Is it just me, or is there something horribly wrong if a computer is "always thrashing hard" tracking timesheets and vacation days for "about 20 employees"?
Is this a 70's-era computer, are the 20 employees all lightning-fingered data entry operators, or what?
Considering how long ago the experiment was done, the article was amazingly short on "what tests we've done on the strange new bacteria we found" details. (Or is the Indian new year not Jan 1, so "last year" is more recent?)
Pretty boring if there was a glitch and the bacteria really didn't come from 41km up. An astrophysics expert probably isn't so expert in preventing biological contamination.
It may be that the bacteria are Earthly, but natives of the upper atmosphere. Bacteria have turned up frequently in places where "everybody knew" that nothing could live, and are recently suspected of living in the atmosphere of Venus.
With native high-atmosphere bacteria around Earth and/or Venus, there would be plausable prospects for occasional cross-contamination via speeding bits of space dirt.
Select comets & a few other places in the solar system might have been able to produce or harbor bacteria that wound up here. Extra-Solar origins would be ultra-significant...but how could you prove it?
My impression is that America's 70's-era, pork-laden shuttle has been the LEAST economical way to get into space for quite a while. Japan can hardly make that worse.
The shuttle's government anyway, so it doesn't respond to reality the way the auto industry had to when Japanese imports took off. (It'd be real nice, but I don't see this kicking Yankee political pride enough to make it happen.)
There are lots of folks trying to make it in the space launch business, many with government subsidies, and not that much stuff that needs to be launched. I wish 'em the best, but I don't see how the Japanese could make money doing this. And their government is also BIG on pork...
"In the framework of ESA's cooperation with Russia, a Russian Proton launcher was chosen to place the Integral (INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory) observatory in orbit. The launcher lifted off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan today at 10:41 local time (06:41 CEST)."
The ESA's site also makes it very clear that the R(ussian)SA was in charge of getting the satellite into orbit. Let me suggest that you read up on it.
The rocket was essentially a giant controlled firecracker with a half-jillion complicated parts that all had to work just right. Just one little oversight, part failure, or unforeseen way for something to go wrong, and ka-BOOM! is the natural result. Look at rocketry's failure history. Rocket launch facilities spread things far out, shelter people in blockhouses, etc. in ways that would be considered crazy overkill at a munitions dump. They've learned the hard way.
Not to say that the investigation of a disaster this big shouldn't consider sabotage, but long history suggests a vastly more likely alternative.
Here's the closing words of the article... "But carbon nanotubes are still expensive to produce, and several teams are looking for production methods that would be viable on a commercial scale."...so don't expect to see such stuff outside of small-quantity/cost-no-object uses anytime soon.
The "as hard as some ultrahard ceramic materials used in engineering." description (also from the article) suggests that it won't be much good for space elevator cable anyway. I'd bet than an elevator cable needs to flex some under loads ranging from tidal forces to microimpacts.
As our Asker noted, macros are dangerous. For example, let a macro processor replace
foo = bar(i++);
and you'd better hope that the parameter isn't used more than once in the function's code - otherwise i will get incremented too often - hello bugs!
Flip side, you can eyeball the most commonly used functions for safe-to-macro-inline candidates and save space just on them.
An el-crapo compiler could easily burn more bytes with call & return code than a small function would need inline.
Are there any dusty & old or not-so-essential hunks of this code that could be ditched? A badly-written section that could be rewritten much smaller? Wordy user interface stuff to edit down?
I've done this for years. Three details: I've got a very quick message ("HiThisIsBob2129891234StartTalking") to cut wasted time. I live in a 2-bedroom apartment (so I never need go far to listen for a voice when the phone rings). I encourage people to call 24x7 (but no promise I'll pick up).
I don't have problems with desirable callers not leaving messages, even if they don't know that I screen calls. Flip side, I get plenty of no-message calls around dinner time, sometimes followed by a "This is award HQ, we've been trying to reach you because you've won..." message.
Yes, some folks are annoyed by this. I'm polite, but too bad for them. If they want to have me on call, they can pay the fees for me to get a 900 #. I happily leave messages for people when I'm calling.
