"nothing inherently brilliant in their architecture" eh?
here's an activity for you. get an athlon64 x2 and a core 2 duo, run them at the same mhz speed with the same ddr2 speed/timings, and compare how much faster the core2duo is clock for clock.
it's faster. it does more work per mhz. it's more efficient.
this has nothing to do with 90nm or 65nm. amd isn't changing anything about their cpus, they're just shrinking them.......
Trollish, fanboish, but Ill bite anyway. DUH! AMD is slower MHz to MHz, they dont claim otherwise! Thats why they went to CPU ratings as opposed to raw MHz on their model names. They did that years ago. Get over it. AMD's architecture allows them to run on much less power (thus cooler) than the equivalent Intel. They might not always have THE FASTEST CPU EVAR!! but neither does Intel, the lead swaps back and forth. As for "just shrinking them", isnt that all that intel is doing too? Oh yeh, they are also cramming another peice of silicon into the same package to add cores... AMD is putting all the cores on the same piece. They also have the memory controller on board, something that Intel is probably working towards since it dramatically increases memory bandwidth to the CPU. Evaluate the CPUs based on how they perform for your specific needs at the prices you can get them for, and you end up with "The Best CPU" for you. Thats what I do, and sometimes Intel wins, sometime AMD does. I currently run an older P4 as my desktop, and a dual AMD MX as a workstation, and a few multi-cpu/core Opteron based SUN servers.
ut instead what is happening is the original advertisements are separated from the content and new, different advertisements are substituted in the web context. So, basically you are taking the "value" of the David Letterman content for free and substituting your own (or someone else's) advertising.
How can they possibly let that stand?
For the case of TV shows, etc, yes, I skipped over that in my original posting... However, this can also be addressed using the suggestion I made as well: require a specific code snippet/java app/flash thingy to do the media presentation on the page. That way they could inject ads into the video display, and/or wrap the video window itself in banner ads. Annoying, yes, but aren't all ads anyway? Rather than litigate and possibly collect one lump sum, they would be able to collect royalties for every viewing. Many sites devoted to video displays currently do this. Besides, I doubt the *AA's previously got $$ from viewings of shows other than those brodcast by the networks. How many "David Letterman Season 5" DVDs do you think they actually sell?
What I dont understand about cases specifically like this, where they go after sites that allow people to have a page that play music and videos, is why they don't look at it as free advertising and let it go. For music, its a little trickier since its easy to get decent quality audio (currently) from the sites, and the possibility of users ripping the songs directly from a page, or using the pages as an online jukebox is much more likely than for the videos. It always seems to me that the MPAA and RIAA have it backwards in these cases, most commercial ventures actually PAY the people that advertise for them, not SUE them. The way it works is the advertisers spread the word about a product, and people that see the ads become interested and possibly purchase said product. Its what 90% or so of the "internet economy" is based on, as well as the reason SPAM is still so prevalent. In this case, people are advertising the music and videos, and by visiting their page, other users become exposed to the songs/videos and might become interested in the artist and go looking for more, which might end in a CD or DVD purchase, resulting in more $$ for the *AA. Granted, this type of advertisement makes some of the product itself available for free, but that too is part of advertising. Companies routinely give away samples or demos of products to try to entice potential new buyers. The samples are normally smaller or not as fully featured/functional, but are good enough to give the potential client an idea of what to expect. In the case of these posted songs and videos, this is accomplished by limiting the quality of the media thats posted. MySpace could probably accomplish this by requiring such postings be used through some dictated java script player or some other code snippet, or require the media be hosted by them or a trusted affiliate such that the bit rate could be verified. If someone likes the lower quality version, they are more inclined to go buy the full quality CD/DVD. By suing your advertisers, which also happen to be your consumers, you only piss off both groups and negatively affect sales (yes, I know its been said thousands of times...). Its like the prohibition era, if you make something illegal that the majority of the populace (in this case the online populace) wants to do, they will do it anyway. Its better to embrace it and find ways to profit from it than resist it and waste time/money fighting it.
