Anyone who's followed the discussions on comp.arch will be familiar with Nick McLaren's appeals for more to be done on parallelizing algorithm's. The writing has been on the wall for several years now that we'll be seeing incremental improvements in single threaded performance over the next few years.
Along those lines, Sun's work on threading was largely in support of adapting applications to run on multiprocessor systems. This work has been going on for more than a decade and has received additional impetus with the 'Niagara' series processors. Seems to me that Intel has finally seen the light.
The tanker truck was carrying gasolene, which would have about the same flame temperature as jet fuel. Good point in bringing that up with respect to the WTC conspiracy theories.
You could buy CDs as far back as 1983, maybe before, but that's when I first saw them.
1983 sounds about right, don't think they were commercially available before then. CD production didn't start in the US before 1987 - the big push was the 20th anniversary release of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - geez has it been 40 years since the original album was released?
> Ironically, McCarthy underestimated the number of Communists working in the state department - the 'true' number
> derived from Venona intercepts was even higher.
That is completely irrelevant. McCarthy pulled his number out of his ass. In fact, he pulled it out of his ass a few times and it was a different number each time.
It is relevant in that using McCarthy and his 'number' is not the best analogy for this case - wouldn't be good if Ballmer was underestimating the number of patents violated by FOSS.
It would be more fun calling Ballmer the George Creel of software. Creel made McCarthy look like a saint by comparison
in February 1950, an undistinguished, first-term Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, burst into national prominence when, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he held up a piece of paper that he claimed was a list of 205 known communists currently working in the State Department
Ironically, McCarthy underestimated the number of Communists working in the state department - the 'true' number derived from Venona intercepts was even higher.
A few years later a Senator from Massachusetts (initials were JFK) claimed that the Soviet Union had close to 200 missiles ready to launch against the US - the truth was that the Soviets had 6 ICBM's ready by mid-1960. So maybe it is safe to say that Microsoft is to software what Kennedy was to politics?
I did misspeak (miswrote?) on my first post - the US Constitution, prior to amendments, does have a mechanism for limiting government power through the doctrine of Separation of Powers, i.e. the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches (often referred to as checks and balances).
The argument used in favor of expanding wiretapping is that a few would lose some rights so that the 'majority' would retain their 'right' to be free of terror. Similar arguments have been used in wartime where a temporary loss of rights were considered preferable to a permanent loss of rights from losing the war. The worst example in the last century was during the US involvement in WW1 where it was illegal to say anything negative about the war effort - and in retrospect, both the US and the world may have been better off letting Europe settle their differences (read Orwell's 1984 and then read Barry's The Great Influenza).
In addition, there are a couple of areas where the 'innocent until proven guilty' doesn't apply - dealing with the IRS and dealing with the family court system in most states. Also the 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination does not apply to civil cases.
Remember folks that the Constitution is not a document about what rights people possess, nor is it a document that outlines what governments can do. Rather it is a document that describes limits on what government can do and it could be clearly argued that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act violates those provisions in the Constitution designed to protect the individual from unreasonable governmental surveillance.
The central part of the US Constitution pretty much describes what the Federal government can do and gives authority to do so. It is the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments that puts the limits on government powers - and the Bill of Rights was passed because of concerns with the powers granted in the Constitution. The Constitution was created and ratified because the central government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to be effective.
Ernestine was one of Lily Tomlin's characters on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, which pre-dated SNL by 8 years. One of the features of the show was 'News of the Future' - in 1968 they joked about Ronald Reagan being president in 1988 and in 1969 joked about the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989.
I recall reading an article in Science News late 70's or early 80's about some research showing it was the blood vessels in the brain spasming that lead to brain death.
Still some pretty nice work and may lead to quite a few lives being saved.
If the RIAA and associated record companies had an ounce of brains, they would have lobbied the bankruptcy court to allow the chain to keep a good number of stores open. At least they made an attempt to carry a wide assortment of music, especially before the the video department was taking up half the stores.
The problem with Big Box retailers is that they treat everything as a commodity - and music other than the current "hit" is anything but a commodity - someone looking for Tangerine Dream is not likely to pick up the latest Britney Spears album.
Kinda OT, but one of the most heartening thing that Ganz, the creator of Webkinz, did was to specifically not sell to the likes of Stuff*Mart, Target, etc.
