it's just as remarkable to look at why Rome didn't develop modern technology as why Britain and the Americas did.
They very nearly did... One of the famous inventors (Archimedes?) came close to inventing a steam engine. Use hot coals to heat water into steam, and is ejected through a rotating arm with holes at both ends. The arm rotates, builds up momentum which allows you to turn an axle. This would have worked as a way of transporting goods, but the authorities were worried the slaves would riot if there was no work for them.
Because the Hoolywood movie is paid for by the following series of distributions: mostly by people going to the cinema, then pay-per-view TV/premium channels, regular cable/satellite channels, movies-for-rental, and finally free-to-view channels and buy-in-the-shops. If a movie is released at the right time, has the right plot, and marketed right, the cinema profits will pay for the production costs alone.
Musicians do have concerts, but would fans be willing to attend a worldwide premier of their favourite group's latest album before they could buy it in the shops?
Wouldn't a neutron star be spinning at tremendous angular velocities, and therefore be deformed along its equator, forming more of a flattened sphere shape?
You are forgetting the intense force of gravity for a star that dense. The force of gravity at the surface of our sun is around 1000G (10,000 metres/second per second). The force of gravity for a neutron star is thousands of times greater than this. If a neutron star has an atmosphere it's no more 5 millimetres deep, with any variation in height compressed to less than two millimetres or less. Scientists are able to measure "starquakes" on these objects due to the variations in their brightness.
I get all my downloads from a CD-ROM delivered by snail-mail, which is then fetched by my dog and delivered onto my lap, without me ever leaving my armchair or having to use broadband.
Hmmmmm, the last thing I would want to happen, is to go into a restaurant/bar/nightclub with a PDA in my trouser pocket, stand up, and have everyone notice there's a damp patch somewhere personal.
I'd prefer it to display a message box indicating that the file was corrupted, and that I should contact the webmaster for it to be fixed, but that would not give the user a "positive end-user experience".
The most successful projects I have worked on were always blue-sky projects, were where:
o Any existing utility libraries had been heavily tried and tested
o Everyone was enthusiastic about the particular area of work they were doing, as new code was being designed.
o Everyone had separate areas of work, and there were well defined API layers between each module.
o There were only two agenda's affecting everyone
- Management wanting the work complete
- The programmers/software engineers
wanting the work experience
The worst projects have been:
o No well cleared API layers, and programmers belting code into each others routines without checking with each other.
o Senior management (in head office) messing everything up by adding a third agenda and switching everyone around for the sake
of having the brighest graduate working on XXXX instead of YYYY.
Were programmers treated as hot-pluggable resources as they are today? There seems to be a mystique to the programmer prior to about 1995.
Everything was more nuts and bolts back then, and there were a lot fewer graduates looking for work as well.
I started university in 1986 when our Computer Science department had just been given funds to expand; we had the latest technology - 4.77Mhz PC's with 14" CGA displays, connected by RS-232 to a 3/180 Sun server with a 32-port terminal connection - that was state of the art.
Programming languages were Prolog, Borland Turbo-Pascal, LISP, 8086/6502/6809/68000 assembly. By 1988, everything was connected by Ethernet; MAC address cards cost around $1000, still required the offical Ethernet cabling - thick yellow cables attached by "vampire taps" to blue cables). The skills in demand then were UNIX/X-Windows/C, X.25, ISDN, TCP/IP and Microsoft C.
Any GUI development was in X-windows/UNIX. Windows 3.1 was still seen as a toy; even solitaire ran slow.
By 1995, everything changed when Windows 95 came out, development shifted from UNIX/X-windows to Windows NT/MFC. Windows NT was going to replace Unix, as Microsoft kept telling everyone. The most obvious changes can be seen in Byte magazine. The earliest magazines were hardware brewing, then home computers with assembler, then PC's hardware reviews, to pure hardware/software comparisons.
At this time, Sun fought back with Java (they had to find a work environment bigger than the corporate network). By 1996, the dot com boom really took off, and thousand of graduates did Computer Science to learn Java/web page design/XML/Shockwave/Flash/Realplayer etc..., without learning the basics like assembly, microcode, ASIC design, systems programming, and object orientated programming.
