credit for the invention belongs to Dr. Joseph V. Foa who was awarded US Patent 3213802 for a "train in a tube" in 1965. This was the basis for a number of years of research into the concept at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1960s.
It's far older than that, of course. Isambard Bunuel was tinkering with 'atmospheric railway' hardware a century and a half ago. Patents issued in Britain, 1838.
A modern day Ben Franklin would outsource the kite flying: some inexpensive foreigner takes all the lightning risk and Benny gets all the credit and fame and votes himself a raise.
Odd you should mention this. In fact, Ben Franklin described the make-a-spark-in-a-storm experiment, and some Frenchmen hired a retiree to do the work. Ben was presented to the (then) King of France with the results (and suddenly, America had a bit of international prestige, no longer just a backward colony).
It depends on what they are including in that cost and how they are amortizing it. For instance setting up a local relay station for a small town...
But the cost per CUSTOMER in that small town wouldn't ever be so high. There's microcell pole-top repeaters that can run on a solar panel and battery, that can handle the 'last-mile' problem in a rural environmen. Cisco 1000 series, for instance. The lesser monetary amount mentioned ($3k) would buy one and its maintenance for ten years. The last-mile problem is solved at the community level. Low-capacity fiber backbone is relatively easy to build, and should be provided for in any state roadway construction. That solves the 'last 40 mile' problem, at the state level. So, the real issue is 'last-500-mile' connection, and that's a necessity in interstate commerce, which we've presumably already solved independent of the subsidy.
I'd disbelieve any '$9k per year per customer' costs, and that means either the researcher is cooking his numbers, or there's a telco fraud (like, first-year retirement of costs on a 10-year bit of infrastructure).
30 years ago I was using a 3 1/2" floppy drive. I still have one to this day. Plugs right into a USB port. In fact, you can still get hardware to read any of the old media that you stated.
Not true, of course. The Macintosh floppies of 1984 were recorded in zoned fashion (required a variable speed disk drive), not compatible with 1.44M modern 3.5" drives, and the early file formats aren't intelligible to modern computers. There were so many 5.25" floppy formats that we had a special computer set up just to read 'em all (does anyone remember Discon?).
Thankfully, there's a good written standard for CD and DVD filesystems; those will be readable for a long time if the media survives.
No need to worry about ink: even the cheapest and nastiest laser printers use toner, and a mixture of thermoplastic and carbon black thermally fused to your paper isn't going anywhere...
Carbon black does go away (turns to carbon monoxide) over a few centuries; the run-of-the-mill toner, though, uses Fe3O4/Fe2O3 pigment (it's slightly magnetic). So does classic oak-gall ink for quill pens, and the longevity is good.
Mac Air: 2xUSB 3.0, HP/Mic, SD (Air 13), Thunderbolt
Ativ: 2xUSB 3.0, micro HDMI, mini VGA, RJ45(Dongle), SD, HP/Mic
Ativ beats air by 2 video outputs and wired ethernet. Also by SD when compared to the Air 11.
The Thunderbolt contains miniDisplayPort i.e. DVI and HDMI and VGA all in one; just choose a short adapter or use long cable with two different end-connectors. Maybe you can call the tiny connector 'nonstandard', but it supports two distinct standards (DVI and VGA) as well as some variants like HDMI.
The 'micro HDMI' isn't any more standard, in any useful sense. The real difference,
is only the missing wired Ethernet port and maybe SD card slot. Neither gets lots of use on laptops.
There is battery life. But what we really need is recharge time. You can fill a hydrogen car in about as much time it takes to fill a gasoline car.
It's not practical or safe to fuel a car with pressurized gas or with liquid H2. The best prospect for automotive hydrogen tanks is a sponge-like intercalation storage, and it TAKES TIME to fill (or drain) that kind of tank.
H2 cars will have to swap cartridges at refuel stations. Metal embrittlement is no real problem when the fueling stations are required to reinspect and rebuild on safe schedules.
Technology that belongs to Apple and is incompatible with everything else. Many other machines used standard floppy disk controller chips.
That's twisted; proprietary technology means OWNED technology. Apple had a patent on some its floppy controllers, and IBM decided on a NEC part, uPD765 if memory serves, that was proprietary to NEC. It wasn't a standard, either, just a documented solution that DOS was made compatible with.
All the early floppy disks were proprietary. CDs had a data-format standard, though.
A standard is built around a full formal specification, by a group (IEEE, ANSI...) that usually is not the 'owner' of the underlying patents, but is an interest group which sponsors the publication and growth/modification of the specification.
