CmdrTaco has talked about this subscriber "plum" in his journal.
Part of the reason that this perk has been extended to subscribers is that the statistics showed that subscribers get modded up more often anyway, and when they moderate, their mods score better in metamod.
In other words, they discovered that the people willing to pay to support/. are better posters and better mods (on average).
In any case, subscribers cannot post until everyone can see the stories, they just get a head start on being able to read the articles before the/. effect kicks in.
Don't like it? Adjust your preferences to give subscribers a -1 (or more) penalty.
I think he meant that his DVD player wouldn't play SVCDs. It plays VCDs and DVDs, so he's looking into a DVD burner for more and higher quality video per disc.
Let's think a little before we post. I suspect you weren't actually intending to troll.
Vacancies are not necessarily a problem. As you say, vacancies are entropically favored, but there is also a formation energy associated with a vacancy. So thermodynamics tells us there will be a balance between the energy required to create a vacancy with the entropy gained by creating one.
Thus, there is an equilibrium number of vacancies in any crystal. As long as you know what the equilibrium value is for a given temperature and you maintain that temperature, then you will also know how many vacant sites you will have on the crystal lattice. I don't have any of my texts handy, but I'm sure someone can chime in with the numbers for silicon.
To sum up. All crystals will have vacancies because vacancies are thermodynamically favored. However, the number of vacancies will tend towards an equilibrium value which allows them to be accounted for.
It is 3d in the resect that the content of the windows are treated as textures which are mapped onto planes. That allows the compositing to be handled by the video chip instead of the CPU.
Apple introduced this in Jaguar as "Quartz Extreme". Basically some of the CPU intensive stuff in the interface is offloaded into the 3D functions of the video chip. It requires a fairly hefty video chip (Radeon, or GeForce2+), but those are common now. The upside to it is that Quartz Extreme makes some of the flashier features (e.g. transparancy) available with no additional CPU cycles. It uses the video chip (which is largely untaxed anyway unless you are playing a game). In fact, on a Mac with QE, you can play a quicktime movie under a transparant terminal window with no slowdown and no increase in CPU use. You can use an OpenGL screensaver as your background with no significant CPU use.
One of the byproducts is a fairly large supply of neutrons. These neutrons are absorbed by the reactor, which will slowly but surely become radioactive. Therefore, you will eventually be left with radioactive waste to dispose of.
I think they plan on dealing with this by using vanadium alloys. If you start with the most stable form of vanadium (V51) and bombard it with neutrons, the first neutron absorbed will cause a quick beta decay to Cr52. Fortunately, chromium has the same crystal structure as V, so you won't weaken the alloy much. Cr can absorb another 3 neutrons before it beta-decays to Mn55, which has a different crystal structure, so at that point, you might start causing enbrittlement of the alloy. However, Mn55 can absorb 5 more neutrons before you end up with an element that has a worrying half life (Co60).
So by picking your materials correctly, you can potentially avoid some of the problems associated with neutrons.
This has been the way that Apple has always done accents, but as I was testing it out, I noticed a new feature (at least in Safari).
When you type Option-`, for example, a little yellow block appears with an accent grave in it. The next letter you type will get the accent grave (as long as the accent can be added to that letter).
It is worth mentioning that the 10 and 15 GB iPods are even smaller, at 0.63 inches or just 16mm thick. Which makes these models almost exactly half the volume of the Nomad Zen.
Remember, when the PPC spec was set down over a decade ago, the 32 -> 64-bit transition was planned for. The PowerPC architecture is a 64 bit architecture with a 32 bit subset. All of the instructions are 32 bit, but some of them operate on 64 bit data. Really, there is no need for more than 2^32 or roughly 4 billion instructions. I don't know what the total instruction count for PPC is, but I'm sure it is less than 500. Altivec alone is 162 instructions
Anyway, the current G4 PPCs have 32-bit integers, 64-bit floating points, and 128-bit vectors. The 970 will have 64-bit integers, 64-bit floating points, and 128-bit vectors. The only change is the integer unit and the bus width. There are new instructions for operating on 64-bit integers, but that is it for new instructions. The 970 will be able to handle 32-bit integers with no problem.
