Hey - does this mean I can model Bill Gates' head onto the shoulders of all the monsters that I kill in Doom and Duke Nukem and all those First Person Shooter games?
I'm sure there's lots of people that would love to customize Doom and the other shooter games to add a picture of Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh (the alleged "big fat idiot deaf crackfiend" as I've heard various political 'extremists' call him), and other politicos.
Likewise, this applies to Leisure Suit Larry and Grand Theft Auto - putting specific faces on the people in the games. This could get legally complicated, couldn't it...?
I mean, since Cindy Crawford techically owns almost all of the images of her. Or, her photographers do. So, hypothetically, if I take a set of random headshots (prove which photographer took them!) grab data from it, encode it to become the prostitute character for Grand Theft Auto, then sell the product of this work as a derivative work, is it covered under copyright law as a derivative work, or have I stolen the likeness from the photographers?
Shouldn't there be a red sky? All the dust in the atmosphere is heavily red-tinted due to iron content, by my understanding. Am I wrong? Anyone out there a planetary geologist or actually WORK for NASA?
The above article references some products. Here's the links: 1. Aver.com (product link is HERE has a closed unit (no fan noise, solid state it seems) that is advertised to turn a VGA monitor into a TV. Price: $130.
2. InnoVision (product link is HERE same features. Price: Unknown, pricegrabber.com doesn't have any prices nor does the manufacturer site.
3. ViewSonic (product link is HERE same features. Price: $163
4. WalMart (buy a Micron SuSE PC model "Microtel SYSMAR746 PC With 1.4 GHz Duron" for $199.98, install a Video Card like the "ATI TV Wonder Pro that does this kind of stuff for $65 at Amazon.com figure out how to control it easily and eliminate fan noise) and you've spent about $275 including shipping. It may be more versatile, but you may not need it to be versatile.
If you want a large but immobile telescope, there's a way to do it with a large spinning pool of Mercury. Some canadian university built a nice observatory doing this.
The limitations are that they have to wear breathing protection around it due to Mercury outgassing vapor and them (understandably) wanting to avoid heavy metal poisoning.
However, it apparently makes a wonderful mirror, albeit a parabolic one. It would be interesting if someone could set up a manufacturing process whereby we would spin up Aluminum as a mirror base then spray a thin layer of Silver or chromium onto it to give a polished surface.
Of course I don't know jack about mirrors except that grinding glass ones is a pain in the butt and therefore costly.
In total there are about 10 high-specification PCs on an Ethernet network within the LOCC, most running supporting applications such as image processing.
What are 'high specification' pc's (in their eyes) I wonder...?
Maybe dual processor 3200+ ? Athlons or Pentiums? Built by whom? Big monitors? Any neat case mods here (yah- this is a government entity - no overclocking or neon case mods likely) ?
It might be neat if someone from that program office could answer this question. Whom do we email to request that? Does Beagle have a website? Webmaster? FAQ?
For the uninitiated, there was a James Bond villan (an asian one) named, "Lo Fat". I'm not sure which movie it was, though. I can't find it on any of the lists... Maybe it was Austin Powers instead.
I wonder if the fancy-shmancy simulations they run to figure out what a hurricane will do next have any applicablity to hurricanes in the southern hemisphere (which are commonly referred to as 'Typhoons', right?)
There was a story a while back about amateurs in Canada building a telescope out of a circular spinning table with Mercury on it. The result was a not-very-pointable telescope with a way huge size for very little money. Of course, prolonged exposure to liquid mercury is dangerous to breathe near, but a simple facemask can help a bunch and this would potentially be outside or in an open-topped building anyway.
It seems to me that if the goal is a bunch of all-night observations of whatever piece of sky happens to be overhead, this might be a good telescope to use for that purpose. Superb light-gathering power, relatively cheap to build and operate, transportable, but with limited pointing capability.
I wonder who might be interested in setting up one and linking up the observations with these folks?
I work for a large multinational bank in Chicago. We are aggregating data in a data warehouse and have both lots of sources and lots of data.