>I suspect that you are likely going to be very safe with Cat-6 for a few decades, but...
A few decades is the human lifespan. That's good enough for me.
Parenthetically, cat5 was developed for the old only-uses-two-pair standard, 10baseT, but works fine with four-pair gigabit (1000baseT) gear. The cat6 advantage isn't really speed, it's range (and for my house, one can painlessly forego any range beyond 50m).
>Have fun writing...algorithms for those if you can't work out analytical solutions
Truth. It's easy to write code, but only a good little computable-on-back-of-an-envelope test case will give me confidence in it. I've found errors that were hidden four decimals down in my brute-force algorithms.
Oh, there's a good chance there ARE uses for this, and in a surprising way. The energy levels in electrons of atoms are perturbed by magnetic fields. So, in addition to temperature, and pressure, a magnetic field can change chemical energies (and cause or inhibit reactions, change reaction rates...). Douglas Hofstadter did some work (theoretical) on high magnetic fields, before writing _Goedel, Escher, Bach_.
The IOS update process seems too long and data-transfer-intensive, of course, but the worst feature is the intermediate steps that (if they hiccup) will recover JUST FINE. Except, the hiccup puts up an error message, and it looks like nothing is happening, so folk (even who should know better) do things like disconnecting the phone, or following up the 'it all has to be reinstalled from scratch' instructions. The best thing to do with an updating IOS device, is to walk away. For a day. And not read the messages on the screen, or try to interfere.
The spectrum of hydrogen has several lines that might be seen (3835 Angstroms, 3889, 3970, and 4102) but that's no improvement on so-called blacklight (which has Hg gas lines, a very strong one at 3650, another at 4046, and a dozen or more weak lines inbetween).
The filament of a halogen lamp, on the other hand, fills a monochromator slit nicely and gives broadband radiation - continuous UV spectrum.
So, get a grating (Edmund Scientific used to sell little replica gratings) use two slits in series to collimate a bit of the light from a halogen lamp, and admire the spectrum it throws on a wall, in a dark room.
The hard part, is calibrating the wall (for that, use the strong-spectral-line source).
[about a machine-specific install DVD and install using the intended machine onto an unintended target's disk]
There's no guarantee, of course, that the system as installed is suitable (the target machine could be one of the old 68k Mac models, if it had a big enough drive). You can test easily enough, by holding down T while booting the friend's Mac, then boot your target Mac with the 'option' key down, and choose to boot (if it's offered as an option) the 'external disk' which is your friend's internal drive. You need to connect 'em with a firewire cable, of course.
Buying a new system upgrade/install disk is a legal option, but none currently available from Apple work on (for instance) my trusty old G3 iMac. So, it's not always available.
Apple OEM install discs only install on hardware they came with [...]
Gotta love it when a non-trivial amount of engineering goes into making the product less useful. What if your disc breaks and your friend doesn't have the same model?
Well, it ain't pretty, but (1) you can restore from a bootable backup disk, or (2) you can SOMETIMES get a disk replaced for shipping/handling (while stocks last, for new machines), or (3) an Apple dealer is authorized to reinstall your original operating system version (the license for that version is tied to the machine, by serial number).
What USUALLY happens, though, is your friend boots from his install DVD, you hold down the "T" key and boot your machine into target disk mode, then your box is just an external drive for your friend's box, and the install proceeds as though friend was putting the OS onto his own disk. This requires a Firewire cable to link the two computers.
Microsoft said they're trying to figure out how...to keep boot secure but still allow users to boot into Windows 7, since Windows 7 doesn't support this. And if it works for Windows 7, it'll probably work for Linux.
This is not necessarily good news. Microsoft has done this before, in the form of "Virtual PC for Mac" after they bought out Connectix. The MS market geniuses sold a core product that included the virtual machine, then additional products for all the other operating systems you would ever need. Presumably, no one ever needed Linux.
The tag line here, is (from the Installation Overview booklet) "You can install a version of the Windows operating system that is licensed separately."
The overwhelming probability is that no future Linus Torvalds will have any opportunity to put a new OS on a generic machine that enforces this kind of security. The specific Linux case, maybe there's a way to make THAT work. After all, IBM ships lots of Linux boxes - it's not a garage-shop-only suspport environment.
"IBM did try to keep some of the particulars of the BIOS secret to prevent PC clones, but it was swiftly reverse-engineered..."
That's not right. IBM published, in full, in the technical reference manual, the commented BIOS source code. It wasn't SECRET, it was COPYRIGHT.
The third-party BIOS'es were reverse engineered, by clean-room techniques where the authors never saw the IBM publication, but only the formal specification. The formal-specification team DID read the source.
