It's possible to get a second-hand mobile data card for less than $15 from E-bay. You just plug it in yuour laptop with a SIM card and you are online. If you could get a hand-held PDA/PC with a PCMCIA slot you could more or less build your own mobile phone. If it had a touch sensitive LCD display, you could build your own i-Phone.
The size of a defect is of a fixed size. Usually it is a particle of dust that got in the way of the optical etching process. The distribution of such defects is even across the surface of the silicon wafer, so the distribution can be modelled mathematically. Suppose there are 20 defects across the wafer. If your chip were the size of the entire wafer, it would be guaranteed to be defective. Try half the size of the wafer, and there would be on average 10 defects. A quarter of the wafer, 5 defects. If you have a chip that is one hundredth the size of a single wafer, then the odds are now in your favour; on average 20/100 that you will have a defect, 80/100 that you will not.
The Cell processor is etched with eight processors anyway. If one is defective, they can ignore it, otherwise if all eight are working, then they will just deactivate one.
I wonder how long it will be before they start adding more processors to the chip.
Thanks for that link. Interesting, that the powers-that-be wish to introduce identity cards, but don't actually know what the actual purpose for them is.
Delivery Options for the National Identity Scheme
There are four potential 'pure' Scheme models. These are:
1. Citizenship (Borders) Model - "I want to know you have a RIGHT TO BE HERE" 2. Trusted Relationships Model - "I want to know who YOU are" 3. Access Model - "I want joined up services which meet MY NEEDS" 4. Inclusion Model - "I want to be able to prove who I AM"
And for the poster above who gives the usual slashdot antiwar rant... of what use is a Maglev is some asshat blows it the hell up?
You could always build it underground like the UK-France channel tunnel. Avoid the problems associated with bad weather, storms, snow, the wrong kind of leaves on the tracks, people following sat-nav systems and driving onto the tracks.
Unfortunately, you would still have the same "no-land-access-unless-we-are-put-on-the-map" politices from small towns that affected California. They wanted to build a high-speed train from San-Francisco to Los-Angeles through San Jose. They got state permission to start the project, but it was the getting land access rights from every small-town city mayor that killed the project. They would only grant permission if the trains would stop at a station in their city. For every city, this would involve an extra ten minute delay added onto the journey, which would defeat the purpose of being faster than air travel.
5. They clicked on the wrong option by mistake - it's quite easy to do, especially with the new moderation system.
With the old moderation system, the moderation points weren't added until you clicked the moderate button at the very bottom of the page. With the new system, the moderation points are assigned immediately, with no chance to reverse the changes.
They are the highest level elected officeholders and party officials, just not through the party primaries or caucuses. The idea is to have a say in the selection of candidates in line with the party objectives. Party activists at the lower ranks of the party would tend to select the most extreme candidate, who would ultimately lose to a more mainstream candidate.
A 56K modem will download 1 MB in 3 minutes (5.5K second) or 20 MB/hour. for 50 MB, that would be a 2.5 hour. For a local rate of 3 cents/pence minute, or 4.50 dollars.
I hate to imagine what the cost of downloading a Linux DVD ISO image file is going to be. Even downloading it once leads to the broadband rate being capped to something below 256K/second.
Say you have a dual boot hard disk drive, that has three or more partitions on it (Windows partition, a couple of Linux partitions for kernels, user home directories, Swap space etc....). For whatever reason, you need to reinstall the Windows partition. As far as the recovery disk is concerned, the whole hard disk drive belongs to Windows and no-one else. So you can either delete the partition altogether or leave it as it is until Judgement day.
I had the same problem with a latop - turns out the intake vent (on the underside of the laptop!) for the cooling fan was clogged with dust - using the narrow tip of vacuum cleaner cleaned out all that junk. No more "CPU is running in modulated mode" messages.
With the current PC architecture, the CPU has to send data to the Physics card, read the data back, then finally send it down to the GPU. This would have to be done for things like character animation (ragdoll motion), particle systems for visual effects (bouncing off the scenery/characters). Ideally, you would want the Physics processor to have a direct path to the GPU. Then you could avoid two of these steps.
And if nothing else, Nvidia also get a team of engineers who have worked together and have both DSP and current game industry technology experience.
