would be a user interface that allows a real dog to do useful things. Spaniels in particular are quite intelligent and their brainpower is woefully under-utilised. Among things our spaniel would probably like to see:
Door opener and closer
Remote controlled steerable pressure jet for blasting cats
On-demand biscuit dispenser
iPong, which downloads and dispenses interesting smells (including the x-rated sites which have smells of hot lady dogs)
If, as someone points out elsewhere, these consoles are optimised to handle rendering of backgrounds rather than general purpose computing, wouldn't it be more interesting to see if, with a suitable architecture, they couldn't be used in thin(ish) client applications? Perhaps an Xbox is just the thing to render Looking Glass (the proposed Sun 3d desktop) when (if) it is eventually commercialised.
Perhaps IBM doesn't just want to sell chips to these people. Perhaps it has a reason for selling the PC division to Lenovo. Perhaps it sees an opportunity to create a business architecture in which the virtual business world runs on the server farm, while the graphics and sound capability of the very cheap clients delivers a superior user experience that makes users happy not to have a "PC" on their desk. Meanwhile the data mining and compute-intensive activities are farmed out to those clients while they aren't being used. Fault tolerant. Cheap to extend. And round objects to Microsoft.
I'm quite convinced that Karl Rove et al take the history of the Roman Empire very seriously in assessing how to preserve the special status of the American ruling class (=patricians.)
The point about the Roman Empire was that there was nowhere to hide for its citizens. The reason that, when accused of crimes, senators went off and committed suicide was that there was nowhere to escape to. This gave the people in power effectively total control.
In classical Rome, just like Elizabethan England, huge networks of paid informers ensured that the government knew what people were thinking. The result was that the upper classes could continue their internecine wars (i.e. kill one another) while knowing that the system that kept them, as a class, in power was secure. There was no risk that while they were slaughtering one another, the peasants would revolt. Of course, in Rome the emperor also had a private security force - but ultimate power was controlled by whoever had the support of the army. So one Imperial tactic was to keep the army as far away from Rome as possible fighting foreign wars.
Step 1: Build time machine
Step 2: Go 5 years into past, buy domain names, set up sites with lots of soft porn images
Step 3: Return to present, stopping off each year on the way to renew domains.
Step 4: Sell to spammers etc.
Step 5: Profit.
I'm open to venture capitalists for investment in this one.
I'm sure Exxon would confirm we need the natural gas before we run out of stuff to help keep our planet warm and fend off those pesky ice ages, during which even the biggest SUV would find it hard to get out of the drive, which would have major adverse effects on junior soccer leagues.
Meanwhile, the idiots on these remote asteroids have volcanos and seas full of the stuff and are doing absolutely nothing to exploit it.
Rummy really needs to get out there with some ex-military contractors and get started on the pipeline. Looks like there's not too much risk of anyone firing RPGs at the construction force, either.
The heat removal from a refrigerator is pretty small and the overall combination of limited efficiency in the heat pump and limited air flow over the fins means it would be far less effective than the simplest fan arrangement.
Efficient small refrigerators are in fact shockingly expensive. I have an Isotherm which would house a PC quite nicely, but cost nearly $1000. And it would be able to remove about 24 watts in continuous running, just enough to cool a small ITX system with no graphics capability.
Reminds me of years ago when we tried to cool a CCD with a Peltier device in a prototype military system and the extra power needed to drive the Peltier meant that the case interior got hotter, not colder.
A pretty bright hardware engineer but with no sense of proportion. He built himself a 24 bit (yes...24 bit) cpu out of 4 bit slice components with a custom instruction set which if I remember rightly ran at about 2MHz. When I asked why he said, well, Intel haven't got a 32 bit chip yet, perhaps they would like my design for a 24 bit one instead. I am still unsure as to whether he was joking...Unfortunately I never really took in the details because I was too busy trying to get our multi-cpu 68010 based real time beast going at the time.
Mike, if you read this you'll know it's you. Keep taking the medicine, huh?
