Does anyone know how much energy this takes? They mentioned the previous petawatt laser experiment that was decommissioned, but I didn't see where it mentioend the power required for this experiment. If the laser guess by kdawson is correct, we could be looking at a mere 400 joules per 1E11 positrons. Which (if I'm not mistaken) would be an unheard of efficiency for creating antimatter! (Can someone verify? My brain is fried at the moment.)
What I find interesting is that this level of production is competitive with Fermilab. Even if they ran this twice an hour, they'd handily meet or outstrip Fermilab production.
Even more interesting is the possibility for mass manufacture of antimatter. By using mass-produced gold targets, you could rotate the materials in and out of the machine every few seconds, creating previously unseen amounts of antimatter. Such a process could easily provide materials for an antimatter catalyzed fission drive. Possibly even enough to power new forms of interplanetary propulsion.
Am I the only one who's getting really excited about this?/dreamer
Well, here we go with another "I've got lots of RAM I don't need swap" thread:
Well then, it's a good thing I didn't say that. I said that the Windows swap system sucks. Especially when there's more than enough memory for it to operate efficiently. When I have only 40% of my memory wired, yet Windows is swapping like mad because it's too aggressive that's a bad implementation.
At least Windows XP and Vista don't auto-swap on minimize like NT4 used to do. It was always "fun" minimizing a J2EE server to let it run in the background, only to have to wait for 2-3 minutes when I decided to check the log. For bonus points, accidentally click the minimize button. It was totally awesome waiting for Windows to finish swapping it out, only to swap it right back in after immediately trying to restore.
In my experience, BSD, Linux, and Solaris all have far better paging systems. OS X's system is figgety, but it's not any worse than Windows'.
My primary complaint is that most OSS developers expect all Unix systems to be Linux systems. Which means that I have to let Linux software get its hooks into my OS X system in order to get anything compiled. Since OS X is NOT Linux, this is quite an unpleasant process.
It's capable of running its own proprietary OS that is specifically designed to not run on any otherwise capable hardware
OS X runs Unix software. Period. I usually get a host of tools installed first thing on my Mac. Thankfully, this has become less and less necessary over time as Apple has started including many of the most useful utilities up front.
You do know that we're talking about a NETWORK file transfer protocol, right? The Mac file system is HFS+, which is perfectly fine for anything you might want to do.
Yet for many, the Mac remains sluggish and poorly tuned for development, with developers citing its virtual memory system's poor performance in paging data in and out of memory
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately? Swapping is a *bleeping* killer! Especially when you have more than enough memory not to swap.:-/
likening use of the default-network file system, AFS, to engaging oneself with 'some kind of passive-aggressive torture.
So don't use it. Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty darn well these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
A quick search at PirateBay easily shows how full of shit your reasoning is.
That doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense. Either you don't understand the argument, or you think that Pirate Bay somehow tracks the number of copies pirated. Either way, there's no way that searching Pirate Bay disproves the argument I just made.
Just for fun, let's make up some numbers to demonstrate. Let's say I create a game for only the PC. Let's say that 500 people buy it. Later on I'm able to prove that 500 people pirated it. What is my piracy rate on the PC version? 50%.
Now let's say I create a game that can be distributed via the Wii, Steam, or a PC Download. Let's say that the Wii version sells 1500 copies, the Steam version sells 1000 copies, and the PC version sells 100 copies. Later on I'm able to prove that 500 people pirated the PC Download. What is my piracy rate on the PC download? 83%.
Except that in the second scenario, we can see that many of the previous customers shifted to the alternative content streams. If we assume that those other streams are well protected, this means that the ratio between pirated copies and PC Downloads is now out of whack with actual sales. Overall sales are great and piracy rates have not changed. Yet through some interesting misapplication of statistics, we have managed to create a 33% increase in piracy.
What that suggests is not that piracy kills all video games and that they should be destroyed. What it suggests is that the PC Download stream is far less profitable when alternative streams are available.
"There are three types of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" --Mark Twain
Here's an odd question: What is so horribly wrong with the demo that you refused to download it? If you had done so, you would be providing one less piracy statistic and instead providing a failed-conversion statistic. A failed-conversion tells the developer that they need to do better. A piracy statistic suggests that they're not getting paid for their hard work.
Which is all just proof that the DRM that the other game shipped with clearly isn't strong enough.
