what does low end mean?
on
Low-end Laptops?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I think you can still find some pentium based laptops on ebay for around $200 or so. It's more than the $80 that you were talking about, but I think it's quite reasonable.
For something like that, it's only really useful for terminal and low end word processing / browsing use, but that might be enough for you.
I think the other thing is that people don't need to upgrade their laptops that much anymore either: most pII based laptops have enough to run the stuff that people want to run anyway. It might not be just that the upgrade cycles have gotten longer because of the economy.
maybe this is the same problem that affected the old intel venus pentium pro motherboards.
What you described happens when you try to do a w2k shutdown on that board.
The other thing is, on NT4, they had an APM thing that properly shut down the thing, but microsoft won't make an equivalent one available for w2k+
Clearly they have the code to make things work, and I wonder why they don't have that available as an option somewhere to use different apm/acpi routines. It's not even like it's going to affect the rest of the system since this is a shutdown command and any instability introduced at that point will quickly be irrelevant.
Something like this and the article makes you wonder more about those theories that microsoft is in league with the hardware manufacturers to continually update your hardware.
As far as I understand, positrons and probably anti-ions would be affected by an electric/magnetic field and therefore can be controlled somewhat.
An anti-hydrogen would be a neutral antiatom, and the only way you could move it would be if you were to physically push it somewhere. The problem now might be that after you create the stuff you can't move it around anymore without an explosion.
And ever try keeping hydrogen in a jar? It doesn't want to stay in a jar for very long. I'm thinking that anti-hydrogen would behave in the same way, and once it gets out, normal atmosphere has normal hydrogen all over the place.
Of course the guys at CERN will be smarter than I am here, so they probably have some way out of this problem, but they haven't mentioned it in the new scientist article.
The lasers can be mounted on buildings' walls or roofs or behind windows, but they all must have one essential: a clear line of sight between the transmitting laser and its receiver
so yes, you can go window to window, but you're not restricted to that.
sure, you can't see IR laser beams, but it might not take very much to look at the packets going over the beam: the tranceiver assemblies are supposed to already take care of interference from air turbulence, so they might not notice if someone refracts off a little bit of the beam to their own receiver.
two problems to overcome:
1) how are you going to get up a couple of floors to do this, and
2) what if (and I would hope they do) encrypt the data stream?
while the use of calculated sunrise and sunset times are pretty neat, a simple photosensor might be an idea too. (Of course, the photosensor might get dirty and give faulty data.)
And what happens if the server hangs (which is possible if not likely)? The pool might get much more clorination than he hoped for.
Parallel backup safety systems is probably a good idea here - perhaps just a 555 variant (cascaded?) circuit with a long, if not accurate, delay time that shuts down the system if it ever stays on too long.
someone else do the math here, but even if they double the price on those 10% of the people using the 70% of the bandwidth, they don't get that much. And if they also drop the price on some of those 90% (probably greater than 20% of the whole), they're probably going to end up getting less total revenue than they are right now.
Or maybe they're going after the, say, 30% using 50% of the bandwidth?
I checked, the natural number summation is by gauss.
A variation of that can be used to sum the digits from 1 to n:
- sum from 1-9, get 45 (gauss).
- notice that the sums cycle with cycle length 10
- use the following forumula:
- m = (n+1)/10 (gets 1, 2, 3,...)
- [m * 45] + [(m(m-1)/2)*10]
- the second part of the sum is gauss
where n is 1 less than a multiple of 10. e.g. n can be 9, 19, 29, etc...
I think I got my math right. But I could be wrong.
I'm not sure that this 'test' really serves to differentiate applicants:
- assuming that the base 4 transform really is as trivial as it sounds (can't get at the link - site overloaded probably) there are two ways to solve the summation problem:
1) with brute force summation
2) with euler's method (well, one of euler's methods [n*(n+1)/2])
with 1) you get the CS people who are sometimes too lazy to know the math.
but with 2) you get the math people who are too lazy to write the brute force algorithm.
But since this is a first-reply contest and since it is the cs/math departments accepting applicants, it probably doesn't matter who they get. Maybe they shunt people into different departments depending on the answer?
that idea is nothing new. some people think that it's possible that the entire universe is within the event horizon of a black hole. Another way of looking at it is the question of is the universe open, closed, or static.