In my high-school days, the local church used to organise: Cub scouts, Girl Guides, Boys Brigade, Mothers club, Christian Society, Creche/Daycare, Art classes, Music tuition, Yoga etc.... Apart from the standard church benches, altar, and religious decoration, they also had a couple of large halls at the back which were used for all of these purposes. These helped to pay for the up-keep of the place (cleaners, property tax).
Although, it's bit odd why a church would need a 50+" widescreen TV. If they are playing education videos or live TV, then they should have a public venue broadcasting license, which isn't that expensive.
This is the largest anchor I have seen. Our neighbour has a fence made out of 18-inch anchor chains segments. I can see how having one of those fall on top of a repeater unit could do damage, and the momentum of a large tanker attached to a cable could easily pull it apart.
A second cable thought to lie alongside it - SEA-ME-WE 4, or the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable - was also split.
FLAG is a 28,000km (17,400 mile) long submarine communications cable that links Australia and Japan with Europe via India and the Middle East.
SEA-ME-WE 4 is a submarine cable linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.
The two cable cuts meant that the only cable in service connecting Europe to the Middle East via Egypt was the older Sea-M-We 3 system, according to research firm TeleGeography.
It's amazing that a ship's anchor could have the strength to pull apart two layers of stranded steel armour wires, a layer of copper, kevlar layers, and three polyethylene layers.
Having swipe cards is a more efficient system, but you have to associate a credit card or other banking account with that card - the money has to come from somewhere. Mobicarte is really designed for use by high-school kids; Discount hours for SMS and calls are outside of school hours, with the main goal being that there are no surprise bills at the end of the month.
Depending upon your mobile operator in the UK, you can top up simply by calling a five digit service number or just by using an ATM, thus eliminating the need for swipe cards altogether.
With French Pay-As-You-go 3G Sim cards for mobile internet (Mobicarte), you top up your account by purchasing scratch cards from your local supermarket. Scratch the card to reveal a security code, then use SMS to send the code to the account managers. No need to use or disclose your credit card details.
It would allow people to earn extra money from home by tele-working (see www.mturk.com). Depending upon your skills, it's not too difficult to earn an extra $100/week simply by doing work like transcription/editing/grading. Then there is the possibility of distance learning.
A good many families in poverty can't even afford hot meals let alone a computer and a broadband connection.
Make sure the two aren't going down into the same underground conduit. I once thought it was incredibly clever to have two dial-up ISP's so that if the server of one went down, I would be able to access the server of another. Unfortunately, the underground piping flooded during Winter snows, and both connections were lost. Now I have a couple of second hand wireless modems just in case.
But now, you have one technician supervising 15 completely automated looms, while upstairs, the pattern designer creates the patterns using Photoshop and some custom plugins. The largest patterns can range from 1000 threads to 10,000 threads across.
On our campus, the administration gave priority to students who made block bookings together. It reduced the chances of personality clashes between tenants. Consequently students studying the same subjects would usually end up sharing the same housing units. This was particularly true of students who were working on their group projects in final year.
Trying doing the same thing to your network admin who maintains the corporate IT network; "Hey, I've found this really neat improvement to the performance of your network - if you just change these bytes in the boot images for the routers, performance is doubled. I don't know what they do, but it seems to speed things up."
If the casino industry can get the user interface to a digital slot machine so simple that a child can play, how difficult can it be to get a digital voting machine to get a valid vote?
You haven't seen some of the ballot papers used in Scotland. To save money, the polling stations chose to have two votes on one ballot paper. On the left column, you had twenty candidates, of which you had to select in order of preference. On the right column, you had a smaller number of candidates of which you could only pick one. The result? 100,000 spoilt ballot papers
Slashdot Mirror
It's possible to get a second-hand mobile data card for less than $15 from E-bay. You just plug it in yuour laptop with a SIM card and you are online. If you could get a hand-held PDA/PC with a PCMCIA slot you could more or less build your own mobile phone. If it had a touch sensitive LCD display, you could build your own i-Phone.
The size of a defect is of a fixed size. Usually it is a particle of dust that got in the way of the optical etching process. The distribution of such defects is even across the surface of the silicon wafer, so the distribution can be modelled mathematically.
Suppose there are 20 defects across the wafer. If your chip were the size of the entire wafer, it would be guaranteed to be defective.
