For a while there were CPUs specifically designed to run
LISP, aka AI . Symbolics was one of the better knowns one.
It failed in bankrupcy. My vague understanding was that the designing dedicated LISP processors was hard and slow and with little resources they could not keep up. Essentially the Symbolics computers ran LIPS pretty quickly given the MHZ but SUN and Intel kept moving up the MHZ faster than Symbolics could keep up. In the end there were not speed advantage to a dedicated LISP machine, just an increase in price. Economics might change eventually. Who knows.
It's quite likely that you don't need heat if your power interruption is only going to be 8 hours. During the
Quebec ice storm we were out of electricity for 7 days. The house will stay decently warm for the first 2 days. It will be chilly for the next 2 and getting cold after that. But even after 7 days the appartement was still above freezing in weather that was always a little below freezing.
My recommendation: don't sweat 8 hours of power failiures.
That said, if you really need electricity, say to prevent perishable from going bad your best bet is a generator essentially because it's easy to refuel and keep going for days. You also get decent power in relatively small packages.
I've got the shrinkle. It's a camera bag and a laptop bag at the same time. When you travel you need room for the digital camera and the laptop. That bag is ideal. Since you can take the camera part completely out, you can also convert it into a regular back pack.
Long range weather forecast is still an open research topic.
There is a weather simulation project called ClimatePrediction.net where your computer simulate 15 years of the earth climate while you get a cool looking screen saver with the simulated weather.
Their goal is to have the most accurate weather forecast model around. This should lower the uncertainty and clear up this question of CO2 and how much it contributes to global warming
They are calibrating with simulation of past weather. With the calibrated models they will then forecast the next 50 years and hopefully this will tell us if hurricanes become more likely.
Join in numbers and help clear up doubt about the future climate.
Many of you are familiar with
Seti@Home to look at ET. They moved to their new infrastructure called BOINC. Boinc supports multiple concurrent project.
Well there is a weather simulation project called ClimatePrediction.net
where your computer simulate 15 years of the earth climate while you get a cool looking screen saver with the simulated weather. They are calibrating with simulation of past weather. With the calibrated models they will then forecast the next 50 years and hopefully have a best model of
global warming.
Join in numbers and help clear up doubt about the future climate. You can share the same machine with SETI@Home if you want.
If you are in north america, the
Clear Sky Clock gives you an quick way to see what light pollution is like on your clock having extracted sections from the atlas. For instance the Montreal
clock
clock gives this map for
Montreal. Clearly not a great location for astronomy.
But the worst, is to realise that this loss of light results in actual light pollution since much of this electricity has been generated with fossil fuels which produces the CO, NOX, CO2 and eventually SMOG.
It's not the hours that has me worried these days, it's the outsourcing. With a newborn kid, you now need an income stream for 25 years. The way the industry is going, it's not as obvious that this is in the cards and or going to be easy.
With that in mind, a working spouse makes raising kids more challenging but also present a security blanket in case of layoff and that seems to be necessary in today's market. That said, an IT friend of mine is married to a medical doctor. With that kind of job security it doesn't matter so much and life was ok even after he was laid off. But that's an exception not the rule.
Ok so nuclear might suck but recently presented study demonstrated that coal electricity is cause for much pollution.
A study done during last August east coast powerfailure as reported in this article
that when electricity production was cut, the sky was more transparent and pollutants droped significantly. Transparency moved from 20km to 60km for instance.
So there is no doubt that we need to move away from these polluting energy sources.
That's OK, but for the man of the 50's on the go what do you do? You get a CURTA calculator. They were said to be popular with rally drivers for instance.
They are relatively
valuable
and pretty
nifty
calculator. You can try to get a feel for it with the simulator. Enjoy!
Those that think that outsourcing is harmless have not learned from what happened in the consumer electronics (TV, VCR, Radio) field. While most of these devices were invented or perfected in the US, they were all outsourced, actually emigrated, to Japan and now Korea and China. The result is that the US may well be the largest consumer of electronic but barely assembles or engineers one.
An industry moves as one large block. Production first and then engineering. So a massive exodus of enginering jobs should not be considered harmless as history demonstrated.
