"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." -- Yogi Berra
TTFN
Re:Innovation is obviously lacking at Nasa
on
NASA's New Shuttle
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· Score: 1
If the requirement is to be maneuverable in atmosphere, how else would you design it?
That's the GP's point. The solution hasn't changed because the problem hasn't changed.
Same thing for the SDLV. The problems of getting into orbit and back down safely haven't changed since Apollo. We tried a spaceplane design, found that it wasn't such a great idea, and now we're changing back.
When materials and technology advance a bit farther, perhaps spaceplanes will make sense. Until then, we know that rockets work.
Rather than a gyro, how about a series of accelerometers (1 for every axis). If you know the acceleration in an access, derive it and you have speed. Derive it again and you have the distance moved.
Actually, you would integrate from acceleration.
And it wouldn't work very well.
Finding position from accelerometers works over short time scales, but your value drifts over time due to accumulation of errors. You need something like a pendulum to tell you absolute orientation relative to the ground. Also, you need to know what angle the controller makes with the TV, so that's probably what the external sensors are for.
Realistically, the bacteria would be foreign to us, and might kill most humans who came in contract with it. Think Indians (excuse me, Native Americans) and smallpox. We have no resistance against Martian bacteria.
We have oxygen. In large quantities. Anything living on Mars is anaerobic. Oxygen is a poison to obligate anaerobes.
The worst case that is even remotely plausible is that we'll get a new form of tetanus. It's much more likely that any Martian bacteria would simply find our high pressure, high temperature, oxidizing environment to be completely inhospitable.
Regarding deprocessing then reverse engineering and copying each layer, I know it sounds absurd, but I have a taiwanese friend of mine who said this happens all the time.
IIRC, IBM's original VGA chip was reverse-engineered by other companies in just this fashion.
Good point. Let me be more specific. The article describes bonding multiple wafers in a stack with connecting wires between the layers so the whole functions as a single unit.
For example, it appears that only one of the wafers needs a connection to the outside world. In contrast, the article you referred to appears to be talking about multiple ICs sharing a single package with no intra-package connections between them.
True enough. I got my information from undergraduate courses in computer engineering.
Multiple layers of transistors are currently in all of Intel's latest fabs.
I do find this hard to believe though. How do they grow a layer of monocrystalline silicon on top of a glassy surface? Or have they found a way to make polysilicon transistors not suck horribly?
Just because you are not aware of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Yup. That's why I said "I am not aware of".:)
The article does not mention anything that is not already in currently production and for sale on the shelves of you local PC shop today.
Not true. The article describes bonding multiple wafers in a stack. This is most certainly not how ICs are currently made.
I think it's still an important language to learn and understand as a beginner programmer.
As a beginner programmer perhaps, but please don't teach it as a new programmer's first language. Like BASIC, it causes brain damage which is difficult to repair.
They do already do this... Intel chips have more than 7 layers on them. They arent really stacked wafers either; the film-growing, dopant implanting, CMP, and other processes can be repeated many times on the same wafer.
Didn't RTFA, but obviously this must be more than just the usual layering.
The current 7+ layer chips are talking about metalization layers. Wires, in other words. There is only one layer of transistors, which is at the top of the silicon substrate. I am not aware of any production process which has multiple layers of transistors.
People have been trying to build 3-D ICs for a long time because of the obvious benefits. The article describes a process of bonding multiple wafers in a stack, with wires going between the levels. Sounds to me like it would work, but it would only make the heat dissipation problem worse than it already is. My guess is 3-D chips will be used for low-power devices initially.
...they lead me to lean towards thinking he did nothing wrong. But I don't know. And I'm not dishing up my cash until I do.
The purpose of a legal defense is not to exonerate the guilty. It is to ensure a fair trial. Whether you believe he is guilty or innocent, or whether you don't know, makes no difference. He has the right to a fair trial. At present in the United States, that means having a lot of money to pay a competent lawyer.
The other factor that is important (to me) is the plastic case. I have dropped eMate on concrete with no damage other than cosmetic.
The other thing about the emate was that it had no moving parts. No floppy drive, no cdrom, no hard drive. With no moving parts, everything can be "strapped down" so a fall doesn't hurt too much.
