Well, the thing about the Earth being 70% covered in water compared to nearly 0% (how big are Mars' ice caps?) on Mars, probably explains the difference. I doubt we have our ocean bottoms completely mapped to 10m resolution.
"...The end results generally mean a lot of money spent, but little accomplished..."
That, from Congress' vantage, is the point. As long as the money flows into their states and districts, most could really give a rat's ass if anything is actually accomplished.
Mac Classic running System 6.0.7. Created a document with Microsoft Word 5.1a and the Finder correctly gave the date as January 1, 2004.
This is the first time I've turned this old Mac on in years. What fun! The Word application used only 881 Kbytes! The screen is so tiny. How quickly it starts up and shuts down. This one doesn't even have Multifinder on it so literally, only one program can run at a time on its measly 4 Mbytes of RAM.
Actually, the first flight was accomplished by caveman Grog in 2,000,000 B.C. After a vaguely disturbing encounter with a black monolith, Grog blundered into the path of a rabid Sabre-Toothed Cave Goat. While running from the Cave Goat, Grog (who wasn't looking where he was running) encountered a cliff, off of which he launched himself. Grog's flight was propelled by his panicked writhing and arm flapping. His various animal skins and pelts provided significant lift but little control. After a short, and very steep flight, (approximately 20 Grog-lengths long and 100 Grog-lengths down with a duration of at least 15 Grog-heart-beats) Grog landed in the river below. Head Caveman Skrog didn't believe Grog's fantastic story -- apparently there were no eyewitnesses or supporting cave paintings -- and Grog went back to hunting and gathering and thereafter avoided Sabre Toothed Cave Goats.
Well, considering that Europa is continuously exposed to intense radiation from Jupiter's radiation belts and from the Sun (no atmosphere to speak of), I doubt a few puny kilograms of Uranium would make any difference.
Here's a reference that states the radiation exposure on the surface of Europa as 6,000 rad/hour! If that's right, then it's at least 6000 rem/hour, probably worse. Lethal dose for humans is a couple hundred rem.
I'm guessing: The thing has no mechanical drive, just a thrust vectoring system which is used for everything. So perhaps it has a nozle pointing sideways that it vectors some of the flow to instead of having a mechanical linkage to a tail rotor. Maybe some contraption like a thrust reverser (a thrust sidewayser?) snaps over the rear when it's in vertical flight?
Just looking at the pic in the article, there's what could be a vent on its side, torward the rear.
I looked it up on the O.E.D., mainly to see how far back it goes. This is definitely not a new thing! There's a reference that's using the term the way we mean it from 1812.
Excerpts from OED:
"trans. To subject (a state, a constituency) to a gerrymander. Also transf., esp. in sense: To manipulate in order to gain an unfair advantage.
1812 N.Y. Post 28 Dec. 3/1 They attempted also to Gerrymander the State for the choice of Representatives to Congress."
No doubt that computers and demographics make it a lot more efficient.
When I think of the "classic HP" I think of calculators and lab test equipment. That nifty technical core is now Agilent (well not the calculators, alas). It seems like the wrong company got to keep the "HP" name.
There are other things to worry about in addition to how clean things are:
Electrostatic discharge - magnetoresistive heads are very sensitive to ESD. Those little baggies the site shows the drives being stored in without their covers, didn't look like ESD bags.
Outgassing/particulates from the modified components. In the article, the guy glued a plastic shell to a hole cut in the aluminium cover and then siloconed in some LEDs. Any or all of that stuff could contaminate the insides.
Altering the mechanics of the spindle. There was a screw removed attaching the spindle to the now-missing chunk of the cover. Considering how cost-concious drive makers are, that screw had a purpose or else it wouldn't be there.
I'd like to ses what happens when one fills a drive with helium. The drives are designed with air in mind (the heads "fly" over the surface on a cusion of air) and helium would behave differently. Who knows, it might work better. Anyway, since drives aren't sealed, the helium would leak out in a short time anyway.
Exactly my question. And how feasible is the stacking operation that the article mentions? It looks like its areal density is nothing spectacular (10^6 bits per mm^2) Theoretically, we could stack die for other memory types into super-dense packages but it's so expensive that it's rarely done.
