I read the article (pause for shock)
All that stuff about huge speed increases and sackloads of extra memory bandwidth, reduced clock cycles, RAID...but when you eventually get to the performance testing it seems very little faster than top end current boards. Perhaps if you have a daily compute-intensive job that is slowly growing and currently takes 23hours, you would get excited, but as a developer I guess I might gain a few minutes off my build times (and that's staring into space thinking time anyway.)
I'm not knocking progress: the lower voltage and the ability to use a 4-layer board, plus the serial ATA on-board support look nice, but the number of people with more money than sense needed to get a fast R&D payback isn't that high at the moment.
Or is this a cunning plan to make money through selling compute farms to rogue states that have just decided they need WMDs really fast?
The haymakers association announced that sales were down as a result of illegal use of roads by the so-called "autos" of Henry Ford. For many years, horse cart owners had to use their product in order to travel. The association owns the concept of putting fuel (hay) into an engine (horse) to permit travel to take place. The association is lobbying Congress for a tax on each auto and can of fuel sold, to be paid directly to the Association. It also wants all mechanics, engineers, auto workers and executives to be required to pay damages to them for loss of income, estimated at $10 trillion over the next 100 years.
That's the current Microsoft argument. In effect, 10% of your workers are power users so you need to deploy a power user solution to 100% of the workforce.
However, the great majority of workers are only mobile within site, where wireless networking is going to be continuous. And to do productive work they usually need to get resources off the network...they should not be relying on possibly obsolete versions of docs while mobile.
In terms of data integrity, it could be highly advantageous to many corporates if many workers could not do certain things without being connected to current data feeds.
So, I understand where you are coming from, but no MBA 101 for you.
Methane hydrates
on
Gas Goes Solid
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's true that there are vast reservoirs on the continental shelf- and a big fear of global warming is that it will cause the hydrates to start dissociating, filling the atmosphere with methane (=powerful greenhouse gas) and accelerating the warming process. It's the speed of warming, not the actual temperature, that is considered to be the biggest problem.
Methane hydrates are not particularly high-energy-density fuels- wouldn't be suitable for automotives, for example-but the bigger a store the easier it is to keep cold (lower surface area to volume ratio) so I guess they could actually be useful as a way of storing large amounts of gas economically and safely, the role they are basically playing on the seabed right now.
Basically, I just don't get the Japanese argument. Is it really going to be cheaper to transport several ordinary refrigerated trucks of methane hydrate than one very cold truck of liquid methane? It looks as if the technology might be more of a way to stockpile large reserves of gas. As electricity generation in many parts of the world is increasingly gas-fired using turbine generators, perhaps this is a way to protect fuel reserves and generator capacity better from terrorists.
As IBM very well knows. Increasingly corporates basically want identical disk images on their clients for manageability. But users still have the ability to change many local settings in Windows and then scream for help.
As Ethernet bandwidth increases, the argument for putting the power back in the server farm gets stronger. The server farm is in a controlled environment, it's easier to manage. If you assume in a few years many corporates will have gigabit Ethernet to the desk, and simple, cheap thin clients running XPE or Embedded Linux, the IBM approach makes sense. It is also going to be cheaper for developing countries to do this from the start than to put big, expensive, rapidly obsoleting boxes on every desktop.
To a certain extent too, it leverages the Linux strength in the server versus its perceived weakness in the desktop.
Corporate IT should be about delivering the necessary, usable functionality to end users. Geeks often lose sight of that. Microsoft might lose sight of it. But it's IBM core business.
HPQ sells pocket PC devices. This emulator runs on PalmOs. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the relevant bit of the HP marketing dept. Is this the start of something new? Is HP going to start bringing out PalmOs devices or Linux PDAs? So few questions, so many answers.
I am the former CTO of a company that made safety critical products. And I have worked on international safety standards. I have developed passive and active safety systems and done many risk evaluations. I could write you an essay on evaluating safety, but I doubt you would read it.
Just remember, in any successful system, the risks must be evaluated and countermeasures have to be evaluated and applied before there is an accident. If the countermeasures consist of continuous inspection and testing in order to try and keep the system safe, that is an inherently unsafe system. An aircraft with too few passenger miles flown to provide an accurate statistical safety estimate is not safe because it has not had an accident. In fact, the dangerous weakness of the Concord tanks was known about before the fatal crash but the assessment of the risks was clearly inadequate. The design was flawed and the aircraft was not as safe as it should have been. That design flaw would still exist even if, by pure luck, it had never resulted in a crash.
