Unfortunately people who are bad at programming, don't have an eye for the big picture, can't factor in that some things will be just barely functional, also think everyone else is incompetent. I think the people who think like that actually aren't the best. It is the ones who understand people are different in ability - even the same person over time, and that things that look like mistakes might have been judgement calls. They understand the tradeoffs. These are the people who actually really get the big projects done. they make mistakes and realize it. They deal with reality and can pick out what is really important. they can take the heat when some manager wants to blow off. When you've got millions on the line you don't want brilliance (not that you won't take it!), just competence.
The title of the summary is totally wrong. This has nothing to do with mass extinctions. Its looking at fossil Species and Family counts vs time correlated with Solar motion. The 62 MY cycle barely touches the Mass extinction events. Better summary title - "Life's Diversity changes with Solar Galactic Orbit". Or something like that.
The fact that FEMA gave out some money that was scammed doesn't really bother me or a lot of other people I know. You know that is going to happen. Try to minimize it, and it is just part of the cost. What people are PO'd about is the lack of planning and leadership. It is the old officers rule - you can screw up if you are decisive about it. You can even make wrong decisions if you'll admit it and take the heat. All that works as long as people see you have some kind of plan. That wasn't there and there was no responsibility - buck stops here mentality except for political infighting issues. That was the problem with FEMA/Homeland Security.
Yes this is teasing information out about processes that we just didn't have enough data for before. We have this wonderful model - the Standard Model, that makes all sorts of predictions about the probability of events. We are still only now getting to the amount of data needed to statistically separate a lot of the events. There are are all sorts of lower energey things that we think are there but we have never "seen" or really which we probably have seen but can't tell, because it could be something else - and you need enough data (collisions) to have a statistical ability to say something like - we are 95% confident that this is that Cascade B series Down-Strange-Bottom Quark combination or whatever.
Yes this "just" supports the standard model, but it gives people a lot more confidence that yup - the model and our calculation techniques work. We can actually predict that something like this should be there, what we think its properties should be, what it signature should be in these trillions and more collisions in accelerators, and be right! Really things like this is what the ILC would be doing if it ever got built. (In the US? it won't). You don't predict and discover new baryon particles every year...
This is a lousy article. First, anybody could wirelessly light a flourescent for the last few decades (or century really). Almost any college could also build a setup that caused a regular lightbulb to glow if they wanted to, at any time in the last, say 70 years. What they are really showing is a test of their "put your equipment close and we'll figure out what we should do to charge it" technology, not "beamed power". We have pretty well understood electromagnetism at that level for a long time.
"What apps have I added in the last 10 years? Music players. Video players. Browsers. Pretty much it. I wonder where the hell my 4.5 billion clock cycles a second are actually going."
You just said it. We are getting close to the point that video (and audio) is like text - we are almost to the "VideoStar" era where we play with video like we did with text documents. That is the real main use of all that computing power - better video effects and showing video. I am actually kind of interested to see what happens after we reach the point of easy messing about with reasonable resolution. I could see for the last 20 years pictures, audio and video driving the use of computer resources in PC's. Once we can really play with it, whats next? You could say Higher def, but I don't think people really need that much resolution. I think that is the time the "PC" kind of dissappears into appliances.
This whole article is off. What does "Market" share mean for Linux. Linux has no market. Red Hat or Suse may have a market, but Linux isn't a company. "Less than impressive" to whom? The fact that a free operating system is challenging the largest companies in the business shows that something is out of whack in the "market" already. Perhaps the market is artificial, and in the long run economics will eventually dictate that people pay for where the value is - service, support and development effort, not for the product itself which has almost no marginal cost for a widely used software system. Economics is on the side of open source in the long run simply because marginal costs will be forced to near zero for standard programs over time. Linux doesn't need to worry about market share, even if only a few new people use it in any period, there is no time limit. As long as developers want to support it and crucially there is hardware to run it on, it will be around. If the interfaces to computers change radically such that linux is irrelevant, so be it, all the other current OS's would be likewise irrelevant.
