A lot of medical science these days seems to have forgotten that quality of life matters as much as life itself.
I don't want to seem unsympathetic to you and your family. Your grandmother is experiencing a terribly reduced quality of life? You suspect she is being kept alive against her will? That is truly awful.
But humans made the decision to keep her alive. I believe it is a mistake to blame science for this. Her children and other relatives should not be feeling like helpless victims here. Her doctors are not modern shaman, whose suggestions you have to take. If they act that way, if they are playing god, you, her relatives, should challenge them, and keep challenging them.
We face the same kind of decisions, around xeno-transplants, as a society, as your family faces with your grandmother. If we believe in democracy, it is time to be really diligent about keeping our selves informed. And we have to be prepared to explore our values, and what we believe in, and speak up once we have figured it out.
I tried it too. Then I tried clicking on the cached version. It took a couple of minutes before my browser gave up on fetching some gifs.
Google said that page was cached in 1993. I
did however click on this link to info on the crawler's cracked bearings, from August 12th.
I don't know anything about the 487, although I would imagine they built it because their customers asked for it (seems like something an OEM would love).
Hmmm. When I wrote my reply to you I was surprised how hard it was to dig up authoritative references about the 487 that were as critical as I remember at the time.
Intel has often had two versions of their processors. A more expensive one, for "power users", and one that was crippled in some way, but available at a lower price, to compete with their low end rivals.
I have heard some wags refer to the 8088 as the "8086sx". I know there was an 80188, to serve as the 80186sx. I have heard some wags say the "SX" versions are called that because they suck. I have heard some say the various versions of the Celeron were really the Pentium II SX, the Pentium III SX and the Pentium 4 SX.
At the time, it was widely believed that the 486sx was exactly the
same chip as the 486dx and the 487. And if you check these three intel web-pages describing the 486sx, the 486dx and the 487, you will see that they all extremely similar. They all have 1,200,000 transistors. The buzz was that as 486 chips were baked, they were tested at different speeds. Those capable of working reliably at 33MHz were destined to become 486dx chips. Less reliable chips had their FPU burned out by a laser, and were packaged as 486sx chips.
Some 486 chips were packaged in a different pinout, and marketed as the 487, the floating point co-processor for the 486sx. Plugging a 487 into 486sx motherboard turned off the 486sx. My recollection is that the 487 was more expensive than the basically identical 486. It is interesting that intel is still maintaining the fiction that the 487 was a separate chip.
I have been told I should be more forgiving. But I decided six years ago that I would never buy another intel CPU.
Okay. We are both agreed that megahertz doesn't matter to the extent
many columnists, reviewers and computer salesclerks contend.
Correct me if I am wrong. Are you suggesting that the decision to design the P4 so it accomplished less per clock cycle, but was able to do them more quickly was purely a technical decision? Are you suggesting that it wasn't influenced at all being able to exploit a foolish confidence in megahertz?
You seem to know what you are talking about, so I would welcome learning how you came to have such confidence in Intel's ethical standards.
Isn't intel the company that tried to slip CPU serial numbers past us, on the Pentium III?
Isn't intel the company that told their customers they would have to prove to them they would have to prove they needed flawless floating point before they would replace defective CPUs? Let me quote from the Doctor Dobbs Journal article:
When this bug was first reported, Intel denied that it existed. After this bug was proven to exist, Intel denied that it was a problem. When customers wanted a replacement chip, Intel demanded that *THEY* (the customer) prove that they were affected by this bug. Yet to this very day, Intel refuses to acknowledge that this is a bug; instead they always refer to this as a flaw -- whatever the difference may be.
And how about the intel 487?
Didn't they introduce an expensive 487 floating point co-processor, to augment the 486sx cpu, which was actually just a 486dx in disguise, that totally disabled and replaced the user's existing 486sx?
Another reason to forget about megahertz
on
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
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This article Pandering to the Masses: Does Engineering Still Matter? explains how the Pentium III beat the Pentium 4. If the P3 and the P4 are run at the same clock speed the P3 performs much better than its anemic younger sibling.
Shaped charges project plasma jet, not molten jet
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Electric Armor
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Lars's link is a very interesting one.
A lot of respondents here have said that a shaped charge projects a jet of molten copper. Years ago, when I used to subscribe to sci.military, I made that mistake.
Many of the correspondents there didn't hesitate to quickly set me straight, and explain that the shaped charge projects a plasma jet.
This newspaper article gets the scale wrong. It says the jet travels at around 1000 miles per hour, ie not much more than the speed of sound, whereas the Lawrence Livermore article I linked to above says the jet travels at 10,000 kilometers per second. Michael Smith, the telegraph's defence correspondent, was off by a factor of just 57,000,000.
Last June there was a closer near miss, of a smaller asteroid, that was only detected after its closest approach to Earth. This article commented on the press hysteria over the failure of
however, some of the press coverage has been sensationalistic. Some either decry that the object was found after closest approach (rather than before) or express concern about the "blind spot" otherwise commonly known to astronomers as the daytime sky.
The NASA page he cites says the plan is to map all the major near Earth asteroids by 2008. How is this pitiful? If extinction class rocks hit us every 10^7 or 10^8 years, how much time can we budget to defend ourselves against the next one? What if it took 10^2 years? Would that be an unreasonable amount of time to be confident we had detected most of them?
