The real question is will anyone use Google once MS integrates their newly acquired search engine into the OS and breaks Google functionality in future releases of IE?
Even though Unicode is supported in OS X, Word for OS X uses the old carbon libraries and has no support for Unicode. This has been driving me batty.
I do quite a bit of technical work and I need Greek fonts for mathematics, etc. Of course, I can still use Symbol, but there are problems sharing documints with Windows users. Many people on the Windows side don't have Symbol installed, and when I get a document made on a Windows box and uses Greek Unicode it doesn't translate correctly.
The big problem is that MS has no desire to generate a Cocoa version of Mac Office anytime soon. If they would include Unicode support, all of the cross platform font problems would go away. The sky would be bluer, grass would be greener, and life would be good.
The article doesn't say exactly what the laser wavelength is, but it's invisible, and above the bandgap for the photovoltaic material (probably Si) so something close to 1 micron is a good guess. Furthermore, the 1.064 micron Nd:YAG line is quite common.
This gives me concerns for eye safety. That particular wavelength can focus to a diffraction limited spot on the retnia. Since you can't see it, you don't even know the beam is there until it's too late. Powers well under a watt can do serious damage. I don't want multi-watt beams at this wavelength shooting through the skys all over the world.
It seems to me that the splicing problem is much more than a minor obstacle. Nanotubes are connected by a lattice of covalent carbon-carbon bonds, stabilized by aromaticity. That's the reason why nanotubes have such a phenomenal tensile strength when you scale a microscopic tube to macroscopic dimensions.
When you try to make a rope out of a bunch of microscopic fibers, you have just another composite material. In order to make it work, you need to splice the fibers with multiple covalent bonds, just as strong as the fiber.
Then there's the problem of spaghetti. I forget how long DNA in a gene is when you stretch it end to end, but it's long. Why don't you see long DNA ropes? The stuff basically tangles up in a knot. I don't know what the radius of gyration of a nanotube is, but they will also flex.
The real problem is that you need a straight chain, 100,000 km long that's all covalently bound. Right now, it doesn't exist.
Then there are a huge number of other obstacles. Like where do you start building the thing?
The point of the whole concept is that it's self supporting; you can't start on Earth and go up, because it would never support itself before you get past geocentric orbit.
Therefore, you need to start at geocentric orbit and build up and down at such a rate that the whole thing stays in geocentric orbit. Then you need to keep the thing stable when gets deep enough into the atmosphere to encounter weather.
It's one thing to through a couple of hundred $K at it for a feasibility study, but if people are seriously asking for $7 billion, they're nuts.
Are advanced composite materials using nanotubes worthy of government funding? Yes. But let's scale up to rocket motors on the federal dollar with spin-offs like tennis rackets to make the technology cheap before we worry about space elevators.
100,000 km vs 3 cm? So we're only off by 10 orders of magnitude. It sounds like a bit more than "not quite there" to me.
However, I don't need to worry about that problem. I'll just be kicking it at my compound in the
Bahamas, counting the money that I made by selling time-shares on the space elevator to slashdotters.
The IR is where many molecular spectral signatures can be found. This is a critical region of the spectrum for studying molecules in interstellar clouds.
No refrigerators here. Closed cycle refrigerators capable of reaching cryogenic temperatures are big, bulky beasts with prohibitive power requirements. Furthermore, they tend to induce vibrations, which aren't generally good for precision photography.
Of course, I'm talking about more conventional cryostats. The laser cooling methods that the poster referred to are only relevant for gas phase atoms.
Instead, the telescope launched with 360 liters of liquid helium. It will last 5 years. When the helium is gone, the mission is done. You can read about it here:
What about all the boxed copies out there waiting for consumers and small business to buy, install, and continue propagating this thing?
I think that just like any other piece of defective merchandise, these boxes should be recalled from the shelves and MS should generate new boxed versions with all the latest patches.
It's one of the coolest hands-on science museums out there. The fact that it's in San Francisco is an added bonus.
The US also has some cool nature--the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellostone should be on everyone's must see list.
If your computers are all next to each other, you can alwasy combine text-to-speach with voice recognition.