Sadly it also seems inevitable. If it's done by US corporations seeking cheap labor or foreign companies competing on their own. The large sucking sound is loud. While the former can be legislated out, the later is much harder to circumvent successfully. One can only hope that China and India quickly become expensive enough to balance out that trend.
If the numbers floated here of about 100,000 unreliable PCs, doesn't this make Google a serious industrial toxic waste hazard? There's a lot of lead and other exotic elements in all of these machines put together. Especially if they die quickly.
I am half kidding here but it still makes for a large amount of hardware to dispose at one point.
Ok so maybe they have boosters and capsules in production they can reuse and save engineering costs. But which lander would they be reusing?
I don't remember any hardware other than the LEM that could land humans. So the lander they have to engineer pretty much from scratch. It's not a small bit of hardware either. On it's own wouldn't that use their entire budget?
It's simple, americans are too expensive compared to the rest of the world. For the longest time, ecologist have been complaining that such a small population hoards so much resources. Despite what US politicans can say, it's not their god given rights. Other countries can do this as well.
Guess what, what is happening is a natural leveling out of this inequity. My bet is the US (and europe but likely to a lesser extent) will be stuck with this for a while.
Hopefully, India and China will have open enough trade that the US can export to them enough to level things out. Once they are richer, like south Korea or Japan are today, the outsourcing trend will diminish.
It's already happening, gaz prices are going up thanks to increase chinese demand. It's not going to be easy for the western world for the next 20 years.
A now that I see what the
Robot looks like, I vaguely remember it. Looks cool but just the computer would have been enough. And I don't remember goot girls hanging around with kit robots either. That photo is mesleading!
A Concordia in Montreal QPIRG did the same thing. Now being a french province, they also had a french translation (at least the first year they were there) of the acronym. The translated acronym was GRIPQ which, when pronounced, and the resulting word translated back into English means Grab Ass which was very politically incorrect even then.
I can't beleive that someone wants to leave being a MD to become, at best, a mid level programmer. That said, you can probably go halfway.
Become a medical expert resource for medical software companies. They are full of programmers with no medical knowledge who need medical experts on staff to, essentially, write specifications and perform medical validation.
You guys are just jalous of the technical superiority of most other countries currency. Let's review:
different colours make them easier to identify.
easier identification speeds up transactions and reduces the risk of errors.
different colours make them harder to counterfeit since you have a much wider palette to match.
Multiple colours gives more artistic freedom, making it possible to have scenes looking more realistic. I mean who ever saw a green horse or a green building!
different sizes make them easier to use for the sight impared
Better spread of denominations (the missing $2) means fewer pieces of paper to exchange, speeding up transactions, reducing the currency space consumption
Missing high denomination coins ($1 and $2) means more equipement needed at vending machines since processing paper bill is required increasing costs thereby reducing the efficency of the currency system.
Missing high denomination coins means increased expense for the treasury due to increased bill production compared to coins resulting in higher taxes to sustain the increased cost of a suboptimal system.
No wonder the US dollar is falling against most other important currencies!
Ok, Apparently few of you actually tried to find a real comet at a real telescope freezing your but outside. Real hunting has the following problems:
Poor weather (especially in the North East) means that you can't observer frequently enough to have good odds of being the first one to see something because you will be clouded out far too often. Truly serious comet hunters
move to Arizona to have enought clear skys to have good odds.
Today most comets are found by professional searches such as linear
with bigger scopes. That doesn't leave much left for amateurs
Equipement maybe affordable for SillyValley stock holders but not for the masses out there.
Min. req. these days for comet hunting is about a 20" or 22" obsession scope. That's the trend in recent amateur discovery such as comet Petriew
to find stuff that faint you need to be several hours out of town to get a dark enough sky becuase you work in a big town to affoard all the equipement. Avoiding
light pollution is essential to see stuff that faint so you can't do it often enough
So SOHO is actually a playing field leveler in that sense and makes comet discovery more accessible than before. Sure the is less glory that doing it the old fashion way. It's free, always good weather, timely data. It's also the only
legitimate way to get your name in the heavens instead of
buying stars which is nothing more than a scam IMHO.
So, sure, it's sure a much bigger kick to find one at the eyepiece but a SOHO one still counts in my book.
