The problem would be to make the inductors able to dissipate the DC power; it is the same kind of overloading that is expected to melt the transformers. However, putting in series capacitors that can withstand a high enough voltage, might be more feasible.
As well as managing to shut down the grid in time. I'm wondering, would there not be a possible intermediate step on the way back to have cities run pumps and such at reduced power from local sources, until the inter-ties are back in action?
I wonder if maybe DRM hasn't been a big part of the problem. The shiny discs that we used to know as "CDs" back in the day, actually had a standard format on them, and they would carry the "Compact Disc" logo as trademarked by Philips. Now, a few years ago, EMI and others started with their "Digital Restriction Management" which meant that the discs no longer were allowed to carry the good old "Compact Disc" logo. Instead the logo was just quietly removed, sometimes replaced with a different, publisher-defined one, signifying the hardware-enforcement of the standard admonition against unauthorised copying or broadcasting.
Even though this has been reversed in the last few years; the few CDs I have from 2007 and 2008 actually have the "Compact Disc" logo again.
The point is, the DRM train seems to have left and gone for good. It isn't just a matter of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, it is more like closing the barn door after the barn has burned down. Pull the weeds, start over...
An even easier and more obvious explanation is that there is hardly any new music worth listening to in the quantities provided by a disc. What might be OK for three minutes is not the same as will work for an hour, and the push is ever faster and ever onwards. There's just not the attention span there anymore it seems.
What might work would be to bring back the concept albums, but you need artists that can sing and play -- not just sound like some soft-porn star faking an orgams -- for more than three minutes in a row for that.
"You're in a maze of little functions, all alike. In the distance you hear somebody practicing throwing chairs."
And all of the functions have at least seven arguments, and one of these is a pointer to variable-length structs that have to be populated before calling the function. Another argument that always appears is an opaque pointer referring to SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES, which may be, and usually is, set to NULL becuse no-one is arsed to go through the necessary contortions of obtaining the required credentials.... stuff works anyways.
Teleportation device with bug reports? Lets hope, for all that is good and well, that the bugs are just software and not, for example,
flies, making it into the teleportation system.
This is not going to work, as there is no competing with free. If any news site starts requiring payments, most readers will go somewhere else that doesn't pay. Charging for access to a site that still emits advertisements is a very hard sell.
And if the news outlets all start charging at the same time, the readers will start reading (and writing) blogs instead. And perhaps even pay "tips" to those blogs they like.
The harder one tries to squeeze the more it will slip past one's fingers...
Yes, and both phosphorus and arsenic are Group V, with 5 electrons in their outer shell so they can be expected to have chemical properties that are similar. But the main material of living things, carbon, will more than likely be the same, for reasons of carbon's unique abilities to form complex compounds.
Silicon-based life with phosphor or arsenic? Apart from this sounding very much like the list of main ingreidents for N-type semiconductor material; silicon, while in Group IV like carbon, with 4 electrons io their outer shell, does not form the same complex molecules as carbon. There is silane, SiH4, analogous to methane, CH4, and silicon dioxide, SiO2, the analogy to carbon dioxide, CO2, and a handful of others, but larger molecules such as sugar or protein analogues just do not form easily from silicon, or fall apart too easily.
There are not that many other elements that possibly oould replace carbon.
Same thing happened here. It began with cartoon characters, then continued with various other names from space, mythology, and fiction. The problem with cartoon characters is that one seems to run out of them too quickly. And I don't think naming a server Marvin or Kenny ever was such a good idea either...
Somehow naming the various NAS boxes after satellites made a bit of sense too. Other objects of the heavens also will do, then watch out for the naming collision: Is it Pluto the dog or Pluto the former planet?
Based on the spam I get here, there is no big incentive to buy anything from whoever's business being advertised to begin with. To the extent there even is any kind of business there at all.
To illustrate, from looking at some recent deleted spam I make the following observations:
First of all, my penis is just the size it should be and it works the way it should, so no need for enlargments and viagra, nor, presumably, subsequently having to carry it around in a wheelbarrow.
With that taken care of, next, I don't have time to do contract negotiations with alleged attorneys claiming to represent rich deceased people whom I've never heard of, living in countries where I've never been.