Whimpy?!? The AlBooks are made with aircraft-grade aluminum. Those are some of the strongest alloys available. It is a far better alloy than the CP-titanium crap that Apple used to use.
IAAMSBMSINM (I am a materials scientist, but my specialty is not metals), I would be shocked if these alloys annealed at 120F. You can anneal 2024 aluminum at 920F, so I doubt 120F is doing anything.
Bluetooth is an open standard, and the SonyEricsson T68i (and a few others) use SyncML, another open standard. So such a phone would be perfectly capable of syncing under Linux, just as soon as someone writes the software.
OTOH, if you use MacOS X, then this functionallity is already built into iSync.
People always forget that Apple did make an "Apple III" that was targeted at buisness. Unfortunately the machine was an unmitigated failure. It wasn't fully backwards compatible with the Apple II's, and it had lots of hardware problems to boot.
I meant they were gems for jewelers. Obviously fakes
Sigh.....
I suppose it is worth noting that there are two categories of manufactured gemstones: Imitation and Synthetic
Immitation stones look like some prized gemstone, but are chemically different. For instance, Cubic Zirzonia (ZrO2+Y2O3) is an immitation diamond. To the naked eye, a good CZ is indistinguishable from diamond, but it is a completely different stone. The tester that jewelers use to determine a stone is CZ or diamond actually measures thermal conductivity, because diamond conducts and CZ insulates.
Synthetic stones are chemical copies of a prized gemstone produced in the lab. Synthetic sapphire can be made which is indistinguishable from sapphire that has been mined. You cannot tell a good synthetic sapphire from a real one. Period. The stones have no memory, and there is no analysis that will tell you when it was made.
Me too. I managed to talk my wife out of getting a diamond on ethical grounds. We went with moissanite instead. Her ring has a green moissanite flanked by two clear moissanite stones.
The funny thing about clear moissanite is that people refuse to believe it is not diamond, even when they are told directly. Moissanite actually has a higher index of refraction than diamond, and so it sparkles more! Plus, moissanite only costs one tenth as much as an equivelant quality diamond. Most people have never heard of it, because it is not a naturally occuring stone. The plus side to that is that I can definitively say that I know the stones came from a factory in North Carolina. Can you tell me where your diamond came from?
You can tell the difference under a jeweler's loop (if you know what you are looking for, moissanite is birefringant), but moissanite will actually fool the cubic zirconia testers that most jewelers use.
In the interest of full disclosure, I do own some stock in the company that makes moissanite. I bought the stock because I was impressed with the product, but you are welcome to take everything I say with a grain of salt.
They glow because they're doped--rubies were shown on a PBS show a few years back. Lab created gems are generally doped with elements to make them distinguishable somehow--don't think scientists and engineers don't get bribed to produce a perfect gem.
Uh, What?. Synthetic gemstones are chemically indistinguishable from the real thing. For a while, the distinguishing characteristic of lab created gemstones was their remarkable lack of defects. However, enterprising companies that make synthetic stones have figured out how to include the defects that you normally see in natural stones. So you can no longer tell the difference. There is no law to require they be marked, and there is no inscentive for the manufacturers to do so. If you saw stones that glowed, they were probably made that way for industrial use. Ti-doped Sapphire (Al2O3) is used for "tunable" lasers, for example. In fact, the first laser was made from ruby (Cr-doped Sapphire). These days people can make synthetic sapphires the width of a telephone pole and several feet long. They are used as windows on the barcode scanners in the supermarket because sapphire is much more scratch resistant than glass.
Frankly I don't understand why people value stones that were dug up out of the ground more than ones created in the lab. It's not like there is a real difference. Besides, if you actually visited a gemstone mine, you would probably lose all the romantic ideas you have about the origin of the stones.
As far as synthetic diamonds go, there are several possible ways to produce them. CVD is commonly done to produce diamond films for research. GE Superabrasives produces industrial diamonds using a high pressure process for decades. The diamonds are small, but they are cost effective. GE also produces "clarity enhanced" diamonds. They take natural diamonds that are lousy color and treat them to make them a more appealing color. Can you tell? I doubt it.
I'm a materials scientist, and I suspect that synthetic diamonds are less than a decade off. When that happens, the whole house of cards that is the diamond industry will come crashing down. Diamonds are not rare, but DeBeers controls most of the supply. When they loose that control, diamonds will crash to a price befitting their rarety.