That's far from the only sane conclusion. The problem with World of Goo is that the "honest" customers may take advantage of one of the more convenient and easier download options. These additional options that do a better job reaching the target audience may artificially inflate the piracy figures for PC downloads. i.e. It's not that the game is heavily pirated, it's that the PC version is less popular among paying customers and thus at a statistical disadvantage.
Oh, come on! A little neutron radiation never hurt anybody!... Much.... Okay, so it slowly turned them into swiss cheese. Not to mention the gamma ray burst after they accidentally set the hemispheres too close to each other. *cough* But that's beside the point!:-P
Joking aside, I'd say the problem is even deeper than proper handling. Once it's all processed for you, shaped, and clad in a protective carton or sheath for transport, U235 is relatively harmless. It's the processing that will kill you. Processing uranium into yellow cake, then converting it into uranium hexafluoride for enrichment, then finally shaping an enriched quantity of U235 is a rather difficult process that's just asking for accidents to happen.
Of course, I've always had a soft spot for the TXT file floating around that describes how to enrich uranium in your backyard with little more than a bucket. Perfect (and humorous) example of what NOT to do when processing uranium.;-)
The joke was that I was interrupted before I could tell you that you need to use that mass to create two equally sized hemispheres of U235. Fix one against a solid wall (e.g. the inside of a steel casing would do) and position the other a short distance away. (Preferably on some sort of guides that force it to face the other hemisphere. Again, steel casing is a good idea here.) Pack explosives behind the loose hemisphere. The explosives will thrust the loose hemisphere toward the fixed hemisphere, hopefully with enough force to compact the U235 and cause a super-critical reaction.
If you manage a super-critical reaction, then *BOOM*. If you fail at it, then no boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow.
Having done quite a bit of research on nuclear everything (from power generation to weapons to propulsion) and then openly sharing that information with others, I'm sure I'm already a person of interest. So if you don't mind, I'll just go ahead and click away!;-)
P.S. Gun-type bombs are easy. All you need is a critical mass of U235-- err... never mind. I seem to have guests. I'll get back to you...
The President is the ultimate authority on the budget. If he vetos it, Congress will have to start again. In result, bills are often a negotiation between Congress and the President. Which doesn't mean that Congress won't take a hard-line position and slam space funding through in exchange for other concessions, but it's far more likely that space funding will BE the concession.
Nonsense. I've visited the homes of Mac-only users. They usually have two or three. Where things get interesting however, is that they tend to be using an Airport Router. (Which caused me no end of grief when I didn't spring to have WiFi added to my last laptop.) As someone mentioned higher up in the discussion, Airport routes IPv6 by default. Something that most other consumer routers (typically paired with Windows and Linux machines) do not.
I was ONLY trying to get across in my original post the notion that early on and even in later days there has been a bit of confusion about it between the various script writers.
I guess I'm just confused about what you're trying to get at then. I don't recall the issue of the nacelles being engines or not engines ever coming up in the canon series. AFAIK, they were always engines. In result, I don't understand the point you are trying to make. So... just confuguled, I guess.:-)
I even have a beaten up die-cast 1701 to prove it...
I think I still have my Enterprise-D around somewhere. I'm too young to have seen the original series when it first aired, but I do remember sneakily hanging over the balcony to watch TOS and TNG rather than sleeping. (As I recall, Star Trek aired at midnight!) My mother must have been royally confused when I asked her for a die-cast Enterprise for Christmas.;-)
I think most of the original logs were based upon TOS plots (maybe four episodes per book?). Although as the Log numbers climbed into the teens they may have gotten into the Animated Series.
Nope, they were all based on the Animated Series. It may have seemed like they related to original episodes because the stories tended to revisit planets and situations from TOS. (e.g. The R&R world was revisited.) Also, the series never made it to the teens.
My thought is that the concept of warping space and then moving at a sub-light speed (relative) was too hard for the average viewer to understand, so they had to *become* engines...
I don't understand why you think there's a dichotomy between the way that the warp drive works and the nacelle system being a pair of "engines". (Though more properly, they'd be part of one "engine" just as multiple cylinders are part of a single "engine".)
Wikipedia defines engine as, "An engine is a mechanical device that produces some form of output from a given input." Dictionary.com lists it as, "a machine for converting thermal energy into mechanical energy or power to produce force and motion."
