Are these leaks the reason that firefox is so abysmally slow on my mac? I love firefox on Windows, but it seems really unresponsive on a (1.5 GHz 512 MB ram) mac portable. Most of the time, it freezes up with the spinning ball of death on page load, and eventually (after a few seconds) displays the page. During that time it's impossible to even move the page, let alone read other pages. So - no page loading in the background while I read things for me. This problem seems to not have been fixed in this new release. Ah well... i guess it's safari for me still. I guess I go run away with my firefox support questions elsewhere...
Actually, the z-machine is a relatively cheap device. 100's of millions instead of billions. Much cheaper than other fusion test devices like NIF http://www.llnl.gov/nif/ or ITER http://www.iter.org/
The magnetic fields and forces are a result of the fact that the z-pinch uses an enromous current to both create the magnetic field as well as generate the plasma. Mega amps of current flow along the wire cage creating a magnetic field. The flow of current also heats the cage to temperatures which are hot enough to ionize the atoms making up the cage. These ionized atoms are the plasma generated by the machine. The magnetic forces discussed is owing to the charge of the ion, not on the magnetic moment of its nucleus. The ions are charged, and consequently are driven by a lorentz force as the ions move through the magentic field (F = q v x B). The moving ions also generate magnetic fields, which complicates the whole affair further.
Of course, iron sits at the bottom of the nuclear binding energy saddle, so you would get little energy from either fusing or fissing an iron nucleus. Anything nuclear happening here is likely from some other element in the reaction or in the vicinity of the reaction.
What there is left to nuclear weapons research today is understanding what happens to nuclear weapons as they age. This is the goal of so-called 'stock-pile stewardship.' And since we are currently not testing nuclear weapons, there's no empirical way to understand how our decades-old nuclear stock pile will perform today and in the future. These laser facilities will be able to provide weapons designers some information on the subject. That's one major reason why the DOE is willing to spend tens of billions of dollars on these facilities.
Break even can be defined in a number of ways. I think the next big goal of fusion research is to achieve "ignition" (which has not yet been achieved by any reactor.) Ignition implies a sustained reaction in which the energy produced by fusion is in turn used to sustain the fusion process. If I understand this, ignition in the case of NIF involved completely burning one fuel pellet with the energy produced mosty by fusion and ignited by the laser pulse (with a reactor built from NIF-type laser operating by burning multiple pellets.) In magnetically confined fusion, this would involve a sustained reaction within a confined plasma with fuel being continually injected into the plasma and burned by the "ignited" reaction sustained in the reaction vessel. I believe ignition of this type is the goal of the ITER project www.iter.org
The national energy research scientific computing center (NERSC: http://www.nersc.gov ) is actively working on creating computing clusters capable of a petaflop within the next five years (I can't seem to find a reference on their website, but as I understand it, this is one of their oeprating goals.) NERSC facilities are used extensively to model the kinds of processes involved in this sort of fusion as well as others (The z-pinch, for example, http://zpinch.sandia.gov/ ) I'm sure groups are using this facility to do computation for magnetically confined fusion, and certainly all theses tasks are being worked on by other groups. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab does much work in all these fields, and their website has links to many other sites devoted to plasma and fusion ( http://www.pppl.gov )
I disagree with the statement that careers are being wasted on dark matter studies.
Without some sort of hypothesis to explain a phenomena, no progress would be made whatsover. Okay - so maybe dark matter will not be the ultimate explanation to the question of why universe is apparently lacking mass, but careers spent studying the possible existance of dark matter and ways one would detect said matter if it did exist does ultimately yield information about the nature of the world.
After all, without the Michaelson-Morley experiment, we may have continued laboring under the idea that we exist in an ether. And without a testable hypothesis for the ether, there would have been no experiment.
You don't need to do anything special to get the aqua look and feel (ALF) on OS X - the aqua look and feel is the look which is the standard "java look and feel" for swing. OS X's JVM uses aqua to implement the gui for swing apps. Therefore, there's nothing to move to some other system, unless you want to port the JVM as well as aqua. If you run a swing app with an aqua look and feel on any other jvm, it just looks like a standard swing app for that platform.
let me tell you how shocking it was to take a swing app which you were used to running on windows and running it on OS X, automatically gaining the very-nice ALF...