Not quite -- for making unauthorized copies available. It's just two words, but an important distinction. If the library made their own copies and sold or lent them, there'd be an issue. But (much to the RIAA's chagrin, I'm sure), you can generally lend, sell, trade, etc. originals as much as you like. I know that many people reading this will say "what's the big deal if I lend the CD I bought to my friend Billy, vs. burning him a copy?" but the law has countless examples of many seemingly meaningless distinctions
Bits for thought: what's to prevent someone from putting the CD in their computer drive, and having it set as a shared drive? Sure, you would have to d/l the raw track, which would be an order of magnitude larger than if it were compressed to mp3/ogg/whatever, but by doing so, no "Copy" is being made until the download is sent to the other computer and then only if saved to disk. Would fair use allow someone to directly stream from the shared CD, since it is the original media and not a copy (besides the intermediate transmitted data going from the drive through the computer, network, other computer, and out the soundcard, which is at least partially explicitly allowed by recent adjustments to the fair use clauses)? Only the one, original copy is in existance, and thus this is more like your example of letting billy borrow the CD itself. What if the share is piped through compression filter to compress it on the fly or before being sent, would that change things?
just over $1billion in fines already, and only 8500 pages to show for it after two whole years? That doesnt sound like much, and comes out to $118,000 per page. Taking the average of 275 words per page, that comes to $429 per word, or about $72 per non-whitespace.
Remember, we are dealing with transonic velocities, where the pressure waves are basically generated on top of themselves, since the source is moving close to, at, or just past the same speed they propagate from the location they were created. This causes a shockwave to form, which extends radically from the source (the aircraft). The aircraft itself will actually create two major shocks, one at the leading edge, the bow shock, and one at the trailing edge, the tail shock. These two shockwaves will create interference patterns where they overlap. If the conditions are right, the interference will be constructive, resulting in areas of even higher pressure, with areas of lower pressure between. These areas could be quite far from the aircraft, since the shockwave extends steeply from the sources. The lower pressure areas would cause the formation of the cloud, and the immediately following higher pressure would destroy it. I again looked for the demonstration applets, which show the shockwaves, but have again failed to find them...
Often in the court system, these legal loopholes (be they ill-defined laws or what have you) allow criminals to go free.
Often, maybe, but not in this case, even if they did find for the defendant on this particular charge... he was already busted for soliciting a minor. What this is about is that the court did not throw it out due to "email" being very poorly defined. Because of that, these is less of a chance that it will be changed. Yes the judge noted the poor definition, but at the same time, allowed for the law to be bent. Had this pedo been let off on this charge, it would have lit a fire under someones ass to get the law fixed, making it harder for others to attempt to bend it in this same manner.
How can the air so quickly return to the state that it was in so as to immediately absorb (I don't know the proper term) the condensation?
Thermodynamics... Pressure, Temperature and Volume are all related. Sound is nothing more than pressure waves, and the aircraft moving through the air at close to Mach speeds will create very interesting pressure waves around it, that can extend quite far from the craft itself. Since the source of the pressure wave is the aircraft itself, and moving at close to the speed of sound (speed that pressure waves propagate), the pressure wave will become a standing wave with respect to the aircraft. As substances compress (increase pressure in the same volume), thermodynamics regulates that temperature will rise, and as they expand (pressure drops), temperature will drop. These same principals are what cause your Air conditioner and refrigerator to work. The atmosphere also has what is known as the dew point, which simply stated, is the temperature that a cloud of condensation will form. When the ground temperature is at the dew point, you get fog. It is a temperature based on pressure and humidity. Since the aircraft causes radical changes in temperature and pressure, if you get the right combination of conditions, the aircraft's movement through the air can cause a local zone of air that will hit the dew point and create the cloud. It is when it hits this point that the cloud will magically appear. The thermal "momentum" for the change is dictated by the specific heat of the air, and the heat of vaporization for the water in the air at the location (amount of energy needed to change its temp, and energy required to change phases of the water). Since the energy is being provided by the aircraft, there is no shortage, and it is powerful enough to drive these changes very quickly, which is why it appears and disappears so fast.