Neither of those definitions preclude a warp drive from being an "engine". And again, the Logs are not canon, so don't pay too much attention to them. Back in those days authors got to take quite a bit of freedom in their writing.
My main point simply being that a lot of the ST technical manual is fairly revisionistic.
There's certainly been some revisionism going on, though I'd think of it more as "refinement". Gene's idea was pretty rough when he first proposed it. Besides Star Trek being one of the first media attempts to actually tackle the problem of FTL travel, the science simply wasn't there yet. Barely a handful of Antimatter particles had been observed, the Standard Model was still developing, Quantum Physics and Relativity were wrestling, and rocket engineering was still a strange and bizarre new field.
Given what Roddenberry had to work with, he pulled off an impressive bit of SciFi for its time. By the time NextGen rolled around, they had worked out many of the details of the FTL concepts and made sure to write them down in the show's bible. (Which eventually lead to Okuda's tech manual.)
Actually, I think the hydrogen was for the impulse engines.
It may act as propellant for the impulse engines, but I don't recall the designs separating the storage of hydrogen by purpose. My understanding is that all hydrogen needed by the ship comes from the same tanks. (And thus the same tanks are recharged by the Bussard collectors.)
the matter/antimatter reactor was to generate enough power to energize the warp field.
Correct. The impulse engines are powered by on-board fusion reactors. Though it's never really made clear why power from the warp-core can't be used to power the impulse drive.
One of the old "Log" paperbacks even made a big deal that calling the warp nacelles "engines" was incorrect because they didn't have any motive power--they just created a warp field and the normal impulse engines moved the ship through it.
Weren't those the paperbacks that were based on the non-canon Animated Series? They were fun, but I wouldn't consider them to be gospel. Scotty regularly referred to "warp engines" (aka his "wee bairns") when discussing warp propulsion. Plus they do generate forward motion. Per the interviews in Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, the warp field is twisted at the back so that the "Enterprise rides it like a surfboard". Thus the velocity inside the field is irrelevant.
Besides, I don't see any way in which they would not be considered engines. e.g. The engine in my car does not use propellant, yet we still consider it an engine.
How can it not exist when Fermilab churns out over 12.4E10 antiprotons per hour? I'll grant you that Fermilab is nowhere near productive enough to power a starship, but there is supposed to be a few hundred years separating today from Star Trek. I think it's okay to gloss over how they increased production.
But where are we going to find these megatons of hydrogen??? It doesn't exist naturally
You mean, other than all that hydrogen the sun spews out? Or the hydrogen that Jupiter is composed of? Or the large quantities of hydrogen produced when you get electricity near sea-water? Or the truly MASSIVE amounts of hydrogen floating through deep space?
I mean, this isn't rocket science. (Well, save for when it is.:-P) Being the most common element in the universe, hydrogen is relatively easy to come by. If it wasn't, the space program wouldn't use Liquid Hydrogen/Oxygen engines. The only issue with using hydrogen to power cars and trucks is making hydrogen creation both economical and clean. Shifting the power-generation costs up to the grid definitely helps. If we then make the grid clean (e.g. nuclear power), our energy infrastructure will then be clean.
Thus the fuel cycle of the Star Trek starships makes perfect sense: Use the largest fusion reactors in existence (i.e. stars) to power the antimatter creation equipment installed at fuel-production starbases. Transfer this antimatter to starships as they drop by for refueling.
I'll leave the simple issue of how to collect gigawatts to terawatts of solar power as an exercise to the reader. That's already a solved engineering problem that we'd probably be using today if it weren't for the pesky dangers of long-range microwave transmissions.
I don't see how Wrath of Khan conflicts. The deflectors, Bussard collectors, and warp field will do zip to stop a massive explosion capable of overloading the shields, much less protect against a device designed to reorganize matter at a molecular level. Having the warp drive online means that the Enterprise was able to twist the space around it, escaping the blast at an effective velocity of > c. Inside the field, particles might have moved at "real space" speed, but they wouldn't have made the Genesis wave any less deadly.
That's like watching the Fast and the Furious and asking where unleaded gasoline comes from. It doesn't matter. Antimatter is created at Starbases (ostensibly using solar power from a nearby star) and the Enterprise is refueled every few years. How the Starbases does it is of no real consequence.