The Park Lane Hilton is a very ordinary hotel. Anybody who describes it as swanky needs to get out more. Mind you, they used to do a good afternoon tea. Back in the 70s.... Now Browns is a swanky hotel. And the Savoy was, once, before it was taken over. But, and I'm sorry to destroy anybody's fantasies, the London Hilton is about as swanky as Paris Hilton, and for much the same reason.
Any other older-timers may remember the already very slow RCA 1802 CMOS processor. I used one of these in a home-made portable EPROM programmer, which allowed you to enter data from a keypad to make tiny patches to tiny machine code programs. To increase battery life, the thing was clocked using a 2MHz crystal (enough for the eprom programming) but when it wasn't burning, it ran on a 20KHz clock which was enough for the keypad data entry. The result was a power consumption in the low hundreds of microamps when idle, rather than 10mA or so. To those who say, why not just turn it off? I have to explain that in those days flash memory came in units of 64 expensive bytes. The battery power was necessary to keep the CMOS static RAM alive.
Thank you for letting me share this old-timer drivelling on slashdot.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the next generation of the Palm Os going to be Linux based? And aren't Nokia going to bring out a nifty little mini-Tablet later this year? And isn't Google just ramping up for when bandwidth up as well as down is cheap and they can provide everything you really need anywhere in the world to your simple little tablet device with its 10 hour fuel cell? And doesn't the OO technology make it easily feasible to push just as much word processor, spreadsheet or what have you technology to your tablet to do your day to day office needs, while ensuring that your software version is always up to date?
All these technologies seem to be converging really quickly just at the moment.
Joe public is faced with computers that are just too hard to maintain except for specialists. By moving all these issues of data management, backup, version control, virus prevention etc. to big clusters of servers out of sight, the opportunity exists to produce computers that exceed the Mac in ease of use. And perhaps the answer to Linux on the desktop is that the servers will run Linux and the end user will no longer even have to have the minimal clue about what an operating system is, any more than he knows what processor runs the engine management in his car.
Sure, people will produce plug in appliances to do home movie editing, and specialised games machine will continue to develop. But, think about it. Microsoft grew because the smaller, cheaper PC supplanted the mini. Google's opportunity is to provide services to the smaller, cheaper thing that supplants the PC.
Oh, and predictions of the future are always wrong.
This is a link to a seriously interesting article which actually negates much of my own earlier post by suggesting that the US could, in fact, afford to produce all its transportation oil needs from biodiesel. Even if the estimates are quite a long way adrift, it still looks feasible over maybe a 20 year timescale- in fact, if the present administration didn't have such ties to the oil industry, perhaps now would be the time to start amassing shares in biodiesel companies.
However, the implication is that if the US had a rational energy policy, the administration would be throwing its legislative weight the way of Diesel now so that the gas replacement strategies are well under way. The issue is simply that the Diesel cycle is a vastly more efficient way of using naturally occurring plant oils than the Benz cycle, and the author points out the basic impracticability of the hydrogen economy, which is intended to keep the oil industry in a revenue stream from remaining natural gas reserves for as long as possible.
As far as I can see, these processes may just be reproducing the original events that led to oil being underground in the first place. Since the energy input is solar, the overall limitations on eventual output are subject to the same constraints as any form of solar power. However, we are using the underground oil up very much faster than it was laid down, and biodiesel as a replacement fuel won't work without severe energy conservation measures. The biggest problem for the US is that cheap oil has caused people to go and live in places (suburbs,sun-belt) that will be uninhabitable without that cheap oil. A policy of replacing gas engines with Diesel engines would help, but only by a maximum of about 25% of the current transport oil consumption. There would also be the enormous incremental oil usage involved in prematurely retiring and replacing all those engines and the oil distribution system.
In effect, the people who will benefit most from oil replacement technologies are the Chinese, the Indians, and Europeans. This is because they start from a lower energy base, they are used to living in their existing environments without air conditioning and cheap transport (transport fuel in Europe is much more expensive than in the US) and so they will not build the unaffordable infrastructure because their development will take place against a background of energy constraints.