Neither do I care about spending time attempting to claim a prize in lotteries where I never bought a single ticket.
I don't use Paypal in French either.
Then there are the bankers in Ghana that send me notices of their new e-mail address, with wild and wonderful and completely unrelated titles. Since all these notices are basically formatted the same way, the precipitated hypothesis is that there are a lot of bankers in Ghana, and all of them are getting yahoo.com e-mail addresses. Well, I don't need Ghanesian banking services any time soon. If I ever should, I'd deal with someone whose e-mail address had a reasonable resemblance to the name of the bank and the country the bank is operating in, not just some random attention-getter I found in the spam-box.
And that is just looking at the stuff that comes in a language I can read. Sometimes it is Chinese or Hebrew, and sometimes it is in some mysterious language that merely renders as garbage.
Point of all this, there is hardly any legitimate business or services of any kind advertising through this spam channel at all. Hence no one to boycott.
Expressions containing the assignment operator, like x = y + 5, might look the same as statements of algebra, but the value on the left of the assignment operator does not behave as an alias for some specific value, but as a kind of box into which the result of the calculation ends up stored. Hence we get "impossible" statements like x = x + 3, which is perfectly OK in a fair number of programming languages, but inconsistent and illegal as a statement of algebra, where one of the important rules is that any variable name always is an alias of the same value wherever it appears in each equation.
To someone who is shaky in regular algebra, this exception is mind-boggling.
The "high gain" inductive connection is a transformer itself, with the primary in the base and the secondary and batteries in the moveable part. And this kind of separable transformer makes a lot of good sense for toothbrushes, shavers, and kettles, where moisture and water is nearby. However, there is no energy transfer taking place unless the kettle or handle is sitting on its base.
Now I can't quite imagine how that "charging table" would not use some minimal amount of standby power for at least the circuitry that detects the presence of a phone or ipod or portable mp3 player or whatever.
ROMs, EPROMS, EEPROMs, and other static or non-volatile memory devices tend to be advertised as having some 2^N number of bits in them. Even if they most commonly are organized and used as words of 8 bits.
This tends to be reflected in the part numbers, which frequently have a strong relationship to the number of bits of storage in the device. EPROMs in the 27xx series and EEPROMs in the 24xx and 28xx series are the most likely. For example, the 2764, 27C64, 2864, 24C64, etc., all have 64K (65536) bits of storage, although available and used as 8192 by 8, and the 24256 and 27256 have 256K (262144) bits in them, organized and used as 32768 by 8. There are several other sizes of these memories with corresponding part numbers.
Arrh! With the shorts giving to the longs, there'd be at least half of them unfilled lessn'n your ship runs on old 8-bit engines -- and what's with all this rubbish about naked shorts... me sposed to be naked inside the shorts if at all and no landlubber tell otherwise. Yarrgh. And if both legs be peg legs short trousers get nae in the way the same way as long ones; but daft landlubbers selling their shorts?! Shiver me timbers indeed! Arr... profit but what're they left to wear then? Huh?
Looks like it might be possible to do a kind of "legal D.O.S" on the whole state via OSHA regulations: refusing to work in a building posted as being a place where one could get cancer. After all since the sign is there, some kind of risk must be presumed to exist?
This is daft, of course. Maybe it shows the need for putting severe brakes on the legislative process: at some point it becomes a self-propelling business of law-making, never mind if the laws are even meaningful anymore.
From what I gather from the featured article, the amusement park officials apparently will confiscate PDAs upon sight, and place them in a storage for the day, so the owner gets it back when they leave with their family in the evening. I'd imagine that the de-PDA'd owner will get some kind of claim check for it, to be returned for the PDA upon leaving. Similar to how coats are checked-in and checked-out at some restaurants during the winter.
Also, I think they better have the security details for this storage well worked out in advance. Consider what will happen when someone's PDA is stolen or lost here, and the fall-out from the resulting lawsuit...
