Russian officials stated as recently as Oct 22nd they would be deploying their new RS-24 ICBM “in 2009.” Why wait? It technically violated the START-I nonproliferation treaty, to which they were party. The ‘good’ news? The START-I treaty expired on Saturday, Dec 5th, 2009.
What makes the RS-24 special? Its widely-boasted ability to penetrate the US’s anti-ballistic-missile shield technology (e.g.: Tactical High Energy Lasers). There are a variety of theoretical ICBM laser countermeasures, and it looks like the Russians are trying at least two: 1) Oscillating Trajectory 2) Ablative gas shield. They may be coming from the same system, e.g.: the shield also causes the oscillations with a carefully vectored output.
Doesn’t hurt for leverage in the literally ongoing as I type renegotiation of a treaty to replace START-I. Also, doesn’t hurt that Obama’s scheduled to be in Oslo, Norway, for the Nobel Prize acceptance ceremony tomorrow.
I guess the question is not 'can' it be fixed, but 'should' it be fixed. Yes, I'm sure everything he has could be reconstructed, given ample time, money, energy, and soldering skill. But what the hell, dry it out, plug it in. Worst case, it'll catch on fire. Best case, it'll just work!
Consider anything with IC pins, surface contacts, etc. to be a write-off. I/suppose/ you could save some of the passives, like RCA and speaker cables, if you soak their ends in contact cleaner.
Consider buying a generator and/or better pumps and moving your electronic gear to higher ground...:/
Though it looks like it could be very useful for certain types of virtual controls (particularly x/y axis controllers as well as sliders), its usefulness is slightly limited by its lack of velocity and pressure (other than boolean, anyway) sensitivity. Requiring PC host software seems more of a handicap than a feature, too...
Still, anything to break away from having to use a mouse to tweak realtime parameters on-screen is welcome.
This could be a good thing
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
It's a good idea if these are mature reactor designs that won't suffer from Chlorine-related chamber corrosion and cannot go sufficiently out of control to achieve melt down.
We need to resume the serious development and deployment of fossil-fuel alternatives. I just wish somebody would create a commercial Energy Amplifier reactor so we could use Thorium as an energy source and move away from enriched uranium, which is energy and environmentally costly to mine, refine, and dispose of.
Interestingly, we have Accu-Weather spearheading an attempt to make the data formats put out by NOAA less accessible to non-meteorologists. Much of this data is readily available in obscure meteorological data formats like the dense GRIB-format 5-dimensional GFS model output and the equally obscure METAR surface obs format (whose byzantine structure dates back to the 1940s when observations were distributed codified and via teletype).
Make no mistake about it-- all of this data is publically available via FTP, or C-band satellite downlink (aka NOAAPORT). What the leader of the industry consortium (which does not represent all meteo firms by a long shot) is apparently protesting is NOAA putting out data in a modern format that ANYONE, not just meteorologists, may be expected to work with. He is, perhaps, upset with the notion that in this day and age of realtime data exchange on the Internet, it really doesn't take a BS in meterology and a publisher like a newspaper, TV station, or radio station to get the weather from the government to the people-- his business's model, acting as an interpreter that (for a fee) translates the data produced by the National Weather Service into something the public understands-- this model of business is becoming incresingly obsolete.
Any protests about NOAA supporting new and more accessible formats is a cynical cry for business or industry protectionism, nothing more. Which is a shame-- there is plenty of room for innovation in the weather industry-- niche forecasts specialized for markets where small-scale accuracy matters (like the agricultural and power industries), or more advanced and interactive web-based tools (like The Weather Underground's NEXRAD interface) can innovate the way the public look at weather data.
There are regulations in place by Linden Lab for its staff. They're actually quite draconian; basically, most anything that could be interpreted as influence or power in the world is restricted employees of LL. 'sides, forget land, the real abuse would be giving themselves L$. L$250 = US$1.00 on the open gaming markets. This, too, is restricted, of course.
It has been done. Oz Spade built it in Freelon (a sim in SecondLife). As far as I know, he's the second proprieter of a Black Sun in SL since it opened. Viva la metaverse?
It's cool and all, but sort of obscure. I understand hackers were really into it in the 70s, but how do you anthropomorphize a bunch of dots? Maybe that's a statement about the hacker persona, though... ^_^
It's all fun and games until you are stuck two hundred feet down in your disabled craft, waiting for the oxygen to run out. I think I'd take up a safer hobby, like, flying.
