Depends on where the bomb is detonated. If it's in an aircraft, it's something you might want to concern yourself with. Check out the fallout distribution map from the 126 nulcear tests conducted in Nevada: http://www.mimbres.com/holp/holpath/Images/FO50S.g if
Nevada is in the western half of the country and yet some of the fallout made it to the east coast. Food for thought.
You're a little off-base with your apples and oranges comparison.
Did you ever play video games as a kid? Was there ever a part you just couldn't get past, and you'd play it all the time, over and over? What if, for instance, that part of the game involved you shooting up the one-stop cop shop and everyone inside? We're not talking about one episode of Law and Order here, we're talking about repetetive behavior in a static environment. And you know how it can be when you're in the game and you lose and you throw the controller across the room in disgust. These games can make us ANGRY. They do AFFECT us no matter how much we like to claim to the contrary.
It's being able to distinguish between the affect of a game and the ultimate desires of a person that keeps all of the GTA players from following this kid's example.
What everybody seems to be missing out on is the multifaceted nature of blame. No one person is at fault here. The parents for not clearly defining right and wrong and structuring the environment around the "right" things. The Wal-Mart is to blame for not checking his ID when he was 17 and young and impressionable. The game itself is to blame for being vividly real. I'm not saying we should pull GTA from the shelves, but if the violence in GTA were more cartoony (eyeballs bulging out, action words like ka-pow! in those little yellow/orange bursts of color, etc) and less realistic, then this sort of thing would be a non-issue. It's the realism of the violence which can make GTA more of a simulator than a game. I mean, they drive around mapping out the cities they use for the GT games, in an attempt to make them "more real."
The kid might've been programmed to do the wrong thing because he played the game and couldn't distinguish fantasy from reality. Here's a question for you: WHY would somebody kill three cops? In GTA you can do it "just because" and there's 0 reprecussions. In real life, you can't just drop cops for no reason and expect to get away with it. So what was his motivation? Did he see three boys in blue and suddenly think "OMG MY TRAINING MAKES ME DO IT!!!!" or was there a calculated "I hate pigs for what they did to my friend bobby and I know I can go in there and mess them all up so I'm gonna."
That's more or less it. I want to know what went through the kid's head. If he said "I thought it would be fun." without considering the officers' families or anything like that, then I think it's time we stop acting so childish about this and really have a serious discussion about the place that realistically violent video games have in our society. When the youth of your country believe that killing your police officers is FUN, then you've got a serious problem.
I'm curious, tangentially, what the specific mode of data transmission generally is: amplitude modulation or frequency modulation. (AM/FM) I'm asking this because FM usually requires a suitable chunk of spectrum; FM radio is chunked into 200khz pieces. ie, 88.5 MHz then 88.7MHz, they don't ever license 88.6, though. FM transmitters make use of the whole 200 Khz band to transmit their signal.
Couldn't you get more bandwidth using AM transmission on 200,000 channels, instead of frequency-modulating across 200 Khz of the spectrum? Even if you had to pair the channels (or even pool them) for error correction (AM transmissions are prone to interference), you'd be left with several thousand if not many dozens of thousands of channels with which to transmit high-speed 3.5GHz data.
So I'm curious how this technology works. Is it numerously-channeled AM based, FM based, more-precise FM based (not using the whole 200kHz necessarily, but maybe 100kHz or 50kHz)... or? I'm curious about the nitty-gritty of the underlying tech. How are they doing it? Why? etc.
The windows TCO thing is largely affected by the inexpense of hiring a Windows admin versus a Linux admin. If the difference in yearly salaries between Windows and Linux admins is more than the yearly cost of the Windows OS software, then the Windows solution is cheaper. ie, if the Linux admin costs $50k/yr and comes with free software and the Windows admin costs $38k/yr and the Windows software(s) cost less than $12k/yr then you've just put money in your pocket by choosing Windows over linux.
Linux is good for technical companies with a strong web presence because of the ease with which its technical workings can be manipulated. It isn't so hot for non-tech companies doing generic things like bookkeeping. Especially not non-tech startup companies where the Boss's son/nephew/whatever already knows Windows Server 2003 because of some class he took and he can troubleshoot all the problems for free. Everybody and their dog knows somebody who can set up a simple Windows network these days, it may even be possible to not even hire an employee. Yeah you could go with an expensive emergency service appointment with a Linux consultant, sure, but then when things go wrong and you need him ASAP, your pocketbook becomes your weak link. If it's Windows, you call Bob up from the sales floor and say "Bob, that Windows thingy is acting up again, do that thing you do." and the problem is solved within the hour, bob gets a $50 bonus, and you never have to concern yourself with how to pronounce "Linux."
Linux is gaining momentum because of the ease with which it can be customized. The flexibility that it offers both in terms of UI, peripheral interfaces, language support, all of it is becoming more and more robust. As Martin mentioned, it's possible to strip down to the bare minimum, if you wanna. Get a WaySmall computer, drop an MMC card in there with your own mini distro on it and use it for home automation or a networked webcam on your fish tank or set up an aerial cam in your R/C plane, or whatever. I see Linux making a killing in the specialty and hobby markets in the next decade because it really allows people to tinker and play and improve and scale up or down as need be, for free. It's kind of like giving somebody a sandbox with an unreasonably large amount of sand. You can do anything you want with it, all it costs you is your own time and effort. For some reason, I like the sound of that. Windows doesn't really afford that kind of flexibility, but of the things that it does do, it does them well. (I speak of Windows XP, which has been a delightful OS to use ever since I installed it many moons ago)
I actually agree, especially because steel isn't prone to burning at temperatures which Joe Soandso can achieve, thus eliminating some concern over house fires.
