I spent a lot of time searching for a place that would replace the capacitors on my motherboard today, and I finally gave up on generic searches and did a google search for that guy, since his name was mentioned in the article, and came up with that page.
Maybe this is old news, but it's new to me, and I am most grateful slashdot ran that story today. I knew nothing about such a problem, and I just got a new Abit motherboard a couple days ago that I strongly suspect has failing capacitors. I've been trying to figure out the problem in this thread, so this story has been very enlightening to me in my current situation. Now I need to figure out how and where to get my capacitors replaced before they blow up or start leaking.
Should I check for the failure of malloc in C? I mean, if malloc does fail, what's the proper way to handle it? Print "Out of memory" and then exit(-1)? How is that any worse than just catching SIGSEGV and aborting the program more gracefully in that case? Could someone enlighten me?
I still recall my grandpa's first video camera, it was like you describe (except it wasn't wireless): the capture device (the camera itself) was tethered to a VCR. When camcorders first came out, where you could put the tape inside the camera, we were all amazed by this new breakthrough, no more lugging your VCR around to take videos. Of course it was much bulkier than my grandpa's video camera, but the convience of having everything in one box outweighed the extra size of the camcorder. I'm sure having seperate camera and recorder now would be less of a hassle, they would be much smaller, but I'm still not sure it would be desirable to have two seperate parts to keep track of.
Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science
on
When Appliances Revolt
·
· Score: 5, Funny
This joke has been floating around the net for many years, seemed appropriate for this discussion:
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes."
"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v.8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
And Olorin. You know, Gandalf. Gandalf was, in actuality a Maiar who wanted to remain after the Valar sealed themselves away. Not exactly a fallen Maiar, like Sauron or Balrogs. Make for odd family reunions though.
Actually, after Aman was removed from the world, the Valar would never again fight a war like they did with Morgoth. Instead they sent the Istari, Gandalf, Saruman, and Radagast being 3 of the 5, to middle Earth to rally those living in Middle Earth against Sauron. They were not sent with the might to oppose Sauron, the people of middle earth must be where the strength comes from. But yeah, your point that they were Maia is correct, just not that Gandalf was there because he hadn't wanted to leave.
Morgoth entered a pact with Sheloeb's kin (not entirely clear if it is or isn't actually Sheloeb)
No, Shelob was definitely a decendant of Ungoliant. And the spiders of Mirkwood that Frodo had to fight in The Hobbit were Shelob's decendants.
I've read it. Actually, most of the book is Quenta Silmarillion. The other parts are kind of like an introduction and a followup on what happened afterwards. Shelob, the giant spider who shows up near the end of TTT, was the last child of Ungoliant. Morgoth, whom Sauron had only been a servant of, offered the two trees, Telperion (which the white tree in Gondor was in the image of) and Laurelin, that Yavanna (another of the Valar) had created to light middle earth. Ungoliant would have killed Morgoth after consuming the trees, but Morgoth's Balrogs came and rescued him. Anyway, once the trees were destroyed, the only place where the glory of them was preserved was in the Silmarils, which Feanor had created (two leaves that were saved, one from each tree, and carried by 2 Maiar to become the Sun and the Moon). Yavanna asked for the Silmarils so she might try to save the trees, but Feanor refused. While the elves and valar were arguing about what to do, Morgoth broke into Feanor's home and stole the Silmarils. When Feanor found out what happened, he and his sons swore an oath that they would not rest until the Silmarils were in their possession. They followed Morgoth to Middle Earth, killing kin along the way and getting banned from returning, and waged a long war against Morgoth and his servants. Most of the Silmarillion is the story of that war. Feanor died right away in battle, but his sons had to keep their oath for many millenia. Finally Earendil, son (or was it grandson) of Beren (who had cut a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown with the help of Luthien), took the Silmaril and sailed for the forbidden land of Aman, where the Valar and the elves who had not followed Feanor lived. He convinced the Valar to get in the act, but he was not permitted to return to middle earth. Instead, he was to carry the Silmaril across the heavens, which is where the light came from in the Phial that Galadriel gave to Frodo. Anyway, the Valar finally got in the act and broke Morgoth's stronghold, Thangorodrim, and banished him from the world. Sauron fled rather than submit to the Valar. But that leaves out all the stories of the war between the elves and Morgoth, which is most of the story. Sauron took new form and gained favor with the elves, and they made their rings of power, and when he had fasioned The One Ring, he demanded the other rings be turned over to him because they had been made from his knowledge. But Celebrimor had made the 3 most powerful, Nalya, Nenya, and Vilya, and when Sauron put on his right, the elves became aware of him and hid the three, and did not use them. After the Last Alliance, when Isildur cut the ring from Sauron's hand, Isildur travelled north, and thinking all the enemy had been destroyed, didn't realize the ring attracted orcs. His company was ambushed, and he escaped via the ring, but while he swam away, the ring slipped from his finger into the Anduin, and the orcs saw him and shot him. There it laid until Smeagol found it, and well, the rest is found in LotR, for the most part. Hope that helps a bit. It's a long and challenging read, with many, many names of people and places, don't expect a LotR type story.