Seriously, though, this is playing out almost exactly like the geek movie classic, Real Genius. Except I doubt this particular weapons program will wind up being scrapped...
Yes, I was talking about the video RAM. The system RAM in both configurations was fixed at 1024MB, which is why I didn't feel the need to specify about my objections to "differences in RAM"... Regardless, I'm not convinced that it make sense to run video speed benchmarks between systems with different video card configurations-- exactly what they've done on the x86 side of the tests.
CPU tests are not useless if they are representative of the sort of operations you'll be conducting on a machine, although the good ones will tie in tests that flex the memory and cache subsystems. What's not "real" about these tests is that Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, or id Software may release new, better optimized, apps or OSes for either architecture and completely change the results at any time. If this were a software benchmark, fine. But this article isn't making claims about software performance. It's making claims about hardware performance-- claims which are misleading for the reasons I've listed and continue to list.
Also, as the article itself admits, there aren't really 64-bit optimized applications available yet. I get the impression that none of the benchmarked apps were actually native-64bit, although some may have had "extensions" where CPU-heavy loops are optimized for these new architectures, this is not going to be quite the same thing. Ditto for MacOS's 64-bit support, and XP 64 is also still beta, I believe. FWIW, even if they were, to some extent we're cross-evaluating compiler and OS/app coder optimization aptitude, but you've got to draw the line somewhere.
Agreed, those of us who read the article, including the fine print, should feel affronted. I'm not particularly pro G5 or pro AMD; I think they are both excellent, healthy things for the market, so I have no particular attachment to either architecture. Despite your arguments to the contrary, I believe that this benchmark still smells.
Oh hell. Did you look at those benchmarks? I hate this sort of performance comparison because it's really testing system and application performance. (e.g.: My apple is bigger than your orange, hence better.)
Besides the fact that this is an application test (e.g.: render times and frame rates), many of the included tests are not even on equivalent hardware (e.g.: did anyone else noteice that more than half of the Atlon "benchmarks" had twice as much RAM and a RAID system running where the Apple didn't?).
Give us a real test, or shove over, pcworld. Cruft like this is why I stopped reading Ziff-Davis years ago.
Heh. Reasonable question, but whoever modded you Insightful is nuts. There is hardware that support modular CPU and memory hot-swapping / installation. Just the thing for modularity and upgrading in situations where downtime is not an option.
Well, sure, I came to this conclusion and switched to Mozilla v1.0 when it came out. Having a solid multiplatform browser like Mozilla also ment that I could ditch Win2K at work and run Linux instead. I haven't looked back. Really, I just got tired of getting pr0n windows popping up at random when I went to download emulator ROMs and such at home and feeling extra vulnerable on my workstation at work.
Why anyone would run a browser that effectively gives more control to the world at large than the actual user is beyond me.
Yeah, this trend is as big a boon as the four-track recorder was back in the 80s. But it's a much larger paradigm shift, as the article hints; we're not just doing digital multitrack recording, but also creating sound via software synthesis and f/x plugins.
Portability is an excellent argument for going to software synthesis, although price is not; for half the cost of the laptop, you can build a very powerful synthesis workstation (non-portable) with a used PIII PC and MIDI hardware synths, which are all over e-bay. An Alesis MidiVerb IV, Kawai K4, Yamaha TX81Z, Akai S1000, and an Oberheim Matrix 1000 can all be had for about $900 total, plus a Sequencer/Multitrack Recorder like Cakewalk Pro Audio, and a USB MIDI breakout box. Fun stuff!
I find it interesting the the article fails to cite increased usage as a strain factor on our electrical networks. Are we really consuming the same amount of electricity as we were twenty or thirty years ago?
Ironically, if we could just see widespread residential and commercial deployment of high-efficiency commodity electronics, lighting, and environmentals, the supply peak draw problem would probably be reduced. Of course, then, the utilities might reduce supply capacity to the edge of overload for economic reasons...
The fact that people watching the screen got feelings of motion sickness doesn't seem to prove anything about the resolution. I have friends who felt ill playing the original Doom computer game at 320x200 resolution, which is less than plain-old NTSC TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Russian officials stated as recently as Oct 22nd they would be deploying their new RS-24 ICBM “in 2009.” Why wait? It technically violated the START-I nonproliferation treaty, to which they were party. The ‘good’ news? The START-I treaty expired on Saturday, Dec 5th, 2009.
