feeds for smaller local media that have local advertising concerns not large enough for the big boys to worry about. The key here is just like radio: Local, Local, Local. Local folks presenting local issues concerning the local area. This is awfully hard to do with big media. The availability of more distribution channels at a local level also makes it harder on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything that slows down the sale of CD-ROMs and thence plastic resin sales will probably not get their approval.
Philips does not seem to own very many content producers. They don't care who put what on a disc, as long as somebody does.
No Jenny there.
Leave it to gorillas to invent a super-gorilla, when what nature (the client) wanted was a human.
Emulation of the past in bigger and better methods is not the shining future I had hoped, for, folks. After all, I don't really want a computer, I want machinery that does my work and makes my life more comfortable, preferably without my having to train or tell it. I don't want robot slaves that act like human, I want a thermostat. I want an operating ystem that helps my computers be devices that help me in my life, not the other way around.
But we are still pretty decorative, and some of us dance well.
It should be noted that the the main use for publishing on demand appears to be scientific and technical data, where very expensive information is to be distributed in an easily chargable form. You don't need these books very often, and the shelf cost is prohibitively high for a bookstore to keep them. Print on demand is turning out to be the answer.
Also, the title of the head of the PRC space program roughly translates as "Director of Fire Arrows".
and a Sol II.
a sock monkey that would work for shares.
Funny how most representations of extraterrestrial aliens are bilaterally symmetrical and have foreheads.
"Ah, Earthman, you surprise I speak your language so well..."
if most of these games are networked first person shooters, shouldn't they be checking egos instead?
1. How much petroleum (fertiliser and fuel) and land use does it take to make a gallon of used french-fry oil?
2. What does it cost in terms of energy to produce methyl alcohol and lye?
3. By-products of this process (dilute gycerin and water contaminated with metallic stearates) are also considered toxic waste, and form a goodly percentage (roughly one third) of the volume converted.
Simple economics should tell you that this is an emergency measure only, for extreme shortage conditions. Five dollars a gallon for fuel is not extreme enough to make this economic.
A better plan might be to take the used fry oil, mix it with old wheat flour (thrown away at mills) and corn or rice cuttings (also thrown away) and flavorings, some water and salt, apply gentle heat to bake, and crumble up for dogfood. Sell the premium dogfood (don't think so? check how commercial dogfood is made...) for cash, say seventy-five cents a pound in hundred pound lots. Use cash to buy regular fuel, or anything else.
Burning edible hydrocarbons for fuel. Who ever thought this up...
I love caribou, but I've never been able to finish a whole one at one sitting.
Believe me, there is plenty of already less-than-pristine area to but a data center and its attendant folks on, even up on the slope. Too bad the oil company tore down the annex, would have made a good place for the workers building this thing, and the food was better than the BOC.
relying on my memory. Rats, My Bad.
Single plate color didn't show up until 1905 or so. See Autochrome. Also, Technicolor movie film operated this way, as did dye-transfer prints (still the best color print process, IF you can find someone to make them...)
What is really interesting though is that these negatives lack the standard registration marking of most such processes. Without these markings, it is very difficult to produce a reasonable image. Also, emulsion creep makes recovery from older images even more difficult. Using the computer to key off of the image points themselves rather than a series of markings on the substrate allows such old images to be restored with reasonable accuracy. And I bet it beats playing with registration pins and a squegee any old day.
A lot of production hassles will have to be worked out before these kind of devices become easily mass produced. EEs go through great pains to avoid building anything that will require setting exact frequencies or tuning servo or PLL-style feedback loops. Doing such things in quantity with current mass-produced component tolerances will be difficult. Not that it cannot be worked out, but it adds to the cost.
Second, this sort of tech works really good when you are the only one on the block. Get everybody and all their electronic fodlops to have one of these, and the noise floor goes up. Which means the reliability goes down dramatically.
When they uncompress through turbines for power recovery, they are going to have to make up the loss, and I suppose this is why they intend to use hybrid (part combustion) turbines.
Granted, hydroelectric storage lakes take up more room, but at least you can boat on them in the summer and skate on them in the winter. I suppose it is better than no storage at all, but I think the real solution is to invest in generation on demand equipment (far more smaller generators) and cooperative load sharing agreements between widely distributed areas.
Vibration is one of the worst things for hard disc drives, as the moments repeat themselves. Most G specs for drives are for a one-time shock. Disc drive suceptibility also depends greatly upon the orientation of the drive to the shock as well. Drives ae USUALLY (may vary by drive construction...) much less sensitive when the shock in in the same plane as the platters.