So attempted murder is no longer a crime, only the actual act of murder is? No threat of murder is a crime, no waving of a knife in somebody's direction or pointing a gun is a crime either, because they're just potential threats?
I don't like your ideas.
Eliminating potential threats and making potential threats illegal does serve well to eliminate problems down the line. Can I buy Uranium by the pound? No. Why? Because I might build a bomb with it. I could build a special kind of new nuclear reactor with the Uranium and power my entire city/county/whatever as well, but that I might use it for a weapon and that I'm deemed to be unqualified (I'm classed/categorized as a citizen. love that.) to handle it prevents me from acquiring it. I wouldn't mind having some Uranium on-hand to play with, honestly. I'm into Stirling engines lately and building an RTG to power my house just kind of makes me get all nerdy inside. If you have a platter of radioactive matter which is highly emissive of thermal energy... well, anyhow, I'm getting off on a tangent. Point is, I'd like to have some uranium. It'd be nice. They won't let me have any.
Is it good that they won't let me have any? I'm particularly upset about it, really, but it's good that in addition to me, nobody else in the "Joe Citizen" category gets to play with such materials either.
One is lifetime. Lumileds' Luxeon solution licks nuts compared to Lamina's LTCC-M technology. There's no better way to say it, really. Luxeons de-rate signifcantly after 20,000 hours while Lamina's modules are much more robust. LEDs are nice in that they don't "burn out" (unless you pump too much current through them. heh.) but instead they just get dimmer over time. So 10 years down the line you need to set your projector a little closer to the wall and have a screen a bit smaller. ahwell.
Another good point is packaging. When I say "array" or "cluster" you need to understand what Lamina has done. They've created a ceramic substrate into which they can directly layer circuit traces, and this substrate exhibits an incredibly high degree of heat conductivity, able to wick away large amounts of heat from the individual LED chips used. An LED chip is tiny. Imagine the head of a pin--that tiny. All of the stuff around the "LED" as most people are familiar with it is just packaging: the leads, the epoxy casing, etc. What Lamina has done is take packaging to the next level by doing away with most of the epoxy and clustering many LED chips densely on this extremely nice heat-conducting surface. That little less-than-1.25x1.25 device I was talking about has 39 cavities, each cavity containing, I believe, 6 LED chips, which would be 234 LED chips total.
Let's compare with A 5mm LED. Assuming circular uniformity, the cross-sectional area of a a 5mm LED is about 19 square mm. This works out to about 4500 square mm for 234 5mm LEDs. Lamina's solution, at an exact 26.7mm x 31.8mm, occupies slightly under 850 square mm, or about 1/5 the space.
They have a pretty spiffy RGB module too, which I suspect will be in a projector before too long. Oh, and these little buggers get HOT too; an active heatsink is REQUIRED.
Luxeons aren't the most concentrated source out there. They're probably the most publicized high-power emitter out there, but Check out Lamina Ceramics if you want some real concentrated sources. Their highest-end commercial line, the BL-3000 line, has some pretty impressive specs for something less than 1.25 x 1.25 inches, including a 26-watt 567 lumen 5500K white light engine (which will set you back about $80 from Mouser Electronics. Search for Mouser part# 599-BL-32D0-0133).
I was following Lumileds pretty close until I read about the LTCC-M technology that Lamina is using. They're able to pack so many LED chips with this technology that it blows my mind, and they keep getting better at doing it, having just recently cut prices across the board for its two major product lines (BL-2000 and BL-3000).
yeah, I don't think something like that exists though. You remember how all the first-gen players got new songs on them right? You had to connect them to a computer. I can imagine somebody trying to pitch it in a board meeting.
Designer: "So we've got this alarm clock right, and it plays MP3s!!!"
PHB: "How do we get more mp3s on it?"
Designer: "Well you hook it up to your computer."
PHB: "You need a computer to use the alarm clock? One of the prerequisites for owning one of these clocks is a $1000 piece of hardware?"....
This does of course also beg the question why the fellow I originally responded to won't just use his computer as an alarm clock. I do it, it works marvelously. I have a little utility I wrote in C to display a message box onscreen and play sounds/mp3s. I just use the windows task scheduler to have a message box appear and play some music every weekday morning. Painless, easy.
If this guy was keen on spending $200, he could pick up a gumstix (http://www.gumstix.com) module with a cfstix expansion board and code his own alarm clock. Those gumstix boards are pretty slick.
Ok, I'll rephrase it then: packaged LEDs tend to be highly directional. The only non-directional packaged LED I know of is the inverted cone style (or the side-emitting Luxeon style).
(linky to some inverted cone LEDs: http://www.quickar.com/discrete.php)
A related complaint, I wanted an alarm clock radio that could play MP3s. Sounds easy? It isn't. I found a total of one product under $500 that can play MP3s and has an alarm. Why? Because they only make tiny little MP3 players that run off batteries, not ones the size of an alarm clock with a display I can read across the room.