TTFN
Re:Just think, won't be able to say this much long
on
Stars Have a Weight Limit
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It will cost just as much to repair the Hubble as it would to put something else more compact and powerful out there, so troll or not, Hubble needs to make way for leaner and more powerful machinery.
I wouldn't mind Hubble dying if there were a replacement for it, but there isn't one. JWST isn't going to be active until 2011, and it is infrared-only.
The video looked really cool--except for the wobbling heads. If these robots were given active head stabilization (easy to do with a camera or two in the eyes controlling neck motors) they'd look very intimidating.
Also, the herbivore needs to have a bone in its crest. It looks a bit Yoda-ear-ish.
Slight nitpick: cat is meant to concatenate two files together. It just happens that when you concatenate nothing onto the first file you end up with the same thing you started with.
Yep, that's cat all right.
Did you know that grep can search multiple files? And that it concatenates the matching lines from each file?
As it turns out, I had forgotten that grep prefixes each matching line with the name of the file when you give it multiple files to search. You have to specify -h to supress that behavior if you want to simulate cat.
Thus, cat is a subset of grep. Just like I said it was.:)
You might want to do a refresher on your Unix utils.
Grep is a great program. But it's REALLY broken if what you wanted was cat, or ftp.
Slight nitpick: cat is a subset of grep. Just use a pattern that matches every line like ".*". Granted, if you said "write cat" and your programmer wrote grep, you should have a talk with him about creeping featuritis.
The discussion so far has focused on the redefinition of the kilogram. However, the point of the article was not to argue for the redefinition, but rather to argue for redefining it sooner rather than later.
Every informed person agrees that the kilogram needs to be redefined in terms of physical constants, and several projects are underway to make this possible. However, these projects are not currently able to define the kilogram with as much precision as the current kilogram object can be measured.
The article is arguing that the benefits of a physical constant based definition of the kilogram are enough to outweigh the temporary loss of precision in the definition of the kilogram.
In fact (I didn't believe this when I first heard it) humans can breathe through their skin when skydiving!
From http://www.dur.ac.uk/freefall.club/faq.php:
This was posted as a joke on a skydiving FAQ years ago. The author thought everyone would realise it was a joke because it was such a silly concept, but actually managed to convince quite a lot of people that this was true! Indeed, it is far from the truth - the human body was simply not designed this way! You can breathe perfectly normally in freefall as long as you relax and don't seize up.
Yes, humans get 2% of their oxygen through their skin. No, that number doesn't increase while skydiving.
5) I'd like to teach him to program like my father did for me. Logo, basic, and games with programmable parts.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
I agree with you about Logo and programmable games. Use Python or similar instead of BASIC though. If something better than BASIC had been available when I was learning to program, I sure would have preferred it.
Home insurance is a whole different animal. When I had to file a home insurance claim, dude was offering to give me more money than I actually wanted. I actually turned down a full replacement of wallpaper in our kitchen -- he offered to replace it because one little corner had been damaged.
So, what insurance company are you with? The rumor I heard was that insurance companies have been canceling people's policies when they submit a claim. This caused problems for those who by law are required to carry home insurance.
I also think that if one can only do about 5 hours in an MMORPG, maybe that game genre just isn't for them?
So if someone isn't prepared to work at a game like it was a part-time job they shouldn't play it? There's no room for someone who plays a game for fun?
My situation is that my friends play City of Heroes. I would like to be able to play it with them. (It's the only MMOG that's been able to attract and hold my attention for even a few hours at a time. Most of them bore me to tears.) However, because I have less time than they do (married, etc) I can't devote many hours per week to playing the game.
I would like to be able to jump in on a mission of theirs every now and then for a little cooperative bozo trashing, but I can't without paying $10 for the privilege. The Skinner Box aspect of MMOGs means next to nothing to me. The social aspect of the game would attract me if I could get it at a reasonable price.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most telling signs of unpreparedness for Hurricane Katrina was flooded parking lots full of school buses.
What's wrong with the good old p=mv (momentum)?
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."
-- Yogi Berra
TTFN
If the requirement is to be maneuverable in atmosphere, how else would you design it?
That's the GP's point. The solution hasn't changed because the problem hasn't changed.