The on-board equipment to create small quantities of antimatter is explained in the Next Gen Tech Manual. I don't remember the details, but it sounded a bit like a particle accelerator. The manual glossed over the exact procedure a bit, and discounted it as "producing very little". I think the only reason for its existence was as a possible plot device in the future.
Abrams confirmed it was the bridge. Kirk is in academy uniform while everyone else is in commissioned attire due to the twists and turns of the storyline. (Namely that he gets snuck aboard and eventually has to save the day.)
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone know how much energy this takes? They mentioned the previous petawatt laser experiment that was decommissioned, but I didn't see where it mentioend the power required for this experiment. If the laser guess by kdawson is correct, we could be looking at a mere 400 joules per 1E11 positrons. Which (if I'm not mistaken) would be an unheard of efficiency for creating antimatter! (Can someone verify? My brain is fried at the moment.)
What I find interesting is that this level of production is competitive with Fermilab. Even if they ran this twice an hour, they'd handily meet or outstrip Fermilab production.
Even more interesting is the possibility for mass manufacture of antimatter. By using mass-produced gold targets, you could rotate the materials in and out of the machine every few seconds, creating previously unseen amounts of antimatter. Such a process could easily provide materials for an antimatter catalyzed fission drive. Possibly even enough to power new forms of interplanetary propulsion.
Am I the only one who's getting really excited about this? /dreamer
Well then, it's a good thing I didn't say that. I said that the Windows swap system sucks. Especially when there's more than enough memory for it to operate efficiently. When I have only 40% of my memory wired, yet Windows is swapping like mad because it's too aggressive that's a bad implementation.
At least Windows XP and Vista don't auto-swap on minimize like NT4 used to do. It was always "fun" minimizing a J2EE server to let it run in the background, only to have to wait for 2-3 minutes when I decided to check the log. For bonus points, accidentally click the minimize button. It was totally awesome waiting for Windows to finish swapping it out, only to swap it right back in after immediately trying to restore.
In my experience, BSD, Linux, and Solaris all have far better paging systems. OS X's system is figgety, but it's not any worse than Windows'.
X11 compiles just fine.
http://www.xfree86.org/current/Darwin.html
http://developer.apple.com/opensource/tools/X11.html
http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R6.9.0/doc/html/Darwin.html
My primary complaint is that most OSS developers expect all Unix systems to be Linux systems. Which means that I have to let Linux software get its hooks into my OS X system in order to get anything compiled. Since OS X is NOT Linux, this is quite an unpleasant process.
OS X runs Unix software. Period. I usually get a host of tools installed first thing on my Mac. Thankfully, this has become less and less necessary over time as Apple has started including many of the most useful utilities up front.
You do know that we're talking about a NETWORK file transfer protocol, right? The Mac file system is HFS+, which is perfectly fine for anything you might want to do.
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately? Swapping is a *bleeping* killer! Especially when you have more than enough memory not to swap. :-/
So don't use it. Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty darn well these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
They don't. In fact, they're not counted at all. That's the problem.
Read this post for an example scenario.
That doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense. Either you don't understand the argument, or you think that Pirate Bay somehow tracks the number of copies pirated. Either way, there's no way that searching Pirate Bay disproves the argument I just made.
Just for fun, let's make up some numbers to demonstrate. Let's say I create a game for only the PC. Let's say that 500 people buy it. Later on I'm able to prove that 500 people pirated it. What is my piracy rate on the PC version? 50%.
Now let's say I create a game that can be distributed via the Wii, Steam, or a PC Download. Let's say that the Wii version sells 1500 copies, the Steam version sells 1000 copies, and the PC version sells 100 copies. Later on I'm able to prove that 500 people pirated the PC Download. What is my piracy rate on the PC download? 83%.
Except that in the second scenario, we can see that many of the previous customers shifted to the alternative content streams. If we assume that those other streams are well protected, this means that the ratio between pirated copies and PC Downloads is now out of whack with actual sales. Overall sales are great and piracy rates have not changed. Yet through some interesting misapplication of statistics, we have managed to create a 33% increase in piracy.
What that suggests is not that piracy kills all video games and that they should be destroyed. What it suggests is that the PC Download stream is far less profitable when alternative streams are available.
"There are three types of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" --Mark Twain
Here's an odd question: What is so horribly wrong with the demo that you refused to download it? If you had done so, you would be providing one less piracy statistic and instead providing a failed-conversion statistic. A failed-conversion tells the developer that they need to do better. A piracy statistic suggests that they're not getting paid for their hard work.