Re:I remember when it was the best...
on
Altavista Renewed
·
· Score: 1
I can't see how anyone can complain about Google's advertisements.
I agree, I like the way they handle ads. However, one thing about their ads, they recently added ads to google groups (USENET), and the way they're handled is strange. When browsing a specific group, it seems to take a random key word from the last message that was posted to that group, and bring up advertisers based on that. For example, in a game related forum, in response to request for information, someone answered the question and then mentioned checking the spoiler files. Somehow google picked up that single word, and I got three ads for hot rod spoilers. That's how the google groups ads seem to work in general, quite unrelated to anything in the newgroup. But other than that, their advertising seems quite appropriate.
The question was to tick what was the primary reason for buying a particular film over another and among the list was 'the studio'. I couldn't, and still can't, understand how someone would think "Oh, that film was made by Warner Bros, it must be good, I'll get it." What made it memorable was that some marketing monkey boy must have believed that to be case.
Actually, I buy Pixar movies for exactly that reason. I don't like their association with Disney, but Pixar is awesome, so in their case, I buy the movies before I even see it the first time.
I'm not really a physicist, but I was a physics major in college and read a lot of books on the subject, hopefully my memory isn't too rusty. You seem to be asking two different questions. The first one: why is there more matter in the known universe than antimatter? As physics is currently understood, it is because during the big bang, matter was created in equal quantities as antimatter...almost. Symmetry between matter and antimatter is only true under 3 conditions: time, "handedness" (or spacial orientation, I don't recall the proper term for it), and whether it's matter or antimatter. The primary place where this asymetry can be observed today is in beta decay. Anyway, supposedly there was a slightly larger amount of matter than antimatter created, on the order of 1/1,000,000th more. Then supposedly all the antimatter and matter annihilated with each other, leaving the microwave background radiation, which has been cooling ever since as the universe continues to expand (via the Doppler effect). During beta decay, a neutron is converted into a proton when an neutrino travels back in time (making it an anti-neutrino from our perspective), interacts with the quarks inside the neutron via the weak force, and gets converted into an electron, which now travels forward in time. This makes it look like the neutron emitted both an anti-neutrino and an electron (preserving the lepton number in the process).
As far as anti-matter being hard to produce: it's not currently any harder to produce than normal matter.:-) But you don't see too many people producing normal matter in quantities either. e=mc^2 means that since c^2 is so big (~90000000000000000 m^2/s^2), it takes a lot of energy to produce a small amount of matter (or anti-matter). During fusion, for so much energy being given off, only about 2% of the matter is converted in the process. So basically producing antimatter in quantity would take massive amounts of energy (particle accelerators), and then managing to seperate the resulting matter from the resulting antimatter before they reconnect and turn back into energy. So you need two things: the ability to concentrate a large amount of energy into a small area, and the ability to capture the product before it destroys itself. A very, very challenging combination, especially to do on a large scale.