Maybe the polymer+transistors stuff is flexible? One could make a big, flat sheet and then roll/fold it up into a smaller package 8^)
Interesting, but I'm not sure if it's Earth-shattering just yet.
"So, if it can be cut, it has to be able to be repaired, or it's not worth building."
Perhaps the thing is never done. It just keeps growing downward and crews trim it as it decends. The cable is thickest at the top and thinnest at the bottom, so the outer layers (possibly damaged by small impacts) would be trimmed away as the cable descended. Over time, the cable would be completely replaced.
If some knucklehead in a plane chops off the bottom few kilometers. Well, we clean up the mess on the ground and then wait a few months for the elevator to grow back down and then hook it back up to the terminal. No big deal.
Just an idea. I'm sure my patent on it will have expired by the year 4000 when they build the thing. That is, unless, Disney can do for patents what they've already been done for copyrights!
"Cassini was loaded with plutonium... is there reason to be concerned about dropping it into that planet?"
Yes. The plutonium will, in all likelihood cause Saturn to collapse into a small, unstable star. This will last a few months and then it will explode. The shockwave will cause Jupiter to similarly collapse. Being larger, the small star Jupiter forms will last a bit longer but it will also explode, more violently. This shockwave will destroy the Earth. Basically, you have 500 days to live so you should sell everything and transfer the proceeds to my paypal account. Izmunuti@bigliar.com.
In truth, worrying about Cassini having any effect on Saturn is like worrying about ill effects from the nitrogen atoms in the air bumping into your skin. About the only thing that could be dropped into Saturn that would make a difference would be a black hole.
Speaking of enormous payloads, say they switch to capsules and ditch the shuttle. We still have a decent launch system that the shuttle rode into orbit. Plop a cargo pod on there in place of the shuttle, with a throw away (or flyback) SSME pod and we have a heavy-lift launcher almost as big as the Saturn V with minimal development cost. Hell, if no people are on board, we could probably slap four SRBs on and really move some cargo!
Maybe the capsule thingy could be perched on top of the big tank or the cargo pod. Of course, the capsule could be attached to smaller launchers too. That way we get the safety and flexibility of the capsule, much larger payload than the shuttle, reuse much of the existing infrastructure, and save on development costs!
With all the savings from a lower operational cost, maybe NASA could afford to develop cool stuff like aerospike engines, more space probes, and incremental improvements in the system. Right now, it seems like they're strugling to just operate the shuttle and ISS -- not much left over to invest in new technology, which I always thought should be the point of having NASA.
"The only clever thing about these kinds of things is how to avoid 0x00."
Yea, that was interesting. I wonder if the processor designers should start checking the reserved fields in some of those instructions and throwing an illegal-instruction trap if they are non-zero. That would seem to make it more difficult to design these bits of code. Makes forward compatibility for object code more difficult too, I guess. (G5+reserved field checking might not run G6 code that defines some of those bits...)
"As far as zinc-air: zinc is both way too heavy and way too expensive to be a viable vehicle fuel!"
I think raw zinc is less than $2/kg. In any case, it doesn't have to be used up in the reaction and spewed out the exhaust pipe (probably a bad idea since it's a solid...). The zinc-oxide can be extracted and recycled when the car is refueled. Over time most of the money will go into electricity to make Zn out of ZnOx.
" At least hydrogen doesnt generate carbon monoxide when it burns."
True, but if you're burning an air-H2 mixture isn't NOx a problem, just as it is when burning anything else in air?
Anyway, I don't get the obsession with having end users mess with H2. H2 is potentially dangerous (high pressure tanks, flamability), expensive (see high pressure tanks), and inefficient (fuel tends to leak out). Yea, I know people are working on better/safer/cheaper H2 storgage solutions, and hopefully they meet with more success than the people working on better/cheaper batteries for electric cars.