This also lets me see the whole situation before answering. I won't pick up likes-to-chat Aunt Lucy if I've got guests over, but will if she says "Uncle Jim had a heart attack". Ditto the boss with "Tuesday softball game's cancelled" vs. "T-3 line's down!".
This bill would have to get through both the Senate and White House before it could become law. Rumor has it that both of 'em are preoccupied with higher priority government business just now, and all the elected officials are thinking about the November election most of the time anyway.
In GeekSpeak: looks like vaporware, smells like vaporware,...
Let's see... You've got to control air pollution from the burning. Plant-nutrient minerals in the ash probably need to be seperated from the nickel and returned to the soil. (Or is spreading mineral fertilizer cheaper...but where does what's left of the nickel-removed-from-it ash go?). A nickel plant that's running 24x7x365 on ore from a strip mine enjoys a certain economy over one that's usually idle & waiting for the fall harvest.
It would be nice if this worked in the real world, especially if such techniques could be extended to other minerals, pollutants, etc.
There IS parity checking...in a sense
on
Parity Code And DNA
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The combination of the H-bond acceptor=0 / donor=1 (in each of 3 positions) AND purine=0 / pyrimidine=1 gives you a 4-bit number (nibble) for each base (example: C = 1001). Each of these bits represents one aspect of the molecule that should "fit" to make a good pair in a DNA double helix.
The point is NOT that some DNA repair gadget is coming along, adding the bits, and trying to fix nibbles with parity error.
The point is that the four nibbles for the four DNA bases (A, C, G, & U/T) are all different in at least TWO bits. This means that any screw-up in a double helix will be a mis-fix in at least two of the four aspects. In the analog world of chemical reactions in a cell, a two-way mis-fit is a far less probable accident than a one-way mis-fit.
Speaking as a luke-warm Apple fan & potential switcher, this sounds cool...but so have most of the daily "ray of hope" rumors that serious Apple fans have been kicking around for years.
IBM has known for many years that an Intel/MS monopoly ain't good for IBM. (Anyone recall OS/2 for PowerPC?) Pumping up Apple with better CPU's would be good strategy, even if they make no money on the chips. But what's taken them so long?
My impression is that Motorola's attitude & situation are so bad that Apple couldn't get much out of 'em with "we'll switch to IBM" threats.
Now if someone can actually SHIP substantial quantities of non-defective chips BEFORE Intel is cranking out Pentium 6's & Itanium 4's at 10GHz...
The article notes that sheep with the gene convert their food into meat 30% more efficiently than normal sheep. Are there any other slashdotters breaking out the mint jelly and dreaming of more & cheaper lamb for their dining pleasure?
"Phantom Works" means that they've got the budget & clearance to work on cool "outside of the box" stuff. Boeing has no special interest in "secret", they're a big company trying to make money. The military doesn't waste much time trying to keep their huge, heavy, & slow transport equipment secret anyway.
If you read a bit down the page, you'd see that they want to replace many of the world's commercial container ships with new Boeing Pelicans (costing $$$$ each). "Phantom Works" will just be part of the sales pitch.
The CO2 would be in thousands or millions of old oil wells, coal seams, etc. and millions of square miles of deep ocean. Any one of those spots could have a problem & release some small fraction of 1% of the CO2.
If anything big enough to release a large fraction of the CO2 comes along (giant asteroid, Iraq's "Planet Buster" nuclear doomsday device, etc.), then we'll have *far* greater worries than the CO2 release.
Hopefully the Germans "fixed" this thing so it can only be used for astronomy...not for watching people who's brain waves looked suspicious when they were pledging "Everything that President Bush says is Truth, Peace, Freedom, and the American Way. Only sub-human terrorists and traitors ever doubt this."
There are a couple (old model) HP 16C calculators being sold on ebay right now. Other than "RPN ain't my style" and "long since discontinued", I've never heard anything bad about the 16C. But old HP's have their fans, and they don't sell cheap.
There's more info on 16C's at www.hpmuseum.org, supposedly including a MS Windows simulation of one.
As science, this sounds very cool. HOWEVER, this is a report of some ultra-preliminary initial discovery. The chance of it living up to the first-press-release hype is essentially zero.
There are jillions of chemicals that will disable/destroy/etc. HIV in a test tube. Like plain old chlorine bleach. You know any AIDS sufferers being successfully treated with bleach?
