Yes, it's "The Typewriter", by Leroy Anderson. There's a streaming version to listen to here. I wish I hadn't, now it's stuck in my head, and removing it will take something industrial-strength...
There's no question that Clarke, in person, has been described by various journalists as having been a SF God for too long. It's all gone to his head, which is (allegedly) firmly lodged where the buses don't run. I can't imagine having twenty journalists a day asking me to predict the future...
That doesn't diminish the impact of his work, however. I suggest finding his Complete Short Stories and reading a few at a time. My personal favourite is "Death And The Senator", which is totally topical at the moment, with space travel being opened up to non-astronauts. Then there's "The Star", a Christmas story of sorts, which I believe was made into a Twlight Zone episode a few decades back. And if it all starts getting too serious, there's always the "White Hart" stories. The Rama books are far from his best work, don't discard the man's work based on those.
Never mind Dune, what about all the stuff he lifted from Asimov? The robots, of course, but there's also the remarkable simularity between Asimov's "Trantor" (from Foundation) and Lucas' "Coruscant" - both cities that completely cover a planet. There must be more, too.
I really have to wonder how the citizens of Dublin, Ohio feel about having their tax dollars pay such a dramatic building in their back yard? Normally you only find this kind of luxury in Europe...
I know, I know. But if Lucas's designers are copying Irish buildings, what's next? The next CGI character: a little green thing with a red hat (?) that drinks a whole lot and rejoices in the moniker Pah-de-oht'ool ?
Nah, I can't believe you mean that. What about Canada? Even better, go and see "Bowling For Columbine".
If "Friends" can visit London, so can you. Just jump on a plane. Not in summer though, you won't get a hotel room, too full of American Tourists getting hit by buses that drive on the "wrong" side of the road. (evolution in action...)
And it's Robert Fripp, not Peter Fripp. Peter Giles (brother of drummer Michael) worked with them before they were KC and some session work later. Carl Palmer was not involved!
For more on the Crim, past, present and future, there are three worthwhile sites to visit:
elephant talk - reference site, home of the mailing list
They toured with Tool last year, and have just released a new EP, "happy with what you have to be happy with".
There's also an in-house "remix" album called BPM&M: ExtraKcts and ArtifaKcts, which has already cost me a loudspeaker - more bass than you can shake a Stick at.
If the prices come down significantly, I can see schools being a huge market for Tablets. That and waterproofing to prevent damage from spills of Coke or Pepsi or vomit (from too much sugar). Kids love to doodle and draw, and (I believe) parents will always want their kids to learn handwriting, even if it's becoming obsolete.
I can even see a Tablet being very useful in teaching kids how to write. (Follow the rabbit around while he traces out a capital Q.) If handwriting recognition is hard for computers, well, we can teach kids to write in a way that saves CPU cycles and improves accuracy.
Just imagine: the apple-of-your-eye comes home from school and shows you the handwriting she learned today: perfect "Times New Roman"!
Now this surprises me... I'm a Scot who has lived in Dublin for 3 years now, and I'm not convinced that Ireland deserves to be so far ahead of the UK on this score. The main thing that bugs me about the Irish press is how insular they are. Looking at the main dailies, any events from outside Ireland need to be big news to get anywhere near the front page, otherwise they are swamped under reports of government tribunals and road accidents. On a normal day, "world news" is confined to a few middle pages.
The media situation here is a bit confusing. The Irish constitution preaches freedom of religion, yet Catholicism pervades the media, currently in the form of reports of priests playing with little boys. The RTÉ (state TV) has a daily Catholic "Angelus" (some kind of sunset prayer), yet Richard Dawkins was on a few weeks ago, dumping on organized religion. When a jounalist is killed here, for getting too close to outing a drug dealer, it gets made into a Hollywood movie!
"Peppered" is the right word - the original poster took a "blunderbuss" approach, calling us "lemmings" because we happen to agree with Ms. Ian's well-chosen words. If it was a specific criticism, I/we might be able to take corrective action. I've lost 10 pounds in the last month since someone called me "bloated"... why am I telling you this? Nurse! Nurse!