It is possible in most rack-mount (big cable complexity) systems to get your cables routed from the source, to the edge of the array, down (or up) the rack then across to the destination, if the wires are long enough. This is important if a box in the rack ever requires replacement, because all cables NOT routed to that box are out of the way for removal/replacement operations.
It is relatively commonplace, in science labs, to see wiring tied to the rackmount modules' handles, just to keep its loops draped on the side, out of the way of maintenance and configure and monitor operations. It ought to be more commonplace, IMHO.
Three ways. Compressed gas (not really safe, compressed H2 causes embrittlement of metals eventually).
Liquefied gas (safe enough unless you want a mobile
tank, like in an automobile) - can vent large amounts
of material rapidly if the tank is breached
Intercalation. Hydrogen can weakly bond to some kinds of surfaces (like O2 bonds to hemoglobin), and this allows storage at low pressure of lots of room-temperature H2. It's only capable of outgassing slowly, because release of H2 cools the intercalate. Charging the intercalate requires some heat-removal, and happens slowly.
The idea that the statute is contrary to free speech is a good one, but not the ONLY problem: 'the right of the people peaceably to assemble' is in the US Constitutioin also, and it covers lots of nonspoken communication, including, IMHO, telecommunications. Also, hanging out on the corner. And playing WOW.
> I'm looking forward to commercially available transmitters and receivers with at least 100mbps.
Oh, those are old news, in PCI or PCIe form, with fiber optic connections, as an Ethernet variant.
>Point-to-point links for mesh networking
Not with THIS scheme; the description is clearly of one-way communication (light source:== data source). It's also an easily snooped scheme, so wouldn't be practical in a security-conscious environment.
No, just another important part of the national infrastructure that we all have an interest in. When railways didn't have a common gage, it tied up shipping. So, they were regulated to common mechanical standards and encouraged to allow each other's trains to share tracks. When telephone standards were needed (numbered dials and phone numbers aren't NATURAL, they're an imposed standard), they were created and imposed uniformly. Likewise, electrical power standards were imposed (the Japanese have incompatible electric grids-it's UGLY). And TCP/IP connections cannot easily replace POTS unless additional rules are imposed. What use is FIOS if you're miles from home and looking for a phone? And Skype and cellphones and landlines CAN connect, because of the imposed rules. These are GOOD rules. Enjoy 'em!
You don't want to use electric power on a copper cable, because of lightning. I'm thinking there will have to be 'running lights' to warn aircraft at night, too.
It's worse than that; the oil layer is a kind of subsea asphalt, and some might be centuries old for all we know from this article. The La Brea tar pits (aka the 'the tar' tar pits) are well known to have significant age, because of the animal remains (of extinct species). There have been oil seepages other than the recent burst from the BP well. It'd be nice to get samples of the oil/tar/asphalt stuff, and to carbon-date the beasties inside.
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It's far older than that, of course. Isambard Bunuel was tinkering with 'atmospheric railway' hardware a century and a half ago. Patents issued in Britain, 1838.
Odd you should mention this. In fact, Ben Franklin described the make-a-spark-in-a-storm experiment, and some Frenchmen hired a retiree to do the work. Ben was presented to the (then) King of France with the results (and suddenly, America had a bit of international prestige, no longer just a backward colony).
[it simply doesn't cost THAT much]
But the cost per CUSTOMER in that small town wouldn't ever be so high.
There's microcell pole-top repeaters that can run on a solar panel and battery, that can handle the 'last-mile' problem in a rural environmen. Cisco 1000 series, for instance. The lesser monetary amount mentioned ($3k) would buy one and its maintenance for ten years. The last-mile problem is solved at the community level.
Low-capacity fiber backbone is relatively easy to build, and should be provided for in any state roadway construction. That solves the 'last 40 mile' problem, at the state level.
So, the real issue is 'last-500-mile' connection, and that's a necessity in interstate commerce, which we've presumably already solved independent of the subsidy.
I'd disbelieve any '$9k per year per customer' costs, and that means either the researcher is cooking his numbers, or there's a telco fraud (like, first-year retirement of costs on a 10-year bit of infrastructure).
Not true, of course. The Macintosh floppies of 1984 were recorded in zoned fashion (required a variable speed disk drive), not compatible with 1.44M modern 3.5" drives, and the early file formats aren't intelligible to modern computers. There were so many 5.25" floppy formats that we had a special computer set up just to read 'em all (does anyone remember Discon?).
Thankfully, there's a good written standard for CD and DVD filesystems; those will be readable for a long time if the media survives.
