Actually, I think this is pretty close to the original meaning of 'hacking' -- cobbling together a piece of equipment to do what you want when there's no commercially available system to do it.
If I were designing a mission using this system, it would be as an additional boost, rather than the only propulsion. Deceleration would probably be a combination of traditional rockets and aerobraking.
In a serious emergency, you'd be able to use the systems designed for getting you home to get you to mars itself. Once there, you'd be forced to use Zubrin's techniques to actually make yourself comfortable while you wait for Earth to figure how exactly they're going to mount a rescue operation. The mission would be carrying equipment for extracting oxygen & water from Martian minerals in order to enable an extended stay there anyway; I'm not sure what you'd do for food supplies, though.
True, but I figure a lot of admins would rather see a CPU auto-underclock, record the cooler failure in the system log, and continue to serve requests than see a server crash.
Sure, in high-availability situations that's essential. But for the average user, who never bothers to read their logs anyway, the system crashing is probably just about the best way for them to find out that something's gone wrong with it. OK, a message and a clean shutdown would be nicer, but a crash is rarely catastrophic for most people.
This ignores Newton's law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
According to Newton if the transitter unit isn't fixed to something big and heavy (i.e. a planet) it would also propel itself backwards (and out of position) at an inversely proportional acceleration rate to the spaceship.
Here's a suggestion: you could use two beams in opposite directions to cancel these effects out.
It's the other way around; they're keeping the plasma emitter at a base station and using a magnetic field on the probe to collect the plasma and transfer its momentum to the probe.
It's not actually that fast. Mars is only about 50 million miles away from us; that means the capsule would need to travel at an average speed of 23,148 miles per hour to achieve this. Assuming acceleration and deceleration were continous, you'd need a peak speed of twice that. Your acceleration figure works out to be about 0.3 miles per hour every minute. You'd hardly feel it.
Err.. thanks, but could you include paragraph breaks next time?:)
The critical sentence:
Under the mag-beam concept, a space-based station would generate a stream of magnetized ions that would interact with a magnetic sail on a spacecraft and propel it through the solar system at high speeds that increase with the size of the plasma beam.
So this is a refinement of the laser/sail system proposed many years ago (and popularised by Niven & Pournelle's novel, The Mote in God's Eye).
The problem P4 have today is that it's L1 caches are too small, there are some workloads hurt because of this.
Another big problem is that it takes 2 cycles to execute shifts (see intel document 24896611 p C-17 for information) and effective address calculation instructions (based on 3rd party timings; Intel don't seem to have released details for this), rather than the single cycle that the P3 or P-M take for the same instructions. It used to be standard practice to optimize constant multiplication into shifts and additions; that actually slows down the P4.
There's nothing exaggerated there. The P4 was a step backwards from the P3 in every respect other than the ability to push it to high clock speeds. The speed comparisons he makes seem roughly correct; for some applications it would have been worse.
Fans wear out. Does the Athlon have automatic underclocking on overheat like the P4 has? Intel has won businesses over by focusing on reliability.
I am in charge of maintenance of an office full of PCs. We have a wide assortment of Intel and AMD kit (because we're cheap!). Yes, fans wear out. Regularly.
2 points:
1. AMD processors these days are being supplied with quality fans. These fans seem to be a lot more reliable than the cheap fans that tend to get stuck on machines with processors that didn't have one supplied.
2. When fans fail, without automatic underclocking what happens is this: the computer crashes. The processor stops processing instructions. At some point, I get called around. I replace the fan. Everything works fine. I've _never_ seen a CPU damaged by overheating. If you're not overclocking them, I just don't believe it happens.
There was a case in the UK recently where somebody got off charges of downloading child porn because he had a trojan on his system that he claimed somebody else had been using to download the stuff in order to frame him.
I know when I worked at an ISP (admittedly several years ago), the policy was basically to give the authorities anything they wanted, with or without an actual court order.
Authorities, sure. An industry association of record labels? I would hope they wouldn't.
I believe British ISPs are now legally required to keep this information, which is a serious PITA for them. The ISPA complained and complained about the terabytes of storage they would need... but I don't recall the government ever relenting.
That's amazing. I remembered that film as being good, but none of those "memorable quotes" are... well... even remotely memorable, other than the one you quoted.
I suspect that for years that each group of words is using some printer serial number identifier micro-printed in the characters.
If that is true, then printer resolution has been better than we've been led to believe, and that would mean that we have been paying for "featureful" but crippled machines.
You left your tinfoil hat at home and your theories are leaking. For god's sake get another one before they find you!
This cannot possibly work. Why not? Well, in order for it to work, it would need cooperation of software vendors, who would have to mark up their EULAs into a form it could understand.
Why would they do this?
In fact, specifically, I believe that most software vendors are concerned about the enforceability of click-through EULAs. If the EULA is never actually shown to the user, this would possibly make them less enforceable. Therefore they will not cooperate with such a system, at least until such unseen agreements are legally binding.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think this is pretty close to the original meaning of 'hacking' -- cobbling together a piece of equipment to do what you want when there's no commercially available system to do it.
Hmmm... that link's redirecting straight to the XM Radio home page.
I've never come across the term before. Anyone got a handy explanation?
If I were designing a mission using this system, it would be as an additional boost, rather than the only propulsion. Deceleration would probably be a combination of traditional rockets and aerobraking.