This leads to an interesting future scenario in which the US engages in more and more wars to safeguard its oil supply, and Europe engages more and more closely with Russia and Iran to conserve theirs while using the spaces of Russia, the Ukraine and Eastern Europe to grow oil replacement crops, develop wind energy and build nuclear stations. The question is whether, in the long run, the US has the political will and ability to curb its demand for oil before the oil runs out. Will a future US president have to face the evacuation of Arizona and large parts of Texas? How will society adapt to the flight from the suburbs to the affordable cities?
Will the world's banking systems continue to underwrite US debt when it is clear the economy is running completely on empty? Sometimes I wish I had stuck to my original idea of writing science fiction. The 21st century is certainly giving us some interesting scenarios to think about.
It's simple economics. The British government for some bizarre reason wants a national electronic ID card that is going to cost nearly $200 a head - yes, really. That's $10bn going from the UK GNP to fund IT companies. Naturally, the US would like a slice of the $10bn. (Most of it will go to US-owned IT companies anyway, but getting all of it won't hurt.)
Look at it like this. The US may have an awful lot of sheep that are having their freedom eroded by the political class, but the British are even more sheeplike. And all that the British prime minister gets out of this is the occasional phot with G Bush and a few well paid lecture tours after he finally gets the push - no oil billions. It reminds me of the sad comment of a member of the intelligence services: "It's depressing how little money some people will sell their country for."
They suffer from imagination deficiency. Apart from disrupting things like pipelines, which (as I discovered when working for a company that made pipeline parts, among other things) have some interesting design deficiencies, there is the potential to do things like change the schedule of estuarine sewage pumps so that they pump out on the rising, not the falling tide. Or change the dosing pump settings on water treatment plants. Most of the world is incredibly dependent on clean water and sewage treatment, with river pollution so high as to make untreated water undrinkable. Serious disruption to the water system would kill or make sick a lot of old people and young children - and, just like US and Russian landmines that are designed to injure children rather than kill them, this would have disruptive effects out of proportion to the numbers and economic activity of those affected.
I really do not know why supporters of the BBC Micro and its descendants still bother, given that each successive generation eventually gets buried at a crossroads, but please someone get the flaming torches and the villagers with pitchforks, and put a stake through the thing's heart. It's sad and pathetic to see it flapping around trying to get off the ground, and even if it does its chance that anything will stay around long enough to be bitten in the neck is nonexistent. It was a good design for the 70s, folks, it was OK for the 80s, but this is the 21st century and we use those things for PDAs. If you want to build a competitor for the Mac Mini, there's the AMD 64 mobile technology just asking for a Novell/Suse 9.3 build. Please?
Either this is a feeble troll or you need to learn some chemistry. Diamond is made from carbon atoms in a covalent three dimensional structure. The carbon atoms are not "mashed together", any more than crushing sand would produce a single silica crystal. It is the fact that the carbon atoms are arranged in the precise lattice that makes diamond diamond rather than a lump of coal. The hardness arises because it requires a great deal of force to move an atom from one covalent bond to another. Crystals like sodium chloride which can be grown from solution have little covalent character: they are mostly ionic and so not as physically strong as the covalent diamond structure. This is probably the source of your confusion.
Metals consist of electrostatically bonded atoms which can slip without breaking covalent bonds, so that they can never be as hard as covalent bonded compounds. Hard cutting tools consist of a covalent substance such as WC embedded in a metal matrix. Diamond cutting tools work the same way.
Trying to get into places they shouldn't, whether it is safes or knickers, is something that adolescent boys are programmed to do. Anybody responsible for school systems has an obligation to understand this and deal with it. This is nothing to do with social relativism, as the more fascist/.ers seem to think: it's elementary precaution. Regardless of the motivation of the hackers, the people responsible for the system should be required to be trained in security (and perhaps be downgraded till they had passed their exam) because they failed to take account of something widely known in education. If the zoo keeper leaves the doors unlocked on the lion cages, the lions may escape and end up having to be shot, but what about the zoo keeper?
