they'll have fun trying to use it... there's zero credit left at the moment... if they like, they could always put some back on it first...
Actually, that's fairly common... let's say I get your card and it's got a five grand limit on it but only a grand is left...
I can take my thousand bucks and run OR I can pay off four grand, call the credit company, and get "my" limit increased (FYI on a full payoff most companies will gladly increase your limit)... then instead of a grand I've got six grand (assuming they double the limit) to go with...
I know a friend this happened to. VISA sent him a form with checkboxes for each transaction, to indicate which ones fradulent transactions.
The checkbox next to the payoff was not chcked when he sent it back.
If you're talking about the audio format discs then maybe (though at $1 a disc with room for 5 hours and much higher manufacturing costs than CDs I don't see how)... the data discs are pro dj discs though... I would assume no royalties are involved there...
Yes they do. The minidiscs I got are even Sony brand (other brands like Sanyo, Toshiba, TDK, and Memorex produce minidiscs. The Memerox MD-Data discs are IMHO the best of the bunch)
But they weren't produced by a business unit that has anything to do with Sony BMG (see other posts by me in this discussion... someone was making the point that Sony's minidisc / blank media sales are contrary to Sony BMG's anti-piracy goals)
Speculation on how to defeat a copy protection system based on information the label themselves released with no insider knowledge or reverse engineering isn't illegal...
DMCA be damned. It's not illegal. Were I to be arrested under this I would consider myself not to be a criminal but rather a prisoner of war... and act in accordance with my geneva convention rights.
Now if I had reverse engineered this information from their product that *might* be different. I think we should have a right to reverse engineer anything we want to. But my dutifully appointed representatives (damn them all) voted (damn the vote) to approve the DMCA (damn it all to hell) and my franchise as a voter is dependant on following the laws of this country. A good citizen of a democracy is responsible for following even the bad laws (perhaps while working to change them)
All the same it's a moot point. I can't tell you the last time I bought a Sony BMG product. For contrast, I purchased 30 blank minidiscs just last month.
This seems a little disturbing- for the first time they're admitting they're not trying to stop big pirate-mills but slow down the consumer? Why does Sony still sell blank CDs, blank minidiscs and blank audio cassettes then? That's a hypothetical question: I mean, I know they make money off it, that's why they sell it.
Keep in mind that Sony's media division is a completely different entity than their music label (Sony BMG)... and given the fact that Sony seems to have even more schizophrenia in their internal politics than most companies, it wouldn't surprise me if Sony BMG considers the Sony media peeps to be enemies-from-within already.
Or do I need to complain every single time I bother to buy a CD? The problem is they are making a speed-bump to my legitimate use of loading the songs onto my portable player.
They're using Windows DRM. From what I've seen this universally involves autostarting a program that disables the audio CD playing ability and instead loads.wmv files with the appropriate DRM bits inside.
Most likely the backdoor is how to disable that autostart program. Here's a hint; try holding down your left shift key.
One nanometer equals one-billionth of a meter, which means it would take 100,000 nanometers lined up side-by-side to equal the diameter of a human hair.
I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. How many of these suckers can I fit in a Library of Congress?
Forget libraries of congress... what I'd like to know is exactly how you line up 100,000 nanometers side-by-side.
things can be lined up side-by-side. measurements can describe a length but aren't inherently "stackable"
While we're at it, you can line up (side-by-side) an infinite number of 2-D measures in whatever space you choose; a nanometer has a width of zero.
In the scooby doo episode they guested in, I believe he had carousel lubricant on the built.
Seriously what kind of crime fighter gets up in the morning and says "where is my carousel lubricant. I could get into a situation where that will save my life today! Yeap today may be the day."
That's a good issue. How is a home replicator going to build devices that take a complex clean-room fabrication plant with all sorts of expensive equipment (like modern CPUs)?
Every single atomic assembler so far designed (sadly thus far, gedanken) does it's assembly in a vacuum environment and is atomically precise. Doesn't matter if you're making a chair or a CPU. But making a CPU this way will be cheaper. (!!!) And making it smaller will be CHEAPER (!!!!!)
Today: photographic technologies gradually scale down towards an ideal size. Each scaling requires more energetic photons, which results in exponentially tighter tolerances and precision. As we get smaller, these costs increase.
