But my primary thought is: Wouldn't any dust particles get vaporized by the beam? How do the characteristics of this situation vary from lasers to masers?
I get to play with some reasonably high power lasers at work - dust is a problem but one that can be solved.
The power densities that some lasers put out is greater than the power per unit area exiting the surface of the sun. This isn't a problem so long as nothing in the high power density region absorbs the wavelength of light that the laser is running at - as long as the optics are transparent the light goes in, gets bent around, and comes out the other side without causing any heating. If, however, a speck of dust lands on some part of the optics chain with a concentrated beam it can absorb the light and becomes a hot spot that damages optical coatings and scatters light out of the optical path.
The main cure for this is hermetically sealing the optical path, or at least operating it in a very clean environment. At some point the laser has to exit the system to be useful, so tricks like flowing pure nitrogen boiled off from a liquid N2 source over the output lens are used. The pure gas contains essentially no dust and provides a buffer layer to the dirty outside air.
I once ran a system like this in an area that was supposed to be a cleanroom, but the filtering system wasn't working properly. Every once in a while a bit of dust would pass through the beam and cause a bright flash as it scattered light and burnt to a crisp. Good times.
Instead of removing the ability of players to trade cash I wonder if they could set up a tracking system that monitors how much money each character gives to other characters per unit time.
Passing a few gold here and there to guildmates or newbie players is normal, but some guy who hands out hundreds or thousands of gold per week would stand out from the crowd. Have a GM monitor him for an hour to establish that they are really meeting up with and giving cash to nearly random folks, then kill the account along with all the farmbots that are colleting the gold. Maybe nuke the accounts of people who were buyers just to attack the market from the demand side too.
Regardless of whether MS or Linux violates more patents, it should be easy to put Balmer in a corner with his own bullshit by asking the following question:
"Your assertion is that Linux violates a set of patents, and therefore as an end user I might be found liable and forced to pay dammages at some future date.* Does using Windows remove this problem for me? Are you willing to either guarantee that Windows does not have any IP property issues or to indemnify me if someone decides that they want $699 for every copy of XP that I use because they think one of their patents is being violated?"
cricket... cricket... Mr. Balmer - are you still there?
* For the sake of argument, I'm going along with Blamers FUD that end users are responsible for paying for IP violations, not the producers of the software.
I was wondering about similar issues - the idea of a distributed raido 'station' is an interesting one but likely not really possible in the sense of 'multiple cheap transmitters' that the original author seems to have in mind.
Not only would there be problems caused by two transmitters getting a signal off the internet with different latency times, but even supposing the transmitters were in perfect sync the signals from the two transmitters would only be perfectly in phase if you were standing on a line exactally between them. Move a little toward station A, and you get station A's signal a tiny bit faster than station B's, etc. This would cause ghosting, interference, etc., which is why traditional radio stations have assigned frequencies and broadcast footprints.
Not trying to flame down the idea, just pointing out that it would need some additional thinking if it was going to be put into use.
Will it be filmed in first-person view or third-person view? Will the DVD come with an option that lets us switch between the two to look around corners?
SCO is manging to convince people that this is somehow difficult to prove... They have yet to show ONE section of code that was lifted. They haven't even shown how one was *similar* enough to have potentially been stolen and heavily modified.. they have shown *NOTHING*
I've been thinking this was strange too. After all, if code was copied into Linux it is essentially a public document now - out there for everyone to see. All SCO would have to do is download it and print it out side-by-side with a copy of their matching code. Case closed. SCO wins.
The fact that they haven't done this extremely simple thing seems to strongly point to SCO being a bunch of total bullshitters. Even if some malicious programmer intentionally stole code and modified it slightly (changed variable names, comments, re-arranged the order of functions in header files, etc.) it should be pretty trivial to show a judge what happened and move on to the 'get sacks of cash from IBM' phase of the trial.
Funny, you would think that a company that is suffering continuous, ongoing harm to the tune of US$699 per user would be pretty quick to do such a thing...
Sure this is fine for the garage bands, but it will never catch on with the "mainstream" bands. This is for one reason. No money.
I agree that this will likely be a backwater of smallish bands without some kind of payment scheme. What would be cool would be something like a $10/month subscription where 1-5% of the money went to the groups running the software/servers and the rest of the cash went to the artists based some kind of (number of downloads)*(average listener rating) scheme. Everyone gets paid, and the musicians who produce something worth listening to get paid a lot.