The way we cope with this problem is that each data source is given a code (it's usually just the filename). We have a Perl program parse these files (they're comma delimited ascii, tab delimited, DBase IV, etc., and some even human-readable reports), and load the database with the contents. Each record includes the source ID, for easy attribution / tracking.
We keep each file version for a while. Each file has a business date so if they want to clobber a previous version of that data, they get to do so.
This could keep your troubles to a miminum. Write a parser and have a file-upload site that lets people upload data. Define a group of people if you want. They should only be able to add/replace/delete their own data by the nature of the file. Each group can only create a certain filename or the group id is in the file.
This way, many can share database updates via a batch run where updates are tracked and possibly even approved before committing them.
Also, what about just setting up a pair of webcams on both ends, with a normal telephone connection? this should be simple, relatively robust, etc.
Your costs would be bandwidth usage (significant, though someone else can estimate that for me), the webcams themselves (about $200 range for better-than-average versions, though someone can recommend which ones those are), the phone costs (already known).
I've found a list of 'Required Reading' for KU's english department. The list is here if you're interested.
Other Resource from KU's English Dept. are Here and include lots of info for the english teacher of science fiction, even at the High School level.
Literary analysis of Sci Fi is similar to many other kinds of analysis, with the added issue of bringing people into a complex and scientific environment (and problems / solutions involved therewith), believablity, the role of coincidence (as Dostoyevsky said, the quality == less coincidences), etc.
William Gibson, noted sci-fi author, is a prof at the University of Kansas and has taught a course in Literature Of Science Fiction (there are many "Lit Of..." classes there). He may be able to provide a syllabus and lesson plans.
I unfortunately did not take his course while there, I just missed it. Alas.
And you thought that doing a packet flood could just disrupt communications! Disk IO now could get hammered, right? And corrupted? What's the spec say about that?
I believe an OpenMosix cluster CAN help load balance and thus scale an Apache web farm. Follow my logic here: If your web application is serving very heavy requests, you can very easily be CPU bound, not IO bound (disk IO or comms IO). Take for example a web app that queries a database, grabs a large complex result set, parses the results, and creates a graph or PDF file, and thus takes 15 seconds at 100% cpu per request. On a normal Apache server, two simultaneous requests take 30 seconds and no one is happy (bigtime!).
On an openMosix cluster, the first heavy request uses all local CPU. The primary box (the only one running Apache) spawns a new process for the second, 3rd, 4th, etc. requests, which migrate automatically. They use the available custer CPU power, run to completion, migrate back, and the results returned as if the box was just very fast.
I've written several CPU bound web apps; they made me nervous about timeout (I had limited optimization possibilities). I could have solved this worry with openMosix had it been available then.
Please don't get me wrong, Joe Batt (and Thanks! to "benjamindees Alter Relationship"), this cluster concept will be entirely useless serving thousands of static HTML page requests. It wouldn't help a single bit. But with fewer, heavyweight requests, it could solve the problem rather simply.
OpenMosix seems to be an ideal solution where programming time is limited and CPU needs are large (fat requests). If programming time is less limited, you could do the standard 3-tier architecture of a web, application, and database layer. You would then need to build in a one-to-many web-to-application-server architecture, so the app servers did the CPU and returned results to the web server. This method needs much more programming than my openMosix simple solution. If I was architecting Sears.com (I helped there a bit on back-end stuff), I would do 3-tier with a specialized load balancer where I had a support agreement with Quality-of-Service guarantees and liability insurance.
But, if I was serving in-house queries of subsets of what-if scenarios from a data warehouse in PDF format, I'd probably want to use openMosix since the rest of the project would be so complex I'd want to cut down on complexity if at all possible.
Another workaround would be to move the CPU requirements from Server to Client, running a big Java app on the browser box to farm out computing power. Hmmm. This would also require Java programmers, which are fewer in number, expensive, and add a completely new layer to my design. Ug. This approach limits me - I could't cache results, and I could blame their CPU's for the delay. But, Java already adds overhead (and thus time), and I don't know if the libraries are there for everything I want to do (granted Java has lots of libraries but it's not omnipotent). No, I like OpenMosix better here, too.
