Though we may be impotent in the field of international politics, that has absolutely no affect on the ability of our women to carry children to term and give birth. We are _not_ barren.
For H/W debugging I sincerely recommend
on
What's in Your Toolbox?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Fine-point tweezers and a magnifying glass. Luckily, we can find these at work, and we even have those nifty magnifying lenses with built-in lights. They really help for people with fat fingers and bad eyes (like me).
Cell phone: $99 Humongous gas guzzling SUV: $32,000 Inattentive soccer mom: free (god knows there's enough of them) Bicycle on same roadway: $199 Video sent in to Real TV showing gruesome death: priceless.
Well, read carefully, it states with no wire or wireless connection between the computers themselves. If read in one manner, it means that the computers are not connected at all. If read in another manner, it means that the computers are not connected directly to each other. That does not preclude them from being connected to the same LAN, at which point this operation becomes trivial.
(For those of you who question the triviality, imagine a porgram running on both computers whose sole job is to inform the other computer when the mouse has reached the edge of the screen).
It sounds to me like they spent a lot of time making this advertising copy more exciting than it really is.
I remember seeing a study on this on Discovery or TLC. The fired rifle bullets into sand at high velocities and at many different angles, and the resulting crater was almost always circular. A quick google search turns up this link, a section from some lecture notes at University College Worcester.
Craters are not always circular as they may have been created from impacts which hit the surface at oblique angles forming elliptical craters however as impact craters are formed by very high velocity impacts which act essentially like an explosion rather than a distortion of the surface so unless the impact is very shallow and ploughs along the surface the craters will tend to be circular.
Here is another interesting quote from the same page that may explain the concentric rings:
If the crater is larger and the same order of magnitude as the thickness of the lithosphere then shock waves will penetrate the more plastic athenosphere resulting in the formation of multiringed basins.
Using CMOS sensors, it is possible to get both linear and logarithmic responses from pixels, depending on your biasing conditions.
For a linear sensor, the photosite is generally a floating N+ diffusion, that makes up one side of an NMOS transistor. At reset, the voltage here is set to VDD. As incident light generates electron-hole pairs, the electrons are collected in the diffusion, lowering the voltage in a linear fashion, dependent upon the parasitic capacitance of the photosite. When the integration time is up, this charge/voltage is sampled, and you have a linear sensor.
For logarithmic response, the reset level of the photosite is actually even with the biasing of the gate to that transistor (minus the Vt, of course). Incident light generates electrons, and the transistor operates in the sub-threshold region, making the voltage at the photosite vary as the logarithm of the current being generated and flowing through the gate region. Sample that voltage, and tah-dah, you've got a logarithmic response to light.
I admit, this is much easier to understand with diagrams of the diffusions, so if you want, here is a pdf of a paper discussing a sensor that has combined linear-logarithmic response:
Robert A Heinlein had a 3-bit computer in Number of the Beast at one point. It was only briefly mentioned that it used trinary logic rather than binary, and I believe it was based on 3-phase A/C power, rather than the DC that computers are now based on.
As for why a trinary computer would be better, consider it analagous to why a language with 10 words is better than one with only 4. You can say a lot more things in a lot less space. Of course, how this would actually be accomplished is very hard for us to envision, as we are so used to the binary logic of true and false, on and off. Kudos to the guy that can actually wrap his head around it.
Well, having colour would mean they would need a grid of filters, and then do some interpretation between pixels to guess at what the colour level there would be. In other words, if the grid looked like:
G B G R...
R G B G...
Which are Green, Blue, and Red sensitive pixels (a fairly standard pattern), then there would be no measure of how intense the blue light was on a green pixel, or vice versa. Some extrapolation would be required, and you would essentially be reducing the effective number of pixels on your device. My suspicion is that they wanted max resolution, and weren't overly concerned with putting pretty pictures on the net for us to gawk at, like Hubble can do.
On another note, who else thinks that this device has 2-3 dead pixel columns? Note the vertical black lines on the full-sky pictures. I'd be a little upset if I bought one of these babies (for $$$ probably) and ended up with dead columns.
