A while back a company was giving free demo CDs to companies that could use their software. I think it was The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy, a CAD tutor program. The CDs had things written all over them like "please make unauthorized copies" and the like. I think that vast amounts of people at a giant of a company I know of at least tried the demo. So basically, make it as easy as possible to get the demo, put a link straight to the demo on your page, and put the EULA in the installation so they don't have to swim through that to get to the download. Easy == good.
No potential customer gives a flying fizuck about you wanting marketing info.
Is it just me or did those books get worst as they went on. 2001 was quite good, 2010 rather good, 2061 passable, and 3001 left me writhing in pain. You were expecting some deep insight into the functioning of the universe, maybe find out EXACTLY what these things were and where they came from, and what do you get? A freakin computer virus! HAL shamed me.
In order to successfully design a high-speed aircraft, it's very important to know which direction it is going to fly. There are, to date, exactly zero exceptions to this rule.
I agree with your post, but I don't think you can make the claim that there are "zero exceptions". I believe that the SU-47 (formerly the SU-37) counts as an exception. It can completely flip around, or face backwards at 120 deg. Neat, huh?
Photoshop 6 opens 21600x21600 tiffs in about 2-3 minutes on my athlon 1.3 w/384megs DDR. Once you get it loaded, you can zoom all the way in and out at will with very little lag.
Check out the Blue Marble satellite images from NASA! They're huge and really sweet. You can see individual sand dunes on the Sahara!
As soon as I installed Win XP, I started chronically masturbating. Man, it just doesn't stop. I wore out my right hand and now my left is turning red. One that hand's through, I don't know what I'm gonna do. Switch to Linux I guess. Anyone else with the same problem?
Muon catalyzed fusion has existed for some years now. You simply replace the electrons of deuterium with much much much much much heavier muons (did I say that they're much heavier?). This allows the atoms to fuse more easily, and at lower temperatures. This is a form of cold fusion. Unfortunately, it takes more energy to make the muons then you get out of the fusion. So far.
So remember kiddies, when they say "we can do fusion", or "we have cold fusion", they're usually right, but it might just not be a viable power source in the way that they do it.
I'm posting a fresh hotmail address here to see how much spam becomes of it.
slashpost@hotmail.com
I'll reply to this post with the results in a day or so.
On your printer point, I remember a printer I had 7-8 years ago, an HP 520C I think, one of the early ink jets (or was it bubble jet?). It didn't have all the instructions for everything, this was well into Windows 95, but that thing had 10 sweet buttons and 10 LEDs to go with them. It had a button for contrast, brightness, feed forward, on/off, RESTART I think, and several others. These new damn things come with two that aren't even labeled, and one green LED with a picture of a piece of paper next to it that flashes the same damn pattern no matter what is wrong. What's that Lassie? Is did Timmy fall into a paper jam? Or are we out of ink again? What? No paper? Speak up damnit, don't bark the same god damned thing over and over again, talk to me bitch!
Yes the cold fusion reported back in the day was probably BS, but other types of cold fusion have been proven to exist. Muon Catalyzed fusion comes to mind. You take some muons, which are basically really really really really have electrons, and replace the electrons in deuterium and/or tritium and/or Helium-3, and you can get the atoms to spontaneously fuse at 3 Kelvin. The problem with it is that Muons only exist long enough for about 100 events, so you have to keep making more and more Muons. That takes energy, more energy than you get out of the fusion. At least for now. This is a very well documented and accepted process.
By the way, that link was just one of the first links I found on a Google search.
Yeah, Micro is abreviated with mu. However, since mu doesn't exist in the ASCII set, people usualy type 'u'. Then the satalite would actualy be uASS, which I'm sure they wanted to avoid. By the way, has anyone found a link to a picture from the top down? All I see is from the side.
It will be a lot more than 5 years before we can go any faster. What advancements have you seen lately? Every satellite that has gone into deep space (deep space in current terms) has been boosted by a conventional rocket and left to coast for a decade or two. The exception is Deep Space 1, which was the same except for its ion engine. The ion engine supplied a few grams of thrust for many many months, which did make a significant increase in speed.