After visiting the Concord(e) at Duxford Air Museum, I decided there was no way I could ever fly in the thing. Even on the ground, I got claustrophobia. I don't mind really small planes, even sailplanes, but somehow the idea of Mach 2 in a sardine can was just too much. And then one of the sardine cans crashed.
Sadly, it isn't a superior technology. It's noisy, uneconomic and not very safe.
And, actually, we are seeing something similar in other fields. For a long time we had no speed limits, then a mixture of road deaths, increasing traffic, and the 70s fuel crisis brought them in just about everywhere. Now we expect cars to be comfortable, safe, economical (even SUVs are actually more economical than midsize cars of 30 years ago) and to provide us with in-vehicle entertainment that we can hear above engine noise. Most of the journeys I do are now slower than they were 10 years ago, but actually less stressful. That's progress.
Also, improved network technology has made many journeys less urgent. Twenty years ago it took me 3 days just to set up an international telephone call in Mexico. Ten years ago in Brazil I had to dial an international number an average of 200 times to get through. When Concord was designed, a 2 hour phone call from London to NY probably cost as much as a round air trip. Fax machines were a joke. And a portable telephone occupied the entire car trunk. Now, you could videoconference several people all day for less than the cost of a round trip between the UK and the US.
So I'd say, Concord has actually been wiped out by progress. It's just that, as usual, progress came from a different direction from what people expected.
Actually I think this is not a bad idea. High schools don't teach plumbing, heating and ventilation, TV repair or auto bodyshop. So why teach applied IT? Go back to paper based research that actually involves transcribing material so it might actually pass through brain rather than direct from internet to printer.
What's the chance of this having a serious informed debate? Not a lot, I guess.
I know this may come as a shock to some people, but one of the purposes of Universities is to challenge the existing state of things. That's what research is about: finding out that official history was wrong, that there are better ways of doing things. Universities are hotbeds of discontent. They exist to change the world, not to accept it as it is.
Polytechnics and similar exist to teach existing technology and skills. They reinforce the status quo by producing a workforce whose careers depend on that status quo being maintained.
Of course there is overlap, particularly visible in engineering. My point? A college that cooperates 100% with the RIAA (and still gets stuffed) is behaving like a polytechnic. A college that challenges the RIAA and argues that technological progress is making them irrelevant is behaving like a university. If the US is to continue as the world technological leader, I really think it needs to encourage its true universities and allow them to experiment with the effects of deviant and creative thinking. And if that means some form of protection from hugely inflated lawsuits by trade cartel bodies, so be it.
One possibility would be some kind of judicial oversight over damages claims - making it perjury or criminal libel, i.e. a criminal offence, to present information in a statement of claim which inflated the damage suffered. This would provide an effective remedy, for instance, for cases in which damages were exaggerated to over $250000 to allow the FBI to be called in.
Disclaimer: I have been to both university and technical college, and I know the difference. And yes, those were suine aeronauts passing the window just now.
I'm reading stuff here which people have clearly got out of pop-sci books. Suggestion: just try actually working with radioactives in commercial quantities before you blether on about "just" emitting neutrons or tritium. Or "just" converting steel in a practical containment vessel to cobalt, and the metallurgical challenges that result.
Tritium is harmless till it gets into the water supply and you drink it. Neutrons are harmless until you get in the way of them. Our ability to organise effective containment so far has been less than exciting. Tritiated water is slowly leaching towards the Colorado river in large amounts, and the Irish Sea has amazing amounts of the stuff from the British nuclear program (the solution to it reaching British beaches? Make the pipe longer so more of it reaches Ireland.) Both governments have sites with tanks that contain mixtures so radioactive that they have to be constantly cooled with circulating water - so what happens when the pipes corrode and leak? Huge taxpayer costs, that's what.
The coal power industry had to spend a lot on research to deal with the problem of ash disposal, and a lot of it now finds its way into cement. There's not much chance of that for radioactive waste. On the other hand, wind power and solar power produce little pollution, can be dismantled at end of life and removed without trace, are relatively terrorist-proof (a wind farm needs a lot of artillery and bombs to destroy completely) and can be built in marginal areas (exposed seacoasts and littoral, desert). Sadly, they seem to attract practical engineers rather than mad scientists, and it's mad scientists that seem to get government funding.