Google is our friend.
http://www.buydig.com/shop/product.aspx?sku=IRIF P7 90T#description has "alarm functionality" (doesn't sound so impressive) but runs for quite a while on an AA battery (45 hours) ($134.00)
http://www.normthompson.com/jump.jsp?itemType=PR OD UCT&iProductID=4940 is an actual clock radio. this bad boy takes CDs and has an mp3 decoder. I like this more; only $99, too.
(why the hyphens in the search terms you ask? alarm-clock will match alarm clock, alarm-clock, and alarmclock; whereas "alarm clock" will only match "alarm clock". In other words, using the hyphen to conjoin two words instead of the quotes expands the possible pool of search results by including minute variations on a theme. hard-drive is another good example, catching: hard drive, hard-drive, and harddrive.)
I got to read the first page of the article. It is pretty impressive. I didn't get to the dirty details but I'm pretty sure this uses three of TI's DLP chips. I have seen this sort of thing coming for a while now; the DLP chip is truly a technology marvel.
Now, as far as the Lumens are concerned... Lumens are a way to measure the light which is isotropically radiated from a given source. A projector doesn't isotropically radiate though, its emission is highly directional. For this reason, lumens are a very crappy way of defining, technically, the "brightness" of a projector. But, since people are used to buying lightbulbs according to the market-ese of Lumens, that's how Projectors are rated as well. Since the projector uses LEDs (Luxeons, from the sound of it) as the light source, I suppose that's why they're lacking a fancy lumen number to throw around: because LEDs, as highly directional light sources, are measured in Candles (abbreviated "cd" or millicandles as "mcd") and not measured in Lumens.
They'll probably make up a marketable number before too long, fret not.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. CO2 is also the stuff that plants THRIVE on. Yes, initially, it's going to be difficult to deal with the hotter temperatures, but as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is reduced, the temperature will also be reduced. The only other thing plants need is light, and honestly, LEDs are enough. NASA has experimented with growing algal cultures under LEDs and LEDs with fluorescent lamps, and they've gotten encouraging results. Given that under normal operating conditions, LEDs can last for up to 10 years, I can foresee at least 10 solid years of terraforming on Venus.
So here's how I'd cool it down: Send a series of robot landers to the planet, each one containing about a cubic foot of phytoplankton, the creatures responsible for most of our oxygen production here on earth. Using a heat exchanger, incoming hot CO2 would be cooled and passed off to the phytoplankton which will gladly remove the carbon. Every once in a while the dead cells in the culture are going to have to be dumped. Telling the difference between healthy and unhealthy may be impossible necessitating the dumpage of a set volume instead of "just the dead cells". Dumping them straight out into the environment of Venus shouldn't cause any problems, as for the first few years it'll be too hot for them to keep living anyhow. But as it gradually cools down, dumping phytoplankton into pools of water becomes a very good way of accelerating the change. Once you've taken most of the carbon out of the atmosphere, you need to set up some arc stations on very high-flying balloons to produce high-voltage electricity (ideally from small nuclear reactors as we're about to use a lot of it) to zap three O2 molecules into two O3 molecules, hopefully forming an upper-atmosphere of ozone similar to our own.
But the big first step is using plants to filter out all that carbon, using heat exchangers and other fancy technologies to remove the heat so the plants can luxuriously enjoy it.
Parenthetically, it would probably be easier to terraform Venus. Its atmosphere is even thicker than Earth's and is mostly carbon dioxide. It's this CO2 which is responsible for Venus' highly elevated temperature.
How much gaseous CO2 is on Mars, in cubic meters? How much CO2 does the world's hungriest plant/algae consume in a day, and how much O2 is thereby produced? If we construct giant greenhouses on Mars, does enough light reach the planet (sand losses from the greenhouse glass, of course) to "power the plants" which will filter all that CO2 and produce lovely, clean, human-friendly oxygen? If we hand-craft the atmosphere before turning it to shit (read: don't burn any hydrocarbons while we're trying to rid the atmosphere of its carbon) then it won't take that much time, I don't think. I've seen some pretty massive greenhouses in my time, and I've also seen what concentrated amounts of CO2 can do to plant growth. Mars is a friggin' jungle waiting to happen; it just needs a properly layered atmosphere to retain heat enough to support basic plant life, then we can move the plants outside of the greenhouses and really get the party started.
But there are other problems with Mars, like gravity. You need enough gravity to *retain* the atmosphere. Where's all the gravity? Does Mars have a molten liquid core? What about the magnetic field, does it protect Mars from the solar wind, or will the atmosphere we craft over hundreds of years just "blow away" ? It's thought that the atmosphere of Venus once contained a lot of water vapor, but under the assault of the solar wind, the water split into hydrogen and oxygen and the hydrogen did subsequently evaporate completely, as it is too light to be retained unbound with other molecules by even Earth's gravity.
The existing atmosphere on Mars, though, is very thin--less than 1% that of the Earth. This is why they're saying we need to take gas with us to Mars. I say no. I way warm the planet up, get a plant-breathable atmosphere going, and see what comes up from the soil. We know there's water and methane available; what else? Maybe we can come up with the extra things we need (like nitrogen, which makes up about 70% of our atmosphere here on Earth) from the planet itself.
