i guess in a case where a worker has to work one month at place a and then another month at place b and then returning to a for a month..
Or how about a business or technology consultant. Many times I'll be at a client site, doing real work on site, for weeks at a time, on my laptop. Anything to make this situation a little more comfortable for me, I'm for it...
"Erode competition's standing" could be OK or not OK. That really depends on what specific action is being done.
Yeah I'm not saying that Step 2 HAS to be evil. I'm just saying that if you're standing at Step 1, then Step 2 is a logical next step for a corporation whose primary goal is increasing shareholder value.
I do not claim that it is stationary wrt the earth's magnetosphere. I claim that it is stationary wrt the earth's surface (which it is), and that it is orthogonal to the earth's magnetic field at any height at which it could cause atmospheric disturbances (which it is)
These two criteria make it stationary wrt magnetic field lines, which is the important determination. Remember, magnetic field lines connect the earth's north and south poles (magnetic ones, not rotational ones)
While, as the earth rotates in the solar wind, these field lines compress and expand, no new field lines would sweep across a vertical. Remember, electricity is generated by a CHANGE in magnetic field. That wouldn't be happening here.
That's been one of the fundamental technologies that needs to be addressed before building it...
The solution I liked the best was basically building two cables side by side; the cost of building a space elevator is not in the materials but in the technologies, and you can use the first cable to lift the second cable cutting down on launch costs.
Then you basically put a voltage potential across them, and manage all your energy needs at the base station. The beauty of this system is that if your motors and inductors and whatnot are built right, then you don't even need a base station if you're dropping and lifting mass at the same time...
You have a massive string under tention, it is going to vibrate. I'm sure you could figure it out if you had some clue as to the properties of the material.
Well I can name the most critical property:
length=100,000m
That's a long long way... and with the wing singing against it, it'll definitely be vibrating. I imagine its first order harmonic is really LFE, the kind of stuff from the slashdot article the other day... that makes people hallucinate and see weird shit and stuff.
But with a string that long and the amount of tension its under, even the thousandth order harmonics will be loud enough to hear, if you put your ear near the elevator...
You'd be basically creating the largest "short" ever.
Not unless you made it out of superconducters! Even the best conductor we know is going to have a significant amount of resistance along the kinds of lengths we're talking about.
And depending on the exact carbon nanotube technology they settle on, the elevator won't be all that conductive to start with... it could very well end up being less conductive than the air around it...
Another interesting question: What fuel is used for getting the unit into space (36k km) to begin with: To power the elevator?
Well you can get most of your fuel the easy way; counterbalances.
Except instead of using a rope and pulley system to connect the counterbalance, you just store the energy electrically. The same system that propels mass upwards could be used to get energy from mass coming down, and store it until its needed. Then you could setup asteroid mining or comet mining operations or zero-G fab factories or whatever you want up in space and actually MAKE a return on shipping the stuff, in terms of energy costs.
But how will they protect it from, well, planes at altitudes below 100,000 feet?
The problem isn't protecting it from planes, the problem is protecting planes from it.
Think not in terms of an elevator, but in terms of a tether. Under tremendous tension. The elevator has 36,000 km worth of tide at the bottom end, and nearly twice that at the top end. The thing is under so much tension that if the edge is thin enough, you could cut steel rebar like a hot knife through butter.
And it stands that tension all day every day without even so much as a hint of a complaint. A measley plane cannot hurt it.
A space elevator would make rockets redundant by granting cheaper access to space. At about a third of the way along the cable - 36,000km from Earth - objects take a year to complete a full orbit. If the cable's centre of gravity remained at this height, the cable would remain vertical, as satellites placed at this height are geostationary, effectively hovering over the same spot on the ground.
Objects take one DAY to complete a orbit at 36,000 km... and if that orbit is in the same direction as the earth turns, then you can orbit continuously over a spot on the equator. There's actually a minor perturbation, but those forces are minor compared to the other forces a space elevator would have to deal with...
BTW, a nice recent sci-fi novel on the subject of space elevators is _Rainbow_Mars_ by Larry Niven, of _Ringworld_ fame.