Whenever market share is raised with free software in general, as opposed to a specific company, you know someone is trying to spin something. There are obviously a lot of Linux users currently, enough to keep a vibrant development community going. Worrying about some market penetration above that is counterproductive for free software users. Rather, worry about specific problems or needs with the free software, that is where effort has tangible results.
If chances are that these probes will hit a habitable planet are good then the Sun must surely hit a habitable planet as it moves about the galaxy. In fact every Sun must hae a good chance - they are all moving at roughly the same interstellar speed as the stages, they are much bigger so they have a much bigger change of hitting something... doesn't seem so likely now? the chances of those stages hitting any planet are... well astronomical in the best sense. Love that line - space is very big.
"I don't know about you, but like a ton of people in the IT industry, I work for a company that produces pretty much nothing but intellectual property."
Then you work for a company that produces pretty much nothing. I have never seen any software company whose main product for sale is intellectual property as the term is legally used. Even Microsoft doesn't say that. What they do is sell you a service - the use of their programs - with strings, the usage agreements. Microsoft, in general, sells no copyrights and sells no trademarks and sells no patents - like virtually every other software company. Thus it sells no "intellectual property".
More likely you work for a company that also provides a service - either contract programming or creation of tools that it sells the use of as a service. As soon as people start thinking in this way, the DCMA, especially the circumvention aspects, looks as absurd and terrifying as many have said.
"Ok wiseass - give me an example of a true shared calendar application with clients that isn't called Exchange or Notes."
I'm not Wiseass, but that is easy, Zimbra. Pretty soon you'll be saying it doesn't do this or that that Exchange does. but it does do things exchange doesn't also, so it is an example.
Please, this may be to late, but that "enormous explosion" has the energy of about 250 kilowatt hours. That isn't enormous, in fact there are things with similar levels of energy happening all around you. The "explosion chamber" is the size of a thimble of thread. If they can get the rate of firing to 1 in 10 seconds that means they have automated it, and don't have to manually rebuild the target every time which would be an advance. None of this means that fusion is just around the corner, but it does mean that some building blocks for controlled inertial fusion are happening. This isn't "development" (the D in R and D) it is still just research. The Z machine is NOT a powerplant and never will be nor anything directly based on it. The technology it demonstrates could well be incorporated in a different design of a powerplant someday. (Ob. I have never worked for Sandia or ever got any money from them).
WARF is independent legally from U. Wisconsin, and it has held patents for at least 60 years. Warfarin (Coumadin) was originally patented by Warf long ago. A lot of vitamin technology (producing them, etc.) was also. They are basically the research trust fund of the University. That is, they get a piece of the patents from researchers at Un. of Wisconsin and then distribute the money as grants to UW researchers. I think virtually all big Universities have similar structures.
Whether these patents were good is another thing, I'm kind of hoping they go on obviousness or previous technology, because if they go the only software patent that would even match them might have been RSA. If I had any trust in the patent system to be consistent I would be for this rejection (speaking as a Wisc graduate) and as a principle I guess I still am.
"You know those plants will probably only be 25% efficient when all is said and done. That means 75% of the heat energy taken out of the earth will contribute directly to global warming. Nice job."
Uhm... that turns out not to be the case, and even if it was the amount would be trivial. Think about it. The earth is not a perfect insulator, and that heat that is creating the temperature gradient will be conducted to lower temp areas, and since any gethermal sources we can use are very close to the surface (within a few km), the lower temp area will be the surface. Geothermal energy just intercepts that flow and gets some work from it.
The second point is the "Larry Niven" heat idea that our actual heat really could make any difference to global warming. Ha ha - Just think about this way - what do you think the temperature of the surface of the earth would be if the sun went out and there was no thermal conduction from the earths interior (as you seem to think), given human energy output? Think way below liquid nitrogen temperatures. The only reason we are talking about human effects on energy balance is that we can cause the atmosphere to retain a very tiny percentage of the Sun's energy that strikes the earth and that alone is quite large compared to human usage.