The truth is the lazy, idle and incompetent always prefer the cover up to the fix. Whether it is the Roman Catholic church and child abuse, torture at Guantanamo Bay, or security holes, the people in charge will conceal rather than cure. Two examples from my own career:
I was once asked to investigate the apparent failure of an automated component test system. Eventually a review of the hardware and software left the only option as being that the production personnel were deliberately falsifying results and passing rejected batches. Result: three senior managers demanding I be sacked. Fortunately at this point we acquired a new CEO who had several clues. One manager was fired, one left of his own accord and the other was downgraded. But customer confidence had been eroded and the plant eventually had to be shut down. The second example was less exciting: a production director who resisted for years the introduction of statistical process control because it would make clear where systems were failing.
I'm sure many of us have similar examples. It is not in fact important what the motivation of the whistle blower is, we need to change the culture to one in which the response is "Fix it", not "shoot the messenger". With hindsight, we may one day conclude that the tradition of open bug fixing is FOSS is its greatest social legacy.
For the few who don't know, a magneto is a self-energising spark generator for spark-ignition internal combustion engines. It consists, basically, of a magnet (duh), a coil and a contact breaker. Either the coil or the magnet rotates, generating current which passes through the coil until the breaker opens when, in accordance with the laws of conservation of energy, the energy has to go somewhere and some of it ends up in the spark. (Yes, this is real electrotechnology 101.)
The hand-cranked generators used on early telephones and, for rather longer, on field telephones was also called a magneto, and I guess this is why Microsoft has expropriated yet another common word for its products.
So from this important piece of information we can work out the features of magneto the operating system:
It will be capable of doing only one thing at a time
It will generate a lot of stray EMI
The user interface will suck: it will need a lot of hand cranking and point setting to work properly
It will be replaced by something better just as soon as it becomes available.
And yes, I still have bitter and twisted memories of the magnetos on my Vincent, my Velo...in fact, every British motorbike I ever owned. Not that I'm in any way prejudiced (I was stupid to buy the things)
You can take a picture using an unstructured light source and a structured receiver (e.g. a light bulb and a camera). Or you can use a structured light source (e.g. an LCD projector) and an unstructured light sensor (e.g. a photodiode.)
OK, the stitching together is harder in the latter case, maybe an awful lot harder, but unless I have missed something really big it is a statement of the nearly obvious. Anyone remember the scanning electron microscope? By collecting backscattered electrons, you could use one of those to see around (very small) corners.
Or I am completely wrong and this is something very much more clever. If so, please can someone explain?
I have to point out that Aspergers is basically a diagnosis of a particular behavior pattern. For some reason the behavior pattern of many people in public life - e.g. many politicians - is not diagnosed as a disorder, though some people might think that alcoholism, control freakery, leaving a trail of kids fathered on different women, exploitation of people in inferior positions, and finding dubious reasons to invade foreign countries were much more serious disorders in terms of their effect on society.
Men with Aspergers often end up in jobs where they make the nuts and bolts of society run, because they can focus on them. And, in fact (sorry about the myth destruction) many of them do get laid. And seem to have mostly normal kids... Men with alpha male social disorder frequently end up killing people, destroying social structures and generally making people's lives a misery. It's a matter of perception.
I have a feeling that in earlier societies where there were no chattering classes, the intelligent people with Aspergers ended up as priests or shamans and acted as a check or balance on the alphas. Prophets like Nathan and Jeremiah with their tendency to flame people in public and obsessions with strange things would seem to have exhibited at least some of the symptoms of Aspergers.
I am not denying that Aspergers makes normal social relations difficult. I probably have a mild version of it but never needed to get formally diagnosed: I know of people who have it more seriously and it can be a real handicap. But it is not usually as severe a handicap as being stupid, being brought up by useless parents, or growing up in a criminal society like the Jamaican or LA gang culture.
and was of a completely different style from Lewis. (He was also embarrassingly anti-semitic as was his friend Hilaire Belloc.)
