You could never make an "L-box" as cheap as the X-box because the beauty of it is that it's subsidized hardware! Every X-box subverted to another purpose not only deprives Microsoft of razor-blade revenue, but actually causes them to lose money!
If X-box can be made to run Linux, then it would be an excellent base for an open source Tivo!
I thought there was only unconditional JP... I think I may have been confusing it with the 6502 which I spent a lot more time programming (I was co-author of Acorn ISO-Pascal for the 6502).
I'd be sad to see a company that's such a piece of microprocessor history disappear.
My first computer was a 1978 NASCOM-1 kit (a board, bag of chips and seperate bare transformer!) that was based on a 1 MHz Z80 with a whopping 2K of memory - 1K for the monitor program, and 1K for the user. Back in those days we programmed from memory directly in hex - none of this fancy modern symbolic assembler stuff!
Zilog also had 16 and 32 bit microprocessors, but neither took off - the Z80 has had a long life though.
The story of the Z80 is quite interesting - the design of the Intel 8080 basically walked down the road in the head of the designers who then designed the Z80 which was close to being dual 8080's on a single die - with it's dual A and A' register sets.
I wonder if there'd be any benefit to going straight up and then at the right time (before you start falling back) have a smaller or different type motor shoot you "sideways" to put you in orbit?
Maybe one day we'll be able to figure out how to keep cats in superimposed states, but for the time being Schroedringer's gonna have to decide whether to whack the cat before he closes the lid.
The collapse postulate is an add-on hack to the Cohenhagen interpretation that makes for a simplistic quantum to classical mapping. IMO it's bunk - the other interpretations that don't require it make a lot more sense, if not [i]common]/i] sense!
IMO the quantum wave is it. Everything is just probabalistic (there is no classical reality), but sometimes the probability is close to 100% or at least appears that way.
The trouble with any ground bsed thing, particularly a small one, is that it's going to take forever to cover any interesting amount of territory, and in practice would likely fail somehow (reach end of life or get disabled by terrain) before it got too far.
What I'd like to see would be some kind of self inflating blimp that could survey a lot of land and transmit back imaging info. Maybe a helium blimp or perhaps even a hot air one powered by solar electricity.
What would be really cool would be if they had a public competition to allow one or two non-NASA designed bots to go along too. Fighting with the NASA bit would have to be a no-no, though!
One the age of engineering was here, it didn't take us very long to create fixed wing aircraft, helicopters, parachutes... I don't see flapping wings as any more of a big deal than rotating ones or the principle of the aerofoil.
That's simply because of lack of CODECS. For AVI there's the avifile framework that allows use of x856 Windoze CODECs, but for your QT for Linux there's zippo. AVI is also the preferred format because of DivX (originally a hacked MS AVI CODEC) having taken off, and DivX/MPEG-4 having become associated with AVI rather than it's native MPEG-4/QT framework.
There's also the issue of tools - VirtualDub (AVI) is much more capable for ripping off DVDs and cleaning them up than is Bloatfest 2000 (QT).
Well first the Russians embarass NASA by proving they can make a profit from a $20M passenger while the shuttle costs $500M per trip (10x over budget), and now they're going to embarass them by doing science up their while all we hear about NASA is how smart they were to build table out of junk and duct tape.
Maybe NASA should step aside in the interests of space research, and sell their ISS spot to Russia who it appears can not only pay for it commercially, but also get science done (pretty damn cool that a competition winner is going to get his/her experiment on the ISS!).
If he were a realist, he'd realize that spreading free software in as many ways as possible is a good thing. If he doesn't want free software running on commercial systems then he's just ensuring the continued viability of commercial software, not that I see that as a bad thing, being a professional programmer!
You've gotta be kidding about Armadillo Aerospace?! It least this guy has got his rocket up to a respectable height. Carmack et al are still hopping about on the ground like a TM-er trying to fly or a crippled frog!
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me! The Delta II site has the following info on it's capabilities:
The Delta II can carry payloads into near-earth orbits (approximately 100 nautical miles [160 kilometers] in space). It can lift up to 11,100 pounds (4,995 kilograms) into a 28-degree circular near-earth orbit and up to 8,420 pounds (3,789 kilograms) into a 90-degree polar near-earth orbit. The Delta II also can carry up to 4,010 pounds (1,804.5 kilograms) into geo-transfer orbit (approximately 12,000 miles (19,200 kilometers)) and up to 2,000 pounds (909 kilograms) into geosynchronous orbit (approximately 22,000 miles (35,200 kilometers)).
The near earth orbit of 162Km isn't so much more than the X-prize 100Km, and as the Delta II numbers indicate it gets easier to go further the higher you get.
Secondly the Delta II lifts a pretty hefty payload, whereas I assume there'd at least be some sort of commerical market for putting much lighter payloads into near earth orbit.
Re:GTK Seems solid, but slow on Solaris
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 2
I believe you can also configure mozilla to build using Xlib directly rather than GTK - but I've no idea if that makes it any faster. I've just switched to mozilla 0.9.6 from netscape 4.X as my main browser, and it is rather sluggish on both x68/linuz and SPARC/Solaris, but the tabs are a killer feature!