Why not zinc-air fuel cells instead of hydrogen fuel cells? The zinc-air reaction is not as efficient as the hydrogen-air one, but it makes up for that in other ways. The input is zinc metal, the output is zinc-oxide -- both safe, stable solids. The electrolyte is rather poisonous, but so is gasoline, battery acid and radiator fluid. There's no need for expensive high-pressure tanks or need to wait for a breakthrough in storage technology. The ingredients don't leak out while your car is parked at the airport. Dealing with solid fuel and waste products can be handled by pumping a slurry of the electrolyte and zinc/zinc-oxide.
I'm not saying zinc-air is the ultimate solution but it seems to be a more practical solution for cars than hydrogen.
"This isn't a link to a dual cpu version, but you might be interested in what people on pricewatch are charging for tower Opeteron servers with U320 SCSI and 3 year warranties. It's significantly less than apple's low end G5 tower..."
I followed the link and found references to some boxes from www.americancomputech.com. I went there and used their configurator to spec a couple of systems. I think the prices on pricewatch are for case+motherboard sans processor, memory, drives, etc.
Here's the Dual Opteron that is spec'd as close to the high-end G5 as possible. (Dual AMD Opteron 244 1.8 GHz 1024K, 2x256 Mb DDR266 PC2100, 160 Gb ATA133 Maxtor 8MB 7200 RPM, ATI 8MB RAGE XL Graphics Controller, Built In Gigabit Ethernet Controller, Pioneer DVR-A05 DVD-R/RW, Creative Labs Sound Blaster PCI 128AWE OEM, PCI 56K V.92 Modem, cheapest keyboard and mouse, Window XP Home) I think that's pretty comparable. Total is $3102.57. In the same ball park as the top-of the line G5 ($2999)
Spec'd the same system but with a single Opteron 242 1.60 GHz CPU and it totals at $2060. Which is also close to the low-end G5 ($1999).
As spec'd the PC's might have a better (but not bigger) HD. The Macs have a better video card. I'm not sure how Opterons compare to PPC 970s GHz for GHz. It's as close as I could get with the web site's configurator.
In any case, it's clear that the G5 towers are currently price competitive with the Opteron servers you reference, assuming similar configurations. If anything the G5's are slightly cheaper.
Ha! They helped design the "Itanic" so it will need to be pried from their cold, dead fingers. You will not see Opterons from HP unless (until?) the Itanium is a confirmed flop.
"Maybe the techniques for programming the exploit program described here are well known to more experienced programmers, but I found the article extremely interesting and enlightening."
Yes, very interesting. Yet another reason for PCs and Macs to start using ECC memory standard.
Their implementation (carefully filling memory with objects of one type that, if a bit error occurs, can allow access to an arbitrary address) reminded me of an old game called "Core Wars" for some reason. In that game, two programs would duke it out trying to corrupt each other in simulated memory space. Anybody remember that game?
"I presume the black mark in the middle of the picture is an artifact of the imaging process."
Not at all. Like Earth, Jupiter is hollow. The black spot is the polar entrance to the subjovian realm. The Earth has a similar hole at the North pole but the UN, with help from the Illuminati covered it up. In the near future NASA plans to crash Galileo into the Jovian hole in hopes of collapsing it.
I learned all of this during my most recent abduction.
Given enough time, the Earth-Moon system would eventually evolve to the point that the Earth and Moon will be tidally locked to each other.
One problem is that they probably won't get enough time. It would take over 100 billion years for the moon to tidally lock the Earth. Long before the process is complete, the Sun will enter its red giant stage and destroy the Earth. Well, assuming we haven't moved it out of harms way by then...:)
'it seems like they DON'T make them like they used'
Helping the Pioneer and Voyager's longevity was that they were cast into escape trajectories after their encounters. They've basically been coasting along in interplanetary space for decades with most of their instruments turned off. Pretty static environment. Now poor Galileo has been orbiting Jupiter, dipping in and out of that planet's enormously intense radiation belts for years. All that radiation takes a toll. If Galileo had just done a flyby and then a long coast, it would have aged much better.
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Well, the thing about the Earth being 70% covered in water compared to nearly 0% (how big are Mars' ice caps?) on Mars, probably explains the difference. I doubt we have our ocean bottoms completely mapped to 10m resolution.
