The article hasn't been proofread very carefully and may not reflect very accurately what McNealy actually said. But I have just been on a customer site where, really, the users would all be better off with thin clients and a straightforward locked down implementation of Star Office. The management hasn't yet upgraded from workstation NT4/Office 97. In fact, they could save considerable server space and network traffic by saving documents in the SO6 zipped XML format. And as their main MIS system is now browser based, it really does look like they could run the whole thing on Linux.
OK, they won't do it. There's a learning curve (though they'll have to retrain everybody when they eventually move to XP/Office 11, won't they?)But Indian companies might, they might get some real economic benefits from it, and McNealy is surely right in the general thrust of his argument.
Incidentally, and taking a less anglocentric view of the universe, how well do K/gnome/CDE support Indian languages compared to XP?
A UPS converts mains to 12V battery and then converts the 12V back to the mains. Then the little power supply brick converts the mains down to a few volts again...stupid.
Now look at those in-car chargers which are just a plug to the lighter socket with some simple voltage conversion.
What I would like to see is simply a UPS with a suitably large battery and a set of those car sockets round the back, and neat little adaptors for gadgets that plug into those sockets. Maybe the sockets could even go on top and you plug in a Motorola, Nokia, Palm what have you socket adaptor so you just push the gadget in, no wires. Now I can run everything from the UPS, and in the event of mains power failure I can turn off the PC and then still use the battery to charge my PDA, phone, etc.
Fewer voltage conversions to go wrong, less power wasted in converting up and down. And, unlike this induction scheme, existing devices can easily be modified: they just need a 12V adaptor which many of them have anyway.
Which country used to throw kids in jail for years for "hooliganism"? Yes, the former Soviet Union.
However, I don't think this goes far enough. I have a more Texan solution for the rep. to adopt. Kill them all.
Yes, it's well known that most crimes are committed by young men aged 16-30. Kill the lot of them. It'll stop most of the hacking, most of the file sharing, get rid of most of the drug addicts. It will get rid of most of the cheap foreign labor so senior US programmers will have jobs again. It will reduce US carbon dioxide output significantly so Bush can take credit for reducing global warming. It will reduce underage pregnancies. It will remove most of the opposition to the religious Right. It will greatly reduce drunk driving.
OK, the downside is that CD sales will fall catastrophically. But in these difficult times, we must all make sacrifices. Even the RIAA. And we could have a stonking great memorial in DC, to all the young men who gave their lives in the war against (file-sharing) terror.
Next off: Why they should bring in the death penalty for double parking.
Stupid? Not as stupid as "let's give a few people a major criminal record for a minor offence to discourage the others." Texas and Saudi: the similarities run deep.
Apart from the fact that the article is utter nonsense ( energy is needed to split water to hydrogen, where does the energy come from? The engine...so there is a net energy loss as heat compared to running without the hydrogen generator) there are two other points to make First, an acid filled generator will produce acid spray in the hydrogen. Which gets into the engine...which is made of aluminum and iron. Instant damaging corrosion time. If you use the alternative electrolyte, sodium hydroxide, that just dissolves the piston.
Second, it is possible that (assuming the article isn't a complete troll) the engine used was fouled up and the acid mist actually cleaned up the plugs a bit. Cleaning plugs on old dirty engines usually increases gas mileage for a short while till the thing starts poorly and fouls up again.
I don't know why chemistry teachers bother, honestly. Conservation of energy, thermal changes in reactions, then their little charges grow up and forget the lot, and start believing in fairy dust.
Buy a VW. The VW 1.9 litre turbo engine turns out between 100 and 150 horsepower depending on variant. The technology is basically that used on large marine Diesel engines, the most efficient you can get. 50-60 mp (US) gallon is achievable on highways. But don't believe the wilder claims of people who had Diesels in the early 80s. Believe me, I was working on Diesel R&D then, and the engines were nowhere near as good, or efficient, as we have now.
Haiku = Japanese form not directly translatable into English. OK?
5-7-5 = rigid format which cannot be directly related to original Haiku. Also OK?
Therefore the question has to be, does an attempt to represent the feel of haiku have to follow what are in effect arbitrary rules? I suggest not.
Spirit of haiku != programming language syntax.