To some extent the huge volume of spam is a result of the increasing abilities of spam filters. To see why this is, suppose you're a spammer who needs to send one email to every person on your list in order to get enough responses to make a profit. If there were no spam filters in the world, you'd need to send one and only one message to each person. If there were spam filters but they only caught 50% of the spam, you would need to send two copies of the message on average to each person. If the spam filters were 95% effective, you need to send 20 copies. As the filter efficiency goes toward 100% the amount of spam you need to send to remain profitable goes to infinity. Since filters are typically climbing into the upper ninety percent range, we're just really starting to enter the interesting part of the spam curve.
I appreciate the joke and all, but if a FFB was implemented properly it wouldn't work in reality. This issue has alredy been identified and it's been recognized that before crawling a website any links would have to be matched against a blacklist (or blacklists, to prevent spammers from easily gaming any one particular filter technique). While SCO are indeed assholes, they aren't spammer assholes (yet, but with those guys you never know...) and so most likely won't be blacklisted.
That said, I went to www.sco.com and couldn't find the pictures you were talking about. Do I need to get some kind of free trial membership or something to see 'em?
I think trying to make something out of the stories in The Silmarrilion would be better (those battles really were bigger) - but obviously brining that to the screen would involve basically filling a story around the history told in the book.
I see your point, but still have to disagree that The Simarrilion would be a better basis for a movie than The Hobbit. The Simarrilion was dripping with exactally the kind of complex histories, tangled family lines, and generally convoluted plots that Jackson et al worked so hard to remove from LOTR to make it watchable by the general public (i.e. people like my sister who had never read the books).
The hobbit on the other hand has a well-defined group of heros who go on an interesting walk thru the woods and see some nifty stuff along the way. And as for the 'better computers means more people in the final battle' thing, I'd hope the technology would scale well enough to do the battle of five armies justice - that'd just be plain cool.
If Free RedHat == Fedora, why are they shaking things up with the name change? RedHat (not Fedora) is the most widespread Linux distro out there
My guess is that the decision to re-name the free version came from the marketing group. I bet they want to take advantage of the well-known Red Hat name to publish the more profitable Enterprise version as the 'gold standard' OS that a middle manager can justify putting on an important server system, while Fedora will gradually become identified with the 'hippies, hackers, and poor students' crowd. I suppose that this is a way for them to get around the 'free software is for commies' view of some of the higher-ups in business and make a buck at the same time. Not a big deal in my view, and maybe not even entirely crazy from a business plan point of view.
instead of banning the player completly, take a tip from the Amish and just shun them for a time
At the risk of exposing my geekier gamer roots, Dark Age of Camelot already has something like this. You can type/ignore {playername} and then anything that person says, messages they send you, actions they take that would normally generate a message, etc., are blocked on your screen. It's like being able to hit the mute button on the village idiot. The nice thing is, the system isn't really abusable because it's the people who are being annoyed who chose who and when to do a little bit of personal shunning. The idiot in question usually runs around for a minute or two, then realizes that they aren't attracting attention anymore and goes away.
To distinguish between more logic levels, you'd have to increase the voltage level, and power is proportional to the square of voltage.
Or use +V, 0V, -V, where V is whatever voltage you want it to be. Positive and negative signals use the same amount of power, but you've added one more state that consumes energy, so just a 50% increase instead of a factor of V increase.
On the other hand, most CMOS type transistors (the dominant class of modern high-speed stuff) really only uses significant amounts of power when the gates of the logic circuit change states, so if the system were implemented this way, the power increase would scale more with clock speed than with the number of states.
Re:I think you missed the point
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P2P Spam?
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's not the addresses that are for sale. It's the network that does the mailing - a distributed spam-house, one that can not be shut down at the source.
Suppose the network is what they're planning to use, instead of selling the email addresses. If I get a penis/breast enlargement pill ad from my co-worker in the next cube over (you know - the person who likes to play with their Bonzai Buddy and watch their comet cursors) it would seem safe to assume that it was spam sent through the worm network. In order for that piece of spam to generate any profit for the spammer, the message needs to have a link to a website with a payment system plus a mailing address, i.e. the ability to charge a credit card and then send me my magic pills. This generates a traceability link to the spammer who paid for this service - if the cops look up who is generating the credit card charge and what account the money is going to, you've identified the spammer. Then, if the cops cross-check the bank account of several such spammers, a very short list would be generated of locations that each spammer on the worm network had paid money to. This short list would have to include the person who controls the worm - book 'em Danno. Because of this, I'd guess that the system isn't designed to deliver spam from a bunch of infected zombie machines. I don't know what the worm is supposed to do, but a spam-delivery system seems to be bustable in short order.
Probably most important is the Jacobsen vs Hughes copyright case. Apart from considering much of the material uncopyrightable historical facts, Judge Kimball was quite unimpressed by the plaintif's failure to act in a timely manner to mitigate damages. [...]SCO of course will claim they stopped distribution of linux, but this ruling at least shows that Judge Kimball isn't likely to be be charmed with the deplorable way SCO has conducted itself.