Imagine your Mac OS9 box reading an 'enlarge your penis' e-mail in the Bad News voice to a Windows box that has Via Voice installed. Not high bandwidth, but entertaining!
You have nailed one of the biggest problems with LabView on non-Windows systems. Yes, you can drop 1 k$ on LabView software for non-Windows systems, but National has been reluctant to port the drivers for their PCI cards to non Windows systems.
I'm familiar with the Mac scene. The situation with Linix on PC hardware might be different. Here, it's next to impossibile to utilize any PCI cards other than GPIB. If you want to get one of their spiffy DAQ cards to function in OS X, tough luck!
I suspect that one of the problems is National's desire to move instrumentation off the commodity boxes into their PXI platforms with their embedded PCs. Unfortunately, the cost of implementing this solution is astronomical. In addition to a generic box for general control and user interface, you need to lay out multiple k$ for their embedded PC plus additional seats for LabView for the desktop PC and the embedded box.
Now if I had an infinite budget, it would indeed be slick to have a flat-panel iMac front-end running LabView talking to one of their embedded PCs on PXI with ethernet or FireWire.
However, if I can get the same Lab View functionality with a commodity Windows PC and PCI card based data acquisition, I can't justify the extra $$$ for the pretty Mac based UI and embedded controller. In research, there is always something better to spend money on. Hell, for the additional $$$$ I could get a decent oscilloscope!
You make a valid point regarding the US government.
However, I remain convinced that M$ is a monolithic evil entity that exists for the sole purpose of making my life hell, and nothing you say will convince me otherwise.
Does anybody know if the click-through license is worth a rat's ass in Korea? Does Korean law give the plantifs an edge that they wouldn't have in the US? Any Korean laywers out there?
Slashdot Mirror
What about prior art?
Wait...this is the US patent office we're talking about here.
Never mind.
Working with Windows makes me feel like I'm aging twice as fast. Does that count?
String theory physics has determined that the universe is a really big 11 dimensional Rubik's cube.
"certain software" = virtual PC?
I hope not.
As long as the Justice Department rolls over and plays dead, there is no anti-trust coffin.
The real question is will anyone use Google once MS integrates their newly acquired search engine into the OS and breaks Google functionality in future releases of IE?
Even though Unicode is supported in OS X, Word for OS X uses the old carbon libraries and has no support for Unicode. This has been driving me batty.
I do quite a bit of technical work and I need Greek fonts for mathematics, etc. Of course, I can still use Symbol, but there are problems sharing documints with Windows users. Many people on the Windows side don't have Symbol installed, and when I get a document made on a Windows box and uses Greek Unicode it doesn't translate correctly.
The big problem is that MS has no desire to generate a Cocoa version of Mac Office anytime soon. If they would include Unicode support, all of the cross platform font problems would go away. The sky would be bluer, grass would be greener, and life would be good.
The article doesn't say exactly what the laser wavelength is, but it's invisible, and above the bandgap for the photovoltaic material (probably Si) so something close to 1 micron is a good guess. Furthermore, the 1.064 micron Nd:YAG line is quite common.
This gives me concerns for eye safety. That particular wavelength can focus to a diffraction limited spot on the retnia. Since you can't see it, you don't even know the beam is there until it's too late. Powers well under a watt can do serious damage. I don't want multi-watt beams at this wavelength shooting through the skys all over the world.
It seems to me that the splicing problem is much more than a minor obstacle. Nanotubes are connected by a lattice of covalent carbon-carbon bonds, stabilized by aromaticity. That's the reason why nanotubes have such a phenomenal tensile strength when you scale a microscopic tube to macroscopic dimensions.
When you try to make a rope out of a bunch of microscopic fibers, you have just another composite material. In order to make it work, you need to splice the fibers with multiple covalent bonds, just as strong as the fiber.
Then there's the problem of spaghetti. I forget how long DNA in a gene is when you stretch it end to end, but it's long. Why don't you see long DNA ropes? The stuff basically tangles up in a knot. I don't know what the radius of gyration of a nanotube is, but they will also flex.
The real problem is that you need a straight chain, 100,000 km long that's all covalently bound. Right now, it doesn't exist.