I don't think that Digital Restrictions as defined in the topic are possible in the real world. You would have to be able to mind read to only stop illegal copying without also stopping legitimate copying. So I don't think it is a well formed question (as my Quantum Mechanics professor used to tell me) and there is no viable answer. I don't think there should be any government support - broadcast flag, mandates on equipment, DMCA type reverse engineering guidelines, etc. that stop me from doing whatever I want with data in my possession. I don't really care If there is DRM outside of this as long as there is no monopolistic forcing off the market of tools designed to get around it. For example I don't mind Apples DRM as long as CD burning is there, and as long as there is a Hymn type program.
Re:With the introduction of AppleTV...
on
The Home Server Cometh
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· Score: 5, Insightful
What home market? That market doesn't exist yet. It has been crippled by proprietary standards and DRM. When there is a setup where I can stick all my DVD's in like itunes with CD's, where I can load in my photo's easily and its all available on my TV, then we'll have something. I'll be able to check the latest online videos as easy as I check things like blogs.
I kind of think that is where Apple TV is a start (just a small piece). There will have to be a "media server" with a LOT of storage in the background. then on the one hand the interface to the large components - the TV and big speakers - that is Apple TV, on the other hand an interface to handheld devices - which the iphone is the start. That is where a tablet or really a good reading device would come in - the new newspaper - wirelessly attached at home or away - with stories and video. The computer kind of dissappears in this - the old "ubiquitous" computing stuff from long ago finally realized (forget the phone and look at the other features of that Apple product). That might be part of the reason for "Apple Inc" now with Apple Computer gone..
I talked Apple, but Microsoft could be coming at this from the angle with the Xbox and Zune front end, back end Vista server. Its just that a large part of their earnings are from business software - which is really a different market altogether that right now happens to use the same equipment.
I'm laughing at the responses here because they reflect the thing that this little exercise showed - people online aren't responding to what was actually done, but to something they want to see. Orzel saw a NYT writer complaining about how bad the SAT essays were and basically said, they aren't that bad - you try to write something in 20 minutes online, cold, and it will be just as bad. And he and Cognitive Daily showed exactly this.
This depends - see other comments for most situations. However if you have a large Sun, HP, Fujitsu, IBM, etc. with 16+ CPUs and say 2 to 8 Gb per CPU (not uncommon in the big systems), then at minimum you need 3 times the --per CPU-- memory, becuse if one of the CPU's goes bad, the hot swap mechanism is going to use the swap space to keep the processes (at least on some of these systems) for moving them to the other CPU's as it marks the one as bad. You certainly don't need 2 times the total memory, or several hundred Gig. This is assuming the kind of NUMA architechure that I think all of these systems still have. Generally we just used to use, say, 36 Gig local drives as (mirrored) swap for simplicity. In this environment you are probably on a SAN and people will say to move everything there, and that might be more true now than a year or two ago.
I figured I'd calc out that 1.3 million autos figure - based on gas use I can see it - with the caveat that 22.5 MPG seems pretty good as an average , but it gives me a nice divisor:
Average distance per vehicle per week in the US is 225 miles per EPA. Lets be generous and assume 22.5 MPG so the average car uses 10 Gallons/week of gas = 520 per year.
1.3*10^8 Joules per gallon gas / 3.611*10^6 J/KWH gives about 36 KWH/Gal * 520 = 18720 KWH/year * 1.3 Mil = 24336 GWH / yr which is feasible.
Now we take 110 Mil bulbs * 50W efficiency increase * 6 Hrs/day * 365 days = 12045 Gigawatt-hours
So at least it is within half with a 6 hours a day lit bulb being used.
Seems a bit off - but wait I guess if you only assume 50% eff in the conversion to electricilty you would get the numbers. Interesting that it does come out. You can play with the assumptions of hours lit and efficiency and such but close enough for me.