Further, since adding more CPU is a simple matter of adding another box with a minimum of disk (or network boot), my project costs come way down even if all 14 VPs love my app and spend every morning from 7:30 to 9 running scenarios, I don't have to explain what "CPU Bound" means to them.
OpenMosix is a Linux Kernel Patch that distributes load between Linux boxes invisibly to the user. Spawn an application and it is migrated to the box with the most availble processing power. Details available at OpenMosix.org. It's in wide university use.
Simply put, it makes any group of linux boxes into a highly scalable cluster.
This may do what you wish, it may not, but it's a good option. I'm in process on setting it up t home now - first I had to get a kernel compile going.
OpenMosix sounds very interesting for multiplying processing power. We have more horsepower needs than capability now, and Solaris boxes are WAY too expensive - I want to migrate to an openMosix Linux cluster for way cheap.
It seems reasonable that that gamma radiation (high energy photons) could be intercepted by a 'cloud of electrons' in the polymer in this material.
However, high energy neutrons would not interact with the electrons due to their high velocities. The relativistic effect of width/length contraction applies to these neutrons. This was the fundamental problem of early fission reactors - they had to moderate (reduce the speed of) the neutrons in order for them to appear big enough to interact with a nucleus. An electron is 1,836 times less massive than a proton. Thus you'd need 1836 electrons to equal one proton-with of neutron blocking power. I doubt they have that many electrons in the polymer's cloud!
However, any material that more effectively screens high energy photons is a welcome material. It would also be highly useful in creating X-Ray and Gamma-ray telescopes, methinks! NASA, you listening?
The article should have gone into which radiation types besides Alpha particles that it would block (Alphas I think are just Hydrogen nucleii - or is it Helium...).
Cosmic ray shielding would be useful on the ISS as well, but it would not stop relativistic particles, and it might break down under repeated insults of high energy collisions occurring regularly in space.
Any nuclear engineers out there who can comment better? go Navy?!?
right to form a political party (speak with people about political topics in a group setting);
Non-verbal speech, including right to express love in public (teenagers in some high schools cannot kiss or hug - it's a 'public display of affection');
Non-verbal speech including flag, draft-card, and bra/underwear burning;
Non-verbal speech including civil disobedience;
Sexual (verbal) speech including innocent informational all-ages topics like "condoms prevent disease transmission";
Sexual (verbal) speech only adults should hear;
Non-obscene 'innocent' Pornography in all it's wonderful variety (pictures of naked people);
Non-obscene 'active' Pornography in all the wonderful positions available (pictures of actual coitus);
Non-obscene 'active' Pornography with controversial topics (Mapelthorpe's Peeing on crosses pictures);
I'd be glad to hear from the group Transparency International (often quoted in the Economist) in connection with this project. Perhaps they have a deleate they can send to this conference. I've been reading about their activities helping citizens in many countries ask questions of their governments about election results, closed-door meeting minutes, campaign contributions, budget expenditures, etc.
I'm sure that they'd have an opinion about Free Speech rights in many countries where such rights would do the most good in promoting good governance. Yet, though I've read about them in The Economist, I've not heard of them elsewhere. Is anyone out there a member? Where does Transparency International get funding and is it a good cause (I don't know either way, I just hear good stuff about their activities).
It seems to me a debate about free speech has to hit on the following issues:
Commercial speech (copyright law);
Personal speech about "innocent" topics ("my kid likes dogs");
Personal criticism on controversial topics (e.g., "I hate people that...";-) )
Personal criticism of people ("Joe stinks!");
Personal libelous speech of people ("Joe beats his wife");
Personal libelous speech of public figures ("Senator Joe beats his wife");
Personal speech criticizing government actions ("the Army kidnapped my grandmother");
Asking the government questions ("Hey, Senator, where is my Grandmother?");
Challenging religious thought ("God looks like Bella Abzug!");
Hate speech ("I hate everyone who thinks God looks like Bella Abzug!");
Incitement to Riot speech ("Let's Kill everyone who thinks god looks like Bella Abzug!");
I'm sure my list is meager and could be added to, but perhaps it's a starting point for discussions on the nature of speech. Did I miss any?