Apple's site is really short on hard facts, but DDR main memory can still be very useful with both CPU's stuck on a single SDR bus. IF the system controller (chipset), OS, & drivers are clever enough, DDR can up to (theoretical) double performance when the CPU's, video, network, disks, etc. are collectively making memory the performance bottleneck. Apple's ads suggest that they want to look good in intense multitasking situations like this.
Point a webcam at an ant farm, really busy road, TV tuned to a too-distant station (really noisy picture), or similar. Run the webcam's image files through MD5 or some similar high-quality bit-blender.
Announce that you're spending $million$ researching some dubious, far-out idea that (if REALLY long odds went your way) could be awesomely profitable.
Set up a big secret lab, post guards, etc. Assign a bunch of researchers (especially poor security risks) to seems-real research on the cover story. Insure a regular trickle of leaks about false leads, barely-measurable & irreproducable effects, discovered sources of error, etc.
Meanwhile, have a bunch more (tight-lipped) researchers in the back room doing the real research on the REAL secret project.
Who here is suggesting that Apple might go to a 3-button STANDARD? Sure, some folks are grasping at crumbs 'cause they want it bad. Others are better at reading what they want to see than the actual words on the page.
A well-done Apple 3-button mouse standard could be good in many situations and extremely good in a few. Don't hold your breath.
So I'm using 2 hands to crank this thing, holding my cell phone against my ear with my shoulder as I talk, steering through rush hour with my left knee SCRrreeeeee!!CRASH!!
Um...in case you didn't know, there are already trillions of "robotic, self-replicating bugs" running free, and they've been around since long before there were humans on this planet.
Yes, "living naturally" and drinking water you pulled out of hand-dug well with a bucket will eventually clean up the largest toxic waste dump...if you can find enough "living naturally" volunteers who don't mind ending up in the toxic graveyard.
Is there some special reason for you to think that bacteria designed to live on nuclear waste would want to eat your flesh?
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just me, or is there something horribly wrong if a computer is "always thrashing hard" tracking timesheets and vacation days for "about 20 employees"?
Is this a 70's-era computer, are the 20 employees all lightning-fingered data entry operators, or what?
Considering how long ago the experiment was done, the article was amazingly short on "what tests we've done on the strange new bacteria we found" details. (Or is the Indian new year not Jan 1, so "last year" is more recent?)
Pretty boring if there was a glitch and the bacteria really didn't come from 41km up. An astrophysics expert probably isn't so expert in preventing biological contamination.
It may be that the bacteria are Earthly, but natives of the upper atmosphere. Bacteria have turned up frequently in places where "everybody knew" that nothing could live, and are recently suspected of living in the atmosphere of Venus.
With native high-atmosphere bacteria around Earth and/or Venus, there would be plausable prospects for occasional cross-contamination via speeding bits of space dirt.
Select comets & a few other places in the solar system might have been able to produce or harbor bacteria that wound up here. Extra-Solar origins would be ultra-significant...but how could you prove it?
My impression is that America's 70's-era, pork-laden shuttle has been the LEAST economical way to get into space for quite a while. Japan can hardly make that worse.
The shuttle's government anyway, so it doesn't respond to reality the way the auto industry had to when Japanese imports took off. (It'd be real nice, but I don't see this kicking Yankee political pride enough to make it happen.)
There are lots of folks trying to make it in the space launch business, many with government subsidies, and not that much stuff that needs to be launched. I wish 'em the best, but I don't see how the Japanese could make money doing this. And their government is also BIG on pork...
From the full article on the ESA's web site...
"In the framework of ESA's cooperation with Russia, a Russian Proton launcher was chosen to place the Integral (INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory) observatory in orbit. The launcher lifted off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan today at 10:41 local time (06:41 CEST)."
The ESA's site also makes it very clear that the R(ussian)SA was in charge of getting the satellite into orbit. Let me suggest that you read up on it.
Notice my sig?
I bet the folks in Moscow are feeling a lot better now (vs. right after yesterday's rocket-blew-up-29-seconds-after-launch disaster).
This was a different model of rocket, launched from a different cosmodrome/spaceport/rocket range. Redundancy is next to Godliness.