Any colony on the moon would be under several meters of soil, for solar radiation shielding alone, but also just to help counteract the air pressure inside the colony. If you had 1 atm pressure in the colony then that would be 14 lbs(earth equiv) / square inch, of upward force on the roof. Thick plastic like a balloon would be verry expensive since you would have to bring it all from Earth. Probably you would try to balance the pressure. Less for less air pressure of course, but still a bunch. Maybe using a lava tube so you wouldn't have to excavate much. It would be interesting to figure the effect of a hit like this on a buried structure.
Uh.. its probably 5 cents a KWH not $5. So a Megawatt-Hour is about $50 - then say the device uses 2 MW rounding up we get about $100/hour of electricity costs. Not too bad. That is $2400 a day. So $100 a day per beam according to your usage. That is negligable for something like this and almost sounds wrong - but even if it were 2 MW per beam, that would still only be that $100/hr per researcher which again is not much.
I am not usually on the leading edge of things, but even with multiple cable channels I could never get decent coverage of one of my favorite sports - bicycling (Beyond Lance Armstrong who was almost a sport to himslf). I looked around and the only place I could find actual race coverage was on the internet. All sports channels seem to want to show are high volume shows, poker, and hunting and fishing, with hour a week of coverage max. This internet TV thing is great - even if they do seem to be super Microsoft focused in technology and still not very much resolution. Cable was supposed to lead to differentiation, but I think the overhead of the cable distribution network is stifling this, and I don't want to pay $100/mo for tons of channels I will never watch. The article says that the 500+ cable channels are full, but I don't see them available anywhere without very big cash outlays by me. That same infrastructure (cable modems) can also deliver programming not under the control of the cable provider through internet TV. I wonder as this develops when it will hurt them so they notice?
I had to laugh at the ESPN spokesman - yeah they will put $ in quality production of Poker or dumb commentary shows but don't want poor quality shows, like actual coverage of sporting events. Typical big corp talk - it doesn't match the walk.
The story isn't very informative, but since the Neooffice people seem to have a good port underway for OS/X, there isn't a lot of reason to go after pure aqua anyway. If this brings more resources to the Neooffice folks, then I don't see this as a bad thing at all.
Just a happy Neo Office user who loaded in a bunch of Excel sheets annd got a lot of work done.
On number 1 there is no uneasiness except by people who want to make it. I have read the original papers by both - they are actually amazingly easy to find in large University Physics Libraries, look in the History of Science area - or were in the early 1980's. Poincare might very well have developed special relativity at some point, but the approaches are not compatible - in fact Minkowski's formulation of SR is much closer to Poincare's work. Einstein's initial papers are amazingly basic and obviously guided by physical intuition, whereas Poincare's are more in the European Academic tradition and mathematically formulated. You can see they are coming from different directions easily (IMHO). MRJK
You must increase your exposure - I have used Sun 10K's with 64 CPU's in an image and we got 80% scaling, I've used 72 CPU images and and got 75% scaling and what was running- crappy Oracle parallel code. If you think 15K's, Superdome or Big IBM's max out at 8 CPU's you just haven't run in a large corporate data center. When you have 10's of thousands of processes these monsters scale well - with increasing overhead, of course, as they get bigger. Where you want to make the cutoff depends but it is way higher than 8 cpu's - I would say around 64 CPU's these days.
Well... Lets use the old dots on a balloon analogy. When the photon was emitted it was not a "microwave" photon and the entire universe was much much smaller. Space itself expanded tremendously - like the balloon. Now since our "balloon" (universe) expanded farther than our event horizon from the beinning of the universe it doesn't really matter if it is closed (like a balloon) or open (like an infinite sheet of paper) to us it looks open and every place is equally the "center". Also the photon wavelength itself was stretched from the gamma radiation or whatever was emitted to the microwave photon we detect.