To be precise, the Blackbird used an astro-inertial navigation system originally developed for the Skybolt missile. This used the position of the sun or other selected stars to refine the position estimates given by the inertial nav system. A related guidance system is used in the Trident II missile.
I remember reading that same article and getting really excited about it (was a senior in high school). And similar to your experience, ended up getting the HP-45 and using it until about 4-5 years - replaced by grpn. The intro price for the HP-35 was $395 when you could still buy gas for less than $0.30/gallon and the lowest price for a new car was just under $2,000.
BTW, Mac's Service Shop was a holdover from Electronics World which was folded into PopTronics in 1970. I did keep my copy of the issue with the HP-35 story as well as the Jan 1975 issue announcing the Altair 8800.
If the magnets were built to spec, and if proper engineering practices (such as design review) were performed, then it means that multiple minds on both continents missed something and both are responsible.
TFA did state that design reviews were conducted with both Fermilab and CERN folks attending and I agree with you that both organizations are responsible.
An "Oh shit - nobody thunk of that" moment which building a particle accelerator.. Promising.
If you read TFA, the magnet worked fine in normal operation, the problem only occurred when an asymmetric load was put on the cryostat (which might happen when the magnet quenched). The outcome is that you have broken magnets, the major hazard is the helium vented when the magnets quench.
These 'oh shit' moments are not unique to the US - the Europeans have had a few over the last decade:
The first Arienne V lost because of an integer overflow
An Airbus crashing because the flight computer thought overstressing the airframe to be worse than flying into terrain
The delay in delivery of the A380 due to incompatibilities between different versions of a CAD program.
IIRC, one of the resons that Sun bought StarDivsion was to have an M$-Orifice compatible office wuite to run on Solaris. There were some office suites that ran on Solaris, Island Write, Draw & Paint (which had a much saner way of inserting graphics than I've seen in either M$-Orifice or OOo) and AplixWare are two that come to mind - both only had very limited Office compatibility and neither was cheap.
OOo runs on both Solaris/Sparc and Solaris/x86 - both Sparc and x86 versions will work on 32 bit or 64 bit kernals.
Thanks to those who pointed out SonicDSL and DSLExtreme as alternatives, I hope I won't need them.
I'm gonna give speakeasy a chance. They've been a fabulous ISP and they deserve the chance.
I've been a Speakeasy customer for almost three years now and also do not have plans to 'immediately jump ship' - OTOH, I will be paying more attention to alternatives. One would be AT&T's VDSL service (there's a box about one-third mile from my house), but am really turned off by having Yahoo as the ISP (if they offered Sonic.net as an alternative...).
Some of the things that I like about SE are static IP's, web based account management, shell account, IMAP accounts and having their own NTP servers. A couple of downsides in the last year were dropping their support forum (one of the things I liked about my original ISP, CTSnet - which was one of the first 100.com domains) and dropping of plans for IPv6 service.
Sonic.net does sound promising... But they work with SBC/AT&T only
Ugh. I had TFBnet DSL provisioned by SBC and dropped that after a year in favor of Speakeasy - seems like every couple of months SBC would goof and cause a 12 to 24 hour outage of connectivity. Dropouts on Speakeasy have been much fewer and shorter duration.
Now if AT&T would offer Sonic.net on their new vdsl service, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.
The wavelength of 2.4 GHz radio is 12.5 cm, and 5 GHz is 6 cm. As long as your gaps are well below that size, there should be very little power transmitted.
As long as the length of the gaps are much less than that size. A gap that is, say, 2mm wide and 12.5 cm long will make one very nice slot radiator. s another poster pointed out, ground wires are only effective if they are much shorter than a quarter wavelength.
A good follow-up would be to read John M Barrie's The Great Influenza to find out how 1984 was in part inspired by the US under the administration of Woodrow Wilson.
The impact probability for 2007_CA19 is based on a bit over 5 days of observations. Further observations are more likely to decrease impact probability than to increase it. It is definitely worth keeping an eye on, but I wouldn't take impact probabilities too seriously until a few more weeks of observations have taken place.
I see the nitrogen nuclear quadrupole resonance as have more potential in finding IED in the road beds in places like Iraq.
Snicker....
As was pointed out by 'Entrope', NQR is probably not the best choice for detecting roadside IED's - there are other methods better suited for rapid scanning. What NQR would be good for is confirming whether or not a non-conducting anomaly picked up ground penetrating radar contains explosives.