I disagree about apple being strictly a hardware company. Probably a large percentage of their revenue comes from hardware sales - true. But I don't think that apple is fundamentally marketing their hardware. They may not have explicitly stated this, but when buying apple harware you implictly get the apple OS (unless you install linux.)
Now, whether you like the OS or not, I think what apple is really trying to do is make an effort at a unified computer experience. I'm not going to argue about the success or failure of this.However, if you pull off such a thing it has a some advantages over using cheap x86's and assorted hardware.
Admittedly, the aging MacOS (= 9.x) had limited usefulness for today's market. OS X has much broader market appeal if it's accepted. I suspect that whether it succeeds or fails will be largely based on what apple ultimately decides its importance in the market will be.
Personally, I long for the old days of MacOS when things worked the first time you plugged them in. I sincerely doubt that this will ever be truly possible on an entire hardware base like x86 where everyone and their grandmother has a different x86 flavor floating around.
And sure, you lose choice and diversity and good things like that. But I'd be willing to pay more and have fewer choices if I knew it would work for me (not that that's a guarantee at the moment, minf you.) If apple can do this again, and they can make people believe them, I feel that this could be one of apple's stronger points.
NeXT failed due to price and poor marketing. With hardware that had a price tag of $5000-$10000, it was never going to be a consumer success. Despite this failure, cocoa is an excellent API, and NeXTStep and excellent OS (just like Be;) )
Apple stands a better chance of making this work for them now where companies like NeXT and Be failed for the following reasons: numbers and marketing. Apple may not have as many users as, say, MS does. However a 5,000,000 machine base does speak to companies, and people *will* develop programs with mass appeal on it.
NeXT didn't fail because the technology was bad - NeXT failed because of losing on the business end. Of course, Apple can blow this one as well, but I think they have a better chance right now than NeXT ever had.
Slashdot Mirror
Are these leaks the reason that firefox is so abysmally slow on my mac? I love firefox on Windows, but it seems really unresponsive on a (1.5 GHz 512 MB ram) mac portable. Most of the time, it freezes up with the spinning ball of death on page load, and eventually (after a few seconds) displays the page. During that time it's impossible to even move the page, let alone read other pages. So - no page loading in the background while I read things for me. This problem seems to not have been fixed in this new release. Ah well... i guess it's safari for me still. I guess I go run away with my firefox support questions elsewhere...
-x
Actually, the z-machine is a relatively cheap device. 100's of millions instead of billions. Much cheaper than other fusion test devices like NIF http://www.llnl.gov/nif/ or ITER http://www.iter.org/
These are multi-billion dollar devices.
The magnetic fields and forces are a result of the fact that the z-pinch uses an enromous current to both create the magnetic field as well as generate the plasma. Mega amps of current flow along the wire cage creating a magnetic field. The flow of current also heats the cage to temperatures which are hot enough to ionize the atoms making up the cage. These ionized atoms are the plasma generated by the machine. The magnetic forces discussed is owing to the charge of the ion, not on the magnetic moment of its nucleus. The ions are charged, and consequently are driven by a lorentz force as the ions move through the magentic field (F = q v x B). The moving ions also generate magnetic fields, which complicates the whole affair further.
Of course, iron sits at the bottom of the nuclear binding energy saddle, so you would get little energy from either fusing or fissing an iron nucleus. Anything nuclear happening here is likely from some other element in the reaction or in the vicinity of the reaction.
The first laptop I ever used (company computer) was actually called a 'PowerBrick'. Not the most auspicious nomiker ever...
What there is left to nuclear weapons research today is understanding what happens to nuclear weapons as they age. This is the goal of so-called 'stock-pile stewardship.' And since we are currently not testing nuclear weapons, there's no empirical way to understand how our decades-old nuclear stock pile will perform today and in the future. These laser facilities will be able to provide weapons designers some information on the subject. That's one major reason why the DOE is willing to spend tens of billions of dollars on these facilities.