Future: atomic assembly will mean that the cheapest way to assemble a CPU will be with as few atoms as possible. Since each atom has to be supplied in a purified feed and electrically / mechanically welded to the CPU each atom has a definite cost attached to it.
Building parts/objects for yourself doesn't benefit from mass production, and thus would tend to cost more. Perhaps some car components would have such a small margin in terms of mass production cost and personal production cost that it would outweigh transportation costs and profit margins for the auto manufacturers, but I doubt that most would.
Mass production is designed to take advantage of a few economies of scale. First off, mass production is not necessarily more or less wasteful of raw materials compared to any other production technology. Where are the other costs of production? Setting up and paying for the machines, tools, molds/blanks, raw materials, and people to do the production, and the time it takes to create a unit (this is a "cost" in that it affects your amortisation rate)
How do these economies apply to home assembly? Assume the home assembler is not used around the clock and that assembly is not being done in a just in time manner; in that case the time it takes to create a unit is "free" (in that you are not giving up the ability to do anything by doing so)
The other costs?
Machines: one time machine able to create anything. Tools: unneeded molds/blanks: molds are unneeded. Raw materials WILL be needed but will either be a powder form, or a solid block. Either case is probably cheaper per unit mass than using, for example, sheet metal blanks raw materials: depending on the technology, raw materials may cost less (unprocessed powder), a tiny bit more (solid blocks) or a deal more (chemically processed powder) But raw material cost, for most consumer items, is a very small portion of the overall cost anyways. people: unneeded
Overall, a home automated fab will beat mass production in every cost category except raw materials. For the cost of the car, the value of the steel is surprisingly little.
Posit: unobtanium is unneeded to create a replicator Posit: an atomic assembler can create ANYTHING given a large enough working space, the appropriate raw atomic materials, and enough energy.
So the only constraint to a machine replicating itself is that with most of the assembly technologies we have right now, the act of creation is internal to the device.
If the replicator was seperated into easily assembled parts (and you don't count the manual work of linking lego parts together to be necessary to the replication effort), then it could definitely reproduce itself.
That's step one of the decision algorithm; compute the raw probabilities.
Step two is to look at the actions of all the other players at the table, and compare to previous actions, and determine the probability based on that (and the cards showing) of them having a better hand.
That's something that's REAL hard for a computer to do. There's a ton of fuzzy logic and unknowns, especially considering that mucking is legal.
You *could* go about it by analyzing all the possible hands, comparing their betting strategy to each, and determining the likelihood of each hand being part of the betting strategy. On a fold, analyze the behaviours of all the raisers and determine the liklihood of each bluffing, creating probability spreads for all possible hands, and assume that the folder believes he was beat by the most likely probaiblity from at least one player (the one with the best hand) and assign a probability spread to that player based on that assumption.
As you can see it quickly gets complicated. I think a "default" neural network with online trainer would be simpler to code and just as effective (given how unpredictable the problem is anyways)
When a new player logs in, use previous training data from aggregate play styles and start training every hand (the training algorithm is simple; a "win" is a positive... a "lose" is a negative) Organize it into subnetworks... then feed the outputs of those nodes into a decision network (which is the same for all players)... ideally the end result is that (with enough time and information) each individual player's network is able to reverse engineer their hand from their actions (of course this is impossible in RL but a good goal)... but even a close guess should be enough to tip the scales for an otherwise perfect statistical strategy...
Finally, making the probabalistic move every time will not do as well, because if you do that you would absolutely never bluff. A bot to be good in the long run must bluff, otherwise it is far too predictable and you can gain too much information from its bets and raises.
When I play, I play on an information theory basis. Look at it as a crypto problem; I want to reveal as little information as possible about the contents of my hand while maximizing my profit.
Did you know that during WWII, commanders would send troops to what they KNEW was the wrong location based on intercepted communications? The reason is simple... convince the enemy that their encryption protocol was not broken.
I do the same thing. Try to bluff as often as you have a real hand. Act the same way when bluffing as when you think you're going to win. Occasionally "lose" a moderately large bluff (and get to the end so you show your hand and they can see you were REALLY bluffing) so that in a future hand you can play the same and get a call.
It's all about giving out as little and as incorrect information of my bluffing strategy as possible.
That atmospheric pressure is the exact WRONG kind of environment to be growing diamonds.