Now, there is also this picture of a poster showing a kid dressed up as a police officer, (complete with bullet-proof vest) next to the sign proclaiming "The Alton Towers Resort is a PDA-free place" so there's still a few questions remaining. Apparently, regular mobile phones are not affected by this ban. But with the division between mobile phone and PDA becoming less and less distinct, there is the risk of losing communication access, with the resulting inconveniences.
Maybe 1 or 2 percent is a bit on the low side, but there is a lot of attrition with sub-netting/30s, where there are 4 addresses taken, of which two (one half) are the network and the broadcast address (x00 and x11) leaving the remaining two (x01 and x10) for actual devices, of which one will most likely be a router or gateway, and the last one is the actual server doing something interesting.
On the other hand, several ISPs use dynamic allocation when assigning IP-addresses to their customers, and a number of these addresses may not be in use at any one time, but as ADSL customers and dial-up hosts in particular come and go all the addresses are used eventually.
As for ping for checking, not everything wants to reply to pings anymore, for whatever reason: the fact that pings to some address don't show replies could just as well be because the host at that address is eating the packages, as compared to there not being any host there. An alternative which seems to be better able to tell the difference between a dead host and one that doesn't want to talk, would be nmap with TCP connection attempts at a number of likely ports, but that would tend to draw attention.
The systems I've checked actually did revert to 1901, but there could be other systems reverting to 1970, depending on the internals.
Either way, there would be a problem in 2038, as the 32-bit time_t cannot count past 0x7FFFFFFF without something having to be done about the present-day interpretation of its value.
Re:In the future there will be more lame predictio
on
The Next 25 Years in Tech
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
We'll be oke for food, but busy worrying about and fixing the
Year 2038 bug
which is due in another 5 years, when old 32-bit unix-family systems will set their clocks back to 1901.
"Look" at all? Won't electromagnetism fail at this point too when the photons stop dead, so there won't be anyone left to look for or at anything? Not that there would be any way to see anything either. After all, it is electromagnetism that really holds atoms, molecules, and thus people, planets, and stars together...
Will it look like the langoliers
finishing off the reality starting at one edge, or will it be like the encounter with the
Boojum "softly and suddenly vanish away"?
Or maybe it just will be a party lasting indefinitely at a restaurant at the end of the universe.
The problem with that one will be everyone who is using some other OS than Windows XP or Vista, or at first, some other mail client than Outlook (including web-based ones such as Gmail), will complain about unreadable e-mails. Of course, this will also be a possible way to stem the tide of spam, at least temporarily, but I feel the effect is that e-mail will become even less reliable than it already is.
Vacuum capacitors actually do exist, but their capacitance is way too small for the decoupling jobs that the capacitors on a PC motherboard do. Not a likely option as they tend to find use in high-power, high-frequency radio or radar equipment, with price tags to match.
The opposite of "solid-state" capacitors is in this case the aluminium electrolytic capacitors. Presumably they just use tantalum or some other kind instead on this board. Now, these are also polarized and technically also "electrolytic" (besides, they can still fail) but their failure mode does not include emitting nasty goop onto the board.
Could be they don't want to have too much traffic either. I get the following message prior to the actual information:
$ whois slashdot.org
[Querying whois.publicinterestregistry.net]
[whois.publicinterestregistry.net]
NOTICE: Access to.ORG WHOIS information is provided to assist persons in
determining the contents of a domain name registration record in the Public Interest Registry
registry database. The data in this record is provided by Public Interest Registry
for informational purposes only, and Public Interest Registry does not guarantee its
accuracy. This service is intended only for query-based access. You agree
that you will use this data only for lawful purposes and that, under no
circumstances will you use this data to: (a) allow, enable, or otherwise
support the transmission by e-mail, telephone, or facsimile of mass
unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations to entities other than
the data recipient's own existing customers; or (b) enable high volume,
automated, electronic processes that send queries or data to the systems of
Registry Operator or any ICANN-Accredited Registrar, except as reasonably
necessary to register domain names or modify existing registrations. All
rights reserved. Public Interest Registry reserves the right to modify these terms at any
time. By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this policy.