You are basically right, but you have to place them at the Lagrange points, otherwise they wander off.
However, it's much easier just to put the telescope in orbit around the earth. Without atmospheric scattering, the telescope can be aimed close to the sun. That's one of the advantages of Hubble over any terrestrial telescope.
Turing complete it may be, but why the limitation to 4 letter words and bytes? With 64 bits in the offing, we need a bigger version of this language to cope with the cursing that will surely result. There is no shortage of suitable tokens, after all. BMF, FOAD... if it's true that the needs of pornography drive the internet, it would be nice to have a 64-bit web server whose source code was itself pornographic. I'm releasing the concept under a license which says that all resulting code must be GPLed.
"Programming" is, or should be, about problem solving. Computing is about extending the range of problems that human beings can solve. In essence it works like all other thinking prosthetics, by substituting a different, easier to manage API.
When I went to school in the precomputer age, mutiplying and dividing decimal numbers (a hard process) was handled with logarithm tables, which substituted an API of a two dimensional + interpolation table search plus addition and subtraction. It wasn't a very good API, and for multiplication at least kids good at mental arithmetic could calculate faster than the logarithm lookup, to four places at least. Now we have calculators, which have a different API (pressing buttons, but also knowing about the need for batteries, keeping the thing free of water etc.)
It may seem stretching it to use the term "API", but in every single problem solving case there is a point at which people interact to make the machine do work, whether it is at the earliest stage (design) in an embedded application such as an elevator, or at the latest stage as in an interpreted language.
And my point? I think we should be carefully distinguishing problem solving and information absorbtion in children. The present personal computer is only one metaphor and it has a short history. Introducing children to it early on is perhaps no bad thing, but not at the expense of other manual, visual and auditory skills. Introducing children to logical and mathematical problem solving via dedicated programming languages is good, but to stick to the present GUI is about as sane as the British education system, which regarded proficiency in Latin as the main indicator of intelligence virtually to the middle of last century (Alan Turing had trouble at his English school partly because mathematics had such low status compared to Latin.) It would be interesting (but impractical) to get experienced teachers to describe what facilities would most benefit their attempts to teach their subjects, regardless of technology, and then get a lot of the more venturesome technologists to try and find a way of meeting those needs without considering present metaphors. After all, that's how applications are supposed to be scoped, not "We've been given computers, how can we be seen to be using them?"
The difference is a bit like the difference between the amateur photographer and the pro. The amateur thinks "If I had a Cakon H2000 with a 0-60 in 3 seconds telephoto I could do such-and-such." The pro thinks "I have to produce such-and-such a job, what resources do I need?". It's amateur thinking that fills schools with computers when perhaps what they really need is sackloads of technical Lego, or perhaps an old 60s PDP11 so they can really experience the conversion from ideas to 1s and 0s.
Oh well, just the out of touch ramblings of of a crusty old git.
Unicode is "just" a character encoding and so can't handle the localisation issue for right to left languages. (In fact after years of anglocentricity I'm now having to work on a site design with both internationalisation and localisation and, even with J2EE, it's a pig, folks.) Hebrew, btw, is a lot easier than Arabic because only a few letters morph at the ends of words, but it's still a complication we could do without. I guess we could save effort by having a form on the site for registered users to be sent a free mirror, but then we'd have to have the typeface reversed...oh weh, goyim
In answer to the people who suggest (electro)magnets, a design to do just this was published long ago, before the 1993 archive start, in dead tree Scientific American. Assuming the pendulum weight is cast iron, it is perfectly practical to use a magnet. As I remember it, the magnet goes on the dead center line below the pendulum bob. Depending on where in the cycle it is turned on briefly, it will accelerate or decelerate the pendulum very slightly. I guess with some clocks if you made the magnet big enough, it could be used to decelerate the pendulum very slowly to a complete stop allowing the Daylight Saving adjustment, and the use of a second magnet to one side could then enable a restart. Potentially less invasive than an arm that prods the pendulum, which seems extremely Heath Robinson or Wallace and Gromit to me.