As I see it is in less expensive surface-to-orbit vehicles. Use a standard RAMJET to acheive mach whatever-the-hell-you-need-to-start-the-SCRAMJET. SCRAMJET kicks in, and slingshots you out of the atmosphere, where conventional rockets can then manoeuver you. Hopefully, this could be made into a completely re-useable space shuttle.
Ideas quoted in this post are not mine, they come from a book called Silver Tower by an author I can't remember now. They used a magnetic launching track to get the shuttle up to the speed where the RAMJET would work, then the RAMJET until they could turn on the SCRAMJET.
Static discharges can destroy many an integrated circuit if there is improper internal protection. Think about it, if one external pin of a device is connected to the gate of one MOSFET (which can happen sometimes), and that pin suddenly accumulates charge through ESD, it won't take much for the oxide to break down between the gate and the substrate, and then you've got a chip that won't work.
Say the ESD pulse happened on the power (or gnd) line. Suddenly, across your entire chip, you have a 200V difference between power and gnd for a fraction of a second. Unless you've specifically added extra circuitry to cope with this (and any knowledgable designer will), something's gonna blow, even if it is for just a fraction of a second. With a 200V potential difference, it doesn't take long for 77 angstroms of SiO2 to break down.
Standard ESD protection within a chip consists of control circuitry that will turn on a low-resistance path between any two pins whenever the potential difference becomes too great. The plan is to make the current flow through a large internal ESD bus, rather than through the delicate core circuitry of your device.
Of course, a good defense is to prevent static discharges from ever reaching your device. Anti-static bags provide a conductive path around the outside of the bag, so that the least resistive path is not through your device, but rather around the outside of the bag. They are in general a very good idea, because there is no telling what kind of ESDs you can encounter during shipping and handling, whereas when a component has been installed somewhere, the ESD that it will encounter can generally be predicted.
PS - Charge is measured in Coulombs, capacitance is measured in Farads.
...Martians across the globe are boarding up their windows, in anticipation of the thousands of so-called "soccer hooligans" on their way to see the semi-final match.
Residents are advised to stay off the streets, and if meeting one of these British soccer fans, not to claim loyalty to any particular team.
Also called "Mother-in-law's tongue" probably because they are long, sharp, and impossible to get rid of. My girlfriend left hers in the dark, on top of a heating vent, unwatered for four months and it sprouted new shoots.
Whenever I'm off on a co-op term, I just leave mine in the house with the sublettors. It doesn't matter whether they water it or not, it's still gonna be there when I get back.
Really? I could have sworn that when he gets whacked with the wrench, his ear almost comes off and he starts leaking white goo. I thought that was part of the point, how the company was still lying to Ripley. I don't have the movie with me now, so unfortunately, I can't check.
I guess I can't explain the reaction to the suicide unless he's some sort of super-android, who has had an "emotion chip" installed.
Nope. Bishop was simply an android. You may say clone because he looked like his creator (or did he? In the end that guy in III turned out to be an android as well - remember the ear).
IIRC, Data (ST:TNG) also looks like his creator. They simply chose the easiest model to work with when deciding what the physical form of the outer skin would be.
These two are very much not clones, who are supposed to be essentially human, but "my father was a test-tube, my mother was a knife" and complete DNA copies of the original. Both Data and Bishop have super-human abilities (strength, speed, calculational power, etc) that their "parents" most definitely did not, so they are certainly not DNA copies. Also, neither are organic.
Hrumph. You young'uns and all your new-fangled techy stuff.
When I was your age, and I wanted a redraw, I had to pay a little whippersnapper $6.50/hr for seven hours, and even then I'd have to pour over his work to make sure the resulting picture was at least close enough to the original to make it useful. And don't get me started about the number of pencils I had to supply him with to do that, either...
Okay, this was kinda funny, but I just want to point out that it is impossible to tack with a solar sail in space.