There are problems involved in a Pluto mission though. It is damn far away, and that means carrying a lot of gas for the ion engine. That means a lot of mass to carry with you, which means you need that much more fuel to push the fuel you are already using. And as you get really really far from the sun, you can't get much energy from it anymore, so you had better hope you have enough speed to make it. I think that if we wait for better ion technology to develop, we would loose any benefit that we would have gained with ions. I am all for alternative propulsion, though.
The second law of thermodynamics really only says that spontaneous processes increase the entropy in the universe. Extremely loosely speaking, this means that whenever you do something, the net entropy of the universe goes up. I don't think you were right when you said that it is impossible to raise the efficiency higher than the ideal Otto cycle. However, it is more or less impossible to be more than perfectly efficient (you get more energy out then you put in). This would just push the line a little closer to perfect.
Slightly off topic, but interesting, many physicists believe that entropy (disorder, related to temperature) is only statistical, that it is possible for a closed system to have a decrease in entropy. For example, all of the air in the room could condense to a solid and run laps around the room at the exact speed and direction, thus having almost no entropy. That probably won't happen though, so for almost all real purposes, entropy always increases.
We should spend the money on Pluto now for a couple of reasons. 1) It is the nearest Kuiper-belt like object, and the Kuiper-belt is quite likely the largest and most poorly understood part of our solar system. 2) If we don't act now to launch, rather than wait for cheaper space travel that should come in a few decades, then we will not get the chance to investigate it until 150 years from now or we devise much much much more powerful forms of space propulsion.
They made no mention of propulsion at all, however they did say that they expected the trip to take about a decade. That is about right for a conventional rocket like the voyager probes. I too would love to see some new technology used. I am a physics student and am considering working in this field. Ion/plasma propulsion could easily cut down the travel time. However, the technology has not been thoroughly developed, so it would be much more expensive. I say that while it would be worth the cost, it is may be too much of a risk to test a new technology when we will only have this one chance.
We have always known that we could send waves "piggybacking" on light that move FTL. When light enters a plasma, such as the ionosphere, the free electrons can cause little ripples to travel along the light wave at significant FTL. However, while you can send information on these waves, the information itself does not move FTL, but at c. This has been known for quite some time, this is just the first time I know of that it has been done in a cable.
Bah! Humanity is the supreme power of the universe. The 60's was the golden age of Space Travel! We fucking sent a man to the moon! We have cured every disease that exists and could ever exist, all social problems have disapeared, we have a Grand Unified Theory that works perfectly, and have proven, beyond any doubt that we must all worship The Diety. Humanity is in the prime of its maturity.
I have to go now. I have to take care of my dad that has cancer, my aunt that is distrought over the terrorists, a friend that can't stand the failures of NASA, and a physics professor that is suicidal because his GUT was just disprooven.
I suppose you think there was no sand (SiO2), carbon dioxide (CO2), or Water (H2O) on earth back then. There was virtualy no Oxygen gas (O2) on earth back then, because it was tied up in the above chemicals, among many others. Once simple life developed, it made O2 out of some of those chemicals, mostly CO2 I should think. Get it straight, you pseudo-intelectual bastard.
I say we boycot ALL sites that use these blatantly annoying adds. Banner adds are annoying enough, but I do see how they are necessary. These new adds have crossed the line, however. I say that if you visit any site that uses one of these adds, that you should not go back to that site for at least a week, and then only to check to see if it is still there, and then leave again if it is. Now is the time to make a stand
He said that there is no certain mass limit. He showed a graph of possible masses, and there was a certain area from around 60 to 300 GeV (if I remember correctly) where it probably lies, however there is nothing in the standard model that would put an absolute limit. So, I guess that technicly we could find a mind-bogglinly huge mass, but it is most likely on the order of the low hundreds of GeV. He suspects the mid hundreds, but that part was pure speculation.
Slashdot Mirror
A while back a company was giving free demo CDs to companies that could use their software. I think it was The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy, a CAD tutor program. The CDs had things written all over them like "please make unauthorized copies" and the like. I think that vast amounts of people at a giant of a company I know of at least tried the demo. So basically, make it as easy as possible to get the demo, put a link straight to the demo on your page, and put the EULA in the installation so they don't have to swim through that to get to the download. Easy == good.