Iz
"...The end results generally mean a lot of money spent, but little accomplished..."
That, from Congress' vantage, is the point. As long as the money flows into their states and districts, most could really give a rat's ass if anything is actually accomplished.
Iz
Mac Classic running System 6.0.7. Created a document with Microsoft Word 5.1a and the Finder correctly gave the date as January 1, 2004.
This is the first time I've turned this old Mac on in years. What fun! The Word application used only 881 Kbytes! The screen is so tiny. How quickly it starts up and shuts down. This one doesn't even have Multifinder on it so literally, only one program can run at a time on its measly 4 Mbytes of RAM.
Iz
Actually, the first flight was accomplished by caveman Grog in 2,000,000 B.C. After a vaguely disturbing encounter with a black monolith, Grog blundered into the path of a rabid Sabre-Toothed Cave Goat. While running from the Cave Goat, Grog (who wasn't looking where he was running) encountered a cliff, off of which he launched himself. Grog's flight was propelled by his panicked writhing and arm flapping.
His various animal skins and pelts provided significant lift but little control. After a short, and very steep flight, (approximately 20 Grog-lengths long and 100 Grog-lengths down with a duration of at least 15 Grog-heart-beats) Grog landed in the river below. Head Caveman Skrog didn't believe Grog's fantastic story -- apparently there were no eyewitnesses or supporting cave paintings -- and Grog went back to hunting and gathering and thereafter avoided Sabre Toothed Cave Goats.
Well, considering that Europa is continuously exposed to intense radiation from Jupiter's radiation belts and from the Sun (no atmosphere to speak of), I doubt a few puny kilograms of Uranium would make any difference. Here's a reference that states the radiation exposure on the surface of Europa as 6,000 rad/hour! If that's right, then it's at least 6000 rem/hour, probably worse. Lethal dose for humans is a couple hundred rem.
I'm guessing: The thing has no mechanical drive, just a thrust vectoring system which is used for everything. So perhaps it has a nozle pointing sideways that it vectors some of the flow to instead of having a mechanical linkage to a tail rotor. Maybe some contraption like a thrust reverser (a thrust sidewayser?) snaps over the rear when it's in vertical flight?
Just looking at the pic in the article, there's what could be a vent on its side, torward the rear.
Excerpts from OED:
No doubt that computers and demographics make it a lot more efficient.
When I think of the "classic HP" I think of calculators and lab test equipment. That nifty technical core is now Agilent (well not the calculators, alas). It seems like the wrong company got to keep the "HP" name.
There are other things to worry about in addition to how clean things are:
Electrostatic discharge - magnetoresistive heads are very sensitive to ESD. Those little baggies the site shows the drives being stored in without their covers, didn't look like ESD bags.
Outgassing/particulates from the modified components. In the article, the guy glued a plastic shell to a hole cut in the aluminium cover and then siloconed in some LEDs. Any or all of that stuff could contaminate the insides.
Altering the mechanics of the spindle. There was a screw removed attaching the spindle to the now-missing chunk of the cover. Considering how cost-concious drive makers are, that screw had a purpose or else it wouldn't be there.
I'd like to ses what happens when one fills a drive with helium. The drives are designed with air in mind (the heads "fly" over the surface on a cusion of air) and helium would behave differently. Who knows, it might work better. Anyway, since drives aren't sealed, the helium would leak out in a short time anyway.
Iz
Exactly my question. And how feasible is the stacking operation that the article mentions? It looks like its areal density is nothing spectacular (10^6 bits per mm^2) Theoretically, we could stack die for other memory types into super-dense packages but it's so expensive that it's rarely done.
Maybe the polymer+transistors stuff is flexible? One could make a big, flat sheet and then roll/fold it up into a smaller package 8^)
Interesting, but I'm not sure if it's Earth-shattering just yet.
Iz
"So, if it can be cut, it has to be able to be repaired, or it's not worth building."
Perhaps the thing is never done. It just keeps growing downward and crews trim it as it decends. The cable is thickest at the top and thinnest at the bottom, so the outer layers (possibly damaged by small impacts) would be trimmed away as the cable descended. Over time, the cable would be completely replaced.