Not the issue; this is about keeping a backup of some
currently-in-use data, it'll get REWRITTEN onto those
flash drives every year or so.
So, a ten year data retention is more than adequate.
It'd be really easy to come up with a suitable fire-safe
place for a dozen microSD cards; that's only five
cubic centimeters...
The Thunderbolt contains miniDisplayPort i.e. DVI and HDMI and VGA all in one;
just choose a short adapter or use long cable with two different end-connectors.
Maybe you can call the tiny connector 'nonstandard', but it supports two distinct
standards (DVI and VGA) as well as some variants like HDMI.
The 'micro HDMI' isn't any more standard, in any useful sense. The real difference,
is only the missing wired Ethernet port and maybe SD card slot. Neither gets lots of use on laptops.
There is battery life. But what we really need is recharge time. You can fill a hydrogen car in about as much time it takes to fill a gasoline car.
It's not practical or safe to fuel a car with pressurized gas or with liquid H2. The best prospect for automotive hydrogen tanks is a sponge-like intercalation storage, and it TAKES TIME to fill (or drain) that kind of tank.
H2 cars will have to swap cartridges at refuel stations. Metal embrittlement is no real problem when the fueling stations are required to reinspect and rebuild on safe schedules.
That's twisted; proprietary technology means OWNED technology. Apple had a patent on some its floppy controllers, and IBM decided on a NEC part, uPD765 if memory serves, that was proprietary to NEC. It wasn't a standard, either, just a documented solution that DOS was made compatible with.
All the early floppy disks were proprietary. CDs had a data-format standard, though.
A standard is built around a full formal specification, by a group (IEEE, ANSI...) that usually is not the 'owner' of the underlying patents, but is an interest group which sponsors the publication and growth/modification of the specification.
>I suspect that you are likely going to be very safe with Cat-6 for a few decades, but ...
A few decades is the human lifespan. That's good enough for me.
Parenthetically, cat5 was developed for the old only-uses-two-pair standard, 10baseT, but works fine with four-pair gigabit (1000baseT) gear. The cat6 advantage isn't really speed, it's range (and for my house, one can painlessly forego any range beyond 50m).
>Have fun writing...algorithms for those if you can't work out analytical solutions
Truth. It's easy to write code, but only a good little
computable-on-back-of-an-envelope test case will give
me confidence in it. I've found errors that were hidden
four decimals down in my brute-force algorithms.
Oh, there's a good chance there ARE uses for this, and in a surprising way.
The energy levels in electrons of atoms are perturbed by magnetic fields. So, in addition to temperature, and pressure,
a magnetic field can change chemical energies (and cause or inhibit reactions, change reaction rates...).
Douglas Hofstadter did some work (theoretical) on high magnetic fields, before writing _Goedel, Escher, Bach_.
The IOS update process seems too long and data-transfer-intensive, of course, but the worst feature is the intermediate steps that (if they hiccup) will recover JUST FINE.
Except, the hiccup puts up an error message, and it looks
like nothing is happening, so folk (even who should know
better) do things like disconnecting the phone, or
following up the 'it all has to be reinstalled from scratch'
instructions. The best thing to do with an updating IOS
device, is to walk away. For a day. And not read
the messages on the screen, or try to interfere.
The spectrum of hydrogen has several lines that
might be seen (3835 Angstroms, 3889, 3970,
and 4102) but that's no improvement on so-called
blacklight (which has Hg gas lines, a very strong
one at 3650, another at 4046, and a dozen or more
weak lines inbetween).
The filament of a halogen lamp, on the other hand,
fills a monochromator slit nicely and gives broadband
radiation - continuous UV spectrum.
So, get a grating (Edmund Scientific used to sell
little replica gratings) use two slits in series to
collimate a bit of the light from a halogen lamp, and
admire the spectrum it throws on a wall, in a dark room.
The hard part, is calibrating the wall (for that, use the
strong-spectral-line source).
[about a machine-specific install DVD and
install using the intended machine onto
an unintended target's disk]
There's no guarantee, of course, that the
system as installed is suitable (the target
machine could be one of the old 68k Mac
models, if it had a big enough drive). You
can test easily enough, by holding down T
while booting the friend's Mac, then boot
your target Mac with the 'option' key down,
and choose to boot (if it's offered as an option) the
'external disk' which is your friend's internal drive.
You need to connect 'em with a firewire cable, of course.
Buying a new system upgrade/install disk is a legal option,
but none currently available from Apple work on
(for instance) my trusty old G3 iMac. So, it's
not always available.