Try half the size of the wafer, and there would be on average 10 defects. A quarter of the wafer, 5 defects. If you have a chip that is one hundredth the size of a single wafer, then the odds are now in your favour; on average 20/100 that you will have a defect, 80/100 that you will not.
The Cell processor is etched with eight processors anyway. If one is defective, they can ignore it, otherwise if all eight are working, then they will just deactivate one.
I wonder how long it will be before they start adding more processors to the chip.
Is there a danger than decrypted data stored in RAM could be swapped out to a swap drive partition?
Thanks for that link. Interesting, that the powers-that-be wish to introduce identity cards, but don't actually know what the actual purpose for them is.
Delivery Options for the National Identity Scheme
There are four potential 'pure' Scheme models. These are:
1. Citizenship (Borders) Model - "I want to know you have a RIGHT TO BE HERE"
2. Trusted Relationships Model - "I want to know who YOU are"
3. Access Model - "I want joined up services which meet MY NEEDS"
4. Inclusion Model - "I want to be able to prove who I AM"
This is a "Blob-fish"
Blob fish
No muscles, just gelantinous flesh so it can float just above the sea-bed without exerting any energy and eat anything that happens to float by.
And for the poster above who gives the usual slashdot antiwar rant... of what use is a Maglev is some asshat blows it the hell up?
You could always build it underground like the UK-France channel tunnel. Avoid the problems associated with bad weather, storms, snow, the wrong kind of leaves on the tracks, people following sat-nav systems and driving onto the tracks.
Unfortunately, you would still have the same "no-land-access-unless-we-are-put-on-the-map" politices from small towns that affected California. They wanted to build a high-speed train from San-Francisco to Los-Angeles through San Jose. They got state permission to start the project, but it was the getting land access rights from every small-town city mayor that killed the project. They would only grant permission if the trains would stop at a station in their city. For every city, this would involve an extra ten minute delay added onto the journey, which would defeat the purpose of being faster than air travel.
Or:
5. They clicked on the wrong option by mistake - it's quite easy to do, especially with the
new moderation system.
With the old moderation system, the moderation points weren't added until you clicked the moderate button at the very bottom of the page. With the new system, the moderation points are assigned immediately, with no chance to reverse the changes.
Superdelegate
They are the highest level elected officeholders and party officials, just not through the party primaries or caucuses. The idea is to have a say in the selection of candidates in line with the party objectives. Party activists at the lower ranks of the party would tend to select the most extreme candidate, who would ultimately lose to a more mainstream candidate.
http://www.minnesotamonitor.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3034
superdelegates.org
Sounds like the old debate of "real books" vs "phonics".
In "real books", the idea was that you could just place a large pile of books in front of a group of toddlers and they would teach themselves to read.
In "phonics", the basic sound of each syllable is taught first, along with some basic words and pictures (cat, mat, apple, pea, and so on).
A 56K modem will download 1 MB in 3 minutes (5.5K second) or 20 MB/hour. for 50 MB, that would be a 2.5 hour. For a local rate of 3 cents/pence minute, or 4.50 dollars.
I hate to imagine what the cost of downloading a Linux DVD ISO image file is going to be. Even downloading it once leads to the broadband rate being capped to something below 256K/second.
Say you have a dual boot hard disk drive, that has three or more partitions on it (Windows partition, a couple of Linux partitions for kernels, user home directories, Swap space etc....). For whatever reason, you need to reinstall the Windows partition. As far as the recovery disk is concerned, the whole hard disk drive belongs to Windows and no-one else. So you can either delete the partition altogether or leave it as it is until Judgement day.
I had the same problem with a latop - turns out the intake vent (on the underside of the laptop!) for the cooling fan was clogged with dust - using the narrow tip of vacuum cleaner cleaned out all that junk. No more "CPU is running in modulated mode" messages.
With the current PC architecture, the CPU has to send data to the Physics card, read the data back, then finally send it down to the GPU. This would have to be done for things like character animation (ragdoll motion), particle systems for visual effects (bouncing off the scenery/characters). Ideally, you would want the Physics processor to have a direct path to the GPU. Then you could avoid two of these steps.
And if nothing else, Nvidia also get a team of engineers who have worked together and have both DSP and current game industry technology experience.