If this is a rack-mounted installation, try industrial equipment isolator pads. Little round things that go between the bottom of the rack and the floor. For desktop or similar, see if you can find an old wavepad from underneath a typerwriter (don't worry, son, look in a museum...) or a half-inch pad of Sorbothane (Costly, ouch....)
1. Pack up the Gerber file and send it on its way to a prototype shop, and they send you back the boards. If you can't afford the three hundred (seen it as low as eighty) bucks then laser print onto mylar, press onto FRP (or whatever) with hot iron, and etch.
2. Assuming that the proto house won't put the chips on for an extra fifty bucks, glue the suckers down, solder wash, and drop in the convection oven.
3. Take coffee break, or go back to Spice.
4. Remove cold board from oven and do other side if required. Clean off connectors and test.
As one who still has to put up with wire wrap on an almost weekly basis, I can tell you that I never want to see one of those cheezy little OK wirewrap guns again in my life. Or big bulky cards, little wire tails shorting pins when you least expect it, connections sliding off due to worn bits, oxidised connections, and once somebody's made about three layers worth of changes, trying to figure out where the other end of the damn wire goes, because they didn't write it down.
Wire wrap. Bah. It made me the man I am today...
Plus, if you are existing on advertising dollars, it takes heavy upkeep to run those salesman out to get those dollars. The day of the "on commission" salesdroid is just about over in our neck of the woods. DOL regs about such are getting stiffer, and in our area nobody is dumb enough to take anybody up on a commission position.
I think the FCC's involvement in radio shold be limited to interference and frequncy assignment, and let the station owners fight it out in the market.
Maybe there ought to be a law protecting web site owners from children.
The first uses a radioactive isotope spread on one side of a set of Peltier juntctions. The other side is left at ambient. Radioactivity is absorbed by the junction mass, turns into heat, which in turn creates voltage across device. Descendants of the SNAP generators. This might not be so practical for a PDA, but might fit in a laptop.
Second, silicon-based photoelectric cells react to particle radiation in much the same way as light. Small printed patterns of ink containing radioactive material are laid down on silicon cells, which are then stacked to give needed voltage and power. There was also some talk of using amorphous solar cell material, which is flexible, putting the radioactives on a strip near one end, and then rolling the thing up in order to get it into a smaller box with less labor. I believe E.F. Johnson holds patent on some of this.
It has been years since I looked into this, I don't know if anybody is mass-producing these critters or not. Round up the usual mil-spec hardware vendors.
Fuel cells are nice, but they have to have air, you can't use them in a rated space, and the fuel runs out. True, you can get more, but then you just have a longer running version of the AAA cell.
I want PDAs to come with a thin-layer isotopic battery built in, that never needs to be changed during the lifetime (oh, say thirty years) of the computer. Save wear, tear, grief all the way around, no more annoying battery doors to pop off at unsuspecting moments, decent reliability, and it gives us a reason to dig out some of the nuke waste that we've been hording and get it usefully distributed around the world.
Next time, whoever it is will not have to stand you in the streets until they find out all about you and write it down. You and your municipal government will have done it all for them, in advance.
Radio got that way due to the heavy entry and upkeep costs on a radio station. Big media wants this, it allows them to use their money as that extra lever.
That said, you ought to see the penetration statistics on LLL style radio broadcasts. Yep, folks keep the office radio tuned to sat-fed pop-rock (musak with commercials) because they're trying not to offend, or simply because they can't / don't want to think about it, but if you are out trying to get the local opinion leaders in a market nailed, then you can do worse than real local radio.
I suspect the real change will come when computers become capable of inexpensive content filtering. At that point, the advertisement becomes much less a revenue factor, and content provision becomes king. Yes, it will probably mean a shift in funding sources and role for media providers, but hey, what ever happened to horse-carriage makers?
It's a deplorable situation, but one that can be corrected. Curiously enough, the internet is one of the largest correcting factors, primarily because it is inherently two-way, and because the entry price is low.
Media companies know this. I suspect it is one of the driving factors behind big media's push to make the internet "simpler", as they put it. More like, say, television.
It's really hard to run an internet media company. After all, just about anybody can stand up and call bullshit on your stuff. They even seem to get a perverse satisfaction out of it.
I suspect that in the future, though the media world will realign itself. Large media will probably become feeds for smaller local media that have local advertising concerns not large enough for the big boys to worry about. The key here is just like radio: Local, Local, Local. Local folks presenting local issues concerning the local area. This is awfully hard to do with big media. The availability of more distribution channels at a local level also makes it harder on them.