"... the blue ring is one of two new outer rings recently discovered around Uranus using the infrared Keck adaptive optics system. The rings are blue and red like Saturn's E and G rings."
I would love to have been the astronomer that got to stand up in front of a conference room full of scientists and said:
"We have found a red ring around Uranus..." [Room erupts in laughter.]
According to TFA, Windows Media 10. That is just another kick in the face to us Mac and Linux users.
Ars Technica discussion on why so much GPU memory
on
ATI's 1GB Video Card
·
· Score: 1
Last year, Ars Technica talked about how newer OS's are leveraging fast GPUs for advanced graphics. The main problem is the bottleneck between system memory and GPU/VRAM. One solution is to move the bottleneck to the other side of the backing store.
Would like to RTFA, but the 11-pound pencil site is slashdotted too. I did get to read the first page, so I got the gist of the story. But it is one of those annoying sites that only put 2 paragraphs of text per page, forcing you to [Next] your way through the article. The article is probably only 10-12 paragraphs long, but I only saw the first two. All subsequent pages failed to load. There just is no excuse for serving up text in such tiny nibbles. I am not an infant.
Yeah, I know site designers do it to inflate ad delivery statistics. But in truth, I don't go passed the first page on most of these sites, because thh poor quality of the content does not warrant the frustration factor of having to navigate through it.,
Because a Wankel Rotary Engine has no valves it makes an excellent hydrogen combustion engine.
[The high temperature of hydrogen combustion tends to burn valves in piston engines.]
The effect is improved by burning a mixture of hydrogen, air (oxygen), and aerosolized water.
The high combustion temps vaporize the water, increasing the expansion pressure.
[Note that a hydrogen combustion engine is different than a hydrogen fuel cell engine].
Wankel rotary engines are underutilized today because of the bad rep they got in the 70's.
Their horsepower-to-weight ratio makes them an excellent performance engine for light
vehicles (like the Rx7, portable generators, and airplanes). They tend to be weak on the
torque side, however. [Performance piston engines often can built with 1-1 horsepower
to torque ratios.]
The lightweight, simple, valve-less structure of rotary engines make them good candidates
for alternative fuels. However, current rotary engine designs require injections of small
amounts of oil to lubricate the apex seals. This oil is combusted with the fuel and expelled.
[Typical oil consumption on a 13B engine is about 1/2 quart per 1500 miles.] Unfortunately,
even when burning hydrogen, this tiny amount of burned hydrocarbons disqualifies the
engine as a "zero emissions" vehicle - no research grants - no subsidies - no ZEV tax credits.
Would you trust a carpenter that opened his tool chest and it contained only a #2 Phillips screwdriver? An auto mechanic that used only Channel-Locks? A hair-stylist that used only a Flo-Be?
I have been writing software for 25 years. A good professional programmer knows when to use the appropriate tool for a specific task. Only an idiot would tell him he couldn't.
Of course, every time I used awk to transform some text, I probably could have built an equally functional solution using C or Java. It would just be 10-100 times more code - with the corresponding increase in bugs and time spent creating it.
So Jeff Bezos just patented calling the recipient to ask his mailing address or looking it up in the phone book.
I can see the phishing scams now.
"LandShark.com wishes to arrange delivery of a candygram gift to you. Please provide full delivery address and a time when someone will be available to answer the door..."
My computer of choice is a Mac running OS X (and yes I am a power user - a software developer for 20 years). But I must say, the only Wintel machine I really appreciated was a ThinkPad 600e. Rugged as hell, great display, and I actually did like the trackpoint better than the trackpad. All the other Gateways, Dells, Toshibas, and generic white boxes I've had really were pieces of sh*t. [Yes, even the Dell, whose flakey power supply managed to fry 3 CDROM drives and a HDD.] The two Compaq machines I had weren't as terrible.
I think it is interesting that 11% of the top 500 are Power architecture, and 64% of the top 500 are intel based systems.
Yet 50% of the top 10 are Power architecture and only 20% of the top 10 are intel architecture. Also interesting is that the Power based systems seem to have twice the Mflop/dollar ratio over the intel systems.
