I applied for a job at a company that did a similar thing for rolled steel... the feedback from the device would adjust the rollers so that a consistant thickness was achieved. I didn't take the job, but it's funny to think of how dangerous it could have been:
1. The sensor is radiation-based... it takes a significant amount of radiation to penetrate the steel (radiation exposure badges required) 2. The metal is thin and sharp, not to mention large and heavy. 3. It's moving at very high speed. 4. for some reason I never found out, it's covered in a thin layer of acid.
An acid-covered-high-speed-knife soaking in radiation. Could get painful. But the device worked really well, I'm told. Glad to see it used with paper, where you can't take rejects and recycle them to back to the same quality.
At the newseum I saw an exhibit (link sadly doesn't have item I'm goint to mention) where they had the cell phone of a reporter in the gulf war. It was an expensive sony phone, using new-at-the-time lithium batteries. The phone is shattered; you can see where the bullet entered and was stopped by the dense battery. The battery didn't violently explode with the damage.
That gives me an idea... can you have an antibiotic and/or steriliazation suit? Not that it would help a whole lot...
They aren't absolved of any liability.. they still have to accept returns from non-satisfied customers (and pay return postage!), either directly or through resellers (stores) for up 30 days.
Overall, a great settlement. But, I wonder if the warnings will follow the obfuscation standards that liquor and cigarette manufacturers use. (Why the pregnant woman warning before the drunk driving warning? Surely there are more drivers than pregnant people!).
I wonder if the warning would like this:
PLAYS IN ANY CD PLAYER. TO ACCESS ADDITIONAL DIGITAL MUSIC FILES ON A COMPUTER, YOU NEED MICROSOFT WINDOWS 98 OR LATER, MICROSOFT WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER 7.0 (INCLUDED FREE ON THIS CD), AND ACCESS TO THE INTERNET (ALSO INCLUDED; TRY AOL FOR 50 HOURS FOR FREE). ACCESS WILL REQUIRE NOT MORE THAN SIX DOWNLOADS. NOT DESIGNED TO WORK IN DVD, MP3, OR COMPUTER CD-ROM PLAYERS. FOR A LIST OF KNOWN COMPATIBLITY PROBLEMS RELATED TO COMPUTERS, CD PLAYERS, AND DIGITAL MUSIC PLAYING DEVICES, PLEASE VISIT WWW.RECORDSTORE.COM/01lOI/|I\!.HTML
(Yeah, I know it's in upper case. It's meant to be hard to read. That's why liquor and cigarette labels use it...)
I think that the agreement contradicts itself a little:
II.B.c. Defendants shall not impair or limit in any manner the ability and right
of consumers to lawfully sell or transfer ownership of the Charlie Pride CD to others who shall have the equal ability to download related digital music files;
and
II.B.a.v. Defendants shall include a warning that the downloadable encrypted
digital music files of the songs contained on the Charlie Pride CD may only be downloaded six times.
Does this mean that If I use my 6 downloads and then sell the disc to a friend, they'll get 6 downloads, too? Or will they have bought a disc that they can't play in their computer (and they'll have no way of knowing it until after they've bought it)?
Oh yeah, it's a great site... maybe I should have mentioned it:) I've been lucky to work at two places with good optical equipment... mainly for PCB inspection/rework, so not quite the magnification at that site. When I mysteriously blew up a FET in a hybrid package, I got to remove the top (a welded-on metal top; none of the dice were potted inside) and see if it was over voltage or over current that killed the part. At another facility, we an X-ray machine and a scanning electron microscope, neither of which I got to use:(
A nice addition would be tempest-resistant fonts! Here's a great article on tempest about tempest & creating fonts that are unreadable. Basically, the tempest setup only picks up the upper 30% of the frequency range, so this font has those components filtered out. But, the cool thing is that you can superimpose a (low amplitude) high-frequency pattern that isn't very visible to the user, but is visible to the tempest receiver. A whole fake Win98 screen transmitted? Here's the slide presentation for the above article (if you just want to look at the pretty pictures)
Peltier coolers are just heat pumps... like an air conditioner, they still require something to cool off the hot side. Also, peltiers don't move heat for free, so (like air conditioners) they require power, and thus generate heat. So, you'll need a beefier heatsink than before. You can't get the hot side of the peltier too hot, otherwise the solder in it will melt. And, if the peltier fails, it will provide a bunch of thermal insulation between your processor and the heatsink -- meaning that your processor will probably quickly fry.