Re:Licencing... and support
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 2
I think Qt comes out ahead on the free/licensing issue; if you want to use it for free software, then Qt is GPL'd, but if you want to use it for commercial software you need to buy a licence - but most importantly that also brings you commercial support. In either case you have the source so that you can fix bugs or figure things out for yourself, but if you're working on a commercial project and under deadline pressure it's nice to have that commercial support available.
I don't know why everyone is so focused on smallbox, even if it's an awful disease.
Ken Alibek (formerly Kantajin Alibekov) who was the deputy director of the immense Soviet Biopreparat biowarfare research and manufacture organizion defected to the US in the early 90's, and has written a book on it as well as testifying to congress and having been thoroughly debriefed on the Soviet program.... They worked on a whole slew of biological weapons including things like marlburg virus (similar to ebola) that would make you wish you only had smallpox!
The Soviets stockpiled weaponized smallpox, plague, marlburg, tularemia etc in quantities of tens of tons each! They aqpparently killed around 100,000 nazis with tularemia in the Battle of Stalingrad.
Unfortunately it's going to be tough to knwo who to believe here.. terrorists may claim it was an attack even if it was not, and the FAA may deny it was even if they eventually piece it together and determine it was. The government is going to be torn between wanting to attribute it to terrorism to support the war, and wanting to say it wasn't to help the airline industry and economy recover. In the current climate moreso than ever you can't take news at face value - you also have to apply a sceptical analysis of the agenda of the source, and reconcile many contradictory sources.
bin Laden and al Qai'da are Arabs, not "Afgahni", but the Taliban ARE - they're Pashtun. Pashtunistan was part of Hindustan (now divided up as Afgahnistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India), and when the Brits divided up Hindustan they divided Pashtunistan into two - part now lies in Afghanistan and part in Pakistan.
The difference between the Taliban and traditional Pashtun (as in Pakistan) is that the traditional Pashtun are tribal and look to the Khans - feudal lords - as their leaders; the Mullah's or religious clerks do not have a high place in their society.
Slashdot Mirror
You could never make an "L-box" as cheap as the X-box because the beauty of it is that it's subsidized hardware! Every X-box subverted to another purpose not only deprives Microsoft of razor-blade revenue, but actually causes them to lose money!
If X-box can be made to run Linux, then it would be an excellent base for an open source Tivo!
.. and don't forget the addition of the IX, IY indexed addressing registers, plus all those interesting "unofficial" instructions that ran so slowly!
Heh - I don't think the kids nowadays even know what self modifying code is! :-)
I must be going senile! :-(
I thought there was only unconditional JP... I think I may have been confusing it with the 6502 which I spent a lot more time programming (I was co-author of Acorn ISO-Pascal for the 6502).
Microprocessor instruction set cards
Nothing, because there's no such instruction as JP NZ - maybe you meant JR NZ? ;-)
.. and yes, I can do hex subtractions in my head!
I'd be sad to see a company that's such a piece of microprocessor history disappear.
:-(
My first computer was a 1978 NASCOM-1 kit (a board, bag of chips and seperate bare transformer!) that was based on a 1 MHz Z80 with a whopping 2K of memory - 1K for the monitor program, and 1K for the user. Back in those days we programmed from memory directly in hex - none of this fancy modern symbolic assembler stuff!
Zilog also had 16 and 32 bit microprocessors, but neither took off - the Z80 has had a long life though.
The story of the Z80 is quite interesting - the design of the Intel 8080 basically walked down the road in the head of the designers who then designed the Z80 which was close to being dual 8080's on a single die - with it's dual A and A' register sets.
Ah, the good old days....
OK, thanks! I see what you mean.
I wonder if there'd be any benefit to going straight up and then at the right time (before you start falling back) have a smaller or different type motor shoot you "sideways" to put you in orbit?
Actually, Schroedringer's cat, being a classsically sized critter, is saved from the being a member of the living dead by decoherence.
How decoherence killed schroedringer's cat
Maybe one day we'll be able to figure out how to keep cats in superimposed states, but for the time being Schroedringer's gonna have to decide whether to whack the cat before he closes the lid.
The collapse postulate is an add-on hack to the Cohenhagen interpretation that makes for a simplistic quantum to classical mapping. IMO it's bunk - the other interpretations that don't require it make a lot more sense, if not [i]common]/i] sense!
IMO the quantum wave is it. Everything is just probabalistic (there is no classical reality), but sometimes the probability is close to 100% or at least appears that way.
The trouble with any ground bsed thing, particularly a small one, is that it's going to take forever to cover any interesting amount of territory, and in practice would likely fail somehow (reach end of life or get disabled by terrain) before it got too far.
What I'd like to see would be some kind of self inflating blimp that could survey a lot of land and transmit back imaging info. Maybe a helium blimp or perhaps even a hot air one powered by solar electricity.
What would be really cool would be if they had a public competition to allow one or two non-NASA designed bots to go along too. Fighting with the NASA bit would have to be a no-no, though!
One the age of engineering was here, it didn't take us very long to create fixed wing aircraft, helicopters, parachutes... I don't see flapping wings as any more of a big deal than rotating ones or the principle of the aerofoil.