Dorothy L Sayers shouldn't be mentioned in the same paragraph. When she was advised that a character in one of her books could be taken as anti-Semitic, she promptly started to write in positive but not over-signalled Jewish characters.
I mention this because one thing that does stand out about the writings of CSL is that, like Sayers, he was a Christian but not a fundamentalist bigot - he was too well educated, well connected and well read for that. In his adult science fiction he started to play with the idea that Christianity was a partial revelation, and that the battle between good and evil was going on in other civilisations elsewhere in the universe. It's a pity he got over mystical and started to bring in the Arthurian legends, because there is stuff in That Hideous Strength which to my mind spoils the book. But I guess no-one will make a film of it anyway, because it is anti-corporatist, anti-Statist and proposes that a small group of activists can and should employ rather violent means to defeat a technocratic dictatorship. In fact, if the Department of Homeland Security is reading this, you might want to investigate who has been reading That Hideous Strength. They might be potential terrorists.
But I am increasingly worried about it. Anybody who has studied the history of science will be aware that there have been regressions in the past - the destruction of the advanced Moorish kingdom in Spain by the Habsburgs being one example - but never before has a major world power seemed to start an intellectual regression out of religious fundamentalism. When you think of the societies that made significant scientific progress - the Athenian empire, the Arabs during the European Dark Ages, the Italian city states in the Renaissance, Europe during the Enlightenment, Victorian Britain, Bismarck's united Germany, and the US for much of the late 19th and 20th Centuries - these were societies in which religious ideas were in flux as much as scientific ones. Now we have a situation in which rigid, inflexible religious bigots who, let's face it, cannot even take on a theological argument with other religions without shouting, think it's time to start suppressing scientific enquiry. It's bad news for the rest of us.
I was doing something I rarely do, the other day, actually watching a made-for-TV science program, from the UK and about the small people found in Indonesia. The presenters were casually discussing the course of human evolution over the last hundred thousand years or so. It suddenly occurred to me that, free speech notwithstanding, before long not many schools in the US would be able to show that program without giving equal time to a book-thumper telling the kids that carbon dating is the devil's mumbo-jumbo. Now that's depressing.
And this from barbarians so ignorant of even their own religion that most of them could not read the first word of their first sacred book in the original.
If you read the article, you may realise that the point here is that the US lags the rest of the developed world in using engineered cement composites. Back in dead tree days, Scientific American had an interesting article on how restrictive building codes and fear of litigation was causing the US to lag behind in road and building construction because more modern materials could not be used. This results in higher build and repair costs for roads and bridges and explains the poor maintenance of many US highways.
The article is essentially saying that, at last, someone is prepared to experiment with ECCs in the US on a small scale following a test in a difficult area. Meanwhile, advantage has been taken of these materials in the Far East for a number of years. This is important because in many ways the US is becoming depressingly conservative. It is no longer a world leader in innovative building. Ford and GM have just seen their shares reduced to junk status as the Japanese and Daimler-Chrysler increase their share of the US auto market. And the whole IP/copyright thing is basically about trying to protect what you have rather than innovate and create new markets. If this little experiment is a sign that someone is getting brave enough to risk trial lawyers (my client tripped over a kerb as a result of using this unproven concrete technology...) perhaps it's a green shoot.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps IBM doesn't just want to sell chips to these people. Perhaps it has a reason for selling the PC division to Lenovo. Perhaps it sees an opportunity to create a business architecture in which the virtual business world runs on the server farm, while the graphics and sound capability of the very cheap clients delivers a superior user experience that makes users happy not to have a "PC" on their desk. Meanwhile the data mining and compute-intensive activities are farmed out to those clients while they aren't being used. Fault tolerant. Cheap to extend. And round objects to Microsoft.
I'm quite convinced that Karl Rove et al take the history of the Roman Empire very seriously in assessing how to preserve the special status of the American ruling class (=patricians.)