Besides my contorted description here, the referenced articles do a decent job going into more detail. There are also some nice java applets that can visualized the pressure waves created at near-mach speeds to demonstrate why the shape of the cone is as large as it is (mainly due to the amplification predicted by the Prandtl-Glauert singularity equations). I tried looking for them but couldnt find the one I remember seeing before..
...a small robot, no larger than a hornet to follow, film, and kill terrorists.
Sounds like the flying robotic syringes in Dune, they silently fly around to find their target, then fly directly into them and inject some sort of fast acting poison (the spice?).
true, but to get royalties from an american company, one only needs to sue in america yes?
From the article, though it wasn't layed out very clearly, it appears they are doing this as a counter-suit: the other US based companies filed to invalidate the patents in question, CSIRO tried filing that they were immune to the US lawsuit since they are a foreign governmental body, judge dismissed their claim and allowed the invalidation claims to proceed, so CSIRO filed counter-suit for patent infringement.
How can they collect royalties from Buffalo for every wireless device sold in the world? Does buffalo technology own the patent for that? Wouldn't that mean that companies like Netgear blah blah blah
RTFA... to answer all your questions, YES. They (CSIRO) own the patent, which evidently covers technology that lead to the standard and would mean royalties from most wireless (802.11a/g) devices worldwide, and they are going after the others (Netgear was specifically mentioned) as well...seriously, RTFA!
There's a (probably urban myth) story about someone nicking power from the UK national grid by putting a huge coil in a shed directly under the power lines that hung over his garden...
Yeh, urban legend, the myth busters did that one a while ago, though its one of the "lost" episodes, and managed to pull only a few millivolts with 100lbs of wire from a set of transmission lines (See here, is the "Free Power" one). While their experiment was typical of their normal stuff (done quickly and not the most scientific), I doubt a normal individual could gain anything worthwhile from attempting it either. The coil would have to be enormous and very close to the lines themselves to get anything, and you would end up spending more building it that you would recover in electric bills for many years.
Well, not sure what the exact problem was or how widespread it was, but while at the poll this morning a guy was obviously agitated about the voting machine and the people working the poll were scrambling around verifying things and even calling the electorate board. From what I overheard, the ballot was incomplete or the choices on it were not what they should have been or something. It went so far as to them opening a locked metal box in the corner and pulling out what appeared to be very large full-color screen shots of the ballots the machines were supposed to display. It seemed they agreed that something was not right, not matching the Sample/absentee ballot available when you walked in (they kept comparing between the two) but they couldn't do anything to fix it and voting continued as normal. The guy eventually went back to his machine, completed (or cleared?) his ballot, and stormed out stating "whats the point in coming here to vote if it wont let me vote?"
Not sure, my ballot appeared ok, but then again I wasnt comparing line for line all the candidates or options, I just voted for the ones I knew ahead of time, which all appeared normal.
Oh, and M&M's are designed to melt at just above room temp. That way they "Melt in your mouth, not in your hands." There is no need for nano-tech to fix them.
IIRC (and no, I didnt RTFM so this might have been mentioned there), the high-temp M&Ms have been around since the first gulf war (the one H. W. Bush presided over), and were designed specifically so that they could be sent to the troops there without melting. At least, Im pretty sure I remember some new article or TV special report that mentioned that...
I admit my ignorance of any structure that will stand up to the accelerations/velocities applied to the kinds of masses they're talking about launching, whether straight-line or circular, for the time needed to achieve said velocities: Granted, 2 up to even 9 or 10 g is doable for awhile (see NASA's training centrifuge, for example) but is it scalable to escape velocities?
Its not so much the actual g forces, but rather the total radial and linear forces involved between the mass of the object being launched and the launch structure itself. g forces are nothing more than an acceleration, your weight is the effect of the earth's gravity (an acceleration of 1g) towards the center of mass of the earth, yet it takes more to hold you up than a small piece of paper even though the g forces are the same. SuperColliders already accelerate particles way past escape velocity, but the masses they accelerate are so small that the payload is not worth shooting into space. I would think a radial loop would create forces greatly in excess of that of a simple linear accelerator, but the overall size of the launch device could be much more compact since it could build speed over the same track. Finding the right balance between the loop and a linear ramp for final trajectory would be the best option IMHO. Im still skeptical though, how a stucture, let alone the innards of a satelite itself, could withstand the type of forces listed. At 2000g a 1g mass would exert the same force as a 2Kg mass on earth, a 1000Kg sattelite would exert the same as 2000000Kg.... I think it would crush itself flat under the forces before it reached escape velocity.