Who can forget Beagle Bros., probably one of the most famous humorous manuals of all time (ok, at least among those of us who grew up using Apple IIs).
Here are a few samples, I wish I had one of their product catalogs in digital format (they're all packed away), but they were hilarious, stuff like:
In order to recieve $1000000, please follow the following instructions: (Continued on page 53)
And when you start turning, you realize there were only 48 pages in the manual. It was full of stuff like that.
My friends and I are big Starcraft fans, and while we played pirated versions of it for a while, we finally all went out and bought the full version. We all have legal copies, with legal CD keys. However, battle.net is such a mess, we eventually got fed up with it. It's full of cheaters and immature people who cuss you out over nothing. We decided we wanted to just play among friends, and the lag on battle.net was so bad, I went searching for an alternative, and finally came across FSGS. After a lot of messing around (one of my friends is running W2K and we had to do some registry hacking to get FSGS to work), we finally got it going.
Now here's where it gets interesting. At the beginning of this month, Blizzard released a new patch for Starcraft, 1.09. My friend who was running the server told us all to upgrade to the new patch, so we did. After making the upgrade, we all simultaneously discovered that 1.09 disables FSGS. In other words, we couldn't connect to his server anymore. Fortunately, I had a copy of the previous patch that I had saved, and I shared this around (the old 1.08b patch from Blizzard's FTP was broken) and after fighting with W2K all day again, we finally got it all working again.
But if you want to use FSGS, DO NOT upgrade to 1.09.
I know your comment was supposed to be a joke, but I was thinking, why do we have stoves and ovens and such whose sole purpose is to generate heat? What if someday all our heating appliances actually had computational power, and provided their heat as a side effect. I don't know if there are any semiconductors that operate at temperatures of 450 degrees F, but it might be a worthwhile area to put reaserch into. I guess it raises the question of what to do with the computational power. Most projects to use spare processing power don't seem to be that useful. But just think, you could boast to your friends, "I've got a 2.5 GHz toaster with 512 MB of RAM, and when I scramble my eggs, I can calculate 10,000,000 digits of pi a second". Oh well, maybe it's not such a useful idea after all.
I wish I could find the actual article, but I have so many Scientific Americans stacked in my room that I might spend several hours looking for it. Basically what it was about was how astronomy is moving back to using film from CCDs. For a couple of reasons. Film has a much lower threshhold for what it will record. In order to register an event, there needs to be enough light to trigger an electrical cascade in the detector. I'm pretty sure a digital camera is going to have a pretty high trigger threshhold compared to the CCDs used by astronomers, since it's designed for everyday use, not taking pictures of stars. Most stars probably don't produce enough light to actually trigger the electronics inside. The other advantage of the film is the resolution. While film is not "infinite" resolution, it has much higher resolution than any electronic device. You might be able to get away with the lower resolution for taking pictures of solid objects, but if you're trying to get pictures of single points, resolution suddenly becomes much more important.
I do not know exactly what they do with the metals in this case, but often this type of cleanup involves bonding the metal into non-toxic compounds. These compounds can then safely stay in the environment indefinitely, without the ill effects that original metal had. I think I read about doing this with cadmium (all those rechargable ni-cad batteries, leeching cadmium from landfills into the groundwater), but I don't know if that's what's happening here.
Just because the copyrighted material isn't being sold doesn't mean the owner
shouldn't keep the copyright. A more logical way to do it
would be to give software copyrights a short lifespan, like 3 years,
but make it indefinitely renewable. That way if the owner forgets
about it, it becomes public domain, but as long as it's something
important to its creator, they can retain control of it. I
bet most abandonware would simply enter the public domain
this way because most companies don't care about it
anymore/have gone out of business/etc.
I wish I had seen this story earlier, as there are so many comments by now
that the chance of anyone actually reading this one is pretty slim, but
I wish I could shout this out to anyone who is listening.