The point about the Roman Empire was that there was nowhere to hide for its citizens. The reason that, when accused of crimes, senators went off and committed suicide was that there was nowhere to escape to. This gave the people in power effectively total control.
In classical Rome, just like Elizabethan England, huge networks of paid informers ensured that the government knew what people were thinking. The result was that the upper classes could continue their internecine wars (i.e. kill one another) while knowing that the system that kept them, as a class, in power was secure. There was no risk that while they were slaughtering one another, the peasants would revolt. Of course, in Rome the emperor also had a private security force - but ultimate power was controlled by whoever had the support of the army. So one Imperial tactic was to keep the army as far away from Rome as possible fighting foreign wars.
Any similarities are purely coicidental.
Step 2: Go 5 years into past, buy domain names, set up sites with lots of soft porn images
Step 3: Return to present, stopping off each year on the way to renew domains. Step 4: Sell to spammers etc.
Step 5: Profit.
I'm open to venture capitalists for investment in this one.
Meanwhile, the idiots on these remote asteroids have volcanos and seas full of the stuff and are doing absolutely nothing to exploit it.
Rummy really needs to get out there with some ex-military contractors and get started on the pipeline. Looks like there's not too much risk of anyone firing RPGs at the construction force, either.
Efficient small refrigerators are in fact shockingly expensive. I have an Isotherm which would house a PC quite nicely, but cost nearly $1000. And it would be able to remove about 24 watts in continuous running, just enough to cool a small ITX system with no graphics capability.
Reminds me of years ago when we tried to cool a CCD with a Peltier device in a prototype military system and the extra power needed to drive the Peltier meant that the case interior got hotter, not colder.
Mike, if you read this you'll know it's you. Keep taking the medicine, huh?
The Park Lane Hilton is a very ordinary hotel. Anybody who describes it as swanky needs to get out more. Mind you, they used to do a good afternoon tea. Back in the 70s....
Now Browns is a swanky hotel. And the Savoy was, once, before it was taken over. But, and I'm sorry to destroy anybody's fantasies, the London Hilton is about as swanky as Paris Hilton, and for much the same reason.
Thank you for letting me share this old-timer drivelling on slashdot.
All these technologies seem to be converging really quickly just at the moment.
Joe public is faced with computers that are just too hard to maintain except for specialists. By moving all these issues of data management, backup, version control, virus prevention etc. to big clusters of servers out of sight, the opportunity exists to produce computers that exceed the Mac in ease of use. And perhaps the answer to Linux on the desktop is that the servers will run Linux and the end user will no longer even have to have the minimal clue about what an operating system is, any more than he knows what processor runs the engine management in his car.
Sure, people will produce plug in appliances to do home movie editing, and specialised games machine will continue to develop. But, think about it. Microsoft grew because the smaller, cheaper PC supplanted the mini. Google's opportunity is to provide services to the smaller, cheaper thing that supplants the PC.
Oh, and predictions of the future are always wrong.
However, the implication is that if the US had a rational energy policy, the administration would be throwing its legislative weight the way of Diesel now so that the gas replacement strategies are well under way. The issue is simply that the Diesel cycle is a vastly more efficient way of using naturally occurring plant oils than the Benz cycle, and the author points out the basic impracticability of the hydrogen economy, which is intended to keep the oil industry in a revenue stream from remaining natural gas reserves for as long as possible.
In effect, the people who will benefit most from oil replacement technologies are the Chinese, the Indians, and Europeans. This is because they start from a lower energy base, they are used to living in their existing environments without air conditioning and cheap transport (transport fuel in Europe is much more expensive than in the US) and so they will not build the unaffordable infrastructure because their development will take place against a background of energy constraints.
This leads to an interesting future scenario in which the US engages in more and more wars to safeguard its oil supply, and Europe engages more and more closely with Russia and Iran to conserve theirs while using the spaces of Russia, the Ukraine and Eastern Europe to grow oil replacement crops, develop wind energy and build nuclear stations. The question is whether, in the long run, the US has the political will and ability to curb its demand for oil before the oil runs out. Will a future US president have to face the evacuation of Arizona and large parts of Texas? How will society adapt to the flight from the suburbs to the affordable cities?