An educated adult can remember and know the meaning of over 40,000 words in whatever language (English, Japanese, Chinese,...) they were brought up in. And many adults have been educated to speak in two if not more languages. I know of technical translators who can speak/read/write in four or more languages, so that would discredit the 100,000 chunks limit.
There used to be a talent show (You Bet!) in the UK, where people would be challenged to see if their claim to recognise highly similar objects was really true (one guy claimed to recognise records/CD's simply from the pattern of the reflected/diffracted light). Another guy claimed he could recognise the exactmodel/version/manufacture date of cars just by looking at the colour photograph of the car.
A similar thing happened in the UK; When air force planes were practising low flying, they accidently brushed the tops of the some trees, and knocked a sidewinder missile off one of the launch rails/pylons. After a hastily launched police search, the unarmed missile was found in the garden with the trees. Imagine hitting one of those with an electric lawnmower.
It would make more sense, but a projection system for a windscreen is far more expensive than a headset mounted LCD display. For a windscreen, you need a bright light source, reflective mirror and a large projector, all in order to generate a image large enough to cover the visual field, which can just as easily be generated by a small LCD display close to the eye.
It would be good for road driving if you could have a map of where you were going displayed below your view of the windscreen. Especially if it could tell you which lane you should be in, and which direction you should go, in order to make the correct intersection change on the freeway. Or maybe it could be used for driving in foggy/rainy conditions.
How many accidents have been caused by someone trying to read a map, while trying to drive at the same time?
The earliest tools manufactured by blacksmiths were spear-tips, knives, hammers and horseshoes. All of these items could be designed and manufactured by a single person.
Then manufacturing technology evolved, so that the tasks of mining, extraction, and shaping could be handled by different companies. Advancements in mining technology removed the restrictions of having to tunnel underground or only scavange for metallic rocks.
The development of automatic and precision milling tools allowed other companies who required metal in their products to handle the shaping of those components, without having to handle the melting and cooling of ores.
For those components that still require special manufacturing processes (engine blocks, turbine blades), there exist specialist companies to handle this task.
The use of CAD software has also allowed the actual design of metal components to be separated from the tasks for shaping and drilling.
This is much the same case with software. Programmers were originally employed to write inhouse wordprocessors or spreadsheets. Then it became more profitable for programmers to work together and form companies to write these tools. Eventually these companies merged until they were bought out by a single company and the industry converged onto a single standard. Now the industry is evolving into open-source data formats, and specialist companies exist to handle different types of data (web pages, databases, online servers).
The same is happening with algorithms/software research. In the early days, everyone wrote their own custom programs in whatever language they knew the best; Fortran/C/C++/assembler. This led to everyone rewriting the same functions and documentation, but to different programming styles, and made it hard to combine components into ever more complex systems.
Now products like Mathematica, Matlab, and Java are advancing such that nobody needs to write the same basic functions again. While code may not be as fast as handcoded C/C++ (this could form an heated debate), the time saved in not having to design, debug and document basic library functions, far exceeds any extra processor time required. The department I work in, have standardised on Matlab and Java for their algorithms research.
Bangalore doesn't seem to even have a reliable phone network yet,
The offshoring centres in Bangalore have a direct satellite link to the international telephone network, and backup power generators in the basement. They organise their own shuttle services to and from the residential areas to their offices. They can't really be any more self-sufficient.
According to the article, the maximum resolution is 640x480. To accurately recognise a number plate, you need to recognise around 8-10 characters with at least 8x8 pixels per character. Assuming the field of view is 45 degrees, you'd need to have a number plate at least two feet away to be fully visible, and then the visible size would halve every time you doubled the distance. You'd probably be able to get 16 feet range if this were the case.
The lighting would be up to you. These cameras are sensitive to infrared light (Some buildings actually have infrared lamps on the outside, which appear not to be working to us, but will make the scene appear illuminated to a video camera). You'd probably want to have motion activated outside lighting before you had a camera for night-time protection.
