You could make a laser out of water ice in orbit to any size using fusion purification and rotation of the billet, doping with chromium or rare earths as you go. Thermal mass should keep it solid enough to pipe light through, and if it's long enough you could add energy slowly enough to pump it to some pretty fantastic numbers of photons before the coherent beam left the less-reflective mirror. Fifty metre aperture? Kilometer in length? Mine the ice from the rings of one of the gas giants and use shaped solar reflectors. You could use silicon too, I imagine, but I like ice because it's cool. Plentiful, too, once we evolve past the point of STS and SFS (Space Food Sticks).
Hey, Sergey! You have a few bucks lying around? You could keep your jet out of the rain. Just think about that big door opening before you roll out to the apron -- what a power fix!
I remember hearing some years back about a graduated set of calibrated weights sent to Kennedy Space Center -- very expensive, environment-controlled copies calibrated against the standard in Paris. The set arrived in good condition, but the quartermaster who received them had instructions affix an identification plate to all inbound goods received, and complained that some of the smaller weights had turned out to be too small to drill and rivet...
I used to work at Aames, thought the blimp hangars were totally awesome. Are they still there? Are they filled with Google Jets(tm)? Will Google Earth let us peek at the jets? (I know I could check myself, but I think I'd get more mileage out of just pondering it).
It's a bit more like -- the Internet (capital I) is made up of a lot of separate entities connected together. Let's call one of these sub-networks an "internet" (small i). Given that capacity can be expressed in a metaphor of bandwidth as "diameter" of the conduit, it's clear that you could express the relationship as a series of differentially-diametered cylinders that provide communication for these sub-networks in a continuous flow, rather than the batch-burst of monolithic network prime-movers of the past. So to simplify, then, you can't expect the Internet to be like a single large truck; it's more like a series of tubes that deliver these "internets" to your desk each day.
is often a matter of writing a record to many files...Obviously more costly.
Uh, careful with that assumption Eugene -- that presumes a single disk, where your statement would be true. In a large RAID-5 or RAID-1+0 array it could be as quick, or even quicker to write to multiple files depending on where the allocation table resides (Yipes, Stripes!).
Other than that, you're making sense, but I'd add -- how does retrieval stack up relative to index generation? You have to give up something to get that speed, RDBMS' have a lot of in-built power, refined over a long period of time. Is this shift all due to XML storage doubling up on metadata? Are we tending towards external index builds due to the upsurge in search technology? Will this fly like the leap from CODASYL to Relational DBMS' or will it um, "achieve a flat trajectory" like OODB? Tune in next week...
I imagine the serial numbers all started with Sierra Charlie Foxtrot..
Any process that has people as part of the process is a flawed process. All you have to do is have a few F**ups in a row miss the protocols, then someone does something seriously, egregiously, mass-extinction-threateningly wrong. Focus, peebles!
Umm, hang on, offset rays can in theory be explained by impact. Consider whether the primary body that impacted the centre of Tycho was alone, or had friends -- I think a fractured body of smaller mass accompaning the main body, with an impact point slightly off-centre of the main body (still remaining within the Tycho crater) could explain a ray that has a non-concentric origin? A comparison of the size of the concentric-origin vs. the nonconcentric origin rays, plus any of the main crater's divergence from circularity would be telling. Has that been factored in?
Relatively few people will refer to a B-52 as a "cargo bird" except in certain rather niche circles.
I don't see how this is an incident worth reporting, except that they were carried by mistake, and that they were carried on pylons instead of in containers, and that the media found out...
I'd be more interested in the problem being solved by a new technical approach rather than by an application of brute-foce technology we already have mostly sussed out (except for the control systems, but that's just micro-SCADA to be worked out). Anyone have a take on Drexler's (I think it was Drexler's) "fan cloth" idea? Wings don't have to be solid lumps in cross section in order to provide lift. Bazillions of nano-sized engines that capture individual air molecules at random vectors and send them downward in a single direction to provide a pressure differential & thus thrust. Interesting stuff, I wonder if it would be workable.
I believe corporations are registgered as fictitious entities, aren't they? "fictitious business name" is on the business license they have to post publicly.
Arsen Darnay, "The Karma Affair". What if people actually could control reincarnation via technology? In Darnay's book, it was used as part of a long-term solution to nuclear waste storage. Breed priests who keep the stuff isolated, by needing it close down deep in their soul. Scary book, really. Scary. Afraid to re-read it scary.
I had to look past the sunbeams and imagine the impact both on the firm and the guy if he stayed on. It wouldn't have been good for us, or for him. The guy should have been a life coach or a priest and by not taking the step of sacking him I was keeping him from a chance to do good somewhere else. Sucked having to tell him.