I mean The Internet Debacle, the one that started this whole thing off. Read the Fallout article next. Janis does offer a realistic, practical way forward for both media companies and "consumers" (i.e. you). This is where it starts, here at the coalface: if you expect to cause direct changes at boardroom level, you will need the financial resources of Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner to get any real results at this time. Realistically.
Personally, I'm almost weaned off the major labels, by chance, since most of my favourie artists are also going independent. I think Britney's or Eminem's albums should come with a government health warning: "Purchasing this major label album may be detrimental to the health of music and music lovers worldwide".
You may have some valid points in your rant, but, like many here, I tend to switch off when the personal insults start appearing. We don't need this, do we?
Correct - at geo, the tower's mass would be equal to the orbital velocity at geo. This tower will be going faster the higher you go, the opposite of standard orbits. So there should be a useful whip effect, and timing of release would be as crucial as ever, unless you fancy going from Earth to Mars via Venus.
And we know that such a tower will need to reach much higher than geo, because its centre of mass will need to be at geo for it to be stable, both during and after construction. Clarke's "Fountains Of Paradise" has a great description of one way of doing this: push an asteroid into geo, mine it right there, and build up and down simultaneously, keeping the centre of mass at geo. (I do mean centre of mass, not centre of gravity - think about it.)
Speaking of performance electrics, don't forget NEDRA. Their current champion, "Current Eliminator IV", uses Dragster - 336V of batteries and did a standing quarter-mile in 8.801 seconds. I wonder what it sounded like - a two-tonne bumble-bee on crack..?
I second the previous comments about the need to keep wheel mass low - low sprung weight is a definite goal of performance cars. It's hard to call this thing a car, it's more like a bus, since it seats 8 and weighs 3 tonnes...
The authors of this article seem to have missed out on the fact that, on some hard drives, you can decide the tradeoff between noise and performance. I have an IBM-DTLA 44GB drive with which I can use the IBM Feature Tool to adjust the "Automatic Acoustic Management" (AAM). When set to its quietest setting, it totally cuts out the clicking from the voice coil. I haven't benchmarked it like that, but it would certainly come in handy if I had a RAID setup with a cacheing controller.
The IBM 120GXP (IC35L120) in the test supports this, and this implies that Seagate are doing this kind of "seek shaping" now and plan to extend the facility to OEMs, so that they can customize acoustic performance for the application e.g. PVR. Where possible, the review tests should have been done using either extreme. (They don't say whether the drives were seeking during the noise test, though. I hope they were, otherwise the noise tests would be half-baked.)
I started wondering about potential antitrust problems with Apple's use of Pentiums, but though better of it. Why? I started making an analogy: how would/. readers react if Microsoft designed their own PC, had it built to their their own specifications, and released an OS and applications that only ran on the specified hardware. Then I realised that they've already done this, and called it the X-Box. So I wouldn't think Apple would get a call from the FTC or the SEC if they did move to Px systems.
However, what about Intel? Some might say this would give Intel a monopoly position in PC hardware, and lead to calls for their breakup. They could spin off the StrongARM division, for example. I wish I was a corporate lawyer, I'd need a forklift to get my bonus check to the limo..!
Indeed, the main protagonist is a heavily re-engineered porn actress..!
(Her body required extreme modification so that the "feelies" customers got the right amount of stimulation after transmission losses. A bit like the old days of TV, when everyone had to wear extreme makeup to be visible on screen.)
This is a SF novel from 1994 which covers exactly this scenario. The long-term effects of global warming include the melting of the ice caps, as we know, but this book is about the shorter-term effects. An overall rise in the sea temperature, due to a huge release of clathrate methane, enlarges the hurricane-spawing areas of the ocean (areas above 27C). The result is larger and larger hurricanes, until, well, you can guess the rest from the title.