I participated in a Data Warehousing project at a fortune 100 retailer that we anticipated could grow to over 10 Exabytes if we threw all our data sources at the same DB. It would have kicked butt, albeit at great (probably non-justifiable) expense.
We figured on prices similar to the ones above, though somewhat inflated as this project was several years ago. The problem was EMC.
I worked with a systems engineer who had headbutted management for years over EMC. EMC has NEVER allowed a head-to-head comparison between their products and any competitor including the retailer I worked for. In our case at least, apparently any time he got his technical managers to get close to requesting a comparision between "in-house" EMC systems and normal DEC Alpha / Compaq drive systems , EMC would get wind of it, call everyone with any power, and invoke the 'strategic relationship' and 'technical partnership' phrases. Management would always falter under such onslaught, so bamboozled they couldn't tell which end was up. The comparisons never went forward.
We did some preliminary comparisons ourselves, reading and writing a several hundred gigabytes of data using a small C program that SEQUENTIALLY read and rewrote data. The EMC was about the same speed as the standard drive system (slightly slower, but not much) for sequential access.
The comparisons were VERY IMFORMATIVE when we read and wrote RANDOM data. EMC was an ABSOLUTE DOG (very, very slow). The problem was that EMC uses a 32K byte buffer because of its mainframe history, so each record we read (a 1 kb record) incurred disk read penalties like we were reading 32 kb.
Further, we learned by rumor that EMC employs 'read-ahead' software that tries to anticipate the next read location and fills the multi-GB buffer with disk data if it detects a sequential read. Since we occassionally had 2 or 3 sequential reads in the middle of our data (the nature of our data made this happen occassionally), the disk array would apparently go hog wild filling buffers for sequential reads it thought we would use but did not.
The final point was that although EMC had good prices initially, they apparently RENT their equipment (you never own your own hardware), so the prices for upkeep/next-years-rental can spiral up at their salesperson's whim.
That's my 5 cents here. Please be aware these were unofficial studies performed during spare cycles by probably incompetent persons including myself; any correspondence between the truth and the above remarks is purely coincidental. This post provided for entertainment purposes only, please don't sue me, I'm a worthless nobody.
What's the difference between it and Mozilla?
on
Netscape 7.0 is Out
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· Score: 0
What's the difference between it and Mozilla?
Where is a link to a page describing the differences?
Pulse jets (like the WWII German V-1 "cruise missle") could transition between air-scoop and rocket. Features:
using atmospheric oxygen as oxidizer at low altitude & speed
use onboard oxygen as oxidizer at higher altitudes and speeds;
climb to 50-60 K feet altitude and refuel conventionally (subsonic of course);
change air scoop / inlet geometry with increasing speed / air density (model this in wind tunnel);
Add oxidizer as needed to optimize fuel efficiency;
Fuel/oxidizer drop-tanks if necessary (cheap, conventional);
pulsejets are non-continuous burn, can shut them down easeier than turbine / rocket engines;
Can use variable-sweep wings for different mach numbers and to optimize wing loading;
Just some ideas.
ALSO: How come we don't see postings on Nasa websites with "what we've considered and why it didn't work" so outside engineers can solve their problems for them...
Continuus (http://www.continuus.com) redirects to Telelogic.com because Continuus (Irvine CA USA)was just purchased for $42 by Telelogic (Malmo Sweden).
I did a white paper on configuration management while a consultant at a... fortune 500 retailer Se**s.com (home of cr****man tools and Ken***e appliances). I evaluated version control and bug tracking combined ('config management' embodies these two functions).
In any large software project, the issues of bug tracking and version control are very, very tightly interwound. With 100+ developers and 20+ quality assurance (qa) testers, we'd get lots of both bugs and fixes. The trouble was how to associate the two. I built some tools for short term use (that are still in use) using (ugg!) PVCS (not polyvinyl chloride:-) ) and a custom built bug database. We'd associate a checkin of several files with a bug number, promote them to(copy 'em into) the qa dir, send a email to qa, and allow qa to approve the change by bug number not by file number, which promoted (copied) them to the production-level directory. Its a pretty smooth system for something we developed in-house, but it would have been nice to have a web interface, and all the bells and whistles that a purchased product would provide.