Thanks for the info - interesting stuff. I'm not sure that having SCO stop distribution of linux is the most important part however - if Kimball has a history of ruling against plaintifs who don't act in a timely manner when they sense that their IP is being violated, it doesn't bode well for SCO that they have complained for months about their 80-3,000,000 lines of code while refusing to tell anyone which lines of code are in question. If a company felt that it was being hurt by a copyright infringement, it would seem logical that they would take every action possible to end that harm as quickly as possible, i.e. point out which lines are offending so it could be fixed, then sue for dammages incurred between the time the code went in and when it was re-written. Since anyone can read through the code whenever they want, it's not like knowing that lines 1,300,256-1,300,293 of the kernal code came from SCO is going to reveal any new IP to the public.
Of course, if a company doesn't want to end the 'harm' to itself by fixing the problem because, oh, say they want to spew FUD for as long as possible to pump up their stock and get a few checks for $699, it sounds like they are setting themselves up to get schmucked by Kimball regardless of any other merits their case might actually have. This just keeps getting better.
Actually, the problem is that when the device *does* break, it heats up a LOT. That means that the liquid nitrogen is no longer a liquid. It vaporizes so quickly that you have to have a pressure-release valve to avoid an explosion. Assuming your device doesn't melt, cooling it back down again is a lenghly process.
Very true - as a student I used to work at a superconductor research lab that did this kind of work. We would run 100kA through a superconducting coil cooled with liquid nitrogen as part of our experiments, creating a magnetic field with about 3 megaJoules of stored energy. One day a tech mis-wired part of a safety circuit that was used to dump the energy at the end of the experiment run (and then very nicely faked his check-off sheet afterward), and the superconductor heated up so fast it vaporized the one inch aluminum stabalizing rod it was attached to as well as several hundred gallons of liquid He. A nine inch port blew out of the top venting all the (now gasseous) helium into the lab and we all ran like hell to avoid being smothered by the sudden lack of O2 in the room.
Nobody got injured (except the tech, who got fired), but I couldn't help but think about the alternate scenario where the lab staff somehow got trapped inside the room, and the last thing I'd hear before passing out would be "We're all gonna die!" in a Mickey Mouse helium voice.
There are a bunch of problems that using a diamond substrate for semiconductors would pose. I mean for one thing, not being a metal but instead a crystal, the resistance to currents is magnitudes greater than for silicon.
The idea in the article wasn't that the diamond would be used as a substrate for a conventional (Silicon) semiconductor, but that the diamond would act as the semiconductor itself. To be a useful semiconductor, a material needs to have two main properties (a) it has a crystaline structure, which causes the allowed quantum states of the outer electrons to form 'bands' of energy states where electrons can exist that are separated by gaps in energy where no electrons can exist, and (b) the material needs to have a proper amount of electrons per atom so that all of the low-energy bands are filled completely up to some level, then there's a gap in energy where no elecrons exist, followed by a band where electrons can exist but typically dont because they dont have the energy to get up there. Single-material semiconductors like Ge, Si, and diamond-C have both of these properties.
A crystal of semiconductor of the type described above is pretty uninteresting. All the electrons are trapped in the low-energy bands and since that band is full the electrons effectively can't move around - the material is an insulator. But, if a few of the atoms in the crystal are replaced by atoms of similar size which have one extra electron or one missing electron things get more interesting. If we add an atom with one extra electron, and the lower energy band is full, the new electron will be forced into the upper energy band. Since this upper band is devoid of any other electrons, the new electron can hop around all it wants, and if several such electrons exist a useful electrical current is produced when a Voltage is applied. Conversely, if an atom with one fewer electrons is introduced into the crystal, it sucks up an electron from the filled energy band and a vacancy, or 'hole' is created. In this case when a voltage is applied all of the electrons move one way and the 'hole' appears to move in the opposite direction, again effectively creating a current. If these special atoms, or dopants as they are called in the industry, can be found for diamond-C the material can be made to either conduct (dopants are present) or not conduct (no dopants, or a special case where two types of opposite dopant meet up), and the diamond-C either conducts or not - i.e. it is a semiconductor. Some of this was mentioned int the article, mainly about using different configurations of boron.
My guess is that the actual use of diamond-C in household items is a few years off - the dopant and other issues will need to be resolved. Then, it will start turning up in specialty items like cell phones, which now use GaAs semiconductors, that need the high-frequency ability. In the meantime, good 'ol Si chips will continue to be the workhorse for everything else that can run slower and needs to be cheap.