Did anybody else notice the rather prurient tone of the Forbes article? The baby talk about people taking their clothes off, and the "you wouldn't want to know"? How many of their readers need to have explained in baby talk what streamed video porn might be about? And then there's the suggestion that a law firm had to be persuaded to take the case. Let's just explain this. The way you "persuade" a law firm to take your case is, you offer them enough money.
The writer seems to be uncomfortable that porn companies are involved. But it's hard to understand why they should be any worse ethically than gun companies, liquor companies, and certainly tobacco companies, and they spend huge amounts of money on lobbying and litigation to protect their interests.
Anyway, they are to be applauded. Acacia is basically (in my admittedly incompetent opinion only) a loser company with a business model based on a protection racket, and has tried to set the price of being left alone at a level low enough that its victims will pay rather than litigate. They have chosen to litigate, and that increases the chance that this kind of thing will fail in future. Which is good for innovation and the economy. And, as I suspect the Democrats will be saying in 2004, it's the economy, stupid.
Offtopic I know, but actually, you usually got a knighthood and a good job in the British Government. (Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake) But times have moved on: now you just get the knighthood, and the shareholders pay for your huge pension fund.
Really? I bet if you had just been acquitted of an offense and then told that the prosecution was going to appeal - in other words you were going to go through the whole thing all over again because they were bad losers - you might find it hard to see the difference.
It's also an excuse for lazy prosecutors to bring badly framed cases before courts on the basis of finding where the arguments are weak then trying to bolster them for an appeal. And the threat of repeated appeals can be used to frighten an innocent party into plea-bargaining, increasing the conviction rates at the expense of justice.
The same thing goes, of course, for cases brought by large corporations against small ones and individuals: deep pockets wins out over justice. Forget English common law, this is about overbearing power being brought against small individuals. And, much as I dislike the term, it sucks.
Since 9/11 there seems to be a growing desire by governments to abolish double jeopardy - the idea that you cannot be tried twice for the same offense. One way around it is that many countries now have so many statutes that one action can be held to break several different laws - so they can try one thing and then if it doesn't work, try another until they get you. We possibly shouldn't be surprised that Norway is one of them: underneath the clean and friendly image, Scandinavian states have a history of social control, significant right-wing politics, and social repression of dissident groups. Just like us, in fact.
Long ago. The Scott-still engine was a Diesel engine whose exhaust gases were used to boil water which was used to drive a steam engine (the underside of the main piston).
CATCH: the waste heat from Carnot 1 is lower grade heat. As the efficiency of Carnot cycle 1 increases, the exhaust temperature must fall, so the efficiency of cycle 2 must decrease. In effect, it does not matter how many stages you use to reduce the temperature of the initial hot fluid to the lower temperature, you can never extract more energy than you could from a single stage engine doing the same thing. And that energy is still governed by the T1/T2 rule.
The killer for the Scott-still engine is that turbochargers extract energy from the exhaust quite efficiently, and in doing so reduce the exhaust temperature.
Multistage steam engines have been around for over 100 years, but they are basically a workaround for the design limitations on practical steam engines.
Who said that people who do not know history are condemned to repeat it?
And what happens if you want to increase the number of fields in a record with time?
For one of our applications we use an xml format that is steadily growing with time. Not only the number of fields but the levels of nesting can vary within the "same" message as it develops. The current revision can read all the old messages back to the first one ever, because it can parse the field names.The first ever version of the software can read the latest message, it just doesn't work on the fields it does not understand. And the presentation layers of both versions present correctly. No format converters, no legacy code to handle previous incarnations. The xml simply stores in a database as a blob field.
The US has never been invaded and conquered except by its present majority inhabitants. Nor has the UK. Proportionately far more Northern Irish citizens have been killed by the IRA than US citizens by Al-Queda, but the UK somehow managed not to carpet bomb Crossmaglen and Londonderry. It's a pity the present UK PM doesn't seem to have followed the example of his predecessors over Iraq.
France, Germany and Russia have a history of invasion as well as themselves being the aggressors.
The Germans know that the cause of WW2 was the outcome of WW1. OK, they (or rather the Kaiser and his military elite, the product of the conquest of the rest of the German states by Prussia) made WW1 into a pan-European conflict. But the result is that modern Germans are well placed to understand that aggression and invasion ultimately result in a cycle of violence unless something really intelligent is done afterwards. Like Marshall Aid.