Although, I hope the cameras also save the time and date on the display. Some courts won't accept such evidence unless it is timestamped.
If you've got a Linux system attached to the internet (firewall or home PC on broadband) trying looking at your security logs. On my system, there is always at least one group of login attempts as root/cisco/sysadmin/admin/various usernames coming from different IP4 addresses all over the world (Germany/South Korea/Hong Kong/USA).
Thanks for the link - lots of cool pictures, including this one. Going by the look on the feline's face, I can only guess that he/she was ready to go bananas do the full claws/hissing act.
You can save even more money if you buy it secondhand or borrow it from the university library and use a scanner to copy the pages, or just nick it from the desk of the geeky kid who has just gone out of the lab to buy a snack from the vending machine.
Aren't cats already permacute large feline cubs? Bred by Egyptians to keep granaries clear of rodents? (I was told this was the reasons why cats like to run through closing doors and jump into boxes). And dogs are permacute wolve cubs adapted to various roles (retrieving, searching, attacking, guarding etc...).
Of course only a tiny handfull of people need to really be on call. How many cell phone calls have you overheard or even had that were important?
The majority of calls seem to be a running commentary of the location of the train/bus; "Oh, we're just going over the bridge now, we should be stopping at the station in 10 minutes, we're just going under the freeway now.....", followed by the first two lines of Beethoven's fifth symphony then, ".... sorry about that, I got cut off going under the freeway, we're just passing the a row of houses, we should be at the station in a couple of minutes".
how everybody was able to survive 10 years ago, when NOBODY had a cell phone in the cinema or on a concert...
Emergency service workers like doctors, anaesthetists and consultants had pagers. This device would allow simple text messages to be received (if not just a telephone number), and could be set to vibrate rather than play a polyphonic tune at 120 decibels.
I think I may have seen one in a museum, but that was a long time ago...
Slashdot Mirror
it's just as remarkable to look at why Rome didn't develop modern technology as why Britain and the Americas did.
They very nearly did... One of the famous inventors (Archimedes?) came close to inventing a steam engine. Use hot coals to heat water into steam, and is ejected through a rotating arm with holes at both ends. The arm rotates, builds up momentum which allows you to turn an axle. This would have worked as a way of transporting goods, but the authorities were worried the slaves would riot if there was no work for them.
Because the Hoolywood movie is paid for by the following series of distributions: mostly by people going to the cinema, then pay-per-view TV/premium channels, regular cable/satellite channels, movies-for-rental, and finally free-to-view channels and buy-in-the-shops. If a movie is released at the right time, has the right plot, and marketed right, the cinema profits will pay for the production costs alone.
Musicians do have concerts, but would fans be willing to attend a worldwide premier of their favourite group's latest album before they could buy it in the shops?
Wouldn't a neutron star be spinning at tremendous angular velocities, and therefore be deformed along its equator, forming more of a flattened sphere shape?
You are forgetting the intense force of gravity for a star that dense. The force of gravity at the surface of our sun is around 1000G (10,000 metres/second per second). The force of gravity for a neutron star is thousands of times greater than this. If a neutron star has an atmosphere it's no more 5 millimetres deep, with any variation in height compressed to less than two millimetres or less. Scientists are able to measure "starquakes" on these objects due to the variations in their brightness.
I get all my downloads from a CD-ROM delivered by snail-mail, which is then fetched by my dog and delivered onto my lap, without me ever leaving my armchair or having to use broadband.
I'd prefer a warning message, and the web page designer informed, than my browser to keel over without warning five pages later.
Hmmmmm, the last thing I would want to happen, is to go into a restaurant/bar/nightclub with a PDA in my trouser pocket, stand up, and have everyone notice there's a damp patch somewhere personal.
I'd prefer it to display a message box indicating that the file was corrupted, and that I should contact the webmaster for it to be fixed, but that would not give the user a "positive end-user experience".