"SCO announced today that an undisclosed Fortune 500 company purchased Linux licenses for each of their servers..."
So... SCO has been making noise about this for weeks and as of today one single Fortune 500 company has bought a license? And SCO thinks this is positive news that a whopping 0.2% of the major industrial powers of the world drank their Kool Aid? Funny, when I saw this it immediately leaped to mind that despite the threats of legal action, making major parts of IT departments effectively illegal, etc., 499 of 500 (i.e. 99.8%) bigtime companies decided that SCO was full of crap. Yeah, that's something I would tout to the media...
I'm not so sure this would be a good idea as stated. One of the things that makes open source work as well as it does is that it is started by someone who has the proverbial 'itch' that needs to be scratched, meaning that they wish they had a particular bit of software and so head out to create it themselves. If enough other folks share the same 'itch' they start helping out with testing, adding new features, documentation, etc. The people who have the commitment and skill to make the biggest difference rise to the top and good software is made.
Now imagine a scenario where there is governmnet funding. Out of work programmers, people who took a semester of pascal in highschool and are now looking for cash, etc., will go looking for projects to do to get in on the funding chuckwagon rather than responding to an existing need. Other hangers-on will attempt to join, not because they know the subject well or feel the same need to create a particular bit of software, but because they want in on the $$$. Arguments over which code to include would be biased by the author's desire to prove to the funding source that they had added the most lines of code, and not on technical merrit. Overall, it would become the opposite of what a good open source project should be.
There's been a lot of posts to the effect of 'everyone knows you don't bend a fiber - duh!', but I think they might be missing the point of the article. The article was trying to point out that as laser powers get higher, the bend radius becomes larger since phenomena that don't matter at low power come into effect when you try to cram more optical power into the same fiber.
I design and build fiber-coupled semiconductor lasers as a day job, and some of the stuff in our R&D lab has a significantly higher power than what is currently used in most systems out there. A fiber bend radius that leaks/absobs x% of the power at 10mW with no difficulty becomes dangerous when you put a 5W laser in the system - the amount of leaked power becomes enough to fry fiber claddings (especially if the fiber was metalized for soldering to a package) and make a crunchy black line where a perfectly good bit of cable had been moments before.
The take-home message of all of this is that as optical powers go up to increase bandwidth, some existing fiber installation methods may need to be re-thought. That said, I'd doubt that this will have much of an impact on many systems outside of long-haul lines since local systems don't need to have powers of this type to get the bits across town or around an office building.
IANAL, but from my experience at work I know that you can't be found 'guilty' of destroying evidence if the documents in question were in a class that was slated to be destroyed on some regular basis, i.e. after some amount of time had passed or after the project they were associated with had ended. Businesses regularly do this since keeping every shred of paper ever generated would be pretty difficult - imagine if a steel manufacturer had to keep records for how many pounds of material they sold in 1872.
There are exceptions, however - destroying something after a lawsuit has been brought is a big one, tax records, SEC filings, etc are others. If Rambus is shown to have gotten rid of the paperwork in a non-standard manner after hearing about the lawsuit, they're in some pretty hot legal water. However if the steel company mentioned earlier got a subpoena for their 1872 steel sales, and pointed out that they only keep that kind of record for 15 years, no problem.
After all, we know how law-abiding spammers are. And how effective the government is in combating computer criminals. I really don't think this will make a difference.
Agreed. Maybe the solution would be to set up the law to also target the people who hire the spammers since they are really the ones fueling the fire by paying the spam kings to do their dirty deeds. They should also be easier to track down as they need to put some kind of contact info in the message for it to be effective, i.e. you can bounce emails advertising your penis enlargement pills off some campus server or off China, but you have to have a website with a credit card service if you want to actually sell penis enlargement pills. Having the credit card service implies that MasterCard, Visa, etc., have the business address of the folks who asked the spam to be sent out. Since the sellers are therefore much more easily tracked down, they have the kind of accountability that is needed to effectively impose fines. After a few of them get whacked with boku bills, many of the rest of them will start putting ADV in the subject line which in turn will cause my ISPs filter to kill the messages, meaning that advertising via spam will become yet more unprofitable and the number of people hiring spam agencies will drop. It's not a perfect solution since some spam doesn't need a formal contact point to be effective (i.e. the folks from Nigeria who need help getting money out of their country), but it'd be a start.
Multi-mode emitters are very possible - it just means that more than one optical mode can exist at the same time in a given optical cavity, i.e. inside a laser waveguide. The different modes tend to have nearly the same wavelength tho - usually something on the order of a few fractions of a nanometer, depending on the dimensions of the lasing cavity. Since red light is usually in the 700ish nm range and blue light is in the 400ish nm range, you can't get both colors out of a typical multi-mode laser.