No potential customer gives a flying fizuck about you wanting marketing info.
Is it just me or did those books get worst as they went on. 2001 was quite good, 2010 rather good, 2061 passable, and 3001 left me writhing in pain. You were expecting some deep insight into the functioning of the universe, maybe find out EXACTLY what these things were and where they came from, and what do you get? A freakin computer virus! HAL shamed me.
In order to successfully design a high-speed aircraft, it's very important to know which direction it is going to fly. There are, to date, exactly zero exceptions to this rule.
I agree with your post, but I don't think you can make the claim that there are "zero exceptions". I believe that the SU-47 (formerly the SU-37) counts as an exception. It can completely flip around, or face backwards at 120 deg. Neat, huh?
Photoshop 6 opens 21600x21600 tiffs in about 2-3 minutes on my athlon 1.3 w/384megs DDR. Once you get it loaded, you can zoom all the way in and out at will with very little lag.
Check out the Blue Marble satellite images from NASA! They're huge and really sweet. You can see individual sand dunes on the Sahara!
As soon as I installed Win XP, I started chronically masturbating. Man, it just doesn't stop. I wore out my right hand and now my left is turning red. One that hand's through, I don't know what I'm gonna do. Switch to Linux I guess. Anyone else with the same problem?
Man my floor's crusty...
been a solid day and a half now, still no spam....
Muon catalyzed fusion has existed for some years now. You simply replace the electrons of deuterium with much much much much much heavier muons (did I say that they're much heavier?). This allows the atoms to fuse more easily, and at lower temperatures. This is a form of cold fusion. Unfortunately, it takes more energy to make the muons then you get out of the fusion. So far.
So remember kiddies, when they say "we can do fusion", or "we have cold fusion", they're usually right, but it might just not be a viable power source in the way that they do it.
14 hours and no spam yet. I guess that all the hype was about nothing. Unless that other dipshit really did sign me up on a dozen lists.
I'm posting a fresh hotmail address here to see how much spam becomes of it. slashpost@hotmail.com I'll reply to this post with the results in a day or so.
This guy's site is now completely slashdoted. I got a message saying that he broke his 3 gigs/month limit. Sucks to be him.
On your printer point, I remember a printer I had 7-8 years ago, an HP 520C I think, one of the early ink jets (or was it bubble jet?). It didn't have all the instructions for everything, this was well into Windows 95, but that thing had 10 sweet buttons and 10 LEDs to go with them. It had a button for contrast, brightness, feed forward, on/off, RESTART I think, and several others. These new damn things come with two that aren't even labeled, and one green LED with a picture of a piece of paper next to it that flashes the same damn pattern no matter what is wrong. What's that Lassie? Is did Timmy fall into a paper jam? Or are we out of ink again? What? No paper? Speak up damnit, don't bark the same god damned thing over and over again, talk to me bitch!
Yes the cold fusion reported back in the day was probably BS, but other types of cold fusion have been proven to exist. Muon Catalyzed fusion comes to mind. You take some muons, which are basically really really really really have electrons, and replace the electrons in deuterium and/or tritium and/or Helium-3, and you can get the atoms to spontaneously fuse at 3 Kelvin. The problem with it is that Muons only exist long enough for about 100 events, so you have to keep making more and more Muons. That takes energy, more energy than you get out of the fusion. At least for now. This is a very well documented and accepted process.
By the way, that link was just one of the first links I found on a Google search.
This is great, now if we all ping it we can have the first ever Slashdoting of a Teddy Bear!
Actualy, I'm getting a ping of 180, how about the rest of you?
Yeah, Micro is abreviated with mu. However, since mu doesn't exist in the ASCII set, people usualy type 'u'. Then the satalite would actualy be uASS, which I'm sure they wanted to avoid. By the way, has anyone found a link to a picture from the top down? All I see is from the side.
It will be a lot more than 5 years before we can go any faster. What advancements have you seen lately? Every satellite that has gone into deep space (deep space in current terms) has been boosted by a conventional rocket and left to coast for a decade or two. The exception is Deep Space 1, which was the same except for its ion engine. The ion engine supplied a few grams of thrust for many many months, which did make a significant increase in speed.
