Why the hell is this flamebait? Don't tell me you Americans are suddely ashamed of all the shit your government does, and doesn't do, when it shouldn't and should? It may not be directly on-topic, but I've got a fair idea it's accurate, and certainly relevant.
I can't believe that no one has realised this! Don't you understand fellow slashdotters? The entire moonie "conspiracy theory" is a conspiracy! It was clearly perpetrated by some rival government in the hopes that it would discredit NASA, thereby reducing the rate at which America is able to launch ion-drive powered vessels into space, so that the rival government can do it first! Then, they will make contact with the Moon People referred to in an earlier post, and the reason that America did not send people back to the moon, and they will obtain the perfect dental mouth-wash, thereby rendering all technology developed by America null, since the entire populace of this rival country will have sparkling white teeth and never have to floss! Who is this evil faction? Please tell me you've worked it out by now -- it's Antarctica of course! That's where all those little flying saucers come from, isn't it?
Can I please repeat what this evidently intellectually-equipped individual has just said?
What the eff is the point of a beautifully-rendered piece of eye-candy when it means nothing? It's like watching a TV series just for the visual effects, or going to a movie simply because Leonardo DiCaprio is going to get wet (my favourite example). Give me a deep story line with complex non-player interaction and conversations as well! I won't care if the graphics are blocky, 320x200, and super aliased.
Ultima, Star Control II, System Shock 1 and 2, and Deus Ex rock the universe. Or so I've been told...now I just have to get them.
Why is everyone so obsessed with the latest game graphics, when the story lines suck eggs (or don't even exist)?
I know very little of such things, however it occurs to me that each pixel, if using only 8-bit colour, would require individual paletting. Now, I'm really not sure about this but it strikes me that calculating every individual palette would probably eat into performance at least as much as using a standard 32-bit palette for all the pixels at once, especially when there are four times the number. Can somebody with a bit more knowledge in this area verify?
Hmm, that's interesting about defining things by wavelength actually. I think I heard it somewhere before, but I never really thought about it. Thanks for enlightening me on that aspect at least;)
With regard to metre being pronounced metree, however, I think that's about as old as the Imperial system. Generally any word ending with re is simply pronounced like a word ending in er. And no, using the old spelling of kilogramme is simply that; old. Although no doubt its death can be directly attributed to the American influence once again.
As for the other moron who seems to think that spelling things differently in order to define between them is a bad idea...well, I guess he's very easily confused by unusual spellings and suchlike. Me, I prefer to know what somebody means when I'm reading something. I come back to the old kB versus kb versus KB versus Kb argument. Use the right freaking spelling so you know if it's a kilobyte or a kilobit. Same applies for megabyte and megabit, gigabyte and gigabit, terabyte and terabit, petabyte and petabit...I could go on. Oh, and don't forget just plain bytes and bits. (This argument's right off that article on Sony's monster graphics processor.)
Oh my God, an American who can spell! You think I mispelled gauge by accident?
And no, I'm not thinking of the kilogram; I'm thinking of the actual piece of metal that is exactly one metre long and by which every other metric length-measuring device is scaled.
Since when are the English the ones who insist on using an outdated and confusing method of measuring everything, also known as the Imperial System? (Somebody a long way back in this thread said "English/metric" or somesuch thing). Sure, they developed it, but the only ones too stupid to see the error of their ways were the Americans, not them. Get your facts straight.
There's also an important thing that all those Americans out there should know. Just because you've bastardised the spelling of such things as centre, turning it into center (and let's not even go near words that should end with our) does not mean you can do the same with words like metre which actually have different meanings for different spellings (although that's never stopped you before I guess, just look at check versus cheque). A meter is a guage, a device for measuring a specific quantity of something. A metre, on the other hand, is a unit of length (which I believe resides somewhere in Europe; France?).
If you don't use the metric system, don't screw it up, and if you do use it, do it properly. I know it's vastly inferior to the oh-so-efficient and thoroughly-convenient-to-use metric system, and therefore worthy prey for illiterate American geeks (check the difference between a geek and a nerd on dictionary.com if you can work out how to use it -- this is supposed to be news for nerds), but you are not (contrary to "public" opinion) the centre of the universe, or even anywhere near it.
Is that sarcasm you detect in my voice?