Building this was a pain in the butt. Continuus does this, as does Rational, but they are both hideously expensive ($300 - $500 per seat). There were some also-rans (close competitors that didn't quite work right or satisfy the criteria).
The big deal was getting something in house fast. The more money it cost, the more time management took to decide (they still haven't). What we (in the open source community, and Linux in particular) need is a toolset that integrates bug tracking and version control tightly. It really multiplies programmer productivity because the time they don't spend copying files for a custom build. QA is happy because they're assured a bug goes away, and that the tests they run can be regressively associated with a bug number and therefore with a set of files that work together, not one at a time.
If I get time, I'll post the white paper that I wrote specifying all the criteria for config management. There's a bunch of config managment links on my homepage at justanyone.com.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey - does this mean I can model Bill Gates' head onto the shoulders of all the monsters that I kill in Doom and Duke Nukem and all those First Person Shooter games?
I'm sure there's lots of people that would love to customize Doom and the other shooter games to add a picture of Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh (the alleged "big fat idiot deaf crackfiend" as I've heard various political 'extremists' call him), and other politicos.
Likewise, this applies to Leisure Suit Larry and Grand Theft Auto - putting specific faces on the people in the games. This could get legally complicated, couldn't it...?
I mean, since Cindy Crawford techically owns almost all of the images of her. Or, her photographers do. So, hypothetically, if I take a set of random headshots (prove which photographer took them!) grab data from it, encode it to become the prostitute character for Grand Theft Auto, then sell the product of this work as a derivative work, is it covered under copyright law as a derivative work, or have I stolen the likeness from the photographers?
Shouldn't there be a red sky? All the dust in the atmosphere is heavily red-tinted due to iron content, by my understanding. Am I wrong? Anyone out there a planetary geologist or actually WORK for NASA?
The above article references some products.
Here's the links:
1. Aver.com (product link is HERE has a closed unit (no fan noise, solid state it seems) that is advertised to turn a VGA monitor into a TV. Price: $130.
2. InnoVision (product link is HERE same features. Price: Unknown, pricegrabber.com doesn't have any prices nor does the manufacturer site.
3. ViewSonic (product link is HERE
same features. Price: $163
4. WalMart (buy a Micron SuSE PC model "Microtel SYSMAR746 PC With 1.4 GHz Duron" for $199.98, install a Video Card like the "ATI TV Wonder Pro that does this kind of stuff for $65 at Amazon.com figure out how to control it easily and eliminate fan noise) and you've spent about $275 including shipping. It may be more versatile, but you may not need it to be versatile.
Just some links, hope this is helpful.
If you want a large but immobile telescope, there's a way to do it with a large spinning pool of Mercury. Some canadian university built a nice observatory doing this.
The limitations are that they have to wear breathing protection around it due to Mercury outgassing vapor and them (understandably) wanting to avoid heavy metal poisoning.
However, it apparently makes a wonderful mirror, albeit a parabolic one. It would be interesting if someone could set up a manufacturing process whereby we would spin up Aluminum as a mirror base then spray a thin layer of Silver or chromium onto it to give a polished surface.
Of course I don't know jack about mirrors except that grinding glass ones is a pain in the butt and therefore costly.
Anyone know more?
My wife brought an HP LaserJet 6P into my life and it works fine with my Linux box (Redhat 7 onwards).
It's been very reliable and we haven't changed toner in about 2 years. Of course, we don't print that much.
They have 3 printers priced at $200, $400, and $600, information is here.
What are 'high specification' pc's (in their eyes) I wonder...?
Maybe dual processor 3200+ ? Athlons or Pentiums? Built by whom? Big monitors? Any neat case mods here (yah- this is a government entity - no overclocking or neon case mods likely) ?
It might be neat if someone from that program office could answer this question. Whom do we email to request that? Does Beagle have a website? Webmaster? FAQ?