On a sailboat, tacking works because the wind coming at an angle across the sail bellies it out into a wing-like shape, with the front of the sail being curved like the top of a wing. Just like on an airplane, this creates an area of lower pressure, which pulls the boat forward. Also, the large keel on the sailboat keeps it from just being pushed sideways.
In space, apart from no-one being able to hear your screams, no-one can provide a medium in which a keel will work. As well, the aerodynamic properties that make tacking possible just don't apply, as there is not medium in which a lower pressure can be made (except, of course, the ether...:)
Not so much irritated, as enraged. Never before has one commercial elicited so many profanities from me. I would rather watch N'Stink videos than that commercial. In fact, that's what I often do. I change channels as soon as it comes on.
The worst part is that I can't place my finger on what exactly it is that annoys me so much. It's kind of like Barney in that manner...
that your strong suspicion is based on an incorrect hunch at best. Compilers must be written to handle any possible usage of any statement of a language, leading to a lot of redundancies simply so that it can conform to some rules that allow them to handle any possible usage of the higher level code.
For example, you'll often find that not all of the data registers are used for an arithmetic operation, because some have been reserved for things like pointer arithmetic, and subroutine route tracing. Also, a subroutine will often back up ALL registers to the stack, because it has no way of knowing which are important, and which are just storing garbage.
If you know for certain which registers are being used, and which are free, you are given a lot more leeway in writing your code. Need places for 6 ints so you can add them together? Load them into 6 unused registers and add away. Often compilers will do something even as simple as that using the stack and some RPN-like math.
Anyway, the point is, because you are writing specialized code that you know all the ins and outs of, you can cut corners that no compiler would be able to, and streamline your code to something truly magnificent.
Slashdot Mirror
Though we may be impotent in the field of international politics, that has absolutely no affect on the ability of our women to carry children to term and give birth. We are _not_ barren.
:)
I can't speak for the Russians, though
MasterBlaster runs barter town.
Fine-point tweezers and a magnifying glass. Luckily, we can find these at work, and we even have those nifty magnifying lenses with built-in lights. They really help for people with fat fingers and bad eyes (like me).
Cell phone: $99
Humongous gas guzzling SUV: $32,000
Inattentive soccer mom: free (god knows there's enough of them)
Bicycle on same roadway: $199
Video sent in to Real TV showing gruesome death: priceless.
Well, read carefully, it states with no wire or wireless connection between the computers themselves. If read in one manner, it means that the computers are not connected at all. If read in another manner, it means that the computers are not connected directly to each other. That does not preclude them from being connected to the same LAN, at which point this operation becomes trivial.
(For those of you who question the triviality, imagine a porgram running on both computers whose sole job is to inform the other computer when the mouse has reached the edge of the screen).
It sounds to me like they spent a lot of time making this advertising copy more exciting than it really is.
I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about the alien.
Was the alien carbon based, or silicon based?
Uh, the other one. Zilliphone.
I remember seeing a study on this on Discovery or TLC. The fired rifle bullets into sand at high velocities and at many different angles, and the resulting crater was almost always circular. A quick google search turns up this link, a section from some lecture notes at University College Worcester.
Craters are not always circular as they may have been created from impacts which hit the surface at oblique angles forming elliptical craters however as impact craters are formed by very high velocity impacts which act essentially like an explosion rather than a distortion of the surface so unless the impact is very shallow and ploughs along the surface the craters will tend to be circular.
Here is another interesting quote from the same page that may explain the concentric rings:
If the crater is larger and the same order of magnitude as the thickness of the lithosphere then shock waves will penetrate the more plastic athenosphere resulting in the formation of multiringed basins.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal...in every way
Harrison Bergeron? Vonnegut?
Using CMOS sensors, it is possible to get both linear and logarithmic responses from pixels, depending on your biasing conditions.
For a linear sensor, the photosite is generally a floating N+ diffusion, that makes up one side of an NMOS transistor. At reset, the voltage here is set to VDD. As incident light generates electron-hole pairs, the electrons are collected in the diffusion, lowering the voltage in a linear fashion, dependent upon the parasitic capacitance of the photosite. When the integration time is up, this charge/voltage is sampled, and you have a linear sensor.