That's far from the only sane conclusion. The problem with World of Goo is that the "honest" customers may take advantage of one of the more convenient and easier download options. These additional options that do a better job reaching the target audience may artificially inflate the piracy figures for PC downloads. i.e. It's not that the game is heavily pirated, it's that the PC version is less popular among paying customers and thus at a statistical disadvantage.
It was eliminated from this model. But you can buy an extra toilet seat!
Oh, come on! A little neutron radiation never hurt anybody! ... Much. ... Okay, so it slowly turned them into swiss cheese. Not to mention the gamma ray burst after they accidentally set the hemispheres too close to each other. *cough* But that's beside the point! :-P
Joking aside, I'd say the problem is even deeper than proper handling. Once it's all processed for you, shaped, and clad in a protective carton or sheath for transport, U235 is relatively harmless. It's the processing that will kill you. Processing uranium into yellow cake, then converting it into uranium hexafluoride for enrichment, then finally shaping an enriched quantity of U235 is a rather difficult process that's just asking for accidents to happen.
Of course, I've always had a soft spot for the TXT file floating around that describes how to enrich uranium in your backyard with little more than a bucket. Perfect (and humorous) example of what NOT to do when processing uranium. ;-)
The joke was that I was interrupted before I could tell you that you need to use that mass to create two equally sized hemispheres of U235. Fix one against a solid wall (e.g. the inside of a steel casing would do) and position the other a short distance away. (Preferably on some sort of guides that force it to face the other hemisphere. Again, steel casing is a good idea here.) Pack explosives behind the loose hemisphere. The explosives will thrust the loose hemisphere toward the fixed hemisphere, hopefully with enough force to compact the U235 and cause a super-critical reaction.
If you manage a super-critical reaction, then *BOOM*. If you fail at it, then no boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow.
Having done quite a bit of research on nuclear everything (from power generation to weapons to propulsion) and then openly sharing that information with others, I'm sure I'm already a person of interest. So if you don't mind, I'll just go ahead and click away! ;-)
P.S. Gun-type bombs are easy. All you need is a critical mass of U235-- err... never mind. I seem to have guests. I'll get back to you...
Carpooling. Ur doing it wrong.
The President is the ultimate authority on the budget. If he vetos it, Congress will have to start again. In result, bills are often a negotiation between Congress and the President. Which doesn't mean that Congress won't take a hard-line position and slam space funding through in exchange for other concessions, but it's far more likely that space funding will BE the concession.
Nonsense. I've visited the homes of Mac-only users. They usually have two or three. Where things get interesting however, is that they tend to be using an Airport Router. (Which caused me no end of grief when I didn't spring to have WiFi added to my last laptop.) As someone mentioned higher up in the discussion, Airport routes IPv6 by default. Something that most other consumer routers (typically paired with Windows and Linux machines) do not.
I guess I'm just confused about what you're trying to get at then. I don't recall the issue of the nacelles being engines or not engines ever coming up in the canon series. AFAIK, they were always engines. In result, I don't understand the point you are trying to make. So... just confuguled, I guess. :-)
I think I still have my Enterprise-D around somewhere. I'm too young to have seen the original series when it first aired, but I do remember sneakily hanging over the balcony to watch TOS and TNG rather than sleeping. (As I recall, Star Trek aired at midnight!) My mother must have been royally confused when I asked her for a die-cast Enterprise for Christmas. ;-)
Nope, they were all based on the Animated Series. It may have seemed like they related to original episodes because the stories tended to revisit planets and situations from TOS. (e.g. The R&R world was revisited.) Also, the series never made it to the teens.
I don't understand why you think there's a dichotomy between the way that the warp drive works and the nacelle system being a pair of "engines". (Though more properly, they'd be part of one "engine" just as multiple cylinders are part of a single "engine".)
Wikipedia defines engine as, "An engine is a mechanical device that produces some form of output from a given input." Dictionary.com lists it as, "a machine for converting thermal energy into mechanical energy or power to produce force and motion."
Neither of those definitions preclude a warp drive from being an "engine". And again, the Logs are not canon, so don't pay too much attention to them. Back in those days authors got to take quite a bit of freedom in their writing.