I would hope that these turbines have a control system that would "feather" the blades (turn them to their point of least wind resistance) in extreme conditions. I imagine that this would also be varied to keep a constant angular velocity. (Are these turbines AC or DC?)
On the other hand, here's a US company that makes turbines using a flexible design that they say can "shed excessive wind loads".
It is possible to hold some on your tongue and blow "smoke rings", but if you want to know what happens if you swallow it, you may end up in the running for a Darwin Award. This guy did it and failed to qualify (i.e. lived to tell the tale). It's in his own words, and he left out the goriest details, but it's still cringeworthy.
If you've seen this article before: yes, I know. Some people haven't. This is for them. Thanks.
That could be an alternative name to "warflying". I can see where "warstorming" comes from (think "barnstorming").
However, why are we using full-size planes for this? A serious model plane could do the job as well, if done right. Tightly strap in an IPaq and a small GPS, padded, with an external antenna on the Orinoco card. Add MiniStumbler, some gas, and go.
Even better, with some custom software on the IPaq, and assuming you stay in range of your AP, there may be a chance of real-time telemetry. Add a camera card and spy on your neighbours... no, now I'm just getting silly!
I tend to agree that a 48fps rate would be a vast improvement: blur is lost detail, which can never be recovered. If you're watching at 48fps, the apparent blur per frame would be halved, which is only a good thing, I think.
I say apparent blur because real blur in a frame is of course related to the shutter speed, which is in turn a function of the film, the aperture, and available light. 48bps won't change that.
Motion Blur is added in CGI to make motion look smoother. Imagine Final Fantasy (The Spirits Within) re-rendered at 48bps: the makers would probably find they could get away with less motion blur, again improving the perceived image sharpness.
Then there's aliasing, which I would rather not have, thank you very much. This is the effect that you can see in old westerns in particular, when the chuck wagon is moving forward but its wheels are rotating backwards. I can't say if a higher frame rate would help here, but it can't hurt.
By way of comparison, we're seeing a gradual shift to 96,000 samples per second in the audio field. People are generally right in arguing that this has no benefits for most material, but when you need it, you need it.
If, like me, you tend to sit in the front row at any movie theater, blurring and aliasing artefacts can be a real hindrance to enjoyment of a movie.
Fibre Channel is dying out? Huh? Do you actually deal with high-end storage?
first or all, 2Gb FC is already being used, with 10Gb on the way. That's plenty if you use it correctly.
Don't forget that current SAN design involves FC Switched Fabric, which is to FC-Arbritrated Loop as a Ethernet Switch is to a Hub. (No, you can't have one, unless you sell your car first.)
in current FC disk subsystems, the disks use FC-AL for their local connection. That's more than enough bandwidth for an array of physical disks, and high-end controllers support multiple loops.
Comparisons between FC-AL and Token Ring are only superficially correct. At the bit level, there's far less overhead, and no token-passing delays.
This has been said earlier, but bears repeating: FC is a transport-level standard. At the physical level, it can run on copper (short runs), or fibre. At higher levels, it commonly carries SCSI-3 and IP, but could carry anything else e.g. IPX, SNA, MIDI, whatever, if someone implements it.
Gigabit Ethernet is not currently a replacement for FC by any means, I'm afraid, unless you discount the whole SAN concept. I think I still have a few years left before I need to think about switch careers (again)...
"For the words of the profits are written on the studio walls, and concert halls, echo with the sounds of salesmen."
- from "The Spirit of Radio" by Rush, 1980
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's "The Typewriter", by Leroy Anderson. There's a streaming version to listen to here. I wish I hadn't, now it's stuck in my head, and removing it will take something industrial-strength...
After you do that, look up, and check if the stars are going out. Not much point worrying about what happens next...
(xref the Arthur C Clarke short story.)
There's no question that Clarke, in person, has been described by various journalists as having been a SF God for too long. It's all gone to his head, which is (allegedly) firmly lodged where the buses don't run. I can't imagine having twenty journalists a day asking me to predict the future...