The basic CVD setup for diamond is alcohol and hydrogen vapors flowing over a filament and then onto a sample deposition plate.
Take a tank of alcohol and bubble hydrogen through it. You can get H2 from a gas supply company, or any acid-metal reaction. You'll want a valve to control the ratio. The Carbon-Hydrogen ratio should be quite low (about 10%?) to give a good controlled growth rate. The slower, more controlled the growth rate, the better and larger the end product.
Research shows that a certain amount of water vapor may be desirable. I've heard therefore that Sake and Burbon are actually pretty good to use for this. I would use just straight ethanol if I were attempting, however.
Pipe this from the top through a verticle pyrex tube. In the middle mount a tungsten filament. This you'll want to get to 2400 degrees centigrade by running a current through it (through a rheostat)... I've heard that a good way to check is to view it through exposed daytime film; it'll start showing through the film at the right temperature. A few millimeters beneath that mount a small plate as a growth medium. You can either vent the outgassing or burn it. Of course this technique requires an oxygen free environment so don't just leave the bottom open; force it through a tube of equal or lesser diameter as your feed tube.
extremely low pressures or extremely high pressures are very good for making better diamond from this process. If you're going high pressure try stainless steel for your containment vessel. Low pressure only requires thick enough glass to stand near-vacuum.
Use inert materials for everything. The process is basically to start with a seed plate (silicon or molybdenum are both good candidates for diamond growth)... grow VERY slowly at first until you get a good seed crystal. Then you replace the seed plate with an inert piece of glass with any seed crystals in it. You'll get mostly carbon dust unless you can tune everything properly (the dust contains a large number of microscopic diamonds and actually shows up on xray crystallography as diamond)
Ideas for tuning to get gem-quality diamonds (some of these from the original researchers some from me)
The process works by taking the OOH out of the alcohol (-COOH) and combining it with the raw H2 to make water. The carbon becomes free radicals and crystallize quickly. The process doesn't yield gem quality diamonds because the crystallization happens so quickly that it has numerous nucleation sites and therefore yields many microscopic crystals instead of one large crystal.
1. Decrease the thermal gradient between the sample and the filament. (no I have no idea how to do this. if *I* were designing from scratch I would put a smaller secondary filament under the sample) 2. Play with flow rates. A high flow rate accompanied by a low temperature may encourage better crystal growth. Same thing with a low flow rate and high temperature. 3. Try ionizing the flow. The extra repulsion between radicals should keep them seperated longer and provide better nucleation targets. For that matter putting an opposite charge under your samples might help as well. Of course, diamond is an insulator so that might actually be counterproductive by providing nucleation sites apart from the seed itself. Maybe using a pulsed ionic spray on the seed will help? 4. Increase potential energy in the seed. Light abrasion with diamond grit sandpaper provides more potential energy for nucleation. This is similar in idea to ionizing, in that it electrochemically roughens the surface.
I played around with this stuff 10 years ago in high school. It might be worthwhile to set up a new experiment now that I've written this hahaha.
I've thought for years that a series of heads side by side, with code and logic to read sequentially or simultaneously would drastically improve hard drive performance, while reducing hardware failures.
Well the old multi-platters could do that. But I can just imagine the top of a hard drive case packed with read heads end to end.
I think the problem is that head positioning is too precise of a problem to rely on static load bearing structures. It has to be a dynamic process.
That said I have often imagined an array of n drives (where n is the bit width of the data protocol used to communicate with the drive)... each bit in a data word gets written to a seperate drive.
But then I read up on RAID 5. With a hardware controller, RAID 5 is a lot more immune to hdd failures and not much less performant (for files over a block in size). To get comparable performance to the above scenario, simply use n+1 drives instead of n.
Fundamental communism is about unfair distribution of wealth. Unfortunately there are only a couple of government styles that can make that work at all....
The two most frequently seen in history are the dictatorship and a religious aristocracy (fundamental judaism, for instance, had an economy far closer to communism than capitalism)
They were,however, a real bitch to sort out. So the computer world focused upon digital designs, which , it turned out, were a lot easier to do.
A key factor is that analog computers are inherently lossy; components aren't precise enough to make a large analog computation as the imprecisions tend to add up...