The means of information transmission for e-mail is
through the movement of electrons, as opposed to the entire
atom/molecules/ions that compose ordinary mail. Hasn't anyone
ever taken Physics or Chemistry? Remember what the standard way
of representing an electron is? It's an e with a superscript
minus sign next to it. Now since we want to show that the
mail is being transmitter primarily via electrons, we
prepend the symbol for electron to the word mail. Unfortunately,
superscript capabilities aren't considered universal, so
to make it simple, it's just written as e-mail.
Of course, I think it should be spelled e- mail, but
e-mail is close enough.
Your problem is that your pole would have an infinite mass, and mass bends space through gravity, and with an infinite mass, you would collapse the whole universe. Do you even understand the word infinite? Take a small object of about a gram. Now think about how many atoms are in that object. It's on the order of 10^23 or so. Bill Gates at his richest only had about $10^11, so SQUARE his money. That's about how many atoms are in a gram. Now think about how many grams are in the earth. The earth weighs about 6x10^21 tons, or on the order of 10^27 grams. There's about as many atoms in a gram as there are kilograms in the earth, making about 10^48 or so atoms in the earth. Now look at the sun. Not directly, we don't want to destroy your eyes. The Sun is about 1,000,000 times the size of our Earth. It's probably not as dense as the Earth since it's mostly hydrogen and helium, or it might be more dense since it's so compressed, but that puts us at about 10^54 atoms in the sun. Now at night, go out and look at the stars. If you live where it's dark, you can probably see several thousand with the naked eye, but one estimate I've heard for our galaxy is about a billion stars, or 10^9, which puts us up to about 10^63 atoms in our galaxy, not counting dark matter. Then there's the estimate that there are around a billion galaxies in the known universe, or another 10^9, which puts us at about 10^72 atoms. OK, so my numbers aren't exact, but they're not for coming up with an exact number. They're there to help give an appreciation for how big our universe is (I think I heard an estimate for the number of electrons in the universe of 10^87, so I know my result is pretty far off). My point? 10^72 is a huge number, but it's nowhere close to infinity. In fact, you can imagine a googleplex of universes (a googleplex is so large it can't be written. It's represented by 10^google, or 10^10^100), but it is still dwarfed by infinity. Trying to claim something could have infinite mass is preposterous, unless the universe itself turns out to be infinite, in which case I guess it would have infinite mass, but there would be no way to prove that it is infinite. I hope that makes sense.
I'd like to see one of these drawing its power from a battery pack instead of the PS/2 port and featuring a tiny LCD display, for times when it'd be nicer to type an e-mail out on the porch than inside, or as a more efficient idea-gobbler than a pen-driven PDA.
Somebody already makes a keyboard like this. It's called the Alphasmart. It's pretty expensive, but if you really want to be able to take your keyboard with you, the option is there. It even has a Dvorak option for those of us who use the superior layout:)
In your comment, you suggest that carbon dating is accurate, and that if it's not, then we might as well throw science out the window. Unfortunately you make the assumption that if carbon dating is wrong that it's nuclear theory that's at fault. There's nothing wrong with using carbon dating to measure time IN A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT. The problem is that this earth, where these samples are taken from, IS NOT A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT. First, a little explanation of how carbon dating works works: Scientists discovered that carbon 14 is being created at a pretty much constant rate in the upper atmosphere as cosmic radiation (from both the sun and outside the solar system) strikes nitrogen nucleii, converting a proton into a neutron. This carbon carbon then mixes with other carbon in the environment (think carbon dioxide). It also immediately starts decaying at a rate directly proportional to the amount that is there. Therefore, we can assume that the amount of carbon 14 created will eventually reach equilibrium with the amount that is decaying. Also, if the amount of carbon 14 created is small compared to the total amount of carbon in the environment, there should be a constant ratio of carbon 12/13 to carbon 14. The next assumption is that living things we be exchanging carbon with the environment as long as they live, and cease to when they die. Therefore, a living creature will have the same carbon ratio as it's environment until it dies. Then, since it's not exchanging carbon anymore, the carbon 14 will decay without being replaced. The decay rate follows an inverse exponential curve, so based on the carbon ratio of the specimen in question, it is elementary to calculate how long it has been since it stopped exchanging carbon (died). Or it should be.