Please note that I am not targeting most Americans in this rant; only the select few that splash their garbage all over slashdot. However, since the majority of slashdotters are probably American anyway, and this posting is way off-topic into the bargain, go ahead and give me a -1. Gee, I care.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't this what Windows 2000 already does with its "Hibernate" feature? Write everything in RAM to a file on disk, and then reload that file into RAM when the PC boots again? Sure, it isn't instant on, but it's quicker than a complete boot (unless you have freaking 320 MB of RAM like me, and it takes ages to write back). It seems that this is some major revelation that people are suggesting, but then I may have the wrong end of the stick. Come to think of it, does anyone actually use Windows 2000? Perhaps you should try it; contrary to common belief, and at risk of severe loss of karma, it is probably the best operating system you can currently buy. No kidding. I hate Microsoft too, but I am bound by the truth.
And I know that replying to your own posts is really rather sad, but I suddenly remembered the reason that I hadn't decided that those nanobots should only be atoms wide (because, by 2072 we would probably be able to do that without any trouble).
How hard would it be for a nanobot manufactured at, say, 100 atoms length, to manipulate any kind of object realistically? Sure, it can stick atoms together, and rudimentary molecules if it's clever, but try shifting a skin cell with something that small. You'd need about five hundred nanites just to be able to put a composite picture of the cell together, surrounding it and viewing it from a relatively large distance. So patching up your cuts like you're hoping will be slightly hard when the cut is on such a large scale compared to the machines that stitching up the skin would be like one of us trying to pull two continents back together.
Then you want the poor things to start building you cars and skyscrapers, and doing all sorts of things. This goes beyond the ludicrous; hell, with enough power I guess you could pull two continents across the oceans, tearing up the Earth in the process (and how would you manage to apply the force evenly over the masses, I wonder? You sure couldn't just pull on one point), but to put a skyscraper together would be like building a structure almost the size of the Solar System, and a lot more complex, and filled with more material. Don't just think in terms of linear distance; think cubicly and you get an idea of the enourmous scale involved. Just so you don't have to go and look up useless information like this yourselves, the Solar System is around 4.5 Tm (terametres), or 4.5 billion kilometres in radius, using the so-called new standard that Pluto is no longer classified as a planet (which I think I saw on SlashDot also). If you include Pluto, that's 5.9 Tm; 11.8 Tm in diameter. This is around 860 Tm cubed. Rather a lot of space for one of us to cover, so relatively speaking it's about the same for the poor nanite. This is obviously looking at quite a small cut, and quite a large skyscraper.
Subsequently, I decided on cell-sized nanites, which made sense anyway, since their movement engine is based on the molecular motion engine found in plant cells.
I am working on a book that contains, in part, some nanotechnology. I didn't like the scope that it brought, so in the plot I asserted that it had been outlawed by the UN (so maybe I'm stupid) due to the dangers involved. Now, I'm no mathemetician, but I worked out what is probably a very rough estimate of the kind of damange a run-away grey goo scenario could do, on the off-chance that it could happen. Sure, it won't, but it could and that was the premise for outlawing nanotechnology that involved bots of any kind.
This is an extract directly out of my glossary:
grey goo scenario A concept first formulated at some stage during the late twentieth century, based on the projections of a possible runaway "breeding" situation with nanites. At the time, research into the construction of nanites using a biological engine was underway in America by several independent research organizations, with many varied and generally benevolent goals in mind. Nanites, had they been developed to a viable solution, could have theoretically done anything from repairing damaged tissue at a cellular level in cancer patients to building a car, or even a skyscraper, from the ground up. The idea was that you would start out with a certain number of nanites, which would then "breed", creating more of themselves from raw materials in order to increase the speed at which a job could be performed. Since it involved an exponential growth factor something like that of bacteria only around thirty times faster, a single nanite placed on a table and instructed to multiply could theoretically result in a patch of "grey goo" about ten millimetres square by one millimetre high in just twenty minutes, which would be approximately 25 million nanites. This was an exciting prospect, however if the nanites could turn a bit of table into goo (which is what a large number of them clustered would look like) then what would happen if they didn't stop there? Theoretically, operating at maximum efficiency, there could be in the order of 5.369 10 ^17 nanites in just twelve hours and 1.441 10 ^18 in a day. A more realistic estimate, assuming that each nanite would have to extract raw material from its surroundings in order to build another, and allowing for the necessary travel time (otherwise the inner nanites would have no food), would calculate them to take probably four times that long to reach this number. So, in four days there could be over one quintillion nanites.