There are problems involved in a Pluto mission though. It is damn far away, and that means carrying a lot of gas for the ion engine. That means a lot of mass to carry with you, which means you need that much more fuel to push the fuel you are already using. And as you get really really far from the sun, you can't get much energy from it anymore, so you had better hope you have enough speed to make it. I think that if we wait for better ion technology to develop, we would loose any benefit that we would have gained with ions. I am all for alternative propulsion, though.
The second law of thermodynamics really only says that spontaneous processes increase the entropy in the universe. Extremely loosely speaking, this means that whenever you do something, the net entropy of the universe goes up. I don't think you were right when you said that it is impossible to raise the efficiency higher than the ideal Otto cycle. However, it is more or less impossible to be more than perfectly efficient (you get more energy out then you put in). This would just push the line a little closer to perfect.
Slightly off topic, but interesting, many physicists believe that entropy (disorder, related to temperature) is only statistical, that it is possible for a closed system to have a decrease in entropy. For example, all of the air in the room could condense to a solid and run laps around the room at the exact speed and direction, thus having almost no entropy. That probably won't happen though, so for almost all real purposes, entropy always increases.
We should spend the money on Pluto now for a couple of reasons. 1) It is the nearest Kuiper-belt like object, and the Kuiper-belt is quite likely the largest and most poorly understood part of our solar system. 2) If we don't act now to launch, rather than wait for cheaper space travel that should come in a few decades, then we will not get the chance to investigate it until 150 years from now or we devise much much much more powerful forms of space propulsion.
They made no mention of propulsion at all, however they did say that they expected the trip to take about a decade. That is about right for a conventional rocket like the voyager probes. I too would love to see some new technology used. I am a physics student and am considering working in this field. Ion/plasma propulsion could easily cut down the travel time. However, the technology has not been thoroughly developed, so it would be much more expensive. I say that while it would be worth the cost, it is may be too much of a risk to test a new technology when we will only have this one chance.
No, you can put information on it, but the information moves allong the FTL wave at light speed. Odd, huh?
We have always known that we could send waves "piggybacking" on light that move FTL. When light enters a plasma, such as the ionosphere, the free electrons can cause little ripples to travel along the light wave at significant FTL. However, while you can send information on these waves, the information itself does not move FTL, but at c. This has been known for quite some time, this is just the first time I know of that it has been done in a cable.
Bah! Humanity is the supreme power of the universe. The 60's was the golden age of Space Travel! We fucking sent a man to the moon! We have cured every disease that exists and could ever exist, all social problems have disapeared, we have a Grand Unified Theory that works perfectly, and have proven, beyond any doubt that we must all worship The Diety. Humanity is in the prime of its maturity. I have to go now. I have to take care of my dad that has cancer, my aunt that is distrought over the terrorists, a friend that can't stand the failures of NASA, and a physics professor that is suicidal because his GUT was just disprooven.
I suppose you think there was no sand (SiO2), carbon dioxide (CO2), or Water (H2O) on earth back then. There was virtualy no Oxygen gas (O2) on earth back then, because it was tied up in the above chemicals, among many others. Once simple life developed, it made O2 out of some of those chemicals, mostly CO2 I should think. Get it straight, you pseudo-intelectual bastard.
That was a great part. The poor guy's last words as he finds life on Europa. Classic.
I say we boycot ALL sites that use these blatantly annoying adds. Banner adds are annoying enough, but I do see how they are necessary. These new adds have crossed the line, however. I say that if you visit any site that uses one of these adds, that you should not go back to that site for at least a week, and then only to check to see if it is still there, and then leave again if it is. Now is the time to make a stand
He said that there is no certain mass limit. He showed a graph of possible masses, and there was a certain area from around 60 to 300 GeV (if I remember correctly) where it probably lies, however there is nothing in the standard model that would put an absolute limit. So, I guess that technicly we could find a mind-bogglinly huge mass, but it is most likely on the order of the low hundreds of GeV. He suspects the mid hundreds, but that part was pure speculation.