Remember the assumptions we made? How do we know they're true? First of all, we assume that carbon 14 has been created at a constant rate as long as life has been around. Various things can effect it's production (such as the strength of the earth's magnetic field, solar flares, and who knows what else.) The effect of any changes probably isn't that great, but how do we know how much it's changed? If something has happened to cause it to change, it would also take time for the decay/production to reach it's new equilibrium, so you're not even dealing with a constant amount of carbon 14 during this period. But I don't think that this would have too much impact on the dating methods (I could be wrong, though). Here's where the serious problem with carbon dating comes in: assuming that the ratio of carbon 12/13 to carbon 14 has always been what it has been. If you know anything about what the bible says, it tells of flood that killed just about everything. I think that it's pretty safe to assume that this flood would have buried massive amounts of carbon in various forms (coal and oil deposits are a good example). What does that mean? First, most of the formerly available carbon is now trapped in the earth where it is no longer available for use by living things. If we assume that the production of carbon 14 hasn't changed significantly, when it reaches it's production/decay equilibrium again, the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 will have gone WAAAAY up, mainly because we have a lot less carbon 12. So now Mr. Scientist comes along, and not knowing what happened, assumes that this ratio has always been the same. He measures the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in his specimen and discovers that it's several million years old. Unfortunately, he didn't know that the carbon ratio of the specimen when it died was a lot smaller than he assumed it was. Therefore, the date he measured won't be even close to the real amount of time that has passed, although it may be indirectly proportional to its age. The other effect that removing carbon from the environment would have is to throw the production/decay out of equilibrium. In fact, in any system that undergoes production/decay competition like this, it takes about 4 half lives to reach equilibrium from state of no product present. (It actually reaches about 96% of equilibrium, which is close enough). Therefore, right after the carbon is removed from the environment, the carbon ratio will be the same as before, but it will immediately start climbing as the production/decay tries to reach equilibrium. Basically, it would make it look like stuff that was alive at a time farther away from when equilibrium was reached would be much older, because the carbon ratio was a lot lower than it is now. That would mean that the million years scale timeline would be compressed into a much shorter time than the scientist would be led to believe by his measurements. I don't remember what the half-life of carbon 14 is off the top of my head, but it's long enough that the non-equilibrium effect would be very real.
That's my piece, whether you agree or disagree with creationism is up to you, but don't assume that just because something sort of fits the available data means that it's the only reasonable explanation of what really happened.
M.U.L.E. is the best game ever made!!! I still go over to a friend's house on saturday nights just to play M.U.L.E. I even bought a Commodore for $100 (a few years ago) just to play M.U.L.E. I love that game!!!
Actually, there was no such thing as ASR, it is actually LSR, or logical shift right. I guess putting the lowest bit in the carry just didn't make it arithmetical (if that's a word).
Slashdot Mirror
You mean with cellphones like this?
I spent a lot of time searching for a place that would replace the capacitors on my motherboard today, and I finally gave up on generic searches and did a google search for that guy, since his name was mentioned in the article, and came up with that page.
Maybe this is old news, but it's new to me, and I am most grateful slashdot ran that story today. I knew nothing about such a problem, and I just got a new Abit motherboard a couple days ago that I strongly suspect has failing capacitors. I've been trying to figure out the problem in this thread, so this story has been very enlightening to me in my current situation. Now I need to figure out how and where to get my capacitors replaced before they blow up or start leaking.
Should I check for the failure of malloc in C? I mean, if malloc does fail, what's the proper way to handle it? Print "Out of memory" and then exit(-1)? How is that any worse than just catching SIGSEGV and aborting the program more gracefully in that case? Could someone enlighten me?
I still recall my grandpa's first video camera, it was like you describe (except it wasn't wireless): the capture device (the camera itself) was tethered to a VCR. When camcorders first came out, where you could put the tape inside the camera, we were all amazed by this new breakthrough, no more lugging your VCR around to take videos. Of course it was much bulkier than my grandpa's video camera, but the convience of having everything in one box outweighed the extra size of the camcorder. I'm sure having seperate camera and recorder now would be less of a hassle, they would be much smaller, but I'm still not sure it would be desirable to have two seperate parts to keep track of.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes."