Ok, Apparently few of you actually tried to find a real comet at a real telescope freezing your but outside. Real hunting has the following problems:
- Poor weather (especially in the North East) means that you can't observer frequently enough to have good odds of being the first one to see something because you will be clouded out far too often. Truly serious comet hunters move to Arizona to have enought clear skys to have good odds.
- Today most comets are found by professional searches http://www.ll.mit.edu/LINEAR/ with bigger scopes. That doesn't leave much left for amateurs
-Min. req. these days for comet hunting is about a 20" or 22" obsession scope. Affordable for SillyValley stock holders but not for the masses out there http://www.globaldialog.com/~obsessiontscp/OBHP.ht ml
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a zoomed in movie . That's probably more what people were expecting. It doesn't have the wide angle scenic view, just the moon Pretty nice.
For a while there were CPUs specifically designed to run LISP, aka AI . Symbolics was one of the better knowns one.
It failed in bankrupcy. My vague understanding was that the designing dedicated LISP processors was hard and slow and with little resources they could not keep up. Essentially the Symbolics computers ran LIPS pretty quickly given the MHZ but SUN and Intel kept moving up the MHZ faster than Symbolics could keep up. In the end there were not speed advantage to a dedicated LISP machine, just an increase in price. Economics might change eventually. Who knows.
It's quite likely that you don't need heat if your power interruption is only going to be 8 hours. During the Quebec ice storm we were out of electricity for 7 days. The house will stay decently warm for the first 2 days. It will be chilly for the next 2 and getting cold after that. But even after 7 days the appartement was still above freezing in weather that was always a little below freezing.
My recommendation: don't sweat 8 hours of power failiures.
That said, if you really need electricity, say to prevent perishable from going bad your best bet is a generator essentially because it's easy to refuel and keep going for days. You also get decent power in relatively small packages.
I've got the shrinkle. It's a camera bag and a laptop bag at the same time. When you travel you need room for the digital camera and the laptop. That bag is ideal. Since you can take the camera part completely out, you can also convert it into a regular back pack.
Long range weather forecast is still an open research topic. There is a weather simulation project called ClimatePrediction.net where your computer simulate 15 years of the earth climate while you get a cool looking screen saver with the simulated weather.
Their goal is to have the most accurate weather forecast model around. This should lower the uncertainty and clear up this question of CO2 and how much it contributes to global warming They are calibrating with simulation of past weather. With the calibrated models they will then forecast the next 50 years and hopefully this will tell us if hurricanes become more likely.
Join in numbers and help clear up doubt about the future climate.
Many of you are familiar with Seti@Home to look at ET. They moved to their new infrastructure called BOINC. Boinc supports multiple concurrent project.
Well there is a weather simulation project called ClimatePrediction.net where your computer simulate 15 years of the earth climate while you get a cool looking screen saver with the simulated weather. They are calibrating with simulation of past weather. With the calibrated models they will then forecast the next 50 years and hopefully have a best model of global warming.
Join in numbers and help clear up doubt about the future climate. You can share the same machine with SETI@Home if you want.
Actually this is gives just a rough idea of what light pollution you might experience. If you want to find out more, you can look at the The World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness.
If you are in north america, the Clear Sky Clock gives you an quick way to see what light pollution is like on your clock having extracted sections from the atlas. For instance the Montreal clock clock gives this map for Montreal. Clearly not a great location for astronomy.
But the worst, is to realise that this loss of light results in actual light pollution since much of this electricity has been generated with fossil fuels which produces the CO, NOX, CO2 and eventually SMOG.
Here's a link to a SAMPE journal paper describing the project in details.
It's not the hours that has me worried these days, it's the outsourcing. With a newborn kid, you now need an income stream for 25 years. The way the industry is going, it's not as obvious that this is in the cards and or going to be easy.
With that in mind, a working spouse makes raising kids more challenging but also present a security blanket in case of layoff and that seems to be necessary in today's market. That said, an IT friend of mine is married to a medical doctor. With that kind of job security it doesn't matter so much and life was ok even after he was laid off. But that's an exception not the rule.
It's too bad we didn't get rich durnig the boom.
Ok so nuclear might suck but recently presented study demonstrated that coal electricity is cause for much pollution.
A study done during last August east coast powerfailure as reported in this article that when electricity production was cut, the sky was more transparent and pollutants droped significantly. Transparency moved from 20km to 60km for instance.