In fact, the idea of a short poem based around a single feeling can manifest itself in other ways. I happen to like the limeraiku:
In Arabia,
baby, a girl just gets dust in her labia
which is a long way from haiku but would never have existed as a form had the haiku not existed.
Some of the element "haiku" are mildly amusing, some are thoughful, some belong with the Sweet Singer of Michigan, but the attempt to do something with a form is surely worth doing if only to see if it works. This is a mannered exercise in writing a very short verse on a single subject. Arguing about 5-7-5 or whether it works as a menmonic misses the file system checking point. Extending the Housman Test, I'd suggest that whether or not these verses work AS POETRY depends on:
Does reading one produce a sudden emotion?
Does it suddenly stick in your mind?
Does it feel as if it sprang naturally from its subject?
First, the boiling point of nitrogen is much lower than -100C. And the atmospheric pressure of nitrogen you would need to get a river to flow when the temperature dropped would mean a planet much bigger than Mars.
Second, the remarkable thing about water is that based on simple chemical rules it should not be a liquid at ordinary temperatures: ammonia, with a similar MW, is a gas. It is the strong hydrogen bonding between water molecules that gives it the high melting and boiling points, and the very wide range between them. The ideal liquid to sustain life has a wide range between MP and BP, dissolves a wide range of substances, is itself mostly unreactive, is made from elements common in planets, does not react with oxygen, hydrogen, carbon or sulphur in the liquid state at ordinary pressures, and is easily formed in chemical reactions (which implies a small molecule). Water fits the bill extremely well. Another liquid which is quite good is ethyl alcohol. The other small molecules (ammonia, nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, methyl alcohol, hydrogen cyanide) all fall down badly or one or more of the criteria.
Water may not be the only liquid that makes a suitable carrier for life, but it would be really hard to find a more suitable one. Human experiments to use alcohol instead are rarely successful for very long.
Read the post. I'm suggesting that a monopoly based on a kludgy architecture is a bad thing, just like a country with a one party government is a bad thing. Choice between an increasingly messy Intel archiecture and an increasingly messy similar AMD architecture isn't real choice, except in the short term.
Has anyone noticed how processors are getting to be like businesses and governments? I'm serious, and I don't think it's off-topic.
Businesses, as they develop, tend to end up supporting more and more legacy products and services, and relying on structures that have got stretched and stretched but actually changed as little as possible. Governments are held back by the weight of their Civil Services.
Back in the 70s and 80s, we had a completely new architecture every week (felt like..) and there was some real competition. But now the Intel x86 architecture is like some vast bloated Communist bureaucracy, with people in the back office still using quill pens and running mysterious private empires (Actually, we have 128 registers but we are only going to let you refer to 8, comrade. ) And all this stuff doubtless adds to development cost, power consumption, and die size.
What will make it collapse? A new clean 64 bit processor with wonderful porting tools? The combined skills of China, Taiwan and Korea? A completely new, simpler software design paradigm?
Or perhaps it doesn't matter and silicon is just so cheap that we can easily afford Soviet-bureaucracy-on-a-chip. But I doubt it. Ships eventually went from highly developed sail to steam and Diesel; trains went from steam to Diesel and electric; and phones are fast going from fixed to mobile. For the sake of my still finding this business interesting in five years time, I really hope there is a real paradigm shift around the corner.
Re:Coming soon from Lucas films...
on
Defining "Planet"
·
· Score: 1
Not coming any time. The UK builds some good satellites but has never been very successful with launchers. I guess "The Chinese Party member" is much more likely.
In fact, if you actually trace out the orbital paths, the moon does not "revolve" around the Earth. What actually happens is it is sometimes further from the sun and sometimes nearer, and it sometimes leads and sometimes lags the earth in orbit. This gives the appearance, from earth, of revolution, but from the point of view of an observer on a line perpendicular to the plane of the Ecliptic, it just looks like a wobble.
This is because the moon is so massive and close to earth compared to all other planetary moons in the solar system.
We need to define what a "moon" is, and I would suggest a definition based around the relative gravitational forces on the body of sun and primary. The sun is about 300000 earth masses and is about 400 times as far from the moon as the earth is - so a rough calculation suggests that the sun-moon gravity is about twice that between the moon and the earth. On this basis, the moon seems to be a satellite of the sun rather than the earth, and the earth-moon system is a dual planet. Despite the size of the inner moons of Jupiter, their paths are almost totally controlled by Jupiter's gravity and they are moons.