What makes the RS-24 special? Its widely-boasted ability to penetrate the US’s anti-ballistic-missile shield technology (e.g.: Tactical High Energy Lasers). There are a variety of theoretical ICBM laser countermeasures, and it looks like the Russians are trying at least two: 1) Oscillating Trajectory 2) Ablative gas shield. They may be coming from the same system, e.g.: the shield also causes the oscillations with a carefully vectored output.
Doesn’t hurt for leverage in the literally ongoing as I type renegotiation of a treaty to replace START-I. Also, doesn’t hurt that Obama’s scheduled to be in Oslo, Norway, for the Nobel Prize acceptance ceremony tomorrow.
I guess the question is not 'can' it be fixed, but 'should' it be fixed. Yes, I'm sure everything he has could be reconstructed, given ample time, money, energy, and soldering skill. But what the hell, dry it out, plug it in. Worst case, it'll catch on fire. Best case, it'll just work!
Not really... a 7ft by 7ft room would have about 25ft of linear drywall along the base of the room, once you subtract out the door.
Consider anything with IC pins, surface contacts, etc. to be a write-off. I /suppose/ you could save some of the passives, like RCA and speaker cables, if you soak their ends in contact cleaner.
Consider buying a generator and/or better pumps and moving your electronic gear to higher ground... :/
MS Vista Ultimate (SP0) x64, Firefox (gecko/2008051206).
Swell. Google Earth's download page is still crashing it.
Though it looks like it could be very useful for certain types of virtual controls (particularly x/y axis controllers as well as sliders), its usefulness is slightly limited by its lack of velocity and pressure (other than boolean, anyway) sensitivity. Requiring PC host software seems more of a handicap than a feature, too...
Still, anything to break away from having to use a mouse to tweak realtime parameters on-screen is welcome.
It's a good idea if these are mature reactor designs that won't suffer from Chlorine-related chamber corrosion and cannot go sufficiently out of control to achieve melt down.
We need to resume the serious development and deployment of fossil-fuel alternatives. I just wish somebody would create a commercial Energy Amplifier reactor so we could use Thorium as an energy source and move away from enriched uranium, which is energy and environmentally costly to mine, refine, and dispose of.
Interestingly, we have Accu-Weather spearheading an attempt to make the data formats put out by NOAA less accessible to non-meteorologists. Much of this data is readily available in obscure meteorological data formats like the dense GRIB-format 5-dimensional GFS model output and the equally obscure METAR surface obs format (whose byzantine structure dates back to the 1940s when observations were distributed codified and via teletype).
Make no mistake about it-- all of this data is publically available via FTP, or C-band satellite downlink (aka NOAAPORT). What the leader of the industry consortium (which does not represent all meteo firms by a long shot) is apparently protesting is NOAA putting out data in a modern format that ANYONE, not just meteorologists, may be expected to work with. He is, perhaps, upset with the notion that in this day and age of realtime data exchange on the Internet, it really doesn't take a BS in meterology and a publisher like a newspaper, TV station, or radio station to get the weather from the government to the people-- his business's model, acting as an interpreter that (for a fee) translates the data produced by the National Weather Service into something the public understands-- this model of business is becoming incresingly obsolete.
Any protests about NOAA supporting new and more accessible formats is a cynical cry for business or industry protectionism, nothing more. Which is a shame-- there is plenty of room for innovation in the weather industry-- niche forecasts specialized for markets where small-scale accuracy matters (like the agricultural and power industries), or more advanced and interactive web-based tools (like The Weather Underground's NEXRAD interface) can innovate the way the public look at weather data.
Support innovation, not protectionism!
Heh, if I had a L$1 for every floating glowing spinning mall and casino sign I had to fly past or live next to, I could be the next big SL Land Baron.
--Chromal Brodsky
Unfortunately, no. Large swaths of the land ARE forests of idiotic billboards.
It hurts because it's true.
--Chromal Brodsky
There are regulations in place by Linden Lab for its staff. They're actually quite draconian; basically, most anything that could be interpreted as influence or power in the world is restricted employees of LL. 'sides, forget land, the real abuse would be giving themselves L$. L$250 = US$1.00 on the open gaming markets. This, too, is restricted, of course.
It has been done. Oz Spade built it in Freelon (a sim in SecondLife). As far as I know, he's the second proprieter of a Black Sun in SL since it opened. Viva la metaverse?
Chromal Brodsky (SecondLife)
Wow. A troll moderation is completely unfair. I'd love to hear the rationale for that by whoever thought this was flamebait.