I think what you meant to ask was 'is it possible to build a laser that could emit both red and blue wavelengths?'. While it is possible to make devices with tunable wavelengths over a small range, I don't know of anyone who can make the jump from red to blue. The reason for this has to do with the fact that the quantum wells used in normal semiconductor wavelengths which act as the optical power source for the laser ususally can only provide that power over a small range. You also have to have a way to tune the waveguide to pick the wavelenght you want, and getting from red to blue by normal tuning methods would require some kind of radical leap from current technology. So sadly, I don't think anyone could do the red/blue jump within a single device right now.
There is an out for this - you can put multiple lasers on the same read head and just turn on the one you needed for a given media type - my old laptop could do CD-RW and DVD in the same drive, and I noticed that there were multiple lenses on the read head indicating that more than one laser was present. So, for the cost of adding a bit of extra hardware a multi-media drive should be doable.
One advantage of the technology itself that counters this effect to some degree is the increased penetration ability of higher energy wavelengths.
Not trying to be flamey, but do you have a link for this? I've always understood that as wavelengths get shorter (i.e. higher energy) the penertation ability (aka absorption length, usually defined as the distance light can travel into something before falling to 1/e of its' original power) goes down until you hit wavelengths somewhere in the UV/X-ray range. Moving from red lasers to blue lasers should then cause the penetration depth to become smaller, not larger. The reason for this is that molecular bonds have resonance energies on the order of UV light, and electron orbits have resonance on the order of X-ray light, so the closer you get to this range (in this case moving from long red wavelengths to shorter blue wavelengths) the more strongly the light interacts with the material and hence the more strongly the material can absorb the light energy - meaning that the absorption lengths go down.
Again, I'm not trying to say you're wrong, it's just that that statement doesn't jive with the physics I'm familiar with, so I'd be curious to know if there's some other phenomena going on here that I don't know about. Thanks.
Unfortately... those channels are actually keeping youy cable rates down.The shopping channels are paying the cable companies to be there by giving them a cut of the sales in exchange for the cable space.
So why not make these channels optional too, but with a negative price, i.e. get QVC and take $0.50 a month off your bill? I expect most people would just program their TVs to skip over these channels anyway, just like we do now, but with a bit of a savings.
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I get to play with some reasonably high power lasers at work - dust is a problem but one that can be solved.
The power densities that some lasers put out is greater than the power per unit area exiting the surface of the sun. This isn't a problem so long as nothing in the high power density region absorbs the wavelength of light that the laser is running at - as long as the optics are transparent the light goes in, gets bent around, and comes out the other side without causing any heating. If, however, a speck of dust lands on some part of the optics chain with a concentrated beam it can absorb the light and becomes a hot spot that damages optical coatings and scatters light out of the optical path.
The main cure for this is hermetically sealing the optical path, or at least operating it in a very clean environment. At some point the laser has to exit the system to be useful, so tricks like flowing pure nitrogen boiled off from a liquid N2 source over the output lens are used. The pure gas contains essentially no dust and provides a buffer layer to the dirty outside air.
I once ran a system like this in an area that was supposed to be a cleanroom, but the filtering system wasn't working properly. Every once in a while a bit of dust would pass through the beam and cause a bright flash as it scattered light and burnt to a crisp. Good times.
Instead of removing the ability of players to trade cash I wonder if they could set up a tracking system that monitors how much money each character gives to other characters per unit time.
Passing a few gold here and there to guildmates or newbie players is normal, but some guy who hands out hundreds or thousands of gold per week would stand out from the crowd. Have a GM monitor him for an hour to establish that they are really meeting up with and giving cash to nearly random folks, then kill the account along with all the farmbots that are colleting the gold. Maybe nuke the accounts of people who were buyers just to attack the market from the demand side too.
"Your assertion is that Linux violates a set of patents, and therefore as an end user I might be found liable and forced to pay dammages at some future date.* Does using Windows remove this problem for me? Are you willing to either guarantee that Windows does not have any IP property issues or to indemnify me if someone decides that they want $699 for every copy of XP that I use because they think one of their patents is being violated?"
cricket... cricket... Mr. Balmer - are you still there?
* For the sake of argument, I'm going along with Blamers FUD that end users are responsible for paying for IP violations, not the producers of the software.
Not only would there be problems caused by two transmitters getting a signal off the internet with different latency times, but even supposing the transmitters were in perfect sync the signals from the two transmitters would only be perfectly in phase if you were standing on a line exactally between them. Move a little toward station A, and you get station A's signal a tiny bit faster than station B's, etc. This would cause ghosting, interference, etc., which is why traditional radio stations have assigned frequencies and broadcast footprints.