Each nanite takes up around four cubic microns, so a number this large would occupy a space of 5.765 10 ^12 m^3. The volume of the Earth is only 1.083 10 ^9 metres cubed. This being the case, and even allowing for vastly slower reproductive speeds, an out-of-control nanite growth could easily consume the mass of the Earth in well under a week. In such a situation, the "grey goo scenario", there is virtually nothing that could be done to prevent the nanites from spreading. For this reason, research into nanites was banned by international treaty in 2007.
[After the Earth, the nanites would have to wait a while before they could consume another planet, and while I don't think that it's within my capabilities to work out how long they would take to consume the galaxy (how would they eat a star, I wonder?) I am sure it would be sooner rather than later. Pretty scary huh? Humanity responsible for the destruction of the galaxy--and who said we were insignificant?]
Hmm. Just some thoughts, probably erroneous. If anyone wants to correct the maths, or anything else for that matter, I would be grateful, not annoyed. Oh, and I know that something occupying 4 cubic microns is technically not on the nano-scale, but that's beside the point. They're still called nanobots because the name has become synonomous with a microscopic machine.
I know you probably can anyway; your comment seemed nicely civil, but surely you can see the slight idiocy of using "KBPS" for kilobits per second, when kilobytes per second are also used and would look the same? Which one are you referring to? This is the reason that intelligent people like computer programmers and scientists first developed ways of distinguishing between such things (or at least, I hope it is). I mean, it's just a little above-averagely obvious that confusion will arise by having the same notation for two different things. Now this Binary SI, that sounds like a good idea. Thanks for that useful bit of info whatsyourface; it's actually helped me more than you realise.
And yes, I know about the factor of two thing; I did mention that k was not actually one thousand, but 1024...perhaps I should have been clearer. Also, you are technically correct about using a capital K; it's just that I'm a perfectionist and I hate seeing a perfectly good SI unit going to waste;) Now, people like Yahoo! who have "File space available: 100232 Kb" really get my goat; you wonder how stupid they are? I can manage the capital K, but the lowercase b is just downright stupid, not ignorant. I know they mean kilobyte (or do they?), so why don't they just freaking say so like someone with a brain would?
Don't answer that last question; it's rhetorical and blindingly obvious.
If you'd place an acknowledgement after your Sig quote people might be more impressed. You do know who you're quoting, don't you? And, perhaps if you read more closely yourself, you'd realise that this "clarification" about the size has already been said about five hundred times before.
Okay, here's the deal. You all seem to have a fair grasp of the complexities of how many bits there are in a byte, how many bytes in a kilobyte...etc, etc...(except, of course, for our friend who believes there to be 128 MB in 256 Mb)
Now, let's go onto something more simple. The SI notations for these things, which would really help when people are reporting on professional newspages or SlashDot alike, so we don't have to freaking guess what you mean!
1. a bit is a lowercase "b
2. a byte is an uppercase "B"
3. the prefix for a thousand is a lowercase "k" (don't listen to Microsoft and all the other sheep who think it's a capital; they're both wrong and stupid)
4. the prefix for a million is an uppercase "M"
5. the prefix for a thousandth is a lowercase "m".
In case you want to know this as well, though it's not directly relevant to the confusion here, the notation for a billion is an uppercase "G" and the notation for a trillion is an uppercase "T".
Now, some examples so you can remember this. It's really rather simple; in case you feel bogged down by the immense complexity, a small "m" means it's a small number, a big "M" means it's a big number.
So, a Mb is a megabit, one million bits.
A MB is a megabyte, one million bytes.
A kb is a kilobit, one thousand bits (okay, technically these are all 1024, not 1000, but that's not the issue; if it were they could not technically be called kilo- or mega-bits or -bytes.)
A kB is a kilobyte, one thousand bytes.
That should be all you need to start your new lifestyle. If you're still having difficulty with these concepts, pack your computer back into its original packaging (don't worry if you don't have it; just use any old cardboard box), kiss it goodbye and send it back to where you bought it from, because you're too stupid to own one. Do not ask for your money back.