And don't go around thinking that diamonds have ever been a good investment. The vast majority of diamonds actually depreciate relative to inflation.
I remember reading somewhere that a lot of video production houses use iMovie for "video storyboards". Rather than drawing cartoon style storyboards, they go out with a cheap digial videocam and film the basic scenes they want and assemble them in iMovie to show customers what they have in mind.
When they film the final product, they use Final Cut Pro.
The really cool feature Apple introduced with Shake 3 is automatic clustering with Rendezvous. From Apple's Shake page:
Because with the inclusion of unlimited network render licenses and render management software on Mac OS X, visual effects artists can now distribute rendering tasks across multiple PowerPC G4-based Macintosh computers.
...and from a press release...
New Shake Qmaster network render management software included with Shake for Mac OS X uses Apple's Rendezvous(TM) networking technology to automatically identify available render nodes and clusters on a network while load balancing optimizes usage across each machine in the workflow. If one Xserve or Power Mac G4 goes offline, built-in fault tolerance allows Shake Qmaster to re-route tasks to other render nodes in the cluster, so the project gets done on time. As Shake Qmaster is based on an open architecture, it can also provide distributed rendering support for many leading third-party applications, such as Alias/Wavefront's Maya.
Point and click clustering, courtesy of Apple. Looks like a good way to sell Apple's new XServe Cluster Node config.
I find it amusing that everybody seems to be talking like someone has actually been fined 97.8 billion dollars. That is just the maximum possible sentence based on the charges being levied. If someone got fined that much by the Judge, it would get overturned on appeal as excessive.
Besides, even if the RIAA was awarded more money than the person charged could pay, they could just declare bankrupcy and clear the debt. They cannot take away your means to live.
Yes, but the point was that Ender did not know that. He thought he was training on a simulation. The situations they put him in kept getting harder and harder until they reached the homeworld of the "buggers" where the odds became impossible and so he just blew up the planet. He thought he was being tested and he was angry that they would give him such an impossible task, so he completed it the only way possible, by killing everyone, including his own men.
It worked, but the point was that Ender wouldn't have done it if he knew it was real.
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CmdrTaco has talked about this subscriber "plum" in his journal. Part of the reason that this perk has been extended to subscribers is that the statistics showed that subscribers get modded up more often anyway, and when they moderate, their mods score better in metamod.
In other words, they discovered that the people willing to pay to support /. are better posters and better mods (on average).
In any case, subscribers cannot post until everyone can see the stories, they just get a head start on being able to read the articles before the /. effect kicks in.
Don't like it? Adjust your preferences to give subscribers a -1 (or more) penalty.
Hey Rosco,
I think he meant that his DVD player wouldn't play SVCDs. It plays VCDs and DVDs, so he's looking into a DVD burner for more and higher quality video per disc.
Let's think a little before we post. I suspect you weren't actually intending to troll.
Vacancies are not necessarily a problem. As you say, vacancies are entropically favored, but there is also a formation energy associated with a vacancy. So thermodynamics tells us there will be a balance between the energy required to create a vacancy with the entropy gained by creating one.
Thus, there is an equilibrium number of vacancies in any crystal. As long as you know what the equilibrium value is for a given temperature and you maintain that temperature, then you will also know how many vacant sites you will have on the crystal lattice. I don't have any of my texts handy, but I'm sure someone can chime in with the numbers for silicon.
To sum up. All crystals will have vacancies because vacancies are thermodynamically favored. However, the number of vacancies will tend towards an equilibrium value which allows them to be accounted for.
Actually, since the (linear) range of a is about one third the range of g, you need 3^2 or nine times as many access points to cover the same area.
Myself, I've just avoided buying 2.4GHz cordless phones since I use 802.11b at home. 900Mhz is just fine quality wise.
It is 3d in the resect that the content of the windows are treated as textures which are mapped onto planes. That allows the compositing to be handled by the video chip instead of the CPU.