Then later I found out he'd fabricated everything in his resume in the first instance, coached his friends to act as references (who looks past the phone number?) and screwed up a bid that would have employed another dozen peeps. Sucked finding that out.
Advice? Don't assume you know everything about people, just like you never assumed you knew everything about software or hardware. HR people -- good ones -- can help, and so would a bit of reading about psychology, body language, every possible fad or truth about knowing people from the best sources you can find. People are a lot more difficult than software. Learn your subject, grasshopper.
Agreed. While Mythical Man-Month is dated, the attitudes it imparts will serve you very, very well. Also recommend "Good to Great" and "The Search". And whoever said you lose your technical competence after a few years, that's a darn lie! I can still write Vax-11 assembler with the best of them!
Ok, maybe you're right. My advice?
1) Get a mentor
2) Start reading on your topic. Spend big on books.
Microsoft Exchange had this from the inception -- context based automated response was a feature of public folders since 4.0 -- expose email address of public folder, then use public folder rules to generate auto response and send it.
Not the earliest perhaps, but Hello Mr. 800lb Gorilla! Troll vs. Borg -- who has the biggest legal budget?
...managers abandoned. I'm sure they'll do a good job of quantifying the sinkhole their servers will become when their best people skip ship, then they'll spend a lot of money on monitoring software, give the work of watching it to some cupholder diagnosticians from overseas and wonder what to do when the db logfile overflows.
You know, some ship captains can guide their ships to dock without an on-shore pilot, but they generally don't, because they have the good sense (mostly) to avoid risking their gear in unfamiliar waters. A good business captain should heed the example.
A lot of SCADA is still controlled by VMS systems. You can still buy them from HP. You can put off patches or upgrades until they scrap the refinery, and there's not a lot of activity among the script kiddies for DCL hacks. KESU rules.
Amerinds believed/believe that everything is alive. The question is "how alive?" I mean, even a rock has a life cycle. I'm kind of that way inclined myself ("miracle of the covalent bond" school of thought).
Kind of reminds me of the AI meme "asking whether a machine can think is akin to asking whether a submarine can swim". Life, shmife, if an old word can't be bent to fit make up a new one.
Hmm... Ok. I hereby declare that Viking I has discovered "Shmife".
Oh, and I was in JPL SFOF when the first picture returned. Still have it framed on the bookshelf in the living room;-)
Yep, there is magic in the covalent bond. I see chemistry at this level as profoundly spiritual, don't you? The categorisation, classification of particles and energies at the level of the double-helix only expands our understanding of the profound miracle that is life.
Of course, it's fun to control the miracles ourseleves, too.
Igor? Would you be so kind as to raise the lightning rod? There's a good chap...
Slashdot Mirror
You could make a laser out of water ice in orbit to any size using fusion purification and rotation of the billet, doping with chromium or rare earths as you go. Thermal mass should keep it solid enough to pipe light through, and if it's long enough you could add energy slowly enough to pump it to some pretty fantastic numbers of photons before the coherent beam left the less-reflective mirror. Fifty metre aperture? Kilometer in length? Mine the ice from the rings of one of the gas giants and use shaped solar reflectors. You could use silicon too, I imagine, but I like ice because it's cool. Plentiful, too, once we evolve past the point of STS and SFS (Space Food Sticks).
Hey, Sergey! You have a few bucks lying around? You could keep your jet out of the rain. Just think about that big door opening before you roll out to the apron -- what a power fix!
I remember hearing some years back about a graduated set of calibrated weights sent to Kennedy Space Center -- very expensive, environment-controlled copies calibrated against the standard in Paris. The set arrived in good condition, but the quartermaster who received them had instructions affix an identification plate to all inbound goods received, and complained that some of the smaller weights had turned out to be too small to drill and rivet...
I used to work at Aames, thought the blimp hangars were totally awesome. Are they still there? Are they filled with Google Jets(tm)? Will Google Earth let us peek at the jets? (I know I could check myself, but I think I'd get more mileage out of just pondering it).
It's a bit more like -- the Internet (capital I) is made up of a lot of separate entities connected together. Let's call one of these sub-networks an "internet" (small i). Given that capacity can be expressed in a metaphor of bandwidth as "diameter" of the conduit, it's clear that you could express the relationship as a series of differentially-diametered cylinders that provide communication for these sub-networks in a continuous flow, rather than the batch-burst of monolithic network prime-movers of the past. So to simplify, then, you can't expect the Internet to be like a single large truck; it's more like a series of tubes that deliver these "internets" to your desk each day.
TapeCutter wins!
Uh, careful with that assumption Eugene -- that presumes a single disk, where your statement would be true. In a large RAID-5 or RAID-1+0 array it could be as quick, or even quicker to write to multiple files depending on where the allocation table resides (Yipes, Stripes!).