Well, we can just hope that they haven't registered a whole lot of other names to make them obviously trademark squatting; if they can get away with this, who cares that it's filling some areshole's pocket? It's still pissing off Microsoft and costing them money...now, if only we could all register names and be bought out, we'd have a real chance of taking down those bastards. The only problem here is that if MS does buy out this company, who I think we can probably assume are trademark squatting (and a bloody good idea it was too, don't you think?), it sends a message that MS has the power to buy out pretty much anything. Well I guess, no shit. Nothing new there. On the other side of that coin, maybe the message will get out that it's possible to screw Microsoft for as much money as you freaking can, and more people will try it. Oh, I see the balancing of the economy already. What a wonderful sight it is too...
Re:Survival Research Labs has used one for years
on
DIY Railgun Projects
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· Score: 1
It occurs to me that, in all the instances I have seen, having the projectile plasmarise due to the extreme velocity and energy involved has been considered a bad thing. This is understandable, as a railgun should fire a solid projectile, however I am sure I cannot be the only one to think that having the entire projectile reduced to plasma has turned the railgun into a plasma gun. I would expect that this plasma would be remarkably destructive, as plasma is, probably more so than a projectile since it is burning at a fairly high temperature. The only question I have is how much of this energy would be disapated before reaching the target and, indeed, whether the plasma, having the same mass as the projectile but a larger surface area, would get to the target at all. Would air resistance cause a significant problem, or would the plasma gain energy by igniting the surrouning air? And at what kind of speed would the plasma be likely to leave the muzzle as opposed to the projectile. Take a weapon with a 4 km/s projectile velocity; if we allowed that projectile to be vaporised at launch, would it still manage 4 km/s? It seems unlikely, but perhaps a compromise would be to allow most of the projectile to vaporise, while leaving a solid core to carry the momentum more efficiently? Ideas?
Re:I'm sure this is all wrong
on
Plastic Valley?
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· Score: 1
Just slightly off the topic, while remaining somewhat on it as well; has anyone heard of laser-optic chips, or something similar? I have not actually investigated this in any detail, but this article just reminded me of some research I saw a long time ago into the idea of using light and mirrors as logic gates, instead of standard transistors. I may have this all backwards, but I am presuming that some sad slashdotter like myself, with far too little to do at work, and far too much bandwidth, has found or knows something about the issue.
Heavens, has no one heard of this nifty invention called the plasmadisplay? For God's sake, anything involving electrons requires power in proportions I find it difficult to believe a PDA could output for more than a second. Plasmadisplays are getting cheaper, brighter, require less power and can be flexible. You'd better check the date on your Commodore 64 man--it's the twenty-first century and it's happening faster than you think. Believe it; Star Trek is real; they just pretend it's a TV show.
Sure, okay. A 10 Mbps link is actually 12.5 MBps, but I doubt you'd be able to maintain that as a peak. Still, most 5400 rpm ATA 66 hardrives wouldn't often get above that speed anyway. The only problem is setting up the network so your terminal will boot off the server. Probably with Linux it's easy--I'm no expert on Tux. But I do know that with Windows and DOS it's virtually impossible, this according to a good friend of mine who's tried his damndest without the benefit of Windows 2000 Server. I guess it depends what netcards you use also. It would probably still be a fairly tricky arrangement to work out, but you're right. It sure would be nice and quiet.
Just in addition to this, I would like to take the time to wonder: I recently bought a 30 GB IBM DeskStar, 7200 rpm ATA 100 version (is there any other 30 GB version?) and, sure, it's quiet. But it's not silent. In fact, I can hear it quite clearly when it grinds. Admittedly my computer's side panel nearest to me is always off, so the hardrive is in plain view, and sure I have my box on my desk about half a metre from my head. What's the arrangement of all you people that claim not to be able to hear them? Hmm, here's another thing: I have no system fan, only one CPU fan and my little PSU fan at the back, so I can't claim my hardrive is inaudible because it's drowned out by the sound of whirring. But still, I can play music and still hear the hardrive when it's thrashing. Only thrashing though. I checked the IBM site, and yes, this is supposed to be the quietest hardrive on the market. I wonder if I got a dud. My new Philips monitor is having fuzziness issues, and smells a bit like something's burning inside...although it doesn't feel so hot on top...buying duds is something that happens to me a lot.
It occurs to me now, that we aren't exactly on the topic any more.
the_Brainz (Hey! I scored 83% on the SlashDot test!)
Slashdot Mirror
Why the hell is this flamebait? Don't tell me you Americans are suddely ashamed of all the shit your government does, and doesn't do, when it shouldn't and should? It may not be directly on-topic, but I've got a fair idea it's accurate, and certainly relevant.