The wikipedia entry on Terraforming mentions some of these problems with Mars, among others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming
I guess it depends upon the fundamental outlook of the player.
The best example I can think of right off the top of my head is Trickjumping in any FPS that uses the quake3 engine. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is my preferred Q3-using game, so I'll use it for my example. Here's a little background so I don't lose anyone: W:ET is an axis-versus-allies team-based online multiplayer first-person shooter. It is largely objective-based and there are 5 character classes available: soldier (heavy weapons), field ops (hands out ammo / calls in airstrikes), medic (can give out health packs / revive fallen teammates), engineer (can build/destroy things), and covert ops (can take enemy uniforms and throw smoke grenades). The game also has one-way doors that only members of a specific team (or a covert ops in that team's uniform) can open.
There's this map entitled "Siwa Oasis" or just "oasis" for short. On this map, you need to repair the water pump at the oasis and/or run through the tunnels to the old city, capture the old city, and then by either blowing up the old city wall or repairing the old city water pump and draining the tunnel, make your way to the two anti-tank guns and destroy them.
Seems pretty straightforward, right? Well, it's actually possible to JUMP over the wall (without blowing it up and drawing attention to yourself), by exploiting what I guess you could call "nuances" in the physics engine. You see, it's possible to convert downward momentum into forward momentum by "bouncing" off of a curved or slanted surface, much the same way that a ray of light changes direction when hitting a mirror at an angle. Utilizing this method, it is possible to generate enough forward momentum from a position at about the same height as the wall, that you can propel yourself over the wall and be well on your way to blowing up the anti-tank guns before anybody knows what hit them.
It requires a great deal of timing and skill to pull off this jump. I have personally spent hours getting it just right. Is totally circumventing the old city wall cheating? I could have gone through one of those one-way doors I mentioned earlier if I had the assistance of a covert ops and an enemy uniform, and that is certainly within the realm of gameplay mechanics. So, the circumvention of the wall is something that seems to be acceptable (given the door options presented to me), so does the method of wall-circumvention matter? Is jumping over the wall actually cheating?
I totally agree with the statement made, "When a player cheats in a game, they are choosing a battlefield that is broader in context than the game itself." I like this statement because it speaks to my nature. I am the sort of person that likes to approach things from outside the box, and sometimes that means choosing a battlefield that is broader in context than the box itself.
I used to work for a company that does predominantly Macintosh hosting. They have a datacenter with 500+ Macintoshes in it. Everything from old-style beige Powermacs to the newer G3/G4 and even Xserve models. Anyhow, the older boxen ran OS9, and OS9 has the single critical flaw of being single-threaded.
This isn't so bad when there's only one person using the computer, but when you're using the computer to host a filemaker database which back-ends a website which is all hosted on a lovely macintosh, it becomes a problem. Any time you get a dialog on the screen, the computer disappears off the internet. Any dialog: system error, a prompt, a confirmation, a warning that you're low on disk space--whatever. Any dialog, and it all stops, because of the single-threading. The system can't continue execution until you interact with the dialog box.
We had a program we used called Okeydokey to automatically click OK to the dialog boxes, but every once in a while there'd be a colocated server or something running a weird version of XYZ program that didn't use the standard dialog interface and therefore couldn't be okeydokey-ed.
This is now not really a problem since Darwin is BSD-based, and BSD-based systems are all very capably multithreated.
Why not just get something hosted with HavenCo of the Principality of Sealand (see http://www.havenco.com/ for details), something you can have and use while you're alive? Their rates are absolutely disgusting ($1500/month for colocation with 256kbps bandwidth and 5 IP addresses) but for secured hosting in a place where there aren't any IP laws....
Judging from the law excerpt posted by another, what you say is indeed partially true. Performing modifications to a commercially available or marketed product or kit is illegal, whereas home-building something completely from scratch is not. So if you take a swiss army knife to your existing antenna you're breaking the law, but if you wire up a pringles can, you're not.
Re:I doubt this would work very well
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You may be right. However, if you had to determine if 4,294,967,298 was prime or not, you could do that instantaneously, because you would know that the only even prime is 2, so the number is therefore not prime.
Reasoning only applies to decisions for which there are not standard rules governing the decision. If there's a rule that says "if greater than 2 and even, not prime" then any number that is encounter that fits the rule can be easily snap-judged, while anything that doesn't fit a rule needs to be reasoned/evaluated. A rule is a direct link from point A (in this case, a number) to point B (to determine the primeness of the number), while reasoning is the indirect path we take between point A and B when we don't have an appropriate and simple rule.
The more simple rules you're able to develop and understand, the more rapidly and capably you're able to interact with the world around you. Here's a couple fundamental rules that you don't even think about any more: red means stop, green means go. You don't really think about it though, you just act upon it because you know the rule. There isn't a reasoning process between "see green light" and "make car go" because it's a direct an unquestionable link. Green = go. It's a rule inside your head, and it makes you more efficient as a person.
The S-man won't take special interest money because he's already filthy rich. If a politician already has money unrelated to his political endeavours, he's usually a pretty straight-laced politician.
