Nope, not quite. On the page that lists products by hierachy, it says that they've stopped evaluating stuff at C1 level anymore. C2 is the lowest security level that they will evaluate at. (Any lower than that it's probably not worth their time) -=- SiKnight
That's totally not true about Microsoft and the no-name credits rule. I have a friend on the Win2000 dev-team, and not only is his name in the easter egg, so is a "Free Kevin" comment. 8-) -=- SiKnight
I wasn't there, but my roommate was. And a flashbang grenade from the cops went off not too far from him. He caught wiffs of teargas too. He wasn't there to be some anarchist punk asshole rippin' crap up, he was just there to see what's going on. (Curiosity doesn't always pay, I guess).
True, most of the protest were pretty peaceful. True, there weren't any wide spread looting. Thank god. I really feel sorry for the protesters though. They have every right to stand in a peaceful protest, and they exercised that right, to bring to people's attention the *other* side of the issue involving the WTO. Only to have some punk anarchist bastards screw everything up for them with their vandalism.
I believe that the bottleneck is somewhere else - namely, getting the DNA, running PCR on it to amplify it, then cleving the DNA into chunks, and then running the chunks thru gel plates, and then getting the data on the chunks...
From what I remember and understand about gene sequencing, the process is:
Running a PCR reaction. This induces DNA reproduction. You run this (mostly) by cycling the temperature the DNA is at in a special medium. And the DNA chains cleves and reproduces exponentially (1-2, 2->4, 4->8, etc).
Cleving at certain sequences. This breaks the DNA chains into chunks. The chunks are then analysised by some gell chromatography. IN the movies when you see people hold up 2 film with bands in it, that's what they are doing - the chunks are of a certain size and migrate thru the gell at a certain speed - and when the lines match up in intensity and location that means the same concentration of a particular block is present in both the standard and the unknown.
Repeating the process, cleving at different sites, until you have enough information about the "chunks" to reconstruct the sequences.
For a computer to match the chunks up, it's not that difficult. It's just like sorting arrays - not that much processor power is required. Storage, maybe, but not processor power.
The most time consuming part is running the reactions, spottingthe plates, running the plates, blah, blah...
Since it's basically just a really another way of tracking planes, this technology has no offensive capabilities, right? I mean, it's not like it's a radar system that can be mounted onto a ship and taken into a theater of conflict - this technology is totally for defensive use only.
So why the hell are people so upset about it? Gee, poor USAF, they are gonna fly their plane into some other country's airspace and they might actually get shot down? Oh, horror, horror.
All the racist comments from the Chinese-bashing idiots about how this technology in the hands of the Chinese is evil are about as valid as a script kiddie grumbling about the new firewall that someone installed to protect their box from "l33t h4x0r winnuke" attacks.
He did not deface the Whitehouse webpage. He denied it, he knows who's responsible but refused to name them. (read Hackernews, www.hackernews.com) as an example.
I don't like the idea of limiting him to "3 years without a computer". I think that the laws are very vague on the definiton of what a computer is. Can he use an ATM machine? Work at McDonalds? Or operate any Point-Of-Sale system for that matter? Prison is supposed to reform prisoners, but denying someone computer access (not internet access) is like denying someone a way to make a living, and a lot of good that does to help them fit back into society again.
They broke my computer too. It was a full tower case, all set up and ready to go for the dorm network, and when I opened the box, I was greeted with the sight of my hard drives tumbling out of the box.
I kid you not, my mouth dropped when I saw the damage. The edges of the box, and the 6" of foam peanuts, was completely crushed in. So was one corner of my case. In fact, it took a mallet to hammer out the drive bay back into shape so that I can slide my CD-ROM and CD-R back in. They've crushed one of the corners of the chassis, knocked all 4 harddrives off it's mount, and the 4 drives tumbled inside the case and knocked everything loose. 2 of the drives never spun back up after that abuse - they even managed to crack the RAM holder on my motherboard.
Insurance was unhelpful at best. They told me not to touch the computer and they'll send someone out to assess the damage. It took over 10 calls and a few reschedules and 3 weeks before they even gave me the phone number of the tech. And it took a bit more wardialing before he decided to come out to take a look at the remains.
When I called the first time, the person on the phone flat out told me that anything weighing over 40 pounds gets rolled, end-over-end, onto a truck. "Sometimes handtrucks aren't availble". That just sounded like total BS.
