He probably meant "magnetize." You need a ferromagnetic material to be able to do that, though. If you don't make a habit of wrapping your cards in iron or nickel foil (or one of the various ferromagnetic alloys), you should be fine.:)
As for electric charges, foil is such a good conductor, it's unlikely you'd be able to build up any charge at all with it bouncing around in your wallet. You'd have to turn your wallet into a little Van de Graf generator....
I did some more googling on this, and it seems the dust hypothesis is the favored one.
They pointed out that old Viking pictures were originally broadcast with bad color correction (some dust got on the white card used to calibrate the color camera) and looked pink. Once things were fixed up, and along with comparison to later rovers, the consensus is that the Martian sky looks more or less "butterscotch" (yellow/tan) colored. That seems to be consistent with the fine dust expected to be in the atmosphere.
But if the dust content were to drop, the sky would move toward the blue range.
Indeed. Rayleigh scattering of light is more likely at shorter wavelengths, biasing the color spectrum toward the blue end of things. The sky looks less blue the closer you get to a direct path to the sun (don't burn out your eyes!) due to other types of light scattering becoming dominant. (like off dust)
An interesting question to which I haven't yet found a good answer is why the Martian atmosphere also does not appear blue to landers on the surface. Same reasoning would apply. Best guesses I've seen is that there is so much dust in the air, it dominates the coloring. (Also possibility is that there is some difference between N2 and CO2, but I haven't found anything relevant there.)
Between my iBook and my friend's Dell, we've each averaged about 3 serious warranty repairs over the 3 year extended manufacturer's warranty. The first 18 months were usually flawless, and then all that carrying to and fro started to make things fail. Failures included main boards, LCDs, and optical drives, any one of whch could have easily cost more than the $250 warranty to fix.
I build all my desktop machines with crap parts and no extended warranties, but laptops need the 3 year full service warranty.
(It's actually a draft of a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters, not yet approved.)
It's a nice phenomenology paper without any heavy math that puts together a bunch of theoretical ideas floating around. Even better, it has testable hypotheses! (unlike many papers these days)
Gravity should deviate from the inverse-square law at the nanometer scale.
Dark matter should be composed of a particle with mass 3e-16 GeV/c^2. (For comparison, mass of electron is 5e-4 GeV/c^2.)
The large extra dimensions assumptions all this is based on would require us to see all sorts of quantum gravity interactions at the LHC.
Now short-range gravity experiments are just approaching the micron scale, so we're 3 orders of magnitude away from testing hypothesis #1. I doubt anyone has an idea how to close that gap right now.
Checking hypothesis #2 would require some independent way of determining the mass of dark matter particles. I don't know what the sensitivity range of the various dark matter experiments running or planned are. Maybe they would be able to see something this light.
#3 however is going to start running in 2 years, and then we'll get some good information either way.
Right-to-left languages (which I assume you mean as "backwards") are displayed that way to the user, but it does not affect their digital storage, which is still forwards (in the numerical offset sense).
Given the popularity of Slashdot, I'm sure that most interesting stories get submitted several times. Surely one of the submissions won't be a breathlessly over-hyped, poorly written, misleading summary that ends with a loaded question?
(OK, so this submission thankfully didn't end with "Is this the end of Bluetooth?", but you know what I'm talking about.)
Anyway, complaining in the comments is probably pointless from a practical point of view. But the motivation is sound. The point is asking editors to be a little less trigger happy about posting stories without having at least checked to see if the summary is crazy. They don't have to rewrite it, just be more judicious in their use of the Post button. Story submitters will unconsciously (or not) adapt their style to reflect what they read on the front page.
I don't know anything about Ruby, but I do program in Python a lot. Perl was my first experience with a scripting language. Coming from C, I was initially amazed at how nice it was to have strings be first-class data types and to no longer have to explicitly manage memory. The syntax was a little confusing, and I never really got proficient at it. I tried reading some OO-based perl and got totally lost.
Some years later, I happened to try out Python for a project and fell in love. I find the syntax easier to remember, the OO is clear and straightforward, and while the selection of libraries is nowhere near as comprehensive as Perl, it is pretty good.
I would strongly suggest you browse through Dive Into Python. That was how I learned the basics of the language.
Re:Will FAT apps run slow on PPC though?
on
New Apples Next Week
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· Score: 3, Informative
There shouldn't be any PPC issue with fat binaries. The reason the binary is called "fat" is because it actually contains two copies of the program. One compiled natively for PPC, and one compiled for Intel. The correct binary is selected automatically when you double-click on the application, so you always run native code just like usual.
Xcode provides the magic to do the compilation twice and package up both programs into the same bundle. This is really just to simplify the user experience. You could just as well offer separate "Photoshop - Mac PPC" and "Photoshop - Mac Intel" products, but that gets annoying to keep track of.
The main issue with porting OpenOffice to the Mac (and NOT using X11) is how to interface with the Mac OS APIs to draw the GUI, handle the clipboard, etc. Apple offers C, Objective C and Java bindings to these APIs.