Not trying to flame down the idea, just pointing out that it would need some additional thinking if it was going to be put into use.
Will it be filmed in first-person view or third-person view? Will the DVD come with an option that lets us switch between the two to look around corners?
I've been thinking this was strange too. After all, if code was copied into Linux it is essentially a public document now - out there for everyone to see. All SCO would have to do is download it and print it out side-by-side with a copy of their matching code. Case closed. SCO wins.
The fact that they haven't done this extremely simple thing seems to strongly point to SCO being a bunch of total bullshitters. Even if some malicious programmer intentionally stole code and modified it slightly (changed variable names, comments, re-arranged the order of functions in header files, etc.) it should be pretty trivial to show a judge what happened and move on to the 'get sacks of cash from IBM' phase of the trial.
Funny, you would think that a company that is suffering continuous, ongoing harm to the tune of US$699 per user would be pretty quick to do such a thing...
I agree that this will likely be a backwater of smallish bands without some kind of payment scheme. What would be cool would be something like a $10/month subscription where 1-5% of the money went to the groups running the software/servers and the rest of the cash went to the artists based some kind of (number of downloads)*(average listener rating) scheme. Everyone gets paid, and the musicians who produce something worth listening to get paid a lot.
To some extent the huge volume of spam is a result of the increasing abilities of spam filters. To see why this is, suppose you're a spammer who needs to send one email to every person on your list in order to get enough responses to make a profit. If there were no spam filters in the world, you'd need to send one and only one message to each person. If there were spam filters but they only caught 50% of the spam, you would need to send two copies of the message on average to each person. If the spam filters were 95% effective, you need to send 20 copies. As the filter efficiency goes toward 100% the amount of spam you need to send to remain profitable goes to infinity. Since filters are typically climbing into the upper ninety percent range, we're just really starting to enter the interesting part of the spam curve.
That said, I went to www.sco.com and couldn't find the pictures you were talking about. Do I need to get some kind of free trial membership or something to see 'em?
I see your point, but still have to disagree that The Simarrilion would be a better basis for a movie than The Hobbit. The Simarrilion was dripping with exactally the kind of complex histories, tangled family lines, and generally convoluted plots that Jackson et al worked so hard to remove from LOTR to make it watchable by the general public (i.e. people like my sister who had never read the books).
The hobbit on the other hand has a well-defined group of heros who go on an interesting walk thru the woods and see some nifty stuff along the way. And as for the 'better computers means more people in the final battle' thing, I'd hope the technology would scale well enough to do the battle of five armies justice - that'd just be plain cool.
My guess is that the decision to re-name the free version came from the marketing group. I bet they want to take advantage of the well-known Red Hat name to publish the more profitable Enterprise version as the 'gold standard' OS that a middle manager can justify putting on an important server system, while Fedora will gradually become identified with the 'hippies, hackers, and poor students' crowd. I suppose that this is a way for them to get around the 'free software is for commies' view of some of the higher-ups in business and make a buck at the same time. Not a big deal in my view, and maybe not even entirely crazy from a business plan point of view.
At the risk of exposing my geekier gamer roots, Dark Age of Camelot already has something like this. You can type /ignore {playername} and then anything that person says, messages they send you, actions they take that would normally generate a message, etc., are blocked on your screen. It's like being able to hit the mute button on the village idiot. The nice thing is, the system isn't really abusable because it's the people who are being annoyed who chose who and when to do a little bit of personal shunning. The idiot in question usually runs around for a minute or two, then realizes that they aren't attracting attention anymore and goes away.
Or use +V, 0V, -V, where V is whatever voltage you want it to be. Positive and negative signals use the same amount of power, but you've added one more state that consumes energy, so just a 50% increase instead of a factor of V increase.
On the other hand, most CMOS type transistors (the dominant class of modern high-speed stuff) really only uses significant amounts of power when the gates of the logic circuit change states, so if the system were implemented this way, the power increase would scale more with clock speed than with the number of states.
Suppose the network is what they're planning to use, instead of selling the email addresses. If I get a penis/breast enlargement pill ad from my co-worker in the next cube over (you know - the person who likes to play with their Bonzai Buddy and watch their comet cursors) it would seem safe to assume that it was spam sent through the worm network. In order for that piece of spam to generate any profit for the spammer, the message needs to have a link to a website with a payment system plus a mailing address, i.e. the ability to charge a credit card and then send me my magic pills. This generates a traceability link to the spammer who paid for this service - if the cops look up who is generating the credit card charge and what account the money is going to, you've identified the spammer. Then, if the cops cross-check the bank account of several such spammers, a very short list would be generated of locations that each spammer on the worm network had paid money to. This short list would have to include the person who controls the worm - book 'em Danno. Because of this, I'd guess that the system isn't designed to deliver spam from a bunch of infected zombie machines. I don't know what the worm is supposed to do, but a spam-delivery system seems to be bustable in short order.