For logarithmic response, the reset level of the photosite is actually even with the biasing of the gate to that transistor (minus the Vt, of course). Incident light generates electrons, and the transistor operates in the sub-threshold region, making the voltage at the photosite vary as the logarithm of the current being generated and flowing through the gate region. Sample that voltage, and tah-dah, you've got a logarithmic response to light.
I admit, this is much easier to understand with diagrams of the diffusions, so if you want, here is a pdf of a paper discussing a sensor that has combined linear-logarithmic response:
CMOS Active Pixel Sensor With Combined Linear and Logarithmic Mode Operation
Especially since it will probably be transmitted in binary, and look like:
111111111111111111111111111111...
(2^k-1)
Robert A Heinlein had a 3-bit computer in Number of the Beast at one point. It was only briefly mentioned that it used trinary logic rather than binary, and I believe it was based on 3-phase A/C power, rather than the DC that computers are now based on.
As for why a trinary computer would be better, consider it analagous to why a language with 10 words is better than one with only 4. You can say a lot more things in a lot less space. Of course, how this would actually be accomplished is very hard for us to envision, as we are so used to the binary logic of true and false, on and off. Kudos to the guy that can actually wrap his head around it.
Well, having colour would mean they would need a grid of filters, and then do some interpretation between pixels to guess at what the colour level there would be. In other words, if the grid looked like:
G B G R...
R G B G...
Which are Green, Blue, and Red sensitive pixels (a fairly standard pattern), then there would be no measure of how intense the blue light was on a green pixel, or vice versa. Some extrapolation would be required, and you would essentially be reducing the effective number of pixels on your device. My suspicion is that they wanted max resolution, and weren't overly concerned with putting pretty pictures on the net for us to gawk at, like Hubble can do.
On another note, who else thinks that this device has 2-3 dead pixel columns? Note the vertical black lines on the full-sky pictures. I'd be a little upset if I bought one of these babies (for $$$ probably) and ended up with dead columns.
... it's about 117 Kelvin.
Relatively inexpensive, and getting warmer all the time. I'm looking forward to the day...
As I see it is in less expensive surface-to-orbit vehicles. Use a standard RAMJET to acheive mach whatever-the-hell-you-need-to-start-the-SCRAMJET. SCRAMJET kicks in, and slingshots you out of the atmosphere, where conventional rockets can then manoeuver you. Hopefully, this could be made into a completely re-useable space shuttle.
Ideas quoted in this post are not mine, they come from a book called Silver Tower by an author I can't remember now. They used a magnetic launching track to get the shuttle up to the speed where the RAMJET would work, then the RAMJET until they could turn on the SCRAMJET.
...where do you buy yours?
Static discharges can destroy many an integrated circuit if there is improper internal protection. Think about it, if one external pin of a device is connected to the gate of one MOSFET (which can happen sometimes), and that pin suddenly accumulates charge through ESD, it won't take much for the oxide to break down between the gate and the substrate, and then you've got a chip that won't work.
Say the ESD pulse happened on the power (or gnd) line. Suddenly, across your entire chip, you have a 200V difference between power and gnd for a fraction of a second. Unless you've specifically added extra circuitry to cope with this (and any knowledgable designer will), something's gonna blow, even if it is for just a fraction of a second. With a 200V potential difference, it doesn't take long for 77 angstroms of SiO2 to break down.
Standard ESD protection within a chip consists of control circuitry that will turn on a low-resistance path between any two pins whenever the potential difference becomes too great. The plan is to make the current flow through a large internal ESD bus, rather than through the delicate core circuitry of your device.
Of course, a good defense is to prevent static discharges from ever reaching your device. Anti-static bags provide a conductive path around the outside of the bag, so that the least resistive path is not through your device, but rather around the outside of the bag. They are in general a very good idea, because there is no telling what kind of ESDs you can encounter during shipping and handling, whereas when a component has been installed somewhere, the ESD that it will encounter can generally be predicted.