If some knucklehead in a plane chops off the bottom few kilometers. Well, we clean up the mess on the ground and then wait a few months for the elevator to grow back down and then hook it back up to the terminal. No big deal.
Just an idea. I'm sure my patent on it will have expired by the year 4000 when they build the thing. That is, unless, Disney can do for patents what they've already been done for copyrights!
Iz
"Cassini was loaded with plutonium... is there reason to be concerned about dropping it into that planet?"
Yes. The plutonium will, in all likelihood cause Saturn to collapse into a small, unstable star. This will last a few months and then it will explode. The shockwave will cause Jupiter to similarly collapse. Being larger, the small star Jupiter forms will last a bit longer but it will also explode, more violently. This shockwave will destroy the Earth. Basically, you have 500 days to live so you should sell everything and transfer the proceeds to my paypal account. Izmunuti@bigliar.com.
In truth, worrying about Cassini having any effect on Saturn is like worrying about ill effects from the nitrogen atoms in the air bumping into your skin. About the only thing that could be dropped into Saturn that would make a difference would be a black hole.
Iz
Who said anything about not being able to use them? I was talking about "enormous payloads" after all.
None of those have near the payload capacity that a shuttle-C like launcher would have:
Ariane 5 to LEO: ~16,000 kg
Delta IV to LEO: ~23,000 kg
Atlas 550 to LEO: ~20,000 kg
Shuttle-C to LEO: ~77,000 kg
Speaking of enormous payloads, say they switch to capsules and ditch the shuttle. We still have a decent launch system that the shuttle rode into orbit. Plop a cargo pod on there in place of the shuttle, with a throw away (or flyback) SSME pod and we have a heavy-lift launcher almost as big as the Saturn V with minimal development cost. Hell, if no people are on board, we could probably slap four SRBs on and really move some cargo!
Maybe the capsule thingy could be perched on top of the big tank or the cargo pod. Of course, the capsule could be attached to smaller launchers too. That way we get the safety and flexibility of the capsule, much larger payload than the shuttle, reuse much of the existing infrastructure, and save on development costs!
With all the savings from a lower operational cost, maybe NASA could afford to develop cool stuff like aerospike engines, more space probes, and incremental improvements in the system. Right now, it seems like they're strugling to just operate the shuttle and ISS -- not much left over to invest in new technology, which I always thought should be the point of having NASA.
Iz
"The only clever thing about these kinds of things is how to avoid 0x00."
Yea, that was interesting. I wonder if the processor designers should start checking the reserved fields in some of those instructions and throwing an illegal-instruction trap if they are non-zero. That would seem to make it more difficult to design these bits of code. Makes forward compatibility for object code more difficult too, I guess. (G5+reserved field checking might not run G6 code that defines some of those bits...)
Iz
"As far as zinc-air: zinc is both way too heavy and way too expensive to be a viable vehicle fuel!"
I think raw zinc is less than $2/kg. In any case, it doesn't have to be used up in the reaction and spewed out the exhaust pipe (probably a bad idea since it's a solid...). The zinc-oxide can be extracted and recycled when the car is refueled. Over time most of the money will go into electricity to make Zn out of ZnOx.
" At least hydrogen doesnt generate carbon monoxide when it burns."
True, but if you're burning an air-H2 mixture isn't NOx a problem, just as it is when burning anything else in air?
Anyway, I don't get the obsession with having end users mess with H2. H2 is potentially dangerous (high pressure tanks, flamability), expensive (see high pressure tanks), and inefficient (fuel tends to leak out). Yea, I know people are working on better/safer/cheaper H2 storgage solutions, and hopefully they meet with more success than the people working on better/cheaper batteries for electric cars.