And then there's the whole Turing concept of code as data. Analog computers were "programmed" by adding and subtracting components; software as bits is a lot more mutable. Even so, with the appropriate switching devices, an analog circuit that's programmable is theoretically possible.
But why bother when digital is so much more precise?
On the flip side, analog computers STILL see some life in minor subsystems everywhere. With proper design they happen to be quite handy for feedback-control applications...
Only if you release peripherals and require software support for them.
The PS/2 has USB ports.
Can I use my USB wireless network adapter? no.
Can I use my USB mouse? no.
Can I use my USB keyboard? Only on games that support it. (yes there are online games that don't support any keyboard but the Sony)
Webcam? no. TV-Tuner? no. (yes there are games for the PS2 that use a proprietary camera) Printer? no. Force-feedback joysticks? no. Any joysticks? no.
This is not expandable, IMO. Large classes of devices; in fact EVERY SINGLE USB DEVICE I OWN is not supported on this platform.
Forcefeedback doesn't mean miniature dildos inside your controller.
A (non-HD) TV is not good resolution.
A closed/proprietary executable format does not utilise the innovation of the entire human race.
Licensing deals do not a good game make.
Neither do FLOPS.
(However, Shigeru Miyamoto does.)
And I'm not even a nintendo fanboy. I've just never seen another developer whose every game I have consumed voraciously. But other than that and an occasional foray into PS2 console land (GTA/NFSU2/Square RPGs), I'm a PC gamer and the advantages of PC gaming have a lot more to do with freedom of creative expression than raw framerates.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a form somewhere that I can enter my credit card information to check if my cc number has been comprimised?
Sure is! Just go to www.giveawaymyccnumber.com
they'll have fun trying to use it... there's zero credit left at the moment... if they like, they could always put some back on it first...
Actually, that's fairly common... let's say I get your card and it's got a five grand limit on it but only a grand is left...
I can take my thousand bucks and run OR I can pay off four grand, call the credit company, and get "my" limit increased (FYI on a full payoff most companies will gladly increase your limit)... then instead of a grand I've got six grand (assuming they double the limit) to go with...
I know a friend this happened to. VISA sent him a form with checkboxes for each transaction, to indicate which ones fradulent transactions.
The checkbox next to the payoff was not chcked when he sent it back.
well it depends.
If you're talking about the audio format discs then maybe (though at $1 a disc with room for 5 hours and much higher manufacturing costs than CDs I don't see how)... the data discs are pro dj discs though... I would assume no royalties are involved there...
Yes they do. The minidiscs I got are even Sony brand (other brands like Sanyo, Toshiba, TDK, and Memorex produce minidiscs. The Memerox MD-Data discs are IMHO the best of the bunch)
But they weren't produced by a business unit that has anything to do with Sony BMG (see other posts by me in this discussion... someone was making the point that Sony's minidisc / blank media sales are contrary to Sony BMG's anti-piracy goals)
You may have just committed a felony.
I was worried about this when I posted...
Speculation on how to defeat a copy protection system based on information the label themselves released with no insider knowledge or reverse engineering isn't illegal...
DMCA be damned. It's not illegal. Were I to be arrested under this I would consider myself not to be a criminal but rather a prisoner of war... and act in accordance with my geneva convention rights.
Now if I had reverse engineered this information from their product that *might* be different. I think we should have a right to reverse engineer anything we want to. But my dutifully appointed representatives (damn them all) voted (damn the vote) to approve the DMCA (damn it all to hell) and my franchise as a voter is dependant on following the laws of this country. A good citizen of a democracy is responsible for following even the bad laws (perhaps while working to change them)
All the same it's a moot point. I can't tell you the last time I bought a Sony BMG product. For contrast, I purchased 30 blank minidiscs just last month.
From a borderline paranoid schizo allow me to address this.
Look at the bright side: you outnumber your ennemies 2 to 1.
Yeah but I don't fully trust my ally. I sometimes wonder if he's a traitor.
This seems a little disturbing- for the first time they're admitting they're not trying to stop big pirate-mills but slow down the consumer? Why does Sony still sell blank CDs, blank minidiscs and blank audio cassettes then? That's a hypothetical question: I mean, I know they make money off it, that's why they sell it.
Keep in mind that Sony's media division is a completely different entity than their music label (Sony BMG)... and given the fact that Sony seems to have even more schizophrenia in their internal politics than most companies, it wouldn't surprise me if Sony BMG considers the Sony media peeps to be enemies-from-within already.