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Depends on where the bomb is detonated. If it's in an aircraft, it's something you might want to concern yourself with. Check out the fallout distribution map from the 126 nulcear tests conducted in Nevada: http://www.mimbres.com/holp/holpath/Images/FO50S.g if
Nevada is in the western half of the country and yet some of the fallout made it to the east coast. Food for thought.
You're a little off-base with your apples and oranges comparison.
Did you ever play video games as a kid? Was there ever a part you just couldn't get past, and you'd play it all the time, over and over? What if, for instance, that part of the game involved you shooting up the one-stop cop shop and everyone inside? We're not talking about one episode of Law and Order here, we're talking about repetetive behavior in a static environment. And you know how it can be when you're in the game and you lose and you throw the controller across the room in disgust. These games can make us ANGRY. They do AFFECT us no matter how much we like to claim to the contrary.
It's being able to distinguish between the affect of a game and the ultimate desires of a person that keeps all of the GTA players from following this kid's example.
What everybody seems to be missing out on is the multifaceted nature of blame. No one person is at fault here. The parents for not clearly defining right and wrong and structuring the environment around the "right" things. The Wal-Mart is to blame for not checking his ID when he was 17 and young and impressionable. The game itself is to blame for being vividly real. I'm not saying we should pull GTA from the shelves, but if the violence in GTA were more cartoony (eyeballs bulging out, action words like ka-pow! in those little yellow/orange bursts of color, etc) and less realistic, then this sort of thing would be a non-issue. It's the realism of the violence which can make GTA more of a simulator than a game. I mean, they drive around mapping out the cities they use for the GT games, in an attempt to make them "more real."
The kid might've been programmed to do the wrong thing because he played the game and couldn't distinguish fantasy from reality. Here's a question for you: WHY would somebody kill three cops? In GTA you can do it "just because" and there's 0 reprecussions. In real life, you can't just drop cops for no reason and expect to get away with it. So what was his motivation? Did he see three boys in blue and suddenly think "OMG MY TRAINING MAKES ME DO IT!!!!" or was there a calculated "I hate pigs for what they did to my friend bobby and I know I can go in there and mess them all up so I'm gonna."
That's more or less it. I want to know what went through the kid's head. If he said "I thought it would be fun." without considering the officers' families or anything like that, then I think it's time we stop acting so childish about this and really have a serious discussion about the place that realistically violent video games have in our society. When the youth of your country believe that killing your police officers is FUN, then you've got a serious problem.
I'm curious, tangentially, what the specific mode of data transmission generally is: amplitude modulation or frequency modulation. (AM/FM) I'm asking this because FM usually requires a suitable chunk of spectrum; FM radio is chunked into 200khz pieces. ie, 88.5 MHz then 88.7MHz, they don't ever license 88.6, though. FM transmitters make use of the whole 200 Khz band to transmit their signal.
Couldn't you get more bandwidth using AM transmission on 200,000 channels, instead of frequency-modulating across 200 Khz of the spectrum? Even if you had to pair the channels (or even pool them) for error correction (AM transmissions are prone to interference), you'd be left with several thousand if not many dozens of thousands of channels with which to transmit high-speed 3.5GHz data.
So I'm curious how this technology works. Is it numerously-channeled AM based, FM based, more-precise FM based (not using the whole 200kHz necessarily, but maybe 100kHz or 50kHz)... or? I'm curious about the nitty-gritty of the underlying tech. How are they doing it? Why? etc.
indeed, a tangent.
The windows TCO thing is largely affected by the inexpense of hiring a Windows admin versus a Linux admin. If the difference in yearly salaries between Windows and Linux admins is more than the yearly cost of the Windows OS software, then the Windows solution is cheaper. ie, if the Linux admin costs $50k/yr and comes with free software and the Windows admin costs $38k/yr and the Windows software(s) cost less than $12k/yr then you've just put money in your pocket by choosing Windows over linux.
Linux is good for technical companies with a strong web presence because of the ease with which its technical workings can be manipulated. It isn't so hot for non-tech companies doing generic things like bookkeeping. Especially not non-tech startup companies where the Boss's son/nephew/whatever already knows Windows Server 2003 because of some class he took and he can troubleshoot all the problems for free. Everybody and their dog knows somebody who can set up a simple Windows network these days, it may even be possible to not even hire an employee. Yeah you could go with an expensive emergency service appointment with a Linux consultant, sure, but then when things go wrong and you need him ASAP, your pocketbook becomes your weak link. If it's Windows, you call Bob up from the sales floor and say "Bob, that Windows thingy is acting up again, do that thing you do." and the problem is solved within the hour, bob gets a $50 bonus, and you never have to concern yourself with how to pronounce "Linux."
Linux is gaining momentum because of the ease with which it can be customized. The flexibility that it offers both in terms of UI, peripheral interfaces, language support, all of it is becoming more and more robust. As Martin mentioned, it's possible to strip down to the bare minimum, if you wanna. Get a WaySmall computer, drop an MMC card in there with your own mini distro on it and use it for home automation or a networked webcam on your fish tank or set up an aerial cam in your R/C plane, or whatever. I see Linux making a killing in the specialty and hobby markets in the next decade because it really allows people to tinker and play and improve and scale up or down as need be, for free. It's kind of like giving somebody a sandbox with an unreasonably large amount of sand. You can do anything you want with it, all it costs you is your own time and effort. For some reason, I like the sound of that. Windows doesn't really afford that kind of flexibility, but of the things that it does do, it does them well. (I speak of Windows XP, which has been a delightful OS to use ever since I installed it many moons ago)
Tangentially, did you ask for permission before deep-linking to the rules? ;)
You can't edit a comment on slashdot and this comment will persist after the new rules go into effect...