They also know that there were many times before WW2 when Hitler could have been stopped. If the European states and the Soviet Union had pursued a policy of control and mutual support, beginning as soon as they realised the kind of state Germany had become (pretty obvious by the 1936 Olympics) Hitler could have been contained. But the states were divided among themselves. France and Britain had significant numbers of Nazi sympathisers, Italy had Mussolini, and the US thought Britain could do with someone taking it down a peg or two.
So I do not think the Germans are being at all inconsistent. They are actually learning from history, and Churchill's remark that jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
Restricting (not banning) access to mindless violence and seeking to promote more constructive engagement seems to me like a sensible thing for a government to do. But then I'm biased. In the 80s I worked for a company that was being unofficially urged by the Government to sell arms to our friend in Iraq, Saddam. He was the same homicidal lunatic then. And instead of containing him, our governments built him up. I think the Germans have a point, and that people who try and shout them down are doing it because they are afraid of the truth they might hear.
It makes sense. The development of life actually demonstrates that carbon-chain based molecules are a good place to start when you want to do something. Until the twentieth century the main source of applied energy was animal movement, an incredibly complicated way of obtaining movement from the breakdown of sugars, starch and fat. Even now, most cars don't last as long as a horse, so clearly the longevity problem is soluble. It's just that we have only very recently been able to start using that kind of technology deliberately instead of finding it by accident.
Now excuse me, my fuel cell needs a shot and then it wants to go to the bathroom.
Slashdot Mirror
All that stuff about huge speed increases and sackloads of extra memory bandwidth, reduced clock cycles, RAID...but when you eventually get to the performance testing it seems very little faster than top end current boards. Perhaps if you have a daily compute-intensive job that is slowly growing and currently takes 23hours, you would get excited, but as a developer I guess I might gain a few minutes off my build times (and that's staring into space thinking time anyway.)
I'm not knocking progress: the lower voltage and the ability to use a 4-layer board, plus the serial ATA on-board support look nice, but the number of people with more money than sense needed to get a fast R&D payback isn't that high at the moment.
Or is this a cunning plan to make money through selling compute farms to rogue states that have just decided they need WMDs really fast?
The haymakers association announced that sales were down as a result of illegal use of roads by the so-called "autos" of Henry Ford. For many years, horse cart owners had to use their product in order to travel. The association owns the concept of putting fuel (hay) into an engine (horse) to permit travel to take place. The association is lobbying Congress for a tax on each auto and can of fuel sold, to be paid directly to the Association. It also wants all mechanics, engineers, auto workers and executives to be required to pay damages to them for loss of income, estimated at $10 trillion over the next 100 years.
However, the great majority of workers are only mobile within site, where wireless networking is going to be continuous. And to do productive work they usually need to get resources off the network...they should not be relying on possibly obsolete versions of docs while mobile.
In terms of data integrity, it could be highly advantageous to many corporates if many workers could not do certain things without being connected to current data feeds.
So, I understand where you are coming from, but no MBA 101 for you.
Methane hydrates are not particularly high-energy-density fuels- wouldn't be suitable for automotives, for example-but the bigger a store the easier it is to keep cold (lower surface area to volume ratio) so I guess they could actually be useful as a way of storing large amounts of gas economically and safely, the role they are basically playing on the seabed right now.
Basically, I just don't get the Japanese argument. Is it really going to be cheaper to transport several ordinary refrigerated trucks of methane hydrate than one very cold truck of liquid methane? It looks as if the technology might be more of a way to stockpile large reserves of gas. As electricity generation in many parts of the world is increasingly gas-fired using turbine generators, perhaps this is a way to protect fuel reserves and generator capacity better from terrorists.
As Ethernet bandwidth increases, the argument for putting the power back in the server farm gets stronger. The server farm is in a controlled environment, it's easier to manage. If you assume in a few years many corporates will have gigabit Ethernet to the desk, and simple, cheap thin clients running XPE or Embedded Linux, the IBM approach makes sense. It is also going to be cheaper for developing countries to do this from the start than to put big, expensive, rapidly obsoleting boxes on every desktop.
To a certain extent too, it leverages the Linux strength in the server versus its perceived weakness in the desktop.