Or do I need to complain every single time I bother to buy a CD? The problem is they are making a speed-bump to my legitimate use of loading the songs onto my portable player.
.wmv files with the appropriate DRM bits inside.
They're using Windows DRM. From what I've seen this universally involves autostarting a program that disables the audio CD playing ability and instead loads
Most likely the backdoor is how to disable that autostart program. Here's a hint; try holding down your left shift key.
Whew...wearing that thing sure makes you paranoid...but does it make you paranoid enough?
From a borderline paranoid schizo allow me to address this.
Once you have started wondering if you're paranoid enough, the answer is "yes, but just barely."
One nanometer equals one-billionth of a meter, which means it would take 100,000 nanometers lined up side-by-side to equal the diameter of a human hair.
I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. How many of these suckers can I fit in a Library of Congress?
Forget libraries of congress... what I'd like to know is exactly how you line up 100,000 nanometers side-by-side.
things can be lined up side-by-side. measurements can describe a length but aren't inherently "stackable"
While we're at it, you can line up (side-by-side) an infinite number of 2-D measures in whatever space you choose; a nanometer has a width of zero.
And don't forget the compartment full of prerolled
smokin bat bud in the bat cave
(blatantly stolen from the rap duo twiztid, one member of which likes batman so much that he's done photoshoots in his authentic 60's era batsuit)
In the scooby doo episode they guested in, I believe he had carousel lubricant on the built.
Seriously what kind of crime fighter gets up in the morning and says "where is my carousel lubricant. I could get into a situation where that will save my life today! Yeap today may be the day."
Atomic Assembly my friend
That's a good issue. How is a home replicator going to build devices that take a complex clean-room fabrication plant with all sorts of expensive equipment (like modern CPUs)?
Every single atomic assembler so far designed (sadly thus far, gedanken) does it's assembly in a vacuum environment and is atomically precise. Doesn't matter if you're making a chair or a CPU. But making a CPU this way will be cheaper. (!!!) And making it smaller will be CHEAPER (!!!!!)
Today: photographic technologies gradually scale down towards an ideal size. Each scaling requires more energetic photons, which results in exponentially tighter tolerances and precision. As we get smaller, these costs increase.
Future: atomic assembly will mean that the cheapest way to assemble a CPU will be with as few atoms as possible. Since each atom has to be supplied in a purified feed and electrically / mechanically welded to the CPU each atom has a definite cost attached to it.
Building parts/objects for yourself doesn't benefit from mass production, and thus would tend to cost more. Perhaps some car components would have such a small margin in terms of mass production cost and personal production cost that it would outweigh transportation costs and profit margins for the auto manufacturers, but I doubt that most would.
Mass production is designed to take advantage of a few economies of scale. First off, mass production is not necessarily more or less wasteful of raw materials compared to any other production technology. Where are the other costs of production? Setting up and paying for the machines, tools, molds/blanks, raw materials, and people to do the production, and the time it takes to create a unit (this is a "cost" in that it affects your amortisation rate)
How do these economies apply to home assembly? Assume the home assembler is not used around the clock and that assembly is not being done in a just in time manner; in that case the time it takes to create a unit is "free" (in that you are not giving up the ability to do anything by doing so)
The other costs?
Machines: one time machine able to create anything.
Tools: unneeded
molds/blanks: molds are unneeded. Raw materials WILL be needed but will either be a powder form, or a solid block. Either case is probably cheaper per unit mass than using, for example, sheet metal blanks
raw materials: depending on the technology, raw materials may cost less (unprocessed powder), a tiny bit more (solid blocks) or a deal more (chemically processed powder) But raw material cost, for most consumer items, is a very small portion of the overall cost anyways.
people: unneeded
Overall, a home automated fab will beat mass production in every cost category except raw materials. For the cost of the car, the value of the steel is surprisingly little.
Not until I can replicate the replicator.
Posit: unobtanium is unneeded to create a replicator
Posit: an atomic assembler can create ANYTHING given a large enough working space, the appropriate raw atomic materials, and enough energy.
So the only constraint to a machine replicating itself is that with most of the assembly technologies we have right now, the act of creation is internal to the device.