In my high-school days, the local church used to organise: Cub scouts, Girl Guides, Boys Brigade, Mothers club, Christian Society, Creche/Daycare, Art classes, Music tuition, Yoga etc.... Apart from the standard church benches, altar, and religious decoration, they also had a couple of large halls at the back which were used for all of these purposes. These helped to pay for the up-keep of the place (cleaners, property tax).
Although, it's bit odd why a church would need a 50+" widescreen TV. If they are playing education videos or live TV, then they should have a public venue broadcasting license, which isn't that expensive.
This is the largest anchor I have seen. Our neighbour has a fence made out of 18-inch anchor chains segments. I can see how having one of those fall on top of a repeater unit could do damage, and the momentum of a large tanker attached to a cable could easily pull it apart.
The BBC has an article with a cross section of an undersea cable
The first cable - the Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) - was cut at 0800 on 30 January, the firm said.
INSIDE A SUBMARINE CABLE
cable infographic
1 Polyethylene cover
2,4 Stranded steel armour wires
3,5 Tar-soaked nylon yarn
6 Polycarbonate insulator
7 Copper sheath
8 Protective core
9 Optical fibres
Not to scale
A second cable thought to lie alongside it - SEA-ME-WE 4, or the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable - was also split.
FLAG is a 28,000km (17,400 mile) long submarine communications cable that links Australia and Japan with Europe via India and the Middle East.
SEA-ME-WE 4 is a submarine cable linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.
The two cable cuts meant that the only cable in service connecting Europe to the Middle East via Egypt was the older Sea-M-We 3 system, according to research firm TeleGeography.
It's amazing that a ship's anchor could have the strength to pull apart two layers of stranded steel armour wires, a layer of copper, kevlar layers, and three polyethylene layers.
Having swipe cards is a more efficient system, but you have to associate a credit card or other banking account with that card - the money has to come from somewhere. Mobicarte is really designed for use by high-school kids; Discount hours for SMS and calls are outside of school hours, with the main goal being that there are no surprise bills at the end of the month.
Depending upon your mobile operator in the UK, you can top up simply by calling a five digit service number or just by using an ATM, thus eliminating the need for swipe cards altogether.
With French Pay-As-You-go 3G Sim cards for mobile internet (Mobicarte), you top up your account by purchasing scratch cards from your local supermarket. Scratch the card to reveal a security code, then use SMS to send the code to the account managers. No need to use or disclose your credit card details.
It would allow people to earn extra money from home by tele-working (see www.mturk.com). Depending upon your skills, it's not too difficult to earn an extra $100/week simply by doing work like transcription/editing/grading. Then there is the possibility of distance learning.
A good many families in poverty can't even afford hot meals let alone a computer and a broadband connection.
Make sure the two aren't going down into the same underground conduit. I once thought it was incredibly clever to have two dial-up ISP's so that if the server of one went down, I would be able to access the server of another. Unfortunately, the underground piping flooded during Winter snows, and both connections were lost. Now I have a couple of second hand wireless modems just in case.
But now, you have one technician supervising 15 completely automated looms, while upstairs, the pattern designer creates the patterns using Photoshop and some custom plugins. The largest patterns can range from 1000 threads to 10,000 threads across.
If you forget where you put the car keys once in a while, that's not a problem. If however, you forget what they are for, then you have a problem.
On our campus, the administration gave priority to students who made block bookings together. It reduced the chances of personality clashes between tenants.
Consequently students studying the same subjects would usually end up sharing the same housing units. This was particularly true of students who were
working on their group projects in final year.
Trying doing the same thing to your network admin who maintains the corporate IT network; "Hey, I've found this really neat improvement to the performance of your network - if you just change these bytes in the boot images for the routers, performance is doubled. I don't know what they do, but it seems to speed things up."
If the casino industry can get the user interface to a digital slot machine so simple that a child can play, how difficult can it be to get a digital voting machine to get a valid vote?
You haven't seen some of the ballot papers used in Scotland. To save money, the polling stations chose to have two votes on one ballot paper. On the left column, you had twenty candidates, of which you had to select in order of preference. On the right column, you had a smaller number of candidates of which you could only pick one. The result? 100,000 spoilt ballot papers