Imagine a 100,000 km cable falling to earth.. I wouldn't want to be under it.
The cable is actually pulling up. Catastrophic failure at any point along the cable results in it leaving earth.
Basically, you put the center of gravity of the cable right at geosynchronous orbit (ideally you want it to be a little higher than that)
If it's at geo orbit, then the cable stays still even if you cut it off. A hurricane would push the cable sideways, tidal gravity is enough to keep the cable taut by itself. It's a non-stable equilibrium however; eventually the cable will drift enough to escape earth gravity. Unless it hits a mountain first. But even then, EVERYONE is under it. It'll wrap around the earth at least once before it's done falling...
Cons: [...] Will cause gas prices to rise -- see econ 101 supply vs. demand
Price varies as demand over supply?
I don't see how you get an increase in price out of that? The large scale adoption of gasoline efficient vehicles will cause a drop in demand while supply remains constant... which equates to an overall decrease in price...
Basically the big problem is that DB servers are IO-bound, not CPU-bound. Clustering is a way to increase throughput for CPU-bound application, up to the point where they become IO-bound.
Clustering DB servers only works in situations where you have a write-seldom, read-often application. Otherwise, the bandwidth traffic of write replications starts to overwhelm the useful bandwidth.
All that said I have seen a MS SQL Server setup that may be interesting to the Free/OSS database folks; basically you have a SAN and connect multiple database servers to it. It requires specialized hardware, but you could probably fake it with a computer with a big raid array and gigabit networking.
The idea was that the SAN manages disk accesses such that multiple computers can read the same disks at the same time, and therefore everyone always has a fresh copy of the data.
o if a single ISP box gets hacked, they may count that as 100 linux sites hacked because of virtual hosting.
I work in the industry (site colo hosting) so allow me to point out that anyone doing numbers greater than 5-10 virtual servers per box ALWAYS go with Linux... IIS5 couldn't even handle 256, and once you got to the greater than 10 level the admin tools couldn't really take it. Anyone trying to do it ended up coding their own tools to admin the sites.
IIS6 can handle 64K sites, but again the admin tools don't really like it. And once you get on the wrong side of 10 sites per box, performance and stability really start being affected.
Whereas seeing a big Linux server with a huge RAID and a couple thousand sites on it isn't an unusual thing at the big hosting sites...
They claim a database of 280,000 attacks since 1995. They claim there were at least 18,000 attacks in August alone, or 6.5% of the total of 1% of their sample
*scratches head*
I don't get it. I mean really, WTF is "6.5% of the total of 1% of their sample"
1% of their sample = 2,800 The total of 1% of their sample = ??? what value are you totalling? 6.5% of 1% of their sample = 182
I don't really see how your math works...
For those who you know actually care about math and stuff, 18,000 is 15.6% of 280,000... which is certainly quite a large figure for a single month out of the 80+ months in which this sample data was collected...
Who do think started the fire in the first place? 87% of all arson fires in the United States are started by robots. 63% of all cattle mutilations. 6% of 7-11 robberies.
I would like to point that, while the ratio of robot responsible cattle mutilations is depressingly high, that of those robots, only 8% are owned by humans, the rest being split more or less evenly between extra-terrestrials and giant squid...
for anyone saying that, give it a try. I doubt it will last past the novelty phase, and will NOT pass the girlfriend test...
I did it. I spent a total of $290 on it (I will admit that some hardware was free as I already had it... notably the hard drive and remote control)
It hooks up to my TV, looks like a VCR or DVD player, is controlled by remote, and otherwise functions as you would expect something in the living room.
Which is to say it just works.
My girlfriend, who delivers pizza at night, was watching Will & Grace on it (local airtime: 6:30 PM) when I left for work this morning. I don't know what you mean by the girlfriend test, but I certainly think it passed.
Though I will not she does not use the commercial skip feature I programmed in:D I think I need to make it just a little more intuitive.