"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v.8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
Actually, after Aman was removed from the world, the Valar would never again fight a war like they did with Morgoth. Instead they sent the Istari, Gandalf, Saruman, and Radagast being 3 of the 5, to middle Earth to rally those living in Middle Earth against Sauron. They were not sent with the might to oppose Sauron, the people of middle earth must be where the strength comes from. But yeah, your point that they were Maia is correct, just not that Gandalf was there because he hadn't wanted to leave.
Morgoth entered a pact with Sheloeb's kin (not entirely clear if it is or isn't actually Sheloeb)
No, Shelob was definitely a decendant of Ungoliant. And the spiders of Mirkwood that Frodo had to fight in The Hobbit were Shelob's decendants.
I've read it. Actually, most of the book is Quenta Silmarillion. The other parts are kind of like an introduction and a followup on what happened afterwards. Shelob, the giant spider who shows up near the end of TTT, was the last child of Ungoliant. Morgoth, whom Sauron had only been a servant of, offered the two trees, Telperion (which the white tree in Gondor was in the image of) and Laurelin, that Yavanna (another of the Valar) had created to light middle earth. Ungoliant would have killed Morgoth after consuming the trees, but Morgoth's Balrogs came and rescued him. Anyway, once the trees were destroyed, the only place where the glory of them was preserved was in the Silmarils, which Feanor had created (two leaves that were saved, one from each tree, and carried by 2 Maiar to become the Sun and the Moon). Yavanna asked for the Silmarils so she might try to save the trees, but Feanor refused. While the elves and valar were arguing about what to do, Morgoth broke into Feanor's home and stole the Silmarils. When Feanor found out what happened, he and his sons swore an oath that they would not rest until the Silmarils were in their possession. They followed Morgoth to Middle Earth, killing kin along the way and getting banned from returning, and waged a long war against Morgoth and his servants. Most of the Silmarillion is the story of that war. Feanor died right away in battle, but his sons had to keep their oath for many millenia. Finally Earendil, son (or was it grandson) of Beren (who had cut a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown with the help of Luthien), took the Silmaril and sailed for the forbidden land of Aman, where the Valar and the elves who had not followed Feanor lived. He convinced the Valar to get in the act, but he was not permitted to return to middle earth. Instead, he was to carry the Silmaril across the heavens, which is where the light came from in the Phial that Galadriel gave to Frodo. Anyway, the Valar finally got in the act and broke Morgoth's stronghold, Thangorodrim, and banished him from the world. Sauron fled rather than submit to the Valar. But that leaves out all the stories of the war between the elves and Morgoth, which is most of the story. Sauron took new form and gained favor with the elves, and they made their rings of power, and when he had fasioned The One Ring, he demanded the other rings be turned over to him because they had been made from his knowledge. But Celebrimor had made the 3 most powerful, Nalya, Nenya, and Vilya, and when Sauron put on his right, the elves became aware of him and hid the three, and did not use them. After the Last Alliance, when Isildur cut the ring from Sauron's hand, Isildur travelled north, and thinking all the enemy had been destroyed, didn't realize the ring attracted orcs. His company was ambushed, and he escaped via the ring, but while he swam away, the ring slipped from his finger into the Anduin, and the orcs saw him and shot him. There it laid until Smeagol found it, and well, the rest is found in LotR, for the most part. Hope that helps a bit. It's a long and challenging read, with many, many names of people and places, don't expect a LotR type story.
I agree, I like the way they handle ads. However, one thing about their ads, they recently added ads to google groups (USENET), and the way they're handled is strange. When browsing a specific group, it seems to take a random key word from the last message that was posted to that group, and bring up advertisers based on that. For example, in a game related forum, in response to request for information, someone answered the question and then mentioned checking the spoiler files. Somehow google picked up that single word, and I got three ads for hot rod spoilers. That's how the google groups ads seem to work in general, quite unrelated to anything in the newgroup. But other than that, their advertising seems quite appropriate.