This is distict from the Inflation part of the Big Bang also where if true the Universe really expanded.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately people who are bad at programming, don't have an eye for the big picture, can't factor in that some things will be just barely functional, also think everyone else is incompetent. I think the people who think like that actually aren't the best. It is the ones who understand people are different in ability - even the same person over time, and that things that look like mistakes might have been judgement calls. They understand the tradeoffs. These are the people who actually really get the big projects done. they make mistakes and realize it. They deal with reality and can pick out what is really important. they can take the heat when some manager wants to blow off. When you've got millions on the line you don't want brilliance (not that you won't take it!), just competence.
The title of the summary is totally wrong. This has nothing to do with mass extinctions. Its looking at fossil Species and Family counts vs time correlated with Solar motion. The 62 MY cycle barely touches the Mass extinction events.
Better summary title - "Life's Diversity changes with Solar Galactic Orbit". Or something like that.
The fact that FEMA gave out some money that was scammed doesn't really bother me or a lot of other people I know. You know that is going to happen. Try to minimize it, and it is just part of the cost. What people are PO'd about is the lack of planning and leadership. It is the old officers rule - you can screw up if you are decisive about it. You can even make wrong decisions if you'll admit it and take the heat. All that works as long as people see you have some kind of plan. That wasn't there and there was no responsibility - buck stops here mentality except for political infighting issues. That was the problem with FEMA/Homeland Security.
Yes this is teasing information out about processes that we just didn't have enough data for before. We have this wonderful model - the Standard Model, that makes all sorts of predictions about the probability of events. We are still only now getting to the amount of data needed to statistically separate a lot of the events. There are are all sorts of lower energey things that we think are there but we have never "seen" or really which we probably have seen but can't tell, because it could be something else - and you need enough data (collisions) to have a statistical ability to say something like - we are 95% confident that this is that Cascade B series Down-Strange-Bottom Quark combination or whatever.
Yes this "just" supports the standard model, but it gives people a lot more confidence that yup - the model and our calculation techniques work. We can actually predict that something like this should be there, what we think its properties should be, what it signature should be in these trillions and more collisions in accelerators, and be right! Really things like this is what the ILC would be doing if it ever got built. (In the US? it won't). You don't predict and discover new baryon particles every year...
This is a lousy article. First, anybody could wirelessly light a flourescent for the last few decades (or century really). Almost any college could also build a setup that caused a regular lightbulb to glow if they wanted to, at any time in the last, say 70 years.
What they are really showing is a test of their "put your equipment close and we'll figure out what we should do to charge it" technology, not "beamed power". We have pretty well understood electromagnetism at that level for a long time.
"What apps have I added in the last 10 years? Music players. Video players. Browsers. Pretty much it. I wonder where the hell my 4.5 billion clock cycles a second are actually going."
You just said it. We are getting close to the point that video (and audio) is like text - we are almost to the "VideoStar" era where we play with video like we did with text documents. That is the real main use of all that computing power - better video effects and showing video. I am actually kind of interested to see what happens after we reach the point of easy messing about with reasonable resolution. I could see for the last 20 years pictures, audio and video driving the use of computer resources in PC's. Once we can really play with it, whats next? You could say Higher def, but I don't think people really need that much resolution. I think that is the time the "PC" kind of dissappears into appliances.
This whole article is off. What does "Market" share mean for Linux. Linux has no market. Red Hat or Suse may have a market, but Linux isn't a company. "Less than impressive" to whom? The fact that a free operating system is challenging the largest companies in the business shows that something is out of whack in the "market" already. Perhaps the market is artificial, and in the long run economics will eventually dictate that people pay for where the value is - service, support and development effort, not for the product itself which has almost no marginal cost for a widely used software system. Economics is on the side of open source in the long run simply because marginal costs will be forced to near zero for standard programs over time. Linux doesn't need to worry about market share, even if only a few new people use it in any period, there is no time limit. As long as developers want to support it and crucially there is hardware to run it on, it will be around. If the interfaces to computers change radically such that linux is irrelevant, so be it, all the other current OS's would be likewise irrelevant.