Those estimates aren't really accurate. Here's what I spent on mine:
Mini-ITX case: $59 Mini-ITX board with integrated sound/video: $89 128MB of PC100: $20 Remote Receiver: $20 Remote: Free (left over from DVD player when I upgraded to universal) Infrared Keyboard w/ Integrated Mouse: $39 TV-Wonder VE: $39 (after rebate) DVD-Drive: $25 (e-bay) 250 GB Drive: $239
Total: $530
Note: I didn't put a 250 GB in mine. I put in a 40GB cause it was free and sufficient. My actual cost for this pvr? $291... and I'm not locked into a particular application or operating system.
If I could do it all over? Ditch the TV-Wonder VE and get a card that has a hardware MPEG-2 Encoder. The Mini-ITX can just barely handle it. I think it would be better with a hardware encoder. If it has an RF Remote bundled with it all the better...
Goddamn! That's why my gaming company is failing! We need to focus on making the games fun! Holy Fucking Shit man, this is fresh! This is information I could've never fucking figured out ever!
Here I am spending all this time making new levels and texture maps and special abilities with pixel shaders and shit. My goal when I was making these was to make the game less fun! I mean I'm totally dropping the fucking ball here, man! I just screwed the pooch and jumped the shark at once here. I mean seriously. Mary Mother of God help me, I've got to turn this whole outfit around and make sure everyone is focused on making a fun fucking game from now on, cause if we don't... well according to this guy, we're going to fail!
If you're mentioning that in reference to such things as legally establishing a timeline (patent prior-art, copyright, etc), an IP lawyer once told me it doesn't work. It might if you have a tamper-proof envelope, but otherwise it won't hold up.
Which is why having a digitally encrypted, provably tamper-proof manner to do this that is supported by the USPS is so exciting!!!
Number one most important feature of this that it seems noone is getting:
This is just Public Key Cryptography based on open and documented standards!
How do I know? I was there when it was announced. In early June at TechEd 2003 in Dallas Texas. Some Korean VP of Verisign showed it off. His accent gave it a very scary "All your base are belong to us" kind of feel, but there it is.
Please read this before you spout off one more cockeyed comment on how Microsoft is evil cause you won't be able to read this on the plane or how it's proprietary and noone will ever understand it or work with it ever again.
It's perfectly reasonable for corporate customers to want to control access to their documents in the workplace, and that's what the Office 2003 DRM features are targeted towards. It's just a dumb client-server authentication scheme, people.
I was there at TechEd 2003 when a VP of Verisign took the stage during the keynote address and announced these features.
It is not dumb client-server authentication. It is a public key encryption package. You need access to a centralized server for typical key management operations, including looking up the public keys of parties with whom you have not communicated in the past.
However you will certainly be able to access the documents in a disconnected fashion, as long as your local keystore contains the right information.
Oh and at the time they also announced that the USPS would be supporting a stamping feature for this. Just like today, you can take a document and send it through the mail (to yourself) just to get it stamped with the current date. The USPS will digitally stamp the document with their current date/time. They didn't go into details on how this would work, but I imagine it's a typical hash/signature style function...
Depending on what you want to do, a DSP may be the answer.
TI makes a few good ones. Advantages over a MicroController? How about a decent Math package (fixed point or floating point), built in programmers, and a large array of I/O options? The DSPs I've been playing with have 3 General I/O registers, any pin of the 24 available to the GIO can be configured to be input or output.
Add on integrated ADCs and DACs, and a decent clock speed, and you've got a nice system.
Did I mention that you can find older development kits on ebay for $100?
Oh and if you get a nice commercial application out of it, TI will custom manufacture them for you in sufficient quantities, with your program masked on the silicon itself. Prices for these are pretty cheap; starting at about $12/unit last time I looked into it (about 2 years ago)
Slashdot Mirror
i guess in a case where a worker has to work one month at place a and then another month at place b and then returning to a for a month..
Or how about a business or technology consultant. Many times I'll be at a client site, doing real work on site, for weeks at a time, on my laptop. Anything to make this situation a little more comfortable for me, I'm for it...
"Erode competition's standing" could be OK or not OK. That really depends on what specific action is being done.
Yeah I'm not saying that Step 2 HAS to be evil. I'm just saying that if you're standing at Step 1, then Step 2 is a logical next step for a corporation whose primary goal is increasing shareholder value.