But, other than that, they are great! They are solid state and just about the only (non-exotic) way to cool a processor to below-ambient (where you have to worry about condensation, or even frost on your processor)
It should be pretty easy to find some info on peltiers on the web...
There is a large barrier to entry for designing huge processors, but I think processor startups will always exist. With resources a small fraction of the big guys, they can't design and manage a device this complex. Instead of designing a 25 million transistor beast, people are designing much smaller processors, making sure that each can network well, and then populating chips with multiple copies of these processors.
Startup Pact (with a staff of only 30!) has designed a 30 million transistor chip by iterating a 200k transistor processor 128 times, yielding a theoretical maximum 12.8 billion MACs/sec @ 100 MHz. Of course, that's the theoretical max... it will take the correct problem and/or some good programming to get anywhere near that maximum.
For those curious what a Dutch roll is. From this site:
Dutch roll diagram The second oscillation is known as the Dutch roll (named for the motion of an ice skater). According to one NASA research pilot, an airplane in the Dutch roll mode "resembles a snake slithering." Obviously, this is not a desirable way to travel off the ground. This complex oscillation combines several factors including yaw, roll, dihedral effect, lift, and drag. In a Dutch roll, the airplane's nose typically rotates through about three degrees. When an airplane tries to find the runway, there is only about one degree of margin for safe runway touchdowns.
Your name would have been encrypted from "teamspam" to "ftv", and then decrypted to "dgu".
That was my experience, too. It was about last spring when I went, too. I thought that maybe I should have volunteered to rewire the thing with some white LEDs. After all, I did have a security clearance;). If its still burned out, then maybe I should! But it was really neat to be able to touch one of those machines!
I was interested in the wobble aspect... the way I had heard it was that the outlawed bullets were marginally stable in air (perhaps aided by the spin), but weren't stable in tissue. I'm not an expert, and don't know to what extent the aerodynamics are affected by the density/density consistency of the medium.
I found this reference on high-speed bullet damage. Even without tumbling in the body, high speed bullets generate a temporary cavity of up to 30x the bullet diameter (existing for 5-10msec, generating 100-200atm pressure!). There's a cool picture of this cavity in a gelatin block.
I had a friend who had some unfinished parts of his website point to "xxx" thinking he could fill the address in later. Well, come demonstration day, he was showing it to the customer and they hit some of those links... let's just say that netscape was a little to eager to figure out what it thought my friend meant to link to...
I, too, had the PC-2... Even though I had an Apple II, I liked the portability of the tandys. I started with a PC-4, and added a 1K memory upgrade and the casette port. This computer could keep 10 basic programs in memory at once (and they could call each other), and had a little memory counter at the top of the screen - it would display, in bytes, the amount of RAM left! It was great for trying to get that last bit of functionality into 1.5K.
I traded up to the PC-2. It offered graphics (I no longer had to use the yen sign to represent the protagonist dog in my adventure game!), a piezo speaker. I got the 4-color plotter/tape interface and plotted all sorts of neat geometric designs (as neat as you could get on adding machine tape). It's a clone of a sharp model... I just realized Sharp offered cool stuff that RS didn't, including a soft-key keyboard and apparently a video interface. Besides the video (which I thought was available only on the much-more-expensive HP basic calculator), the holy grail was the RS-232 interface: Thay way I could hook up a modem, a printer, or talk to big computers.