Will the world's banking systems continue to underwrite US debt when it is clear the economy is running completely on empty? Sometimes I wish I had stuck to my original idea of writing science fiction. The 21st century is certainly giving us some interesting scenarios to think about.
Look at it like this. The US may have an awful lot of sheep that are having their freedom eroded by the political class, but the British are even more sheeplike. And all that the British prime minister gets out of this is the occasional phot with G Bush and a few well paid lecture tours after he finally gets the push - no oil billions. It reminds me of the sad comment of a member of the intelligence services: "It's depressing how little money some people will sell their country for."
They suffer from imagination deficiency. Apart from disrupting things like pipelines, which (as I discovered when working for a company that made pipeline parts, among other things) have some interesting design deficiencies, there is the potential to do things like change the schedule of estuarine sewage pumps so that they pump out on the rising, not the falling tide. Or change the dosing pump settings on water treatment plants. Most of the world is incredibly dependent on clean water and sewage treatment, with river pollution so high as to make untreated water undrinkable. Serious disruption to the water system would kill or make sick a lot of old people and young children - and, just like US and Russian landmines that are designed to injure children rather than kill them, this would have disruptive effects out of proportion to the numbers and economic activity of those affected.
I really do not know why supporters of the BBC Micro and its descendants still bother, given that each successive generation eventually gets buried at a crossroads, but please someone get the flaming torches and the villagers with pitchforks, and put a stake through the thing's heart. It's sad and pathetic to see it flapping around trying to get off the ground, and even if it does its chance that anything will stay around long enough to be bitten in the neck is nonexistent. It was a good design for the 70s, folks, it was OK for the 80s, but this is the 21st century and we use those things for PDAs. If you want to build a competitor for the Mac Mini, there's the AMD 64 mobile technology just asking for a Novell/Suse 9.3 build. Please?
Metals consist of electrostatically bonded atoms which can slip without breaking covalent bonds, so that they can never be as hard as covalent bonded compounds. Hard cutting tools consist of a covalent substance such as WC embedded in a metal matrix. Diamond cutting tools work the same way.
The truth is the lazy, idle and incompetent always prefer the cover up to the fix. Whether it is the Roman Catholic church and child abuse, torture at Guantanamo Bay, or security holes, the people in charge will conceal rather than cure. Two examples from my own career:
I was once asked to investigate the apparent failure of an automated component test system. Eventually a review of the hardware and software left the only option as being that the production personnel were deliberately falsifying results and passing rejected batches. Result: three senior managers demanding I be sacked. Fortunately at this point we acquired a new CEO who had several clues. One manager was fired, one left of his own accord and the other was downgraded. But customer confidence had been eroded and the plant eventually had to be shut down. The second example was less exciting: a production director who resisted for years the introduction of statistical process control because it would make clear where systems were failing.
I'm sure many of us have similar examples. It is not in fact important what the motivation of the whistle blower is, we need to change the culture to one in which the response is "Fix it", not "shoot the messenger". With hindsight, we may one day conclude that the tradition of open bug fixing is FOSS is its greatest social legacy.
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry
I actually took care to preserve Blake's exact half rhyme. I may write feeble burlesques, but I do try to retain the scansion and rhyme schemes.
What immortal hand or eye
Protects thy brand integrity?
Under India's burning skies
IP issues do not rise
If you've passed on being shot
You still can't sue the goddam lot
Genus felis does not code
Nor shifts boxes by the load
Salesmen in expensive shirts
Don't care if your image hurts
Tiger,tiger burning bright
In the forests of the night
Though extinction faces you
It faces all those brand-names, too
With sincere apologies to William Blake.
The hand-cranked generators used on early telephones and, for rather longer, on field telephones was also called a magneto, and I guess this is why Microsoft has expropriated yet another common word for its products.