Fortunately, I was never one to follow the rules. I reasembled the machine, bought new parts with the money I had saved up, and disassemble it before the tech came out to show him the remains. "Good call that you didn't power up the box" was his remark. "Yeah, right" was the thought that went thru my mind. 3 weeks without a computer? Gimme a break, I needed that box for all my work.
The final line? Almost 2 months, and fighting them tooth and nail, before they'd give me $1700.00 of the $2000.00 declared value. The cool thing was that the let me keep the parts. With the money I bought a new laptop (never gonna let them ship my box again!).
Moral of the story is:
A: If they broke something, keep all the packaging, keep all the receipts, and LOG ALL PHONE CALLS. Like any large organization they have a tendency to forget that you've called. Having a name of someone you talked to means accountability.
B: ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS let an authorized UPS shipping place pack your box. I can't emphasise this enough. If I packed it myself, the insurance tech would have just said "sorry". If someone else packs the box UPS can't claim it as "bad packaging".
C: BACKUP before you ship. Fortunately for me, I had the insight to do that, and had the discs on my person. It may sound obvious, but software and data is NEVER insured.
First of all, our military has a tendency to over-exagerate things. How many "sophisicated, coordinated attacks" turns out to be script kiddies running NMAP randomly on.mil domains? How many "dangerous teeange hackers" gained access by exploiting age old exploits? I'm not in any way condoning such acts, personally, I'd leave the.mil computers alone, but let's face it, we are not looking at an electronic Pearl Harbor. And, how many of you want to bet that pretty soon we are going to see someone cry to Congress complaining about "the evil nations trying to crack our computer networks?"
The general public, as a rule of thumb, is pretty ignorant. And ignorant people are always afraid of the unknown. That's what FUD's made of. Case in point:
Issues like these are meant to generate anti-Chinese sentiments. "Chinese students at American universities might be trained for cyber attacks?" Unless the author can back that up, that's slander to a lot of students.
Secondly, who is to say that the US doesn't have infowar capabilities? At DefCon in Las Vegas, there was a talk given about EMP bombs - developed by the Army. Military commanders know how the game is played. You develop a weapon, someone else develop a similar weapon as a counter. And, in most cases, the spread of these weapons, in the hands of rational heads of States, allows us to have checks and balances in place. Chinese government officials aren't dumb, they know that if they launched an unprovoked attack they can be sure to face retalliations.
If you use an MD-ROM, then you open up the possibilities of:
A: Using the device as a laptop drive (cool as shit, I'd *DEFINATELY* get one). It's the same legal loophole that allows the MPMAN to first be sold in the US, since it is more than just an audio playback device, it can be used separately as a data storage device. Of course, with the low prices of MDs (say, in the Asian market) it will actually be *VERY* feasable to use the device as storage alternative.
B: Better transfer rate. To dump 74 mins of audio via Audio out requires 74 minutes. Even if TosLink supports 2x recording, that's still 30+ mins per disc. How long does it take the USB ZIP drive to copy 100Mbs of files? By copying the data accross and have the device being able to natively decode the MP3 off the disc, it would speed up transfer a lot faster.
C: No conversion loss. I have a hard time believing that the transfer is lossless. Even though both formats are digital, both are *LOSSY COMPRESSION* formats. Ever opened a compress TIFF, saved it as a JPEG, and repeat the process a few times?
Minidiscs are cool. Small form factor, virtually indestructable. How many CDs have you scratched? I've washed my Dad's Minidiscs before (oops) and they play perfectly after I dried them out.
Sony makes Discmans with a PCMCIA adaptor to be used as a CDROM drive, why can't they do the same for Minidisc?
I never said that it *is* fusion that we are seeing. If all fusion is is burning shit in a microwave, then we'd be there already.
It *is* a plasma, and it does illustrate some of the difficulties in fusion reactor design (namely, the Tokamak, which, if I understand correctly, utilizes a toroid-shaped container and a magnetic field generated around it to confine the plasma into a ring. And the flamin' flint in a microwave demostrates precisely the difficult nature of containing a plasma effectively. Besides, it looks cool! 8-)
I am not too sure if florescent lightbulbs contains plasmas either. Inside the glass tube is evacuated and filled with mercury gas. When we turn on the light, we bake electrons off a cathode (much like the CRT tube in your monitor) and this exites the mercury atom, causing it to fluorese (sp?). Mercury's emission spectra is in the UV series, so we coat the tube with phosphor which absorbs the UV and emits white, visible light.