The rock last week was about 100 meters in diameter. Tunguska is estimated to have been 60 meters in diameter. Since the mass goes up as the cube of the diameter this one would have been about five times as powerful as Tunguska. The planetary.org article I linked to says one that size strikes us every couple of millenia. Is this program a failure if we can't detect and divert the next Tunguska sized rock? The article says the Tunguska strike was as powerful as the blast from a 16 megaton H-bomb. It said it devastated 2000 square kilometres. That would be a square about 42 kilometers on a side. Ie. Bigger than Monaco, smaller than NYC.
16 megatons? Rick Green's glossary of cold-war terms defined a "small-theatre nuclear exchange" as "Curtains for the actors after just one act, hence the prefix 'small theatre'". Sure, this could be devastating for lots of people, if it too didn't land somewhere relatively deserted, like northern Siberia.
But civilization would survive, even if it landed on Hollywood.
The planetary.org article said 25% or more of the rocks that have hit Earth may have been long period comets. Figuring out how to detect and deflect long period comets that might hit the Earth would be much more difficult. Maybe so much more difficult we shouldn't waste any resources trying?
Clouded leopard [umich.edu], anyone? Of all the modern cats, it has the longest canines in proportion to its body. If the can make a bulldog out of a wolflike creature, they could make a semi-Smilodon out of a clouded leopard.
I heard a scientist say something relevant to this on the Discovery channel.
He said that dogs have a much richer genetic heritage than cats, and this is why dog breeder have been able to breed more breeds of dogs than cat breeders have been able to breeds of cats.
Also worth noting that domestic dog breeds differ from one another much more than domestic cat breeds.
I found a link to an online book entitled "Biodiversity and Conservation: A Hypertext Book" by Peter J. Bryant. Here is a link to the chapter devoted to captive breeding and reintroduction. About halfway through this very interesting chapter Bryant addresses the woolly mammoth reintroduction.
African elephants and Mammoths are more closely related than either is to the Indian elephant.
A zoo experimented by crossing an Indian and an African elephant. The hybrid calf died. Bryant pointed out that a Elephant-Mammoth hybrid would probably be sterile, like a mule.
This though, is such a far cry from managing to wipe out an entire species, that I would think you were trolling me.
I didn't claim that humans wiped out the entire species. I merely challenged your assertion that hunting megafauna with stone age tools was too dangerous to work.
Stampeding them over a cliff works nice, if they are a super villain, you are James Bond, and you have a helicopter waiting to pull you safely away on a rope ladder. Unfortunately, mammoths have neither sinister mustaches nor an enviroment with a surplus of convenient cliffs. It doesn't work.
Do you mind if I give you a suggestion?
If someone disagrees with one of your assertions, and their reply contains a hyperlink that they think backs up their point, that is worth paying attention to.
You see, your browser, that is the program you use to access web-pages, lets you slide your mouse over the link, and you can actually visit the page they referenced!
I am really going to recommend you really should try it sometime. You see, if you check the link, you can save yourself from posting something that makes you look lazy or foolish.
As to your point that the hunters could hardly move the cliffs to their hunt? Of course they couldn't. But they could move the hunt to the cliff. Lots of herd animals engage in mass migrations. Locate one of the locations on the migration route where the animals are vulnerable. You don't think stone age hunters could figure this out? It is not rocket science.
Here is a link to a line drawing showing the cliffs and the "drive lanes" where Native Americans slaughtered Buffalo. I didn't find it on the site, but IIRC thousands or tens of thousands of buffalo were believed to have been killed here over the long period of time Native American occupied this site.
West of the cliff lies a large drainage basin 40 square km in extent. This is a natural grazing area
with plenty of water and mixed grass which remains fresh well into the fall. This natural grazing
area attracted herds of buffalo late into the fall.
Drive lanes: Long lines of stone cairns were built to help the hunters direct the buffalo to the cliff
kill site. Thousands of these small piles of stones can still be seen marking the drive lanes that
extend more than fourteen kilometers into the gathering basin. These cairns may have served as
simple markers, or they may have supported sticks or brush to hide the hunters.
To start the hunt, "Buffalo Runners" young men trained in animal behavior would entice the herd to follow them by imitating the
bleating of a lost calf. As the buffalo moved closer to the drive lanes the hunters would circle behind and upwind of the herd and
scare the animals by shouting and waving robes. As the buffalo stampeded towards the edge of the cliff, the animals in front
would try to stop but the sheer weight of the herd pressing from behind would force the buffalo over the cliff.
I don't claim to know what killed them, and I certainly won't defend humanity when it's perfectly clear we're willing to cause extinction...
FWIW I too would never claim to know what killed them. I do believe that it is likely that foolish humans did play key roles in hunting at least some of the megafauna to extinction.
... but
your theory smacks of some kind of arrogance, almost hubris. I mean, we're so nifty, only we can wipe out species? You'll have to do better than that.
Ever try to hunt elephants with rifles and jeeps? You're still likely, to this day to end up as elephant toe jam, rather than proud hunter who has slain the mighty land mammal.
No, I have never done any big game hunting. Have you?
But stone age hunters won't be worrying about being sporting.
Stampeding the herd with a grass fire might let them single out the weaker or younger individuals. Or perhaps they could stampede them over a cliff. Native Americans did precisely this, prior to the introduction of the horse back to North America.