For the uninitiated, there was a James Bond villan (an asian one) named, "Lo Fat". I'm not sure which movie it was, though. I can't find it on any of the lists... Maybe it was Austin Powers instead.
I wonder if the fancy-shmancy simulations they run to figure out what a hurricane will do next have any applicablity to hurricanes in the southern hemisphere (which are commonly referred to as 'Typhoons', right?)
There was a story a while back about amateurs in Canada building a telescope out of a circular spinning table with Mercury on it. The result was a not-very-pointable telescope with a way huge size for very little money. Of course, prolonged exposure to liquid mercury is dangerous to breathe near, but a simple facemask can help a bunch and this would potentially be outside or in an open-topped building anyway.
It seems to me that if the goal is a bunch of all-night observations of whatever piece of sky happens to be overhead, this might be a good telescope to use for that purpose. Superb light-gathering power, relatively cheap to build and operate, transportable, but with limited pointing capability.
I wonder who might be interested in setting up one and linking up the observations with these folks?
-- Kevin
Try the trusty tool available from any Viking Supply House.
I work for a large multinational bank in Chicago. We are aggregating data in a data warehouse and have both lots of sources and lots of data.
The way we cope with this problem is that each data source is given a code (it's usually just the filename). We have a Perl program parse these files (they're comma delimited ascii, tab delimited, DBase IV, etc., and some even human-readable reports), and load the database with the contents. Each record includes the source ID, for easy attribution / tracking.
We keep each file version for a while. Each file has a business date so if they want to clobber a previous version of that data, they get to do so.
This could keep your troubles to a miminum. Write a parser and have a file-upload site that lets people upload data. Define a group of people if you want. They should only be able to add/replace/delete their own data by the nature of the file. Each group can only create a certain filename or the group id is in the file.
This way, many can share database updates via a batch run where updates are tracked and possibly even approved before committing them.
What about a MS Netmeeting or another product?
Also, what about just setting up a pair of webcams on both ends, with a normal telephone connection? this should be simple, relatively robust, etc.
Your costs would be bandwidth usage (significant, though someone else can estimate that for me), the webcams themselves (about $200 range for better-than-average versions, though someone can recommend which ones those are), the phone costs (already known).
That's it!
-- Kevin
http://justanyone.com
I've found a list of 'Required Reading' for KU's english department. The list is here if you're interested.
Other Resource from KU's English Dept. are Here and include lots of info for the english teacher of science fiction, even at the High School level.
Literary analysis of Sci Fi is similar to many other kinds of analysis, with the added issue of bringing people into a complex and scientific environment (and problems / solutions involved therewith), believablity, the role of coincidence (as Dostoyevsky said, the quality == less coincidences), etc.
William Gibson, noted sci-fi author, is a prof at the University of Kansas and has taught a course in Literature Of Science Fiction (there are many "Lit Of..." classes there). He may be able to provide a syllabus and lesson plans.
I unfortunately did not take his course while there, I just missed it. Alas.
And you thought that doing a packet flood could just disrupt communications! Disk IO now could get hammered, right? And corrupted? What's the spec say about that?
I used to work at UBS Warburg (Swissbank) and they had a meeting room that was titled 'Triskadekaphobia' on the 12th floor.
Triskadekaphobia == Fear of the number 13.
I believe an OpenMosix cluster CAN help load balance and thus scale an Apache web farm. Follow my logic here: If your web application is serving very heavy requests, you can very easily be CPU bound, not IO bound (disk IO or comms IO). Take for example a web app that queries a database, grabs a large complex result set, parses the results, and creates a graph or PDF file, and thus takes 15 seconds at 100% cpu per request. On a normal Apache server, two simultaneous requests take 30 seconds and no one is happy (bigtime!).
On an openMosix cluster, the first heavy request uses all local CPU. The primary box (the only one running Apache) spawns a new process for the second, 3rd, 4th, etc. requests, which migrate automatically. They use the available custer CPU power, run to completion, migrate back, and the results returned as if the box was just very fast.
I've written several CPU bound web apps; they made me nervous about timeout (I had limited optimization possibilities). I could have solved this worry with openMosix had it been available then.