Domain ID:D2289308-LROR
Domain Name:SLASHDOT.ORG
[rest of the info about slashdot.org follows here]
Notice how they say they don't want automated tools banging away at their servers. At the very least, asy parsability of the output doesn't seem to be a design criterion, and this might also discourage the implementors of such tools further. There's also the matter of copyright to the data stored.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem would be to make the inductors able to dissipate the DC power; it is the same kind of overloading that is expected to melt the transformers. However, putting in series capacitors that can withstand a high enough voltage, might be more feasible.
As well as managing to shut down the grid in time. I'm wondering, would there not be a possible intermediate step on the way back to have cities run pumps and such at reduced power from local sources, until the inter-ties are back in action?
I wonder if maybe DRM hasn't been a big part of the problem. The shiny discs that we used to know as "CDs" back in the day, actually had a standard format on them, and they would carry the "Compact Disc" logo as trademarked by Philips. Now, a few years ago, EMI and others started with their "Digital Restriction Management" which meant that the discs no longer were allowed to carry the good old "Compact Disc" logo. Instead the logo was just quietly removed, sometimes replaced with a different, publisher-defined one, signifying the hardware-enforcement of the standard admonition against unauthorised copying or broadcasting.
Even though this has been reversed in the last few years; the few CDs I have from 2007 and 2008 actually have the "Compact Disc" logo again.
The point is, the DRM train seems to have left and gone for good. It isn't just a matter of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, it is more like closing the barn door after the barn has burned down. Pull the weeds, start over...
An even easier and more obvious explanation is that there is hardly any new music worth listening to in the quantities provided by a disc. What might be OK for three minutes is not the same as will work for an hour, and the push is ever faster and ever onwards. There's just not the attention span there anymore it seems.
What might work would be to bring back the concept albums, but you need artists that can sing and play -- not just sound like some soft-porn star faking an orgams -- for more than three minutes in a row for that.
"You're in a maze of little functions, all alike. In the distance you hear somebody practicing throwing chairs."
And all of the functions have at least seven arguments, and one of these is a pointer to variable-length structs that have to be populated before calling the function. Another argument that always appears is an opaque pointer referring to SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES, which may be, and usually is, set to NULL becuse no-one is arsed to go through the necessary contortions of obtaining the required credentials.... stuff works anyways.
Teleportation device with bug reports? Lets hope, for all that is good and well, that the bugs are just software and not, for example, flies, making it into the teleportation system.
Too much unpleasant prior art for that.
As for the device featured, I definitely want some!
This is not going to work, as there is no competing with free. If any news site starts requiring payments, most readers will go somewhere else that doesn't pay. Charging for access to a site that still emits advertisements is a very hard sell.
And if the news outlets all start charging at the same time, the readers will start reading (and writing) blogs instead. And perhaps even pay "tips" to those blogs they like.
The harder one tries to squeeze the more it will slip past one's fingers...
Yes, and both phosphorus and arsenic are Group V, with 5 electrons in their outer shell so they can be expected to have chemical properties that are similar. But the main material of living things, carbon, will more than likely be the same, for reasons of carbon's unique abilities to form complex compounds.
Silicon-based life with phosphor or arsenic? Apart from this sounding very much like the list of main ingreidents for N-type semiconductor material; silicon, while in Group IV like carbon, with 4 electrons io their outer shell, does not form the same complex molecules as carbon. There is silane, SiH4, analogous to methane, CH4, and silicon dioxide, SiO2, the analogy to carbon dioxide, CO2, and a handful of others, but larger molecules such as sugar or protein analogues just do not form easily from silicon, or fall apart too easily.
There are not that many other elements that possibly oould replace carbon.
Same thing happened here. It began with cartoon characters, then continued with various other names from space, mythology, and fiction. The problem with cartoon characters is that one seems to run out of them too quickly. And I don't think naming a server Marvin or Kenny ever was such a good idea either...
Somehow naming the various NAS boxes after satellites made a bit of sense too. Other objects of the heavens also will do, then watch out for the naming collision: Is it Pluto the dog or Pluto the former planet?
Based on the spam I get here, there is no big incentive to buy anything from whoever's business being advertised to begin with. To the extent there even is any kind of business there at all.