-xest
Break even can be defined in a number of ways. I think the next big goal of fusion research is to achieve "ignition" (which has not yet been achieved by any reactor.) Ignition implies a sustained reaction in which the energy produced by fusion is in turn used to sustain the fusion process. If I understand this, ignition in the case of NIF involved completely burning one fuel pellet with the energy produced mosty by fusion and ignited by the laser pulse (with a reactor built from NIF-type laser operating by burning multiple pellets.) In magnetically confined fusion, this would involve a sustained reaction within a confined plasma with fuel being continually injected into the plasma and burned by the "ignited" reaction sustained in the reaction vessel. I believe ignition of this type is the goal of the ITER project www.iter.org
The national energy research scientific computing center (NERSC: http://www.nersc.gov ) is actively working on creating computing clusters capable of a petaflop within the next five years (I can't seem to find a reference on their website, but as I understand it, this is one of their oeprating goals.) NERSC facilities are used extensively to model the kinds of processes involved in this sort of fusion as well as others (The z-pinch, for example, http://zpinch.sandia.gov/ ) I'm sure groups are using this facility to do computation for magnetically confined fusion, and certainly all theses tasks are being worked on by other groups. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab does much work in all these fields, and their website has links to many other sites devoted to plasma and fusion ( http://www.pppl.gov )
I disagree with the statement that careers are being wasted on dark matter studies.
Without some sort of hypothesis to explain a phenomena, no progress would be made whatsover. Okay - so maybe dark matter will not be the ultimate explanation to the question of why universe is apparently lacking mass, but careers spent studying the possible existance of dark matter and ways one would detect said matter if it did exist does ultimately yield information about the nature of the world.
After all, without the Michaelson-Morley experiment, we may have continued laboring under the idea that we exist in an ether. And without a testable hypothesis for the ether, there would have been no experiment.
You don't need to do anything special to get the aqua look and feel (ALF) on OS X - the aqua look and feel is the look which is the standard "java look and feel" for swing. OS X's JVM uses aqua to implement the gui for swing apps. Therefore, there's nothing to move to some other system, unless you want to port the JVM as well as aqua. If you run a swing app with an aqua look and feel on any other jvm, it just looks like a standard swing app for that platform. let me tell you how shocking it was to take a swing app which you were used to running on windows and running it on OS X, automatically gaining the very-nice ALF...
I disagree about apple being strictly a hardware company. Probably a large percentage of their revenue comes from hardware sales - true. But I don't think that apple is fundamentally marketing their hardware. They may not have explicitly stated this, but when buying apple harware you implictly get the apple OS (unless you install linux.) Now, whether you like the OS or not, I think what apple is really trying to do is make an effort at a unified computer experience. I'm not going to argue about the success or failure of this.However, if you pull off such a thing it has a some advantages over using cheap x86's and assorted hardware. Admittedly, the aging MacOS (= 9.x) had limited usefulness for today's market. OS X has much broader market appeal if it's accepted. I suspect that whether it succeeds or fails will be largely based on what apple ultimately decides its importance in the market will be. Personally, I long for the old days of MacOS when things worked the first time you plugged them in. I sincerely doubt that this will ever be truly possible on an entire hardware base like x86 where everyone and their grandmother has a different x86 flavor floating around. And sure, you lose choice and diversity and good things like that. But I'd be willing to pay more and have fewer choices if I knew it would work for me (not that that's a guarantee at the moment, minf you.) If apple can do this again, and they can make people believe them, I feel that this could be one of apple's stronger points.
NeXT failed due to price and poor marketing. With hardware that had a price tag of $5000-$10000, it was never going to be a consumer success. Despite this failure, cocoa is an excellent API, and NeXTStep and excellent OS (just like Be ;) )
Apple stands a better chance of making this work for them now where companies like NeXT and Be failed for the following reasons: numbers and marketing. Apple may not have as many users as, say, MS does. However a 5,000,000 machine base does speak to companies, and people *will* develop programs with mass appeal on it.
NeXT didn't fail because the technology was bad - NeXT failed because of losing on the business end. Of course, Apple can blow this one as well, but I think they have a better chance right now than NeXT ever had.