Please don't get me wrong, Joe Batt (and Thanks! to "benjamindees Alter Relationship"), this cluster concept will be entirely useless serving thousands of static HTML page requests. It wouldn't help a single bit. But with fewer, heavyweight requests, it could solve the problem rather simply.
OpenMosix seems to be an ideal solution where programming time is limited and CPU needs are large (fat requests). If programming time is less limited, you could do the standard 3-tier architecture of a web, application, and database layer. You would then need to build in a one-to-many web-to-application-server architecture, so the app servers did the CPU and returned results to the web server. This method needs much more programming than my openMosix simple solution. If I was architecting Sears.com (I helped there a bit on back-end stuff), I would do 3-tier with a specialized load balancer where I had a support agreement with Quality-of-Service guarantees and liability insurance.
But, if I was serving in-house queries of subsets of what-if scenarios from a data warehouse in PDF format, I'd probably want to use openMosix since the rest of the project would be so complex I'd want to cut down on complexity if at all possible.
Another workaround would be to move the CPU requirements from Server to Client, running a big Java app on the browser box to farm out computing power. Hmmm. This would also require Java programmers, which are fewer in number, expensive, and add a completely new layer to my design. Ug. This approach limits me - I could't cache results, and I could blame their CPU's for the delay. But, Java already adds overhead (and thus time), and I don't know if the libraries are there for everything I want to do (granted Java has lots of libraries but it's not omnipotent). No, I like OpenMosix better here, too.
Further, since adding more CPU is a simple matter of adding another box with a minimum of disk (or network boot), my project costs come way down even if all 14 VPs love my app and spend every morning from 7:30 to 9 running scenarios, I don't have to explain what "CPU Bound" means to them.
OpenMosix is at OpenMosix.org.
OpenMosix is a Linux Kernel Patch that distributes load between Linux boxes invisibly to the user. Spawn an application and it is migrated to the box with the most availble processing power. Details available at OpenMosix.org. It's in wide university use.
Simply put, it makes any group of linux boxes into a highly scalable cluster.
This may do what you wish, it may not, but it's a good option. I'm in process on setting it up t home now - first I had to get a kernel compile going.
OpenMosix sounds very interesting for multiplying processing power. We have more horsepower needs than capability now, and Solaris boxes are WAY too expensive - I want to migrate to an openMosix Linux cluster for way cheap.
It seems reasonable that that gamma radiation (high energy photons) could be intercepted by a 'cloud of electrons' in the polymer in this material.
However, high energy neutrons would not interact with the electrons due to their high velocities. The relativistic effect of width/length contraction applies to these neutrons. This was the fundamental problem of early fission reactors - they had to moderate (reduce the speed of) the neutrons in order for them to appear big enough to interact with a nucleus. An electron is 1,836 times less massive than a proton. Thus you'd need 1836 electrons to equal one proton-with of neutron blocking power. I doubt they have that many electrons in the polymer's cloud!
However, any material that more effectively screens high energy photons is a welcome material. It would also be highly useful in creating X-Ray and Gamma-ray telescopes, methinks! NASA, you listening?
The article should have gone into which radiation types besides Alpha particles that it would block (Alphas I think are just Hydrogen nucleii - or is it Helium...).
Cosmic ray shielding would be useful on the ISS as well, but it would not stop relativistic particles, and it might break down under repeated insults of high energy collisions occurring regularly in space.
Any nuclear engineers out there who can comment better? go Navy?!?
I'm sure that they'd have an opinion about Free Speech rights in many countries where such rights would do the most good in promoting good governance. Yet, though I've read about them in The Economist, I've not heard of them elsewhere. Is anyone out there a member? Where does Transparency International get funding and is it a good cause (I don't know either way, I just hear good stuff about their activities).
It seems to me a debate about free speech has to hit on the following issues:
I'm sure my list is meager and could be added to, but perhaps it's a starting point for discussions on the nature of speech. Did I miss any?
