From the article, it's pretty obvious that the SETI project seems to have plenty of search power. I'm a bit disheartened that they still haven't found anything yet. I know it's a gigantic universe with an almost infinite amount of places to search, but not finding anything must say something about the scarcity of aliens/civilizations/radio/whatever. Or perhaps the aliens have simply switched to fiber...
Not sure if that's a good analogy. You pay money for magazines or newspapers (i.e. subscription) but they're still loaded with ads. If you paid for how much it really cost to produce those publications, the subscription rates would be much, much higher. Same for TV, radio, and most media. They sell ads (and subscriptions) to pay the bills. Why should the net be any different? The fact that a content provider needs to sell ads doesn't particularly reflect on the quality of the content.
Salon is in financial trouble. They started a premium service to get more money, but still offer a lot of content for free. I guess if more people subscribed as premium members, this would not be an issue. If they need to do this to stay afloat, then that's their business. Salon is a great site, and I'm personally willing to put up with a few ads. I just hope they keep going.
Radio has become so generic with companies such as Clear Channel and Infinity owning over half of all stations. Satellite radio might be the answer. I just hope some of these 100 stations will actually play something decent. Otherwise, my $400 is going into a nice car MP3 player.
"Even if they did receive a large # of letters, chances are that a staff assistant or legislative correspondent would draft some sort of stock letter to be sent in response"
Yes, but they do calculate a running tally of who is for and against an issue. A lot of letters advocating a specific point will have an effect. I do agree showing up and getting in your representative's face is also a good tactic.
NO - In addition to the "mere 5000-6000 dead" as the original poster stated. The point is, everyone is affected. Hundreds of thousands of people will lose thier jobs -- people with children to support. And, sadly, more people will die as this conflict heats up.
Ummm... mere 5000-6000 dead? Get some perspective. Drunk drivers don't blow up $30 billion in prime real estate, destroy an entire industry so that over 80,000 airline employees lose their jobs, and cause the stock market to lose over $1 trillion in value. Every single person in this country has been affected by this, either physically, emotionally or financially.
My motherboard's BIOS (Epox D3VA - dual 800 PIII) has a feature where you can set the machine to power down if the temp gets above a certain point. I'm sure most other motherboards have this feature, so why don't people use it? Would prevent a lot of fried silicon...
BTW - Here's a question - what's the temp where a processor gets permanently damaged? I think I have my BIOS sutting down somewhere between 65-70C (my processors usually run 38-40C)
But... at least Russia still has a few chips to bargain with - nuclear weapons, vast resources that US companies want, etc.. etc...
Not sure if Putin wants to spend those chips on Dmitry, but pointing out the hypocrisy of the situation might have some leverage.
If Dmitry was from a smaller/third world country he'd be a lot more screwed. At least Putin still has a direct line to Washington - for what its worth.
The discovery page seems dead. But, going out on a limb -- from what I've read, it seems to take about 6 months to get to mars. There have been more than a few people who've lasted this long in space, and they seemed to have nice smiles when they returned.
Once on mars, the effects should be mitigated by the gravitational field - right? How much less is mars' gravity compared to earth?
Instead of wiring it to a fixed point in the house (meaning I have to wire the WHOLE house with CAT5) they should put rechargable batteries in the thing and an 802.11 card instead of plain old ethernet.
That way, I can take the thing anywhere! My own MP3 radio station! (Well, within limits, of course... ) But I do think that wireless would be the true killer app for this stuff.
Siggraph seemed much smaller/calmer
on
SIGGRAPH 2001
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Was just me, or was Siggraph much smaller this year? I've been going for over 10 years, and just seemed as though there weren't as many people and vendors. Side Effects (Houdini) wasn't there, and Disney also pulled out at the last minute. I think everyone I ran into mentioned it was a much calmer show than previous years.
Also - the level of technical advancement seems to be leveling off. In the past, my jaw always dropped at least once during the show. The NVidia/Square realtime Final Fantasy was cool, and there was a nice IBM 600dpi monitor, but that was about it. Outside of a few things (ExLuna, for one) no huge software releases, either. Mostly incremental improvements.
Perhaps it's to the point where the technology is getting "good enough" (relative term, I know...) The only things that really made my jaw drop was the content itself. In the Electronic Theater, I'd see a really good film, then the credits would list just one person... Jaw drop. Pretty amazing how far it's all come.