I can't find the reference, but I think Isaac Asimov may have made this point at greater length in a magazine article.
Yes, the microscope is cheap. It's making the really tiny lathes and milling machines cost all the money. You try building a lathe chuck one atom at a time, especially as you need to build in lots of carefully planned dislocations to make it rigid..
Repeat after me: the smaller the volume of production, the higher the unit cost.
You need to understand the difference between the US pancake ( CD-rom size only thicker) and the European crepe-type pancake (up to LP size, 30cm diameter, and beyond.) Even if you had a spatula large enough, you would struggle to get it under the crepe without tearing out the middle. Strange as it may seem, there is actually often reason and logic behind what foreigners do.
The BBC quotes a garbled version of the equation (haven't they got an equation setter? cheapskates) but clearly don't understand what it means.
AFAIUI it simply means that the pancake needs to spin at such a rate that it will flip 180 degrees between leaving the pan and returning. Given that it will not fall back flat unless the flip is 180n degrees, n integral, this is pretty blindingly obvious.
Unfortunately, the equation is just that and doesn't tell you how to achieve flip rate nirvana. So here is my guide:
First, use a nonstick pan with a gently sloping edge.
Second, use just enough oil to ensure the crepe can slide around smoothly.
Third, in order to flip, start by lowering the far edge of the pan so the crepe starts to slide towards the edge.
Then, as the crepe reaches the edge, rotate the elbow upwards so that the crepe slides off the edge in an upward direction. This provides the spin. The speed doesn't need to be too high. As the crepe flips over, catch it with the pan horizontal.
Start with small crepes and build up.
When I was first shown this technique in a creperie in Normandy, by the end of the evening I could flip them up to ceiling height and still recover them.
Creperies that use precooked crepes made on industrial conveyor belts are of course beyond the pale.
These unfortunate people need help badly. Where is the list of names and addresses? I have this brilliant scheme to recover lost assets, guaranteed no selling, no pyramid involved, just send cheque for GB£20000 to the following Lagos box number marked payable to bearer...
Seriously, though, has anybody considered how easy it would be to data mine the output from credit cards or supermarket loyalty cards etc. to identify gullible people? People with a big annual spend who buy gold plated hi-fi connectors, or crystals to stop damaging radiation from computer monitors, or some of the more ridiculously expensive "health" foods. Oh wait, I just saw the special offers on my credit card statement. Someone just did.
Given the number of gay men at Cambridge and the number who had been to British public (=private) schools and did not know the connection between women and the equipment below the waist, anybody heterosexual would have to be totally socially unacceptable or alternatively single by choice.
We are and we aren't. Rosalind Franklin did some very good X-ray analysis, but did not make the theoretical leap of Watson and Crick and did not share the Nobel prize. You can put forward a number of reasons for this including the MCPiggery of the scientists of the time (and, skirting around the laws of libel, in my own completely idiotic and prejudiced opinion neither Watson nor Crick had the personality traits of the Dalai Lama.) However, many scientists have combined great talents with difficult personalities (Newton being a prize example) and we shouldn't allow this to predudice us against recognising their actual achievements.
Any great discovery tends to be associated with a number of important but lesser discoveries, whether of theory or technique, and it would be nice if we could recognise those appropriately rather than have to try and link them directly with the main advance.
In two other cases of the last century, I have heard Mrs. Einstein got the money from the prize in exchange for allowing Albert all the credit, and Scientific American and other journals continue to link Jocelyn Bell Burnell's name with Geoffrey Hewish's. The mills of God grind slowly, but they tend to get there eventually.
Fusion power has been predicted to be just around the corner since the 50s. AFAIK the current technology approaches produce just as much radiation as fission and direct H+H->D fusion is just as far off as ever.
On the other hand the North Sea is windy and relatively shallow, and the basic technology for building platforms in it and running cables from it has been long established by the oil industry. Building wind farms in the North Sea actually looks like quite an exciting technical challenge with a real payoff. If the space program kickstarted the 60s high tech economy in the US, perhaps a serious wind farm program would do the same for the moribund, dismal UK economy.