Same thing for the SDLV. The problems of getting into orbit and back down safely haven't changed since Apollo. We tried a spaceplane design, found that it wasn't such a great idea, and now we're changing back.
When materials and technology advance a bit farther, perhaps spaceplanes will make sense. Until then, we know that rockets work.
TTFN
Rather than a gyro, how about a series of accelerometers (1 for every axis). If you know the acceleration in an access, derive it and you have speed. Derive it again and you have the distance moved.
Actually, you would integrate from acceleration.
And it wouldn't work very well.
Finding position from accelerometers works over short time scales, but your value drifts over time due to accumulation of errors. You need something like a pendulum to tell you absolute orientation relative to the ground. Also, you need to know what angle the controller makes with the TV, so that's probably what the external sensors are for.
TTFN
Realistically, the bacteria would be foreign to us, and might kill most humans who came in contract with it. Think Indians (excuse me, Native Americans) and smallpox. We have no resistance against Martian bacteria.
We have oxygen. In large quantities. Anything living on Mars is anaerobic. Oxygen is a poison to obligate anaerobes.
The worst case that is even remotely plausible is that we'll get a new form of tetanus. It's much more likely that any Martian bacteria would simply find our high pressure, high temperature, oxidizing environment to be completely inhospitable.
TTFN
Regarding deprocessing then reverse engineering and copying each layer, I know it sounds absurd, but I have a taiwanese friend of mine who said this happens all the time.
IIRC, IBM's original VGA chip was reverse-engineered by other companies in just this fashion.
TTFN
Actually.... yes it is
Good point. Let me be more specific. The article describes bonding multiple wafers in a stack with connecting wires between the layers so the whole functions as a single unit.
For example, it appears that only one of the wafers needs a connection to the outside world. In contrast, the article you referred to appears to be talking about multiple ICs sharing a single package with no intra-package connections between them.
TTFN
does not have access to Intel's latest fabs
:)
True enough. I got my information from undergraduate courses in computer engineering.
Multiple layers of transistors are currently in all of Intel's latest fabs.
I do find this hard to believe though. How do they grow a layer of monocrystalline silicon on top of a glassy surface? Or have they found a way to make polysilicon transistors not suck horribly?
Just because you are not aware of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Yup. That's why I said "I am not aware of".
The article does not mention anything that is not already in currently production and for sale on the shelves of you local PC shop today.
Not true. The article describes bonding multiple wafers in a stack. This is most certainly not how ICs are currently made.
TTFN
I think it's still an important language to learn and understand as a beginner programmer.
As a beginner programmer perhaps, but please don't teach it as a new programmer's first language. Like BASIC, it causes brain damage which is difficult to repair.
TTFN
They do already do this... Intel chips have more than 7 layers on them. They arent really stacked wafers either; the film-growing, dopant implanting, CMP, and other processes can be repeated many times on the same wafer.
Didn't RTFA, but obviously this must be more than just the usual layering.
The current 7+ layer chips are talking about metalization layers. Wires, in other words. There is only one layer of transistors, which is at the top of the silicon substrate. I am not aware of any production process which has multiple layers of transistors.
People have been trying to build 3-D ICs for a long time because of the obvious benefits. The article describes a process of bonding multiple wafers in a stack, with wires going between the levels. Sounds to me like it would work, but it would only make the heat dissipation problem worse than it already is. My guess is 3-D chips will be used for low-power devices initially.
TTFN
Girls don't even like that kind of stuff, man.
They want RAM.
...they lead me to lean towards thinking he did nothing wrong. But I don't know. And I'm not dishing up my cash until I do.
The purpose of a legal defense is not to exonerate the guilty. It is to ensure a fair trial. Whether you believe he is guilty or innocent, or whether you don't know, makes no difference. He has the right to a fair trial. At present in the United States, that means having a lot of money to pay a competent lawyer.
TTFN
The other factor that is important (to me) is the plastic case. I have dropped eMate on concrete with no damage other than cosmetic.
The other thing about the emate was that it had no moving parts. No floppy drive, no cdrom, no hard drive. With no moving parts, everything can be "strapped down" so a fall doesn't hurt too much.
TTFN
It will cost just as much to repair the Hubble as it would to put something else more compact and powerful out there, so troll or not, Hubble needs to make way for leaner and more powerful machinery.