Whenever market share is raised with free software in general, as opposed to a specific company, you know someone is trying to spin something. There are obviously a lot of Linux users currently, enough to keep a vibrant development community going. Worrying about some market penetration above that is counterproductive for free software users. Rather, worry about specific problems or needs with the free software, that is where effort has tangible results.
If chances are that these probes will hit a habitable planet are good then the Sun must surely hit a habitable planet as it moves about the galaxy. In fact every Sun must hae a good chance - they are all moving at roughly the same interstellar speed as the stages, they are much bigger so they have a much bigger change of hitting something ... doesn't seem so likely now? the chances of those stages hitting any planet are ... well astronomical in the best sense. Love that line - space is very big.
"I don't know about you, but like a ton of people in the IT industry, I work for a company that produces pretty much nothing but intellectual property."
Then you work for a company that produces pretty much nothing. I have never seen any software company whose main product for sale is intellectual property as the term is legally used. Even Microsoft doesn't say that. What they do is sell you a service - the use of their programs - with strings, the usage agreements. Microsoft, in general, sells no copyrights and sells no trademarks and sells no patents - like virtually every other software company. Thus it sells no "intellectual property".
More likely you work for a company that also provides a service - either contract programming or creation of tools that it sells the use of as a service. As soon as people start thinking in this way, the DCMA, especially the circumvention aspects, looks as absurd and terrifying as many have said.
"Ok wiseass - give me an example of a true shared calendar application with clients that isn't called Exchange or Notes."
I'm not Wiseass, but that is easy, Zimbra. Pretty soon you'll be saying it doesn't do this or that that Exchange does. but it does do things exchange doesn't also, so it is an example.
Please, this may be to late, but that "enormous explosion" has the energy of about 250 kilowatt hours. That isn't enormous, in fact there are things with similar levels of energy happening all around you. The "explosion chamber" is the size of a thimble of thread.
If they can get the rate of firing to 1 in 10 seconds that means they have automated it, and don't have to manually rebuild the target every time which would be an advance. None of this means that fusion is just around the corner, but it does mean that some building blocks for controlled inertial fusion are happening. This isn't "development" (the D in R and D) it is still just research. The Z machine is NOT a powerplant and never will be nor anything directly based on it. The technology it demonstrates could well be incorporated in a different design of a powerplant someday. (Ob. I have never worked for Sandia or ever got any money from them).
WARF is independent legally from U. Wisconsin, and it has held patents for at least 60 years. Warfarin (Coumadin) was originally patented by Warf long ago. A lot of vitamin technology (producing them, etc.) was also. They are basically the research trust fund of the University. That is, they get a piece of the patents from researchers at Un. of Wisconsin and then distribute the money as grants to UW researchers. I think virtually all big Universities have similar structures.
Whether these patents were good is another thing, I'm kind of hoping they go on obviousness or previous technology, because if they go the only software patent that would even match them might have been RSA. If I had any trust in the patent system to be consistent I would be for this rejection (speaking as a Wisc graduate) and as a principle I guess I still am.
"You know those plants will probably only be 25% efficient when all is said and done. That means 75% of the heat energy taken out of the earth will contribute directly to global warming. Nice job."
Uhm... that turns out not to be the case, and even if it was the amount would be trivial. Think about it. The earth is not a perfect insulator, and that heat that is creating the temperature gradient will be conducted to lower temp areas, and since any gethermal sources we can use are very close to the surface (within a few km), the lower temp area will be the surface. Geothermal energy just intercepts that flow and gets some work from it.
The second point is the "Larry Niven" heat idea that our actual heat really could make any difference to global warming. Ha ha - Just think about this way - what do you think the temperature of the surface of the earth would be if the sun went out and there was no thermal conduction from the earths interior (as you seem to think), given human energy output? Think way below liquid nitrogen temperatures. The only reason we are talking about human effects on energy balance is that we can cause the atmosphere to retain a very tiny percentage of the Sun's energy that strikes the earth and that alone is quite large compared to human usage.