That's simply because of lack of CODECS. For AVI there's the avifile framework that allows use of x856 Windoze CODECs, but for your QT for Linux there's zippo. AVI is also the preferred format because of DivX (originally a hacked MS AVI CODEC) having taken off, and DivX/MPEG-4 having become associated with AVI rather than it's native MPEG-4/QT framework.
There's also the issue of tools - VirtualDub (AVI) is much more capable for ripping off DVDs and cleaning them up than is Bloatfest 2000 (QT).
Well first the Russians embarass NASA by proving they can make a profit from a $20M passenger while the shuttle costs $500M per trip (10x over budget), and now they're going to embarass them by doing science up their while all we hear about NASA is how smart they were to build table out of junk and duct tape.
Maybe NASA should step aside in the interests of space research, and sell their ISS spot to Russia who it appears can not only pay for it commercially, but also get science done (pretty damn cool that a competition winner is going to get his/her experiment on the ISS!).
Hippy
If he were a realist, he'd realize that spreading free software in as many ways as possible is a good thing. If he doesn't want free software running on commercial systems then he's just ensuring the continued viability of commercial software, not that I see that as a bad thing, being a professional programmer!
You've gotta be kidding about Armadillo Aerospace?! It least this guy has got his rocket up to a respectable height. Carmack et al are still hopping about on the ground like a TM-er trying to fly or a crippled frog!
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me! The Delta II site has the following info on it's capabilities:
The Delta II can carry payloads into near-earth orbits (approximately 100 nautical miles [160 kilometers] in space). It can lift up to 11,100 pounds (4,995 kilograms) into a 28-degree circular near-earth orbit and up to 8,420 pounds (3,789 kilograms) into a 90-degree polar near-earth orbit. The Delta II also can carry up to 4,010 pounds (1,804.5 kilograms) into geo-transfer orbit (approximately 12,000 miles (19,200 kilometers)) and up to 2,000 pounds (909 kilograms) into geosynchronous orbit (approximately 22,000 miles (35,200 kilometers)).
The near earth orbit of 162Km isn't so much more than the X-prize 100Km, and as the Delta II numbers indicate it gets easier to go further the higher you get.
Secondly the Delta II lifts a pretty hefty payload, whereas I assume there'd at least be some sort of commerical market for putting much lighter payloads into near earth orbit.
I believe you can also configure mozilla to build using Xlib directly rather than GTK - but I've no idea if that makes it any faster. I've just switched to mozilla 0.9.6 from netscape 4.X as my main browser, and it is rather sluggish on both x68/linuz and SPARC/Solaris, but the tabs are a killer feature!
I think Qt comes out ahead on the free/licensing issue; if you want to use it for free software, then Qt is GPL'd, but if you want to use it for commercial software you need to buy a licence - but most importantly that also brings you commercial support. In either case you have the source so that you can fix bugs or figure things out for yourself, but if you're working on a commercial project and under deadline pressure it's nice to have that commercial support available.
Alas, they don't seem to have any mp3s or warez that I don't already have. Bummer.
Yeah, but much worse, the nudie pictures of the guy's girlfriend suck!
Journal of Historical Review
Biowarfare in the 20th Century
Biohazard (Alibek) review
It's hard to imagine anyone much better placed than Alibek to know the truth.
I don't know why everyone is so focused on smallbox, even if it's an awful disease.
Ken Alibek (formerly Kantajin Alibekov) who was the deputy director of the immense Soviet Biopreparat biowarfare research and manufacture organizion defected to the US in the early 90's, and has written a book on it as well as testifying to congress and having been thoroughly debriefed on the Soviet program.... They worked on a whole slew of biological weapons including things like marlburg virus (similar to ebola) that would make you wish you only had smallpox!
The Soviets stockpiled weaponized smallpox, plague, marlburg, tularemia etc in quantities of tens of tons each! They aqpparently killed around 100,000 nazis with tularemia in the Battle of Stalingrad.
How about searching for "bomb" on this list:
Airline disasters 1920-2000
Now which seems the greater likelyhood to you - accident or terrorism? YOU do the math!
Unfortunately it's going to be tough to knwo who to believe here.. terrorists may claim it was an attack even if it was not, and the FAA may deny it was even if they eventually piece it together and determine it was. The government is going to be torn between wanting to attribute it to terrorism to support the war, and wanting to say it wasn't to help the airline industry and economy recover. In the current climate moreso than ever you can't take news at face value - you also have to apply a sceptical analysis of the agenda of the source, and reconcile many contradictory sources.
bin Laden and al Qai'da are Arabs, not "Afgahni", but the Taliban ARE - they're Pashtun. Pashtunistan was part of Hindustan (now divided up as Afgahnistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India), and when the Brits divided up Hindustan they divided Pashtunistan into two - part now lies in Afghanistan and part in Pakistan.
The difference between the Taliban and traditional Pashtun (as in Pakistan) is that the traditional Pashtun are tribal and look to the Khans - feudal lords - as their leaders; the Mullah's or religious clerks do not have a high place in their society.