I can't believe that no one has realised this! Don't you understand fellow slashdotters? The entire moonie "conspiracy theory" is a conspiracy! It was clearly perpetrated by some rival government in the hopes that it would discredit NASA, thereby reducing the rate at which America is able to launch ion-drive powered vessels into space, so that the rival government can do it first! Then, they will make contact with the Moon People referred to in an earlier post, and the reason that America did not send people back to the moon, and they will obtain the perfect dental mouth-wash, thereby rendering all technology developed by America null, since the entire populace of this rival country will have sparkling white teeth and never have to floss! Who is this evil faction? Please tell me you've worked it out by now -- it's Antarctica of course! That's where all those little flying saucers come from, isn't it?
I seem to recall Shakespeare referring to the moon a number of times. Maybe it's another conspiracy, but didn't he die some time before 1950?
What the eff is the point of a beautifully-rendered piece of eye-candy when it means nothing? It's like watching a TV series just for the visual effects, or going to a movie simply because Leonardo DiCaprio is going to get wet (my favourite example). Give me a deep story line with complex non-player interaction and conversations as well! I won't care if the graphics are blocky, 320x200, and super aliased. Ultima, Star Control II, System Shock 1 and 2, and Deus Ex rock the universe. Or so I've been told...now I just have to get them.
Why is everyone so obsessed with the latest game graphics, when the story lines suck eggs (or don't even exist)?
I know very little of such things, however it occurs to me that each pixel, if using only 8-bit colour, would require individual paletting. Now, I'm really not sure about this but it strikes me that calculating every individual palette would probably eat into performance at least as much as using a standard 32-bit palette for all the pixels at once, especially when there are four times the number. Can somebody with a bit more knowledge in this area verify?
With regard to metre being pronounced metree, however, I think that's about as old as the Imperial system. Generally any word ending with re is simply pronounced like a word ending in er. And no, using the old spelling of kilogramme is simply that; old. Although no doubt its death can be directly attributed to the American influence once again.
As for the other moron who seems to think that spelling things differently in order to define between them is a bad idea...well, I guess he's very easily confused by unusual spellings and suchlike. Me, I prefer to know what somebody means when I'm reading something. I come back to the old kB versus kb versus KB versus Kb argument. Use the right freaking spelling so you know if it's a kilobyte or a kilobit. Same applies for megabyte and megabit, gigabyte and gigabit, terabyte and terabit, petabyte and petabit...I could go on. Oh, and don't forget just plain bytes and bits. (This argument's right off that article on Sony's monster graphics processor.)
return 0;
And no, I'm not thinking of the kilogram; I'm thinking of the actual piece of metal that is exactly one metre long and by which every other metric length-measuring device is scaled.
return 0;
There's also an important thing that all those Americans out there should know. Just because you've bastardised the spelling of such things as centre, turning it into center (and let's not even go near words that should end with our) does not mean you can do the same with words like metre which actually have different meanings for different spellings (although that's never stopped you before I guess, just look at check versus cheque). A meter is a guage, a device for measuring a specific quantity of something. A metre, on the other hand, is a unit of length (which I believe resides somewhere in Europe; France?).
If you don't use the metric system, don't screw it up, and if you do use it, do it properly. I know it's vastly inferior to the oh-so-efficient and thoroughly-convenient-to-use metric system, and therefore worthy prey for illiterate American geeks (check the difference between a geek and a nerd on dictionary.com if you can work out how to use it -- this is supposed to be news for nerds), but you are not (contrary to "public" opinion) the centre of the universe, or even anywhere near it.
Is that sarcasm you detect in my voice?
Please note that I am not targeting most Americans in this rant; only the select few that splash their garbage all over slashdot. However, since the majority of slashdotters are probably American anyway, and this posting is way off-topic into the bargain, go ahead and give me a -1. Gee, I care.
Really.
return 0;
return 0;
How hard would it be for a nanobot manufactured at, say, 100 atoms length, to manipulate any kind of object realistically? Sure, it can stick atoms together, and rudimentary molecules if it's clever, but try shifting a skin cell with something that small. You'd need about five hundred nanites just to be able to put a composite picture of the cell together, surrounding it and viewing it from a relatively large distance. So patching up your cuts like you're hoping will be slightly hard when the cut is on such a large scale compared to the machines that stitching up the skin would be like one of us trying to pull two continents back together.