I mean this seriously made me think of 99. Obligatory /. .com business plan?
1. Create interoperable standards so users can migrate from one OS to another without rewriting code
2. ????
3. Profit!
Except I have a strong suspicion that number 2 is:
2. Erode competitions' standing in marketplace and watch customers gradually migrate to your software, because migration is no longer a hassle
I think that these companies should support third party applications or, atleast, ports to differnt operating systems.
Yahoo has had for some time a Java Client... does that count?
I do not claim that it is stationary wrt the earth's magnetosphere. I claim that it is stationary wrt the earth's surface (which it is), and that it is orthogonal to the earth's magnetic field at any height at which it could cause atmospheric disturbances (which it is)
These two criteria make it stationary wrt magnetic field lines, which is the important determination. Remember, magnetic field lines connect the earth's north and south poles (magnetic ones, not rotational ones)
While, as the earth rotates in the solar wind, these field lines compress and expand, no new field lines would sweep across a vertical. Remember, electricity is generated by a CHANGE in magnetic field. That wouldn't be happening here.
And will we be able to make fuel cells that big?
That's been one of the fundamental technologies that needs to be addressed before building it...
The solution I liked the best was basically building two cables side by side; the cost of building a space elevator is not in the materials but in the technologies, and you can use the first cable to lift the second cable cutting down on launch costs.
Then you basically put a voltage potential across them, and manage all your energy needs at the base station. The beauty of this system is that if your motors and inductors and whatnot are built right, then you don't even need a base station if you're dropping and lifting mass at the same time...
You have a massive string under tention, it is going to vibrate. I'm sure you could figure it out if you had some clue as to the properties of the material.
Well I can name the most critical property:
length=100,000m
That's a long long way... and with the wing singing against it, it'll definitely be vibrating. I imagine its first order harmonic is really LFE, the kind of stuff from the slashdot article the other day... that makes people hallucinate and see weird shit and stuff.
But with a string that long and the amount of tension its under, even the thousandth order harmonics will be loud enough to hear, if you put your ear near the elevator...
You'd be basically creating the largest "short" ever.
Not unless you made it out of superconducters! Even the best conductor we know is going to have a significant amount of resistance along the kinds of lengths we're talking about.
And depending on the exact carbon nanotube technology they settle on, the elevator won't be all that conductive to start with... it could very well end up being less conductive than the air around it...
Another interesting question: What fuel is used for getting the unit into space (36k km) to begin with: To power the elevator?
Well you can get most of your fuel the easy way; counterbalances.
Except instead of using a rope and pulley system to connect the counterbalance, you just store the energy electrically. The same system that propels mass upwards could be used to get energy from mass coming down, and store it until its needed. Then you could setup asteroid mining or comet mining operations or zero-G fab factories or whatever you want up in space and actually MAKE a return on shipping the stuff, in terms of energy costs.
But how will they protect it from, well, planes at altitudes below 100,000 feet?
The problem isn't protecting it from planes, the problem is protecting planes from it.
Think not in terms of an elevator, but in terms of a tether. Under tremendous tension. The elevator has 36,000 km worth of tide at the bottom end, and nearly twice that at the top end. The thing is under so much tension that if the edge is thin enough, you could cut steel rebar like a hot knife through butter.
And it stands that tension all day every day without even so much as a hint of a complaint. A measley plane cannot hurt it.
Now, the base station is another story...
Nasa played around with dragging wires through the atmosphere to generate static electricity.
Unless I'm mistaking, you're referring to them draggin wires through the earth's magnetic field to generate electricity, not through the atmosphere.
In which case there is no problem here; the space elevator is almost perfectly orthogonal to earth's magnetic field, and stationary.
A space elevator would make rockets redundant by granting cheaper access to space. At about a third of the way along the cable - 36,000km from Earth - objects take a year to complete a full orbit. If the cable's centre of gravity remained at this height, the cable would remain vertical, as satellites placed at this height are geostationary, effectively hovering over the same spot on the ground.