As North Sea oil dries up the UK is predicted to become a net oil importer within 3 years - the stock market is far deader than the Dow Jones - if Blair doesn't do something soon there will be no money to pay the wages.
A rough calculation suggests that a flow of no more than 1.5 litres/min should be needed.(Water is an extremely effective heat removal fluid). This is very small indeed. So why is the equipment so big? The wall of the tubing is given as being 3mm thick. I would have thought that 5mm bore 1.5mm wall tubing would be more than adequate, with the result of much lower stresses on the heatsink, and much easier pipoe routing. The convector ("radiator") only needs to be large because the temperature differential between air and liquid is tiny and the design is extremely inefficient.
As for conformal coating, if you want to try this heed this well meant advice: use the brush on stuff. It is much less likely to get into connectors from BELOW (masking doesn't cover the holes on the board side of the connectors) and it is easier to apply around devices that have heat sinks or just need some air exposure.
I may be wrong but I am going to hazard a guess that a lot of this water cooling stuff is far bigger than necessary in order to look impressive - but that does not improve the performance, neither is a thick walled tube less likely to leak than a properly sized thin walled tube. Computers do not have high levels of vibration and cables and pipes crossing one another or rubbing on metal like they do in the more badly designed cars.
Because there is nothing technically interesting in high output high rev gasoline engines. That's just development, putting well established racing technology on the road unlike the cars in the article which have genuinely new technology, at least for cars.
The extremely cold gas is streaming outwards so fast it pushes the background radiation out of the way? What does this mean exactly?
What is driving the movement of the gas?
I may just be stupid, but this article seems to raise a lot more questions than it answers. Can someone expand this beyond newspaper-level pop science?
Slashdot Mirror
OK, they won't do it. There's a learning curve (though they'll have to retrain everybody when they eventually move to XP/Office 11, won't they?)But Indian companies might, they might get some real economic benefits from it, and McNealy is surely right in the general thrust of his argument.
Incidentally, and taking a less anglocentric view of the universe, how well do K/gnome/CDE support Indian languages compared to XP?
Sorry.
Now look at those in-car chargers which are just a plug to the lighter socket with some simple voltage conversion.
What I would like to see is simply a UPS with a suitably large battery and a set of those car sockets round the back, and neat little adaptors for gadgets that plug into those sockets. Maybe the sockets could even go on top and you plug in a Motorola, Nokia, Palm what have you socket adaptor so you just push the gadget in, no wires. Now I can run everything from the UPS, and in the event of mains power failure I can turn off the PC and then still use the battery to charge my PDA, phone, etc.
Fewer voltage conversions to go wrong, less power wasted in converting up and down. And, unlike this induction scheme, existing devices can easily be modified: they just need a 12V adaptor which many of them have anyway.
However, I don't think this goes far enough. I have a more Texan solution for the rep. to adopt.
Kill them all.
Yes, it's well known that most crimes are committed by young men aged 16-30. Kill the lot of them. It'll stop most of the hacking, most of the file sharing, get rid of most of the drug addicts. It will get rid of most of the cheap foreign labor so senior US programmers will have jobs again. It will reduce US carbon dioxide output significantly so Bush can take credit for reducing global warming. It will reduce underage pregnancies. It will remove most of the opposition to the religious Right. It will greatly reduce drunk driving.
OK, the downside is that CD sales will fall catastrophically. But in these difficult times, we must all make sacrifices. Even the RIAA. And we could have a stonking great memorial in DC, to all the young men who gave their lives in the war against (file-sharing) terror.
Next off: Why they should bring in the death penalty for double parking.
Stupid? Not as stupid as "let's give a few people a major criminal record for a minor offence to discourage the others." Texas and Saudi: the similarities run deep.
First, an acid filled generator will produce acid spray in the hydrogen. Which gets into the engine...which is made of aluminum and iron. Instant damaging corrosion time.
If you use the alternative electrolyte, sodium hydroxide, that just dissolves the piston.
Second, it is possible that (assuming the article isn't a complete troll) the engine used was fouled up and the acid mist actually cleaned up the plugs a bit. Cleaning plugs on old dirty engines usually increases gas mileage for a short while till the thing starts poorly and fouls up again.