Thanks for the info - interesting stuff. I'm not sure that having SCO stop distribution of linux is the most important part however - if Kimball has a history of ruling against plaintifs who don't act in a timely manner when they sense that their IP is being violated, it doesn't bode well for SCO that they have complained for months about their 80-3,000,000 lines of code while refusing to tell anyone which lines of code are in question. If a company felt that it was being hurt by a copyright infringement, it would seem logical that they would take every action possible to end that harm as quickly as possible, i.e. point out which lines are offending so it could be fixed, then sue for dammages incurred between the time the code went in and when it was re-written. Since anyone can read through the code whenever they want, it's not like knowing that lines 1,300,256-1,300,293 of the kernal code came from SCO is going to reveal any new IP to the public.
Of course, if a company doesn't want to end the 'harm' to itself by fixing the problem because, oh, say they want to spew FUD for as long as possible to pump up their stock and get a few checks for $699, it sounds like they are setting themselves up to get schmucked by Kimball regardless of any other merits their case might actually have. This just keeps getting better.
Very true - as a student I used to work at a superconductor research lab that did this kind of work. We would run 100kA through a superconducting coil cooled with liquid nitrogen as part of our experiments, creating a magnetic field with about 3 megaJoules of stored energy. One day a tech mis-wired part of a safety circuit that was used to dump the energy at the end of the experiment run (and then very nicely faked his check-off sheet afterward), and the superconductor heated up so fast it vaporized the one inch aluminum stabalizing rod it was attached to as well as several hundred gallons of liquid He. A nine inch port blew out of the top venting all the (now gasseous) helium into the lab and we all ran like hell to avoid being smothered by the sudden lack of O2 in the room.
Nobody got injured (except the tech, who got fired), but I couldn't help but think about the alternate scenario where the lab staff somehow got trapped inside the room, and the last thing I'd hear before passing out would be "We're all gonna die!" in a Mickey Mouse helium voice.
The idea in the article wasn't that the diamond would be used as a substrate for a conventional (Silicon) semiconductor, but that the diamond would act as the semiconductor itself. To be a useful semiconductor, a material needs to have two main properties (a) it has a crystaline structure, which causes the allowed quantum states of the outer electrons to form 'bands' of energy states where electrons can exist that are separated by gaps in energy where no electrons can exist, and (b) the material needs to have a proper amount of electrons per atom so that all of the low-energy bands are filled completely up to some level, then there's a gap in energy where no elecrons exist, followed by a band where electrons can exist but typically dont because they dont have the energy to get up there. Single-material semiconductors like Ge, Si, and diamond-C have both of these properties.
A crystal of semiconductor of the type described above is pretty uninteresting. All the electrons are trapped in the low-energy bands and since that band is full the electrons effectively can't move around - the material is an insulator. But, if a few of the atoms in the crystal are replaced by atoms of similar size which have one extra electron or one missing electron things get more interesting. If we add an atom with one extra electron, and the lower energy band is full, the new electron will be forced into the upper energy band. Since this upper band is devoid of any other electrons, the new electron can hop around all it wants, and if several such electrons exist a useful electrical current is produced when a Voltage is applied. Conversely, if an atom with one fewer electrons is introduced into the crystal, it sucks up an electron from the filled energy band and a vacancy, or 'hole' is created. In this case when a voltage is applied all of the electrons move one way and the 'hole' appears to move in the opposite direction, again effectively creating a current. If these special atoms, or dopants as they are called in the industry, can be found for diamond-C the material can be made to either conduct (dopants are present) or not conduct (no dopants, or a special case where two types of opposite dopant meet up), and the diamond-C either conducts or not - i.e. it is a semiconductor. Some of this was mentioned int the article, mainly about using different configurations of boron.
My guess is that the actual use of diamond-C in household items is a few years off - the dopant and other issues will need to be resolved. Then, it will start turning up in specialty items like cell phones, which now use GaAs semiconductors, that need the high-frequency ability. In the meantime, good 'ol Si chips will continue to be the workhorse for everything else that can run slower and needs to be cheap.
So... SCO has been making noise about this for weeks and as of today one single Fortune 500 company has bought a license? And SCO thinks this is positive news that a whopping 0.2% of the major industrial powers of the world drank their Kool Aid? Funny, when I saw this it immediately leaped to mind that despite the threats of legal action, making major parts of IT departments effectively illegal, etc., 499 of 500 (i.e. 99.8%) bigtime companies decided that SCO was full of crap. Yeah, that's something I would tout to the media...