Since a black hole is something that nothing escapes out of the event horizon of (disregarding hawking radiation), if the universe is closed and collapses on itself, by definition, we are inside a big black hole, and if it's open, it's not.
there's also the people who think that the singularity never forms in the observable lifetime of the black hole because as the center mass contracts, things slow down (because time / speed of light is 'apparently' slower in gravitational fields)
I got bitten by the 2.4.5 included in slackware 8. Got it working on a p60 mb, but wouldn't boot on a 486. I thought it was my falut at first because I thought that a problem as basic as booting shouldn't have made it all the way up to.5. Either not many people are running 486's anymore or no one's complaining.
well, there's always the possibility of magnetic braking - even though it doesn't sound as cool as areobraking. The shuttle did an experiment a while ago where they stuck out a long wire (in a loop) and had it generate so much current that it melted the wire or blew a fuse. Obviously that power came from potential energy from the shuttle's orbit thereby slowing it down or dropping it's orbit. Imagine what all that power could be used for: for the braking phase, the probe could be sending out really strong radio signals if it's transmitter didn't get fried first.
But then mars doesn't have a magnetic field. Pity. It might be workable for Jupiter or some other magnetic-field-endowed planet though.
Offtopic, but it's interesting to know that the University of British Columbia has the ubc.edu domain too as the article links to. As a former UBC student, I always thought that it was just ubc.ca... Always thought that.edu was just for the american universities. Simon Fraser University - also in Vancouver, BC is just sfu.ca, not sfu.edu.
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I think you can still find some pentium based laptops on ebay for around $200 or so. It's more than the $80 that you were talking about, but I think it's quite reasonable.
For something like that, it's only really useful for terminal and low end word processing / browsing use, but that might be enough for you.
I think the other thing is that people don't need to upgrade their laptops that much anymore either: most pII based laptops have enough to run the stuff that people want to run anyway. It might not be just that the upgrade cycles have gotten longer because of the economy.
maybe this is the same problem that affected the old intel venus pentium pro motherboards.
What you described happens when you try to do a w2k shutdown on that board.
The other thing is, on NT4, they had an APM thing that properly shut down the thing, but microsoft won't make an equivalent one available for w2k+
Clearly they have the code to make things work, and I wonder why they don't have that available as an option somewhere to use different apm/acpi routines. It's not even like it's going to affect the rest of the system since this is a shutdown command and any instability introduced at that point will quickly be irrelevant.
Something like this and the article makes you wonder more about those theories that microsoft is in league with the hardware manufacturers to continually update your hardware.
for more math than you probably want to look at, you can try:
http://sdphca.ucsd.edu/pdf_files/PHP04331.pdf
It's a paper on how to trap neutral atoms and it's pretty neat the way they get the fields to cancel out.
http://press.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/f actory/AM-factory04-b.html
says that they just let the things anhiliate.
As far as I understand, positrons and probably anti-ions would be affected by an electric/magnetic field and therefore can be controlled somewhat.
An anti-hydrogen would be a neutral antiatom, and the only way you could move it would be if you were to physically push it somewhere. The problem now might be that after you create the stuff you can't move it around anymore without an explosion.
And ever try keeping hydrogen in a jar? It doesn't want to stay in a jar for very long. I'm thinking that anti-hydrogen would behave in the same way, and once it gets out, normal atmosphere has normal hydrogen all over the place.
Of course the guys at CERN will be smarter than I am here, so they probably have some way out of this problem, but they haven't mentioned it in the new scientist article.
quote from the article:
The lasers can be mounted on buildings' walls or roofs or behind windows, but they all must have one essential: a clear line of sight between the transmitting laser and its receiver
so yes, you can go window to window, but you're not restricted to that.
sure, you can't see IR laser beams, but it might not take very much to look at the packets going over the beam: the tranceiver assemblies are supposed to already take care of interference from air turbulence, so they might not notice if someone refracts off a little bit of the beam to their own receiver.
two problems to overcome:
1) how are you going to get up a couple of floors to do this, and
2) what if (and I would hope they do) encrypt the data stream?
last I looked they don't have any respect for statues. What makes people think that their rooftop mounted equipment will be safe?
while the use of calculated sunrise and sunset times are pretty neat, a simple photosensor might be an idea too. (Of course, the photosensor might get dirty and give faulty data.)