Corporate IT should be about delivering the necessary, usable functionality to end users. Geeks often lose sight of that. Microsoft might lose sight of it. But it's IBM core business.
HPQ sells pocket PC devices. This emulator runs on PalmOs.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the relevant bit of the HP marketing dept. Is this the start of something new? Is HP going to start bringing out PalmOs devices or Linux PDAs?
So few questions, so many answers.
I am the former CTO of a company that made safety critical products. And I have worked on international safety standards. I have developed passive and active safety systems and done many risk evaluations. I could write you an essay on evaluating safety, but I doubt you would read it.
Just remember, in any successful system, the risks must be evaluated and countermeasures have to be evaluated and applied before there is an accident. If the countermeasures consist of continuous inspection and testing in order to try and keep the system safe, that is an inherently unsafe system. An aircraft with too few passenger miles flown to provide an accurate statistical safety estimate is not safe because it has not had an accident. In fact, the dangerous weakness of the Concord tanks was known about before the fatal crash but the assessment of the risks was clearly inadequate. The design was flawed and the aircraft was not as safe as it should have been. That design flaw would still exist even if, by pure luck, it had never resulted in a crash.
Sadly, it isn't a superior technology. It's noisy, uneconomic and not very safe.
And, actually, we are seeing something similar in other fields. For a long time we had no speed limits, then a mixture of road deaths, increasing traffic, and the 70s fuel crisis brought them in just about everywhere. Now we expect cars to be comfortable, safe, economical (even SUVs are actually more economical than midsize cars of 30 years ago) and to provide us with in-vehicle entertainment that we can hear above engine noise. Most of the journeys I do are now slower than they were 10 years ago, but actually less stressful. That's progress.
Also, improved network technology has made many journeys less urgent. Twenty years ago it took me 3 days just to set up an international telephone call in Mexico. Ten years ago in Brazil I had to dial an international number an average of 200 times to get through. When Concord was designed, a 2 hour phone call from London to NY probably cost as much as a round air trip. Fax machines were a joke. And a portable telephone occupied the entire car trunk.
Now, you could videoconference several people all day for less than the cost of a round trip between the UK and the US.
So I'd say, Concord has actually been wiped out by progress. It's just that, as usual, progress came from a different direction from what people expected.
What's the chance of this having a serious informed debate? Not a lot, I guess.
Polytechnics and similar exist to teach existing technology and skills. They reinforce the status quo by producing a workforce whose careers depend on that status quo being maintained.
Of course there is overlap, particularly visible in engineering. My point? A college that cooperates 100% with the RIAA (and still gets stuffed) is behaving like a polytechnic. A college that challenges the RIAA and argues that technological progress is making them irrelevant is behaving like a university. If the US is to continue as the world technological leader, I really think it needs to encourage its true universities and allow them to experiment with the effects of deviant and creative thinking. And if that means some form of protection from hugely inflated lawsuits by trade cartel bodies, so be it.
One possibility would be some kind of judicial oversight over damages claims - making it perjury or criminal libel, i.e. a criminal offence, to present information in a statement of claim which inflated the damage suffered. This would provide an effective remedy, for instance, for cases in which damages were exaggerated to over $250000 to allow the FBI to be called in.
Disclaimer: I have been to both university and technical college, and I know the difference. And yes, those were suine aeronauts passing the window just now.
Tritium is harmless till it gets into the water supply and you drink it. Neutrons are harmless until you get in the way of them. Our ability to organise effective containment so far has been less than exciting. Tritiated water is slowly leaching towards the Colorado river in large amounts, and the Irish Sea has amazing amounts of the stuff from the British nuclear program (the solution to it reaching British beaches? Make the pipe longer so more of it reaches Ireland.) Both governments have sites with tanks that contain mixtures so radioactive that they have to be constantly cooled with circulating water - so what happens when the pipes corrode and leak? Huge taxpayer costs, that's what.
The coal power industry had to spend a lot on research to deal with the problem of ash disposal, and a lot of it now finds its way into cement. There's not much chance of that for radioactive waste. On the other hand, wind power and solar power produce little pollution, can be dismantled at end of life and removed without trace, are relatively terrorist-proof (a wind farm needs a lot of artillery and bombs to destroy completely) and can be built in marginal areas (exposed seacoasts and littoral, desert). Sadly, they seem to attract practical engineers rather than mad scientists, and it's mad scientists that seem to get government funding.