Actually, I buy Pixar movies for exactly that reason. I don't like their association with Disney, but Pixar is awesome, so in their case, I buy the movies before I even see it the first time.
As far as anti-matter being hard to produce: it's not currently any harder to produce than normal matter. :-) But you don't see too many people producing normal matter in quantities either. e=mc^2 means that since c^2 is so big (~90000000000000000 m^2/s^2), it takes a lot of energy to produce a small amount of matter (or anti-matter). During fusion, for so much energy being given off, only about 2% of the matter is converted in the process. So basically producing antimatter in quantity would take massive amounts of energy (particle accelerators), and then managing to seperate the resulting matter from the resulting antimatter before they reconnect and turn back into energy. So you need two things: the ability to concentrate a large amount of energy into a small area, and the ability to capture the product before it destroys itself. A very, very challenging combination, especially to do on a large scale.
In order to recieve $1000000, please follow the following instructions:
(Continued on page 53)
And when you start turning, you realize there were only 48 pages in the manual. It was full of stuff like that.
Now here's where it gets interesting. At the beginning of this month, Blizzard released a new patch for Starcraft, 1.09. My friend who was running the server told us all to upgrade to the new patch, so we did. After making the upgrade, we all simultaneously discovered that 1.09 disables FSGS. In other words, we couldn't connect to his server anymore. Fortunately, I had a copy of the previous patch that I had saved, and I shared this around (the old 1.08b patch from Blizzard's FTP was broken) and after fighting with W2K all day again, we finally got it all working again.
But if you want to use FSGS, DO NOT upgrade to 1.09.
-Bryce
I wish I could find the actual article, but I have so many Scientific Americans stacked in my room that I might spend several hours looking for it. Basically what it was about was how astronomy is moving back to using film from CCDs. For a couple of reasons. Film has a much lower threshhold for what it will record. In order to register an event, there needs to be enough light to trigger an electrical cascade in the detector. I'm pretty sure a digital camera is going to have a pretty high trigger threshhold compared to the CCDs used by astronomers, since it's designed for everyday use, not taking pictures of stars. Most stars probably don't produce enough light to actually trigger the electronics inside. The other advantage of the film is the resolution. While film is not "infinite" resolution, it has much higher resolution than any electronic device. You might be able to get away with the lower resolution for taking pictures of solid objects, but if you're trying to get pictures of single points, resolution suddenly becomes much more important.
-Linknoid
The means of information transmission for e-mail is through the movement of electrons, as opposed to the entire atom/molecules/ions that compose ordinary mail. Hasn't anyone ever taken Physics or Chemistry? Remember what the standard way of representing an electron is? It's an e with a superscript minus sign next to it. Now since we want to show that the mail is being transmitter primarily via electrons, we prepend the symbol for electron to the word mail. Unfortunately, superscript capabilities aren't considered universal, so to make it simple, it's just written as e-mail.
Of course, I think it should be spelled e- mail, but e-mail is close enough.
Your problem is that your pole would have an infinite
mass, and mass bends space through gravity, and
with an infinite mass, you would collapse the whole
universe. Do you even understand the word infinite?
Take a small object of about a gram. Now think about
how many atoms are in that object. It's on the order
of 10^23 or so. Bill Gates at his richest only had
about $10^11, so SQUARE his money. That's about
how many atoms are in a gram. Now think about how
many grams are in the earth. The earth weighs
about 6x10^21 tons, or on the order of 10^27 grams.