So, once upon a time there was a NeoOffice/C which used the C bindings, but for some reason it was very difficult to develop. The authors then abandoned it and used the Java bindings instead, producing NeoOffice/J. This was only feasible because OpenOffice makes heavy use of Java internally.
(One minor point of confusion for me: The NeoOffice FAQ claims that NeoOffice/C used the Cocoa API, but I thought that was only for Objective C and Java. I thought for pure C you had to go with the Carbon API.)
For those who haven't watched the video, they "landed" the helicopter not in the way you think.
From the pictures it looks like the top of Everest isn't flat enough to actually touch down and turn off your engines. Instead, they lowered until one of the landing gear ("feet"? not sure what you call those things on a helicopter) sunk into the snow, but kept the engines running the whole time to keep them balanced. The video makes it appear that they just hovered that way, partially airborne, partially touching the surface, until the 2 minute time requirement was achieved. Then they powered back to full engines and took off again.
Not that I fault them....:) This is probably the best you can do given the area.
That's actually an interesting idea. My first thought when reading your comment was "hybrid vehicle". If those things had enough battery capacity for gas-free local driving, then you would only need to use the gasoline engine for longer distances. (And could presumably recharge the batteries directly at home after the short trips.)
However, carrying around an entire gasoline engine all the time, even when you don't need it is pretty inefficient, and would lower the electric-only range of the vehicle. So having the gas generator part in some sort of detachable trailer would be very handy.
Of course, it would be quite a design challenge to ensure it didn't turn out looking and handling as bad as a U-Haul trailer. Not to mention the safety issues of having the gasoline tank out back where it could be more easily crushed in an accident. But these are probably surmountable engineering challenges...
Some (usually older in my experience) devices do use angstroms for the display of light wavelengths, but they have 4 digit displays (since you just add a zero to go from nanometers to angstroms).
Not to rain on anyone's parade, but based on that article, this is NOT a test of supersymmetry or string theory in the sense the article blurb leads you to believe. (Surprised?) These physicists have thought up a clever way to create an analog to a superstring out of a macroscopic quantum system. The neat thing about condensed matter physics is that you can concoct systems that behave like more fundamental systems which you can't easily create. You can then test the implications of a particular mathematical model.
So this is very cool (literally!) science, but NOT a test of superstring theory as a way to describe fundamental particles or interactions. At best, it will provide some interesting checks of the mathematical predictions of string-like theories, but only translated into this system. You still won't know if string theory has any hope of describing real electrons, photons, gravitons, etc.
I worked on the previous project, ASUSat1. First day after launch was just painful. Those of us on the software team stayed in the lab all night waiting for information from tracking stations in other countries who would be in range of the sat before us. Saddest thing was getting a telemetry packet from South Africa and decoding it to find there was no current flowing from the solar array. ASUSat1 was dead in 16 hours when the inital battery charge ran out. Near as we could tell, the ride was way rougher than we were expecting. (No guarantees with free rides on prototype rockets.)
I moved on to other things about the time Three Corner Sat was just gearing up. Sad to hear you guys met a similar fate.
BTW, this is why the Opterons have on-chip memory controllers. Then your aggregate memory bandwidth scales with the number of CPUs (assuming your OS is suitably NUMA-aware) and you can sidestep this problem. (More or less. A memory hog processes could start stealing bandwidth from the other CPUs if its working set doesn't all fit in one CPUs memory bank.)
Slashdot Mirror
Except they haven't released Skype for ARM Linux.
As for electric charges, foil is such a good conductor, it's unlikely you'd be able to build up any charge at all with it bouncing around in your wallet. You'd have to turn your wallet into a little Van de Graf generator....
They pointed out that old Viking pictures were originally broadcast with bad color correction (some dust got on the white card used to calibrate the color camera) and looked pink. Once things were fixed up, and along with comparison to later rovers, the consensus is that the Martian sky looks more or less "butterscotch" (yellow/tan) colored. That seems to be consistent with the fine dust expected to be in the atmosphere.
But if the dust content were to drop, the sky would move toward the blue range.
An interesting question to which I haven't yet found a good answer is why the Martian atmosphere also does not appear blue to landers on the surface. Same reasoning would apply. Best guesses I've seen is that there is so much dust in the air, it dominates the coloring. (Also possibility is that there is some difference between N2 and CO2, but I haven't found anything relevant there.)
I'll be sure to let you know how it turns out in another 20 laptops...
I build all my desktop machines with crap parts and no extended warranties, but laptops need the 3 year full service warranty.
Looks like the astrophysical observations will have to save the day. :)
Observational Evidence for Extra Dimensions from Dark Matter
(It's actually a draft of a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters, not yet approved.)
It's a nice phenomenology paper without any heavy math that puts together a bunch of theoretical ideas floating around. Even better, it has testable hypotheses! (unlike many papers these days)
- Gravity should deviate from the inverse-square law at the nanometer scale.
- Dark matter should be composed of a particle with mass 3e-16 GeV/c^2. (For comparison, mass of electron is 5e-4 GeV/c^2.)
- The large extra dimensions assumptions all this is based on would require us to see all sorts of quantum gravity interactions at the LHC.