However, it's much easier just to put the telescope in orbit around the earth. Without atmospheric scattering, the telescope can be aimed close to the sun. That's one of the advantages of Hubble over any terrestrial telescope.
Turing complete it may be, but why the limitation to 4 letter words and bytes? With 64 bits in the offing, we need a bigger version of this language to cope with the cursing that will surely result. There is no shortage of suitable tokens, after all. BMF, FOAD... if it's true that the needs of pornography drive the internet, it would be nice to have a 64-bit web server whose source code was itself pornographic. I'm releasing the concept under a license which says that all resulting code must be GPLed.
When I went to school in the precomputer age, mutiplying and dividing decimal numbers (a hard process) was handled with logarithm tables, which substituted an API of a two dimensional + interpolation table search plus addition and subtraction. It wasn't a very good API, and for multiplication at least kids good at mental arithmetic could calculate faster than the logarithm lookup, to four places at least. Now we have calculators, which have a different API (pressing buttons, but also knowing about the need for batteries, keeping the thing free of water etc.)
It may seem stretching it to use the term "API", but in every single problem solving case there is a point at which people interact to make the machine do work, whether it is at the earliest stage (design) in an embedded application such as an elevator, or at the latest stage as in an interpreted language.
And my point? I think we should be carefully distinguishing problem solving and information absorbtion in children. The present personal computer is only one metaphor and it has a short history. Introducing children to it early on is perhaps no bad thing, but not at the expense of other manual, visual and auditory skills. Introducing children to logical and mathematical problem solving via dedicated programming languages is good, but to stick to the present GUI is about as sane as the British education system, which regarded proficiency in Latin as the main indicator of intelligence virtually to the middle of last century (Alan Turing had trouble at his English school partly because mathematics had such low status compared to Latin.)
It would be interesting (but impractical) to get experienced teachers to describe what facilities would most benefit their attempts to teach their subjects, regardless of technology, and then get a lot of the more venturesome technologists to try and find a way of meeting those needs without considering present metaphors. After all, that's how applications are supposed to be scoped, not "We've been given computers, how can we be seen to be using them?"
The difference is a bit like the difference between the amateur photographer and the pro. The amateur thinks "If I had a Cakon H2000 with a 0-60 in 3 seconds telephoto I could do such-and-such." The pro thinks "I have to produce such-and-such a job, what resources do I need?". It's amateur thinking that fills schools with computers when perhaps what they really need is sackloads of technical Lego, or perhaps an old 60s PDP11 so they can really experience the conversion from ideas to 1s and 0s.
Oh well, just the out of touch ramblings of of a crusty old git.
Unicode is "just" a character encoding and so can't handle the localisation issue for right to left languages. (In fact after years of anglocentricity I'm now having to work on a site design with both internationalisation and localisation and, even with J2EE, it's a pig, folks.)
Hebrew, btw, is a lot easier than Arabic because only a few letters morph at the ends of words, but it's still a complication we could do without. I guess we could save effort by having a form on the site for registered users to be sent a free mirror, but then we'd have to have the typeface reversed...oh weh, goyim
In answer to the people who suggest (electro)magnets, a design to do just this was published long ago, before the 1993 archive start, in dead tree Scientific American. Assuming the pendulum weight is cast iron, it is perfectly practical to use a magnet. As I remember it, the magnet goes on the dead center line below the pendulum bob. Depending on where in the cycle it is turned on briefly, it will accelerate or decelerate the pendulum very slightly. I guess with some clocks if you made the magnet big enough, it could be used to decelerate the pendulum very slowly to a complete stop allowing the Daylight Saving adjustment, and the use of a second magnet to one side could then enable a restart. Potentially less invasive than an arm that prods the pendulum, which seems extremely Heath Robinson or Wallace and Gromit to me.
How many of their readers need to have explained in baby talk what streamed video porn might be about? And then there's the suggestion that a law firm had to be persuaded to take the case. Let's just explain this. The way you "persuade" a law firm to take your case is, you offer them enough money.
The writer seems to be uncomfortable that porn companies are involved. But it's hard to understand why they should be any worse ethically than gun companies, liquor companies, and certainly tobacco companies, and they spend huge amounts of money on lobbying and litigation to protect their interests.