There's about as many atoms in a gram as there
are kilograms in the earth, making about 10^48 or
so atoms in the earth. Now look at the sun. Not
directly, we don't want to destroy your eyes. The
Sun is about 1,000,000 times the size of our
Earth. It's probably not as dense as the Earth since
it's mostly hydrogen and helium, or it might be more
dense since it's so compressed, but that puts us
at about 10^54 atoms in the sun. Now at night, go
out and look at the stars. If you live where it's
dark, you can probably see several thousand with
the naked eye, but one estimate I've heard for
our galaxy is about a billion stars, or 10^9,
which puts us up to about 10^63 atoms in our
galaxy, not counting dark matter. Then there's the
estimate that there are around a billion galaxies
in the known universe, or another 10^9, which
puts us at about 10^72 atoms. OK, so my numbers
aren't exact, but they're not for coming up with
an exact number. They're there to help give an
appreciation for how big our universe is (I think
I heard an estimate for the number of electrons
in the universe of 10^87, so I know my result is
pretty far off). My point? 10^72 is a huge number,
but it's nowhere close to infinity. In fact, you
can imagine a googleplex of universes (a googleplex
is so large it can't be written. It's represented
by 10^google, or 10^10^100), but it is still dwarfed
by infinity. Trying to claim something could have
infinite mass is preposterous, unless the universe
itself turns out to be infinite, in which case I
guess it would have infinite mass, but there would
be no way to prove that it is infinite. I hope that
makes sense.
Somebody already makes a keyboard like this. It's called the Alphasmart. It's pretty expensive, but if you really want to be able to take your keyboard with you, the option is there. It even has a Dvorak option for those of us who use the superior layout :)
-Linknoid
Remember the assumptions we made? How do we know they're true? First of all, we assume that carbon 14 has been created at a constant rate as long as life has been around. Various things can effect it's production (such as the strength of the earth's magnetic field, solar flares, and who knows what else.) The effect of any changes probably isn't that great, but how do we know how much it's changed? If something has happened to cause it to change, it would also take time for the decay/production to reach it's new equilibrium, so you're not even dealing with a constant amount of carbon 14 during this period. But I don't think that this would have too much impact on the dating methods (I could be wrong, though). Here's where the serious problem with carbon dating comes in: assuming that the ratio of carbon 12/13 to carbon 14 has always been what it has been. If you know anything about what the bible says, it tells of flood that killed just about everything. I think that it's pretty safe to assume that this flood would have buried massive amounts of carbon in various forms (coal and oil deposits are a good example). What does that mean? First, most of the formerly available carbon is now trapped in the earth where it is no longer available for use by living things. If we assume that the production of carbon 14 hasn't changed significantly, when it reaches it's production/decay equilibrium again, the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 will have gone WAAAAY up, mainly because we have a lot less carbon 12. So now Mr. Scientist comes along, and not knowing what happened, assumes that this ratio has always been the same. He measures the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in his specimen and discovers that it's several million years old. Unfortunately, he didn't know that the carbon ratio of the specimen when it died was a lot smaller than he assumed it was. Therefore, the date he measured won't be even close to the real amount of time that has passed, although it may be indirectly proportional to its age.
The other effect that removing carbon from the environment would have is to throw the production/decay out of equilibrium. In fact, in any system that undergoes production/decay competition like this, it takes about 4 half lives to reach equilibrium from state of no product present. (It actually reaches about 96% of equilibrium, which is close enough). Therefore, right after the carbon is removed from the environment, the carbon ratio will be the same as before, but it will immediately start climbing as the production/decay tries to reach equilibrium. Basically, it would make it look like stuff that was alive at a time farther away from when equilibrium was reached would be much older, because the carbon ratio was a lot lower than it is now. That would mean that the million years scale timeline would be compressed into a much shorter time than the scientist would be led to believe by his measurements. I don't remember what the half-life of carbon 14 is off the top of my head, but it's long enough that the non-equilibrium effect would be very real.
That's my piece, whether you agree or disagree with creationism is up to you, but don't assume that just because something sort of fits the available data means that it's the only reasonable explanation of what really happened.
-Bryce Wagner
M.U.L.E. is the best game ever made!!! I still go
over to a friend's house on saturday nights just to play
M.U.L.E. I even bought a Commodore for $100 (a few years
ago) just to play M.U.L.E. I love that game!!!
Actually, there was no such thing as ASR, it is
actually LSR, or logical shift right. I guess putting
the lowest bit in the carry just didn't make it
arithmetical (if that's a word).
The Saturn processor used in HPs calculators is a special chip designed by HP for use in their calculators.