Little did I know that many years down the line I would eventually get a calculator that came with an RS232 serial port standard (HP48SX).
The part I found most interesting was that the creature seemed to be 'handed'... it "may have been making sweeping, brush-like movements with its right feet, collecting small animals like worms and crustaceans from the sediment which it then "combed" with its left feet, pushing the most desirable prey items towards its mouth." Of course, I'm presuming the reason they mention the right side and the left side is because it's could be supported by the trial evidence.
What's interesting is that scorpions are built pretty symetrically, like humans (at least externally - the internal organs that we only have one of are all over the place). I wonder if all the creatures were "right sweepers", or were they mostly "right sweepers" (as 90% of people are right-handed), or if it's a 50-50 toss up (like in lobsters).
In the cursher claw the closer muscle is composed entirely of slow fibers, and in the cutter claw it has 65 to 75 percent fast fibers and 25 to 35 percent slow fibers. While claw placement in the adult is essentially random, it can be demonstrated in two ways that the muscle fiber properties are not genetically fixed: (i)if one claw is removed in the fourtyh and early fifth stages, the remaining closer muscle develops all slow muscle fibers, and *ii) if the animals are raised in smooth-bottomed containers, both claws can become cutter types, having closer muscles with more than 50 percent fast fibers. Thus, as in vertebrate skeletal muscle, the proprties of lobster closer muscle fibers can be transformed by various experimental manipulations.
Sure wish I had one of these guys to study and play with, not just their tracks! (ok, maybe not play ball with, but you get the idea)
Re:10 Ghz ALU = 5Ghz CPU
on
Inside Intel
·
· Score: 2
Page 4 of the article:
The Pentium 4's double-pumped ALUs are actually only 16-bits wide, thus requiring a single clock to produce one 32-bit result.
Imagine what would happen if the ALU is only running at the same speed as the CPU.
You'd have a 16 bit processor?
No, seriously, they are going for a ALU that works on 32 bits per clock, like the one demo'ed. But, I'd be just as happy with a 20 GHz double pumped 16-bit ALU as I would a 10 GHz single pumped 32-bit ALU... as long as the performance is the same, I'll leave it to intel to decide the best implementation.
Another caveat: The power supply is external, but I didn't see any pictures of it on their website.
The specs are a bit confusing, but it looks like the thing takes 12-24V DC, and there is an optional AC adapter that can supply this (the detailed spec sheets were slashdotted). It's probably cutely packaged in a form factor similar to the PC. Here are the specs:
Here's one possible example (the surge/max current may be more, so to really pick the right supply you'd need more data):
FW50 (12 or 24v, 50W) 5"x3"x1.3" $54
EPS169-ND (24v, 50W) 4.1"x2.1"x1.2" $82.80
I, too, went for the spendy bose headphones as a last resort. They work great. My only complaints: because these are rather well sealed units, after a while my ears get sweaty (but they are still very comfortable). Also, the external amplifier/battery box is cumbersome -- it sometimes falls off my desk, yanking the cord to my head.
With the bose, some noise still gets through, but I'm always amazed when I take them off how loud my computer really is. The sound quality is good, but the amplifier injecting noise (as it is designed to do!), I don't think any noise canceling headphones can compete with a decent pair of studio-type headphones and a quiet room.
I also tried two Sony headphones from crutchfield:
MDR-NC5, $99 - Not a closed-ear type, so the noise reduction wasn't that great.
MDR-NC20, $150 - This has a closed construction, but the noise reduction didn't seem to work too well - the headphones added quite a bit of their own white noise.
I was replying to a suggestion to use a floppy-based firewall that ran un-halted, and not talking about the halted version. We're in agreement; there are advantages to running halted.
Yeah, all one has to worry about is that machine is used as a proxy to break into all local machines; running with a rooted firewall is just as bad a running without a firewall. You could still run local processes by remote mounting some drive on the internet.