Most of the staff who work in theatres are teenage kids, earning minimum wage, or a bit more. It is an age when you get embarrassed easily. Maybe the management lets it slide if the kids are too reluctant to do enthusiastically?
used to be a big guy who said it, he was 6'7 and his nick name was "Lurch."
You listened to him, because he said "If you leave your cell phone on, and it rings, I am going to come up there and make it not ring."
Sounds like, in Lurch, they found someone enthusiastic in Niagara Falls.
The conversation between Dr. von Braun and some Nazi big wig went something like this:
"Herr von Braun. You can work for us and develop your cunning little rockets, and do keep in mind that failure will NOT be tolorated, or, you and your entire family will be shipped off to a concentration camp and executed as traitors to the Fatherland."
Wasn't von Braun himself a member of the Nazi party? And as manager of a big research projects, wasn't he himself a big wig?
What do you think became of people who resigned, proved incompetent, became alcoholics, or had nervous breakdowns... Probably... potentially dangerous...
Let me see if I have this right. Von Braun was a card carrying Nazi wasn't he? We are not talking about an innocent civilian. We have a guy, who is head of weapons development programs that caused thousands of deaths, correct? Or possibly tens of thousands, as one of the other contributors to this thread said that many slave labourers were worked to death. We have this weapons developer, and you defend him
because he might have been afraid to quit?
I think that the war criminals should have and in most cases were tried and punished appropriately by the allies.
You really should read Szilard's
"My trial as a War Criminal". It is set in 1949. The Soviets
conquer America in a sneak germ warfare attack. President Truman,
Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of State Byrnes are to stand trial for their decision to drop the bomb. Szilard stands trial for his role in the development of the bomb. (After the Soviets offer him the same deal the Americans offered von Braun -- charges dropped if he moved to the Soviet Union, and worked on their weapons programs.)
Szilard is, I believe, correct to believe he and Truman would have stood trial under those circumstances. Truman is convicted of violating the 'customs of war', because prior to Hiroshima, it wasn't 'customary' to drop atomic bombs on cities.
And my interpretation would be that Szilard thought the Nuremberg trials were about vengeance, not justice. Germany and Yugoslavia had laws, which presumably included laws against kidnapping, rape, murder.
Should those who ordered or committed kidnapping, rape or murder stand trial under the laws of their own nation? Or the nation where the crimes were committed?
If the reasons we didn't trust the Germans, Japanese to conduct
trials for the crimes committed on their territory is that we don't
trust it will result in a satisfactory verdict or sentence, then
were the trials about justice, or vengeance?
If the war trials were truly just then Allied soldiers who committed war crimes should also have stood trial. Saving Private Ryan portrayed Americans shooting prisoners who had already surrendered.
That is a war crime.
I know these kinds of incidents happened -- maybe not on Omaha beach,
but they did happen.
Some probably escaped and alot of people whose role was ambiguous didn't get punished. I don't personally think that Von Braun needed to be punished.
Are you suggesting that von Braun shouldn't have stood trial in
Germany because his role was ambiguous? Isn't that what a trial
is for?
Or are you suggesting that von Braun shouldn't be punished because some other criminals slipped away unpunished?
And geoswan let me ask you this, when you grow up what will it be,
hawaii or braces for the kids???
Mr or Ms Anonymous Coward, I have had occasions in my life where I
have had my courage tested. I witnessed what appeared to be Police Brutality from my office window some time ago. I reported it to the Police Complaints Commision. Which resulted in having the
investigator lean on me, and try to intimidate me. He made clear
that before he investigated his fellow officers he was going to investigate me. In spite of this pressure I was dogged in my
pursuit of the truth. I stuck to my principles. It took five
months to learn what had really happened. Yes,
frankly, it was frightening.
No, this test wasn't nearly as challenging as
those I believe von Braun should have faced. But then I didn't
choose to manage a huge weapons development program.
I find it a bit ironic that you should question my courage, when
you choose to post as an "anonymous coward".
About von Braun's status as a Nazi party member -- I was told
this by a buddy of mine, who was a big fan of space exploration.
He had read a biography of VB, and explained he wasn't
really a Nazi. He just wanted to make rockets. He
told me VB joined the Nazi party just because he thought it
would make it easier for him to use his political pull to enable
him to build rockets. My buddies interpretation was that VB
was taking advantage of the Nazis.
Heroic scientists, who took a moral stand...
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Man Conquers Space
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Not to necessarily defend von Braun, but I suspect that few of the people who employed him were stupid. Odious genocidal maniacs, but not so stupid as to fall for any of those hoary old tricks.
I am going to repeat my main point. Von Braun was prepared to risk his life to make a point. And the point he risked it to make was that he thought the Nazis were wasting money, not that they were wasting lives.
You suggest that most senior Nazis weren't stupid? Did you check out the link to the brief biography of Rudolph Hess? Clearly nutty as a fruit-cake.
Jacob Bronowski describes how one of the senior Nazis, Goebbels or Himmler IIRC, wanted to take Heisenberg away from atomic research to try to prove, once and for all, that the stars are made of ice.
Look at the German research into atomic weapons. It was a complete failure, but no one was shot, or thrown in prison. In his book "Surely you are joking Mr Feynman" Richard Feynman describes how he supervised a team of young Army enlisted guys, who were chosen right out of basic training because they had scientific ability. These guys were human calculators, and ran punched cards through big mechanical calculators, to perform the very labourious calculations necessary to determine the amount of Fissile material needed to make a bomb. Heisenberg's group did the same calculation, but their answer was wildly off. They thought a bomb would require hundreds of kilograms of U235, not a kilogram or two.