:: shrug::
I'm a chemist by training, I just thought the demo looks cool. 8-)
Unfortunately, no. This demo was passed down to me by a physics major. The best that we can do is to derive a force diagram as to where the particles are being pulled in a combination electric and magnetic field. And since it pulls the ions apart, doesn't that qualify as a plasma, nature's 4th state of matter?
In our microwaves (at an unnamed university's dorms) it takes about 30 seconds to warm up, and we can get continous discharges until the fire burns out (minute or more)
You forgot to mention the other two variants: Strontium-clad nukes. Same effect - strontium is more soluable in cobalt, so it effectively kills the entire biosphere. (Strontium is one down from calcium on the good ol' periodic table, which means it can have very similar chemcical binding properties as the calcium that's say, in milk, or your bones). Neutron weapons - they emit massive amounts of neutrons that will kill living organisms, but leave most structure intact. For the sake of my (unborn) children's generation, and for their children's generation, I hope we'll never see any of this shit used. -=- SiKnight
Here's a quick plasma physics demostration that you can do at home:
Take a wooden splint, like one of those things used to stir coffee.
Stick it into something that will stand it up, say a pencil eraser, or a piece of bread.
Light the tip and stick it into the microwave. Nuke for 1 minute.
Voila. what you will witness is a plasma being formed at the flame. A redox reaction is occuring, with atmospheric oxygen oxidizing the wood. The microwave energy is somehow disrupting the flow of the ionized particles (electrons and all) and forming your plasma.
Now, generating this plasma is one thing (Try it! It doesn't damage the microwave) but controlling this plamsa is a totally different story. Think you can accelerate this plasma down a tube and aim it at some target, a la plasma rifle from Quake? If you can do that, gimme a call 8-)
This demo illustrates the precise nature of fusion research. While generating a fusion reaction isn't difficult, it's controlling the reaction that's being a pain in the arse...
I started out learning Linux about 6 months ago with a RedHat 5.2 installation, dual-booting with Windows NT. I have a P200MMX box that ran NT like a tank. Slow, *relatively* stable (stabibility is always relative - at least my box wasn't being rebooted 4 times a day like my roomies). But, every once in a while, my NT ball will go "balls up" on me, and NT bluescreens are a lot harder to remove than standard 9x bluescreens. I was blesssed with living on a floor with a few geeks on it, and 2 of these geeks were Linux users who showed me the door. They helped me with an install, with recompiling my kernel, etc. Within 2 months I found myself killing the old Windoze distro, and getting a bigger hard drive to mount my root partition on. I still have a dual boot machine, but the only time I boot into Windoze is to install software to run under WINE. Since I've switched almost fulltime to Linux, I've learned far more about my computer than any compsci class can teach me. I'll never have to hear the words "Our software is not designed for that", or "wait for the upgrade". I run a stripped down version of Win98 on my laptop, but that's only because it's out of necessity and because there are hardware that my Linux box doesn't support (parallel port scanners, etc + stuff that won't run under WINE, such as chem programs). As far as getting new users onto my box, the biggest hurdle is the login prompt and adaptation to the GUI. Adaptation to the GUI is pretty easy if I select a non-fancy theme that looks and feels close enough to windows. And, once that's done, about the only other thing that users miss from a Windows system is a blue screen 8-) I think in order for Linux to suceed in the desktop arena, it should have a standard, stock GUI that's easy to learn. For the newbies who have never seen a M$ box, Linux is not a bad choice, once the box is all configured and ready to go. With enviroments such as GNOME and KDE, it's quite possible that a person can do all their work without ever dorpping to a terminal/shell. Having worked for tech support, a standard GUI helps. I have enough trouble getting people to right click on "My Computer" already, could you imagine supporting the miraids of possible themes? Not saying that the configurability is a bad thing, but corperations should have standards to make IT staff's life easier. -=- SiKnight
Vincent is correct about heat dissipation. Hong Kong summers can be brutal, I grew up there.
Not to mention that LCD panels are less suceptable to magnetic interference. In my chemistry lab, there's a device called an NMR machine that we never work with with steel tools. 8-). Not surprisingly, all the displays on that thing are LCD displays. The nearest CRT has to be some 20 ft away from the machine, so as not to interfere with readings and get interfered by the mag fields.