Also, the reason the NASA g force simulator hits 9 or 10 is only because that is near the limit that Humans can withstand. Modern jet fighters can handle more, and are generally limited by the ability of the pilot to not black out/red out during the maneuver that generated them. The platters of your harddrive spinning at 7k rpm generates more g force at the edge of its platters.
The only problem I have found with ESX is that it requires a RAID controller just so you can setup Virtual Machines, and I find it very annoying that you have to shell out money for overpriced SCSI drives in order to make use of ESX. I know there are a few select IDE/SATA RAID cards that work with ESX, but I've only found one that is PCI Express and it is way too expensive for me. A few others are PCI-X, and don't even support SATA300.
Theres your problem, you are not in their target audience. Most people using this would be using it for a server or other higher end computer, where RAID is there by default. If you dont want to pay for "overpriced" scsi equipment, then you are definately not in their primary target. Would you really want to run misson critical servers on single threaded drives? RAID not only gives you the benefit of redundancy (except striping), but also speed enhancement (except mirroring). And, if I read their specs correctly, you can use ISCSI or other network attached storage to store the VMs on. If you are willing to spend the $$ on ESX, you probably are willing to purchse the required hardware to power it.
I imagine if this thing is successfull it could fund the next stage, which would be an orbital vehicle.
Or extremely high parchuting! I remember reading a short sci-fi story about something like this once. They had a tower that went up into the stratosphere/leo region, where you take an elevator ride to the top, put on a space suit with a dish shaped heat shield, then jumped off. After re-entering the atmosphere and slowing down enough from drag, you jettison the dish, then procede like a normal jump. Sounds fun..
Its VMWare's non-free ESX server. You boot directly into a VMWare style OS, where you directly run VMs. It also has the benefit to pause/resume VMs, and even export them to other VM Servers on other hardware. Its like a Game Genie for servers!
Many schools have Never accepted AP credits... Ga Tech and most other engineering schools do not accept most/any math/science AP credits because they know how worthless they are compared to their own courses. I entered GaTech with AP credits for Calculus and physics (4s on both), which would have allowed me to only skip Calc1, but elected (upon recomendation of my counselor) to not use them and actually take the course. Im so glad I did, my entire HS calculus curriculum was summed up and completed in the first few weeks of the quarter long course, and went into many things the HS courses skipped over or barely touched. If I had applied my AP credits, Calc2-8 would have been even more of a hell than they were.
Engine efficiency also plays a part though. Combustion engines are very energy-inefficient, on the order of 50% or less (theoretical max is 59%) for the very large maritime diesels that power cargo ships, the 90000HP variety, with smaller engines being alot less, ~30%. Compared to Electrical motors, which get 95% and better, your numbers reduce to 209/0.95, roughly 210:1. While this still sounds big, it basically cuts the difference in half. To put everything into perspective, if a particular trip takes 10days, and each day takes 10tons of diesel (its probably ALOT more than that, but doesnt matter in this calculation since it reduces out to the ratio above), thats 100Tons per trip, which would require 21000 Tons of battery for the full trip without recharge. If you kept the same weight in batteries as fuel, 100Tons, you would have half a day of battery reserves, probably not enough to keep power the whole trip, but well worth taking looking at. Longer trips would yield much larger savings as well, since the initial fuel ammount would go up while battery weight remains constant. This would also reduce the ammount of balast water the ships would need to take in, as the weight of the ship would also remain relatively constant during the trip, and time spent fueling would be reduced or eliminated (except for emergency reserves to power a generator onboard or something, Im sure a large enough ship would not go pure electric without a backup). Density would also be important, as Lead/Acid batteries are about 3000KG/M^3, while Diesel is 950Kg/M^3, so the batteries would take as much as 3x less space per unit wieght on the ship than the fuel. Ships could replace their lead ballast with lead-acid batteries, and regain most of the space taken for fuel. Other things to consider though are weight and placement of the solar cells, and having enough of them to produce the required energy to power the ship...