I'm 6'3 and I love my Aeron. Of course, I bought a large (you know, of course, they come in small, medium, large...) Most companies buy mediums, which can be a bit tight, and the smalls dig into my shoulder blades, too.
It seems as though using rocket thrust for landing is a HUGE waste of fuel. Plus it seems kinda risky - as you land, the exhaust bouncing back up off the ground could set your vehicle on fire. Dangerous! This is not a practical concept.
Robotics isn't engineering? Gimme a break! Mindstorms is totally an engineering toy. I seem to recall they even use it at some engineering schools.
The Technic stuff has lots of the bits and my old Erector set had, plus more - motors, gears, pulleys, etc. You can totally understand how mechanical devices are put together, and build some pretty complex gizmos.
The only difference between Lego and Erector/Meccano is the bolts (which I always lost anyways.) Oh yeah, and Mecanno/Erector rusts and tends to slice open little kids fingers. This guy is just angry that his favorite childhood toy is unpopular.
I disagree. The shape of the bits is irrelavant. Lego is still cool. My four year old son loves Lego. When he gets a new set, we build the spaceship/robot/whatever and then, invariably, he gets bored of it, takes it apart and builds something completely different out of the bits. Its just as creative a process as when I was a kid. Big deal that he has a windshield for his car that actually *looks* like a windshield.
What about all the people that Microsoft will need to hire just to answer the phones from people who've upgraded their memory/disk/NIC/whatever and need their code reauthrorized? I could imagine all of these bogus phone calls adding up.
Yeah, I'm sure MS will pass these costs on, pi$$ing off its customers both when they buy the software and when they need to upgrade their machines to run the bloated XP code, which will stop running as soon as they upgrade... hee hee...
Let's see - you heat it up too much and it automatically goes half as fast. What about the opposite? If I put it in the freezer will it automatically go twice as fast? I think not...
Three atoms thick? Wow. That seems to be pretty much the end of the line in terms of standard chip technology. Maybe they should start working on making the atoms themselves smaller...
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This is going to be a very long war. Just hope we get the bad guys, that our soldiers remain safe, and that we protect the innocents.
Not WW3 yet, but if one thing goes wrong, we have a billion people from Islam against us.
From the article, it's pretty obvious that the SETI project seems to have plenty of search power. I'm a bit disheartened that they still haven't found anything yet. I know it's a gigantic universe with an almost infinite amount of places to search, but not finding anything must say something about the scarcity of aliens/civilizations/radio/whatever. Or perhaps the aliens have simply switched to fiber...
and 10 years before that? I'll believe it when I see it.
Not sure if that's a good analogy. You pay money for magazines or newspapers (i.e. subscription) but they're still loaded with ads. If you paid for how much it really cost to produce those publications, the subscription rates would be much, much higher. Same for TV, radio, and most media. They sell ads (and subscriptions) to pay the bills. Why should the net be any different? The fact that a content provider needs to sell ads doesn't particularly reflect on the quality of the content.
Salon is in financial trouble. They started a premium service to get more money, but still offer a lot of content for free. I guess if more people subscribed as premium members, this would not be an issue. If they need to do this to stay afloat, then that's their business. Salon is a great site, and I'm personally willing to put up with a few ads. I just hope they keep going.
Radio has become so generic with companies such as Clear Channel and Infinity owning over half of all stations. Satellite radio might be the answer. I just hope some of these 100 stations will actually play something decent. Otherwise, my $400 is going into a nice car MP3 player.
"Even if they did receive a large # of letters, chances are that a staff assistant or legislative correspondent would draft some sort of stock letter to be sent in response"
Yes, but they do calculate a running tally of who is for and against an issue. A lot of letters advocating a specific point will have an effect. I do agree showing up and getting in your representative's face is also a good tactic.
NO - In addition to the "mere 5000-6000 dead" as the original poster stated. The point is, everyone is affected. Hundreds of thousands of people will lose thier jobs -- people with children to support. And, sadly, more people will die as this conflict heats up.
Ummm... mere 5000-6000 dead? Get some perspective. Drunk drivers don't blow up $30 billion in prime real estate, destroy an entire industry so that over 80,000 airline employees lose their jobs, and cause the stock market to lose over $1 trillion in value. Every single person in this country has been affected by this, either physically, emotionally or financially.
My motherboard's BIOS (Epox D3VA - dual 800 PIII) has a feature where you can set the machine to power down if the temp gets above a certain point. I'm sure most other motherboards have this feature, so why don't people use it? Would prevent a lot of fried silicon...