Ever seen a recording studio? MY friend runs one. They have to have the boxes stored in another room and run extension cords for all the cables into the control console because of the noise from the cooling fan. Even if you have the money to pay for cooling systems, they might not be an option.
I love LCD as much as the next geek, and there are applications that almost require LCD displays (such as labs where RF interference is a problem). But, as most laptop owners can tell you, every once in a while a pixel can go bad on you, and no matter how small the pixel is, it's noticble and annoying as hell. Now, when a traditional CRT bust an element, most of the time whatever it is (power supply, synch circuit, etc) can be replaced relatively easily. But burn a pixel out on an LCD screen, there's no real way of replacing it except for scrapping the whole damn display.
If I'm investing *that* much money on a display, it has to have a good enough warranty on it such that I can sleep soundly at night without worrying one or two annoying pixels that's always red.
Why not build a small CD-ROM drive that will take CD singles? That'd be the perfect, wallet-sized storage media, it will give you the same footprint as a minidisc, and CD-R single blanks are fairly cheap. For some reason, CD-R singles are not very popular, but in asian countries such as Japan they are all over the place. At about 150Mbs a disc, it's great for a CD-ROM bootable Linux distro, a clean (though horrendously slow) Windoze installation, or just a wallet sized disc of MP3z. 8-) -=- SiKnight
It's one thing to have a pirate haven, it's another thing to have the bandwidth to host a site , CVS server, etc. Most of the people who are professional pirates makes a lot of money doing it, setting up little shops stacked with pirated CDs. If they were to host a server and let anyone access and download stuff from them, AND they have to pay for the bandwidth - then there's really not any incentive for them to do it, right? I believe that a while ago an article was posted here on how Argentina supreme court ruled that copying of commercial software is not a crime because there is no real financial loss. Can someone dig up the URL? -=- SiKnight
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, not quite. On the page that lists products by hierachy, it says that they've stopped evaluating stuff at C1 level anymore. C2 is the lowest security level that they will evaluate at. (Any lower than that it's probably not worth their time) -=- SiKnight
That's totally not true about Microsoft and the no-name credits rule. I have a friend on the Win2000 dev-team, and not only is his name in the easter egg, so is a "Free Kevin" comment. 8-) -=- SiKnight
I wasn't there, but my roommate was. And a flashbang grenade from the cops went off not too far from him. He caught wiffs of teargas too. He wasn't there to be some anarchist punk asshole rippin' crap up, he was just there to see what's going on. (Curiosity doesn't always pay, I guess).
True, most of the protest were pretty peaceful. True, there weren't any wide spread looting. Thank god. I really feel sorry for the protesters though. They have every right to stand in a peaceful protest, and they exercised that right, to bring to people's attention the *other* side of the issue involving the WTO. Only to have some punk anarchist bastards screw everything up for them with their vandalism.
-=- SiKnight
I believe that the bottleneck is somewhere else - namely, getting the DNA, running PCR on it to amplify it, then cleving the DNA into chunks, and then running the chunks thru gel plates, and then getting the data on the chunks ...
From what I remember and understand about gene sequencing, the process is:
Running a PCR reaction. This induces DNA reproduction. You run this (mostly) by cycling the temperature the DNA is at in a special medium. And the DNA chains cleves and reproduces exponentially (1-2, 2->4, 4->8, etc).
Cleving at certain sequences. This breaks the DNA chains into chunks. The chunks are then analysised by some gell chromatography. IN the movies when you see people hold up 2 film with bands in it, that's what they are doing - the chunks are of a certain size and migrate thru the gell at a certain speed - and when the lines match up in intensity and location that means the same concentration of a particular block is present in both the standard and the unknown.
Repeating the process, cleving at different sites, until you have enough information about the "chunks" to reconstruct the sequences.
For a computer to match the chunks up, it's not that difficult. It's just like sorting arrays - not that much processor power is required. Storage, maybe, but not processor power.
The most time consuming part is running the reactions, spottingthe plates, running the plates, blah, blah...
-=- SiKnight
Since it's basically just a really another way of tracking planes, this technology has no offensive capabilities, right? I mean, it's not like it's a radar system that can be mounted onto a ship and taken into a theater of conflict - this technology is totally for defensive use only.
So why the hell are people so upset about it? Gee, poor USAF, they are gonna fly their plane into some other country's airspace and they might actually get shot down? Oh, horror, horror.