There's certainly been some revisionism going on, though I'd think of it more as "refinement". Gene's idea was pretty rough when he first proposed it. Besides Star Trek being one of the first media attempts to actually tackle the problem of FTL travel, the science simply wasn't there yet. Barely a handful of Antimatter particles had been observed, the Standard Model was still developing, Quantum Physics and Relativity were wrestling, and rocket engineering was still a strange and bizarre new field.
Given what Roddenberry had to work with, he pulled off an impressive bit of SciFi for its time. By the time NextGen rolled around, they had worked out many of the details of the FTL concepts and made sure to write them down in the show's bible. (Which eventually lead to Okuda's tech manual.)
It may act as propellant for the impulse engines, but I don't recall the designs separating the storage of hydrogen by purpose. My understanding is that all hydrogen needed by the ship comes from the same tanks. (And thus the same tanks are recharged by the Bussard collectors.)
Correct. The impulse engines are powered by on-board fusion reactors. Though it's never really made clear why power from the warp-core can't be used to power the impulse drive.
Weren't those the paperbacks that were based on the non-canon Animated Series? They were fun, but I wouldn't consider them to be gospel. Scotty regularly referred to "warp engines" (aka his "wee bairns") when discussing warp propulsion. Plus they do generate forward motion. Per the interviews in Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, the warp field is twisted at the back so that the "Enterprise rides it like a surfboard". Thus the velocity inside the field is irrelevant.
Besides, I don't see any way in which they would not be considered engines. e.g. The engine in my car does not use propellant, yet we still consider it an engine.
How can it not exist when Fermilab churns out over 12.4E10 antiprotons per hour? I'll grant you that Fermilab is nowhere near productive enough to power a starship, but there is supposed to be a few hundred years separating today from Star Trek. I think it's okay to gloss over how they increased production.
You mean, other than all that hydrogen the sun spews out? Or the hydrogen that Jupiter is composed of? Or the large quantities of hydrogen produced when you get electricity near sea-water? Or the truly MASSIVE amounts of hydrogen floating through deep space?
I mean, this isn't rocket science. (Well, save for when it is. :-P) Being the most common element in the universe, hydrogen is relatively easy to come by. If it wasn't, the space program wouldn't use Liquid Hydrogen/Oxygen engines. The only issue with using hydrogen to power cars and trucks is making hydrogen creation both economical and clean. Shifting the power-generation costs up to the grid definitely helps. If we then make the grid clean (e.g. nuclear power), our energy infrastructure will then be clean.
Thus the fuel cycle of the Star Trek starships makes perfect sense: Use the largest fusion reactors in existence (i.e. stars) to power the antimatter creation equipment installed at fuel-production starbases. Transfer this antimatter to starships as they drop by for refueling.
I'll leave the simple issue of how to collect gigawatts to terawatts of solar power as an exercise to the reader. That's already a solved engineering problem that we'd probably be using today if it weren't for the pesky dangers of long-range microwave transmissions.
I don't see how Wrath of Khan conflicts. The deflectors, Bussard collectors, and warp field will do zip to stop a massive explosion capable of overloading the shields, much less protect against a device designed to reorganize matter at a molecular level. Having the warp drive online means that the Enterprise was able to twist the space around it, escaping the blast at an effective velocity of > c. Inside the field, particles might have moved at "real space" speed, but they wouldn't have made the Genesis wave any less deadly.
Those guys in the video are having WAY too much fun with their jobs. "Why your computer boot so fast? I must get ASRock motherboard!"
Now I know why ASUS mobos tend to be so good. They encourage a fun workplace. ;-)
That's like watching the Fast and the Furious and asking where unleaded gasoline comes from. It doesn't matter. Antimatter is created at Starbases (ostensibly using solar power from a nearby star) and the Enterprise is refueled every few years. How the Starbases does it is of no real consequence.
The on-board equipment to create small quantities of antimatter is explained in the Next Gen Tech Manual. I don't remember the details, but it sounded a bit like a particle accelerator. The manual glossed over the exact procedure a bit, and discounted it as "producing very little". I think the only reason for its existence was as a possible plot device in the future.
Abrams confirmed it was the bridge. Kirk is in academy uniform while everyone else is in commissioned attire due to the twists and turns of the storyline. (Namely that he gets snuck aboard and eventually has to save the day.)
Per Abrams, it's not a reboot. This is supposed to maintain continuity with the series.