Now short-range gravity experiments are just approaching the micron scale, so we're 3 orders of magnitude away from testing hypothesis #1. I doubt anyone has an idea how to close that gap right now.Checking hypothesis #2 would require some independent way of determining the mass of dark matter particles. I don't know what the sensitivity range of the various dark matter experiments running or planned are. Maybe they would be able to see something this light.
#3 however is going to start running in 2 years, and then we'll get some good information either way.
Right-to-left languages (which I assume you mean as "backwards") are displayed that way to the user, but it does not affect their digital storage, which is still forwards (in the numerical offset sense).
(OK, so this submission thankfully didn't end with "Is this the end of Bluetooth?", but you know what I'm talking about.)
Anyway, complaining in the comments is probably pointless from a practical point of view. But the motivation is sound. The point is asking editors to be a little less trigger happy about posting stories without having at least checked to see if the summary is crazy. They don't have to rewrite it, just be more judicious in their use of the Post button. Story submitters will unconsciously (or not) adapt their style to reflect what they read on the front page.
(OK, so it has nothing to do with Clarke's Law, other than sharing the same sentence pattern.)
That was sequence C.
Some years later, I happened to try out Python for a project and fell in love. I find the syntax easier to remember, the OO is clear and straightforward, and while the selection of libraries is nowhere near as comprehensive as Perl, it is pretty good.
I would strongly suggest you browse through Dive Into Python. That was how I learned the basics of the language.
Xcode provides the magic to do the compilation twice and package up both programs into the same bundle. This is really just to simplify the user experience. You could just as well offer separate "Photoshop - Mac PPC" and "Photoshop - Mac Intel" products, but that gets annoying to keep track of.
Man, the red and black Guru Meditation screen is probably the creepiest error message I've ever seen. No soothing blue or green to be found there. :)
So, once upon a time there was a NeoOffice/C which used the C bindings, but for some reason it was very difficult to develop. The authors then abandoned it and used the Java bindings instead, producing NeoOffice/J. This was only feasible because OpenOffice makes heavy use of Java internally.
(One minor point of confusion for me: The NeoOffice FAQ claims that NeoOffice/C used the Cocoa API, but I thought that was only for Objective C and Java. I thought for pure C you had to go with the Carbon API.)
A little searching on arXiv.org brought up:
Quantum Algorithm for SAT Problem and Quantum Mutual Entropy
So at least the first half of that title relates to your question.
From the pictures it looks like the top of Everest isn't flat enough to actually touch down and turn off your engines. Instead, they lowered until one of the landing gear ("feet"? not sure what you call those things on a helicopter) sunk into the snow, but kept the engines running the whole time to keep them balanced. The video makes it appear that they just hovered that way, partially airborne, partially touching the surface, until the 2 minute time requirement was achieved. Then they powered back to full engines and took off again.
Not that I fault them.... :) This is probably the best you can do given the area.
My guess is copy-paste crapflooding. Looks like a bot of some sort is pulling highly moderated comments and reposting them in different articles.
That's actually an interesting idea. My first thought when reading your comment was "hybrid vehicle". If those things had enough battery capacity for gas-free local driving, then you would only need to use the gasoline engine for longer distances. (And could presumably recharge the batteries directly at home after the short trips.)
However, carrying around an entire gasoline engine all the time, even when you don't need it is pretty inefficient, and would lower the electric-only range of the vehicle. So having the gas generator part in some sort of detachable trailer would be very handy.
Of course, it would be quite a design challenge to ensure it didn't turn out looking and handling as bad as a U-Haul trailer. Not to mention the safety issues of having the gasoline tank out back where it could be more easily crushed in an accident. But these are probably surmountable engineering challenges...
Some (usually older in my experience) devices do use angstroms for the display of light wavelengths, but they have 4 digit displays (since you just add a zero to go from nanometers to angstroms).
Specifically, September 1993: The September That Never Ended
So this is very cool (literally!) science, but NOT a test of superstring theory as a way to describe fundamental particles or interactions. At best, it will provide some interesting checks of the mathematical predictions of string-like theories, but only translated into this system. You still won't know if string theory has any hope of describing real electrons, photons, gravitons, etc.
I worked on the previous project, ASUSat1. First day after launch was just painful. Those of us on the software team stayed in the lab all night waiting for information from tracking stations in other countries who would be in range of the sat before us. Saddest thing was getting a telemetry packet from South Africa and decoding it to find there was no current flowing from the solar array. ASUSat1 was dead in 16 hours when the inital battery charge ran out. Near as we could tell, the ride was way rougher than we were expecting. (No guarantees with free rides on prototype rockets.)
I moved on to other things about the time Three Corner Sat was just gearing up. Sad to hear you guys met a similar fate.
BTW, this is why the Opterons have on-chip memory controllers. Then your aggregate memory bandwidth scales with the number of CPUs (assuming your OS is suitably NUMA-aware) and you can sidestep this problem. (More or less. A memory hog processes could start stealing bandwidth from the other CPUs if its working set doesn't all fit in one CPUs memory bank.)