So from this important piece of information we can work out the features of magneto the operating system:
- It will be capable of doing only one thing at a time
- It will generate a lot of stray EMI
- The user interface will suck: it will need a lot of hand cranking and point setting to work properly
- It will be replaced by something better just as soon as it becomes available.
And yes, I still have bitter and twisted memories of the magnetos on my Vincent, my Velo...in fact, every British motorbike I ever owned. Not that I'm in any way prejudiced (I was stupid to buy the things)OK, the stitching together is harder in the latter case, maybe an awful lot harder, but unless I have missed something really big it is a statement of the nearly obvious. Anyone remember the scanning electron microscope? By collecting backscattered electrons, you could use one of those to see around (very small) corners.
Or I am completely wrong and this is something very much more clever. If so, please can someone explain?
Men with Aspergers often end up in jobs where they make the nuts and bolts of society run, because they can focus on them. And, in fact (sorry about the myth destruction) many of them do get laid. And seem to have mostly normal kids... Men with alpha male social disorder frequently end up killing people, destroying social structures and generally making people's lives a misery. It's a matter of perception.
I have a feeling that in earlier societies where there were no chattering classes, the intelligent people with Aspergers ended up as priests or shamans and acted as a check or balance on the alphas. Prophets like Nathan and Jeremiah with their tendency to flame people in public and obsessions with strange things would seem to have exhibited at least some of the symptoms of Aspergers.
I am not denying that Aspergers makes normal social relations difficult. I probably have a mild version of it but never needed to get formally diagnosed: I know of people who have it more seriously and it can be a real handicap. But it is not usually as severe a handicap as being stupid, being brought up by useless parents, or growing up in a criminal society like the Jamaican or LA gang culture.
Dorothy L Sayers shouldn't be mentioned in the same paragraph. When she was advised that a character in one of her books could be taken as anti-Semitic, she promptly started to write in positive but not over-signalled Jewish characters.
I mention this because one thing that does stand out about the writings of CSL is that, like Sayers, he was a Christian but not a fundamentalist bigot - he was too well educated, well connected and well read for that. In his adult science fiction he started to play with the idea that Christianity was a partial revelation, and that the battle between good and evil was going on in other civilisations elsewhere in the universe. It's a pity he got over mystical and started to bring in the Arthurian legends, because there is stuff in That Hideous Strength which to my mind spoils the book. But I guess no-one will make a film of it anyway, because it is anti-corporatist, anti-Statist and proposes that a small group of activists can and should employ rather violent means to defeat a technocratic dictatorship. In fact, if the Department of Homeland Security is reading this, you might want to investigate who has been reading That Hideous Strength. They might be potential terrorists.
I was doing something I rarely do, the other day, actually watching a made-for-TV science program, from the UK and about the small people found in Indonesia. The presenters were casually discussing the course of human evolution over the last hundred thousand years or so. It suddenly occurred to me that, free speech notwithstanding, before long not many schools in the US would be able to show that program without giving equal time to a book-thumper telling the kids that carbon dating is the devil's mumbo-jumbo. Now that's depressing.
And this from barbarians so ignorant of even their own religion that most of them could not read the first word of their first sacred book in the original.
This results in higher build and repair costs for roads and bridges and explains the poor maintenance of many US highways.
The article is essentially saying that, at last, someone is prepared to experiment with ECCs in the US on a small scale following a test in a difficult area. Meanwhile, advantage has been taken of these materials in the Far East for a number of years.
This is important because in many ways the US is becoming depressingly conservative. It is no longer a world leader in innovative building. Ford and GM have just seen their shares reduced to junk status as the Japanese and Daimler-Chrysler increase their share of the US auto market. And the whole IP/copyright thing is basically about trying to protect what you have rather than innovate and create new markets. If this little experiment is a sign that someone is getting brave enough to risk trial lawyers (my client tripped over a kerb as a result of using this unproven concrete technology...) perhaps it's a green shoot.