Now imagine a scenario where there is governmnet funding. Out of work programmers, people who took a semester of pascal in highschool and are now looking for cash, etc., will go looking for projects to do to get in on the funding chuckwagon rather than responding to an existing need. Other hangers-on will attempt to join, not because they know the subject well or feel the same need to create a particular bit of software, but because they want in on the $$$. Arguments over which code to include would be biased by the author's desire to prove to the funding source that they had added the most lines of code, and not on technical merrit. Overall, it would become the opposite of what a good open source project should be.
I design and build fiber-coupled semiconductor lasers as a day job, and some of the stuff in our R&D lab has a significantly higher power than what is currently used in most systems out there. A fiber bend radius that leaks/absobs x% of the power at 10mW with no difficulty becomes dangerous when you put a 5W laser in the system - the amount of leaked power becomes enough to fry fiber claddings (especially if the fiber was metalized for soldering to a package) and make a crunchy black line where a perfectly good bit of cable had been moments before.
The take-home message of all of this is that as optical powers go up to increase bandwidth, some existing fiber installation methods may need to be re-thought. That said, I'd doubt that this will have much of an impact on many systems outside of long-haul lines since local systems don't need to have powers of this type to get the bits across town or around an office building.
There are exceptions, however - destroying something after a lawsuit has been brought is a big one, tax records, SEC filings, etc are others. If Rambus is shown to have gotten rid of the paperwork in a non-standard manner after hearing about the lawsuit, they're in some pretty hot legal water. However if the steel company mentioned earlier got a subpoena for their 1872 steel sales, and pointed out that they only keep that kind of record for 15 years, no problem.
Agreed. Maybe the solution would be to set up the law to also target the people who hire the spammers since they are really the ones fueling the fire by paying the spam kings to do their dirty deeds. They should also be easier to track down as they need to put some kind of contact info in the message for it to be effective, i.e. you can bounce emails advertising your penis enlargement pills off some campus server or off China, but you have to have a website with a credit card service if you want to actually sell penis enlargement pills. Having the credit card service implies that MasterCard, Visa, etc., have the business address of the folks who asked the spam to be sent out. Since the sellers are therefore much more easily tracked down, they have the kind of accountability that is needed to effectively impose fines. After a few of them get whacked with boku bills, many of the rest of them will start putting ADV in the subject line which in turn will cause my ISPs filter to kill the messages, meaning that advertising via spam will become yet more unprofitable and the number of people hiring spam agencies will drop. It's not a perfect solution since some spam doesn't need a formal contact point to be effective (i.e. the folks from Nigeria who need help getting money out of their country), but it'd be a start.
I think what you meant to ask was 'is it possible to build a laser that could emit both red and blue wavelengths?'. While it is possible to make devices with tunable wavelengths over a small range, I don't know of anyone who can make the jump from red to blue. The reason for this has to do with the fact that the quantum wells used in normal semiconductor wavelengths which act as the optical power source for the laser ususally can only provide that power over a small range. You also have to have a way to tune the waveguide to pick the wavelenght you want, and getting from red to blue by normal tuning methods would require some kind of radical leap from current technology. So sadly, I don't think anyone could do the red/blue jump within a single device right now.
There is an out for this - you can put multiple lasers on the same read head and just turn on the one you needed for a given media type - my old laptop could do CD-RW and DVD in the same drive, and I noticed that there were multiple lenses on the read head indicating that more than one laser was present. So, for the cost of adding a bit of extra hardware a multi-media drive should be doable.
Not trying to be flamey, but do you have a link for this? I've always understood that as wavelengths get shorter (i.e. higher energy) the penertation ability (aka absorption length, usually defined as the distance light can travel into something before falling to 1/e of its' original power) goes down until you hit wavelengths somewhere in the UV/X-ray range. Moving from red lasers to blue lasers should then cause the penetration depth to become smaller, not larger. The reason for this is that molecular bonds have resonance energies on the order of UV light, and electron orbits have resonance on the order of X-ray light, so the closer you get to this range (in this case moving from long red wavelengths to shorter blue wavelengths) the more strongly the light interacts with the material and hence the more strongly the material can absorb the light energy - meaning that the absorption lengths go down.
Again, I'm not trying to say you're wrong, it's just that that statement doesn't jive with the physics I'm familiar with, so I'd be curious to know if there's some other phenomena going on here that I don't know about. Thanks.
So why not make these channels optional too, but with a negative price, i.e. get QVC and take $0.50 a month off your bill? I expect most people would just program their TVs to skip over these channels anyway, just like we do now, but with a bit of a savings.