That doesn't diminish the impact of his work, however. I suggest finding his Complete Short Stories and reading a few at a time. My personal favourite is "Death And The Senator", which is totally topical at the moment, with space travel being opened up to non-astronauts. Then there's "The Star", a Christmas story of sorts, which I believe was made into a Twlight Zone episode a few decades back. And if it all starts getting too serious, there's always the "White Hart" stories. The Rama books are far from his best work, don't discard the man's work based on those.
Never mind Dune, what about all the stuff he lifted from Asimov? The robots, of course, but there's also the remarkable simularity between Asimov's "Trantor" (from Foundation) and Lucas' "Coruscant" - both cities that completely cover a planet. There must be more, too.
I really have to wonder how the citizens of Dublin, Ohio feel about having their tax dollars pay such a dramatic building in their back yard? Normally you only find this kind of luxury in Europe...
I know, I know. But if Lucas's designers are copying Irish buildings, what's next? The next CGI character: a little green thing with a red hat (?) that drinks a whole lot and rejoices in the moniker Pah-de-oht'ool ?
If "Friends" can visit London, so can you. Just jump on a plane. Not in summer though, you won't get a hotel room, too full of American Tourists getting hit by buses that drive on the "wrong" side of the road. (evolution in action...)
For more on the Crim, past, present and future, there are three worthwhile sites to visit:
- elephant talk - reference site, home of the mailing list
- krimson news - news & blog site
- discipline global mobile - fripp's independent record label
They toured with Tool last year, and have just released a new EP, "happy with what you have to be happy with". There's also an in-house "remix" album called BPM&M: ExtraKcts and ArtifaKcts, which has already cost me a loudspeaker - more bass than you can shake a Stick at.I can even see a Tablet being very useful in teaching kids how to write. (Follow the rabbit around while he traces out a capital Q.) If handwriting recognition is hard for computers, well, we can teach kids to write in a way that saves CPU cycles and improves accuracy.
Just imagine: the apple-of-your-eye comes home from school and shows you the handwriting she learned today: perfect "Times New Roman"!
The media situation here is a bit confusing. The Irish constitution preaches freedom of religion, yet Catholicism pervades the media, currently in the form of reports of priests playing with little boys. The RTÉ (state TV) has a daily Catholic "Angelus" (some kind of sunset prayer), yet Richard Dawkins was on a few weeks ago, dumping on organized religion. When a jounalist is killed here, for getting too close to outing a drug dealer, it gets made into a Hollywood movie!
"Peppered" is the right word - the original poster took a "blunderbuss" approach, calling us "lemmings" because we happen to agree with Ms. Ian's well-chosen words. If it was a specific criticism, I/we might be able to take corrective action. I've lost 10 pounds in the last month since someone called me "bloated"... why am I telling you this? Nurse! Nurse!
Personally, I'm almost weaned off the major labels, by chance, since most of my favourie artists are also going independent. I think Britney's or Eminem's albums should come with a government health warning: "Purchasing this major label album may be detrimental to the health of music and music lovers worldwide".
You may have some valid points in your rant, but, like many here, I tend to switch off when the personal insults start appearing. We don't need this, do we?
Correct - at geo, the tower's mass would be equal to the orbital velocity at geo. This tower will be going faster the higher you go, the opposite of standard orbits. So there should be a useful whip effect, and timing of release would be as crucial as ever, unless you fancy going from Earth to Mars via Venus.
And we know that such a tower will need to reach much higher than geo, because its centre of mass will need to be at geo for it to be stable, both during and after construction. Clarke's "Fountains Of Paradise" has a great description of one way of doing this: push an asteroid into geo, mine it right there, and build up and down simultaneously, keeping the centre of mass at geo. (I do mean centre of mass, not centre of gravity - think about it.)
Speaking of performance electrics, don't forget NEDRA. Their current champion, "Current Eliminator IV", uses Dragster - 336V of batteries and did a standing quarter-mile in 8.801 seconds. I wonder what it sounded like - a two-tonne bumble-bee on crack..?