Other than that, you're making sense, but I'd add -- how does retrieval stack up relative to index generation? You have to give up something to get that speed, RDBMS' have a lot of in-built power, refined over a long period of time. Is this shift all due to XML storage doubling up on metadata? Are we tending towards external index builds due to the upsurge in search technology? Will this fly like the leap from CODASYL to Relational DBMS' or will it um, "achieve a flat trajectory" like OODB? Tune in next week...
I haven't. Does this presuppose the use of television or some such nonsense?
Any process that has people as part of the process is a flawed process. All you have to do is have a few F**ups in a row miss the protocols, then someone does something seriously, egregiously, mass-extinction-threateningly wrong. Focus, peebles!
Umm, hang on, offset rays can in theory be explained by impact. Consider whether the primary body that impacted the centre of Tycho was alone, or had friends -- I think a fractured body of smaller mass accompaning the main body, with an impact point slightly off-centre of the main body (still remaining within the Tycho crater) could explain a ray that has a non-concentric origin? A comparison of the size of the concentric-origin vs. the nonconcentric origin rays, plus any of the main crater's divergence from circularity would be telling. Has that been factored in?
I don't see how this is an incident worth reporting, except that they were carried by mistake, and that they were carried on pylons instead of in containers, and that the media found out...
Okay, it was an incident worth reporting.
Get'cher mobo humming...on the superhighway...looking for some venture...and whatever comes my way...
I'd be more interested in the problem being solved by a new technical approach rather than by an application of brute-foce technology we already have mostly sussed out (except for the control systems, but that's just micro-SCADA to be worked out). Anyone have a take on Drexler's (I think it was Drexler's) "fan cloth" idea? Wings don't have to be solid lumps in cross section in order to provide lift. Bazillions of nano-sized engines that capture individual air molecules at random vectors and send them downward in a single direction to provide a pressure differential & thus thrust. Interesting stuff, I wonder if it would be workable.
The Cricket Bat -- a more refined tool from a nobler time.
I believe corporations are registgered as fictitious entities, aren't they? "fictitious business name" is on the business license they have to post publicly.
Arsen Darnay, "The Karma Affair". What if people actually could control reincarnation via technology? In Darnay's book, it was used as part of a long-term solution to nuclear waste storage. Breed priests who keep the stuff isolated, by needing it close down deep in their soul. Scary book, really. Scary. Afraid to re-read it scary.
I had to look past the sunbeams and imagine the impact both on the firm and the guy if he stayed on. It wouldn't have been good for us, or for him. The guy should have been a life coach or a priest and by not taking the step of sacking him I was keeping him from a chance to do good somewhere else. Sucked having to tell him.
Then later I found out he'd fabricated everything in his resume in the first instance, coached his friends to act as references (who looks past the phone number?) and screwed up a bid that would have employed another dozen peeps. Sucked finding that out.
Advice? Don't assume you know everything about people, just like you never assumed you knew everything about software or hardware. HR people -- good ones -- can help, and so would a bit of reading about psychology, body language, every possible fad or truth about knowing people from the best sources you can find. People are a lot more difficult than software. Learn your subject, grasshopper.
Ok, maybe you're right. My advice?
1) Get a mentor
2) Start reading on your topic. Spend big on books.
3)...?
4) Maximise shareholder value!
Not the earliest perhaps, but Hello Mr. 800lb Gorilla! Troll vs. Borg -- who has the biggest legal budget?
Did the invasive surgery trigger a healing response, or did she just need a boost until natural processes finished the job?
The Sigma 7 was an excellent computer in it's day. It was the first computer to have a hardware priority interrupt, invented by Max Palevsky.
I think you might mean "Six Sigma" which is slightly less old.
You know, some ship captains can guide their ships to dock without an on-shore pilot, but they generally don't, because they have the good sense (mostly) to avoid risking their gear in unfamiliar waters. A good business captain should heed the example.
A lot of SCADA is still controlled by VMS systems. You can still buy them from HP. You can put off patches or upgrades until they scrap the refinery, and there's not a lot of activity among the script kiddies for DCL hacks. KESU rules.
Kind of reminds me of the AI meme "asking whether a machine can think is akin to asking whether a submarine can swim". Life, shmife, if an old word can't be bent to fit make up a new one.
Hmm... Ok. I hereby declare that Viking I has discovered "Shmife".
Oh, and I was in JPL SFOF when the first picture returned. Still have it framed on the bookshelf in the living room ;-)
Of course, it's fun to control the miracles ourseleves, too.
Igor? Would you be so kind as to raise the lightning rod? There's a good chap...