You are correct in stating that NQR would be ineffective against peroxide explosives. The explosives that NQR is especially effective at detecting are also the ones with essentially zero vapor pressure that give problems for trace detectors.
The signals are very weak, even with tens of watts of excitation
Make that several kilowatts (peak) of excitation...
The maximum signal amplitude is directly proportional to the mass of material and inversely proportional to the absolute temperature (until you get to the micro-kelvin temperature). The effective noise is inversely proportional to the square root of the available signal averaging time and that time is a messy function of material, excitation power, receiver recovery time and temperature.
The novel aspect from TFA is the use of SQUIDs for detection which would, under ideal conditions, reduce the noise and thus improve detection performance. The reality is that SQUIDs buy very little in noise performance since most of the noise picked up by a conventional NQR detector comes from either the Johnson noise of the coil or target (room temperature electronics can be made to have a noise temperature of a few Kelvin). The coil noise can be reduced by cooling the coil, but that will come for naught if the target is lossy (e.g. wet soil).
Research into using NQR for explosive detection dates back to the 1970's. The first NQR baggage scanner was built by Al Garroway's group at NRL in the early 1990's using room temperature coils and room temperature electronics.
Ron Sager and Alan Sheldon of Quantum Design used a SQUID in 1992 for detecting the NQR response of ammonium perchlorate (~38kHz), so the Japanese group isn't even the first to use SQUIDs for NQR...
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Along those lines, Sun's work on threading was largely in support of adapting applications to run on multiprocessor systems. This work has been going on for more than a decade and has received additional impetus with the 'Niagara' series processors. Seems to me that Intel has finally seen the light.
The tanker truck was carrying gasolene, which would have about the same flame temperature as jet fuel. Good point in bringing that up with respect to the WTC conspiracy theories.
1983 sounds about right, don't think they were commercially available before then. CD production didn't start in the US before 1987 - the big push was the 20th anniversary release of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - geez has it been 40 years since the original album was released?> derived from Venona intercepts was even higher.
That is completely irrelevant. McCarthy pulled his number out of his ass. In fact, he pulled it out of his ass a few times and it was a different number each time.
It is relevant in that using McCarthy and his 'number' is not the best analogy for this case - wouldn't be good if Ballmer was underestimating the number of patents violated by FOSS.It would be more fun calling Ballmer the George Creel of software. Creel made McCarthy look like a saint by comparison
Ironically, McCarthy underestimated the number of Communists working in the state department - the 'true' number derived from Venona intercepts was even higher.A few years later a Senator from Massachusetts (initials were JFK) claimed that the Soviet Union had close to 200 missiles ready to launch against the US - the truth was that the Soviets had 6 ICBM's ready by mid-1960. So maybe it is safe to say that Microsoft is to software what Kennedy was to politics?
The argument used in favor of expanding wiretapping is that a few would lose some rights so that the 'majority' would retain their 'right' to be free of terror. Similar arguments have been used in wartime where a temporary loss of rights were considered preferable to a permanent loss of rights from losing the war. The worst example in the last century was during the US involvement in WW1 where it was illegal to say anything negative about the war effort - and in retrospect, both the US and the world may have been better off letting Europe settle their differences (read Orwell's 1984 and then read Barry's The Great Influenza).
In addition, there are a couple of areas where the 'innocent until proven guilty' doesn't apply - dealing with the IRS and dealing with the family court system in most states. Also the 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination does not apply to civil cases.
The central part of the US Constitution pretty much describes what the Federal government can do and gives authority to do so. It is the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments that puts the limits on government powers - and the Bill of Rights was passed because of concerns with the powers granted in the Constitution. The Constitution was created and ratified because the central government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to be effective.
Ernestine was one of Lily Tomlin's characters on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, which pre-dated SNL by 8 years. One of the features of the show was 'News of the Future' - in 1968 they joked about Ronald Reagan being president in 1988 and in 1969 joked about the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989.Still some pretty nice work and may lead to quite a few lives being saved.
The problem with Big Box retailers is that they treat everything as a commodity - and music other than the current "hit" is anything but a commodity - someone looking for Tangerine Dream is not likely to pick up the latest Britney Spears album.
Kinda OT, but one of the most heartening thing that Ganz, the creator of Webkinz, did was to specifically not sell to the likes of Stuff*Mart, Target, etc.