The most successful projects I have worked on were always blue-sky projects, were where:
o Any existing utility libraries had been heavily tried and tested
o Everyone was enthusiastic about the particular area of work they were doing, as new code was being designed.
o Everyone had separate areas of work, and there were well defined API layers between each module.
o There were only two agenda's affecting everyone
- Management wanting the work complete
- The programmers/software engineers
wanting the work experience
The worst projects have been:
o No well cleared API layers, and programmers belting code into each others routines without checking with each other.
o Senior management (in head office) messing everything up by adding a third agenda and switching everyone around for the sake
of having the brighest graduate working on XXXX instead of YYYY.
Were programmers treated as hot-pluggable resources as they are today? There seems to be a mystique to the programmer prior to about 1995.
Everything was more nuts and bolts back then, and there were a lot fewer graduates looking for work as well.
I started university in 1986 when our Computer Science department had just been given funds to expand; we had the latest technology - 4.77Mhz PC's with 14" CGA displays, connected by RS-232 to a 3/180 Sun server with a 32-port terminal connection - that was state of the art.
Programming languages were Prolog, Borland Turbo-Pascal, LISP, 8086/6502/6809/68000 assembly. By 1988, everything was connected by Ethernet; MAC address cards cost around $1000, still required the offical Ethernet cabling - thick yellow cables attached by "vampire taps" to blue cables). The skills in demand then were UNIX/X-Windows/C, X.25, ISDN, TCP/IP and Microsoft C.
Any GUI development was in X-windows/UNIX. Windows 3.1 was still seen as a toy; even solitaire ran slow.
By 1995, everything changed when Windows 95 came out, development shifted from UNIX/X-windows to Windows NT/MFC. Windows NT was going to replace Unix, as Microsoft kept telling everyone. The most obvious changes can be seen in Byte magazine. The
earliest magazines were hardware brewing, then home computers with assembler, then PC's hardware reviews, to pure hardware/software comparisons.
At this time, Sun fought back with Java (they had to find a work environment bigger than the corporate network). By 1996, the dot com boom really took off, and thousand of graduates did Computer Science to learn Java/web page design/XML/Shockwave/Flash/Realplayer etc..., without learning the basics like assembly, microcode, ASIC design, systems programming, and object orientated programming.
Could the data captured by this telescope and the HST be combined together to make a telescope with an even large "virtual" diameter?
An educated adult can remember and know the meaning of over 40,000 words in whatever language (English, Japanese, Chinese, ...) they were brought up in. And many adults have been educated to speak in two if not more languages. I know of technical translators who can speak/read/write in four or more languages, so that would discredit the 100,000 chunks limit.
There used to be a talent show (You Bet!) in the UK, where people would be challenged to see if their claim to recognise highly similar objects was really true (one guy claimed to recognise records/CD's simply from the pattern of the reflected/diffracted light). Another guy claimed he could recognise the exactmodel/version/manufacture date of cars just by looking at the colour photograph of the car.
A similar thing happened in the UK; When air force planes were practising low flying, they accidently brushed the tops of the some trees, and knocked a sidewinder missile off one of the launch rails/pylons. After a hastily launched police search, the unarmed missile was found in the garden with the trees. Imagine hitting one of those with an electric lawnmower.
Some other links with pictures:
Sam-650
Sam-650 User Manual
TM-44 ASIC
Solid State Disks
It would make more sense, but a projection system for a windscreen is far more expensive than a headset mounted LCD display. For a windscreen, you need a bright light source, reflective mirror and a large projector, all in order to generate a image large enough to cover the visual field, which can just as easily be generated by a small LCD display close to the eye.
It would be good for road driving if you could have a map of where you were going displayed below your view of the windscreen.
Especially if it could tell you which lane you should be in, and which direction you should go, in order to make the correct intersection change on the freeway. Or maybe it could be used for driving in foggy/rainy conditions.
How many accidents have been caused by someone trying to read a map, while trying to drive at the same time?
The earliest tools manufactured by blacksmiths were spear-tips, knives, hammers and horseshoes. All of these items could be designed and manufactured by a single person. Then manufacturing technology evolved, so that the tasks of mining, extraction, and shaping could be handled by different companies. Advancements in mining technology removed the restrictions of having to tunnel underground or only scavange for metallic rocks. The development of automatic and precision milling tools allowed other companies who required metal in their products to handle the shaping of those components, without having to handle the melting and cooling of ores.