Nah, they are still playing catch-up. SUN has already been selling their Niagara (Ultra Sparc T1), which has 6-8 cores each, with an additional 4 threads per core, and the ability to have 4 in a box (8*4*4 = 128 threads!) blows Intel out of the water. Yes, I am perfectly aware that this chip is a SERVER cpu, but you mention servers and virtualization (vmware, parallels, etc), which Sun basically designed this chip to do. As a sysadmin, this cpu also get my attention over Intel for using very little power, something Intel isn't exactly known for. Less power == less heat generally, and with the number of cores the T1 has, we can run multiple VMware instances on one box instead of several 1u servers or blades. The drawbacks to the T1 are its relative lower speed (1.2Ghz, tho it is a Sparc based CPU), and a single shared FPU per cpu, but for general purpose servers, the T1 is it. For our heavyweight servers, the ones that need the most CPU horsepower regardless of heat/power consumption, we still pick AMD opteron based Suns (Sun Fire x4600). The memory bus to the Cores alone far surpasses Intel when it comes to throughput, which directly translates to faster operation with bigger datasets, not to mention that you can get an 8xdual core 3Ghz Opteron setup...
AMD beat Intel to the dual core CPU, and will be releasing a 4core opteron soon as well. IBM's Cell cpus are also multi-core, though in a different arrangement, and will be used in the ps3 and IBM's next megasupercomputer.... Multi-core itself isnt too special, it just takes multi-cpu and puts them in the same physical chip to save space/heat/power. The advantages for programmers/gamers/etc (neglecting the environmentals like heat/power) are basically the same as if each core were a different physical chip. Intel got behind, and is now rushing to one-up AMD. The same old CPU war rages on
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here's an activity for you. get an athlon64 x2 and a core 2 duo, run them at the same mhz speed with the same ddr2 speed/timings, and compare how much faster the core2duo is clock for clock.
it's faster. it does more work per mhz. it's more efficient.
this has nothing to do with 90nm or 65nm. amd isn't changing anything about their cpus, they're just shrinking them.
Trollish, fanboish, but Ill bite anyway. DUH! AMD is slower MHz to MHz, they dont claim otherwise! Thats why they went to CPU ratings as opposed to raw MHz on their model names. They did that years ago. Get over it. AMD's architecture allows them to run on much less power (thus cooler) than the equivalent Intel. They might not always have THE FASTEST CPU EVAR!! but neither does Intel, the lead swaps back and forth. As for "just shrinking them", isnt that all that intel is doing too? Oh yeh, they are also cramming another peice of silicon into the same package to add cores... AMD is putting all the cores on the same piece. They also have the memory controller on board, something that Intel is probably working towards since it dramatically increases memory bandwidth to the CPU. Evaluate the CPUs based on how they perform for your specific needs at the prices you can get them for, and you end up with "The Best CPU" for you. Thats what I do, and sometimes Intel wins, sometime AMD does. I currently run an older P4 as my desktop, and a dual AMD MX as a workstation, and a few multi-cpu/core Opteron based SUN servers.
blah
tm
For the case of TV shows, etc, yes, I skipped over that in my original posting... However, this can also be addressed using the suggestion I made as well: require a specific code snippet/java app/flash thingy to do the media presentation on the page. That way they could inject ads into the video display, and/or wrap the video window itself in banner ads. Annoying, yes, but aren't all ads anyway? Rather than litigate and possibly collect one lump sum, they would be able to collect royalties for every viewing. Many sites devoted to video displays currently do this. Besides, I doubt the *AA's previously got $$ from viewings of shows other than those brodcast by the networks. How many "David Letterman Season 5" DVDs do you think they actually sell?