The suggestion has been made that Heisenberg, or someone in his
group, purposely fouled up the calculation.
If Leo Szilard hadn't escaped from Germany one step ahead of the Nazis do you think that he would have refused to work on German weapons research? Szilard circulated petition to Truman among the other scientists pleading with him forgo dropping the bomb on a Japanese city before it had been demonstrated to the Japanese high command.
Szilard gave up Physics after the war. He wrote some science fiction. This collection includes the short story "My Trial as a War Criminal", which I will strongly recommend...
The article later states that benchmarks would be more reliable. However, I've seen some benchmarks saying that the Athlon is a lot slower than the P4 (at least on Tom's Hardware)...
Tomshardware.com has published some articles that really knocked the stuffing out of Intel. They published articles which exposed the failure of the Pentium 1.137 gigahertz. They exposed the poor performance of the Rambus memory.
But for the last year or too they seemed to be taking a lot softer line towards Intel. I was puzzled over this. Until recently, when I came across the following article about a former columnist at Tomshardware. He has his own hardware site now. If I understood this article properly, Tom re-edited and re-attributed Van Smith's articles, after his departure. And it sounds like when he was caught he yanked all of them. Altering the past like in 1984.
They are definitely all gone now.
I can't help wondering whether his departure was connected to THG cozying up to Intel.
OTOH, I don't recall for sure if the original Pentium (or derivatives, like P54C) were known as "P5". If they had, then it's already time for a name change for the successor of the P4.
The "P5" refers to the original, 5 volt, socket 4 pentiums, that ran at 60 and 66 megahertz. The P54 were the 3.3 volt, socket 7 pentiums, from 75 -> 200 megahertz. The P55 was the split voltage Pentium MMX, from 133 -> 300 megahertz, which also used socket 7.
uh, lots of asteroids have struck earth, thousands (millions?) Just none big enough to cause mass extinction or similar.
Mr P understands gravity. Yes, gravity sweeps a lot meteors to strike the Earth all the time. If I was a grammar nazi I would argue over the dividing line between a small asteroid and large meteor. Life is too short for that however.
Instead I will give you some friendly advice.
Mr P, you understand gravity perfectly.
But Mr P, it is not enough to understand gravity. Sometimes you must understand the opposite of gravity -- comedy!
The use of lots of exclamation points should have been your first clue.
The Buran was a better design overall. It was cheaper, easier to fix and maintain, safer thanks to ejection seats and the Russians didnt use O rings a la Challenger. It had more reuseable parts, but it was also built after out shuttles were, so they had the benifit of learning from our mistakes. The Buran should have become the international standard but politics and the "evil empire" myth means that the Buran today is nothing but a statue in a Moscow park and we are still flying the Shuttle.
It is not quite as bad as this poster states. The original Buran the one to fly two orbits is safely stored at Baikonur. The second one, which had been scheduled to dock with Mir, in 1993, is 97% complete, and is also safely stored at Baikonur. The one in the Moscow's Gorky Park, was a full-scale mockup, like the American shuttle Enterprize.
Yes, the "evil empire" nonsense is a great shame. I think it is really in our interests to employ the aerospace and defense researchers of the former Soviet Union. If you click on the link for the Gorky Park shuttle, you will read that the author paid a few bucks for a security guard to give him a pre-opening tour. He writes that the security guard had formerly worked on the Buran's design team. Working as a security guard paid more than working in aerospace.
I am going to repeat something Dennis Tito said, in his press conference, after his return to Earth. You all remember that Tito was the first Space Tourist, getting a lift to the space shuttle aboard a Russian vehicle. At the time the idea of space tourism was so new, and shocking, that all kinds of commentators were commenting on how wasteful it was to spend $20,000,000 USD on a vacation, when the world faced problems of poverty, and threat of war. It was the first question Tito was asked at his press conference. Tito's answer was something like:
You are completely correct, that $20,000,000 should have been spent helping the poor. And it was. Do you know the average monthly wage of a Russian aerospace worker? About $100 USD per month.
This is a great answer. It earned my respect. Soviet researchers were highly skilled, and it is a tragedy to have their training and experience go to waste.
But it not just the talents of Soviet aerospace researchers we need to make sure don't go to waste. I would feel the world was a more secure place if former Soviet defense researchers were getting grants from Western institutions, to lift them out of poverty. Visiting fellowships? Send Western students to go learn from them on exchange programs? I believe it is strongly in the West's interests to give these guys and gals jobs that use their talents and preserve their dignity.
Face it, who is going to be more tempted to sell their skills on the black market, or help smuggle out Fissile material? The researcher who has had his dignity restored with a good job, research facilities, and a living wage? Or the researcher who is starving in poverty?
And the shuttle design we have now, the one with the horrible semi-reusable solid fuel boosters and the ultra-expensive non-reusable tank was a political compromise due entirely to budget cuts and funding limits. The real shuttle design was fully reusable and much safer: no uncontrollable solid boosters to blow up.
Slashdot has proved to be an excellent resource for links to the Buran's design. Thanks slashdotters!