To illustrate, from looking at some recent deleted spam I make the following observations:
First of all, my penis is just the size it should be and it works the way it should, so no need for enlargments and viagra, nor, presumably, subsequently having to carry it around in a wheelbarrow.
With that taken care of, next, I don't have time to do contract negotiations with alleged attorneys claiming to represent rich deceased people whom I've never heard of, living in countries where I've never been.
Neither do I care about spending time attempting to claim a prize in lotteries where I never bought a single ticket.
I don't use Paypal in French either.
Then there are the bankers in Ghana that send me notices of their new e-mail address, with wild and wonderful and completely unrelated titles. Since all these notices are basically formatted the same way, the precipitated hypothesis is that there are a lot of bankers in Ghana, and all of them are getting yahoo.com e-mail addresses. Well, I don't need Ghanesian banking services any time soon. If I ever should, I'd deal with someone whose e-mail address had a reasonable resemblance to the name of the bank and the country the bank is operating in, not just some random attention-getter I found in the spam-box.
And that is just looking at the stuff that comes in a language I can read. Sometimes it is Chinese or Hebrew, and sometimes it is in some mysterious language that merely renders as garbage.
Point of all this, there is hardly any legitimate business or services of any kind advertising through this spam channel at all. Hence no one to boycott.
Makes me wonder why do they bother.
Expressions containing the assignment operator, like x = y + 5, might look the same as statements of algebra, but the value on the left of the assignment operator does not behave as an alias for some specific value, but as a kind of box into which the result of the calculation ends up stored. Hence we get "impossible" statements like x = x + 3, which is perfectly OK in a fair number of programming languages, but inconsistent and illegal as a statement of algebra, where one of the important rules is that any variable name always is an alias of the same value wherever it appears in each equation.
To someone who is shaky in regular algebra, this exception is mind-boggling.
The "high gain" inductive connection is a transformer itself, with the primary in the base and the secondary and batteries in the moveable part. And this kind of separable transformer makes a lot of good sense for toothbrushes, shavers, and kettles, where moisture and water is nearby. However, there is no energy transfer taking place unless the kettle or handle is sitting on its base.
Now I can't quite imagine how that "charging table" would not use some minimal amount of standby power for at least the circuitry that detects the presence of a phone or ipod or portable mp3 player or whatever.
ROMs, EPROMS, EEPROMs, and other static or non-volatile memory devices tend to be advertised as having some 2^N number of bits in them. Even if they most commonly are organized and used as words of 8 bits.
This tends to be reflected in the part numbers, which frequently have a strong relationship to the number of bits of storage in the device. EPROMs in the 27xx series and EEPROMs in the 24xx and 28xx series are the most likely. For example, the 2764, 27C64, 2864, 24C64, etc., all have 64K (65536) bits of storage, although available and used as 8192 by 8, and the 24256 and 27256 have 256K (262144) bits in them, organized and used as 32768 by 8. There are several other sizes of these memories with corresponding part numbers.
Arrh! With the shorts giving to the longs, there'd be at least half of them unfilled lessn'n your ship runs on old 8-bit engines -- and what's with all this rubbish about naked shorts ... me sposed to be naked inside the shorts if at all and no landlubber tell otherwise. Yarrgh. And if both legs be peg legs short trousers get nae in the way the same way as long ones; but daft landlubbers selling their shorts?! Shiver me timbers indeed! Arr ... profit but what're they left to wear then? Huh?
Looks like it might be possible to do a kind of "legal D.O.S" on the whole state via OSHA regulations: refusing to work in a building posted as being a place where one could get cancer. After all since the sign is there, some kind of risk must be presumed to exist?
This is daft, of course. Maybe it shows the need for putting severe brakes on the legislative process: at some point it becomes a self-propelling business of law-making, never mind if the laws are even meaningful anymore.
I don't suspect that there would be a problem with that. Just as it isn't a problem with the Microsoft brand of synthetic pillow material..
Drinks, pillows and operating systems are sufficiently different.
The Linux distro or the web browser are more likely points of conflicts. Something will have to give here.