It's cool and all, but sort of obscure. I understand hackers were really into it in the 70s, but how do you anthropomorphize a bunch of dots? Maybe that's a statement about the hacker persona, though... ^_^
It's all fun and games until you are stuck two hundred feet down in your disabled craft, waiting for the oxygen to run out. I think I'd take up a safer hobby, like, flying.
And you've been a very naughty boy...
Seriously, though, this is playing out almost exactly like the geek movie classic, Real Genius. Except I doubt this particular weapons program will wind up being scrapped...
Yes, I was talking about the video RAM. The system RAM in both configurations was fixed at 1024MB, which is why I didn't feel the need to specify about my objections to "differences in RAM"... Regardless, I'm not convinced that it make sense to run video speed benchmarks between systems with different video card configurations-- exactly what they've done on the x86 side of the tests.
CPU tests are not useless if they are representative of the sort of operations you'll be conducting on a machine, although the good ones will tie in tests that flex the memory and cache subsystems. What's not "real" about these tests is that Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, or id Software may release new, better optimized, apps or OSes for either architecture and completely change the results at any time. If this were a software benchmark, fine. But this article isn't making claims about software performance. It's making claims about hardware performance-- claims which are misleading for the reasons I've listed and continue to list.
Also, as the article itself admits, there aren't really 64-bit optimized applications available yet. I get the impression that none of the benchmarked apps were actually native-64bit, although some may have had "extensions" where CPU-heavy loops are optimized for these new architectures, this is not going to be quite the same thing. Ditto for MacOS's 64-bit support, and XP 64 is also still beta, I believe. FWIW, even if they were, to some extent we're cross-evaluating compiler and OS/app coder optimization aptitude, but you've got to draw the line somewhere.
Agreed, those of us who read the article, including the fine print, should feel affronted. I'm not particularly pro G5 or pro AMD; I think they are both excellent, healthy things for the market, so I have no particular attachment to either architecture. Despite your arguments to the contrary, I believe that this benchmark still smells.
Oh hell. Did you look at those benchmarks? I hate this sort of performance comparison because it's really testing system and application performance. (e.g.: My apple is bigger than your orange, hence better.)
Besides the fact that this is an application test (e.g.: render times and frame rates), many of the included tests are not even on equivalent hardware (e.g.: did anyone else noteice that more than half of the Atlon "benchmarks" had twice as much RAM and a RAID system running where the Apple didn't?).
Give us a real test, or shove over, pcworld. Cruft like this is why I stopped reading Ziff-Davis years ago.
Heh. Reasonable question, but whoever modded you Insightful is nuts. There is hardware that support modular CPU and memory hot-swapping / installation. Just the thing for modularity and upgrading in situations where downtime is not an option.
For an example, scope this.
Well, sure, I came to this conclusion and switched to Mozilla v1.0 when it came out. Having a solid multiplatform browser like Mozilla also ment that I could ditch Win2K at work and run Linux instead. I haven't looked back. Really, I just got tired of getting pr0n windows popping up at random when I went to download emulator ROMs and such at home and feeling extra vulnerable on my workstation at work.
Why anyone would run a browser that effectively gives more control to the world at large than the actual user is beyond me.
Yeah, this trend is as big a boon as the four-track recorder was back in the 80s. But it's a much larger paradigm shift, as the article hints; we're not just doing digital multitrack recording, but also creating sound via software synthesis and f/x plugins.
Portability is an excellent argument for going to software synthesis, although price is not; for half the cost of the laptop, you can build a very powerful synthesis workstation (non-portable) with a used PIII PC and MIDI hardware synths, which are all over e-bay. An Alesis MidiVerb IV, Kawai K4, Yamaha TX81Z, Akai S1000, and an Oberheim Matrix 1000 can all be had for about $900 total, plus a Sequencer/Multitrack Recorder like Cakewalk Pro Audio, and a USB MIDI breakout box. Fun stuff!
I find it interesting the the article fails to cite increased usage as a strain factor on our electrical networks. Are we really consuming the same amount of electricity as we were twenty or thirty years ago?
Ironically, if we could just see widespread residential and commercial deployment of high-efficiency commodity electronics, lighting, and environmentals, the supply peak draw problem would probably be reduced. Of course, then, the utilities might reduce supply capacity to the edge of overload for economic reasons...
The fact that people watching the screen got feelings of motion sickness doesn't seem to prove anything about the resolution. I have friends who felt ill playing the original Doom computer game at 320x200 resolution, which is less than plain-old NTSC TV.