Well, I have this question about the American shuttle's design compromises. I have heard that political pressure from the USAF, and the military-industrial complex, resulted in a larger shuttle, capable of carrying larger, military payloads. I read that a smaller shuttle would have been cheaper to build and run.
True?
Safety? The Burans had four ejection seats.
The Buran could have carried five times the payload of the American shuttle.
It was not Von Braun's decision to use concentration camp dwelling forced labor in the factory, and the historians doubt he was very enthused about it. But would YOU have spoken out against it in Nazi Germany? I didn't think so. When he did voice an opinion that he felt the rockets were being wasted as weapons and he'd rather work on space travel, he was tossed in prison for a while.
In other words he was willing to take a moral stand. And he felt it was more important to object to a waste of money, rather than the cruel waste of human life?
You suggest he had just two choices: a suicidal objection to slave labour, or continuing, full-speed ahead, with the rocket program?
How about waiting for the war to be over, before continuing his rocket research?
What about resigning? What about getting fired for incompetence? What about faking some experiments to make the program look like a waste of money? What about pretending to become a hopeless alcoholic, or pretending to have a nervous breakdown?
Rudolph Hess was able to defect, in May 1941. Was this a possibility for von Braun?
Grownups make lots of compromises. Do you go to Hawaii for Xmas, or do you get braces for your kid's teeth? Grownups give up thing to respect their principles.
Do we let the President of ENRON or Worldcomm claim they "didn't know" what was done by those who answered to them?
Is it just me, or does anyone else find the headline "Man conquers space" ironic coupled with the news of a half-mile-wide asteroid nearly missing Earth?
What are you talking about? It missed didn't it? As some other people have already pointed out, the efforts to find and deflect Earth striking asteroids has been a complete success! After all, during the couple of decades spent looking for them not ONE asteroid has successfully struck the Earth!
NASA however, do not have the defense budget. They only get what congress gives them. If this looks bad, then they'll get even less. $200m is a lot of money, and it's definately a lot of money to them.
Woops, I meant to comment on this.:-)
In another thread on this probe someone said something like, "I wish NASA would make probes that work darn it!"
I thought the "faster, cheaper" experiment, where NASA would build more probes, but cheaper probes, which would carry fewer instrument packages, and be easier to build -- I thought it was a good idea.
It was an experiment. NASA's plan was to accept a greater failure rate, which was supposed to be balanced by the probes overall smaller budgets. A greater proportion of these probes did fail. The public didn't like hearing about these failures.
But was the experiment a failure? Did NASA get more instruments out there, for cheaper, than if they had built a fewer number of gold-plated probes? Either way, I would say the experiment was worth trying.
Has NASA officially announced the abandonment of the faster, cheaper experiment?
And, if so, was the CONTOUR one of the last "faster, cheaper" probes.
If NASA were sending cosmonauts out there, the probes would have to be really reliable, and consequently a lot more expensive. NASA sends robot probes knowing some will fail. I wish there wasn't all this criticism when it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to seem unsympathetic to you and your family. Your grandmother is experiencing a terribly reduced quality of life? You suspect she is being kept alive against her will? That is truly awful.
But humans made the decision to keep her alive. I believe it is a mistake to blame science for this. Her children and other relatives should not be feeling like helpless victims here. Her doctors are not modern shaman, whose suggestions you have to take. If they act that way, if they are playing god, you, her relatives, should challenge them, and keep challenging them.
We face the same kind of decisions, around xeno-transplants, as a society, as your family faces with your grandmother. If we believe in democracy, it is time to be really diligent about keeping our selves informed. And we have to be prepared to explore our values, and what we believe in, and speak up once we have figured it out.
I tried it too. Then I tried clicking on the cached version. It took a couple of minutes before my browser gave up on fetching some gifs. Google said that page was cached in 1993. I did however click on this link to info on the crawler's cracked bearings, from August 12th.
Hmmm. When I wrote my reply to you I was surprised how hard it was to dig up authoritative references about the 487 that were as critical as I remember at the time.
Intel has often had two versions of their processors. A more expensive one, for "power users", and one that was crippled in some way, but available at a lower price, to compete with their low end rivals.
I have heard some wags refer to the 8088 as the "8086sx". I know there was an 80188, to serve as the 80186sx. I have heard some wags say the "SX" versions are called that because they suck. I have heard some say the various versions of the Celeron were really the Pentium II SX, the Pentium III SX and the Pentium 4 SX.
At the time, it was widely believed that the 486sx was exactly the same chip as the 486dx and the 487. And if you check these three intel web-pages describing the 486sx , the 486dx and the 487 , you will see that they all extremely similar. They all have 1,200,000 transistors. The buzz was that as 486 chips were baked, they were tested at different speeds. Those capable of working reliably at 33MHz were destined to become 486dx chips. Less reliable chips had their FPU burned out by a laser, and were packaged as 486sx chips.
Some 486 chips were packaged in a different pinout, and marketed as the 487, the floating point co-processor for the 486sx. Plugging a 487 into 486sx motherboard turned off the 486sx. My recollection is that the 487 was more expensive than the basically identical 486. It is interesting that intel is still maintaining the fiction that the 487 was a separate chip.
I have been told I should be more forgiving. But I decided six years ago that I would never buy another intel CPU.