Then you want the poor things to start building you cars and skyscrapers, and doing all sorts of things. This goes beyond the ludicrous; hell, with enough power I guess you could pull two continents across the oceans, tearing up the Earth in the process (and how would you manage to apply the force evenly over the masses, I wonder? You sure couldn't just pull on one point), but to put a skyscraper together would be like building a structure almost the size of the Solar System, and a lot more complex, and filled with more material. Don't just think in terms of linear distance; think cubicly and you get an idea of the enourmous scale involved. Just so you don't have to go and look up useless information like this yourselves, the Solar System is around 4.5 Tm (terametres), or 4.5 billion kilometres in radius, using the so-called new standard that Pluto is no longer classified as a planet (which I think I saw on SlashDot also). If you include Pluto, that's 5.9 Tm; 11.8 Tm in diameter. This is around 860 Tm cubed. Rather a lot of space for one of us to cover, so relatively speaking it's about the same for the poor nanite. This is obviously looking at quite a small cut, and quite a large skyscraper.
Subsequently, I decided on cell-sized nanites, which made sense anyway, since their movement engine is based on the molecular motion engine found in plant cells.
This is an extract directly out of my glossary:
grey goo scenario A concept first formulated at some stage during the late twentieth century, based on the projections of a possible runaway "breeding" situation with nanites. At the time, research into the construction of nanites using a biological engine was underway in America by several independent research organizations, with many varied and generally benevolent goals in mind. Nanites, had they been developed to a viable solution, could have theoretically done anything from repairing damaged tissue at a cellular level in cancer patients to building a car, or even a skyscraper, from the ground up. The idea was that you would start out with a certain number of nanites, which would then "breed", creating more of themselves from raw materials in order to increase the speed at which a job could be performed. Since it involved an exponential growth factor something like that of bacteria only around thirty times faster, a single nanite placed on a table and instructed to multiply could theoretically result in a patch of "grey goo" about ten millimetres square by one millimetre high in just twenty minutes, which would be approximately 25 million nanites. This was an exciting prospect, however if the nanites could turn a bit of table into goo (which is what a large number of them clustered would look like) then what would happen if they didn't stop there? Theoretically, operating at maximum efficiency, there could be in the order of 5.369 10 ^17 nanites in just twelve hours and 1.441 10 ^18 in a day. A more realistic estimate, assuming that each nanite would have to extract raw material from its surroundings in order to build another, and allowing for the necessary travel time (otherwise the inner nanites would have no food), would calculate them to take probably four times that long to reach this number. So, in four days there could be over one quintillion nanites. Each nanite takes up around four cubic microns, so a number this large would occupy a space of 5.765 10 ^12 m^3. The volume of the Earth is only 1.083 10 ^9 metres cubed. This being the case, and even allowing for vastly slower reproductive speeds, an out-of-control nanite growth could easily consume the mass of the Earth in well under a week. In such a situation, the "grey goo scenario", there is virtually nothing that could be done to prevent the nanites from spreading. For this reason, research into nanites was banned by international treaty in 2007.
[After the Earth, the nanites would have to wait a while before they could consume another planet, and while I don't think that it's within my capabilities to work out how long they would take to consume the galaxy (how would they eat a star, I wonder?) I am sure it would be sooner rather than later. Pretty scary huh? Humanity responsible for the destruction of the galaxy--and who said we were insignificant?]
Hmm. Just some thoughts, probably erroneous. If anyone wants to correct the maths, or anything else for that matter, I would be grateful, not annoyed. Oh, and I know that something occupying 4 cubic microns is technically not on the nano-scale, but that's beside the point. They're still called nanobots because the name has become synonomous with a microscopic machine.
return 0;
Don't answer that last question; it's rhetorical and blindingly obvious.
If you'd place an acknowledgement after your Sig quote people might be more impressed. You do know who you're quoting, don't you? And, perhaps if you read more closely yourself, you'd realise that this "clarification" about the size has already been said about five hundred times before.
Now, let's go onto something more simple. The SI notations for these things, which would really help when people are reporting on professional newspages or SlashDot alike, so we don't have to freaking guess what you mean!