The NeXTstep and OpenStep APIs are extremely well designed. The are both comprehensive and consistent. Even as new "kits" (now call frameworks) were created, they shared a great deal of consistency with existing frameworks.
The quality of the designs are evident in the very small number of frameworks that needed to be modified in an incompatible way or completely replaced. (The inadequately designed DBKit being replaced by EOF comes to mind.)
When I compare these attributes to Sun's highly inconsistent Java APIs and Microsoft's frequent replacement of frameworks with a completely different "improved yet incompatible" API, I just groan. Even though Sun and NeXT had a relationship, I couldn't figure out why Sun didn't copy some of NeXT's obviously better designs for its own Java frameworks.
I used the high quality, ease of use, and consistency of the NeXTstep/OpenStep APIs as examples that help me significantly improve my own OO design skills.
Most of the OS X 3D drawing is done via OpenGL. The OpenGL is [optionally] hardware-accelerated using the GPUs and shaders select high-end ATI and Nvidia cards. The combination of the fast GPU and the Altivec vector processor makes for some intense 3D image manipulation.
Now that CERT and the Dept. of Homeland Security both recommend consumers abandon Intenet Explorer, can we get them to recommend dropping Outlook Express?
> Can you directly access the files on an iPod via something other than iTunes? Was that documented?
Yes. the iPod mounts as a Firewire or USB2 attached hard disk drive. You can browse the file system at will - there is nothing odd about it. It is documented. I remember dumping my contacts out of Palm desktop, massaging it slightly, then copying it to my iPod (all based upon documentation I read at the time). All the files (except DRM'd music) are in ordinary, common file types - AAC, MP3, iCalendar, VCard, and plain text.
In 1988 I was working on a contract to Lotus. Our very small team was developing an outline-based technical word processor called Lotus Manuscript. I sat between the two principal developers - on one side, Dave wrote the document editor - on the other side Scott wrote the layout engine and print formatter.
I worked on the project for 3 years and rarely did anything related to word processing. My job was to overcome the limitations of the Operating System (made in Redmond). This was pre-NT, so I got to write an overlay manager, a dynamic linking loader, virtual memory manager, window manager, menu system, and libc abstraction that avoided all the bugs in the Microsoft C library.
In October 1988 Steve Jobs came to Cambridge for the east coast introduction of the NeXT Computer. In his keynote address, he put forth the statistic that current application developers spent 70% of their time developing the UI and and compensating for weaknesses in the OS. That left the remaining 30% to write the actual business logic that made the application unique. His promise was that the NeXT Computer, coupling the rock solid Unix OS and NeXT's object-oriented development frameworks and Interface Builder application, would knock that 70% effort down to 10%. 10% effort to develop the UI, 90% to do the business logic. It allowed us to write better apps, faster.
I walked away from DOS and Windows development that day. I started using NeXTstep 0.8 in 1989, and continued developing apps for NeXTstep, OpenStep, Mac OS X, Unix, and Linux to this day. When I was using NeXTstep (or OpenStep) while all the other developers around me used Windows or Solaris, they laughed at me. But when their Windows boxes are decimated with 256 different worms, trojans, and viruses, I'm the one laughing. When Microsoft randomly changes, obsoletes or replaces some API for no apparent reason, they get to go back and rewrite their code.
Although I have 2 Windows machines, and a Linux machine, Mac OS X is still my preferred development and user platform. Now that Macs are "fashionable" again. I get the last laugh.
Actually, electrolysis does not produce sulfuric acid, it utilizes it as a catalyst. Addition of sulfuric acid to the water helps create an ionic solution, making the water a better conductor. As the electrolysis progresses, the solution grows more acidic as the water dissociates, preserving the ions. Adding more water dilutes the solution again.
If you are going to use nuclear, solar, or geothermal energy sources, you might as well produce hydrogen more directly via electrolysis. Much cleaner and more direct than separating hydrogen from fossil fuels or ethanol. However the real issues involve the energy density, convenience, and safety of the delivery mechanism to the consumer.
I have a ReplayTV and Digital Cable. Basically, the ReplayTV sits in-between the cable box and the tv. The ReplayTV has a small infrared transmitter that you stick over the IR port on the cable box. The ReplayTV changes channels by sending the appropriate commands to the cable box via the IR port, mimicking the cable remote.