Tm
Tm
Bits for thought: what's to prevent someone from putting the CD in their computer drive, and having it set as a shared drive? Sure, you would have to d/l the raw track, which would be an order of magnitude larger than if it were compressed to mp3/ogg/whatever, but by doing so, no "Copy" is being made until the download is sent to the other computer and then only if saved to disk. Would fair use allow someone to directly stream from the shared CD, since it is the original media and not a copy (besides the intermediate transmitted data going from the drive through the computer, network, other computer, and out the soundcard, which is at least partially explicitly allowed by recent adjustments to the fair use clauses)? Only the one, original copy is in existance, and thus this is more like your example of letting billy borrow the CD itself. What if the share is piped through compression filter to compress it on the fly or before being sent, would that change things?
Tm
Seriously though, do they realize how many anime tentical rape videos are out there???
blah
Tm
Remember, we are dealing with transonic velocities, where the pressure waves are basically generated on top of themselves, since the source is moving close to, at, or just past the same speed they propagate from the location they were created. This causes a shockwave to form, which extends radically from the source (the aircraft). The aircraft itself will actually create two major shocks, one at the leading edge, the bow shock, and one at the trailing edge, the tail shock. These two shockwaves will create interference patterns where they overlap. If the conditions are right, the interference will be constructive, resulting in areas of even higher pressure, with areas of lower pressure between. These areas could be quite far from the aircraft, since the shockwave extends steeply from the sources. The lower pressure areas would cause the formation of the cloud, and the immediately following higher pressure would destroy it. I again looked for the demonstration applets, which show the shockwaves, but have again failed to find them...
tm
Often, maybe, but not in this case, even if they did find for the defendant on this particular charge... he was already busted for soliciting a minor. What this is about is that the court did not throw it out due to "email" being very poorly defined. Because of that, these is less of a chance that it will be changed. Yes the judge noted the poor definition, but at the same time, allowed for the law to be bent. Had this pedo been let off on this charge, it would have lit a fire under someones ass to get the law fixed, making it harder for others to attempt to bend it in this same manner.
Tm
Thermodynamics... Pressure, Temperature and Volume are all related. Sound is nothing more than pressure waves, and the aircraft moving through the air at close to Mach speeds will create very interesting pressure waves around it, that can extend quite far from the craft itself. Since the source of the pressure wave is the aircraft itself, and moving at close to the speed of sound (speed that pressure waves propagate), the pressure wave will become a standing wave with respect to the aircraft. As substances compress (increase pressure in the same volume), thermodynamics regulates that temperature will rise, and as they expand (pressure drops), temperature will drop. These same principals are what cause your Air conditioner and refrigerator to work. The atmosphere also has what is known as the dew point, which simply stated, is the temperature that a cloud of condensation will form. When the ground temperature is at the dew point, you get fog. It is a temperature based on pressure and humidity. Since the aircraft causes radical changes in temperature and pressure, if you get the right combination of conditions, the aircraft's movement through the air can cause a local zone of air that will hit the dew point and create the cloud. It is when it hits this point that the cloud will magically appear. The thermal "momentum" for the change is dictated by the specific heat of the air, and the heat of vaporization for the water in the air at the location (amount of energy needed to change its temp, and energy required to change phases of the water). Since the energy is being provided by the aircraft, there is no shortage, and it is powerful enough to drive these changes very quickly, which is why it appears and disappears so fast.
Besides my contorted description here, the referenced articles do a decent job going into more detail. There are also some nice java applets that can visualized the pressure waves created at near-mach speeds to demonstrate why the shape of the cone is as large as it is (mainly due to the amplification predicted by the Prandtl-Glauert singularity equations). I tried looking for them but couldnt find the one I remember seeing before..
tm
Sounds like the flying robotic syringes in Dune, they silently fly around to find their target, then fly directly into them and inject some sort of fast acting poison (the spice?).
tm
Though most have high bidders with 0 feedback, and are probably being shilled to look like a real PS3 by price...
tm
From the article, though it wasn't layed out very clearly, it appears they are doing this as a counter-suit: the other US based companies filed to invalidate the patents in question, CSIRO tried filing that they were immune to the US lawsuit since they are a foreign governmental body, judge dismissed their claim and allowed the invalidation claims to proceed, so CSIRO filed counter-suit for patent infringement.