Yes, but only if you do it like this:
Orbitz!
(think: litigious bastards)
I actually agree, especially because steel isn't prone to burning at temperatures which Joe Soandso can achieve, thus eliminating some concern over house fires.
So attempted murder is no longer a crime, only the actual act of murder is? No threat of murder is a crime, no waving of a knife in somebody's direction or pointing a gun is a crime either, because they're just potential threats?
I don't like your ideas.
Eliminating potential threats and making potential threats illegal does serve well to eliminate problems down the line. Can I buy Uranium by the pound? No. Why? Because I might build a bomb with it. I could build a special kind of new nuclear reactor with the Uranium and power my entire city/county/whatever as well, but that I might use it for a weapon and that I'm deemed to be unqualified (I'm classed/categorized as a citizen. love that.) to handle it prevents me from acquiring it. I wouldn't mind having some Uranium on-hand to play with, honestly. I'm into Stirling engines lately and building an RTG to power my house just kind of makes me get all nerdy inside. If you have a platter of radioactive matter which is highly emissive of thermal energy... well, anyhow, I'm getting off on a tangent. Point is, I'd like to have some uranium. It'd be nice. They won't let me have any.
Is it good that they won't let me have any? I'm particularly upset about it, really, but it's good that in addition to me, nobody else in the "Joe Citizen" category gets to play with such materials either.
This is a very good thing.
Actually, this raises some important points.
One is lifetime. Lumileds' Luxeon solution licks nuts compared to Lamina's LTCC-M technology. There's no better way to say it, really. Luxeons de-rate signifcantly after 20,000 hours while Lamina's modules are much more robust. LEDs are nice in that they don't "burn out" (unless you pump too much current through them. heh.) but instead they just get dimmer over time. So 10 years down the line you need to set your projector a little closer to the wall and have a screen a bit smaller. ahwell.
Another good point is packaging. When I say "array" or "cluster" you need to understand what Lamina has done. They've created a ceramic substrate into which they can directly layer circuit traces, and this substrate exhibits an incredibly high degree of heat conductivity, able to wick away large amounts of heat from the individual LED chips used. An LED chip is tiny. Imagine the head of a pin--that tiny. All of the stuff around the "LED" as most people are familiar with it is just packaging: the leads, the epoxy casing, etc. What Lamina has done is take packaging to the next level by doing away with most of the epoxy and clustering many LED chips densely on this extremely nice heat-conducting surface. That little less-than-1.25x1.25 device I was talking about has 39 cavities, each cavity containing, I believe, 6 LED chips, which would be 234 LED chips total.
Let's compare with A 5mm LED. Assuming circular uniformity, the cross-sectional area of a a 5mm LED is about 19 square mm. This works out to about 4500 square mm for 234 5mm LEDs. Lamina's solution, at an exact 26.7mm x 31.8mm, occupies slightly under 850 square mm, or about 1/5 the space.
They have a pretty spiffy RGB module too, which I suspect will be in a projector before too long. Oh, and these little buggers get HOT too; an active heatsink is REQUIRED.
More like he won the geek lottery and went to claim the prize and the prize officials tore up the ticket.
Luxeons aren't the most concentrated source out there. They're probably the most publicized high-power emitter out there, but Check out Lamina Ceramics if you want some real concentrated sources. Their highest-end commercial line, the BL-3000 line, has some pretty impressive specs for something less than 1.25 x 1.25 inches, including a 26-watt 567 lumen 5500K white light engine (which will set you back about $80 from Mouser Electronics. Search for Mouser part# 599-BL-32D0-0133).
I was following Lumileds pretty close until I read about the LTCC-M technology that Lamina is using. They're able to pack so many LED chips with this technology that it blows my mind, and they keep getting better at doing it, having just recently cut prices across the board for its two major product lines (BL-2000 and BL-3000).
yeah, I don't think something like that exists though. You remember how all the first-gen players got new songs on them right? You had to connect them to a computer. I can imagine somebody trying to pitch it in a board meeting.
....
Designer: "So we've got this alarm clock right, and it plays MP3s!!!"
PHB: "How do we get more mp3s on it?"
Designer: "Well you hook it up to your computer."
PHB: "You need a computer to use the alarm clock? One of the prerequisites for owning one of these clocks is a $1000 piece of hardware?"
This does of course also beg the question why the fellow I originally responded to won't just use his computer as an alarm clock. I do it, it works marvelously. I have a little utility I wrote in C to display a message box onscreen and play sounds/mp3s. I just use the windows task scheduler to have a message box appear and play some music every weekday morning. Painless, easy.
If this guy was keen on spending $200, he could pick up a gumstix (http://www.gumstix.com) module with a cfstix expansion board and code his own alarm clock. Those gumstix boards are pretty slick.