I don't think that Digital Restrictions as defined in the topic are possible in the real world. You would have to be able to mind read to only stop illegal copying without also stopping legitimate copying. So I don't think it is a well formed question (as my Quantum Mechanics professor used to tell me) and there is no viable answer. I don't think there should be any government support - broadcast flag, mandates on equipment, DMCA type reverse engineering guidelines, etc. that stop me from doing whatever I want with data in my possession. I don't really care If there is DRM outside of this as long as there is no monopolistic forcing off the market of tools designed to get around it. For example I don't mind Apples DRM as long as CD burning is there, and as long as there is a Hymn type program.
What home market? That market doesn't exist yet. It has been crippled by proprietary standards and DRM. When there is a setup where I can stick all my DVD's in like itunes with CD's, where I can load in my photo's easily and its all available on my TV, then we'll have something. I'll be able to check the latest online videos as easy as I check things like blogs.
I kind of think that is where Apple TV is a start (just a small piece). There will have to be a "media server" with a LOT of storage in the background. then on the one hand the interface to the large components - the TV and big speakers - that is Apple TV, on the other hand an interface to handheld devices - which the iphone is the start. That is where a tablet or really a good reading device would come in - the new newspaper - wirelessly attached at home or away - with stories and video. The computer kind of dissappears in this - the old "ubiquitous" computing stuff from long ago finally realized (forget the phone and look at the other features of that Apple product). That might be part of the reason for "Apple Inc" now with Apple Computer gone..
I talked Apple, but Microsoft could be coming at this from the angle with the Xbox and Zune front end, back end Vista server. Its just that a large part of their earnings are from business software - which is really a different market altogether that right now happens to use the same equipment.
I'm laughing at the responses here because they reflect the thing that this little exercise showed - people online aren't responding to what was actually done, but to something they want to see. Orzel saw a NYT writer complaining about how bad the SAT essays were and basically said, they aren't that bad - you try to write something in 20 minutes online, cold, and it will be just as bad. And he and Cognitive Daily showed exactly this.
This depends - see other comments for most situations. However if you have a large Sun, HP, Fujitsu, IBM, etc. with 16+ CPUs and say 2 to 8 Gb per CPU (not uncommon in the big systems), then at minimum you need 3 times the --per CPU-- memory, becuse if one of the CPU's goes bad, the hot swap mechanism is going to use the swap space to keep the processes (at least on some of these systems) for moving them to the other CPU's as it marks the one as bad. You certainly don't need 2 times the total memory, or several hundred Gig. This is assuming the kind of NUMA architechure that I think all of these systems still have.
Generally we just used to use, say, 36 Gig local drives as (mirrored) swap for simplicity. In this environment you are probably on a SAN and people will say to move everything there, and that might be more true now than a year or two ago.
I figured I'd calc out that 1.3 million autos figure - based on gas use I can see it - with the caveat that 22.5 MPG seems pretty good as an average , but it gives me a nice divisor:
Average distance per vehicle per week in the US is 225 miles per EPA. Lets be generous and assume 22.5 MPG so the average car uses 10 Gallons/week of gas = 520 per year.
1.3*10^8 Joules per gallon gas / 3.611*10^6 J/KWH gives about 36 KWH/Gal * 520 = 18720 KWH/year * 1.3 Mil = 24336 GWH / yr
which is feasible.
Now we take 110 Mil bulbs * 50W efficiency increase * 6 Hrs/day * 365 days = 12045 Gigawatt-hours
So at least it is within half with a 6 hours a day lit bulb being used.
Seems a bit off - but wait I guess if you only assume 50% eff in the conversion to electricilty you would get the numbers. Interesting that it does come out. You can play with the assumptions of hours lit and efficiency and such but close enough for me.