I wouldn't mind Hubble dying if there were a replacement for it, but there isn't one. JWST isn't going to be active until 2011, and it is infrared-only.
TTFN
The video looked really cool--except for the wobbling heads. If these robots were given active head stabilization (easy to do with a camera or two in the eyes controlling neck motors) they'd look very intimidating.
Also, the herbivore needs to have a bone in its crest. It looks a bit Yoda-ear-ish.
TTFN
Slight nitpick: cat is meant to concatenate two files together. It just happens that when you concatenate nothing onto the first file you end up with the same thing you started with.
:)
Yep, that's cat all right.
Did you know that grep can search multiple files? And that it concatenates the matching lines from each file?
As it turns out, I had forgotten that grep prefixes each matching line with the name of the file when you give it multiple files to search. You have to specify -h to supress that behavior if you want to simulate cat.
Thus, cat is a subset of grep. Just like I said it was.
You might want to do a refresher on your Unix utils.
Good advice, thanks.
TTFN
Grep is a great program. But it's REALLY broken if what you wanted was cat, or ftp.
Slight nitpick: cat is a subset of grep. Just use a pattern that matches every line like ".*". Granted, if you said "write cat" and your programmer wrote grep, you should have a talk with him about creeping featuritis.
Other than that I agree.
TTFN
The discussion so far has focused on the redefinition of the kilogram. However, the point of the article was not to argue for the redefinition, but rather to argue for redefining it sooner rather than later.
Every informed person agrees that the kilogram needs to be redefined in terms of physical constants, and several projects are underway to make this possible. However, these projects are not currently able to define the kilogram with as much precision as the current kilogram object can be measured.
The article is arguing that the benefits of a physical constant based definition of the kilogram are enough to outweigh the temporary loss of precision in the definition of the kilogram.
From http://www.dur.ac.uk/freefall.club/faq.php:
Yes, humans get 2% of their oxygen through their skin. No, that number doesn't increase while skydiving.
TTFN
What phrase (ie, not "free software") might more accurately connote "free as in speech" without implying "free as in beer"?
The problem is that in English, there is no phrase that does that. Just as there's no translation for "wishful thinking" into Italian.
In any given language there are concepts and distinctions that simply cannot be expressed succinctly.
TTFN
You should have used a simulator to teach Assembly, like MMIX or MIPS (plenty of MIPS simulators abound). Using Linux and x86 was a mistake.
MIPS? Ew. Branch delay slots are evil. (But at least it doesn't have those silly register windows like SPARC.)
Teach something like ARM instead. Very nice, very cool. Shifted immediates, predicated instructions, thumb code. And ARMs are as common as MIPSs.
TTFN
5) I'd like to teach him to program like my father did for me. Logo, basic, and games with programmable parts.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
I agree with you about Logo and programmable games. Use Python or similar instead of BASIC though. If something better than BASIC had been available when I was learning to program, I sure would have preferred it.
TTFN
Home insurance is a whole different animal. When I had to file a home insurance claim, dude was offering to give me more money than I actually wanted. I actually turned down a full replacement of wallpaper in our kitchen -- he offered to replace it because one little corner had been damaged.
So, what insurance company are you with? The rumor I heard was that insurance companies have been canceling people's policies when they submit a claim. This caused problems for those who by law are required to carry home insurance.
TTFN
religious leaders take advantage of one's fear of death and need for meaning
So you're saying there are no sincere religious leaders? I find that improbable.
TTFN
I also think that if one can only do about 5 hours in an MMORPG, maybe that game genre just isn't for them?
So if someone isn't prepared to work at a game like it was a part-time job they shouldn't play it? There's no room for someone who plays a game for fun?
My situation is that my friends play City of Heroes. I would like to be able to play it with them. (It's the only MMOG that's been able to attract and hold my attention for even a few hours at a time. Most of them bore me to tears.) However, because I have less time than they do (married, etc) I can't devote many hours per week to playing the game.
I would like to be able to jump in on a mission of theirs every now and then for a little cooperative bozo trashing, but I can't without paying $10 for the privilege. The Skinner Box aspect of MMOGs means next to nothing to me. The social aspect of the game would attract me if I could get it at a reasonable price.
TTFN