Objects take one DAY to complete a orbit at 36,000 km... and if that orbit is in the same direction as the earth turns, then you can orbit continuously over a spot on the equator. There's actually a minor perturbation, but those forces are minor compared to the other forces a space elevator would have to deal with...
BTW, a nice recent sci-fi novel on the subject of space elevators is _Rainbow_Mars_ by Larry Niven, of _Ringworld_ fame.
Imagine a 100,000 km cable falling to earth.. I wouldn't want to be under it.
The cable is actually pulling up. Catastrophic failure at any point along the cable results in it leaving earth.
Basically, you put the center of gravity of the cable right at geosynchronous orbit (ideally you want it to be a little higher than that)
If it's at geo orbit, then the cable stays still even if you cut it off. A hurricane would push the cable sideways, tidal gravity is enough to keep the cable taut by itself. It's a non-stable equilibrium however; eventually the cable will drift enough to escape earth gravity. Unless it hits a mountain first. But even then, EVERYONE is under it. It'll wrap around the earth at least once before it's done falling...
Cons: [...] Will cause gas prices to rise -- see econ 101 supply vs. demand
Price varies as demand over supply?
I don't see how you get an increase in price out of that? The large scale adoption of gasoline efficient vehicles will cause a drop in demand while supply remains constant... which equates to an overall decrease in price...
Basically the big problem is that DB servers are IO-bound, not CPU-bound. Clustering is a way to increase throughput for CPU-bound application, up to the point where they become IO-bound.
Clustering DB servers only works in situations where you have a write-seldom, read-often application. Otherwise, the bandwidth traffic of write replications starts to overwhelm the useful bandwidth.
All that said I have seen a MS SQL Server setup that may be interesting to the Free/OSS database folks; basically you have a SAN and connect multiple database servers to it. It requires specialized hardware, but you could probably fake it with a computer with a big raid array and gigabit networking.
The idea was that the SAN manages disk accesses such that multiple computers can read the same disks at the same time, and therefore everyone always has a fresh copy of the data.
o if a single ISP box gets hacked, they may count that as 100 linux sites hacked because of virtual hosting.
I work in the industry (site colo hosting) so allow me to point out that anyone doing numbers greater than 5-10 virtual servers per box ALWAYS go with Linux... IIS5 couldn't even handle 256, and once you got to the greater than 10 level the admin tools couldn't really take it. Anyone trying to do it ended up coding their own tools to admin the sites.
IIS6 can handle 64K sites, but again the admin tools don't really like it. And once you get on the wrong side of 10 sites per box, performance and stability really start being affected.
Whereas seeing a big Linux server with a huge RAID and a couple thousand sites on it isn't an unusual thing at the big hosting sites...
They claim a database of 280,000 attacks since 1995. They claim there were at least 18,000 attacks in August alone, or 6.5% of the total of 1% of their sample
*scratches head*
I don't get it. I mean really, WTF is "6.5% of the total of 1% of their sample"
1% of their sample = 2,800
The total of 1% of their sample = ??? what value are you totalling?
6.5% of 1% of their sample = 182
I don't really see how your math works...
For those who you know actually care about math and stuff, 18,000 is 15.6% of 280,000... which is certainly quite a large figure for a single month out of the 80+ months in which this sample data was collected...
Who do think started the fire in the first place?
87% of all arson fires in the United States are started by robots. 63% of all cattle mutilations. 6% of 7-11 robberies.
I would like to point that, while the ratio of robot responsible cattle mutilations is depressingly high, that of those robots, only 8% are owned by humans, the rest being split more or less evenly between extra-terrestrials and giant squid...
for anyone saying that, give it a try. I doubt it will last past the novelty phase, and will NOT pass the girlfriend test...
:D I think I need to make it just a little more intuitive.
I did it. I spent a total of $290 on it (I will admit that some hardware was free as I already had it... notably the hard drive and remote control)
It hooks up to my TV, looks like a VCR or DVD player, is controlled by remote, and otherwise functions as you would expect something in the living room.
Which is to say it just works.