I second the previous comments about the need to keep wheel mass low - low sprung weight is a definite goal of performance cars. It's hard to call this thing a car, it's more like a bus, since it seats 8 and weighs 3 tonnes...
The IBM 120GXP (IC35L120) in the test supports this, and this implies that Seagate are doing this kind of "seek shaping" now and plan to extend the facility to OEMs, so that they can customize acoustic performance for the application e.g. PVR. Where possible, the review tests should have been done using either extreme. (They don't say whether the drives were seeking during the noise test, though. I hope they were, otherwise the noise tests would be half-baked.)
However, what about Intel? Some might say this would give Intel a monopoly position in PC hardware, and lead to calls for their breakup. They could spin off the StrongARM division, for example. I wish I was a corporate lawyer, I'd need a forklift to get my bonus check to the limo..!
(Her body required extreme modification so that the "feelies" customers got the right amount of stimulation after transmission losses. A bit like the old days of TV, when everyone had to wear extreme makeup to be visible on screen.)
This is a SF novel from 1994 which covers exactly this scenario. The long-term effects of global warming include the melting of the ice caps, as we know, but this book is about the shorter-term effects. An overall rise in the sea temperature, due to a huge release of clathrate methane, enlarges the hurricane-spawing areas of the ocean (areas above 27C). The result is larger and larger hurricanes, until, well, you can guess the rest from the title.
Reviews: here and here.
Ouch. Do you still want to touch those deposits?
I would hope that these turbines have a control system that would "feather" the blades (turn them to their point of least wind resistance) in extreme conditions. I imagine that this would also be varied to keep a constant angular velocity. (Are these turbines AC or DC?)
On the other hand, here's a US company that makes turbines using a flexible design that they say can "shed excessive wind loads".
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to type the phrase "begging the question" into Google and read every hit returned.
In other words: HUH?
If you've seen this article before: yes, I know. Some people haven't. This is for them. Thanks.
How about "warbuzzing"? Or would that just be applicable to using model planes for this purpose? (I've already posted on that topic above.)
That could be an alternative name to "warflying". I can see where "warstorming" comes from (think "barnstorming").
However, why are we using full-size planes for this? A serious model plane could do the job as well, if done right. Tightly strap in an IPaq and a small GPS, padded, with an external antenna on the Orinoco card. Add MiniStumbler, some gas, and go.
Even better, with some custom software on the IPaq, and assuming you stay in range of your AP, there may be a chance of real-time telemetry. Add a camera card and spy on your neighbours... no, now I'm just getting silly!
I tend to agree that a 48fps rate would be a vast improvement: blur is lost detail, which can never be recovered. If you're watching at 48fps, the apparent blur per frame would be halved, which is only a good thing, I think.
I say apparent blur because real blur in a frame is of course related to the shutter speed, which is in turn a function of the film, the aperture, and available light. 48bps won't change that.
Motion Blur is added in CGI to make motion look smoother. Imagine Final Fantasy (The Spirits Within) re-rendered at 48bps: the makers would probably find they could get away with less motion blur, again improving the perceived image sharpness.
Then there's aliasing, which I would rather not have, thank you very much. This is the effect that you can see in old westerns in particular, when the chuck wagon is moving forward but its wheels are rotating backwards. I can't say if a higher frame rate would help here, but it can't hurt.
By way of comparison, we're seeing a gradual shift to 96,000 samples per second in the audio field. People are generally right in arguing that this has no benefits for most material, but when you need it, you need it.
If, like me, you tend to sit in the front row at any movie theater, blurring and aliasing artefacts can be a real hindrance to enjoyment of a movie.
thx...
Gigabit Ethernet is not currently a replacement for FC by any means, I'm afraid, unless you discount the whole SAN concept. I think I still have a few years left before I need to think about switch careers (again)...
"For the words of the profits
are written on the studio walls,
and concert halls,
echo with the sounds of salesmen."
- from "The Spirit of Radio" by Rush, 1980