1. a bit is a lowercase "b
2. a byte is an uppercase "B"
3. the prefix for a thousand is a lowercase "k" (don't listen to Microsoft and all the other sheep who think it's a capital; they're both wrong and stupid)
4. the prefix for a million is an uppercase "M"
5. the prefix for a thousandth is a lowercase "m".
In case you want to know this as well, though it's not directly relevant to the confusion here, the notation for a billion is an uppercase "G" and the notation for a trillion is an uppercase "T".
Now, some examples so you can remember this. It's really rather simple; in case you feel bogged down by the immense complexity, a small "m" means it's a small number, a big "M" means it's a big number.
So, a Mb is a megabit, one million bits.
A MB is a megabyte, one million bytes.
A kb is a kilobit, one thousand bits (okay, technically these are all 1024, not 1000, but that's not the issue; if it were they could not technically be called kilo- or mega-bits or -bytes.)
A kB is a kilobyte, one thousand bytes.
That should be all you need to start your new lifestyle. If you're still having difficulty with these concepts, pack your computer back into its original packaging (don't worry if you don't have it; just use any old cardboard box), kiss it goodbye and send it back to where you bought it from, because you're too stupid to own one. Do not ask for your money back.
return 0;
Well, we can just hope that they haven't registered a whole lot of other names to make them obviously trademark squatting; if they can get away with this, who cares that it's filling some areshole's pocket? It's still pissing off Microsoft and costing them money...now, if only we could all register names and be bought out, we'd have a real chance of taking down those bastards. The only problem here is that if MS does buy out this company, who I think we can probably assume are trademark squatting (and a bloody good idea it was too, don't you think?), it sends a message that MS has the power to buy out pretty much anything. Well I guess, no shit. Nothing new there. On the other side of that coin, maybe the message will get out that it's possible to screw Microsoft for as much money as you freaking can, and more people will try it. Oh, I see the balancing of the economy already. What a wonderful sight it is too...
It occurs to me that, in all the instances I have seen, having the projectile plasmarise due to the extreme velocity and energy involved has been considered a bad thing. This is understandable, as a railgun should fire a solid projectile, however I am sure I cannot be the only one to think that having the entire projectile reduced to plasma has turned the railgun into a plasma gun. I would expect that this plasma would be remarkably destructive, as plasma is, probably more so than a projectile since it is burning at a fairly high temperature. The only question I have is how much of this energy would be disapated before reaching the target and, indeed, whether the plasma, having the same mass as the projectile but a larger surface area, would get to the target at all. Would air resistance cause a significant problem, or would the plasma gain energy by igniting the surrouning air? And at what kind of speed would the plasma be likely to leave the muzzle as opposed to the projectile. Take a weapon with a 4 km/s projectile velocity; if we allowed that projectile to be vaporised at launch, would it still manage 4 km/s? It seems unlikely, but perhaps a compromise would be to allow most of the projectile to vaporise, while leaving a solid core to carry the momentum more efficiently? Ideas?
Just slightly off the topic, while remaining somewhat on it as well; has anyone heard of laser-optic chips, or something similar? I have not actually investigated this in any detail, but this article just reminded me of some research I saw a long time ago into the idea of using light and mirrors as logic gates, instead of standard transistors. I may have this all backwards, but I am presuming that some sad slashdotter like myself, with far too little to do at work, and far too much bandwidth, has found or knows something about the issue.
Just in addition to this, I would like to take the time to wonder: I recently bought a 30 GB IBM DeskStar, 7200 rpm ATA 100 version (is there any other 30 GB version?) and, sure, it's quiet. But it's not silent. In fact, I can hear it quite clearly when it grinds. Admittedly my computer's side panel nearest to me is always off, so the hardrive is in plain view, and sure I have my box on my desk about half a metre from my head. What's the arrangement of all you people that claim not to be able to hear them? Hmm, here's another thing: I have no system fan, only one CPU fan and my little PSU fan at the back, so I can't claim my hardrive is inaudible because it's drowned out by the sound of whirring. But still, I can play music and still hear the hardrive when it's thrashing. Only thrashing though. I checked the IBM site, and yes, this is supposed to be the quietest hardrive on the market. I wonder if I got a dud. My new Philips monitor is having fuzziness issues, and smells a bit like something's burning inside...although it doesn't feel so hot on top...buying duds is something that happens to me a lot.
It occurs to me now, that we aren't exactly on the topic any more.
the_Brainz (Hey! I scored 83% on the SlashDot test!)