If the replicator was seperated into easily assembled parts (and you don't count the manual work of linking lego parts together to be necessary to the replication effort), then it could definitely reproduce itself.
The "trick" isn't computing the probabilities.
That's step one of the decision algorithm; compute the raw probabilities.
Step two is to look at the actions of all the other players at the table, and compare to previous actions, and determine the probability based on that (and the cards showing) of them having a better hand.
That's something that's REAL hard for a computer to do. There's a ton of fuzzy logic and unknowns, especially considering that mucking is legal.
You *could* go about it by analyzing all the possible hands, comparing their betting strategy to each, and determining the likelihood of each hand being part of the betting strategy. On a fold, analyze the behaviours of all the raisers and determine the liklihood of each bluffing, creating probability spreads for all possible hands, and assume that the folder believes he was beat by the most likely probaiblity from at least one player (the one with the best hand) and assign a probability spread to that player based on that assumption.
As you can see it quickly gets complicated. I think a "default" neural network with online trainer would be simpler to code and just as effective (given how unpredictable the problem is anyways)
When a new player logs in, use previous training data from aggregate play styles and start training every hand (the training algorithm is simple; a "win" is a positive... a "lose" is a negative) Organize it into subnetworks... then feed the outputs of those nodes into a decision network (which is the same for all players)... ideally the end result is that (with enough time and information) each individual player's network is able to reverse engineer their hand from their actions (of course this is impossible in RL but a good goal)... but even a close guess should be enough to tip the scales for an otherwise perfect statistical strategy...
Finally, making the probabalistic move every time will not do as well, because if you do that you would absolutely never bluff. A bot to be good in the long run must bluff, otherwise it is far too predictable and you can gain too much information from its bets and raises.
When I play, I play on an information theory basis. Look at it as a crypto problem; I want to reveal as little information as possible about the contents of my hand while maximizing my profit.
Did you know that during WWII, commanders would send troops to what they KNEW was the wrong location based on intercepted communications? The reason is simple... convince the enemy that their encryption protocol was not broken.
I do the same thing. Try to bluff as often as you have a real hand. Act the same way when bluffing as when you think you're going to win. Occasionally "lose" a moderately large bluff (and get to the end so you show your hand and they can see you were REALLY bluffing) so that in a future hand you can play the same and get a call.
It's all about giving out as little and as incorrect information of my bluffing strategy as possible.
That atmospheric pressure is the exact WRONG kind of environment to be growing diamonds.
The basic CVD setup for diamond is alcohol and hydrogen vapors flowing over a filament and then onto a sample deposition plate.
Take a tank of alcohol and bubble hydrogen through it. You can get H2 from a gas supply company, or any acid-metal reaction. You'll want a valve to control the ratio. The Carbon-Hydrogen ratio should be quite low (about 10%?) to give a good controlled growth rate. The slower, more controlled the growth rate, the better and larger the end product.
Research shows that a certain amount of water vapor may be desirable. I've heard therefore that Sake and Burbon are actually pretty good to use for this. I would use just straight ethanol if I were attempting, however.
Pipe this from the top through a verticle pyrex tube. In the middle mount a tungsten filament. This you'll want to get to 2400 degrees centigrade by running a current through it (through a rheostat)... I've heard that a good way to check is to view it through exposed daytime film; it'll start showing through the film at the right temperature. A few millimeters beneath that mount a small plate as a growth medium. You can either vent the outgassing or burn it. Of course this technique requires an oxygen free environment so don't just leave the bottom open; force it through a tube of equal or lesser diameter as your feed tube.
extremely low pressures or extremely high pressures are very good for making better diamond from this process. If you're going high pressure try stainless steel for your containment vessel. Low pressure only requires thick enough glass to stand near-vacuum.
Use inert materials for everything. The process is basically to start with a seed plate (silicon or molybdenum are both good candidates for diamond growth)... grow VERY slowly at first until you get a good seed crystal. Then you replace the seed plate with an inert piece of glass with any seed crystals in it. You'll get mostly carbon dust unless you can tune everything properly (the dust contains a large number of microscopic diamonds and actually shows up on xray crystallography as diamond)
Ideas for tuning to get gem-quality diamonds (some of these from the original researchers some from me)
The process works by taking the OOH out of the alcohol (-COOH) and combining it with the raw H2 to make water. The carbon becomes free radicals and crystallize quickly. The process doesn't yield gem quality diamonds because the crystallization happens so quickly that it has numerous nucleation sites and therefore yields many microscopic crystals instead of one large crystal.