The rocket was essentially a giant controlled firecracker with a half-jillion complicated parts that all had to work just right. Just one little oversight, part failure, or unforeseen way for something to go wrong, and ka-BOOM! is the natural result. Look at rocketry's failure history. Rocket launch facilities spread things far out, shelter people in blockhouses, etc. in ways that would be considered crazy overkill at a munitions dump. They've learned the hard way.
Not to say that the investigation of a disaster this big shouldn't consider sabotage, but long history suggests a vastly more likely alternative.
Here's the closing words of the article... ...so don't expect to see such stuff outside of small-quantity/cost-no-object uses anytime soon.
"But carbon nanotubes are still expensive to produce, and several teams are looking for production methods that would be viable on a commercial scale."
The "as hard as some ultrahard ceramic materials used in engineering." description (also from the article) suggests that it won't be much good for space elevator cable anyway. I'd bet than an elevator cable needs to flex some under loads ranging from tidal forces to microimpacts.
As our Asker noted, macros are dangerous. For example, let a macro processor replace
foo = bar(i++);
and you'd better hope that the parameter isn't used more than once in the function's code - otherwise i will get incremented too often - hello bugs!
Flip side, you can eyeball the most commonly used functions for safe-to-macro-inline candidates and save space just on them.
An el-crapo compiler could easily burn more bytes with call & return code than a small function would need inline.
Are there any dusty & old or not-so-essential hunks of this code that could be ditched? A badly-written section that could be rewritten much smaller? Wordy user interface stuff to edit down?
Amen.
I've done this for years. Three details: I've got a very quick message ("HiThisIsBob2129891234StartTalking") to cut wasted time. I live in a 2-bedroom apartment (so I never need go far to listen for a voice when the phone rings). I encourage people to call 24x7 (but no promise I'll pick up).
I don't have problems with desirable callers not leaving messages, even if they don't know that I screen calls. Flip side, I get plenty of no-message calls around dinner time, sometimes followed by a "This is award HQ, we've been trying to reach you because you've won..." message.
Yes, some folks are annoyed by this. I'm polite, but too bad for them. If they want to have me on call, they can pay the fees for me to get a 900 #. I happily leave messages for people when I'm calling.
This also lets me see the whole situation before answering. I won't pick up likes-to-chat Aunt Lucy if I've got guests over, but will if she says "Uncle Jim had a heart attack". Ditto the boss with "Tuesday softball game's cancelled" vs. "T-3 line's down!".
This bill would have to get through both the Senate and White House before it could become law. Rumor has it that both of 'em are preoccupied with higher priority government business just now, and all the elected officials are thinking about the November election most of the time anyway.
...
In GeekSpeak: looks like vaporware, smells like vaporware,
Let's see... You've got to control air pollution from the burning. Plant-nutrient minerals in the ash probably need to be seperated from the nickel and returned to the soil. (Or is spreading mineral fertilizer cheaper...but where does what's left of the nickel-removed-from-it ash go?). A nickel plant that's running 24x7x365 on ore from a strip mine enjoys a certain economy over one that's usually idle & waiting for the fall harvest.
It would be nice if this worked in the real world, especially if such techniques could be extended to other minerals, pollutants, etc.
The combination of the H-bond acceptor=0 / donor=1 (in each of 3 positions) AND purine=0 / pyrimidine=1 gives you a 4-bit number (nibble) for each base (example: C = 1001). Each of these bits represents one aspect of the molecule that should "fit" to make a good pair in a DNA double helix.
The point is NOT that some DNA repair gadget is coming along, adding the bits, and trying to fix nibbles with parity error.
The point is that the four nibbles for the four DNA bases (A, C, G, & U/T) are all different in at least TWO bits. This means that any screw-up in a double helix will be a mis-fix in at least two of the four aspects. In the analog world of chemical reactions in a cell, a two-way mis-fit is a far less probable accident than a one-way mis-fit.
Speaking as a luke-warm Apple fan & potential switcher, this sounds cool...but so have most of the daily "ray of hope" rumors that serious Apple fans have been kicking around for years.
IBM has known for many years that an Intel/MS monopoly ain't good for IBM. (Anyone recall OS/2 for PowerPC?) Pumping up Apple with better CPU's would be good strategy, even if they make no money on the chips. But what's taken them so long?