Correct me if I am wrong. Are you suggesting that the decision to design the P4 so it accomplished less per clock cycle, but was able to do them more quickly was purely a technical decision? Are you suggesting that it wasn't influenced at all being able to exploit a foolish confidence in megahertz?
You seem to know what you are talking about, so I would welcome learning how you came to have such confidence in Intel's ethical standards.
Isn't intel the company that tried to slip CPU serial numbers past us, on the Pentium III?
Isn't intel the company that told their customers they would have to prove to them they would have to prove they needed flawless floating point before they would replace defective CPUs? Let me quote from the Doctor Dobbs Journal article:
And how about the intel 487? Didn't they introduce an expensive 487 floating point co-processor, to augment the 486sx cpu, which was actually just a 486dx in disguise, that totally disabled and replaced the user's existing 486sx?
This article Pandering to the Masses: Does Engineering Still Matter? explains how the Pentium III beat the Pentium 4. If the P3 and the P4 are run at the same clock speed the P3 performs much better than its anemic younger sibling.
A lot of respondents here have said that a shaped charge projects a jet of molten copper. Years ago, when I used to subscribe to sci.military, I made that mistake. Many of the correspondents there didn't hesitate to quickly set me straight, and explain that the shaped charge projects a plasma jet.
Here is an article from Lawrence Livermore Labs with some excellent pictures of the jets in action.
Here is another article.
And here are some animations.
1 meg avi
770K avi
10 meg avi
This newspaper article gets the scale wrong. It says the jet travels at around 1000 miles per hour, ie not much more than the speed of sound, whereas the Lawrence Livermore article I linked to above says the jet travels at 10,000 kilometers per second. Michael Smith, the telegraph's defence correspondent, was off by a factor of just 57,000,000.
The NASA page he cites says the plan is to map all the major near Earth asteroids by 2008. How is this pitiful? If extinction class rocks hit us every 10^7 or 10^8 years, how much time can we budget to defend ourselves against the next one? What if it took 10^2 years? Would that be an unreasonable amount of time to be confident we had detected most of them?
The rock last week was about 100 meters in diameter. Tunguska is estimated to have been 60 meters in diameter. Since the mass goes up as the cube of the diameter this one would have been about five times as powerful as Tunguska. The planetary.org article I linked to says one that size strikes us every couple of millenia. Is this program a failure if we can't detect and divert the next Tunguska sized rock? The article says the Tunguska strike was as powerful as the blast from a 16 megaton H-bomb. It said it devastated 2000 square kilometres. That would be a square about 42 kilometers on a side. Ie. Bigger than Monaco, smaller than NYC.
16 megatons? Rick Green's glossary of cold-war terms defined a "small-theatre nuclear exchange" as "Curtains for the actors after just one act, hence the prefix 'small theatre'". Sure, this could be devastating for lots of people, if it too didn't land somewhere relatively deserted, like northern Siberia. But civilization would survive, even if it landed on Hollywood.
The planetary.org article said 25% or more of the rocks that have hit Earth may have been long period comets. Figuring out how to detect and deflect long period comets that might hit the Earth would be much more difficult. Maybe so much more difficult we shouldn't waste any resources trying?
I heard a scientist say something relevant to this on the Discovery channel. He said that dogs have a much richer genetic heritage than cats, and this is why dog breeder have been able to breed more breeds of dogs than cat breeders have been able to breeds of cats.
Also worth noting that domestic dog breeds differ from one another much more than domestic cat breeds.
I found a link to an online book entitled "Biodiversity and Conservation: A Hypertext Book" by Peter J. Bryant. Here is a link to the chapter devoted to captive breeding and reintroduction. About halfway through this very interesting chapter Bryant addresses the woolly mammoth reintroduction.
African elephants and Mammoths are more closely related than either is to the Indian elephant.
A zoo experimented by crossing an Indian and an African elephant. The hybrid calf died. Bryant pointed out that a Elephant-Mammoth hybrid would probably be sterile, like a mule.
If someone disagrees with one of your assertions, and their reply contains a hyperlink that they think backs up their point, that is worth paying attention to.
You see, your browser, that is the program you use to access web-pages, lets you slide your mouse over the link, and you can actually visit the page they referenced!
I am really going to recommend you really should try it sometime. You see, if you check the link, you can save yourself from posting something that makes you look lazy or foolish.
As to your point that the hunters could hardly move the cliffs to their hunt? Of course they couldn't. But they could move the hunt to the cliff. Lots of herd animals engage in mass migrations. Locate one of the locations on the migration route where the animals are vulnerable. You don't think stone age hunters could figure this out? It is not rocket science.
Here is a link to a line drawing showing the cliffs and the "drive lanes" where Native Americans slaughtered Buffalo. I didn't find it on the site, but IIRC thousands or tens of thousands of buffalo were believed to have been killed here over the long period of time Native American occupied this site.
FWIW I too would never claim to know what killed them. I do believe that it is likely that foolish humans did play key roles in hunting at least some of the megafauna to extinction.
Maybe you mistook me for someone else?
No, I have never done any big game hunting. Have you?
But stone age hunters won't be worrying about being sporting.
Stampeding the herd with a grass fire might let them single out the weaker or younger individuals. Or perhaps they could stampede them over a cliff. Native Americans did precisely this, prior to the introduction of the horse back to North America.
Sure they are domesticated. Indian Elephants were used as beasts of burden up until very recently. And what about Hannibal Barca?