1. Decrease the thermal gradient between the sample and the filament. (no I have no idea how to do this. if *I* were designing from scratch I would put a smaller secondary filament under the sample)
2. Play with flow rates. A high flow rate accompanied by a low temperature may encourage better crystal growth. Same thing with a low flow rate and high temperature.
3. Try ionizing the flow. The extra repulsion between radicals should keep them seperated longer and provide better nucleation targets. For that matter putting an opposite charge under your samples might help as well. Of course, diamond is an insulator so that might actually be counterproductive by providing nucleation sites apart from the seed itself. Maybe using a pulsed ionic spray on the seed will help?
4. Increase potential energy in the seed. Light abrasion with diamond grit sandpaper provides more potential energy for nucleation. This is similar in idea to ionizing, in that it electrochemically roughens the surface.
I played around with this stuff 10 years ago in high school. It might be worthwhile to set up a new experiment now that I've written this hahaha.
I've thought for years that a series of heads side by side, with code and logic to read sequentially or simultaneously would drastically improve hard drive performance, while reducing hardware failures.
Well the old multi-platters could do that. But I can just imagine the top of a hard drive case packed with read heads end to end.
I think the problem is that head positioning is too precise of a problem to rely on static load bearing structures. It has to be a dynamic process.
That said I have often imagined an array of n drives (where n is the bit width of the data protocol used to communicate with the drive)... each bit in a data word gets written to a seperate drive.
But then I read up on RAID 5. With a hardware controller, RAID 5 is a lot more immune to hdd failures and not much less performant (for files over a block in size). To get comparable performance to the above scenario, simply use n+1 drives instead of n.
Right.
Fundamental communism is about unfair distribution of wealth. Unfortunately there are only a couple of government styles that can make that work at all....
The two most frequently seen in history are the dictatorship and a religious aristocracy (fundamental judaism, for instance, had an economy far closer to communism than capitalism)
If you were a real geek you'd know that the web server is far cooler! ;P
If he were a real geek he wouldn't even be able to specify the properties of the perfect artificial vagina
(perfection in imitation requires subject knowledge)
They were,however, a real bitch to sort out. So the computer world focused upon digital designs, which , it turned out, were a lot easier to do.
A key factor is that analog computers are inherently lossy; components aren't precise enough to make a large analog computation as the imprecisions tend to add up...
And then there's the whole Turing concept of code as data. Analog computers were "programmed" by adding and subtracting components; software as bits is a lot more mutable. Even so, with the appropriate switching devices, an analog circuit that's programmable is theoretically possible.
But why bother when digital is so much more precise?
On the flip side, analog computers STILL see some life in minor subsystems everywhere. With proper design they happen to be quite handy for feedback-control applications...
A USB port does not equal expandability.
Umm... Actually, yes it does.
Only if you release peripherals and require software support for them.
The PS/2 has USB ports.
Can I use my USB wireless network adapter? no.
Can I use my USB mouse? no.
Can I use my USB keyboard? Only on games that support it. (yes there are online games that don't support any keyboard but the Sony)
Webcam? no.
TV-Tuner? no. (yes there are games for the PS2 that use a proprietary camera)
Printer? no.
Force-feedback joysticks? no.
Any joysticks? no.
This is not expandable, IMO. Large classes of devices; in fact EVERY SINGLE USB DEVICE I OWN is not supported on this platform.
A controller is not a keyboard.
A joystick is not a mouse.
A USB port does not equal expandability.
Forcefeedback doesn't mean miniature dildos inside your controller.
A (non-HD) TV is not good resolution.
A closed/proprietary executable format does not utilise the innovation of the entire human race.
Licensing deals do not a good game make.
Neither do FLOPS.
(However, Shigeru Miyamoto does.)
And I'm not even a nintendo fanboy. I've just never seen another developer whose every game I have consumed voraciously. But other than that and an occasional foray into PS2 console land (GTA/NFSU2/Square RPGs), I'm a PC gamer and the advantages of PC gaming have a lot more to do with freedom of creative expression than raw framerates.
"My Computer" is a view representing the various logical storage devices available, including hard drives