I don't know why chemistry teachers bother, honestly. Conservation of energy, thermal changes in reactions, then their little charges grow up and forget the lot, and start believing in fairy dust.
Buy a VW. The VW 1.9 litre turbo engine turns out between 100 and 150 horsepower depending on variant. The technology is basically that used on large marine Diesel engines, the most efficient you can get. 50-60 mp (US) gallon is achievable on highways. But don't believe the wilder claims of people who had Diesels in the early 80s. Believe me, I was working on Diesel R&D then, and the engines were nowhere near as good, or efficient, as we have now.
5-7-5 = rigid format which cannot be directly related to original Haiku. Also OK?
Therefore the question has to be, does an attempt to represent the feel of haiku have to follow what are in effect arbitrary rules? I suggest not.
Spirit of haiku != programming language syntax.
In fact, the idea of a short poem based around a single feeling can manifest itself in other ways. I happen to like the limeraiku:
which is a long way from haiku but would never have existed as a form had the haiku not existed.Some of the element "haiku" are mildly amusing, some are thoughful, some belong with the Sweet Singer of Michigan, but the attempt to do something with a form is surely worth doing if only to see if it works. This is a mannered exercise in writing a very short verse on a single subject. Arguing about 5-7-5 or whether it works as a menmonic misses the file system checking point. Extending the Housman Test, I'd suggest that whether or not these verses work AS POETRY depends on:
Enough rant. Back to work.
Second, the remarkable thing about water is that based on simple chemical rules it should not be a liquid at ordinary temperatures: ammonia, with a similar MW, is a gas. It is the strong hydrogen bonding between water molecules that gives it the high melting and boiling points, and the very wide range between them. The ideal liquid to sustain life has a wide range between MP and BP, dissolves a wide range of substances, is itself mostly unreactive, is made from elements common in planets, does not react with oxygen, hydrogen, carbon or sulphur in the liquid state at ordinary pressures, and is easily formed in chemical reactions (which implies a small molecule). Water fits the bill extremely well. Another liquid which is quite good is ethyl alcohol. The other small molecules (ammonia, nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, methyl alcohol, hydrogen cyanide) all fall down badly or one or more of the criteria.
Water may not be the only liquid that makes a suitable carrier for life, but it would be really hard to find a more suitable one. Human experiments to use alcohol instead are rarely successful for very long.
Read the post. I'm suggesting that a monopoly based on a kludgy architecture is a bad thing, just like a country with a one party government is a bad thing. Choice between an increasingly messy Intel archiecture and an increasingly messy similar AMD architecture isn't real choice, except in the short term.
Businesses, as they develop, tend to end up supporting more and more legacy products and services, and relying on structures that have got stretched and stretched but actually changed as little as possible. Governments are held back by the weight of their Civil Services.
Back in the 70s and 80s, we had a completely new architecture every week (felt like..) and there was some real competition. But now the Intel x86 architecture is like some vast bloated Communist bureaucracy, with people in the back office still using quill pens and running mysterious private empires (Actually, we have 128 registers but we are only going to let you refer to 8, comrade. ) And all this stuff doubtless adds to development cost, power consumption, and die size.
What will make it collapse? A new clean 64 bit processor with wonderful porting tools? The combined skills of China, Taiwan and Korea? A completely new, simpler software design paradigm?
Or perhaps it doesn't matter and silicon is just so cheap that we can easily afford Soviet-bureaucracy-on-a-chip. But I doubt it. Ships eventually went from highly developed sail to steam and Diesel; trains went from steam to Diesel and electric; and phones are fast going from fixed to mobile. For the sake of my still finding this business interesting in five years time, I really hope there is a real paradigm shift around the corner.
Not coming any time. The UK builds some good satellites but has never been very successful with launchers. I guess "The Chinese Party member" is much more likely.
This is because the moon is so massive and close to earth compared to all other planetary moons in the solar system.
We need to define what a "moon" is, and I would suggest a definition based around the relative gravitational forces on the body of sun and primary. The sun is about 300000 earth masses and is about 400 times as far from the moon as the earth is - so a rough calculation suggests that the sun-moon gravity is about twice that between the moon and the earth. On this basis, the moon seems to be a satellite of the sun rather than the earth, and the earth-moon system is a dual planet. Despite the size of the inner moons of Jupiter, their paths are almost totally controlled by Jupiter's gravity and they are moons.