All the racist comments from the Chinese-bashing idiots about how this technology in the hands of the Chinese is evil are about as valid as a script kiddie grumbling about the new firewall that someone installed to protect their box from "l33t h4x0r winnuke" attacks.
-=- SiKnight
Just a quick correction:
He did not deface the Whitehouse webpage. He denied it, he knows who's responsible but refused to name them. (read Hackernews, www.hackernews.com) as an example.
I don't like the idea of limiting him to "3 years without a computer". I think that the laws are very vague on the definiton of what a computer is. Can he use an ATM machine? Work at McDonalds? Or operate any Point-Of-Sale system for that matter? Prison is supposed to reform prisoners, but denying someone computer access (not internet access) is like denying someone a way to make a living, and a lot of good that does to help them fit back into society again.
-=- SiKnight
I wonder if they can use X-RAY? That has a much smaller wavelength (higher resolution)
-=- SiKnight
Correct me if I am wrong, but given:
A: IBM's technology to fabricate LCD displays onto plastic, giving rise pretty soon to flexable and cheap LCD panels
B: All these new transistor technologies, that allow pixels to be made smaller...
Is it just me, or are we living in a very exciting era? 8-)
-=- SiKnight
They broke my computer too. It was a full tower case, all set up and ready to go for the dorm network, and when I opened the box, I was greeted with the sight of my hard drives tumbling out of the box.
I kid you not, my mouth dropped when I saw the damage. The edges of the box, and the 6" of foam peanuts, was completely crushed in. So was one corner of my case. In fact, it took a mallet to hammer out the drive bay back into shape so that I can slide my CD-ROM and CD-R back in. They've crushed one of the corners of the chassis, knocked all 4 harddrives off it's mount, and the 4 drives tumbled inside the case and knocked everything loose. 2 of the drives never spun back up after that abuse - they even managed to crack the RAM holder on my motherboard.
Insurance was unhelpful at best. They told me not to touch the computer and they'll send someone out to assess the damage. It took over 10 calls and a few reschedules and 3 weeks before they even gave me the phone number of the tech. And it took a bit more wardialing before he decided to come out to take a look at the remains.
When I called the first time, the person on the phone flat out told me that anything weighing over 40 pounds gets rolled, end-over-end, onto a truck. "Sometimes handtrucks aren't availble". That just sounded like total BS.
Fortunately, I was never one to follow the rules. I reasembled the machine, bought new parts with the money I had saved up, and disassemble it before the tech came out to show him the remains. "Good call that you didn't power up the box" was his remark. "Yeah, right" was the thought that went thru my mind. 3 weeks without a computer? Gimme a break, I needed that box for all my work.
The final line? Almost 2 months, and fighting them tooth and nail, before they'd give me $1700.00 of the $2000.00 declared value. The cool thing was that the let me keep the parts. With the money I bought a new laptop (never gonna let them ship my box again!).
Moral of the story is:
A: If they broke something, keep all the packaging, keep all the receipts, and LOG ALL PHONE CALLS. Like any large organization they have a tendency to forget that you've called. Having a name of someone you talked to means accountability.
B: ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS let an authorized UPS shipping place pack your box. I can't emphasise this enough. If I packed it myself, the insurance tech would have just said "sorry". If someone else packs the box UPS can't claim it as "bad packaging".
C: BACKUP before you ship. Fortunately for me, I had the insight to do that, and had the discs on my person. It may sound obvious, but software and data is NEVER insured.
-=- SiKnight
I have a hard time choking that FUD down.
.mil domains? How many "dangerous teeange hackers" gained access by exploiting age old exploits? I'm not in any way condoning such acts, personally, I'd leave the .mil computers alone, but let's face it, we are not looking at an electronic Pearl Harbor. And, how many of you want to bet that pretty soon we are going to see someone cry to Congress complaining about "the evil nations trying to crack our computer networks?"
First of all, our military has a tendency to over-exagerate things. How many "sophisicated, coordinated attacks" turns out to be script kiddies running NMAP randomly on
The general public, as a rule of thumb, is pretty ignorant. And ignorant people are always afraid of the unknown. That's what FUD's made of. Case in point:
Communists + Nuclear "Secrets"
Communists + Cyber attacks.
Issues like these are meant to generate anti-Chinese sentiments. "Chinese students at American universities might be trained for cyber attacks?" Unless the author can back that up, that's slander to a lot of students.