Anyway, they are to be applauded. Acacia is basically (in my admittedly incompetent opinion only) a loser company with a business model based on a protection racket, and has tried to set the price of being left alone at a level low enough that its victims will pay rather than litigate. They have chosen to litigate, and that increases the chance that this kind of thing will fail in future. Which is good for innovation and the economy. And, as I suspect the Democrats will be saying in 2004, it's the economy, stupid.
You're confusing post war Sweden with the general history of Scandinavia. As for recent Norway, read
this
Offtopic I know, but actually, you usually got a knighthood and a good job in the British Government. (Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake) But times have moved on: now you just get the knighthood, and the shareholders pay for your huge pension fund.
It's also an excuse for lazy prosecutors to bring badly framed cases before courts on the basis of finding where the arguments are weak then trying to bolster them for an appeal. And the threat of repeated appeals can be used to frighten an innocent party into plea-bargaining, increasing the conviction rates at the expense of justice.
The same thing goes, of course, for cases brought by large corporations against small ones and individuals: deep pockets wins out over justice. Forget English common law, this is about overbearing power being brought against small individuals. And, much as I dislike the term, it sucks.
Since 9/11 there seems to be a growing desire by governments to abolish double jeopardy - the idea that you cannot be tried twice for the same offense. One way around it is that many countries now have so many statutes that one action can be held to break several different laws - so they can try one thing and then if it doesn't work, try another until they get you. We possibly shouldn't be surprised that Norway is one of them: underneath the clean and friendly image, Scandinavian states have a history of social control, significant right-wing politics, and social repression of dissident groups. Just like us, in fact.
CATCH: the waste heat from Carnot 1 is lower grade heat. As the efficiency of Carnot cycle 1 increases, the exhaust temperature must fall, so the efficiency of cycle 2 must decrease. In effect, it does not matter how many stages you use to reduce the temperature of the initial hot fluid to the lower temperature, you can never extract more energy than you could from a single stage engine doing the same thing. And that energy is still governed by the T1/T2 rule.
The killer for the Scott-still engine is that turbochargers extract energy from the exhaust quite efficiently, and in doing so reduce the exhaust temperature.
Multistage steam engines have been around for over 100 years, but they are basically a workaround for the design limitations on practical steam engines.
Who said that people who do not know history are condemned to repeat it?
And what happens if you want to increase the number of fields in a record with time?
For one of our applications we use an xml format that is steadily growing with time. Not only the number of fields but the levels of nesting can vary within the "same" message as it develops. The current revision can read all the old messages back to the first one ever, because it can parse the field names.The first ever version of the software can read the latest message, it just doesn't work on the fields it does not understand. And the presentation layers of both versions present correctly. No format converters, no legacy code to handle previous incarnations. The xml simply stores in a database as a blob field.
France, Germany and Russia have a history of invasion as well as themselves being the aggressors.
The Germans know that the cause of WW2 was the outcome of WW1. OK, they (or rather the Kaiser and his military elite, the product of the conquest of the rest of the German states by Prussia) made WW1 into a pan-European conflict. But the result is that modern Germans are well placed to understand that aggression and invasion ultimately result in a cycle of violence unless something really intelligent is done afterwards. Like Marshall Aid.
They also know that there were many times before WW2 when Hitler could have been stopped. If the European states and the Soviet Union had pursued a policy of control and mutual support, beginning as soon as they realised the kind of state Germany had become (pretty obvious by the 1936 Olympics) Hitler could have been contained. But the states were divided among themselves. France and Britain had significant numbers of Nazi sympathisers, Italy had Mussolini, and the US thought Britain could do with someone taking it down a peg or two.
So I do not think the Germans are being at all inconsistent. They are actually learning from history, and Churchill's remark that jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
Restricting (not banning) access to mindless violence and seeking to promote more constructive engagement seems to me like a sensible thing for a government to do. But then I'm biased. In the 80s I worked for a company that was being unofficially urged by the Government to sell arms to our friend in Iraq, Saddam. He was the same homicidal lunatic then. And instead of containing him, our governments built him up. I think the Germans have a point, and that people who try and shout them down are doing it because they are afraid of the truth they might hear.
Now excuse me, my fuel cell needs a shot and then it wants to go to the bathroom.