The disadvantage is that it takes 5-7 seconds to change the channel - so channel surfing is painful. Since my TV has multiple inputs, I added a cable splitter, feeding Basic [analog] cable directly into the TV's cable input and connecting the Digital Cable/ReplayTV combo to the TV's Line Input. This allows me to channel-surf basic cable as well as watch basic cable while the ReplayTV records something off of digital cable. When I want to watch ReplayTV, I put the TV in Line mode and switch remote controls.
Another advantage of the direct basic cable connection is image quality. Although I love the PVR features of the ReplayTV, the image quality suffers - a bit snowy with occasional bleach-out effects.
Charter Communications (my cable provider) has recently introduced a Digital Cable PVR box that you can lease for $10/month. It has a paltry 50 hours of record time (vs 320 hours for my ReplayTV) and almost certainly doesn't have commercial-skip or even 30 second advance. I suspect it probably also has some DRM that prevents you from recording PPV or premium movie channels.
Actually, the costs quoted for both systems include infrastructure costs, not just the hardware. The VT project required extensive cooling and power delivery modifications to the building housing the system. The quoted $5.2M includes the engineering costs, electricity budget, racks, cables, and switches, in addition to the cost of the 1100 dual G5 computers.
VT got the standard Apple 10% educational discount, according to early interviews by the VT program director. Apple did, however give them delivery preference, with the initial large shipments of G5's going directly to VT. This pushed back the expected delivery dates for other edu shipments to schools and students by approximately 3 weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they had already found a red ring:
"... the blue ring is one of two new outer rings recently discovered around Uranus using the infrared Keck adaptive optics system. The rings are blue and red like Saturn's E and G rings."
I would love to have been the astronomer that got to stand up in front of a conference room full of scientists and said:
"We have found a red ring around Uranus..." [Room erupts in laughter.]
According to TFA, Windows Media 10. That is just another kick in the face to us Mac and Linux users.
Last year, Ars Technica talked about how newer OS's are leveraging fast GPUs for advanced graphics. The main problem is the bottleneck between system memory and GPU/VRAM. One solution is to move the bottleneck to the other side of the backing store.
/ 13 / 14 / 15
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
Would like to RTFA, but the 11-pound pencil site is slashdotted too.
I did get to read the first page, so I got the gist of the story. But it
is one of those annoying sites that only put 2 paragraphs of text
per page, forcing you to [Next] your way through the article. The
article is probably only 10-12 paragraphs long, but I only saw the
first two. All subsequent pages failed to load. There just is no
excuse for serving up text in such tiny nibbles. I am not an infant.
Yeah, I know site designers do it to inflate ad delivery statistics.
But in truth, I don't go passed the first page on most of these sites,
because thh poor quality of the content does not warrant the frustration
factor of having to navigate through it.,
Because a Wankel Rotary Engine has no valves it makes an excellent hydrogen combustion engine. [The high temperature of hydrogen combustion tends to burn valves in piston engines.] The effect is improved by burning a mixture of hydrogen, air (oxygen), and aerosolized water. The high combustion temps vaporize the water, increasing the expansion pressure. [Note that a hydrogen combustion engine is different than a hydrogen fuel cell engine].
o ls/1tools/hydrogen.html
Wankel rotary engines are underutilized today because of the bad rep they got in the 70's. Their horsepower-to-weight ratio makes them an excellent performance engine for light vehicles (like the Rx7, portable generators, and airplanes). They tend to be weak on the torque side, however. [Performance piston engines often can built with 1-1 horsepower to torque ratios.]
The lightweight, simple, valve-less structure of rotary engines make them good candidates for alternative fuels. However, current rotary engine designs require injections of small amounts of oil to lubricate the apex seals. This oil is combusted with the fuel and expelled. [Typical oil consumption on a 13B engine is about 1/2 quart per 1500 miles.] Unfortunately, even when burning hydrogen, this tiny amount of burned hydrocarbons disqualifies the engine as a "zero emissions" vehicle - no research grants - no subsidies - no ZEV tax credits.
http://www.millville.org/Workshops_f/kess_mech/to
Would you trust a carpenter that opened his tool chest and it contained only a #2 Phillips screwdriver?