Secondly, who is to say that the US doesn't have infowar capabilities? At DefCon in Las Vegas, there was a talk given about EMP bombs - developed by the Army. Military commanders know how the game is played. You develop a weapon, someone else develop a similar weapon as a counter. And, in most cases, the spread of these weapons, in the hands of rational heads of States, allows us to have checks and balances in place. Chinese government officials aren't dumb, they know that if they launched an unprovoked attack they can be sure to face retalliations.
Just my 2 cents.
-=- SiKnight
I respectfully disagree.
If you use an MD-ROM, then you open up the possibilities of:
A: Using the device as a laptop drive (cool as shit, I'd *DEFINATELY* get one). It's the same legal loophole that allows the MPMAN to first be sold in the US, since it is more than just an audio playback device, it can be used separately as a data storage device. Of course, with the low prices of MDs (say, in the Asian market) it will actually be *VERY* feasable to use the device as storage alternative.
B: Better transfer rate. To dump 74 mins of audio via Audio out requires 74 minutes. Even if TosLink supports 2x recording, that's still 30+ mins per disc. How long does it take the USB ZIP drive to copy 100Mbs of files? By copying the data accross and have the device being able to natively decode the MP3 off the disc, it would speed up transfer a lot faster.
C: No conversion loss. I have a hard time believing that the transfer is lossless. Even though both formats are digital, both are *LOSSY COMPRESSION* formats. Ever opened a compress TIFF, saved it as a JPEG, and repeat the process a few times?
Minidiscs are cool. Small form factor, virtually indestructable. How many CDs have you scratched? I've washed my Dad's Minidiscs before (oops) and they play perfectly after I dried them out.
Sony makes Discmans with a PCMCIA adaptor to be used as a CDROM drive, why can't they do the same for Minidisc?
I never said that it *is* fusion that we are seeing. If all fusion is is burning shit in a microwave, then we'd be there already.
::
It *is* a plasma, and it does illustrate some of the difficulties in fusion reactor design (namely, the Tokamak, which, if I understand correctly, utilizes a toroid-shaped container and a magnetic field generated around it to confine the plasma into a ring. And the flamin' flint in a microwave demostrates precisely the difficult nature of containing a plasma effectively. Besides, it looks cool! 8-)
I am not too sure if florescent lightbulbs contains plasmas either. Inside the glass tube is evacuated and filled with mercury gas. When we turn on the light, we bake electrons off a cathode (much like the CRT tube in your monitor) and this exites the mercury atom, causing it to fluorese (sp?). Mercury's emission spectra is in the UV series, so we coat the tube with phosphor which absorbs the UV and emits white, visible light.
:: shrug
I'm a chemist by training, I just thought the demo looks cool. 8-)
-=- SiKnight
Unfortunately, no. This demo was passed down to me by a physics major. The best that we can do is to derive a force diagram as to where the particles are being pulled in a combination electric and magnetic field. And since it pulls the ions apart, doesn't that qualify as a plasma, nature's 4th state of matter?
In our microwaves (at an unnamed university's dorms) it takes about 30 seconds to warm up, and we can get continous discharges until the fire burns out (minute or more)
-=- SiKnight
You forgot to mention the other two variants: Strontium-clad nukes. Same effect - strontium is more soluable in cobalt, so it effectively kills the entire biosphere. (Strontium is one down from calcium on the good ol' periodic table, which means it can have very similar chemcical binding properties as the calcium that's say, in milk, or your bones). Neutron weapons - they emit massive amounts of neutrons that will kill living organisms, but leave most structure intact. For the sake of my (unborn) children's generation, and for their children's generation, I hope we'll never see any of this shit used. -=- SiKnight
Here's a quick plasma physics demostration that you can do at home:
Take a wooden splint, like one of those things used to stir coffee.
Stick it into something that will stand it up, say a pencil eraser, or a piece of bread.
Light the tip and stick it into the microwave. Nuke for 1 minute.
Voila. what you will witness is a plasma being formed at the flame. A redox reaction is occuring, with atmospheric oxygen oxidizing the wood. The microwave energy is somehow disrupting the flow of the ionized particles (electrons and all) and forming your plasma.
Now, generating this plasma is one thing (Try it! It doesn't damage the microwave) but controlling this plamsa is a totally different story. Think you can accelerate this plasma down a tube and aim it at some target, a la plasma rifle from Quake? If you can do that, gimme a call 8-)
This demo illustrates the precise nature of fusion research. While generating a fusion reaction isn't difficult, it's controlling the reaction that's being a pain in the arse...