I saw a system that was an ultra-high-speed signal capture device, kindof like a digital oscilliscope. The circuit board had two promient traces -- one straight, and one wavy. One was a clock, the other was the sampled data (I don't really remember which one was which). Both had feeds off of them to small circuits that would hold a sample. In the case of the wavy trace, it was one tap per wave. The resulting data stored had a time resolution determined by the diference in lengths between the taps on the wavy trace and the taps on the straight trace.
Slashdot Mirror
I applied for a job at a company that did a similar thing for rolled steel... the feedback from the device would adjust the rollers so that a consistant thickness was achieved. I didn't take the job, but it's funny to think of how dangerous it could have been:
1. The sensor is radiation-based... it takes a significant amount of radiation to penetrate the steel (radiation exposure badges required)
2. The metal is thin and sharp, not to mention large and heavy.
3. It's moving at very high speed.
4. for some reason I never found out, it's covered in a thin layer of acid.
An acid-covered-high-speed-knife soaking in radiation. Could get painful. But the device worked really well, I'm told. Glad to see it used with paper, where you can't take rejects and recycle them to back to the same quality.
At the newseum I saw an exhibit (link sadly doesn't have item I'm goint to mention) where they had the cell phone of a reporter in the gulf war. It was an expensive sony phone, using new-at-the-time lithium batteries. The phone is shattered; you can see where the bullet entered and was stopped by the dense battery. The battery didn't violently explode with the damage.
That gives me an idea... can you have an antibiotic and/or steriliazation suit? Not that it would help a whole lot...
blinking 888 (which the 3-digit LED display would do after a general system panic)
Ha ha! I would have made it blink 12:00, but that's just my sick sense of humor.
They aren't absolved of any liability.. they still have to accept returns from non-satisfied customers (and pay return postage!), either directly or through resellers (stores) for up 30 days.
Overall, a great settlement. But, I wonder if the warnings will follow the obfuscation standards that liquor and cigarette manufacturers use. (Why the pregnant woman warning before the drunk driving warning? Surely there are more drivers than pregnant people!).
I wonder if the warning would like this:
PLAYS IN ANY CD PLAYER. TO ACCESS ADDITIONAL DIGITAL MUSIC FILES ON A COMPUTER, YOU NEED MICROSOFT WINDOWS 98 OR LATER, MICROSOFT WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER 7.0 (INCLUDED FREE ON THIS CD), AND ACCESS TO THE INTERNET (ALSO INCLUDED; TRY AOL FOR 50 HOURS FOR FREE). ACCESS WILL REQUIRE NOT MORE THAN SIX DOWNLOADS. NOT DESIGNED TO WORK IN DVD, MP3, OR COMPUTER CD-ROM PLAYERS. FOR A LIST OF KNOWN COMPATIBLITY PROBLEMS RELATED TO COMPUTERS, CD PLAYERS, AND DIGITAL MUSIC PLAYING DEVICES, PLEASE VISIT WWW.RECORDSTORE.COM/01lOI/|I\!.HTML
(Yeah, I know it's in upper case. It's meant to be hard to read. That's why liquor and cigarette labels use it...)
and
Does this mean that If I use my 6 downloads and then sell the disc to a friend, they'll get 6 downloads, too? Or will they have bought a disc that they can't play in their computer (and they'll have no way of knowing it until after they've bought it)?