Apple introduced this in Jaguar as "Quartz Extreme". Basically some of the CPU intensive stuff in the interface is offloaded into the 3D functions of the video chip. It requires a fairly hefty video chip (Radeon, or GeForce2+), but those are common now. The upside to it is that Quartz Extreme makes some of the flashier features (e.g. transparancy) available with no additional CPU cycles. It uses the video chip (which is largely untaxed anyway unless you are playing a game). In fact, on a Mac with QE, you can play a quicktime movie under a transparant terminal window with no slowdown and no increase in CPU use. You can use an OpenGL screensaver as your background with no significant CPU use.
I think they plan on dealing with this by using vanadium alloys. If you start with the most stable form of vanadium (V51) and bombard it with neutrons, the first neutron absorbed will cause a quick beta decay to Cr52. Fortunately, chromium has the same crystal structure as V, so you won't weaken the alloy much. Cr can absorb another 3 neutrons before it beta-decays to Mn55, which has a different crystal structure, so at that point, you might start causing enbrittlement of the alloy. However, Mn55 can absorb 5 more neutrons before you end up with an element that has a worrying half life (Co60).
So by picking your materials correctly, you can potentially avoid some of the problems associated with neutrons.
This has been the way that Apple has always done accents, but as I was testing it out, I noticed a new feature (at least in Safari).
When you type Option-`, for example, a little yellow block appears with an accent grave in it. The next letter you type will get the accent grave (as long as the accent can be added to that letter).
The ones I'm aware of are
You wouldn't do this in Java anyway. Failure to open the file would generate an exception.
Which I think is a lot easier to understand.Actually, i believe that in Java
if(x = 5)
will throw a compiler error because (x = 5) does not resolve to boolean.
That is something I like about Java, it doesn't allow you to do stupid things like that. There is no reason to do an asignment in an if() statement.
It is worth mentioning that the 10 and 15 GB iPods are even smaller, at 0.63 inches or just 16mm thick. Which makes these models almost exactly half the volume of the Nomad Zen.
Instruction size doesn't change.
Remember, when the PPC spec was set down over a decade ago, the 32 -> 64-bit transition was planned for. The PowerPC architecture is a 64 bit architecture with a 32 bit subset. All of the instructions are 32 bit, but some of them operate on 64 bit data. Really, there is no need for more than 2^32 or roughly 4 billion instructions. I don't know what the total instruction count for PPC is, but I'm sure it is less than 500. Altivec alone is 162 instructions
Anyway, the current G4 PPCs have 32-bit integers, 64-bit floating points, and 128-bit vectors. The 970 will have 64-bit integers, 64-bit floating points, and 128-bit vectors. The only change is the integer unit and the bus width. There are new instructions for operating on 64-bit integers, but that is it for new instructions. The 970 will be able to handle 32-bit integers with no problem.
Whimpy?!? The AlBooks are made with aircraft-grade aluminum. Those are some of the strongest alloys available. It is a far better alloy than the CP-titanium crap that Apple used to use.
IAAMSBMSINM (I am a materials scientist, but my specialty is not metals), I would be shocked if these alloys annealed at 120F. You can anneal 2024 aluminum at 920F, so I doubt 120F is doing anything.
Well...
Bluetooth is an open standard, and the SonyEricsson T68i (and a few others) use SyncML, another open standard. So such a phone would be perfectly capable of syncing under Linux, just as soon as someone writes the software.
OTOH, if you use MacOS X, then this functionallity is already built into iSync.
Ask Slashdot and Ye Shall Recieve?
So will Apple Computer have to pay off Apple Records again?
People always forget that Apple did make an "Apple III" that was targeted at buisness. Unfortunately the machine was an unmitigated failure. It wasn't fully backwards compatible with the Apple II's, and it had lots of hardware problems to boot.
More Apple III info...
Sigh.....
I suppose it is worth noting that there are two categories of manufactured gemstones: Imitation and Synthetic
Immitation stones look like some prized gemstone, but are chemically different. For instance, Cubic Zirzonia (ZrO2+Y2O3) is an immitation diamond. To the naked eye, a good CZ is indistinguishable from diamond, but it is a completely different stone. The tester that jewelers use to determine a stone is CZ or diamond actually measures thermal conductivity, because diamond conducts and CZ insulates.
Synthetic stones are chemical copies of a prized gemstone produced in the lab. Synthetic sapphire can be made which is indistinguishable from sapphire that has been mined. You cannot tell a good synthetic sapphire from a real one. Period. The stones have no memory, and there is no analysis that will tell you when it was made.