For those components that still require special manufacturing processes (engine blocks, turbine blades), there exist specialist companies to handle this task.
The use of CAD software has also allowed the actual design of metal components to be separated from the tasks for shaping and drilling.
This is much the same case with software. Programmers were originally employed to write inhouse wordprocessors or spreadsheets. Then it became more profitable for programmers to work together and form companies to write these tools. Eventually these companies merged until they were bought out by a single company and the industry converged onto a single standard. Now the industry is evolving into open-source data formats, and specialist companies exist to handle different types of data (web pages, databases, online servers).
The same is happening with algorithms/software research. In the early days, everyone wrote their own custom programs in whatever language they knew the best; Fortran/C/C++/assembler. This led to everyone rewriting the same functions and documentation, but to different programming styles, and made it hard to combine components into ever more complex systems.
Now products like Mathematica, Matlab, and Java are advancing such that nobody needs to write the same basic functions again. While code may not be as fast as handcoded C/C++ (this could form an heated debate), the time saved in not having to design, debug and document basic library functions, far exceeds any extra processor time required. The department I work in, have standardised on Matlab and Java for their algorithms research.
Bangalore doesn't seem to even have a reliable phone network yet,
The offshoring centres in Bangalore have a direct satellite link to the international telephone network, and backup power generators in the basement. They organise their own shuttle services to and from the residential areas to their offices. They can't really be any more self-sufficient.
According to the article, the maximum resolution is 640x480. To accurately recognise a number plate, you need to recognise around 8-10 characters with at least 8x8 pixels per character. Assuming the field of view is 45 degrees, you'd need to have a number plate at least two feet away to be fully visible, and then the visible size would halve every time you doubled the distance. You'd probably be able to get 16 feet range if this were the case.
The lighting would be up to you. These cameras are sensitive to infrared light (Some buildings actually have infrared lamps on the outside, which appear not to be working to us, but will make the scene appear illuminated to a video camera). You'd probably want to have motion activated outside lighting before you had a camera for night-time protection.
Although, I hope the cameras also save the time and date on the display. Some courts won't accept such evidence unless it is timestamped.
If you've got a Linux system attached to the internet (firewall or home PC on broadband) trying looking at your security logs. On my system, there is always at least one group of login attempts as root/cisco/sysadmin/admin/various usernames coming from different IP4 addresses all over the world (Germany/South Korea/Hong Kong/USA).
Thanks for the link - lots of cool pictures, including this one. Going by the look on the feline's face, I can only guess that he/she was ready to go bananas do the full claws/hissing act.
You can save even more money if you buy it secondhand or borrow it from the university library and use a scanner to copy the pages, or just nick it from the desk of the geeky kid who has just gone out of the lab to buy a snack from the vending machine.
Aren't cats already permacute large feline cubs? Bred by Egyptians to keep granaries clear of rodents? (I was told this was the reasons why cats like to run through closing doors and jump into boxes). And dogs are permacute wolve cubs adapted to various roles (retrieving, searching, attacking, guarding etc...).
Of course only a tiny handfull of people need to really be on call. How many cell phone calls have you overheard or even had that were important?
The majority of calls seem to be a running commentary of the location of the train/bus; "Oh, we're just going over the bridge now, we should be stopping at the station in 10 minutes, we're just going under the freeway now.....", followed by the first two lines of Beethoven's fifth symphony then, ".... sorry about that, I got cut off going under the freeway, we're just passing the a row of houses, we should be at the station in a couple of minutes".
One Qubit = one Caesium atom
how everybody was able to survive 10 years ago, when NOBODY had a cell phone in the cinema or on a concert...
Emergency service workers like doctors, anaesthetists and consultants had pagers. This device would allow simple text messages to be received (if not just a telephone number), and could be set to vibrate rather than play a polyphonic tune at 120 decibels.
I think I may have seen one in a museum, but that was a long time ago...