So there is no doubt that we need to move away from these polluting energy sources.
That's OK, but for the man of the 50's on the go what do you do? You get a CURTA calculator. They were said to be popular with rally drivers for instance.
They are relatively valuable and pretty nifty calculator. You can try to get a feel for it with the simulator. Enjoy!
Those that think that outsourcing is harmless have not learned from what happened in the consumer electronics (TV, VCR, Radio) field. While most of these devices were invented or perfected in the US, they were all outsourced, actually emigrated, to Japan and now Korea and China. The result is that the US may well be the largest consumer of electronic but barely assembles or engineers one.
An industry moves as one large block. Production first and then engineering. So a massive exodus of enginering jobs should not be considered harmless as history demonstrated.
Sadly it also seems inevitable. If it's done by US corporations seeking cheap labor or foreign companies competing on their own. The large sucking sound is loud. While the former can be legislated out, the later is much harder to circumvent successfully. One can only hope that China and India quickly become expensive enough to balance out that trend.
If the numbers floated here of about 100,000 unreliable PCs, doesn't this make Google a serious industrial toxic waste hazard? There's a lot of lead and other exotic elements in all of these machines put together. Especially if they die quickly.
I am half kidding here but it still makes for a large amount of hardware to dispose at one point.
Ok so maybe they have boosters and capsules in production they can reuse and save engineering costs. But which lander would they be reusing?
I don't remember any hardware other than the LEM that could land humans. So the lander they have to engineer pretty much from scratch. It's not a small bit of hardware either. On it's own wouldn't that use their entire budget?
Guess what, what is happening is a natural leveling out of this inequity. My bet is the US (and europe but likely to a lesser extent) will be stuck with this for a while.
Hopefully, India and China will have open enough trade that the US can export to them enough to level things out. Once they are richer, like south Korea or Japan are today, the outsourcing trend will diminish.
It's already happening, gaz prices are going up thanks to increase chinese demand. It's not going to be easy for the western world for the next 20 years.
A now that I see what the Robot looks like, I vaguely remember it. Looks cool but just the computer would have been enough. And I don't remember goot girls hanging around with kit robots either. That photo is mesleading!
In an odd way maybe that was kind of appropriate.
Become a medical expert resource for medical software companies. They are full of programmers with no medical knowledge who need medical experts on staff to, essentially, write specifications and perform medical validation.
- different colours make them easier to identify.
- easier identification speeds up transactions and reduces the risk of errors.
- different colours make them harder to counterfeit since you have a much wider palette to match.
- Multiple colours gives more artistic freedom, making it possible to have scenes looking more realistic. I mean who ever saw a green horse or a green building!
- different sizes make them easier to use for the sight impared
- Better spread of denominations (the missing $2) means fewer pieces of paper to exchange, speeding up transactions, reducing the currency space consumption
- Missing high denomination coins ($1 and $2) means more equipement needed at vending machines since processing paper bill is required increasing costs thereby reducing the efficency of the currency system.
- Missing high denomination coins means increased expense for the treasury due to increased bill production compared to coins resulting in higher taxes to sustain the increased cost of a suboptimal system.
No wonder the US dollar is falling against most other important currencies!Sorry for the duplicate folk. Ignore this one and read the one with all the markups etc...
So SOHO is actually a playing field leveler in that sense and makes comet discovery more accessible than before. Sure the is less glory that doing it the old fashion way. It's free, always good weather, timely data. It's also the only legitimate way to get your name in the heavens instead of buying stars which is nothing more than a scam IMHO. So, sure, it's sure a much bigger kick to find one at the eyepiece but a SOHO one still counts in my book.
Ok, Apparently few of you actually tried to find a real comet at a real telescope freezing your but outside. Real hunting has the following problems: - Poor weather (especially in the North East) means that you can't observer frequently enough to have good odds of being the first one to see something because you will be clouded out far too often. Truly serious comet hunters move to Arizona to have enought clear skys to have good odds. - Today most comets are found by professional searches http://www.ll.mit.edu/LINEAR/ with bigger scopes. That doesn't leave much left for amateurs -Min. req. these days for comet hunting is about a 20" or 22" obsession scope. Affordable for SillyValley stock holders but not for the masses out there http://www.globaldialog.com/~obsessiontscp/OBHP.ht ml