Any colony on the moon would be under several meters of soil, for solar radiation shielding alone, but also just to help counteract the air pressure inside the colony. If you had 1 atm pressure in the colony then that would be 14 lbs(earth equiv) / square inch, of upward force on the roof. Thick plastic like a balloon would be verry expensive since you would have to bring it all from Earth. Probably you would try to balance the pressure. Less for less air pressure of course, but still a bunch. Maybe using a lava tube so you wouldn't have to excavate much. It would be interesting to figure the effect of a hit like this on a buried structure.
Uh.. its probably 5 cents a KWH not $5. So a Megawatt-Hour is about $50 - then say the device uses 2 MW rounding up we get about $100/hour of electricity costs. Not too bad. That is $2400 a day. So $100 a day per beam according to your usage. That is negligable for something like this and almost sounds wrong - but even if it were 2 MW per beam, that would still only be that $100/hr per researcher which again is not much.
I am not usually on the leading edge of things, but even with multiple cable channels I could never get decent coverage of one of my favorite sports - bicycling (Beyond Lance Armstrong who was almost a sport to himslf). I looked around and the only place I could find actual race coverage was on the internet. All sports channels seem to want to show are high volume shows, poker, and hunting and fishing, with hour a week of coverage max. This internet TV thing is great - even if they do seem to be super Microsoft focused in technology and still not very much resolution. Cable was supposed to lead to differentiation, but I think the overhead of the cable distribution network is stifling this, and I don't want to pay $100/mo for tons of channels I will never watch. The article says that the 500+ cable channels are full, but I don't see them available anywhere without very big cash outlays by me. That same infrastructure (cable modems) can also deliver programming not under the control of the cable provider through internet TV. I wonder as this develops when it will hurt them so they notice?
I had to laugh at the ESPN spokesman - yeah they will put $ in quality production of Poker or dumb commentary shows but don't want poor quality shows, like actual coverage of sporting events. Typical big corp talk - it doesn't match the walk.
The story isn't very informative, but since the Neooffice people seem to have a good port underway for OS/X, there isn't a lot of reason to go after pure aqua anyway. If this brings more resources to the Neooffice folks, then I don't see this as a bad thing at all.
Just a happy Neo Office user who loaded in a bunch of Excel sheets annd got a lot of work done.
On number 1 there is no uneasiness except by people who want to make it. I have read the original papers by both - they are actually amazingly easy to find in large University Physics Libraries, look in the History of Science area - or were in the early 1980's. Poincare might very well have developed special relativity at some point, but the approaches are not compatible - in fact Minkowski's formulation of SR is much closer to Poincare's work. Einstein's initial papers are amazingly basic and obviously guided by physical intuition, whereas Poincare's are more in the European Academic tradition and mathematically formulated. You can see they are coming from different directions easily (IMHO).
MRJK
You must increase your exposure - I have used Sun 10K's with 64 CPU's in an image and we got 80% scaling, I've used 72 CPU images and and got 75% scaling and what was running- crappy Oracle parallel code. If you think 15K's, Superdome or Big IBM's max out at 8 CPU's you just haven't run in a large corporate data center. When you have 10's of thousands of processes these monsters scale well - with increasing overhead, of course, as they get bigger. Where you want to make the cutoff depends but it is way higher than 8 cpu's - I would say around 64 CPU's these days.
Well... Lets use the old dots on a balloon analogy. When the photon was emitted it was not a "microwave" photon and the entire universe was much much smaller. Space itself expanded tremendously - like the balloon. Now since our "balloon" (universe) expanded farther than our event horizon from the beinning of the universe it doesn't really matter if it is closed (like a balloon) or open (like an infinite sheet of paper) to us it looks open and every place is equally the "center". Also the photon wavelength itself was stretched from the gamma radiation or whatever was emitted to the microwave photon we detect.
This is distict from the Inflation part of the Big Bang also where if true the Universe really expanded.