PS - Charge is measured in Coulombs, capacitance is measured in Farads.
...Martians across the globe are boarding up their windows, in anticipation of the thousands of so-called "soccer hooligans" on their way to see the semi-final match.
Residents are advised to stay off the streets, and if meeting one of these British soccer fans, not to claim loyalty to any particular team.
Well, at least it's innovative. Gotta admit that.
Also called "Mother-in-law's tongue" probably because they are long, sharp, and impossible to get rid of. My girlfriend left hers in the dark, on top of a heating vent, unwatered for four months and it sprouted new shoots.
Whenever I'm off on a co-op term, I just leave mine in the house with the sublettors. It doesn't matter whether they water it or not, it's still gonna be there when I get back.
Really? I could have sworn that when he gets whacked with the wrench, his ear almost comes off and he starts leaking white goo. I thought that was part of the point, how the company was still lying to Ripley. I don't have the movie with me now, so unfortunately, I can't check.
I guess I can't explain the reaction to the suicide unless he's some sort of super-android, who has had an "emotion chip" installed.
Nope. Bishop was simply an android. You may say clone because he looked like his creator (or did he? In the end that guy in III turned out to be an android as well - remember the ear).
IIRC, Data (ST:TNG) also looks like his creator. They simply chose the easiest model to work with when deciding what the physical form of the outer skin would be.
These two are very much not clones, who are supposed to be essentially human, but "my father was a test-tube, my mother was a knife" and complete DNA copies of the original. Both Data and Bishop have super-human abilities (strength, speed, calculational power, etc) that their "parents" most definitely did not, so they are certainly not DNA copies. Also, neither are organic.
Hrumph. You young'uns and all your new-fangled techy stuff.
When I was your age, and I wanted a redraw, I had to pay a little whippersnapper $6.50/hr for seven hours, and even then I'd have to pour over his work to make sure the resulting picture was at least close enough to the original to make it useful. And don't get me started about the number of pencils I had to supply him with to do that, either...
Okay, this was kinda funny, but I just want to point out that it is impossible to tack with a solar sail in space.
:)
On a sailboat, tacking works because the wind coming at an angle across the sail bellies it out into a wing-like shape, with the front of the sail being curved like the top of a wing. Just like on an airplane, this creates an area of lower pressure, which pulls the boat forward. Also, the large keel on the sailboat keeps it from just being pushed sideways.
In space, apart from no-one being able to hear your screams, no-one can provide a medium in which a keel will work. As well, the aerodynamic properties that make tacking possible just don't apply, as there is not medium in which a lower pressure can be made (except, of course, the ether...
Not so much irritated, as enraged. Never before has one commercial elicited so many profanities from me. I would rather watch N'Stink videos than that commercial. In fact, that's what I often do. I change channels as soon as it comes on.
The worst part is that I can't place my finger on what exactly it is that annoys me so much. It's kind of like Barney in that manner...
that your strong suspicion is based on an incorrect hunch at best. Compilers must be written to handle any possible usage of any statement of a language, leading to a lot of redundancies simply so that it can conform to some rules that allow them to handle any possible usage of the higher level code.
For example, you'll often find that not all of the data registers are used for an arithmetic operation, because some have been reserved for things like pointer arithmetic, and subroutine route tracing. Also, a subroutine will often back up ALL registers to the stack, because it has no way of knowing which are important, and which are just storing garbage.
If you know for certain which registers are being used, and which are free, you are given a lot more leeway in writing your code. Need places for 6 ints so you can add them together? Load them into 6 unused registers and add away. Often compilers will do something even as simple as that using the stack and some RPN-like math.
Anyway, the point is, because you are writing specialized code that you know all the ins and outs of, you can cut corners that no compiler would be able to, and streamline your code to something truly magnificent.
That doesn't mean it's easy, though...
Warhol. 'nuff said.
one gram and you don't give a damn -- aldous huxley
Isn't it "a gram is better than a damn"?