-=- SiKnight
I started out learning Linux about 6 months ago with a RedHat 5.2 installation, dual-booting with Windows NT. I have a P200MMX box that ran NT like a tank. Slow, *relatively* stable (stabibility is always relative - at least my box wasn't being rebooted 4 times a day like my roomies). But, every once in a while, my NT ball will go "balls up" on me, and NT bluescreens are a lot harder to remove than standard 9x bluescreens. I was blesssed with living on a floor with a few geeks on it, and 2 of these geeks were Linux users who showed me the door. They helped me with an install, with recompiling my kernel, etc. Within 2 months I found myself killing the old Windoze distro, and getting a bigger hard drive to mount my root partition on. I still have a dual boot machine, but the only time I boot into Windoze is to install software to run under WINE. Since I've switched almost fulltime to Linux, I've learned far more about my computer than any compsci class can teach me. I'll never have to hear the words "Our software is not designed for that", or "wait for the upgrade". I run a stripped down version of Win98 on my laptop, but that's only because it's out of necessity and because there are hardware that my Linux box doesn't support (parallel port scanners, etc + stuff that won't run under WINE, such as chem programs). As far as getting new users onto my box, the biggest hurdle is the login prompt and adaptation to the GUI. Adaptation to the GUI is pretty easy if I select a non-fancy theme that looks and feels close enough to windows. And, once that's done, about the only other thing that users miss from a Windows system is a blue screen 8-) I think in order for Linux to suceed in the desktop arena, it should have a standard, stock GUI that's easy to learn. For the newbies who have never seen a M$ box, Linux is not a bad choice, once the box is all configured and ready to go. With enviroments such as GNOME and KDE, it's quite possible that a person can do all their work without ever dorpping to a terminal/shell. Having worked for tech support, a standard GUI helps. I have enough trouble getting people to right click on "My Computer" already, could you imagine supporting the miraids of possible themes? Not saying that the configurability is a bad thing, but corperations should have standards to make IT staff's life easier. -=- SiKnight
Vincent is correct about heat dissipation. Hong Kong summers can be brutal, I grew up there.
Not to mention that LCD panels are less suceptable to magnetic interference. In my chemistry lab, there's a device called an NMR machine that we never work with with steel tools. 8-). Not surprisingly, all the displays on that thing are LCD displays. The nearest CRT has to be some 20 ft away from the machine, so as not to interfere with readings and get interfered by the mag fields.
Ever seen a recording studio? MY friend runs one. They have to have the boxes stored in another room and run extension cords for all the cables into the control console because of the noise from the cooling fan. Even if you have the money to pay for cooling systems, they might not be an option.
I love LCD as much as the next geek, and there are applications that almost require LCD displays (such as labs where RF interference is a problem). But, as most laptop owners can tell you, every once in a while a pixel can go bad on you, and no matter how small the pixel is, it's noticble and annoying as hell. Now, when a traditional CRT bust an element, most of the time whatever it is (power supply, synch circuit, etc) can be replaced relatively easily. But burn a pixel out on an LCD screen, there's no real way of replacing it except for scrapping the whole damn display.
If I'm investing *that* much money on a display, it has to have a good enough warranty on it such that I can sleep soundly at night without worrying one or two annoying pixels that's always red.
-=- SiKnight
Why not build a small CD-ROM drive that will take CD singles? That'd be the perfect, wallet-sized storage media, it will give you the same footprint as a minidisc, and CD-R single blanks are fairly cheap. For some reason, CD-R singles are not very popular, but in asian countries such as Japan they are all over the place. At about 150Mbs a disc, it's great for a CD-ROM bootable Linux distro, a clean (though horrendously slow) Windoze installation, or just a wallet sized disc of MP3z. 8-) -=- SiKnight
It's one thing to have a pirate haven, it's another thing to have the bandwidth to host a site , CVS server, etc. Most of the people who are professional pirates makes a lot of money doing it, setting up little shops stacked with pirated CDs. If they were to host a server and let anyone access and download stuff from them, AND they have to pay for the bandwidth - then there's really not any incentive for them to do it, right? I believe that a while ago an article was posted here on how Argentina supreme court ruled that copying of commercial software is not a crime because there is no real financial loss. Can someone dig up the URL? -=- SiKnight