From what I gather from the featured article, the amusement park officials apparently will confiscate PDAs upon sight, and place them in a storage for the day, so the owner gets it back when they leave with their family in the evening. I'd imagine that the de-PDA'd owner will get some kind of claim check for it, to be returned for the PDA upon leaving. Similar to how coats are checked-in and checked-out at some restaurants during the winter.
Also, I think they better have the security details for this storage well worked out in advance. Consider what will happen when someone's PDA is stolen or lost here, and the fall-out from the resulting lawsuit...
Now, there is also this picture of a poster showing a kid dressed up as a police officer, (complete with bullet-proof vest) next to the sign proclaiming "The Alton Towers Resort is a PDA-free place" so there's still a few questions remaining. Apparently, regular mobile phones are not affected by this ban. But with the division between mobile phone and PDA becoming less and less distinct, there is the risk of losing communication access, with the resulting inconveniences.
Then you're actually the closest to the value of pi:
July 22, 22/7 = 3.142857; 3.142857-3.141593 = 0.001264; 0.1264 percent high
March 14, 3.14 = 3.140000; 3.140000-3.141593 = -0.001593; 0.1593 percent low
Jan 3, 3/1 = 3.000000; 3.000000-3.141593 = -0.141593; 14.1593 percent low
Congratulations!
How about 0.1 base 3 ? Nice and concise with no interminable string of decimals, and no division required.
Still remains to see if it is actually useful, of course....
Maybe 1 or 2 percent is a bit on the low side, but there is a lot of attrition with sub-netting /30s, where there are 4 addresses taken, of which two (one half) are the network and the broadcast address (x00 and x11) leaving the remaining two (x01 and x10) for actual devices, of which one will most likely be a router or gateway, and the last one is the actual server doing something interesting.
On the other hand, several ISPs use dynamic allocation when assigning IP-addresses to their customers, and a number of these addresses may not be in use at any one time, but as ADSL customers and dial-up hosts in particular come and go all the addresses are used eventually.
As for ping for checking, not everything wants to reply to pings anymore, for whatever reason: the fact that pings to some address don't show replies could just as well be because the host at that address is eating the packages, as compared to there not being any host there. An alternative which seems to be better able to tell the difference between a dead host and one that doesn't want to talk, would be nmap with TCP connection attempts at a number of likely ports, but that would tend to draw attention.
The systems I've checked actually did revert to 1901, but there could be other systems reverting to 1970, depending on the internals.
Either way, there would be a problem in 2038, as the 32-bit time_t cannot count past 0x7FFFFFFF without something having to be done about the present-day interpretation of its value.
We'll be oke for food, but busy worrying about and fixing the Year 2038 bug which is due in another 5 years, when old 32-bit unix-family systems will set their clocks back to 1901.
"Look" at all? Won't electromagnetism fail at this point too when the photons stop dead, so there won't be anyone left to look for or at anything? Not that there would be any way to see anything either. After all, it is electromagnetism that really holds atoms, molecules, and thus people, planets, and stars together ...
Will it look like the langoliers finishing off the reality starting at one edge, or will it be like the encounter with the Boojum "softly and suddenly vanish away"?
Or maybe it just will be a party lasting indefinitely at a restaurant at the end of the universe.
The problem with that one will be everyone who is using some other OS than Windows XP or Vista, or at first, some other mail client than Outlook (including web-based ones such as Gmail), will complain about unreadable e-mails. Of course, this will also be a possible way to stem the tide of spam, at least temporarily, but I feel the effect is that e-mail will become even less reliable than it already is.
The opposite of "solid-state" capacitors is in this case the aluminium electrolytic capacitors. Presumably they just use tantalum or some other kind instead on this board. Now, these are also polarized and technically also "electrolytic" (besides, they can still fail) but their failure mode does not include emitting nasty goop onto the board.
Could be they don't want to have too much traffic either. I get the following message prior to the actual information:
Notice how they say they don't want automated tools banging away at their servers. At the very least, asy parsability of the output doesn't seem to be a design criterion, and this might also discourage the implementors of such tools further. There's also the matter of copyright to the data stored.
Either it is that, or it is what the calculator displays when trying to divide by 0. Guess it would have shown as 1701 otherwise.