Then there are a huge number of other obstacles. Like where do you start building the thing?
The point of the whole concept is that it's self supporting; you can't start on Earth and go up, because it would never support itself before you get past geocentric orbit.
Therefore, you need to start at geocentric orbit and build up and down at such a rate that the whole thing stays in geocentric orbit. Then you need to keep the thing stable when gets deep enough into the atmosphere to encounter weather.
It's one thing to through a couple of hundred $K at it for a feasibility study, but if people are seriously asking for $7 billion, they're nuts.
Are advanced composite materials using nanotubes worthy of government funding? Yes. But let's scale up to rocket motors on the federal dollar with spin-offs like tennis rackets to make the technology cheap before we worry about space elevators.
100,000 km vs 3 cm? So we're only off by 10 orders of magnitude. It sounds like a bit more than "not quite there" to me. However, I don't need to worry about that problem. I'll just be kicking it at my compound in the Bahamas, counting the money that I made by selling time-shares on the space elevator to slashdotters.
The IR is where many molecular spectral signatures can be found. This is a critical region of the spectrum for studying molecules in interstellar clouds.
Of course, I'm talking about more conventional cryostats. The laser cooling methods that the poster referred to are only relevant for gas phase atoms.
Instead, the telescope launched with 360 liters of liquid helium. It will last 5 years. When the helium is gone, the mission is done. You can read about it here:
That sounds like my HMO!
What about all the boxed copies out there waiting for consumers and small business to buy, install, and continue propagating this thing? I think that just like any other piece of defective merchandise, these boxes should be recalled from the shelves and MS should generate new boxed versions with all the latest patches.
What I want to know is how many hackers used this exploit to gain root access to computers without creating any noticeable instability.
Ahh, so that's why Duke Nukem Forever is taking so long.
It's one of the coolest hands-on science museums out there. The fact that it's in San Francisco is an added bonus. The US also has some cool nature--the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellostone should be on everyone's must see list.
If your computers are all next to each other, you can alwasy combine text-to-speach with voice recognition. Imagine your Mac OS9 box reading an 'enlarge your penis' e-mail in the Bad News voice to a Windows box that has Via Voice installed. Not high bandwidth, but entertaining!
For a moment, I thought it said "...John Ashcroft in his attempt to create a corps of volunteer zombie spies..."
It must have been those subsersive European mind-control rays creeping into my head. Better get more aluminum foil.
Because all know that it will return with some really advanced technology from a race of robots.
You have nailed one of the biggest problems with LabView on non-Windows systems. Yes, you can drop 1 k$ on LabView software for non-Windows systems, but National has been reluctant to port the drivers for their PCI cards to non Windows systems.
I'm familiar with the Mac scene. The situation with Linix on PC hardware might be different. Here, it's next to impossibile to utilize any PCI cards other than GPIB. If you want to get one of their spiffy DAQ cards to function in OS X, tough luck!
I suspect that one of the problems is National's desire to move instrumentation off the commodity boxes into their PXI platforms with their embedded PCs. Unfortunately, the cost of implementing this solution is astronomical. In addition to a generic box for general control and user interface, you need to lay out multiple k$ for their embedded PC plus additional seats for LabView for the desktop PC and the embedded box.
Now if I had an infinite budget, it would indeed be slick to have a flat-panel iMac front-end running LabView talking to one of their embedded PCs on PXI with ethernet or FireWire.
However, if I can get the same Lab View functionality with a commodity Windows PC and PCI card based data acquisition, I can't justify the extra $$$ for the pretty Mac based UI and embedded controller. In research, there is always something better to spend money on. Hell, for the additional $$$$ I could get a decent oscilloscope!
Now all I need to do is download the patch to the last patch to get my internet connectivity back....
You make a valid point regarding the US government.
However, I remain convinced that M$ is a monolithic evil entity that exists for the sole purpose of making my life hell, and nothing you say will convince me otherwise.
(I am not a Korean laywer)
Does anybody know if the click-through license is worth a rat's ass in Korea? Does Korean law give the plantifs an edge that they wouldn't have in the US? Any Korean laywers out there?
and 7500 songs on the new iPod = Profit!