Ok, I'll rephrase it then: packaged LEDs tend to be highly directional. The only non-directional packaged LED I know of is the inverted cone style (or the side-emitting Luxeon style).
(linky to some inverted cone LEDs: http://www.quickar.com/discrete.php)
Google is our friend.
http://www.buydig.com/shop/product.aspx?sku=IRI
http://www.normthompson.com/jump.jsp?itemType=P
Search terms included: mp3-player plays-mp3s with-alarm alarm-clock
(why the hyphens in the search terms you ask? alarm-clock will match alarm clock, alarm-clock, and alarmclock; whereas "alarm clock" will only match "alarm clock". In other words, using the hyphen to conjoin two words instead of the quotes expands the possible pool of search results by including minute variations on a theme. hard-drive is another good example, catching: hard drive, hard-drive, and harddrive.)
I got to read the first page of the article. It is pretty impressive. I didn't get to the dirty details but I'm pretty sure this uses three of TI's DLP chips. I have seen this sort of thing coming for a while now; the DLP chip is truly a technology marvel.
Now, as far as the Lumens are concerned... Lumens are a way to measure the light which is isotropically radiated from a given source. A projector doesn't isotropically radiate though, its emission is highly directional. For this reason, lumens are a very crappy way of defining, technically, the "brightness" of a projector. But, since people are used to buying lightbulbs according to the market-ese of Lumens, that's how Projectors are rated as well. Since the projector uses LEDs (Luxeons, from the sound of it) as the light source, I suppose that's why they're lacking a fancy lumen number to throw around: because LEDs, as highly directional light sources, are measured in Candles (abbreviated "cd" or millicandles as "mcd") and not measured in Lumens.
They'll probably make up a marketable number before too long, fret not.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. CO2 is also the stuff that plants THRIVE on. Yes, initially, it's going to be difficult to deal with the hotter temperatures, but as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is reduced, the temperature will also be reduced. The only other thing plants need is light, and honestly, LEDs are enough. NASA has experimented with growing algal cultures under LEDs and LEDs with fluorescent lamps, and they've gotten encouraging results. Given that under normal operating conditions, LEDs can last for up to 10 years, I can foresee at least 10 solid years of terraforming on Venus.
So here's how I'd cool it down: Send a series of robot landers to the planet, each one containing about a cubic foot of phytoplankton, the creatures responsible for most of our oxygen production here on earth. Using a heat exchanger, incoming hot CO2 would be cooled and passed off to the phytoplankton which will gladly remove the carbon. Every once in a while the dead cells in the culture are going to have to be dumped. Telling the difference between healthy and unhealthy may be impossible necessitating the dumpage of a set volume instead of "just the dead cells". Dumping them straight out into the environment of Venus shouldn't cause any problems, as for the first few years it'll be too hot for them to keep living anyhow. But as it gradually cools down, dumping phytoplankton into pools of water becomes a very good way of accelerating the change. Once you've taken most of the carbon out of the atmosphere, you need to set up some arc stations on very high-flying balloons to produce high-voltage electricity (ideally from small nuclear reactors as we're about to use a lot of it) to zap three O2 molecules into two O3 molecules, hopefully forming an upper-atmosphere of ozone similar to our own.
But the big first step is using plants to filter out all that carbon, using heat exchangers and other fancy technologies to remove the heat so the plants can luxuriously enjoy it.
Parenthetically, it would probably be easier to terraform Venus. Its atmosphere is even thicker than Earth's and is mostly carbon dioxide. It's this CO2 which is responsible for Venus' highly elevated temperature.
How much gaseous CO2 is on Mars, in cubic meters? How much CO2 does the world's hungriest plant/algae consume in a day, and how much O2 is thereby produced? If we construct giant greenhouses on Mars, does enough light reach the planet (sand losses from the greenhouse glass, of course) to "power the plants" which will filter all that CO2 and produce lovely, clean, human-friendly oxygen? If we hand-craft the atmosphere before turning it to shit (read: don't burn any hydrocarbons while we're trying to rid the atmosphere of its carbon) then it won't take that much time, I don't think. I've seen some pretty massive greenhouses in my time, and I've also seen what concentrated amounts of CO2 can do to plant growth. Mars is a friggin' jungle waiting to happen; it just needs a properly layered atmosphere to retain heat enough to support basic plant life, then we can move the plants outside of the greenhouses and really get the party started.
But there are other problems with Mars, like gravity. You need enough gravity to *retain* the atmosphere. Where's all the gravity? Does Mars have a molten liquid core? What about the magnetic field, does it protect Mars from the solar wind, or will the atmosphere we craft over hundreds of years just "blow away" ? It's thought that the atmosphere of Venus once contained a lot of water vapor, but under the assault of the solar wind, the water split into hydrogen and oxygen and the hydrogen did subsequently evaporate completely, as it is too light to be retained unbound with other molecules by even Earth's gravity.
The existing atmosphere on Mars, though, is very thin--less than 1% that of the Earth. This is why they're saying we need to take gas with us to Mars. I say no. I way warm the planet up, get a plant-breathable atmosphere going, and see what comes up from the soil. We know there's water and methane available; what else? Maybe we can come up with the extra things we need (like nitrogen, which makes up about 70% of our atmosphere here on Earth) from the planet itself.