My girlfriend, who delivers pizza at night, was watching Will & Grace on it (local airtime: 6:30 PM) when I left for work this morning. I don't know what you mean by the girlfriend test, but I certainly think it passed.
Though I will not she does not use the commercial skip feature I programmed in
Those estimates aren't really accurate. Here's what I spent on mine:
Mini-ITX case: $59
Mini-ITX board with integrated sound/video: $89
128MB of PC100: $20
Remote Receiver: $20
Remote: Free (left over from DVD player when I upgraded to universal)
Infrared Keyboard w/ Integrated Mouse: $39
TV-Wonder VE: $39 (after rebate)
DVD-Drive: $25 (e-bay)
250 GB Drive: $239
Total: $530
Note: I didn't put a 250 GB in mine. I put in a 40GB cause it was free and sufficient. My actual cost for this pvr? $291... and I'm not locked into a particular application or operating system.
If I could do it all over? Ditch the TV-Wonder VE and get a card that has a hardware MPEG-2 Encoder. The Mini-ITX can just barely handle it. I think it would be better with a hardware encoder. If it has an RF Remote bundled with it all the better...
Goddamn! That's why my gaming company is failing! We need to focus on making the games fun! Holy Fucking Shit man, this is fresh! This is information I could've never fucking figured out ever!
Here I am spending all this time making new levels and texture maps and special abilities with pixel shaders and shit. My goal when I was making these was to make the game less fun! I mean I'm totally dropping the fucking ball here, man! I just screwed the pooch and jumped the shark at once here. I mean seriously. Mary Mother of God help me, I've got to turn this whole outfit around and make sure everyone is focused on making a fun fucking game from now on, cause if we don't... well according to this guy, we're going to fail!
No shit.
If you're mentioning that in reference to such things as legally establishing a timeline (patent prior-art, copyright, etc), an IP lawyer once told me it doesn't work. It might if you have a tamper-proof envelope, but otherwise it won't hold up.
Which is why having a digitally encrypted, provably tamper-proof manner to do this that is supported by the USPS is so exciting!!!
Number one most important feature of this that it seems noone is getting:
2 00 30603b.html
This is just Public Key Cryptography based on open and documented standards!
How do I know? I was there when it was announced. In early June at TechEd 2003 in Dallas Texas. Some Korean VP of Verisign showed it off. His accent gave it a very scary "All your base are belong to us" kind of feel, but there it is.
Here's the press release from that day:
http://www.verisign.com/corporate/news/2003/pr_
Please read this before you spout off one more cockeyed comment on how Microsoft is evil cause you won't be able to read this on the plane or how it's proprietary and noone will ever understand it or work with it ever again.
It's perfectly reasonable for corporate customers to want to control access to their documents in the workplace, and that's what the Office 2003 DRM features are targeted towards. It's just a dumb client-server authentication scheme, people.
I was there at TechEd 2003 when a VP of Verisign took the stage during the keynote address and announced these features.
It is not dumb client-server authentication. It is a public key encryption package. You need access to a centralized server for typical key management operations, including looking up the public keys of parties with whom you have not communicated in the past.
However you will certainly be able to access the documents in a disconnected fashion, as long as your local keystore contains the right information.
Oh and at the time they also announced that the USPS would be supporting a stamping feature for this. Just like today, you can take a document and send it through the mail (to yourself) just to get it stamped with the current date. The USPS will digitally stamp the document with their current date/time. They didn't go into details on how this would work, but I imagine it's a typical hash/signature style function...
Depending on what you want to do, a DSP may be the answer.
TI makes a few good ones. Advantages over a MicroController? How about a decent Math package (fixed point or floating point), built in programmers, and a large array of I/O options? The DSPs I've been playing with have 3 General I/O registers, any pin of the 24 available to the GIO can be configured to be input or output.
Add on integrated ADCs and DACs, and a decent clock speed, and you've got a nice system.
Did I mention that you can find older development kits on ebay for $100?
Oh and if you get a nice commercial application out of it, TI will custom manufacture them for you in sufficient quantities, with your program masked on the silicon itself. Prices for these are pretty cheap; starting at about $12/unit last time I looked into it (about 2 years ago)