Oh yeah, it's a great site... maybe I should have mentioned it :) I've been lucky to work at two places with good optical equipment ... mainly for PCB inspection/rework, so not quite the magnification at that site. When I mysteriously blew up a FET in a hybrid package, I got to remove the top (a welded-on metal top; none of the dice were potted inside) and see if it was over voltage or over current that killed the part. At another facility, we an X-ray machine and a scanning electron microscope, neither of which I got to use :(
A nice addition would be tempest-resistant fonts! Here's a great article on tempest about tempest & creating fonts that are unreadable. Basically, the tempest setup only picks up the upper 30% of the frequency range, so this font has those components filtered out. But, the cool thing is that you can superimpose a (low amplitude) high-frequency pattern that isn't very visible to the user, but is visible to the tempest receiver. A whole fake Win98 screen transmitted? Here's the slide presentation for the above article (if you just want to look at the pretty pictures)
Peltier coolers are just heat pumps... like an air conditioner, they still require something to cool off the hot side. Also, peltiers don't move heat for free, so (like air conditioners) they require power, and thus generate heat. So, you'll need a beefier heatsink than before. You can't get the hot side of the peltier too hot, otherwise the solder in it will melt. And, if the peltier fails, it will provide a bunch of thermal insulation between your processor and the heatsink -- meaning that your processor will probably quickly fry.
But, other than that, they are great! They are solid state and just about the only (non-exotic) way to cool a processor to below-ambient (where you have to worry about condensation, or even frost on your processor)
It should be pretty easy to find some info on peltiers on the web...
Those words were in Cyrillic (of course)... see them on the chip here!
There is a large barrier to entry for designing huge processors, but I think processor startups will always exist. With resources a small fraction of the big guys, they can't design and manage a device this complex. Instead of designing a 25 million transistor beast, people are designing much smaller processors, making sure that each can network well, and then populating chips with multiple copies of these processors.
Startup Pact (with a staff of only 30!) has designed a 30 million transistor chip by iterating a 200k transistor processor 128 times, yielding a theoretical maximum 12.8 billion MACs/sec @ 100 MHz. Of course, that's the theoretical max... it will take the correct problem and/or some good programming to get anywhere near that maximum.
Lexra has put 16 MIPS32 processors on a single die. Again, with only 30 employees.
Here's some info on the Agat - a clone of an Apple II.
If you want to buy an old Russian computer, try here (has many pictures!). I don't know if this guy's stock is representative of 1980's Russian computing, but it contains a lot (31) of Sinclair clones, and information on other computers, including IBM PC-compatibles. If nothing, the names listed should help searches.
Your name would have been encrypted from "teamspam" to "ftv", and then decrypted to "dgu".
;). If its still burned out, then maybe I should! But it was really neat to be able to touch one of those machines!
That was my experience, too. It was about last spring when I went, too. I thought that maybe I should have volunteered to rewire the thing with some white LEDs. After all, I did have a security clearance
great post, really informative!
I was interested in the wobble aspect... the way I had heard it was that the outlawed bullets were marginally stable in air (perhaps aided by the spin), but weren't stable in tissue. I'm not an expert, and don't know to what extent the aerodynamics are affected by the density/density consistency of the medium.
I found this reference on high-speed bullet damage. Even without tumbling in the body, high speed bullets generate a temporary cavity of up to 30x the bullet diameter (existing for 5-10msec, generating 100-200atm pressure!). There's a cool picture of this cavity in a gelatin block.
I had a friend who had some unfinished parts of his website point to "xxx" thinking he could fill the address in later. Well, come demonstration day, he was showing it to the customer and they hit some of those links... let's just say that netscape was a little to eager to figure out what it thought my friend meant to link to...
Some large 50-caliber bullets (capable of taking out armored personel carriers!) are not legally allowed to be used against people -- only material and equipment... the same situation as the laser. But this isn't considered a deterent to users of the gun... the loophole? a shooter can always claim they were weren't aiming at the preson, only their the canteen, beltbuckle, dogtag, etc.
I, too, had the PC-2... Even though I had an Apple II, I liked the portability of the tandys. I started with a PC-4, and added a 1K memory upgrade and the casette port. This computer could keep 10 basic programs in memory at once (and they could call each other), and had a little memory counter at the top of the screen - it would display, in bytes, the amount of RAM left! It was great for trying to get that last bit of functionality into 1.5K.