tm
RTFA... to answer all your questions, YES. They (CSIRO) own the patent, which evidently covers technology that lead to the standard and would mean royalties from most wireless (802.11a/g) devices worldwide, and they are going after the others (Netgear was specifically mentioned) as well...seriously, RTFA!
tm
Yeh, urban legend, the myth busters did that one a while ago, though its one of the "lost" episodes, and managed to pull only a few millivolts with 100lbs of wire from a set of transmission lines (See here, is the "Free Power" one). While their experiment was typical of their normal stuff (done quickly and not the most scientific), I doubt a normal individual could gain anything worthwhile from attempting it either. The coil would have to be enormous and very close to the lines themselves to get anything, and you would end up spending more building it that you would recover in electric bills for many years.
Tm
Not sure, my ballot appeared ok, but then again I wasnt comparing line for line all the candidates or options, I just voted for the ones I knew ahead of time, which all appeared normal.
tm
Not to mention the default screensaver of the flaming face of J. R. Bob Dobbs himself!
tm
IIRC (and no, I didnt RTFM so this might have been mentioned there), the high-temp M&Ms have been around since the first gulf war (the one H. W. Bush presided over), and were designed specifically so that they could be sent to the troops there without melting. At least, Im pretty sure I remember some new article or TV special report that mentioned that...
Tm
Its not so much the actual g forces, but rather the total radial and linear forces involved between the mass of the object being launched and the launch structure itself. g forces are nothing more than an acceleration, your weight is the effect of the earth's gravity (an acceleration of 1g) towards the center of mass of the earth, yet it takes more to hold you up than a small piece of paper even though the g forces are the same. SuperColliders already accelerate particles way past escape velocity, but the masses they accelerate are so small that the payload is not worth shooting into space. I would think a radial loop would create forces greatly in excess of that of a simple linear accelerator, but the overall size of the launch device could be much more compact since it could build speed over the same track. Finding the right balance between the loop and a linear ramp for final trajectory would be the best option IMHO. Im still skeptical though, how a stucture, let alone the innards of a satelite itself, could withstand the type of forces listed. At 2000g a 1g mass would exert the same force as a 2Kg mass on earth, a 1000Kg sattelite would exert the same as 2000000Kg.... I think it would crush itself flat under the forces before it reached escape velocity.
Also, the reason the NASA g force simulator hits 9 or 10 is only because that is near the limit that Humans can withstand. Modern jet fighters can handle more, and are generally limited by the ability of the pilot to not black out/red out during the maneuver that generated them. The platters of your harddrive spinning at 7k rpm generates more g force at the edge of its platters.
Tm
Theres your problem, you are not in their target audience. Most people using this would be using it for a server or other higher end computer, where RAID is there by default. If you dont want to pay for "overpriced" scsi equipment, then you are definately not in their primary target. Would you really want to run misson critical servers on single threaded drives? RAID not only gives you the benefit of redundancy (except striping), but also speed enhancement (except mirroring). And, if I read their specs correctly, you can use ISCSI or other network attached storage to store the VMs on. If you are willing to spend the $$ on ESX, you probably are willing to purchse the required hardware to power it.
Tm
Or extremely high parchuting! I remember reading a short sci-fi story about something like this once. They had a tower that went up into the stratosphere/leo region, where you take an elevator ride to the top, put on a space suit with a dish shaped heat shield, then jumped off. After re-entering the atmosphere and slowing down enough from drag, you jettison the dish, then procede like a normal jump. Sounds fun..
tm
tm
~s/messy/crispy/
Tm
tm
AMD beat Intel to the dual core CPU, and will be releasing a 4core opteron soon as well. IBM's Cell cpus are also multi-core, though in a different arrangement, and will be used in the ps3 and IBM's next megasupercomputer.... Multi-core itself isnt too special, it just takes multi-cpu and puts them in the same physical chip to save space/heat/power. The advantages for programmers/gamers/etc (neglecting the environmentals like heat/power) are basically the same as if each core were a different physical chip. Intel got behind, and is now rushing to one-up AMD. The same old CPU war rages on
tm