Me? an idiot
How could I not trust this deal?
here you go my friend!
Most of the staff who work in theatres are teenage kids, earning minimum wage, or a bit more. It is an age when you get embarrassed easily. Maybe the management lets it slide if the kids are too reluctant to do enthusiastically?
Sounds like, in Lurch, they found someone enthusiastic in Niagara Falls.
Wasn't von Braun himself a member of the Nazi party? And as manager of a big research projects, wasn't he himself a big wig?
Wouldn't that VB himself a Nazi big wig?
Let me see if I have this right. Von Braun was a card carrying Nazi wasn't he? We are not talking about an innocent civilian. We have a guy, who is head of weapons development programs that caused thousands of deaths, correct? Or possibly tens of thousands, as one of the other contributors to this thread said that many slave labourers were worked to death. We have this weapons developer, and you defend him because he might have been afraid to quit?
You really should read Szilard's "My trial as a War Criminal". It is set in 1949. The Soviets conquer America in a sneak germ warfare attack. President Truman, Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of State Byrnes are to stand trial for their decision to drop the bomb. Szilard stands trial for his role in the development of the bomb. (After the Soviets offer him the same deal the Americans offered von Braun -- charges dropped if he moved to the Soviet Union, and worked on their weapons programs.)
Szilard is, I believe, correct to believe he and Truman would have stood trial under those circumstances. Truman is convicted of violating the 'customs of war', because prior to Hiroshima, it wasn't 'customary' to drop atomic bombs on cities.
And my interpretation would be that Szilard thought the Nuremberg trials were about vengeance, not justice. Germany and Yugoslavia had laws, which presumably included laws against kidnapping, rape, murder. Should those who ordered or committed kidnapping, rape or murder stand trial under the laws of their own nation? Or the nation where the crimes were committed?
If the reasons we didn't trust the Germans, Japanese to conduct trials for the crimes committed on their territory is that we don't trust it will result in a satisfactory verdict or sentence, then were the trials about justice, or vengeance?
If the war trials were truly just then Allied soldiers who committed war crimes should also have stood trial. Saving Private Ryan portrayed Americans shooting prisoners who had already surrendered. That is a war crime. I know these kinds of incidents happened -- maybe not on Omaha beach, but they did happen.
Are you suggesting that von Braun shouldn't have stood trial in Germany because his role was ambiguous? Isn't that what a trial is for? Or are you suggesting that von Braun shouldn't be punished because some other criminals slipped away unpunished? Mr or Ms Anonymous Coward, I have had occasions in my life where I have had my courage tested. I witnessed what appeared to be Police Brutality from my office window some time ago. I reported it to the Police Complaints Commision. Which resulted in having the investigator lean on me, and try to intimidate me. He made clear that before he investigated his fellow officers he was going to investigate me. In spite of this pressure I was dogged in my pursuit of the truth. I stuck to my principles. It took five months to learn what had really happened. Yes, frankly, it was frightening.No, this test wasn't nearly as challenging as those I believe von Braun should have faced. But then I didn't choose to manage a huge weapons development program.
I find it a bit ironic that you should question my courage, when you choose to post as an "anonymous coward".
About von Braun's status as a Nazi party member -- I was told this by a buddy of mine, who was a big fan of space exploration. He had read a biography of VB, and explained he wasn't really a Nazi. He just wanted to make rockets. He told me VB joined the Nazi party just because he thought it would make it easier for him to use his political pull to enable him to build rockets. My buddies interpretation was that VB was taking advantage of the Nazis.
I am going to repeat my main point. Von Braun was prepared to risk his life to make a point. And the point he risked it to make was that he thought the Nazis were wasting money, not that they were wasting lives.
You suggest that most senior Nazis weren't stupid? Did you check out the link to the brief biography of Rudolph Hess? Clearly nutty as a fruit-cake.
Jacob Bronowski describes how one of the senior Nazis, Goebbels or Himmler IIRC, wanted to take Heisenberg away from atomic research to try to prove, once and for all, that the stars are made of ice.
Look at the German research into atomic weapons. It was a complete failure, but no one was shot, or thrown in prison. In his book "Surely you are joking Mr Feynman" Richard Feynman describes how he supervised a team of young Army enlisted guys, who were chosen right out of basic training because they had scientific ability. These guys were human calculators, and ran punched cards through big mechanical calculators, to perform the very labourious calculations necessary to determine the amount of Fissile material needed to make a bomb. Heisenberg's group did the same calculation, but their answer was wildly off. They thought a bomb would require hundreds of kilograms of U235, not a kilogram or two.
The suggestion has been made that Heisenberg, or someone in his group, purposely fouled up the calculation.
If Leo Szilard hadn't escaped from Germany one step ahead of the Nazis do you think that he would have refused to work on German weapons research? Szilard circulated petition to Truman among the other scientists pleading with him forgo dropping the bomb on a Japanese city before it had been demonstrated to the Japanese high command.
Szilard gave up Physics after the war. He wrote some science fiction. This collection includes the short story "My Trial as a War Criminal", which I will strongly recommend...
Tomshardware.com has published some articles that really knocked the stuffing out of Intel. They published articles which exposed the failure of the Pentium 1.137 gigahertz. They exposed the poor performance of the Rambus memory.