Why not zinc-air fuel cells instead of hydrogen fuel cells? The zinc-air reaction is not as efficient as the hydrogen-air one, but it makes up for that in other ways. The input is zinc metal, the output is zinc-oxide -- both safe, stable solids. The electrolyte is rather poisonous, but so is gasoline, battery acid and radiator fluid. There's no need for expensive high-pressure tanks or need to wait for a breakthrough in storage technology. The ingredients don't leak out while your car is parked at the airport. Dealing with solid fuel and waste products can be handled by pumping a slurry of the electrolyte and zinc/zinc-oxide.
I'm not saying zinc-air is the ultimate solution but it seems to be a more practical solution for cars than hydrogen.
Iz
I love these BabelFish translations:
"Thus begin now already strongly with saving."
Good advice!
Interesting. See anyone wearing Cadence or Synopsys shirts while you were there? That would be cool.
Iz
"This isn't a link to a dual cpu version, but you might be interested in what people on pricewatch are charging for tower Opeteron servers with U320 SCSI and 3 year warranties. It's significantly less than apple's low end G5 tower..."
I followed the link and found references to some boxes from www.americancomputech.com. I went there and used their configurator to spec a couple of systems. I think the prices on pricewatch are for case+motherboard sans processor, memory, drives, etc.
Here's the Dual Opteron that is spec'd as close to the high-end G5 as possible. (Dual AMD Opteron 244 1.8 GHz 1024K, 2x256 Mb DDR266 PC2100, 160 Gb ATA133 Maxtor 8MB 7200 RPM, ATI 8MB RAGE XL Graphics Controller, Built In Gigabit Ethernet Controller, Pioneer DVR-A05 DVD-R/RW, Creative Labs Sound Blaster PCI 128AWE OEM, PCI 56K V.92 Modem, cheapest keyboard and mouse, Window XP Home) I think that's pretty comparable. Total is $3102.57. In the same ball park as the top-of the line G5 ($2999)
Spec'd the same system but with a single Opteron 242 1.60 GHz CPU and it totals at $2060. Which is also close to the low-end G5 ($1999).
As spec'd the PC's might have a better (but not bigger) HD. The Macs have a better video card. I'm not sure how Opterons compare to PPC 970s GHz for GHz. It's as close as I could get with the web site's configurator.
In any case, it's clear that the G5 towers are currently price competitive with the Opteron servers you reference, assuming similar configurations. If anything the G5's are slightly cheaper.
Iz
"HP will be releasing an Opteron soon"
Ha! They helped design the "Itanic" so it will need to be pried from their cold, dead fingers. You will not see Opterons from HP unless (until?) the Itanium is a confirmed flop.
Iz
"Maybe the techniques for programming the exploit program described here are well known to more experienced programmers, but I found the article extremely interesting and enlightening."
Yes, very interesting. Yet another reason for PCs and Macs to start using ECC memory standard.
Their implementation (carefully filling memory with objects of one type that, if a bit error occurs, can allow access to an arbitrary address) reminded me of an old game called "Core Wars" for some reason. In that game, two programs would duke it out trying to corrupt each other in simulated memory space. Anybody remember that game?
Iz
"I presume the black mark in the middle of the picture is an artifact of the imaging process."
Not at all. Like Earth, Jupiter is hollow. The black spot is the polar entrance to the subjovian realm. The Earth has a similar hole at the North pole but the UN, with help from the Illuminati covered it up. In the near future NASA plans to crash Galileo into the Jovian hole in hopes of collapsing it.
I learned all of this during my most recent abduction.
Iz
Given enough time, the Earth-Moon system would eventually evolve to the point that the Earth and Moon will be tidally locked to each other.
:)
One problem is that they probably won't get enough time. It would take over 100 billion years for the moon to tidally lock the Earth. Long before the process is complete, the Sun will enter its red giant stage and destroy the Earth. Well, assuming we haven't moved it out of harms way by then...
Iz
'it seems like they DON'T make them like they used'
Helping the Pioneer and Voyager's longevity was that they were cast into escape trajectories after their encounters. They've basically been coasting along in interplanetary space for decades with most of their instruments turned off. Pretty static environment. Now poor Galileo has been orbiting Jupiter, dipping in and out of that planet's enormously intense radiation belts for years. All that radiation takes a toll. If Galileo had just done a flyby and then a long coast, it would have aged much better.