My impression is that Motorola's attitude & situation are so bad that Apple couldn't get much out of 'em with "we'll switch to IBM" threats.
Now if someone can actually SHIP substantial quantities of non-defective chips BEFORE Intel is cranking out Pentium 6's & Itanium 4's at 10GHz...
The article notes that sheep with the gene convert their food into meat 30% more efficiently than normal sheep. Are there any other slashdotters breaking out the mint jelly and dreaming of more & cheaper lamb for their dining pleasure?
"Phantom Works" means that they've got the budget & clearance to work on cool "outside of the box" stuff. Boeing has no special interest in "secret", they're a big company trying to make money. The military doesn't waste much time trying to keep their huge, heavy, & slow transport equipment secret anyway.
If you read a bit down the page, you'd see that they want to replace many of the world's commercial container ships with new Boeing Pelicans (costing $$$$ each). "Phantom Works" will just be part of the sales pitch.
The CO2 would be in thousands or millions of old oil wells, coal seams, etc. and millions of square miles of deep ocean. Any one of those spots could have a problem & release some small fraction of 1% of the CO2.
If anything big enough to release a large fraction of the CO2 comes along (giant asteroid, Iraq's "Planet Buster" nuclear doomsday device, etc.), then we'll have *far* greater worries than the CO2 release.
Hopefully the Germans "fixed" this thing so it can only be used for astronomy...not for watching people who's brain waves looked suspicious when they were pledging "Everything that President Bush says is Truth, Peace, Freedom, and the American Way. Only sub-human terrorists and traitors ever doubt this."
There are a couple (old model) HP 16C calculators being sold on ebay right now. Other than "RPN ain't my style" and "long since discontinued", I've never heard anything bad about the 16C. But old HP's have their fans, and they don't sell cheap.
There's more info on 16C's at www.hpmuseum.org, supposedly including a MS Windows simulation of one.
As science, this sounds very cool. HOWEVER, this is a report of some ultra-preliminary initial discovery. The chance of it living up to the first-press-release hype is essentially zero.
There are jillions of chemicals that will disable/destroy/etc. HIV in a test tube. Like plain old chlorine bleach. You know any AIDS sufferers being successfully treated with bleach?
I didn't think so.
Apple's site is really short on hard facts, but DDR main memory can still be very useful with both CPU's stuck on a single SDR bus. IF the system controller (chipset), OS, & drivers are clever enough, DDR can up to (theoretical) double performance when the CPU's, video, network, disks, etc. are collectively making memory the performance bottleneck. Apple's ads suggest that they want to look good in intense multitasking situations like this.
Point a webcam at an ant farm, really busy road, TV tuned to a too-distant station (really noisy picture), or similar. Run the webcam's image files through MD5 or some similar high-quality bit-blender.
Announce that you're spending $million$ researching some dubious, far-out idea that (if REALLY long odds went your way) could be awesomely profitable.
Set up a big secret lab, post guards, etc. Assign a bunch of researchers (especially poor security risks) to seems-real research on the cover story. Insure a regular trickle of leaks about false leads, barely-measurable & irreproducable effects, discovered sources of error, etc.
Meanwhile, have a bunch more (tight-lipped) researchers in the back room doing the real research on the REAL secret project.
Who here is suggesting that Apple might go to a 3-button STANDARD? Sure, some folks are grasping at crumbs 'cause they want it bad. Others are better at reading what they want to see than the actual words on the page.
A well-done Apple 3-button mouse standard could be good in many situations and extremely good in a few. Don't hold your breath.
So I'm using 2 hands to crank this thing, holding my cell phone against my ear with my shoulder as I talk, steering through rush hour with my left knee SCRrreeeeee!!CRASH!!
Um...in case you didn't know, there are already trillions of "robotic, self-replicating bugs" running free, and they've been around since long before there were humans on this planet.
Yes, "living naturally" and drinking water you pulled out of hand-dug well with a bucket will eventually clean up the largest toxic waste dump...if you can find enough "living naturally" volunteers who don't mind ending up in the toxic graveyard.
Is there some special reason for you to think that bacteria designed to live on nuclear waste would want to eat your flesh?