An auto mechanic that used only Channel-Locks?
A hair-stylist that used only a Flo-Be?
I have been writing software for 25 years. A good professional programmer knows when to use the appropriate tool for a specific task. Only an idiot would tell him he couldn't.
Of course, every time I used awk to transform some text, I probably could have built an equally functional solution using C or Java. It would just be 10-100 times more code - with the corresponding increase in bugs and time spent creating it.
Tim O'Reilly made an excellent point in support of Google Print when he
pointed out that the biggest threat to authors is not piracy, but obscurity.
So Jeff Bezos just patented calling the recipient to ask his mailing address or looking it up in the phone book.
I can see the phishing scams now.
"LandShark.com wishes to arrange delivery of a candygram gift to you. Please provide full delivery address and a time when someone will be available to answer the door..."
Obscure SNL "Land Shark" reference explained here:
What is a LandShark?
Trick-or-Treating LandShark
Jaws II
Jaws III
And those that leach water when they use the toilet?
My computer of choice is a Mac running OS X (and yes I am a power user - a software developer for 20 years). But I must say, the only Wintel machine I really appreciated was a ThinkPad 600e. Rugged as hell, great display, and I actually did like the trackpoint better than the trackpad. All the other Gateways, Dells, Toshibas, and generic white boxes I've had really were pieces of sh*t. [Yes, even the Dell, whose flakey power supply managed to fry 3 CDROM drives and a HDD.] The two Compaq machines I had weren't as terrible.
Punching, Beating - how extreme. What's wrong with the old fashioned "spank the monkey"?
I think it is interesting that 11% of the top 500 are Power architecture, and 64% of the top 500 are intel based systems. Yet 50% of the top 10 are Power architecture and only 20% of the top 10 are intel architecture. Also interesting is that the Power based systems seem to have twice the Mflop/dollar ratio over the intel systems.
It is actually 6 of the top 10, and 13 of the top 25.
The NeXTstep and OpenStep APIs are extremely well designed. The are both comprehensive and consistent. Even as new "kits" (now call frameworks) were created, they shared a great deal of consistency with existing frameworks.
The quality of the designs are evident in the very small number of frameworks that needed to be modified in an incompatible way or completely replaced. (The inadequately designed DBKit being replaced by EOF comes to mind.)
When I compare these attributes to Sun's highly inconsistent Java APIs and Microsoft's frequent replacement of frameworks with a completely different "improved yet incompatible" API, I just groan. Even though Sun and NeXT had a relationship, I couldn't figure out why Sun didn't copy some of NeXT's obviously better designs for its own Java frameworks.
I used the high quality, ease of use, and consistency of the NeXTstep/OpenStep APIs as examples that help me significantly improve my own OO design skills.
Most of the OS X 3D drawing is done via OpenGL. The OpenGL is [optionally] hardware-accelerated using the GPUs and shaders select high-end ATI and Nvidia cards. The combination of the fast GPU and the Altivec vector processor makes for some intense 3D image manipulation.
> I hate waiting in line for a PC when all 6 of those stupid Macs are free.
So, why bother waiting in line? Just use the G5 - you might just like it - alot.
Or is that what you are afraid of?
Interesting time to publish this - right between last week's IIS/IE multiple exploits and this week's Evaman Worm outbreak.
Now that CERT and the Dept. of Homeland Security both recommend consumers abandon Intenet Explorer, can we get them to recommend dropping Outlook Express?
> Can you directly access the files on an iPod via something other than iTunes? Was that documented?
Yes. the iPod mounts as a Firewire or USB2 attached hard disk drive. You can browse the file system at will - there is nothing odd about it. It is documented. I remember dumping my contacts out of Palm desktop, massaging it slightly, then copying it to my iPod (all based upon documentation I read at the time). All the files (except DRM'd music) are in ordinary, common file types - AAC, MP3, iCalendar, VCard, and plain text.