I participated in a Data Warehousing project at a fortune 100 retailer that we anticipated could grow to over 10 Exabytes if we threw all our data sources at the same DB. It would have kicked butt, albeit at great (probably non-justifiable) expense.
We figured on prices similar to the ones above, though somewhat inflated as this project was several years ago. The problem was EMC.
I worked with a systems engineer who had headbutted management for years over EMC. EMC has NEVER allowed a head-to-head comparison between their products and any competitor including the retailer I worked for. In our case at least, apparently any time he got his technical managers to get close to requesting a comparision between "in-house" EMC systems and normal DEC Alpha / Compaq drive systems , EMC would get wind of it, call everyone with any power, and invoke the 'strategic relationship' and 'technical partnership' phrases. Management would always falter under such onslaught, so bamboozled they couldn't tell which end was up. The comparisons never went forward.
We did some preliminary comparisons ourselves, reading and writing a several hundred gigabytes of data using a small C program that SEQUENTIALLY read and rewrote data. The EMC was about the same speed as the standard drive system (slightly slower, but not much) for sequential access.
The comparisons were VERY IMFORMATIVE when we read and wrote RANDOM data. EMC was an ABSOLUTE DOG (very, very slow). The problem was that EMC uses a 32K byte buffer because of its mainframe history, so each record we read (a 1 kb record) incurred disk read penalties like we were reading 32 kb.
Further, we learned by rumor that EMC employs 'read-ahead' software that tries to anticipate the next read location and fills the multi-GB buffer with disk data if it detects a sequential read. Since we occassionally had 2 or 3 sequential reads in the middle of our data (the nature of our data made this happen occassionally), the disk array would apparently go hog wild filling buffers for sequential reads it thought we would use but did not.
The final point was that although EMC had good prices initially, they apparently RENT their equipment (you never own your own hardware), so the prices for upkeep/next-years-rental can spiral up at their salesperson's whim.
That's my 5 cents here. Please be aware these were unofficial studies performed during spare cycles by probably incompetent persons including myself; any correspondence between the truth and the above remarks is purely coincidental. This post provided for entertainment purposes only, please don't sue me, I'm a worthless nobody.
What's the difference between it and Mozilla?
Where is a link to a page describing the differences?
Why bother?
Just some ideas.
ALSO: How come we don't see postings on Nasa websites with "what we've considered and why it didn't work" so outside engineers can solve their problems for them...
Continuus (http://www.continuus.com) redirects to Telelogic.com because Continuus (Irvine CA USA)was just purchased for $42 by Telelogic (Malmo Sweden).
I did a white paper on configuration management while a consultant at a ... fortune 500 retailer Se**s.com (home of cr****man tools and Ken***e appliances). I evaluated version control and bug tracking combined ('config management' embodies these two functions).
In any large software project, the issues of bug tracking and version control are very, very tightly interwound. With 100+ developers and 20+ quality assurance (qa) testers, we'd get lots of both bugs and fixes. The trouble was how to associate the two. I built some tools for short term use (that are still in use) using (ugg!) PVCS (not polyvinyl chloride :-) ) and a custom built bug database. We'd associate a checkin of several files with a bug number, promote them to(copy 'em into) the qa dir, send a email to qa, and allow qa to approve the change by bug number not by file number, which promoted (copied) them to the production-level directory. Its a pretty smooth system for something we developed in-house, but it would have been nice to have a web interface, and all the bells and whistles that a purchased product would provide.
Building this was a pain in the butt. Continuus does this, as does Rational, but they are both hideously expensive ($300 - $500 per seat). There were some also-rans (close competitors that didn't quite work right or satisfy the criteria).
The big deal was getting something in house fast. The more money it cost, the more time management took to decide (they still haven't). What we (in the open source community, and Linux in particular) need is a toolset that integrates bug tracking and version control tightly. It really multiplies programmer productivity because the time they don't spend copying files for a custom build. QA is happy because they're assured a bug goes away, and that the tests they run can be regressively associated with a bug number and therefore with a set of files that work together, not one at a time.
If I get time, I'll post the white paper that I wrote specifying all the criteria for config management. There's a bunch of config managment links on my homepage at justanyone.com.