But for the last year or too they seemed to be taking a lot softer line towards Intel. I was puzzled over this. Until recently, when I came across the following article about a former columnist at Tomshardware. He has his own hardware site now. If I understood this article properly, Tom re-edited and re-attributed Van Smith's articles, after his departure. And it sounds like when he was caught he yanked all of them. Altering the past like in 1984.
They are definitely all gone now.
I can't help wondering whether his departure was connected to THG cozying up to Intel.
The "P5" refers to the original, 5 volt, socket 4 pentiums, that ran at 60 and 66 megahertz. The P54 were the 3.3 volt, socket 7 pentiums, from 75 -> 200 megahertz. The P55 was the split voltage Pentium MMX, from 133 -> 300 megahertz, which also used socket 7.
Mr P understands gravity. Yes, gravity sweeps a lot meteors to strike the Earth all the time. If I was a grammar nazi I would argue over the dividing line between a small asteroid and large meteor. Life is too short for that however.
Instead I will give you some friendly advice.
Mr P, you understand gravity perfectly. But Mr P, it is not enough to understand gravity. Sometimes you must understand the opposite of gravity -- comedy!
The use of lots of exclamation points should have been your first clue.
It is not quite as bad as this poster states. The original Buran the one to fly two orbits is safely stored at Baikonur. The second one, which had been scheduled to dock with Mir, in 1993, is 97% complete, and is also safely stored at Baikonur. The one in the Moscow's Gorky Park, was a full-scale mockup, like the American shuttle Enterprize.
Yes, the "evil empire" nonsense is a great shame. I think it is really in our interests to employ the aerospace and defense researchers of the former Soviet Union. If you click on the link for the Gorky Park shuttle, you will read that the author paid a few bucks for a security guard to give him a pre-opening tour. He writes that the security guard had formerly worked on the Buran's design team. Working as a security guard paid more than working in aerospace.
I am going to repeat something Dennis Tito said, in his press conference, after his return to Earth. You all remember that Tito was the first Space Tourist, getting a lift to the space shuttle aboard a Russian vehicle. At the time the idea of space tourism was so new, and shocking, that all kinds of commentators were commenting on how wasteful it was to spend $20,000,000 USD on a vacation, when the world faced problems of poverty, and threat of war. It was the first question Tito was asked at his press conference. Tito's answer was something like:
This is a great answer. It earned my respect. Soviet researchers were highly skilled, and it is a tragedy to have their training and experience go to waste.
But it not just the talents of Soviet aerospace researchers we need to make sure don't go to waste. I would feel the world was a more secure place if former Soviet defense researchers were getting grants from Western institutions, to lift them out of poverty. Visiting fellowships? Send Western students to go learn from them on exchange programs? I believe it is strongly in the West's interests to give these guys and gals jobs that use their talents and preserve their dignity.
Face it, who is going to be more tempted to sell their skills on the black market, or help smuggle out Fissile material? The researcher who has had his dignity restored with a good job, research facilities, and a living wage? Or the researcher who is starving in poverty?
Slashdot has proved to be an excellent resource for links to the Buran's design. Thanks slashdotters!
Well, I have this question about the American shuttle's design compromises. I have heard that political pressure from the USAF, and the military-industrial complex, resulted in a larger shuttle, capable of carrying larger, military payloads. I read that a smaller shuttle would have been cheaper to build and run.
True?
Safety? The Burans had four ejection seats.
The Buran could have carried five times the payload of the American shuttle.
In other words he was willing to take a moral stand. And he felt it was more important to object to a waste of money, rather than the cruel waste of human life?
You suggest he had just two choices: a suicidal objection to slave labour, or continuing, full-speed ahead, with the rocket program?
How about waiting for the war to be over, before continuing his rocket research?
What about resigning? What about getting fired for incompetence? What about faking some experiments to make the program look like a waste of money? What about pretending to become a hopeless alcoholic, or pretending to have a nervous breakdown? Rudolph Hess was able to defect, in May 1941. Was this a possibility for von Braun?
Grownups make lots of compromises. Do you go to Hawaii for Xmas, or do you get braces for your kid's teeth? Grownups give up thing to respect their principles.
Do we let the President of ENRON or Worldcomm claim they "didn't know" what was done by those who answered to them?
What are you talking about? It missed didn't it? As some other people have already pointed out, the efforts to find and deflect Earth striking asteroids has been a complete success! After all, during the couple of decades spent looking for them not ONE asteroid has successfully struck the Earth!
Woops, I meant to comment on this. :-)
In another thread on this probe someone said something like, "I wish NASA would make probes that work darn it!"
I thought the "faster, cheaper" experiment, where NASA would build more probes, but cheaper probes, which would carry fewer instrument packages, and be easier to build -- I thought it was a good idea. It was an experiment. NASA's plan was to accept a greater failure rate, which was supposed to be balanced by the probes overall smaller budgets. A greater proportion of these probes did fail. The public didn't like hearing about these failures.
But was the experiment a failure? Did NASA get more instruments out there, for cheaper, than if they had built a fewer number of gold-plated probes? Either way, I would say the experiment was worth trying.
Has NASA officially announced the abandonment of the faster, cheaper experiment?
And, if so, was the CONTOUR one of the last "faster, cheaper" probes.
If NASA were sending cosmonauts out there, the probes would have to be really reliable, and consequently a lot more expensive. NASA sends robot probes knowing some will fail. I wish there wasn't all this criticism when it happens.