In 1988 I was working on a contract to Lotus. Our very small team was developing an outline-based technical word processor called Lotus Manuscript. I sat between the two principal developers - on one side, Dave wrote the document editor - on the other side Scott wrote the layout engine and print formatter.
I worked on the project for 3 years and rarely did anything related to word processing. My job was to overcome the limitations of the Operating System (made in Redmond). This was pre-NT, so I got to write an overlay manager, a dynamic linking loader, virtual memory manager, window manager, menu system, and libc abstraction that avoided all the bugs in the Microsoft C library.
In October 1988 Steve Jobs came to Cambridge for the east coast introduction of the NeXT Computer. In his keynote address, he put forth the statistic that current application developers spent 70% of their time developing the UI and and compensating for weaknesses in the OS. That left the remaining 30% to write the actual business logic that made the application unique. His promise was that the NeXT Computer, coupling the rock solid Unix OS and NeXT's object-oriented development frameworks and Interface Builder application, would knock that 70% effort down to 10%. 10% effort to develop the UI, 90% to do the business logic. It allowed us to write better apps, faster.
I walked away from DOS and Windows development that day. I started using NeXTstep 0.8 in 1989, and continued developing apps for NeXTstep, OpenStep, Mac OS X, Unix, and Linux to this day. When I was using NeXTstep (or OpenStep) while all the other developers around me used Windows or Solaris, they laughed at me. But when their Windows boxes are decimated with 256 different worms, trojans, and viruses, I'm the one laughing. When Microsoft randomly changes, obsoletes or replaces some API for no apparent reason, they get to go back and rewrite their code.
Although I have 2 Windows machines, and a Linux machine, Mac OS X is still my preferred development and user platform. Now that Macs are "fashionable" again. I get the last laugh.
Actually, electrolysis does not produce sulfuric acid, it utilizes it as a catalyst. Addition of sulfuric acid to the water helps create an ionic solution, making the water a better conductor. As the electrolysis progresses, the solution grows more acidic as the water dissociates, preserving the ions. Adding more water dilutes the solution again.
More information here.
If you are going to use nuclear, solar, or geothermal energy sources, you might as well produce hydrogen more directly via electrolysis. Much cleaner and more direct than separating hydrogen from fossil fuels or ethanol. However the real issues involve the energy density, convenience, and safety of the delivery mechanism to the consumer.
Since PDF is the native imaging model for OS X, ALL apps are PDF authoring tools. You simply select "Save as PDF file" from the Print panel.
I have a ReplayTV and Digital Cable. Basically, the ReplayTV sits in-between the cable box and the tv. The ReplayTV has a small infrared transmitter that you stick over the IR port on the cable box. The ReplayTV changes channels by sending the appropriate commands to the cable box via the IR port, mimicking the cable remote.
The disadvantage is that it takes 5-7 seconds to change the channel - so channel surfing is painful. Since my TV has multiple inputs, I added a cable splitter, feeding Basic [analog] cable directly into the TV's cable input and connecting the Digital Cable/ReplayTV combo to the TV's Line Input. This allows me to channel-surf basic cable as well as watch basic cable while the ReplayTV records something off of digital cable. When I want to watch ReplayTV, I put the TV in Line mode and switch remote controls.
Another advantage of the direct basic cable connection is image quality. Although I love the PVR features of the ReplayTV, the image quality suffers - a bit snowy with occasional bleach-out effects.
Charter Communications (my cable provider) has recently introduced a Digital Cable PVR box that you can lease for $10/month. It has a paltry 50 hours of record time (vs 320 hours for my ReplayTV) and almost certainly doesn't have commercial-skip or even 30 second advance. I suspect it probably also has some DRM that prevents you from recording PPV or premium movie channels.
Actually, the costs quoted for both systems include infrastructure costs, not just the hardware. The VT project required extensive cooling and power delivery modifications to the building housing the system. The quoted $5.2M includes the engineering costs, electricity budget, racks, cables, and switches, in addition to the cost of the 1100 dual G5 computers.
VT got the standard Apple 10% educational discount, according to early interviews by the VT program director. Apple did, however give them delivery preference, with the initial large shipments of G5's going directly to VT. This pushed back the expected delivery dates for other edu shipments to schools and students by approximately 3 weeks.