The wikipedia entry on Terraforming mentions some of these problems with Mars, among others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming
I guess it depends upon the fundamental outlook of the player.
The best example I can think of right off the top of my head is Trickjumping in any FPS that uses the quake3 engine. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is my preferred Q3-using game, so I'll use it for my example. Here's a little background so I don't lose anyone: W:ET is an axis-versus-allies team-based online multiplayer first-person shooter. It is largely objective-based and there are 5 character classes available: soldier (heavy weapons), field ops (hands out ammo / calls in airstrikes), medic (can give out health packs / revive fallen teammates), engineer (can build/destroy things), and covert ops (can take enemy uniforms and throw smoke grenades). The game also has one-way doors that only members of a specific team (or a covert ops in that team's uniform) can open.
There's this map entitled "Siwa Oasis" or just "oasis" for short. On this map, you need to repair the water pump at the oasis and/or run through the tunnels to the old city, capture the old city, and then by either blowing up the old city wall or repairing the old city water pump and draining the tunnel, make your way to the two anti-tank guns and destroy them.
Seems pretty straightforward, right? Well, it's actually possible to JUMP over the wall (without blowing it up and drawing attention to yourself), by exploiting what I guess you could call "nuances" in the physics engine. You see, it's possible to convert downward momentum into forward momentum by "bouncing" off of a curved or slanted surface, much the same way that a ray of light changes direction when hitting a mirror at an angle. Utilizing this method, it is possible to generate enough forward momentum from a position at about the same height as the wall, that you can propel yourself over the wall and be well on your way to blowing up the anti-tank guns before anybody knows what hit them.
It requires a great deal of timing and skill to pull off this jump. I have personally spent hours getting it just right. Is totally circumventing the old city wall cheating? I could have gone through one of those one-way doors I mentioned earlier if I had the assistance of a covert ops and an enemy uniform, and that is certainly within the realm of gameplay mechanics. So, the circumvention of the wall is something that seems to be acceptable (given the door options presented to me), so does the method of wall-circumvention matter? Is jumping over the wall actually cheating?
I totally agree with the statement made, "When a player cheats in a game, they are choosing a battlefield that is broader in context than the game itself." I like this statement because it speaks to my nature. I am the sort of person that likes to approach things from outside the box, and sometimes that means choosing a battlefield that is broader in context than the box itself.
Because there were (are?) people and companies out there willing to pay us to do so.
Money justifies everything stupid. If somebody wanted to pay $100/pound for my poop, I would start saving it by the bucketload for him.
I used to work for a company that does predominantly Macintosh hosting. They have a datacenter with 500+ Macintoshes in it. Everything from old-style beige Powermacs to the newer G3/G4 and even Xserve models. Anyhow, the older boxen ran OS9, and OS9 has the single critical flaw of being single-threaded.
This isn't so bad when there's only one person using the computer, but when you're using the computer to host a filemaker database which back-ends a website which is all hosted on a lovely macintosh, it becomes a problem. Any time you get a dialog on the screen, the computer disappears off the internet. Any dialog: system error, a prompt, a confirmation, a warning that you're low on disk space--whatever. Any dialog, and it all stops, because of the single-threading. The system can't continue execution until you interact with the dialog box.
We had a program we used called Okeydokey to automatically click OK to the dialog boxes, but every once in a while there'd be a colocated server or something running a weird version of XYZ program that didn't use the standard dialog interface and therefore couldn't be okeydokey-ed.
This is now not really a problem since Darwin is BSD-based, and BSD-based systems are all very capably multithreated.
Why not just get something hosted with HavenCo of the Principality of Sealand (see http://www.havenco.com/ for details), something you can have and use while you're alive? Their rates are absolutely disgusting ($1500/month for colocation with 256kbps bandwidth and 5 IP addresses) but for secured hosting in a place where there aren't any IP laws....
Judging from the law excerpt posted by another, what you say is indeed partially true. Performing modifications to a commercially available or marketed product or kit is illegal, whereas home-building something completely from scratch is not. So if you take a swiss army knife to your existing antenna you're breaking the law, but if you wire up a pringles can, you're not.
You may be right. However, if you had to determine if 4,294,967,298 was prime or not, you could do that instantaneously, because you would know that the only even prime is 2, so the number is therefore not prime.
Reasoning only applies to decisions for which there are not standard rules governing the decision. If there's a rule that says "if greater than 2 and even, not prime" then any number that is encounter that fits the rule can be easily snap-judged, while anything that doesn't fit a rule needs to be reasoned/evaluated. A rule is a direct link from point A (in this case, a number) to point B (to determine the primeness of the number), while reasoning is the indirect path we take between point A and B when we don't have an appropriate and simple rule.
The more simple rules you're able to develop and understand, the more rapidly and capably you're able to interact with the world around you. Here's a couple fundamental rules that you don't even think about any more: red means stop, green means go. You don't really think about it though, you just act upon it because you know the rule. There isn't a reasoning process between "see green light" and "make car go" because it's a direct an unquestionable link. Green = go. It's a rule inside your head, and it makes you more efficient as a person.
The S-man won't take special interest money because he's already filthy rich. If a politician already has money unrelated to his political endeavours, he's usually a pretty straight-laced politician.