In a serious emergency, you'd be able to use the systems designed for getting you home to get you to mars itself. Once there, you'd be forced to use Zubrin's techniques to actually make yourself comfortable while you wait for Earth to figure how exactly they're going to mount a rescue operation. The mission would be carrying equipment for extracting oxygen & water from Martian minerals in order to enable an extended stay there anyway; I'm not sure what you'd do for food supplies, though.
True, but I figure a lot of admins would rather see a CPU auto-underclock, record the cooler failure in the system log, and continue to serve requests than see a server crash.
Sure, in high-availability situations that's essential. But for the average user, who never bothers to read their logs anyway, the system crashing is probably just about the best way for them to find out that something's gone wrong with it. OK, a message and a clean shutdown would be nicer, but a crash is rarely catastrophic for most people.
This ignores Newton's law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
According to Newton if the transitter unit isn't fixed to something big and heavy (i.e. a planet) it would also propel itself backwards (and out of position) at an inversely proportional acceleration rate to the spaceship.
Here's a suggestion: you could use two beams in opposite directions to cancel these effects out.
It's the other way around; they're keeping the plasma emitter at a base station and using a magnetic field on the probe to collect the plasma and transfer its momentum to the probe.
Is it just me that is amused by the fact that the first "Gooooogle" ad link is labeled "antigravity"? Are google dismissing this as junk science? :)
TFA is rather slashdotted, at the moment. Most of us can't read it (although an AC has posted a copy below).
I get 0.01m/s^{2}, so no, not really. :)
Well, I for one was talking about the BPI, not the RIAA. Dunno about everyone else here. :)
D'oh. Round trip, not single direction. Double my figures; 0.6 miles per hour per minute.
It's not actually that fast. Mars is only about 50 million miles away from us; that means the capsule would need to travel at an average speed of 23,148 miles per hour to achieve this. Assuming acceleration and deceleration were continous, you'd need a peak speed of twice that. Your acceleration figure works out to be about 0.3 miles per hour every minute. You'd hardly feel it.
Err.. thanks, but could you include paragraph breaks next time? :)
The critical sentence:
Under the mag-beam concept, a space-based station would generate a stream of magnetized ions that would interact with a magnetic sail on a spacecraft and propel it through the solar system at high speeds that increase with the size of the plasma beam.
So this is a refinement of the laser/sail system proposed many years ago (and popularised by Niven & Pournelle's novel, The Mote in God's Eye).
An interesting idea, certainly.
The problem P4 have today is that it's L1 caches are too small, there are some workloads hurt because of this.
Another big problem is that it takes 2 cycles to execute shifts (see intel document 24896611 p C-17 for information) and effective address calculation instructions (based on 3rd party timings; Intel don't seem to have released details for this), rather than the single cycle that the P3 or P-M take for the same instructions. It used to be standard practice to optimize constant multiplication into shifts and additions; that actually slows down the P4.
There's nothing exaggerated there. The P4 was a step backwards from the P3 in every respect other than the ability to push it to high clock speeds. The speed comparisons he makes seem roughly correct; for some applications it would have been worse.
Fans wear out. Does the Athlon have automatic underclocking on overheat like the P4 has? Intel has won businesses over by focusing on reliability.
I am in charge of maintenance of an office full of PCs. We have a wide assortment of Intel and AMD kit (because we're cheap!). Yes, fans wear out. Regularly.
2 points:
1. AMD processors these days are being supplied with quality fans. These fans seem to be a lot more reliable than the cheap fans that tend to get stuck on machines with processors that didn't have one supplied.
2. When fans fail, without automatic underclocking what happens is this: the computer crashes. The processor stops processing instructions. At some point, I get called around. I replace the fan. Everything works fine. I've _never_ seen a CPU damaged by overheating. If you're not overclocking them, I just don't believe it happens.
There was a case in the UK recently where somebody got off charges of downloading child porn because he had a trojan on his system that he claimed somebody else had been using to download the stuff in order to frame him.
I know when I worked at an ISP (admittedly several years ago), the policy was basically to give the authorities anything they wanted, with or without an actual court order.
Authorities, sure. An industry association of record labels? I would hope they wouldn't.
Because of the law discussed in this article.
I believe British ISPs are now legally required to keep this information, which is a serious PITA for them. The ISPA complained and complained about the terabytes of storage they would need... but I don't recall the government ever relenting.
That's amazing. I remembered that film as being good, but none of those "memorable quotes" are ... well ... even remotely memorable, other than the one you quoted.
Oh, well.
I suspect that for years that each group of words is using some printer serial number identifier micro-printed in the characters.
If that is true, then printer resolution has been better than we've been led to believe, and that would mean that we have been paying for "featureful" but crippled machines.
You left your tinfoil hat at home and your theories are leaking. For god's sake get another one before they find you!
The way to beat it:
- Work exactly like it does until the last round on which you would normally cooperate
- Defect on that round
I think this would improve your score to its detrement.
This cannot possibly work. Why not? Well, in order for it to work, it would need cooperation of software vendors, who would have to mark up their EULAs into a form it could understand.
Why would they do this?
In fact, specifically, I believe that most software vendors are concerned about the enforceability of click-through EULAs. If the EULA is never actually shown to the user, this would possibly make them less enforceable. Therefore they will not cooperate with such a system, at least until such unseen agreements are legally binding.