And what happens if the server hangs (which is possible if not likely)? The pool might get much more clorination than he hoped for.
Parallel backup safety systems is probably a good idea here - perhaps just a 555 variant (cascaded?) circuit with a long, if not accurate, delay time that shuts down the system if it ever stays on too long.
someone else do the math here, but even if they double the price on those 10% of the people using the 70% of the bandwidth, they don't get that much. And if they also drop the price on some of those 90% (probably greater than 20% of the whole), they're probably going to end up getting less total revenue than they are right now.
Or maybe they're going after the, say, 30% using 50% of the bandwidth?
first techtv writes it on the 23rd, then abcnews (mind the ads, here...) gets it from them on the 24th, and now slashdot 3 days after even that.
oops, am wrong. missed the recurrences (cycles are at 10^n for n > 0)
I checked, the natural number summation is by gauss.
...)
A variation of that can be used to sum the digits from 1 to n:
- sum from 1-9, get 45 (gauss).
- notice that the sums cycle with cycle length 10
- use the following forumula:
- m = (n+1)/10 (gets 1, 2, 3,
- [m * 45] + [(m(m-1)/2)*10]
- the second part of the sum is gauss
where n is 1 less than a multiple of 10. e.g. n can be 9, 19, 29, etc...
I think I got my math right. But I could be wrong.
oh right Gauss. Got Euler and Gauss mixed up.
But wasn't the story that Gauss got into trouble for using his summation method? Maybe these guys require a manual summation...
I'm not sure that this 'test' really serves to differentiate applicants:
- assuming that the base 4 transform really is as trivial as it sounds (can't get at the link - site overloaded probably) there are two ways to solve the summation problem:
1) with brute force summation
2) with euler's method (well, one of euler's methods [n*(n+1)/2])
with 1) you get the CS people who are sometimes too lazy to know the math.
but with 2) you get the math people who are too lazy to write the brute force algorithm.
But since this is a first-reply contest and since it is the cs/math departments accepting applicants, it probably doesn't matter who they get. Maybe they shunt people into different departments depending on the answer?
that idea is nothing new. some people think that it's possible that the entire universe is within the event horizon of a black hole. Another way of looking at it is the question of is the universe open, closed, or static.
Since a black hole is something that nothing escapes out of the event horizon of (disregarding hawking radiation), if the universe is closed and collapses on itself, by definition, we are inside a big black hole, and if it's open, it's not.
there's also the people who think that the singularity never forms in the observable lifetime of the black hole because as the center mass contracts, things slow down (because time / speed of light is 'apparently' slower in gravitational fields)
I got bitten by the 2.4.5 included in slackware 8. Got it working on a p60 mb, but wouldn't boot on a 486. I thought it was my falut at first because I thought that a problem as basic as booting shouldn't have made it all the way up to .5. Either not many people are running 486's anymore or no one's complaining.
2.4.17 at least boots fine now.
well, there's always the possibility of magnetic braking - even though it doesn't sound as cool as areobraking. The shuttle did an experiment a while ago where they stuck out a long wire (in a loop) and had it generate so much current that it melted the wire or blew a fuse. Obviously that power came from potential energy from the shuttle's orbit thereby slowing it down or dropping it's orbit. Imagine what all that power could be used for: for the braking phase, the probe could be sending out really strong radio signals if it's transmitter didn't get fried first.
But then mars doesn't have a magnetic field. Pity. It might be workable for Jupiter or some other magnetic-field-endowed planet though.
well, if they had a kitten eating scene, that would qualify (according to the cartoon series) as pure evil
yes, the cartoon series was much better - especailly the endings. Does anyone know if they're going to do any more of those?
Offtopic, but it's interesting to know that the University of British Columbia has the ubc.edu domain too as the article links to. As a former UBC student, I always thought that it was just ubc.ca... Always thought that .edu was just for the american universities. Simon Fraser University - also in Vancouver, BC is just sfu.ca, not sfu.edu.