Well, it ain't pretty, but (1) you can restore from a bootable
backup disk, or (2) you can SOMETIMES get a disk
replaced for shipping/handling (while stocks last, for
new machines), or (3) an Apple dealer is authorized
to reinstall your original operating system version (the
license for that version is tied to the machine, by serial number).
What USUALLY happens, though, is your friend
boots from his install DVD, you hold down the "T" key and
boot your machine into target disk mode, then your
box is just an external drive for your friend's box, and the
install proceeds as though friend was putting the OS onto his
own disk. This requires a Firewire cable to link the two computers.
This is not necessarily good news. Microsoft has done this before, in the form of "Virtual PC for Mac"
after they bought out Connectix. The MS market geniuses sold a core product that included
the virtual machine, then additional products for all the other operating systems you would
ever need. Presumably, no one ever needed Linux.
The tag line here, is (from the Installation Overview booklet)
"You can install a version of the Windows operating system that is licensed separately."
The overwhelming probability is that no future Linus Torvalds will have any opportunity to put a new OS on a generic machine that enforces this kind of security. The specific Linux case, maybe there's a way to make THAT work. After all, IBM ships lots of Linux boxes - it's not
a garage-shop-only suspport environment.
"IBM did try to keep some of the particulars of the BIOS secret to prevent PC clones, but it was swiftly reverse-engineered..."
That's not right. IBM published, in full, in the
technical reference manual, the commented BIOS
source code. It wasn't SECRET, it was COPYRIGHT.
The third-party BIOS'es were reverse engineered, by
clean-room techniques where the authors never saw
the IBM publication, but only the formal specification.
The formal-specification team DID read the source.
It is possible in most rack-mount (big cable complexity) systems to
get your cables routed from the source, to the edge of the array,
down (or up) the rack then across to the destination, if the wires
are long enough. This is important if a box in the rack ever
requires replacement, because all cables NOT routed to that box are out
of the way for removal/replacement operations.
It is relatively commonplace, in science labs, to see wiring tied to the
rackmount modules' handles, just to keep its loops draped on the
side, out of the way of maintenance and configure and monitor operations.
It ought to be more commonplace, IMHO.
Three ways.
Compressed gas (not really safe, compressed H2
causes embrittlement of metals eventually).
Liquefied gas (safe enough unless you want a mobile
tank, like in an automobile) - can vent large amounts
of material rapidly if the tank is breached
Intercalation. Hydrogen can weakly bond to some
kinds of surfaces (like O2 bonds to hemoglobin),
and this allows storage at low pressure of lots of
room-temperature H2. It's only capable of outgassing
slowly, because release of H2 cools the intercalate.
Charging the intercalate requires some heat-removal, and
happens slowly.
The idea that the statute is contrary to free speech is
a good one, but not the ONLY problem: 'the right
of the people peaceably to assemble' is in the US Constitutioin
also, and it covers lots of nonspoken communication,
including, IMHO, telecommunications. Also, hanging
out on the corner. And playing WOW.
> I'm looking forward to commercially available transmitters and receivers with at least 100mbps.
Oh, those are old news, in PCI or PCIe form, with fiber
optic connections, as an Ethernet variant.
>Point-to-point links for mesh networking
Not with THIS scheme; the description is clearly :== data source).
of one-way communication (light source
It's also an easily snooped scheme, so wouldn't be practical
in a security-conscious environment.
No, just another important part of the national infrastructure
that we all have an interest in. When railways didn't have a common gage, it tied up shipping. So, they were regulated
to common mechanical standards and encouraged to allow each other's trains to share tracks.
When telephone standards were needed (numbered dials
and phone numbers aren't NATURAL, they're an imposed
standard), they were created and imposed uniformly.
Likewise, electrical power standards were imposed (the
Japanese have incompatible electric grids-it's UGLY).
And TCP/IP connections cannot easily replace POTS
unless additional rules are imposed. What use is FIOS if you're miles from home and looking for a phone?
And Skype and cellphones and landlines CAN connect,
because of the imposed rules. These are GOOD rules. Enjoy 'em!
You don't want to use electric power on a copper cable,
because of lightning. I'm thinking there will have to
be 'running lights' to warn aircraft at night, too.
It's worse than that; the oil layer is a kind of subsea asphalt, and some might be centuries old for all we know from this article.
The La Brea tar pits (aka the 'the tar' tar pits)
are well known to have significant age, because
of the animal remains (of extinct species).
There have been oil seepages other than the recent burst from the BP well. It'd be nice to get samples of the oil/tar/asphalt stuff, and to carbon-date the beasties inside.