Me too. I managed to talk my wife out of getting a diamond on ethical grounds. We went with moissanite instead. Her ring has a green moissanite flanked by two clear moissanite stones.
The funny thing about clear moissanite is that people refuse to believe it is not diamond, even when they are told directly. Moissanite actually has a higher index of refraction than diamond, and so it sparkles more! Plus, moissanite only costs one tenth as much as an equivelant quality diamond. Most people have never heard of it, because it is not a naturally occuring stone. The plus side to that is that I can definitively say that I know the stones came from a factory in North Carolina. Can you tell me where your diamond came from?
You can tell the difference under a jeweler's loop (if you know what you are looking for, moissanite is birefringant), but moissanite will actually fool the cubic zirconia testers that most jewelers use.
In the interest of full disclosure, I do own some stock in the company that makes moissanite. I bought the stock because I was impressed with the product, but you are welcome to take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Uh, What?. Synthetic gemstones are chemically indistinguishable from the real thing. For a while, the distinguishing characteristic of lab created gemstones was their remarkable lack of defects. However, enterprising companies that make synthetic stones have figured out how to include the defects that you normally see in natural stones. So you can no longer tell the difference. There is no law to require they be marked, and there is no inscentive for the manufacturers to do so. If you saw stones that glowed, they were probably made that way for industrial use. Ti-doped Sapphire (Al2O3) is used for "tunable" lasers, for example. In fact, the first laser was made from ruby (Cr-doped Sapphire). These days people can make synthetic sapphires the width of a telephone pole and several feet long. They are used as windows on the barcode scanners in the supermarket because sapphire is much more scratch resistant than glass.
Frankly I don't understand why people value stones that were dug up out of the ground more than ones created in the lab. It's not like there is a real difference. Besides, if you actually visited a gemstone mine, you would probably lose all the romantic ideas you have about the origin of the stones.
As far as synthetic diamonds go, there are several possible ways to produce them. CVD is commonly done to produce diamond films for research. GE Superabrasives produces industrial diamonds using a high pressure process for decades. The diamonds are small, but they are cost effective. GE also produces "clarity enhanced" diamonds. They take natural diamonds that are lousy color and treat them to make them a more appealing color. Can you tell? I doubt it.
I'm a materials scientist, and I suspect that synthetic diamonds are less than a decade off. When that happens, the whole house of cards that is the diamond industry will come crashing down. Diamonds are not rare, but DeBeers controls most of the supply. When they loose that control, diamonds will crash to a price befitting their rarety.
And don't go around thinking that diamonds have ever been a good investment. The vast majority of diamonds actually depreciate relative to inflation.
Eh....
Diamonds aren't forever, they are only a metastable state.
Besides, "A Diamond is Forever" is a DeBeers marketing sloagan created in the 1920s, not some ancient piece of wisdom.
I remember reading somewhere that a lot of video production houses use iMovie for "video storyboards". Rather than drawing cartoon style storyboards, they go out with a cheap digial videocam and film the basic scenes they want and assemble them in iMovie to show customers what they have in mind.
When they film the final product, they use Final Cut Pro.
The really cool feature Apple introduced with Shake 3 is automatic clustering with Rendezvous. From Apple's Shake page:
Point and click clustering, courtesy of Apple. Looks like a good way to sell Apple's new XServe Cluster Node config.
I think a Dennis Leary comedy routine would probably accomplish more.
I find it amusing that everybody seems to be talking like someone has actually been fined 97.8 billion dollars. That is just the maximum possible sentence based on the charges being levied. If someone got fined that much by the Judge, it would get overturned on appeal as excessive.
Besides, even if the RIAA was awarded more money than the person charged could pay, they could just declare bankrupcy and clear the debt. They cannot take away your means to live.
Yes, but the point was that Ender did not know that. He thought he was training on a simulation. The situations they put him in kept getting harder and harder until they reached the homeworld of the "buggers" where the odds became impossible and so he just blew up the planet. He thought he was being tested and he was angry that they would give him such an impossible task, so he completed it the only way possible, by killing everyone, including his own men.
It worked, but the point was that Ender wouldn't have done it if he knew it was real.