To be precise, the Blackbird used an astro-inertial navigation system originally developed for the Skybolt missile. This used the position of the sun or other selected stars to refine the position estimates given by the inertial nav system. A related guidance system is used in the Trident II missile.
BTW, Mac's Service Shop was a holdover from Electronics World which was folded into PopTronics in 1970. I did keep my copy of the issue with the HP-35 story as well as the Jan 1975 issue announcing the Altair 8800.
TFA did state that design reviews were conducted with both Fermilab and CERN folks attending and I agree with you that both organizations are responsible.
If you read TFA, the magnet worked fine in normal operation, the problem only occurred when an asymmetric load was put on the cryostat (which might happen when the magnet quenched). The outcome is that you have broken magnets, the major hazard is the helium vented when the magnets quench.
These 'oh shit' moments are not unique to the US - the Europeans have had a few over the last decade:
The first Arienne V lost because of an integer overflow
An Airbus crashing because the flight computer thought overstressing the airframe to be worse than flying into terrain
The delay in delivery of the A380 due to incompatibilities between different versions of a CAD program.
OOo runs on both Solaris/Sparc and Solaris/x86 - both Sparc and x86 versions will work on 32 bit or 64 bit kernals.
I'm gonna give speakeasy a chance. They've been a fabulous ISP and they deserve the chance.
I've been a Speakeasy customer for almost three years now and also do not have plans to 'immediately jump ship' - OTOH, I will be paying more attention to alternatives. One would be AT&T's VDSL service (there's a box about one-third mile from my house), but am really turned off by having Yahoo as the ISP (if they offered Sonic.net as an alternative...).Some of the things that I like about SE are static IP's, web based account management, shell account, IMAP accounts and having their own NTP servers. A couple of downsides in the last year were dropping their support forum (one of the things I liked about my original ISP, CTSnet - which was one of the first 100
Ugh. I had TFBnet DSL provisioned by SBC and dropped that after a year in favor of Speakeasy - seems like every couple of months SBC would goof and cause a 12 to 24 hour outage of connectivity. Dropouts on Speakeasy have been much fewer and shorter duration.
Now if AT&T would offer Sonic.net on their new vdsl service, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.
As long as the length of the gaps are much less than that size. A gap that is, say, 2mm wide and 12.5 cm long will make one very nice slot radiator. s another poster pointed out, ground wires are only effective if they are much shorter than a quarter wavelength.
Not with 'simple paint'. This could be done with panels of circuit board material with structures that resonate at 2.4 GHz.
A good follow-up would be to read John M Barrie's The Great Influenza to find out how 1984 was in part inspired by the US under the administration of Woodrow Wilson.
The impact probability for 2007_CA19 is based on a bit over 5 days of observations. Further observations are more likely to decrease impact probability than to increase it. It is definitely worth keeping an eye on, but I wouldn't take impact probabilities too seriously until a few more weeks of observations have taken place.
Snicker....
As was pointed out by 'Entrope', NQR is probably not the best choice for detecting roadside IED's - there are other methods better suited for rapid scanning. What NQR would be good for is confirming whether or not a non-conducting anomaly picked up ground penetrating radar contains explosives.
You are correct in stating that NQR would be ineffective against peroxide explosives. The explosives that NQR is especially effective at detecting are also the ones with essentially zero vapor pressure that give problems for trace detectors.
Make that several kilowatts (peak) of excitation...
The maximum signal amplitude is directly proportional to the mass of material and inversely proportional to the absolute temperature (until you get to the micro-kelvin temperature). The effective noise is inversely proportional to the square root of the available signal averaging time and that time is a messy function of material, excitation power, receiver recovery time and temperature.
The novel aspect from TFA is the use of SQUIDs for detection which would, under ideal conditions, reduce the noise and thus improve detection performance. The reality is that SQUIDs buy very little in noise performance since most of the noise picked up by a conventional NQR detector comes from either the Johnson noise of the coil or target (room temperature electronics can be made to have a noise temperature of a few Kelvin). The coil noise can be reduced by cooling the coil, but that will come for naught if the target is lossy (e.g. wet soil).
Ron Sager and Alan Sheldon of Quantum Design used a SQUID in 1992 for detecting the NQR response of ammonium perchlorate (~38kHz), so the Japanese group isn't even the first to use SQUIDs for NQR...
At least I hope you're staying away from the new-fangled 12AT7's in favor of the tried and true UX-199's.