BTW - Here's a question - what's the temp where a processor gets permanently damaged? I think I have my BIOS sutting down somewhere between 65-70C (my processors usually run 38-40C)
Guess what - the US government is also beholden to Redmond for a lot of software. Perhaps they should follow this lead. Yeah, right...
But... at least Russia still has a few chips to bargain with - nuclear weapons, vast resources that US companies want, etc.. etc...
Not sure if Putin wants to spend those chips on Dmitry, but pointing out the hypocrisy of the situation might have some leverage.
If Dmitry was from a smaller/third world country he'd be a lot more screwed. At least Putin still has a direct line to Washington - for what its worth.
The discovery page seems dead. But, going out on a limb -- from what I've read, it seems to take about 6 months to get to mars. There have been more than a few people who've lasted this long in space, and they seemed to have nice smiles when they returned.
Once on mars, the effects should be mitigated by the gravitational field - right? How much less is mars' gravity compared to earth?
Instead of wiring it to a fixed point in the house (meaning I have to wire the WHOLE house with CAT5) they should put rechargable batteries in the thing and an 802.11 card instead of plain old ethernet.
That way, I can take the thing anywhere! My own MP3 radio station! (Well, within limits, of course... ) But I do think that wireless would be the true killer app for this stuff.
Was just me, or was Siggraph much smaller this year? I've been going for over 10 years, and just seemed as though there weren't as many people and vendors. Side Effects (Houdini) wasn't there, and Disney also pulled out at the last minute. I think everyone I ran into mentioned it was a much calmer show than previous years.
Also - the level of technical advancement seems to be leveling off. In the past, my jaw always dropped at least once during the show. The NVidia/Square realtime Final Fantasy was cool, and there was a nice IBM 600dpi monitor, but that was about it. Outside of a few things (ExLuna, for one) no huge software releases, either. Mostly incremental improvements.
Perhaps it's to the point where the technology is getting "good enough" (relative term, I know...) The only things that really made my jaw drop was the content itself. In the Electronic Theater, I'd see a really good film, then the credits would list just one person... Jaw drop. Pretty amazing how far it's all come.
I'm 6'3 and I love my Aeron. Of course, I bought a large (you know, of course, they come in small, medium, large...) Most companies buy mediums, which can be a bit tight, and the smalls dig into my shoulder blades, too.
It seems as though using rocket thrust for landing is a HUGE waste of fuel. Plus it seems kinda risky - as you land, the exhaust bouncing back up off the ground could set your vehicle on fire. Dangerous! This is not a practical concept.
Robotics isn't engineering? Gimme a break! Mindstorms is totally an engineering toy. I seem to recall they even use it at some engineering schools.
The Technic stuff has lots of the bits and my old Erector set had, plus more - motors, gears, pulleys, etc. You can totally understand how mechanical devices are put together, and build some pretty complex gizmos.
The only difference between Lego and Erector/Meccano is the bolts (which I always lost anyways.) Oh yeah, and Mecanno/Erector rusts and tends to slice open little kids fingers. This guy is just angry that his favorite childhood toy is unpopular.
I disagree. The shape of the bits is irrelavant. Lego is still cool. My four year old son loves Lego. When he gets a new set, we build the spaceship/robot/whatever and then, invariably, he gets bored of it, takes it apart and builds something completely different out of the bits. Its just as creative a process as when I was a kid. Big deal that he has a windshield for his car that actually *looks* like a windshield.
What about all the people that Microsoft will need to hire just to answer the phones from people who've upgraded their memory/disk/NIC/whatever and need their code reauthrorized? I could imagine all of these bogus phone calls adding up.
Yeah, I'm sure MS will pass these costs on, pi$$ing off its customers both when they buy the software and when they need to upgrade their machines to run the bloated XP code, which will stop running as soon as they upgrade... hee hee...
Graphics? I believe Symbolics/Nichimen is written entirely in LISP. It's a pretty hefty graphics app if you ask me.
Let's see - you heat it up too much and it automatically goes half as fast. What about the opposite? If I put it in the freezer will it automatically go twice as fast? I think not...
At 900 bucks a pop? That's not what I call "cheap"
Three atoms thick? Wow. That seems to be pretty much the end of the line in terms of standard chip technology. Maybe they should start working on making the atoms themselves smaller...