I traded up to the PC-2. It offered graphics (I no longer had to use the yen sign to represent the protagonist dog in my adventure game!), a piezo speaker. I got the 4-color plotter/tape interface and plotted all sorts of neat geometric designs (as neat as you could get on adding machine tape). It's a clone of a sharp model... I just realized Sharp offered cool stuff that RS didn't, including a soft-key keyboard and apparently a video interface. Besides the video (which I thought was available only on the much-more-expensive HP basic calculator), the holy grail was the RS-232 interface: Thay way I could hook up a modem, a printer, or talk to big computers.
Little did I know that many years down the line I would eventually get a calculator that came with an RS232 serial port standard (HP48SX).
What's interesting is that scorpions are built pretty symetrically, like humans (at least externally - the internal organs that we only have one of are all over the place). I wonder if all the creatures were "right sweepers", or were they mostly "right sweepers" (as 90% of people are right-handed), or if it's a 50-50 toss up (like in lobsters).
Check out a quote from this site:
Sure wish I had one of these guys to study and play with, not just their tracks! (ok, maybe not play ball with, but you get the idea)
Imagine what would happen if the ALU is only running at the same speed as the CPU.
You'd have a 16 bit processor?
No, seriously, they are going for a ALU that works on 32 bits per clock, like the one demo'ed. But, I'd be just as happy with a 20 GHz double pumped 16-bit ALU as I would a 10 GHz single pumped 32-bit ALU
Another caveat: The power supply is external, but I didn't see any pictures of it on their website.
The specs are a bit confusing, but it looks like the thing takes 12-24V DC, and there is an optional AC adapter that can supply this (the detailed spec sheets were slashdotted). It's probably cutely packaged in a form factor similar to the PC. Here are the specs:
Input Voltage:12V - 24V DC-Input
Powersupply: 110/220V (60/50Hz)
Powerconsumtion: typ. 40W (700MHz)
For a general idea of what this external power supply could look like, check these power supplies from digikey; look for the specs above.
Here's one possible example (the surge/max current may be more, so to really pick the right supply you'd need more data):
FW50 (12 or 24v, 50W) 5"x3"x1.3" $54
EPS169-ND (24v, 50W) 4.1"x2.1"x1.2" $82.80
Think notebook power supply size.
Sounds like my experience...
I, too, went for the spendy bose headphones as a last resort. They work great. My only complaints: because these are rather well sealed units, after a while my ears get sweaty (but they are still very comfortable). Also, the external amplifier/battery box is cumbersome -- it sometimes falls off my desk, yanking the cord to my head.
With the bose, some noise still gets through, but I'm always amazed when I take them off how loud my computer really is. The sound quality is good, but the amplifier injecting noise (as it is designed to do!), I don't think any noise canceling headphones can compete with a decent pair of studio-type headphones and a quiet room.
I also tried two Sony headphones from crutchfield:
MDR-NC5, $99 - Not a closed-ear type, so the noise reduction wasn't that great.
MDR-NC20, $150 - This has a closed construction, but the noise reduction didn't seem to work too well - the headphones added quite a bit of their own white noise.
I was replying to a suggestion to use a floppy-based firewall that ran un-halted, and not talking about the halted version. We're in agreement; there are advantages to running halted.
Yeah, all one has to worry about is that machine is used as a proxy to break into all local machines; running with a rooted firewall is just as bad a running without a firewall. You could still run local processes by remote mounting some drive on the internet.
I saw a system that was an ultra-high-speed signal capture device, kindof like a digital oscilliscope. The circuit board had two promient traces -- one straight, and one wavy. One was a clock, the other was the sampled data (I don't really remember which one was which). Both had feeds off of them to small circuits that would hold a sample. In the case of the wavy trace, it was one tap per wave. The resulting data stored had a time resolution determined by the diference in lengths between the taps on the wavy trace and the taps on the straight trace.