I can't find the reference, but I think Isaac Asimov may have made this point at greater length in a magazine article.
Repeat after me: the smaller the volume of production, the higher the unit cost.
You need to understand the difference between the US pancake ( CD-rom size only thicker) and the European crepe-type pancake (up to LP size, 30cm diameter, and beyond.) Even if you had a spatula large enough, you would struggle to get it under the crepe without tearing out the middle. Strange as it may seem, there is actually often reason and logic behind what foreigners do.
Thank you for the correction. It's nice to know there is intelligent life out there.
AFAIUI it simply means that the pancake needs to spin at such a rate that it will flip 180 degrees between leaving the pan and returning. Given that it will not fall back flat unless the flip is 180n degrees, n integral, this is pretty blindingly obvious.
Unfortunately, the equation is just that and doesn't tell you how to achieve flip rate nirvana. So here is my guide:
- First, use a nonstick pan with a gently sloping edge.
- Second, use just enough oil to ensure the crepe can slide around smoothly.
- Third, in order to flip, start by lowering the far edge of the pan so the crepe starts to slide towards the edge.
- Then, as the crepe reaches the edge, rotate the elbow upwards so that the crepe slides off the edge in an upward direction. This provides the spin. The speed doesn't need to be too high. As the crepe flips over, catch it with the pan horizontal.
- Start with small crepes and build up.
- When I was first shown this technique in a creperie in Normandy, by the end of the evening I could flip them up to ceiling height and still recover them.
Creperies that use precooked crepes made on industrial conveyor belts are of course beyond the pale.Seriously, though, has anybody considered how easy it would be to data mine the output from credit cards or supermarket loyalty cards etc. to identify gullible people? People with a big annual spend who buy gold plated hi-fi connectors, or crystals to stop damaging radiation from computer monitors, or some of the more ridiculously expensive "health" foods. Oh wait, I just saw the special offers on my credit card statement. Someone just did.
Given the number of gay men at Cambridge and the number who had been to British public (=private) schools and did not know the connection between women and the equipment below the waist, anybody heterosexual would have to be totally socially unacceptable or alternatively single by choice.
Any great discovery tends to be associated with a number of important but lesser discoveries, whether of theory or technique, and it would be nice if we could recognise those appropriately rather than have to try and link them directly with the main advance.
In two other cases of the last century, I have heard Mrs. Einstein got the money from the prize in exchange for allowing Albert all the credit, and Scientific American and other journals continue to link Jocelyn Bell Burnell's name with Geoffrey Hewish's. The mills of God grind slowly, but they tend to get there eventually.
I'm reminded of the flyby in 2010 where Heywood indicates his preference for over-engineered Russian heatshields. Clarke being prescient as usual?
On the other hand the North Sea is windy and relatively shallow, and the basic technology for building platforms in it and running cables from it has been long established by the oil industry. Building wind farms in the North Sea actually looks like quite an exciting technical challenge with a real payoff. If the space program kickstarted the 60s high tech economy in the US, perhaps a serious wind farm program would do the same for the moribund, dismal UK economy.
As North Sea oil dries up the UK is predicted to become a net oil importer within 3 years - the stock market is far deader than the Dow Jones - if Blair doesn't do something soon there will be no money to pay the wages.
As for conformal coating, if you want to try this heed this well meant advice: use the brush on stuff. It is much less likely to get into connectors from BELOW (masking doesn't cover the holes on the board side of the connectors) and it is easier to apply around devices that have heat sinks or just need some air exposure.
I may be wrong but I am going to hazard a guess that a lot of this water cooling stuff is far bigger than necessary in order to look impressive - but that does not improve the performance, neither is a thick walled tube less likely to leak than a properly sized thin walled tube. Computers do not have high levels of vibration and cables and pipes crossing one another or rubbing on metal like they do in the more badly designed cars.
Write the V backwards. It's in the FAQ.
Because there is nothing technically interesting in high output high rev gasoline engines. That's just development, putting well established racing technology on the road unlike the cars in the article which have genuinely new technology, at least for cars.
What is driving the movement of the gas?
I may just be stupid, but this article seems to raise a lot more questions than it answers. Can someone expand this beyond newspaper-level pop science?